Careful With That Blog, Eugene

If you were unaware...

2011-09-06T22:44:00.000-04:00

Fear of a Ghost Planet has officially launched. Please, please, please check it out: The site looks great, has a bunch of new posts and contains all the old stuff from here you could ever want.

Update your RSS feeds, point your browser on over, drop a few comments. I want to hear from you, the good people of the internet.

FEAR OF A GHOST PLANET

That's probably it for this blog. Thank you very much for your support.

Enough is enough (and it's time for a change)...

2011-07-14T22:31:00.000-04:00

It's been a slow, slow year at Careful With That Blog, Eugene; slower than any year but possibly the first, wherein I whined and moaned about my personal life and was netstalked and had something like two readers. For those of you who've waited with baited breath for any upcoming movie reviews, album reviews, Netflix Roulettes, Awful Character Database entries, Coming Attractions, and umpteen other features I or somebody else on this blog started, promised, abandoned, etc.; thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I started this blog on a whim and started reviewing movies because some dude decided to comment on a dumb post I made in 2007. I didn't know how to review a film properly then and, judging by my recent review of Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son, I still don't, but I think I've steadily improved over the past four years. Life has gotten hectic in the last six months between graduating, going to grad school, moving four times and losing my great aunt to a stroke. There's a lot I want to do here, but everytime I look and see that grinning robot in the background, the cramped text of my reviews, the links to other blogs that stretch out forever, it all seems like too much to fix.

So I'm starting over. In a week or so, I will officially be closing Careful With That Blog, Eugene to make way for Fear of a Ghost Planet, which will have its own domain (fearofaghostplanet.com) and everything. Why the change of name? First, because www.carefulwiththatblogeugene.com is a mouthful. Second, because my name isn't Eugene, and you wouldn't believe how many e-mails start off asking for him. Third, because why have one reference to Pink Floyd when you can have one reference to Public Enemy and one reference to Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.

I sincerely hope that those of you who read/follow/comment/care will migrate to Fear of a Ghost Planet. Since my money's on the line, it'll be updated a lot more frequently than this ol' hunk of junk, it'll look nicer, and I'll stop getting search engine hits for "Eugene porn," whatever that is. If not, I'll see you in another life.

Movie Review: Season of the Witch (2011)

2011-07-11T15:14:00.001-04:00

Season of the Witch (2011)

Directed By:
Dominic Sena

Starring:
Nic Cage: Behmen
Ron Pearlman: Felson
Stephen Campbell Moore: Debelzaq
Christopher Lee: Cardinal D'Ambroise
Claire Foy: The Girl

Rating:

Shut the Fuck Up, Donny

Season of the Witch, the latest in a series of Nic Cage projects that were, I assume, born from Cage's inherent need to be in front of a camera (I guess technically Drive Angry was the latest, but I enjoyed that) is a film about nothing, even if it'd present itself to you as a film about Templars, plague, guilt and (and!) witches. That's heavy stuff for what was clearly once a summer blockbuster hopeful, but fear not: Season of the Witch's aspirations as serious business are cast aside the minute Nic Cage and Ron Pearlman, standing on a hill of sand before a sherbet-colored sky, begin cracking wise about going out for a few drinks after dispatching a few hundred Moors.

"I'm working up a powerful thirst," Pearlman says, bear-hugging a man roughly his size to death.

Later, having deserted the Templars after being forced to kill one (1) woman, ex-Templars Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Pearlman) discover that, while they were out, bubonic plague has ravaged the land. Felson seems disturbed by the boil-ridden dead bodies and, while riding with Behmen to Parts Unknown, opines on the fate of those pour souls, thusly:

"We've seen much death, you and I. But what does one do to deserve a death like that?"

"Nothing," observes Behmen, stoically.

Then the camera swoops out from them, showing a town off in the distance.

"Finally," Behmen says, as if finishing his taxes. "A town."

That sort of exchange happens quite often in Season of the Witch, a movie that knows all the old adventure movie clichés (rope bridges, spooky forests, steep mountain passes), but doesn't have the slightest clue about what made those tropes reliable stand-bys. When the crew of men tasked with taking a supposed witch (Claire Foy)--which eventually includes a priest, a knight, a swindler and a sword-able alter boy--overlook their route, marking the spooky forest ("Wormwood forrest. Not a place to be trifled with.") and mountain pass, Felson and Behmen react like they've read this particular script hundreds of times, more "Not this again" than "Let's be off, then!" Considering how old the ex-Templars are, that makes a certain bit of sense, but, really, what the hell else were they going to do with their time, sit in a dungeon and make comments about the smell?

You can probably guess what happens along the way. There are a few action scenes, a couple of people die, the girl in the cage that's being wheeled across the countryside may or may not be a witch, etc. This movie's cardinal sin, in my estimation, is that it blows nearly every opportunity it has to be entertaining. The Church's position here is that the bubonic plague is being caused by this witch. The movie's position is that the bubonic plague is not unlike whatever Hollywood-fashioned disease causes dead bodies to rise up and hunger for human flesh. It's got a bunch of Templars, who were a pretty corrupt, devious bunch. Nic Cage, Ron Pearlman and Christopher Lee (in a bubonic plague make-up) are along for the ride, and the early scenes where Cage and Pearlman sack and pillage Muslim stronghold after Muslim stronghold are shot against backdrops that are, at best, completely unreal. This could have been a movie about paranoia and fear and psychological stress and whatever illicit drugs Templars were doing--a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the medieval set--but instead the movie settles into its stilted dialog and eventually accepts shadow, fog and dirt as its color palate and, despite the best efforts of some low-budget CGI, decides to be a shallow, boring husk of a film.

I can't say that I've exactly enjoyed director Dominic Sena's previous movies, but at least in other genre schlock films he's done, like Gone in 60 Seconds or Swordfish, he's gotten his actors to perform with some degree of immediacy. The three men traveling with the Templars are here because the movie both needs to kill people who aren't Cage and Pearlman, and because it needs survivors who aren't them, either. They act as you might expect from cannon fodder. Ron Pearlman is as authentic as a wax figurine, Christopher Lee is criminally squandered, and Nic Cage seems like he's always just woken up from the world's worst nap. Not worthy of even so-bad-it's-good aficionados, Season of the Witch is a 90-minute shrug of the shoulders. It's bad, but at least it wasn't Your Highness.

Movie Review: Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son (2011)

2011-07-07T00:05:00.003-04:00

Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son (2011)

Directed By:
John Whitesell

Starring:
Martin Lawrence: Big Momma
Brandon T. Jackson: Trent Pierce
Faizon Love: Kurtis Kool

Rating:

The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain

You know that part of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis have Indiana Jones and Marion tied up and are going to force them to watch as the contents of the Ark of the Covenant are unveiled, presumably resulting in the Nazis winning World War II? How Indy was all like “Don’t look!” and he and Marianne didn’t look while the Nazis did and had their faces promptly melted off by the awesome power of God? Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son is a lot like that scene, only it goes on considerably longer and is likely to convince you that God is either dead or a Hollywood executive who only greenlights the worst film sequels possible.

Officially the worst movie featuring Martin Lawrence in a fat suit, Big Mommas is a movie about a father/son undercover operation at an all-girls school, so you can probably guess that the son is girl crazy and the father wishes he’d keep his libido under the dress. But there wouldn’t be any comedy if Trent (Brandon T. Jackson) were able to keep it under his plus-sized dress. Early on, the movie establishes that Trent got into Duke University, but he’s an aspiring rapper with a mixtape, and school kids don’t get paid like rappers. Judging from the two songs he performs as Prodi-G and how smart he is in a gunfight/hostage situation/stock sitcom plot, he’s not long for either career, but you can guess which one he chooses.

So, without any dramatic or comedic tension, Martin Lawrence and Brandon T. Jackson plod their way through 90 minutes of awkward dialog, old fat jokes, and worse ones about crossdressing. Along the way, Faizon Love appears as a chubby-chasing security guard, but, oh-ho, he’s unaware that he’s actually chasing a different kind of chubby. The movie really needed Love, if only because it would have been wholly unrealistic for Lawrence and Jackson to apprehend even the biggest bumbler in criminal history. The big mommas are stupid, stupid people, and it’s hard to imagine anybody laughing at their cliché, stereotypical antics.

If God is a cynical Hollywood exec, He’s been rather busy lately. In the past four or five years, we’ve been given unnecessary sequels to Cats and Dogs, Baby Geniuses, The Mask, and now Big Momma’s House. None of these films have made money, and I can’t imagine they were greenlit for any other reason than to claim the losses as a rather massive tax write-off, with whatever money the film makes from DVD or syndication rights as gravy. Here’s the thing, though: The movie was going to lose money, and they made it anyhow. As 3D and sequels like this continue to lose traction and serious filmgoers retreat to the arthouses and, increasingly, their Netflix queues, I’ve got to wonder why you wouldn’t leave a movie like Big Mommas in development hell and greenlight two or three movies like Meek’s Cutoff. Admittedly, those films aren’t going to rake in the cash, but they'll at least have the distinction of being worth the time and effort that goes into production. Hell, you could even take the money you’d save by making those other films and give it to Martin Lawrence to not make movies like Big Mommas. Just a suggestion, God.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

2011-06-06T15:40:00.000-04:00

X-Men: First Class (2011)

Directed By:
Matthew Vaughn

Starring:
James McAvoy: Charles Xavier
Michael Fassbender: Erik/Magneto
Rose Byrne: Moira McTaggart
Jennifer Lawrence: Raven/Mystique
Kevin Bacon: Sebastian Shaw
January Jones: Emma Frost
Nicholas Hoult: Hank McCoy/Beast

Rating:

Far Fucking Out

Something that’s been missing for me since comic book movies became Hollywood’s predominant summer revenue generator was the inherent sense of silliness found in most comic books. Sure, Batman and Superman and the X-Men and Spiderman and all the other superheroes have potential as characters of significant gravitas, but the fact of the matter is that, for much of the history of the medium, they weren’t. So I was surprised when Sebastian Shaw, the villain of X-Men: First Class made his getaway from an angry Magneto and a curious United States Coast Guard in a nuclear submarine that just happened to be hidden by a yacht, and I was pretty much giddy when he asked Emma Frost to get some ice for his drink, which meant surfacing the sub so she could break some off of an iceberg.

I’ve always appreciated that goofiness in comic books, as a sense of humor made superpowers and the constant threat of global destruction go down a little easier. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), for example, believes that mutants are, as Stan Lee used to proclaim, the Children of the Atom, and as such stand to inherit the Earth. He and his group of rogue mutants, the Hellfire Club, aim to ensure this happens sooner rather than later, as he orchestrates the Cuban Missile Crisis, hoping to plunge the United States and Russia into thermonuclear war.

The world at large isn’t aware of the existence of mutants, who, by and large, are unaware of each other. Shaw’s club, for example, has four members at any given time, and most of the mutants in this film who have some sort of physical defect can hide them with a pair of shoes or, in the case of Angel, by spinning some story about drinking so much that a giant tattoo of a housefly’s wings suddenly seemed a good idea. But it’s 1960, and the world is changing about as fast as the human genome. If Shaw’s going to put together a team of mutants, so will the CIA. They turn to young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), a recent Oxford graduate whose thesis was on genetic mutation to ask if it’s possible that the mutants he discusses in his thesis may already exist. They do. He is a telepath, and his best friend, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is a shapeshifter whose natural skin color is blue.

In trying to apprehend Shaw on his yacht, Xavier meets Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), a Holocaust survivor with the power to magnetically manipulate metallic objects. Lehnsherr unwittingly sets the story in motion, as Shaw was once a Nazi officer (though it doesn’t seem that he’s German or that he particularly cares about the Nazi agenda) and, from his office, he saw young Erik bending the gates of the concentration camp as he was separated from his family. Shaw, also a mutant, wants to experiment on Erik in an effort to maximize mutant potential and, in the process, has Erik’s mother killed. After World War II, Lehnsherr makes killing Shaw his reason for being, and Xavier, rather brilliantly, observes that if Shaw can be part of a team, so can Lehnsherr. And so the X-Men are born.

Beyond Charles, Erik, and Raven, the First Class includes: Hank “Beast” McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), who is super smart, super agile and, eventually, is covered in a thick coat of blue fur; Angel Salvadore (Zoe Kravitz), who flies like a housefly and spits what appear to be small meteorites, because bulimia isn’t a good mutant ability; Sean “Banshee” Cassidy (Caleb Landry Jones), who can scream really loud; Armando “Darwin” Nuñoz (Edi Gathegi), who has the bizarre mutant ability of “adapting to survive;” and Alex “Havok” Summers (Lucas Till), who hurls hula hoops of brightly colored kinetic energy. Beyond their abilities and nicknames, not much is known about the team, who don’t get a lot of time to evolve (haw haw) as characters. It’s just as well. The film trusts that you’ve either read the comic books and know who these people are, or that you just came to see stuff get blown up good and don’t particularly care who the mutants are as long as they get the job done. They, and Shaw’s less impressive Hellfire Club, get the job done just fine.

Besides, this isn’t really a movie about the X-Men, the Cold War, or Kevin Bacon’s fabulous attire. That’s all background noise in establishing the main rivalry of the franchise, between Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (a name I’ve always felt was a poor P.R. move) and Professor X’s X-Men (a name that’s nothing if not slightly egotistical). Yes, there’s the Cuban missile crisis, and yes, both Beast and Mystique debate whether they want to go through life with blue skin and gigantic feet, but that’s all a matter of filling the time between Xavier and Lehnshherr’s meeting and separation, not over the plot of the film, but over their ideology.

The movie also trusts that you know the moral differences between Professor X and Magneto, which is more fair than expecting you to know who “Riptide” and “Azarel” are, which means that the movie spends a lot of time on recruiting, training, and, ultimately, fighting. Disappointing, since literally every other superhero movie has that stuff down to a science. But when there’s not a war going on, McAvoy and Fassbender do most of the film’s heavy lifting. McAvoy brings the right blend of compassion and cockiness to Xavier, and Fassbender should do one movie a year where he finds himself in a bar full of Nazis. Lawrence, who was so good in Winter’s Bone, doesn’t have much to do as Mystique, which is unfortunate, but seemingly the nature of being the woman in a superhero movie.

The charming retro effervescence of X-Men: First Class is the product of Matthew Vaughn, whose adaptation of Kick Ass was a flavorless, ultraviolent take on dark, “realistic” superheroics, and his shifting of the X-Men franchise from a loud, noisy, bland present day to a blissfully stereotyped 1960s represents not only a good lateral move for him, but for the Marvel’s mutant crew, who’ve spent their last two outings assaulting Alcatraz and battling atop nuclear reactors, but haven’t been particularly interesting since 2004. By shedding a lot of dead weight and daring to embrace some decidedly old-school cheese, X-Men: First Class takes a slight detour from well-established comic book movie tropes, and is much better for doing so.

Movie Review: Meek's Cutoff (2011)

2011-06-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

Meek's Cutoff (2011)

Directed By:
Kelly Reichardt

Starring:
Michelle Williams: Emily Tetherow
Bruce Greenwood: Stephen Meek
Will Patton: Solomon Tetherow
Zoe Kazan: Millie Gately
Paul Dano: Thomas Gately
Shirley Henderson: Glory White
Neal Huff: William White
Rod Rondeaux: The Indian

Rating:

The Dude Abides

If you're around my age and went to a school with a computer lab, odds are you had a go at The Oregon Trail, an "educational" game where you set off for Oregon with your oxen, your shotgun, your family, your wagon, your family hope chest, your clothes and a few barrels of salted pork. The game doesn't really teach you all that much, other than that leaving for Oregon a month before winter is disastrous and that the family hope chest is a thing best left behind, but I suspect that, for my generation, hunting and fording rivers and random deaths from dysentery are the enduring images of life on the Oregon Trail, much like our enduring images of the Old West come from movies where the hero can take on a pack of twenty desperadoes without a scratch, and an Indian ambush was waiting for the wagon train come sundown. All of this is to say that Meek's Cutoff is neither a stereotypical portrayal of the Oregon Trail, nor a stereotypical western. Folks clamoring for an old-style shootout on horseback, a circling of wagons or a barroom brawl are set to be disappointed, as Meek's Cutoff is a film with plenty of time on it's hands, but no time for any of that old nonsense. It's got issues, and continuing old, ingrained myths isn't one of them.

Meek's Cutoff does its best to be an accurate representation of what life was like on a wagon train headed to Oregon. At the center of this particular train is Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a shady-looking frontiersman who was hired by the group because he said he could get them to Oregon in two weeks time. Mr. Meek knows a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot--for instance, the market for fur in Oregon is all but saturated, but there are still riches galore just waiting to be plucked from the ground--but he doesn't seem to know where the hell he's going. He promises a two week journey. Considering the space of a typical wagon and the need to travel light in order to move quickly, the group might be forgiven for only taking enough water for a two week journey. But it's week five, and out in the Oregon High Desert, there's not much water to be found. So the group is torn between two paths: Trusting Meek and carrying on, or beginning a desperate search for water.

Where the film really takes off from the traditional western is in the attention it pays to women, who, while usually the recipient of a cursory hat tip and “Ma’am,” are the ones who do the real work of the wagon train--not just cooking and cleaning, but leading the oxen and, when the men have gone off to look for food and water, protecting camp. Meek’s Cutoff centers on Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) in particular, who does most of the philosophical heavy lifting while the husbands of the group—Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton), Thomas Gately (Paul Dano) and William White (Neal Huff)—squabble over hanging Meek for his transgressions.

A typical western would be tempted to follow the men riding away from the camp on horseback or having their discussions on Meek's fate, but Emily's really the only member of the group with a level head. She's also the only person in the caravan at least half aware of the group’s predicament—they’re alone in a desert with dwindling supplies of food and water, they’ve been led there by a man claiming to know a shortcut, and that man has gotten them lost. When they capture an Indian (Rod Rondeaux) and squabble about killing him, she puts all that aside and tasks the Indian with finding them water. This is an unpopular decision with Meek and a few others in the group, and it serves to alienate her from the wagon train--but they're all alienated to begin with, and that's a problem, she seems to realize, that won't go away by slaughtering one Indian.

Ultimately, the film is unconcerned with the group’s arguments, the search for water, or Meek’s shortcut. Things of real consequence happen in this movie, but less in service of a plot and more to demonstrate the hopeless reality of their situation. These people are strangers in a strange land—the conditions are unlivable and the only person they encounter they tie up like a dog and can’t understand. Eventually Meek finds himself reduced from the group’s pathfinder to a pathetic tagalong, spewing proverbs and nonsense about Indians and water and pathfinding, and that’s the fate of most of the characters here—to be reduced by their circumstance, to know that their future plans in Oregon have, perhaps permanently, been derailed, and to know that survival, while still a remote possibility, is uncertain at best. Under those circumstances, what’s left to cling to? Emily chooses the Indian, and the group chooses her.

Meek’s Cutoff is a somber film, but man is it beautiful. The film is shot like an old, pre-1950s western, and in many shots, the landscape seems like it’s about to swallow the wagon train whole. Deserts sweep out in every direction, hills seem impossible to lead a wagon down, and mountains jut out from the horizon. At one point, Meek says something to the effect that Hell is for the mountains. It’s just as well that they’re off in the distance—these men and women are on the outskirts of existence.

Movie Review: Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

2011-05-17T23:52:00.000-04:00

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Directed By:
Jason Eisener

Starring:
Rutger Hauer: Hobo
Brian Downey: The Drake
Molly Dunsworth: Abby
Slick: Gregory Smith
Ivan: Nick Bateman

Rating:

Shut the Fuck Up, Donny

I know before I even write the bulk of this review that critiquing Hobo with a Shotgun is a pointless exercise, that the movie is knowingly one-note and that its 74% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes is indicative of a critical base that accepted and liked the movie on that basis—a film called Hobo with a Shotgun delivers a hobo with a shotgun; take it or leave it. I also know going into this that my expectations for Hobo with a Shotgun were too high. In 2007, when Grindhouse flopped and was split into two movies for the foreign market and eventual DVD release, the overarching concept of the Tarrantino/Rodriguez collaboration was dropped in hopes of salvaging what money there was left to be made. The small number of people who went to see Grindhouse in its original form, myself included, came out of the experience talking less about the two real movies—Death Proof and Planet Terror—that made up the bulk of the experience, but the fake trailers that served as a garnish for the main course. The only way of sharing these fake trailers was to look for bootleg versions on YouTube, and doing so turned up the incredibly amateurish, lo-fi trailer that became this film. Originally shot for a Robert Rodriguez-judged SXSW contest with the winning trailer getting added to some cuts of Grindhouse, Hobo with a Shotgun’s lack of pedigree and star power, combined with its incredible title and endless pluck made it seem both the most genuine effort of Grindhouse’s five fake trailers and the one least likely to get blown up to feature length. But Hobo with a Shotgun got made, and with the unexpected addition of Rutger Hauer as the titular shotgun-wielding hobo. This, coupled with another fantastic trailer, pushed my expectations through the roof. As is obvious from the “Shut the Fuck Up, Donny” rating I’m giving it, I was more than a little let down by the end product.

It’s not the plot, which is simple and effective in way of other movies whose plots can be summed up by their titles. The film is concerned with a hobo (Hauer) who rides the rails to the end of the line and ends up in a desolate, grimy city where seedy filmmakers offer men like him $10 to fight other bums or chew broken glass, and where a town full of people simply look on as an over-the-top crime lord beheads his own brother using a manhole cover, a pickup truck, and a barbwire noose. This crimelord, known as The Drake (Brian Downey), commits his crimes as though he were the host of the Running Man, and uses his considerable cachet to ensure that his sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) are eternally coked-up, sexed-up, and satisfied in their nightmare version of the Foot Clan’s arcade, where the most fun one is likely to have is not having your head smashed in between the fenders of two bumper cars.

The hobo begins all this as an idle spectator. He’s horrified, of course, but all he wants is enough change to buy the lawnmower in the window of the city’s pawnshop so he can go into business for himself. Eventually, the hobo is witness to Slick’s decision to kill Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a prostitute, so he knocks Slick out with a sock full of coins and turns him in to the local police. Unsurprisingly, they’re corrupt, and the corruption of the city leads the hobo to doing some degenerating things for the bumfight promoter so he can get his lawnmower and get out of town. But when the pawnshop is held up, the hobo instead grabs a shotgun off the wall and begins delivering justice…one shell at a time.

Obviously the hobo starts small and works his way up. He blows away crooks, dirty cops, pedophiles and rapists before turning his attention to Slick, Ivan and The Drake himself, and Hobo with a Shotgun makes every effort to shock and appall its audience along the way. This is Hobo with a Shotgun’s first mistake. In the 70s, Hobo with a Shotgun’s formula—crime in progress, hobo shows up with shotgun, hobo calls criminal a cocksucker, hobo pulls the trigger and paints the camera lens with criminal’s blood—might have been audacious enough to see the film through, but it’s 2011, and if you’re the kind of person who is offended by buckets of fake blood and mile after mile of fake intestine, you probably weren’t going to give Hobo with a Shotgun much of a chance to begin with. While I can’t speak for all genre aficionados, I’ve come to expect something more over the top to these films than just the level of violence. Planet Terror, for instance, put its hero on a pocket bike while he blew away zombies. Black Dynamite’s one-liners were so knowingly bad that characters stared into the camera in disbelief. Death Proof was so pretentious that calling it a grindhouse movie was a bit of a stretch. Here, when a cop screams “Welcome to Fucktown!” it may as well be because the city is called Fucktown, for all the filmmakers care.

But, on the other hand, I might be reading too much into the new grindhouse, or, hell, the old; maybe the social commentary I read into Shaft or Foxy Brown, the empowerment angle I saw in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or the showmanship I appreciate in a William Castle movie (or, for that matter, an old Dolemite film), or the classic gothic horror elements of a Hammer or Paul Naschy flick are flimsy excuses I hold for liking stuff that others would see as bad films about breasts, revenge and sadism. Maybe I’m really mad about Hobo with a Shotgun because it doesn’t hide its breasts, revenge or sadism behind (real or imagined) artifice.

If that’s the case, then Hobo with a Shotgun is still an incredibly bad movie with few things to recommend it on. For instance, there’s Rutger Hauer, who seems to have been cosmically displaced in this film from an alternate universe where Hobo with a Shotgun doesn’t suck. He manages to conjure up flashes of Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Bronson’s Paul Kersey, oscillating wildly between The Man’s icy reserve and Kersey’s lunatic fringe, and does so without following the film over the edge. In a movie where the characters are either a) dull b) dreadfully campy or c) both, Hauer’s restraint is admirable. He nails his part and deserves a better movie. I also dug the film’s score, which relied on fat, driving, John Carpenteresque synths that are often more dramatic, more chilling than the scenes they’re playing under. Otherwise, scenes where The Drake hits a human piñata with a baseball bat that’s got razorblades affixed to it or where The Drake’s kids roast a school bus full of children with a flamethrower do as much to advance the plot as they did for me as a viewer, which is to say nothing. Hauer aside, Hobo with a Shotgun plays like a student project that substitutes ugly, blacklight-washed scenes for style and watered down elements of better films for substance. It’s less a love letter to an old genre than an excuse to throw stage blood at a rolling camera. Hobo with a Shotgun didn’t need to be art, but I would’ve liked it to at least be a movie.

Dawn of the Skinny White Boy

2011-04-30T18:42:00.006-04:00

What's up, Careful Eugenicists! My name's Karl, and if you look into the archives of this publication far enough, you might find some posts by me. No matter; all you need to know is that I'm a peer of Paul's, and Rap Royalty.

Ever since I was born, I have had a deep love and appreciation for hip-hop culture, as well as a difficult-to-pronounce Eastern European last name. These coalesced at some point in my early teen years, and I became known as MC G-Rock (G-Rock being a close approximation of my surname's pronunciation). I rapped and rapped, but didn't record anything until 2008 or 2009 when a friend helped produce some tracks; those songs are fan favourites, but my skill has far surpassed them since.

Then, in the early days of 2011, I finalised a setup that made me self-sufficient: USB turntable, microphone, keyboards, and bare-bones sound editing software. I had never stopped writing and creating, and now I could put something out there on my own timetable: Dawn of the Skinny White Boy, a five-track EP of new material.

You'll hear (unauthorised) shoutouts from the likes of NPR great Terry Gross, as well as Republican harpy Christine O'Donnell. I take an amazing beat that was saddled with horrendously unimaginative and misogynistic rhymes, and commandeer it into the service of certified dopeness. I sample Sharon Jones' blistering backup band the Dap-Kings, as well as the treble-blasting darlings of 2010, Sleigh Bells. Capping it all off, I included a reenactment of a completely true story from the annals of my college years, because every rap album needs a skit or other filler you delete immediately or listen to once!

I invite everyone to visit my sparsely populated Soundcloud page. There you can stream each of Dawn of the Skinny White Boy's five tracks, and download them free of charge. All I ask is that I be credited and praised undyingly. You can also become a fan on Facebook, where you'll find an embarrassingly small amount of fans from around the world.

WWE Tough Enough Episode 2 Live Blog

2011-04-11T19:59:00.007-04:00

As some of you know, I love wrestling. Matter of fact, I love wrestling so much that I started a blog about it, which you can find here, if you're so inclined. I've been trying to figure out a nice, easy way to plug the blog without subjecting myself to the WWE Films overue, which includes such classics as Knucklehead, The Chaperone, and See No Evil, and this show, a new iteration of an old "unscripted drama," seems as good a way as any. Here, I'll report the goings on of WWE Tough Enough, which promises to combine all the hilarity of reality TV with professional wrestling. Follow-up posts on eliminated contestants will appear on Blogamania the Tuesday following the show.

* Tonight, John Cena is going to surprise people! And 13 men and women will be attacked by wild dogs and 300 pound men!

* Tough Enough has maybe the worst theme song ever. And the intro video shows the contestants doing push ups while the established trainers laugh at them.

* The two people with the most experience were also the two people who almost went home last week. This week, they're trying to prove that they're in shape enough to last.

* Stone Cold Steve Austin's secret word for the week is courage. People have been paralyzed in the ring. People have died in the ring. There are risks involved with going after your dreams, which is why they're going to be spending so much time falling on their back.

* The dude with crazy blonde hair has been nicknamed "Skidmarks" by Bill "Hugh Morris" DeMott, and he's not making a strong impression. He had trouble body slamming a 130 lbs. woman. For the record, the daily training stuff isn't very exciting--a lot of headlocks and body slams and whatnot--but the point is to drill these people, some of whom have never been in anything approximating a wrestling match before, on the basics of the art. If you can't do it in a garage surrounded by 15 people, you aren't going to be able to do it in front of 15,000.

* Matt Cross, who's been wrestling for around 10 years, just failed to impress the judges. Poor guy. He's the one legit wrestler on the show.

* John Cena just walked through the door and hugged Steve Austin. To Steve, John Cena is the epitome of courage. Cena's here to give a pep talk and ask some questions. "You're only as good as what you do tomorrow," Cena says.

* Rima Fakih, Miss USA, is incredibly nervous in front of John Cena. How adorable. Stone Cold wants to see her body slammed over and over and over again.

* And, after watching people get bodyslammed a few times, Cena is gone.

* PARTY TIME! Luke, who is probably the favorite to win, has an absolutely awful Steve Austin impersonation. If I ever get drunk enough to impersonate my favorite wrestlers, I encourage you to shoot me.

* So far, I'm underwhelmed. This time last week, people were setting up rings, getting into sexist arguments, and were dying at the prospect of running ropes. This episode is doing a good job of showing the level of dedication it takes to be a wrestler (all those bumps!) but isn't satisfying my need to see a bunch of people throw each other under the bus in the trashiest way possible.

* Skidmarks is writing a letter to his girlfriend. According to the Guido he shares a room with, this makes him less of a man. It's somewhat romantic that this muscly, long-haired dude is crying because somebody made fun of him for writing his girlfriend a letter in longhand.

* The Crystal Skull from Indiana Jones just made a cameo.

* A bunch of dogs are here to bite these contestants in the ass. The goal is to run to a checkered flag, even though an attack dog is primed to, well, attack. The contestants can barely run in their puffy suits. Austin seems to think it's hilarious. Eric Watts is going to make the dog his bitch. HE REFUSES TO GO DOWN AND DRAGS IT TO THE CHECKERED FLAG. That's quite a turnaround from last week's awful effort. Luke also makes it, which disappoints Austin. He's only here to see people suffer. Jeremiah, by far my favorite contestant, made it running with the dog on his back. Full sprint. Bill DeMott wants to see the dog kill Skidmarks. He does not. Bill is still disappointed in the way he ran. And poor Miss USA just got destroyed. The dog even took a chunk of her hair. Being attacked by a dog, to her, is what the WWE is all about.

* Miss USA is still asleep. This is upsetting to Bill DeMott, who subscribes to the old maxim that being on time means that you're late.

* The contestants will stand in a corner as Bill DeMott, a 300 pound man, charges into them. Then they'll take five body slams. According to AJ, Bill is more vicious than the dogs. Austin, again, smiles through all of this. Miss USA seems to be the focus of this show. Bill crushes her, and she can hardly get up for the body slams. But she does it. Bill is dropping these guys like sacks of potatoes. According to Stone Cold, everybody did a great job. True enough. Not sure who I'd eliminate, based on this challenge.

* Elimination talk. Trish Stratus is pro-Rima. Bill thinks that it's ridiculous that she was 20 minutes late.

* Bottom three are Matt, Skidmarks, and Rima. Matt's presence in the bottom three is surprising to everybody, but I suppose he lacked charisma in the three minutes of ring time Trish Stratus saw. Matt is pretty freaked out. Rima is also pretty freaked out. She doesn't want to go back to being Miss USA. That seems like a limited career window.

* Ryan is my pick for this week's loser. Few people on WWE programing have been as uninteresting as he.

* Austin leaves his smoke-filled office. He's about to stomp a mudhole in somebody's dreams. He looks absolutely bored with everybody's self chatter. Not buying any of it. "How long did it take you to think of that bullshit?" he asks Skidmarks. Nobody said "WWE Superstar." Whoops.

* Matt hasn't shown Austin anything. He hasn't done anything in nine years. Almost put Trish to sleep. Miss USA has done as much as him, for all practical purposes.

* Austin is fascinated with time, which is why he always asked interviewers what his watch was saying. He wants to know if Rima was late out of arrogance or laziness. There are no other options. Austin is impressed by her ability to keep going, but he's not sure she can handle it.

* Skidmarks is either rubbing everybody the wrong way, or Bill DeMott is an asshole. Skidmarks respects Bill. Austin wants to know why he should get rid of Skidmarks. Matt agrees, as Skidmarks was crying to his girlfriend. You can't cry to your girlfriend if you're going to be a WWE superstar. Now Austin is incensed. Skidmarks is too nice to make it.

* Austin wants to know why the nine year vet is playing it safe. All he's doing is taking body slams and shit. Austin is legit pissed that Matt wasn't doing backflips from the top rope.

* If Rima is ever late again, she's gone.

* And Matt is going home for playing it safe. Wasn't expecting that. Poor guy's dreams have been crushed. And, considering that he's the dude who came into this with the most riding on it, his dreams probably have been legitimately crushed.

* Clearly, Austin dressing down people will be the most interesting part of the show. And I'll probably be unable to guess who'll be eliminated from week to week.

The Best Movies of 2010

2011-04-05T12:56:00.002-04:00

This list is almost hilariously belated, but graduate school will take the starch out of all but the most dedicated blogger and, as my previous record with blogs on music, Muppets, comic strip cats and theology will show, "dedicated blogger" isn't a phrase you could describe me with. It is my hope that posting this list will allow me to start writing about movies again in some capacity, as I really miss reviewing and (maybe foolishly) thought that I was starting to get *really* good at it.

That being said, a few disclaimers about this list. First, I haven't seen every movie from 2010 that I wanted to see, so this list is probably a fair bit incomplete. Second, there are some movies on this list that, I suppose, were technically made in 2009, but they didn't find their way into American theatres or VOD suppliers until 2010, so I'm cheating a bit. Third, I hate top 10 lists, so this isn't one of those. If the inclusion of more than 10 movies cheapens the list for you, I apologize. Fourth, there will be instances when a "The Dude Abides" movie doesn't make the list and something of a lesser rating (say, a "Far Fucking Out") does. Most of my movie reviews are written within an hour of my getting home from the theatre/shutting off the TV, so reviews of films like Machete are done in full-on sugar rush mode. Does that mean that Machete is a better film than I Am Love? Probably not, but one man's Citizen Kane is another man's Sucker Punch. Fifth, this list's particular order is by release date, so don't try to infer anything from placement. That being said...

Greenberg (dir. Noah Baumbach)

I was one of a very small group of folks who enjoyed Judd Apatow's Funny People, and I suspect that I'm one of the few who really appreciates Greenberg, which takes a popular comedian and places him squarely in a full blown crisis. Ben Stiller's Greenberg, a failed carpenter, controlling friend, poor lover, etc., was one of the most depressing, arresting characters of 2010. It isn't so much how he falls apart that sells the film, but how he manages to drag an old friend (Rhys Ifans) and a new girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) down with him. (full review)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy)

This year seemed absolutely dominated by documentaries about war or the environment or the crumbling facets of American society, education, banking, an otherwise, and while those are certainly fine subjects, the dwindling societal value of art is one that, at least to me, seemed the riskiest to cover. Considering that Banksy is, according to law, a vandal, what could he possibly have to say about art? Considering that his work is routinely stolen off the streets and sold for amazing sums of money, quite a bit. It's nice to watch a documentary that doesn't feel the need to beat you over the head with its message, and it's doubly nice to watch the documentarian's experiment (the creation of an artist/monster who looks at what Banksy does and sees an opportunity to get famous and make millions) blow up in his face. The scary thing about Mr. Brainwash is that the public's quick acceptance of him as an artistic voice only proves that we're willing to call anything art, so long as a guy is willing to rent out an abandoned TV studio to sell it to us. (full review)

Winter's Bone (dir. Debra Granik)

The best movie nominated for the Academy Award, and the best debut performance I can remember seeing in some time. Winter's Bone is backwoods noir with a very strong woman at it's core. She's certainly no angel and is rather ambivalent about her father's possible death and meth cooking past, but Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is one tough 17-year-old, and she'd rather die than see her family get evicted from their home. The pivotal scenes here are awful in their brutality. They leave scars.

I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

Tilda Swinton continues to make a compelling case for herself as being the greatest living actress. For I Am Love, she learned Italian so she could play a Russian woman who married into a wealthy Italian family, only to find herself shut out from the family and very much without a home. Like Swinton's last arthouse project, Julia, I Am Love went sorely underseen during its limited theatrical run, but Netflix exists for a reason, and those with the necessary patience for quiet, subtle dramas will not be disappointed.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed (dir. J Blakeson)

The plot might be a little convoluted and the ending a little expected, but The Disappearance of Alice Creed grabs your attention from the opening credits and keeps it until the end. I have a thing for movies that feature The Perfect Crime at their center, particularly when the plan begins to fall apart. The good movies of the genre, the Dog Day Afternoons, for example, know that the characters committing and falling victim to the crimes are more interesting than the crime itself, that a little, unseen detail unraveling the plot is more effective than sending in the SWAT team. The Disappearance of Alice Creed is entirely self-contained, taking place between the kidnapped and the kidnappers, one of them sloppy, the other almost anal in his attention to detail. The result is a nerve-wracking thriller.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (dir. Edgar Wright)

The flop-turned-cult-film of 2010, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World didn't get a fair shake during its theatrical run. Edgar Wright deftly mixes elements of coming-of-age comedy, sitcom, and video game violence, at once skewering and celebrating a generation raised on Sega Genesis and Mountain Dew while providing it a hero in Michael Cera's broken hearted, post-collegiate slacker. If there was a movie that I enjoyed more in 2010, I can't name it. (read the full review or Horatio Q.'s take on Ramona Flowers)

The American (dir. Anton Corbijn)

The American is almost embarrassingly stylish. Every shot, every word of dialog is as precise as it's main character, as expertly crafted as the guns he builds. It's clear that Jack (or Edward, but it's George Clooney either way) understands the ramifications of his job, which is nice. Often, superspy movies feature men who mindlessly go about their day killing others by the dozens until act three, when the spy realizes that his employer has been evil all along, at which point he grows a conscience and turns the gun on his employer. The American is not hung up on the trifling matter of good and evil, and it's possible that Jack has no conscience. Its concern is survival, even when it looks like Jack is falling in love. The cat-and-mouse elements of the movie are effective, and Italy provides one hell of a maze for the action. (I was obsessed with The American's use of pay phones)

Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson)

Edward Norton is large. Edward Norton contains multitudes. More than a hazy drug comedy, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass deals with the inescapability of one's roots. An Ivy League philosophy professor on the verge of a huge career breakthrough is called home to Oklahoma, where his entire life begins to unravel. He is to play patsy in his identical twin brother's scheme to settle his drug debts to Pug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss), a fixture in Tulsa's small Jewish community. Academic gossip back home threaten his promotion while the Oklahoma drug community threaten his physical well-being. The 10 minutes featuring Dreyfuss were funnier than anything else released last year.

Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

At this point, the comparison to Aronofsky's The Wrestler might be tired, but it's still appropriate. As a portrait of an artist suffering to clinch a role that might be beyond her, Black Swan's as visceral and compelling as the Wrestler, which saw an old, broken idol trying his hardest for another shot at something like an audience. Months later, I'm not as sure of my love of Black Swan as I was. I've talked to dancers who loved it, people who hated this but loved The Wrestler, and there are very compelling cases both for and against the film. Regardless, it's the only mainstream movie that's inspired any kind of debate, which is something that more films should aspire to. The movie has problems, but so does everything else on this list. (full review)

Rabbit Hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell)

It's possible that John Cameron Mitchell can direct any kind of movie successfully. After Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, Rabbit Hole, about a husband and wife whose relationship and individual well-being are torn apart when their son is killed by an also-suffering teenage driver, seems an unlikely third film, if only because those films were gleefully indulgent, where Rabbit Hole is quiet and withdrawn. This is an incredibly mature movie about grief and guilt, with very good performances from Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, the parents, Miles Teller, the teenage driver, and Dianne Wiest, who plays Kidman's mother.

True Grit (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

True Grit doesn't strike me as a remake of the John Wayne classic, even if Jeff Bridges, one-eyed, mean and drunk, carries himself a bit like the Duke. Instead, it's a reinterpretation of Charles Portis' classic anti-western novel, placing the focus right back where it belonged, on Mattie Ross, the book's young protagonist. Hailee Steinfeld, who played Ross, managed to steal the show from Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin, which, obviously, is no small feat. That being said, it would have been preferable to me had Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth switched Oscars. Bridges' Rooster Cogburn was more deserving of recognition than Firth's King George, and Firth's performance in A Single Man more deserving than Bridges' in Crazy Heart. Here, Bridges fashions himself an icon, and his Rooster, who, were this a 4D movie, would smell of piss and blood and whisky, is as fully realized and memorable a character as The Dude.

Blue Valentine (dir. Derek Cianfrance)

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is one hell of a film. The film charts the course of a shotgun marriage, from its initial dizzying highs to its eventual, inevitable misery. The film features the extensive use of flashback, and the effects are devastating. Without a kid and without commitment, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are young, happy, in love. Five years later, they look fifteen years older and at the end of their rope. Gosling's slacker charm has become passive aggressiveness. Williams' cool has become fragility. It's inarguably terrible what their marriage has done to them, but they've got a kid, and they've got a responsibility to stay together for that kid, right?

On the Verge: Shutter Island, Robin Hood, Toy Story 3, Cyrus, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Easy A, The Town, The Social Network, 127 Hours, Unstoppable, The King's Speech, The Fighter.

Movie Review: Drive Angry (2011)

2011-03-17T01:40:00.000-04:00

Drive Angry (2011)

Directed By:
Patrick Lussier

Starring:
Nic Cage: John Milton
Amber Heard: Piper
Billy Burke: Jonah King
William Fitchner: The Accountant

Rating:

Far Fucking Out

Drive Angry is a misnomer of a title, as Nic Cage, here the spare-with-words, poet-with-a-shotgun John Milton, is actually quite calm behind the wheel of many a classic muscle car, the better to wreck, maim, and mutilate the bad guys, who drive stupid or drive scared or drive like their brain's been perforated, which is often the case. Nobody drives angrily. Nic Cage, in fact, is as placid as an empty lake on a windless day. He groans when he gets shot, but otherwise it's tough to tell if any of the video game carnage he's meting out registers, or if it's just another day at the office.

Patience seems to be the key to Milton's passivity, even if "patience" seems like a strange word for a dude with a taste for guns, muscle cars, and vengeance. As it turns out, Milton's spent a lot of time in Hell, and chasing down some hillbillies in a truck is nothing compared to an eternity of suffering. He's back because a satanic cult has killed his daughter and abducted her child, planning to sacrifice it at the next full moon, bringing forth Hell on Earth. Having been to hell (and back, haw haw), Milton has little interest in saving the world--he just wants to save his granddaughter.

In a lot of ways, that's nice. Too many movies in Drive Angry's position would get caught up in the battle between spiritual good and evil, looking for Truth or Reason in what would otherwise have been a very fun action movie. Drive Angry's a movie very much in the grindhouse style and has no time for the moral implications of child sacrifice. It's bad, yes, but the hero's got a sweet ride and a giant gun and a name that lies just beyond plausibility (though John Milton probably wouldn't cause an eye to twitch in a movie not involving hell), and he lives in a world populated by attractive women and over-the-top hicks who want him dead. Sometimes I like going to a movie where I'm not beaten over the head with a muddled high concept. If anything, it's a breath of fresh air.

Joining John Milton on his quest is Piper (Amber Heard), a recently unemployed ex-waitress who owns a Dodge Charger and is recently split from her deadbeat fiance. They're racing cross-country to catch Jonah King (Billy Burke), a generally unlikable dude infamous enough to be mentioned as a murder suspect on TV News, but not enough to be stopped by the cadre of police officers who are there to shoot, be shot at, and watch stuff get blown up good. He's really obvious about his movements, driving around in a flame-painted van and carrying around a cane topped by a human femur. But he's really the MacGuffin, the means to the film's main action. It turns out you can't just waltz out of hell--there's always somebody wanting to take you back.

That somebody is the Accountant (William Fitchner), who seems permanently bored as he chases Milton. What happens is that Milton walks into a bar, a trailer park, or a church and unleashes havoc. The Accountant follows after, picking up the trail. He always seems to be way behind Milton, though he conveniently pops up, Wile E. Coyote style, when the movie needs somebody to run off a cliff. Fitchner is the film's strength, the ambiguity in a film that would have otherwise seen Cage blow over every last satanist like a paper cup in a hurricane. If Cage's detached nature is his charm in this movie, Fitchner matches him one wry one-liner for another.

Alas, things aren't perfect in Drive Angry. There's the business of 3D, for instance. I'm not a fan of the process, but when the advertising blares over and over again that a film is shot in 3D, it can't hurt to take a flier and see what they've done. I was expecting something on the order of Piranha, where the blood, beer, vomit, and dismembered penises flew off the screen in ways so shamelessly exploitative that the paddleball master from House of Wax would have blushed. Instead, the process was taken seriously and no fun was had. Those stupid plastic Ray Bans served little purpose beyond darkening an movie that otherwise would have been bursting with color (considering the orange/blue hues of most action films, darkening Drive Angry via 3D is almost criminal). Then there's the issue of CGI. I understand and appreciate CGI when it is done well and doesn't get in the way of a movie, but one of the key action pieces in Drive Angry involves a hydrogen transport truck that flips over and blows up. Sounds cool, only the CGI is pretty damn lame and ruins the whole bit. Maybe the Dodge Charger got me thinking about Stuntman Mike and about how real cars crashed into real cars, with real dumb people driving them, and maybe I'm being a bit nitpickey, but it's hard to buy into the movie's otherwise charmingly fly-by-night when a movie that practically begs for live action stunt work instead opts for a computer rendering.

Otherwise, this here's a movie where a killing machine named after a poet goes after a cult leader who wants to sacrifice a child. There are tight shots of the polished grills of classic cars. There are short shorts so short you can see the pockets. There are breasts and orgies and a giant, ridiculous gun. Drive Angry is shameless fun. How shameless? It's end credits feature a Meat Loaf song. A recent Meat Loaf song.

The Modern Epic: Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle

2011-03-04T11:20:00.002-05:00

It's difficult to follow Kenneth Anger. There are few figures in cinema, or in the 20th century as a whole, who were as unwilling to be satisfied by the status quo as he. At the age of 19 (probably; he claims 17) he made the film Fireworks, a homoerotic and sadomasochistic avant garde piece that sheared good taste and linearity like the unwelcome vestigials they are, and brutally skewered the unpleasant American tendency of military glorification.

All in 15 minutes. Not bad going, had the film came out this year – Hollywood is to this day struggling with the idea that gay love is not to be patronised as some idealised romance (see Milk, Brokeback Mountain) but rather subject to the same issues as every other kind. That it was made in 1947, before homosexuality was even legalised (and only two years after the War, when admiration for 'our boys' in Uncle Sam's Armed Forces was at an all time euphoric high), seems an astounding anachronism.

If that had been all Anger did, it would be a lot more than almost anyone else. But that wasn't all he did.

Fireworks itself is, of course, viscerally striking – the opening shot, with its dockside fog, brings to mind another film by a subversive enfant terrible, 1939's L'Atalante. This shot melts into the narrative (as much as one exists) to re-emerge as photographs, personal curiosities on the floor of the protagonist (played by a delectable Anger). What follows is a fever dream of sex, rape, murder, and ascendancy; with an anxious, transgressive sensibility to rely wholly on symbol and subtext that would not arise again until Lynch's Eraserhead.

Because, as we see with The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Anger is distinct from, say, Louis Bunuel in that he does not set up a machine of free association for the viewer to draw from but rather weighs each aspect of movie-making, from costume design to background colour, to connect to a specific pool of (in this case, occult) meaning. Described as a “Dionysian revel,” Pleasure Dome could be analysed literally by any fair mystic. Myself, a dabbler in the arts arcane, recognised the odd Pan or Lord Shiva, gathered in an undefined space distinct from their pantheons. This place-outside-of-places could have a fair few Qabalistic or mathematical correspondences, but what's really interesting is that this means the events before our eyes are actually happening; film-making having been described by Anger as “a spell.” Unsatisfied with merely the symbolic language, Anger moves into the performative speech of religious texts, for instance casting (pun intended) Marjorie Cameron in the Scarlet Lady role she fulfilled in other genuine Thelemic rituals. As Maya Deren, Anger's contemporary in avant garde cinema, reminds us in Divine Horsemen, as much as Cameron is the Scarlet Lady, that, too, is Bacchus, or Diana, or whoever, on the screen; the material body of the participant or actor having shed its gros-bon-age, or spirit, to be inhabited by the lwa, or god. Especially since the lwa in many cases has long outlived the actor portraying him or her, and is recalled to life every time we watch the film.

So the gods gather, and they laugh and drink wine, and from the wine they trip. The God-Trip is here represented by a sophisticated montage of visions and repetitions, until time and space both are meaningless. The geography of the film has been fractured by the excesses of the deities, and we can only look on in astonishment. It reminded me somewhat of the K-hole, the disembodied, depersonalised state ketamine can place an abuser, vaguely unpleasant but endlessly fascinating.

Scorpio Rising (1963), the first film set to rock and roll, preceding the music video by decades, and Lucifer Rising (1970-80), complete the cycle. Despite the similarity of their titles, the former has more in common with Fireworks, while the latter shares an occult meaning-field with Pleasure Dome. I am sorry to say I walked in slightly late to Scorpio Rising, and much of it washed over me. It feels like a collection of clippings from the dark side of the 50s noosphere, brought to light as a portent of what was to come, in the midst of the 60s Love Generation. Anger revels in his role as outsider: just as he refused to bend a knee to the oppressive patriarchal environment of the post-war years as a young man, he now sets himself in opposition to both liberal and conservative mindsets of the 1960s. He imbues his film with shocking, sexual and frequently fascist imagery, sending up the rebels while joyfully offending the structures of power (Scorpio Rising was, I believe, banned, just as Fireworks was subject to an obscenity trial).

Lucifer Rising, on the contrary (naturally), is far more optimistic. While its predecessor reports on the defeat of Christ, Lucifer muses on what might take his place. There are some lovely sequences – the Egyptian gods awakening in the sun and signalling to each other, a crocodile emerging from its leathery egg, monks carrying flaming torches up a hill temple. The latter reminds us that Lucifer means 'light bringer,' meaning he shares an etymological source with Jesus himself.

One wonders if this, then, is a rejoice in the demise not of the Son of God, but of the Manichaean dichotomy in Theistic religion. Anger, though he was friends with Anton LaVey, has never himself been a Satanist. Consulting Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, we note The Devil card in the Tarot is in symmetrical opposition to Death, both of which exude from Tipareth on the Qabalah, with Art between them. Crowley associates Tipareth with human consciousness, while G.I. Gurdjieff, Crowley's contemporary and rival, and John Lilly call it “Christ consciousness.” Gurdjieff and Lilly are far from unique, here – could we then say that Lucifer Rising is about our Qabalistic growth from Christ?

If this seems too far fetched an analysis, consider that Crowley's photograph features prominently in Lucifer Rising. Anger was a huge fan, and has been a follower of Thelema for most of his life. Consider also the almost incessant symbolism of the eye in Lucifer Rising, from the Illuminati-esque monad to the Eye of Horus, and that in the context of the Qabalah, the Devil Tarot card corresponds directly with the 'Ayin path, which literally means 'eye.' And that's before we bring Baphomet, pentagrams and the Evil Eye and their relationship to the Devil card in the Thoth Tarot deck into it.

If so, what does Anger reckon we are growing towards? The 'Ayin path lies between Tipareth and Hod, which means Splendour. But that is only part of the story of Lucifer Rising. To quote Crowley, The Devil and Death lead from Tipareth, consciousness,

“to the spheres in which Thought (on the one hand) and Bliss (on the other) are developed. Between them, [Art] leads similarly to the sphere which formulates Existence. These three cards may therefore be summed up as a hieroglyph [leading us again to the Egyptian overtures of Lucifer Rising] of the processes by which idea manifests as form.

“[The Devil card] represents creative energy in its most material form […] The formula of this card is then the complete appreciation of all living things.”

Crowley goes on to say that 'Ayin, along with Aleph and Yod in the Hebrew alphabet, form the sacred name of God – a threefold explanation of the male creative energy. This reminds us that everything, Lucifer included, is, Qabalistically, manifestation of the divine. But it is 'Ayin, and thus The Devil, that is creative energy at its most masculine. It cannot be doubted that Anger's films are indeed creative, masculine (he once said he personally preferred the solar, masculine Thelema to the lunar, feminine Wicca) and energetic, and none more so than Lucifer Rising. It is at once enthralling and disturbing, not least because it is scored by and stars Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family, and it is as desolate in setting as it is rich in meaning and visuals, much of it being shot up mountains or in the desert beside the Pyramids. Anger, like Crowley before him, identifies Lucifer as Set, the ass-headed god of the Egyptian deserts, and recognises that, to quote Crowley once more, “Essential to the symbolism are the surroundings – barren places, especially high places. The cult of the mountain is an exact parallel.”

The Apollonian force of Lucifer Rising makes it a fitting book-end to Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle, coming as it does after the Dionysian excesses that preceded it. Viewed holistically, it is difficult not to see the Cycle as a Homeric report on the mutually defining existence of humans and their gods, of the material and the divine.

Reposted from Implicate Disorder, with permission of the author.

Movie Review: No Strings Attached

2011-02-16T01:20:00.001-05:00

No Strings Attached (2011)

Directed By:
Ivan Reitman

Starring:
Natalie Portman: Emma
Ashton Kutcher: Adam
Greta Gerwig: Patrice
Kevin Klnie: Alvin
Lake Bell: Lucy

Rating:

You're Entering A World of Pain

No Strings Attached operates on the somewhat dated premise that two people can’t have sex without falling in love. In it, watered down Judd Apatow characters watch as watered down characters from romantic comedies made early last decade meet, meet again, meet one more time and, finally, get around to having sex. Then they get around to having an argument about the meaning of the sex. Then, mercifully, it’s over.

Two somewhat useless preludes to the film tell us everything we need to know about the main characters, Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Aston Kutcher). In the first, 10 years before the action of the movie, kid Adam and kid Emma meet at camp and get to talking to each other. Adam is the emotional type, you can tell, because he’s crying over his mom and dad’s divorce. Emma, as is made clearly evident, isn’t the emotional type. She tells him to buck up and that, no, he can’t get to third base. Ten years later, the two are in college. Emma, you can tell, is weird and smart because she goes to MIT and wore flannel pajamas to a frat house pajama party. Adam, you can tell, is kind of stupid because he doesn’t go to MIT and because he was going to have a good time that night, regardless of Emma’s random appearance.

Before you can say “doomed romance,” we flash forward a year, when Adam and his girlfriend are broken up, when Emma is a doctor-in-residency at a hospital in L.A., where Adam is a staffer on a high school musical T.V. show. Adam goes to his father’s house and finds out that dad (Kevin Kline) is sleeping with his ex. This is horrible, possibly psychologically damaging news, and Adam responds to this life crisis the way any rational male would: by getting drunk and dialing every woman in his contact list, looking to get laid. He wakes up in Emma’s apartment, where a bunch of med students and a gay dude giggle at him because he has nothing more than a towel to cover himself with. Hungover and unable to remember his night, Adam sleeps with Emma. The two enjoy it so much that they decide to sleep together a whole lot, pledging not to let their casual sex develop into a serious relationship. Hence the title.

Obviously, things don’t go as planned. Two people like Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman don’t walk into a romantic comedy without falling in love. I guess my only problem with the sex first, romance later attitude of the film is that we’re never really given a sense of Adam or Emma as people, so when they fall in love all we have to fall back on is that really long montage of them having sex every time they have the urge. I imagine the vows they eventually exchange have something to do with Adam’s ability to do everything right, do it in fifteen minutes, and do it in the back of a BMW 5 Series.

Actually, I guess I shouldn’t complain about the lack of character development in No Strings Attached, simply because most comedies don’t go overboard with character detail. Characters in these films are broad, designed so as to be laughed or awwwwed at, people who we’re supposed to be as smitten with as they are with each other. But No Strings Attached’s strokes are really broad, and the fact that Adam and Emma eventually get together permanently looks less like star-crossed destiny and more like guidebook scriptwriting. Adam is a nice guy with a nice career and good looks, but I guess we should look on his life with pity because his dad is screwing his hedonist ex. Emma has unexplained problems with emotion and seems driven to have lots of sex with Adam due to something that can really only be described as programming. The reason they break up is because Adam got attached, this despite the fact that they went on zero dates and had literally no conversations that didn’t revolve around rules to ensure that the two would only have sex. The reason they get back together is because Emma is magically emotional, presumably because she hasn’t had sex in two weeks. Understandable, considering that her and Adam had sex every fifteen minutes, with breaks for awkward dinners and work.

These aren’t real people, which tends to be a big problem in comedy. Real people, well, probably wouldn’t have fallen in love based on a relationship that was 100% sexual. After their disaster of a first date, they probably would have made note of their irreconcilable differences and, shock of shocks, moved on in life. Both might have been hung up on each other for awhile, but new people would have entered the picture, and new people are nice, too. Normal relationships exist at the fringes of this people: One of Emma’s friends starts dating one of Adam’s friends, and even though Adam’s friend is a typical dude and is all like “Yo, bro, you need to nail this broad like it ain’t no thang,” he seems absolutely happy with his decision to date and be in a normal human relationship with Emma’s friend. But maybe that’s just because Greta Gerwig is so nice, and we’d all be so lucky to date such nice people.

And that’s the other thing—it’s 2011, and I can probably describe 80% of the characters in an Ivan Reitman comedy as “nice” without slighting any of them. Greta Gerwig is nice, Mindy Kaling is nice, Lake Bell is nice, and while Ludacris talks a good game, he cries during the filming of a high school musical TV show. Even Kevin Kline’s character gets redemption, though it would have been preferable had his character only appeared once and gotten his joke out of the way. The only characters who are irredeemable are the ones who cheat on Adam or tell him that his 5 Series and lame job aren’t enough to score a woman like Emma for life, but Emma is neurotic and strange and also a doctor, which makes the guy’s line about big words and saving lives an odd one. Then again, Adam leaves a perfectly awesome girl because their first kiss didn’t go right. Maybe Adam and Emma deserve each other, after all.

Movie Review: The Rite (2011)

2011-02-13T02:20:00.001-05:00

The Rite (2011)

Directed By:
Mikael Håfström

Starring:
Anthony Hopkins: Fr. Lucas Trevant
Chris O'Donoghue: Fr. Michael Kovak
Alice Braga: Angeline
Marta Gastini: Rosaria

Rating:

Yeah, Well, That's Just Your Opinion, Man

It might be the Catholic in her, but my mother has always had an intense fear of exorcism movies; a fear so deep that she won't even see them. I remember, as a kid, her telling me that The Exorcist was the scariest movie ever made. Years later, she told me she'd never seen it, but that it didn't change her opinion. Anything with spinning heads and pea soup was out, as far as she was concerned. So I never saw an exorcism movie either, and it might have been my inner Catholic that saved me from spending all my hard earned money on demonic possession, curse words spat at priests, and token Latin incantations. The Rite has all of that, but it is imbued with quietness untypical of a modern horror film. I only counted one cat-related jump scare, and the film is largely dependent on Anthony Hopkins' ability to be menacing without shouting anybody down.

The Rite's long preamble concerns Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue), the son of a mortician who dreads following his father's footsteps and wants very badly to get himself a college education. His father probably wouldn't pay, so he decides to go to the seminary, study for four years, get his degree and drop out. In a very after-school special-ish way, Michael aces all his finals but one: Theology. This earns him a talking to from his mentor, who tells him that, were he to leave, he'd owe $100,000 in student loans. He could, on the other hand, travel to Rome for free and take up exorcism. Yes, he's being blackmailed by the Catholic church, but Michael's a skeptic, and he's willing to face down the Devil if it means loan forgiveness.

His plot arc from there is all very connect-the-dots: He goes to Rome, occupies some awesome buildings, takes classes, doubts his faith, meets an attractive girl, and meets his mentor. His mentor is Fr. Lucas Trevant (Hopkins), an exorcist who is very successful and, according to the buzz, very unorthodox. So he goes to Trevant's house and watches an exorcism be performed on a pregnant teenager. She writhes and moans and curses Trevant in a foreign tongue, but Michael is unconvinced. He suggests a psychiatrist, even when the girl coughs up nails. Sure, she could have swallowed them as Michael suggests, but they’re not exactly the swallowing kind. A whole lot of magic is going to need to happen for him to be convinced.

The thing about The Rite is that it can’t decide if it wants to scare its audience or make it think. The film tries to have it both ways and fails to do much of anything in either department. This means that demonic possession is transmitted by a disease, is marked by the appearance of bad CGI, and takes several leaps of faith that a serious movie would have never thought twice about. Much of the deep thinking is done by Kovacs, and his deep thought amounts to the old maxim that there must be some logical explanation behind the illogical stuff he’s been party to. Ho-hum.

The girl is Angeline (Alice Braga), who isn’t given a last name because she’s not really a love interest for our young priest. She’s a journalist who wants to report on what Travant does during his exorcists and, based on the fact that the Holy See dug The Rite, you can probably guess what she reported. Like plenty of surname-less women in horror movies, Angeline is little more than an expository device, a sounding wall that Fr. Kovak can bounce questions off of, a doubting Thomas ripe for the conversion. It’ll be nice when, sometime in the distant future, a movie like this will be able to support three characters, full names and all.

Kovak’s weightlessness and Angeline’s aimlessness mean that much of The Rite’s weight rests with Anthony Hopkins, who is up to the task as a priest who, even as an experienced exorcist, experiences some doubts about his faith. That, ultimately, is what The Rite is trying to do: examine the issue of man’s belief in a supreme being. It’s a fine mission, only it seems to be getting radioed in from some distant battlefield, over a bad receiver. Without the drive to scare or enlighten its audience, The Rite becomes a tepid religious drama; a spiritual quest undertaken by a blank slate who, given the film's lack of gravity, would untether himself from the plot and float into the ether were it not for Hopkins' presence, a solid foundation for a house of cards.

Imported From Detroit

2011-02-07T12:25:00.003-05:00

To know me is to know that I love Detroit; big, dumb, corrupt Detroit which, for so long, has served America as both scapegoat and chilling vision of an post-apocalyptic urban wasteland. You want to know why the economy's so bad? Politicians will tell you that it's the Unions and their highly paid factory workers, their health benefits, their unmanageable pensions. Our crippling dependance on foreign oil. Our biggest corporations needing government bailouts just to pay debtors and keep the assembly lines rolling. In a political climate that fosters divisiveness and hopelessness and seeks only to get incumbents reelected, it's Detroit that remains a favorite card-up-sleeve. We don't want to be like Detroit. We will not fail like Detroit. We will not Detroit this government issue blank check. Nevermind that Detroit is, regardless of its flaws, a city trying to find itself, that a lot of good people have a lot of good ideas and are trying to get something good out of this town.

I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night because I was flying back from a conference in Washington D.C., but the above ad, the longest in Super Bowl history, played to promote the Chrysler 200. Here is what I know about the Chrysler 200 after watching the ad a few times.

It comes in black.
For money, Eminem will lend a song to it.
It is capable of locomotion.
It costs around $9 mil. to advertise.
It represents the first time in branding history that a company has subtracted from the allure of a previously existent brand.
It is unashamed, perhaps even combative, about its origins.

That second to last point is particularly puzzling to me. The Chrysler 300 was never a particularly popular car, and subtracting 100 from it and calling it a day might not seem like a bad idea on paper. But, thinking about it, this would be like Ford rolling out the F-75 after a particularly rough sales year, or if Wheaties signed an endorsement deal with the four-time Super Bowl losing Buffalo Bills and branded themselves as The Breakfast of Runners-Up. I'm not an advertising executive (though I play one when I watch TV), but I'm smart enough to know that diminishing your brand is a dumb, dumb move.

As far as the content of the ad goes, its appreciable on very small levels. The Hey, I've Been There! Factor. But watching this sleek luxury sedan drive through the artificially rain-slicked streets of Detroit as a gravel-voiced narrator asks me what my town knows of luxury before answering with some nonsense about us knowing plenty because we've lived without it for so long kind of undoes the notion that this is a feel-good moment for the town, a two minute advertisement for a city that needs a little brotherly love. Because this isn't an ad about a city or the way of life in that city, but for a car that, for all you know, isn't even built in Detroit, where the fires burn the hottest.*

*The car is built in Sterling Heights, MI, which counts.

And as this car travels through a town that's been through hell and back, we see signs of reassurance. There's an American flag flying proud in the wind. The happily nodding doorman. The football team running in the cold. A figure skater on the ice. The magnificent Fox Theatre with its KEEP DETROIT BEAUTIFUL marquee. But the truth of the matter is that this is the same propaganda featured in every American car commercial, only now they're being tied to a luxury vehicle with a $20,000 MSRP. This makes all the underdog imagery--the Spirit of Detroit, Joe Louis' fist, Diego Rivera's fresco of a Ford factory (which is unintentionally ironic for reasons I hope I don't need to go into)--that much more insulting. A company actually spent nine million dollars to make Detroit look broken, but looking to make a comeback with the help of Americans wealthy or stupid enough to take a flier on an expensive car made by a company with a recent history of failing to make appealing expensive cars.

It's the nine million dollars that get at me, particularly when Eminem climbs out of the car, walks into a venue too-small for him to perform at, turns heel to the choir that is trying to imbue this commercial with the epic flare required in the field of car salesmanship and says "This is the Motor City." Not too long ago Chrysler and GM went to Congress and asked for a government bail out of a failing industry. They did this despite the fact that they were pocketing bonuses large enough to save a significant portion of Detroit's most financially destitute from foreclosing on their homes, and they did so in private jets. Not only were they (rightly) kicked around by the media, the city of Detroit was, too. They got that bailout, and things look to be better for the company. They posted a profit, though it was smaller than Ford's or GM's, but considering that the weight of Detroit or the American manufacturing industry's problems don't exactly fall on Chrysler's shoulders, that's fine. It's also fine that a lot of Detroiters will look at the commercial and think of it not as some heartless, derivative crap, but as an ernest expression of appreciation for the city, millionaires extending the olive branch and saying "We, too, are Detroiters."

But I can't help myself from wondering how an expensive commercial played during the nation's largest televised event, one that hopes to trade in depression and the husks of abandoned buildings for a successful luxury model, isn't the very poster child of exploitation. There won't be many Chrysler 200s in Detroit driveways, and there won't be many formerly unemployed factory workers making the morning commute to a new plant in Flint or Woodhaven or Warren to build them. But there will always be this ad, this ad and its nine million dollar price tag and its snappy tag line, that the Chrysler 200 is imported from Detroit. For all that the rest of the country knows about the city, Detroit may as well be another country, an amputated limb best remembered for the glories it had and the pain it eventually caused. But Chrysler and its car are not from that country, and no amount of money will buy its way in.

The only thing The American appreciates more than a naked woman is a pay phone.

2011-01-24T17:42:00.000-05:00

Movie Review: The Green Hornet (2011)

2011-01-23T17:05:00.000-05:00

The Green Hornet (2011)

Directed By:
Michel Gondry

Starring:
Seth Rogen: Britt Reed (The Green Hornet)
Jay Chou: Kato
Cameron Diaz: Lenore Case
James Reid: Tom Wilkinson
Chudnofsky: Christoph Waltz

Rating:

Shut the Fuck Up, Donny

The Green Hornet isn't going to be remembered for much. Sure, it's the low point of director Michel Gondry's mostly brilliant career and another in the long list of pedestrian action movies retrofitted with cheap, unnecessary 3D, but these things come and go; Gondry will make another film, and Drive Angry is on the horizon, ready to hit theatres before this film makes it to 3DTV tie-in title. Sure as the Earth turns, there will be other movies just as underwhelming as the Green Hornet. Thing is, few will have the credentials Green Hornet had. Seth Rogen wrote Pineapple Express and Superbad, which may have worn out their welcome by the time every frat boy in America had memorized all the McLovin bits, but seemed proof of a genuinely funny guy who could do little wrong.

Lots of things are wrong with Green Hornet, and most of it surrounds Rogen. As Britt Reed, he is a swaggering jerk of a man, a party-animal-turned-superhero. It's not that I have anything against that--Spiderman was kind of a jerk until his uncle died, Superman needed boring parents to teach him not to abuse his powers, and I'm sure Batman whined a lot as a kid--but man is it hard to watch Britt do anything without wanting to punch him in the mouth. He's a jerk because his life is a constant rebellion against his father (Tom Wilkinson), a newspaper magnate who tells him from a young age that trying things isn't worth squat if you fail miserably. He throws himself into partying and is pretty successful. This, too, is a source is disappointment.

Then his father dies, leaving the newspaper to Britt. It's pretty obvious that a paper helmed by Britt is going to fail, but he makes a go of it anyway, occupying his office and attending editorial meetings and making a few hires here and there. There's hardly anything at risk here because his paper, one of the few family-owned rags left in Los Angeles (indeed, the world), has been floundering of late. Violent, gang-related crime is ravaging the city, but it goes unreported. Britt eventually stumbles into a gig that could help others and help sell his paper: The Green Hornet, a supposed gang leader who's really a good guy.

How he gets there doesn't really matter, but it's important to know that Britt hardly does any of the work. He is backed by Kato (Jay Chou), who had the unlikely dual role of his father's mechanic and personal barista. In addition to those talents, he's a draftsman, engineer, and one hell of a martial artist--he can slow down time and target an opponent's weaknesses or weapons the same way the Predator targets his prey. He does all the heavy lifting, but the media gives credit to the Green Hornet. Britt's paper ratchets up coverage of the emerging super villain, which draws the ire of Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), who until this point has managed to unify L.A.'s gangs.

What I've described is a generic action comedy, but The Green Hornet is full-on desperate for you to love it. At least I imagine that's why Seth Rogen yells every line of self-penned dialog, as if he believes that volume adds humor. But half the time he's a big white dude subjugating a smaller Asian dude to his will, and the other half of the time he's a desperate sexist trying to get into his secretary's pants. You'd feel sorry for Kato if he wasn't also kind of a jerk, and poor Lenore (Cameron Diaz) is just there to smile and be frazzled by Britt's advances, in that order. Mostly, I feel bad for Chudnofsky, an old school gangster with a bad name and an insecurity complex. Nobody pays attention to him (probably a boon for a crime boss, but whatever), so he changes his name to Bloodnofsky and comes up with a catchphrase. He's a villain who wasn't made for these times.

And I guess I feel for Michel Gondry, too. Robbed of the sentimentality and lo-fi charms of his best work, it's obvious that he isn't the right director for a movie about shouty American jerks. It might have worked as a con-job, a Frenchman and an American comedian teaming up for a satire of the superhero origin story in the vein of parodies like Last Action Hero, but the script is wooden and unyielding; at no point is anybody allowed to do something new, unexpected, or momentarily exciting. At one point, Britt throws Kato into a pool and, before firing him, is courteous enough to throw an inflatable raft to his drowning friend. The Green Hornet is a lot like Kato in the pool, only nobody is there to throw it a raft.

The Worst Films I Saw in 2010

2011-01-10T20:21:00.001-05:00

Generally speaking, Worst-of Lists are a horrible idea, a small bit of vengence on the part of an angry writer or critic who, for whatever reason, saved a joke or two about Sex and the City 2. I suppose the reason I feel like doing a Worst of 2010 list is pretty simple: Wandering through the internet, there were a hell of a lot of posts about how this year was the worst in some time. That's objective, but maybe there's something to that--2010 at times felt like a forgotten year. Beyond towering sequels and a stand-out original summer blockbuster, most of the movies that came out this summer felt like fat trimmed from 2008 and 2009. The A-Team, Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia--these wouldn't have survived a season stocked with the likes of The Dark Knight, Star Trek or (*sigh*) Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Speaking of Star Trek, the money spent on promoting that movie forced Paramount to move Shutter Island to the early 2010 dead zone--a Martin Scorcesse movie was bumped from its slotted release date so a bunch of 20-somethings could pal around with Spock.

Here's the thing though--2010 wasn't really that bad. Yes, it was heavy on the action throwbacks (the surprisingly pleasant Salt and Unstoppable), kinda-schmaltzy redemption story dramas (The Fighter, which was very good; Secretariat, which was pretty good; and Stone, which might not have been a redemption story at all), and more than a year's worth of awful romantic comedies (Going the Distance, Valentine's Day, Life As We Know It, The Bounty Hunter, etc.), but that doesn't make it awful in comparison to the last few years. Middling, maybe, but not awful. I saw just north of 50 films last year, and this handful are so bad that I wouldn't watch them again if the director bought me a nice dinner to make it up to me. It's not such a big list. Certainly not befitting the Worst Year in Film of All Time.

Alice in Wonderland (Dir. Tim Burton)

A two-pronged assault on the eyes and the intellect. Alice doesn't want to marry some boorish snob and finds herself back in Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat talk in coded references to nothing, the Dormouse is a cagy revolutionary and everybody watches as what was vibrant and original about both the original book and the animated movie swirl 'round the drain, ready for the garish, ready-for-Hot-Topic afterbirth of Tim Burton's imagination. Instead of going on a journey where she discovers herself an autonomous being, Alice learns little but that she should fall somewhere between the waifishness of the White Queen and the abrasiveness of the Red. This means becoming an action figure--an empty vessel upon which the dull can impress their slight fantasies. Yes, she slays the dragon, but the stakes are so low (and the visuals so muddied) that the rabbit hole may as well have gone uncovered and all Alice's problems solved over tea.

Bitch Slap (Dir. Rick Jacobson): Read the Review

Considering its budget, Bitch Slap probably had better special effects than Alice in Wonderland. This was a big year for grindhouse movies, what with Machete, Piranha 3D, and the release of Grindhouse on blu-ray, and Bitch Slap tries to be a smaller scale version of those movies, but it takes a wrong turn at late-night Cinemax softcore porn and never finds its way back. When it comes to gimmickry, having buckets of water laying around the desert so your cast can spill them all over each other is maybe the worst since the paddleball expert appeared in a 3D movie.

Cop Out (Dir. Kevin Smith)

I would have killed for this to be an underrated, Last Action Hero style send-up of genre convention. Instead, Cop Out was a movie so bad that Kevin Smith had a public meltdown about critics seeing movies like this one for free. Here's the thing though: All the silence in the world wouldn't have saved this from being a bomb.

Actually, Cop Out might be my favorite film going experience of the year. My mom and I were taking a break from family related stuff in Abingdon, a small town in Virginia with an independently-owned multiplex (which happens to have one hell of a soundsystem). The two of us have seen plenty of movies there--usually alone. Cop Out was no different. We walked up to the counter and asked for our tickets.

"We weren't even going to start that one up," the cashier said. "Nobody's come to see it in days."

"Should we?" my mom asked.

"I haven't seen it myself," the cashier replied, turning to pour us a gigantic Coke, "but it's kinda slow here, so I guess it could be."

"What are our other options?" mom asked, turning to me.

"Alice in Wonderland," I told her, groaning. "Failing that, we could see Percy Jackson again."

"Cop Out it is," my mom said.

"TURN ON THEATRE SEVEN!" the cashier cried, giving us our food and our tickets.

We walked to theatre seven in silence, like two people approaching the firing squad, and watched in horror as Tracy Morgan stumbled his way through one of the movie posters in the background on 30 Rock.

Sex and the City 2 (Dir. Michael Patrick King): Read the Review

Some people's nightmares involve clowns or dentists. My nightmares are simpler: Sarah Jessica Parker's Dior tutu, or Kim Cattrall grabbing my junk in public and exclaiming "Lawrence of my labia!" It was months before I could look at yams or think about humus without dying inside.

The Last Airbender (Dir. M. Night Shyamalan): Read the Review

Unlike The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Village, Shyamalan's adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon isn't even interesting to watch as an indication of the once promising director's professional downfall. Shyamalan has been making garbage films for some time now, but the difference between this and his work since Signs is that all previous garbage has at least been nuanced. This is lifeless stuff; the only thing that remains to be seen is if this is Shyamalan calling for a retreat or him raising the white flag and surrendering.

The Best Albums I Heard in 2010

2011-01-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

I often forget that I started my blogging career with the (fortunately deleted forever) Blog of Destiny, an mp3 blog so named because there was a Tenacious D movie coming out about a guitar pick of destiny, the song about which I was way into (oh, to be 17 again). And I often forget that this blog's first foray out of my personal life and into something relevant and sustainable was a failed list of the top 50 records of 2007. And that list led to the creation of Sublime Noises, a music blog that floundered because I hadn't quite found my voice as an e-writer and my friends didn't quite have the time to contribute. This year, Horatio Q. started reviewing records on this here site, augmenting my meager collection of record reviews and necessitating the creation of the Killian Gradient of Winners, which, I promise, will see more use this year (if there's something the internet needs more of, it's references to The Running Man). Horatio Q. moved to London and hasn't had as much time to write about stuff, so music was kind of left on the back burner for most of 2010. Let's change that.

The most significant thing I can think of saying for my 2010 in music is that it's the year that I totally gave up on the CD as a medium. I mean, good for gigantic record companies when whatever flavor of the month they're pimping sells 30,000 records in a week, but this isn't 1992, and I'm not lined up outside of Sam Goody to buy Use Your Illusion. I made the switch to vinyl, which sounds stupid when I say it after deeming the CD an anachronism, but I like owning physical objects, and the vinyl record certainly qualifies. Bigger cover artwork, richer sound quality, and, depending on the record label, a coupon to download the album in high quality mp3? Sounds like a good deal. Besides which, I can buy most records for the same price as a CD (from local retailers, good people, not the faceless types who run iTunes and Amazon mp3), and more when I buy used. It's the best of every possible world.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet year. I didn't buy tickets to Bonnaroo for the first time in three years, only went to three concerts, and spent most of my music listening time on old David Bowie albums. That being said, here in no specific order and with scant description are the best albums I listened to in 2010. This one goes to 11.

Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III)

It's about damn time somebody realized that soul music wasn't just a genre for schmaltzy slowburners about candlelight and making love. People used to dance to this stuff, too. The Metropolis-meets-Stax-Records aesthetic makes for thrilling pastiche, one too unique to be cribbed and repopulated by wannabe radio stars. The best debut of 2010, complete with a degree in interplanetary funksmanship.

Gil-Scott Heron - I'm New Here

Sixteen years is a long time to go between albums, and listening to I'm New Here, I wished Heron was in the right frame of mind to record something during, say, the Bush Administration, or in the aftermath of Katrina. His voice is hardbitten, observational and not particularly hopeful. The title of this album is almost sarcastic in a way--the world is no less embattled now than when he recorded Bridges or "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The revolution was televised after all, but went ignored before it got overturned, and here we are. Heron sounds worn out by it all, but he carries on. That's what artists do.

Girls - Broken Dreams Club (EP)

Girls' frontman, Christopher Owens, has snatched triumph from circumstances that would have crushed lesser human beings. While this collection of six songs is less raw than their debut, Album, Broken Dreams Club is the work of an incredibly tight band that has found its sound and is clinging to it for dear life. Probably the best thank you note a band has ever written to its fans, and a thrilling preview of what's next.

Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM

Technically speaking, this came out in December, 2009, but December is traditionally a month when the music industry goes into its cave and relies on The Eagles Greatest Hits selling enough copies as a last minute gift idea to get them through the winter. Written and produced by Beck in the aftermath of a water-skiing accident that nearly killed Gainsbourg, this is an album preoccupied with death and the lack of control. After this, Beck moved on to covering classic albums with a smattering of famous friends and collaborators, including The Velvet Underground and Nico, but this, alternately breathtaking and ramshackle, is much closer to the Velvet's aesthetic than Beck got with the later project. And listening to Gainsbourg here, it's hard to believe that 2009 also saw her mangle Willem Dafoe's testicles in Antichrist. Against Beck's music, she sounds positively overjoyed just being alive.

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

If it really is the last we'll ever hear of LCD Soundsystem, it's one hell of a way to go out. All of James Murphy's previous successes and demons converge on this album, battling it out for his musical soul. It's hard to tell which side he believes has won. Too melancholy to celebrate, too transcendent to muck about in depression, it sounds simultaneously like Murphy's lost his edge and found a new one. I've endlessly played and replayed this album, and there isn't a cut that gets old. The work of a true mastermind.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

It doesn't get much ballsier than asking "Can we get much higher?" a minute into your new album, but it's pretty clear by now that Kanye West isn't living on this or any other plane of reality. After all the badass Twitter posts, the revelation that West's infamous live TV rant about Hurricane Katrina was George W. Bush's personal nadir, all the talk of Kanye wanting to become the next Michael Jackson (though he admits he can't sing or dance), anything less than a monstrous album would have been an absolute flop. Without going on and on and repeating everything you've heard, believe the hype. It's hard to know what Kanye's thinking. It's also hard to not be excited by it.

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Given that the wait between this and Ys was three years, I probably anticipated Have One On Me more than any album that came out in 2010. Opening the gigantic black box that houses the three vinyl records necessary to contain Newsom is not unlike sitting at the feet of a master storyteller. Her music is a modern cabinet of curiosity, able to take me through time and space. When I saw her live in April, the songs from this album, still mostly new to my ears, made me putty in her hands. Her evolution, from The Milk-Eyed Mender to now, has been astonishing. Not only has she adapted to having a full band surrounding her, but her voice sounds less fragile, more sure of itself. I don't think two whole hours of this is going to convert anybody who didn't already like her, but the fact that two whole hours of harp can land anywhere in the Billboard 100 is astonishing in an age of Nickelback and Auto Tune.

Robyn - Body Talk

For a fat, rhythmless man, I sure do like dance music. And this is the best dance music of the year, without question. It probably helps that Robyn released two albums before Body Talk, which is a collection of the best of Body Talk Pt. 1 and 2 with new stuff thrown in, but the new tracks and new sequencing come together to make something new (shocking, I know), and unexpected: a dance record that validates the album's continuing existence as an entertainment medium. Considering that dance music is one genre that probably could sustain itself on singles and singles alone, the refusal of one of its best artists to give up on it is welcome news.

Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

I've always been part of the camp that held up OutKast's 2003 Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as an unappreciated classic, mostly due to the trunk-rattling awesomeness of Big Boi's effort on Speakerboxx. Because of the undeniable and ubiquitous charm of "Hey Ya!," the group's sudden megastardom was chalked up to Andre 3000. Here, Big Boi steps out of that shadow. Andre 3000 appears only in material cut from the album due to label issues, and Big Boi delivers the most organic, unforced rap album in some time.

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Music rarely comes harder or more furious than it does on Titus Andronicus' second album. Influenced by everything from Bruce Springsteen to the Civil War, it's as if this album was made using a checklist of my nerdy passions, past and present. Every song is vibrant and exhausting, and just when it seems like they've got nothing left, the band charges forward. The sound of punk to come, one hopes.

The Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards

Jack White keeps moving farther and farther from the self-imposed constraints of the White Stripes, wandering out from the little room he described on the Stripes' breakthrough record, White Blood Cells. While The Raconteurs delve into White's seeming admiration for the 70s guitar gods who graced posters and magazine covers, The Dead Weather get to the down and dirty parts of White's aesthetic and, poked and prodded by Kills frontwoman Allison Mosshart, reveals the dark, seamy underbelly of his formerly innocent schoolboy sexuality.

SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Santa's Slay (2005)

2010-12-25T21:58:00.002-05:00

The first thing you need to know about Santa's Slay is that Bill Goldberg, the man in the red suit, is Jewish. The second thing you need to know about Santa's Slay is that Santa, the son of Satan, is only nice because he lost a bet to an angel 2,000 years ago; a bet that involved curling. Stop-motion curling.

If I had a movie theatre, I'd play Santa's Slay every December, along with the likes of Die Hard, Batman Returns, Gremlins and Jingle All the Way--Christmas movies that make for great anti-programming in the face of hours and hours and hours of "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas," awkward family dinners, antiquated and unchanged state liquor laws and whatever garbage is lurking at the multiplex, trying to rob you of your hard earned Christmas money. Movies like Gulliver's Travels come and go; they are the flotsam and jetsam of holiday filmgoing. It takes guts (or, at the very least, a shiteating grin) to turn the fat, jolly old man into a Jewish asskicker from the bowels of hell.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!" Naturally, skepticism hounds Santa; the only people who believe in St. Nick anymore are the very young and the advertisers who still plater Santa on Macy's displays and bottles of Coke. But it's obvious from the minute Santa kicks the family dog into the ceiling fan: He's real, and he hates Christmas. Heck, the premise would have worked without the high stakes curling scene. I imagine Santa isn't too happy that those wooden trains and hobby horses his elves slave over have given way to iPads and Kindles, that Christmas is an economic institution Too Big to Fail, that a society obsessed with body image still doesn't want a skinny Kris Kringle.

Yeah, all of this is giving Santa's Slay too much credit. It's just a movie where Santa rides around in an ox-drawn sleigh, killing people in the most elaborate way a cynical screenwriter can imagine. It's campy, perhaps shamefully so, but there's something to be said for camp when its done right. Spare me your cookie cutter holiday movies, hastily and shoddily upconverted to 3D. Spare me your sentimentality. Santa's Slay is a Christmas movie for people who see through Christmas. Dole out the eggnog and watch the bodycount rise.

Movie Review: Black Swan (2010)

2010-12-25T16:16:00.000-05:00

Black Swan (2010)

Directed By:
Darren Aronofsky

Starring:
Natalie Portman: Nina Sayers
Mila Kunis: Lily
Vincent Cassel: Thomas Leroy
Barbara Hershey: Erica Sayers
Winona Ryder: Beth Macintyre

Rating:

The Dude Abides

Life is full of disappointment. That’s obvious enough, but a person’s success or failure at life, at any component of life, is how well that person copes with disappointment. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a young woman ill-equipped to deal with these disappointments, which is unfortunate because she faces them nearly every day. She’s a ballerina in a premiere New York City troupe, technically perfect but relegated to background roles because her perfection has rendered her frigid. There are flashes of something brilliant within her, but they’re dull, muted, must be coaxed out. Her director, her co-workers, her ex-ballerina mother—they tell her that she isn’t the kind of dancer who gets offered the glamour part, but Nina proves them wrong when she is cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. The trouble is that she must prove herself worthy of the role, which requires perfection, but also a kind of rage that she doesn’t seem capable of.

Nina is a fragile individual, a porcelain figurine set spinning in a music box. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) has bred Nina like that, from the pink walls of her room to the fact that Nina, unlike most young women her age, has yet to have her ears pierced. Her life is the definition of routine: Wake up, eat breakfast, go to rehearsal, come back, go to sleep. The routine is disturbed by a rash, maybe, or Nina’s inert need to pick at herself, to hunt for and eradicate any flaw or blemish she sees. Her mother dresses and undresses her, obsessively calls her on her cell phone, knows exactly what roles she’s suited to dance. Two things are clear in Nina’s mother: That she wants for her daughter what she gave up as a young woman, and that she wants, as a ballerina, to compete against Nina, even if only her ghost is dancing.

Nina’s fragility works in her favor, to an extent, because the role of the white swan requires a dancer to be removed, fragile and perfect, a dancer capable of expressing love without being able to speak it. She auditions for the part and her director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), tells Nina that she’d be perfect were he only looking for the one role. But his take on Swan Lake is one of duality. Somewhere within the white, virginal swan, there’s got to be something dark, physical, full of lust; a black swan aching to burst from the white one’s fragile cage. He doesn’t see that in her, believes the black swan’s embodiment to be Lily (Mila Kunis), a free spirited ballerina from San Francisco whose lack of technical perfection is more than made up for by the emotion that comes across in her movement.

“You can tell she’s not faking it,” Leroy tells Nina. But if Nina is guilty of anything, it isn’t faking. She’s utterly incapable of hiding herself from those around her, though she’s so obsessed with building a wall around herself that she fails to notice. Obsession plays a big role in Nina’s downfall. She’s obsessed with the rash on her back, obsessed with the technical perfection of her dance, obsessed with becoming somebody who isn’t her. Her deepest desire is to become Lily or Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), the company’s retiring lead ballerina, but she doesn’t understand what makes these people work, and it seems like the walls are closing in as she constructs them.

Every minute of Black Swan is packed with director Darren Aronofsky’s signature blend of the subtle and the glaringly obvious. For instance, it isn’t enough to demonstrate Lily as Nina’s opposite by showing the difference in their dancing. Lily is tanned and tattooed, a cigarette smoking, pill popping girl from San Francisco. To Nina, pale and socially stunted, Lily is simultaneously alien and goddess. Every compliment paid to Lilly is a deathblow. Every exchange between the two is as forced and awkward as it is disconnected. It’s the same between Nina and her mother, the same between her and Leroy.

This is a bold, audacious film, obsessed with self-destruction, perfection and professionalism. It’s not merely a feminine version of The Wrestler, whose main character also suffered for his profession. Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson was a past-his-prime wrestler living a hardscrabble life in search of one last glorious moment. Plenty of us know people like that, but Nina’s a little different. As a ballerina, she’s an anachronism, some rich philanthropist’s bauble. Somebody like Lily would have learned to live with and accept that fact, but to Nina, dancing isn’t just a job—it’s all she knows. Her downfall isn’t pride, envy or physical limitation. She is pushed to the brink by her insecurities, and it’s there that the darker aspects of her personality lay, waiting to take over.

Movie Review: Stone (2010)

2010-12-22T01:02:00.000-05:00

Stone (2010)

Directed By:
John Curran

Starring:
Robert De Niro: Jack Mabry
Edward Norton: Gerald "Stone" Creeson
Milla Jovovich: Lucetta Creeson
Madylyn Mabry: Frances Conroy

Rating:

Far Fucking Out

A parole officer finds himself a month or so from retirement. He’s got a clean record, a quiet home life, does everything by the book. Old school, some would call him. Beneath his button-up shirt and military haircut, however, there is a darkness. It’s buried, almost invisible to his peers, but there it is—a black abscess, an Achilles heel—on display before an arsonist looking for a little leverage, a way to get out of jail free. Stone, a grey, quiet, drab movie about the parole officer’s darkness and the arsonist’s cunning, seems like the least likely film to feature a breakout performance, especially considering that the cop is Robert De Niro and the prisoner is Edward Norton, but Millla Jovovich, as the eponymous prisoner’s wife, breezes into the movie and steals the show.

In a lot of ways, this makes complete sense. Stone, regardless of its two leads, treads dangerously familiar ground for a psychological thriller. One man pits his brain against another man’s brain, searches him for any conceivable flaw, the list of possible flaws including old chestnuts like money, power, paranoia, women, or some shameful event in the mark’s past. Usually, the script double dips and gives the sucker two of these flaws—a guy who loves money loves to spend that money on women, usually women who aren’t the man’s wife. It’s possible to plug any two good actors into the role of con-man and mark and have an acceptable psychological thriller, and it just so happens that De Niro and Norton are both tremendous actors capable of bringing life to almost any script they read. The trick, however, is to have an interesting MacGuffin. If it’s a woman, as it is in Stone, she’s got to hold her weight. Jovovich does more than that. By the end of the film, hers is the only character left worth caring about.

This also makes complete sense. Regardless of how you feel about them at any point in time during the story, Stone (Norton) and Jack (De Niro) aren’t the kind of people you root for. The first scene, a flashback, shows Jack to be a catatonic sort a zombie before a TV. His wife threatens to leave him. He explodes, runs up to the second floor of their house, and dangles his daughter out the window. There aren’t any hints in Stone that he’s done something worse than that over the ensuing years, but it’s obvious that he’s smoldering, just waiting for something to set him off. Until then, it’s the same routine everyday: Wake up, go to work, go to the liquor store, drink self to sleep. Stone isn’t much better. He’s a convicted arsonist who wants out of jail, and his every action, his every word is crafted with that goal in mind. He’s obviously pushing Jack’s buttons vainly, hoping to find the right one. He studies the religions. All of them. He has cordial conversations. He tells his wife (Jovovich) to meet with Jack outside the confines of your typical, non-existent parole officer/wife of prisoner relationship. Stone converts to a religion called Zukangor, which posits that life is a series of responses to plucked strings. It seems awful relevant to Jack’s situation with Lucetta, who is trying to seduce him. Maybe too relevant. But it’s hard to tell if Stone is really a convert to Zukangor or if he’s just going through the motions, hoping to play Jack as a religious sap.

The movie does nothing but smolder, and much of it revolves around Jovovich’s Lucetta, who, it seems, is willing to do anything if it means seeing her husband free from prison. She married him only a few months before he was locked up, has hook-ups with a few men, but still makes the visits and is willing to seduce a dead-eyed old man like Jack. The situation makes Jack’s home life with his wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy) all the more tense. He starts drinking more. She starts quoting more scripture. Lucetta genuinely appears to want Jack, who stays out with her later and later. Meanwhile Stone enters an almost meditative state. He’s uninvolved in prison life in every way but proximity and sees Jack for what he is.

But, in the end, it’s hard to say exactly who Stone or even Lucetta are or what they represent for Jack, who doesn’t so much fall apart so much as he shuts himself in for an imagined siege. Though you can see Jack’s fuse burning, though you can see the look of Stone’s eyes, and though you can feel Lucetta’s warmth, these elements don’t converge at the center to become something more than a study of three very different human beings. Their lives don’t intersect, even though the plot of the movie says that they must. Without a true sense of connection, the fuse continues to burn in vain. Even when it reaches the bomb, by the looks of things, it’ll be a dud.

Movie Review: Megamind (2010)

2010-12-20T13:40:00.000-05:00

Megamind (2010)

Directed By:
Tom McGrath

Starring:
Will Ferrell: Megamind
Tina Fey: Roxanne
Hal/Titan: Jonah Hill
Minion: David Cross
Metro Man: Brad Pitt

Rating:

Far Fucking Out

There’s only really so much you can do with a character like Superman, who, as the overbearing, overpowering and ultimately alien avatar of truth, justice and the American way, hasn’t really evolved much since his debut in 1938. Superman has been part of the American cultural lexicon for a long time now—I know something like five people who, as children, owned copies of Action Comics #1—but little about him fascinates the imagination anymore, and probably hasn’t since the 1978 film. What remains most interesting about the Man of Steel is his origin story. You don’t have to be a nerd to know that Superman was the last son of a dying planet, that he was shoved into a rocket with nothing more than a blanket and a CD-ROM of the accumulated knowledge of his planet. We know these things, have known them for some time, and know some tremendous stories with the premise that Superman didn’t land in a Kansas cornfield, never became Clark Kent. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Megamind isn’t one of those tremendous stories, but it comes loaded with the accumulated knowledge of what makes Superman great, and happens to be a pretty good story in its own right.

It escapes some people that the first draft of Superman had him as a villain, a poor man plucked from a breadline and experimented on by a mad scientist. Under the influence of the scientist’s telepathy potion, the superman grows a giant head and has designs on world domination. Megamind (Will Ferrell), looks a little bit like the original superman and has similar plans, though his chosen place of dominance is Metro City, which is protected by a scene-stealing, baby kissing hero by the name of Metro Man (Brad Pitt). Megamind and Metro Man have what Megamind calls “a glorious rivalry,” though “glorious” isn’t exactly the adjective most would lavish on the villain’s never-ending string of defeats. That changes, however, when Megamind discovers Metro Man’s weakness and kills him in broad daylight.

No longer a C-level villain mired in a hopeless quest to defeat his nemesis, Megamind does what any good bad guy would do and ransacks the city. But, without the promise of another battle with Metro Man, life for Megamind is rather boring. He mopes around his lair, lusting for the glory days. Purposelessness isn’t exactly Megamind’s bag, so, rather than drift aimlessly, he develops a potion that will turn a regular man into a Metro Man. He accidentally juices up Hal (Jonah Hill), the cameraman for Roxanne (Tina Fey), the newswoman he has a horrible, horrible crush on. Hal becomes Titan, and once it becomes obvious to him that superpowers aren’t what turns Roxanne on, Titan goes rogue, destroying the city at a clip that a poor sap like Megamind could never hope to match.

But…wait. Titan was supposed to be the good guy in all this, smashing Megamind’s nefarious plots with a bare minimum effort, snapping photos with tourists and attending ribbon cutting ceremonies for new stores that open in the rubble of old stores destroyed by Titan vs. Megamind superbrawls. Yeah, well, life doesn’t always work out that way. The funny thing about destiny is that the only people who know theirs in advance are in books or on the screen. Megamind probably never figured on killing Metro Man, but he does. Megamind probably never figured he’d date a woman like Roxanne, but he does. Megamind probably never figured on a lot of things, and his superman going crazy on them is certainly one of them, but like many an animated hero before him, he finds that destiny isn’t pre-ordained by circumstance.

While Megamind does a good job of riffing on its influences, it is at times maddeningly hamstrung by its desire to be cheered and by its potential to become a franchise rife with easily repeated jokes. Megamind’s biggest misstep is its music. Nothing happens in this movie if it isn’t set to some ancient, easily predicted rock anthem. It’s possible that I’m nitpicking, but believe me, in any other film, were the bad guy to strut through a devastated town to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” you’d feel patronized to the point that your gag reflex kicked in. The old maxim in storytelling is “Show, don’t tell,” meaning that you want your reader or viewer to feel the point of what you’re doing without having to lead them to that feeling by the hand. Megamind, like most Dreamworks animated features, grabs a megaphone and screams at its audience, like so:

“Bad to the Bone” by George Thurgood and the Destroyers: HE’S A BAD DUDE! BAD, I TELLS YA!
“Highway to Hell” by AC/DC: THE HERO HAS BEEN BEATEN AND THE BAD GUY IS WALKING TRIUMPANTLY AND THAT’S BAD, REAL BAD.
“Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton: IT’S FUNNY THAT SUCH ARCHETYPICALLY STRAIGHT CHARACTERS ARE LISTENING TO SUCH AN ARCHETYPICALLY GAY STONG. HAW HAW HAW.
“Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ‘n Roses: OBVIOUSLY A HUGE FIGHT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. BE PREPARED FOR AMAZEMENT.

And so on. The Hans Zimmer score is there just to be a Hans Zimmer score. At no point in time does anything approach the level of, say, The Incredibles or Superman or even Zimmer’s The Dark Knight, superhero film scores that underline what’s going on without coming across as lazy. Obviously, that comes with a disclaimer. Maybe I’m too old to appreciate the humor in using songs like “Kung-Fu Fighting” in a movie where a panda uses kung-fu, or maybe I’ve been spoiled by Pixar. But these little things continue irk me in just about every Dreamworks film I see, and when I’m irked by the little things, the bigger flaws really stand out. Megamind shows that the studio knows what it’s doing—now it just needs to find enough confidence to do it without relying on the same old pratfalls.

I Would Fuck An Editor To Fuck Paul Verhoeven

2010-12-17T05:54:00.011-05:00

I don't know where this will take me, so just bear with me. This is a new style of journalism I'm innovating called 'fevercrit;' I've been running a temperature for two days and my brain's been running wild with all sorts of streams of consciousness - some pleasant, some not so pleasant. Like Professor Pyg, "I want to be sick in front of everyone..."

Verhoeven. Last time I saw one of his films was about two years ago. And yet, he became one of my favourite directors lately (while I've been a fan of his work with the Jesus Seminar for somewhat longer). It might be because my housemate bought the Alien boxset. The first Alien film... well, what can you say that hasn't already been said. An excellent film, and sci-fi to the core, because it's all about that fear of the viral invasion of the body, not to mention AI anxiety. Then again, it's also all about working class solidarity, and anti-colonialism. Drawing deep from two the two great wells (or Wells) of specfic there. Whereas Aliens turns things rather on their head. It's the retribution of the colonialists - masculinising Ripley into a kind of intergalactic John Wayne from The Green Berets (but with a feminine side, so Cameron still gets his violent woman... uh, I mean, female action hero... kick), and transmuting the xenomorphs into space gooks who will soak up plenty of American... uh, sorry, human... bullets. Aliens is unforgivable for two reasons - it creates a franchise, and reclaims Alien for the populists, even going so far as creating a blue collar family at the end (and David Fincher basically had no choice but to slaughter this Space Family Robinson right from the getgo, but that's another story).

So I started reimagining Starship Troopers as a kind of response to this. Maybe it's just the European citizen in me, wanting one of our lot to go and give what Zizek calls Cameron's hypocritical Hollywood Marxism a kicking. But I think there's something to it. Cameron seems more than willing to go along with the American flavour of the Just War while ostensibly criticising it, much like how films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Rambo: First Blood and Predator were used to recruit mentally deficient highschool jocks, and left themselves open for it by not offering up a single valid characterisation of the other side. Verhoeven, on the other hand, just doesn't truck with it - Soldier of Orange is far from the usual hoo-rah for military heroism, and this comes back again in Black Book, which completely removes the moralistic aspect of anti-Nazi resistance and instead places emphasis on survival under occupation.

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Service-men and women aren't heroes. They're real, breathing people, and they range from the exploited poor to psychopaths who have played too many video games. Some of them are even normal people. In conjunction with the generally rightwardsly retarded political awareness and miseduction of Americans, making stuff like Stone's movies and Cameron's is not just questionable, it's downright bad fucking ethics.

So roll on Starship Troopers. While Cameron's Aliens are space gooks, Verhoeven's space gooks are whoever's been on the end of an American propaganda campaign. And while Cameron's heroes are the troopers, Verhoeven's troopers are the sorts who saw Aliens/Predator/Rambo/Platoon and signed on the dotted line. While Cameron sneaks in the back door with his propaganda, Verhoeven has Arnie bursting through your window with a ripped shirt and an implausibly big gun screaming THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA until we can recognise the propaganda tropes more clearly.

(Wait, that was Total Recall... point still stands. Recall, along with Robocop and Troopers, forms a thematic trilogy of satire and subversion. The uninitiated might see Total Recall as an American sci-fi action flick. When in fact, it's two European con-men, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, oiling themselves up and giggling the whole time. But while it's sodden with bitter sarcastic loathing, it's also bursting with invention (which is true of every Verhoeven film), with genetic mutants and colonies on Mars and dual personalities and virtual realities.)

We might here recognise Verhoeven as a deconstructive director, but that's only if you weren't paying attention when Basic Instinct deconstructed the genre so that Sharon Stone is in fact the wide-eyed innocent and Michael Douglas the exploitative villain. This is playing with the conventions of the Hitchcock knock-off, and he did the same with The Fourth Man in case you're one of the Bill Hicks crowd who just doesn't buy it. And then we might look at his sarcastic, camp and knowing takes on the historical movie, the sports movie, and the social realist movie, and returning to sex again with Showgirls.

Indeed, I fancifully imagine Verhoeven getting off the boat, looking around, seeing neon dollar signs everywhere, knowing they're all traps, and asking himself "how can I milk these cunts for all their worth, take the utter piss out of them, and stay true to myself?" The answer he came up with was to turn his career into a drag act, wearing genres like Divine wore wigs, 'whoring' himself so blatantly that it made the pimps feel uncomfortable, gave all the patrons a good time and thoroughly pissed off the literalists and moralists who just didn't get it.

He then has to ask himself what the American people want. And he doesn't like what the answer is. They want to be couch potatoes, and have the fucking cops or the army save their ass, and then they want to be the American James Bond, and they want Sharon Stone to be their wife, and they want to be the great individual myth hero standing up to the evil corporate machine, but really they just want to have done all these things already, because really they want to be sitting on the couch, and they want to be drinking a Coke, and if they can't have done those things that's okay because Arnie's got that covered and aren't we all Arnie anyway? What they don't want to do is examine these ultraviolent crypto-fascist fantasies, or in any way consider that maybe those fantasies have something to do with why the gooks/commies/sand niggers/japs don't like us, or why Private Joey Sixpack Jr., American Hero™, got killed overseas last week. And they certainly don't want to know what the real life Rekalls or Omni Consumer Products like Coca-Cola get up to in places like Colombia or India. Because a Coke goes down really well with another stupid fucking Arnie action movie.

VERHOEVEN: "Here is your Nazi propaganda, you fucking moron. And here's some more. Here is you being made into a real man by the army. Here is your American fascist narrative being taken into space. Recognise it yet? No, no, of course you don't, you fucking moron. Here's some women being exploited. Not ringing any bells? Here are some women, being exploited, to the point, where they have had to grow six titties! Got the joke yet? Of course you fucking haven't. You cunt. Here, buy the fucking action figures. Hahahahaha I'm rich!"

All of which is not without precedent. And we should mention that Verhoeven isn't doing anything that Pat Mills and John Wagner weren't doing for longer in Britain with 2000 AD (fitting that Stallone and other Americans would later take Judge Dredd on face value). Robocop borrows liberally from this, as well as from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, and the whole thing came full circle when Chaykin acolyte Frank Miller wrote for the Robocop sequels and TV series. But that puts Verhoeven in a good company of sardonic, and perhaps evil, creators who didn't let their cynicism about their audiences prevent them from creating great art.

Pass the Hatchet: Instructors of Death (1981)

2010-12-16T02:55:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of kung-fu movies for as long as I can remember, and my fandom has evolved along a similar track as my socially damning love of professional wrestling. As a kid, watching a martial artist or a wrestler take no untold amount of damage is amazing. They writhe in pain, take inhuman beatings, bleed and have their shirts ripped off their backs, but the hero finds a way to peel himself up from the dust and continue fighting. It's a magic trick, in a lot of ways--pulled punches and louder-than-life sound effects--and pale imitators (like my much-beloved Dolemite) are the cinematic equivalent of an amateur asking "But still, where'd the lighter fluid come from?"

The above clip, from the Shaw Brothers' Instructors of Death neatly packages everything I love about kung-fu in one eight minute demonstration. We know how Gordon Liu and Wang Lung-Wei do what they do, know that it takes years of practice, much like we know that a pro wrestler, if he's serious and dedicated to his craft, spends years learning how to simply fall on his back. To continue with the magician comparisons, good fight scenes (and good wrestling matches) are like rabbits pulled out of hats. We appreciate them because they're both beautiful to watch and easy to appreciate for their technical mastery.

And that's the thing that escapes a lot of people who don't appreciate kung-fu, I think. To an outsider, this clip is little more than a collection of punches and kicks significant of nothing, bad English dubbing and awkward fashion. But the key to all of this is the footwork, the missed blows, the blocked body shots and the announced styles. Kung-fu, unlike the American gunfight, isn't a game played between two combatants looking to mindlessly blow each other away. It's a chess match fought between opponents who are on an equal playing field. You can buy a book of chess moves and study them, just as the young martial artist goes to school and learns kung-fu. But to see Tiger Style, to see Crane Style, to match yourself against an opponent with strong foundation and true grit--that's the beauty of fighting. And when the opponent pulls out something new and wholly unexpected (as happens here), that's something else entirely. That's a thing to be admired.