TensersFloatingDisk Reviews

Stir of Echoes (1999)

It's all about the Bacon

[7/10 · 19 March 2007]

Kevin Bacon is a fine actor. We all know that, right? But it's not until you see him in this fairly weak flick, a rather poorly plotted and paced derivation of a classic ghost story, that you know just *how* fine an actor he is. And I'm here to tell you, Kevin Bacon is a *FINE* actor.

The material here is pretty sketchy. We have a protagonist who is an average Joe with a few aspirations which never amount to much (in an early scene, he makes a vague reference to being in a band, a plot line that strangely disappears at once), a ghost story that takes place almost entirely in a well-lit suburb (not the most haunting of circumstances), and some shoddy dialog (the supporting characters mostly seem to drink beer, swear, and watch high-school sports). The motivations are absent (why does this average Joe have a sister-in-law who is clearly an art-ees-teek hypnotherapist? Why would he let this flake experiment her technique on his brain?). The special effects and camera angles and mechanics are strictly functional (save one well-handled early scene of hypnosis, on which they apparently blew their entire SFX budget).

Yet Bacon rises above all of this petty mishandling to deliver some real soul to his part. When he gets a sudden premonition about danger and tears through a crowd to follow up his instincts, you find yourself breathing hard along with him. When his wife confronts him about how his new obsessive behaviors are tearing their family apart, his rage and frustration are palpable, as his his sweetly delivered, completely nonverbal, guilty apology. It's really a remarkable performance, and worth the price of admission to an otherwise very straightforward story, one which would have been downright boring without the man's talents.

Well done, Kevin.

Æon Flux (2005)

Outstanding visuals. And, for a change, I mean that.

[6/10 · 19 March 2007]

The visual artists of this film should have received the Academy Award. Production Designer Andrew McAlpine; Artistic directors Marco Bittner Rosser, Sarah Horton, and Andreas Olshausen; Set Designer Berhard Henrich; Costume Designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor; the makeup artists; even the hair designers. It's all good.

You've got to understand, I have never been a fan of the visuals-driven movie. Occasionally a film is so revolutionary (Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands, The Matrix) that you simply have to applaud, but most of those movies have other things going for them. Far, FAR too much crapola gets filmed these days and passed off as 'art' when all it really is is 'flashy.' The worst offenders have always been genre flicks (fantasy, horror, sci-fi), and the worst of *those* have been supposedly "futuristic" science fiction films which take their 'vision o' the future' oh-so-seriously, yet fail to understand that the future's changes will be more than simply grim recreations of 1930's Germany (Equilibrium) or a rather glitzy version of an L.A. mall scene (Ultraviolet).

Finally, with Aeon Flux, there seems to have been some real care taken. The clothing, the architecture, even the foodstuffs have a slightly-slimy, neoprene 'wetness' to them which goes right along with the core themes of bio-engineering, yet manages to avoid ripping off either H.R. Giger or the Watchowski Brothers. Kudos to them for producing what is, yes, an effects-driven film, but one in which those effects serve the mood and purpose of the narrative.

Oh, the plot and characters and whatnot? Yeah, forgettable schlock. But who cares, these days, other than some self-important, smug, high-brow critical types anyway?

Dark Water (2005)

Pretentious. Also, wet.

[4/10 · 28 February 2007]

Oh, look, Hollywood found another Japanese horror flick they hadn't remade yet.

Well, kind of. Dark Water turns out to be from the guys who brought you the 'Ring' series, and boy does it show. Single mom? Check. Kid who sees apparitions? Check. Spooky kid ghosts? Check. Slowly developed tale of abandoned kids, discovered through circumstantial evidence? Checkarooni. Lots of water imagery? Check. Haunted bathroom? Check.

Consider that last one closely. What is the Japanese obsession with water, particularly bathrooms, as a vehicle for death and haunting? Yes, I know, their country is surrounded by oceans. So is ours. That doesn't compel us to make EVERY SINGLE FILM about the perils of going swimming in the bathtub.

The worst part of this movie, oddly, is not the flat acting, the hackneyed plot, the forgettable imagery, or the red herrings scattered liberally (and pointlessly) throughout the film. It's the extras, in which we see and hear the filmmakers gushing (there's that water imagery again) about how ar-tees-teek their vision is for, get this, hosing down their sets. They are really excited, like little kids, about just how WET these sets are going to be. Man oh man, these will be the wettest. Sets. Evahr!

Then they offer you a DVD extra in which you can layer and mix the sounds of various flushing toilets, just like the real sound engineer from the film, in order to create the Ultimate Spooky Bathroom Scene!

No, I am not making this up. That's what passes for horror these days.

Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (2005 TV Movie)

We apologize for the previous movie

[6/10 · 28 February 2007]

Dear viewer: we here in Hollywood would like to apologize for the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie released in 2000 which starred Jeremy Irons as the ghost of Liberace and Marlon Wayans as Marlon Wayans, only whinier.

To make up for that abomination, we'd like to offer this movie in its place. It's not particularly deep, but its plot is awfully similar to the role-playing games its based on, so it's at least true to the material. The acting isn't stellar, about what you'd expect from a competent college theater department. The special effects are a little sci-fi-network, but hey, we were sneaking CGI time on the computers in between making real movies like "Star-Wars vs. Pirates-of-the-Caribbean, part 7." Best of all, this movie is clearly made for the actual fans of the original games on which it was based. There are in-jokes and name-dropping aplenty here, from the expedition to the Barrier Peaks all the way up to the Ghost Tower of Inverness. Gems of true-seeing, liches, dragons with breed-specific breath weapons, all that geeky stuff you memorized when you were twelve years old, instead of going out and getting a date? Yeah, that's all in here. We thought that might be important after we abused the heck out of you with the first D&D flick, expecting you slavering fanboys and aging RPG players to simply roll over and pony up cash even when we churned out a perfectly crummy movie. We felt awfully bad about it later, and so we made this film, like I said, as an apology.

Anyway, we hope this makes up for the previous flick. Sorry about that. So, are we good now? You can indicate your acceptance of this apology by buying tickets to SW-vs-PotC-7, mentioned above. Matinée is cool. Thanks in advance.

Sincerely, Hollywood.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Kill the editor!

[7/10 · 13 February 2007]

This is a nice little film. It's a tightly written action thriller, with an unusual setting for this kind of movie, and a likable protagonist, half Sherlock Holmes, half Indiana Jones. I particularly enjoyed the pacing, in which no scene is wasted, nor drawn out too long, and...

Oh who am I kidding.

This *should* have been a nice little film. In a pleasant alternate universe, it is. But what we have instead is a likable protagonist, great setting, and an engaging plot which unfortunately has been bloated up to two-and-a-half-hours by Director Christophe Gans' unfortunate love-affair with his slow-motion camera lens. The turgid pacing, in which scene after scene just drags on and on and on, is enough to unfortunately rob this movie of some of its enjoyment factor.

Example: in one scene, our hero enters a high-class brothel. Lots of ladies are around wearing not much other than rouge and face powder. It should have taken about five to ten seconds to establish this fact, before our hero wanders deeper into the brothel to establish an important contact with another character. Instead, we get two and a half minutes of slow motion tracking shots of our hero, happily wandering through bolts of hanging silk, encountering new lovelies behind every tilted fan. About a minute in, I started feeling a little dirty for watching what was looking more and more like porn. After two minutes, I was simply bored.

The problem can be summed up in Gans' comments on the DVD extras. He shows the un-cut version of the opening fight scene, which lasts almost four times longer. Then he goes on and on, gushingly, about how WONDERFUL the editor was, how BEAUTIFUL the fight choreography was, how MANY, MANY DAYS of footage were shot and how if (oh rapture!) he'd had the chance, he would have included all of it in the final film.

Did you catch that? Days of uncut footage of a single fight scene, half of which is already in slo-mo. And Gans wants to force ALL of it on his viewers.

Take a clue, Gans. You've got a nice eye for visuals. You've got a good head for characterization (though you work too much in gesture, rather than dialog). You've even got a heart for atmosphere.

But fire your editor. He stinks.

Lady in the Water (2006)

Arrogant

[3/10 · 8 February 2007]

Once upon a time, there was a filmmaker who thought he would write a totally new story, totally original, never before attempted, about how people should be nice and not make wars so much. Except instead of actually saying anything about that, he wrote a bland fairytale about a mermaid who wants to go home but is in danger of being eaten by a cactus-dog.

******************************************************************

"Batteries not Included," but with mermaid instead of toy-sized aliens.

******************************************************************

See the building. See the people in the building? Each one has a special thing. One has a big Mexican family that screech a lot. One of them is a loud Chinese-American mama stereotype. One has a big arm! Oh my, those people sure are quirky! That must mean they are "characters," boys and girls! No need for icky "subtlety" or "motivation" here! See the people in the world? They fight a lot. We know because the animated prologue told us so! If only some nice angel would make them stop. Having them actually have a reason to stop fighting would be a hard story to tell, wouldn't it boys and girls? Too hard.

Too bad nobody knows why the angel-mermaid-girl is here. It makes it hard to have any kind of story. Oh look, look! The nice angel-mermaid is in a fairytale that one of the people heard when she was a little girl! Good thing, huh boys and girls? Now we know what all the characters have to do to save her! Wasn't that lucky?

*********************************************************

I heard some film critics on the radio talking about who should win the Razzie award for worst picture of the year. They mentioned some real stinkbombs, but as one of them pointed out, you *expect* low-profile, exploitive, and genre movies like "BloodRayne," or "Little Man" to be terrible. They're not pretending to be ART. "Lady in the Water" on the other hand, the critics claimed, should be named worst film of the decade, strictly because it's so "arrogant." Perfect word. Perfect summation. Perfect fate.

Slither (2006)

For once, they got it all right

[9/10 · 16 January 2007]

Horror/Comedies are usually neither. They aren't horrific. They aren't funny. Slither is.

The horrible thing is, there are these nasty little alien slugs bent on taking over the earth and devouring its inhabitants. The funny thing is that nobody in the hick town where they land can quite take them seriously.

Nathan ("Serenity") Fillion is the standout star of this flick, with a dry delivery perfected working for various Joss Whedon projects tempered by his own goofy sensibility (very evident in the generous out-takes and behind-the-scenes cramming the DVD). But there really isn't a loser in the whole bunch. Gregg Henry delivers a perfectly smarmy take as the mayor of this tiny town, full of fake smiles and bonhomie one moment, of very real pettiness and terror the next. Michael Rooker is unexpectedly sympathetic as the primary 'villain.' It's unexpected because Fillion's character clearly has the hots for Rooker's wife, who married him when she was young, and you expect from the first reel that this guy's going to turn out to be some kind of abusive jerk. But he isn't. He seems to honestly love her, which plays havoc with all the expectations we have for the character, and makes his ultimate fate as the host of the alien slugs a lot more horrible than it would have been had the character simply been the pure jerk cliché demanded.

And that's where Slither really shines: it plays merry hob with the clichés of both comedy and horror, but manages to get the best of both. Slapstick comedy relies on making fun of someone, but in some of the most obvious pratfalls in this movie, people die who shouldn't. Horror relies on the intrusion of the unreal into the real, but the monsters, in this movie, are rendered with a kind of practical flatness (the camera is not at all shy about revealing the bad guys or their victims) that makes it somehow even worse. Witty humor is usually put in the mouths of the smartest characters, to make fun of the hicks, but in this movie the hicks have all the best lines.

Kudos to the filmmakers for rising to the occasion in a way few movies of such mixed genres can manage. Here's hoping they manage even more in the future.

Grade: A

Stay Alive (2006)

I've seen worse

[5/10 · 16 January 2007]

Not bad. Not great, certainly, but not bad.

"Stay Alive" is a horror flick about a video game which manages to somehow kill off its users. This premise has been used for several (possibly several dozen) horror movies, stretching back at least to the early eighties. This treatment of the storyline is fairly consistent (a plus, given some of the dogs like "Virtuousity" which plague this genre) and doesn't try to bite off more than it can chew (like the pseudo-apocalypse of "Pulse").

The gore-hounds won't be happy with this movie, because the deaths, while on screen, are treated with a kind of modest mid-range shot, not the leering close-up zoom they crave. The story-driven horror set will deride the corny dialog (and it is often corny) and transparent plot. The few 'scares' are mostly driven by the MtV-style jump-cut...strictly for teenagers. The visual effects aren't particularly compelling or new.

But I liked it all the same. Other than Jimmi Simpson, who grossly overplays his part, the acting is competent. Frankie Muniz, the one name-recognizable semi-star of this flick is given achingly bad lines during the first half of the movie, but his character settles down in act two. The visuals are passable, particularly the bits which are supposedly taken from the game itself, and look close enough to today's actual video games that the filmmakers should deserve a point for that alone (why do so many filmmakers have NO CLUE what a computer program actually looks like?). The main villain is no great shakes, and there's some unexplained backstory, but there's enough sense of menace that we can forgive it.

In more seasoned hands, this could have been a much better movie, yes. But as it is, it's worth a quick rental.

Grade: C+/B-

Westender (2003)

Crummy

[3/10 · 14 January 2007]

This movie actually deserves a '2.' I give it one half-point bonus for being a low-budget production (they tried) and another half-point bonus for clever packaging mentioning their independent film-festival awards, rather than anything about the actual movie inside.

This is quite clever of them, for you see there ain't much movie there. Westender is an off riff on the medieval/fantasy genre: it's the middle part of a trilogy which doesn't exist. Our protagonist, a Doughty Knight (tm) is wandering the countryside. As he goes from minor scrape to minor scrape, he gets visions of some mysterious past 'failing' so we can piece together that he USED to be some big hotshot in the army, but quit when his sweetie was torched as a witch or some similar thing. By film's end, he has decided to recommit to his knighthood, and take the army back to victory.

But that's it. We never really see the initial problems which led to his downfall. We never see what happens once he takes the reigns of the army again. All we see is this kind of lumpy-faced guy lurching drunkenly around the forest, occasionally in grave-robbed armor, weeping about what a failure he is. Sometimes these lurching scenes take place on sand dunes. Sometimes in waterfalls. Sometimes they last for up to fifteen minutes, with no dialog whatsoever.

Verdict: boring. I am all for psychological exploration, but to indulge in it I have to GIVE A DAMN about the character. I don't, in this case. Oh, and special anti-kudos to the hapless dweeb who plays our hero's sometimes traveling companion and minstrel: poor delivery doesn't magically improve when it's delivered in a louder whine.

Grade: D/D-

An American Haunting (2005)

A whole less than the sum of its parts

[5/10 · 14 January 2007]

This little ghost story has quite a bit going for it, including a perfect setting (1700's New England), adequate visuals, and a solid cast (including such luminaries as thriller-vet Donald Sutherland and down-homey Sissy Spacek, just the people to lend credence to an Olde Worlde ghost tale.) What it lacks, unfortunately, is much in the way of a compelling story. Instead, it has Courtney Solomon, the "brains" behind the absolutely rotten "Dungeons and Dragons." What D&D and this movie have in common is Solomon's ability to take some worthwhile material and leech it of precisely those things which should make it work. In D&D, that meant he focused (wrongly) on all the clichés of fantasy, going so over the top as to repel even stolid fans, and forgot about the mystery and grandeur fantasy can give even cliché. In "American Haunting," Solomon plays around with foolish camera angles which crop out the reactions of the characters, and 'shock' jump-cut editing, when he should be focusing on what makes a story like this work: our sympathy for the characters. We don't care much for these people, and minute after minute of 'spooky' footage is used (multiple chase scenes through the underbrush just fizzle out and everyone shrugs) when the time should be devoted to rendering these people as PEOPLE.

This movie has a political axe to grind as well, which is just awful icing on an awful cake. The needless framing story adds insult to the injury. So, what are we left with? Some good actors in search of some characters to play. A good setting, in search of a story to take place in it.

Pulse (I) (2006)

It's NOT a '1.' But it sure is below par.

[4/10 · 14 January 2007]

'Pulse' follows up on the recent surge of American adaptations of Japanese horror flicks. The problem with following up on a trend is simple to see: if you're the first person to try a new thing (such as those bringing the coolly creepy sensibility of Japanese horror to American shores), you're going to try to choose the very best material ("Ringu") to get the very best results ("The Ring"). Then, when later people come along and try to duplicate that success ("The Grudge," "Dark Water," and now "Pulse"), they're going to have a harder time, because they are NOT working with the best material, but with the stuff you passed over the first time through.

So it is with "Pulse." While "The Ring" offered a real sense of controlled story (other than that miserable final sequence), the key word for "Pulse" is "excess." The supposed undergraduate-age protagonists are TOO pretty, TOO hip (and a good deal TOO old), and way TOO connected to their cell phones. Look, I teach college for a living. I see real students, in California no less, in their native environment. NOBODY acts like these tech-heavy clowns.

Yes, I know it's all to prove the political point of the film ("technology BAD"), but what it seems like is laziness. Like too many badly done horror movies, the protagonists are so godawfully smug about their sophistication in the face of creepy happenings that by the time people start getting their faces chewed off, we're really willing for it to happen to them.

Ah well. Maybe someone somewhere has some better material for American adaptors. Bollywood horror, anyone?

Night Watch (2004)

Heavy on visuals, light on everything else

[4/10 · 29 September 2006]

Dark Watch, first of a trilogy of special-effects-driven fantasies from deepest, darkest Russia makes clear two things: 1.) Visuals alone can no longer sell a movie. 2.) Russian fantasists will buy anything.

Since the Matrix movies redefined the visual texture of movies, filmmakers have been desperate to outdo themselves, creating more and more lavish techniques to generate eye-candy. Well, we've done it. We've achieved the miraculous. We can now make anything, and I mean pretty much anything, look so bloody realistic that you'll swear you're watching an un-retouched documentary. Result of all this eye-candy? Eye diabetes. The precise opposite of what filmmakers thought would happen, but what should have been easily predictable, given the simple laws of supply and demand: visuals alone can no longer sell a movie. Enter DarkWatch, a dark fantasy with a hackneyed storyline, generally lame dialogue, poor acting, mediocre design, and poor editing. And fabulous visuals. Does that make you want to watch it? Yeah, I did too. So I did, and the disappointment was palpable. What the writer Timur Bekmambetov has accomplished here is the death knell of the visuals-driven movie. He has demonstrated that simply ripping off the storyline of every good-vs.-evil modern-set fantasy is not a sufficient basis for two hours of flashy effects. Skip it. Skip the sequels. They're a waste. Pretty though. Grade: C-

Mirrormask (2005)

Incomprehensible. Vaguely sickening.

[2/10 · 22 September 2006]

Well, that was sure a waste of Dave McKean's talents, wasn't it? Don't get me wrong: when it comes to graphic design, Dave McKean may be the best in the world right now. The layered, textured look he can accomplish with just a few pencil lines on rough paper make the efforts of people like Peter Greenaway and David Fincher look like what they are: hackwork. McKean has been the godfather of a revolution in the look of comics, film, even magazine ads which borrow the distinctive collage effect he has pioneered.

But this movie? It's junk. Complete junk. The story, from Neil Gaiman, is, unfortunately, exactly what Gaiman has been giving us ever since he ripped off Clive Barker for the first time: a pseudo-mythic, overblown dreamscape, populated by characters which have Titles in All Capital Letters rather than names. Everything is allegory, to the point that it is impossible to get any human drama, emotion, or empathy from anyone involved. People make pithy postulations, speaking in riddles which bring to mind what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead might have sounded like if Tom Stoppard had suffered a debilitating stroke halfway through its composition. Really, Gaiman, get over yourself. You're not a prophet. You're a poser.

McKean's directing doesn't help - his pacing is poor, taking fully half an hour to actually rev himself up for the main picaresque plot, and then simply providing a disconnected sequence of events, none of them given any weight. The monsters don't menace because they're not foreshadowed, simply thrown at the screen. The plot doesn't engage because we don't really care about the rancid little protagonists. Half the dialogue, muttered into into shirt fronts and ubiquitous masks, is unintelligible.

Some of the visuals are pretty, and I'm sure the fanboys will lick it up. Pity. Think of the amount of really good work McKean could have produced if he hadn't been stuck with this lame project.

Grade: D/D-

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

A grave disappointment

[4/10 · 18 September 2006]

Like many viewers, I was drawn to this re-released flick by the quirky plot synopsis, the heavy internet buzz, and, of course, the inimitable Bruce Campbell.

Other than that last, this film disappoints in every way. The plot, in which rest-home retirees who may be the real Elvis and JFK take on an ancient mummy, sounds like pure gold. It's not. The pacing is aimless and slow. The 'comedy' moments aren't funny, not even unintentionally so. The movie, oddly, tries to actually be scary at times, with leering over-the-shoulder shots and synthesized sharp string music, but merely feels dull, like a made-for-t.v. flick of the 70's. The special effects are bad - nearly unprofessionally so, without the benefit of a doubt a truly unprofessional effort might have afforded them.

The only bits which work are Campbell's monologues in which he reminisces about fame, music, and 'Scilla, but even the down-home southern accent can't quite save the wooden script.

I expected a cult favorite. I got a wienerschnitzle chili-dog meal: commonplace, cheap, slightly stale, and eventually a tad nauseating.

Grade: C-

V for Vendetta (2005)

Pretentious, and not even for a good purpose

[3/10 · 14 September 2006]

Well, the critics have spoken, the box office has spoken, the fans have spoken, and now I will speak:

This movie is junk.

Anyone who thinks this is high-flown political allegory should take a remedial class in civics, and another in history, and yet a third in rhetoric. Anyone who thinks it's art needs to take a shower.

V for Vendetta has none of the flash of the Matrix, but all of the pretentious pseudo-intellectual "philosophizin'." It oversimplifies both politics and human nature to the point that none of the characters are remotely believable, nor is their situation. Despite this, it manages to fail even at the level of popcorn fare, yielding not even a satisfactory final scene. Simply put, it's not even technically successful.

Statements which should be the clear bulwark for the opposing forces are mumbled unintelligibly through several layers of cardboard (Mr. Weaving' voice is often-times inaudible. Don't believe me? Go look at the message boards: half of the threads are requests for clarifications on the inaudible dialog). Confrontations like the final fight scene, which should be titanic, are instead grungy and poorly lit (seriously, someone buy the cameraman a mining helmet or something).

And then there are the characters wandering through this pasteboard wasteland. The main bad guy is never seen, and never provides his rationale, rendering him beyond flimsy and certainly no threat. The main hero is similarly opaque, since the filmmakers decided obscurity would somehow seem like wisdom to the sweating masses of fanboys who elevated this dreck. The most emotionally affecting voice comes through a long flashback sequence from a character long-dead. That should tell you something about the characters.

And finally, the politics: shoddy, ill-researched, and venal. All the characters we're supposed to think of as 'noble' seem motivated by the most pettily personal of reasons, with the arguable exception of the main police officer investigating V's actions. That the system would rise, then collapse so spontaneously is not only unrealistic, but irresponsible since young and foolish filmgoers are apt to mistake anarchy for freedom. My worst possible curse upon them would be that they get precisely what they ask for.

Thank all Gods that may be that their safety, the arts, and the world, are in better hands than these.

Underworld: Evolution (2006)

Blue

[3/10 · 13 September 2006]

It's Blue. Light blue. Dark blue. Midnight blue. Blue, blue, blue.

Have I mentioned how B-L-U-E this movie is? Somewhere, somehow, someone got it into their heads that the way to convey to an audience that this film takes place primarily at night was to make every shot a wash of bluish-gray. Seriously, every single shot in the whole movie. The cameraman must have run down to the local Blue Lens Filter Mart and just bought them out. I can hear the director now, yelling at his lighting crew: "What??? Hey, there's a trace of color in this shot that is not blue! You're fired!" It was probably supposed to be surreal or nightmarish, but instead the sameness of it all just made me kind of sleepy.

In addition to its unrelentingly monochromatic palette, this turkey has an unrelentingly monochromatic heroine, an unrelentingly monochromatic hero, and an unrelentingly monochromatic villain. That's not a death knell in the usually stark two-dimensional action-thriller genre, but in addition we get the fact that every character is dressed in black bondage gear, making them physically, as well as psychologically, indistinguishable. The fight scenes are thus rendered stale, even more so once we realize, about halfway through the first reel, that our heroine is so ridiculously skilled and super-powered that absolutely nothing can possibly threaten her. All possible tension in this "thriller" is therefore leeched away well before we get to the hackneyed plot. Sleep-inducing stuff indeed, and a grave disappointment after the first film's superior quality.

Blue.

It's all just...blue.

Silent Hill (2006)

Surprisingly good ghost story - who cares about the game?

[8/10 · 13 September 2006]

Yes, I know this is based on a popular series of video games. Who cares? I haven't played 'em, neither have most people. That's the end of that topic.

Silent Hill is a story of twin tragedies, one the public ruin of a West Virginia mining town which has collapsed into the (real and metaphoric) underground fires of its own coal mines, the other the brutal history of a young girl with a mysterious past tied to the town. The story unfolds as a series of clues are pieced together by the girl's adoptive mother, searching for her in the ruins, while in a parallel plot line, the semi-estranged father sifts through records of the town. The movie is a bit slow to get to the reasons behind all this, and relies too heavily on a single long expository scene (complete with flashbacks) to finally piece it all together, but the revelations, when they come, are satisfying (that seems to be a word I keep returning to in my consideration of the movie: it satisfies).

This movie stands on its own merits as a much better ghost story than we've seen on film for a while now. While most of the horror genre seems itching to see how many psychopaths it can cram onto screen at one time (Saw, House of Wax) or splatter-driven monsters (Descent, Hills Have Eyes), lost in the background is the self-contained ghost story. The key difference here is that unlike a horror flick in which the villain is a psycho (Hostel), or a monster (Dawn of the Dead), or a disease (Cabin Fever, 28 Days), the ghost story demands a *STORY*. It has to have an internal rationale, a reason for the ghost to be haunting folks.

Short of some of the Dark Castle productions, that attention to background rationale has been missing from many recent horror flicks. Enter Silent Hill, which takes a longish while to get to the reason for all the horrific ghoulies, but which satisfyingly delivers once it does. The story, when it comes, satisfies in a way I haven't seen since The Ring, though it also reminded me of the excellent Poltergeist.

Similar to The Ring, there are a number of visual clues as to the nature of the haunting which are explained by the end (i.e., it's not just random walking corpses, it's very specific, and I like that kind of detail), and similar to Poltergeist, by the end of the movie our loyalties are a bit split. We want the heroes to escape gruesome death and damnation, but we also sympathize a bit with the 'bad guys,' who have been driven to this horrific end.

A note on the visuals: any schmuck can (and many have) paint a room with dirt and rust. Any pinhead can animate a CGI monster to lurch across the screen. It takes CONFIDENCE to keep the camera ON that monster as it goes. Too many horror flicks these days rely on jumpy MtV-style editing to flash quickly to and away-from the monster, so the audience can never really see it (are you LISTENING, Dark Castle???). The movie makers seem to think this makes it more scary. It doesn't. It makes it impossible to see. It's annoying, and eventually boring. Thank the Gods of Horror Cinema that the makers of Silent Hill had enough confidence in their visuals to show the bloody monsters on screen, sometimes for long sequences, so we in the audience could appreciate their handiwork. This was particularly important since several of the nasties provide important visual clues as to the nature of the haunting going on. Good for them for avoiding a common pitfall.

Grade: A-/B+

Ultraviolet (2006)

Not so good. No, not even the visuals.

[3/10 · 12 September 2006]

Well, this was something of a wash. Take one part The 5th Element (Milla Jovovich), two parts Equilibrium (a shadowy militaristic world government, a strangely quick-on-the-draw-for-a-desk-jockey uberboss), two parts Matrix (bullet time and kung fu) and you get...

Well, something which isn't remotely as good as even those movies, each of which had their flaws. In Ultraviolet, those flaws are magnified. Like 5th Element, Jovovich has the convincing emotional range of a sack of fish. Like Equilibrium, the ridiculous contradictions inherent in the main plot make it impossible to suspend disbelief. And like the Matrix, the action is supposed to carry the show, regardless of characterization, which is almost entirely ignored).

We don't know why Jovovich is fighting, and don't ultimately care. She's so good at it, thanks to sped-up, over-the-top fight choreography, that we get no sense of threat to her ever, at all, which means no tension. The evil uberboss is...well, he's lame. Badly written, badly acted, even badly dressed.

Worst of all, even the action sags. In addition to the complete lack of tension, the monochrome hordes of Jovovich's enemies make it impossible to make anything out. Rather than pull back the camera, the fool of a cameraman actually closes in even further, so all we see is a swishing flap of fabric, followed by a lot of bodies hitting the floor while Jovovich poses unconvincingly, sword or gun upraised. Interesting to watch once, maybe, but not the fifteen or so times we get the treatment.

Give this one a miss.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Keanu Reeves makes the movie

[9/10 · 10 September 2006]

This is probably my favorite of all the many, many film adaptations of Stoker's novel I've seen. Despite its slightly psychedelic visuals, Coppola really captures the essential tensions of the text, and if he focuses too much on the Dracula/Mina love story, he is still closer to the action of the book than 90% of the film versions available.

But the real winner here is whoever did the casting for this flick. Oldman is suitably snarky as the Count, more dirty-old-man than fiend here, while Rider and Hopkins chew the scenery in most of the right places. But the gem of the bunch, and the actor who really sells me on this version as an accurate adaptation of Stoker's work, is Keanu Reeves.

Keanu Reeves, like Jack Nicholson, is strictly a one-trick-pony, acting-wise. For Nicholson, it's the gigglingly violent manic-depressive. He's got the crazy-thang down pat, but whenever he plays any other kind of role he falls right on his butt. For Keanu Reeves, think back to his star-maker, Bill n' Ted's Excellent Adventure. What Keanu Reeves, in all his blow-dried glory, pulls off well is pure California Stoner.

Cast him as an action star in The Matrix and you've got crapola, cast him as a Shakespearian villain in Much Ado About Nothing, and it's laughable. But cast him as an everyman who is caught up in Things He Cannot Control, and he pulls it off neatly. Think of his signature line: "whoah." It's the mating cry of the laid-back schmuck, run up against something WAY too heavy for him to handle. It's why the only parts of The Matrix that work, acting-wise, are those in which Keanu is dorking around, bumbling from one chaotic nightmare to another, totally over his head. The second he tries to pull off the uber-cool hero schtick, he blows it.

Luckily, in Coppola's Dracula, all Reeves has to do is play his best role. Johnathan Harker is Stoker's everyman, a typical English twit, prissy, correct, and utterly devoid of imagination. The whole reason the Count can get away with his invasion of Englan is because Johnathan is too dull to conceive of really cosmic evil. Dracula gives the guy about 400 clues as to his demonic nature, and they just wash over Harker like oil over a goose. Reeves plays that up in the flick...blue flames, giant wolves, people crawling backwards down the walls, and he just goes "whoah," then gets on with arranging paperwork. Pure gold.

When you get to Hopkins or Rider's overly-dramatic huffing and puffing, it's almost a let-down from the subtle humor of seeing Ted 'Theodore' Logan trapped in Castle Dracula. Grade: A.

The Descent (2005)

Victim of its own hype

[3/10 · 4 August 2006]

We heard it would be the second-coming of horror cinema. Inevitably, The Descent suffers from comparison to the massive internet buzz which greeted its arrival here in the U.S.

The Descent is really two parallel stories, the literal descent of the heroines into an unexplored cave system, and their figurative descent into madness and brutality. It's a metaphoric ploy which could work in the hands of someone with more experience, but in the oafish claws of Neill Marshall, all that is on display here is slickly produced gore, to no real end. There's promise, in some early scenes, of real tension which is never fulfilled, and the much-touted psychological characterizations of the five cave explorers is lost in a lot of shrieking during the second-half of the movie.

The movie has its moments, but they're not where you'd expect, and not, sadly, where Marshall spends any time as a director. The natural paranoia and claustrophobia of the early cave exploration, as these people are shoved into tighter and tighter confines (and tighter and more uncomfortable psychological space) should be riveting...instead, we get a few cringe-worthy scenes of shifting rocks and then...more running about and screaming.

By the (highly anticlimactic) end, you're simply not sure why you bothered. There's a certain grim fun in guessing which of the heroines will meet their doom next, but by then you care so little about any of them that it's too easy to dismiss this as yet another substitution of fake blood for story, or scares.

Grade: C-.

Good Will Hunting (1997)

What 'education' really means

[10/10 · 24 July 2006]

Other reviewers, professional and public alike, have praised this movie to the skies for its superb writing, fine acting, and smooth direction. This was, of course, the career-maker for two of Hollywood's biggest stars, and an inspiration to young would-be filmmakers.

One element that has not, perhaps, received as much attention is the degree to which this movie deconstructs for the audience one of its primary tropes: what it means to be educated. As an educator, I find the point a crucial one, and one which elevates this movie from the merely "very good" to the level of "important."

There is certainly a simple surface reading, in several scenes in which the audience is explicitly told that it is individual talent, ambition, and personal character which make for genius, not just a collection of degrees after your name from a prestigious university. The best of these is the scene early on at the bar, as Matt Damon's "Will Hunting" character dresses down one preppie pseudo-intellectual after another, revealing that the 'education' they have received could have been bettered at any local library. It's funny, and it's true: education doesn't happen when you get an "A" in a class, it happens when you internalize a bit of knowledge so thoroughly that you can integrate it, on the fly, with other material, as Hunting proceeds to do in a blistering (and hilarious) verbal assault.

But just as important is the subtext of Damon's character's story-arc as he proceeds from working-Joe to star-pupil. Rather than being seduced by the prospect of grants, lab-space, or prestigious employment which his degree could net him, Hunting chooses to pursue his principles (and the love of his life). It could be a ham-handed, overly dramatic feel-good moment, but it's not because Hunting doesn't arrive at this decision by giving up his brains and following his heart. Quite the opposite. His decision is almost cold-bloodedly rational. It is arrived at after much debate, external and internal, and a number of quotes, statistics, anecdotes and analogies are forwarded from both sides of the debate: it's an instance of education in action, not as a bloodless, disconnected ivory-tower theory, but as a living model for our lives. Would that more students would approach their educations in that fashion.

Cars (2006)

Doc Hollywheels

[7/10 · 3 July 2006]

Well, what can we say? It's Doc Hollywood on wheels.

Only not quite. The Michael J. Fox original was the story of a lone man with no soul, who was kindly provided one by the inhabitants of small-town America. It's about the development of an individual.

Pixars' Cars, on the other hand, is the story of a small town in need of re-energizing, which is kindly provided an infusion of energy by a lone man..er, car. It's about the development of a community.

This difference affects not only the individual characterizations, but the overall thrust of the narrative, the humor, even the artwork. The foreground characters sometimes disappear into vast landscapes, particularly during an extended middle digression of some ten or so minutes in which Sally Porsche, our heroine, introduces Lightning McQueen to the virtues of small town life, meandering along Route 66, quaint hotels, and the painted desert.

For all its occasional preachiness about the glories of small-town life, and the need for inspiring heroes are good by virtue of their character rather than their athleticism, at no time is your heart in danger here: there's nothing like the poignancy of Buzz Lightyear's fall in Toy Story, much less Jesse's reminiscence scene in Toy Story 2. There's not even the real tension and family feeling of Finding Nemo. Cars don't have families, and struggle though they have to personalize these mechanisms, the Pixar animators simply can't add the rough physicality necessary to convey broad emotion to something which has to keep 4 wheels on the ground. It's fine popcorn fare, sometimes amusing, and harmless fun.

Expiration Date (2006)

Clever and warm, even when it shouldn't be

[9/10 · 3 July 2006]

So there's this young man, see, and he knows when he's going to die due to an old family curse, and he spends the last two weeks of his life preparing for his grisly demise.

Sounds gloomy, doesn't it? And a bit corny.

Happily, Expiration Date avoids both of these two pitfalls adroitly, and what could have been an 'artsy' bit of gallows humor is instead a very surprisingly warm romantic bildungsroman. It is often cheeky, sometimes hilarious, and never self-indulgent.

After a brief framing narrative (think of the boy-and-grandpa bits in The Princess Bride) we are introduced to our hero, who believes that, like his father and grandfather before him, he is doomed to be crushed by a milk truck on his next birthday, just a few days hence. The preparations he makes for his imminent demise certainly occasion a few obvious bits of black humor (measuring the view from his burial plot by stretching himself out on the grass) but that takes up a lot less of our character's attention than the young woman who has entered his life and who keeps encouraging him, despite himself, to get involved with living instead of with dying. Her performance, sometimes a bit shrill, is the only sour note I felt in this movie, but I was able to overlook it because the lead character is so charming and she is clearly trying to serve as a foil for that.

The plotting is neatly reflexive, with lots of little detailed sub-plots which are brought around later in the movie and wrap the whole bundle up so that it's more allegory than realism. But that turns out to be okay (minus, again like the Princess Bride, the unnecessary framing story), and the leads generally keep things light enough that we excuse the poetic bits. I certainly hope this one finds a distributor. It deserves it.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

Weirdly good.

[8/10 · 19 May 2006]

I didn't like those damned books.

I really tried. I appreciate humor dark enough to tar rooftops, have two kids, and study 19th-century Gothic literature for a living. I was Lemony Snicket's dream audience.

Hated those damned books. I found the plotting poor, the pacing weak, the dialog crude and ineffective, and the intrusive narratorial sneer grating as hell. I labored my way through the first, and tossed the second halfway through.

So I had low expectations for this movie. I'd heard some of the criticism both from fans of the series ("not close enough to the original," they whined) and regular movie viewers ("slow and dull," they groused). I was prepared for a thoroughly miserable time, and only agreed to the viewing to screen it for my kid.

Imagine my surprise when I found a tight little allegorical gem. The acting is passable, and occasionally quite good (with the strange and glaring exception of Carrey, who positively reeks in his roles in this flick - gratefully, he ain't on screen much). The art direction, as has been noted, is flawless, out Tim-Burtoning even Tim Burton. The music is strange, atonal, and absolutely perfect without being intrusive. And the pacing, while admittedly slow in some places (particularly when Carrey takes leering center-stage) is generally fine.

Best of all, the films take the sprawling, snide and obnoxious text and translates them into a taut moral fable. Jude Law deserves extra kudos for transforming the character of the narrator from a sneering know-it-all to a deeply sympathetic figure - it saves the entire tale, even the macabre bits (absolutely *NOT* for small children) and the melancholy parts (very affecting - again, not for small children, nor the easily weepy). A fine translation, which stands alone from the books as a superior product. Lemony Snicket should take a lesson.

Saw (2004)

Interesting premise for about 5 minutes.

[3/10 · 4 May 2006]

You know, just when some know-it-all says, for the upteenth time, "all the plots that can be done have been done" or "there are no original story ideas," somebody pulls out a new one.

This one isn't an absolutely unique idea, but in the initial moments of the film, there was great potential. Take a standard mystery/thriller convention: the locked room mystery. How the heck did the killer escape? How can we get in there? Then just reverse the premise: How the hell did we get in here? How do we get out?

As I said, it's been pulled off before (Cube comes to mind), but the very tight limitations here - one room, one tape recording, one gun, two guys, two chains - made it seem this was going to be an intense little flick. The added frisson of the little test, the puzzles to be figured out, could have made this a remarkable two-man-play translated to screen, a psychological study, lots of things.

Then? It all falls to hell and gone. For some reason, the screenwriter and director made the worst mistake in their artistic lives: they indulged in flashbacks. Then we get flashbacks within flashbacks. Then we get framed stories with flashbacks, inside the flashbacks, inside the flashbacks. Suddenly, a claustrophobic and genuinely creepy premise tuns into an ensemble gore-fest, edited with all the tricks - jump cuts, silhouette lighting, sharp angles... Boring. Strictly for the VH1 crowd. That the characters turn out to have no decent motivation (and that includes our unseen villain and our heroes) is simply par for the course once this movie takes that sad, sad turn down the road to mediocrity.

Pity.

Grade: D+