Category — Movies

I know I’m given over to wild hyperbole sometimes.  So when I say that Twilight and the massive embrace it has received from American readers represent the death of art in another couple of sentences, it’s likely that some of you will think that I’m exaggerating.

I’m not exaggerating.

Twilight and its attendant cult of fictionality represent the death of art.

Not because the movie is bad (it is) or because the book is worse (it is), but because the collective thumbs-up that our culture has given this underedited, overwrought ’saga’ of wish-fulfillment fan fiction denotes a massive lowering of our bar.  In fact, if given time and Red Bull enough, I can craft a flow chart that shows the negative influence Twilight has had on every piece of art, literature and cinema that have been released in its wake.  The book is an exercise in lazy self-indulgence and the film manages to do a workmanlike job of taking that inauspicious source material and not make it an apocalyptic disaster.  Oh, it’s still bad, but it’s a manageable kind of bad, the kind that you can laugh at with a few martinis in you.

Marvel Super Intern and Twitter pal LiterateKnits told me that Twilight was enjoyable as long as I could put myself in the frame of mind of a sixteen year old girl.  I tried, honest, but sixteen-year-old-girl Jeff is apparently the kind of sixteen year old girl that wants to drop a brick on Bella Swan’s head.  Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time rooting for a vapid, self-absorbed drama queen who spends half of the time bemoaning the cruel, cruel circumstances that she has created for herself and the other half of her time monologuing about how much of an outcast she is - despite being the BFF and crush object of everything with a pulse in a 20 mile radius around the ridiculous town of Forks, Washington.  And several things without pulses.  Like, you know, vampires.

As bad as the whole ‘pretty ugly girl’ part of Twilight is, the vampire stuff is what makes it criminal instead of merely disposable.  Not because they have none of the traditional vampire weaknesses.  Not because they sparkle in the sunlight (which is, let’s face it, ridiculously dumb), and not because an overwhelming majority of the vampires in Twilight are ‘good vampires’ (which is also ridiculously dumb - it’s like reading an R.A. Salvatore book and replacing all of the characters with different versions of Drizzt).

No, the reason I hate the vampires in the Meyerverse is the lack of theme, metaphor and consequence that they have.  They are only vampires instead of, say, angels or elves or sentient cheeseburgers because the author thinks that vampires are cool and sexy.  That’s not a crime, mind you - vampires, when done well, are cool and sexy, but the associations that fiction makes with vampires, the ones that make them not only cool and sexy but also dangerous and destructive.  If a vampire isn’t symbolic of the consequences of our baser urges - sex, drugs, gluttony, lust - then they’re totally impotent from a literary perspective.  There is no danger inherent in Bella and Edward’s relationship other than ‘Will Edward take me to the prom?’  There is no negative consequence to being a vampire; in fact, being a vampire is so amazing that Bella can’t wait to be one.  By the end of Bella’s story, the awesomeness of vampires is something that not only Bella, but every other person in the freaking world, apparently, has accepted as fact - even their sworn werewolf enemies (who are also hopelessly in love with Bella, by the way).

So, it’s not the bad, fanfic romance or silly supernatural elements that make Twilight so unbearable, it’s the total lack of substance behind it.  Unfortunately, its devotees like it that way.  I saw the movie a few days ago, and the throngs of mindless, lovestruck teens nearly deafened me with their whoops and applause and shrieks of ‘OMG’ and their swooning whenever Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson locked lips.  It was like being at a tent revival, except instead of religion, these hapless kids were getting crappy supernatural romance.   Pray for them.

That Quarantine will not be successful is not amazing surprise, but it is unfortunate.

Unfortunate because, for a remake of a movie that draws heavily from Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, it’s not that bad.  On the bad side, it’s simple and workmanlike, without the nuance that informed the other two “This is bad and I’m recording with a camera” movies I mentioned above.  On the plus side, It’s taut, it never drags and many of the ‘dumb mistakes’ that horror victims often make seem a bit more natural here.

Just like Blair Witch, Quarantine’s premise works because while we know it can’t happen, some hidden part of us is sure that it could, that it has, that it could even happen to us.  Of course, rather than getting lost in the woods, this particular fear is that our government will wordlessly leave us to die in the name of the so-called greater good.

If you’re pro-zombie, Quarantine’s a Netflixer, but take some Dramamine first because, like, lots of shaking and running.

Once the ‘game’ portion of Saw V begins and five unwitting, morally gray contestants are forced to navigate a series of ever-less-clever death traps in order to survive a series of explosions* in order to escape captivity with an increased sense of moral rectitude enforced by way of limb loss and/or self-inflicted torture, the voice of Jigsaw intones that the ‘contestants’ should ignore their instincts in order to survive.

The balance of the film shows that their instincts involve acting like fucking idiots.

In fact, the entire plot of Saw V is predicated on the assumption that everyone in the film except for Jigsaw and his secret apprentice is a total moron, especially Agent Strahm, who seems canny for about a second when he escapes a trap at the beginning of the movie only to engage in a fumbling, Ahab-like quest that can only end badly.

Saw V fumbles a second time in that it’s the only entry in the series that is not an effective standalone film.  There are several elements, including the subplot with Jigsaw’s estranged wife, that are introduced and never go anywhere  - meaning that the payoff is basically teased for next year’s Saw VI.  As much as I appreciate the complexity of the series as a whole, there’s nothing like a delayed payoff to kill my buzz.

Strike three?  Completely ignoring the end of Saw IV.  We end with Jigsaw telling Hoffman that he’s about to be tested, and lo, this never happens.  See above about being forced to wait for Saw VI.

That said, I can’t hate that someone dies after shoving their arm through a band saw.  Or that this is the first movie in the series where the contestants are really up front about trying to kill one another without even a second thought.  The lack of cutthroat behavior between the victims in Saw II always rung a bit false.

I’m still interested in seeing how the series ends, so I’ll be back next year for Saw VI, but my expectations are going to be suitably low.  Saw V is nothing more than a gory placeholder that makes sure all the pieces are in place for the finale.

*My thoughts on using explosions as a horror device are amply on record in my review of Thr3e.  That Saw is now at this level is depressing.

I love ghosts. I don’t believe in them, but as I pointed out all the way back in my very first post, I find the subculture that does absolutely fascinating. And perhaps as a tangent off of that fascination, I love ghost horror.

Which is how I came to watch Shutter.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie.

The real reason I watched Shutter was that my wife made me because Joshua Jackson is in it. And my wife fucking adores Pacey. But I could have just torrented the Fringe pilot for her in order to sate her lusts. So I confess that I wasn’t objecting to her movie choice overly much.

Shutter is basically a 90 minute breakdown of why a Fatal Frame movie, though it sounds good on paper, could never be good - I need to wait for a Polaroid to develop before I can get tense, anxious or scared.

It also doesn’t help that the emotional point of view character in the movie is played by the Australian girl from Transformers - you know, the totally emotionless one. So we’ve got a dull protagonist and a nonthreatening antagonist. Which is when the ghost starts appearing in reflections, too, and that seems like a different gimmick altogether.

If there’s one element of Shutter that I didn’t hate, it’s that they actually managed to take a relatively trivial character trait in Pacey’s photographer character and make it pay off at the end. From the moment we see the character around women other than his wife, there are all kinds of nonverbal clues that he’s a bit of a womanizer. Nothing’s ever made of this in the dialogue between him and his wife, but there are all the right glances and body language going on. Watching it helped me to predict the “shocking twist” near the end with a precision that really annoys my wife, but that kind of I-told-you-so feeling is better than the actual surprise at the revelation any day.

At its best, Shutter is inoffensive and it looks okay - it just lacks the emotional core and the actual horror required to make it a standout ghost film. Watch it if you’re bored and have seen all the other pay per view options. Or if you like Pacey.

Outside of maybe The Amityville Horror (and even there, only the original), I don’t know that putting the word “Horror” right there in the title of your movie does a lot to inspire me, Flu Bird Horror. I kind of regard genre as one of those things you should be able to figure out pretty easily. I mean, Rob Schneider’s The Hot Chick wasn’t called The Hot Chick Comedy and the greatest John Travolta film of all time isn’t called Battlefield: Earth Sci-Fi/Action, although in those particular examples, it would be a welcome aid for the audience.

As both a Sci-Fi Channel original film and a movie directed by Leigh Scott, nobody should have any expectations that anything about Flu Bird Horror would be any good. You can infer that from the title. Or from Leigh Scott’s name attached to it. If you haven’t learned this lesson the hard way and already sat through a Leigh Scott film, make me a promise right now that you never will.

As you might guess, a low budget horror film is bound to have some problems. And a Sci-Fi original movie is bound to deliver inelegant solutions to those problems. For instance:

Problem number one: Despite the annual day or two of widespread news attention it gets each year, avian flu really isn’t all that scary, especially if you don’t live in, say, Bodega Bay. Solution? Turn the birds into dinosaurs. Dinosaurs flying around a national park infecting people with avian flu.

Problem number two: Killer flu dinosaur birds threatening a small town requires lot of extras. Solution? Let’s forget that there’s a town and put everybody out in the woods as fast as possible.

Problem number three: Where did these dinosaur birds come from? Solution? Um…let’s just ignore it.

The movie is seriously awful, guys. It’s got a totally slapdash plot structure, less-than-one-dimensional characters, horrible special effects and, well, I don’t need any other ands, do I? I mean, unless you want to include actors that can’t act and the rushed, nonsensical ending that makes the ending of Skeleton Man (fistfight with a ghost in a nuclear power plant) look radmazing.

So, don’t watch Flu Bird Horror. But then again, you probably already know that.

I swear to you, if the other characters in Mirrors didn’t keep calling Kiefer Sutherland’s character “Ben”, I’d have made the (faulty) assumption that the movie was a 24 tie-in: Jack Bauer Vs. Ghosts. The dude’s an emotional wreck with a hair-trigger temper, and he says things like, “DON’T MAKE ME THREATEN YOU!” That’s pretty Jack Bauer.

Plus, he kind of holds a nun at gunpoint, and that’s REALLY Jack Bauer.

I went to see Mirrors wholly on impulse, without doing any research beforehand. Why? Kiefer Sutherland starring in a horror movie directed by Alex Aja. All of the nouns in that sentence excite me. And if you’re not familiar with Aja’s work and dig horror, you should probably check out his The Hills Have Eyes remake or, even better, Haute Tension.

But here, Aja’s remaking another Asian horror film. How can I tell? The film has a duo of Asian horror staples that you can’t ignore:

• Creepy Children, like a 12 year old girl possessed by a demon - or the malevolent mirror-version of Kiefer’s son
• Evil Water, which is incredibly prevalent in the film’s third act. In fact, you’ll hear Agent Bauer shout, “DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER! IT MAKES REFLECTIONS!”

Mirrors wasn’t bad, but I have to say that I’m getting a bit J-horror’d out. Which is my own fault, or more accurately, the fault of the Hollywood zeitgeist. Unfortunately, with distance, some of the more ridiculous moments - like the nun hostage scene or the way that a taut, atmospheric supernatural thriller devolves into a running gun battle by the end - stand out in my mind. If you’re in the mood to watch a scary movie but not to think very hard about it - and yeah, it does lack some internal consistency - then Mirrors has some good effects, brutal kills and a premise that, if not fresh, is at the very least amusing.

Plus, you know, Jack Bauer.

Since I crashed as soon as I came home from the midnight showing of The Dark Knight and went to work and then went out with my coworkers after work and then spent my weekend largely wasting time away from the Internet, accept my apologies for the lack of strict temporal relevance.

The Dark Knight is amazing. Yes, it’s better than Batman Begins. It manages to be a movie firmly rooted in its comic book origins while redefining the characters to ‘work in the real world.’ Normally, this results in a massive misfire, but as we know from the last film, Christopher Nolan can do it better than anybody else tasked with making a realistic superhero film.

Part of Nolan’s success is his willingness to let the characters look like comic book characters. Not strictly the canonical DC versions, mind you, but iconic, larger-than-life villains and heroes. The visual design is aided immensely by Aaron Eckhart and the late Heath Ledger giving definitive performances as Harvey Dent and Joker, the latter of whom manages to be deeply disturbing and highly charismatic at the same time.

The beauty of the Nolan Bat-franchise is that both films are not only above-average superhero movies, but excellent crime movies as well. The plot is taut and organically paced, and there are even a few ‘wow, I didn’t expect that’ moments.

As a theater experience goes, The Dark Knight had the most energy I’ve seen at a movie opening since I saw Independence Day on opening night in high school, back in the days before text messaging. Back in the days when interacting with the movie’s front matter (”Which NBA great stars in the fantasy adventure Kazaam?” “Larry Bird?”) wasn’t totally obsolete and I didn’t go to the movies often enough to have all the answers memorized. An incredibly earnest young man kept trying to get the crowd to do The Wave, an effort which failed time and time again. Others evangelized that the movie was “going to be awesome.” The crowd, many of whom were dressed as Batman, seemed more than willing to accept their message of hope.

If I want to split hairs, I can find things I didn’t like about the film, but the list begins and ends with nobody in the audience dressing like Surf Jams Joker.

In other cosplay news, I’m a bit saddened to report that the guy who came to the Episode I premiere carrying a toy lightsaber and wearing a white t-shirt with “I %#@&ed Amidala” scrawled on the front is NO LONGER the most entertaining cosplayer I’ve seen. Not now that I’ve seen Jack Daniels Batman. Imagine a young version of Springfield’s Comic Book Guy wearing a Jack Daniels t-shirt, jean shorts, and a Batman cowl and cape. I should have taken pictures.

Confession time: I’d never really read Hellboy prior to the first movie’s release. The comics-buying experience of my youth was so heavily skewed toward DC and Marvel that, as a child, I thought that anything not being published by the Big Two represented a lower quality product. I had my thinking backwards, but let’s not get into that here. And it should also be noted that when Hellboy debuted in 1993, I was still kind of out of the comics loop. And, well, my proclivities at that time lay elsewhere (as demonstrated by my unending love for Cable #1).

The first movie, though, made me fall in love with the franchise. The sequel, The Golden Army, is a big, fun popcorn flick - which is to be applauded - but it feels slight in comparison to the previous film.

The increase in humor and the accompanying decrease in plot makes me think that Hellboy II needs to be liked by everyone just as much as its title character does. That aside, the characterization of the main players is as good as last time; Ron Perlman still is Hellboy, Selma Blair brings more depth to Liz than she did in the first film, and Doug Jones turns in a good enough vocal performance as Abe that you may be all “David Hyde Wha-?” But Seth MacFarlane’s Johann was probably the surprise of the film for me, managing to be over-the-top silly in his articulation (”focused,” for instance) without making his character silly or ruining my immersion in the film.

Basically, everything about Hellboy II was good - the fight choreography, the visual effects, you name it - and I’d even go very good. But then the forest elemental scene was straight-up great, and it’s the only part of the movie that is truly great. It’s beautiful, poignant and haunting, and two hours of that sort of storytelling would have blown me away.

To sum up: See it. A bit watered down from the first film, but still a strong comic book movie.

Being a comic book fan, I’m curious about other ventures that comic book creators delve into. David Goyer launched the late 90s JSA book with James Robinson and Geoff Johns, and that volume of the book is one of my favorites.

Oh, and he wrote Batman Begins. Which you may have heard of.

So although I wasn’t in a hurry to see one of his directorial efforts after the last, Blade: Trinity, was a bit of a disappointment, it got added to the queue.

The Invisible is the story of a disaffected teen who gets beaten to death by disaffected malcontent teens. He then wanders around as a ghost, feeling angry and maudlin by turns and not ever quite figuring out that all his emo sturm und drang is useless.

Which, really, is my problem with it. The emo.

That and the pacing. And the glaring plot holes. Like why, when we know a character is being tailed by the cops, and all of the characters in the movie know this, too, would the movie’s villain (who knows that this kid is being tailed by the cops) ask that character to help him hide the main character’s body? Like why does every scene in the movie feel like it goes on five minutes too long, making some parts of the third act nothing more than tiring and awkward?

The verdict on The Invisible? Act like you can’t see it.

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Listening to: Gerald Albright - Georgia on My Mind

True confession time, humble reader:

I love Pixar.

Because I watch a lot of movies, it’s almost inevitable that whatever horrible, Shrek-derivative animated films that come out in a given year end up in my Netflix queue (thanks, honey!) and you can tell after a few seconds that the movie is going to be straight up horrible just by watching the lifeless computer animation, which always ends up looking like a Weekend At Bernie’s sequel involving Disney Princesses On Ice.

Even as far back as Toy Story, though, you could tell that Pixar was peddling a different set of wares. Though it wasn’t until Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and especially The Incredibles that I became a full-on fanboy, they’ve essentially had me since ‘hello.’

So keep that in mind when I tell you how great Wall-E is, lest you be swayed by my gushing hyperbole. I don’t know if it surpasses The Incredibles as my favorite of the bunch, but it’s neck and neck with it. The level of immersion and storytelling the filmmakers are able to accomplish without any real, meaningful dialogue and a few snippets of the Hello Dolly soundtrack makes me jealous.

It is not a movie that attacks fat people. It is not a movie that is desperate to tell us that we need to save the environment. Rather, Wall-E is a movie about living deliberately. It makes a salient point about the illusion of connectivity that the Internet gives us (I know what people in California, Atlanta and Europe are doing right now thanks to Twitter, but I couldn’t tell you the names of my neighbors’ grandchildren). The lesson is that allowing a faceless, quasi-automated force to dictate opinion and action to thinking, independent people is a disastrous piece of folly. Instead of being a bit of pablum about green living or regular daily exercise, which it easily could have been, Wall-E promotes activism in the sense that activism is giving a damn about something outside yourself.

Another strike in their favor is that a robot love story manages to elicit emotion from the audience. The Wall-E/EVE relationship has the traditional meet-cute/complication/resolution model, but the interactions between the two, while utterly robotic, still seem very human. Not only is that something robots don’t do, that’s something actors in romantic comedies don’t do.

Like any good movie, Wall-E runs the gamut from romance to adventure to humor almost effortlessly. That it happens to be animated as well as immersive and impressive, well, it’s Pixar.

Short review: Get off your ass. See it.