Xeno's Guide To:

President Obama Says No More Earmarks! ...So, What'll We Call Them, Then?

2009-01-26T07:44:00.000-05:00

Despite the campaign promise to end "earmarking," the long-accepted, perenially abused practice of adding pork to any and every spending bill by allowing each and every Congressman to add little line-item "and spend some money on my yokel friend Dwight, back home" spending projects, there isn't any end in sight.

President Obama says no more earmarking? NO PROBLEM.

We'll just call it something else, then, and then he can go to the public and say that Congress has stopped the practice of earmarking, without actually changing anything.

This, of course, comes at a time when the Democrats are planning a huge spending bill, thinly disguised under the rubric of economic stimulus, despite the fact that it does no such thing. The Republicans are opposing it, in a kind of luke-warm way, and everyone seems to think that it's inevitable.

But what happens when - not if - it doesn't work?

Will we place the blame for the economic disaster that will result from doubling the national debt and building tons of huge, expensive public works projects, all the while raising taxes, in an already damaged economy, where it belongs?

Will we actually call the Democrats out for wasting their opportunity to turn things around - and reap the credit therefrom - or will we yet again allow them to dictate the narrative, and claim that no matter what goes wrong, it was the fault of the Bush administration?

These days, I really wonder. How stupid ARE we, as a nation, really?

Are we really this fucking dumb, to let the Democrats do EXACTLY AND PRECISELY what they've been saying was wrong under the Bush Administration for eight years, and then pass blame for its failure off to President Bush?

If it was a failure then - and bailouts always are - it is and will be a failure now.

The way to repair the economy is to do away with this spending bill entirely, and instead cut tax rates enough to account for $825 billion, instead.

They won't do that; you and I know it.

And any other course will FAIL.

There won't be an economic turnaround here. And by the time we elect someone with the good sense to actually try tax cuts, the cuts required to repair things will have to be far more drastic than the Congress will actually allow.

It's sad we can't seem to elect anyone who passed a high school economics class.

Returning You To Your Regularly Scheduled Ranting And Vitriol...

2009-01-15T16:39:00.000-05:00

...Oh, yes, I am.

So, look out. Because I'm back. Still crazy (but more so,) still angry (or so Wendy thinks, anyway,) still mean as a scorpion (and just as poisonous,) still wrong six ways from Sunday (and looking for more ways all the time, I am back.

Fear me.

A House Built Upon The Sand (The Mortgage Meltdown, Part Five Of Seven)

2008-10-04T16:40:00.000-04:00

[* The series as it unfolds:
You Unmitigated Bastards
What The Fuck Are Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac, Anyway?
Community Organizing
It's Like A Weed, Man
A House Built Upon The Sand...
And Like That House, Down It Goes
None Of You Is Fit To Lead
*]

At first, the effects of ACORN and the ACLU's strong-arm use of the CRA to create thousands of subprime mortgage loans looked good, on paper. Minority home investment went up; overall home investment went up; housing values started to climb.

The first - the VERY first - concrete sign that something was going very wrong came in 1999, from none other, interestingly enough, than a man I've already called out as a criminal: Senator Barack Obama's campaign advisor, Franklin Raines. As CEO of FNMA, Mr. Raines warned in 1999 that the flood of CRA loans was risky, and that the amount of debt FNMA was securing was already greater than its assets, and that assuming even more would be very dangerous.

He was right.

He was ignored, and after months of mounting pressure from HUD and Congress, relented and joined the chorus, apparently resigned to the coming crisis. But history is clear; Raines was the first to really point out the dangers.

Why?

Most likely the major reason Raines wanted to forestall the incredibly risky lending practices at FNMA, was because his hands were in the cookie jar; he was later forced to resign under investigation for fraud, because the entire time he was at FNMA - prior to his role in the Obama campaign - he was busily robbing the public blind, and didn't want to let risky loan practices and overspeculation kill his source of extra income.

The result was a company whose managers engaged in one questionable maneuver after another, including two transactions with investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, OFHEO said, was always the same: To shape the company's books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives including Raines, Howard and others.

Note that name? Goldman Sachs? Remember it. It'll come back to haunt us. That notwithstanding, his was the first red flag raised about the CRA loans, and he was ignored.

In fact, the signs had been there all along; they had simply been ignored in the rush to get every non-white person in America a house, whether or not they could afford it.

The Heritage Foundation warned - as far back as 1991 - that

The haunting fear is that if the corporations falter, the taxpayer could end up being forced to bail them out.

Gee, you think?

But the SECOND person to raise a red flag about subprimes was none other than our much-disliked President, George W. Bush. In fact, he proposed an impressive overhaul of the GSEs, including nearly all the features Newt Gingrich would recommend in the National Review seven years later.

That legislation was shot down.

But more than that, it was openly mocked by Representative Barney Frank, who said:

I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury.

...Good luck with that.

Having been stymied in humiliating fashion, the president turned his attention to the Iraq War, and left the GSEs to Congress.

In hindsight, that was a huge mistake.

Congress tried its best to ignore it, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions was Senator John S. McCain. In 2006, he gave a series of - I would call them fiery, except he's 370 years old and it was more like "banked coals" - speeches on the Senate floor, recommending basically all the same changes to the GSE regulations that the President had. He made a lot of political capital out of being a "maverick," and defying - well, someone - about the issue, before quietly letting it drop.

Of course, Senator McCain's hiding a dirty secret, too. His comes in the person of a gentleman named Leland C. Brendsel. Brendsel has been a campaign staffer and advisor to Senator McCain since 1988.

He's still on Senator McCain's staff today.

He's also the same Leland C. Brendsel who - when he was CEO of FHLMC - was removed for fraud, and forced to pay millions of dollars in fines for doing the exact same thing Franklin Raines did.

Senator McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, owns a lobbying firm that has been taking $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac since 2005 - shortly before Senator McCain let the issue of GSE regulation drop - and still is.

And let's not forget Senator McCain's campaign co-chairman, Phil Gramm, the man who authored and sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which eliminated regulations on Credit Default Swaps (remember those?) or Mark Buse, Senator McCain's Senate office chief of staff, who earned $460,000 in 2003 and 2004 from Freddie Mac for lobbying the Senator on their behalf. In fact, TONS of McCain advisors and staffers are lobbyists.

I wasn't kidding when I said that nobody's hands were clean here.

Senators Dodd, Kerry, Clinton, and Obama were the unquestioned leaders in campaign contributions from FNMA and FHLMC, true, but good ol' Maverick McCain received $21,500 from them directly, as well; nowhere near the sums they spent on the Democrats, but still.

Maybe - just maybe - the mess might have been prevented, if the warnings hadn't been ignored.

We'll never know.

But since the ones responsible for causing the mess are the same ones we're relying on to fix it, we'll continue to see corruption as usual from Washington.

[* As promised, here is the information you'll need to contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators about this mess, if you are so inspired. I hope you will. I hope you're furious. I hope you're as furious as I am. I hope you tell them so at great length. Here's the info; enjoy.

U.S. House Of Representatives Member Directory By State

U.S. Senate Member Directory By State

And while I'm at it, the president's email address - I hope he gets a ton of viagra ads - is president@whitehouse.gov, and the Veep is vice_president@whitehouse.gov - so use them wisely and OFTEN. *]

OMG, What Is That Thing?

2008-04-28T19:25:00.000-04:00

Right. So, this weekend, with some degree of trepidation, my wife and I sat down to watch "Cloverfield." Trepidation, because, well, "LOST" doesn't really do it for me. The trailers were cool, but that's their whole purpose, so, I take them with a grain of salt.

Now, I will begin by saying that I can understand why Cloverfield didn't do as well in theaters as they'd hoped; if you followed the marketing at all, or watched the first 60 seconds of the movie, you know exactly how it's going to end.

I will say secondly that I feel profanity has a proper time and place; often it's overused in movies. I would have to say, though, that when a horrifying (and it is) and unexplained (and so it remains) monster rises up out of the ocean and begins demolishing New York, that might be an appropriate time for it; I'm fairly sure I would have sworn a whole lot more than the characters did, and that change - for me - would have added to the already magnificent authenticity the filmmakers built into the film. They could have gone for the R, instead of settling for PG, and for me it made it just a tiny bit less of an experience.

That said, and all hyperbole from critics aside, this movie is solidly in my top ten favorite monster movies of all time. Other than the language, it feels tight, authentic, and a couple of times scary as hell.

Wisely, the screenwriter opted to leave the monster a total mystery; no hints whatsoever are given as to the origins or purpose of the creature, other than the obvious "it's really pissed off." No dreary expository sequences here, but again, this is authentic; Joe Schmoe - or in this case, the movie's narrator, videographer, and main character, Hud - wouldn't KNOW what the monster was, until some kind of maybe-months-down-the-road press release; he'd be, just like in the film, too concerned with staying alive and getting evacuated.

Unusually, the military fares quite well in this movie; not in a weaponry sense - one soldier openly tells Hud "whatever it is, it's winning," which isn't very reassuring - but in the sense that the screenwriter understood something of America's perceptive dichotomy quite well. See, in the movies, Hollywood typically portrays the military as either a vast cabal of crazed warmongers, or a stumbling collection of jackasses; whichever they feel like this week. The popular perception of the actual servicemembers, however, is quite different, and the screenwriter used this to add even more authenticity to the film, by simply portraying the soldiers doing the things soldiers are actually trained to do; that takes one layer of expected Hollywoodism out of the film from the get-go, and it works wonders. There's one fantastic scene where the monster is charged by a platoon or so of foot soldiers, rifles blazing, trying desperately to draw its attention away from the civilians who are cowering in doorways and behind cars long enough for the civilians to escape; at that moment, you really, really buy this movie completely.

I will also say that - in this single, specific instance - I applaud the use of the "shaky-cam" to portray events; I will say it again, that it simply sells the movie. The authentic feel of everything in the film is what makes it convincing. This technique has been used, thus far, in only three movies I've actually enjoyed: 84Charlie MoPic, the Blair Witch Project, and... Cloverfield. It makes this film immediate, blisteringly convincing, and just outright sells you the story, the characters, the movie, from top to bottom. As I said before, this movie resides firmly in my list of the ten best monster movies ever made.

For your edification, the other nine are, in no particular order, The Host; The Howling; King Kong (the original;) Gojira (the original, unexpurgated film;) The Thing; Them!; The Fly (Cronenberg's version;) the original, uncut version of Mothra, and An American Werewolf In London. So, take that for what it's worth.

More OMGWTF!?! Than Any One Country Needs, And Then Some...

2006-07-03T12:16:00.000-04:00

Suicide Circle at IMDB.com!

Instead of a quote, I will start with a note. The Japanese language is syllabic, rather than letter-based, like English. This means that a lot of the time, when they go to name something, if they're using a word which derives originally from English, they spell it phonetically, which sometimes looks odd. The trick is, it always sounds fairly similar to its English origin if you actually say it out loud, which makes it easy to tell what word they were using. The American release of Suicide Circle didn't bother to understand this, and called the movie "Suicide CLUB" which is just wrong. The original title of this movie is "Jisatsu saakuru" which - say it - is CIRCLE.

Enough of the mini-rant; I just hate it when someone ignores something that's staring them right in the friggin' face, that's all.

Now, before I begin my discussion of this movie, I want you to be aware in advance that I am going to link images from this movie. I am linking them, rather than embedding them, because this movie is EXTREMELY gory, and some of you might just not want to see the actual images I'm discussing.

First things first. You will need to watch this movie twice, at least; once to go "OMGWTF!?!" and then let it sit for a couple of days, and then again to really enjoy it. The reason for this is because the movie is - subtle - about some of the things it tries to get across, and it may take more than one viewing to really get the point ; when I first watched it, my reaction was "OMGWTF!?!" and then about 2 days later, I began to realize that it was, in fact, a damned impressive movie.

The movie starts off with a shot that is, and should be, legend. A train station, filled with people, is waiting for the Tokyo Express train to pass through. Express trains don't stop; they fly right through. As the train approaches, 54 high school girls, in uniform, filter into the station, move to the platform, and line up across its edge. They clasp each others' hands; chant in unison "one... two... three!" and THROW THEMSELVES UNDER THE TRAIN. The train blows a literal tidal wave of gore across the station. In the resulting hysteria, someone who is never revealed deposits a white gym bag in the station, which is later found to contain a roll made up of 200 strips of human skin - from different people - sewn neatly together, end-to-end.

The detectives investigating don't even believe this is happening; the girls are from 18 different high schools and presumably didn't even know each other. However, this quickly becomes a trend; a nurse on night shift at a hospital tells a security guard she will talk to him later, steps up, and throws herself right out of a window to her death; another group of high school kids, joking around about a "suicide club" throw themselves - in nearly identical fashion to the train incident - off the roof of their school building; a performer stabs himself in the throat in front, so to speak, of a live studio audience; four women hang themselves as a group; and a news report is read in the background later on describing the apparent suicide of 200 more people who threw themselves off a castle in the country.

At every turn, Director Sono Shion takes us to a more extreme place than we expected. The infamous radish scene is a perfect example. Nearly every horror movie has an obligatory scene where someone is slicing a vegetable or other food item, and cuts their finger. Sono doesn't settle for the cheap shot, though; when his character slices, she takes her finger THE FUCK OFF. Then she cuts again, removing the rest of that finger and part of the next, then again, cutting her hand in half, then again, and again, and again, all the while smiling faintly, as if at a joke we cannot hear, all the while in full view of her daughter, who is maybe 5.

There appears to be no connection amongst the suicides, except that more of the white gym bags show up, with identical contents. The police are mystified. The discovery of a website that appears to be predicting the suicides doesn't help at all.

Now, to Western viewers, is the part where the director suddenly smokes a huge pipe full of crack and just goes batshiat crazy. A Japanese version of Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show shows up and does a musical number - no, I'm not kidding - and the movie quickly concludes with a song by a teenybopper pop girl group whose name changes several times during the movie, advising us to become "connected to ourselves."

I realize you're all going "and you said this movie was GOOD?!?"

But, in fact, it is. Not because of the staggering gore and brutality evident in the movie - after the second batch of highschoolers die, the cops find an ear hanging from a ledge, where one of the kids hit their head on the way down, and the investigator gets a stick, yells "here comes an ear" and flips it off the ledge to fall at the feet of the medical examiners - but because of the point those things are getting across.

Japanese society is so highly industrialized, and so highly focused on work to the exclusion of anything else, that many Japanese are feeling increasingly alienated from their fellow humans. Suicide rates are very high, and the movie is not only pointing this out but in fact demonstrating the very factors that create this environment - the disillusionment, alienation, depression, hopelessness, and isolation.

I admit; I still think the Rocky Horror Guy was a bit much, but after thinking about it for a couple of days, and letting the movie kinda soak in, I am convinced that this was one of the better J-horror movies I've seen. Not on a par with Kairo, but then, what is?

Only One Thing Need Be Said.

2006-06-01T14:30:00.000-04:00

And that's all I have to say about that.

Violent Vengeance Violating Vagaries Valiantly - It Must Be V For Vendetta!

2006-05-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

The futuristic tale unfolds in a Great Britain that's a fascist state. A freedom fighter known as V (Weaving) uses terrorist tactics to fight the oppressive society. He rescues a young woman (Portman) from the secret police, and she becomes his unlikely ally.

Here's some background on V For Vendetta.

Originally, it was a comic book, or more properly, serial graphic novel, by Alan Moore, who also wrote From Hell, The Watchmen, and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Before you vomit, remember that Alan Moore himself has disavowed every film version of his work. DC Comics owns the rights to his work, and can therefore make movies if they want, but the movie versions have pretty universally been crap. Although I personally enjoyed From Hell as a movie, it was a TERRIBLE adaptation of Moore's work.

Now, V For Vendetta I will give one thing: it TRIED harder than the others did to be a good film version of Moore's graphic novels; it failed only by virtue of the fact that the Wachowski Brothers, the EXCELLENT gentlemen who made Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, didn't understand the point of the exercise.

See, in Moore's graphic novels, the point is the resistance to the oppression of an ever-increasingly totalitarian government. In the movie, the filmmakers aren't sure if they want you to feel that, or if they want to blame the Iraq war and President Bush for the totalitarian nightmare of the future. They certainly try to muddy the issue by using "news" broadcasts to describe the situation - saying that the reason the world is all fucked up is because the U. S. "bit off more than they could chew." The fact that anyone living in that society would know that, and therefore not need the handholding of the news broadcasts to remember it, seems to have escaped the Wachowskis; the ham-handedness with which they ladle blame on America diverts attention from the anti-totalitarian nature of the story.

It also suffers from the fact that they dulled-down the villains so they'd be more acceptable. In Moore's novels, the villains were completely reprehensible in every way; the only reason they were tolerated by society was because the citizens didn't know how to resist, and didn't know that they COULD. Enter "V," a masked rebel who promises to overthrow the government, and suddenly society's vague but powerful resentment of the ruling elite has a crystallizing leader to follow.

Not so in the movie. V appears, makes vague pronouncements about freedom being better than secret police and totalitarianism - which, you'd think, wouldn't be necessary - anyone knows they are - but then rescues Evey (Natalie Portman) from a squad of the government's "fingermen," who were planning to do unfortunate things to her for curfew violations. He murders a mouthpiece of the regime, after which takes place the best scene in the film.

The government, of course not wanting to admit that there are terrorists, announces that the man in question died of natural causes; Evey, watching the news, realizes that the anchor herself knows the story is a lie, because she gets shifty-eyed.

That was a dig at the media, and their collusion with a particular ideology that I'm actually surprised made it past the Wachowskis; since the media can at best be described as "hostile" to the right, seeing the anchors willingly colluding with the group in power, despite knowing the falsity of the news reports and the differing ideologies, makes the media look very bad indeed, and most filmmakers these days choose to portray the media and its members as heroic crusaders for truth, despite the total, obvious falsity of such an image.

The movie quickly bogs down because the Wachowskis cannot understand that illogical, unrealistic things are jarring to suspension of disbelief, unless given a context; we didn't object to the insane stunts in The Matrix because we were told from the beginning that it was not reality; we therefore didn't expect it to conform to reality's laws. However, V for Vendetta is set, at least partly, in reality; we are expected by the premise to see the world of V for Vendetta as something that might arise from our own reality, if certain decisions are made, or not made; yet things happen in this movie that are impossible to believe unless they are in the Matrix. Maybe the Wachowskis didn't understand that this is not another sequel, and that it's time to move on.

Sadly, unlike the graphic novels, there is no real underlying ideology behind V For Vendetta, other than that the government is bad; well, ok, but what are you planning to replace it with? No mention is made of any plan to replace the government with something more friendly to the citizens; V's only priority seems to be destruction, which is totally counter to his character in the graphic novels. Obviously, if you haven't read the graphic novels, you won't realize that this wasn't the original intent, but you will nonetheless feel the inner soullessness of this movie; it's unavoidable, as they have characters behave in ways that humans simply don't behave, just to gain a plot point.

At one point, V does something so hideous to Evey that you are left with the feeling that everything that follows in the plot is impossible; those events could have been unfolded in a different way, and they might have worked, but as the film shows them, not a chance. And V's final pronouncement to Evey at the end of the movie betrays his character in a way irreparable by the inevitable Director's Cut; it changes the fundamental motivations of the character in a way so counter to his original intent that, for me, it ruined the movie.

The original graphic novels are a wonderful reading experience; that cannot be said for the movie. Don't buy this. If you just HAVE to, rent it, but be prepared for anti-American propaganda, plot silliness, superhuman powers in the hands of those not superhuman, without explanation; and last, but not least, a total lack of moral understanding on the part of the filmmakers.

You don't need morals to make most movies; but when making a movie about morality, politics, and the moral responsibilities of the citizens, it helps if you have some. Just a thought. Hey! Wachowskis! Stop making movies and go back to film school, because you suck.

Wow, This Town Is Foggy. Oh, Look, Honey, It's Silent Hill!

2006-04-24T22:29:00.000-04:00

Silent Hill At IMDB!

Rose cannot accept the knowledge that her daughter Sharon is dying of a fatal disease. Over the protests of her husband, she flees with her child, intending to take the girl to a faith healer. On the way, she ends up driving through a portal in reality, which takes her to the eerie and deserted town of Silent Hill. Sharon disappears in Silent Hill, and Rose follows what she thinks is her daughter's silhouette all over town. It's soon clear the town is not like any place she's ever been. It's inhabited by a variety of creatures and a living darkness that descends and literally transforms everything it touches.

...And so far as that goes, it's fine.

I will go a bit farther.

While trying to avoid anything spoiler-like, I will tell you as much as I can about this. Silent Hill began as a series of games by Konami, and they're currently working on the fifth title in the franchise. This is because the games are creepy on a level not found in any other franchise to date. Fatal Frame can stretch its fingers out and reach a distant second, but that's about it.

Most of the titles in the so-called "survival horror" games are pretty much not scary per se; they're survival games. The main character is usually military or police, set against an army of zombies / dinosaurs / zombies / more zombies / zombies of a new and different type / diseased humans who act like, but really aren't zombies / you get the idea. Silent Hill isn't like that. At all. There are monsters, sure, but in Silent Hill, one of the persistent themes of the series is the disjunction between perception and reality; in fact the main character of the third game asks another character about the monsters, and gets "is that what you see them as?" as a reply.

Silent Hill is about atmosphere, and it's certainly a more cerebral franchise than, say, Resident Evil. Don't get me wrong; RE games are fun, but as far as I'm concerned they're only horror by virtue of the grossout, which is the wimpiest horror. Silent Hill games are different. They are scary. Really scary. Looking-over-your-shoulder-in-the-parking-lot scary. Psychological horror, persistent exploitation of the fear of the dark, disturbing sounds, terrifying images, and uncertainty of perception are all themes you can expect to see explored in a typical Silent Hill game.

Inevitably, they decided to make a movie.

When I first heard about the movie, I cringed. Video game movies are first and foremost never like the games; secondly, they suck, and thirdly, they SUCK.

This one doesn't.

I described the games for one reason: because I suspect that word of mouth will drag an awful lot of people who don't play games to see it, and I want them to know what they're walking into. The movie is the best, by far, translation of game to movie I've ever seen. All the themes from the games are there, and it can be severely disturbing. Walk into it with your eyes open, because it's worth the ride.

I realize the critics right now are pretty unanimously hating it, but after reading several different reviews, I'm starting to wonder how many of them actually saw the movie, and how many of them reworded other reviewers' comments, because they all have the same complaints, and they're complaints that simply don't apply to the movie I just saw.

"The plot makes no sense."
Um, kay, so you can't understand more than one concept at a time, due to a steady diet of "romantic comedies" and other brainless "entertainment?" It's not hard. Little girl sleepwalks and yells name of creepy town. Mom takes her to creepy town to find out why. Girl disappears; mom hunts for her. Town is really, really creepy. Woooo, too tough for me, there, boy.

"It's dark."
It's a movie largely predicated on fear of the dark, just like the games it's based on. If nyctophobia is one of your big scares, gee, you think it might just be DARK?!?

The next two go together: "It's too much like the games," and "It's not very much like the games." To which I answer: pick one, and I'll disagree. If you can't even decide which one of those applies, shut up.

Here's the deal: they used plot themes from the games. The plot is remarkably similar to the first game, though not exact. The monsters are, by and large, directly from the first three games in the series. Most of the music is from the games. Several of the characters are from the games, directly. The locations and town map are from the game. It's a hell of a lot like the game.

However, all that does is supply a fan of the game with tons of "moments," when you recognize something from the game you didn't expect to see, and go "OOOOoooooOOO!!!" If you're not a fan, it's more than possible to enjoy this as a straight horror movie; it does quite nicely even without the background of having played the games. In this case, having a history with Silent Hill is more of a bonus than anything else.

Normally, I either outright hate (Wing Commander,) or laugh at (Doom) game movies; although I'm willing to give them a chance, they're almost always disappointing, like the American re-filmings of Asian movies; often for the same reason, the games are largely made by Asians, and exploit fears and cultural themes not prevalent in the West. This movie was one that I unashamedly enjoyed, both as a fan of the games, and as a horror movie buff. Is it art? Well, I don't know that I'd go that far; but it's a hell of a good show, and there was only one real "OMG can you BE that stupid" moment involved.

For the fans: Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 is in the movie, and at one point does something so outrageously hideous that I turned to my wife and said "Ok, honey, we're definitely buying this one." She agreed after she got through saying "eeeeeeewwwwwwww." And just wait until the first time you hear that air raid siren. All your hair will stand right on end - outstanding.

Go see this movie. It may be the only horror movie to come out this year that deserves the bloated, inflated ticket price theaters charge. It certainly deserves the venue; the big screen and surround sound will help make this an experience, sure enough.

Amazingly, Another Sequel That Doesn't Suck

2006-04-18T23:02:00.000-04:00

Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution continues the saga of war between the Death Dealers and the Lycans. The film goes back to the beginnings of the ancient feud between the two tribes as Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the beautiful vampire heroine, and Michael (Scott Speedman), the lycan hybrid, try to unlock the secrets of their bloodlines.

Well, that's pretty accurate.
This movie begins with a flashback to events in the 1200's, when the Corvinus brothers first became vampire and werewolf. It then returns to the "present," that being about an hour or so after the events of the first movie.
I always like it when filmmakers do that; having a break of days, weeks, months, or even years between the events of the original and the events of the sequel suggests that the two in fact have nothing to do with each other besides milking a few dollars out of a profitable franchise, which I always hate.

Now, the IMDB users point out a few continuity errors, which I noticed, although I have to say they're much less glaring than has become the norm these days; things like a ripped shirt becoming whole are minor after seeing the cab windshield becoming whole in Collateral - several times.

I will admit that I derive a great deal of enjoyment from watching Kate Beckinsale in skintight leather; what straight male doesn't? But unlike the first, this movie brings its formula to the table more effectively, and that is action. There's nothing wrong with an action film, and this is a good one. Does the plot make sense? Well, sort of, but really it's mostly a backdrop used to provide the characters a way to beat the crap out of each other.

The effects are, if anything, more effective than in the first Underworld title, mostly because the crew got past the whole "whoa, we're making a werewolf film" issue and passed off the transformations as commonplace, often panning the camera past a human-werewolf transformation without even stopping. This is effective - usually, even in the first Underworld movie,directors of werewolf pictures end up "drawing out the drama" of the transformation at some point by giving an extended close-up effects shot - which is universally a mistake. Special effects are most convincing in moderation. Your brain has a tolerance level for visual effects, and past a certain point, the brain rebels against it. Spiderman and Spiderman 2 are perfect examples of how to do it right - the Spiderman character is entirely CG, but it's never focused on as the exclusive core of the frame, so your eye doesn't have time to pick out the details that give it away.

It's for exactly this reason that Evolution works. Both the effects and the plot, which does have holes, like any action movie, are tacitly accepted by the crew, and therefore easier to accept by the audience, because they move past before you have a chance for your mind to nitpick it to pieces. Since this is something that I am notorious for, I expect that the fact that I liked this movie will come as somewhat of a surprise, but the way the movie is put together, and the pacing, really doesn't give you much of a chance to do anything other than wince and cringe a bit when someone's head gets ripped off.

I will give this movie a good recommendation, with the caveat that you will enjoy it more if you watched the first movie, and the second caveat that you really shouldn't eat during some of the fight scenes.

OMG! A New Entry! It Must Be A Fable!

2006-03-31T22:04:00.000-05:00

Fable!

In this groundbreaking role-playing adventure game from Lionhead Studios, your every action determines your character's skills, appearance and morality. Your character's life story is created from childhood through to adulthood and on to old age. Grow from an inexperienced child into the most powerful being in the world, spoken of by all and immortalized in legend.

Now, Fable:TLC is a good game. It's not a GREAT game, but it is a good one. The majority of the flaws from which it suffers are due not to actual bad design, but instead not enough GOOD design.
For example: the quests. There aren't enough of them. The quests that are in the game are fairly engaging, no farming to be found, although there are a couple of "go-get-em's." The problem's not the QUALITY, rather strictly a matter of QUANTITY: there are only enough quests in the game to guarantee about 12 hours of solid gameplay for a dedicated gamer. Contrast that with any game in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series - I guarantee that without cheating it is totally impossible to win any game in the series in under 50 hours.

The game's morality system is fairly interesting in an academic sort of way - by which I mean, seeing what the game devs decided would count as good or evil. Not murders or stealing, but the minor stuff like healing party members, using particular spells, wearing dark, scary looking armor (?!?) or tattling on an adulterous husband. The only problem is, it doesn't go far enough. Although people will flee from you if you get scaaaary enough, shops will still sell to you unless you actually attack the shopkeeper, and towns have no memory at ALL - if you leave town and go throw some coins in a church donation bowl, suddenly you are Golden Boy again, and everyone loves you. Although your appearance changes based on your "alignment," it doesn't seem to really matter; you are at no point so repulsive that a change of armor won't cause women all over the game - and men too - to fall at your feet.

The romance system is fairly interesting, if not realistic at all. You can cause anyone in the game world to fall in love with you if you are impressive enough looking and say "hey," in a smutty kind of way, over and over again. Gifts ranging from flowers and chocolates to jewels of every description give you a boost in how effective your flirting is, and soon the tiny floating heart over your victim's head will become a giant golden heart, at which point they will begin pestering you in a VERY rude way for a wedding ring. Once you get them one, they pester you for a house, and you can acquire one in a couple of places. Actually, you can acquire several, complete with wives or husbands, in different locations at the same time, and none of your spouses will ever figure it out. You can have sex in this game, although it doesn't actually show anything; but you can listen to a variety of moans and groans based on how good you are at it - practice makes perfect. Occasionally, if you treat your spouse(s) well, they will give you presents, or if badly, divorce you in loud, public fashion, causing you to get laughed at by local children.

Combat is fairly well put together, with three divisions of fighting: magic, ranged, and melee. Melee is fairly straightforward, the more times you hit without getting hit, the more you charge up your weapon, until you can unleash a super attack. Repeat as necessary. Ranged is a function of patience; the longer you let your attacks charge before loosing an arrow, the more damage you do, allowing a constant stream of one-hit kills on even enemies of much higher level if you're patient. Magic... Ah, now there's the gravy.

I'll tell you why.

Unlike in melee, where your attacks move you around, and ranged, where you're pretty much obligated to stay locked onto one enemy, whether by target locking or sniper zooming, when using magic you can pretty much move freely, because most of your useful spells are area-of-effect spells. This is where combat starts to break down, though, as once you master the Enflame spell, you can pretty much whup the crap out of any monster in the game, including the bosses. The area-of-effect spells added in the Lost Chapters expansion are somewhat less unbalanced, as they require such a significant charge time that the enemies will virtually certainly get a free lick or two while you get your spell ready. Enflame, however, leaves you temporarily invulnerable to enemy damage, covers an enormous area, does really impressive damage, and best of all has no casting delay at all. None. Not even a little bit.

Which leads me to my next point, kids: don't smoke crack and then design a questing system. Why do I say that? Because the quest system is innately exploitable to a really impressive degree. See, saving your game outside of an active quest area is a "world save," which when loaded deposits you, items, xp, and all, right where you left off. Saving during an active quest, however, is a "hero save," which means that if you load it, you keep all the xp and items you'd found to that point in the quest, but start outside the quest area in the last position you were in before beginning the quest.

What does this mean? Well, effectively, it means that you only have to struggle for xp and items until you receive the Hobbe Cave quest, and then you're set like Chet. The Hobbe Cave quest features a really huge, ongoing outpouring of enemies, a ton of items, loads and loads of xp, and can be repeated ad nauseum until your character is maxed out in every stat- and it's about the 6th quest you get. Also, one of the items you can get repeatedly during this quest is a Silver Key, which means that you can open any treasure chest in the game by the time you've been playing for about 3 hours.

Similar exploitability is built into the trading system, as well, allowing you to trade repeatedly with the same trader without interruption until you have amassed amounts of wealth so stratospheric it looks like the score that breaks Pac-Man. See, the traders base their prices on the scarcity of goods, which means that if they have a bunch, it's cheap, but if they have one, it costs a ton. So, you go get yourself about 9,000 gold, run around to every merchant you can find and buy them out of health and magic potions, and then go to the merchant in the first town and sell all of them at once. Then buy them back for less than you sold them for. Repeat as necessary. Ultimately, you need about 50 potions for this to make any serious headway, but you can get that many pretty quickly. The more potions you have, the faster your money goes up. This can be used with any commodity in the world, although jewels are ultimately the way to go - there's one merchant at which you can make a million plus a trade, over and over again, just for selling a jewel he carries in lots of 50.

There are, however, tons of interesting touches to offset this kind of goofiness. For example, you can buy businesses and houses, and rent them out. Unfortunately, this is ALSO a feature the devs didn't feel like showing off, so they only put in a few places where you can buy either houses or businesses in the entire game. As a result, if you want to buy a bar, for example, the best way to go about it is to pick one, and kill everyone in it. If your reputation is good, or at least you're wearing "Good Guy" armor, you can pay the guards to leave you alone - in fact, the morality system and its consequences are so profound in their effects upon the game world that you can usually tell the town guards "I'm Sorry," (there's an in-game emote for it, and you can hotkey it,) and have them totally forgive your brutal murder of dozens of people.

Wait, that's more goofiness.

Well, you can customize your weapons, and your character. Um, like, with haircuts, beards, tattoos, and different clothing. The tattoos and clothing can even make you more evil or good!

Wait, that's goofy, too.

Dammit.

See, this is the problem with Fable: it's not a bad game, it's just that although the devs came up with any number of really interesting ideas, they didn't bother to think them all the way through. Logical Consequences = interesting game world, if and only if you bother to actually HAVE consequences, and stuff. Saying "I'm Sorry," after murdering 25 people should not get you of the hook, no matter HOW good your reputation is.

All in all, this is an interesting game, and certainly worth playing, but I really hope that in the inevitable sequel, the devs at Lionhead Studios manage to convince themselves to carry things through, and to avoid the screamingly annoying exploitive nature of the current setup. Honestly, make money easier to make honestly, and players won't have to invent elaborate ways to defraud your merchants. Leaving loopholes to allow players to defraud your merchants so that you don't have to actually create a working economy is just lazy.

Oh, and since I haven't mentioned it yet: welcome back to Xeno's Guide!

A Little Discussion Of The Asian Cinema

2005-11-07T11:04:00.000-05:00

I am an American. Now, to most people, that says right at the outset that I don't speak any language besides English, and that not very well; that I'm biased in favor of all things American; and further, that I have a resolute willingness to be lulled into inactivity for extensive periods by forms of "entertainment" not requiring a great deal of brainpower.
All of the above are true.

However, that does not totally remove my ability to distinguish between things which suck and things which don't. And it is for just this reason that I would like to make a blanket recommendation for anyone reading this: go check out some Asian movies. No, really.
In the last few years, movie critics all over the country have been bemoaning the lack of innovation and creativity in American cinema, weeping and wailing over the near-total triumph in Hollywood of the formula over the new storyline, and absolutely agonizing over the notion that creation of a franchise is more important than just plain telling a good story.
These same critics have hailed a few foreign films, notably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, while somehow managing to conveniently avoid noticing that there are, in fact, other movies coming out in Asia and the rest of the world.
Now I grant that we in America are resistant to anything different from our culture, whatever group you choose to identify yourself with; (how many black people went to The Station Agent? And how many whites went to Barbershop?) but sometimes we just need to get out a little more. The Academy Awards lump anything not made in Hollywood into one category, giving out a single Oscar for "Best Foreign Film." We ought to either open things up a bit (and maybe lower the number of bribes taken by Academy voters,) or rename the proceedings "The American Movie Awards."
Recently, there has been a bit of a renaissance of the horror film; it's amazing how many people really don't know where it comes from. Well, I'll tell you. Asia.
That's right. You may have heard of The Ring? Or, should I say, Ringu? Or its sequel, The Ring 2? I mean, Ringu 2? You've gone to the theater to be scared witless by The Grudge (by which I mean Ju-On,) and some of you may have noticed your local video store being invaded by Infection, Premonition, The Eye (1 and 2,) and Inner Senses? You SHOULD have heard of Dark Water, starring Jennifer Connelly, I mean Dark Water, starring Hitomi Kuroki?
A moment that absolutely made me grit my teeth was during the Halloween festivities on TV this year: Bravo ran a special on "the 100 scariest moments in movie history," or something like that. What's so bad about that? The fact that the idiot talking heads they got to comment on the "moments" spent 15 minutes raving about the innovation of the filmmakers who shot "The Ring," _completely ignoring the fact that it was a remake of a vastly superior movie (Ringu) that has been out for 10 years._
While we in America have been stifling innovation every chance we get, Asia has been blowing things up in a big way, and now it's starting to carry over into Hollywood, and we don't even seem to realize it. Over the next 3 years, over 30 Japanese and Chinese, and about 10 more Thai, movies of various stripes are planned for release in the U.S. in one form or another. They range from the excellent (Kairo, Ong Bak) to the pretty good ( Whispering Corridors) to the really out there(Versus.) Not only that, but literally dozens and dozens of remakes of Asian films, or outright ripoffs of the same, are planned, and yet we seem to be nearly totally unconscious of everything aside from the fact that "horror movies are cool right now."
Well, let me dispel an illusion for you, right now. AMERICAN horror movies are NOT cool right now. They suck. Anyone watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Amityville Horror, both terrible, pointless remakes of movies that frankly weren't all that great to start with? How about Wrong Turn, or Cabin Fever? These movies did poorly at the box office, and poorly so far on home video, because of one simple fact: they SUCK.
The Ring did well in theaters, and does well at home, because it doesn't; although it's not as good as the movie it's ripped off from, The Ring is actually a pretty sharp movie. Damn shame we didn't come up with the idea.
And why didn't we? More and more, Hollywood studios are treading the path of the reliable sale, and while this may lead to temporary profits, in the long term it's disastrous for their business, as more and more consumers are figuring out that you really can get anything you want on eBay, including really good movies from Asia. After all, why watch bad horror movies, when you can instead watch good ones?
More disturbing is the fact that American movie companies, and even American TV stations, don't seem to realize this. If you didn't notice while it was going on, take a look at the Halloween TV Guide; there was a parade of Halloween horror movies, nearly all of them bad. The Relic, a sad case taken from a really good book; the TV movie of The Shining, which stayed true to the book and somehow managed to suck anyway; Rose Red and Storm Of The Century on four different channels apiece; Halloween 5, Friday the 13th 6; need I go on?
Apparently, the TV stations' thinking went something like this: "Hey, horror movies are doing pretty good right now. (Notice there was barely any sign of the festivities this time last year.) Let's get some cheapie movies that we don't have to pay much for and run them, people will like them."
I don't get it. We, by and large, HATED those movies the first time around; just because we're enjoying the NEW, GOOD movies doesn't necessarily mean we will automagically love the OLD, CRAPPY movies.
You should definitely check out the Asian cinema, if you're interested in seeing some movies that don't suck, and you're willing to read subtitles.
I'll even give you some standout recommendations:
The Eye 2: oddly enough, this is vastly superior to the first one.
Premonition: low-budget, but manages to give you chills anyway.
Kairo: if you're not disturbed by this movie something is terribly wrong with you and you should seek professional help.
Not just horror, though: there are some really fantastic movies coming out of Asia right now that have nothing whatsoever to do with horror.
House of Flying Daggers: A great love triangle / assassination movie.
Hero (Jet Li): a wonderful, and overlooked, movie about sovereignty and the nature of governing;
Ong Bak: a Thai movie about a young fighter;
Yee Do Hung Gaan (Inner Senses): the Asian Sixth Sense, I will not call this a horror movie, although some of the circumstances surrounding it are a little weird.
And that doesn't begin to cover the animated movies, among which are the delightful films of Miyazaki Hayao, whose "Studio Ghibli" has produced some of the greatest animated films of all time. Don't believe me? Princess Mononoke, upon its release, became in short order the highest-grossing film in the history of Japan. Numbered among Miyazaki's cinematic accomplishments are Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Whisper of the Heart, Castle in the Sky, Grave of the Fireflies (possibly the saddest movie ever filmed of any kind, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED) and Kiki's Delivery Service.
You could also catch Steamboy, the latest feature film by the director of the internationally acclaimed movie Akira; it took 10 years to make, and looks it - Steamboy is one of the world's all-time most beautifully animated movies.
Or, you could go see Chicken Little.
It's up to you, but as time goes by, I'm paying more and more attention to the Asian cinema, and in the process rediscovering classics that most Americans never even knew existed. Did you know the classic Western movie The Magnificent Seven was a remake of a Japanese film, The Seven Samurai? Or that movies like The Usual Suspects owe their existence to a film called Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa? Or that A Fistful of Dollars was originally a Kurosawa film as well? Or, for that matter, that the original Godzilla (Gojira) was an anti-war protest film, and Raymond Burr was nowhere to be seen?
It makes me wonder how long Hollywood has been stealing from Asia without us even knowing about it. As far as I'm concerned, it's long past time for some credit to be given where it's due: go rent an Asian movie today. You might be surprised.
(Just don't watch them in English. While the original audio features the finest actors in Asia, the English audio tracks often appear to have recorded by the bums sleeping outside the distribution houses in the streets, and can really detract from the impact of otherwise fine films. Think I'm kidding? Go watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in English. I dare you.)

Oh No! I've Got Something In My Eye - Both Of Them, Even!

2005-11-07T10:37:00.000-05:00

There is a phenomenon prevalent enough in American cinema (and I suppose everywhere else, too,) that it has earned its own name: sequelitis. This is the syndrome suffered by moviemakers who, having made a profitable (or even not-so-profitable) movie, attempt to cash in on the "franchise" by making a quick-and-cheap sequel which almost always sucks. Even hugely popular movie franchises suffer from this; look at Star Wars. The original movie, and indeed Empire Strikes Back, were both excellent; by the time Return of the Jedi rolled around, though, the production values were beginning to suffer a little. The Phantom Menace sucked outright, Attack of the Clones was nearly unendurable, and Revenge of George Lucas' Giant, Inflated Ego is a blasphemous monstrosity.
It is, in fact, so rare that a sequel is better than the original that it deserves a special pat on the back for the filmmakers who managed it.
So here goes:

The Eye 2. (Jian Gui 2.)
Go see it.
NOW.
In case you didn't see it, The Eye was a decent, though low-budget, Cantonese movie by the Pang brothers, who apparently are a kind of reverse clone of the Wachowski brothers. (You know the Wachowskis: they made one of the all-time good S/F action movies, The Matrix, and followed it with two horrifying and insipid sequels.) The Pangs, on the other hand, created a good-side-of-mediocre original, and followed it up with a sequel that is absolutely stellar.
The Eye is sort of like an Asian version of The Dead Zone, a film based on Stephen King's novel about a guy who can foresee people's lives following a terrible accident. In The Eye, Wong Kar Mun has a corneal transplant which goes really well until she starts to have visions of catastrophes, visions of the dead, and generally starts seeing all kinds of really wacky crap that makes her very nervous. The film follows her quest to find the donor of her eye, and find out why she's seeing all this weird stuff.
Ok. Now that I've told you all that, disregard it entirely; the sequel has nothing whatsoever to do with any of it.
Instead, it focuses on a beautiful young woman who is pregnant by her married lover, who suddenly begins to be haunted by the ghost of another woman who is determined that she stay pregnant - for reasons that, when they become clear, will severely disturb you, to say the least. (Follow all that? Good.)
One of the things I respect the most about the Pang brothers as filmmakers is the fact that they don't flinch from their own storylines. Too often directors shy away from showing the things that happen in their storylines directly. Now, this can work, when used as a technique; take a look at Yee Do Hung Gaan (Inner Senses) sometime. There is in that movie an absolutely horrifying scene involving a high school girl and a pair of pruning shears, that is absolutely guaranteed to make even the toughest audience hide their eyes and curse, despite the fact that the filmmakers never actually show you anything. However, too often in movies it is not a technique, but rather a lack of grit (and maybe a fear of directorial typecasting) that makes the director avoid showing the consequences of storyline events.
A good example that is almost always seen in movies is when a character falls off of something high; how many times do you recall seeing someone fall and be followed by the cameras ALMOST all the way to the ground, only to then cut away from the actual impact at the last second? The frequently used shot of "the gory remains" later on is merely a cop-out; the real horror is in the impact itself. A dead body is just a dead body, however messy. The moment that sends chills up and down your back is the moment that someone's life is actually snuffed out, not the later examination of their now-vacant body. Autopsies may be disgusting, and frequently repulsive, but they're almost never horrifying.
The Pang brothers, on the other hand, flinch from nothing, and when their character hurls herself off a roof not once but TWICE, they follow her all the way down both times. It is absolutely guaranteed to make you bite through your lower lip, especially after the first time, as you watch her drag herself up the stairs to try again.
However, as horrifying as this movie can sometimes be, there's another factor at work here. The Pang brothers are not only unflinching when it comes to horror; they are equally unsparing of hope, and ultimately that's how this movie plays out.
Have you ever watched all the way through a movie, and then in the last few seconds, turned to your neighbor at the movie and said "Now if _I_ was writing this, here's what _I_ would do...?" I bet you have. Everyone has at least once in a while. But how often do filmmakers actually end things that way? Not very, huh? Usually, at the last second, where they might cross the line from "decent" to "brilliant," they back off, step away from the risky choice, and retreat into the safety of established theatrical formulas. This is not one of those films.
Rarely in cinema do I experience a moment like the one at the end of The Eye 2, when I unpaused my DVD and watched the very scene I had just finished describing to my wife unfold before me. This movie is a fantastic cinematic experience, and although not for the theatrically faint-of-heart, it is well worth the effort required to find it on DVD. I was able to get it at my local video store, but then, I've had good luck with them lately. (It may have something to do with the amount of time I spend pestering them to get more foreign films, and Canada doesn't count.)
I will add one qualifier to my description of this film, however; do yourself the favor of steeling yourself for the subtitles, and watch this movie in the original Cantonese. The original voice acting is incredible, but the English dub isn't that great. It's not TERRIBLE, mind you, like that of some well-known films I could name, but any letdown diminishes the impact of this film, which deserves better. Watched in its original, compelling Cantonese, with fine acting by Shu Qi, Eugenia Yuan, Philip Kwok, and Rayson Tan, this is one of the best movies I've seen all year.
Granted, this is hardly surprising, considering the astonishing lack of anything approaching good movies this year from Hollywood, but still.

I Can See The Future! Oh, Wait, It's Just A Premonition...

2005-11-07T10:07:00.000-05:00

Premonition (Yogen) is an excellent movie based on a comic originally by Jiro Tsunoda. Like Ringu, (which you may know better as "The Ring,") this movie is almost certainly better in its original form than any Americanization of it will turn out to be; this is because American directors just seem to miss the point a lot of the time when reshooting foreign films.

For example, the Tom Cruise movie "Vanilla Sky," which did SO very well in American theaters, is actually a remake of a great film called "Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)." Now, Abre Los Ojos is a fantastic movie, alternately really creative and very disturbing, and its conclusion will absolutely knock your socks off. Vanilla Sky, on the other hand, sucks. Despite frequently reshooting scenes using what looks like the same sets (they weren't, just very detailed recreations) as the original, all too often the impact of a scene is lost completely when the American director focuses on parts of the scene irrelevant to the story, rather than on the crucial clues shown in the far superior original.
Ringu suffered the same treatment at the hands of director Gore Verbinski, who just plain didn't understand the point of a lot of the scares in the original. Everyone knows kids are creepy, which of course is why we still have them in droves, so I can sort of understand replacing the 18-year-old girl from the original movie with the 8-year-old girl in The Ring (but not really.) However, if you watched The Ring, maybe you remember my favorite scene in the movie: the ghost comes out of the television, and rather than GET TO HIS FEET AND RUN AWAY, like a sensible human, Noah Clay flops around on the floor like a dying fish, allowing the ghost to catch him with ease and kill him. Why, you ask? What sense does this scene make, you ask? Why, after all, DIDN'T he just get up and run away?
Well, because the script demands that he's supposed to die. This is because the character died in the original; however, to understand how profoundly (the American director) missed the point, let me paint you a picture of life in Tokyo. The average bachelor salaried worker, called "sarariman," (say it in a bad Japanese accent if you don't get it on sight,) lives in an apartment smaller than a typical American living room. A small family (husband, wife, 2.5 kids) typically lives in an apartment the size of an American living room with a den. When Sadako (Samara in the American version) comes out of the television in Ringu, Ryuji Takayama is less than 5 feet from the television, with his back to a huge wooden railing which divides his "den" from his "living room." He has nowhere to go; he CANNOT simply leap to his feet and escape. The entire point of the scene is claustrophobia, and a comment on the cramped nature of city life for Japanese, something Gore Verbinski totally failed to understand.
What does all this have to do with Premonition?
Well, I'll tell you.
Premonition is a movie intimately concerned with the nature of fate and destiny, in a way often explored by the Asian cinema, yet often ignored by the West; this is not, in itself, a problem, but I cringe at the thought of this excellent, contemplative little horror movie being remade by hands as callous as those of Gore Verbinski.
Hideki is an associate professor looking for tenure; he is out for a drive with his wife and daughter and stops to phone in some crucial work, when he sees a newspaper clipping in the phone booth that reports a horrible crash that hasn't happened yet - one in which his daughter is killed (picture and all.)
He attempts to save his daughter but fails; a huge truck, whose driver had suffered a heart attack, veers onto the side of the road and crushes their car, daughter and all. His wife, understandably in shock about this disaster, thinks he's crazy when he starts raving about having seen it coming.
Think I'm giving something away? That's the first 3 minutes of the movie. Hideki continues to see "premonitions," and begins to wonder if he can change their outcome, attempting to enlist his (now estranged) wife in his efforts to stymie destiny's plan, much like Final Destination. Unlike Final Destination, however, the consequences of meddling with fate play out in a very different fashion, at one point even placing him (in a vision) in the truck responsible for his daughter's death moments before impact.
This movie speculates about destiny in a way American movies have forgotten, if they ever tried to explore it in the first place, and hopefully it will receive its just respect from audiences in its original form, rather than in a watered-down form deemed acceptable for the obviously painfully stupid American audiences by the Hollywood executives responsible for The Ring and The Ring 2, which was an even greater butchery of a good film than was the original.
Think not? Watch Ringu 2. They left out the single best scene in the film in its entirety - didn't even attempt it. Oh, yeah, and there's a "Ringu 0" also, which comes chronologically before Ringu, and explains how Sadako got dead in the first place. Of course, since they A. explained all that in The Ring, and B. made the girl so young that the story prior to her death is almost irrelevant, I'm not exactly sure what they have planned for the next movie. It will almost certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with the original.
At any rate, Premonition is a first-rate movie, and deserves your attention in its original form; you can get it at most video stores on DVD, and I recommend you try, as it is definitely worth the effort to find it.

Wes Craven, You've Been Cursed!

2005-07-02T13:16:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

A werewolf loose in Los Angeles changes the lives of three young adults, who, after being mauled by the beast, learn they must kill their attacker if they hope to change their fate.

Well, that's sorta true.
Kinda.
Not really.
More like TWO young people are mauled and cursed. One is just plain killed.

Ok.
First things first.
Wes Craven has a well-deserved reputation for making horror films.
He's made such gems as The Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Serpent And The Rainbow, Shocker, and Scream.

Sadly, he's decided to rest on his laurels.
Cursed has no horror at all, and is the epitome of what Hollywood has been doing to one of the all-time great movie monsters recently: the "funny" werewolf movie.

I'm not sure I understand this phenomenon. For me, it's a complete waste of a perfectly good movie monster. Werewolves are supposed to eat your ass, not give you the finger and gripe about fat thighs. Werewolves are supposed to be dark and evil, not skinny social climbers. But most importantly, werewolves are supposed to be SCARY.

This movie isn't. It has one clever bit of subversiveness in it, which I will explain in a bit, and one good scene in which one of the characters' dog, who has gotten infected with the werewolf whatevers, becomes a really angry mutant dog and tries to chew his face off for no reason. Not really true to the werewolf mythos, but hey, who's picky.

Certainly not theater audiences these days. I mean...

...Oh, wait, movie revenues are way down at the theater, aren't they? Maybe I'm needlessly badmouthing theater audiences.
Well, we'll see.

The movie is a relentless advertisement for the Craig Kilborn show. The main character works for the show, and is trying to find guests. In a clever bit of subversiveness, the movie tries to sell Scott Baio as the bad guy, but he doesn't even make a very good red herring. All in all, he has about 6 lines in the whole movie, which begs the question "Does Scott Baio still have a career?"

Clearly, no. "Please, please, SOMEONE, pay me! I'm broke and have no job skills!"

Apparently, neither does the screenwriter. Wes Craven's reputation, for me, was severely damaged by this show, and my willingness to buy a ticket to another movie because it's "a film by Wes Craven" is going to be very, very limited.
VERY limited.
Try none.

This movie was a huge, smelly waste of $80 million or so. All that money ought instead to have been put to better use - say, making a HORROR MOVIE about werewolves. The world didn't need another teen comedy with that happens to feature werewolves.

Let me just spell it out for you.

In high school wrestling, if you perform a WWE-style delayed vertical suplex on your opponent, any wrestling coach in the country would absolutely have you up on charges; in Cursed, the coach just winces, as though to say "wow, that musta HURT."

In ANY WORLD, if you have a bully who is secretly gay, and you call him on it in front of all his friends and in public, the last thing in the world he will do is come to your house later that night to announce that you were right about him and he WANTS you - except in Hollywoodland.

Werewolves die from silver bullets, not from being shot in the head with normal bullets. Don't you guys watch movies, fa Chrissakes?!?

In closing, let me just say that if I had directed this ungodly mess, it would have been an Alan Smithee film; I wouldn't have wanted my name attached to it in any way, much less with top billing. I feel for Christina Ricci, who hasn't yet gotten the notoriety she deserves and the concomitant ability to pick which scripts she will work on; she shouldn't be saddled with trash like this.

This movie is a definite buy for me - yes, a BUY - in fact, I want ALL the copies, so I can burn them on the front lawn of Miramax.

Never buy this DVD, unless you're planning on sending me the DVD for safe, legal disposal.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2005-06-24T14:40:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

Li Mu Bai, a great warrior decides to turn in his sword, the Green Destiny to a treasured friend. When the sword is then stolen, it is up to him to retrieve it. At the same time he is trying to avenge his master's death by the evil Jade Fox. He is joined in his quest by Shu Lien, the un-conceded love of his life. During all of this, they are introduced to Jiao Long Yu (Jen), the mysterious and beautiful daughter of a well known family. She is the mysterious link to all these tales. But through all the many subplots, this is in essence, a love story.

Well, that's one way to put it.
Another way to put it is: BUY THIS DVD. NOW.

CT,HD is one of the all-time greatest romantic movies ever made - if you watch it in Mandarin with subtitles. The English audio track on the DVD is horribly done, and reduces a magnificent movie to the level of Saturday Action Cinema. However, the entire cast did a wonderful job on the Mandarin track; it's definitely the way to go.

The story revolves around a swordsman, Li Mu Bai, who wants to retire from what he sees as senseless violence. He has a special sword, called the "Green Destiny," which is nearly indestructible; rather than see it fall into the hands of someone unable to appreciate it, he wishes to give it to his patron.

The complications begin when Jen, played with skill and sensitivity by Zhang Ziyi, steals the sword from Mu Bai's patron. Mu Bai pursues her, and discovers that she has been taught the martial techniques he uses, but by someone who does not fully understand them. He determines to take Jen as his student, despite her objections, and follows her when she flees.

There are two separate, but intertwined, love stories - Li Mu Bai and his unacknowledged love, Shu Lien, and Jen and Black Cloud, a bandit chieftain. Jen is fleeing an arranged marriage to a minor noble who will certainly require her to become a traditional Qing dynasty wife, and falls in love with Black Cloud, who offers her greater freedom than she had thought possible.

Both stories are carried out around the chase for the sword, and both are played with vast sensitivity and skill by the cast; Yuen Wo Ping's fighting choreography only serves to contrast the essential serenity of Mu Bai and Shu Lien's relationship, and to highlight the essential wildness of Jen's relationship with Black Cloud.

The movie is filled with incredible visuals. Often the fight scenes defy physics and gravity, but this isn't a realistic movie anyway; it's a lyrical fairy tale in the old sense, a movie so caught up in wonder, and its own sense of magic, that it doesn't stop to ask if it can do something. It just does.

Buy this; anyone with any imagination will enjoy it immensely. This is the movie that all the other adaptations of Giang Hu novels have been shooting for, and missed. This is the bar; it challenges other filmmakers to reach its standard merely by existing.

I bow, in the most profound admiration, to Ang Lee.

House of Flying Daggers

2005-06-24T14:24:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

During the reign of the Tang dynasty in China, a secret organization called "The House of the Flying Daggers" rises and opposes the government. A police officer called Leo sends officer Jin to investigate a young dancer named Mei, claiming that she has ties to the "Flying Daggers". Leo arrests Mei, only to have Jin breaking her free in a plot to gain her trust and lead the police to the new leader of the secret organization. But things are far more complicated than they seem...

A big part of the ad copy for HoFD was the fact that it starred several of the same actors as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and was largely made by the same team.

Sadly, although he definitely has his strengths, Zhang Yimou is no Ang Lee. HoFD is not as good as CT,HD. Let's make no mistake there. Although it occasionally even surpasses CT,HD in its visuals, the story isn't as strong, and Zhang Yimou doesn't build the sympathy with his characters that Ang Lee managed so wonderfully in CT,HD. Don't get me wrong, here, this is an enjoyable movie - I bought it - but it's just not as good as CT,HD.

That said, though, it is a very impressive film. The set design and costumes are amazing, and Zhang Yimou's use of color to delineate events is a technique raised here to an art form. The cinematography is incredible, and the visual effects are so striking I found myself re-running scenes just to see how they were put together.
What weakens this film is first the story, which while certainly interesting, does not possess the depth or complexity of CT,HD; and secondly, the fights.

Yes, I said the fights weaken the film.

See, the fights are beautifully choreographed, and eye-poppingly well filmed; it's just that they're too over-the-top. So many moments occur that defy reality so extremely that your brain, watching, simply cannot dismiss is as fantasy.

When you see one thrown dagger sever 25 or so stalks of bamboo, you think, simultaneously, "Cool!" and "Bullshit!" The problem is that you're never supposed to get to the second one, and you do so several times during HoFD.

In CT,HD, Ang Lee managed to take amazing, gravity-defying fight scenes, and play them as a kind of lyrical fantasy, turning Chow Yun Fat's character into a mythic hero, rather than a stuntsman. Sadly, Zhang Yimou cannot quite make the same leap, and although his fight scenes are visually beautiful to behold, they never make the leap from "fantastic but fake" to "wow."

Zhang Ziyi, who plays the female lead in this movie and the role of Jen, the sword thief, in CT,HD, does her usual stellar job; she is not only beautiful, and stunt-capable, but she is in fact a fine actress, and deserves her rapidly growing reputation. I only wish that she could get a role in which they'd let her beauty shine; makeup artists seem determined to minimize its impact as much as possible, for what seems to me no reason whatsoever.

This is a visually amazing movie, with a good story and (astonishingly enough) a competently acted English audio track on the DVD. It's certainly worth every penny for the DVD, which is in the superior anamorphic widescreen format and comes packed with extras, including over an hour of "making-of" documentaries, audio commentaries by the director and cast, storyboards, and loads of other goodies. Just don't go into it thinking that this is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 - it's not. What it is, is a good, action-filled, visually striking film.

The Bourne Identity

2005-06-24T14:08:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

On a stormy night, a young man is pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea by the crew of a fishing boat. Thinking the young man is dead, a curious fisherman with a scalpel finds two bullets in his back and a miniature laser device in his hip. The laser reveals a Swiss bank account number. But our wet hero isn't dead, and soon finds himself in Zurich. In the bank vault the young man discovers his name, Jason Bourne. In addition, he finds a baffling pile of different passports, all with his picture, and a huge pile of cash. In the U.S. Embassy, Jason Bourne discovers his love interest and travel partner, Marie, along with the fact that someone wants to kill him. Armed with a bag of money and mysterious martial arts skills, with Marie by his side, Bourne scours Paris for clues about his identity and past life... and finds himself in the middle of two assassination plots masterminded by the CIA.

Yeah. Allow me to discuss the concept of "sticking to the book."

I hate it when Hollywood attempts to "improve" a story. It never, ever works. TBI is a perfect example. To understand why, let me talk for a minute about the novel.
In the novel, Bourne has amnesia because he has been shot in the head. In the movie, he's been shot in the back of his shoulder - traumatic, granted, but not likely to induce memory loss.
In the book, Bourne is a fake assassin - his organization has him undercover posing as an assassin in an attempt to draw out a real assassin. When he loses his memory, his own agency tries to kill him, because they think he's lost his mind and bought into his own cover story. In the movie? No cover, he is an assassin, and his agency goes after him for no clearly defined reason. They've "lost contact," so he must be a bad guy. Very sensible.
In the novel, the woman who becomes his accomplice is a Canadian economist - I know, oxymoron, but still - who he takes hostage to escape from some police in Zurich. In the movie, she's an ex-patriate American "gypsy" living from friend to friend in Europe. Not plot-crucial, I suppose, but why change it? There wasn't really a reason to.
The problem is not that TBI is a bad movie - on the contrary, it's pretty good - but rather that it has almost no relationship whatsoever to the book. You should buy it for action, certainly; just don't do so thinking that you're getting a film version of the book. I've barely scratched the surface of the differences, which are profound.
The worst element of this is that they made a sequel - The Bourne Supremacy. Why is this bad? Well, in the novel TBI, Bourne was recruited after some bad things happened to him in Vietnam. While his time in Southeast Asia is barely touched on in the first book, the ENTIRE SECOND NOVEL is set in Southeast Asia, and the whole plot depends on the events of the first book, and the events which took place in Asia prior to the events chronicled in TBI. Having left all these plot elements conveniently out of the first movie, how in the hell can you make a movie of the second novel at all?
TBI is a good movie. Just disregard the title entirely, and consider it a separate, discrete entity. If you want a film version of TBI that's in accord with the novel, try the 1988 TV miniseries, starring Richard Chamberlain, instead. It's vastly superior.

An Addendum

2005-06-24T13:43:00.000-04:00

...to my review of The Phantom Of The Opera.

DO NOT BUY THIS DVD.
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Here's why:

The Fullscreen DVD is Pan & Scan, in a most terrible way. More on this later.

There are no special features. None. Not one.

No, really, NO SPECIAL FEATURES WHATSOEVER.

Now, maybe this has been the experience of some of you, but not mine: I've never even SEEN a DVD without a "Special Features" option on the menu. I've seen some pretty threadbare ones - "Multiple theatrical trailers!" Ooooooo. But never one that didn't even have the option.

I bought the much less popular movie House of Flying Daggers on DVD at the same time as I bought Phantom. HoFD has over an hour of documentaries on the DVD about the process of making the movie, including a 20-minute featurette on the visual effects; storyboards of the movie, production stills, bios of the cast and crew, and audio commentaries by the director and stars. HoFD cost me $2 less than Phantom did, was in anamorphic widescreen, and was vastly superior in terms of what I got for my money.

Now, a little DVD technical note: anamorphic widescreen is the best kind, because it adapts to your television's resolution, allowing it to display properly no matter how new or old your TV is. Even a standard widescreen DVD will suffer from image degradation on a newer, widescreen TV, because the image is stretched to fit the screen, first horizontally, then vertically. An anamorphic widescreen DVD is pre-stretched vertically, which means that when your TV displays the movie, there are no black lines and image degradation.

Pan & Scan, as I mentioned earlier, is related to this. See, theatrical movies are filmed in a different format than televisions: 2.35" to 1", as opposed to televisions' 4" to 3" format. In order to display a theatrical movie on a standard television, you have two options: letterboxing, or Pan & Scan. In letterboxing, the picture is smaller, because the movie is resized so that the horizontal width is the same as the television's, and then black bars are added to the top and bottom of the screen. In Pan & Scan, the DVD company simply chops off the sides of the screen, resulting in an image that fits the standard TV, and focuses only on what the studio considers the "main" action in a scene.

What this means for Phantom is that when the Phantom is onscreen, the screen centers on him - and you can't even see what's going on to the sides. In a musical, in which there are several amazingly choreographed, costumed, and set-designed song-and-dance numbers, ("Masquerade" just LEAPS to mind,) something like 60% of the scene is simply gone.

IF you simply must buy the Phantom DVD, buy the widescreen edition. That way all you have to suffer with is the total lack of special features. For myself, I'm waiting for the "Collector's Edition" or whatever, which will no doubt be along in a few months. But frankly, let me say this flat out: the fullscreen edition is the worst DVD I have ever purchased. Total waste of cash.

Legacy Of Kain (PC, PS, PS2, XBOX)

2005-06-18T14:33:00.000-04:00

Lost Worlds

Every epic story has elements that were removed for one reason or another during its creation. For many of these stories, they are lost forever - or slowly fade into obscurity and misunderstanding.

The goal of The Lost Worlds is to preserve in as much detail as possible the apocrypha of the Legacy of Kain series of video games. Like the deleted scenes bonuses on DVDs, these pages catalogue what might have been - and in some cases what might yet be.

Lost Worlds talks about one of my all-time favorite game franchises, Legacy Of Kain.

The Legacy of Kain series now encompasses 5 games: Blood Omen, Blood Omen 2, Soul Reaver I and II, and Defiance. The story is not yet complete, and neither the publisher, Eidos Interactive, nor the creators, Crystal Dynamics, are willing to speculate on how many more games there might be in the series.
This is a very gothic, very ornate series of games, with a plot that spans millennia, and involves vampires, humans, a third race called Hylden, demons, time travel, fate, and the nature of free will. Continuity is preserved across all the games, with the sole exception of Blood Omen 2, and the same actors play the vocal parts throughout, which rapidly makes Kain and Raziel some of the most distinctive, and recognizable, videogame characters ever.
Much of each game is told through voice-overs and asides by the characters. The game designers were courteous enough to include what they call the "Dark Chronicle" in each game, which allows you to read the scripts for each cutscene and rendered sequence in each game, so if you use a cinema to get a drink, you haven't missed anything you can't find out about again. I'd really use the pause key, though: the writing is really good, if a bit melodramatic, and some of the comments the various characters make are fascinating.
The basic premise is simple, but its implications aren't. Kain, the main character of both Blood Omen games and co-lead of Defiance, is born fated to be the "Guardian of Balance," which makes him one of the guardians of an ancient artifact known as the Pillars of Nosgoth. However, just as he's born, the guardian he's fated to replace is murdered, which drives all the remaining guardians mad. Kain himself is later assassinated and resurrected as a vampire, and then confronted with a choice: he can kill himself, which will cleanse the Pillars of their corruption, or he can live, which will doom the world, but make him its ruler.
The thing is, Kain quickly realizes that this is a false dilemma, which he explains later to the other major character in the series, Raziel, in what I think is one of the best cutscenes in the entire series to date. This takes place in Soul Reaver 2:

Kain:
Thirty years hence, I am presented with a dilemma - let's call it a two-sided coin. If the coin falls one way, I sacrifice myself and thus restore the Pillars. But as the last surviving vampire in Nosgoth, this would mean the annihilation of our species. Moebius made sure of that. If the coin lands on the reverse, I refuse the sacrifice and thus doom the Pillars to an eternity of collapse. Either way, the game is rigged.

Raziel:
We agree then that the Pillars are crucial, and must be restored?

Kain:
Yes, Raziel - that's why we've come full-circle to this place.

Raziel:
So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate you must die so that new Guardians can be born.

Kain:
The Pillars don't belong to them, Raziel...

[Kain gestures derisively, indicating humanity in general.]

Kain:
...They belong to us.

Raziel (disgusted):
Your arrogance is boundless, Kain.

Kain (laughing softly):
There's a third option - a monumental secret, hidden in your very presence here. But it's a secret you have to discover for yourself. Unearth your destiny, Raziel. It's all laid out for you here.

Raziel:
You said it yourself, Kain - there are only two sides to your coin.

Kain:
Apparently so. But suppose you throw a coin enough times... Suppose one day, it lands on its edge.

(This taken from DarkID's excellent script guide for SR2, available at GameFAQS and specifically, here.)
This, to me, is an excellent example of the kind of discussions that happen in this series. The entire storyline is based around the essential question of free wil and destiny - is destiny immutable? Or can we change our paths?
LoK is one of the few game series that has improved with age; Defiance is one of the best games I've ever played. Most series repeat themselves, but because of the time-travelling nature of the story, you find yourself seeing the same events over from different perspectives as you play through the games, and new information about them comes to light.
For anyone who loves a good story and doesn't mind a LOT of combat to get there - along with a good deal of puzzle-solving - this is definitely the series for you. Anyone else need not apply; if you can't hang with puzzles you will HATE these games.

One final note: Be aware, if you play Blood Omen 2, that it was not made by the same design team as the rest of the series, and there ARE continuity flaws in it. I didn't hate it; it's certainly an enjoyable game, but there is a definite difference in the production values between it and the rest of the series.

The Phantom Of The Opera

2005-06-18T14:08:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!
For once, I am not including a plot summary from IMDB. This is because there are only two posted - one written like bad advertising copy, and the other telling the entire story of the movie in one paragraph.
Bah.
Well, before we get started: Buy this DVD. But only if you can find it in widescreen.

To expand on this, for those who don't know why they should care: TVs are becoming widescreen. All of the HDTVs are widescreen, and widescreen standard TVs are becoming more and more common, because the movie industry is pushing - hard - to make widescreen the standard. For once, I don't disagree with what they're doing. Anyone who reads my main blog knows that I typically loathe the decisions and actions of the movie industry, but this is not one of those times.
The reason for this is exemplified perfectly by the fullscreen DVD of Phantom of the Opera. In the movie, the set design is incredibly lavish, and goes from edge to edge of the movie screen, in amazing panoramas of lush detail. The fullscreen DVD chops all the set design away completely, focusing only on the actors / singers. The singing and acting are still great, but this detracts enormously from the impact of the movie as a whole.
It's great to avoid the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen (called letterboxing,) but if you do so at the expense of later having even more intrusive bars at either SIDE of the screen when you upgrade to a widescreen, you're not improving your DVD collection, not to mention that you are missing huge chunks of the director's vision. While this is not always necessarily a bad thing, in a movie with such powerful set design, like Phantom or Vanity Fair, it hurts the movie immensely.
However, let me talk about the movie. (Lest I forget, in my orgy of distaste for fullscreen DVDs.) This is one instance of the ad copy being right - Phantom is one of the best movies I've seen in years. The screenwriter took Andrew Lloyd Webber's already incredible story and music and added his own touches - usually a kiss of death, I know, but in this case wonderful - and produced a movie script of really impressive depth, and the director carried it out to the peak of its promise.
An example of the kind of "touches" the screenwriter added: in Webber's original stage production, there's never any significant explanation of where the Phantom himself came from and why he's at the opera house. The film not only explains this, but in fact gives a complete backstory for it, which has the effect of humanizing the Phantom to a much greater degree, making him a much more sympathetic character than in the original, and greatly increasing the impact of some of the later scenes and songs.
This movie should have won Best Picture this year at the Oscars. Million Dollar Baby might be a good movie, but Phantom absolutely topped it at every level. (Never think I don't respect Clint Eastwood as an actor and director, but MDB just plain wasn't as good as Phantom.)
As I said when I first got started, if you can find this in widescreen - preferably, the theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio (super widescreen,) buy it. Immediately. If you can only get it in fullscreen, buy it anyway - but bear in mind that you're missing the true impact until you see it in widescreen. The music is fantastic - even worth buying a home theater in-a-box kit to really enjoy it - and this is one of the not too many movies I can think of that leaves not a dry eye in the house, without coming across as maudlin.

Darkness

2005-06-18T13:54:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

There's something in this house... Something ancient and dark that remains still, hidden and silent. It can only wait, having been concealed in the shadows for years. In fact, its milieu is darkness. Only in it can it show itself and move. It even takes its name: DARKNESS. It's lived here since someone tried to call it, more than forty years ago. Because this house hides a secret, a terrible past, an inconceivably evil act... Seven children, faceless people, a circle that must be completed. And blood, lots of blood...

And this is the best that IMDB has to offer about this movie?

Ok. The real scoop on this movie is that it is very, very creepy. The director, Jaume Balaguero, absolutely nailed the use of darkness itself as a "ghostly" effect, something often attempted but rarely so expertly utilized. For some odd reason, this movie has flown somewhat under the radar - it was just released in the U.S. theatrically this year, but has been available online and in europe for at least 3 years. Now, it's out on DVD in a good widescreen edition. For some reason it's being touted as an "unrated" version, although having seen it, I have no idea what was added that was so horrifying it couldn't be run past the ratings board.
Anna Paquin does an excellent job in this film, never coming across as cheesy. The plot is quite involved, much more so than in a normal horror movie - not so much in terms of what is trying to happen, but more in terms of how it's going to take place.
Despite the comments on IMDB, this simply isn't a very bloody movie. There are a few bloody scenes, but they're more disturbing for the WAY they're bloody than for the amount of blood involved. I have no idea why the IMDB people called it loaded with blood, but it isn't true at all.
This movie is very sneaky about how it approaches its revelations - some of the things it tells you, you're not aware of until things come together at the end of the movie. This is a very good entry in the horror genre, and highly recommended for anyone who'd rather be scared than grossed out. Buy it!

One Hour Photo

2005-06-18T13:38:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

Seymour 'SY' Parrish has been doing photo development for 20 years. He has a vast knowledge of modern photography and develops photos at a local department store for a living. But SY lives a sad and lonely life and begins spying on the Yorkin family, his biggest customers who seem to have everything in the world. SY begins to feel that he wants to be in the Yorkin's life, but when he discovers that the Yorkins are not as perfect as they seem, he becomes a man on a mission to expose the imperfections of the Yorkin family that could tear them apart.

Well, that's true, I guess.
So far as it goes.

More accurately, Sy is a freakin' nutball.
The Yorkin family, whose characters you don't see enough of to get truly invested in, gets all their family photos developed by Sy. Oddly, they never seem to notice how disturbingly much he knows about them. However, there is one good scene once Sy's plan to tear the family apart begins to come to fruition, and it's really the only scene that makes you empathize with the Yorkins. Having developed some photos that incriminate Will Yorkin, Sy slips them into an envelope of photos of their children that Nina Yorkin has developed. Nina opens them while driving, and nearly goes off the road at what she sees there - while Sy follows her in his little car.
Like The Final Cut, this movie is entirely carried by Robin Williams. His character is the only one in whom you have a serious investment, and although he's very very creepy and severely disturbing, you can sympathize with his enormous loneliness and isolation.
This movie is also a definite buy - high on the list, as a matter of fact - and should be watched by anyone who gets their film developed in the same place more than once.

The Final Cut

2005-06-18T13:24:00.000-04:00

At IMDB.com!

Omar Naim's The Final Cut is startlingly different than a conventional science fiction film. It's a compelling fable that offers a vision of a world where memory implants record all moments of a person's life. Post mortem, these memories are removed and edited by a "Cutter" into a reel depicting the life of the departed for a commemorative ceremony, called a Rememory. Robin Williams' powerful portrayal of Alan Hackman, a troubled "cutter," propels this character driven story that forces us to question the power of our memories and the sanctity of our privacy.

Robin Williams, Jim Cavieziel and Mira Sorvino play in this fine film. For some reason it didn't do well in theaters - my guess is that there simply wasn't enough publicity to draw an audience.

Williams' character, Alan Hakman, is a cutter who uses only the "good" parts of people's memories to form their Rememory, leaving out any traumas, bad deeds, or other negatives. This, of course, cheats the families - while they have a happy goodbye, they're not left with an accurate picture of the person they've lost.
Frankly, I'd think that if your "loved one" was as much of a sucmbag as some of Hakman's "clients," you'd want to remember what a bastard they really were, so it wouldn't hurt as much. But that's just me.
The thing is, Alan is gradually losing himself, because he spends all his time invested in the lives of others - and because he's the best cutter out there, they assign him anyone who had something to hide, anyone who was a bad person, anyone who knew something they shouldn't - you get the idea. Alan know EVERYBODY's dirty laundry, and it's making him crazy.
Jim Cavieziel and Mira Sorvino both do well in their roles, but realistically, this movie is all about Robin Williams. Cavieziel and Sorvino both play supporting roles in their true sense - their roles serve to contrast, and highlight, Alan Hakman, not to distract from him. The viewer is unable to really identify with either, because their appearances in the story only draw out more of Hakman's character.
This movie is a definite buy - I just did - and I recommend it to anyone, despite IMDB's lukewarm reviews. This is the best acting Robin Williams has done since One Hour Photo, which I am reviewing in a few minutes.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Jim Carrey

2005-06-14T13:36:00.000-04:00

And, of course, Kate Winslet...

This is the story of a guy, Joel (Jim Carrey),who discovers that his long-time girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet),has undergone a psychiatrist's (Tom Wilkinson)experimental procedure in which all of her memory of Joel is removed, after the couple has tried for years to get their relationship working fluidly. Frustrated by the idea of still being in love with a woman who doesn't remember their time together, Joel agrees to undergo the procedure as well, to erase his memories of Clementine. The film, which takes place mostly within Joel's mind, follows his memories of Clementine backwards in time as each recent memory is replaced, and the procedure then goes on to the previous one, which is likewise seen, and then erased. Once the process starts, however, Joel realizes he doesn't really want to forget Clementine, so he starts smuggling her away into parts of his memory where she doesn't belong which alters other things about his memories as well...

To give you an idea how much press this movie got, the summary above was written by some guy on AOL. It was the best summary on the IMDB.com page for this movie, which is a damn shame.

More to the point, there just wasn't much attention paid to this movie, which I can only attribute to the idea that if the movie studios let Jim Carrey get established as a serious actor, they are afraid they will lose all his future rubberface movies.
This is a problem, because as anyone who watches this movie can attest, Carrey is a fine actor. ESotSM was one of his best performances on film, ever, and also one of the best performances on film last year. I will say that I thought Tim Robbins did better in Mystic River, but then he has years of experience in serious roles, where for Carrey, this makes what, two?
Carrey is not alone in his skill, either. Kate Winslet does a fine job, as does Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkenson. Elijah Wood is often mantioned with regard to this movie, but in fact his part is very small; it would have been difficult in the extreme for him to really mess it up.
This movie, like The Machinist, requires the audience to do a little work; it doesn't hand the story to you on a platter, but expects you to use your brain to keep up. Watching this movie requires you to figure out, on-the-fly, which scenes are Carrey's memories, which are real, and when chronologically everything happens. Unlike The Machinist, ESotSM does a better job of tying everything together: even if you're hopelessly lost throughout, you'll get it in the last few minutes.
IMDB maintains a list of all the filmmaking "errors" in every movie; I spotted one they didn't, but to be fair, I didn't spot any of the ones they did. The one mistake I did see seemed fairly glaring, but minor enough to ignore. (At one point, Kirsten Dunst is supposedly listening to an audio tape; she clicks a key on the tape recorder, and a recorded voice comes on that's ostensibly the contents of the tape, but in fact the tape deck's wheels aren't turning, and neither is the tape. No big deal.)
I bring this up only to point out that although I am unusually hawkeyed for movie errors, this movie really only had a couple; not only was the script and acting good, but the director managed to put this movie together very well in terms of the technical aspects of the filmmaking process, which is becoming more and more unusual as we move more towards the quick buck school of film.
All in all, this is an exceptional movie, and well worth watching; I can only assume that the near-total lack of publicity surrounding its release is a result of Hollywood's condescending assumption that the movie public is so stupid they wouldn't understand, and therefore wouldn't enjoy, ESotSM.
Not only did I not feel like my rental fee was wasted, I will be buying this, and soon. It's fantastic.

Really Loud Static

2005-06-14T13:22:00.000-04:00

White Noise, SCAAARY!

When the unexpected happens, architect Jonathan Rivers has become a grieving widower, wallowing in deep confusion over the death of his wife. But a paranormal expert approaches Jonathan with the unlikely: the ability to hear his wife from beyond the grave. Through a form of unusual communication known as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon), Jonathan will finally be able to see his wife. But in doing so, Jonathan has drawn himself into a much more complex situation when his curiosity becomes an obsession. Only that obsession will have him confront those not of this world, and some of them don't approve of Jonathan's interference with their destructive nature.

Um, ok. So, what this really means is that this guy gets told by everyone he meets that "that sounds dangerous," and by several people who are involved in EVP research, and thus would probably know something about it "don't do it alone."

Proving that he's a freakin' dumbass, he ignores the advice, even after finding one of the supposedly knowledgeable people ripped up into nasty bleeding chunks after using EVP alone. His continued meddling draws the attention of 3 evil spirits, who then use a serial killer to lure him to a place where they will be able to kick his ass.
They do, and it's one of the only good scenes in the movie. Watching this arrogant dumbass get ripped in shreds and broken all to pieces by a swirling black mist of evil is about the only enjoyable thing about this film. Although billed as a scary movie, it failed totally to induce that effect, as I spent the whole time thinking to myself "given that much advice and evidence, I would run away."
This one doesn't even merit a second rental. Baaaaaaaaad.