TheWorkingDead

The disc I'm reviewing this time is a collection of short films, 13 to be exact. I didn't plan on writing individual reviews for each film, and I still don't. My friend and fellow Spout Maven Rik did that far more impressively than I could hope to do here. I'm leaving it up in the air right now, some posts may have only one short film, others may include a few, or I may just burn through the final dozen in the next post(that last one is highly unlikely). I do plan on treating each of these shorts as an individual film, however, and will be taking time to review all of the special features they may have(each includes at least one commentary). To many of these filmmakers, this short film they've produced represents just as much passion, sweat and ingenuity as a feature length film, and maybe more of that stuff than many features. I've also decided that the best way of reviewing these films, the best criteria, is a single question I'll ask myself at the end of every viewing; would I pay to see a movie directed by this artist? I'll answer the question for the first of these shorts, Hyper, in the following paragraphs.

Like the Ace, the subject of the fake documentary that is Hyper, and Rik, who suggested this disc to me, I move at a personal speed that is noticeably higher than that of the rest of the world. Part of that is my height, longer legs and longer strides, but most of it is motion. I fidget a bit, I pace constantly when I'm required to be on the phone, and I've somewhat mastered the ability to weave in and out of clusters of shoppers at the mall. And yes, this brings with it a level of frustration. Constantly slowing down to the speed of the people I'm with, or facing the terror of a packed mall where I'll have my own personal rhythm interrupted by some teenager who decides they don't need to see what's going on behind them before they stop short to stare at something in the window. That stuff can sometimes be annoying. I sympathize with Ace. But there is where the similarities end.

I may move at a faster than average clip when walking, and may experience mild annoyance when that clip is interrupted, but in general I am not worried about time. It does not appear logical to me to live your life watching the clock, or constantly measure time in a series of positive or negative blocks. In my life, as anyone reading my infrequent blog can attest, I am not averse to stopping to smell the roses, as it were. But Ace, well, Ace is a bit more extreme. Every moment of his life is lived in fast forward, counting every minute and adding or subtracting to some vague, unmentioned total. Working out while riding the train to work gains him an hour, while spending time with the girlfriend loses him 15 minutes. I'm not sure what he's keeping track for, or what he's doing with the total, but it completely consumes his life..

I guess that would be the biggest question: Why? What is Ace hoping to accomplish? What is he going to do with all that extra time? It's not as if it sits somewhere, accruing interest until some magical day when he retires. And besides, Ace seems to have no real goal or desire to be anything other than a courier, which he already is. He obviously doesn't want a family one day, as private time with a magazine in a public restroom seems more than enough domestic satisfaction. Sure, the point may be that all of Ace's tips for faster living are, in fact, pointless. That in the end Ace winds up stuck in his own rut, alone and never at rest. But I'm still unsure as to why this man would feel so compelled.

By the time I made it through this film for a third time, watching Ace gave me the sort of annoyance I normally reserve for those people who use wheelchairs but push themselves around with their feet.

Final analasis, would I pay to see a feature length film directed by Michael Canzoniero and Marco Ricci? Well, I wouldn't avoid it. I know that sounds like faint praise, but it's hard to judge from this short. Hyper was quick and fun and mildly stylized, but there was nothing to it to set it apart. Nothing in the film gave any idea about the philosophies, ideas or style of the talent behind the camera. So yes, if the subject matter of the film appealed to me, I'd love to see more from these guys.

I'm choosing to review Step Brothers not because I have anything incredibly insightful to say about it, or that the movie inspired an intense reaction, but because I've given this movie a 4 star rating on Spout and feel like I need to qualify that a little. For those reading this on my Working Dead Productions site, a rating of 4(out of 5) literally means 'I liked it.' And I did. Kinda.

Oh sure, I got my two hours worth of laughs out of it, but in the end, I don't feel that there's really anything to recommend watching the full movie over the trailer. You get the joke in that short 2-3 minute montage of clips. The only joke. Will Ferrel and John C. Reilly are 40 year olds that aren't just man-children, but children whose bodies have become man-sized. There's some funny bits in between, some of it quite hilarious, and seeing Ferrel and Reilly dropping F-bombs at the top of their lungs never really loses it's comedic charm, but in the end, you see the trailer, you see the movie. I never really understood or agreed with critics who call a movie easily forgettable, but I will say that Step Brothers is just that. I'm sitting here trying to remember some of the one-liners from the movie, and I just can't do it. People will probably memorize and quote the movie, although probably not to the extent of Anchorman, but I won't be one of them.

Critics lately have been complaining about Judd Apatow's theme of arrested adolescents finally having to grow up, but I have to admit i still find it enjoyable. Perhaps it's because I count myself as one of that tribe, with my house full of comic books, video games, action figures and movie/music posters. I occasionally feel like I should grow up and start to put this stuff behind me, but then I realize that's just crazy talk. That scene in the 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carrell starts packing up his toy collection, it saddens me every time. The scenes in Step Brothers where the two guys just spend their nights watching Steven Segal movies and eating cereal? I wish that was my life. And I know it isn't just me. Just about everyone I know from my generation is going through the same thing. Apatow has struck a nerve with his films, but this one suffers from his more direct input(he produced, but neither wrote nor directed).

Step Brothers is stupid(purposefully so), silly, crass, and lazy. It's like an SNL skit, where it's a pretty funny idea, and then kinda settles and runs out of inertia as you realize you're going to have to wait for them to drag the gag out to movie length before they end it.

It should be noted, before I go into this review, that I was never a huge X-Files fanatic. The closest I got was during the shows first 4-5 seasons, when I think I watched every new episode as it aired. I didn't join any clubs, write any fan fiction, or read any message boards about it, but I watched it all. I remember watching a few episodes with my grandfather, but it wasn't really his thing and eventually it was just me, in the dark, watching some of the scariest television I'd seen at that point in my life. But then, around the time the first film came out, I started to drift away. I would watch the show if I was home on a Sunday night, or if it was in syndication and I happened across it, but I stopped following the increasingly labyrinthine mythology. And then, for no good reason I can recall, I started watching again on it's last season. And for awhile, because I was so lost, the show fooled me into thinking it was more intelligent than it really was. In the end, I never blindly enjoyed the entire series, the way I will admit to doing with Twin Peaks, but it was always fun to sit down and watch a frequently creepy hour of television.

With that in mind, I think it's safe to say that my expectations were at a sufficiently low level for me to enjoy this film. I've read all the reviews from critics who were big fans of the show, and how this is a letdown after so long a wait, but I like to think I'm a bit more clear-eyed. After the first film, and the screaming nosedive the show took in it's final season(I will lay none of this blame on Robert Patrick, who did a fine job with a shit role), and the Seinfeld-esque clip show of a finale, I wasn't expecting too much. In the end, I think The X-Files: I Want To Believe can basically be described as a not-bad, but not-great episode.

Set, apparently, six years after the show ended(which would make it pretty much set today), the new X-Files movie finds Mulder living in the middle of nowhere, still meticulously clipping strange newspaper headlines and pinning them to his walls. Scully is a doctor at a catholic hospital, caring for a young boy who has a condition for which there is no cure. The FBI coerces Scully into tracking down Mulder(who's been hiding from the since they put him on trial in the series finale) to help with a case involving a kidnapped agent. In return they'll grant him a full pardon, although for the life of me I can't remember what crimes he was accused of, or why he ran away. The reason they were called in on this particular case is because the FBI's main lead comes from an ex-priest who claims to be having visions from God about the victims. The ex-priest is played by Billy Connely- even when he acts as grim and dour as he does in this film- and is a convicted pedophile, having molested 27 boys.

So here we have a pedophile priest, full of self loathing and practically forcing himself to believe God can forgive him. Scully, incongruously full of doubt and skepticism about the supernatural(9 years on the show and she still doubts Mulder and gives him the 'you're so crazy' look when he talks about psychics?), but also looking for validation for her own belief in God. A new FBI agent(played by Amanda Peet) who hopes that the priest is for real, and idolizes Mulder. And of course Mulder, who of course jumps to the most outlandish and ridiculous explanations before even considering something logical. Is the title of the movie making sense yet? Everyone in this movie- at least the four leads- is searching for proof that their beliefs are the right ones.

Thematically this fits in with the shows constant search for answers, but other than that it's hard to tell what really makes this an X-Files movie. It almost seems as if the filmmakers, impatient after years of aborted attempts, decided to take a pre-existing script and change the character names to "Mulder" and "Scully". The film is characterized by a distinct lack of supernatural events, and the ad campaign does everything it can to avoid this. That scene in the trailer where Billy Connely rises from the snow with black goo running out of his eyes? I immediately thought of the "Black Oil", a thought that was reinforced by a new "Black Oil" box set being released. Well, turns out he was just crying normal old tears of blood(a phrase I never thought I would use), and they digitally increased the amount and changed the color for the ads. Knowing how detail oriented some of the X-Files fans I can't help but think it was a deliberate attempt to garner more intense fan interest. Also, that scene where some dude is running away through a dark room, and he makes a dramatic leap while emitting a soft blue light? Also digitally altered. It was just a normal dude running from the feds. In fact, forget any mention of aliens in this film(aside from a quick reference to Mulder's sister), as the villains this time out are harvesting organs. And they're Russian, which I suppose is alien, in a different sense of the word.

Also, watching Mulder and Scully's sexual chemistry, which was once electrifying, is now like watching your parents trade sloppy kisses in front of your best high school friends. It was slightly uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, there were more than a few times where I just had to smile because it was so cool to be watching some new X-Files after so long, but for the most part the film was a sluggish and mediocre.

 

In the spring of 1997, my life was changed forever.

In the spring of 1997 I was out of high school, and doing nothing but lounging around and hanging out with my friends, working the occasional odd job for a temp agency here and there for spending money. Larger and more verifiable changes would be coming in the fall and winter, after I started going to college and began to expand my horizons past my basement apartment in my mom's house. And yet the spring of 1997 marked an important shift in both my perception of the world and my habits within it. Most of the time revelations are seen in hindsight, people rarely recognize life changing moments as they happen. But this time I did.

In the spring of 1997, Lost Highway came to town.

Lost Highway may seem like an odd film to lionize as much as I'm about to, especially considering it's reception, which ranges from outright hatred to bored indifference. A hardcore David Lynch fan is unlikely to point out Lost Highway as a pinnacle of his career, but to me it was an honest to god life changing event. In 1997 I had seen nothing like it, and I was completely unprepared for the film's dark world of sex, crime, doppelgangers, time shifts, mysterious men and dangerous women and just pure weirdness. Lost Highway opened my eyes to a whole new world of film that I didn't even know existed, and it shaped the course of my cultural cravings for, well, just over a decade now.

But let's back up for a minute.

Like I said, in 1997 I was still living at home, and while I watched several movies almost daily for this year long period, my tastes had not yet been defined. I was devouring everything I saw, but not really processing it. I'd like to say I enjoyed foreign and arthouse films, but really I was a blockbuster fan. I liked spectacle, and that's what I went for at the video store. That was on it's way to changing in '97, but I was still pretty blind to the world of cinema past whatever was in the horror or new release section of the local video store. I came to Lost Highway because of the involvement of two people. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails produced the soundtrack and contributed two songs, while Marilyn Manson had a brief, brief cameo late in the film. Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails carry with them some pretty negative and embarrassing connotations, but both bands were big in my personal high school life, so when I began reading about this new film both of them would be connected to, I became interested.

At this point I know I'd seen an episode of Twin Peaks; I'd flipped over to it one night because you couldn't open a single publication in the first two years of the 90s without hearing how great the show was. But I was too young, and came to the show too late, so it made absolutely no sense to me and I never returned(I would later, and that obsession would grow and deepen to almost Star Trekian proportions). I'd also seen Dune, but I only had vague childhood memories. My point being that I had no real idea who this David Lynch guy was, but several people in bands I liked had cited him as an influence, and he was spoken of in terms that made me feel as if I were somehow depriving myself by not seeing his films.

When Lost Highway was released, it took a few months to reach Alaska, because at the time there was only one theatre that ran arthouse films; the Capri. I miss the Capri immensely, even though I only saw a handful of films there. It was a tiny, tiny place with a postage stamp screen and some pretty dilapidated chairs. But what it lacked in luxury it made up for in style. There was a cafe attached, with some chairs and magazines, and a collection of old lobby cards and posters for sale. The place exuded a love for cinema, be it underground, foreign, old-time Hollywood, or unapologetic junk(Hitchcock posters shared the same space as DC Cab advertisements). Also it was the only place in Anchorage you could see movies not put out by one of the major studios unless you wanted to wait for video. When the Capri got Lost Highway, I made sure I was there on opening night. And then every other night of the one week that it played. Each night I went with another friend, and each night we spent a few hours discussing the film and each night we had another theory as to what it all meant, and what had actually happened.

I can cite some specifics, but I don't know how well it will describe the film. Fred Madison(Bill Pullman) is a man apparently unable to express any emotion in his daily life, as he lives in a large home with his beautiful, distant wife, Renee(Patricia Arquette). The only time he perks up is when he's on stage playing the saxophone at a smoky nightclub. He and his wife speak in monotone sentence fragments with each other, disconcertingly direct without actually saying anything of meaning, and they have passionless sex. The two begin receiving a series of unlabeled VHS tapes that contain footage of their house, each successive tape becoming more and more intrusive, finally showing footage of a distraught Fred lying amid the scattered body parts of Renee. Fred has no memory of this, but is still sentenced to death for her murder. One morning, when the guard checks on Fred, he finds instead Pete(Balthazar Getty), with a nasty bruise on his head. No one can explain how Pete ended up in the cell, or where Fred went, and the film never fully explains it either. The clues are there, but the answer isn't.

Pete is released, because there's no real legal reason for him to be on death row, and he goes home. His parents and girlfriend make some cryptic statements about 'that night', but they won't speak about it, they only say that he was with a man they've never seen before. Pete works at a garage, where he's become the favorite of over the top crime boss Mr. Eddie. Mr Eddie's girlfriend Alice is also played by Patricia Arquette, and she and Pete begin a very dangerous and very passionate relationship. I'm going to stop my description there, because to go further will not really explain anything, and will ruin some of the bizarre happenings still to come. And really, if you haven't seen the film I haven't done it justice. It's like a fever dream version of Vertigo(the film has more than a few allusions to the Hitchcock classic).

The film is full of mysteries, and piles enigma on top of enigma. Is the man in white face(Robert Blake) that exudes such creepy menace with Fred at a party the same man who was seen with Pete the night he ended up in jail? Are Alice and Renee the same woman, or are they two separate women that both men see as one? Did Fred switch places with Pete, or did Fred become Pete? You can come up with any number of theories, but none of them will be completely satisfying. Some reviewers have stated the movie is going for style over substance by not clearly defining it's world, which I don't see at all. Lynch's films have repeatedly put the focus on the mystery, not the answer. His original plan for Twin Peaks was to never solve the Laura Palmer mystery, but instead focus the show gradually on the town's other residents. I think this is key, in that decoding Lost Highway isn't the point. The point is to get lost on the journey.

After watching the movie several times with several groups of people, I eventually happened upon a theory that made the entire movie make sense, in a loose, figurative sort of way. I began to believe that the entire film was Fred/Pete in a fugue state, along the lines of Incident at Owl Creek Bridge. The idea was that the night where Fred became Pete was actually the night Fred was executed, and that the entire next part of the film was him trying to escape into a fantasy life where he's young, passionate, and desired by women. That fits, mostly. There's a few glitches in there, most notably the actual end of the film, but it could all be explained away. And that stuck with me for a few years. And I actually began to enjoy the movie less when I thought I had figured it out. Luckily that didn't last.

I recently rewatched the film, as it had finally come out on an acceptable North American DVD(the previous Canadian disc was pan and scan), and I tried to ignore my old theory and watch it again with fresh eyes. And I loved it. I saw that the fugue state theory doesn't really hold up. For one it makes everything in the movie- all of the clues- meaningless. The characters who repeatedly pop up in key scenes are now suddenly merely coincidence, and all of the doom-infused foreshadowing really doesn't matter at all. Some cynics may think that's the joke, that Lynch was merely pranking his audience, but I think otherwise. David Lynch is so specific in every little thing he does(although making room for some happy mistakes, like the inclusion of Bob in Twin Peaks), from building many of the props himself, to set design, framing, delivery and dialogue, that I think it all really must add up to something. But I also think he's removed a few clues, or obscured them deliberately. Like I said, the point isn't to know, but to wonder.

David Lynch is a director I've always felt I understood emotionally more than I've understood him intellectually. I can't dissect his films with a clinical eye and speak about them completely critically, but I always feel like I'm on their wavelength. His movies speak to some part of me that I haven't yet fully discovered, but that still affects me. I may laugh, cry, or become absolutely terrified of his films, but I may not be able to pinpoint exactly why.

As a film, Lost Highway may have it's faults(though you'll have a hard time convincing me of that), but in my life it's grown to something more. It symbolises the turning point where I stopped passively consuming entertainment, and began to hunt down the hidden gems. David Lynch was actually the first director where I began to understand what a director really does. I began to seek out films by certain directors, and I began to notice their individual techniques. I began to study films, notice things like writer or director or even director of photography. I began to ask what it means, or maybe just what it means to me.

Writer/Director Lou Ye's Summer Palace takes place over about 15 years, beginning in the late eighties and ending up in 2003. The movie begins as Yu Hong(a charismatically detached Hao Lei, mental note to look for her in other films) discovers she's been accepted to the Beijing University. Shortly afterward she has spontaneous, furtive sex with her boyfriend in a field. The way they move quickly away from one another, and thesuspicious , embarrassed looks they give each other after the act implies that this is their first time. It also gives us some emotional hook to grab onto, since her boyfriend,Xao Jun(played by Cui Jin ) will soon be absent until past the halfway point. Much has been made of the sex in this movie, primarily because it's so frequent and, some say, graphic. I didn't find this film to be anywhere near as graphic as most Hollywood sex scenes, with their fetishistic lighting and camera movements.

In college, Yu Hong is a solitary loner, smoking in the hallway because her dorm room is too crowded, and not talking to anyone until she meets Li Ti. Through her,Yu Hong meets Zhou Wei and the two carry on a passionate affair. Their relationship could be viewed as idyllic for awhile, but not to anyone paying attention.Yu Hong becomes unbalanced and jealous in the relationship, despite always seeming distant and noncommittal . Her private diary, which is narrated to us, reveals hidden depths, but she never allows them to show through until they burst forth in a destructive torrent.

The first half of this film, set in the late 80's, culminates with the Tienanmen Square protests, and while this seems like a dramatic backdrop, it's hardly ever utilized. We, the audience, get a few glimpses, and a pretty emotional montage of news clips(which would never have been shown in mainland China), but there's no context. Although the main characters are involved in the protest, we never see them becoming involved in anything. It appears they just went as a lark, not on behalf of some deep seated beliefs. At first I assumed I was merely missing out because, as an American who was only 11 at the time, I was not very familiar with the events surrounding theTienanmen Protests. I thought that the backdrop would probably be much more self explanatory to a Chinese audience, but of course that would be incorrect. Details of the protests remain under strict censorship, and most people in China are unaware of what happened. That most iconic image, the lone man standing in front of a tank, was unidentifiable to a group of Chinese college students confronted with the photo on a recent episode ofFrontline . In fact, Summer Palace was banned in Mainland China, primarily due to the references to the protests, and the director has been banned fromfilm making for the next 5 years.

The second half of the film takes frequent leaps forwards in time as Yu Hong has a string of relationships and Zhou Wei moves with Li Ti and her boyfriend to Germany. During this period Zhou Wei and Li Ti carry on an occasional affair, and Yu Hong has an abortion in one of the most emotionally powerful scenes of it's kind I've ever witnessed. Yu Hong calls college the most confusing time of her life, but she's obviously trying to regain something in her sexual relationships, which are emotional and passionate, but always, she knows, temporary. She is of course pining forZhou Wei. Although she consents to a marriage proposal from a kind man who genuinely loves her, we get the idea that she's only doing this as an attempt to stop her own personal downward spiral before it becomes truly destructive.

As the movie progresses in time, Zhou Wei and Yu Hong slowly begin to gravitate towards each others lives. Eventually they meet, and the finale of the film is quietly devastating in it's own right, but slightly marred by a frankly needless series of title cards that spell out what happens to the characters just after the movie ends.

Summer Palace is a film I'm actually a little in awe of, and feel some weird, half formed affection for, even if I don't actually like it in the technical sense. For one, as has been noted in just about every review, the movie is a bit long and meanders a bit too much, and yet it also feels too brief at times. Particularly the first half, which frustratingly avoids placing anything in any concrete context. And yet that, in retrospect, gives the film it's own strange power. It's kinda heartbreaking to think that writer/director Lou Ye is from the generation that protested so vehemently and fought to bring democracy to China's government, only to see their every effort wiped from the public conscience. It's not too hard to imagine this movie as his own response to seeing the work of so many quietly forgotten by his own countrymen.

Prior to A Peck On The Cheek I had no real experience with Indian movies, outside of some of the more notorious Bollywood knock-offs of American films. Obviously those films do not constitute the entirety of Indian arts and culture, just as craptacular diversions such as Epic Movie or the Larry the Cable Guy ouvre do not constitute a balanced view of American culture. So I set out with the direct purpose of dispelling the stereotypes I had built up in my head, and hopefully I would be rewarded with an eye-opening, mind expanding look at a completely foreign culture. On that front it both succeeded admirably, and failed miserably.

A Peck on the Cheek is the story of Amudha, a girl orphaned by the violent uprisings in Sri Lanka, who is adopted by a well-to-do(I'd imagine upper middle class, like the Cosby's, would be most accurate in describing their station in life) family as  a baby. On her 9th birthday she is told of her real mother, and eventually talks her parents into traveling to find her. That's the condensed version, but the film itself is much, much more than that.

A pre-credits sequence shows an arranged marriage between Shyama and Dhileepan. These scenes are short, but we see through their shyness and awkwardness at their first meeting during the marriage tells us these are good people, and the humor of that wedding night, and the few domestic images we get, only reinforce that idea. Unfortunately this happiness is not going to last.  An idyllic day out, swimming and walking through the woods, is interrupted by a troop of soldiers marching through the woods. Dhileepan orders to Shyama to run to her father's, while he remains behind to attack the soldiers in some unseen fashion. We find out that Shyama is pregnant, and is sent out of Sri Lanka with a boatful of refugees by her father, and she gives birth in a Red Cross center. This is the last we see of Shyama for most of the film as we jump, post-credits, to the 9th birthday of Shyama's daughter Amudha.

Amudha's parents seem loving and wholesome, but they show some pretty inept parenting skills. Choosing to tell the girl of her adopted status isn't in itself a bad thing, but choosing her birthday, of all times, seems needlessly cruel. The parents take turns reacting in sullen disappointment when Amudha is less than thrilled by this news, and her younger brothers use this information to tease her mercilessly. It's understandable that Amudha attempts running away to her birth mother several times before Indira & Thiru(her adopted parents) agree to help her locate Shyama. It's a noble enough endeavor, and certainly made with only the best of intentions, but it shows a slightly malnourished world view.

Sri Lanka is still in the midst of a violent uprising, and bringing a young child into the middle of a guerrilla war may not the wisest of moves. But it is in these scenes that the film kept surprising me. Every time I settled in for some rote melodrama, the film took a turn into some fairly gripping scenes of urban warfare. Almost immediately upon their arrival, Amudha is slightly injured in a suicide bombing, and guerrillas are constantly lurking in the background as tanks and soldiers march down public streets. Still, the family perseveres, with the help of a local doctor who acts as their guide, and eventually they find Shyama, who is now in charge of teaching the children of the revolutionaries who themselves march through the jungles with automatic half their size in their arms. The few scenes in the beginning with Shyama didn't do much to establish the character in our minds, but despite being absent for 90 minutes of screen time, those scenes speak volumes for the type of person she has become, and the life she is currently living. This is a person who gave up her happiness, her child for the chance to rid her homeland of war and oppression, and in the end she doesn't even have the hope that her dream will ever be realized.

A Peck on the Cheek was miles away from what I was used to in regards to Indian cinema, and yet it still kept up some of the traditions. Several musical numbers serve to lighten the mood and keep the pace up, but they feel out of place and amateurishly directed, with the visual aesthetic of a skin cream commercial at times. The story was undoubtedly going to be a highly emotional one, no matter how you cut it, but a penchant for rampant melodrama actually made some of the scenes slightly laughable, to my Western sensibilities. Also, and this may be due more to my ignorance of the local politics, but I found the Sri-Lankan elements to be slightly lacking. Perhaps if I actually lived there it would be more obvious to me, but I felt like the violence was merely backdrop, and not something that was actually explored, and could have used some expanding upon.

All in all an enjoyable, enlightening experience. I hear good things about the director, Mani Ratnam, who seems to be a fairly popular filmmaker both in and out of his country. This film, at the very least, has inspired me to check out more of his work.

Lately I've had more time to watch movies than I have had to write about them. Actually, that statement is a bit misleading, because any time I'm watching a movie I could be writing instead, but forgive me, I recently got cable for the first time in about 20 years, so I've been overwhelmed lately by so many viewing options. Some of the movies inspire a few random thoughts, but sometimes not enough to warrant a full review. So here goes, my first weekly roundup of the movies I've seen, but don't think I can stretch a full post out of. A little disclaimer; these weren't ALL within the past seven days, lest you think I've done nothing but sit on my couch 24 hours a day. I'm being a bit lenient in my first post so I can clean out the backlog.

Justice League: The New Frontier
I haven't read the graphic novel this is based on, but seeing how closely the animation follows the stylistic illustrations of artist Darwyn Cooke, I'm going to assume it's fairly accurate. It's possible that the comic book is a little more coherent, since the central plot concerning a new villain called The Center doesn't get nearly as much screen time as the individual journeys of it's heroes. The New Frontier is an alternate history story set in the mid-50s, as the Justice Society, disbanded amid McCarthyism and public distrust, investigates individually some pretty gruesome cult activity. While this is going on we get to witness the seeds of the Justice League, as all of the founding members of that group start getting their powers. As I said the central plot tying everyone together is a little vague; I'm still in the dark as to who or what The Center is, or who that man who committed suicide in the movies opening scene was(oh yes, this film takes advantage of it's PG-13 rating), all I know is that it all culminates in a pretty badass battle between the Justice League and some weird sentient island that spawns dinosaurs, and veers off into some weird, 2001, A Space Odyssey style mindfuckery. All that aside, the animation is stylistic and smooth, with some unfortunate CGI(something you can't really avoid in DTV animation these days) that isn't actually too distracting, and the voice work is across the board impeccable. The main cast is of course full of name actors, but instead of stunt casting they all come across pretty well, particularly Neil Patrick Harris as the Flash. Also, it was great seeing Batman in his old school, big eared costume, and a humorous, self serving reason for getting a sidekick.

I bought this film on blu-ray(making it my first such purchase), and despite some cool extras(including an awesome sneak peek at the upcoming Batman: Gotham Knight anthology), I have to complain about their presentation. The entire menu is one screen, and filled with text. Even on my big screen TV I couldn't read the options, and had to go by trial and error.

Hatchet
This one wins the title for least appropriately named horror film of the decade. The cover features a blood spattered hatchet, and yet only once does the killer wield the titular weapon, although he does so memorably. The setup isn't even worth mentioning, because it's all just filler to get to the gory murders, but props must be given to a screenwriter with the wit to inject real humor into the proceedings, and a cast capable of pulling it all off. And I know it's not really worth complaining about, because all slasher films do it, but I started to get annoyed at the group of tourists stalked by a deformed backwoods maniac; every time the killer showed up, someone would get a hit in and incapacitate him, and everyone would run away. After shooting him, and seeing him fall to the ground, no one thought to walk over and shoot him in the head, or stab him AGAIN with the pitchfork once he stumbled bleeding and incapacitated into the mud.

The Matador
Here's where Spout's rating system breaks down a bit, because I think this is a far superior film to Hatchet, and yet on their scale it gets the same grade. I really liked this movie, about a burnt out hitman and a struggling, slightly emasculated everyman, but something held me back from outright loving it. I think it was the on-the-nose nature of Julian Noble's(Pierce Brosnan) breakdown. I totally loved the storyline surrounding the mental decline of this character, and appreciated how nicely it was represented in his life, and how he envied Greg Kinnear for the simple act of owning a home. It was the more stylistic flourishes that I disliked, such as the visions of Julian framed in a gunsight and screaming to the heavens, or of Julian jumping on a trampoline in a cheerleader outfit. This seemed a bit of a hackneyed way of illustrating something that was already perfectly defined in dialogue and character interaction. Still, I enjoyed this movie for at least aiming high, even if I didn't feel it quite hit the mark.

Freedomland
The same can't be said for this film, which seemed to set the bar low, and not even try that hard to reach it. The setup could have lent itself to any number of superior films; a tense crackerjack thriller, a biting examination of race relations, or an emotional character study of a mother suffering unspeakable loss and an African American cop trying to straddle both worlds; that of the street, and that of the establishment. Instead the film shows absolutely no interest in really examining any of these aspects of the film, and it doesn't even seem interested in any type of story. People arrive at conclusions to the central mystery with no discernible reason, and not even the capable performance of Julliane Moore made me care about her dead child. Which is surprising, given how sensitive to the subject I've been since having a child of my own.

The Lookout
I hate to get into the wishing game when it comes to movies. That is, I hate to say of a movie that it could have been better if only it had done such-and-such different. A movie is what it is, and saying you wish it had been different means you should have watched another movie to begin with. And yet, I still wish this movie had done certain things differently. I found Joseph Gordon Leavitt's performance, playing ex-hockey player Chris Pratt, who has a brain injury due to a car accident, to be finely tuned and deeply affecting, and his friendship with a blind Jeff Daniels felt real and rewarding, but the movie itself was full of too many cliches. It had an interesting central twist(pinning the focus of the film on a man with brain trauma), but the rest of the film was standard fare. In the way that characters would stand in the freezing cold and stare at the horizon to show they were conflicted, or the menacing character who only scowls angrily at people through sunglasses that seem to be attached permanently to his head. The Lookout almost seemed ashamed of it's thriller lineage, until the very end, where Chris, with fairly severe memory problems, must figure out how to murder two thugs and save his friend. For a brief moment there, the film embraced the two-fisted allure of the thriller, and offered a few genuine thrills.

It occurs to me that my description of The Lookout, and it's central character, sound suspiciously like Memento. I should note, however, that that's probably due to my interpretation, since I watched the entire film without making the connection. Chris Pratt's condition isn't primarily associated with memory, but he instead must make do with limited physical and mental capabilities. He's aware enough to realize everything he's missing, but not always aware enough to do anything about it. And I should say again that Joseph Gordon Leavitt does an amazing job here. Pretty soon he'll be getting reviews that call him his generations (insert famous, respected actor here).

 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch Duck, You Sucker, so tune in next week for my thoughts on that. 

You know, I'm a geek. That's no secret. At best, I'm a dork. I don't think I quite make nerd because I'm not smart enough. Or at least not smart enough in any specialized area. In any field that I feel myself to be fairly well versed, I can think of several personal friends of mine who are more so. That suits me, actually. 'Jack of all trades, master of none' may unfortunately describe my life sometimes, but I've always preferred to be a bit eclectic in my interests. There are too many wonderful things in the world to limit yourself to just one field. And still, there are many more things out there that I have no real experience in. With this blog you've seen me attempting to stretch the boundaries of my cultural knowledge, and today I make another little nudge at that amorphous wall. Today I take another step into the depths of geekiness, boldly going, you might say, into a new, if not final, frontier. Yes, today I review a Star Trek novel.

Now, there are probably a few people who recognized todays subject from the title line alone, and to them I say 'Welcome! Greetings, member of my tribe!' The Kobayashi Maru, as any geek worth his salt knows, is the name of a Starfleet Training exercise first mentioned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The test has since been mentioned in every subsequent Trek television series, as the Star Trek equivalent of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't.' Basically, the test involves the cadet acting as ship's captain, and receiving a distress call from a civilian ship inside the Klingon nuetral zone(a no-fly zone for both the Federation & the Klingon Empire, for those not in the know). If you ignore the distress call, the civilians will almost certainly die, but if you attempt a rescue, you will be risking intergalactic war. Indeed, immediately upon entering the Neutral Zone in the simulation, three Klingon Warbirds appear and open fire. The cadet can choose to fight back, but the computer has stacked the odds, and for every warbird you destroy, 3 more appear, until the ship is destroyed. Basically it's a no-win scenario, designed to test a command officer's ability to make tough situations that very realistically could kill his entire crew.

In The Kobayashi Maru, the first Trek novel by Julia Ecklar(she would go on to write 10 more), we get to read how most of Kirk's commanding officers handled the test. Returning from an away mission, Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty & McCoy are stranded when their shuttle hits a gravitic mine(it doesn't matter what it is) and their shuttle loses all power. With no way of contacting the Enterprise, and no way for the Enterprise to find them(too much debris and interference), the group passes the time by recounting how their Starfleet days, specifically in relation to the Kobayashi Maru simulation.

We all know how Kirk dealt with the test-it was revealed in The Wrath of Khan that he reprogrammed the simulation so that the Klingons feared him, and refused to attack. The book breezes by this, but spends even less time on how Chekov passed his test, putting considerably more focus on what came afterwards. It turns out Chekov was a bit of a career-minded dickhead in his academy years. After self-destructing his ship during the Kobayashi Maru simulation, Chekov and his class are sent off to an empty space station(closed for repairs, as it were) for a 24 hour test. The premise is simple; there is an assassin on the station, all you have to do is stay alive for one day. Immediately the cadets begin to form alliances and wage war on their fellow students. Imagine a futuristic version of the movie Battle Royale. Chekov, after betraying/killing his friends, then takes out the few remaining cadets by once again 'committing suicide', taking everyone else out when he sets off a bomb he'd been carrying. In the end it's revealed that there was no assassin, and they were being tested on their ability to find peaceful solutions to problems. The Kobayashi Maru, this test, and then that one episode of The Next Generation where Wesley was tested when Starfleet pretended a bunch of his classmates had died in an explosion. Starfleet are a bunch of douchebags.

Sulu is next, and his story begins slightly before he enters Command School, setting up his loving relationship with his great-grandfather, who is dying(slowly) from some unnamed illness. When Sulu finds out his great-grandfather has discontinued treatment, he stops talking to him. A few months later, after a training exercise, he is informed that his great-grandfather has died. The day after this is when he takes the Kobayashi Maru. Still reeling from the news, Sulu takes a completely non-violent approach to the test. When he receives the distress call from within the Nuetral Zone, he sends word back that he will contact Starfleet and they can contact a Klingon ambassador who will, hopefully, facilitate a rescue. This is, by far, the most logical response. After all, what was the freighter doing in the nuetral zone? Without being able to scan the area, how can he be sure it isn't a trap? Also, I found Sulu the most likable character in the book, and his relationship with his Great Grandfather felt authentic. Kirk was, even back in Starfleet, prone to an irritating sense of entitlement, Chekov was, simply, an anti-social jerk, and Scotty, as a character, was almost an afterthought.

Scotty's story walked that line between character drama and science jibber-jabber that has been the bane of the Star Trek universe almost from the get-go. The original series always had better ideas than execution, but as soon as the movies and Next Generation rolled around, the superior execution brought with it an increased focus on fake science. Really, when I watch Star Trek, I don't really care about dilithium crystals or warp cores or how the transporter works. All I need, when watching a science fiction show, is to know that the technology exists. After getting that out of the way, it's time to focus on some character development.


So yes, the big surprise here is that Scotty went to command school before changing his vocation to engineering. He never wanted to be there, though; his mind was always built more for schematics and tinkering than for command. His family, however, viewed engineering as a disappointing career choice, and pressured him into going for a command post. One of Scotty's teachers notices this, and gives him a way to study engineering without disappointing his family; The Kobayashi Maru. Scotty's solution to the test isn't so much a solution as it is a series of increasingly complex ways to destroy Klingon ships. And here's where the science jibber-jabber comes in, because many of the ways in which he destroys Klingon ships involve using the transporter to materialize things like dark matter into a Klingon ship, or causing some weird harmonic frequency between the Klingon's shields that causes them all to explode. I started to phase out a bit, but it also had that unorthodox problem solving aspect that I find oddly satisfying.

Scotty's instructor speaks up and has Scotty kicked out of command school for failing the Kobayashi Maru(apparently the only time this has ever happened). There's some made up reason involving Scotty using a technique that works in theory, but he knew to be impossible in reality, and thus he was cheating. But really, the bigger issue is that his instructor, well-meaning as he might be, thought that the best way to convince Scotty's family that he should be an engineer was to kick him out of command school. Surely that won't disappoint them, right?

In the end, of course, the tale-telling has not only kept everyone's spirits up, but given them an idea of how to signal a rescue. The Kobayashi Maru was a quick read, and all in all I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump into the deep end and commit to any more Trek novels, but it was still a pretty good time.

This last few weeks have marked the passage of the seventh annual Anchorage International Film Festival, an event for which I was lucky enough to be a judge(in one of the short film categories). This presented me with a golden opportunity to attend every screening for free. I was in heaven. Unfortunately, this happened to coincide with my increasingly stupid looking decision to take on a second job for extra holiday money. Coupled with normal familial duties, I was unable to attend all but two films. The first of the two, Once, was extraordinarily enjoyable, and I'll be writing about that one at a later date. The second film, and subject of this post, was Cthulhu, a low budget, DVE-shot horror film loosely based on HP Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth.

In this filmed version, the main character, Russ, is a gay history professor in Seattle who is called back to his home town of Rivermouth when his mother passes away. Back in Rivermouth, Russ can't wait to return to Seattle, finding nothing but antagonism from his father(who leads the church of the Esoteric Order of Dagon) and the townsfolk who view his sexuality as the height of mental degeneration. His father, and indeed a few of the townspeople, take a very aggressive interest in wanting to see Russ have children(for reasons I'll explain later, but will probably make a bit of sense to people familiar with the story). The only friendly face he sees is that of his childhood friend Mike, a divorced father with whom he had a... sexually ambiguous relationship growing up. I suppose at this point something should be said about the homosexual themes in this film, since the protagonist's homosexuality is a large part of the plot both literally and metaphorically. Russ' father is upset at his son not for being gay, it seems, but for not having children, and metaphorically Russ' homosexuality heightens the tension and fear of returning to a small town, let alone one as bizarre as Rivermouth.

The plot(and I'm going to give spoilers here, so if you haven't read the story, or want to see this fresh, I'd suggest you skip ahead a paragraph) revolves around Russ' heredity, and the Esoteric Order of Dagon that his father leads. Dagon, as Lovecraft readers know, is one of the Deep Ones, a fish-god that grants wealth to those who offer up human sacrifices. There's also a lot of inter-species breeding going on, as the fish-men mate with humans and produce immortal offspring, and the people themselves begin to become more fish-like. Russ' family is so intent on him having children because his family has long been the emissaries of Cthulhu(although the church names Dagon, he is never specifically mentioned in the movie, instead they use the more popularly known Cthulhu), and they need him to father the next generation of fish-people and pave the way for the return of the Deep Ones. This is a little ill-defined in the movie, as much of the film is. A lot of it still works, however, to heighten the confusion and fear, but at times is the ambiguity is a bit off-putting. It works well when the characters are confused and unsure of things, but when they seem completely aware of everything and the audience is in the dark, it's a bit frustrating.

Now, I'll be honest here and admit that my initial reaction as the film went to black was 'god, what a mess!' The film is so jumbled and switches scenes and tones at such a jarring rate that it seemed to me a horribly confused mess. But, as the credits rolled, and that final image stuck with me, and I thought back over the film, I realized that the film had some very good ideas, but was slightly off the mark. The film feels one or two drafts, and several days in the editing bay away from being a really good film. The director, Dan Gildark, was at the screening I attended, and said that his distributor was imposing 8 minutes of edits on him, and I really do think that with those trimmings the film could be something special. Particularly, the flashbacks seem largely unnecessary and confusing. There's a brief flashback of Russ entering a room where a woman is crying, you see him with a shocked face as the woman screams 'What did you do to me?' Later in the film Russ is seen attempting suicide in flashback. Who was this woman? Was it his sister(the only prominent female from his childhood we see)? What was done to her? Did Russ attempt suicide because of this or some other reason? It's not clear at all, although when I asked him the director said there was a whole side story there that he cut out, choosing instead to make that vague and mysterious. I think this was a mistake, because without any context the flashbacks only serve to distract from an already convoluted plot, and it seems like these scenes should be important but there's absolutely no connection to the rest of the film.

But let's focus on what does work. As I said, the idea of an ostracized gay man returning home to face malevolent cosmic forces AND unfriendly townspeople is well realized, and more literally turns the hero into 'the outsider', something the film is tactful enough not to hammer you over the head about. The more mundane family and relationship moments work very well, which is something that doesn't happen often in horror movies. There's frequent, albeit brief, suggestions that place this movie in the near future; radio programs talk about increasing violence and ecological decay, one reports that the last surviving wild polar bear had died in Siberia, and every television station seen in the background has a 'breaking news' banner and blurry images of violent events. This all serves to heighten the 'Lovecraftian' horror of the story, with the madness being an ever present threat around the edges of the characters lives until it forces it's way into the center stage. The ever-present threat of rising ocean waters brings with it the implication that the world of the Deep Ones will be coming to overtake the world of man, which is a pretty clever twist.

Cthulhu was shot on DVE, which gave the theatre image a slightly blurry, out of focus look(I don't know if this will be the same for the image on a smaller television set), but made the colors incredibly bright and pure. This is a fairly low budget horror film, so anyone expecting a horror-fest like the Stuart Gordon/Brian Yuzna Lovecraft adaptations is going to be very disappointed. The effects, what little there are, are only briefly glimpsed and, at one point, slightly cheesy. Instead this film is more of a character driven drama with horror elements in it. Some of the horror elements, unfortunately, rely a little too much on the trappings of the genre, such as a scene where a little boy in front of a staticy television screen says "we're waiting... for Cthulhu" and the camera jump cuts a bit closer as he says Cthulhu. Or the crazy old aunt in a mental ward who turns away from the character, towards the camera as she starts over-emoting her forebodings of doom. Or a scene with a weird glowing tentacle thing that would look cheap no matter what, but is made slightly silly by the jump-cut and ominous, piercing string music that accompanies it. All of these scenes are played with such straight-faced seriousness that they stumble over the line and into camp, and are at odds with the tone of the rest of the film.

Speaking of things at odds with the film; Tori Spelling. The director had nothing bad to say about Tori Spelling, but I wanted to comfort him and give him my condolences that she was in this film, because her completely over the top performance suggests an alien trying to emulate femininity after watching hours of Marilyn Monroe, Betty Boop and really bad porno dialogue. I might be a bit harsh on her, but she was really, really unconvincing, and while her plotline was funny and integral, a better actor would have focused the laughs on the humor in the script, not the horrible line readings and unattractive come-ons. Aside from her, I have nothing but good things to say about most of the cast. Although some of the supporting characters ham it up a bit, the two male leads are generally well suited to the parts they play.

So in the end my rating for this film would put it around 3 out of 5 stars, which may be a bit misleading. I don't dislike this film, in fact I quite enjoyed it and plan on seeing it again when it gets an official distribution. But, due to some jarring tonal shifts and jumbled plotting it didn't fully engage me. I have high hopes that a slightly edited version, released in the spring, will improve my rating for this film. The director mentioned as his influences the films of Japanese directors Takashi Miike and Kyoshi Kurosawa. Miike I didn't spot, but anyone who enjoys the glacial pace and subtle horror of Kurosawa's films(particularly Charisma, a film I should admit I understand not a goddamn bit) will probably find a lot here to enjoy.

One last thing should be said about the sexual themes in this movie; I've been lurking around in the wastelands of the IMDB comment board, seeing what people had to say about this film. Many are purists upset at the liberties taken with the source material, and angered by the lack of tentacled monsters and outright scares(there are a few in Cthulhu, but that isn't the main focus), but a surprising amount of them are angered by the fact that the film has a publicly gay main character. This is upsetting, and surprising to me because I assumed that anyone open-minded enough to read Lovecraft, with his mind-bending mythology that isn't exactly Judea-christian friendly, should be open-minded enough to deal with a movie where two men kiss(yes, there is a love scene, and although it will gross many people out, it is filmed with more class, tenderness and romanticism than most heterosexual love scenes, and has 100% less testicles than Borat did). Some have argued that Lovecraft didn't write about sex at all, and so it should be left out of any filmed adaptations. And while that's true to a point, it should be mentioned that many of his stories dealt indirectly with bestiality. What is The Shadow Over Innsmouth about, if not a bunch of fishermen having sex with fish?

I've mentioned in earlier posts my lack of conventional film education. There are plenty of films out there, many in the 'film aficionado canon' that I have never seen. I don't really feel bad about this, it's impossible to see every film out there, even the great ones. If I were to try and watch all the 'classics' I would never again be able to watch a new movie in the theatre. But these are still(mostly) important films, and I do feel as if my background is a bit lacking for not having seen them before(Casablanca is the largest omission I can think of right now). So I've decided to try and round out my movie viewing a little bit, to try and fill in those gaps in my knowledge(hence the title of this post). These won't all be on the AFI top 100 list, and maybe some of them wont be very well known, but these will be films that I think I should see to get a better grasp on the medium, or even just the artist responsible.


The film opens with an 8 minute scene where Scotland Yard chases down, catches, and locks up a criminal. This scene is also completely silent, save for some music and sound effects. It turns out this was because Hitch had already filmed most of the movie by the time the decision was made to use sound, so some scenes were reshot and others just had dubbing put on top of them. But it also seems like it could be an example of Hitch's sense of humor(imagine the first part of Psycho as a very elaborate joke pulled on the audience). Here we have the first British talkie, which it was widely advertised as, and the film opens with 8 minutes of no talking(although we see people moving their mouths).

The rest of the movie has the feel of a silent film, despite having dialogue. Many scenes play out with little being said, but instead with meaningful looks between characters and some fairly easy to follow action. Hitchcock is of course an impressive visual director, with many scenes in here foreshadowing events or visuals in later movies. I really enjoyed some of the visual trickery. The standouts would be a scene in the beginning where two characters climb a long staircase while the camera floats upwards beside them, and a nifty use of shadow where the killer decides to turn themselves into the police. As they stand up, a shadow is cast across their face, making the unmistakable impression of a hangman's noose around their head. This may not be the most subtle of tricks, but I've always enjoyed Hitchcock's overtly theatrical tricks, like the scene in Vertigo where James Stewart first sees Kim Novak, and the lights dim as she passes by.

The film is a bit darker than I expected it to be, but this may be due to the fact that the DVD case describes this film in unbelievably innocuous terms, with the coda 'Suitable for children!' I'm not exactly a prude, but I probably wouldn't show this to my daughter for a few years. This isn't to say the film is bleak, or without humor, in the end it's quite entertaining. But it seems to me that Hitchcock has always had a distinctly pessimistic, misanthropic tone to his work. In Hitchcock's world, even the victims are flawed and slightly unlikable. Marion Crane in Psycho had just embezzled a large sum of money, L.B. Jefferies in Rear Window is, in the end, a voyeur, and John Ferguson in Vertigo had some pretty disturbing sexual issues playing themselves out. Nobody is innocent in a Hitchcock film, and we're usually rooting for the villain instead of the 'good guys'.

I may be making too much of this film, or grading it more highly than I would if I'd seen more Hitchcock films. Perhaps this movie isn't that great, comparatively, but I certainly enjoyed it.

[This is actually part of a series that's been going on over at Working Dead Productions, my normal blogsite. The other two posts are about the novels Death Wish and Death Sentence, the basis of this Charles Bronson series. You can find them over there, by clicking the site name above, or by clicking the links I've embedded in this post, if you are so inclined.]

The novel Death Wish was, as I stated in my review, spare and generally neutral about whether liberal turned vigilante Paul Benjamin was a good upstanding citizen pushed too far or a psychopath indulging his inner fascist. The movie, starring Charles Bronson, continues this neutrality, and in fact the film turned out to be one of the most faithful page-to-screen adaptations I've ever seen. There are a few changes here and there, but with a few exceptions they're all minor. Things like Paul's surname being changed from Benjamin to Kersey, and his job changing from an accountant to an architectural engineer(or something like that). I'm not really sure why the job changed, but perhaps it's because watching a montage of someone surveying property is (only) slightly more interesting than a montage of someone using a calculator.

The plot is still the same; Paul Bejamin's wife and daughter are attacked in the exact same manner described in the book, although the rape of Paul's daughter was new to the film. After his wife dies, Paul begins to see criminals everywhere, and eventually begins taking to the streets every night to stalk and kill muggers. The movie plays out more like an urban western than the book did, with Paul's trip to Arizona adding more than a dash of cowboy flavor(wild west shows and bull horns mounted on cars). The finale of the movie-with the cop who had been on the vigilante case telling him to move out of New York- carried with it the association with every western ever made where the sheriff told the outlaws to get out of town by sundown. Even a few of the scenes of Paul stalking muggers are played out as old fashioned duels at high noon. This idea was brought up in the book, but the movie takes it and runs with it. You could see this as the filmmakers condoning Paul's actions, but it would be more accurate to say this was an outward exhibition of how Paul sees himself. Paul never sees himself as a criminal, or as a man with maybe a few loose screws, he sees himself as Gary Cooper in High Noon. In a town full of frightened citizens, he's the only man willing to stand up and make an example of himself(and the criminals).

The movie is a pretty solid affair, and I enjoyed it well enough, but it still feels a little superficial. The novel was also light on discussion of ethics, but the movie removes almost all of those elements, creating a pretty standard revenge film. Much of the moral of this film, the feeling that we get that Paul's actions are repellent, is due to our own social programming, not anything the film itself brings up. Most of us assume violence is bad, and despite what we enjoy in movies, we recognize that such behavior in real life would be horrible, but the film doesn't make any such assumption. It doesn't go quite so far as to glamorize what Paul does, but it doesn't seem to think it's such a bad thing either.

I know, I know. I'm probably the eleventy billionth person to make that particular pun. But I'm bored today, and the internet has been pretty quiet for a few days now(at least, the people I know have been off on vacation, away from computers). So I thought I'd just post a couple of random observations from this whole Ebert/Disney contract negotiation.

A few years back, when Asian horror was still a relatively new fixation of mine, and still relatively new in the eyes of most westerners, I caught my first glimpse of filmmaker Takashi Shimizu in the low budget horror film Ju-On. It was on a slightly grainy 'grey-market' VCD(I have appropriated the term grey-market from the All Movie Guide entry to this film, because it's a perfect way of describing those unofficial imports that pop up where international copyright laws get hazy), and it scared the bejesus out of me. Like no film had since I was a child, really, and certainly more so than Ringu. A slightly lackluster sequel followed, but it still had a few moments that elevated it to likable, and of course that utterly horrible remake(helmed by Shimizu himself, in all fairness). None of those things dampened my enjoyment of the original, but then came the official release. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out, and told all of my friends to buy it, because it was the scariest film I'd seen in ages. Watching the movie at home, I was completely unmoved, and secretly hoped none of my friends had followed my advice, because the film was decidedly not scary. What had happened was that the film was too clean, too sterile, and what had been terrifying in grainy low-definition became silly and cheap when displayed in a pristine digital format. Possibly, Shimizu-san was aware of this problem, and so filmed his followup to the Ju-On films, Marebito, in a mixture of slightly grainy digital, interspersed with ultra-grainy practical sources, such as a character's handheld video camera, or security-cam footage. And, I must admit, the tactic worked. For the first half of this film I was absolutely terrified, pushing back in my seat and tensing up for a huge scare that always seemed just around the corner.
Cult Japanese director Shinya Tsukamota(director of the infamous Tetsuo films) plays Masuoka, a freelance cameraman who takes whatever odd jobs he can get(documentary, TV news) and spends his free time watching and rewatching his footage. His obsession with filmed media extends to his personal life, and he has camera's set up around his apartment, seemingly not for security purposes. He also takes his camera with him everywhere, sometimes concealing it in a bag and filming his own public interactions, or walking everywhere with the camera in front of him, experiencing the world almost entirely through a viewfinder. Lately, Masuoka has been obsessed with a suicide he witnessed, and filmed, in a subway station. Constantly rewatching the footage, he yearns to see what the suicidal man saw, revisiting the scene of the incident, and embarking on a journey to what may or may not be the Underworld. He remarks at one point that "They didn't see something that terrified them. They saw something because they were terrified." It's statements like that that make it hard to imagine the film isn't speaking directly to(and about) us, the audience. Masuoka searches for terror with increasing veracity, desiring to learn what true terror can teach him, and ruminating on the unending search for new and more horrifying things. And in the end, isn't that exactly what brings us to movies like this?

As Masuoka ventures further and further beneath the streets of Tokyo, he meets the prerequisite oddballs and symbolically wraithlike strangers. Eventually the journey goes deeper than would logically be thought possible, until he finds himself in vast underground caverns reminiscent of a Jules Verne novel, with ruins straight out of Lovecraft. In fact, a lot of this movie seems like a fever dream inspired by turn of the(last) century fiction and occult beliefs, with references to the Dero's(short for Detrimental Robots, featured in Richard Shaver's sci-fi stories), Agartha and the Hollow Earth ideas popular in Lovecraft fiction, and Victorian-era occultist writer HP Blavatsky, all filtered through a modern day Japanese sense of terror and fear of technology. Eventually, in these vast underground caverns, full of natural light, Masuoka discovers a nude girl chained to the rock. She's unresponsive, and, it should be noted, attractive. It may be that last part that most informs Masuoka's decision to bring her back to his apartment. Although the relationship never becomes sexual, and he seems to be honestly interested in helping her recover from what he imagines was a harrowing ordeal.

After this point in the film, the focus on horror shifts from actual scares to terror at the depths that human depravity can reach. The film's frights are more akin to Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, as Masuoka continually films the deeds he is driven to by the madness surrounding him, watching his adventures later with the same emotionless stare he wore when perpetrating the acts. There are a lot of ideas here, and many ways to interpret them. Masuoka's spiralling descent into madness becomes more frenzied, and the line between reality and fantasy begins to blur for both him, and the audience. This isn't a new technique in horror, but it's more clever in it's execution in Marebito. The implication is that when every aspect of your life can be filmed, then edited and re-edited, how do you keep track of what really happened? Events begin to take on different shades, they happen in a slightly different order, and people become characters that shift and change throughout the film. In this case the film is Masuoka's life, and the meta-message is that his madness spreads and draws the people around him into it. In this way it fits perfectly into the canon of Asian horror films dealing with technological anxieties. The camera distorts what it films, and reflects that back on society until it too becomes distorted. A sinister feedback loop that mirrors that politician's argument about how violence in media will bring about the end of the world.

As great as this film is, the end is a bit of a letdown. It fits, perfectly in fact, with the message of the film, but it still gets wrapped up in an unhealthy layer of Asian Horror Bullshit(henceforth to be known as AHB). AHB, basically is the ill-defined, pseudo-philosophical meandering that enters into almost every Asian horror film. Stuff that the filmmakers probably think is going to blow your mind, but is basically boring and nonsensical. It's not as prevalent here as in others, but the film still collapses under the weight of arty, philosophical time and reality warps. It's all consistent, as I said, but it seems a little... bare. The ending came and felt as if it didn't receive the same care the rest of the film did.

When the movie ended, I had no idea how much time had passed. The films running time is officially 92 minutes, but the reality warping effects of the camera spread outwards from the DVD, trapping you in a time-loop. All I knew at the end of the film was that there was daylight outside when I started, and it was pitch-black as the end credits rolled(nightfall comes quickly during Alaskan falls and winters). Had it been 45 minutes? Three hours? Though I didn't outright love the film, it cast a spell on me, and sucked me in to a degree most movies can't manage. If your looking for another frightfest along the lines of Ju-On, you may not really dig this film. But if your looking for something different in the increasingly stale J-Horror subgenre, this film is right up your alley.

I was really looking forward to this week's movie for Spout Mavens, 13 Tzameti. I had seen a flurry of reviews(many positive), and the DVD case was packed to the gills with glowing blurbs from some very respectable sources. The director had won Best First Feature at the Venice Film Festival, and the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, so obviously people liked this film. The description on the back painted the film as a thoughtful, if gritty, meditation on poverty and the temptations of violence. And then I opened the DVD case and was greeted by an ad for a 'real time version' of the game of Russian Roulette that forms the center of this film, which asked 'do you dare play?' So now I didn't know what to think as I began the movie.

Luckily I find uncertainty to be the best state of mind for watching a new movie, and I found myself being drawn in as the movie unfolded. And I do mean that the movie unfolded, like a road map, piece by piece becoming larger and clearer and more informative. The film begins with Sebastian, a 22 year old immigrant in France, and his brother as they work as handymen on a seaside house. We get glimpses of the owners of the house; an affluent-seeming junkie and his girlfriend. There is no effort on the part of the director to explain this scenario, letting the actions speak for themselves, giving a much more realistic feel to this film than many others. How many people speak in exposition that clearly delineates what they are talking about? None, most people have their own shorthand when they get together with friends, and although it isn't really obtuse, it never includes the backstory and explanation that most movie dialogue has. And what eavesdropper is lucky enough to hear every conversation from the beginning, so everything is laid out for him? Again, none, and it is in this way that Sebastian makes the unfortunate choice of stealing an envelope from the seaside house shortly after his employers death. All he, or the audience, knows is that this envelope holds a train ticket to Paris and a pre-paid hotel room, and the promise of a big payout. This is so tempting to him not out of selfish greed(or, not entirely anyway), but out of a need to support his family, who share a tiny apartment. Had he been in a more typical movie, one where eavesdroppers get all the pertinent information, he probably would not have decided to go to Paris.

But, of course, he does go. There would be no film if he hadn't, and now the movie really begins to unfold. In Paris Sebastian receives a phone call with more instructions, which lead to even more instructions, which in turn leads to a secluded house in the middle of a dark, imposing forest, and a very dangerous game run by very dangerous men with very large gambling addictions. This first section of the film, with Sebastian moving from place to place with no idea what is going to happen at the next stop, sets up a good deal of tension. It's twisty and a maybe a little fun to figure out the rules and follow along, but there's a fatalistic dread eating at the edges. Once he makes that first, almost innocent blind step(although lets not fool ourselves, Sebastian is well aware that whatever he's going after is illegal), Sebastian is pulled along on a trip he has no control over, towards an unknown destination.

The tension builds towards that inevitable game in the forest, and although most reviews, and the case for this DVD, seem happy to give spoilers, the details of this game are revealed in a way so integral to the films effectiveness that I would advise you to skip over any part of a review that goes into too deep a description. The tension built in the first half of the film begins to pay off here, while ratcheting up the intensity at the same time. With every round of the game the tension builds, releases for a moment, and then builds again, reaching greater heights each time. Some of this may become a tad bit repetitive, and have a slight numbing effect, but the craftwork is still to be admired, as it unravels with an almost clockwork precision. Sebastian's reaction to this 'game' is at first shocked refusal, but he finds himself unable to leave, stuck by his own bad decisions. As the game continues, and the stakes are raised, he finds himself becoming emotionally numbed even as his internal horror rises. At the end, it's impossible for the viewer to tell if he's laughing or crying as he raises the gun.

So obviously I enjoyed this one. My main complaint with the film itself would be the ending, which seems a little too tidy. It robs the character, and the audience, of the opportunity to reflect and deal with the aftermath of the 'game'. I suppose it fits with the feel of the film, which is spare and concise to the point of feeling like a short film. An extra 15 minutes or so of reflection and aftermath would have made the ending feel a bit bloated. Still, it is a bit of an obvious ending, and a slight disappointment.

Now on to that online game. I went to the site advertised, but the game took a long time to load and then asked me to download a bunch of attachments, so I never went forward with it. But I did look around the site, which is far too tasteless for this film. You can look at the leaderboards to see who's killed the most and survived the most games, read discussion threads full of bloodthirsty trash-talk, or even look at the 'Best Shots', which is a list of famous suicides and Russian roulette losers. I found nothing to indicate whether the filmmakers were involved with this, or if it was a site put up as a marketing tool by clueless studio executives, but it shows no understanding of the film itself, and is as crass as can be. The marketing for this movie, even down to the DVD case, seems to be selling this film as an exploitation piece, capitalizing on the central figure of the infamous game. So maybe I'm the one who's clueless. Perhaps this is merely a bit of modern snuff torture porn, wrapped up in classy french clothes that has fooled me into thinking it's art. Whatever the outcome, it's an interesting ride, and an effective film that I may actually be buying one day, to see it without the screener warnings and maybe check out some of the special features. And that, actually, might be the highest recommendation I can give this film.