Battle: Los Angeles

2011

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, and Bridget Moynahan

Plot: A Marine Staff Sergeant who has just had his retirement approved goes back into the line of duty in order to assist a 2nd Lieutenant and his platoon as they fight to reclaim the city of Los Angeles from alien invaders.

Is Battle: Los Angeles a great new alien invasion movie, despite the horrible reviews its received? Is it watchable and fun despite lacking many qualities of fine cinema? Does it at least partially make up for the tragedy that was Skyline? NO! NO! NO! Battle: Los Angeles is none of these things and worse. I would watch Skyline five times in one day before I would endure this irritating snoozefest again, and just to be clear Skyline was the worst alien invasion movie I'd ever seen... until I saw Battle: Los Angeles.

Like most really really bad movies, its hard to know where to begin with the critique of Battle: Los Angeles. We could talk about the unpleasant hand held style incongruous and out of place with the big budget special affects driven imagery. This was especially irritating for me, because I assumed from trailers this movie might be mixing some traditional camera work with home video Cloverfield-type shots, but instead we got this weird jerky high-power camera work throughout with no interesting mix of point-of-views. We could talk about how bad the aliens are. I don't think they are as bad as everyone else, but they certainly weren't scary or in any way impressive in terms of creature creation. I could also note that 95% of the dialogue is complete throw-away. It occurred to me in the theater that this movie was a kind of antithesis to Quentin Taratino's Reservoir Dogs, where conversations, instead of action or visuals, literally are the entire movie. Battle: Los Angeles may as well be a silent film for all the insight the dialogue provides us, in fact, I'm fairly confident it would be more enjoyable that way. Maybe all of these previous criticisms could be overlooked if the movie had an interesting storyline to explore in this admittedly already overdone alien invasion genre. The movie follows a unit of Marines and it seemed at first that this military angle could have offered a different perspective from the more classic family with kids trying to evade aliens, but (surprise!) this opportunity was totally missed. We have family drama and standard alien evasion, just the order is jumbled from previous formulas. There's a long sequence on a bus that I imagine at one point in the filmmaker's minds was to be the meat and excitement of the middle of the film, instead nothing really happens. Some aliens get blown up, some military men get blown up, then we move along. Later the military group finds the master control alien ship, do they go in it? Do we get to see some interesting alien going-ons? No, we paint it with a laser a la Pauly Shore's In the Army Now and wait outside. And jesus, can we have a uniformed woman in ANY movie that is not Michelle Rodriguez!? I don't have anything against her but seeing her in this role is about as interesting as watching paint dry. There's a backstory with Aaron Eckhart's character regarding how he lost a lot of men while leading his last military mission. That might not sound like a very interesting backstory to occupy, oh, around 30 minutes of a 2 hour movie to you and me, but the makers of Battle: Los Angeles are gonna have to disagree with us there. Trust them, it will be emotional when Aaron Eckhart reveals how beat up he is about losing men, and how he's really a great guy and worthy of leading the men he's already been leading for the last 90 minutes. This lenghty emotional speech is so irrelevant he literally ends it by saying "None of this matters right now..." If only something had mattered, at some point.

Sidenote: Possibly one of the most unintentionally funny lines to look out for "Maybe I can help. I'm a veterinarian."

Easy A

2010

Director: Will Gluck

Cast: Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes and Penn Badgley

Plot: A clean-cut high school student relies on the school's rumor mill to advance her social and financial standing.

Emma Stone has been of interest since her first big break as Jonah Hill's witty love interest in Superbad. Her second big movie was Zombieland, and everything that wasn't Jesse Eisenberg in that movie was pretty good in comparison, so we'll let that one slide. Since funny beautiful young actresses seem few and far between I was excited to see that she got a big starring role in the high school comedy Easy A. Emma plays Olive Pendergast, an excessively witty teenager who lies to a friend and says she's lost her virginity. This news travels fast and Olive is the new slut at her high school. Pretty basic fare thus far, so before I continue I'd like to make a small diatribe concerning the writing for this movie. What is this weird Diablo Cody idea that all high schoolers are extremely witty and mature for their age, cracking dry sarcastic comedienne worthy remarks at every single possible opportunity? I don't get it and it fucking annoys me, because high schoolers can be genuinely funny, but its not because they sound like some fantasy person with a scriptwriter in leiu of their brain's speech center. Superbad was the perfect example, people were shocked at the language, but that profanity laden juvenile banter was so much more authentic and watchable to me than that bullshit that spewed out of Juno's mouth every five seconds. Easy A came close to really bothering me in this department, but luckily Emma Stone is genuinely funny and her character is at times very sophmoric, so she was a touch more relatable. There was a similar, too-funny vibe going on with Olive's oh-so-quirky family that at times worked and at times made me want to barf. This was once again probably saved by good acting, this time on the part of Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci.

Ok, so back to the story. After everyone thinks Olive is a slut, a gay friend asks if she'll pretend to have sex with him to get bullies off his back. She does, and things quickly get out of hand as it dawns on the male population that if a girl will say she's had sex with you, or not deny it when you say it, then you can have the reputation of a stud with none of the work or know-how. This is apparently something men want in spades, and Olive is inundated with fake suitors. What does she get in return? Gift cards to Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Home Depot. This was shameless advertising that occurred many times without me even realizing it until I just wrote the whole list down, but still pretty funny. It seemed like something high school boys might realistically offer up for the price of a girl's reputation. I particularly liked Emma Stone's indignation when one guy attempts to give her a 20% off coupon for Bath and Body Works for her services. Damn there was another product endorsement! Then things get complicated when Olive discovers that being called the school slut really isn't that fun, particularly when you think a guy might like you when really he just thinks you sleep with people for Home Depot gift cards. The movie then quickly resolves itself in a not too interesting or entertaining matter.

The whole thing really seemed like some popular teen novel or better yet, graphic novel, turned slightly-better-than-mediocre movie, but my researching only turns up that this movie was based on The Scarlett Letter, something that is bashed over our heads many times in the movie. We get it, it is sassy that she willingly brandishes an "A" on her clothing. And I was willing to play along, but the fact that all of Olive's problems are resolved once the guy of her dream asks her out was a dumbed-down solution for a movie pretending to be a little bit smarter.

Alive

1993

Director: Frank Marshall

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Vincent Spano and Josh Hamilton

Plot: Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the snow swept Andes are forced to use desperate measures to survive after a plane crash.

Mr. Moneybags had never seen Alive, so I was excited when I saw he had obtained it. I still remember the shocking and mind-boggling experience of watching it when I was young and I was curious to see how the actual movie held up to my memory of it. But then Mr. Moneybags was real reluctant to watch it, fearing it may be too dark and disturbing, especially since its based on a true story. So one night when he wasn't looking I just turned it on anyway. The thing I was most eager to see was the depiction of the plane crash, when the tail gets ripped off in mid flight and whole rows of people get sucked out of the plane and into snowy oblivion. Although I was probably 10 or 11 when I last saw Alive, I clearly remember this scene scaring the shit out of me, and thinking I would never fly in a plane. Upon rewatching this scene I was not disappointed, and it likely made an impression because the movie cuts right to the chase and the crash happens within the first 10 or 15 minutes. This is appreciated since its still a major epic of a movie, going just over the two hour mark, but feeling closer to three. Obviously if they were remaking the movie today some better special effects would be employed for the big crash scene, but the effects were realistic enough that they did not distract from the sheer terror depicted. It remains on of the most horrifying experiences I can imagine, suddenly the back half of the plane is gone and you are just sitting there wondering if your seat is going to be the next one ripped out, into the Andes no less.

The rest of the movies was slightly better than I expected it to be, but I wonder how much of that is due to it just being a really great story. It certainly isn't due to the acting ability of Ethan Hawke, who's ooey gooey stoic cuteness wasn't even that charming at this age. I think it is exactly that real event aspect that makes me wonder what it would have been like to be in the plane, and keeps me engaged throughout the movie. Because of this, it seems more gorey than you'd imagine when the survivors start discussing cannibalism of their dead to stay alive. The second great scene of the movie is when they finally take the plunge and carve into one of the bodies on the ice. Its depicted so realistically, they aren't butchers, it isn't a nice piece of meat, they literally claw at the frozen human flesh with their hands, demoralizing enough and then they've got to eat it!

Besides the downside that is Ethan Hawke, I didn't remember quite so much "faith" and "god" stuff. I get that extreme situations bring out these aspects in people, and that maybe all of the real people were quite religious and that helped get them through, but it feels a bit heavy handed here, not quite on a Shyamalan level, but approaching it. However, considering Frank Marshall's other big directing projects were Arachnaphobia and Congo, Alive is clearly his standout film, and not just because it doesn't ridiculously exaggerate the predatory nature of a random animal. It can be praised for its simple achievement of taking an unbelievable but true event and depicting it in a realistic and compelling way, so that by the end of the film there is no way we don't feel that triumph with the rest of the survivors.

SIDENOTE (w/ spoiler): I was disappointed to learn that the final scene with these iconic men hugging and smiling was one of the few misrepresentations of the real story. The real survivors had heard on the radio that their compadres had made it to Chile and even put on their cleanest clothes for the rescue choppers.

The Gingerdead Man

Much to my chagrin The Gingerdead Man is NOT a Christmas themed movie (?!), and Gary Busey's involvement was minimal at best. So instead of taking the time to discuss its literary themes, I'll just share a few screen caps. Needless to say I don't think we'll be checking out the sequel Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust any time soon. Though I gotta say, if Gingerdead Man 3-D: Saturday Night Cleaver actually makes it to the theaters in 2011, I might have to check it out.

PS Isn't it hard to imagine how that little gingerbread man holds up that gun, let alone aims and fires it?

Santa's Slay

2005

Director: David Steiman

Cast: Bill Goldberg, Douglas Smith and Emilie de Ravin

Plot: Santa Claus is actually a demon who lost a bet with an Angel, so he becomes the giver of toys and happiness. But when the bet is off, he returns to his evil ways.

Since I like watching horror movies year round, I often have trouble deciding which horror movies I'd like to watch on Halloween. I love cheesy holiday films of every genre, but surprisingly Halloween-themed horror movies are harder to find than you might imagine (this year I forced Mr. Moneybags to watch Trick 'r Treat with me, not horrible, but unlikely to make its way onto Anna Paquin's resume). At Christmas time I usually go with the flow and watch all those sappy xmas classics, little did I know that the Christmas/horror merge not only existed, but was rather prolific! I was delighted to find how many options I had to choose from, there were even well-researched lists online to direct me to the more choice movies in this genre. Unfortunately, when I took my list of Christmas horror movies to my video store, some ass clown had the same idea (and list) and had rented all the major Christmas horror movies, hence I had to wait until after Christmas to see some of the more interesting titles. We watched several movies, and we still have Gary Busey's The Gingerdead Man for tonight, but our favorite had to be Santa's Slay.

First and foremost its just superior in terms of film making to most of the other movies we watched. The whole pace of Santa's Slay felt natural and entertaining, and right around the midway lagging point we were rewarded with a pretty awesome snow mobile chase sequence! Really awesome, our main characters jumped cars, huge hills, basically any and everything that came into view on that snow mobile. In general the killing sequences were also pretty good, sort of similar to the Terminators opening sequence only instead of Arnold, its Santa walking around taking out groups of dumbfounded people in bars, strip clubs, etc. Then you have professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as Santa, which was compelling since he looked pretty scary. This is no trivial point, many Christmas horror movies have a real hard time making their Christmas-themed villians scary, for instance it was hard to feel spooked by the evil snowman in Jack Frost just because his eyebrows were pointed down menacingly. Luckily, Bill Goldberg's huge hulking form and exuberance make up for his cute Santa suit, and he still comes across as someone you wouldn't fuck around with.

Unfortunately, the storyline of Santa's Slay is not one of its strong points, so I won't go into explaining why Santa is actually the spawn of Satan or why he has got it out for our main protagonist. I will mention that the favorite Canadian pastime, curling, does feature heavily in the story, and that the main backstory is told in a claymation sequence, fun! One of my only other complaints is that Santa's Slay had the capacity to perhaps go a bit more serious and scary, but instead remained mostly comedic throughout. Overall it was a great little holiday gem, which is a lot more than I think I'll be able to say about The Gingerdead Man tonight.

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.

Avatar

2009

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and Sigourney Weaver

Plot: A paraplegic marine dispatched to the planet Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.

The Classic Formula with a $400 Million Pricetag

by C. True

First, lets tackle the obvious complaint most people will have with Avatar, and that is a story-line that is completely obvious from about 15 minutes in and then lasts another 2 hours and 25 minutes. Looking back James Cameron has done some truly original storytelling and writing with such creative projects as The Terminator, The Abyss and even True Lies which is one of my favorite no-brainer actionpackages because of the unexpected plot developments Cameron throws in to a traditionally super-formulaic genre. Then you have Titanic, which wasn't a bad film but really lacked much innovation in terms of storytelling. Unfortunately, Avatar falls into the Titanic category of Cameron works. The native humanoid population on Pandora, the Na'vi worship nature and commune (directly) with their planet and think us humans (read Americans) are a bunch of insane blundering assholes come to destroy their planet. And we have! I wonder if our protagonist, who is sent to spy on the Na'vi and find some leverage to get them to leave their land so that the corporation he works for can finally mine that, wait for it, Unobtainium, will start to sympathize with these peaceful people? The plus side to Avatar is that James Cameron and his editing crew must have had a meticulous timeline of how many minutes were going to be spent on each plot device envisioned in this giant classic formula. For instance the romance in the film develops organically with only one, maybe two, scenes that directly go towards establishing the romantic bond between the two main characters. And there isn't any deliberation, she shows him amazing things in her world, when its time to chose a mate he obviously chooses her, and she says she's already chosen him as well. Simple, not too short, not too long. Time for battle? Lets stick to the standard beginning 1/3 the battle losing, 1/3 in flux and then the final 1/3 where... well you can guess. The whole movies works this way with everything given the exact amount of time we need to get the jist of what's happening and never once lingering too long on developments that are obvious. In the end the 2 hours and 40 minutes flies by. But of course the visual effects have a large hand in making us forget that we already know what is going to happen.

And they are pretty good special effects. I was skeptical, not overly impressed with Cameron's first pictures and I remained skeptical through the beginning of the film and some of the first creatures. But the Na'vi look pretty good, especially in scenes where humans are also present, something I thought their should have been more of, especially during big fight scenes in the end. The alien jungle is full of hostile creatures, some more original and impressive than others. Close-up shots show the level of detail that really went into these creatures and assuaged some of the cheesy gut-reactions I had initally. The Omaticaya's ritual to become a man involves picking your flying mount (size of mounts definitely matters) and this sequence is done really well and its no wonder why our protagonist would rather stay in this alien world where he can fly through floating mountains on a creature he controls completely with his mind than go home where he is an ex-marine paraplegic. Eventually Cameron gets you to immerse yourself in his alien world and you stop noticing things looking familiar or new, impressive or hokey, and you just go with it. This is a good thing because the battle sequences toward the end of the film are impressive enough without you trying to look at the detail of everything.

Finally, if you're seeing it in the theater the ultimate question I've saved for last: to 3-D or not to 3-D? I did 3-D (because my 2-D vote was overruled) and personally I found it a little jarring, though over time I finally adjusted and stopped feeling like everything on the screen popped out at me. Then again I found it jarring because it the 3-D technology was so impressive, and really sold your brain on the visual illusion. Importantly, I don't think the movie HAS to be seen in 3-D (unlike Final Destination 3 in 3-D which Mr. Moneybags and I found to be a little lacking when we watched it in 2-D at home) so if you don't think you'll like 3-D don't feel like you'll be missing anything critical by seeing the 2-D version. The one major problem for me with the 3-D experience is that it really forces your eye where to look, and when I found myself trying to resist this (or generally confused as to where I was supposed to be looking) things looked weird and out of focus. But there were some small 3-D effects like falling ash and dust that were really pretty beautifully done and added to the visual experience of the film. So I'll give the cop-out answer that if you think you'll like the 3-D version you will, and if you don't think you will then you probably wont. If you're in torn, go 3-D; I was sold the gimmick really can add something when done right.

Hola Mi Muchachos! Feliz Deciembre!

Hola Mi Muchachos!!!
¡Usted me trae mas feliz de cerebro, los amigos!


Feliz Navidad todos Y feliz tarde Cumpleanos Pedro!

It's Christmas movie time and you know our favorite, Bad Santa. But last night C and I tried to watch some of The Santa Clause, which shockingly felt like classic cinema to me. We also discovered that I thought there existed a movie called Miracle on 42nd street with Shirley Temple in it. This is not a documented movie.
Traditionally Die Hard movies were Christmas films but that's over now.
I feel there needs to be a Christmas movie category, but am having a hard time coming up with words. Something that will cover both N.L. Christmas Vacation (Where they stay home the whole movie?) and Lethal Weapon 2. Perhaps a subcategory of wincers.
I'm thinking: Myulevies or Cruicifilms or NaviDVDs... but these are weak...

Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars: Virtuoso Film Maker of Space and Sound

Mission to Mars (2000)
Director: Brian De Palma
Stars: Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and Jerry O'Connell

Allow me to be clear from the out set, I believe strongly that Brian De Palma is the best film maker within the pantheon of great American directors and this article/review will be about his greatness. His greatness is impressive and under appreciated, that's why. I specify that he is the best film maker explicitly because that is the limit of his greatness. Brian De Palma = best at explaining stuff through moving pictures, that's it. Other directors, Martin Scorceses and Clint Eastwoods may get better stories than Brian and may make more enduring and better received films, but Brian De Palma in a number of crucial technical senses makes the best movies. Maybe someone like Walter Hill or some foreigner could hold a candle to him, but they're not famous enough or American enough to play into this equation. Bearing my irrational fandom in mind (I literally decided he was the best at some point last year and am sticking to it), I was shocked to learn that Brian De Palma had directed Mission to Mars.
Somehow I had gotten the notion that he directed the film Red Plant instead. Red Planet came out about the same time as Mission to Mars and somehow I got mixed up.
Since I am currently in a process of seeing all of Brian De Palma's films again, it came as quite a joy to discover my error. Especially since I watched Red Planet again and found it less than great. There is a specific scene in the film in which Valkimer is head banging while looking out an overexposed window looking out at space. It is a vapid shot that for me encapsulates the vapidness of that whole mess. I still enjoy that film for its visual appeal especially the very end when Trinity catches Valkimer in the airlock wearing an awesome space suit.
You must understand that my commitment to understanding De Palma's magic is epic. In high school I saw The Untouchables and Carlito's Way and was struck. Both of those films held something very special in them and it certainly isn't their stories. Without getting into it too far at this point, those films, specifically the more action oriented scenes of Mafia gundowns and drug deals gone awry, are shot with a sense of forensic, spatial clarity difficult to find in almost any other director's works. One of my other favorite things about Brian DePalma is that he gave us Robert De Niro, who before shacking up with Martin Scorsese worked with another of America's greatest film makers, Brian De Palma, first. The film is called Greeting. It is a great film, up there with Joe and Easy Rider when it comes to movies about hippies and freaks. If you can find Greetings, you are good at finding rare titles and are lucky, because it is a joy. Compare the Pornography in Greetings to the flashbacks in Sisters to see how De Palma laid the ground work for Peter Jackson's patent 'documentary footage' montages (He's done this in all his films). When I think of Jackson's Forgotten Silver, I think that the exact sort of mocumentary eye at work was first developed by De Palma. It's a more visceral sense of mocument more akin to The Blair Witch Project or Tim and Eric: Awesome Show Great Job! than This is Spinal Tap and that fair. De Palma in Greetings uses the affect of different visual media (here 16 mm pornographic films of the late 60s) to develop a specific tone in the story. Similarly the flashbacks in Sisters are terrifying glimpses into the character's suppressed consciousness. They're cast in a grainy, black and white that brings to mind documentary footage and at least coincidentally refer to shots in Goddard's Alphavile.
All that confusion aside, when I started to watch Mission to Mars, I knew what I was looking for. Brian De Palma's greatest virtue is his ability to lay out a physical space through the visual medium of film, that enables both tension and resolution. To get at this I point to the classic blood bucket-prom scene in Carrie, where we see each part of the devious teens' plan implemented, each character is spatially positioned in a very palpable way relative to each other, their sight lines are super natural, pacing keeps us interested and movements are in a distinct sense correct. We see and don't see things come together seamlessly until the events culminate with the classic shot of Carrie on stage just before the bucket drops. We've been subliminally informed on all sides by invisible contextual elements. We see her there on stage and know about the girl to the top left of her holding the rope and the two people to the bottom right hidden beneath the stairs and though we can't see them their presence is looming. Again in Mission Impossible when Secret Agent Ethan Hunt meets his contact after things fall apart, De Palma builds through expert cinema an infectious spatial tension. Then the he blows up the giant aquarium.
In Mission to Mars I say De Palma is in top form. The film was unpopular likely because it went too far and got a bit schlocky even for me, though I understand they loved it in France. It could also be said that 'bad science' made this science fiction falter. And of course, the alien at the end (there is an alien kinda) is a bit lame. The film has everything Apollo 13 had (including Gary Sinise as practically the exact same character doing the exact same things) plus Mars plus an alien, but Mission to Mars didn't give me nightmares about being stuck in a space capsule slingshotting around the moon. In fact it gave me no nightmares at all, which I'm ok with.
For all the story's shortcomings De Palma manages to set up a few cinematic sequences that are lush and taught and totally rewarding. Here they are:

First, there is a shot in the rescue mission ship where we have a continuous shot that goes from simulated zero gravity into a gravitronic wheel a la 2001, where the laws of gravity apply. This actually happens twice, once with Jerry O'Conell and again with Gary Sinise. I have no idea how this was done. It is so subtle that, like the first shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil or the Black Dahlia for that matter, you don't even recognize how awesome a thing you've seen once you've seen it. Like the Indians couldn't see the ships.

Second, Tim Robbins floats out into space. I have never seen this happen in any other space movie: someone drift slowly into a planet's atmosphere. De Palma lays this out with such intelligence. The crew of the rescue vessel are in trouble when their engines explode and they loose all control. The crew decides to leave the ship and space walk to a satellite, which they can then maneuver to the surface. Apparently moving through the 3 dimensions of real space space is more confusing than any earthling could intuit. This part of the film is all about angles and distances. There is a tragic shot where Tim Robbin's movie-wife Connie Nielsen shoots a kind of rope gun at him hoping it will make it to him so he can be reeled in. We see him floating slowly away and she's getting closer and then shoots the gun and we know already that it will fall just short because of spatial cues provided by the precise cinematography. Here De Palma uses space as a vehicle for a tragic resolution not tension or ambiance.

My third and final favorite part of Mission to Mars is the sound analysis carried out by Don Cheadle's character. Films like Blow Out and Mission Impossible feature the other side of Brian De Palma's forensic genius, his adept use of sound. When the first crew approach a mountain on Mars in order to collect geographic recordings they encounter a truly bizarre sound. It is in this scene that a giant funnel of wind kills most of the initial characters. That's not important, what is is that we latter de-code the mystery sound and discover that it is in fact a pattern that describes the chemical structure of DNA. Now, this is a great part of the movie because as far as the audience can follow along they make the same profound discovery as the scientists and its neat and kinda unexpected. The problem with this part of the story and truly the final third of the film is that the DNA explanation makes no scientific sense and rather is out right wrong in some of its terms, calling nucleotides chromosomes, implying that DNA has a distinct beginning and end, and indicating that there is one sequence of DNA common to all life on Earth that we can easily identify. All this I was told by an actual scientist is non sense and makes the story a little hard to sit with. Still, there were far out sounds involved.

These are my three favorite things about Mission to Mars. I give the movie an A, like a 90%. That means I'll definitely watch it again some time probably in the next five years. It does fall short in many respects but makes up for it by being exceptionally well made. This sentiment can be applied to many of De Palma's projects for instance The Black Dahlia, which I think of a classic Wellesian noir or Snake Eyes, which is next on my list to watch again.

I implore you reader to give Brian De Palma a try and come at it with limited expectations. Expect craftsmanship and you will be rewarded. Expect to bite your nails and cry or laugh and you'll be disappointed. Think of it as being as good for you as Sudoku without being a form of subliminal advertising.

Zombieland

2009
Director: Rubin Fleischer
Cast: Jesse Eisenburg, Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone

Plot: Two men who have found a way to survive a world overrun by zombies.

Zombies and Whiny Ninnies
by C. True

After Shaun of the Dead it is was inevitable that others would try to cash in on the idea of horror and overt comedy, and thus was born Zombieland. Its the post zombie-apocalypse meaning few people are left and scattered zombies wait in the shadows for bright lights or loud noises to arouse their insatiable hunger. Like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland treats the subject of zombies humorously but the majority of laughs come from the joy Woody Harrelson's character gets out of annihilating them. And there is some good zombie-asskicking, but Harrelson's performance was so gleeful it seemed a shame that we didn't get more of these rampages, or hear his rules and thoughts on zombies. There are also some jokes around Jesse Einsenburg's, Columbus character being wimpy and so impotent its a wonder he gets up in the morning and finds the will and courage to face a new day. Although he was funny in the beginning it was unbearable by the end. I've heard Jesse Eisenburg was good in The Squid and the Whale and somewhat of a serious actor but after seeing Zombieland and the painful Adventureland (is there a theme starting here?) I think its safe to say that comedy is not his genre. I blame Michael Cera, who may have cursed us all with a decade of geeky teenage boys striving to be the next awkward/funny guy, who ends up with the lady in the end because, gee, I guess he's sorta sweet? No, he isn't sweet, he is just non-threatening. He'll never leave you for another girl, or hit you or do anything that isn't completely predictable. That sounds like a potentially boring main character, right? But Cera somehow shows you he isn't liked because he's misunderstood, and to be fair his variety of dweeb was pretty unique when he debuted in AD, but Eisenburg's dork is just ceaselessly annoying and the repulsion other characters feel towards him seems well deserved. Towards the end of the movie I cringed whenever he opened his mouth and had it not been for Woody Harrelson interludes I doubt I would have made it to the end.

Thank You Bruce Hornsby

World's Greatest Dad

I false started World's Greatest Dad three times before actually getting to the twist, and for some reason I stopped one more time before I finally followed it through to the great shoe-drop at the end. This movie works off of a tension verging on meanness. We hate Kyle, the teenage douchebag who seems to exist only to masturbate and push peoples' buttons. We find his father somewhat pathetic, and then lose all sympathy for him as he slips gently into capitalizing on his personal tragedy. We hate the flimsy relationships that he puts up with and passively cultivates, and his milquetoast attitude toward just about everything he does. Bobcat makes us wait until the last second to see Robin Williams explode into sincerity and stop worrying about his desire to reach an audience that misunderstands completely.
When the film finally ended, I had to think about what the resolution meant. Robin Williams had his talent confirmed and in doing so finally felt comfortable destroying his image; Kyle's best friend had his version of Kyle restored. They were now footloose and fancy free to pursue whatever kind of mediocre intoxication and movie watching suited them. Woo Hoo! Whatever happened to the gay jock, or all the other people who'd built a new Kyle to celebrate as a warning against isolation and creative repression? Only Bobcat knows.

See World's Greatest Dad if you're in the mood to think uncomfortable thoughts, experience a non-threatening variety of suspense, laugh nervously and feel genuinely confused. See World's Greatest Dad if you're killing time while Bad Lieutenant downloads. Also, see it if you're the least bit curious about what Peter Pan's aging body, not to mention penis, look like floating in a pool.

Feel-lame movie of the year? I must nominate Precious.

Hola Muchachos! Soy el nuevo escritor de este blog, y támbien uno de los fundadoros de este sistema de clasificación para peliculas. Voy a contribuir con frequencia y estilo elegante!


Precious DVDSCR.

People Dealing with... um... I'm not sure exactly what issue we could lump this under. Family perhaps, or Chaos or maybe just Nature.

Oh, what to say about Precious? I watched the whole thing, and I'm kind of dumbfounded right now. Precious is the story of an abysmal childhood, which, if presented as a darker-than-dark comedy, would probably have been cause for some kind of widespread, uninformed, public media outcry. The topics that Precious encounters on her harrowing cinematic journey toward teenaged single-motherhood and an eighth-grade reading level range from aids, to retardation, to incest. As it is, Precious has been nominated for a "Spirit Award" (this label is stamped across my copy of the film), and while I believe it contains just as much palpable human suffering as last year's winner The Wrestler, I'm struggling to understand just what to take away from Precious.
In the film we are given the privilege of following precious on her journey from horrible home to new school to halfway house and then into an ambiguous future, in which the increasingly empowered, HIV positive, Precious is finally able to worry about caring for her two children: both the products of incest on the part of her father, and one of whom is lovingly referred to as "Mongo" due to some form of mental retardation. Precious, who blacks out during sequences of particularly brutal abuse and enters a dream state in which she is some kind of celebrity and speaks in news-reporter-ish, eventually finds solace in the support from her gay (for some reason we needed to know this?) teacher, her fiesty alternative-school classmates, her male nurse friend and her state-mandated counselor, Mariah Carey. By the end of the film, Precious is able to express herself in a manner that her handlers find to be acceptable, and we are meant to be very proud of her, standing up to face the odds. But I'm still scared to death at the idea that teenaged, obese, HIV+, mother-of-incest Precious is going to have to go it alone in the big crApple. And even if we are to believe that things go rosy enough for Precious, she's got to be an uncommon example. Literacy seems like a sort of half-assed solution to the Precious scenario. What she really needs is perhaps a time machine, so she can find whatever juncture in her mother's life left her completely socially isolated and susceptible to unchecked fear and anger, and give her a shove toward some kind of human support.

Anyway, see Precious at your own risk. The acting is fine, the film engaging, the Mariah Carey understated, and the Monique blistering, But the film is a vicious, overwhelming/depressing mindfuck and a heavy journey into the bowels of urban social disfunction.

House of the Devil

2009
Director: Ti West
Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov

Plot: In the 1980s, college student Samantha Hughes takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret: they plan to use her in a satanic ritual.

Combining Babysitters and Satanists
by C. True

Instead of 70's horror throwback, House of the Devil changes it up with...70's horror throwback set in the 80's. I'm a big sucker for directors striving for the cinematography and stylized look of the 70's, with Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects the most shining example (though the bizarre Return to Sleepaway Camp also went for broke establishing the 70's cinema look and feel). Needless to say when the credits began to role for House of the Devil and the freeze framing began I was squirming in my seat with excitement. Samantha is our quintessential beautiful college student who really needs some cash and takes a babysitting job. Her job happens to be WAY out in the middle of nowhere, and the husband and wife seem a little unusual. Like satanically unusual. Tom Noonan gives a great performance as the husband, with an understated soft spoken creepiness that sets a great mood and had me hoping for greatness. He tells Samantha the babysitting job isn't for a child, but for his wife's elderly mother, and when Sam balks he ups the pay to $400. Obviously this should be a warning sign, but Sam really needs that money. After the husband and wife leave, the movie for all purposes just stops. There is literally about 30-40 minutes of Sam walking around the house alternatingly snooping and investigating strange noises. At ten minutes I was still engaged, at twenty I was hoping the action should start any minute but by the thirty minute mark I was annoyed. Once the action finally did start it looked great and was generally creepy but there was almost no story to follow. There is a lot of reference to the full lunar eclipse but the importance of this to the Satanist is never mentioned, we're just supposed to put together that an eclipse would be an opportune time for a satanic ritual. Presumably they impregnate Sam with Satan's spawn, giving her creepy visual hallucinations, but this isn't developed at all and the conclusion of the movie feels completely abrupt and asinine. SPOILER: Only 10 minutes after this Satanic ritual Sam is so convinced she's being possessed or impregnanted with Satan's spawn that she kills herself? REALLY?! Maybe she should have waited for a little more confirmation before ending it all, and maybe the idea of have Satan's child would have grown on her, after all Rosemary learned to love her little antichrist.

You just had to wonder watching this movie why there is 40 minutes of set up and no storyline explanation. Did the writer/director Ti West not have a story in mind before filming this? It sure doesn't feel like it and maybe we shouldn't be surprised from the person whose big claim to fame is Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. House of the Devil had a good look and a fine idea for a plotline, but watching this movie is about as exciting as reading the plot summary.