The Erection of Disbelief

Movie News of the Day! (Year?)

2009-11-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

"Peter Jackson tells Reuters that he recut his film adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller after a test screening.

Why he recut it though is a reason you rarely here - the audience "wanted far more violence". The director told the news services that the test groups weren't satisfied with the death of a character, and he re-edited the film to "basically add more violence and suffering" but still keep things in the PG-13 rating.

* SPOILERS * The article goes into detail as well about the changes made. The death involves a man falling off a cliff to his death. In the original cut, Jackson chose to simply have him disappear off the edge of a cliff. In the new cut, they use digital effects to add shots where (the character) bounces against the cliff on the way down."

Holy Bogart!

2009-06-20T22:06:00.001-07:00

Drag Me to Hell

2009-05-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the dead! But still emotionally dead.

I saw Drag Me to Hell at a preview screening last week, in the hopes that I could fulfill my shameful dream of getting an early review posted on Aint it Cool News. They didn't run it. As it turns out, the film is advertising heavily on AICN, and the stupid animated Harry Knowles GIF was updated with a DMTH theme. So much for alternative voices! Anyway, here is my initial screed, which I will not edit so as to conserve the vitality of the first impression, and out of laziness.
Director: Sam 'CGI' Raimi
Year: 2009
Leads: Chick from Matchstick Men, Justin Long
Rating: *1/2

I'll try not to get on soapbox with this reaction to Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, but I shall lay my opinions on the director out briefly for some background. I loved Evil Dead II as youth, quite liked Army of Darkness, and loved Darkman. Everything else ranges from mediocre to garbage (a range perfectly exhibited in the Spiderman trilogy). That said, I was excited about this screenign as potential return to form, and had heard good things despite the P(ussy)G-13 Rating.

So how was it? Pretty terrible. The film has a huge overarching problem that pretty much shoots it in the foot from the get go. We are introduced to the dilemma in an abrasive opening sequence in which a poor lad has been cursed with the gypsy demon, and gets Dragged to Hell. Didn't even look like he had a fighting chance. Then, in the opening titles, we are given some clumsy-sly exposition on the nature of the possession: the demon fucks with you for three days, and then Drags You to Hell. We already know that the Hell Draggin is probably inevitable, and we already know the symptoms. Thus most of the movie is spent playing catch-up to what we already know, as the protagonist tries to piece together the obvious.

This leads to a subsidiary problem: This nasty gypsy demon toys with its prey, but waits till the three days are up to burst through the ground and Drag Them to Hell. Thus we know that nothing consequential will happen to the heroine until the end, which renders the various possession scenes pretty void of tension. She'll get spooked by shadows, see eyes in her cake, and get thrashed around a bit Exorcism style, but as an audience we don't feel any real sense of danger or consequence. Perhaps we might have if the possession had ancillary effects on people around her, but its established that everything that happens happens when she is alone, or its the spooky ghost movie trope of "all in her head." The film tries to milk this for comic relief, but it doesn't really work. That kind of thing has been done to death since Drop Dead Fred.

As to the horror itself? There are occasionally effective blips of effects work and pretty gnarly images, but all of it is relegated to jump scares. Which might actually be the biggest problem with the movie. It could literally be titled Jump Scare: The Movie. It happens probably over twenty times. It's mildly effective on occasion, but mostly just grating and irritating, especially given that none of the hauntings pose much of a real phsycial threat to our heroine. (Sorry I'm not using names, I can't remember any.) There are actually two scenes where Raimi jump scares the audience with a CGI hankerchief (technically three). Come on, Raimi. If you're going to try and freak us out with a hankerchief, use the real deal. CGI is used elsewhere in the film to similarly poor effect, but in a positive note most effects work appears to be practical, something of a relief after Spiderman: The Rubber Doll Trilogy.

The acting is for the most part perfunctory. The heroine doesn't offend, but she doesn't make much of an impression. There are a few labored attempts to give her depth (she's used be fat, from a farm, and her mom's a alchie), but it doesn't really register and we aren't given much reason to sympathize, or even jeer, at her character. I think the movie was trying to make us root for the demon to some extent, but the tone is so inconsistent and unfocused that no discernable elements of black comedy or satire conclusively emerge, leaving something of a stilted PG-13 misfire. Justin Long is on hand as the least convincing closeted gay man trying to please his parents on record. I don't think this was supposed to be implied, but in lieu of anything better to do while watching the movie I concocted this backstory to add some depth to the proceedings. But in general he lacks screen presence and has zero chemistry with the heroine.

Also, the script was mostly painful, and at times it felt like the actors were awkwardly improvising just to get to the end of the shot. Plotwise, aside from the other inert elements I discussed above, we spend over two-thirds of the movie pursuing dead ends, which are pretty obviously dead ends, until the helpful psychic character suggests giving the curse away. This was irritating and reminded me of why I didn't like Wolf Creek: two-thirds of the movie were essentially pointless to the plot. Not what I would consider a spook-a-blast. The obviously false climax in a graveyard was surprisingly tepid, and didn't even bother trying to trick the audience that that durned evil demon was all taken care of. The ensuing everythings-okay-now-but-UHOH-not-really! sequence was pathetically obvious, especially to someone who has seen the Evil Dead Trilogy and is pretty damn sure Raimi isn't about to let the ending stand. The ultimate twist is essentially anarrative and based completely on coincidence, and doesn't really have anything to do with the plot or thematics, such as they are, of the film, giving the MWAP-MWAAAP ending little impact. I mean, I literaly snapped my fingers a half-second before the ending title card, it was that rote.

But I don't mean to be a Tommy Talkback Troll! There were some good things going on amongst the wreckage. For one, it was shot confidently and well, particularly the practical effects. It was refreshing to see a modern horror film that didn't look like watered-down J-Horror or retard-glossy Platinum Dunes. So that was nice. Also, the fight scene early on between the heroine and the gypsy in the parking garage was actually great, and stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the best moments of Evil Dead, which got me pretty pumped. Particularly the amazing gummy mouth unwanted mouth contact (which sadly gets defused by turning it into a repeating gag). I really thought Raimi was back in form for a second.

So, that's my verdict. Fine to see as a free screening, but otherwise be prepared for the Raimi of Spiderman 3 to blast your spooks.

Regards,

Jonah Hexidecimal

Afterthoughts:
-It's a damn shame I didn't get Jonah Hexidecimal printed as a code name.
-The film is getting glowing reviews. This goes to show how low standards have fallen for actually effective, edgy, or even funny horror films. DMTH is none of these. See Evil Dead II for an effective example.
-The one negative review I read was aware enough to notice the dull repetition of the scare structure/demonic haunting scenes.
-The positive reviews all point out how tongue-in-cheek and darkly comedic the film is. I guess it is if you consider the main character getting puked on a lot as tongue-in-cheek, and a confused self-aware tone as darkly comedic.

Twiddle Twaddle

2009-02-01T12:44:00.000-08:00

Hello! I apologize for a lack of regular updates recently. I have been busy. Busy drinking.

But expect a resumption of spirited activity, including a new blog project, movie reviews, pictures of my flaccid micropenis, and more!

For now start following my new Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/codypeaceadams.

Twitter is stupid like a fox.

Kicking and Screaming, by Ethan

2009-01-21T15:50:00.003-08:00

Now it is time to introduce another writer to The Erection of Disbelief's anemic stable: Ethan!

Ethan begins his tenure with a dressing down of Noah Baumbach's insufferable Indie "classic" Kicking and Screaming, which is actually harder to watch than Will Ferrell's Kicking and Screaming.

by Ethan

Director: Noah Baumbach
Year: 1995
Leads: Josh Hamilton, Parker Posey, Olivia D'abo, Chris Eigeman
Classification: Indie Dramadey

Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s 1995 debut film about a group of recent college graduates paralyzed by the transition to adulthood, purports to show how cleverness and disaffection serve as defenses against the demands of emotional maturity, and there’s no doubt that the movie is a testament to just that. Educated, culturally upper class liberal arts graduates, the four male best friends spend their fifth year hanging out on and around campus, deferring decisions about what to do with their lives. Grover, the lead, dwells on the girlfriend who dumped him to move on to grad school abroad. They’re assholes, and by the end of the movie they’re still assholes.

The movie is a minor cult favorite, and many people in the same broad demographic as the characters identify with it specifically, above the horde of other films about twenty-something malaise. Kicking and Screaming throws down its cultural markers early and frequently, opening even before the title appears with the Pixies’ “Cecilia Ann”. Tonally the song is an arbitrary choice, out of joint with the scene it plays beneath, but it functions as a blunt signal for Baumbach’s coevals to identify with what’s on screen. Likewise, the first line of dialogue has a character asking, “Who would you rather be stranded on a desert island with, McNeil or Lehrer?” That doesn’t mean anything and no one would ever say it (the latter could be forgivable if not for the former), but the movie flatulates this strained, low-rent Woody Allen wit throughout. Like the scene in Annie Hall where a guy namedrops Marshall McLuhan and McLuhan himself shows up to say, “You know nothing of my work,” the movie doesn’t actually demand any such understanding from itself or its audience – all that matters is recognition of the reference, substituting the invitation to self-flattery for a real joke. Likewise, it doesn’t matter who you would rather be stranded with.

These quips come fast and furious throughout the movie. Ostensibly, the reason is in part to point out their immaturity and the way they mask the characters’ personal uncertainty and fear. However, the boys’ smugness is unleavened by anything that would provide a basis for sympathy, because the movie makes no inquiry into the root of their paralysis. In its attempt to create a recognizable facsimile of a particular period of life for a particular kind of person, the movie leans completely on the empathetic reflex of audience members who’ve been there but gives itself a pass on the demand to universalize or contextualize the boys’ problems. What’s different about Jane, Grover’s girlfriend, that lets her seize an opportunity for herself? We don’t know enough about her to answer that.

Our only small glimpse at life beyond the four leads is of Grover’s dad – like them, an academic type who is still an immature mess – as he goes through separation from his wife. Decades older, he’s going through the same identity crisis they are, serving as a warning to Grover to get his shit together. Presumably, the movie wants to suggest that their paralysis comes from allowing intellectual overconfidence to compensate for an underdeveloped emotional core. It’s a reasonable take because it’s realistic, but not because the movie itself does any work to explore the matter, preferring, exactly like the boys themselves, to stay cocooned in the milieu it knows rather than traumatize its smooth self-consistency with fresh perspective. Our exposure, like theirs, to anything other than their own stale and redundant company is perfunctory, leaving no basis for allowing the characters’ situation to be meaningful. Baumbach doesn’t owe us an answer to why the boys feel like this, but he at least owes us the question.

Unfortunately, even simple empathy is difficult (beyond the empty “I’ve been there” feeling that endears many to the film), because the movie primarily announces the character’s malaise instead of dramatizing it. The thematics are completely foregrounded by the dialogue, but in it rather than through it. Nothing happens, people just announce to one another how they feel and whatever else the movie wants to convey in a given moment. For example, Max says (in no particular context), “What I used to able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.” This is how the film conveys to us its characters’ states of mind.

Even their relationships to one another are bared mainly via the boys literally stating the roles of each of them within the group. Since the characters have no back stories and little to distinguish themselves from one another beyond a couple of empty quirks – thus, not only no future but no past or present – there’s nothing to anchor them beyond their role as tokens of a type. They don’t have enough particularity to attain any sort of universality except by brute force of proclamation.

What we do get exposed to about their behavior to others, including one another, is cruelty and mockery, unbalanced except by a proximity to one another that’s just a reflex borne of fear. But the movie never makes the case for their worthiness or capacity for redemption; instead we just get their sense of entitlement. Baumbach expects us to sympathize with it up front even though the movie does nothing to explore it. The class roots of their surliness is the movie’s biggest missing piece, but Baumbach accidentally shows his hand when he approvingly has Max, one of the four grads, start a relationship with an underage working-class girl to validate his own sense of superiority.

The annoying banter and lifeless characters are devastating failings, because the movie relies entirely on its dialogue for effect. Kicking and Screaming is an early forerunner of the indie/mumblecore genre where lack of visual imagination is compensated for by dialogue and character drama. This isn’t a failure in itself but even aside from its vacuousness the dialogue is grating. The characters try hard to sound dry and witty, but the movie means for them to be successful. Instead, we get Grover saying (to Jane about the graduation walk), “You know, even though all 618 of us were wearing caps and gowns out there today, I couldn't help but think it was a coincidence that we were both wearing black.” Obnoxious even if they were actually funny, these would be insufferable people in real life but no less so here. Every conversation sounds like an overwritten script for the benefit of someone listening in. This, by the way, is the problem with excusing the movie’s egregious quippiness and cultural namedropping as an object of critique within the movie – that function gets subsumed because audience enjoyment of them is the movie’s main gambit for excusing its structural floppiness, visual ugliness, etc. Even the back-of-the-box description cites the “endlessly quotable dialogue,” and the DVD menu screen literally features an audio-only recital of quotes from the movie.

Kicking and Screaming makes some efforts in the direction of visual style, and a few succeed – the smoky blue shot of Grover, back to the camera, slouching in a chair as he talks to his dad on the phone, conveys his loneliness better than the rest of the movie. This is exceptional, though, and most of the movie’s visuals seem deliberately attenuated. Baumbach paints everything with the same babyshit palette, flattening every setting and character into a single dull morass.

It’s clear that Baumbach has carefully transcribed his own experience at college, but he hasn’t added anything to it. There’s no reflection, just a reliving of his anxieties on film and the expectation that the unadorned reenactment of those events will evoke in others the same level of emotional response that they do in him. Instead it incites the same aggravation as its main characters do for anyone they talk to. It’s no doubt difficult to dramatize boring, annoying people doing nothing, but this display of ugly narcissism wouldn’t deserve the sympathy anyway.

We Wanted Information: Rest in Sixes Patrick McGoohan

2009-01-14T18:53:00.000-08:00

Today a great human being died his earned death.

I am speaking of Patrick McGoohan, creator of The Prisoner, the best TV series, and pretty much the best anything, ever produced by our simian hands.

Patrick McGoohan, after the conclusion to The Prisoner, was forced to leave England after the baffled and threatening response. This is a testament to his genius, as the Huguenot of television.

After producing several very successful seasons of the spy show Danger Man, he abruptly refused to continue the show, instead insisting that the BBC give him the largest budget ever given to a BBC show at the time, while also demanding complete creative control. The BBC agreed, and mankind is better for it.

McGoohan also appeared in various films, and is especially notable for turning down the role of James Bond post Sean Connery, and later on for refusing the roles of Gandolf and Dumbledore. The man knew what was what, in a way that the rest of us can only hope to imagine.

I remember watching Scanners for the first time a year or two back, and thinking to myself, 'That older doctor with the beard is awesome. I wish I could look like that at his age." During the credits I discovered that this was none other than the immaculate Patrick McGoohan. It was like cheating on you wife at a costume party, and discovering that the woman in question was you wife all along.

Patrick McGoohan, live gloriously in the genius' Valhalla. You took that information to your grave.

(Above is a pen and ink portrait of Patrick McGoohan that a friend made for me for my birthday, which is proudly displayed on my wall.)

The American Viewing Public and Body of Film Critics are Wrong, Part 2

2009-01-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

I am back with another assault on the system, maaaan.

The Wrestler

Once every year there’s one hyped melodrama that draws nearly universal acclaim and awards accolades at the end of the year, usually something that’s pretending to be an art house film, but is actually a by-the-books weepie. This year that film is The Wrestler. This movie has one of the most transparent, sappy, pretentious, and self-serious scripts I’ve ever seen, which I guess explains why Darren Aronofsky was attracted to the project.

Essentially there’s nothing to The Wrestler. It feels like somewhat wrote a thin outline of a serious drama, peppered with a few clichéd examples of the kinds of line the characters would say in the full draft. Rourke is pretty good in the role, but there just isn’t much there to work with other than general forlornness. He does a decent job of injecting some personality into a severely underwriter role, but this ultimately does not save the film, though his face and body are fascinatingly freakish. The plot is non-exultantly thin, and mostly comprised of generic subplots involving alternately a stripper with a heart of gold and an estranged daughter, neither of which are very good.

The Ram’s eventual breakdown also doesn’t make much sense and feels out of proportion with the inputs, making his, uh, tragic? final scene almost embarrassing to watch. There is one cool/hellish scene with an extreme underground wrestling match though, with glass and staple guns and barbed wire and nails. This exhibited the old freaky Aronofsky for the most part is nowhere to be found in the Wrestler, hiding behind affectedly non-affected Mickey Rourke’s back cam.

Blindness

Now here’s a movie that was completely shat on by the critical consensus, and floundered at the box office. My little brother tells me that he was standing outside a theater in Portland when a free screening of Blindness ended, letting out a crowd full of angry viewers, complaining about the wasted time. And these were Oregonians!

I can see why everybody hated Blindness. It’s about as bleak as you’re going to get from a wide release in the United States. I think this film caused widespread discomfort by nailing the portrayal of the blindness apocalypse so viscerally and realistically. I imagine that if hundreds of people struck with blindness were tossed into a quarantine with little food that things would probably play out as depicted. With shit everywhere, madness, and a complete destruction of the individual’s concept of personal space. Also, no one likes a gang rape scene.

My only quibble with this movie is an unnecessary and distracting occasional narration from Danny Glover, and that the ending was too positive for my liking. I didn’t even mind Julianne Moore that much! Blindness is better than Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler combined; why didn’t it take home any Golden Globes last night?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Again, I think this movie is fairly good, and technically fascinating. But sadly not among the best films of the year, though I would feel less bitterness in my heart if this somehow won over its competitors at the Oscars. Assuming it’s even nominated.

Anyway, Benjamin Button suffers from a heaping dose of Forrest Gump syndrome. You can pretty much watch this as David Fincher’s version of Gump. So it’s a lot better, but still Forrest Gump at heart. Right down to corny, overbearing narration, kindly black folks, a war sequence, age coming of, windfall inheritance, quirky/tragic side characters, episodic pacing, lost and found love, and historical coincidence. Sure, it’s got the whole aging backward gimmick, but most people in the movie just kind of ignore it. The effects, though, are astounding. Little boy/old man Brad Pitt is a marvel, and I have no idea how they pulled it off. I was ready to scoff at crappy CGI/face putty, but its believable in nearly every frame. Kate Blanchette as an old dying woman, however, is just terrible, though they did an extremely impressive job of passing her off as college-aged.

Once the technical wizardy drops off, however, the movie languors in a mostly uninteresting romance between Pitt and Blanchette when their “real” ages meet. I think Fincher was trying to keep a large distance between the characters and the audience, perhaps as a reaction to the bombastically over-scored syrupy method of Forrest Gump and its ilk, but he might have gone too far, as both the leads are kind of uninteresting as adults. The final ten minutes or so, however, are oddly devastating as the little boy/old man Brad Pitt shows up with advanced dementia, driving the essential horror of the whole thing home.

That's all for now! I'm running out of awards fodder to wreck on but I've still got Frost/Nixon by the odious Ron Howard to watch, as well as Milk. Which I guess I'll get around to.

The American Viewing Public and Body of Film Critics are Wrong, Part 1

2008-12-30T12:19:00.000-08:00

Part 1

We’re entering full swing the time of year where film studios push their tedious Oscar bait, film critics congratulate themselves on their good taste, and film audiences feel satisfied for spending money watching the films on top ten lists and aforementioned Oscar bait. Normally I’d ignore such things, as they don’t necessarily relate to the project of this blog, but hey, why not indulge myself in some end of the year smugness too?

With that said, I thought I’d approach the Best of/Worst of list business from a different angle: tearing down the misguided horse race for both categories. 2008 provides especially fertile grounds, as, probably due to the atrocious state of ‘serious’ films, box office winners and maudlin dramas have converged on the ‘official’ quality radar.

First up:

Wall-E

Wall-E sucks! And so does Pixar, for the most part. I had meant to stay out of the wider baffling world of of Pixar worship until a later date when I can comprehensively address the problem, but the frothing joy with which this film has been received by the masses has really chapped my ass.

I regard this film as a transparently obvious mechanism for guiding and dictating audience experience. It is the cinematic equivalent to a chimpanzee with electrodes wired into its brain to stimulate emotional centers to the brain.

Desired Response: Wall-E is super-cute, and would make a great toy, wouldn’t he?

Electrode: Wall-E capers and twitches and spazzes and beeps and stumbles!

Desired Reponse: Ah, that’s so sweet!

Electrode: Wall-E capers and twitches and spazzes out while pursuing female robot, accompanied by absurdly overbearing score.

Desired Response: This is exciting!

Electrode: Wall-E spazzes and beeps in a more alarmed manner, accompanied by an absurdly overbearing score.

Etc.

Not a moment of this film is genuine, and in its way demonstrates one of the most overzealous uses of exposition I’ve ever seen, very thinly coded through the standard Pixar response buzzers.

Other issues: Wall-E is a blatant rip-off of the Johnny Five robot from Short Circuit, compressed and cuted-up.

While the challenge of mounting a film with a silent protagonist is interesting, the filmmakers thought of nothing more creative than having the robot twitch and spazz out and hum and buzz in very close approximations to speech.

The human characters are awful both in terms of aesthetics and plot. They are ugly, boring, and an obvious sign that the writers really couldn’t think up a whole 80 minutes worth of non-verbal robot gags. Wall-E also displays a head-scratching level of internal discrepancy. They show video footage of real humans. But later humans are animated. This does not compute. This must be all or nothing, unless you’re Cool World.

The plant-in-a-shoe plot line is awkward and lame. Also, you can’t expose a delicate flower to the vacuum of space. It would freeze and shatter immediately. Also, space is a vacuum, there is no sound, but this does not stop Wall-E from spazzing and humming and buzzing.

You cannot have a messiah plot without someone ending up on the cross. Wall-E almost sacrifices himself, but of course the film doesn’t have the balls to follow through on its own obvious thematic premise.

The extended Earth Day credits sequence at the end is just plain embarrassing.

The pre-feature cartoon, Presto, was just as bad as the movie, and might even be more overwrought and annoying.

Leaning heavily on Hello Dolly for emotional punch is a road to nowhere.

Both the short film and feature combination of Presto and Wall-E are pathetic in the face of last-years phenomenal Ratatouille and alien abduction short.

So why are some critics listing this as the best picture of the year? I suspect it’s part of a broader infantilization of viewing audiences, particularly through the vehicle of Pixar deification. But that is a topic for another day.

Next at bat:

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire sucks! Unlike the Pixar machine, I don’t even dislike Danny Boyle. Granted Trainspotting is extremely overrated (though not bad), as are most mainstream “cult” films, but 28 Days Later is great, and parts of Sunshine are okay.

But Slumdog is a mess. This movie has been on the internet radar all year, and has suddenly rocketed to the front of the pack of Oscar contenders. Lord, does it beat me why. When I initially read about the premise of the film, which uses Who Wants to be a Millionaire as a frame device, I thought it sounded retarded. More recently, now that the film’s profile has skyrocketed, people are talking about wanting to see it. I always mention how bad the premise sounds. They agree, but still want to see it. Eventually I saw it, and was astounded at how accurate my initial reaction to the one line premise was; Slumdog Millionaire is retarded.

It’s difficult to describe how much of a pandering mess this film is. The game show premise is viscerally stupid, and never manages to even justify itself within the movie’s own plot. The story is a fractured pile of shallow flashbacks, that prevent us from ever really connecting to the adult age “main character,” who just sort of sits there and looks serious as he’s answering questions or being tortured. The “serious” pats come off as laughable, both as a result of the cloying India-riffic house music soundtrack and the absurd nature of the action. A kid falling into a lagoon of shit, and then triumphantly getting an autograph is supposed to inspire what, exactly? There’s a whole interlude with some evil orphan wranglers who in a sort of Pinocchio-esque manner teach the kids songs, and whoever sings the best . . . gets their eyes melted out! This should be horrifying, and I think it’s meant to be “serious,” but it comes off as a goofy Huckleberry Finn plot point.

Again, most of the screen time follows a pack of generic kids, and the rest follows the grown-up generic adults. There’s really nothing there establishing the eternal love between the protagonist and his lady, and her character is particularly shallow and actions inexplicable. It’s not clear why going on Who Wants to be a Millionaire is the best course of action. The plot device of the main character knowing every answer based on his life experience is incredibly tacky and stretched far beyond its limits. It makes no sense why slum children speak the Queen’s English as five-year-olds in a slum. The main character seems to have a slight British accent in the present. A good portion of the screen time is dedicated to people running through blurry environments at Dutch angles while shitty music plays, including an Indian techno song that sounds a lot like Paper Planes, Paper Planes itself, and an Indian techno remix of Paper Planes.

Why this is a critical darling is as arbitrary as anything else I suppose. Why did Crash win the Oscar? Beats the fuck out of me! I understand what Boyle was trying to do, marry the fairy tale qualities of a Bollywood epic with a grittier real-life tale of the slums, but what he comes up with is a ridiculous, cobbled together, joke of a movie, that commits the sin of pretension, attempting to mask its hollow component parts with an artsy/serious shellac that lends it a repugnant falseness. Just like Casino Royale!

And now:

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is a good movie. Very good, even. But it does not deserve the top spot on a top ten list, nor a best picture Oscar. (Although best picture winners rarely do, so The Dark Knight winning would at least be novel.) Heath Ledger probably deserves the best supporting actor Oscar, as his work is mesmerizing. Which is part of Knight’s problem. The Joker, his ideology, and his actions are so much more compelling then anything else that’s going on that Batman and Two-Face are stodgy bores. And really, the film does such a good job making you love the Joker, that his inevitable defeat deflates the entire film. Nolan seems to sense this, as the final “showdown” between the Joker and Batman is utterly weak sauce. Earlier in the movie we had the Joker launching missiles from a moving truck and the Batmobile getting so badly damaged that it turns into a motorcycle. And for the finale we have the Joker hitting Batman with a pipe a couple of times, and Batman punching a couple of dogs. Boo. While I’m glad the Joker didn’t die on screen, he died off screen in real life and we shall never see him again. [I was in Soho the night it happened, meeting a friend after work. He occasioned to work right down the street, so we walked over to the scene, assuming that the hubbub was long over. We were wrong, arriving just in time to see them wheeling Heath out in a body bag. This was terrible. I got drunk that night, called in sick the next day, got a haircut, bought the Zurau Aphorisms, and went to the Bronx Zoo.]

There’s also the matter of the super lame double barge morality test thingy that’s suppose to serve as some major point of tension, but fails miserably, partially thanks to some of the worst featured extra performances this side of network television. The cellphone sonar stuff was also majorly lacking credibility. And while Aaron Eckhart was surprisingly good as Harvey Dent, Two Face was a waste. They made a seriously wrong choice with his stylization; they wanted to be Hardcore about it, but were committed to a PG-13 rating, so instead compromised with the silly looking Two Face we saw, with some of the visual effects of severe burn wounds without any of the unpleasant real-life accompaniments, making him look more silly than anything. A barely alive, mad-with-pain Two Face with putrefying burn wounds, a melted eye, and puss everywhere would have been something to see.

With this one I actually understand the critical attention, and even agree with a lot of it. Unfortunately I also agree with a common refrain: This is the Godfather II of superhero films; yes, in that it is largely overrated, and will remain so into perpetuity.

Check back for more aspersions on the taste of the American public!

Update:

I've received a comment! Midgard Dragon says:

"Wow, praise the most overrated film of the century (TDK was good, not great) and bash two great ones. And now for my total lack of respect: you're and idiot and everyone knows it.”

This is incorrect for several reasons. I expressly did not praise The Dark Knight. Midgard Dragon states that “TDK was good, not great.” The first two sentences of my statement are “The Dark Knight is a good movie. Very good, even.” It would seem Midgard Dragon and I are in agreement on the issue, though I can understand if he confused my ambivalent “very good” for “great,” though for future reference understand that and form of “good” always ranks below “great.” Furthermore, most of the section is dedicated to exploring the film’s faults as a means to demonstrate that it is not worthy of the Best of 2008 title. I’m beginning to suspect that Midgard Dragon did not read the post very closely. As for the “two great” films that I bashed, this is also incorrect; as the title of this post indicates, these films are actually bad. Very bad, even. Finally, Midgard Dragon’s formal expression of disrespect certainly loses power from the glaring typo in “you’re an idiot,” though he does gain points for using the proper “you’re.” This credit is largely undone through the low-level straw man argument of “everyone knows it.”

Huffington Post: What Doesn't Kill You

2008-12-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

Hey, another new feature! Sort of. I'm going to begin attending screenings for the Huffington Post and reviewing new films, most of which I'm assuming are going to be independents. My firs post is up, for the film festival darling What Doesn't Kill You. Here's a tease:

Director: Brian Goodman

Year: 2008

Leads: Mark Ruffalo, Ethan Hawke, Amanda Peet

Classification: Crime Drama

Rating: **

Makes you blander? Writer/director/life story supplier Brian Goodman probably should have avoided the statement/question route when titling his freshman effort, but instead has joined the ranks of movies that you can't quite remember (Any Which Way but Lose, The Whole Nine Yards, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, What Just Happened?, How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, and plenty of others I can't quite recall at the moment). Goodman's tale of petty crimes and consequences set in South Boston come across as a pale shadow of Goodfellas (in other words, the Boston version of Goodfellas), that strives for authenticity, and unfortunately captures the uninteresting truth . . .

For the rest, check out the review on Huffington Post! And leave some comments while you're at it!

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: Slam Dunk Ernest

2008-12-11T13:33:00.000-08:00

Well and so! Another entry into the pantheon of Basketball films has crossed my fearful eyes: Slam Dunk Ernest.

Also, check out all of 48 Minutes of Hell if you are at all inclined toward the sporting life.

Movie Magic: My Top Google Keywords

2008-12-06T11:31:00.001-08:00

So I check Google Analytics to see what keyword searches are getting The Erection of Disbelief hits, and here are four out of the top five:

"Burn After Reading Chair"

"Burn After Reading Dildo Chair"

"Burn After Reading Chair Dildo"

"Burn After Reading Dildo"

I smell more dildos in my future.

P.S.: Burn After Reading Dildo Chair Chair Dildo Sex

Breathless (USA) by Clyde

2008-11-25T07:10:00.000-08:00

Forward:

Today is a very special day for two reasons: (1.) I'm posting something to The Erection of Disbelief, and (2.) It's by a new commentator, Clyde, a film major who among other things works at a theater. He might even be more qualified than I am, what with the appropriate film citations of actor's names and years of movies and such. Judge for yourself. Also, for the record, I don't particularly like the original Breathless, which makes me inclined to agree with Tarantino based on Clyde's gloss.

Breathless (USA)

by Clyde

Year: 1983
Director: Jim McBride
Leads: Richard Gere, Valerie Kaprisky
Classification: Remake, Romance

While Godard’s Breathless (1960) holds a secure place in the canon, few know what to make of that film’s American remake. Its mix of self-reflexivity, pop culture artifacts, and Richard Gere’s penis has confused and angered friends that I’ve subjected to it, but Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983) has aged well and stands as the ballsier movie. Fuck jump cuts, this movie ends with Richard Gere, cornered by the police, suddenly breaking into song and dance while screaming “Breathless!”

The remake, or, as the French would say, A Bout de Souffle Made in USA, opens with petty criminal Jesse (Richard Gere) stealing a car in Las Vegas and shooting a cop in the desert soon thereafter. He flees to LA to hide out with his French girlfriend Monica (Valerie Kaprisky) and tries to plan their getaway but keeps getting sidetracked by sex in pools, showers, and the kitchen sink. I have to clear up a popular misconception about the remake: it is not simply a straight-up Hollywood version of a deconstructionist French movie. The remake may look like a trashy 80’s thriller, but it is actually a very funny movie, and not accidentally so. Prior to remaking Breathless, McBride made a name for himself with the faux documentary David Holzman’s Diary (1967), which sent up cinema verite’s tendency toward self-infatuation. With McBride’s use of music (Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Breathless” and a kick ass punk cover by X), rear-projection driving sequences, and placement of kitschy elements throughout the film, McBride is clearly signaling that he’s in on the joke.

Creating camp on purpose often fails because it can come off as smug and distanced, but McBride manages to avoid this pitfall through brilliant casting and (mis)direction: Richard Gere does not appear to be in on the joke. He mugs his way through the movie with a sex-fever intensity recognizable from his other movies, but uncomfortably long stretches of the film are devoted to Gere muttering to himself variations on “whoo-eee,” “Mon-i-ca,” and, of course, “breathless.” Responsible directors would have called cut long ago because Gere has clearly run out of things to say, but McBride leaves him floundering in front of the camera, and in these moments we see glimpses of Gere as the inarticulate, feral, sex-driven goon that lurks just below the surface of the persona he has crafted throughout his career. In one of his explanations of feeling “breathless,” Gere simultaneously defines what the word means to him and the differences in the meanings of the title. For Godard, Breathless was a joke about how much Belmondo runs in the movie. For Richard Gere, “breathless” refers to how his love for Monica leaves him… BREATHLESS. Whereas self-reflexivity is often marked by detachment, the remake oscillates between loneliness, confusion, and filthy horny passion.

Quentin Tarantino has cited his preference for the remake over the original, which makes a lot of sense given the aesthetic similarities. Breathless’ romanticized lovers on the run, surf rock soundtrack, sunny LA backdrop, and bizarre Silver Surfer obsession are all elements that pop up a decade later in Tarantino’s work, albeit in a less radical form. After experiencing the last decade’s glut of empty genre pastiches, McBride’s Breathless comes as a welcome alternative.

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: He Got Game

2008-11-13T12:13:00.001-08:00

Graduate school applications are a high-heeled bitch!

With that in mind, I present to you my faithful reader(s) a tardy update to my ongoing column at Graydon Gordian’s basketball blog 48 Minutes of Hell.

This week I’m tackling my first contemporary basketball drama, Spike Lee’s gameless He Got Game.

I don’t want to reveal what next week’s column will review, but lets just say it’s got me scared stupid. And going to prison. And saving Christmas.

Synecdoche, New York

2008-11-03T12:12:00.000-08:00

Director: Charlie Kaufman
Year: 2008
Leads: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Noonan, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, One Million Others
Classification: Meloncholia
Rating: ****1/2

I’m going to keep this one short out of necessity. Charlie Kaufman recommends seeing it twice, and I have not done so. Not that I particularly want to at this juncture. I stood outside of the theater in drizzle/rain for about a half-hour after the movie with two friends, barely speaking. Almost ruined my whole night! We were almost first in line for the sold-out show, and watched the faces of those exiting the showing before ours. Countenances ranged from blank, to confused, to sad, to irritated, to mildly bemused, to embarrassed. No one looked like they were going to a party.

But as to the movie itself. I went it expecting a satisfying dose of the patented Kaufman-style amused melancholia prevalent in his previous works, usually dashed with heartfelt whimsy, which has created something of a backlash in the film appreciation community. “Eternal Sunshine was too saccharine/melodramatic and self-satisfied” they said. Poppycock. But in any case, Kaufman has stripped out the quirk and warm fantasy expressed by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, exposing a baffling and emotionally crushing meta-skeleton of a film.

The plot remains somewhat inscrutable upon much reflection, and it wouldn’t do much good to describe it in much detail. The main thrust is watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s life spiral into feverish and dreamlike incoherence as the scope of his imagination bloats and convolutes itself in response to an increasingly acute and labyrinthine emotional destitution and loneliness. A set of Russian dolls on an infinite regress, the characters in the film, and the actors playing them, and the actors playing them create a profound dislocation in the audience that goes beyond mere surreality. Tarkovsky’s films are perhaps the closest comparison I have to the level of puzzling and profound emotional effect that Synecdoche produces, though in a different way.

I’ve explained the film to myself as an evocation of the saddest dream you’ve ever have, where you’ve lucidly experienced a dark night of the soul, genuine grief combined with titanic creative exuberance, only to lose all but the merest echoes upon waking in the morning. The most important thing you’ve ever lost is something you’ll never remember, and if you knew what is was you’d understand why you’re so god damned lonely and never get anything done.

Movie Magic: Man Man

2008-10-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

I had one of those moments last night where the universe comes together in an eerie way while making connections between movies and other aspects of life.

When I first saw Holy Mountain, I was delighted to discover the origin of the title of the first track of Man Man’s first album. The track is called “Against the Peruvian Monster,” which is also the title of a children’s propaganda comic book in Holy Mountain.

Last night, while watching Big Trouble in Little China (review forthcoming), I was strangely reminded of Holy Mountain for some reason. I think it had something to do with the color composition of certain scenes, or the mood of certain segments, or something, but I couldn’t shake the reminiscence. Then, later in the movie, Kurt Russell and his team of Chinese mystics drink a magic potion to steel themselves against Lo Pan’s evil forces. The name of the drink? Six Demon Bag. Which is also the name of Man Man’s second album.

What did I see that Man Man also saw?!

And where did the title of their latest album, Rabbit Hands, come from?

W.

2008-10-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

Director: Oliver Stone
Year: 2008
Leads: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfus, Jeffery Wright
Classification: Tragicomedy
Rating: ****

Who knew Oliver Stone has a good movie left in him? I saw Alexander on late night cable and had a hard time even comprehending how pervasively terrible it was, aside from a great asshole role for Val Kilmer, and the bit where someone cut off part of an elephant’s trunk in battle. Always wanted to do that. But anyway, that was the kind of movie it feels like you just can’t recover from as a director. A Lord of the Rings or Spiderman level sell-out.

But then the forces of fate conspire to allow Oliver Stone to make the best comedy-drama about a sitting president ever made. (That TV movie on ABC starring Harvey Keitel doesn’t count. Also, what ever happened to Harvey Keitel?) Josh Brolin is astounding as the titular W., a sad, muddled, boozing, good-time Charlie of a fuck-up. Photo stills don’t do the portrayal justice, and most of the movie hangs on his hang-dog shoulders. Reactions I’ve read have tended to oscillate between “dead-on perfect” to “decent caricature” but I think that’s missing the point. Most of the movie’s casting isn’t really trying to exactly duplicate the figures in question. We see most of them on TV everyday, putting together a look/sound alike contest would be pointless.

Which brings me to the crux of W. as I interpreted it. The point isn’t to demonize the current administration or construct a character defense of George W. Bush, it’s to give the whole thing a soul. Josh Brolin isn’t just aping W., he’s appropriating the man’s essence and mannerisms to create a new character with the same biography who happens to possess a human soul. This has been lost amongst the last eight years of political discourse, and I think it’s Stone’s primary goal in presenting an explanation/consideration of how we got where we are today. Brolin’s Jr. is a real person, and not necessarily even a bad one, just a hopelessly mediocre, misguided, and stunted human being. A man who deserves to work at a car lot, but due to his family’s position and his own wrong-headed, unfocused determination, and a huge dose of luck, he ends up as the absolute wrong man for the job of president in one of the most trying time periods for the position. And unsurprisingly, he fucks it all up.

W. has fielded a lot of criticism for its loose structure, and seemingly unfinished status, but I don’t think either of these things are accidents or valid criticisms. The movie jumps around in time, jumping from W.’s way-over-his-head days as president leading up to the Iraq war, and various scenes from his youth and middle life, leading up to his election as Governor of Texas. Some of these are clearly messaged scenes demonstrating W.’s psychology and daddy complex, and some of them are just little moments of characterization. This lends the movie a kind of remembered feel, stitched together moments from a mostly inconsequential, unsettled, boozy life, that almost surreally lead up to the presidency. This effect is heightened by the backdrop of most scenes, variations on faded, dusty-bright suburban Texas, juxtaposed with the stuffy, claustrophobic wood-paneled universe of the white house. One doesn’t logically lead to the other.

As for complaints about where the movie ends, after the realization that the Iraq War was predicated on false information about WMDs, it actually works perfectly within the dramatic framework of the film. While I could watch an 8 hour movie on the subject starring the players, the film very much concentrates on W.’s perspective, and from his perspective the Iraq war is his big chance at a major legacy that will outshine both his (rightfully) disapproving father, and his overachieving brother Jeb, who he righteously screws over in his rise to the top of the Republican party. As presented in the film, both W.’s evangelical fervor and desire to topple Saddam are both motivated by the same emotional deprivation from his father and deep-seated feelings of inferiority. When he realizes that his dream of a clean, righteous war in Iraq have evaporated, he is genuinely heart-broken. For all the wrong reasons. He has utterly failed as president and a person under his own dim rubric of success. We can sympathize, but not condone.

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: Space Jam

2008-10-09T11:48:00.001-07:00

The Erection of Disbelief is back in full-swing this week with 3three new posts in three days!

After a hiatus, I am back at 48 Minutes of Hell this Thursday with a post about that most favorite of animated/live-action hybrid basketball children's comedies, Space Jam.

Eagle Eye

2008-10-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Director: D.J. Caruso
Year: 2008
Leads: Shia Labeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Bob Thorton
Classification: Action Thriller
Rating: ***1/2

Oh D.J. Caruso, you had such sterling potential. The Salton Sea was unremittingly awesome, and had the second qualification of starring Val Kilmer. I mean, that movie had Vincent D’Onofrio playing a character named Pooh Bear who’s nose has rotted off from meth, and who carries out model scale recreations of the Kennedy assassination with remote controlled cars and tied up pigeons dressed like Jackie O.

But after that things got a little less promising. I didn’t see Taking Lives, but it sounds like it stars Ashley Judd. Two for the Money, while surprisingly good for a sports betting drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Al Pacino, lacked most of the spastic flair of Sea. Disturbia, which is also surpringly good for a teen remake of Rear Window set in the suburbs, is still a teen remake of Rear Window set in the suburbs.

And now Caruso and LeBeouf have teamed back up for Eagle Eye, a preposterous action thriller that makes Die Hard 4.0 look plausible and measured. Mostly, this is a good thing. Die Hard 4.0 had the unfortunate combination of an idiotic tech-terrorist premise, Justin Long, Kevin Smith, and that pussy of a director Len Wiseman. Eagle Eye has the much better combination of an enjoyable ridiculous tech-terrorist premise, Shia LeBeouf (more bearable than Long), Billy Bob Thorton (thumbs up), and a potentially ballsy director. In Eagle Eye’s case the result borders on subversive and awesome in its best moments, but settles for save-the-president-at-the-last-moment-get-shot-but-then-pop-up-in-a-cast-at-the-award-cermony convention in the long run.

The best parts of Eye are the most preposterous clips from the various trailers. Action set-pieces are the highlight of the film, and unlike such inane high-gloss sequences like the Jet fight in Die Hard 4.0, the fire engine-ambulance street chase in Terminator 3, or the highway-bike chase in The Island, or every second of the abominable Transformers, Eagle Eye manages to provide bombastic action scenes of ludicrous scale that are actually exciting and have impact. It’s sort of like a combination of Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass. One sequence, set in an impossible wrecking yard with electronically controlled cranes impresses particularly through its combination of sheer audaciousness and visceral engagement.

So D.J. Caruso definitely has something going on here. I won’t bother with plot specifics, other than to say the explanation behind the omnipotent voice in the trailers is as out-there and retarded as you might expect, but by the time the complete motivation of the ‘voice’ is made clear it actually works out in a fairly clever fashion, particularly in regards to LaBeouf’s relationship to his recently diseased over-achieving super-genius identical twin (that’s right). And most of the movie is spent exploiting the incredibly satisfying cinematic tropes of escaping certain capture, breaking all kinds of laws, wantonly destroying public property and endangering the lives of complete strangers, and sneaking in to the most unlikely of places.

Overall I’d say Eagle Eye is attempting to go for a nouveau Hitchcockian style paranoid adventure thriller, but falls short of injecting enough of the kind of sly self-parodying awareness that affectively problematizes the happy endings of Hitchcock’s best work. But Caruso almost gets there. I think. Someone else liked Two for the Money, right?

Plague Dogs, by Dylan

2008-10-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

Cody's Introduction: Today, after reviving from a cowardly new-job induced slumber, I 'm returning to regular posting with an exciting addition to the Erection of Disbelief's roster: Dylan! Dylan is now where I was a month ago: unemployed, drinking a lot, and watching several movies a day. He makes his debut here with a startlingly well-observed consideration of British cult animation Plague Dogs, from the director of Watership Down, and in the process invents a brave new epithet for his future spawn.

Plague Dogs

by Dylan
Director: Martin Rosen
Year: 1982
Leads: John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin
Classification: Children's Film
Rating: Up to Dylan

Right from the outset, Plague Dogs is not your average children’s film. The film begins sparsely: a black screen and the song “Time and Tide”—an anemic interpretation of the gospel styling sung by British singer Alan Price. Mr. Price sings, “I don’t feel no pain, no more” in a neutered voice as a faint sloshing sound emerges in the background, and credits begin to appear in red. The splashing swells into fully pronounced slaps, and we sense that we are listening to waves in a tank. The picture fades in, and we meet Rowf, one of the film’s two canine protagonists; we have been listening to Rowf drown.

After Rowf inhales enough water to pass out, characterless veterinarians, or, “white coats” as the dogs refer to them, snatch him out of the tank by his collar and pump the water out of his stomach and lungs; we now know this is an animal testing facility. What exactly the drowning test is in service of, however, remains undisclosed.

When Rowf wakes up from a post-drowning delirium, his cage neighbor, Snitter, informs him that his pen has been left ajar. Snitter squeezes under their partition, and the two sneak out. Looking for an exit, Snitter and Rowf circumspectly skulk through a delirious carnival of torments; they encounter a long gauntlet of vulcanized rubber gloves poking out from Plexiglas, knock over a wretchedly incommodious rat-cage, and sidle by lonely, fearful monkeys sealed in vats. Eventually, Snitter and Rowf crawl into an animal incinerator and escape through an outside-connecting cadaver shoot.

Once out and amidst the surrounding moor, these dogs are not just confused, they are demented. Rowf has become conditioned to aggression, and Snitter, having had an experimental brain operation back at the facility, suffers from post-traumatic stress complete with fits, delusions, and unremitting despondency. (“Bees in my head, they keep buzzing. Feels like smoke.”) His mind now plays like a broken record, constantly replaying an incident when, he believes, he killed his master by luring him into the street.

The question inevitably becomes whether or not it is better outside, or inside the pens. Outside, the world is not hopeless like in the pens, but hope proves feckless against the horrors of living, only deluding the dogs into thinking there is a way out; at times, Snitter wishes he could be caught and sent back. Outside, they encounter towns, shops, potential masters, and possible doggy friends, but these ultimately do nothing except agonize them.

The effect is as frustrating for the spectator as it is for Snitter and Rowf. For instance, in the scene where the dogs spot the shop, the music (which is, for the most part, the Kronos Quartet playing Vivaldi) takes an unprecedented and unrepeated turn up-tempo, and the animation matches this with an artificially joyful series of jump fades accelerating us towards the storefront, effectively engaging us in the dogs excitement. When Snitter and Rowf enter, they are not greeted with pats from warm palms, as we seem to expect, but instead see a man (likely a butcher) wielding a knife (almost certainly not at them). The two dogs panic, and scramble over each other out the door. “They must cut them [dogs] up on those glass tables,” Snitter deduces.

This sort of misinterpretation and misfortune continues throughout the film. Rowf, not understanding a man’s benevolence, bites his hand when he pulls his car over to help Snitter, who, in the throes of a fit, has stranded himself in the middle of the street. Snitter and Rowf together decide, after observing two sheep dogs fluently corral their flock, to have a go in the hope that they my might ingratiate themselves to the other dogs and their master. Their attempt is hapless, however, and the sheep scatter, one even tramples Snitter as it runs off; as a result, both the sheep dogs and their master malign the two. But the most sublime of these instances happens when a hunter spots cute little Snitter sniffing around. The man, smitten by the pup’s cuteness, waves him near; Snitter perks up when he remembers the amiable gesture from times before his internment and runs towards the man waging his tail like mad. In all his excitement, however, and while trying to clamber up the man’s leg, Snitter’s back paw slips onto the trigger of the hunter’s shotgun and he inadvertently blows the man’s face off. Silly Snitter.

Now that Snitter’s plan of finding a master has proven abysmal, the two switch to Rowf’s strategy: fighting. The two make a conscious go at becoming feral, roaming for months killing sheep and raiding chicken coups. Actively terrorizing the countryside, however, makes it evident that the dogs have yet to expire. In light of this, the government can no longer keep quiet about the potential epidemic threat that Snitter and Rowf may be carrying with them; that’s right, the dogs have the plague. (Remember those rats and monkeys they discovered on their way out of the animal testing grounds? Plague rats and plague monkeys, all of them.) A full on dog hunt is now under way.

At this point the dogs have long since made friends with a Geordie fox named “the Tod.” The Tod ends up killing a white-coat sniper who had Snitter and Rowf in his sights, so the facility has no choice but to send out the choppers. Snitter and Rowf escape to the sea by train, thanks to the Todd acting as decoy, but the whirly birds eventually catch up to them, as do the paramilitary batteries. Snitter lies down in resignation, but Rowf, ever the fighter, simply refuses to return to the concentration camp from which he came. Nor will he be killed. The two run down to the shoreline, but Rowf is pinned by his fear of water. A line of soldiers marching abreast descends the dunes.

When Snitter spots the sun on the horizon, he names it their “Island” and deems it “where they have to go.” Rowf paces up and down the shoreline phobicly, but eventually gets in. As they paddle out to sea, bullets pop on the surface of the water about their heads. The fog covers them, and the bullets cease.

The fog soon opens and we see Snitter and Rowf once again, they are struggling and sucking down water; Snitter complains of fatigue and says he can’t see the island anymore, but Rowf chokingly insists that it is still there. They half swim half sink as Alan Price’s “Time and Tide” returns. In this reprise, while still being strangely soulless, the song is more fully realized; the credits trundle up the screen we get the joyous call and response of a gospel choir clapping for deliverance: “I’ve left this cruel world, and I’ve found my piece of mind.”

*********
Whenever a children’s film suffers the criticism of “being too adult,” it usually secures for itself some manner of cultism a decade or two down the line. Plague Dogs is certainly a member of that group, and I am a proud celebrant. The reason why these films, e.g., The Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Secret Of Nimh, etc., are continually returned to is not merely for the sake of nostalgia, or to finally understand what you couldn’t as a child, but because they are just plain excellent films. This is not regardless of genre, of course, for to ignore the intended audience would be to turn these films into something they are not. These are bona fide children’s films; the only difference is that they are the best of the bunch.

The claim that Plague Dogs, or any of those other films, are “too adult” is to condescend children in the worst way. It characterizes thought provoking cinema, or worse, thinking in general, as something that ought to be delayed into adulthood. It either assumes that childhood is a time when one is too young to think, or worse, that childhood is a sanctified time where one does not have to think. This is ugly anti-intellectualism and an obviously repugnant notion.

The fact of the matter is, a truly realized children’s film does not merely entertain children, but conveys deathless concepts in a way that children can relate, and the simple conveyance of complex ideas is strikingly beautiful for the adult as well. Plague Dogs accomplishes this brand of reflection without being overly didactic, something that many children’s films suffer from. Sure, the film explicitly favors animal rights and erects a repulsive portrait of its combatants, but not based on the pithy premise that all dogs go to heaven. The concept of good dog, bad dog is still real, but shown to be impure. By our regular standards these are unequivocally bad dogs: they go through the trash, break things, kill people, and, for fuck’s sake, they have the plague. Nevertheless, we would rather see an entire cell block executed than see a rolled up newspaper anywhere near these dogs. It is never too early to impart on a child how flimsy a moral structure can be, or, for that matter, how the image of a drowning dog has within it the capacity to be both despicable as well as something beautiful.

I imagine my future-self as a parent sitting down with son or daughter and popping in Plague Dogs for family film night. By the time the evening has ended, my child will have learned that his or her life will be a series of seemingly pointless traumas with which no one will ever be able to actually empathize, and my baby girl, or baby boy will feel somewhere inside, although incapable of saying it, that he or she knows why daddy seeks complacency in a job, or in mommy. Because just as Snitter and Rowf needed to be either feral or mastered, pop needs to make sense of himself too, and when it all goes to shit and the world turns abhorrent, my babes might also get why dad can’t look mommy in the face, or why he buys a new bottle every three days; and if daddy ever gets the cherries to do himself in, you, kid—little pip from my tip—better sing me out too.

Burn After Reading

2008-09-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Year: 2008
Leads: Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt
Classification: Comedy/Existential Horror
Rating: ****

Many critics are dismissing Burn After Reading as a silly piece of fluff to counterbalance the supposed austere seriousness of No Country for Old Men. Wrong! No Country For Old Men had strong elements of dark comedy. And Burn After Reading might just have a blacker heart beating in its clammy chest.

Perhaps intentionally mis-advertised as a screwball comedy, Burn After Reading actually plays out like the saddest indictment of human nature with comedic beats. Nor is Burn really a satire of spy/espionage movies. Its skewer pokes straight through the thin premise into the liver of the modern state of humanity. The brothers Coen apparently wrote the script simultaneously with No Country, and I somehow don’t think they were spending every other day just on giggles.

Burn After Reading makes you feel weird and bad. In a good way. The horrors of internet dating amongst the middle-aged are staged so subtly and effectively that you fear outright for the future of our generation. The plot dynamics, such as they are, are powered by ignorance and ugliness. Much has been made about how ‘unlikeable’ the characters in the film are. Again, this is off the mark. The people just are, it’s the world that’s unlikeable. Every bad end came to is the perfect result of bad decisions made by people who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the existential structure of their desperation and unhappiness. John Malkovich’s character doesn’t have a drinking problem; as perhaps the smartest character in the film, life makes him drink.

The Coens are sometimes criticized for the supposedly smarmy trick of having nothing in the plot come together meaningfully, a device least effectively used in The Hudsucker Proxy. In Burn After Reading the action ends abruptly with a violent, valiant, and ultimately pointless assault on “the idiocy of the world.” The scene cuts to a confused and irritated summation from a CIA director before you can even register a hatchet-powered skull-bashing. Most of the surviving characters are dismissed with a few explanatory sentences. At first this feels disappointing. But then you realize you’ve seen about as much as you want to see of the pathetic, overcast, grotesquery that the Coens have stitched together.

At one point in the movie George Clooney proudly unveils his mysterious project: a home-made fuck-chair with a pistoning dildo powered by your own rocking. Later in a fit of confusion and grief Clooney smashes this chair with a sledge hammer. Such is life.

LostInTheSuperMarket Says:

"Great review. I agree totally that most "critics" were far too quick to dismiss the film as merely quirky, a return to a light-heartedness to counterbalance the soberness of "No Country." However, I wonder whether the desperation and the detestable nature of many, if not all of the characters - which leaves an audience little to identify with so they can feel good about themselves for cheering on the good guy, etc. - I wonder whether these characters reflect not so much, as you say, "an existential structure," but the effects of a social condition. That is, its not a question of human nature that should be read off the character's behavior, but rather the behavior should be read as psychologically conditioned and motivated by an impersonal social structure, an abstract form of domination, that necessarily excludes them (and everyone else)."

My Response:

Lost makes good points. My feel of the movie was more one of distanced dread, but I might be over-reading its association with No Country. I read an interview with the Coens today, where they were being delightfully assholic and unhelpful, where they impressed on the interviewer that they place a lot of emphasis on character when writing, and most of the actors were very focused on their genuine characterizations, which lends credence to the idea that the character events of the film are a result of conditions, not an illustration of a generalized state. But I think that the Coens are resourceful enough to use characters as exemplars of underlying thematic structure while keeping them nuanced and human. Also a good point about the audience not only not being able to feel good about themselves for rooting for any sort of good guy, but also that they're forced into living the squalid acts vicariously. And not even in a sastifyingly evil bad guy way like in Face Off.

Man, that sledgehammer hitting the dildo has really struck in my craw.

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: Semi-Pro

2008-09-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday and I'm at it again! We move on to Basketball comedy this week with a consideration of Semi-Pro, a nearly instantly forgettable Will Ferrell vehicle.

Read it at, as usual, at 48 Minutes of Hell.

Val Kilmer for Everything

2008-09-10T10:42:00.001-07:00

Rumors are circulating that colossal actor Val Kilmer is mulling a run at the governorship of New Mexico in 2010. This website whole-heartedly endorses his candidacy, considers it an absolute fact, and fully expects him to win. Governor Kilmer will revolutionize New Mexican politics by starring in a series of self-produced films where he plays himself, and uses his policy positions and personal life as alternate plot points. Most of these films will be mediocre, but will spur unprecedented interest in New Mexican film production, sky-rocketing the gross income of the state, and creating an inhospitable third production hub in the United States besides New York and and Los Angeles.

And the best part of this news? Val Kilmer will be fully eligible to run for President of the United States in 2012. I don’t care if Obama wins in November, I’d still support Kilmer knocking him off an incumbent ticket. Or, if Obama knows what’s good for him, he’ll gracefully step down to the Vice Presidency. Kilmer will finally provide the antidote to Reagan, ushering in a honey-colored era of prosperity, fine art, cold fusion, and impeccable flying skills, unfettered by the likes of man-eating lions, Riddlers, bio-engineered mutants, blindness, white slavers, and the like.

Kilmer/Obama 2012

Update:

Upon further reflection, you know what? Fuck a Kilmer/Obama ticket. What we need is a Val Kilmer/Kurt Russell ticket. Experience. Judgment. No attack would stick. You know why Kurt Russell is ready to take over in the event that something terrible happens to Kilmer? Because he single-handedly saved the president's life in a lawless wasteland. Because while he didn't play Batman, like Val Kilmer did, he really should have been cast in the role at some point, and still has a chance if they make the Dark Knight Returns into a movie.

Cats & Dogs

2008-09-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Director: Lawrence Guterman
Year: 2001
Leads: Tobey Maguire, Alec Baldwin, Jeff Goldblum
Classification: Children’s Film
Rating: **1/2

Cats & Dogs spends most of its run time as an obnoxious, dim-witted foray into talking animal entertainment for undiscerning children. The direction is borderline amateurish, the humor largely scatological, and special effects plastic and unconvincing. The premise is both absurdly flabby and bafflingly undercooked. Cats and dogs, historical enemies, can talk and have access to nonsensically advanced technology, and perpetrate an endless cold war over the primacy of the cat or the dog in the world of humans. Though they apparently have the resources and capabilities to grind us under their paws, dogs just really want to be the best pets possible, and have a disciplined secret infrastructure to maintain the status quo. Cats, who have an equally convoluted and inexplicable shadow organization, logically want to overthrow the human order and really stick it to the dogs.

None of this makes any sense. And not just in the obvious “wait, cats have incredibly small frontal lobes, there’s no way they could have their shit this together” kind of way. I can buy that dogs and cats are sentient, and engage in an endless clandestine struggle. But they don’t have thumbs. There’s no way they could build a high-tech HQ at the center of the Earth, accessible only by rocket sled, much less screw in a light-bulb. And the movie constantly high-lights this obvious contradiction. Dogs have trouble opening a window, but are somehow able to type fluidly on a keyboard and diffuse bombs. Cats can organize ninja air-drops and mass produce a chemical allergen formula, but have a hell of time trying to drive a car.

Cats & Dogs has consistency problems. And the first two-thirds of the movie consistent of dull farting dog antics. But then something happens. The movie becomes so committed to articulating its shitty premise that it goes half-crazy. The dogs fight a Russian demolition experts kitten who wields a razor-blade boomerang, and completely fuck up the house. The cats use a comatose old man as a prop to infiltrate an artificial snow and Christmas tree factory. The dogs drop into a previously unmentioned system of rocket tubes that cakes them to the World Dog Council at the center of the Earth, which is a kind of crazy James Bond dog training Mecca. You have a hard time believing what you’re seeing, and that someone took the time to set up a dog phone bank and train several dozen dogs to pretend to operate phones. The top-of-the-rungs retardation of the enterprise gradually becomes infectious.

“That’s enough mice to feed an army.”

And then there’s the bizarre boy-dog romance that blossoms over the course of movie, one that pops up in almost every movie about a dog. K-9, Turner and Hooch, My Dog Skip. The male protagonist starts out resistant to working with some stupid dog, but gradually develops a bond deeper and more meaningful with romantic love. At the end of the film, the dog is injured, maybe dead, and the male protagonists kneels at its side, shattered at the mere idea that they might part with the dog. But then the dog wakes up! And licks his face (kisses him).

Jeff Goldblum also earns airline miles as the only recognizable actor in the film, voice or otherwise (well, aside from Jon Luvitz). He is the patriarch of the family in contention, and is working on a cure for dog allergies in his basement lab, because apparently there are free-lance scientists. He is also manifestly uninterested in parenthood, ruthlessly ignoring his son. Basically he appears every once in awhile to rub a dog on his face, deflect calls for attention from his family, and return to his locked science bunker.

Highlander

2008-09-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

Director: Russell Mulcahy
Year: 1986
Leads: Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery
Classification: Fantasy Action
Rating: ***½

Highlander is for the most part awesome. Whoever came up with the basic idea deserves some kind of medal. People are occasionally born with immortal predispositions, have super-human strength, and gain the powers of their immortal peers by severing their heads with a sword. Once the time of the Gathering comes, only one will remain, and gain the power of God-like omniscient universal consciousness. On paper it sounds like some crazy crap a middle-school fantasy enthusiast cooked up in his trapper keeper. And Highlander is what happens when one of those ideas somehow makes it to the big screen.

The story is effectively told through the modern-day plot advancements surrounding one of the last immortals, Christopher Lambert, the Highlander, interspersed with episodes from his nearly 500 years of life, where he discovers his powers, gets trained by Sean Connery, loves and loses. (People often mistakenly call all of the immortals Highlanders. This is sloppy; only Christopher Lambert is a Scottish Highlander by birth, while the rest come from all over the place.) These frequent jumps back and forth through time allow Highlander it’s greatest stylistic quirk: absurd form cuts. The camera moves through the ceiling of a modern day parking garage up through a hillock in medieval Scotland. Lambert’s face from the pasts jarringly merges with a wall-size graffiti portrait of the Mona Lisa. A random zoom-in on his fish tank in his New York apartment becomes an underwater shot in a Scottish lake. The list goes on. These transitions would be unbearably gaudy if not for the brazen glee of the filmmaker at his own flashy gambit.

And so for the actual components of the film. Generally pretty good. The director has a good idea for set-piece composition, and the film clicks in the back of your head in the way that you know you’re watching something cool. The sight of Christopher Lambert, wearing a trench coat and fighting a 7-foot tall leather punk with a samurai sword is really pretty out there, but pulled-off in a believably novel fashion. Lambert can’t act worth beans, however, and some of his one-liners are horrendous. (Highlander does manage to explain what the hell is up with his voice; he’s lived so long he has no consistent accent.) The plot being split between the past and future as it is, the narrative on either side isn’t particularly developed, especially as the past scenes occasionally make huge jumps in time. It feels a bit like Highlander: Part 1, and indeed many of the scenes I thought I remembered in this movie were actually in the second. (I had the same experience watching The Neverending Story again.)

Once Lambert decapitates his centuries old enemy, a tongue-flicking, giggling, sadist, he achieves, er, whatever it is you get when “There can be only one.” A bunch of crazy hand-drawn demons come out of the ether and lift Lambert into the air, imparting him with Oneliness, and the movie is over. There’s a brief scene where he’s frolicking with his new girlfriend where casual reference is made to his new God-like powers, but he doesn’t seem to be taking it too seriously. I was left scratching my head about how the sequel could possibly start. Weren’t the immortals actually aliens or something? How the fuck does Sean Connery come back? Now that there’s only one, how can there be not one? Find out in Highlander II: The Quickening.

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: Blue Chips.

2008-09-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday again and I'm back with the second entry of my new basketball film series for Graydon's blog 48 Minutes of Hell.

Click on over to find out everything you ever wanted to know about Nick Nolte's classic basketball morality tale Blue Chips.

Drunk Drive-In Theater: The Exorcist

2008-09-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be honest. Most of the time, when I'm watching movies, I've had a few. Sometimes a multitude. I generally consider this to be immaterial to my ratings system and critical viewing faculty, but once in a while I can't kid myself. Once in a while I'm drunk to the point where watching a movie, going to bed, and waking up the next morning are all the same event.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to rewatch that movie.

And thus I bring you a new feature here at The Erection of Disbelief, Drunk Drive-In Cinema, where I watch a movie hammered-drunk and provide my real-time thoughts.

And for our inaugural post, The Exorcist. I did not come close to finishing the movie, and can't be sure as to what I was referring to.

"Man, I’m Drunk

Alright, so far the Exorcist has been pretty low-key

Some shit happened in the middle East, regarding some devil statues

Oh my it’s the present!

There’s some major Halloween music going on surrounding the current state of things

“The Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Min story”

What the fuck, there’s kids playing and shit.

Clive Owen should have starred in this movie.

Some street punks in New York are showing disrespect

This priest is a bitch momma’s boy

Weedgie board, bad news

Man, there are too many people fucking around with going to sleep and such

Shutttt up, who is this dumb girl with her lesbianic nurse

“I think I’ve lost faith Tom”

Woah, lesbianic tensions within the film

SHUT UP Where are the demons"

Babe

2008-09-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

Director: Chris Noonan
Year: 1995
Leads: Babe, Rex, Fly, Ferdinand, James Cromwell
Classification: Children’s Film
Rating: *****

I liked Babe just fine when it first came out on tape, but my strongest memory of the experience was my father becoming hungry watching the film and leaving the room to retrieve a potted ham, which he ate with glee.

My feeling regarding Babe: Pig in the City are well known to anyone who would dare call me a friend, but until now I’ve sadly neglected its predecessor, dismissing it as a well-made children’s film that made the sublime triumph of Pig in the City possible.

I was wrong. Babe had me on the verge of tears for most of its runtime, and the levee burst on a few occasions. A lot of occasions. From the sheer beauty of it all. It’s like God kissed every frame of a film reel, and Babe was the result. Gorgeous, strange, imposing, uplifting, and transcendent. Granted, it’s not as perfect as Pig in the City, which was kissed by something indescribably greater than God, but it’s in the ballpark.

Babe can be read as a parable regarding the deep-road blocks standing in way of perfect inter-being understanding that prevents us from truly loving each other, and allowing our better instincts to descend into pettiness, jealousy, and violence. It also presents operates as a thoughtful consideration of the inevitability of death and the lengths we go to avoid considering it maturely.

The Hoggett farm is an isolated beatific glen, surrounded by impossibly green hills and fields, integrated perfectly into its natural landscape. But we never quite see the farm at the same angle twice, and the geography and architecture become almost fluid, unsettled. The inside of the farmhouse is hyperbolically cozy and cluttered, and suffers from the vicious influence of a pampered cat. Privilege is dispensed unequally amongst the animal residents of the farm, and a subtle acknowledgment of Animal Farm skates around the periphery of the narrative.

Unlike Animal Farm, though, Babe is ultimately a triumph over division, hatred, and discrimination, while integrating the dark and unavoidable elements of destiny that drive some to distraction. Babe makes a solemn commitment early in the film to never act unkindly toward a fellow animal. On the Hoggett farm the sheepdogs hate the sheep, and think pigs are stupid. The stupid sheep have nothing but disdain for their wolf masters, and live in constant fear of their reprisals. More importantly, there is a stark division amongst the creatures between animals with purpose and those without. Ferdinand the duck, acutely aware of the injustice of human carnivore behavior, reveals to Babe his back-engineered and hauntingly accurate understanding of their place in the world. Dogs wrangle sheep. Sheep produce wool. Chickens lay eggs. Cows produce milk. Horses pull carts. Cats catch mice. Ducks and pigs don’t do anything useful, and are thus eaten.

Thus the thrust of the film involves Babe overcoming this in-born prejudice of animal life, and finding his purpose, that of being a sheep pig. Farmer Hoggett, a stern man of few words, feels Babe’s potential deep in his soul. He is an apostle, and no matter how ridiculous he appears he steadfastly refuses to back down. He falters once, when he mistakes Babe for the murderer of a sheep, and takes the pig out to the shed with a shotgun. Babe, in his innocent glory, mistakes the barrels of the gun for the artificial feeding tubes of the corporate pig factory where he was born. Hoggett realizes his mistake before it is too late, and his faith becomes unshakable. Babe not only triumphs over the butcher’s block, but succeeds in breaching the deep divide between sheep and dogs, brokering a truce between the breeds that leads to near-Messianic harmony.

At’ll do pig, at’ll do

Fortress

2008-08-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

Director: Stuart Gordon
Year: 1993
Leads: Christopher Lambert, Kurtwood Smith, Loryn Locklin
Classification: Sci-Fi Action
Rating: ***½

Here again we have Stuart Gordon, with another top-notch B-movie with taffy-stretched budget. Fortress presents Stuart Gordon’s other specialty besides graphic body-horror: Wonky faux-earnest sci-fi actioners (Space Truckers, Robot Jox). These movies are almost always universally panned, but are actually almost on the same level as classics like Re-Animator. Well, maybe not Space Truckers.

You see, Gordon knows the Paul Verhoeven-ian secret of successful dystopic satire. You play it with a deathly straight face. There is NO winking at the camera in Fortress, no matter how ridiculous the proto-fascist goings on inside the futuristic prison become. Christopher Lambert as the lead is taking this seriously. And when you’re trapped in a hellish supermax prison 30 stories under the desert with roving Big-Brother camera enforcers, laser guarded cells, cyborg orphan storm troopers, and the constant threat of being ’intestinated’ by the kinky, impotent warden, that is no small feat.

In the future, breeding is almost illegal, and Christopher Lambert and his wife get caught trying to exit the country with a contraband fetus in her stomach. Both subsequently get thrown in the privately-operated Fortress, an escape-proof nightmare panopticon. The corporation in charge? MEN-TEL. The warden, the guy who played Red on That 70s’ Show, has total control of all goings-on with the help of his jealous A.I. life mate. To make matters worse, all inmates are force-fed an intestinator, a tracking device, thought monitor, and detonator all rolled into one package. If someone acts up or has unauthorized dreams, they get investigated, which begins with intense, dehabilitating pain and ends in awesome abdominal explosion. (I am heretofore referring to defecation as ’intestinating.’) How will our intrepid Christopher Lambert make it out in one piece?

Via the other key to a successful ironic dystopian genre film: Laying on the extreme violence. Heads explode, pizza-size holes are vaporized into chests, cyborgs get torn to gooey pieces, mouths foam, arms snap, etc. The only real criticism I have is that after Lambert gets a mind wipe from a psychedelic spinning astronaut test gyroscope thing he becomes completely inert for a chunk of the movie, grinding the fighting and plotting to halt. But Fortress succeeds, if only because the black, grinning backbone of the movie makes it pretty clear that truly terrible things can and will happen to likable characters (such as Jeffrey Combs ecstatically over-acted tweaky tech expert). When that medical buzz saw gets closer and closer to Lambert’s wife’s 9-months pregnant stomach, there’s no guarantee when it will stop.

(On a side-note, Fortress features one of the best man-to-man brawls ever put to film. This is because every full-forced punch, kick, or throw immediately produces the realistic result: the shit getting kicked out of you. By the end both combatants are bleeding everywhere and barely able to stand up. And not just artful gashes under the eyes or on the forehead.)

Top Gun

2008-08-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

Director: Tony Scott
Year: 1986
Leads: Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards. Val Kilmer
Classification: Military Drama
Rating: **

What is there left to say about Top Gun? Did anyone ever take it seriously? Did anyone ever take Tom Cruise seriously? It must have done something significant to our conception of rot-gut romance-dramas, because Gun has permanently lodged itself in our cultural conscience. It survived the transition from earnestly presented winner of the Oscar for best Music and Song to exuberant kitsch piece, and with flying colors. I’m just not sure what about the movie has endured so tenaciously.

Sure, Top Gun is an absurdly sappy, homoerotic, manipulative, goofy, self-serious etc. movie. The music is out of control, the dialogue is terrible, the drama contrived and boring, and Tom Cruise is a twinkling, creepy, vacant smirk machine. All of these factors make for an above average trip on the kitsch express. But there are dozens of movies from the 80s that follow the exact same archetype, just replacing fighter jets and air force academies with whatever other convenience hook in order to get men into the theaters to sit through the central tepid romance. (Tom Cruise starred in many of these films. Cocktail and Days of Thunder for instance). So why does Top Gun stick out?

For a film about fighter pilots, there is precious little dog fighting action. Most of the film concerns Tom Cruise swishing around and acting like he is physically attracted to the token love interest, a sexy government contractor who initially spurns his advances, only to immediately fall in love with him. He doesn’t exactly do anything to deserve this attention. He’s not the best pilot (that would be Iceman, played responsibly by Val Kilmer) and he doesn’t have much to say. His co-pilot, Goose, played by Anthony Edwards, sticks out as a three-dimensional human buoy next to Cruise’s jangly-toothed blandness. Which makes it all the sadder (at least, it should) when Goose gets his neck snapped in an ejection accident. Goose had a wife and kids. Cruise has a motorcycle and glass eyes.

Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise’s chief rival in the Top Gun academy, gets on Cruise’s case frequently for being sloppy and reckless. Iceman doesn’t make mistakes. And you know what? Iceman is right. What the hell was Tom Cruise thinking when he buzzes the control tower. It’s dangerous and unnecessary. Later, although he’s technically cleared of wrong-doing, it’s pretty easy to surmise that Cruise’s irresponsible behavior lead directly to Goose’s tragic death. Why the hell should we care about this tool? Iceman should be the star of Top Gun. He’s the cool one because he’s not too cool to buckle up. He’s even man enough to try and console his enemy Tom Cruise in the locker room about the death of his co-pilot, which was pretty much his fault. And Cruise has the gall to brush Iceman off. What a drip. Val Kilmer wins the Top Gun award at the end of the competition because he deserves it. Why is a movie called Top Gun not about the actual Top Gun?

Which brings me back to the original question: Why is Top Gun such a big deal? My best guess is that people are able to read its comically dated sensibilities very easily for a cheap ironic pay-off, without having to acknowledge that the majority of the films they actually like from the same time period are just as embarrassing in this day and age. And you know what? I bet Tony Scott would just love it if he could get away with making movies like Top Gun again. No need to bother with a plot, characterization, sensical transitions from scene to scene, or a tasteful musical score. Just occasional shots of jet engines, motor cycles, two songs for the entire sound track, one excited and happy, one pensive and sad, extended silhouettes of Tom Cruise in-expertly tongue-dancing with his lady love, credits. No, today’s garbage takes a little more work to make mediocre and forgettable.

Graydon's Take:

So, aside from agreeing with the majority of your criticisms, I have a particular beef to settle with this movie.

In the climax, when Maverick has been scrambled to aid Iceman as he is being over run by an increasing number of bogies, Cruise is struck by the same sense of panic and self-doubt that almost rendered him incapable of graduating alongside his classmates. It is crucial to note that when Cruise decides to deal with his personal demons he has already engaged the migs. He is not en route to but rather amidst a combat setting.

Nonetheless the enemy fighters allow him the personal space to disengage (which elicits cries of "damn it" from not only Kilmer but also their flight commander back at the carrier). Maverick merely flies away, removing himself from the battle at hand so he can flatly mutter over and over "talk to me, Goose."

Once he and his departed co-pilot have had a little come-to-Jesus, he returns to the dogfight, catching the enemy fighters completely off guard. "What, that roguishly handsome yet decidedly untalented fighter pilot is still here? I thought he flew off into the nearby distance so as to have a moment of undisturbed reflection."

I shit you not, there has never been a more unrealistic portrayal of aerial combat than the final dogfight in Top Gun.

On a personal note, when I was a kid, I had a snake named Maverick. Yes, it was named after the Top Gun character.

My Response:

I'm somewhat embarrassed that I forgot to address the 'end' of the movie. After fucking up all over the place, Maverick totally redeems himself by blowing away some Migs in the fashion Graydon describes. The problem is that the movie is over, but then some imaginary international incident occurs involving no named nation, and without any explanation why they would try to fuck with an American aircraft carrier. What would actually be a red-alert international incident that would probably lead to a world war is reduced to a chance for Tom Cruise to prove himself against anonymous foreign combatants. And Iceman basically hands it to him. Lame, and unsportsmanlike.

Movies About Basketball Considered by Me, Cody, for Graydon: Hoosiers

2008-08-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

The basketball film. A film about both basketball, and what basketball really means for those who love the sport. Those fine, tall men out there on the court aren’t just passing around an inflated ball and taking shots at a metal hoop, they’re desperately hucking away their demons, toward their friends and colleagues. But they know that at any moment they have to take those demons right back, in the form of a ball, to alleviate those around them, and to steal that precious round demon away from their opponent, to bear it themselves, for the sake of the game.

As a new cross-feature with Graydon Gordian's avant-garde basketball blog 48 Minutes of Hell, I'll be digging in to the rich topsoil of Basketball cinema every Thursday until I've reviewed every single movie ever made about basketball, featuring basketball, or starring basketball players. This will take several years, and probably the world will end before I finish.

The first whistle blows today with classic sports drama Hoosiers. Go for the basketball movie, and stay for the basketball.

Southland Tales

2008-08-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

Director: Richard Kelly
Year: 2006
Leads: Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott, Justin Timberlake
Classification: ?
Rating: ?

This is the way the world ends. With time travel, perpetual energy, soul duplicates, porn stars, former SNL cast members, ice cream trucks, rocket launchers, zepplins, neo-Marxists, and Justin Timberlake music videos. I guess.

Southland Tales, the jaw-droppingly belabored follow up to Richard Kelly’s indie-pop hit Donnie Darko, makes his first film completely consistent and intelligible by comparison. On the front of it, Tales is an abstract depiction of the events surrounding the end of the world, just a few years in the future(!), and centers principally on Dwayne Johnson as an amnesiac conservative movie star who finds himself in bed with the revolutionary neo-Marxists after waking up in the desert. Texas, you see, has been obliterated in a nuclear terrorist attack, launching all-out warfare with the Middle East and also creating a fascist nation-state in the USA. The neo-Marxists seek to upset this balance, and are composed primarily of ex-SNL and Mad TV cast members, most of whom are either double or triple agents.

Wait a second, where was I? This is the way the world ends! Tales is narrated by Justin Timberlake, I forgot to mention, who plays a pop star who was drafted and subsequently maimed in the battle of Fallujah. He walks the audience through the convoluted exposition of the film (it might make more sense if you’ve read the three prequel graphic novels written by Kelly) and occasionally chimes in with thoughts on the action and increasingly fictitious quotes from the book of Revelations. He also apparently watches over most of the beach-side action in the film, which takes place in the California ‘Southlands,’ from an elevated sniper turret. At one point he sells some drugs, called Liquid Karma, also the name of the bio-current perpetual energy production process, and apparently the same thing, to some guy, which triggers a quasi-music video in the middle of the movie, which I present below.

Excellent. Wait, no it isn’t. What the fuck was this movie about? Oh yeah, Sean William Scott plays twin messiahs (actually time-warp dopplegangers) one of whom is undercover as a fascist police enforcer trying to get dirt on the Rock in order to derail the election of a fascist senator. Because the Rock is trying to make a movie about the apocalypse with Sarah Michelle Gellar, an ex-porn star talk show host neo-Marxist revolutionary, who is actually a double agent for the government. Maybe. And the other Sean William Scott just kind of runs around. Meanwhile a bunch of people get shot, including Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler.

Southland Tales is a solid two-and-a-half hours long.

And, um, there’s a zepplin. And Will Sasso is in it. And so is John Larroquette. And John Lovitz. That all deserves some credit. Southland Tales is basically John From Cincinnati stretched thick and thin over the framework of an action-thriller. Right down to the washed out Southern California aesthetic as the major theater of the end times. It makes as little sense as John, but has roughly thrice the amount of plot and characters. And like John, it’s almost impossible to tell what the fuck is going on at any given moment, and there are long stretches of time where you’re not sure why you’re watching at all. But like John, the ending is baffling, strangely beautiful, and makes perfect sense somehow if you don’t try to think about it.

Pimps don’t commit suicide.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

2008-08-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

Director: Scott Glosserman
Year: 2006
Leads: Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals
Classification: Horror Mockumentary
Rating: **½

Despite the title sounding like one of those shitty straight-to-tape biopics about serial killers, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon deserves some small credit for trying to breathe life back into the teenage slasher film. The concept is sort of clever; a self-promoting serial-killer commissions a team of film school students to document the set-up and execution of a classic slasher massacre, to take place at an abandoned farmhouse. In the fictional world of Mask, the legends of ghouls like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger are all real, with the general assumption that they were in fact just extremely clever serial killers who cultivated larger-than-life legends through extreme effort and advanced murder choreography. Our hero, Leslie Vernon, is eager to join their ranks.

Though I suppose the characterization is an obvious one, Leslie is a grinning Midwestern nice guy with real zest for life and a cheery commitment to his work as a serial killer. This should have been annoying, but the actor, Nathan Baesel in his debut film, sells it well. The first 2/3s of the film focus almost entirely on him as he plots and capers, and would have been unwatchable without his nuanced take on the role. Mask also deserves some props for taking what is essentially the premise of Scream, a tongue-in-cheek dissection of the slasher film, and making it almost fresh again for 2/3s of the run time. It’s kind of like the Cloverfield of teenager punishment movies. Or it least is should have been.

Most of the film is anchored in the subjective camera perspective of the documentary crew as they try to remain neutral in the face of escalating depravity. (Actually, Mask is more like a softer-core version of Man Bites Dog than anything else.) This hook is mostly effective and amusing as we watch Leslie set-up an improbably complicated scenario to play out on the big nigh of the teenage massacre. Turns out slasher villains are incredibly meticulous, plotting out every movement of every player, sabotaging every potential weapon, sawing halfway through tree branches, and appearing in flashes of lightning at just the right time in order to maximize terror and give a single man a fighting chance of killing a dozen people. Watching Leslie go through all the motions in a Penn and Teller-esque fashion presents an amusing alternate view on the genre, and the movie could have been great if it had maintained the perspective from start to finish.

Unfortunately Mask rips its own intestines out during the final act of the movie. Though there are flashes of what could be an objective perspective throughout the movie, a late-game twist sees the film crew abandon the project in order to stop Leslie from killing innocent teenagers. The film then lapses into a sub-standard objective-camera slasher film, essentially transforming into a lame retread of Scream. At the same time we lose contact with the off-camera persona of Leslie, and are left with a bland masked specter to the end of the film. While the twist itself, that the documentary crew was the real target the entire time, was potentially clever, they never should have dropped the docu-cam. It makes no sense and completely transforms and degrades the tone of the movie. The movie almost redeems itself with security camera footage over the credits, showing a coroner preparing to examine Leslie’s charred remains in a familiar latter-day Friday the 13th manner. The shot goes on for too long. You expect the body to sit-up, but nothing happens. This is brilliant. The point of the movie being, after all, that undead serial killers are elaborate hoaxes. Then the body sits up. Sigh.

Bucket of Blood

2008-08-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

Director: Roger Corman
Year: 1959
Leads: Dick Miller, Barboura Morris
Classification: Classic Horror Comedy
Rating: ***½

Bucket of Blood exemplifies the best aspects of vintage cheapo Roger Corman horror films. It’s barely over an hour long, most of the cinematography is stagey, the audio sounds like it was all recorded on the same microphone hidden in the center of the set, and the whole production looks and feels like it was slapped together in a week. And yet despite its age and borderline technical malfeasance, there isn’t a dull moment to be found, and the lo-fi pitch black humor feels fresh as a recently dispatched cat.

The plot, such as it is, follows Walter Paisley, a half-wit loser who works a busboy at a trendy bohemian café at the height of the beatnik movement. Poor Walter totally buys into all of the pretentious trappings of the scenesters and wants nothing more than enter their elite fold. He memorizes every word of beat poetry uttered by the café’s star poet, even though the poet himself refuses to repeat the same poem twice or even to remember the words he says, because “repetition is death.” (One memorable line: “Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.”) Besides being a B horror picture, Bucket of Blood is a surprisingly sharp satire of beatnik culture, both in its casually witty skewering of the art an culture of the time period and in the time period in which it was made. (It wasn’t even 1960 yet, most people had no idea what beat poetry was.)

Walter, misguided by the vacuous high-falluting notions of his boheme heros, takes a crack at sculpture in his free time, but ends up accidentally killing a cat in the process. But art is death, or death is art, or life is death, or something, so Walter, in a moment of grisly accidental inspiration, makes himself a radical dead cat statuette. This art piece, mistaken by the café crowd as a bold return to realistic form, becomes a sensation, and soon Walter finds himself in high-demand. The only problem is a lack of more dead cats, but this is soon solved via the accidental self-defense murder of an undercover police officer. From there it’s a slippery slide down the murder slope as Walter needs more and more bodies to cover in clay for his big art opening.

There’s more going on technically, but the groovy tone of the movie never allows for anything to get too serious or matter too much. Two disaffected beatnik drifters provide sardonic color commentary on the goings on, and pretty much act as the god voice of the movie.

After listening to a beat poem:
Beatnik 1: “Crazy man. What did he say?”
Beatnik 2: “Didn’t you hear him?”
Beatnik 1: “No man, I’m too far out.”

Discussing the art of sculpture:
Beatnik 1: “I saw a statue once. It was called “The 3rd time Phyllis saw me, she exploded.”
Beatnik 2: “Man, what kind of statue was that?”
Beatnik 1: “I dunno, it was made out of driftwood and dipped in fluoric acid. Very wild.”

Teeth

2008-08-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Director: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Year: 2007
Leads: Jess Weixler, John Hensley
Classification: Contemporary Horror
Rating: *1/2

"Your mouth is saying one thing babe, but your sweet pussy is saying something very . . . different."

That bit of dialogue pretty much encapsulates the level on which Teeth operates. The concept is admittedly high-concept; a repressed teenage girl, a popular speaker at a conference for youth abstinence, bears the curse of Vagina Dentata, or in layman's terms, wicked vagina teeth. And wouldn't you know it, over the course of the movie, despite her chastity pledge, she finds herself in a series of sexual situations that inevitably end in mid-coitus castration.

There isn't a whole lot else to say about the movie. The vagina teeth, defined only by a single sick-looking specimen found on a crime scene, bite off penises. That's about as far as the writer/director got with the concept. Some dim attempt at social satire floats around in the background, but it's lost among the overly dramatic movements of the plot. I give Teeth credit for some truly gruesome shots of penis decapitation, and for nasty bit involving a dog eating its master's severed member, but most of the limited mayhem doesn't really hit home.

Thematically the film tries to make some sort of case for female empowerment, particularly through our heroine's eventual acceptance of her femme fatal powers, but this progression is both hazy and simplistic. Her first foray into full-on sexual relations turns into a narratively lazy date-rape, and the offender is duly severed by her protective dentata. Later on her voracious dewlaps bite the fingers off of a gynecologist who has the gall to examine her vagina. Later still she de-man's an acquaintance who gets her fucked up on booze and pills, and promises that he's the mythic hero she needs to conquer her internal manifestation of male horror. Turns out he just wanted to lay her for a bet, and her teeth get hungry. Off with his head.

Teeth climaxes by having our heroine willfully turn her dentata on her unscrupulous step-brother, who has harbored repressed lust since a childhood incident involving a kiddie pool and a curious toddler finger. It isn't clear why she has to mutilate her step-brother, or what crowning thematic significance this holds. All men are rapists? Every act of penetration is inherently an act of violence? Maybe. Methinks this material would have been better served by an uncommonly edgy 70s sexploitation film that didn't waster most of its time dithering around with repetitive psychodrama.

From Beyond

2008-08-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

Director: Stuart Gordon
Year: 1986
Leads: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree
Classification: Cult Horror
Rating: ****

Stuart Gordon remains one of the most under-appreciated directors in the industry. The man is able to take a micro-budget and C-grade actors and produce beautifully fucked-up mini-masterpieces. Best known for creating the Reanimator series, Gordon has actually been fairly prolific, even after his days of 'theatrical' releases ended. From Beyond is from his mid-eighties hey-day as part of the underground horror boom, and it demonstrates some of his best work as a visual artist and an unapologetic freak/gore monger.

The setup is fairly simple; a mad scientist has created a machine that stimulates the pineal gland and allows humans to see and interact with the higher dimension above ours. Said dimension is filled with horrifying monsters, one of which kills said mad scientist. His assistant, played by Jeffrey Combs, best know as mad scientist Herbert West from the Reanimator trilogy, survives, but is committed to a mental institution. A pioneering mental health expert extricates him and brings him back to the scene of the experiment because damnit, he just might be telling the truth about those extra-dimensional monsters (his pineal gland is huge).

From there on out it's the sorcerer's apprentice, a beautiful psychologist, an a sassy ex-professional football player orderly hanging out in a creepy mansion, getting fucked-up on pineal gland stimulating vibrations. The majority of the movie doesn't have a narrative per say, but is more a series of excuses for that infernal dimension machine to get turned back on and for our heroes to see some messed-up stuff, especially surrounding the evil extra-dimensional incarnation of the original mad scientist. Also, the mad scientist was an S & M enthusiast, and there are all sorts of thematic through lines about the nature of extreme experience, mental illness, sexuality, and addiction. Stuart Gordon is essentially the B-movie doppelganger of David Cronenberg.

Gordon, as with Cronenberg, is a master of body horror, and there are many spectacularly grisly practical effects on display, especially as things progress and get exponentially weirder. (I might go so far as to say that Gordon cross-influenced Cronenberg, though I have no proof that Cronenberg has even heard of him.) By the third act of the movie the main character is completely bald and has a tentacle/penis-like pineal gland bursting from his forehead. There's a gorgeous scene where he sucks the eyeball out a woman doctor's head in order to suck her brain out through her forehead. It's riveting and far more viscerally affecting than any gore-shot from a studio horror film probably ever.

From Beyond also provides the special pleasure of extreme and straight-faced debasement of its actors. Jeffrey Combs gets swallowed whole by a giant worm and comes out with his entire body shaved. The ex-football orderly spends a good five minutes in a speedo after being startled out of bed by pineal vibrations, and uses a good chunk of that time to wrassle with previously mentioned giant basement worm. The mad scientist bad guy, an older gentleman, is forced to appear completely naked several times, covered in ectoplasm. The beautiful psychologist finds herself grotesquely manhandled by the monstrous extra-dimensional mad scientist, who rips her shirt and underwear off methodically, and then proceeds to awkwardly molest her with a handful of elongated prosthetic fingers.

If that doesn't have you sold I don't know what will. If nothing else the movie is worth watching for the fantastic low-budget prosthetic effects. Stuart Gordon can piss on your head and tell you it's raining, with a rock-solid eye for composition, color, and art-design that elevates what should have been a routine schlock production into a horror classic. Jeffrey Combs also puts in a riveting, stilted lead performance. By god that man can act/can't act in a truly spellbinding fashion.

Tropic Thunder

2008-08-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Director: Ben Stiller
Year: 2008
Leads: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black
Classification: Action Comedy
Rating: *

Did you know? Actors are self-important, empty-headed, pussies! Hollywood is amoral! Action films are often ridiculous! Isn't that hilarious? I bet you didn't even know. Ben Stiller bets you didn't either, and desperately hopes that critical thoughts have never crossed your mind about the film industry. Because that's the only way Tropic Thunder could approach relevance or meta-commentary.

The movie has one joke and that joke is hammered in painfully in the opening few minutes of fake movie trailers. Rap stars are shameless self-promoters and have raunchy lyrics! Action franchises have unnecessary sequels! Broad scatological humor isn't funny! There are serious dramas that take themselves too seriously, especially ones about gay people. Har har! Yes, Ben Stiller has seen movies before, and trusts that you have too, but lacks any nuanced understanding of what makes movies worth satirizing. Ben Stiller probably loved that outbreak of Brokeback Mountain parody trailers on Youtube a few years back. That is the level of humor on display in Tropic Thunder.

Instead of bothering with plot details, I'll summarize the progression of the hilarious 'joke' that provides the backbone of the movie. Jack Black is a bottom-barrel comedic actor who does lots of drugs! Robert Downey Jr. is a serious ACTOR who takes his roles too seriously! Ben Stiller is so self-centered and desperate for a hit that he thinks the whole thing is a movie, even though it clearly isn't. Nyuck nycuk nycuck. It's silly that Downey Jr. is acting like a stereotypical black person! A real black person even calls him out on it once in a while, hysterically defusing the stereotyping by calling him 'Kangaroo Jack' and 'Crocodile Dundee!' Actors take roles as Oscar bait! Wait, did Ben Stiller tell you yet, a lot of actors are stupid and self-centered?

Here's where things get really funny. Ben Stiller understands the 101 of sketch comedy. You create an assumption, and then you fucking pull the rug out from under your audience. Stiller's oblivious jerk character actually just wants to be liked! Downey Jr.'s blackface method actor doesn't actually have a strong sense of self! Black's drug-addled comedy star is actually ashamed of his fart movies! Nick Nolte's grizzled Vietnam vet is actually a pussy! Tom Cruise's mean, screaming movie executive likes to get down and boogie! The machismo steeped rapper Alpa Chino (HAHAHAHA) is actually a homosexual! That, ladies and gentleman, is satire according to Ben Stiller.

Let's take a step back. Could Ben Stiller, a man who spent the last ten years happily wallowing in mass-market PG-13 dreck, actually come up with a cutting or coherent attack on the industry that is paying him millions of dollars to star in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian? Nope. Could the director of Zoolander actually produce a competent, cutting-edge comedy? Nope. Could a man whose career is based on getting a little bit agitated and talking like a jerk about something that he's clearly wrong about present a nuanced commentary on spectacle filmmaking?

Which leads me to one of the most glaring flaws of Tropic Thunder. Besides not being funny, it's an all around shitty movie. Ben Stiller has the visual acumen of a Hannah Barbara cartoon. His compositions are flat, hokey, and plastic-looking, and his staging is obvious, witless, and redundant. Which, when applied to something as innocuously stupid and unimaginative as Zoolander, isn't that big of deal. The problem here is that Ben Stiller is trying to achieve filmic satire. He couldn't for the life of him actually film something as kinetic and competent as the kind of action movie he's trying to parody, nor could he make a smart, well-timed comedy. But in Thunder he has the audacity to try both, and the result is an ugly, despondent mess that plays out like the parody of what Stiller thinks a satire might be like. It's a desperately hollow film that takes itself as seriously as a comedy as the movies it pretends to mock take themselves seriously as dramas or actioners. And it all lets the middle-brow audience walk out 11 bucks lighter winking at themselves with the vague notion that they were in on the joke. Take that Hollywood. Still, though, those trailers for Lakeview Terrace and Righteous Kill looked pretty good, we should go see those . . .

Much has been said about Downey Jr.'s performance. The best I can say is that he doesn't necessarily embarrass himself. His character is extremely overplayed by the script, and his faux-black dialogue just isn't funny. Downey Jr. manages to throw in some amusing facial ticks and line readings on occasion, but again, the sole joke here is that an actor is so serious that he's wearing blackface. Wakka wakka. Much has also been made about Tom Cruise's bullshit 'secret' cameo as a bombastic movie executive. This is a PR move, pure and simple, and based on what I overheard of people's reactions coming out of the theater, it worked dispiritingly well. It isn't funny. It isn't edgy. It isn't actually sending up anything or anyone. It is Tom Cruise desperately trying to show the world that he's still cool, really, even after all that Scientology, couch-jumping stuff. He can curse as much as he wants! Fuck fuck, cock cock! Ha ha! And then he can break character completely, even though he doesn't have the screen time to make a character in the first place. But look, he's wearing fat make-up and he's dancing to hip-hop! Tom Cruise? Dancing to hip-hop? You know what, that guy's alright after all! (Wait, didn't Ben Stiller try to make a point or something earlier about how wearing fat make-up and dancing around and stuff isn't funny?)

This film would receive no stars except that I laughed three times. Time the first was Steve Coogan's Deep Blue Sea style exit from the film. Time the second, immediately afterward, involved Ben Stiller giving one of his standard ear-gouging flustered jerk monologues, but with a ridiculously gory severed head as a prop (he thinks it's a special effect!) The juxtaposition between Stiller's lame, exhausted shtick and one of the most horrendous gore pieces I've ever seen in a studio film almost created something special for a second there. Time the third was when Stiller chucks a toddler off a bridge, though this was subsequently ruined by the precious acknowledgment that the baby is just fine afterward. The Simple Jack retard film within the film is almost funny as perhaps the sole example of a un-safe idea realized un-safely, but gets pulverized as a concept later in the film by a truly horrible and convenient plot development.

Hoo-wee. Tropic Thunder is a terrible film, and far more egregiously, terribly unfunny.

Lolita (1962)

2008-08-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Leads: George Mason, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers
Classification: Classic Drama
Rating: **

A hamburger or a Humburger. This choice is never presented in Kubrick's curiously flaccid 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's stellar novel about obsession, one-sided romance, pedophilia, and verbal deception. The term 'nymphet,' our hero Humbert Humbert's pet name for adolescent girls isn't used once. Obviously adapting Lolita presents any number of icky challenges, especially in the 60s, but the principal difficulty lies in expressing the sinister, repugnant, melancholic, and generally hilarious tone of the novel. Kubrick's version fails on almost all of these accounts.

For one thing, actually portraying Humbert Humbert (which isn't his real name, and is intentionally ridiculous, and is never questioned in the film) is self-defeating. His beautiful monstrosity oozes from the multitudinous layers of often contradictory self-depiction. When depicted objectively, he's just a sad, awkward middle-aged creep. Certainly the novel hints at this truth, but Lolita the novel resides in the realm of fantasy. The film remains objective, and thus boring.

Another critical flaw the movie makes regards the more obvious issue of depicting man-girl love. This problem is neatly solved by casting a near-adult actress as the 12, er, 14-year-old Lolita. She's of mature proportion and is gorgeous. Why wouldn't Humbert want a piece? Aside from the psychological grossness of the step-father surrogate situation, their unwholesome relationship just doesn't come across as fucked up enough. Lolita isn't even dirty and stupid like she is in the book, just kind of bratty.

But this has all focused too much on the book. We're talking about a movie here! Technically, it's probably okay. Shot competently, without frills. George Mason does his best as a fumbling Humbert, but depressingly lacks the menace and texture needed to make him either detestable or sympathetic. Peter Sellers, as an overly-present Claire Quilty, steals every scene he's in, though his depiction runs too close to his Strangelove work to truly render the character as a horrifying arch-pervert. But at least he's having fun, which is sorely lacking from the production as a whole, and is perhaps the most grievous omission from the source material.

The plot is lackluster, and feels like it was stitched together from the least objectionable parts of the novel. Humbert and Lolita's cross-country motor lodge molestation vacation is almost completely absent, as is Humbert's rich back story. We're supposed to feel bad when an adult Lolita rejects Humbert, and he runs away crying to sad music. We're not supposed to feel bad for Humbert Humbert, we're supposed to feel bad about Humbert Humbert feeling bad for Humbert Humbert. If we choose the Humburger.

Real Genius

2008-08-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

Director: Martha Coolidge
Year: 1985
Leads: Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret
Classification: Classic Teen Comedy
Rating: ****

Where better place to start our first regular feature "Everything Val Kilmer Touches Turns to Gold" than with the mid-eighties teen semi-classic Real Genius. Not to say that Val Kilmer was the star of the film, as the modern-day DVD cover would have you believe. Rather, he's the eccentric foil to the real star, Mitch, a genuinely unattractive boy genius who gets plucked from a public high school and dropped into a super-college for eerily smart teenagers. Kilmer plays Chris, the wacky, fast-talking, verbal jujitsu expert who reluctantly becomes the uptight Mitch's mentor.

Where the fuck was this movies when I was an adolescent? I missed it entirely. I was wistfully imaging what this film would have meant to me if I had seen it at the optimal time period of awkward youth. This is a film about 'geeks' and 'brains' without any normals. Revenge of the Nerds was essentially a nerd joke. Real Genius actually celebrates those of super intellect with nary a wink of condescension. Instead of nerds versus jocks, the primary conflict entails eccentric genius teenagers versus asshole genius teenagers (especially that douchebag Kent).

In a refreshing turn of events, most of the actors are actually unpleasant to look at. Mitch, our hero, looks kind of like one of the cat people from Stephen King's Sleepwalkers. His love interest, an A.D.D. addled misfit girl, is only attractive for a girl at a nerd academy. And lets face it, while more handsome and alluring than any of us could ever hope to be, Val Kilmer is kind of weird looking, especially in the early years before his head filled out (but before the later years when it filled out too much).

Essentially the film posits an almost Ayn Randian paradise of pure intellectual superiority. But these baby geniuses don't have their noses buried in a book all day, ho no. (Probably they do but we never really have to see that.) They seem to spend most of their time fucking around in the hallway, skating on magic ice that skips the water process and turns directly into steam, scamming vending machines with nitro glycerin, and reassembling cars in dorm rooms. There're hardly any of the Randian fascist underpinnings, either, because as it turns out super smarts are best utilized for having an awesome time. Sure, Mitch and Val Kilmer are being pressured to complete a 5 megawatt space laser project for the military, but hell, playing with lasers is fun. And once Kilmer deigns to drop in on the project he immediately turns the death ray into a sign post for a bitching underground genius party. This party takes place in a geniusly converted auditorium, with a waterslide and splashdown pool in the orchestra pit. Also, Kilmer is so smart that he convinced a bunch of hot girls to get down with some poindexters. Perfect.

I would have been content to watch the above scenarios repeat over and over again, but the dictates of narrative film require a plot to kick in at some point. It turns out the military wants to use the death ray to kill people. Mitch and Val Kilmer realize that this is against the spirit of Real Genius, and conspire to sabotage the project. This whole process takes far too long and doesn't feature nearly enough of Val Kilmer swaggering, boldly and successfully hitting on girls, making conversational mincemeat of his foes, wearing cool T-shirts, etc. Everything comes back together at the end, though, when our team summons the dean of the college and a real live senator to their evil professor's house to watch . . . the death ray filling the house with popcorn and totally trashing the evil nerd who thinks Jesus is talking to him through his teeth (watch the movie to find out more).

No further mention is made of the senator or dean. Apparently seeing a well-regarded professor's house fucked up with popcorn is enough to derail a long-gestating government laser project. The film ends sublimely with Val and company looking on as neighborhood children frolic in a fresh popcorn mountain. Mitch even kind of touches his girlfriend's shoulders. If I could have been so lucky as a 15 year old.

Everything Val Kilmer Touches Turn to Gold

2008-08-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

Over the course of this project we'll be delving into several subjects of remark that span multiple movies. This series of subcategories shall begin with one of the most illustrious topics in modern filmmaking: Val Kilmer.

Val Kilmer is one of our important working actors, whose career has spanned many highs and lows. But let's get real; a low for Val Kilmer is a soaring peak when compared to the average actor. Whether snapping a rabbit's neck in The Island of Doctor Moreau, drunkenly spinning a tin whiskey cup in Tombstone, or hiding a tiny gun under his balls in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Val always has something beautiful and ineffable to offer his audience, even if the surrounding film sags pathetically around the erect tentpole of his performance.

And so we'll be teasing out that something special from every film Val appears in, if it already wasn't obvious enough to anyone with the good sense God gave a donkey.

Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter

2008-08-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Director: Robert Burge
Leads: Paul Sorvino, Abe Vigoda, Cassandra Edwards
Year: 1986
Classification: Forgotten Comedy
Rating: *

I found a copy of this film on VHS on a bargain tape rack in front of a video store in Williamsburg. The cover was gorgeous, featuring an old-school cartoon caricature of the main characters in a scene that never came close to occurring in the actual movie, namely Paul Sorvino running down a hospital corridor from a snip-happy doctor and his pregnant wife, presumably insistent on taking his Italian manhood in the worst way.

Sadly the film delivered on little of this promise, and included far too much plot not connected to vasectomies. It's filmed on low-grade film stock, and from the quality of the performances and compositions I don't think they knocked off more than one take per scene. The basic action involves Sorvino as a well-off bank employee who loves to knock up his wife as a privilege of his Italian heritage. The opening credits are a montage of his unlucky spouse going into labor over and over again, at the most inconvenient times. Sorvino never seems to mind, as he draws closer and closer to realizing his dream of creating a soft ball team composed entirely of his offspring.

But his wife has other ideas, along the lines of not squeezing out every last good egg in the service of child production. After the 8th spawn she finally works up the nerve to ask Sorvino to get a vasectomy, to prevent further cruel and unusual punishment to her cervix. But check this: Sorvino is not having it. He's Italian and Catholic, and he'll be damned if he's going to his grave half a man. This argument is immediately and counter-intuitively followed by the demand that his wife go on the pill, or get a diaphragm, or an I.U.D., or an "F.B.I. or a Post Office." His wife insists that these options are not safe, and it's difficult not to work up some sympathy for Sorvino, because the pill is over 99.9% effective, and his wife doesn't seem to understand the advances that reproductive science has made since the 50s. (Condoms are never brought into the picture. Which is excusable, as they are 'sucker cozies.')

And that's the set-up. Oh, and also he's embezzled money from the bank with his nephew or protégé or something, and is being investigated. The rest of the movie shambles between weak domestic drama/comedy and weak corporate drama/comedy as Sorvino's wife keeps on bringing the vasectomy thing up and the law keeps on bringing the embezzlement thing up. I lost track of a good twenty minutes or so near the end, but eventually everything works out okay, with Sorvino in the hospital for an unrelated matter but then valiantly deciding to get a vasectomy as well. Also the crime thing goes away, probably being pinned on someone else.

Vasectomy suffers terribly for not fulfilling the madcap vas deferens severing premise of the poster, instead sliding into embarrassing sentimentality and family melodrama. Any film that ends with the straight-faced and meaningful acknowledgment of a ghost in the distance fails.

"Tell Francis I'll finance a whole chain of hot dog stands, if that's what he wants"

Fracture

2008-08-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

Director: Gregory Hoblit
Leads: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling
Year: 2007
Classification: Forgotten Contemporary Thriller
Rating: **

Do you remember when Fracture, the high-tension legal thriller starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling, was tearing up the multiplexes last year? I don’t, and I have an eye for such things. To be fair, I don’t think Anthony Hopkins remembers either, as his latter day acting career has mostly involved taking roles by mistake or boredom. The basic plot of film involves Hopkins straight-up shooting his wife in the head after discovering a marital indiscretion. Harsh, but perhaps understandable. It turns out she just didn’t love him the way he loved her. (With a farewell hug and a bullet, as far as the movie is concerned with the nuances of their marriage.) Hopkins, though, in Robert Blake fashion decides to terminate their civil contract in a brazenly open fashion, practically inviting the police to pin an air tight murder case on his weathered bosom.

But wait! Things aren’t as clear-cut as they initially seem. The gun Hopkins was waving around next to dead wife’s body has never been fired! Not once. And what’s that? His crime scene confession is invalidated by the arresting officer’s conflict of interest, namely that he was banging the pre-corpse in question that very afternoon? Nevermind overwhelming circumstantial evidence and absolutely no alibi given on Hopkins’ part, we’re in for a legal drama.

Enter Ryan Gosling, the hotshot Assistant District Attorney of Los Angeles, who has one foot out the door toward a swank private defense attorney job. He’s got a 97% conviction rate and hates losing. Fucking hates it. But he’s convinced at the last second to take on the slam-dunk Hopkins murder trial. As previously stated, the case goes south quick, and he finds himself on the losing end of an embarrassingly high-profile murder trial. Also, he has a vaguely Southern accent, because he apparently pulled himself up by his bootstraps, as is evidenced by his lack of high-class cultural knowledge regarding Italian vs. English interior decorating.

What begins as a somewhat promising schlocky murder mystery (how did Hopkins dispose of the murder weapon, the absolutely only piece of evidence tying him to the steaming murder in the next room?) quickly devolves into a drab morality play concerning the ethics of lawyering. Ryan Gosling mostly shuffles around, wishing he had some solid evidence against Hopkins. He has dinner with his new girlfriend. He yells at a detective about not having solid evidence against Hopkins. Hopkins inexpertly defends himself in court, but in a cunning fashion. Gosling drives around and tries to find evidence. He finds none. Finally, the ultimate day in court arrives, and he has no evidence. He valiantly resists the urge to introduce fake evidence. Hopkins gets off scott free, and can't wait to pull the plug on his brain dead wife-victim, practically licking his lips in anticipation of swallowing her imprisoned soul. (She wasn't actually dead from the shooting, I was just using the same narrative shorthand applied by the back of the DVD case.) Gosling feels the holy spirit of justice, and tries to stop him.

To expedite this "twist a minute" thriller (in reality the twists occur every 45 minutes or so), I'll just say that Gosling eventually gets wise to the core scam of the murder. Guns were switched. But this was obvious from the beginning of the film to anyone privy to Wishbone reenactments of Sherlock Holmes.

The 'fracture' of the title refers to Hopkins uncanny ability to spot the defects in eggs, as is explained early on, which leads the viewer to believe that he cooked up an unbelievably complex murder scheme. If this had occurred, the film might have accomplished something other than showcasing Hopkins playing a version of Hannibal Lector entering the early stages of chuckling senility. I do, however, award the film points for boldly refusing to further its plot for the majority of the film. It takes some gall to set up a perfect murder scenario and then not address it whatsoever until the final five minutes of the movie.

Manifesto

2008-08-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

The Erection of Disbelief is an online film magazine committed to establishing a new comprehensive system of film criticism. It shall be flexible enough to incorporate the entire body of film history while fully considering the evolving (or devolving) nature of contemporary works, without establishing an arbitrary critical rubric or needlessly formalist standard of analysis.

The primary author of this website considers Tarkovsky’s Solaris one of the finest films ever made. The same author also considers Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City one of the finest films ever made.

This website is thus dedicated to extricating and distilling the marrow of what makes a film worthwhile. Or, more importantly, the parts of a film that are worthwhile. Not every film can be Babe: Pig in the City, but every film is worth watching, for better or worse. The Erection of Disbelief commits itself to drudging out of every theatrical feature it comes across some crucial spark that makes the experience worthwhile. This is not to say that every movie is worthwhile, only that every film offers at least some brief, dim glimpse into the phantasmagoria of cinematic experience that increasingly controls our communal imagination. Hated films are far more instructive than forgettable ones.

(Forgettable films, though, have their own lessons to teach us, and shall not be ignored by this enterprise. Mediocrity deserves its own study.)

The diet of films digested by this website is, unless otherwise stated, haphazard and owing to circumstance. Much of it shall be determined by the whims of the author’s Netflix que, the shifting selection of his local library, and the release schedule at his preferred theaters. Ideally this will create a tapestry of the contemporary, the forgotten, the classic, the infamous, the detestable, the foreign, the cult, and the obscure. All of this toward a more complete consideration of the film medium that transcends genre, nationality, quality, school, era, taste, popularity, and , most importantly, consistency.

The Erection of Disbelief will also consider the film industry as a whole with a broader scope, examining trends, news, and rumors under the same analytical lens.

That said, here are some preliminaries:

Directors That Suck:

Clint Eastwood
Ron Howard
Bret Ratner
Steven Spielberg
Lars Von Trier
Judd Apatow

Well-Regarded Movies that are Terrible:

The Princess Bride
The Boondock Saints
Gladiator
Casino Royale
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Crash (Haggis Version)
The Departed
The 6th Sense
Finding Nemo
The Breakfast Club
Passion of the Christ
Million Dollar Baby
The Professional
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Spiderman (1 and 2; 3 isn’t well-regarded)

(List will be updated as the author remembers/experiences)