Enter the Void

2009

Director: Gaspar Noe

Cast: Paz de La Huerta, Nathaniel Brown, and Cyril Roy

Plot: A drug-dealing teen is killed in Japan, after which he reappears as a ghost to watch over his sister.

Enter the Void will be some people's favorite movie of the year, hands down, while everyone else will think it a completely slow, boring, soft-core porno masquerading as an art house film. I happen to fall in the former category, I loved this movie, and since I saw it a few weeks ago I can't stop thinking about it. I have an overwhelming desire to watch it again, all one hundred and sixty trippy minutes of it. There is something truly hypnotic about Enter the Void, and although it is very dark and disgusting at times, it is also very peaceful. Being a ghost, as imagined by director Gaspar Noe, is a pretty low-stress state of being where we float effortlessly over streets, through buildings and into the sky. The entire movie is shot in a point-of-view camera style, in which the camera sees through the eyes of the main character, Oscar. Though some will likely find this cinematography gimmicky, it seemed integral to the mood and ambiance of the film. We are passive observers to the scenes, and we pop into the lives of other characters almost at random. There usually isn't all that much going on, unless its sex. Which brings us to Paz de la Huerta (that's "Peace of the Orchard" for you non-Spanish speakers), who portrays Oscar's sister, and who is always the one sexing, or being sexed depending on the scene. It is ultimately Linda who seems to be the catalyst of her brother's downfall. She wears her sexuality like a big red bullseye, and it quickly becomes evident that Oscar isn't up to the task of protecting her from the predators she attracts out of the dark alleys and stripclubs of Tokyo.

Some may think that there is a lack of story to this movie, but I'd argue against that point. Certainly, there isn't a classical plot and I'm not sure there is a lot of the highly-touted "character development", but the film has its own perspective if nothing else. The journey we take through the afterlife is described point by point early on in the film, and it seems to be an obvious cue to sit back and let the images flow over us rather than worry about where the movie is going. And arguably what will be most interesting to both lovers and haters of Enter the Void is the imagery, not the plot. Besides the ghost shots mentioned above, you have the visual hallucinations of a (living) man in the grip of a powerful psychotropic drug. These pulsating organic visions transform and expand across the screen for many minutes, just long enough to appreciate them but not so long as to become tedious in this humble viewer's opinion. Ever a stickler for detail, Gaspar Noe even expertly portrays the transition into this brief drugged-state, which starts with disquieting irregularities of reality that grow and soon overwhelm the user and audience. Then in more intense moments late in the ghost trance, benign images contort to fish-eye proportions for unsettling effects. Did I mention most of the movie is set in Tokyo? So all of these effects are overlaid on what is already a visually overpowering urban landscape. By the end of the movie my brain felt a little melty, in a good way. And any movie that visually stimulates my brain into a state of cozy exhaustion is worth a second viewing in my book.

The Flavor of Pathetic

Catfish.


What to say about Catfish? This movie creeped me out for what seemed to be unintended reasons, as far as the makers were concerned. In this film we experience the blossoming of a host of relationships between a very hairy young man in his late 20's and a family of seemingly creative and exciting individuals existing thousands of miles away. The film, made by a brother and a friend of this hairy young man if I recall correctly, did a pretty heavy-handed job of landing its twist and negotiating the revelation of the truth of the facebook associations at its core.

I would have a hard time saying the following things about this movie:
1) This was a good movie
2) I would recommend that you see this film
3) I found this movie coherent and relateable

And yet, something about it did make me squirm and get uncomfortable and feel like I ought to go out and do something. Also, I feel bad "spoiling" it, because sometimes at the height of its discomfiture, the footage that finds its way into the film is potent to the tune of "the land of silence and darkness".

Historically, I have not been the sort of person who interacts or transacts socially through media in the hopes of finding novelty. I will interact with people in these contexts only insofar as it relates to things that we're doing together in three-dimensional flesh-space. These guys, and the relationship(s) they strike up on facebook are wildly divergent from my behaviors in the context of the great blue-windowed content horde that now encapsulates all the busybodies and relatives I, frankly, would rather marginalize by way of only occasional face-to-face contact. But this is their film, and these folks seem to feel like they've hit some kind of digital motherlode of cultural capital in the Michigan family they'd somehow be-faced. The story begins with a kind of zeal that suggests that we're going to see a straight rehash of "My Kid Could Paint That".

In the end, and I must refrain from describing it, these guys make a movie, and the relationships, for all we know, are dissolved. I guess my point is that mediated people are fake, especially if your imaginary for them consists entirely of facebook jetsam. While the shock of discovering deliberate misrepresentation is surely a curiosity, the question for me remains one of why these young fellows from a huge urban center don't make friends with any one of the thousands they daily pass wordlessly and without a glance.

The title of the film comes from an anecdote related by one of the characters that the filmmakers track down, and is a really janky metaphor aimed at redeeming or softening the weirdness of the character(s) who form the core of the revealed deception that is this film's major object. Catfish keep the cod sharp, we are told; thus, they keep from losing their flavor on long shipping runs. If I'm experiencing their film correctly, I take this to mean that the filmmakers have been sharpened up by an exemplary token of this variety of uncommon human. This wrap-up leads to two conclusions about the intrepid filmmakers: they are astute and conventional american-audience marketeers and/or obtuse in the extreme.

I'm Still Here

2010
Director: Casey Affleck
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs

Plot: Documenting Joaquin Phoenix's transition from the acting world to a career as an aspiring rapper.

I'm Still Here is presented as a documentary about a tumultuous year in the life of Joaquin Phoenix, in which he retires from acting to start a career as a hip-hop artist. The movie is in actuality a mockumentary, afterall it seems unlikely that Casey Affleck would make a movie showing his brother in law doing tons of drugs, treating his few friends like shit, and excitedly talking about smelling the assholes of the call girls he's just ordered. But the movie is rarely comedic, unless maybe you are a personal acquaintance of Joaquin's and the whole movie is one big inside joke. Instead its a serious portrayal of failure and self implosion, presented earnestly as a real documentary. And for the most part Joaquin Phoenix "acts" quite well and we believe in his earnesty, so much so that many reviewers believed it was a real documentary. And its precisely this confusion of "what exactly am I watching?" that really detracts instead of adds to the film. Why was it necessary for Joaquin to embody this character so publicly, announce to the press that he was retiring, and generally act like a total dick in all his public appearances if it was all a character? Surely it was apparent that this little joke might cost him future acting jobs along with any kind of positive public image. In fact its distracting how much the film tries to make you hate him. There's a lot of boring melodrama where Joaquin endlessly berates a friend he suspects of telling the press his hip-hop career is a hoax for the movie. And see there it is again, by bringing up the the rumors that the documentary is a hoax we are repeatedly brought back to wondering what the hell is going on. Maybe if you go in knowing its a mockumentary all my bitching will be for nothing, then again I would not be the least bit surprised if a year goes by and Joaquin tells everyone it was actually real, but the footage turned out so embarrassing they decided to try and pass it off as a mockumentary, ZING!

Even taking into account from the beginning that this is a mockumentary, the whole movie still ends up feeling really pretentious, arrogant and confused. Is this a movie questioning what happens when a person takes their life and career and turns it into a fictionalized character for the sake of film? or is it about failure under the pressure of fame? Its got too much of both to discount one or the other as the main intent. If it was about life as film there wasn't anything really groundbreaking in this movie, in fact a follow-up documentary depicting the ramifications and consequences of this hoax on Joaquin's real life would have been much more interesting. If it was about the destructive quality of fame, others have done it better, particularly I have in mind the documentary Overnight (2003), documenting the rise and ego-maniacal downfall of Troy Duffy the writer and director of the Boondock Saints. There we had a genuine story, where it really was Duffy's life and career on the line. But in I'm Still Here we know Joaquin Phoenix is pretending as if he had a breakdown, and the fact that he threw away his real-life career for a movie feels self-righteous as though he knew all would be forgiven. The take home message seems to be then that Joaquin Phoenix is a dick, or maybe that Joaquin Phoenix wants you to think he's a dick. Because despite there being some sympathetic scenes in which we see him portrayed as someone desparately floundering, its all an act and I can't help but wonder how much in real life he bemoans being a famous actor. Doesn't it seem weird that under the pressure of fame in the movie business Joaquin's decision is to quit acting to seek fame in the music business? Maybe that sole story point was just intended to break the ice and make us laugh at Joaquin's rapping, but its so ludicrous that it detracts from the supposed realness of the film. I don't know, it was really a noodle-scratcher. Casey Affleck stated that he didn't think of I'm Still Here as a hoax, that they just wanted the audience to really believe what they were seeing, which unfortunately I think is the last possible thing the audience could think. Afterall, even my beloved Roger Ebert, who believed the film to be a documentary, still felt the need to start his review discussing whether it was possible I'm Still Here was a mockumentary. Also if you haven't already guessed this movie is a major bummer, making Mr. Moneybags go from a bit fussy to full-on cranky after watching this on a Saturday afternoon. There isn't anything inherently wrong with a bummer of a movie, but hopefully it should be interesting, and the novelty of Joaquin Phoenix being an ungrateful asshole wore off after about the 20 minute mark.

Cats and Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore

2010

Director: Brad Peyton

Actors: Bette Midler, Nick Nolte, Chris O'Donnell

Plot: The ongoing war between the canine and feline species is put on hold when they join forces to thwart a rogue cat spy with her own sinister plans for conquest.

The original Cats & Dogs (2001) is a pretty superior movie, and although you don't have much new going on in this sequel, if you found dogs operating overly complicated spy equipment amusing the first time, you are probably going to find it amusing the second time. At least I did. Now that the evil Mr. Tinkles has been locked up, another evil cat, Kitty Galore voiced by Bette Midler, takes the reigns of generally pissing off dogs and people alike. She holds some sort of grudge against both dogs and man but to be honest I think I missed this development during an early movie bathroom break, but the important part is she's got evil plans. The specific plan is to use a satellite to transmit a signal that causes dogs to go crazy. It's not a detail heavy plan but dogs are, as we all know, easily alarmed. This plan is in fact so nefarious that cat agents from MEOWs (due to editing or lack of motivation the acronym was never explained) join forces with the dogs to take down Ms. Galore. Personally I found the portrayal of all cats as dim-witted psychopaths a large part of the original 2001 film's charm, especially the dog training video depicting cats whipping egyptians into making the pyramids. Unfortunately, we are now lead to believe that most cats are good, and although they generally hate dogs, most do not want any harm to come to humans. I missed why dogs going crazy was going to really harm people, or more importantly why humans, cats and most mammals were to be impervious to the insanity-inducing satellite signal. Its almost like they used a formula to make this movie and didn't worry about the details. To be fair I doubt a lot of children watching the movie were wondering how the satellite signal was species specific, and for those adults watching there are movie references thrown in, the most amusing and inappropriate being the Silence of the Lambs type imprisonment of the earlier film's villian, Mr. Tinkles.

Here is a breakdown of the stock jokes that are needed to make a Cats & Dogs movie (ranked in comedic value), if you don't find at least two of these points amusing I'm doubting you'll like either film.

1. Dogs and cats operating outlandish spy equipment such as jet packs, jet cars conveniently located under most dog houses, plastic explosives, james bond style collars etc.

2. Evil cat masterminds forced into degrading/demoralizing outfits by their owners (Mr. Tinkles into a bonnet and Ms. Galore into a bunny costume)

3. Dogs and cats, and in one case a pigeon, speaking with ethnic accents.

4. The fact that dogs have an elaborate secret society to keep humans safe...which they keep secret from humans by pretending to sniff each others butts while having strategy planning sessions.

5. Dogs really hate cats

I should importantly note that I did NOT have the pleasure to view this movie in 3D, and obviously the 9 year gap between the original and this sequel suggests cashing in on the 3D fad was the large motivation for this film. In case you are thinking about skipping Revenge of Kitty Galore, think again, because with the escape of Mr. Tinkles in the final sequence there is likely to be a third Cats & Dogs that intricately builds and elaborates on the complex themes of the earlier two films.

Doblada Roundup

I wrote this in April and never came back to it, but here it is. It's sad to read it now, but only because Ninjavideo is down.


So, I've been out of the loop, like way, way out of the loop. Not in theatres, not online, not following scnsrc, the Pirate Bay, EZTV or even Ninjavideo. I am actually surprised when I return to populated areas and look at movie posters. I would probably have a fit if I were to go to Apple.com right now (supposing I had a good enough connection to even load images, much less video) and browse through their trailers. In fact, the only film watching I've been doing lately has been of movies dubbed in Spanish and of pirate DVD's that could easily have been made from some of the poorest rips currently residing in the ruins of the second kingdom. Sadly, most of the films I've watched in this fashion(usually while taking hellishly long bus rides) were trash, things I'd seen before or things that David and I had been unable to sit through no matter how "bored" we were or how fast they'd downloaded. But there have been a few gems, which I will now summarize, with little regard for chronology, in what I have decided to call the Doblada Roundup.

The first film I watched after landing in Ecuador was Anaconda, a movie I vaguely remembered as being terrible and from the mid-nineties. Anaconda benefits, or at least for me benefitted, tremendously from being watched on an extremely loud bus while a man with a huge bottle of yellow-colored cola and a bag of chips walks up and down the aisle sugaring and salting the captive audience. Forget about your uncomfortable seat, the insane traffic outside, the overactive air conditioner that seeks to turn you into frozen jerky in one extended breath: this is a film packed with action, major actors, digital snakes, brash sexual innuendo and Jon Voight, for Christ's sake. And every male character, as is customary in the translation process of overdubbing, is read with the gusto, machismo and ridiculous emphasis of the most hammed-up Robert Goulet impersonator imaginable, with slight nuances added for gay, skinny and black characters. Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez. I laughed for two hours straight, and I could barely make out the translations. A+, thumbs up, great dub.

Subsequent films seemed to follow this pattern of either intense, action-packed violence or lady movies. I got to watch Mandy Moore freak out about marriage and relationships with Diane Keaton and Piper Perabo in the Peruvian desert. I got to watch Stone Cold Steve Austin kill other prisoners to survive while riding through the Argentine Pampas. And also Kate Hudson. And also Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, Liam Neeson the list goes on and on. We did also see two or three children's films including the frog princess (which was somehow conducive to sleep), the squeakual (I couldn't stare directly into this) and some movie with Richard Gere, Jason Alexander and a fluffy white puppy (which had a faulty disk whose defect I had the pleasure of explaining in to an extremely skeptical woman).

One of the weirdest films I saw in Dub style was a Jonathan Demme movie with a big cast, but primarily featuring the woman from Alice in Wonderland who plays the White Queen (which I saw in 3d, in Quito and Dubbed! out there 3d still costs $4) as a recovering drug addict whose sister is getting married to a black man. The whole family is crammed together in a fit of upper-middle-class angst that seems extremely un-relatable given the comforting elegance of their home and their possessions in contrast with the material poverty surrounding the bus and the fact that we have been explicitly asked not to defecate in the toilets on our bus.

I think this is probably a good movie in English, albeit a serious downer, but dubbing had a really pleasant alienating effect on my experience of watching this film. I was having enough trouble keeping pace not only with the translation but also the weird predicaments that seem to befall Latino voice actors trying to give depth to their overdubs of African American speech, some kind of weird musicality that was part of the film, and the fact that I was crammed into an escalating series of absurd positions designed to negotiate semi-supine comfort with the fact that the air-conditioning vent above me was peeing onto my face, chest and lap.

Most of the films that we watched on the buses were watched with complete, rapt, silent attention, or ignored just as completely. A notable exception to this was an extremely serious film concerning good friends Cuba Gooding Junior and Horatio Sanz, and their experience of accidentally booking passage on a gay, not a straight, singles cruise. I have personally experienced no better way of musing on the question of machismo than to watch the reactions of captive holy week travelers as they confront the height of homosexual stereotypy as brought to you by seasoned SNL alumni and Cuba "Radio" Gooding Junior. This being an American film things eventually got all straightened out and by the end everyone had a properly balanced family based on the ideal relations of capitalist love production. This movie had Roger Moore as well.

To conclude, let me say that while I don't think having a great cinematic experience would be any reason, in and of itself, to ride buses all over South America, if you do happen to find yourself bouncing down a road with your knees impaling the seat in front of you as you are also impaled by some knees, certainly take your opportunity to enjoy some yellow cola and chips and see film in a context and technical style (really shitty tv and insane sound) that is transformatively provocative from the get-go.

(for another blog that updates semi-infrequently and more information on this trip I was on, allow me to plug ---> TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com)

Back to the Blog with Eden Lake

2009

Director: James Watkins

Cast: Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O'Connell

Plot: Refusing to let anything spoil their romatic weekend break, a young couple confront a gang of loutish youths with terrifyingly brutal consequences.

Well its been some time since we, your muchachos, have found time to discuss our latest movie viewings. I blame our watching of Gary Marshall's gorey love-fest Valentine's Day but that's debatable...

Luckily we recently viewed a movie so vile and upsetting that it begged for a blogging. For some time we had Eden Lake on our queue of movies to watch but somehow the timing never seemed right; I'd heard it was scary and disturbing but nothing to make it stand out. The plot of this UK movie seemed straightforward, couple goes camping, encounters some rowdy youth, things go unspeakably wrong. I think we may have originally picked it up since it has that adorable Michael Fassbender as the leading man. Eden Lake is scary, terribly dark, unrelenting and offers some unique perspectives on what appears to be a rather ordinary horror plot. There are obvious connections to the French film Them (Ils) where another couple is harrassed by teens, but unlike Them, Eden Lake gives motive and conscience to its dark teens. Sure they start out vicious and completely apathetic, but when things start going really badly, and their psychopathic ringleader indicates they'll have to kill the couple, most of the kids visibly squirm at the idea. When they are forced by their leader to take turns torturing poor Fassbender, equalizing the guilt of the situation throughout the group, you have one of the grossest horror movie scenes I've ever encountered. Not only are we scared as Fassbender faces his torture and the plans of the disturbed ringleader, but we are also scared for these kids doing it, one of whom is so upset he closes his eyes and clumsily thrusts a boxcutter into Fassbenders mouth. The end result was a movie that both scared the crap out of me, and also made me feel like I watched a really disturbing pyschological drama (Mean Creek came to mind since it also includes kids stumbling into homicidal situations). This gross-out feeling goes along with almost any of the newly genred "torture-porn" horror movies, but there is much in Eden Lake that Eli Roth's Hostel's could learn from. Its the idea of torturing someone that's disturbing, not showing gorey close-ups of the torture happening. And again its the dual point of view of the victims as well as the kids, who cringe and even cry as their bully orders them to finish what they started. I literally had to watch Arrested Development to get into a happier frame of mind after watching this movie, because if this plot didn't sound dark enough, wait until the ending!

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Finally, a Meryl Streep Movie Michael Scott Could Not Love

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Chase Anderson

Plot: Based on the Roald Dahl childrens book of the same name, Mr. Fox and his prairie animal companions deal with a group of farmers hell bent on rooting them out after Mr. Fox steals their hard-made goods; or, the anarchic fecundity of all living things vs. industrial capitalism.

Despite the fact that I'm now joining the ranks of movie reviewers, I usually avoid reading reviews. Unless, that is, I don't like a movie. When I see a movie that makes me want my time and money back, I love to see someone put to words all my feelings of frustration, and trash the shit out of it. Now it's my turn, and I hope in this inaugural post I do justice to the feelings of those of you who are disappointed by Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I didn't hate it, and it had some great highs. There were moments where it was so cute I almost cried. There were some beautiful shots that made me watch them again, and there were shots that worked perfectly with the stop-motion format. I just didn't get it. From the first few scenes, Anderson laid out a clear aesthetic point of view, and then in the next smashed it to pieces. Then went back to that comfortable, appealing first vision only to smash it to pieces again later. One of my biggest complaints is that Anderson could not completely commit to one stylistic approach to stop motion, and moving between the various styles was jarring and unpleasant.

The first version that made up most of the movie sought to go the route of movies like "Chicken Run" and make the characters as human and three dimensional as possible, only more. Complete with clothes, business interests, blinking, pancakes, and all sorts of humanesque attributes, the original style was all about making the characters lovable and cute by exploring the "what if animals lived like us?" angle. It's a similar idea that drives people to dress up their pets: it's kitsch but it's cute as hell sometimes. But during action sequences, he portrayed them so cartoonishly that it could have been an episode of Coyote and Roadrunner. When Mr. and Mrs. Fox go stealing squab in the beginning, they change from humans in fox form to fucking Tom and Jerry, bounding over farm buildings in one leap while doing cartwheels. Or worse, they loose all semblance of either. In one sequence where the animals are flushed out of their underground dwellings into the sewer system by a flood of hard apple cider, the images are reduced to paper cut-outs against two dimensional pictures of sewer pipes.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these. They just don't work together. Juxtaposition of opposites is funny (think about Ron Jeremy Standing next to Shaq, and don't laugh) but that doesn't work with cinematography and style. If in the middle of "District 9" the camera work and feel suddenly changed to that of "The Wedding Singer" would it work? That kind of graceless shift doesn't work because it just doesn't make sense to your brain. It pulls you out of that comfortable world we create, in which the movie and it's characters are real, and we care about what happens as if it were actually happening.

But then, in all honesty, there wasn't that much to care about anyway. Wes Anderson may have fallen victim to that same obsessive syndrome that produced three of the worst movies, in terms of content, of the past decade. That's right: that god damn Hayden Christenson, Jar-Jar Binks laden, miticlorian-what-the-fuck, Natile Portman-is-a-space-whore-zionist-bitch of a travisty, the Star Wars Prequels. George Lucas was so concerned with mastering wholly digital environments and the CGI effects, that he forgot to tell a story. I think Anderson was afflicted by the same syndrome, directed this time at the stop motion technology, while filming Mr. Fox.

He is known for being abrupt and emotionally subdued, even flat, but this movie took that way, way to far. I don't like when people say this, but, I didn't care about anyone in the film. In the penultimate scene, when Jason Schwartzman's character Ash, Mr. Fox's son, tries to rescue his cousin who he's spurned throughout the film for being better liked than him, but now realizes he cares about, we're supposed to care. Or, we're supposed to understand the emotional developments behind this change. Instead, it just kind of happens, because somebody wrote it in a script. A lot of the movie is just kind of there, and there aren't connections between the events and characters that make us care about what happens to them. They're just, there. Moreover, 70% of the movie is George Clooney, Mr. Fox, rambling and acting sly. Other people show up occasionally to say there lines, but it's mostly just him and he doesn't carry the burden well. Even Meryl Streep has only about 10 lines in the whole movie, and they're said so quietly, you kind of forget she's there.

Then, the last quarter of the movie suddenly makes the battle between the animals and the farmers about animal nature vs. repressive civilization. The double-breasted Fox suits, the mole-sized walkmans, the pancakes, they're all just artifice, and in the end animals can't help but be animals. All that crap imposed by society is masking their real selves and abilities. It is only when they employ their innate animal traits that they beat the hard-nosed, capitalist bastard farmers. This move is so out of step with the rest of the film, that you realize, it's just there to resolve the narrative, so Anderson can wrap up with a song and dance number.

I think that Fantastic Mr. Fox is 80-85% there, and it needed a final rework to make it a film. Right now, it's just one of those movies that pulls you in, only to leave you asking, "why did that just happen?"

Prequel to "Sun Setters"

Today my parents went to see Avatar in 3D and I was tasked with finding something else to do for three hours in zero-degree Mason City, IA. My choices were as follows:

1. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

2. The Blind Side

3. Extraordinary Measures

4. Legion

5. Sherlock Holmes

6. The Book of Eli

7. The Lovely Bones

8. The Spy Next Door

9. The Tooth Fairy

10. Avatar 3D

11. Daybreakers

12. The Blind Side

First, options five, six, seven, and, obviously, ten were eliminated by reason of prior viewing. Option one was no good: not without friends, intoxicants or a remote control. I felt the same way about option nine, though perhaps without cause. Likewise with the inspirational weepy options, two and three. It ended up being a toss-up between Legion, the Paul Bettany as violent angel action-pocalypse, and Daybreakers, another fucking movie about vampires starring two really vampiry fellas, Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe! I was very conflicted, but eventually decided against my gut and with Roger Ebert, who seemed to think there was at least something to say about Daybreakers.

I saw Daybreakers in an otherwise completely empty theatre, which allowed me to lay down over several seats, walk around, pace and otherwise amuse myself during the film. At first, the movie was cheesy in what I decided might be described adequately enough as a Boondock Saints manner. It had an over-the-top quality that made the dialog and much of the acting absurd. This combined with an abundance of creaky cgi effects that resembled something out of the late 90's and initially made me quite wary of the movie in general, though the titles were of the three dimensional, embedded style that is so 21st century. Luckily, the punchline of the movie involves a cool explanation of the nature of the whole vampirification/de-vampirification system. Also, we get to find out what happens when vampires starve, and that's vaguely interesting. Without giving away too much, all I can say is that cruising around in daylight-driving enabled cars and firing tiny wooden stakes with automatic crossbows really worked for me in this film, I was absorbed. It almost felt like a movie made ten or fifteen years ago that I'd just never seen before. Oh, and Sam Neil brings his lovable evil side as well.

See this movie. Yes, it is another movie about vampires, but I feel like everybody should always take the opportunity to see gigantic rendered images of humans as farmed, fleshy, matter-converters.