Jay's Movie Blog

Long day yesterday, highlighted by All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Shamo. I could tell by the end of Shamo that I wasn't going to make it through another movie, so I wound up going back here and to bed instead. The way the schedule has been shuffled means I still have a pretty good chance of catching Tokyo Gore Police should I choose to on closing night, although the guests likely won't be there.

Today's plan is Japan-heavy: Robo Rock!, Chasing World, Be a Man! Samurai School (with Tak Sakaguchi apparently present), Akanbo Shojo, and Trailer Park of Terror. If you're in town, I can recommend A Colt Is My Passport.

L: Change the World

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Kenichi Matsuyama's performance as "L" may not have been the best thing to come out of the Death Note double feature, but it's certainly one of the most memorable. Fans mainly familiar with the original manga may find the idea of a spin-off movie featuring the character unlikely, but the premise does work for the movie series, even if some of the execution is lacking.

(Spoilers for the Death Note movies follow, as you may expect)

Full review at EFC.

Wicked Lake

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Here's what you need to know about the quality of this film: They were giving away posters at the door, and a number of them were left in the theater, because who wants to have a reminder of this turd hanging around, even if it's free?

Just bad exploitation all around, full of bad acting without an idea in its plastic-looking head. There's got to be better ways to get one's fill of boobs and blood.

Chanbara Beauty (Onechanbara)

* * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Apparently, no matter what continent they come from, video game movies suck. Not that I've been stuck seeing many, but Chanbara Beauty feels like it would be typical - random zombie attacks, ridiculous costume designs (I don't care how badass someone is as a fighter, when you're living in a world defined by a nasty fluid-borne pathogen and your weapon of choice is a sword, exposed skin is not a good idea), powers that don't hold up to logic, etc., etc.

Even more than expected, Chanbara Beauty is unsatisfying and cheap-looking, although I'll grant that it might be a fun game.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)

There is a lot of crap in the "slasher" subgenre, enough so that a person can be reasonably forgiven for giving the entire thing a pass because the occasional gem is not worth the vast mountains of poorly made movies that camouflage it. The occasional gem like Mandy Lane argues against that position, so of course it's stayed hidden for two years.

Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) really blossomed the summer before her junior year, and as it starts, really doesn't seem comfortable with all the new attention, and still tends to hang out with her far less popular friend Emmet (Michael Welch). At a pool party, jocky host Dylan (Adam Powell) constantly hits on Mandy and harasses Emmet, and after both have had a little too much to drink, Emmet goads Dylan into something foolish and shocking. Jump forward nine months, and Mandy and Emmet are no longer friends. She's still the good girl among the people she hangs out with - cheerleaders Chloe (Whitney Able) and Marlin (Melissa Price), rich kid Red (Aaron Himelstein), and athletes Bird (Adiwn Hodge) and Jake (Luke Grimes). They're going to spend the weekend at Red's family's ranch, with only hand Garth (Anson Mount) to supervise. Mandy still does tend to attract unwanted attention, though...

It may not seem like writer Jacob Forman has done anything particularly special here at first glance. He seems to have a better handle on how teenagers actually act than many others - the characters aren't self-referential constructs like in the Scream movies or lazy stereotypes - but that's not completely unusual. What he does is to rebuild the genre from the ground up, letting us see the killer's face much earlier than is typical and giving us some idea of his or her motives, although there are still a few complications to make the end more interesting. This doesn't seem like much, but for so long it seems as though there have just been a couple basic paths these movies could go down (bloody whodunit and gimmick killer, or some combination of the two) that playing up the characters rather than the mechanics seems downright revolutionary.

Full review at EFC, along with two others.

Shamo (Gwan Gaai)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm going to guess that Shamo was a fairly long manga series; like a lot of anime based on such series, the movie feels cut to the bone, with jumps in the story made in order to get to all the flashy scenes, and characters there because they were in the book but not given very much to do. It works better than usual in this one, in part because we're supposed to think of the protagonist as at least partly a dangerous maniac who can't be reasoned with; the randomness works in its favor.

Visually, it's also a treat, as director Soi Cheang sets it in a garish hightened reality that gives a certain amount of glitz to it trashy settings. The fight scenes are pretty bone-crunching affairs as well.

Labels: action, crap, Fantasia, fantasy, Hong Kong, horror, Japan, thriller, USA

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At some point in any festival, unless you're made of sterner stuff than I, you're probably going to hit the wall. There's just a point where the running between theaters (whether in the same building or in three neighboring cities), waiting in line, going through the rigamarole of getting a full house crammed into the room, and sitting through movies which demand a bit more than the usual matinee fare becomes tiring, and you maybe can't write an honest review because there's a very good chance that you napped through fifteen or twenty minutes.

For Triangle, I'm placing the blame solidly on my decision to go home, eat something marginally closer to a balanced meal than Cherry Coke and Twizzlers, and watch the Red Sox postgame show in the time between the Q&A for Turn the River in Somerville and the start of Triangle in Brookline. I must have fooled my body into thinking I was done for the day, when, no, there was still an hour and a half of Hong Kong action to go. For Severed Ways (where I don't think I missed much important), there's still being tired from not getting home until two-thirty-ish, rushing to Somerville, and winding up in a seat so far toward the front that you have to lean back to see the picture, way closer than digital projection was meant to be seen.

I spent the next couple hours really wishing I had waited a bit and gone to see the jump-rope movie instead. People need to be warned about this turd. (Note that the review for Severed Ways contains coarser language than usual - not my usual, but it's the best words for the job.)

Speaking of projection, I must confess that by the time Triangle showed, I was starting to get a little cranky about the first "F" in "IFFB" being kind of inaccurate; I think the opening night showing of Transsiberian was the only thing I saw on actual film rather than digital video up to that point. It kind of surprised me when Triangle wound up not being digital. Apparently the American movies with people in attendence couldn't get a print shipped, but the one from Hong Kong could. It just doesn't figure.

Tie Saam Gok (Triangle)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2008 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)

I hope to get a chance to see Triangle again sometime soon, because the idea behind it is a lot of fun - getting three big-name action-adventure directors to make one film, handing the reins off to each other, allowing them to change styles to do what they do best... Well, that sounds like a lot of fun, and from the way the credits are arranged, it looks like each director had his own writers, too, and I know that's a lot of fun.

The story starts out as looking like a crime movie, as three down on their luck men are recruited for what initially looks like a robbery but either becomes a treasure hunt or was one all along (my subtitle comprehension does kind of go to heck after midnight). There's complications, of course, with one of the trio's wife having an affair with a corrupt cop who appears to be in on everything.

As it turns out, I think I missed the entire middle segment. I saw most of the set-up which led to the robbery, which is good, gritty crime; it could have been either Ringo Lam or Johnnie To. Then I missed the middle act, picking up for the end, which is much more a caper bit, as the getaway cars break down outside the city, the wife starts acting weird (she may just have one heck of a concussion), and there's a bunch of identical-looking bags, one containing rare coins, one smuggled guns, the other someone's dinner that keep getting mixed up. I'm pretty sure this leg is directed by Tsui Hark, if only because he's the one I most associate with being funny.

Taken on its own, that last act is a lot of goofy fun, but it might not play so well put together with two other acts that I assume are being played more or less straight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out soon; Magnolia's "Magnet" label seems to be putting it out sometime later this year.

Of course, they're also listed as distributor for...

Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2008 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Believe it or not, Severed Ways was one of the movies I was initially fairly excited about when the IFFB announced their roster of films. How many Viking movies do you get at the typical independent film festival, after all, and the fact that it wasn't banished to the "After Dark" segment of the program held out hope that it might be pretty good. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a miserable enough experience that I would have happily traded Vikings for the documentary about competitive jump-roping next door if I could have.

The text at the beginning sounds enticing - it sets up the backstory from the Vinland Sagas, telling us of a group of Norsemen who by 1007 AD had made a settlement in what is now Canada sending a further expedition south, only to be beset by "Skraelings" (the Abenaki) and driven back home. Two scouts, Orn (Tony Stone) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) were left behind and must survive off the land while they try to make their way back north, with hundreds of miles of wilderness, natives, and Christian missionaries between them and their goal.

I wonder if I might have enjoyed this movie a little more had it appeared at the Underground Film Festival rather than the Independent Film Festival. It would seem to fit there better; Severed Ways is very much a backyard film, which Tony Stone shot in Vermont and at Viking ruins in Newfoundland. Stone does practically everything, writing, directing, producing, and editing as well as starring in the picture. Costumes and props do look like they were made in his basement - probably more true to life than something from an elaborate Hollywood production, but still feeling like stuff they cobbled together out of what was lying around. It also feels a little underpopulated, as homemade movies tend to be.

Still, seeing it in a context where I'm more inclined to be generous would not have made it a good movie. Even discounting the question of what those Catholic missionaries are doing in the New World something like five hundred years too early, Stone makes a lot of decisions that maybe seemed to make sense at the time but don't quite work. The heavy metal soundtrack is a good idea, but actually showing Orn headbanging is weird. The actors speak in Greenlandic, apparently the closest thing going to ancient Norse, but it sounds stilted, and the subtitles are in idiomatic twenty-first century English ("we're toast if we stay here!"), further breaking the spell. The overblown chapter titles don't help, either - the small act of mayhem that follows the proclamation of "Conquest" is laughable.

A lot of that can be overcome, but Stone loses his audience pretty decisively early on. There are certain on-screen images you have to earn, and actual shit coming out of your ass is one of them. There was a palpable wave of revulsion that went through the audience at that, and smaller ones when Orn/Stone killed and dressed chickens and fish on-screen, and as much as you can try to defend that by saying it has documentary value, it just feels gratuitous, and no matter how much merit the rest of the film might have, there's no getting over that the audience just doesn't want any part of it any more.

That sort of thing throws the rest of the movie's faults into greater relief. Severed Ways runs nearly two hours but it's generally a slow, introspective 110 minutes, and the audience feels trapped by a performer who mistakenly thinks that every minute detail of his character's actions is just that fascinating. Stone isn't a good enough actor to pull it off, though, and the way he cavorts on screen makes the film seem like a sustained act of egotism. Which is too bad, because there is material for an interesting film here - the idea of being lost that far from home is powerful, as is Volnard's spiritual growth from encountering the Christian monks.

Maybe Stone is a guy to watch, even if his ambition greatly outstrips his resources and skill right now. Someday after working with and learning from the right people, he could become a decent filmmaker. In the meantime, though, I can't think of any good reason for someone to actually watch this movie.

Also on EFC.

Labels: action, crap, drama, history, Hong Kong, IFFB, independent, Independent Film Festival of Boston, indiefilmcafe, USA

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I've been going to The Boston Sci-Fi Marathon for several years now - started at the Coolidge, followed it to Dedham and West Newton before it landed back at Somerville for what seems like a fairly permanent arrangement - and I admit, I've got some mixed feelings about it. It's the sort of event that is absolutely the most fun the first time, and eventually becomes as much a social event as a chance to see a bunch of movies. That's probably why my love for it has waned a bit since I started going; I don't have a group of friends I meet there, and none of the people I've ever tried to talk into going has ever come. So it has, for me, become about endurance to a certain extent, and that's no attitude to have toward something you mainly do out of love.

This year actually had a pretty nice line-up; I wish I could have stayed awake through the whole thing. Maybe next year I'll have someone to elbow me during whatever the equivalent of 1984 is.

Cloverfield

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

As I said in my previous review, this is one that grew on me quite a bit even after liking it a lot the first time. A second viewing didn't do anything to dissuade me from that view; although I still wonder about some of the things that Hud films when I think he and sane people everywhere would either turn the camera off and devote all his attention to running, or when it might not be convenient to evesdropping, there's enough slack because the movie needs it.

Also, it's fun to check for the things I missed the first time around but read about later, like the very last scene, which doesn't just serve a fitting coda.

Full review at HBS, along with eight others.

King Dinosaur

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

Later on in the marathon, people were subjected to A Sound of Thunder, which is similarly awful but in a cynical way. The makers of King Dinosaur, on the other hand, lack the resources of both finance and talent that the makers of today's terrible sci-fi movies possess, and that works in their favor a bit. You see the terrestrial animals shot in extreme close-up to make them appear to be giant alien creatures, and admire the attempt to make something out of nothing.

That doesn't make this a good movie or close to it; too much is still laughable - the useless woman who traveled months in a rocket-ship to Counter-Earth an wants to go home ten minutes after landng, the amount of filler necessary to nudge the running time over an hour, the gung-ho use of an atomic bomb that isn't just awful in retrospect. This is a bad movie all around, the type that is only partially excused by the earnest effort put into it.

The Last Mimzy

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

The Last Mimzy doesn't quite rate "buried treasure" status, but it's certainly in the "buried thing worth seeing" category. It's about kids who find a box of toys from the future, which gives them strange powers but also draws out their innate abilities. They draw the attention of Homeland Security, of course, and inevitably escape with the help of a sympathetic teacher.

It's a kids' movie, but one of the good ones which doesn't talk down to its audience or assume they've got ADHD. The adult characters are sympathetic and reasonable. The effects are restrained but nifty when they do appear. It's a fine sci-fi movie whether or not you've got any little guys watching it with you.

Five reviews at HBS

In the Shadow of the Moon

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

There were a couple people talking behind me during this one, which isn't particularly noteworthy in and of itself, although it bothered me more than usual. The manned space program is one of the most fantastic things in human history, and the moon program its greatest achievement. I'm not a religious person, but I suddenly understood the feelings of anyone who ever shushed me for talking in church.

For this really is an exceptional document - there is no narration beyond a title card or two; the film consists almost entirely of the reminiscences of the surviving Apollo astronauts and actual footage cobbled together from NASA, television news, and other sources. The archival footage (we are reminded that it is all the real deal) generally looks to be either exceptionally well-preserved or restored; the interview segments show us lean men who are still capable of inspiring awe despite their age, but are also generally genial and funny. There's anecdotes that even die-hard space fanatics may not have heard, and the familiar ones are well-told. The closest thing to a complaint is one I have with many documentaries that lean on "talking head" segments, in that I'd like to have everyone constantly identified; the nature of this particular film means we're juggling a bunch of old white men. But it's a small quibble.

Now I just have to hope that the UK HD DVD announced for the end of March actually comes out; I've got that pre-ordered and I'm not quite hopeful about a Region A Blu-ray disc coming out any time soon.

One review at HBS

Ever Since the World Ended

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

This faux-doc has a nifty idea - chronicling life after a nasty plague wipes out ninety-odd percent of humanity - and does a pretty good job of making the audience believe that the characters are living in a nearly-empty San Francisco. The trouble, I guess, is that this world-building doesn't really lead to anything. We find out that the world's children aren't really interested in the pre-plauge world's history and the reaction is just "yeah... that makes sense". We wind up kind of short on interesting conflict; what there is is deliberately small in scale.

It's also a movie where I was still trying to decide whether or not I had already seen it until about about thirty minutes in or so. It has been kicking around for about five years, and I do enough events where a low-budget sf-y film like this might show up that it was a possibility. Eventually, I think I decided that I hadn't, but you know what? If I see it again in five years, I strongly suspect that the only way I'll know that I'd already seen it would be because it's documented here.

One review at HBS

War of the Worlds '53

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

Speaking of anti-climaxes, this story in all its forms is predicated on a thoroughly deliberate one. When Matt saw the recent Tom Cruise version, he actually complained about the ending until being reminded that without that ending, more or less exactly, it's not War of the Worlds. I do kind of wonder how H.G. Wells would react to this film's insinuation that the aliens were eventually brought down by prayer, as he tended toward the atheistic.

That aside, this version of War of the Worlds still stands very tall among fifties sci-fi films. It shares many of that group's faults - it treats "scientists" as something close to magicians and tends not to question authority - but its sights and sounds hold up very well.

(And, besides, it inspired that stupid but fun late-eighties sci-fi/horror series. The first year of that holds a special place in my heart for teaching me that gore can be fun!)

Two reviews at HBS

2001: A Space Odyssey

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

There's seldom been anything quite like 2001, either before or since. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke shared both a grand vision and a mania for detail, along with the skill (and obsessiveness) necessary to actually get it on screen. I tend to gravitate toward the detail; seldom has interplanetary flight ever seemed so right, so precisely imagined and reasonably extrapolated, as it does here.

The grander story, the alien monoliths scattered throughout the solar system that guide and boost human evolution, leaves me a little colder; I tend to be pretty fond of the idea that we got where we are by hard work and taking advantage of favorable mutations. I do love how the stargate grabs the audience and forces them to think, while also staring in wonder at what Kubrick and company created with the visual effects and animation capabilities of the time.

I did start nodding off during this movie, though (at least I made it past midnight!). i'm sure of it, because I missed HAL singing "Daisy, Daisy". Ah, well - at least it gives me an excuse to see just how good the HD version is; I've heard great things.

Two reviews at HBS

Black Sheep

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

Some of the SF/33 promotion labeled this as a regional premiere, which wasn't the case - I saw it at the Boston Fantastic Film Festival a couple years back, which is just a quick hop on the red line or 91 bus away. I liked it then, and liked it again on the second go-round It's perfect for the wee hours of a marathon like this - shockingly funny and gross as well as bright and colorful enough to fool your brain into thinking its still daytime.

Some people describe it as a horror movie, but I really don't see it that way - it's never really trying to scare you. Make you jump, yes. Gross you out, yes. But no-one's going to have nightmares about killer sheep gnawing off their dangly bits because of this movie, or worry about anything. It's just a fine, gross, black comedy.

(I was surprised by the people I overheard saying they had trouble with the accents. On the scale of accents being close to "American", New Zealand is way closer to the Canada side of the scale than the rural Scotland side!)

Full review (and four others) at HBS

1984

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

Here is where I got most of my sleep for the night. Remember how bright and colorful I described Black Sheep as being? 1984 is the opposite of that. It's grey and overcast, populated by serious people speaking in level tones. The voiceovers are probably taken directly from Orwell's prose, and they're dry political theory rather than something that comes from the characters as individuals.

Which, I think, might be a problem with the movie even if it wasn't a 4am death slot. 1984, after all, is about its ideas; the story is close to incidental. It is so thoroughly a lecture on how fascism works and where it ultimately leads that any sort of plot twist would be completely missing the point. That's why I could tell that I had fallen asleep several times during the movie but not really feel like I had missed anything, even though I could see that the story had moved forward without me.

One review at HBS

Journey to the Seventh Planet

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

I'm just not charmed by old, bad sci-fi movies. Some folks are connisseurs, I guess, of such things, and look at John Agar's name in this film's credits as a sort of stamp of legitimacy; he's been in other bad sci-fi flicks and he's a comfortable, reassuring presense. These people tend to be in their forties or fifties or older, and probably don't like the movies themselves as the years in their lives in which they were encountered, whether that be in the theater or on television.

They're not good movies detached from that, and this one is worse than usual, bad enough for the American distributor to actually spring for new visual effects. The film involves landing on Uranus to find an environment that is not hostile - except, of course, for the telepathic creature that convinces the crew that there are some fine-looking women there, in order to lure them to some sort of doom. It's ridiculous, it's been done better, it's just generally not worth the time.

One review at HBS

A Sound of Thunder

* (out of four)
Ignored 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

I generally don't get that much of a kick out of writing negative reviews. I know there are people who do, and the general image most people have of film critics is something like Jay Sherman ("it stinks!"), but I sometimes worry that my reviews cluster in the 2.5-3.5 star range, because even the worst movie still has something within it worth watching.

Not this one. This one is just junk, through and through, and a lot of people were justifiably upset at its inclusion.

I took it as an opportunity to get myself a bacon-and-egg crepe next door and hit up the ATM across the street. This movie's vortex of suck was so powerful that that meant walking out into a downpour, which had mostly cleared up by the end of the marathon. After that was done, I hung out in the upstairs lobby for a half hour or so, enjoying the leg room that you just don't find in the Somerville Theater's balcony section.

Full review at HBS, along with four others.

A Boy and His Dog

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2008 at the Somerville Theater #1 (SF/33)

Post-apocalyptic stories generally don't do much for me. Not just because many are set in the far-off year of 1999 only to be tripped up by the fact that we didn't blow ourselves up leaving all of North America a radioactive wasteland and it looks less likely all the time so stop making these things even if they are cheap and people think a cynical view of the future is cooler than an optimistic one...

Ahem. Sorry; pet peeve. Anyway, this isn't a genre I'm particularly fond of, but A Boy and His Dog is a better-than-average example of it. The telepathic bond between the title characters is a neat idea, and there's some fun insanity in the underground society where Don Johnson's horny teenager winds up. Curiously, these two things don't intersect much at all - the title characters are separated at this point. Before then, though, there's a bunch of wandering around the desert, encountering various hostile but uninteresting groups. Been there, done that.

One review at HBS


I did wonder if I might have gotten through everything better if the films had played in their intended order - A Boy and His Dog was initially scheduled to play at about 10pm, while War of the Worlds was scheduled to close things out at 10am, but the brand new film print that the director had struck just for the Marathon (it did look pretty nice) wound up locked up in a UPS warehouse until it opened on Monday morning

Ah, well. Another one in the books. As cranky as these pieces generally are, I'm looking forward to next year's.

Labels: comedy, crap, documentary, drama, sci-fi, USA

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Or just The Fly. The less said about Home of the Brave, the better.

Also, Fox's Blu-ray Disc prices suck. I'll probably add The Fly to my collection eventually, but the $28 it costs at Amazon is more than I'm willing to pay right now. Sadly, we're likely to see fewer sales on BDs now that they're less focused on beating HD DVD.

The Fly (1986)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2008 in Jay's Living Room (rental Blu-ray disc)

One of my first thoughts after watching David Cronenberg's version of The Fly was that it is a horror movie for adults. Not just because the stars can't exactly pass for teenagers or college kids or because the science in its science-fiction is particularly good - it isn't. The thing that elevates it above many other horror films is how introspective it is.

If The Fly were being remade today (and, for all I know, there probably is something being worked on), there would be more characters, and the human fly of the title would be killing them off, sucking their blood after he did so. That's not where Cronenberg is interested in going, though - he's more interested in examining the effect Seth Brundle's metamorphosis has on the man himself rather than painting targets on people's backs.

Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a physicist who has been working in relative solitude on teleportation for years, and has managed to transport inanimate objects, but living things get turned inside out by the process. He brags about it to Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a pretty science journalist as a means to get her back to his warehouse which serves as both lab and living space. She's fascinated, both by the science and the scientist, but when her editor and former lover (John Getz) tries to publish before she is ready and insert himself back into her life, a drunken Brundle uses himself as a test subject, and though it appears he's fixed the inversion problem, a fly that accidentally entered his teleportation pod has been fused with him at a genetic level, and as time goes on, Brundle begins to exhibit more and more insect-like traits.

Since the movie is only focusing on two or three characters, it's important that we don't get sick of them. None of the characters in The Fly are terribly complex, but they play to the performers' strengths and keep us interested. Seth Brundle is the quintessential Jeff Goldblum character - smart, but more than a bit peculiar; he's the kind of guy who'll get engrossed by a problem and not recognize that it's well past time to be concerned for his own well-being or the world around him. His jealousy of Veronica plays as coming from the same personality traits that make him a successful scientist: He sees all questions as problems to investigate and solve, which is a sure route to madness in a relationship. His positing that he is no longer Seth Brundle, but some hybrid offspring he calls "Brundlefly" means that his curiosity rather than problem-solving instincts are engaged even as the other characters react in horror at what is happening to him.

Geena Davis and John Getz aren't quite that complicated, but they do their jobs very well: Davis's Veronica is sane and beautiful enough to serve as sharp contrast to Brundle's eccentricities, but she's also got the sort of interest in the unusual to be drawn to Brundle and hold off taking action until things get really strange. Getz plays Brundle's opposite, a guy who is basically a jerk and more interested in the practical than the amazing.

The story is good and the performances are pretty decent, and that gives the film an unsettling atmosphere. That might be good enough, but Cronenberg and his special effects team (notably Brundlefly designer Chris Walas) take that air of uncertainty and make it pay off with some top-quality gore. Bones get exposed when Brundle doesn't know his own strength, and its a tough call as to whether his shedding of human characteristics or the addition of insectoid ones are more gleefully disgusting. Even some of the effects which don't stand up as well at least succeed in being unsettling for a moment or two before the urge to laugh kicks in.

The script by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue is smart enough to not be about any one specific thing, as science fiction stories are often wont to be. There's bits about scientific hubris, abortion, stunted emotional development; Brundle's transformation can be seen as disease, aging, or the delusion that he can handle things life throws at us. Cronenberg, Goldblum, and Davis do a pretty fantastic job in making sure that we can see bits of ourselves in Seth and Veronica, but the shift to a nail-biting finale doesn't seem artificial.

Cronenberg's The Fly is one of the great horror movies, not just because it can be accurately described as "more" and smarter than most horror flicks, but because it can do all that and still be eminently watchable when the goal is quality mutilation and gore.

Also at eFilmCritic, along with one other review

Home of the Brave (1986)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2008 in Jay's Living Room (rental Blu-ray disc)

Home of the Brave was probably never going to be the first great Iraq war veteran film; it's far too eager to address that subject directly. Even if it was never going to be definitive, it would have been nice for it to at least be an average movie. Sadly, its unable to even manage those standards, no matter how good its intentions may be.

Director Irvin Winkler and his screenwriter Mark Friedman are trying to make the point that making war is often easier than handling it afterward, but probably didn't expect the quality of their film to illustrate the point. Home of the Brave opens with a fairly well-accomplished sequence where a group of Army reserve soldiers serving in Iraq are introduced and then ambushed on one of their last missions before being sent home: Characters are sketched out efficiently, the action is well-photographed, the sound adds to the tension, and the procedural details seem accurate without being confusing to those without the appropriate knowledge. Then the survivors are sent home.

And then things start to fall apart. For the characters, that's the point - P.E. teacher Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel) is not only self-conscious of and hindered by her prosthetic hand, but no longer feels any connection to her boyfriend. Tommy Yates (Brian Presley) lost his best friend in Iraq and his job at home; none of the work he can find feels like it matters. Jamal Aiken (50 Cent) is angry without an outlet. And Dr. Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson) is drinking when he's not clashing with his son (Sam Jones III), who has taken up an anti-war position in large part to spite his father.

That's not a terrible start, but Winkler and Friedman don't really send them anywhere from there. They've basically got these four characters, in somewhat different situations, and we cycle through them, watching Vanessa feel awkward, Tommy feel lost, Jamal feel angry, and Will feel conflicted. None of their individual stories do much to make them interesting characters rather than just avatars of how people come back from war damaged. When their paths cross, they rarely do much more than talk.

Now, they shouldn't all melt down the way one character does, but their conversations often come across as simplistic lectures to the audience. Tommy and Jamal go to a support group to hear Vietnam vets talk about how it never goes away. There's a scene where Vanessa and Tommy meet and find common ground, and as well as Biel and Presley play it, it's still all about talking to us, rather than revealing anything about them.

Sad, because it might be the best-acted scene of the movie. The rest is mostly adequate, but occasionally it gets embarrassing. A sequence with a drunk Will, for instance, allows Samuel L. Jackson to indulge his worst tendencies toward overacting. Most of the cast isn't given much to do - 50 Cent in particular - and wind up giving fairly flat performances.

I feel bad for Winkler and Friedman, as I suspect this is something they felt strongly about. But strong feelings and good intentions aren't nearly enough to make a good movie.

Also at eFilmCritic, along with two other reviews

Labels: crap, drama, hi-def, horror, sci-fi, USA, war

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I almost missed this at the Brattle because I would have been the only one to see the Saturday midnight show, and there's no point in running a film just for one guy who wasn't actually going to pay money for it (usher-level members don't pay for each ticket. Sound good? Join The Brattle yourself!). Luckily, I guess, someone else decided he wanted to see it at the last minute.

We each bought some candy and soda, so the theater didn't have to run the movie for just seven dollars and fifty cents of return, but they must have taken a bath on it, despite the write-up in the program saying what a gloriously trashy, ridiculous movie it is. Sadly, I think they were overselling it.

I Know Who Killed Me

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2008 at The Brattle Theater ("Recent Raves"/Best of 2007. Seriously)

There's a part of me that would like it if I Know Who Killed Me ended Lindsay Lohan's career. That's not scadenfreude or any dislike of her as an actor talking; I actually like her enough to wish she'd be in better movies. But if a career that started with a better-than-expected remake of The Parent Trap is going to crash and burn, well, this is exactly the movie that should form the other bookend.

In it, Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, an honor student in a prosperous suburb who vanishes one night, apparently the latest victim of the limb-severing serial killer who is apparently the community's only blight (especially if you have an attractive and intelligent daughter). But wait! She seems to have survived and escaped, somehow, though not before losing an arm and a leg. And, apparently, her marbles - when she wakes up in the hospital, she claims to be someone else entirely, a stripper by the name of Dakota Moss, which understandably upsets her parents (Neal McDonough and Julia Ormand), the psychiatrist assigned to help her recover (Gregory Itzin), and the FBI agents investigating the case (Garcelle Beauvais and Spence Garrett). Not so much her boyfriend (Brian Geraghty), what with Dakota being willing to put out and all.

As with its main character, the film seems to have a split personality. At times it feels like it wants to be a murder mystery, or a psychological thriller. So we spend a lot of time before the abduction watching Aubrey's life for something suspicious, paying attention to the seemingly inconsequential scenes that the film lingers over because it might contain clues that will be important in the end. After she's taken, there's a great deal of earnest procedural work, puzzling over the short stories Aubrey wrote about Dakota earlier, and trying to figure out just how to crack through Dakota's resistance to find the necessary clues. This, quite honestly, isn't much fun. Writer Jeff Hammond and director Chris Sivertson don't really have what it takes to tell a good mystery story; they can't tell the difference between boring filler and legitimate red herrings. They also don't give us much in the way of interesting characters; Dakota may be a figment of Aubrey's imagination, but she's still the richest and most entertaining person on-screen.

They probably could have cut a lot of that first part out, because the film's other personality - the one that's completely insane - is where everything really seems to be going on. This is the part that gives Dakota prosthetic limbs so advanced as to be science fictional. It's lurid in every way it can be, from soap-opera storylines to serving up heaping scoops of limbs being severed on-camera, broken bones, and blood. Sadly, it never manages to make such things exciting; at moments when overacting, obvious music, flying cameras, and cheap shocks would be exactly what the movie needs, everything is restrained and terribly serious. And then there's the final twist, on the opposite end of the speculative-fiction spectrum from "robot hands" - though I have to give Hammond credit on it: While most last-act revelations in bad movies make no sense of any kind, this one actually ties things up in a way that almost makes sense. It's an insane, twisted sort of logic that requires mammoth suspension of disbelief to accept the central premise (Art Bell is appealed to as an authority), but it sort of hangs together.

Still, that sort of basic competence isn't necessarily found where it could do the most good. Sivertson, who has mostly done tiny films with the Austin-based Mo-Freak collective, seems unsure what to do with a big studio's resources, and doesn't seem to get a lot of help from his editor in terms of cutting out what's not necessary. He does spend a lot of effort in making sure that Aubrey favors blues and Dakota favors reds, so he's trying, but he really doesn't seem to be ready for the major leagues.

What's sad is that his main cast is dragged down by that. I'm not sure why Lindsay Lohan chose this script, but she's probably better than it deserves. She's got a fun moment in the middle, looking in Aubrey's mirror as Dakota, where she mockingly pretends to be this perfect beloved girl and rolls her eyes at the absurdity of it that actually makes us like this character who has spent almost all her screen time being unpleasant a little, which is no mean feat. McDonough and Ormand, sadly, don't even have that much chance to make an impression, and it just gets worse after that.

Its own story is a mess, but as part of the Lindsay Lohan narrative? Almost perfect; she's almost back where she started, still able to make use believe in two separate characters, but with all the promise replaced by juvenile attempts to seem adult, griminess, and dysfunction. Sad, really, especially since it seems so unaware of what a mess it is.

Also at eFilmCritic, along with six other reviews

Labels: Brattle, crap, drama, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, thriller

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Being generally busy with the BFF got in the way of seeing Dragon Wars during its first couple of weeks in release, which most people would probably consider fortuitous. I had the morbid curiosity going on, though - they'd been talking about this thing on Twitch and Kaiju Shakedown for what seems like forever, and having seen a few good genre flicks from Korea in the past decade, I wondered how well someone from there would do with the Hollywood toybox.

The answer is, basically, "not well", although it's worth noting that we're talking about Shim Hyung-rae, who doesn't seem particularly noteworthy as a director, as opposed to Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho (who did a nice job playing with the CGI toys himself, with The Host). Which is a shame; he blows crap up as well as anyody - his property damage is the best I've seen of that sort of thing since Jackson's King Kong.

I also thought it was pretty cool to see a guy who is so clearly and proudly influenced by George Lucas. Lucas takes a lot more crap than he deserves these days, but there's no one better at directing a Great Big Action scene, and Shim is clearly referencing Lucas's playbook a lot in that area. Heck, the design of some of his creatures seems to be directly lifted from The Phantom Menace. Sadly, Shim also has Lucas's issues when it comes time to direct actors, at least in English. I half-wonder if I might enjoy this film dubbed into Korean or with a Korean cast, because I wouldn't necessarily know what sounded wrong or off. Which also raises the question of how good foreign films really are sometimes - do I just assume that the "foreign" stuff is also good, giving it a pass because I can't access it directly?

Also worth mentioning: I felt terrible once I got home from this movie. Whether it was the mozzarella sticks at the concession stand or using earbuds while playing my Nintendo DS on the bus to and from, something knocked me down pretty good.

Dragon Wars (D-War)

* * (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2007 at Showcase Cinemas Revere #1 (First-run)

Every once in a while, people look at my DVD shelf and ask why some movie or other is there, since they've heard me talk about how it stank. In the case of movies like Dragon Wars, the explanation is that occasionally one-star movies can have four-star pieces to them. I don't think Dragon Wars will end up on my shelf - I've got better impulse control than I once did - but it does do one thing pretty well, even if it's awful otherwise.

And let's be clear - there aren't words for how badly Dragon Wars sucks when the characters open their mouths. Calling them characters is probably generous; Ethan (Jason Behr) and Sarah (Amanda Brooks) are walking plot devices in service to a crappy story. Along with Jack (Robert Forster), they are reincarnations of players in a story of a girl prophecized to merge with an "Imoogu" (as sort of giant snake creature) so that it could become a "celestial dragon" which took place in 1507 Korea, although another giant snake has decided it wants to become a dragon, so he and his army are looking to grab the girl first. Since the virgin sacrifice and her protector fell in love and jumped off a cliff, everything apparently got put on hold for five hundred years, until Sarah's twentieth birthday. Now, there's giant snakes appearing in the Los Angeles area, but Ethan has apparently fallen in love with Sarah again and is looking to defy the prophecy, because reincarnated couples just don't learn.

Chosen ones, prophecy, reincarnation, and destiny are generally crutches used by lazy writers, and that's the case here. Nothing Ethan and Sarah do is really their decision; they're dragged along for the ride as much as we are. Jack is a walking, shapeshifting plot device, appearing in various guises and basically pointing the other characters toward where the filmmaker wants them next. Nobody, between bouts of ridiculous-sounding exposition, says anything memorable, supporting characters appear and disappear as is convenient, and some pieces feel like they were put together in the wrong order. The finale takes place near a giant temple that you'd think people would have noticed being in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Full review at HBS

Labels: action, crap, fantasy, Korea, USA

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