Fantasia Day Two: The Restless, The Signal, et Flight of the Living Dead

A pretty decent evening at the movies, although that came after getting stuck out in the rain at the botanical garden while doing the tourist thing. Lots of walking at the Biodome and Jardin Botanique, so it took me most of the animated shorts program to really get back into it. I ran into the Boston Underground Film Festival's Kevin Monahan and Anna Feder afterward (although they likely have no idea who the heck I am); Anna was in the same screening but happened to be sitting near someone who had brought their kids. Remember: Just because something is animated doesn't mean it's for kids. Aside from two of the shorts revolving around killing cute bunnies, the final segment, "For Whom The Bell Jingles", which involves Santa Claus wracked with guilt for... I mean, gads, keep the kids away from that.

If you're up here, I can recommend The Restless for today (see below). My plans involve a long day - Arch Angels, 200 Pounds Beauty, Dasepo Naughty Girls, The Banquet, The Rug Cop, and Hell's Ground (so Japan, Korea, China, and even Pakistan are represented). Things have been running a little late at Théatre Hall over the first couple of days, so I may wind up substituting Hatchet for The Rug Cop, depending on when The Banquet winds up ending.

The Restless (Jungcheon)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)

There are two ways to describe Restless when someone hits you with the question of what it's about. You could respond with some gobbledegook about Chuyongdae Demon-Slayers and Chuneens. Or you could give what I figure is the correct answer - it's about a guy with a magic sword slicing through demons and former friends to prevent the end of the world.

That guy is Yi Gwak (Jung Woo-sung), and he's the last of an elite team of outlawed demon hunters. His reward for saving a would-be sacrifice from a pack of demons is to be drugged so the villagers can collect the bounty on his head. Rather than awaking in chains, though, he finds himself in "Midheaven", where souls spend 49 days purifying themselves before heading to heaven and reincarnation. Something - several things, really - is amiss, even for this bizarre situation. Yi Gwak doesn't show the usual signs of being dead, for starters. More immediate and alarming, an army of demons attacks, slaughtering souls and spirits alike. Yi manages to save one, the "Chuneen" So-hwa (Kim Tae-hee). She bears a remarkable resemblance to his first love Yon-hwa, and considering that Cuneens are souls who have achieved purity and peace by losing their memories... This reunion is spoiled in part by another one - Ban-chu (Heo Jun-ho), who first recruited Yi Gawk to the Chuyongdae and helped lead to its downfall, is the one orchestrating the attacks - and he's got all of Yi's old comrades with him.

Director and co-writer Jo Dong-oh sets up an ambitious bit of world-building, and in the film's more ponderous moments, it seems as though he's bitten off more than he can chew. All through the film, we're treated to definitions of what a Chuneen is, or given tidbits like how the Kajak Sword can only be wielded by a human being, and all sorts of other fantasy-universe minutia that honestly don't make a whole lot of difference, especially since they sort of sidestep what seem like certain obvious questions - like, if Yi's not dead, what's he doing in the afterlife? This may be something that the subtitles don't convey, but it seems like Jo and his co-writer Lee Hee-dae spent enough time building their world that they'd have reasons for the less explained things that could be fit into the explanations that go on too long.

Full review at EFC.

The Signal

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)

The Signal is not a zombie movie, or a slasher movie, although it uses elements of both to create something new and legitimately frightening. For a horror movie, that's genuinely exciting - I can't remember the last one I've seen that resisted easy categorization.

There is this transmission, you see, and it's blanketing all frequencies. Mya (Anessa Ramsey) is woken by it when her lover Ben's television turns on my itself, but she and Ben (Justin Welborn) turn it off and hang up their phones quickly. When she gets back to her apartment building, everyone seems to be on edge. Her husband Lewis (AJ Bowen) and his friends are trying to get reception from their television, and Lewis is asking uncomfortable questions. Soon someone is dead, everyone seems to be ready to snap, and Mya is running. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the neighborhood, Anna (Cheri Christian) is worried about her New Year's Party not going right with her husband Ken (Christopher Thomas) being dead and their landlord Clark (Scott Poythress) at the door, and Ben is coming into town to get Mya.

The mysterious signal isn't turning people into unthinking, inarticulate zombies, nor is it downloading some sort of alien presence into its victims' heads. It's doing something more insidious, either turning off the thing in their minds that makes them feel murder is wrong. One character describes it as a message that other people don't have to stand between themselves and happiness. Indeed, at times the characters won't let objective reality stand between themselves and what they want, as hallucinations appear and perceptions of who someone is talking to shift. People are who they were, just without any compunctions about killing, and it's sometimes very difficult to tell who is actually insane and who is just doing what is necessary to survive in a world where so much of the rest of the population has gone crazy.

Full review at EFC.

Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (aka Plane Dead)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)

The punny title of Flight of the Living Dead tells you exactly what you're in for, so the only question is whether or not it delivers the goods. It does a pretty good job on that account, hitting every item on the zombie movie and airplane-in-danger movie checklists and doing well by them.

Concord Airlines's flight from Los Angeles to Paris has everyone you'd expect on a plane-bound thriller - a pilot making his last trip before retirement, a cop transporting an international fugitive, some horny college kids, a famous athlete and his cranky wife, some pretty young flight attendants, and even a nun. There's also a refrigerated container under armed guard in the cargo hold which, as you might imagine, involves a virus that can reverse massive cellular damage... with side effects, of course.

Don't look for a whole lot of new zombie ground to be broken here - you're looking at basic yellow-eyed, rapidly decomposing, shrieking flesh-eaters. If I had to answer "fast or slow?", I'd go with fast, although it's not really that important; they seldom need to cover a whole lot of ground. Bullets knock 'em down, but nothing short of a head shot or decapitation really seems to stop them. Similarly, if you've ever seen an airplane-in-danger movie, you know communications with the ground will be knocked out, there will be a terrible storm, someone on the plane is actually an air marshal, it's a bad idea to fire a gun unless you know for damn sure you're going to hit your target but a good idea to have an extra person who knows how to fly a jet along And I don't think I'm giving much away to say that at some point, near the end, a compartment will lose cabin pressure. These are all things that have to happen.

Full review at EFC.

Fantasia Day One: Tekkon Kinkreet et Perfect Creature

Next year, I'm flying out and taking the bus back. Taking the bus up here just leave me feeling drained for the rest of the day, and I'm probably being a little harsh to these films as a result - I had trouble staying awake, but I don't think that's really Tekkon Kinkreet's fault, although Perfect Creature didn't exactly help matters. Hopefully a good night's sleep and taking the Metro rather than actually walking everywhere will do wonders.

I forgot my Montreal guidebook back in Cambridge (hey, when you try to pack and sleep between Boston's Fourth of July fireworks and an early bus, something going to be left behind), so I'm feeling a little antsy about not having an easy reference and not even knowing a good place to get an English-language guidebook here off the top of my head. Maybe I'll go see some penguins; that's always fun.

Today's plan movie-wise is the "Outer Limits of Animation" shorts program, The Restless, The Signal, and Flight of the Living Dead.

Tekkon Kinkreet

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)

The decaying city is a staple of anime and science fiction (though Tekken Kinkreet doesn't really fit that genre). It appears in many conventional urban genres, too, but they seldom have the ability to really show the audience just how magical the place is to its inhabitants, or just why they remain so fiercely loyal. For all cities are described as characters in a story, these characters are seldom as original as they are in a fantasy like Tekken Kinkreet.

Treasure Town, a rough area of the city of Takara, is both crowded and decrepit. There are fanciful signs piled high, and there's a jolly contrast between neighboring buildings. Still, you don't have to look very close to see that the paint is peeling, or that those signs don't provide much light. We spend a lot of time in a junkyard, and it doesn't miss our gaze that Treasure Town is on an island, easily neglected by the surrounding city. It's a beautiful place from about fifteen or twenty feet above ground level; once you're on the street, it's a little more dangerous. Still, by that time the place has already gotten under the audience's skin a little; the visuals of the city are simply a visual feast - most drawn by hand, but scanned into a computer so that the camera can move freely.

That's the world that two orphan brothers, Kuro ("Black") and Shiro ("White"), live in. Homeless, living out of a car in the junkyard when not visiting "Gramps", an older homeless man, these children also serve as the city's superhero guardians, although older brother Black must also give a great deal of personal attention to White, who even for a ten-year-old can sometimes seem very disconnected from reality. They're going to have to be on the top of their games, because a pair of Yakuza - "Rat" and Kimura - are returning to Treasure Town, but to a certain extent their only front men for a group of developers looking to build a family amusement center - and they've hired the monstrous looking "Snake" and his inhumanly powerful goons to make sure it gets done.

The first voice we hear is White's, and it certainly sounds like a kid playing make-believe, so there's a good chance that we're in unreliable-narrator territory. That's probably the simplest way to view the film, too - the fantasy lives of a pair of young children living on the streets, which means that any gaps in logic can be easily explained away. If that's the case, though, these kids have some pretty dark fantasies. Kids probably wouldn't view an amusement park as a threat to the city - that's an adult view. There are some moments that are almost unquestionably happening in the minds of the boys, and director Michael Arias will often go to a different art style to depict that.

Those sequences are often depicted in what look like watercolors, or feature the boys imagining themselves underwater. The visual style tends toward the loose and somewhat abstracted in any event; it's reminiscent of the studio's previous film Mind Game. While few characters look as flat-out demonic as Snake and his henchmen, Arias and company favor slightly caricatured character designs and a thin line that sometimes gets swallowed by the coloring. The coloring itself tends to invoke classic ink & paint rather than the potentially flashier digital tools which were actually used, except when people get some ugly bruises.

Anthony Weintraub's script is a lot more coherent than that of some manga adaptations, perhaps because the source material (sold in the U.S. as "Black & White") is only three volumes long. A few of the characters seem to get short shrift - especially the cops - but he does a good job with Black and White. Arias's work is also very impressive, frequently using the techniques of live-action film even while giving its characters the ability to all but fly: A scene where Black attacks Kimura's office especially looks like it was shot with handheld cameras.

The visuals are never less than striking, more than enough to keep the audience's attention when the story starts threatening to go off the rails toward the end. Treasure Town may be a brutally harsh place, but it's worth a visit.

(Formerly at EFC)

Perfect Creature

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)

For Perfect Creature, the question of "what if vampires were real" isn't quite good enough; it asks what if vampires were real, but instead of being feared, they were objects of worship? It's kind of a dodgy idea, but the film runs with it. If the film is disappointing, it's not because of the basic idea.

Although the long-lived, blood-drinking "Brothers" have long organized as a church and claim to protect humanity in exchange for their blood, we find that one - Edgar (Leo Gregory) has started to act more like a traditional vampire, biting and exsanguinating young New Zealanders. The church, naturally, would very much like to keep this under wraps, and have Edgar's brother Silus (Dougray Scott) tracking him down. Eventually, though, one of his killings is seen by a young boy who calls the police. The case is assigned to Lilly (Saffron Burrows), who immediately sees that it's a ticking time bomb. Though no Brother has ever harmed a human, there have also been no new ones born in seventy years; their mutation (which occurs exclusively in males) leaves them sterile. Even though most people go to church and have their blood drained regularly, there's still a certain level of resentment, as personified by Lilly's partner Jones (Scott Wills).

In some ways the very things which make Perfect Creature so interesting work against it. Writer/director Glenn Standring has created a world which follows from its premise without feeling particularly beholden to making it match ours. It's a steam-engine world, with technology lagging behind our own, blimps in the sky, and a constant paranoia of disease (I imagine all that sharing of needles in church doesn't help). It's a nifty look, although Standring takes it a bit too far - we're really given no reason to think of the Brothers as creatures of the night, but it seems as though the sun never comes out in "Nuovo Zelandia". The film often ends up on the wrong side of the line between "atmospheric" and "murky".

Dougray Scott's performance falls in the somewhat murky category. His character is supposed to be stoic, but Silus often just feels lifeless. He seems a decent, idealistic guy, to the extent where it's hard to figure out how he's somehow risen almost to the top of the Brothers' hierarchy. He doesn't seem to have the ambition, or much personality at all. There's really nothing to suggest he exists before the film starts. Brother Edgar is completely insane, but Leo Gregory throws himself into the role with relish. There's no question who's in charge of any scene he's in. Saffron Burrows is great to watch, too; Lilly's background is familiar and a little generic, but there's always the sense that she's actually lived it. Scott Wills plays his less-sophisticated cop broadly, but Jones's crudity is a good contrast to the very professional Lilly.

The film is set up as a cat and mouse game, and while sometimes there's not a whole lot of "game" to it (Edgar actually tells them where he'll take his next victim at the start of the film), there are a few good chase scenes. Standring frequently reminds us of the Brothers' enhanced senses, so when Silus and Edgar are tracking each other through walls and throwing a good beating down, , it's a pretty good rush. The excitement does stall a bit towards the end, as we get the almost inevitable conspiracies and cover-ups (which, frankly, we've been waiting for ever since a Brother priest commended schoolchildren on recognizing that the Brothers were the source of all good and humans the source of all bad). And the end is kind of a head-scratcher - sure, it's something new and different, but what's it mean?

To a certain extent, Perfect Creature is a victim of its own ambition. It reminds me of the original film of Alien Nation, in that it posits a world rich with possibilities for satire, commentary, and good old science fictional (or horrific) adventure, but confined to a single hour-and-a-half-long feature, it's stuck as an odd-looking crime film, chasing down one man when there's a whole world to explore.

(Formerly at EFC)

Olivier Centennial: Sleuth and Marathon Man

The Brattle had a couple weeks of these - well, probably just a week total, splitting time with the grindhouse films - and I only got to one double feature. I think it was a rainy week where getting to the movies would mean going there straight from work, and the grindhouse stuff was making me feel kind of movie-d out.

That shouldn't be too much of an issue with their summer schedule; they go back to the "vertical" design I love, and I think I'll be able to comfortably skip most of the Wednesday "Great Adaptations" series (which includes Adaptation but not Great Expectations) - although ironically that's the day I actually come into Harvard Square after work for comics anyway. I'm all over the Barbara Stanwyck and Animation programs, along with weekend series for Raymond Chandler and one delightfully titled "Charlton Heston's Apocalypse". Plus, oh yes, after nearly a year, Election 2 (aka Triad Election, because Magnolia didn't want to try and release both) finally shows up at the end of August (it had been booked for last Octobers Boston Fantastic Film Festival) as part of a double feature. Amusingly, if you do the usual route of starting at 7:30, you'll see the sequel first.

(Two surprises found when composing this post - Sleuth is apparently not available on DVD for less than a hundred bucks, and the Brattle seems to be eschewing midnights this summer)

Sleuth

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2007 at the Brattle Theater (The Entertainer: A Centennial Tribute to Laurence Olivier)

It is easy (inasmuch as any creative process is actually easy) to do parody or pastiche; one simply has to be aware of the familiar elements of a genre and repeat them, either mockingly or slavishly. Homage is a more difficult, and is sometimes as awkward. What writer Anthony Shaffer and director Joseph Mankiewicz do in Sleuth is almost scholarly in comparison.

The Agatha Christie-style puzzle mystery has always taken a lot of flack, in part because its priorities are complementary to those of modern critics (that is to say, there is nearly no overlap between the two groups): Mysteries are simple where Quality Literature is complex (they frequently use plain language to describe cardboard characters whose motivations are straightforward, and have a straightforward moral code) and vice versa (the smallest details must be observed, and characters often act upon their simple motivations in roundabout ways). Taking place as they so often do among England's landed gentry, there's often unspoken classism hidden just below the surface. By the time Sleuth premiered on stage and in cinemas, the classic mystery was looking a bit long in the tooth; a relic of a bygone age.

And, indeed, Shaffer and Mankiewicz expose it as such. Mystery writer Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) lives in a sprawling mansion complete with a labyrinth of shrubbery and hidden passages, filled with curios, reminders of a more genteel time, and in the most prized position, the Edgar Allen Poe award he received from the Mystery Writers of America. He's an imperious snob, and he has summoned Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) because he wishes to make his wife's lover a deal: Although he figures he would be well rid of Marguerite (Eve Channing), he knows that she will want money, more than even a successful hairdressing entrepreneur like Tindle can provide. So he hatches a plan by which Milo will break in, steal some of Marguerite's jewelry, and sell it to a fence Wyke knows. As the first act wears on, it becomes clear that behind Wyke's jovial mask is a man whose attitude toward the lower classes is patronizing at best and hateful at worst, with a mind geared toward elaborate schemes where simple ones will do, and whose ultimate plan is far more sinister than the one he initially outlined. Sinister, but not necessarily perfect, as the second half of the film finds him matching wits with Inspector Doppler (Alec Cawthorne), a working-class detective who is unimpressed with Wyke's status but has a keen eye for forensics.

Full review at EFC

Marathon Man

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2007 at the Brattle Theater (The Entertainer: A Centennial Tribute to Laurence Olivier)

Not many thrillers these days start with the sort of slow burn we see in the first act of Marathon Man. The obvious comparison is right there in the title - marathon runners have to keep up a steady pace rather than run the risk of burning themselves out - but just because it's obvious doesn't make it any less true.

The movie does get a good jump at the starter's line, when an old German and an old Jew clash at a traffic light, leading to a frantic chase and a fatal result. After that, he film introduces us to some new characters, not immediately connected to the open: Thomas (Dustin Hoffman), nicknamed "Babe", is a graduate student in history haunted by his father's suicide; he's just met a nice girl (Marthe Keller) in the library. Henry (Roy Scheider) and Peter (William Devane) are operatives for an unnamed agency; right now they're in Europe. Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) is a Nazi war criminal who has been living in Uruguay for the past thirty years. An attack on Henry's life alerts them that something's up, which will have them all converging on New York.

There are a couple action beats in the movie's first half, and they're fairly brutal fights you would not want to be in. Mostly, it's a slow and deliberate examination of Babe's and Henry's worlds. We see the punks in Babe's crappy neighborhood laugh at him as he trains for marathons and the tradecraft Henry uses. We can't quite be sure that Henry's one of the good guys, even when we see that there's a connection between him and Babe. It's not until Szell arrives in New York that things start to get nasty.

Full review at EFC.

Not a bad weekend, I guess: Paris, je t'aime, DOA: Dead or Alive, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

I guess I felt magnanimous this weekend; all the movies I saw had issues - some of them big issues - but I enjoyed all three more than not, and have a tough time holding their faults against them. Even DOA, which is pretty deeply stupid, put a smile on my face more often than not.

I had to go out to Revere to see it, which wasn't as bad as I'd feared: It takes two buses, but the connection between the 91 and 109 was relatively painless, and the walk from there to the gigantic Showcase cinemas was pretty short. It's pretty close to the first time I've been to something labeled "Showcase" since college, when I worked at a couple, although I've been to the Circle a few times. My experiences at Showcase weren't really that bad. This is probably the most elaborate megaplex I've seen outside the Metreon in San Francisco (and I guess that's really more mall than movie theater); the lobby looked more like a food court, although I recognized the basic design as the same as Showcase Cinemas Worcester North. Not the best design, really - even on slow days, you need two ushers on duty because the lobby divides two wings, and the huge concession stand creates a wall in the middle of the lobby, making the place feel much smaller.

As nice as Revere is as a theater, it's unfortunate that DOA: Dead or Alive (can't allow it to be confused with the real D.O.A.) was exiled there. It's not exactly a good movie - it's dumb as a box of rocks, and just because most of the cast has a dance background doesn't necessarily mean they can screen-fight convincingly - but it's not bad enough to hide, either. I'm surprised the Weinstein's couldn't have found a better weekend for it; there must have been a spot during January garbage time.

Paris, je t'aime

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 June 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #6 (First-run)

The idea behind Paris, je t'aime was to tell a Paris love story for each of the City of Light's twenty districts, each from a different director. It falls a bit short of its lofty potential - two of the twenty arrondissements don't make it into the film, and many of the tales don't seem terribly specific to Paris. I don't mind, though, the way I see it, Paris is just an excuse for a passel of talented filmmakers to tell us a story in six or seven minutes.

Six minutes is not a lot of time; filmmakers used to working at feature length might find themselves feeling cramped. Fortunately, that is seldom a problem for any of them. In some ways, the directive to make a love story is a big help; all you really need for a romance is two people; adding many more will likely complicate things and distract from the basic idea the director is trying to get across. As much "love story" might seem restrictive, it turns out to be a fairly flexible description. We get the expected types of stories, the ones that cover the start of a romance, but we also see a number of parents and children, people set in their relationships, people having second thoughts, and relationships reaching their ends.

Expecting all eighteen stories to be top-notch, and a few do turn out to be let-downs. I found that those tended to be the talkiest sequences, though that takes several different forms. The first segment, Bruno Podalydes's "Montmarte", has writer/director/star Podalydes talking to himself a lot, and he's not quite so charming as he seems to imagine himself. Gus Van Sant's "Le Marais" gives us a one-sided conversation, and I found that one side pretty annoying. Scruffy guys not saying much seems to be Van Sant's thing lately; pity the film's only gay love story couldn't be more interesting. Olivier Assaya's "Quartier des Enfant Rouges" isn't terribly verbose, but is kind of charmless.

Full review at EFC.

DOA: Dead or Alive

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 June 2007 at Showcase Cinemas Revere #17 (First-run)

I had to take two buses from one end of the line to the other to get to a theater that was playing DOA: Dead or Alive on its opening weekend, and I cannot honestly say that it merits that kind of effort on my part. The flip side, though, is that it doesn't deserve that kind of exile from its distributor, either.

This isn't a lost masterpiece by any means. Its story is giggle-worthy. The good (or at least decent) actors coast while the bad ones try too hard. It's adapted from a video game and fully embraces that aesthetic - it's frantic and insubstantial. Complaining about this movie's plot, though, is like dismissing a root beer float for not having the properties of a fine wine. The important question is whether or not it's a good root beer float.

It's not the best; to torture the metaphor, it's not made with premium ice cream (the type that has little bits of vanilla bean) suspended in homemade, small-batch root beer. Still, it provides a nice sugar rush. Every moment serves to move things along faster, right down to the scene transitions inspired in equal parts by video games and TV sports. The characters all have a distinctive look that lets the audience pull them out of the crowd, and they live in fun, colorful environments. And give the filmmakers some credit where story is concerned - there is one, it makes a certain amount of rudimentary sense within the confines of this cartoonish world (sci-fi silliness about injected nanomachines recording a person's fighting style), and the film never really stops dead for exposition. And director Corey Yuen can put together a fight scene.

Full review at EFC.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2007 at Regal Fenway #8 (First-run)

The by-now obligatory Stan Lee cameo in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer will make comic fans smile a little: In a moment pulled from Fantastic Four Annual #3 over forty years ago, he's not let into the wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm. Jack Kirby was thrown out alongside Lee in that original story, but the late artist is not mentioned here, which is a shame; it's the willingness to embrace Kirby as well as Lee that makes this film a heck of a lot better than its predecessor.

Part of the appeal of the Fantastic Four has always been what Lee brought to the team: The family dynamic and focus on relationships as well as super-heroing. What the 2005 film was missing was what Jack Kirby brought: Huge, larger-than-life adventure, told with bold art that practically crackled with energy. The last movie was all about the heroes squabbling, and ended with the four of them fighting one guy in an unimpressive sequence, so it's very good to see this one open with a planet being destroyed. We know, right away, that they're thinking bigger.

Soon we're back on Earth, where the celebrity scientists and adventurers Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and Susan Storm (Jessica Alba) are trying to pull off a wedding (Reed, of course, has his head in the clouds) while Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) argue good-naturedly. Their plans are interrupted by an army general (Andre Braugher) with news of climatological anomalies and a mysterious fast-moving object sighted from orbit. It's the Silver Surfer (body of Doug Jones, voice of Laurence Fishburne), and Reed soon discovers that where he goes, planetary destruction follows. The army brings Reed's longtime rival Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) in to assist, which everyone should have realized was a bad idea from the start.

Full review at EFC.

Welcome to the Brattle Grindhouse

Man, I don't think I've ever seen so many prints with the type of damage that makes them turn red in one period of time. Before the first one I saw, Vanishing Point, Ned came out to apologize, saying it was the worst print the Brattle had ever played, which is saying something. All that stuff Rodriguez and Tarantino did to make the print of Grindhouse look like crap? This is the real deal.

Vanishing Point

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Quentin Tarantino has a habit of name-dropping in his movies, and no movie is referenced more in his latest, Death Proof, than Vanishing Point. As per usual, he's got good taste; while many of the grindhouse movies he and Robert Rodriguez were meaning to invoke were not actually very good, this one is worth tracking down - at least if you like chase movies.

Credit Vanishing Point, especially in the early going, with clarity of purpose: Kowalski (Barry Newman) speeds across the Western U.S. in a white 1970 Dodge Challenger that he's trying to deliver from Denver to San Francisco in less than a day. While he's driving, his mind occasionally flashes back to an earlier time... when he was a race car driver. As the film goes on, we learn a bit more about his history, and we encounter a few other characters that he meets on the road, as police in four states try to capture him and disc jockey "Super Soul" (Cleavon Little) spins the soundtrack, feeds him coded advice on what the cops are doing, and elevates the driver to the level of a folk hero.

Vanishing Point is an essential movie for the speed junkie; director Richard Sarafian and cinematographer John Alonzo communicate the feelings of joy, freedom, and power that come from driving a fast car, but they don't overdo it. As we look out Kowalski's window, the road is moving fast, but never quite so fast that we doubt his ability to control the car. Unlike the action filmmakers of a generation later, they favor a steady camera showing the road going by or a majestic cloud of dust to overstating the issue by shaking it. The photography does a nice job of setting the scene, too - for example, even seen on this pretty terrible print, the punishingly hot vastness of the Nevada desert is overwhelming.

Full review at EFC.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

There are some horror movies that use their first half to tease the audience, setting up a palpable dread or quietly dropping hints about information that may prove useful later. Then there's the likes of Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, which frantically tread water for an hour because they've only got the budget for maybe thirty minutes' worth of action and theaters are reluctant to book a film much shorter than an hour and a half.

So we've got Alan (Alan Ormsby) and his troupe of actors taking a boat to an island within sight of Miami which features a graveyard and an abandoned inn. He's trying to psyche them up for a spooky play he's written. This involves getting them to participate in a ceremony where he will attempt to raise an exhumed corpse - that is, when he's not on a power trip, reminding them that without the jobs he's given them, they're not working in showbiz. He appears genuinely disgusted and angry when his incantations don't actually bring a corpse to life. Of course, it does, and not just one; it's just that their muscles are stiff and don't get limber until the group is gathered together in the inn, with the graveyard between them and their boat.

The good news is that once the dead crawl out of their graves, the movie delivers the goods. We came for killing, and the zombies deliver, tearing into the roughly nine or ten people on the island with gruesome gusto and splattering nicely when they fight back. The makeup, blood, and guts are pretty good for a cheapo grindhouse picture; the filmmakers certainly aren't worried about saving any for their next picture. Co-writers Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby (Ormsby also stars; Clark directs) opt for fairly slow, inarticulate zombies with rudimentary problem-solving and tool-using capabilities, and that works out pretty well for them. The living can take out one, but get in trouble pretty quickly when they have to face a crowd.

Full review at EFC.

Satan's Cheerleaders

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

I first became aware of this movie about twenty years ago; it was used in a cryptogram or "spot the fake" puzzle in Games Magazine. That's about the right amount of contact to have with this movie - it's fun to know that it exists, and to imagine what such a movie might be like. One should not sully those happy thoughts with actual first-hand experience.

The actual experience involves a group of four cheerleaders being bratty, but still being enticing to their school's janitor Billy (Jack Kruschen). Unfortunately for them, Billy is both a Satanist and able to sabotage their coach Ms. Johnson's car, and turns up just in time to give them a list - not to the game, but to the local Satanic altar where he tries to make blonde Patti (Kerry Sherman) his love slave. The girls and Ms. Johnson (Jacqueline Cole) escape, but when they find the local sheriff (John Ireland), he and his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) turn out to be Satanists, too - indeed, pretty much everyone in the area is, and they see the fulfillment of a prophecy in these girls.

The biggest problem with Satan's Cheerleaders is that no-one is really trying very hard. The script by Greydon Clark and Alvin Fast doesn't have a single memorable line, and worse, is lazy in creating its threats. So, all these guys are Satanists - what's the big deal? None of them display much in the way of supernatural powers, they bicker too much to ever come together as a real threat, and they never really seem to have that sinister a plan. If they were really interested in making a genuinely suspenseful horror movie, they might well have been better off just making the villains nasty rednecks. The story only comes close to wit once, toward the end, as it follows up the obvious bit of finding a virgin to sacrifice on the cheerleading team with something dark and mean which enough that the audience may feel a little bad about laughing at it.

Full review at EFC.

Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Usually, my trouble with zombie movies is that it's hard to believe that the situation is really apocalyptic - most zombie outbreaks, from Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later, look like they could be contained. Nightmare City has the opposite issue - I have a bit of trouble believing it could be contained as long as it is. Neither is really a big problem, since the people we meet are still in danger.

The first person we meet is named Dean Miller (at least in the English-dubbed version shown), a reporter for a local television station. He's covering the arrival of a plane filled with government scientists and military types, which turns out much more interesting than it sounds: After landing without any contact with the control tower, it disgorges a cargo of atomically-mutated zombies, eager to chew on flesh and drink blood. When Dean (Hugo Stiglitz) tries to get this on the air, he's taken off the air by General Murchison (Mel Ferrer), who doesn't want a panic started, but still sends the message to his daughter Jessica (Stefania D'Amario) and her husband Bob (Pierangelo Civera) to barricade the doors and let no-one in. Murchison's assistant, Major Holmes (Francisco Rabal), delivers roughly the same message to his young artist wife Sheila (Maria Rosaria Omaggio), while Miller takes what is likely the more sensible route of going to the hospital where his wife Anna (Laura Trotter) practices and trying to convince her to get the heck out of town.

All of these places, of course, are spots zombies particularly enjoy turning upside down in movies: Hospitals are multi-level mazes where "sick" people are brought for examination; houses generally have one forgotten method of ingress and can seem much less safe once the power goes out; television stations have studios full of pretty girls shooting a live disco-dance hour whose flimsy tops can be pulled off by clawing mutants just before the biting starts, inciting the panic that the military had hoped to avoid. Director Umberto Lenzi has a grand time throwing his marauders at the place, since it gives him the opportunity to jump between chase, siege, and ambush sequences, rather than settling for doing them in relatively predictable sequence. He's good at giving each the sort of energy they need, and jumping between them does make things like the friend showing up at the door a little less predictable because one's head is still in "chase" mode.

Full review at EFC.

Return of the Living Dead

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Return of the Living Dead is something close to a failure as a horror movie, if it was even trying to be one. That's no bad thing; of all the hyphenated genres, "horror-comedy" is the one whose components are most at cross-purposes, and in a case like that, it's better to do one thing very well than to do two poorly.

The film posits that the events of Night of the Living Dead actually happened, although Romero took some liberties in adapting the story. Afterward, the military put the zombies into containers, some of which were accidentally shipped to a biological supplies distributor in Louisville, KY. The place's night manager, Frank (James Karen), is showing these barrels to new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews) when he breaks the seal, letting one zombie out. Frank, Freddy, and their boss Burt (Clu Gulager) subdue it somewhat, but no amount of dismemberment will actually stop it moving. They get the bright idea of bringing it to the funeral home Ernie Kaltenbrunner (Don Calfa) owns next door and burning it in the crematorium. It's not a bad plan, but the smoke coming out of the stack combines with the rain clouds overhead, basically putting the virus that reanimates corpses into an aerosol form. That's the bad news; the worse news is that there's a graveyard nearby where Freddy's punk friends are waiting for him to finish work.

It's easy to make a zombie movie sound silly just by listing what happens in it, but writer/director Dan O'Bannon embraces that silliness better than most. The little details are funny, and he gets his cast to play it not quite straight, but far short of mugging. When Burt and Frank are trying to convince Ernie to let them burn a few rather active garbage bags full of zombie parts, they spin a lame story about the bags being full of rabid weasels which is obviously ridiculous, and there's this look on their faces that says they're sorry it's the best they could come up with, but, you know, this isn't a situation they're prepared for. That's the feel of the whole movie in a nutshell, from the paramedics examining someone who has recently been infected to the military liaison (Jonathan Terry) who has been waiting for a call like tihs for a while - we're doing the best we can, but the whole zombie thing is throwing us off.

Full review at EFC.

Rabid

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

David Cronenberg hits a lot of buttons in Rabid, playing on his audience's fears of anything particularly intimidating. Everything from science to sex to harshly implemented authority has its moment in here, and it all comes together in some a way that's as interesting as it is scary.

A motorcycle incident leaves Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and Hart (Frank Moore) injured - Rose especially is badly burned - but though it happens too far out in the country to get them to an emergency room, there is a clinic nearby where the wealthy receive plastic surgery. Word of the accident gets Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) out of a meeting with his financier, Murray Cypher (Joe Silver), and he quickly determines that the only way to save her is with a new type of graft he's developed. The surgery does more than just restore Rose's health and beauty, though - it's mutated her internally, giving her a new organ that allows her to feed on blood. Nothing else satisfies her, and to make things worse, those she feeds on quickly develop symptoms of rabies - only much, much worse. A trail of outbreaks between Keloid's clinic and Montreal soon bring the World Health Organization and the military into the picture.

Rabid was released thirty years ago, but Cronenberg's vision remains fascinating for a number of reasons. He's using some classic horror devices - Rose could easily be called a vampire; her victims are close to the now-famous zombie template - but rather than try to do what many have done and try to come up with a real-world explanation for all the trappings of vampirism, he builds something like a vampire from science-fictional building blocks. It feels more real that way - a modern horror, rather than an attempt to recreate something familiar. And while Cronenberg isn't the first to make a horror movie that features soldiers becoming a threat to the citizenry in response to a crisis - and, obviously, he's far from the last - he strikes a nice balance between the necessity of some form of martial law in response to a crisis and the potential for disaster.

Full review at EFC.

The Crazies

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Go figure; I've seen this as part of events twice (previously, at the SF Marathon), and I think I nodded off at the exact same spots both times. I've got no idea how the party gets thinned out.

Fortunately, it's one of those movies where you can drift off for a bit and the end result doesn't feel disjointed; George Romero keeps a very steady tone throughout.

Maybe I'll rent this sometime. At the very least, it'll be a good way to catch a nap on demand.

Beyond the Door II (Schock)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Beyond The Door II, also known as "Shock", has the title of a sequel (at least in America) and relies heavily on prior events. Knowledge of these prior events is not a necessity, though, and that's good - this is a thematically linked if not makeshift series about haunted houses rather than one where characters carry over. I'm not even sure knowing the history beforehand would help, rather than kill suspense.

Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi) and her husband Bruno (John Steiner) are moving back into Dora's family home. Bruno is Dora's second husband; her first died several years back, although no body was found; the house has been shut up ever since. Not surprising she wanted nothing to do with the place; he and Dora did a lot of drugs back then, and she can't remember the exact circumstances of his death. Son Marco (David Colin Jr.) was a product of that first marriage, and though Marco is fond of his stepfather, he's still not "Dad". Since Bruno is an airline pilot, Dora and Marco have a lot of time alone at the house, with its spooky basement and new imaginary friend for Marco.

If we have learned anything from the movies, it's that a new imaginary friend for your kid when you move to a new home is a pretty clear warning sign to get the heck out while you've still got all your blood. Even if that ghost is friendly, there are probably others whose intentions aren't quite so benign. This one certainly isn't; either through influence or straight-out possession, it's having an unsettling effect on Marco, who is not only starting to practice some basic thaumaturgy, but is starting to look at his mother in a way that sons generally don't.

Deep Red (aka The Hatchet Murders, Profondo Rosso)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Dario Argento doesn't make false promises with the title of this movie; as someone with even just passing familiarity with giallo and Argento might expect, the film has plenty of blood and the picture is photographed to maximize the shocking red. Beneath Argento's gloss, though, is a fairly competent murder mystery undermined by some rather hammy acting.

The opening introduces us to Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril), whom we're told is a powerful psychic. She swoons slightly at a lecture, claiming she feels terrible evil from someone in the room. Whether she was for real or got "lucky" doesn't matter; the next time we see her she's being attacked with a hatchet. Her neighbor Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), a visiting English pianist, witnesses the attack, but before he can do anything, the woman is dead. Convinced he's seen something the police don't, Daly investigates on his own, finding reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi) alternately helpful and a nuisance.

There's an air of the paranormal around the mystery, thanks to the dead medium and an abandoned house that the locals certainly treat as being haunted. Argento and company don't lean too heavily on that, though; while Blood Red probably isn't a solvable mystery, it's not one that will spring "character X can move the murder weapon with his mind" on you without any warning, either. Nor does it give Marcus much information that it doesn't share with the audience; it plays fair enough. I don't quite think it makes sense, even beyond the killer being kind of insane - I'm still trying to puzzle out just how one character fits into the story beyond the need to have another murder midway through the movie. That may partly be an artifact of the cuts, though - the English-dubbed print screened is half an hour shorter than the Italian version.

Full review at EFC.

The School That Couldn't Scream (aka What Have They Done To Solange?, Cosa avete fatto a Solange?)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

There's something about The School That Couldn't Scream that remains oddly restrained, even as it happily heaps on more and more lurid subject matter. Slasher films have always had a peculiar moral code, though, and it's just a question of whether this one is more or less peculiar than others.

It starts out innocently enough, with teenager Elizabeth Seccles (Cristina Galbo) and her gymnastics teacher Enrico "Henry" Rosseni (Fabio Testi) making out in a canoe. Elizabeth thinks she sees something strange, but when they row to the riverbank to investigate, they find nothing. What they just missed was one of Elizabeth's classmates getting murdered, and when Henry stops by that spot on his way to class the next morning because he sees police cars, Scotland Yard becomes suspicious. Strangely enough, his wife Herta (Karin Baal) never does, and even helps him as he tries to clear his name. What they eventually discover is that the mounting victims shared a connection to a younger girl at another school named Solange (Camille Keaton), who may hold the key to what's going on.

The materials for an enjoyably trashy mystery movie are all here, and the problem may be that this movie identifies itself as a mystery rather than a thriller or what would later become known as a slasher movie. It's not that I necessarily want there to be more exploitation or graphic violence; it's that by framing it as a murder mystery, the writers wind up focusing on Henry, who has an alibi from the start. More visceral thrills would probably come from focusing on the girls, as they are the ones that could potentially be knocked off at any moment. This may be the fault of adhering too closely to the source material: I haven't read Edgar Wallace's The Clue of the New Pin, but it certainly sounds more like a detective novel than something pulpy. It's as though the filmmakers got caught between a genteel English detective story and a lurid Italian giallo and wound up doing a mediocre job on both.

Full review at EFC.

Paranoia (Orgasmo)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Paranoia (or Orgasmo, its original Italian name) could almost be a play, so tightly does it focus on its core set of characters. This allows it to be single-minded in slowly turning the screw on its main character, working the audience's nerves without distraction.

Kathryn West (Carroll Baker) arrives in Italy a recent widow, remembered in New York more as a gold-digger than a once-promising artist. She's not quite welcomed to her new villa with open arms by longtime housekeeper Teresa (Lilla Brignone), and defying her is part of the reason she opens the house to Peter Donovan (Lou Castel), a handsome expatriot American. Sparks quickly fly, but threaten to fizzle when she sees him with sultry Eva (Colette Descombes). Not to worry, though - she's his sister. Yeah, that's it. His sister.

Kathryn's an interesting character, and Carroll Baker is interesting casting, because the temptation might be to go with someone younger, more obviously a trophy wife. If that's what Kathryn is, she's at least put some time in for her inheritance. Yeah, she's connecting with with Peter kind of fast, but even with as little as Kathryn begrudgingly says about her marriage, it doesn't seem unreasonable that she's ready for somebody to see her that way. She may have genuinely loved her husband, but she spent her youth on him and maybe it was a while since they'd been intimate. You can read a lot into her words and actions, even when she's saying that the details of her marriage are no-one's business but her own.


Full review at EFC.

Autopsy (Macchie Solari)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Yeah, this knocked me out. Too bad; it looked pretty good.

Snow Cake

Snow Cake is one of those movies that doesn't really seem to be doing a lot wrong, but never really captured my attention. I was thinking of a lot of things that had nothing to do with the movie while watching it, such as what Sigourney Weaver is doing in this part.

Honestly - are there so few parts available for a woman in her fifties that she winds up in this, playing an autistic character who seldom seems like more than a series of mannerisms? It's not a bad performance, and I imagine the part looks more interesting than ____'s strong-willed mother/grandmother, but there's really not that much to Linda. Part of it's the movie star thing; seeing someone who has been one of the strongest, most interesting women on-screen for thirty years all but imitating a child plays havoc with one's image, but that would be okay if Weaver had a character interesting enough to overcome that baggage (although I feel kind of strange saying that Ellen Ripley is "baggage").

Ah, well. I just noticed that the last of my five-for-$33 passes at Landmark has to be used by Thursday; probably should have used one on Paprika or this. Guess I'm seeing Paris, Je t'aime this week.

Snow Cake

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 June 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run)

Alan Rickman is an underappreciated treasure. It sounds like an odd thing to say, because he's been a quite memorable part of some huge hits, but movies where he's the feature attraction appear and disappear quickly and quietly (if they do that; ask EFC writer Jason Whyte about the distribution of The Search for John Gissing sometime). Snow Cake isn't that great a movie, but you'd think Rickman and Sigourney Weaver would at least draw some notice.

Rickman plays Alex Hughes, just out of jail and just arrived in northern Ontario, aiming to drive to Winnipeg to meet an old friend. On the way, he meets Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire), a young wannabe writer looking for a ride to Wawa. The chatty Vivienne eventually gets under the taciturn Alex's skin, and just as they're arriving in town, a semi plows into the rental car. Afterward, a dazed Alex feels the need to visit Vivienne's mother Linda (Sigourney Weaver), only to find that she's a high-functioning autistic who depends on Vivienne for many everyday difficulties. He agrees to stay long enough to take out the garbage on Tuesday, but it's not all bad; Linda's neighbor Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss) seems pretty nice.

Rickman is excellent. As always, his deep voice with a bit of a sneer just drips sarcasm when it's called for, but that's not all he's called on to do. His bafflement at Linda's behavior is something we share, and it evolves to acceptance without ever losing track of how difficult Linda can be. There's a lot of guilt wrapped up in the character, but Rickman doesn't simply spend the movie hunched over in self-pity. Underneath Alex's brusque exterior is a caring person, and Rickman knows how to play guilty without being paralyzed.

Full review at EFC.

Paprika

I opted to pass on the Brattle Anime Marathon today; I felt a little out of place at the last one, in part because anime is not my strongest area of geek expertise - just because I gave my niece a Totoro stuffed toy for Christmas and got a reaction of "I'm sure Dagny will love her Japanese... bunny... thing" doesn't mean that I am not incredibly ignorant when compared to those who do eat, drink, and sleep this stuff (I strongly suspect that the trivia question about Survive Style 5+ was throwing me a bone). I like anime in large part because it's a great source for imaginative science fiction; while that's not the only anime I like, the form itself doesn't have much more special appeal to me than Japanese pop culture or animation in general.

Besides, I had a strong feeling that I wasn't going to make it to the end awake, and I also wanted to catch two Red Sox games and the two Zhang Yimou films that the Brattle would be showing after the anime folks clear out tomorrow. There's only so much weekend to do that and get the grocery shopping done and actually get rested up for another work week. So I made up for it, a little, by catching Paprika at Kendall Square. Yeah, it's the Chlotrudis Monday night movie, but... Zhang Yimou again. I'm sadly lacking in seeing Zhang films that don't involve punching and kicking and hacking at each other with swords, and mean to correct that while the Brattle is showing them.

In short: Pretty darn great, enough that I can forgive certain plot holes a truck could be driven through (and I'm not generally forgiving that way). In long...

Paprika

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

That star rating generally indicates that Paprika is a nearly perfect film, which I'll admit isn't the case. Here's the thing, though - there is just so much good stuff crammed into it that I'm willing to overlook that. It's a dense, beautiful piece of work that I love despite its faults.

It initially looks like an ordinary murder mystery, albeit one with a sci-fi twist, as Detective Toshimi Konakawa's dreams lead him to a confrontation with the unknown target of his investigation. The twist is that he's being shadowed by "Paprika", a young woman who is able to enter his dreams with the "DC Mini" headset. But it turns out there's another mystery: The developers of the DC Mini have discovered that some of their prototypes - unapproved as yet - have been stolen. Attractive-but-severe Atsuko Chiba, overweight, immature genius Kosaku Tokia, handsome Morio Osanai, and diminutive lab chief Torataro Shima follow a trail that leads them to Tokia's assistant Himuro, but the technology has become increasingly dangerous, as now the dreams and even waking moments of anyone who has used it (which includes the entire research team) can be invaded, and one dream in particular is driving them mad. The wheelchair-bound chairman of the lab, Seijiro Inui, is calling the DC Mini and science in general an affront to nature and is shutting the program down.

A lot happens in this movie. Claiming that a film feels longer than its running time is often an indication that it drags, but here it's a testament to adapter/director Satoshi Kon's efficiency and good pacing: Despite bringing the film in at a tight ninety minutes, he has plenty of time for the mystery to take several twists and turns and for a side plot like the origins of Konakawa's cinema-influenced nightmares to play out. He's also a master of this animated medium, and as such frequently allows his visuals to carry the movie. Time is never wasted describing with words what the audience can clearly see.

And what the audience can see is glorious. The images are stunning, full of innocent images made dangerous and dangerous situations shot through with whimsy. Kon fills his disturbed dream worlds with intricate parades and detailed crowds that fill the entire screen, but seldom falls prey to self-indulgence. Rather than linger too long on these painstakingly realized sights, he quickly has Paprika or the other characters doing something that advances the story rather than just gawking along with the audience. The style is mostly hand-drawn, although there are digital techniques used at appropriate times: A virtual-reality bar is appropriately slick and shiny, tracking shots don't contrast too much with the rest of the movie's look. The character design (credited to Masashi Ando) is very nice, and flexible to boot: Paprika undergoes an impressive number of transformations, and a younger Konakawa is instantly recognizable. Normally-proportioned characters like Paprika, Chiba, and Konakawa exist seamlessly next to the half-sized Shima and gargantuan Tokia. Maybe Tokia belongs to the former category, though; as much as Kon tends to show him as being to big for elevators or chairs, he's one of the most realistically drawn overweight animated characters I can remember seeing; his weight seems to hang properly, rather than being perfectly rounded.

The voice acting is, as far as I can tell not speaking Japanese, very good. Even serious, adult-oriented animated films from Japan can sometimes lean heavily on very enthusiastic line readings, that's extremely rare here. Only Akio Otsuka really gets to indulge in that, and it's not screaming; Konakawa's film-inspired dreams lend themselves to a slightly stylized delivery by the end, which got knowing and appreciative laughs from the audience. The most impressive job requires a slight spoiler warning - it's something revealed early on in the film, but also something I appreciated not knowing beforehand, so jump to the next paragraph if you want to stay safe. Megumi Hayashibara is excellent in what turns out to be a dual role of both Dr. Chiba and Paprika; she's got a strong, assertive delivery as Chiba but doesn't sound less intelligent when she raises her voice a register to give Paprika a younger, more playful sound. If I can get back to character design for a second, Kon and Ando give these characters very distinct looks, but transition scenes seem very natural. All those factors make Paprika an impressive film, but far from a perfect one. The grandiose climax is in some ways more aggravating than awe-inspiring; I'm not quite sure whether it took place in reality or a dream world, and saying that it doesn't really matter is hard on my hard-science-fiction-loving soul. It's also kind of unnecessary; the resolution to Konakawa's story shows we don't need something apocalyptic to feel excited and, besides, aren't we all a little desensitized to seeing Tokyo get leveled by now? The villain has at least two different and mutually exclusive motivations given at various points. And though Kon supposedly cut a lot of technobabble from Yasutaka Tustsui's original novel, there's a lot left in, and I know just enough science for to think they should have stopped while they were ahead.

That said, the technobabble does get beautifully skewered in one scene where the characters (and audience) are alarmed by the transition from pseudo-scientific nonsense to flat-out aphasia. And even if the film doesn't seem to outright dismiss the emotion, it never forces a scientist or engineer to say "we were wrong to attempt to learn new things and develop new therapeutic technologies; doing that is just a dangerous act of hubris, since there are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know." Not making the science fiction fans in the audience gag on that in order to make it an easy fable is worth half a star by itself.

Nearly perfect? No. But I love Paprika dearly; I can't think of another movie to come out in the U.S. (so far) this year that I enjoy more.

(Originally at EFC)

Stuff that makes the papers

With any luck, this will be my first entry off BostonNow, who invited me to a couple of meetings which were get-togethers with Boston's blogging community. At the second, I saw juts how tiny the space allocated to bloggers would be, especially me since all I do - bizarre serials aside - is review movies. We're talking a little one-inch square with a note to find more on their website. And I don't think I'll get that very often, since I'm not on any press lists, and thus only see films early enough to have a review up in time when I've seen a festival screening, a Brattle eye-opener or stumbled onto a word-of-mouth one. To top it all off, I seldom write full reviews of the big-name films I see because I can't give seven paragraphs to everything and feel I can be a little more useful to eFilmCritic by reviewing movies they have no reviews or just a few reviews for. Since they get me into festivals, I don't see any harm in being useful.

Maybe this week will be a good one for being able to get into the paper; I saw Knocked Up at the beginning of May and Severance back in October at the BFFF. Not that much will change if it does, but I'm sure I'll look more successful with my name on some dead trees.

Knocked Up

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2007 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (Preview)

Before The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow was probably best known as the creator of two TV series much-beloved by those who saw them (Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared). These were not envelope-pushing shows, in fact leaning far more toward the sentimental than the outrageous. This is arguably why Virgin and Knocked Up are so good - network television demands the creation of characters you want to be around, and that's a skill he carries over to his R-rated comedies.

Getting to like Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) is easy - she's beautiful, friendly, patient, helpful and humble. She lives in her sister Debbie's guest house, works behind the scenes at the E! cable channel, and she and Debbie (Leslie Mann) go out to celebrate when Alison is told they want her on camera. It's there that she meets Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), a good natured stoner-slacker who shares a house with similarly-inclined friends, who vaguely intend to start a website where people can look up when a given actress appears naked in movies. Their drunken one-night stand leads to the title condition, and over the next nine months they try to figure out what kind of family they will become. Making it a frightening prospect is that their model - Debbie, her husband Pete (Paul Rudd), and their two kids - is falling apart before their eyes.

One of the things that makes Knocked Up more interesting than the typical romantic comedy is that it sets up a situation where it might not wind up a romantic comedy. The morning-after conversation that Alison and Ben have doesn't just make them appear different while illustrating actual unexpected chemistry; it demonstrates in no uncertain terms how Ben is not good enough for Alison, and isn't really motivated to improve himself. As much as he likes her and she likes him, our expectations and desires, along with Alison's, are a little more modest: Just let Ben get it together enough to be helpful during the pregnancy and a good weekend dad after.

Full review at EFC (or at least, it will be once the embargo period is over).

Spider-Man 3

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2007 at Regal Fenway #12 (First-run)

Disappointing sequels come in threes, or at least "Part IIIs", this summer. Spider-Man 3 is the best of this May's three third installments, but it's also the most disappointing, since I expect more from Sam Raimi and since it has the best predecessors. The irony is that what got Raimi a lot of praise for his first Spider-movie - a story that focuses solidly on Peter Parker as a character rather than empty spectacle - is this movie's biggest weakness; there sometimes seemed to be too much story and not enough fighting supervillains.

What's frustrating is that there are plenty of bits that are really good ideas. Sam and Ivan Raimi and Spider-Man 2 writer Alvin Sargent have distilled the Venom/Black Costume story down to its essence, and hooked it to a well-meaning story of forgiveness. He actually shows us an upbeat, happy Mary Jane for a while. And I half-suspect that it won't be his last outing with the character, as has been widely reported, because he kind of has to do more with Bryce Dallas Howard, James Cromwell, and Dylan Baker as Gwen Stacy, her father, and Professor Curt Connors.

Also: Bruce Campbell with a French accent is hilarious. Why that guy never caught on in the mainstream, I don't know.

Shrek the Third

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2007 at AMC Boston Common #8 (First-run) (Digital)

The third Shrek, though, is just sort of lifeless. I think part of the trouble is that, by the third movie, we know and like Shrek, Donkey, and company too much, and having them be rude or crude in a fairy tale setting is no longer surprising enough to be really funny. I suspect that they've been toned down a little as well, since they're now highly merchandised franchise material. Cameron Diaz's Fiona certainly has. Rupert Everett's Prince Charming, alas, is still not nearly as amusing a villain as John Malkovich's Faarquad.

What is unexpected, and thus kind of funny, is King Arthur as a whiny high school kid, especially the moment when he's told that he's the next king and basically tells the rest of the kids to suck it - even if the whole high school thing is yet another "just like contemporary America... only in another time period!" deal. And I think I would have really enjoyed more of the princesses, especially the catty, bitchy Snow White; the fairy tale princess seems like a nice, ripe target for satire, and this movie wasn't quite mean enough for long enough.

28 Weeks Later

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2007 at Regal Fenway #6 (First-run)

Wow, has it really been five-plus years since both the original 28 Days Later and the only other feature by the sequel's director, Juan Carlos Fresndillo? Hard to believe, and I didn't even realize this was from the maker of Intacto until the topic came up during the Brattle's Grindhouse Panel. That at least gives 28 Weeks Later a nice pedigree, and it's got a good cast, too - I'm always up to see Rose Byrne in something, for instance.

It's a pretty good horror movie. Like most horror sequels, it's basically a repetition of its predecessor - escape from fast-moving zombies, only to find that the military is arguably the bigger threat. It's a slicker, more tech-savvy take on the idea, and the central character conflict is solid: A family ripped apart by distrust, and the rage-infected father being the biggest recurring threat to fleeing kids. It makes the U.S. military look a little stupid and a little vicious, while Days just had the soldiers as desperate. But overall, it works pretty well.

One thing I'd have loved to see them play with - and if by some extraordinary unlikely sequence of events, I got to write 28 Months Later, I certainly would tackle it - is the idea that an entire G-7 nation has basically been wiped out, and now all that property has passed into the hands of a group of expatriots and people who happened to be on vacation. And, heck, I don't think it's ever been mentioned what happened to the royal family. There's got to be an interesting story to be built out of that set of circumstances.

Black Book (Zwartboek)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 May 2007 at Arlington Capitol #1 (Second-run)

Paul Verhoven is ruthless. This has always been the case, of course, but it's intriguing to me that at an age when many would be retiring, or perhaps becoming overcome by sentiment, Verhoven has gone and made a provocative picture about a subject that many talented directors would be content to present simply. There have been many films about the resistance during World War II, but few where the Nazi commander can come out looking pretty good.

It's a testament to Verhoven's skill that this statement doesn't seem ridiculous. The resistance is such a morally gray place, and one where the treatment of Jews like Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is given short shrift compared to that of the Christian Dutch, that it's no wonder she starts to feel something for the SS commander she's assigned to spy on, intimately if necessary: He, at least, seldom lies to her or treats her like she's not wanted. Fortunately, he's got a far more repugnant colleague and seems willing to negotiate, but it's a really fantastic depiction of just how much up can become down and vice versa in the espionage world.

Verhoven also delivers the brutal action that's to be expected, based upon his work in America, sometimes crossing the line between being unflinching and just excessive: On the one hand, I think a scene where Rachel has a gigantic vat of excrement poured on her is too much, but it's also an act of degradation that is hard to rationalize away, and something that egregious might be necessary, since a two-hour movie can't quite communicate the constant, long-term pressure that the character is under. Verhoven also does a fantastic job of subverting expectations based on genre conventions; I've got to agree with what fellow EFC writer Peter Sobczynski wrote in his review: As much as telling the story in flashback initially looks like it may destroy suspense, it winds up serving as a nastily ironic comment on the genre and history. Good show.

Pirates of the Caribean: At World's End

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2007 at Regal Fenway #12 (First-run)

To give Pirates 3 its due, it's at least a letdown in the way that Spider-Man 3 is, as opposed to Shrek 3: It has ambitions and wild ideas that get away from it. As with the Raimis, Jerry Bruckheimer's team of Gore Verbinski, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio have a story they want to tell, and if they make a bit of a hash of it, at least they're not just filling time because these movies make their corporate masters a lot of money like the Shrek guys.

They do, however, fall victim to one of the problems with Shrek 3, big-time: They've made their characters too cuddly. It's not just Johnny Depp's flamboyant, foppish Jack Sparrow - good luck finding a pirate in this movie who truly comes off as a bad guy. In the first movie, Geoffery Rush's Captain Barbossa was a monster, literally - a betraying, murdering thief who turned into a skeleton in the moonlight. Resurrected here for no better reason than being a popular character, he's not quite comic relief, but he's certainly less than he was. Bill Nighy's Davy Jones has been given a tragic backstory as well, and Chow Yun-fat's character (whom we don't see nearly enough of) quickly displays nobility. All we're left with for a villain is a bland seventeenth-century corporate stooge who apparently has the British Navy at his beck and call. I'm not exactly convinced that surrounded by murderers, rapists, and thieves, the British East India Tea Company is the best we could do for bad guys.

That is hardly the only bad decision that Elliot & Rossio (two of my favorites) make; in fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a single minute of this long movie that really made sense. And I don't mean that it was difficult to tell what was going on; just that at no point did it ever seem like anyone made well-motivated decisions. All the excitement and danger of the supernatural present in the first has been drained away as such things as ghosts and resurrections become commonplace, and the idea of giving Sparrow imaginary friends to talk to gets annoying fast. It also smacks of trying too hard to please ("if one Johnny Depp is fun, three will just be awesome!"). And as much as I loved Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann in this movie, I can't help but notice that she rather falls up the ranks as it goes on, as opposed to climbing.

Credit for trying rather than coasting, though. At least I felt like the people involved were trying to entertain me, rather than just take my money.

Catching up to... A month ago.

Some of these films, especially All Through The Night and probably Wristcutters, will be getting full reviews now that I've finished up with the Independent Film Festival of Boston, but a lot of them have slipped far enough out the back of my head that I can't properly give details. The only ones where I'm off HBS/EFC's rating by more than a whole star are Shooter and Diggers, and life's too short to spend too much more time thinking about Shooter, anyway.

The Lookout

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2007 at AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)

Writers don't generally get fan clubs in Hollywood, so Scott Frank's name probably isn't as familiar as it should be. That's a real shame, because he's contributed to some films that I've liked a lot - Dead Again, Out of Sight, Minority Report, and Get Shorty. The man can flat-out write, and he shows some real skills in the director's chair, too.

One thing I really liked was the way he simultaneously subverted and fulfilled my expectations - based upon that list of credits and the title, I expected something more straightforwardly focused on the crime/caper aspects of it. Instead, for the first two or three acts, it's an examination of Joshua Gordon-Leavitt's character, both in terms of how the process he uses to make in through the day, living with a certain amount of brain damage, and how it feels to have been a Big Deal in high school but now the recipient of pity and charity. Godon-Leavitt is great, and he's supported by a cast full of people I like: Jeff Bridges, Isla Fisher, Bruce McGill.

And it makes the last act, where we finally do get to see the crimes and double-crosses in action, extra delicious: Here's a guy who can't keep tasks in order without notes, and who has trouble with short-term memory, trying to outwit a gang of crooks who know his witness. It's an extra level of suspense when things are up in the air and it makes every little victory especially sweet..

Meet The Robinsons

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2007 at Regal Fenway #10 (First-run) (Digital 3-D)

I'll admit - not a movie that particularly appealed to me at first sight (the initial trailers were, if I recall my reaction correctly, awful). But I'm a sucker for animation and 3-D besides, so I went. Despite the slight headache I had which the 3-D glasses didn't help with. And the sucker won me over.

Seeing John Lasseter's name in the opening credits helped perk things up a little - if he had some input, then it was probably at least a step up from the at-best mediocre job Disney's non-Pixar animated features had been lately. Then it gave me fun banter between its young characters that was neither a string of pop culture references or insults. Then it did some time travel and gave me a retro-futuristic world on a par with Robots without leaning too hard on the "retro". I liked the sign that said "Todayland" outside a shot that looked like Disney World's Tomorrowland. I liked that it didn't deliver quite the time-travel twist I was expecting. I liked the change to a landscape both post-apocalyptic and whimsical. I liked ending it on a quote from Walt Disney.

This doesn't all add up to a great, Pixar-quality film - but it's better than anything Disney has done by itself in a long, long time. It looks like they might finally getting things right again in the House of Mouse.

Grindhouse

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 April 2007 at AMC Boston Common #12 (First-run)

There is a lot to love in Grindhouse. It's also easy to forgive its faults, because the movie is clearly a labor of love for everybody involved. Only Rodriguez, I think, really goes overboard - Planet Terror could have been even more fun if he hadn't been trying to crap up the picture with digital faux-wear and just looked at it as a chance to make a seventy-minute balls-out action movie. Although maybe with fewer balls actually out. That was gross.

I think he had the best fake trailer of the bunch, too - "Machete" was a riot, although I don't know if the actual film in pre-production can deliver on the insanity promised by that clip. My next-favorite was "Werewolf Women of the SS", which was out of step with the rest but still damn amusing - the Nicolas Cage cameo worked for me even though it turned a lot of folks off. Conversely, I wasn't quite as amused by "Don't" as some; I could see the joke it was grasping for but not quite reaching. "Thanksgiving" was good at being in bad taste.

"Death Proof" was the jewel, though, and I loved it. I liked the opening half that seems more than a little like padding, but authentically so - many grindhouse pictures did a lot of nothing before getting to the good stuff, and Tarantino's nothing is at least enjoyable to watch and listen to. It also goes on long enough that when he kills his characters, it's something that maybe angers the audience a little as well as establishing the killer's bona fides.

Then he gives us Zoe Bell, and makes it perfectly clear to even the folks who didn't see Double Dare just how cool this stuntwoman is. He name-drops Vanishing Point before giving us a pair of fantastic car chases. Note that all the digital crapification to simulate an old, beat-up print is gone during these scenes - Tarantino wants us to have a good look at what's going on. Normally, when someone is holding onto the hood of a speeding car, they're grabbing the wipers or the back side of the hood, face planted in the windshield so that they can easily be doubled with any shots of the face from inside so that the speeding background can be added with rear projection or matte work. Not the deal with Zoe; she's flying all over the place and giving us a real good look at the fear on her face at eighty miles an hour.

I also love how Tarantino shreds the slasher mystique; although Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike is set up to look cool and fearsome, his attack on Zoe and her friends displays just how pathetic and cowardly he and his ilk are. They only attack people weaker than them, generally after their good and stoned and/or drunk, on terrain they've scouted and made, well, death-proof. When Mike tries to tackle women as competent as these, he's really screwed.

All Through the Night

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 April 2007 at The Brattle Theatre (World War II)

When this movie was made, America hadn't quite gotten involved in WWII - not officially, that is. A wacky caper comedy seems like an odd choice if the aim is propaganda, and it's unlikely many people would have their opinions swayed by this film. As it turns out, Pearl Harbor was attacked about a week after this film's premiere, and that obviously prompted a lot more calls for action than a funny Bogart flick ever could.

In the movie, Bogart plays Alfred "Gloves" Donahue, a friendly neighborhood racketeer who buys candy for kids, loves his mother (Jane Darwell), and doesn't seem to be involved in anything much worse than gambling. He's got no interest in the wars in Europe or Asia or, really, anything in the paper aside from the sports pages. What he does care about is that his favorite baker (Ludwig Stossel) didn't deliver his cheesecake in the morning. Ma has a bad feeling about it, so he investigates, only to find the baker dead. His only lead is Leda Hamilton (Kaaren Verne), a nightclub singer who has ties to Franz Ebbing (Conrad Veidt), whose auction house and toy factories are actually a front for Nazi saboteurs!

The story is, at a basic level, more than a little ridiculous, and the execution is more than a bit silly, too: There's a running gag about Gloves's newlywed driver Barney (Frank McHugh) continually trying to break away from the action to consummate his marriage. The obligatory scene in a nightclub where the title song is sung comes early, and a climactic scene where Gloves and his buddy Sunshine (William Demarest) infiltrate a gathering of Nazi spies is played for broad comedy. It seems a bit incongruous now, but you know what? In 1941, these people weren't the Greatest Generation yet; there was no reason to be overly sentimental. All Through the Night's politics aren't sophisticated - far from it - but it avoids easy soapboxing: It doesn't demonize all German immigrants, and it doesn't have a big moment where Gloves waxes poetic on how he should have been more concerned about more than the sports scores, but from now on... That's the message the film is trying to send, along with how America can make quick work of the Nazis once they set their minds to it, but it doesn't quite just come out and say it.

Full review at HBS.

The Hoax

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 April 2007 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (First-run)

I'm no fan of Richard Gere, as a rule, but he does have the occasional good performance in him. Here, it's in the service of a story I've seen references to before, most notably in Orson Welles's F For Fake. The whole idea of faking Howard Hughes's autobiography actually does fall believably into the category of "so crazy it just might work", and it's fascinating to watch the steps that the participants took to make it happen.

I particularly like Alfred Molina as Gere's researcher friend/partner; as good as Gere is at playing the charismatic schemer who can convince people who should know better that his hogwash is the truth, Molina's character is often the lynchpin on which the scheme depends. It's always a race to see whether he'll break before the enterprise is taken down by the hubris of its leader.

Shooter

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2007 at Regal Fenway #6 (First-run)

I was reminded, while watching this movie, of why I didn't particularly like Tom Clancy's last non-licensed book: They're stories that try to justify their violence with moral outrage, but they go too far. They answer blood with blood so enthusiastically that they halfway convince the audience that the supposed heroes are monsters too. Shooter ends with a bloodbath the audience has already been specifically told won't change anything, and as such feels more like an act of sadism than catharsis.

Ticks me off, because I like this kind of detail-laden thriller. I wonder how much more I'd like it if it starred someone other than Mark Wahlberg, who's a complete blank here. I wish Kate Mara, whom I'd liked a lot on Jack & Bobby and 24, was given better material for her first starring role. And I wish I'd been able to come out of the end feeling a rush, rather than somewhat dirty.

Fracture

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2007 at AMC Boston Common #7 (First-run)

You put Ryan Gosling, Anthony Hopkins, David Strathairn, and Rosamund Pike in a crime film together, the result should be more interesting than this. It really should.

Hot Fuzz

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2007 at AMC Boston Common #2 (First-run)

Throughout most of this movie, I have to admit, I didn't quite feel the love. It was funny, all right, but not quite Shaun of the Dead funny, and certainly not Spaced funny. And then Simon Pegg flies through the air to kick a granny in the face and I completely lose it.

Pegg's Nicholas Angel becomes more than a bit of a cartoon character at this point, but I don't mind, because the rest of the movie is one funny big-action set piece after another. It just assaults the audience with funny bits, more than making up for any perceived slowness in the middle, when Timothy Dalton is arguably carrying the movie with his hilariously suspicious behavior.

This, folks, is how a parody film should be done - fully aware of the genre's silliness but willing to overcome them even as it mocks. Hot Fuzz is a funny movie, but Simon Pegg and Nick Frost aren't just placeholders to work the jokes around; we care what happens to them, specifically.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2007 at The Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)

I talked to the local rep theater's programmer the day after it ran Wristcutters: A Love Story, and he was glad to hear that at least some of us in the audience liked it, and weren't just clapping to be polite to the special guest. He'd been trying to book the movie for about a year, and had loved it himself, but recognized that he was drawn to this type of dark romantic fantasy than a general audience might be.

The idea is extremely high-concept: There's a purgatory, we're told, where the souls of suicides wind up, and in a cruel irony, it's just like the world they left, only worse: It's impossible to smile, there's nothing other than the cast-off and lost objects of the living world to be found, there aren't any stars in the sky. Zia (Patrick Fugit) works in a pizzeria there, and is just passing his days until he finds out that his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb) also killed herself. He enlists the help of his friend Eugene (Shea Whigham) - who has a car, ableit one with a black hole under the passenger's seat) - to look for her. While on the road, they'll pick up Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a hitch-hiker who thinks she's in the wrong place, and find two very different settlements - a commune run by a friendly sort named Kneller (Tom Waits), and a cult compound run by a would-be Messiah (Will Arnett).

Wristcutters is a road movie, one whose afterlife setting hearkens back to one of the original great road stories, Dante's Divine Comedy. There's also a certain element of The Wizard of Oz in Mikal's quest to find the P.I.C.s (People in Charge) and somehow get back home. Writer/director Goran Dukic doesn't hew too close to those influences, though, nor to the story he adapts (Etgar Keret's "Kneller's Happy Campers"). In some ways, he's not that ambitious: He just wants to illustrate that suicide doesn't solve anything, the same issues will persist whether one is alive or not, and that the possibility of happiness and purpose exists even when they seem impossible.

Full review at HBS.

Diggers

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2007 at The Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye-Opener)

Diggers is a nice little movie with a pretty decent cast, and I bet that it's peppered with memories from writer Ken Marino's childhood. It's a fairly well-done working man's drama that will resonate with a big chunk of its audience, and even those that don't love it will at least like it.

The diggers of the title are Long Island clammers, and in 1976 things weren't going so well for the individual clamdigger whose family had been doing it for generations: Money is tight, yields are down, and a corporation has purchased exclusive rights to the best waters. It's little wonder Hunt (Paul Rudd) is only doing it because he's known little else; he certainly doesn't want to die on his boat like his father just has. It's a harsh blow to Hunt and his sister Gina (Maura Tierney), but life goes on. For Hunt, that means taking Polaroids of the man-made landscape and meeting Zoey (Lauren Ambrose), a pretty summer resident. For Gina, it's making a connection with Hunt's friend Jack (Ron Eldard) when he comes to help her with repairs on her now-empty house. Then there's Lozo (Ken Marino), whose wife Julie (Sarah Paulson) tells him she is pregnant again just as vandals rip the motor from his boat.

It's easy to be cynical about having seen every bit of this movie before, especially since there aren't that many new twists to it. The corporation is bad in principle and callous in action, Hunt's father will have always gruffly said he should leave photography to the photographers but keep one of his son's pictures for Hunt to find after the old man's death, and a blow-up is almost inevitable once Hunt makes the discover that Jack is sleeping with a thirty-six year-old woman who is perfectly capable of making of making her own decisions. That's all expected, and there's nothing particularly wrong with doing what's expected, if it does that well.

Full review at HBS.

Vacancy

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2007 at Regal Fenway #7 (First-run)

Vacancy is a pretty darn good horror movie, serial-killer category. It does just about everything I might want it to do right from the moment that it kics off with opening credits that draw the audience in. I like the director (he did Kontroll); I like the cast (Luke Wilson, Kate Beckinsale, Frank Whaley). I like the straightforward story, both in terms of the couple that can only see the worst in each other rediscovering what they love and the relatively uncomplicated nature of the suspense plot. And I really like how the audience is encouraged to think along with the characters: We see everything they see, so we hunt around the screen for the same clues and try to figure out the safe path out of the hotel.

It's also short, which is fine - you really don't need more than eighty minutes or so for a horror movie. Even with that economy, though, it manages to feel a little slow on the ramp-up. I know that the idea is to get the audience thinking "enough with the bickering already!", but it may do that a little too well. And it's got no really new twists to it, substituting solid execution for innovation.

But that's okay. It's a darn good example of its genre, benefitting greatly from all the talent involved.