The trouble with remakes, in which I come to no conclusions

Many of my friends and people I follow on twitter are bristling at the upcoming remake of Straw Dogs. I want to see it. But don't worry - I will be sure to watch the original first. Straw Dogs is one of those movies that's been on my list of "Movies I should probably watch when I get around to it." The positive outcome of this remake is that it pushes the original to the forefront of my list of "Movies I am actively seeking opportunity to watch."

The same is true of Fright Night. I just saw the original and enjoyed it immensely. The remake boosted my interest in seeing the original. And judging by the audience reaction to Chris Sarandon's cameo, a fair number of people in the cinema *had* seen the original.

Why do people moan about remakes? It's something I'm guilty of myself. If the original is good, detractors of the remake will insist that it doesn't "need" to be remade. Of course it doesn't need to be remade. Very few movies - original or not - "need" to be made. If it's a good story, why not tell it again? How might the story be different in a different place or time? And if the original is really that good, then surely it will hold up and not be diminished by the remake. If the original is not-so-good, is it nostalgia that holds people back?

When it comes to American remakes of foreign films, however, there is further snobbery. "Americans are just too lazy to read subtitles," they will say. In reality, it seems to me that it's a case of "Keep your filthy mainstream off my subculture." An Asian film forum I used to frequent once had a headline on April Fool's Day announcing that Brad Pitt would be starring as Kakihara in a remake of Ichi the Killer. Shudders abound. But actually, Brad Pitt could totally pull off Kakihara. He may be a big-name hunk, but he's got the chops.

If pressed, I don't think I could name a bad remake of a good Asian horror film. I'm sure they exist, but I generally avoid them. The remakes that I have seen have been pretty good. The Ring isn't a far cry from Ringu. They're both good. I think it's a positive thing that they both exist. The American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters looked terrible. I didn't see it. I don't know anyone who did, whether they'd seen the original or not. It has had absolutely no impact on the original in terms of quality or, as far as I can tell, audience.

When they announced they were going to remake Infernal Affairs, I was skeptical. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio? Jack Nicholson? Mark Wahlberg? What is all this? But The Departed was fantastic. It is an entirely different movie than Infernal Affairs. I would even argue that it's a *better* movie. So I am pleased that the same producers are in charge of the remake of Oldboy. (Thank God that Speilberg/Smith talk never came to fruition!) I'm not the biggest fan of Spike Lee, who is set to direct, but he knows what he's doing. Announcements regarding the casting of Josh Brolin and Christian Bale as the protagonist and antagonist, respectively, have me very optimistic.

Today I got the news that El Orfanato is being remade with Amy Adams. I love El Orfanato. It is the only horror movie to actually *scare* me since I was a child. I don't really want it to be remade, but I can't seem to put my finger on why. I think it's just a sense of possessiveness. I enjoy introducing the film to people. With an American remake, I won't have that sense of "Look at this awesome movie I found." But that ownership is is an illusion in the first place.

For the most part, I am interested in film theory more than film production. But there are some films I would really like to make. One of them is a remake of Battle Royale. Don't get me wrong - I love the original. But it differs from the book (which I read before I saw the film and also love) in some really crucial ways. I'm not saying I could do better than Kinji Fukasaku, but I see no reason why there can't be more than one film adapted from one work. How many different film versions of Frankenstein are there? If I had the resources, I would write a screenplay adapted more faithfully from the book. It would be in English (because I don't speak Japanese) but I would cast Japanese-American actors. But no matter how I did it, fans of the original film would scorn me.

Doing it Right: Hobo with a Shotgun

Dear Robert Rodriguez,

THIS is how you make a grind-house flick. If you recall my post "One-Trick Movies" (since you're obviously a regular reader of my blog), I said that "Machete" would have been better off if it had just remained a trailer. Not so for "Hobo with a Shotgun." The big difference? Hobo has heart.

Love,
R.

My thoughts on Lucky McKee's "The Woman"

The film is about the upper-middle class New England Cleek family. Chris Cleek is an estate lawyer. His wife Belle is a stay-at-home mom. He has a moody teenage daughter, Peggy, and a tween son Brian who watches his every move to see how to behave. One day while hunting in the woods, Chris comes across a wounded feral woman (the character is a carry-over from the film The Offspring). He captures her and restrains her in the cellar. He introduces her to his family as their project. She must be civilized. If this were an entirely different movie, he would put marbles in her mouth and have her recite English vowel sounds over and over. But this is not that movie. In this movie, the method of choice is torture. 

This movie is NOT “torture porn” – a topic deserving of its own blog post. It does not seek to shock or titillate. Andre Dumas writes in this spot-on review, “I often talk about my problem with films that do not commit to their story and that do not push things as far as they need to go in order to tackle the themes they’ve proposed. The Woman however is one of the most committed films that I have ever seen. It goes to places that I did not anticipate and places that I didn’t plan on seeing ever in my life.” This is not a midnight movie that you go see with your buddies in a theater full of people who have been drinking and cheer on the gore. Even when the woman gets her justifiable revenge, there will be no cheering.

The movie is unsettling, disturbing, and very difficult to watch. It works as a parable for domestic abuse. Even before he captures the woman, Chris Cleek is a physically and emotionally abusive husband and father. Once the woman comes into the picture, the abuse is externalized and focused on her. She becomes a metaphor for domestic violence. Chris tells his family that she is their “secret.” She is also their shame. Mike Everleth over at All Things Horror writes in his review  that when Belle runs into an acquaintance at the grocery store, “you can almost see her searching the internal databanks for answers that are normal and acceptable to an outsider.”If you take the woman out of the equation, the scene would still stand – she’s not just covering up for the woman chained up in her cellar, but also for the treatment she receives from her husband.

I had a college professor who explained patriarchy, the rule of the father, as “the father can fuck or kill whoever he wants.” Mr. Cleek exemplifies this more than anything I have ever seen. And that is why I consider this to be a feminist film – though not one that I would recommend to many feminists I know. It unflinchingly shows (and condemns) the stranglehold that misogyny has over all women in a patriarchal society, and it does so with a rare gravity.

When I asked Lucky Mckee via twitter whether he would classify this film as a horror movie, he responded, “I would classify it as being my only horror movie.” To me, it is only in the third act that the film truly becomes a horror film. When Belle finally reaches her breaking point, it was at first a relief to me. All of that simmering repression needed to come to a boil. But her outburst also cracks Chris’ twisted Mr. Cleaver veneer and unleashes the raging and unabashed misogynist monster that we’ve known the whole time to be right under the surface.

And now I’m going to discuss the rape scene. So if you don’t want to know how it happens or you don’t want to read about rape, you should stop here.

As I said, this is a difficult movie to watch. For me, the hardest scene to stomach was the rape. This was the most disturbing rape scene I have ever seen (disclosure: I have not seen Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible). 

The rape happens the night after the woman has been “cleaned up” (hosed down with a high-pressure hose) and put in a dress. Chris checks to make sure his wife is asleep, goes down to the cellar, and fucks the woman. She doesn’t/can’t fight back as he fondles her breasts and lifts her dress - her hands are chained. To be sure, rape is an act of violence, not one of sex. But it is also an act of entitlement, and this scene’s clear illustration of that is what makes this scene so upsetting. It isn’t explicit. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t hit her. He owns her. He can do whatever he wants with her. 

During the scene, there are cuts to the other members of his family. His daughters asleep in their beds, his wife crying in hers (she wasn’t really sleeping, dickhead), and his son, who wants to know what his father is up to, follows him to the cellar, and spies. As the son peeps through a hole in the cellar door, the woman stares at him with unblinking eyes. It is the hatred and behavior the son learns during this scene that ultimately sets up the climax of the film.

Movies I Wanted to See in 2010 but Didn't

Bitch Slap
Legion
Frozen
Shutter Island
Repo Men
Chloe
Kick-Ass
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Descent 2
Metropia
Holy Rollers
Splice
Toy Story 3
Cropsey
The Killer Inside Me
Restrepo
The Kids Are All Right
winnebago Man
The Last Exorcism
Never Let Me Go
The Town
Catfish
You Again
Buried
Enter the Void
Hatchet II
Let Me In
The Social Network
My Soul to Take
I Spit on Your Grave
Marwencol
Boxing Gym
Monsters
Four Lions
127 Hours
Tangled
Black Swan
I Love You Phillip Morris
The Fighter
The Tempest
Rabbit Hole
Blue Valentine

One-Trick Movies

I am so sick of movies that are just one joke extended to a feature length. I've seen two recently: "RoboGeisha" and "Machete." I'm not going to grace their trailers by posting them here (ie, I'm too lazy) but if you've seen either trailer, that's all you need to see. "Machete," of course, was originally just a trailer - it was one of the fake trailers in "Grindhouse" - until someone thought it would be a good idea to make it into a real movie. Spoiler alert: It wasn't a good idea.

You know you're watching a one-trick movie when it starts off with a pretty great opening scene and then quickly goes downhill and never recovers. There are usually a couple of "memorable" lines that are supposed to stand out as inappropriately cheesy, but they are too forced and self-congratulatory to actually be funny. Overall, these movies suffer from too much dialogue. There will be a few good sight gags, but not enough entertainment value to sustain interest. There is a prolonged final showdown. This kind of movie isn't the class clown, but the kid who acts out to get attention only it backfires because nobody thinks s/he is funny. It tries too hard. Yes, it is supposed to be exploitative and over-the-top, but it ends up just being sloppy and feels at least half an hour too long.

"Machete" and "RoboGeisha" don't take themselves seriously at all. Their tongues are so far in their cheeks that they can't enunciate. It's muddy, a mish-mosh. It's masturbatory writing - nobody cares, only the writers who pat each other on their backs at how funny they are. (If anyone actually read this blog, I would re-read Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and write about the difference between true camp and self-aware camp and how that applies here.) The difference between these films and a film like "The Human Centipede" - which could easily have fallen into the trap of not transcending its own premise - is that "The Human Centipede" actually tries. Same thing with "Piranha 3D" - yes, it is silly and aware of its silliness, but it isn't content to stop there. No matter how self-aware, a movie must take itself seriously. Or else it's just boring.


It is interesting to note, however, that both "Machete" and "RoboGeisha" do follow the Bechdel-Wallace Rule... Hmm...

Blood draws the pack

My laptop has a virus, so I'm posting from my Droid. But I just HAD to write about Piranha 3D. In five words: it was sooooo much fun!

Europeans Will Kill You

Getting killed by Europeans isn't just for American tourists anymore. Two movies I watched recently were European films of the tourist-torture genre of horror.

The first was the 2006 British film "Severance." Severance is about a group of office employees from a weapons manufacturing company that goes off to a cabin somewhere in Eastern Europe for a team-building weekend. Only the cabin they wind up at is not the luxury retreat they were expecting. And they keep getting killed one by one. Oops. The irony is, of course, that they are being killed off with weapons supplied by their own company. Severance is VERY funny. Who doesn't love a good satire-horror about the military industrial complex? (Complete with one office worker whose interest is in building more humane land mines.) The characters are all pretty likable, and I was sad to see a couple of them get it.

The second film was Iceland's 2009 "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre." Sit right back and you'll hear a tale...of a bunch of tourists who get massacred while on a three hour tour, er, whale watch. This film is very, very bleak. It opens with grainy found/archival footage of whalers butchering whales. (Have I ever mentioned on this blog that I'm afraid of whales?) The movie plays out kind of like Texas Chainsaw Massacre but on a boat in the North Atlantic instead of in some Southern US backwoods. The idea here is that the Icelandic Mrs. Fratelli and her sons are pissed about Greenpeace's actions to take down the noble whaling industry and so they take it out on whale-watching tourists. (Although someone not on the boat is concerned that people don't look at whale watching from the whale's point-of-view. What about their privacy?) Also: the song that plays as the credits roll is Bjork's "Oh So Quiet" with the choruses covered by a metal band. Awesome.

The two films are about equally gruesome, but RWWM is a lot less fun simply because the tourist characters are just so mean and selfish. Not only do they not try to help each other make it out alive, they sometimes actively thwart the others' chances of survival. Sure, the crazy inbred hunchbacked Viking Nazi Jesus-freak killers are pretty messed up, but the characters trying to avoid getting killed by them are a brutal bunch themselves. Jeesh.

Anywho, the moral of the story is that if you're ever touring in Northern or Eastern Europe, and wackos come after you with murderous intent, try to help your comrades-without-arms to survive, k? Otherwise you're fucked.

It's called Inception.

I don't really want to write about Inception until I've seen it again, but I need to get these thoughts out of my head and into writing so I can pay attention to other things. No significant spoilers ahead.

- This movie makes very clear the similarities between film and dreams. As the movie points out, one doesn't often start at the beginning of a dream. It's already in progress. The same is true of any scene in a movie. The viewer doesn't know what came before, but fills it in. I was acutely aware of that with this movie, because every shift in scene asks "Is this 'real'? How did they get here?"
Another way that film is like a dream is the dilation of time. In the film, one hour of dream-time is equal to five minutes of real-time. When I entered the movie theater, it was daylight. When I exited, it was dark. I checked the time because I didn't know how much time had elapsed. (Going to see a matinee is even more like waking from a dream because going from the dark of the theater into bright daylight is especially jarring.)

-It is my belief that Christopher Nolan only directed The Dark Knight and made it so awesome so that he could get the name recognition and funding to do this film. "Inception" is very clearly follow-up to "Memento." At a thematic level, both films deal with memory and the perception of reality. On a narrative level, they both feature a man who is tortured by the death of his wife and haunted by memories of her and what he did or did not do to contribute to her death. "Inception" throws dreams into the mix. But both are about the playground that is the subconscious.

- Speaking of "spoilers" there were a couple of plot points that I saw coming right away. They weren't really "twists," because they were fairly easy to guess. But it is a testament to Nolan's writing and direction that figuring it out didn't feel like I was getting ahead of the film, and a testament to the cast's acting that they sold it even though I knew it was coming. The same can be said of a few confusing parts - I didn't entirely understand the details what was going on, but it didn't really matter.

- True or False? Inception : Dreams :: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind : Memories

- I love Leonardo DiCaprio. Has he won an Oscar yet?

- I love Joseph Gordon Levitt.

- Cillian Murphy's cheekbones are to die for.

- At one point near the end, I think Leo shouts "ELLEN!" at Ellen Page instead of her character's name.

- Speaking of Ellen Page's character: the character is named Ariadne. If I'm remembering my Greek mythology correctly, Ariadne is the woman who led Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Reeeeal subtle there, Nolan.

- As with Memento, the film is peppered with just enough really funny lines.

- It is unfortunate that the movie does not follow the Bechdel-Wallace rule, but fuck it. EDIT: Scratch that, I think it does.

- Towards the beginning of the film there is at least 20-30 minutes of scenes that feel overly expository - explaining dream architecture and inception and extraction, etc. I didn't much like that because it felt like the part of Ocean's 11 where we're walked through the plan for the heist. (And yes, I know Inception can be nutshelled as an existentialist heist film, but it's not that easily summated.) It just seemed like too much set-up and0 it was trying to hurry up and get to the good part, the dream. Well it was worth it. And there probably wasn't a better way to do it. But it bugged me at the time.

- The ending is excellent. The whole audience (and the theater was packed) let out a simultaneous expression of delicious frustration. It is ambiguous but not tormentingly so because it doesn't really make a difference which way the cookie crumbles.

- And there is another way the film is like a dream; it is like a dream that you wake from just before it ends and you try as you might, you can't fall back asleep and pick up where you left off.

- At one point early on, a female character (I can't remember if it's Ariadne) is standing at some sort of height or ledge and asks Leo, "What happens if I jump?" I reeeeally wanted him to say "You jump, I jump." (Titanic, people!)

I think that's all I have to say, at least until I see it again. (Tomorrow?)
Oh, and God I fucking love film.


EDIT:
One more thing I forgot about how the film is like a dream:
There are bits of dialogue that are repeated a few times throughout the movie. It is dreamlike in the way that dreams are like a sort of deja vu, variations on and repetitions of themes, objects, and events.
Oh, and also in the film they refer to the people who populate the dreams as "projections." To the audience, all the characters are literal projections on a movie screen.

"Tangled" up in blue (not pink)

So Disney's next outing is a take on the Rapunzel story (presumably without the part where Rapunzel ends up stranded in the desert and the Prince blinded).
Here is the latest trailer:


According to Cinematical, Disney changed the title of the film from "Rapunzel" to "Tangled" in order to have more appeal to boys. It seems that they thought that "The Princess and the Frog" didn't do too well because it had the word "princess" in the title and that they therefore alienated their male audience somehow.

Fine. Change the title. It gives you that nice line in the trailer: "It takes two to get...Tangled." But I'm not sure how I feel about making the trailer entirely centered on the Prince. On the one hand, I don't like that they are taking away the female narrative. It's not about Rapunzel being trapped in a tower, it's about Flynn on the run from the law! (Wait...wasn't that the plot of "Aladdin"?)

But what bothers me even more on a personal level is that it doesn't give me enough footage of Rapunzel to work with to decide whether I am interested in how she is portrayed or not. We see more of her hair than we do of her face. (Her hair can somehow move independently - it's like a cross between AVATAR hair and tentacle porn.) She could be kinda spunky - she's not taken in by Flynn's "smoldering" face. Or she could be a dumb blonde - her only line in the trailer is "Best. Day. Ever!" while swinging from a tree.

So is this a movie I should be supporting or not? Give me something to work with, Disney!

Bad Horror: Right vs. Wrong

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet George A. Romero - the man who created zombies as we know them today. But I overslept. Instead, however, I attended a free screening of his latest film, Survival of the Dead, which he introduced.

First things first: George A. Romero is a tall man.

[Disclaimer: I have seen Romero's original Night of the Living Dead. But I am ashamed to admit that I have not seen his other Dead movies (The Dawn of the Dead remake is one of my favorite zombie movies, though), including the recent first-person POV Diary of the Dead, from which Survival takes a minor character as the lead protagonist.]

My review of the movie:
It was really awesome seeing the Man himself introduce the film. But that's where the evening's awesomeness ended. Survival of the Dead is boring. Flat-out boring. I would post a spoiler warning for this review, but the whole thing is so glaringly obvious that there's nothing to spoil. The plot is tepid. The only interesting things Romero does to move his mythos forward is to suggest that zombies might eat something other than human flesh - but he does this only at the end and just kind of pokes the idea with a stick and walks away from it. The dialogue is awful. I didn't care about any of the characters. It could have been interesting to have military characters as the protagonists since Romero is so very anti-military, but all the characters were totally flat. The zombies weren't the only lifeless ones. (har har har.) If you recall, my criticism of Zombieland was that it had no conflict. Zombie movies aren't about the zombies, but about the survivors. In Survival of the Dead, I *wish* it had been more about the zombies. At least Zombieland was entertaining.

My review of the screening:
When Romero introduced the film, he said he had a lot of fun making the movie and encouraged the audience to laugh at the funny moments. Somehow, the audience took this to mean "add your own sound effects, guffaw at everything, and be a total d-bag" because that's what they did.




Now to do a 180 and look at a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed.

On Saturday, I went to a midnight screening of The Human Centipede. The premise of the film is that this Mengele-esque retired surgeon kidnaps three tourists and sews them together anus-to-mouth to create a "human centipede" with a single digestive tract. Gross. Awesome. I love bizarre movies. I don't usually pay attention to reviews, but Cinematical touted the film as "All concept, no follow-through, " so I was apprehensive. I didn't want to sit through a total stinker. But I had to go. Wow.

My review of the movie:
The film was actually not that bad ("bad" being subjective, of course). It strikes the right balance of taking its concept seriously, but not taking itself too seriously. The actresses who play two American tourists were godawful. Luckily, neither was the head of the centipede, so they don't get to talk at all after the operation. (They do groan and squeal and whine a lot, but they're okay at doing that.) Dieter Laser's Dr. Heiter is fan-fucking-tastic - creepy, insane, deadpan, whacked out of his mind, hilarious. He almost reminds me of Beat Takeshi. His lab-coat/aviators/shotgun get-up gives him the potential to be one of those iconic movie villains. As with Survival of the Dead, it's hard to spoil this movie, but for a different reason - once you know the premise, there's not much more to it. But it's not boring. Not at all boring. Sure, there are a couple of plot-holes, but they're easy enough to disregard or to write off as character stupidity. And as with Survival, I didn't particularly care about any of the characters (Except maybe the Japanese guy who is the head of the centipede, but about whom we know nothing). But that's probably for the best, as it would be real tough to sit through if I identified too closely with any of the victims. As for the gross-out factor, it wasn't that bad, actually. The medical stuff made me a bit squeamish - an IV gets ripped out of an arm and Herr Doktor cuts open a couple of kneecaps - but it was more than bearable. There's some oozing pus which is pretty gross. But the (objectively) grossest parts are implied. You don't get X-ray vision to see the extra long digestive tract in action. Of course, I have a pretty high tolerance for this kind of stuff - on film, that is. That's not to say that I was disappointed, though. It's pretty gross/bizarre, all right.

My review of the screening:
Except for one guy who kept making fart noises (you're not funny, guy), the audience was great. The laughed at all the appropriate moments - the first one being in the opening credits when the Director of Photography's name is displayed: his name is Goof de Koning. It makes me a little bit sad that this film will probably just turn into a sort of trophy for movie-goers - an endurance test, if you will. Oh well.

AVATAR

So I saw "AVATAR" last night.

First let me say that AVATAR is actually in 4D - 3 dimensions and time. We had to wait in line at the IMAX theater for an HOUR before they let us in to be seated! Jerks.

I give it a B-. It both managed to exceed and fall short of my expectations.

**Some spoilers ahead, but none that you didn't see coming.***

- The script wasn't as awful as I thought it would be. And the acting wasn't too terrible either.

- I knew in advance that it was the same general story as "Ferngully" (and Pocahontas, and Dances with Wolves, etc.) but certain shots and lines of dialogue were lifted DIRECTLY from Ferngully! Maybe James Cameron thought that nobody would notice, but Ferngully is one of my top three favorite movies of all time. I noticed. Maybe one day I will even do a shot-for-shot comparison of the plagiarized scenes.

- I HATE what they did to CCH Pounder! I was under the impression that the Na'vi animation was neat because the Na'vi looked like the actors that played them. This was more or less true of Zoe Saldana and Sam Whatsisface and that Norm guy. But look what they did to CCH Pounder:
Just look!

- Sigourney Weaver rocks my socks off. She was awesome. Maybe the Na'vi could have saved her life if they hadn't taken the time to wrap her in leaves before trying to heal her. What were they thinking?

- Giovanni Ribisi was pretty good, too.

- I don't care if Michelle Rodriguez almost always plays the same character. I like her.

- I felt like Colonel Badguy should have been played by Robert Patrick.

- I liked the part where the giant Mecha fought the giant jungle panther.

- For me, the most compelling scene was wherein Jake Sully gets his pet pterodactyl. That was a cool scene.

- The narrative economy was very tight. Kudos! Well played.

- The idea of the trees having synapses was really cool - original, even. I wish the movie was more about that and less about Ferngully.

- Okay, AVATAR probably should have won best sound design. I guess. Of course, I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, so I don't really know.

- The 3D: Here's my beef. Yes, the film was visually stunning. But I don't think it really added anything. Ostensibly, the point of 3D is to create a more immersive viewing experience, to make the audience feel like they're really there on Pandora. Instead, the 3D effects were distracting - they onlly drew attention to themselves. "Look what we can do! I bet you wanna reach out and touch those space jellyfish, huh?" No, I'd rather pay attention to what's going on, thanks. I think that a good director can give the viewer an immersive experience with more traditional techniques. I know James Cameron can! Remember that scene in Titanic when the ship goes end-up and the one guy falls off and hits the smoke-stack on the way down? I saw Titanic five times in theaters and every single time the guy hit the smoke-stack every single person in the audience cringed and went, "Ooh!" Just the camera angle and the sound design puts the viewer there. There were no moments like that in AVATAR. (That being said, Titanic is coming back to theaters in 3D. And I'm shooting for a sixth time.)

- My other beef: Eywa ex machina. Sure, the white guy comes in to save the day. But when it looks like all hope is lost even for him, the deity *literally* comes to the rescue. F'real?

The image in this post was yoinked from somewhere on the Internets.

Keep Pushin', Watson

Sherlock Holmes was rad!

*Possible spoilerishness ahead*

- There were two women of any importance in the film, which sucks but is more than Guy Ritchie usually has. It is unfortunate that they were both such flat stereotypes - the Good Wife and the Sexy Thief Rival/Love Interest. I felt like more could have been done. Mary, especially, had potential, I thought.

- Could someone please direct me to some good Holmes/Watson slash fic? kthx

- The narrative economy wasn't too tight. I get it, Guy, you like boxing. But that scene in the boxing ring wasn't really necessary, now was it? When you have a film where every little detail is supposed to have significance (as Holmes points out to Mary), there should be no flab unless it serves some red herring purpose.

- I don't usually like it when movies set up the sequel with such a groaner of an ending, but I look forward to the continuation of this franchise, so it's fine.

- Actors I would like to see more of: Mark Strong (Lord Blackwood), Kelly Reilly (Mary), Hans Matheson (Lord Coward)

- I would like to see it again at home so I can pause on images from the Book of Spells so I can see whether the Hebrew actually says anything. It didn't look like it, but maybe? The word "tzedek," meaning "justice," appears on an object on Sir Thomas' desk, and the word "shlemut," meaning "completeness," appears under the throne Blackwood sits on when he passes around the goblet.

- I'm not sure how I feel about Blackwood. He was a pretty neat villain, but his goal was pretty dumb. World conquest? Such a tired objective. And his means - a chemical weapon? Really? Kinda weak.

Good Riddance

I know I did a post with some year-end lists last year, but I really dislike year-end lists. I dislike decade-end lists even more.

2009 kind of sucked. A lot. There were lots of good things, but I'd rather not look back at them in a blog post in list format. A list of things I'm looking forward to in 2010 isn't much better than a year-end list, but here goes anyhow:

Movies:
Frozen
The Wolfman
Shutter Island
The Crazies
Kick-Ass
Toy Story 3
Inception

Music:
Contra - Vampire Weekend

Wow, is that it?
What else is there?

UPDATE: How could I forget!? Season 3 of Breaking Bad!

Silver Bells, Silver Screen

Some of my favorite Christmas movies, in no particular order:

Survive Style 5+


Die Hard


Gremlins


Bad Santa


Batman Returns


Brazil


I'll Be Home for Christmas




And just for good measure, the alternate ending to It's A Wonderful Life

Why Film Studies Matters

I've been thinking about grad school. One of the "nice" things about graduating from college into a recession is that I have a lot of time to think about what I *really* want to do. There are lots of things I could do, lots of things I want to do. But after much thought, if I follow my passion I will go to grad school for film studies.

Although I was (am?) an English major, I mostly took film classes. I did the work I am most proud of in those classes. So why wasn't it readily apparent to me that I would want to continue my education in that field?

Well, it's not very practical. When I tell people I want to go to school for film, the response is usually along the lines of, "Oh, you want to make movies?" And then I explain that actually, no, I don't want to make movies. I want to watch movies, and read about movies, and write about movies. "You want to be a reviewer." No. I want to be a theorist. Theory, by definition, is not practical.

Going to grad school for film studies would prepare me for pretty much one career: academia. This was where my passion hit a snag. I didn't think I had any interest in being a professor. And what interest I did have was more about the perks (summer vacation!) than about a desire to teach. So why spend all that time and money studying film if it's not going to get me anywhere? Well, because I love it. But isn't that selfish? Is there any field more self-serving than film theory? Nobody gives a damn! It's all an academic circle-jerk. I want to do something with my life that matters.

But then, as I was trying to articulate my frustration with Zombieland to a friend, it hit me: studying film DOES matter. What I want to do isn't just analyze and write about film - I want to show people why it is important to do so. I want to teach. (It fits! Life makes sense!)

When I look at the body of work I've produced from my years in college, the issues that come to the fore are very real - how gender is codified on screen, what it means to look at a body, the visceral reactions people have to certain images. If you can't sleep at night because you're too spooked from watching El Orfanato, that's real. If you tear up just thinking about Jack Dawson sinking into the freezing Atlantic Ocean, that's real. If a director in Japan and a director in Germany both use horror-comedy to explore queer issues, teasing out why is no less important than unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity. It matters.

Now to put my theory of why I want to go to grad school into practice and go buy a study book for the GRE.

Zombieland wasn't that great.

There. I said it.

I love a good zom-com (that's short for Zombie Comedy), so I wasn't going to pass on seeing Zombieland. I should have.

[Disclaimer: possibler spoilage ahead.]

By my count, Zombieland is the first mainstream US zom-com to come out of the uptrend of zombie movies over the past decade. And it is indeed decidedly mainstream, ie., lackluster. Here are my issues:

- Lack of Conflict
"Zombies are a conflict!" you might say. And you'd be wrong. In any good zombie movie - whether horror or comedy or in between - the zombies are merely a catalyst. The real conflict is between the living. Zombieland didn't have any of that.

- Not That Funny
I can't remember a single good line. Looking through the memorable quotes on imdb, I'm unimpressed.

- Tallahassee
Woody Harrelson's character is problematic. And by that I mean that it's a half-assed characterization. They try and give him some back story and emotional weight, but it falls flat. If you want to see a real zombie-killing badass, take a gander at Guitar Wolf:







Now THAT's a badass.



- US-centric
The opening of the movie says that the United States of America has become the United States of Zombieland. During this voice over, the camera zooms out to show the whole globe. Um, what? If the whole earth is affected, why call it the United States of Zombieland? Why not Planet Zombie?

- Heteronormative
The happy ending is the formation of a nuclear family unit. Yawn.

- Genre Identity Crisis
Any good zom-com recognizes and plays with the conventions of the zombie movie genre. Zombieland recognizes them (to some extent) and doesn't do anything with them. Columbus' zombie survival rules are cute, but more of a nod to the parafilmic zombie fandom than to its predecessors. In terms of self-awareness, Zombieland scores some points for having Bill Murray as himself. But even that seemed out of place. The fact that the poster uses the critical acclaim that it is "the funniest movie since The Hangover" is disappointingly appropriate in that the type of humor was nonspecific to its genre.

I am disappointed in Zombieland. It could have been more, but I'm not surprised that it isn't.

For some *good* zom-coms, check out:
- Wild Zero (2000) - Japanese rock n' roll zombie movie
- Shaun of the Dead (2004) - British zom-rom-com (that's zombie romantic comedy)
- Dance of the Dead (2008) - Indie US teenage zombie movie
- Fido (2006) - Zombie movie meets Douglas Sirk

Miscellaneous Movies

Some quick takes on movies I've watched in the past month and a half:

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes, 2007)
This time-travel movie was pretty good, if not a little confusing. (Trailer)

Stardust (2007)
I remembered kind of wanting to see this when it was in theaters because of Michelle Pfeiffer. It was fabulous! (Trailer)

Lat den ratte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2008)
I'd seen this Swedish vampire love-story before. I can't find the right adjective for it, but it's very, very good. (Trailer)

Away We Go (2009)
I already blogged about this one, but I saw it again. I was less enthusiastic the second time around, though I laughed just as hard. (Trailer)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
I never re-read the sixth book, so I didn't remember it enough to compare it with the movie. But I thought it was pretty entertaining. Way better than the fifth movie. (Trailer)

The Dark Crystal (1982)
Mad impressive puppets, yo. (Trailer)

Dod Sno (Dead Snow, 2009)
I'd been wanting to see this one since I first heard about it. It's a Norwegian movie about Nazi zombies (or zombie Nazis?). It lived up to my expectations quite well! (Trailer)

Bloody Mallory (2002)
I found this one on Hulu. It was friggin' awesome! Just read the description that accompanies the trailer. (Trailer)

Session 9 (2001)
Pretty slow moving and could have been a lot scarier. Some interesting editing choices. (Trailer)

Art fail

I was going to write about personal branding and Barthes' "Death of the Author." But then Heidegger, Derrida, and Kant came along and started to call me names and throw things at me. They're such bullies. So now I can't get my mind straightened out in order to wrap it around authorship and branding as I'd intended to.

I watched The Strangers last night. It wasn't very good. The whole thing was like the last reel of any good slasher - the killer's in the house! - but for a whole movie. Steven Tyler may be the Demon of Screamin', but Liv's just not cut out to be a Scream Queen.
Because it left us with such a bland aftertaste, we watched Scream. Damn. That movie gets better every time I see it.

Image of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" stolen from here.

Away We Go (2009) is awesome! Here's why.

I just got back from a free sneak peek of Sam Mendes' Away We Go, which is to be released later this month. All I knew about it was that Dave Eggers was involved and that John Krasinski was in it. But hey, it was free.

I was blown away. I think I liked it more than American Beauty. (Although I should note that I saw American Beauty years after it was released, and saw Away We Go before it was released. The hype around American Beauty may have lessened its impact on me.)

This post may include "spoilers," but they wouldn't actually spoil your viewing experience.

The movie is about a couple in their early thirties that gets pregnant. They visit friends in a few different cities, trying to decide where to settle down.

From the opening scene I had a good feeling that this would be a feminist-friendly film. I was not disappointed.

The protagonists, Bert and Verona, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, look like real people. In fact, all the characters look like real people - and the cast is quite impressive, I might add.

And finally, a film that obeys The Rule!

I'm actually realizing that I'm a little too tired and scatterbrained to write coherently right now, but I want to get this down. The movie is hilarious and touching. It really is wonderful.

What I like most about the film is that from beginning to end, Bert and Verona are in love. Like all of the families in the movie, their relationship isn't perfect. But they love each other. One of biggest problems with romantic comedies is there is always some Conflict: things start out smoothly, The Conflict comes along, the couple fights or breaks up, there is A Resolution, and they get back together, the way it should be. But that's not how relationships work!! There is no epic battle to win a person's heart. You get to know somebody over time.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write more about the film. Now, sleep.

Thoughts on Star Trek (2009)

I finally saw Star Trek last night. I'd never seen a Star Trek movie before, and have only seen a couple episodes of one of the TV shows. Most of my prior Star Trek knowledge came from recognizing references to it in The Simpsons, Futurama, Can't Hardly Wait, xkcd, etc. Here are my thoughts.


- In the event of a Romulan attack, I don't think it should be necessary for Star Fleet crew to stand at attention whenever the captain walks by. I think they should keep doing whatever the hell it is they need to be doing.

- The average shot length, towards the climax at the end, was probably about 2 seconds.

- About halfway through I realized that the actor who plays Uhura was Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked her better as Anamaria.

- Speaking of Uhura, this movie fails the Bechdel-Wallace Test with flying colors. The movie pays lip service to equality at the end, making a point to say "To boldly go where no one has gone before" instead of "no man." But why talk the talk if they ain't gonna walk the walk?

- Who knew that Hoth was really just Delta Vega?

- Simon Pegg rules. There needed to be way more of Scotty. I also liked his little walking cabbage sidekick.

- My other favorites were Bones and Chekov.

- The clever thing about the time travel plot device is that it allows J.J. Abrams some leeway - if it's an alternate reality, he can stray from the canon. But even so, having Kirk born in space strips Riverside, Iowa of its claim to fame.

- There was not nearly enough pandering to K/S slash fiction writers. I demand more fan service, dammit!

- I am soooo glad I was an English major. They don't shoot English majors off into space before we even graduate.