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Oct. 21st, 2007 @ 09:46 am top ten horror
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The top ten horror movies

There is a single criterion here: these are the movies that scared me the most, or creeped me out, or unsettled me, or otherwise made it difficult to sleep, and did so intentionally (which leaves out Sleeping Beauty). Young Frankenstein, though it uses the genre and is one of my favorite movies, is not on this list. I'm not worried about what the finest movies are that happen to be horror movies; I am rating only the creep factor.

Poltergeist. Despite my disclaimer, this is not only one of the movies that has scared me the most, it is one of -- maybe THE -- best-made movies of the genre. I've talked about it at length, the way Tobe Hooper's chaotic and inherently unfair world haunts an otherwise Spielbergian family, in just the same way that the Indian burial ground haunts the housing development. This is that rare thing: a brilliant horror movie in which the intelligence adds to the scariness instead of apologizing for it. As long as I don't watch it more than a couple times a year, I always find something in it that I hadn't thought of before, or that I can think of in a new light. Even the sequels are a little more compelling than most churned-out horror sequels, if for no other reason than that they remind you of the first.

Ju-On: The Grudge. Third movie in the original Ju-On series, but the first two were made for TV. I still don't know why the remake -- directed by the original creator! remade faithfully! -- is so much less interesting, but I maintain my theory that the original attracts me the way it does because it's subtitled and the scary things so frequently happen in the background or the edges of the screen -- and keeping my visual focus in one place enhances that. This is the ultimate movie for instilling "oh my God I'm going down the basement steps in the dark, did I just see something out of the corner of my eye?" paranoia.

Paperhouse. You'll notice a trend here, movies that make my list because of a line or two, or that I sum up that way. Ben Cross's anguished, angry "I'm BLIND!" when he's just a distant but approaching silhouette, that is essentially why I rented this movie six or seven times as a kid. Plus, a hammer is a scary weapon.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. One of the only movies on this list to be included simply because it is so relentless -- and is the only one of that subset to be so stark as well. Chainsaw played a lot of tricks you can only play once, and the moody dimly lit remake seems to miss the point that there is something fucking scary about a teenage girl running across sunlit rural Texas lawns being pursued by a freak with a chainsaw.

Candyman. Introduced -- or at least put a name to -- "urban legends" for a whole lot of people my age, and the use of mirrors, naming, and repetition is especially compelling in a way that Clive Barker has a flair for. Having grown up hearing several well-known "and then he killed her" urban legends that I accepted at face value, this was a pretty powerful movie for me to see at age ... what, 13 or something, right at the age where you are very receptive to the idea that you have been lied to.

Saw. Like Chainsaw, this is a movie that makes the list for making me wince. I wish I had seen it in the theater, but alas. In any case, it has a lot of the same claustrophobic appeal as a movie like Cube, combined with a new application of horror's penchant for black and white contrasts (instead of the good/evil of virgin-vs-Jason, it's the sacrifice-vs-murder choices of Jigsaw's puzzles) and of the "the killer kills those who deserve it" trope. It's a fairly ingenious ode to horror, without patting itself on the back too much the way Scream does (I love Scream too, mind you).

Cabin Fever. The serial killer is a flesh-eating virus! Everything else plays out very like a maniac-vs-campers movie, which is what's so smart and playful about this gory, shiver-inducing, and sometimes stomach-churning movie.

Nightmare on Elm Street. I was, what, nine when this came out? The idea that there was a bad guy who could only get you when you were sleeping, and who was so frightening that people would cut their eyelids off to stay awake (I think that's from one of the sequels? but whatever) was immensely compelling, and made Freddy Krueger a much more unsettling villain that Jason, Michael Myers, Stepfather, the Children of the Corn, and the other bad guys of the 80s.

Lost Highway. I don't know why, but Patricia Arquette's "you'll never have me" in response to "I want you" has always given me chills. Still does. And it is, really, a movie about loss and being lost. Maybe Lynch's most unsettling movie, despite (or because of) lacking the over-the-top villainy of Dennis Hopper or the sensory assault of Wild At Heart.

Alien. Arguably the only monster movie on the list, as well as the only science fiction horror (though I think the insistence on explanation in many ghost stories and haunted house movies, the obsession with causality, is as much a part of science fiction as space ships are). Alien was the first movie I was not allowed to go see. Everyone who knows me has heard me complain about the time my older cousin went to see a Red Sox game while I was stuck with my less-older cousin seeing The Black Stallion (silver lining: first time having Dr Pepper), but around that same time I was also barred from going to see Alien, which after all was rated R, and I was like 5. Oh, how I shook my fist.

As a teenager, renting this and Aliens, I liked the sequel more -- and was dumbfounded at what a disappointment Alien3 was, the first one we were old enough to see in the theater. But Alien is the creepy one. Claustrophobic, moody, the first movie I'd seen -- and still one of the few -- to remind us that being out in space would be eerie, at least as much as being in a big creepy house. The sequels follow much the same course as those to Friday the 13th and the other slashers -- the focus becomes the fascination with how kewl these bad guys are, and all the kewl stuff they can do and how you totally can't kill them because like they totally activated their anti-killing force field way before you even thought about trying to kill them -- but the original is solid, and even Aliens is a good action movie.

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Notable no-shows on the list: Hitchcock (love him, but he doesn't scare me), serial killer movies (I think only Silence of the Lambs would even qualify for an honorable mention -- I used to have the Hannibal Lecter stand-up from the video store in my bedroom, but we moved shortly thereafter and it disappeared in storage), zombie movies (I just couldn't think of one that stood out as something that'd scared me, especially once I realized there was a good chance the first one I saw was Savini's Night remake), werewolves and vampires, body horror, out-and-out cinema of anxiety (Paperhouse and Lost Highway are very close, though).
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Sep. 22nd, 2007 @ 09:52 pm Being There
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Being There

I wish I had not put off this movie so long; it's been in my Netflix queue since the first time I joined. If you were to put a gun to my head right now and ask me for my twenty favorite movies, it would be on the list. And I have seen a lot of movies. Okay, sure, six of them were Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, but still, I've seen tons of non-Elm Street movies too. A top twenty is a pretty small sliver even of the good stuff.

One reason I put it off is because even though Hal Ashby directed Harold and Maude and The Last Detail before Being There, he also directed The Slugger's Wife and 8 Million Ways To Die after it. It's right in the middle of his career, so ... I knew I wanted to watch it, but I just never got round to it.

Anyway. Peter Sellers -- making a bid for serious acting after a thousand Pink Panther sequels, and doing so without feeling the need for Oscar-grab melodrama -- plays Chance, a man raised in seclusion in a mansion he's never left. When "the Old Man" who took him in dies, Chance doesn't know how to assert his right to stay in the mansion, and finds himself out in the world for the first time -- where he shortly runs into Shirley Maclaine, who -- seeing a well-dressed man in expensive tailored suits and the upper-crust accent he picked up from the Old Man -- mistakes "Chance, the gardner" for "Chauncey Gardner."

More errors like that ensue, until Chance/Chauncey becomes a trusted adviser to the movers and shakers of the country, including the president. It's not the hilarious laugh riot screwbally sort of thing that plot could lead to. Sellers is subdued, soft-spoken, but compelling in his performance; Maclaine, an actress I can rarely tolerate, is never as shrill as she is in her later movies.

It's a funny movie, but ... it's not a goofy movie, it's not even really a movie with jokes, per se. All Chance knows are things he's heard on TV and lessons he's learned from gardening, which means he speaks in such literal terms that everyone takes it for allegory, and the movie goes through that whole "people hear what they want to hear" thing.

See, even describing it, it sounds like a million other movies, but it does what it does differently. It's not a farce; even though we know everyone is wrong for reading too much into what Chance says, they're not really made out to be fools (at least, not every time). The movie was made in 1979, equidistant from the moment Zen and meditation became household words in this country and the industrialization of motivational speakers -- the gap between "the Me Decade" and "Greed is good." It shows, even though the novel had been written eight years earlier.
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Sep. 11th, 2007 @ 06:17 pm Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

First of all, read the book by Patrick Suskind. I don't care if you read it before the movie, after the movie, during the movie, whatever.

It must be the age of unfilmable books being filmed, between this and Tristram Shandy (and Adaptation, I suppose). I know Kubrick was attached to this at one point but couldn't figure out how to make it work.

Well, it works, as directed by Tom Tykwer, of all people -- the director of Run Lola Run.

Somebody I don't know plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is born with no scent of his own but a nose powerful enough to pick up everything else's. He's also a psychopath, with no feelings for people and no particular emotion outside his obsession with scent, especially the scent first encountered with a girl whom he subsequently kills -- which disappoints him when he discovers that her scent dies with her.

Dustin Hoffman plays the perfumer to whom Grenouille apprentices himself in order to learn maceration, before moving on to study enfleurage, in his quest to find out how to capture scents; Hoffman never quite figures out what to make of the boy, especially when his apprentice tries to extract the scents of copper and glass.

It's compelling, it's disturbing, it works. Sure, a lot of narration has to be used, and I think there's a lot that doesn't come across as well as in the book just because it can't, without way too much narration.
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Aug. 31st, 2007 @ 03:45 pm Halloween
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Halloween (Rob Zombie's remake)

There will only be minor spoilers after the cut, basically just explaining the difference in focus between this movie and the original.

The two things I will add prior to that are:

1: I loved it.

2: Danielle Harris, star of the latter Halloween movies, is in this, convincingly playing a teenager ... even though she's thirty now.

( Sheri Mooooooon, she's an intellectual. )
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Aug. 25th, 2007 @ 10:45 pm Beerfest, Zodiac
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Beerfest

Look, I have a pretty high tolerance for stupid movies, but this is ... really stupid.

Some of the Broken Lizard -- Super Troopers -- people are involved, and I don't feel like looking it up to see whether that includes the writing and direction, because this is easily the worst movie they've touched. Even Super Troopers was a fairly slow movie with a couple funny set pieces. This, this is just ... terrible.

Leave aside the fact that there are only a couple funny bits, and that the rest of it not only makes the rookie comedy mistake of "it's a funny premise, that means it's a funny movie" ("funny premise" = "BEER") but also makes some serious missteps along the way. Humor is pretty subjective. That part, I could be wrong about.

What I'm not wrong about is the ridiculously bad acting. Plot summed up, you have a bunch of American guys competing against a bunch of German guys in a beer drinking competition. The German guys are fine -- Will Forte, the blond guy from Not Another Teen Movie, Jurgen Prochnow plays their grandfather, no problem. The American guys are horrible. They can't act, they can't deliver dialogue, they can't read a joke. I'm talking about a quality of performance that is literally at the same level as your buddies reenacting movie scenes in your living room. These guys better be famous for something I don't know about. There better be some fucking American Gladiators and Congressmen and hockey players in this cast, because if I'm sitting through someone who's just relieved to have gotten through the take without blowing the line, that someone better be Mary Lou Retton and I better be watching Diff'rent Strokes.

#

Zodiac

This could not be more unlike Beerfest.

Okay, so you know who the Zodiac killer is. The movie is David Fincher's adaptation of Robert Graysmith's books about the hunt for the killer; Jake Gyllenhaal plays Graysmith, a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the three papers to which Zodiac sent letters.

Nearly everyone in the movie is played by Someone, even if they're only in a couple scenes. Not Someone Huge, but Someone -- Dermot Mulroney, Donal Logue, Anthony Edwards, Casey from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's a little distracting. I mean, it doesn't suck, but ... it's a little distracting. Other than Gyllenhaal, the main players are Robert Downey Jr as the Chronicle's crime reporter and Mark Ruffalo as one of the cops on the case.

This is a movie about a hunt for a serial killer, but I don't know if I'd call it a thriller. It has more in common with All The President's Men than with Silence of the Lambs, but it doesn't focus just on the paper, either. I guess the best way to explain the focus is that it's about the Zodiac Killer phenomenon -- the police investigation, the media coverage, the public response, the narrative arcs of those three things, and (to a lesser extent) the lives of the people involved in those arcs. What it isn't is a hero cop movie, a brilliant detective movie, or an inside the mind of a killer movie.

It's somewhat of a period movie, too -- even the casual viewer is going to have a lot of moments where they stop and realize how differently something would play out if a character could look something up on the internet, email digital photos to someone, etc. The movie doesn't go out of its way to underscore these things, but it's aware enough of them that they aren't glossed over.

It's a very different movie from Seven, enough so that at one point I thought to myself, "So Fincher's finally doing a serial killer movie," and then did an internal double-take; he'd first come to prominence with one of the most famous and memorable serial killer movies of last decade, after all. But other than the existence of a character responsible for multiple deaths, there's almost nothing the two movies have in common -- not tone, not pacing, not the focus of the plot, not the way Fincher shows us the effect that serial killer has on the lives of his pursuers, not the "mind of the killer" stuff (this movie has virtually no interest in why Zodiac kills, while Seven was sort of fascinated with the unanswerability of that question), not the performances, not even the look. In other words, there was nothing familiar about Fincher making a movie about a serial killer, no "oh he's doing that thing he did that time" moments. Brown-eyed Brad Pitt would not fit here.

This is a post-Panic Room Fincher. I don't know anything about film technology -- I just know that Fincher's movies have one look before Panic Room, and another look after them. There's also something funky going on with the film stock, filters, or processing here -- it looks like a 35 year old movie as much as like a movie about 35 years ago, like watching Streets of San Francisco.

It's an engrossing and pains-taking movie, one of the best of the year in a good year. If you were to take the individual pieces of the Zodiac Killer story and propose them as fiction, no one would bite; changes would be made to make it more of a narrative, portions would be thrown out as unbelievable or unnecessary shifts. Does it work only because we know it's true, or does its truth simply shut off that editor and allow a story to survive a process that would normally kill it? I dunno, but either way it works.
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Aug. 17th, 2007 @ 04:13 pm Superbad
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Superbad

Holy shit.

I honestly haven't heard that much laughter in the theater since South Park -- and this theater wasn't even very full. (I live two miles from one of those theater-restaurant concept joints, and even in the summer the place is pretty empty during the day, except on weekends, holidays, and after the first showing on Friday.)

I will say nothing about the plot except that it is more of the One Crraaazzzy Night genre than the American Pie type movie I've heard it billed as. And that Seth Rogen and Bill Hader, as the two cops in the trailer, are in a substantial amount of the movie -- it's not just a walk-on by one of the screenwriters.

If you don't know anything about the movie, the screenplay is by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, friends since high school, and is based partly on their teen years. (This shows through at times, since I'm not sure how many fourth graders had Ghostbusters lunch boxes in 2000.) It's directed by Greg Mottola, who directed half the episodes of Undeclared, where Rogen got his start in writing. Judd Apatow -- Scorsese to Rogen's comedy De Niro -- produces.

Our two leads, Seth and Evan, are played by Jonah Hill from Knocked Up and Michael Cera -- George Michael from Arrested Development. Cera is fine, though if this is really his only style of delivery, his career seems pretty limited. Don't get me wrong, he detracts nothing from the movie, it's perfectly okay. But he only seems to have one way to read a line, one way to be funny, and it's not something that's going to have a lot of legs.

A number of Apatow alumni make appearances, including Martin Starr, Kevin Corrigan, David Krumholtz, Carla Gallo, and I'm sure other people I didn't place.

McLovin -- you know him from the ads -- is a fucking star. It works that he's the third wheel instead of one of the leads, but oh man, this kid is funny. It's a part that could have been totally fucked up, and the writing and direction had to be there too, definitely, but he pulls his weight and then some.

If you've paid much attention to Rogen, it probably won't surprise you that the movie is extremely funny without ever being mean. It goes to a lot of the same places that mean humor does, enough so that you might not even notice it. I'm not saying it's necessarily sweet. I'm just saying it isn't mean. What's more, it's that too-rare comedy, the one where all the jokes are ... on-topic, so to speak. It doesn't just grab nearby jokes because they're available; it makes the jokes that fit the movie. Unlike, say, Epic Movie.

And other than the fact that it is very much an R-rated comedy -- not for nudity, but because it breaks the record for both total utterances of "fuck" and "fucks" per minute -- that's all I'm going to say. In typical comedy movie manner, the post-release ads that they'll start showing now will give away too many of the good jokes as it is, but luckily the dialogue is filthy enough that the funniest stuff will only reach your ears if you're in the theater or have a friend who won't shut up about it.
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Aug. 16th, 2007 @ 07:27 pm The Lookout
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The Lookout

Damn, this is good.

Directorial debut of the screenwriter for Dead Again, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Malice. Fincher was attached to direct at some point. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (from one of my favorite movies of last year, Brick) stars as a former high school hockey player whose brain damage after a car accident is more complicated than Guy Pearce's in Memento, though the movies have been compared -- this guy has trouble with his post-accident memory, but isn't unable to create new memories. He's just shaky, sometimes lightly aphasic and synesthetic, trouble keeping track of things and considerable trouble with sequencing. It seems realer than the gimmicky malady of Memento, without making the movie into an Oliver Sacks case study.

JGL's Chris is improving, too, unlike Guy Pearce's character. He's holding down a job and training in the off hours to qualify for a promotion, even though his impulse control is so shot that he can't stop himself from telling Carla Gugino, his model-turned-social-worker, "I think about fucking you all the time." His family doesn't get him, his acquaintances seem uncomfortable with him, but he's got Jeff Daniels -- blind since adolescence -- as a roommate.

This isn't Regarding Henry. It's a thriller, as noirish in some respects as Brick without being so snappy and self-conscious. Matthew Goode -- Ozymandias in the upcoming Watchmen movie, apparently? -- and Isla Fisher are in it, but it's really all about Gordon-Levitt's performance. He's a strong actor, and his approach here is completely different than it was in Brick (though the ads made him out to be a tough guy of a similar mold) without taking any pains to specifically distance him from that role.

I never really watched 3rd Rock From The Sun -- I like my Lithgow like I like my coffee, as drag queens and preachers -- so for me, this kid's always been David from the Dark Shadows remake. Was he always this good? Because he's really good.
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Aug. 13th, 2007 @ 04:39 pm Stardust
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Stardust

This is one of my favorite movies of the year.

I was only lukewarm about the book, my least favorite of Gaiman's, but everything that I found flat or unengaging there comes to life here.

If Mirrormask was Gaiman and McKean's Labyrinth, then this is Gaiman's Princess Bride. Like Mirrormask's relationship to Labyrinth, it's not that they're largely similar so much as that they have similar appeals. Stardust doesn't have the sort of dialogue that will have people memorizing and reciting it line by line, but that isn't a deficit. What it does have is that dizzying amount of plot information that somehow unfolds without needing lengthy exposition, and which sprawls long enough for us to see how big the world is, but comes together so that nothing was wasted.

I don't know what else to say about it! Just that tons of well-known people are in fairly small roles -- Peter O'Toole, Rupert Everett, and Ricky Gervais, to name three -- that Michelle Pfeiffer is a fantastic villain and Robert De Niro is great as Captain Shakespeare. If he's a little over the top -- well, again, compare it to Princess Bride.

I never never ever recognized Sarah Alexander (Susan from Coupling), and only saw that she was in it (playing one of Pfeiffer's decrepit witch sisters) when I looked up the cast to confirm that Sienna Miller played Victoria.

If I have any complaint, it's that in this story about someone from our world traveling to a fantasy world, we never see much of what makes that fantasy world different for ordinary people. Granted, that's true of Star Wars too -- Luke wants to leave his mundane Kansas behind, but the only Oz he sees is on the battleground -- but I would have liked to have a better sense here of what the ordinary is, on the other side of the wall.
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Aug. 8th, 2007 @ 11:41 am The Cannonball Run
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The Cannonball Run

The first thing I did this morning, before I even got out of bed, was watch this movie.

I hadn't seen it in ... a long time. And only on network television. I know HBO used to run the sequel several times a day, but the original never seemed to be on.

Reviewing it seems pointless, so a few random bullet points:

* Norm MacDonald's Burt Reynolds impression really is dead on! This is the first Young Burt I've seen since MacDonald's impression on SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy skits, see, so the freshest Reynolds memories in my head have been of Middle-Aged Burt, who is very different.

* This movie would be made so differently today. There's virtually no explanation of the race, which doesn't even begin until like half an hour into the movie. There's no real introduction to the many, many characters -- they all enter the frame in media res, but we're barely told who they are, other than people racing across country. Compare it to the exposition-heavy Drive, for instance -- though the point of that show seemed to be the backstories of the characters anyway -- or to the voiceover intros of everyone in Smoking Aces.

* Was Dean Martin drunk the whole time? He stumbles through everything as if he were twenty years older than he actually was.

* What! Jackie Chan is in this! I would have had no idea who he was when I saw it.

* Roger Moore is awesome in it.

* I'm sure this is one of those things everyone points out, like "how did anyone know Charles Foster Kane's last word was 'Rosebud' when he died alone," but the ending doesn't make sense. They go out of their way to establish the punch-clock at the beginning of the race -- the winner isn't the one who crosses the finish line first, but the one with the shortest time on their card -- and then everyone still races to the finish line at the end, even though there are several hours separating their start times!

* I thought Bert Convy was Tom Jones at first.
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Jul. 31st, 2007 @ 06:36 pm 1408, On a Pale Horse
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1408

"1408" is one of my favorite Stephen King stories, up there with "The Mist." Plus I'm a sucker for haunted house movies -- Poltergeist and Ju-On vie with one or two other movies for my favorite movie of all time. PLUS, John Cusack is almost always good, barring the disappointing Must Love Dogs.

So I was definitely looking forward to this -- and I wasn't disappointed.

There are some changes. There's a whole emotional angle added on -- the short story was basically just about this really fucking scary haunted hotel room, but the movie adds a personal conflict for the protagonist, as movies always do. Things are resolved differently as a result, and the hotel manager's personality becomes a little more fleshed out and interesting -- though his role is no bigger, contrary to the impression I had in the ads.

Nothing scary happens for 30 minutes or so -- which isn't a criticism, that's just the movie this is -- but from that point on, it's constant creepiness. There's no comic relief respite here, no cutting to Cusack's editor doing something funny while trying to get him on the phone, none of the usual breathing room a horror movie will give you. This is more like the Dark Castle movies in that respect -- once it starts going, it just goes. I love that (even though what I love about Poltergeist doesn't fit in with what I'm praising here; there's more than one way to skin a cat, that's all).
Most of the movie is Cusack by himself in a hotel room, so thank God they cast the right guy for that.

Anyway, I had a blast.

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On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony

I'm in the process of cleaning all of my stuff out of my mother's basement. My mother moved into the house where she now lives in 1993; I went to college an hour and a half away from 1993-1997; and before she moved into her current house, a bunch of my stuff went into storage in 1991, and was simply transported straight to her house when she moved. So most of my stuff in her basement, it dates to one of those years.

Well, I've been going through the books, and most of them I won't keep. But there's a box's worth that I'd like to read or at least flip through before selling, and I picked up one of them to read -- the first book in Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I remember at the time, I thought this was much more sophisticated and adult than the Xanth books, which weren't just junk food, they were the kind of junk food that half the time was deeply unsatisfying. Like, I don't know, Sixlets. Or Lay's potato chips, when the bag is all crushed up. Or Sixlets-flavored Lay's potato chips.

Anyway.

I guess it is better than the Xanth books, but ... wow, a lot of this is pretty bad. The exposition -- which comes to the fore every other page or so -- is presented like two characters discussing the rules of a roleplaying game, and even worse, this is one of those strawman worldbuilding books: it goes like this --

Narrative states: The World Works Like X.
Character states: But it shouldn't!

There's all this worldbuilding effort put into a setting just so that the character can tell us what's wrong with it, which I know sounds like it could be okay, but we aren't talking about 1984 here. When the character complains about things that work too arbitrarily, he may as well be the reader bitching at the author -- it's hard to sympathize with him since we're so aware that his plight only exists because of those arbitrary rules, and those arbitrary rules only exist because the author created them so his protagonist would have a plight!

I mean, the concept is still great: guy becomes Death when he accidentally/instinctively kills the previous Death who has arrived to sort out his soul, on the anticipation of his suicide. That's a nice movie pitch. It's not a movie, it's not a plot, it's not even a conflict, but it gets your attention. But from there ...

I remember in junior high or high school, me and my friends talking about how well thought out these books were, how much thought Anthony had put into exploring the ramifications of his setting. It's true to an extent, but the quality of the thought, frankly, isn't very good: it's like the priests and rabbis who spent years computing and debating the age of the Earth based on the begats. Yes, it takes work. Yes, completing the task might be impressive. But it's effort that could have been better spent.

I'm being pretty hard on the book, because I'm mostly focusing on the many ways it's disappointing or mediocre in ways I didn't pick up on when I was 13. If you dig the book, I'm not calling you an asshole or anything. There are still some intriguing and compelling ideas, and while the worldbuilding reads like a roleplaying game campaign and the dialogue is as bad as the worst of David Brin's1, the plotting is deftly handled -- and as I recall, this is even more true of the series as a whole and the ways it fits together. (I could be misremembering this, though.)

1Apologies to Mr Brin; after exhausting the in-print cyberpunk books and everything I could find by Larry Niven, Alfred Bester, and Roger Zelazny, I picked up one of Brin's Uplift books. The ideas were fascinating -- the dialogue would not have been out of place in a 1950s rubber monster movie. In the back of my mind, he's been the touchstone of bad science fiction dialogue ever since, though I'm sure he's gotten better.
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Jul. 27th, 2007 @ 04:42 pm The Simpsons Movie
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The Simpsons Movie

I'm not going to spoil anything. I will just say:

1: My expectations were not high at first, because I haven't been actively interested in the show in ... I guess ten years or so. It's no MASH; it has no business staying on the air this long. But the ads looked good, so I had no real reservations about the movie except wondering if a 22 format would stretch to an hour and a half.

2: It does! It doesn't do it as well as South Park did, but it does it differently (it had to do it differently, the two shows being different). Some parts are very very funny. Just like with the show, other parts are less funny. There are aspects of all the main characters that stopped being funny several presidencies ago, because the characters don't grow and you can only explore a static environment so far. The movie reflects that as much as the TV show does, but no worse. So, worst case scenario, you get a really funny long episode (it's really like a two-parter with "hour-long" episodes, minus the time that would have been spent on commercials).

As with most episodes of the TV show in recent memory, the funniest parts are the ones that don't deal directly with the plot; this is where South Park did a better job, but again, that's a difference between the two shows as well.

3: It's PG-13, and takes advantage of that -- sometimes for no real reason (someone says "goddamn"; it's not really a punchline or anything) and sometimes to very funny effect.
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Jul. 26th, 2007 @ 04:20 pm Ratatouille
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Ratatouille

Aw, this was so good.

You know I'm ambivalent about Pixar: I like their movies, but in their middle period I hate their character design. Cars was the most recent exception to that, so I didn't write Ratatouille off until DVD, but I didn't have any strong urge to see it until the restaurant community started raving about it, for being so accurate -- which, given the trailer for that Catherine Zeta-Jones movie No Reservations, makes Ratatouille an exception to the still-extant rule, not the start of a new trend. (Front of house is neglected, though -- mostly to no effect, but there's one scene that would play differently if the filmmakers hadn't forgotten that restaurants have waitstaff, hostess, etc. The plot requires that the whole mechanic of critics and reviews works differently, too.)

Someone involved in making this movie likes food. The dishes, the ingredients, aren't just pulled out of the air -- it's real food, which is like a car buff watching a cartoon and seeing drawings of actual classic cars instead of a generic curvy thing with big poofy tires. A bunch of professional chefs served as consultants; Thomas Keller developed the recipe for the ratatouille in the movie (I've made it; it's good).

One of the best things, too, is that there are far fewer celebrity voice actors in this movie than has become common. Sure, Patton Oswalt plays the main rat, and Janeane Garofalo does a French accent as one of the cooks, but other major roles are played by people I've never heard of, who I assume are actual living, breathing professional voice actors. Who'da thunk it?

Okay, so the deal is that our lead guy is Remy the rat, a rat who lives to eat in a community that eats to live; he's derided for being picky about his food, for not wanting to eat garbage, but he's also blessed with a preternatural sense of smell which not only accounts for his human-like preferences but lets him sniff out rat poison. Circumstance brings him to the restaurant of his idol, where he winds up in an alliance with the garbage boy who has been promoted to a cook -- Remy does the cooking, Linguini takes the credit.

The plot is a lot like a classic Disney movie, with a villain who is ugly and selfish rather than actually evil, and is also slightly incompetent; there's more physical humor than is typical of a Pixar movie, because they're better able to pull that off now and it fits the frenetic pace of the kitchen.

The animation's great: the water scenes stand out, as I guess the fallout of all the work they put into Finding Nemo (the productions of the two movies overlap).
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Jul. 22nd, 2007 @ 04:15 pm Evan Almighty
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Evan Almighty

Uh, okay.

G-rated kid-oriented sequel to the PG-13 Bruce Almighty, taking advantage of not-yet-superstar Steve Carrell's small role in that movie (which is all but irrelevant, since in the first thirty seconds of the movie, Carrell goes from being an anchorman to a successful Congressman).

While Bruce was given the powers of God in order to learn, I don't know, that with great power comes great responsibility and everything has a purpose and you should appreciate stuff, Evan is turned into Noah. His beard keeps growing back, animals won't leave him alone, and his clothes keep being replaced by an Old Testament robe. It's The Santa Clause meets Mr Smith Goes To Washington meets Oh God, with a lot of vague condemnation of housing developments replacing unspoiled nature; basically nothing here is similar to Bruce Almighty except for Morgan Freeman playing God.

I realize kids dig animals -- as we're reminded by one of Evan's children, who constantly quotes Animal Planet factoids -- but the story of Noah's Ark is a weird, weird one to graft onto this kind of nu-New-Testament quasi-theology. You might remember, that's the story where God kills everyone on the planet? Except for one family. Yeah, everyone on the planet's wicked. Yeah, the point of the story is that they deserve it. It's still a lot of death.

But here, the building of the Ark is about environmentalism and family togetherness, and Morgan Freeman's God not only glosses over the near-genocide of the Flood, he actually suggests that it's only the error of human perspective that has made people focus on that part! That part?! Fella, you killed everybody. The point of you killing everybody was not that Noah and his wife got to know each other better. It is not a hand-holding story.

Oh God had a similarly bland feelgood pseudotheology, but at least you got the sense there that the makers were aware of the existence of more specific religious ideas, and were sweeping them aside as irrelevant details; here, it feels more like the filmmakers of Bruce Almighty (who return for this movie, rather than farming it out) set out to make a family movie, and had no idea how to do so except by taking out everything funny from the first movie and adding some stuff they sort of remembered from Sunday school. The only thing that carries through from the first movie is something they didn't intend: however wise and benevolent and unknowable they may want him to be, God is just a dick.
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Jul. 21st, 2007 @ 11:49 am Mr Brooks
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Mr Brooks

Okay, you tell me there's a movie coming out with Dane Cook, Kevin Costner, William Hurt, and Demi Moore, and I'll tell you just what I do ... I wait for DVD. Or cable. Or the alternative programming up against the Super Bowl some year when neither the Patriots nor the Saints are in the game. Or at some point maybe I watch puppets reenact it.

In other words, I muster up no enthusiasm for that cast.

But I did wind up seeing this movie, and the cast breaks down like this:

Costner is the titular character, a super-respectable bowtie-wearing businessman who attends Alcoholics Anonymous in order to confront his addiction ... to killing.

William Hurt plays his serial killer alter ego, who is present in many of the scenes, holding conversations with Costner; other actors just pretend they don't see him, see, or hear the conversation -- no freeze frame, no ghostly light, it's played very straight and I'm glad. It's worth pointing out that Bruce Evans previously directed Kuffs (in which Christian Slater repeatedly addresses the camera), so more obvious gimmicks wouldn't have been beyond him. (He also co-wrote Stand by Me with the same screenwriter who works with him here; how's that for an odd resume?)

Dane Cook is a peeping tom who witnesses Costner's latest killing, his first in two years. He has no interest in turning Costner in, if he can use the threat of doing so as blackmail.

Demi Moore is the detective on the case.

It actually plays out really nicely. Costner is one of those meticulous, finicky serial killers ... and there's more going on than just the dilemma with Cook, which I won't spoil since none of it's introduced in the first act.

Is Cook annoying? Of course he is. But he's supposed to be. This photographer-seeing-something-he-shouldn't isn't Jason Lee in Enemy of the State -- this guy wants in on it, and with his months of surveillance on the murdered couple, he's practically a serial killer without the killing to begin with. See, there's an automatic sympathy for someone who's "trying to do better," even if it isn't enough sympathy to make us like them -- so we dislike Cook even more for making it harder for Mr Brooks to give up killing.

Are we rooting for Mr Brooks? Not necessarily, though maybe we wouldn't mind if he kills Cook. Are we rooting for Demi Moore? Only against her ex-husband, who's putting her through a difficult divorce. We're not really on anyone's side, which is something I've cited as a problem in other movies, or in the case of the latest Pirates sequel, at least an obstacle. Here it's okay, because it's just that kind of movie; whose side are we on in Heat?

Costner isn't playing his usual Costner character here, and while you may find yourself very aware of that, I don't think that awareness is a bad thing -- we know, after all, that Mr Brooks is acting. Interestingly, William Hurt is not just his homicidal side -- he's his insight, it's Hurt telling him when people are lying to him, when they're hiding something. That's a nice touch.

Is it a brilliant movie? No. Moore's character is the weakest link -- she seems like a standard-issue homicide cop in a serial killer movie, imported into a movie that otherwise does a good job of not being standard-issue. But as a whole the movie manages to be both grim and fun, not as eyerollingly campy as the material could easily be, nor as dour as it would be without Hurt's enthusiasm or Cook's sleaziness.
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Jul. 17th, 2007 @ 03:34 pm The Order of the Phoenix
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

There's almost no point in reviewing this, because either you're going to see it or not, no matter what I say.

So: I liked it. Less than most of the others, but I liked it. The reasons I liked it less are probably directly due to the fact that it's my least favorite book: the book is a big mess that both sprawls and suffers from really slow pacing at the beginning. The movie is much less of a mess, but has the same pacing problem -- and the cartoonishly unlikeable Dolores Umbridge, who I really didn't think brought anything to the table.

But again, that's straight out of the book, not a fault of the adaptation process; Umbridge is just the latest of the sitcom characters Rowling keeps importing to the otherwise ever-grimmer world of Hogwart's, and they've never provided the comic relief for me that I guess they provide for their advocates.

Tonks and Luna are the best additions to the cast, though neither is fleshed out well enough for people who haven't read the books.

The ratio of my enjoyment of the book to my enjoyment of the movie stays the same with this one as most of the others, in other words.
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Jul. 15th, 2007 @ 08:24 am Live Free or Die Hard
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Live Free or Die Hard

The best of the Die Hard sequels, but it's not going to convert you if you don't like Die Hard (why should it?)

The basic Die Hard formula is simple and compelling: competent but not superheroic cop, out of his jurisdiction in one respect or another (on vacation in two movies, on leave and hungover in the third, and in this one borrowed by the Feds to round up a suspect when he happens to be the nearest senior detective awake at three in the morning), up against forces of terrorism that are actually motivated by money. Family in jeopardy, circumstances separating McClane from any professional support.

The third movie deviated from the single-location isolation of the first two movies (as well as by taking place during the day), and had to bend over backwards to satisfy some of the other conditions. By the time Die Hard 2 came out, the "hero trapped in a single location fighting bad guys" thing was being used by everyone else -- Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a bus, Die Hard in space -- and the original franchise had to give it up. The fourth movie makes that work better than the third one did. Instead of going on a wild goose chase provided by a maniac criminal, McClane's "isolation" here comes from attacks on the infrastructure of the United States that limit or eliminate the usefulness of roads, telephones, etc., a situation that becomes progressively worse over the course of the movie.

It's a different kind of action movie from the first two, for that reason -- multiple locations, chase scenes, bigger collateral damage, and McClane's isolation from other law enforcement authorities isn't because his only pal is a Twinkie-eating beat cop, it's because everyone's busy dealing with a nation-wide terrorist threat.

It also never becomes a Tom Clancy movie. It's an action movie, not a thriller.

The buddy role that the third movie introduced to the formula is played by the kid from Dodgeball and Ed who is probably best known now as "I'm a Mac," but he was great in Jeepers Creepers, the first third of which is terrific, so I don't care how many computer commercials he makes. He's a hacker implicated in, but innocent of, all these terrorist shenanigans -- the suspect McClane goes to pick up when everything goes to shit, and the one who can explain to him how computers work and stuff.

The "I'm just a caveman, I don't understand your crazy computers" stuff is not hammered as heavily as you would expect it to be -- I was a little afraid McClane would have been turned into a Grumpy Old Man Crusader at this point, but there are a couple eyerolls and that's about it.

All in all, I liked it a lot -- seeing an action movie at the theater always boosts it for me, so if you catch it on cable next year and don't dig it much, don't be surprised.
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Jul. 9th, 2007 @ 11:41 pm Pirates of the Caribbean 3
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Pirates of the Caribbean 3: World's End

1: This is the kind of thing I had expected when David Lynch signed on to do a Disney movie, and instead Gore Verbinski gives it to me. The third installment of a sprawling half-mad epic based on a theme park ride only loosely connected to the theme park's intellectual properties.

2: This is an enormous mess.

3: Sometimes I really love an enormous mess (this is one of those times).
( Minor spoilers, but no plot specifics. )
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Jul. 7th, 2007 @ 03:19 pm Transformers
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( We dig Optimus Prime and not Galvatron, we dig the Furry Freak Brothers and very mild spoiler warnings )
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Jul. 6th, 2007 @ 09:54 am Walt Disney Treasures
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The Walt Disney Treasures DVD collections

Well, you realize by now that I'm a big fan of classic animation.

Disney gets vastly underrated these days, especially by the kids who grew up with Aladdin and Little Mermaid and think that the House of Mouse is and has always been synonymous with goofy celebrity voice actors and overpriced theme parks. While much of Disney's power in the last couple decades may come from their brand name, their financial resources, and their ability to attract scads of underpaid animators, for their first couple decades, they had none of that. In fact, the Disney brand name itself was worth so little that many of the Silly Symphonies shorts were introduced as "Mickey Mouse presents..." because until Donald Duck's popularity in the 40s, Mickey was the only solid brand they had.

Anyway, the Walt Disney Treasures collection is that series of metal-boxed two-disc sets, which like all Disney DVDs go out of print quickly. I've made a point in the last year of trying to get hold of the better ones in the early waves, before they become prohibitively expensive on the resell market.

I don't have an opinion one way or the other on the live-action sets -- Davy Crockett and whatnot. There's some nostalgic value, but my interest in Disney is in the theatrical cartoons.

Of those, I have or have rented:

Mickey Mouse in Black and White (vol 2)
The Complete Goofy
Silly Symphonies
More Silly Symphonies
Disney Rarities

I recommend them all strongly, and I'm sure the other Mickey, Donald, and Pluto sets are just as worthwhile. Goofy was always my favorite of the series characters when I was a kid, because of the Sport Goofy stuff (as they were called when repackaged on Mouseterpiece Theater and The Wonderful World of Disney). Mickey seemed bland, even in the comics -- though the early cartoons, it turns out, are much more interesting than I would have thought.

Cartoons have become so dominated by series -- not just ongoing continuity, but the recurring characters we associate most famously now with Warner Brothers, Disney, and MGM -- that a lot of the best cartoons have been forgotten because they don't have that easy handle for the memory to grasp. The Silly Symphonies series -- of which Warner Brother's Merrie Melodies was a knockoff -- consisted of musical shorts, at a time when synchronizing sound was still a novelty. (Those "follow the bouncing ball" cartoons, the Fleischer's Car-Tunes, that was the whole point -- they were showing off.) You know a lot of these, if you're about my age or older -- the Disney version of "The Tortoise and the Hare," two versions (black and white and color) of "The Ugly Duckling," and you might know "Flowers and Trees," the first Technicolor cartoon. But there's "The Skeleton Dance," too, which is hardly ever on the Disney Channel because it's in black and white and that channel became heavily Nickelodeon-like in the 90s.

The Disney Rarities set is probably the best, though. Disc one includes a selection (not complete, but that's okay) of the Alice Comedies, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks' first character series -- a blend of a live-action little girl (named for, but not intended to be, Alice Liddell) interacting with an animated world. Since the series was silent, it's rarely been seen in the television era, even though Mickey Mouse's nemesis Black Pete (who, like Popeye's Bluto, is actually known by a dozen different names in the cartoons themselves) made his debut in one of them. (It isn't collected here, and I don't know why; there might not be a good copy of it.)

You probably know "Ferdinand the Bull" and "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" from the Rarities set, and maybe the adaptation of "Ben and Me" (about Benjamin Franklin and his mouse). "Football Now and Then" is a great little short because it's from 1953 -- and is bitching about the changes to football, and the perception of modern football as too scientifically-driven, less a sport of heroes and more a sport of methodology. In 1953, man. What would they say now?

The nice thing about the Rarities set is that it spans four decades, and is basically an odds and ends set -- which means you get lots of unfamiliar things, and lots of things that were deviations from the Disney house style. There are cartoons here that would fit in better with those single-disc collections from forgotten studios like Famous and Van Beuren.

Anyway, these are really good. It's a shame that only Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons really get the deluxe treatment -- there's a Popeye set coming out soon (in addition to the half-dozen ones already released because the shorts are in the public domain), and a Droopy set, but I don't know how good they are -- but that's mostly the result of so many early cartoons being owned by companies without any interest in them, or not being owned at all.
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Jul. 3rd, 2007 @ 06:44 pm Epic Movie
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Epic Movie

Wow, why did I rent this?

Remember how I bitched that the first Scary Movie wasn't parody, it was just reenactment? I don't know whether to bitch about it all over again, for lowering the bar so drastically, or to apologize to it because I had no idea just how bad "parody" could get.

Seriously, this isn't a spoof. It just isn't. At least, unlike Scary Movie, it incorporates more than two movies -- and maybe some of the appeal, for people who like it, is going "oh wow now they're working Superman Returns into it!" (except that the Superman scene from the trailer is a dream sequence). This is just a bunch of different movies worked into one movie, without any really cleverness or humor. They're not even all "epic movies"! There should just be a film franchise called "Remember That Movie?" and a new installment can come out every two years in which vaguely familiar actors re-enact movies we've seen and do a lot of pratfalls and shit.

At least it's better than Date Movie, if only because it's got the chick who played the coat check girl on How I Met Your Mother and the waitress on Heroes.
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