I AM LEGEND

Man, I'm a sucker for these QUIET EARTH type stories. You can't help but think about what you would do in a situation like that, alone or with a couple other people, living in an abandoned city, everybody else either dead or disappeared. All of society's leftover resources would be there for the plucking. Where would you take up residence? What would you drive? Would the rides at Disneyland still work? What sort of games would you play to amuse yourself? Backhoe Rampage? Skyscraper Free Throw? Condo Shitting? How would you deal with your loneliness? And would you bother to wear pants?

If there's monsters involved, like in DAWN OF THE DEAD or any of the three movies based on Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend, then it becomes more of a survivalist challenge, you start thinking about strategies. How to fortify your home, how to transport yourself around safely to scavenge, etc. In this case it's vampires he's dealing with so he can pretty much wander around and do what he wants during daylight (vampires have a sunlight related disability), but at nightfall it's on.

To me that's mainly what I Am Legend is about: living a life like that and the toll it takes on you mentally. To some people though the book is mainly about the ironic twist at the end that hasn't been used in any of the movie adaptations. I'd love to see that too, if somebody could figure out how to translate the inner monologue realization from the book into movie form. But I'm not gonna get broken up about another re-interpretation of the story. I guess I'm not as much of a stickler for literal adaptations as alot of individuals. I think it's more important for it just to be a good movie. For example, the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD doesn't have the substance of the original, has a different approach to zombies that I don't like as much, doesn't even spend all that much time in the mall that's the main setting of the original. And yet I can't complain too much because it still works, it is an effective action-horror movie on its own terms, I enjoyed watching it. So I guess I am more interested in faithfulness to the magic of cinema than to original source material.

I bring this up because for the third time this is pretty different from Matheson's book. They finally use the original title, but it ends up meaning a different thing from in the book. For the third time it doesn't end the same way as the book. For the first time the vampires have been drastically changed to the point where they are more monsters than people, they don't talk, and Neville doesn't even pick up on their humanity. It's even been moved from L.A. to Manhattan. (At least it wasn't filmed in Rome like LAST MAN ON EARTH was.) People have told me if they just called it OMEGA MAN again it wouldn't offend them, but I keep going back to Dracula. I've never seen a movie of Dracula that was even 75% faithful to the book, but I've seen a whole bunch of good Dracula movies. As a literal translation, LAST MAN ON EARTH is closest to what happens in the book, but in cinematic terms it's the worst of the three movies. I AM LEGEND is the best.

The first version I saw was OMEGA MAN, which has a classic opening: Charlton Heston driving around in a convertible - seems normal at first, but then you realize that the streets he's driving on have no other cars, no pedestrians, just him. And then he stops and (in a goofy sped up shot) stands up in his car and fires an assault rifle into a building, where silhouettes of hooded figures run past the windows. I AM LEGEND introduces its Robert Neville (Will Smith this time) in a more epic way. He's hauling ass through New York with his German Shepherd Sam in the passenger seat. The streets are not only abandoned but broken, rotting, being slowly reclaimed by nature. It's appropriate because before we know it they're on a hunt, chasing a deer through gridlocked, abandoned cars that for the animals have become a new wilderness.

What's special about this movie is that for the most part it doesn't dumb it down. This really is a big studio special effects movie that's mostly about one dude talking to his dog and some mannequins. I think people were expecting I, LEGEND, but Smith doesn't do this one "Big Willie Style." He treats the role exactly as seriously as he did PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS or ALI. None of that mugging and wisecracking shit at all, no "it's raining black men" or "Ah, hell nah!" He gives a great performance, and the most effective part of the movie is his relationship with his dog and the tragedy of him losing his family (shown in strategically placed flashbacks). Even the asshole wannabe rock star behind me who kept talking through the movie started crying at one point. It's not often that a big studio genre movie is more interested in emotions than in explosions. And you know me, I love explosions, but I am also human so I like the humanity. Good work.

He does some log recordings about his experiments, but most of the explanation of what's going on is visual. You see him pumping his gas, turning on his generator, hunting for meat, scavenging for canned food, trying to communicate with other survivors, systematically mapping which parts of the city he has explored, even consulting charts in the Farmer's Almanac before setting his watch to warn him the sun's coming down. I like how some of the story is explained in background details on the set, like the newspaper article pinned on a wall in an apartment that sets up the rules that will be used later involving infected dogs (or zoltans).

I also like that a few things are left ambiguous, like what the hell the vampires are doing in the scene where we see them for the first time. Creepy shit. There's a scene where Neville falls into a trap that I've found has been read at least two very different ways that drastically change your view of the vampires and Neville's theories about them. And there's one very powerful scene involving an injection - I think I know what happened but I could think of at least 3 ways to interpret it, and all of them are good.

The director is Francis Lawrence whose work so far includes the video where Justin Timberlake stalks his ex-girlfriend and the movie CONSTANTINE, which I thought was pretty good and showed promise for him. And I was right. One of the credited screenwriters is Akiva Goldsman, who I like to compare to Henry Kissinger because he committed artistic war crimes like BATMAN FOREVER, BATMAN AND ROBIN, LOST IN SPACE and A TIME TO KILL before winning an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. If we must have that creepo write a movie good thing it's one where the main character has no one to talk to.

If I had to guess I'd say the scene that Akiva Goldsmanned up the most is the one really out of place scene where Neville discusses Bob Marley. Man, why do so many movies have to have that one scene? Remember before when you treated us like we weren't stupid? So how did you go from that to explicitly stating that yes, his daughter Marley was named after his favorite musician, Bob Marley? And then we're supposed to believe that another character has never heard of Bob Marley, and thinks he's talking about Damien Marley? I mean I liked "Welcome to Jam-Rock" too, but come on. And then Neville makes a not entirely convincing speech comparing Bob Marley's life with his work in virology. And this will sound like a joke but I'm serious - I do believe Goldsman has changed the meaning of the title so that it's no longer I AM LEGEND, it is now I AM LEGEND (YOU KNOW, THE BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS GREATEST HITS ALBUM FOUND IN EVERY COLLEGE DORM IN AMERICA). Or maybe that's what Richard Matheson was getting at in the book and I just never picked up on it.

I think we as a society will agree that the one major thing holding this movie back is the depiction of the vampires as CGI monsters. Apparently they first tried people in makeup and Lawrence didn't think it was working, so who knows, maybe it could've been worse. But the finished product is kind of a bummer - they look cartoony and digital so it's hard not to be at least a little distanced when they're on the screen. It's fair to compare their look to THE MUMMY although the filmatism makes them better - they may look silly but they are still in the context of very tense and well-staged sequences. And fortunately they are off screen for most of the movie, and don't have dialogue or anything.

If I had magical movie-altering powers - and I think there's a chance some day I will - I would try trading these vampires for the ones in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. Those two movies are kind of mirror images. Remember, in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT it bothered me that the movie skimmed over the details of how exactly they survived those 30 days, the systems and routines they came up with for getting through a day. This is the part of the story I AM LEGEND excels at. Then on the other hand 30 DAYS OF NIGHT had great vampires, played by actors with some very scary makeup and digital touchup, who had a scary presence and didn't really look like standard issue vampires. And that's the part that I AM LEGEND is iffy on. Both movies are smart enough to leave the vampires mostly on the outskirts of the story, not really explaining what they're up to, using them more as an off camera threat. In this one you're more thankful for it because usually when they're on screen it takes the movie down a couple notches.

But the filmatism is good. No shakycam bullshit. When it's handheld it just makes it more intense. The action, when it comes up, is nicely staged. Any disorientation does not come from sloppiness but as an intentional effect, like the excellent scene where he has to go into a dark building because his dog chased a deer in there. He can't see much but he has a pretty fuckin good hunch there's gonna be a bunch of god damn vampires in there.

And then you think he's gonna go BLADE or JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES on their ass but the movie takes a different approach. He's not a vampire slayer. He knows that's like trying to kill all the bees in the world. No, he's trying to cure them.

I always loved in OMEGA MAN how he plays chess with a bust of Caesar and talks to it like its his buddy. In this one Neville has mannequins set up at a video store where he goes every day and is going through the alphabet watching them all. It's cool because obviously he could just take the whole collection to his house, but going to rent the videos is his way of simulating normal life. He has names for the mannequins and has a crush on one of them. I noticed that she's posed looking at the porn section, which made me realize that was one topic that is never addressed in the movie. In my opinion, and I don't know if this was covered in the Popular Mechanics article picking apart the reality of the film, but I think the last man on earth would be a HUGE fucking porn fiend. You got no ladies, no nobody, of course you're gonna be watching that shit. This is not mentioned but you know it's true. The weird thing about omega man porn habits is that there is no need for hiding the porn, because who's gonna find it, the vampires? And if so who cares. I wouldn't be embarrassed. They climb around on poles and drink blood, who are they to be judgmental about you jerkin off to the College Invasion series or whatever. But I bet Neville still hides his porn, just to keep that illusion going, that idea that he's gonna fix everything. He doesn't want to leave those DVDs laying around everywhere, because then when he cures vampirism he'll be all excited and forget to hide them and it will lead to embarrassment. No, you gotta have the hiding place. And knowing him, with all his fancy window shutter systems and everything, he's probaly got a pretty amazing hiding place. Maybe that will be in a deleted scene on the DVD.

Anyway, that's kind of the core idea of the character, that he has not given up. He doesn't believe in God anymore, he doesn't believe there are other living humans, but he believes he will "fix it." At first it just seems stubborn, maybe kind of courageous. Eventually you realize that it is also crazy. He's lost it.

By the way, Charlton Heston's Neville had better taste in movies than Will Smith's. Heston went to a movie theater every day and watched WOODSTOCK. Obviously that's not totally in tune with his politics but it's a pretty good documentary and you assume as an omega man he gets off on the crowd scenes. Will Smith's Neville is really into SHREK. Oh well. His mind has gone mushy from all that isolation.

The weakest parts of the movie are all toward the end. You want the vampires to be more real, you want the end to be more solid. It might be fair to say that the movie loses it at the end or that it fizzles out a little. I feel like there was a point where if they had taken a left instead of a right they would've ended up with an all time classic, a masterpiece. Well, there's no taking back that right turn, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. (Shit, let's even save the bathwater. The baby needs it.) This is a flawed movie, but I love it. For years this was going to be a Schwarzenegger movie. Then it was gonna be a Michael Bay. I can't lie, I probaly would've enjoyed one out of two of those options. But what we ended up with is something much better and much more rare: a solemn, serious-minded big studio genre movie. When was the last time you saw one of those?

It's got the seriousness and sincere emotions of a smaller movie but (when it comes to the abandoned New York, if not the vampires) with the production value and scope of a bigger movie. In tone you might compare it to something like 28 DAYS/WEEKS LATER but to me it's more powerful overall between the great performance by Smith and a directorial style that appeals to me more (you know, the old way where you can tell what's going on). So it's got a few things holding it back, but what it has going for it in my opinion catapults it ahead of almost all of the other horror and sci-fi type movies of recent years, even if the main character is really into SHREK.

Man, I hope he's not one of those freaks who had a SHREK themed wedding. That might be enough to ruin it. If that shows up on the DVD supplements I might have to return the DVD and say it's defective.

DVD UPDATE: Nope, no further information on porn stashes or SHREK weddings. In fact, there's not much in the way of extras at all. There's some "animated comics" that I couldn't get all the way through. No deleted scenes, no commentaries, no making of, nothing except a "digital copy" which if you have a PC with various updated software then you can use it to burn this onto your computer and then transfer it to watch on your cell phone or your hair dryer.

But there is exactly one very good bonus: the second disc contains the entire movie but with the original ending, before they test-screened it and reshot it. I'm not sure what Francis Lawrence's view is of this cut, since he is never heard from or mentioned on the DVD, but personally I like this version better. It feels more natural because it's the ending the movie had been building toward. In spirit (but not at all in specifics or even tone) it is more in tune with the book, because without spelling it out it ends up that the title means the same thing as in the book.

SPOILERS FOR THIS OTHER ENDING: It also proves that I was right, that Neville was wrong about the vampires. In this version his eyes are opened so that he realizes vampires really do have higher brain functions, and relationships. And that by experimenting on them he has been murdering them. There's a great shot of him looking at all the photos on his laboratory wall showing the faces of every test subject he's had. He's a mass murderer! He realizes that if these vampires can care about each other, if they have relationships, then he has no right to try to cure them against their will. And at least now he has met another human. Let bygones be bygones. It's funny because this is a happier ending than the other one but it feels less phony. I guess people don't like this type of ending, like they don't like the shaky peace at the end of MATRIX REVOLUTIONS or LAND OF THE DEAD. In movies people want to see good guys kill the shit out of bad guys, they don't want people to understand each other.

One interesting thing if you are familiar with the other ending: that one had a religious message that I assumed was all Will Smith. Earlier in the movie he has said that there is no God, but at the end he has sort of a spiritual awakening where he believes in destiny and purpose and to me it seemed to be him realizing he was wrong to say there was no God. In this one it doesn't happen so in a sense you could say the movie agrees with him that there's no God. You don't get that too often in movies. That might be another reason they changed the ending, I'm not sure.

So it's a good ending and I still enjoyed this movie, maybe even more because this time I was used to the iffy CGI and it didn't bother me as much. I'm still not sure why she didn't know who Bob Marley was (which by the way it turns out was Will Smith's idea, not Akiva Goldsman's. I read that in an interview). But I think this actually will end up as some sort of minor classic, despite its problems. To me the first hour is pretty much perfect, so it already has enough goodwill to float on past the weak spots.

One note of caution: disc one is called "ORIGINAL RELEASE" and disc 2 is called "ALTERNATE THEATRICAL CUT." This confused me - which one is the new version? Turns out it's "ALTERNATE THEATRICAL CUT." I have no inside information here but I'm wondering if that weird titling means they expect to release another cut at some point. Why else would they not call it "DIRECTOR'S CUT" or "UNRATED VERSION"? My dream is that there will be a director's cut where they take some time to tweak the CGI on the vampire's faces, but that might be asking too much. Anyway, the point is, I bought this DVD and I'm happy with my purchase but there is definitely potential for a double dip here.

I COME IN PEACE aka DARK ANGEL

Craig R. Baxley's second directorial work (after ACTION JACKSON, before STONE COLD) is probaly his weirdest. It's kind of like the cop movie version of BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET. Dolph Lundgren plays a plays-by-his-own-rules cop whose partner dies in a drug sting that happens to also be interrupted by an alien invader with a trenchcoat and glowing eyes. This guy, I don't know what his name is but he's not a lovable E.T. type alien, he's just a tall scary dude who goes around and says "I come in peace" but then shoots a weird tube out of his palm into your head and sucks out your endorphins. I could've sworn he stole the heroin from the drug dealers, but the reason he's on earth really is not to steal heroin, it's just to farm people for endorphins. We learn later from an outer space cop who's chasing this guy that endorphins are a valuable drug on whatever planet they're from, I guess we'll call it Planet Icomeinpeace. He must be stopped because if he goes back to Icomeinpeace and gets alot of alien space dollars for his endorphins (or "dorph" as I bet they call it on the space streets) then other aliens are gonna figure out how easy it is to cop dorph out of our heads and it'll be over for the human race.

As you know I am not a big fan of law enforcement but I appreciate what this space cop is doing, he seems like one of the good guys. I don't know if he's necessarily by the book, because who knows what the book is like on Planet Icomeinpeace. It might not even be a book, all the policies could be kept inside a magic crystal or a glowing rod or some weird space shit like that. Who knows. Anyway, Dolph, on the other hand, is definitely not by the book or the glowing space rod. He's in the post-Dirty Harry period (it's 1990, still technically almost the '80s) when it was supposed to be cool for cops to be reckless and break laws and you're supposed to hate his uptight FBI partner who INSISTS on being accountable to society. This is a decent role for Dolph though, one of those happy times when he doesn't have to play a Russian or a hulking oaf, and you remember that he has some kind of natural charm that's enjoyable in movies. It also has an '80s anti-yuppie, anti asshole businessman kind of stance, with the drug kingpins being portrayed almost as CEOs.

It's kind of cool how they don't explain much about the aliens. They do tell you a bunch of stuff toward the end but not enough to ruin it. I have no idea why this guy keeps telling people "I come in peace." Did he learn it from a movie? Is it meant as a trick? Or does he say it to be funny, to fuck with people, like those mean Martian assholes in MARS ATTACKS? I like that you don't really know what the deal is with him saying that.

The most memorable part of the movie probaly, or at least the part I remember seeing in the ads back when this came out, is the CD gun. The evil alien has this gun that fires a disc like a CD, and it ricochets around, chopping people up like vegetables. Alot of villains would really have a good time with one of those things but unfortunately our people have not yet been able to develop that technology, and the alien steals back the evidence before we're able to copy it.

Although the movie is completely worthwhile for its whole weird sci-fi/action combo, I didn't think the stunts were as great as the ones in ACTION JACKSON and STONE COLD. Instead they seem to focus on coming up with interesting special effects like the bouncing CD, a guy glowing from inside and exploding, etc. There are some regular old explosions, too, by the way. Not that I really had to tell you that, I think you could've probaly figured that one out on your own.

If you're not sure whether or not to watch this movie, here are a couple of pertinent facts.

1. Dolph's character is named Jack Caine.
2. At one point Caine gets to say, "Fuck you, space man!"
3. At the end, after the space man says "I come in peace" for the zillionth time, Caine says, "But you go in pieces, asshole," and then blows him to bits. spoiler.

I've been told the movie is called DARK ANGEL elsewhere. I guess the guy who comes in peace could be the dark angel, but I don't know how he's an angel so I'm gonna go with the alien cop who's trying to catch him is the dark angel. Even though he's not all that dark. The one I rented is packaged as I COME IN PEACE but the title screen says DARK ANGEL. It's not on DVD but at least this particular VHS edition is widescreen. That's good because you can't crop Baxley, man. Or Dolph. Don't fuck with Baxley and Dolph.

p.s. Let me drop some random Three Burials of Kevin Bacon type shit on you. One of the writers of I COME IN PEACE was Leonard Maas, Jr. His only other movie is WHY ME?, based on the Donald Westlake novel. The director of that is Gene Quintano. He's some guy who worked on POLICE ACADEMY movies, but I came across him on IMDB the other day because of his movie DOLLAR FOR DEAD. That's because it stars William Forsythe and Howie Long, the stars of FIRESTORM, which I just reviewed. Can you belive that? It's a world of laughter and a world of tears, isn't? Ah, maybe you had to be there. Anyway, I'll have to look for that movie now, because this is some kind of sign from the universe I think.

p.p.s. I apologize if you just wasted your time reading that p.s. part

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME

Other than having a scene where a girl gets sadistically tortured, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is nothing like the current generation of American horror movies. It seems less influenced by SAW than by Brian DePalma thrillers and "giallos" out of Italy - you know, the weird slasher mysteries where logic is not as important as atmosphere and vivid colors. That's definitely the philosophy of this one. Logic is for losers.

The director, Chris Sivertson (best known as the co-director of the behind-the-scenes featurette on the remake of THE TOOLBOX MURDERS) has a lush visual style and is unhealthily obsessed with the color blue. You see it on Lindsay Lohan's clothes and car, her school's football uniforms, the rose her boyfriend gives her, the big Liberace ring her piano teacher wears, her dad's glowing phone, the gloves that both the police and the killer wear, the hospital scrubs, the entire emergency room, the weapons the guy uses to torture her, even the gag in her mouth. Seriously, you'll be pissing blue for a week after you see this. The only things missing are Otter Pops and blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers, otherwise every bright blue colored object or substance that ever existed appears in the movie.

The blue-mania turns out to have a thematic excuse when the DePalma part comes in, where Lohan's character turns out to have a dark alter ego represented by the color red. They grew up in different neighborhoods, I guess. But the movie is definitely leaning Crip. Wocka wocka wocka. But seriously folks - I don't think it's gang affiliated. I think it represents first place and second place. Dark Alter Ego feels like an also ran to Blue Lindsay's trophy winner.

They set up that nice Lindsay is blue and bad Lindsay is red, so then when a police light flashes on her face you think which one is she, red or blue? That's not deep or anything but it's artier than most of these horror guys are trying for these days. The score has lots of eerie singing and classical piano (blue Lindsay plays piano) and the camera has a habit of trailing off into cryptic symbolic imagery. You might think it's trying to be classy except the DVD includes the "Extended Strip Dance" extra - a long cut of Lohan's SIN CITY style clothed pole dance, set to cheesy modern porn-style electro beats.

I have to admit, I was not hoping for good, I was looking for funny-bad, this year's WICKER MAN remake. "Ogie Oglethorp" sent me a negative review he wrote that made it sound like something I would like, and another email bud named Michael T. was blown away by it, I believe he called it "avant retarde." I asked him if he'd seen WICKER MAN and he said this was crazier. I don't agree, and I don't think this is a good movie either, but I've been telling everybody I know to watch it. I even think it's kind of admirable because I'm leaning more toward the "it was on purpose" side of the conundrum. I think they're aiming for a RAISING CAIN type of insanity. The #1 thing I like, also the #1 thing most people will hold against it, is the balls-out ludicrousness of the plot. Literally, the balls are metaphorically out. The plot is walking around with no pants on and its balls are hanging out and they're shaved and it says "FUCK ALL Y'ALL" in Sharpie, right there on the balls. This plot holds its head high and doesn't give a fuck what you think. It's not here to impress you. Fuck you.

Lindsay Lohan plays Aubrey, a depressed girl who writes stories, used to be great at piano, dates a football player. One day during a town-wide post-football game celebration she disappears, abducted by some Blue Man Group lookin creep. Then a few days later she's found in a ditch unconscious, one leg and one arm cut off. She recovers quick and gets robotic limbs (yes! now we're talkin!) but insists she's not Aubrey, she's Dakota, part time stripper and daughter of a deceased crackhead. To show how tough she is she smokes, cusses and accuses her psychiatrist of being "fuzz." Funny that the terror of young Hollywood is completely unconvincing as a bad girl.

To explain how goofy the movie is I sort of have to give away the big plot twist, so here it is. Aubrey writes corny stories to escape reality. You assume that while being tortured she went too far into her fantasy world and convinced herself she was "Dakota." That's what her dad (Neil McDonough from STARSHIP TROOPERS and WALKING TALL REMAKE) would like us to believe when she starts tossing out crazed accusations, like that Aubrey was her twin who dad took from the crackhead down the hall. But it turns out to be true! She really is Dakota, and she and Aubrey were twins and you know how they say twins feel each other's pain? Well when the killer cut off Aubrey's limbs Dakota's came off too. This is explained by that radio host Art Bell on a Ripley's Believe It Or Not style web video. So it must be true.

The effects on her stumps are pretty good, and the rubber cover on her robo-hand is creepy. They do back down from at least one opportunity for Cronenberg style perversion, though. There's a scene where, to prove that she's the bad girl and not the goodie two shoes she's been mistaken for, Dakota fucks Aubrey's boyfriend six ways to Sunday. But it's carefully framed so as to never once show her stumps. Man, think of all the fetishists that came THIS CLOSE to hitting paydirt on that one. You know there's gotta be some poor pervert out there with a thing for Lindsay Lohan and for stumps. When's that gonna come up again? Not for a while. My condolences, fella.

But as weird as this movie is I wouldn't say it was scary. I don't have that moral objection to torture in horror movies, but I do have an artistic one. When the character never has the chance to escape you're missing half of the equation. All cat and no mouse. Or all mouse and no cat, I'm not sure. Maybe that was a shocking, nihilistic approach at one point, but now it's just boring. So I guess this is more of a freakout psycho-thriller than a horror movie.

Even if it had mainstream appeal I think it would get a bad reputation because of who stars in it. If Lohan was getting tortured and bouncing her ass on a stripper pole and America's image of her was still FREAKY FRIDAY, that would be some good stunt casting. But America's image of her is not as an actor, but as a crazy drugged out slut yelling into a cell phone, driving an SUV down the sidewalk, on her way to Brett Ratner's crib after a night of clubbing. She took about a year to go from Walt Disney's America's Li'l Sweetheart to the top of the line model of every negative quality a young rich girl could be expected to have. Completely unappealing. Chlamydia in giant sunglasses.

But I still kind of feel sorry for her and some of these other girls because of the way the whole Entertainment-Gossip Industrial Complex squeezes the juice out of 'em and tosses the rind on the ground and steps on it. Who the fuck is Entertainment Weekly or somebody to tell me Britney Spears is a fat washed up talentless white trash whore with poor parenting skills when they're the exact same pricks who told me who she was in the first place? I didn't want to know. I said that's not a singer, that's a trained monkey, but they wouldn't listen. They give her the rope to hang herself with, tie the noose for her, surround her with diagrams on how to hang herself, put the noose around her neck, stand her on a chair, hang a carrot in front of her face and then when she bites for the carrot they spend the next ten years complaining that she hung herself.

You almost can't blame Britney Spears, she's a little kid, sees Madonna on TV, dances around singing into her brush like any other girl. Her mom is crazy so she trains her to pretend to sing and brings her to auditions until she gets to perform and have all the torment of Michael Jackson's childhood with none of the spark of artistic genius. She gets on the Mickey Mouse Club, not the real one, that was like 40 years ago. Now some fatass cheeseball packages her with an album, teachers her to shake her hips, puts her in a schoolgirl outfit for the dirty old man hubba hubba counting the days 'til she turns 18 factor even though, honestly, she was never all that attractive. She was even a phoney as jailbait!

But the real crime is the second album, when she's no longer a novelty record and the media treats her as a genuine artist whose work is worth discussing. But you might as well discuss the meaning of Cheetohs. It's just a manufactured product. She holds a press conference in front of a giant Pepsi billboard to announce she's gonna tour the world lip synching, getting moved around on wires and mechanical platforms. If it starts to rain the show is cancelled because she might slip. That's how fragile the whole enterprise is, it melts in water like the Wicked Witch of the West or those stupid alien invaders in SIGNS.

And yet year after year those fuckin morons put her on their covers, write about her on a first name basis, complain about her instead of just ignoring her, giving her more attention, more money, pretending to hate her and be sick of her. Britney, your 15 minutes is up, would you PLEASE stop being written about by me right now in this very magazine? But then whenever she puts out a new Cheetoh they're surprised by how delicious it is. That's how it goes at Shit From Shinola Weekly. It's catchy and she's famous so everybody should know about it. They even gave a full page interview to the douchebag who impregnated her, talking about his fake rap career. They didn't know, it could've caught on, it just happened to go the other way. Flip of a coin. They just had to pick a side and they chose wrong that one time.

From what I've read the nail in her coffin was on that MTV show where she seemed all high, failing to properly lip synch, practically naked but with a normal person body not designed for that kind of showcase. She's what, 25 years old and they're already talking about a "comeback"? To be honest I wasn't sure either, I thought her performance was shit, but that's nothing new, people could've liked it, I can't tell anymore. Turns out the verdict was that she blew it. She was not shinola. And then that guy on youtube who looks like a girl started crying.

So she may be a talentless idiot but she's still a tragic figure. Everybody told her she was great and gave her millions of dollars, how's she supposed to know better? You're the assholes who convinced her she was great. Lindsay Lohan is a sadder case because she actually has some talent I think. She was good in that MEAN GIRLS movie anyway. And then she worked with Robert Altman, and Jane Fonda I believe. But she fucks it up with all that twentysomething 24-7 Spring Break debauchery.

Anyway I bring all this up because whether she knew it or not, whether they planned it or not, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is clearly about her life. Aubrey is the original clean cut Lindsay Lohan, the 21st century Hayley Mills who remade THE PARENT TRAP and FREAKY FRIDAY. But Dakota is "bad girl" Lindsay Lohan, who smokes and disrespects her elders and could very well fuck somebody to death even with 2 out of 4 limbs missing. Dakota is troubled because she has no dad and her mom was a crackhead. Lindsay Lohan is troubled partly because her dad is in the joint and her mom acts like a crackhead. Ten years ago she would've been a guest on a "My Mom Dresses Like a Hoochie" episode of RICKI LAKE, these days she might get her own talk show. So Aubrey's adoptive parents - think of them as America - they want sweet little Aubrey back, and they're in denial, but they're stuck with Dakota while Aubrey is buried in the ground somewhere. Dakota resents Aubrey's cushy life so she acts out, just like Lindsay Lohan does after she suddenly got rich.

In fact the killer in this movie turns out to be Aubrey's piano teacher, who thinks she's not living up to her potential. He keeps talking about how she won "The Young Artist's Award." But she's not that great anymore and isn't as interested in playing, why should she have that pressure?

But you were so cute in those Disney movies. We're so disappointed in you young lady. Time to cut off your arm.

In the very end of the movie Dakota finds Aubrey's grave, but she digs it up and Aubrey (inside a blue stained-glass coffin, obviously) is still alive. And she pulls her out and they embrace and just lay on the ground together and that's the end. So the bad girl Lindsay Lohan who chases down former assistants has rescued the MEAN GIRLS era troubled-bu†–not-over-the-cliff-yet Lindsay Lohan and they have made peace with each other and perhaps will stay together, maybe balance each other out. So it's an optimistic ending, saying that the Lindsay Lohan with potential is not dead yet. A happy story. Although their parents are getting a divorce so they might have to switch places to try to get them to stay together. Unless that was some other movie, I can't remember.

That's the weirdest mystery of the movie to me – it wasn't written for Linsday Lohan, but the parallels are undeniable. I don't get how that happens.

One thing that the movie is missing is Nicolas Cage, who should've either played the dad or the killer. Without his bizarre overacting this just can't touch THE WICKER MAN for head scratching intensity. Still, it's one of the more inexplicable and strangely entertaining movies of the year, and with the amount of people I know who seem to be fascinated with it I'm sure it will have more of a shelf-life than some of the year's more successful movies. For years SHIT FROM SHINOLA MAGAZINE will use it as a punchline whenever discussing Lohan, but eventually they'll acknowledge its "cult following" and then criticize her for not making more movies like it. If you're somebody like her you can't win. All you can really do is remember to recharge your robotic leg, dig up your twin sister from her grave and apologize for fucking her boyfriend.

1. A robot can't fuck up a human being, or, through laziness, allow a human being to get fucked up.
2. Robots gotta do what you say unless it goes against the first law.
3. Robots gotta protect themselves unless protecting themselves fucks with laws 1 or 2.
4. You do not talk about fight club.
5. Repeat if desired.

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is one of the most notorious of the revenge pictures. Why? I bet it's mostly because the title is so good. LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is a great title too, because it sounds cool but it doesn't actually mean anything. It's enigmatic. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is the opposite approach, it's blunt and harsh and to the point. Whoever this is that's speaking the title, he or she DOES NOT like you. That much is clear.

Until my recent run-in with CHAOS and David "The Demon" DeFalco I never thought too much about watching this one. Why should I watch a movie that tells me it spits on my grave? But with all the ensuing discussion of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT a couple people recommended this one to me and I thought, ah, what the hell.

Coincidentally, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE's bad rep comes from the same place as CHAOS's: Chicago, and Roger Ebert. Ebert, representing a ruthless group known as the Chicago-Sun Times, and his crosstown rival Gene Siskel, overseeing Chicago's "movie beat" from his throne atop the Tribune Tower, both treated the movie with the sort of respect and sensitivity that the characters treat each other with in the movie. Ebert called it "a vile bag of garbage" and "an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures." Siskel called it "easily the most offensive film" he had seen in his career. Both talk in their reviews about being disturbed by weirdos at the screenings cheering on the rapes or bringing their kids to see it. I can understand why that would sort of ruin the experience, but luckily I didn't have either of those problems watching the movie on DVD at my apartment. I keep a tight lid on those types of things.

Ebert did like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and more recently DEVIL'S REJECTS so he's not a total prude. But I don't really agree with him on this one. Yes, it's raw and exploitative and hard to watch, but I think it has more to it than he was willing to notice back then. I don't think it's misogynistic. I think it's genuine in its anti-rape stance and it's actually very anti-male. But I can take it, men deserve it sometimes. For example those weirdos at his screening who were seriously misinterpreting the movie. They fucked it up for poor Roger.

The very simple plot is about a New York writer named Jennifer Hill (played by Buster Keaton's grand-niece Camille) going out to her summer cabin to work on a novel. We get the idea that she's a feminist because she mentions that all her short stories were published in women's magazines. While she's hanging around trying to get inspired and work on her writing, these yahoos that she met at the gas station earlier keep driving their obnoxious motor boat past her place, whooping and hollering. They're not your usual sinister villains at first, they're just a bunch of fuckin assholes. In a modern movie they would drive hummers and talk on their cell phones loudly in public and possibly have an old Bush/Cheney bumper sticker still in place.

Then one day while Jennifer is out rowing in the lake, the assholes circle around her with their motorboat, a bunch of bullies thinking they're being funny. Things escalate as they rope her boat, drag her to the shore and then gang rape her. The saddest part is they have this retarded guy named Matthew who delivered Jennifer's groceries earlier and seems harmless, but they use his virginity as the excuse for what they're doing and pressure him into raping her too. In my opinion, whatever town this is has the worst Big Brother program anywhere. They oughta be shut down.

This director Meir Zarchi may not be the world's purest feminist, but I think he's serious and that should be acknowledged. He didn't call it I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, he called it DAY OF THE WOMAN. Despite what Roger and Gene thought, there's no way in hell any reasonable person would side with the rapists, except to feel sorry for the retarded guy. They're not presented as charming even in an anti-hero way. But they're not super villains either. They introduce them as some regular yahoos who hang out together fishing and talking about "broads" and getting laid. They represent other sexist attitudes too: one says he doesn't like women to tell him what to do, then he blames Jennifer for the rape because she showed skin at one point and didn't wear a bra. None of them admit their guilt, all of them blame their friends, or say that they couldn't control themselves or imply that she's a slut. But clearly the audience understands that they're wrong on all counts, and that "that woman deserves her revenge" as Michael Madsen says in KILL BILL. And even if it's a savage Old Testament eye-for-an-eye version of feminism, I do think Jennifer's revenge is feminism. In most revenge movies the woman is just the victim, and it's up to her husband to get the revenge (DEATH WISH, WALKING TALL, VIGILANTE, HARD TO KILL, THE CROW, THE PUNISHER 1989, THE PUNISHER 2004, PAPARAZZI, etc.) or occasionally her dad(VIRGIN SPRING, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, CHAOS, THE LIMEY). This time she survives, takes a couple weeks to recover, goes to church for some "sorry God, but I'm about to kill some motherfuckers, just thought I should give you a heads up" type praying, then exacts her vengeance without asking for help from anyone.

One problem is that this is an exploitation movie and even though they're supposed to be shocking and disturbing, you also want these movies to be fun. But there's that 25 minutes in the first half that deliberatlely makes you sick. You can't have much fun watching a movie where the hero gets raped four times. It's a tough question because I'm not sure there's a "right" way to tell a story like this. Either you cut away from the rape and you are sanitizing it, or you show it in all its horror and then you're an asshole for making us sit through that. But in a revenge movie the filmatists are required to "twist the knife," really outrage and piss off the audience, because that way we will root for the hero if she crosses the line when turning the tables. And believe me, this woman will cross the line.

It turns into an amoral slasher picture where you are openly expected to root for the killer, but admittedly it could use some more inventive kills, even more brutal violence. (sorry, Roger.) It doesn't help that the blood looks too orange and soapy. On the positive side, Jennifer does get a couple great killer moments. I love the shot of her speeding toward the camera in the boat she stole from them, wielding the ax she stole from them. The hanging of Matthew really bothered me because I couldn't understand why she let him have sex with her, but Joe Bob Briggs on the commentary track points out what I didn't pick up on, that because of things that happened earlier she wants him to die just as he climaxes. Pretty fuckin cold thing to do to a retarded guy, and this takes place in Connecticut, not Texas. But I was more bothered that she would lower herself to being sexual with these guys, even if its in a predatory way that takes advantage of their male weaknesses. So this was almost a dealbreaker for me.

But of course you have to give it to the scene after she cuts off a guy's dick in the bath tub. She locks the door (from the outside? Oh well, maybe she rigged it that way), goes downstairs, puts on an opera record and sits in her rocking chair as the dude screams off screen about how it won't stop bleeding. She looks crazier than she did when she was sunbathing on her hammock, but not less relaxed.

I guess I can't ask for much more than that. But the first thing I ever knew about this movie was the classic tagline: "This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition... but no jury in America would ever convict her!" Siskel correctly points out that she only kills four men (what other man is there for her to kill, the butcher at the grocery store where Matthew works?) and she only burns a guy's clothes. I don't think Siskel was disappointed by the inaccuracy, but I was. I wanted to see one of these dudes burn. Oh well.

Ebert says the movie is "artless," but I disagree. The guy playing retarded is not very convincing, but otherwise the acting is solid. The sunny days and the location reminded me of those Steve Miner FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels I like, but the feel is way more arty. It has a minimalistic realism that you could compare to some of Gus Van Sant's movies and Steve Soderbergh's BUBBLE - no score, long, quiet takes, minimal dialogue. Ebert mentioned that last one as if it makes it bad, but on that one he is definitely, scientifically incorrect. With many horror movies, especially of this era, you have to forgive a ton of wooden dialogue put in there just to explain what's going on. Zarchi expresses alot of this stuff non-verbally. Camille Keaton actually gives a really good performance, letting us know what she's thinking without many words. Ebert got worked up by those yahoos in his screening, so he got stupid and said things he probaly didn't mean. Usually he would know that less dialogue can be much more cinematic. It adds alot to the movie with tense scenes like the one where the retarded guy slowly pushes his bike toward the house and is surprised from behind - it's all in the sound effects, not people talking and explaining everything.

But I do have a big problem with the fact that Jennifer seduces these assholes before she kills them. The rape scenes are clearly supposed to make you sick, but I'm not as sure about these scenes where she deliberately acts sexy to lure them in. I mean I guess taking a bath with that other guy is a good way to cut his dick off, but still. The feminist message is sort of lost when she has to turn into Shannon Tweed or Sharon Stone or somebody to get her revenge.

Siskel also said in his review "I was stunned, first, that any parents would take their children to a film with a title like 'I Spit On Your Grave.'" True, although he doesn't mention if this includes the 1959 French film about Southern racism that the distributor took the title from. I would be more worried about the kids being bored during that one. Anyway I should warn you in case you plan to travel back through time and bring your children to the movie that the title is misleading, she doesn't actually spit on anybody's grave. The credits start just moments after she kills her last rapist, so there aren't even any graves for her to spit on yet. It's too bad this movie wasn't made in the age of the internet so that they could've realized the response the title was getting and go back for reshoots where she individually spits on each of their graves. You know the character Johnny has a wife and kids so there definitely would've been a funeral for that guy, she could show up during the funeral and spit on the grave, that would be pretty cool. Oh well.

The Millennium Edition DVD has two commentaries. One is by the director/writer, but it's kind of weird because you can tell it's all pre-written and he's reading it. I didn't finish that one but I really liked the commentary by Joe Bob Briggs, who gives a really good defense of the film while also making fun of it a little.

THE ICE HARVEST

I was excited about this at one point, but I missed it when it was in theaters. I thought it was a diamond heist movie starring Billy Bob Thornton, but it turns out Billy Bob is the co-star and there are no diamonds. The ice in the title is literal, because it's winter. Christmas Eve, to be exact. There's not snow though, just frozen rain, which is not something you see in Christmas movies very often, and rings true to me since here we're lucky to even see that. (I don't know about Kansas.)

It's not exactly a heist movie because like RESERVOIR DOGS or something you never see the theft itself. John Cusack (the rich man's Scott Baio) is a Kansas mob lawyer and Billy Bob Thornton (ON DEADLY GROUND) is his partner in skimming. They have just stolen upwards of $2 million from their boss, but can't leave town yet due to the ice. The movie is about them trying to hang out and play it cool for a few hours before they can leave. They figure the boss won't know about the missing money until they're gone, but this seems to be incorrect since Cusack keeps seeing an enforcer played by Mike Starr (ON DEADLY GROUND) going around town looking for them.

I like the sort of rambling feel of the story, since it's about killing time. Before the guns come out and it turns into more of what you expect from a crime movie, the plot seems kind of random. Alot of the movie is spent with him having to look after his drunk friend (Oliver Platt, EXECUTIVE DECISION), who is also married to his ex-wife. We find out that he has two kids - a daughter who misses him and a son who hates him. He only sees hiw own children on Christmas Eve by coincidence. He happened to be in the same restaraunt as drunk Oliver Platt and roped by the management into driving him home. This sad family life to me was the most interesting part of the movie because at first he seems like a reasonably cool guy, but then when you find out about the kids he neglects you wonder what the fuck his problem is. Later on, in the middle of the night, he buys his kids cheap ass Christmas presents at a convenience store. True, he doesn't have the stolen money at this point, but you still gotta figure he's being an asshole. Even a legitimate lawyer oughta be able to afford something decent a week before the big robbery is planned. He tells his daughter he'll see her on Christmas and his son says he's lying. I figured because this is a movie he really would make an effort to show up, but it's more true to life than that. He is lying. He's leaving town.

One problem I had with the movie is that I didn't really understand alot of the details of the situation. Cusack is a lawyer and passes as a respected member of the community, but he also seems to run the strip club he goes to since he's able to comp people for drinks and tell the dancers they don't have to pay the stage rental fee because it's Christmas. I wasn't really sure what the deal was with that. Also, they say that Billy Bob's job is he sells pornography, but I don't really understand what exactly his job is. And once it's clear that things are dangerous in town I'm not sure why they don't leave right away. I'm sure driving on icy roads is safer than getting shot at by Mike "I need time to change" Starr. Also, there's this whole subplot about grafitti that I don't understand the significance of at all.

I feel like I shouldn't be complaining about that, because I prefer movies to not explain everything and let you figure it out yourself. But in this case I guess I just wasn't smart enough. So dumb it down next time, fellas.

I got mixed feelings about John Cusack. He's obviously a good actor and a charming dude, and he has above average standards for a Hollywood actor. He's not in too many movies that are completely horrible, except for fucking CON AIR. (I won't comment on his recent slew of romantic comedies since I won't ever watch them. For all I know they're masterpieces.) But as good as he is - and he's fine in this movie - I'm not completely sold on him as a criminal. He just has such a America's Favorite Nice Guy quality that it's hard to accept him holding a gun in one hand and a suitcase full of money in the other. I mean he looks good in expensive suits which is important to this type of role, but still. There's an indefinable something that doesn't quite click for me.

And the movie is kind of the same way for me. There's nothing really wrong with it. There's some good black humor and awkward social situations here and there. It has a somewhat original feel. Billy Bob is great as always, and some of the scenes with drunk Oliver Platt are pretty funny. There's some nice photography in parts. It's almost entirely devoid of the type of wackiness and whimsical scoring that some directors would use to ruin a movie like this. And like I said I liked the way they handled his fucked up family life. But in the end, it doesn't really add up to much. It's a mostly serious movie but it doesn't feel like it has any substance. When it ended, I really wasn't sure what exactly the story was supposed to be about, or why they wanted to tell it.

I guess a gotta blame the slightly-above-averageness of director Harold Ramis. If I was gonna choose a Ghostbuster to direct a movie, he would be my number one choice. But if I was allowed to open up the field to non-Ghostbusters, he would be alot lower. Sometimes I get him mixed up with the guy who used to be Yoda who directed THE STEPFORD WIVES and shit, and that's not fair. Former-Ghostbuster is a much better director than former-Miss-Piggy. But that doesn't mean he's a genius.

Also I should probaly note that I heard Elvis Mitchell interview Harold Ramis about this movie, and Elvis thought it had all these parallels to Buddhism. I'm pretty sure I didn't pick up on any of that stuff at all, in any way. So maybe it's over my head. But probaly not.

So I guess it's what you expected: not great, not bad, not very memorable, not actually about Buddhism. Maybe they shoulda thrown R. Lee Ermey in there somewhere so it would be more of an ON DEADLY GROUND reunion and then it would've stood out more.

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK PART II

Sometimes at my age a fella has to admit he's not exactly up on things. Not exactly with it. Specially when it seems like every other weekend I'm writing a review for a sequel to some movie where I never even saw the first one. Hell I never even HEARD of the first one half the time how the fuck I'm supposed to seen it already. Cut me some slack buddy.

But I picked up the dvd for this one because of a certain powerful force - the force of young Chloe Sevigny's eyes staring out at me from the cover. I think most of you know how I feel about this gal, ever since I first spied her in the Last Days of Disco picture where her eyes were able to cut through seven layers of postmodern bullshit spewing out of the mouths of the pretentious yuppies in the movie. This girl is a hell of an actor but the main thing I'm talking about here is the presence. She has the presence of a real movie star. In my opinion. So I'll see any movie she's in even if it has her with her hair slicked back, wearing a tie, like in this one.

And please people, I'm just saying she's a good actor. I'm not trying to pull some Jerry Seinfeld/Michael Douglas/Harold and Maude type bullshit here. Unless she's offering.

Now I'm not sure what happened in the first one but this seems to make sense even without having seen it. It is three stories of three generations of lesbians with one thing tying all of them together - they are all lesbians, from three different generations.

The best story is actually not the one with Chloe in it. It's the one starring Vanessa Redgrave as an elderly gal in 1952, who has spent her life in a loving relationship with another gal, sharing a house, birdwatching together and what not. They are very nice and lovable and have a nice house full of antiques. They are like the ultimate grandma team.

But then one of them dies and wouldn't you fucking know it, it's the one who DOESN'T own the deed to the house. So what happens is the other gal's nephew and his bitch of a wife and his cute little daughter end up being the next of kin. And the story is about the uncomfortable situation of sitting in the house with these people who think she's just a friend, watching them decide who gets all of her stuff. And asking her when she's gonna move out.

It's a sad fucking story about the type of rights us dick-in-pussy types take for granted. I'm used to all the movie lesbians either being real hot or being real hot and a vampire. So it's an interesting twist to see a hollywood movie about lesbians who we DON'T want to see in bed together. Don't get me wrong I'm not complaining that in the next story you see Chloe Sevigny and the gal from Dick and Halloween 20 Years Later take their shirts off and roll around together. And I swear on my mother's grave that I never WILL complain about that. All I'm saying is, if I was a lesbian, I would like to see a couple good lesbian movies where nobody's gonna necessarily be getting a boner while they watch. Where they are just a couple of gals in love.

The second story, I believe titled 1974, is about the two aformentioned gals also in love. This brings up another lesbian type issue, the idea of feminine lesbians having a prejudice against the butch lesbians, in this case Chloe riding a motorcycle and wearing an undershirt. The one gal is part of a feminist clique and her friends make fun of her for wanting to get it on with a "man."

I mean hell, I know where they're coming from. Women don't look good wearing ties. I don't know why there are men that can pull off the whole chicks with dicks deal with shocking authenticity, but women almost NEVER can do the man look. There are dudes out there whose worst nightmare is to go looking for some pussy and accidentally find a dick in there. It's a silly fear but at least it's a possibility. NO woman worries about a Brandon Teena. It's so rare a gal can pull that off it would almost be an honor. Get the girl's autograph.

I mean you saw Charlies Angels. You paint a beard on a gal and it just doesn't look right. Still, that's no excuse to put down these butch gals. THere are alot of us who don't look right. There are people with dandruff or bald spots. People with acne scars and boogers hanging out of their nose. People who never wash their pants or let their buttcrack show at the top or wear clothes that are too tight or too baggy. There are kids today who ride around on a little scooter wearing giant pants and with their face painted like an evil clown or wearing a mexican wrestling mask. There are guys who wear faded red dwarf shirts, women who paint on their eyebrows real phoney looking. there are guys who wear mambo socks for fucks sake. And there are women who like to dress like men. I mean jesus this is a not a serious issue, this is not a reason to be excluded from society or from feminist groups or from hot lesbian sex with the gal from Dick. I don't care if it's the '70s or the 2000s let's have some unity here people.

Finally there is the 2000 segment. This is the story of how Sharon Stone and Ellen Degeneres are planning to get artifically inseminalized or whatever. meaning, pregnant. They are a cute couple and what not but it's kind of too cute. I didn't like this one too much.

still, as a whole, part 2 was a good picture and I look forward to seeing these characters return in part 3. I especially hope things worked out for the two gals in the '70s. I'm not sure they'll be able to get vanessa redgrave's character in there again though unless it's a prequel.

Somehow this week I ended up seeing two independent movies starring Kieran Culkin as a troubled rebel kid in a private school uniform. That's just the way life is sometimes, I guess.

You know my theory about Culkins. They squirt 'em out on a conveyor belt somewhere and sell 'em cheap to filmatists. I'm not sure they even have separate identities, they probaly just call them "Rory" when they're young and "Kieran" when they're a teen and "Macaulay" when they quit acting and start going to clubs. If you buy the media hype about them being actual kids, then Kieran must be the most successful of the group because he's doing legitmate acting roles and he must be 16 or so.

Anyway the weaker of the two new "Kieran" pictures I saw was THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS. This one's coming soon to video and it stars Kieran and a couple other kids as, you know, altar boys. The gimmick is that even though they go to a religious private school they say fuck alot and smoke and drink and have sex and are always planning some elaborate prank. Their dream throughout the movie is to build a pully system which they will use to steal a cougar from the zoo and transport it to their school.

Let me repeat that though. They smoke and they fuck but they're ALTAR BOYS. See, it's the juxtaposition. WHO KNEW this kind of shit was goin' on, man. This one is gonna blow the lid offa organized religion, in my opinion.

No, I'm just jerkin your chain. It's not a terrible movie, it's just one of those pictures that you'd probaly enjoy if you were 12 or 13. But if you're like me, you're not 12 or 13. It's a more obvious and cartoony STAND BY ME. Speaking of cartoony, the other gimmick is that these kids like to draw themselves as obscene super heroes like "captain asskicker" who literally "kicks the shit" out of his opponents. Together they battle an evil nun based on their teacher, Sister Assumpta, played by Jodie Foster.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention Jodie Foster. She's the producer, this was a pet project of hers so she gave herself a boring role where she doesn't get to do much, to show she's humble. The most dynamic thing about the character is that she starts out with a strong Irish accent in her first scene and then never uses it again. Vincent D'Onofrio is likable as the Father/soccer coach she works with but he doesn't get the accent to play around with. Poor guy.

Anyway, they do this comic book and what the filmatists decided to do was to include many animated segments of their adventures. So they went to the #1 expert in the field of moronic juvenile super hero garbage, Todd McFarland. He is the guy who created SPAWN, that horrible movie and cartoon show that was on HBO, where he comes out at the beginning and introduces it in person. Man, I would've hid in the back if I was reponsible for that piece of shit.

The animation doesn't seem like a bad idea for conveying the kids' fantasy life but I think the trouble is that the "reality" of the characters is a total fantasy anyway. Every kid WISHES they knew an abandoned house where they could spend all day away from their parents, get laid, drink booze, smoke cigarattes and use an elaborate pulley system to steal a statue from their school. But no kid ever comes even remotely close to pulling off any single element of that dream, unless maybe they got to touch a girl's boob once, I don't know. The point is this is obviously a movie that you're supposed to be able to relate to your own childhood but it sure don't remind me too much of mine. I don't know about you. They might as well figure out how to build jetpacks and it will be equally universal.

Anyway not to give anything away but Kieran gets mauled by a cougar at the end. That was the most exciting part, in my opinion. Didn't his "brother" Macaulay get killed in a bee attack in one of his movies? The freak animal attack fatality is an interesting motif. I think maybe the animals can sense that the Culkins are not real, and they must instinctively attack them, destroy them and devour their clockwork innards, to become more powerful and some day control all of the food.

On the other hand I kind of liked IGBY GOES DOWN, which surprised me. And there isn't even an animal attack, as far as I remember. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen that Claire Danes says "What kind of a name is Igby" and the kid says "It's the kind of name that someone named 'Sukie' can't criticize." Well I'm sorry son but that's avoiding the question. The answer is that "Igby" is a cute name that some 32 year old first time novelist gives his character as a way of showing he is eccentric and interesting, and later there will be a cute story to explain the circumstances that caused the character to be named that. Every fuckin novel they gotta have these interesting names. They can't just be named (insert your name) or Vern, like you or I. No, they gotta be named Igby and Sukie. To my surprise this is actually an original screenplay, it is not a quirky independent movie based on a quirky novel, like that movie FREAK THE MIGHTY starring some other Culkin and various other cute names.

For the record though, eccentrics do not have goofy names, that's what they call "on the nose." Michael Jackson's name isn't Pixielegs Froggildoodle, is it? No, it's just "Michael Jackson." If you have a goofy name either your parents were hippies, you're trying too hard, or you're an anti-hero in a John Carpenter movie.

IGBY GOES DOWN has a couple of these type of annoying traits early on, so I thought I was gonna hate it. In the opening scene we see that Susan Sarandon is the crazy rich bitch mother of "Kieran" and Ryan Phillipe (reprising his role from CRUEL INTENTIONS, I think). We learn that she pops all kinds of pills (can you believe it!) and this makes it harder for them to poison her, so they have to suffocate her with a bag. And I mean they're sitting there in their suits and ties, and they're killing their own mother and they make little wry comments and the music is saying "this part is funny." You feel like the filmatists are nudging you with a big grin on their faces saying "How delightfully wicked, huh? Don't you think it's deliciously macabre?"

And then of course we go back in time to find out what will lead to this incident. Igby's getting bad grades and gets kicked out of private school and instead of worrying about him, mom says "Do you even for one moment stop to think about how this makes me look?" We know this how rich moms are, worrying about their own image, because we've seen it in movies. What we have in store for us, obviously, is one of your "rich kid acts outrageously in school to rebel against his cruel parents" stories. So my knee jerk reaction was "I can't feel sorry for this little prick in the Henry Porter scarf." The idea of these movies is "just because you have alot of money doesn't mean you're happy." And it's true, but it doesn't take into account "just because you're not happy, doesn't mean you're less happy than people who don't even have any fucking food." Write a movie about that, asshole.

That said, I quickly became interested in these characters and their pathetic troubles. Igby hates his mom and his brother. His father is in a mental hospital, and is seen in a few brief scenes played by Bill Pullman, who happens to be the exact right actor to have a breakdown in the shower wearing clothes, walk right through the shower door and lay on the floor bloody and smiling at his son like "Can you believe this shit?"

Jeff Goldblum is kind of likable and real sleazy as Igby's suspiciously interested godfather. Through his world Igby gets hooked up with Clair Danes as Sukie (a nice older girl who somehow ends up fuckin a Culkin) and Amanda Peet (an even older one). Claire Danes is always good but the surprise is Peet, who we all know from the trailers to various movies about the outrageous lives of single people in the '90s or whatever decade this is. She's pathetic as a slowly unraveling dancer/nympho/addict who makes you shake your head sadly and try to avoid eye contact, like a real junkie does. It's a sad portrait of a desperate world, where every single major character is having sex with more than one person but few of them seem to be enjoying it.

Also of note, this is the first movie I know of to use a younger Culkin ("Rory") playing the younger version of the older Culkin. It's always funny when they try to fake something like that, like when someone was in movies as a kid but then they have a kid playing the younger version of them when they're grown up, and the younger version doesn't look like the real life younger version that we're all familiar with. It's too confusing for me. But here, they just got "Rory" to do it.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this movie to most of my readers, I don't think it is particularly original and it is ultimately very bitter and depressing with little redemption. But it has a couple funny lines, the opening scene turns out to be not quite what I thought it was and the emotional journey to me seems sincere.

Here's a movie not directed by Clint Eastwood (it's Wolfgang Peterson, the DAS BOOT guy) but like alot of his directorial works of the past 20 years it deals with him getting old. Clint plays a Secret Service agent named Frank Horrigan. He's still working but he's washed up - he was there when JFK got shot and is still haunted by his failure. After that he became a huge asshole, he started drinking and his wife and daughter left. But this is Clint we're talking about so we still like him, and also he plays jazz piano.

This is a good example of those '90s big budget studio action thrillers along the lines of EXECUTIVE DECISION and DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, movies that depict the workings of a city and its various departments as they respond to an emergency. In this case it's the Secret Service responding to a threat against the president. We see Clint and his new partner (Dylan McDermott, or possibly Dermot Mulrooney - I don't know which is which so if it's important to you check IMDb) making their rounds, so first they have to shoot some guys over counterfeit money, then they have to check out a report of "some weirdo." It just so happens that this is the one in a thousand of those calls that really is a dude planning to kill the president. He's not home but he sees Clint in his apartment from afar and the game begins.

If you can rent this without knowing who plays the villain then you should go ahead and do that right now. I'll wait. But most of you already know that the villain is played by former WWF superstar Jake "The Snake" Roberts in a career-defining role. Actually that's not true, that was a spoiler buffer, it's actually John Malkovich. He's a challenge for Clint because he's real devious and smart. He hand makes his own metal-free zip gun and sets up a false identity to get into campaign rallies. He's a master of disguise. He finds a way to scramble his phone line so he can call Clint untraced and taunt him about things he read about him in magazines, or to pretend like he thinks they're buddies.

The guy is bitter toward the government, he's a master killer and certain agencies are not cooperative in catching him. And you know what that means: disgruntled CIA assassin. But instead of playing him like a Seagal character this is a creepy Malkovich character. He's arrogant because he knows he's smarter than you, but he's emotionally vulnerable because he's, you know, crazy. In one scene he gets a gun pointed in his face so he puts it in his mouth and smiles (apparently that was improv - Malkovich you sick fuckin bastard). He calls himself "Booth" because he thinks John Wilkes had "panache" and he's a showman himself. He takes unneccessary risks to spy on Clint or embarass him with false alarms. I think he's actaully pretty scary and one of the great villains of '90s film and cinema. He deservedly got a supporting actor Oscar nomination but lost to Tommy Lee Jones in THE FUGITIVE, another one of these big budget respectable actor action thrillers of the era.

According to IMDb Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman were both attached to the role of Frank Horrigan (at different times - it wasn't some weird Bunuel shit I don't think). They say it was also offered to Sean Connery and that Val Kilmer (!?) was considered. So there were probaly some rewrites, but by the time Clint was on board the character almost could've been Dirty Harry with a new job. He's got the doomed partner. He's got the reckless abandon (while undercover he fires a gun at McRooney/MulDermott's head even though he's not 100% it's empty). There's a rooftop chase like in THE ENFORCER (unfortunately without the jazz). There's even a bit of his ENFORCER era chauvinism when he tells Renee Russo that as a female agent she's just "window dressing." Funny, because this ain't the '70s, this is 1993. So that's pretty Dirty. But he's older now, he gets so winded from running that people think he's gonna die.

Frank Horrigan has one thing Harry Callahan doesn't, and that's the top shelf badass juxtaposition of being a pianist. I know Clint really plays - not sure if he did for the movie - but it's the perfect sensitive side for this character to have. With the pressure of protecting presidents on your back you might as well have an outlet, and this is a sad and beautiful one. After a long day of almost getting killed he slips into a little bar for some piano blues. He also uses it to woo Renee Russo and to make her laugh when she rejects him. At home he has a Miles Davis CD - a jazz musician who presonifies COOL just as much as Clint does.

Speaking of music, it's worth noting that Ennio Morricone did the score. That's kind of cool seeing as how both are best known for THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY. According to my calculations this was the first movie they did together since TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA 23 years earlier. (they did it 23 years earlier, it was not a part 23 they they did an unspecified number of years earlier)

I like that after UNFORGIVEN got him best director and best picture Oscars Clint still had another commercial movie like this in him. People were probaly saying "Okay, you win Oscars now, you're a serious director. You're too old to do action movies." And okay, by then he probaly already had this one in the can. But fuck reality, I like to believed that just like Horrigan Clint is stubborn and knows what he wants, and made this movie to prove that he could still do it. Also like the character his cover was blown at the end so he couldn't do that anymore. He really did become a full time director, not acting in other people's movies after this one.

Seeing him in a movie like this, though, makes me wish that he would feel like doing another DIRTY HARRY. He doesn't seem entirely opposed to doing one except that he can't see what a good story would be. I would love to see a movie about what happens when somebody wrongs a long retired Inspector Callahan. He would still be a gun nut of course, but he couldn't jump across roofs or off bridges. So he'd really have to out-think this guy.

Well, that'll probaly never happen. But at least this one did. If you're into this type of picture then please be aware that IN THE LINE OF FIRE is one of the good ones.

6/29/08

Listen up Hulkamaniacs -

This new Hulk remake/sequel/do-over/all new adventure starts out with an opening credits montage of flashbacks and headlines to explain his Incredible origin. It's like the opening to a TV show, setting up what you need to know. So I'm gonna do a TV show opening for this review to: I don't know the comic strips, vaguely remember the TV show, still love the Ang Lee movie no matter what you say, but was open to and kind of excited about the notion of the goofball director of fucking TRANSPORTER 2 taking over to do the flip side of that coin.

But I got a little worried when I read that Edward Norton had rewritten the script. Uh oh. That means he thinks he's making the serious Hulk movie. Did he not know about the Ang Lee one? I think he did, because I read that he turned it down. I guess he regretted that maybe. It's true, Louis Letterier is not in TRANSPORTER 2 mode here. He's more in DANNY THE DOG aka UNLEASHED mode: a movie with elements of crazy action fun, but that is trying really hard to be a serious drama.

And I didn't see this coming, but it actually has the same weird story problem that UNLEASHED had: what the hero wants is diametrically opposed to what the audience wants. In UNLEASHED Jet Li played a martial arts expert who was raised as a dog by Bob Hoskins (long story). He wore a collar but whenever it came off him he was mentally programmed to go ape shit and beat the holy living fuck out of anybody in his path. (again, long story.) And then the movie is about how he sort of finds a new family and changes his life and learns to not beat the shit out of everybody when the collar comes off. And it's kind of sweet and Jet Li gets to do way more acting than almost any other movie he's been in.

But on the other hand... we came to see a fucking Jet Li movie! And it's undeniable that the best parts of the movie are the fights, which are choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping but use a very different style than he usually uses, with Jet doing blunt, primal kinds of blows to fit his character, not graceful ones. The fights are so great! So how can you root for this character when his goal is to stop entertaining you?

THE INCREDIBLE HULK kind of does the same thing. America is still angry at Ang Lee for the poetic beauty and inner contemplation of HULK. America demands a Hulk that does not deal with his childhood trauma and relationship to his father, and certainly does not ever contemplate lichen in the desert or fight a psychedelic battle in the sky. America wants Hulk to just fucking punch things and throw and growl and then punch things some more and just fuck everything up, like a Hulk does. So you'd think that would be the focus of the new movie, and yet Dr. Banner spends the whole movie trying to cure himself and not be the Hulk! In his very last scene (I think, but it's kind of unclear) he has decided to control and use the Hulk and be a super hero and what not, but couldn't we have done that at the beginning of the movie?

I think maybe they realized that at some point because the one really huge story stumble happens after a long scene where he gets strapped down and zapped with various mad scientist things and this is supposed to cure him of being the Hulk. Then in the next scene he finds out it would be helpful to be the Hulk so he turns into him again. The whole movie he's trying to cure himself and then when he does he decides nah, I didn't want that, and then it's like it never happened. Good job rewriting Edward Norton, glad you caught that one.

(to be fair, this version is shorter than the one Norton wanted, so maybe the editing messed it up)

I should mention before I go too deep into this that I actually enjoyed this movie. But still. Let's be honest, there are some problems. Most people will not agree, but I think Ang Lee's beats Letterrier's in almost all categories.

For sure Ang Lee's looks better. It has beautiful photography and vivid colors. This one is much more dreary, and not in an artful way. It's not surprising that it was shot in Toronto. It pretty much has the look of a mid-budget action movie instead of a big comic book movie. But I didn't entirely hate that because it's kind of weird to see a cheap action movie with a multi-million dollar special effects monster as the star. That's a new one. Maybe they can use the Hulk in some of the upcoming WWE movies instead of John Cena.

The new Hulk computer character looks both better and worse. He's more chiseled and fierce looking in the face, the old one was kind of doughy. But whenever he has to have an expression other than "GRRRR!!" it becomes ridiculous. There's a couple KING KONG moments where he has to look at Liv Tyler with sensitivity and those fucking girly eyes just made me laugh. I expected him to start batting his eyelashes like Bugs Bunny in drag. They look unnatural on that head, like the creepily human eyes on computerized Garfield. And actually I think the body of the old Hulk was better, more of a big lug and less of a disgusting PUMPING IRON freako tribute to unnaturally enlarged male anatomy.

More importantly, the acting performance by the animators was better in the other one. They give it their best here but the personality seems a little forced, and the action is Stephen Sommers weightless. When Bana Hulk threw things they seemed heavy, Norton Hulk and his enemy monster sometimes just look like they're tossing pieces of foam around. And the moves seem rushed, like so many computer animated animals in movies that just look like special effects and not living creatures.

The General character (girlfriend's dad, guy trying to catch the Hulk and in this one total scumbag villain who is responsible for Banner being the Hulk as part of a weapons program) is way better in the Ang Lee one. First of all, as much as I like William Hurt, he comes off as a poor man's Tommy Lee Jones. Sam Elliot was cooler and was given more dimension - alot of what he was doing came out of being a protective father, and trying to do his job. This version is just a bad guy who doesn't even give a shit about endangering his own daughter, and then at the end he kind of turns less villainous but it only feels partly earned.

It's smart to make the main villain another monster that can get in a punching and smashing fight with the Hulk, and it's cool to have Tim Roth in a movie like this. But there's not a whole lot to his character. He just sees the Hulk monster and gets jealous and wants to do that too, so they give him some injections and shit. I wonder if this is covered in that BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER documentary? Nick Nolte's character was way more interesting, way funnier, and scarier since he seemed so legitimately crazy and since his powers were more abstract, you weren't sure what the fuck was gonna happen with that dude. Also, let's face it, nobody likes dealing with hulk poodles. It's like having your basement flooded or getting in a motorcycle accident or something. Just a huge pain in the ass. Nothing good comes out of hulk poodles. In fact, how do we really know this Edward Norton Hulk is any good if we have not seen him tear a hulk poodle in half with his bare hands? That is the true test of any hulk, in my opinion. Today's hulks are so pampered.

What really surprised me though is I think the action is better in the Ang Lee one. All this time I was thinking this will be the dumb version of HULK, the character and story stuff won't be nearly as good, but it will have more and better action. Way off. Actually, the story is kind of more involving than Ang Lee's, if more obvious and less serious. The pacing is not as much of a challenge. And the action is fine, there's some cool smashing stuff here and there. But nothing has the same visceral thrill as Hulk flying around in the desert fighting the tanks and jets in the first movie. Or the thrill of Letterier's other movies, for that matter. He tries, but maybe computerized fights are not his thing.

There's some hype about the climax being a long monster fight. I thought that would be great. The weird thing is I was completely involved in the movie, enjoying it, never bored, and then when the fight was over I just kind of thought huh. That's it. Oh well.

Didn't expect that from a guy I think of as an action director. But I guess in retrospect the guy who directed CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON is gonna have better fights than the guy that did TRANSPORTER 2. But luckily there is room in this world for both of them to try their hand at the Incredible Hulk. I wonder what nationality of action director we should give the Hulk to next? How about the ONG BAK guys? Or the Chileans who did KILTRO and MIRAGEMAN? Maybe Isaac Florentine and Scott Adkins.

I only noticed a slight French feel to this one, but I did read afterwards that Cyril Rafaelli from DISTRICT B13 (also stunt coordinator for many Besson productions) did the movements for Hulk and Abomination. And I actually thought briefly about parkour at the end when Hulk was jumping from the sides of buildings. But the thing about this guy and his colleagues is that they really, for real do these amazing things. They run up the sides of buildings, swing on poles, fly through tiny spaces, leap from up high and land on narrow ledges. Rafaelli was the mercenary in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD who did that leap onto the fire escape, and when I first saw it I thought it was a special effect until I realized who it was, and then I knew it was real.

So when he's in this movie and he actually is a special effect it's not quite the same thrill. It doesn't take advantage of his talents. Still, nice that they gave him the job.

Norton does a good job turning this character into your usual Edward Norton character. The fact that he's not some muscleman badass is a good contrast to the monster he becomes. I'm not prepared to say he's better than Bana, but maybe. As much as I like that movie it's too bad Bana had to turn all his acting inward. When the fuck is somebody gonna figure out a role for him that's half as good as Chopper? Still, you gotta give him credit for being dedicated enough to Hulk to have a name that sounds like Banner. Norton did not go the same distance for his performance, which is a shame. A sad, ugly shame.

I can give one to INCREDIBLE HULK though: it has the better girlfriend. Nothing against Jennifer Connelly, who many men in their 30s are obsessed with due to the movie LABYRINTH. Maybe Academy Award winners just aren't my type or something but I thought Liv Tyler was way more lovable. She seems genuinely infatuated with Banner, and protective of him. When she goes into Soothe the Savage Beast mode it's completely convincing, she knows how to get through to him. And the way the two joke with each other makes them seem more like a real couple.

In fact the most clever trick in the movie has to do with their relationship. Banner has been on the run and he comes back home and sees Betty from afar, but she has a new boyfriend. We know what this means: he has to slowly reveal himself to her, she is torn but tells him she has moved on with her life, and he hurt her so bad, and the new boyfriend will be a pretty cool guy but will be kind of possessive, and either he will show his true colors as a scumbag later or he will realize her heart is really with Bruce and he will set her free like a balloon... well, none of this happens. Instead when she accidentally catches a glimpse of Bruce she walks away from the boyfriend and ends up running off with Bruce. I love that she never even talks about it. Clearly that was just the guy she found to try to fill the hole that could never be filled, and now he is unnecessary. Sorry dude. You were such a prick in the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, maybe this is karma.

I was a little confused since the trailer started with Banner getting advice from the new boyfriend. I kept waiting for him to come back into the story, but that scene never happened. But I loved that they handled the love story the way they did. It seems like every other super hero has some tortured love life. Batman's got that girl he grew up with and she says he's not the same person anymore, Spider-man has all that drama with Mary Jane and has to do an evil dance, Punisher had his wife, kids, parents, grandparents, second cousins and co-workers all massacred mafia style, Superman blew it with Lois because he flew off into space for too long, Wolverine loves Jean Grey even though she already has a man AND died AND turned evil AND died again, Popeye split up with Olive Oyl because they were always fighting over money. And then Blade and Tony Stark sleep around. It's nice that Incredible Hulk has his girl and they just get along well and support each other, even go fugitive together. The drama in the story comes from punching, not from relationship troubles.

Another point in this movie's favor is that it has the better title. Maybe that's why it looks cheaper, they blew most of the budget on an "INCREDIBLE" and even a "THE" which were sorely missing in HULK.

So I'm still sticking by the Ang Lee version. Definitely the most ambitious and bravest of the two and for me more fun to watch. But I do like this one as a more normal version for normal people and I'm glad it turned out okay. Very few will like it as much as IRON MAN, but it's closer to that category than to the sucky Marvels movies like FANTASTIC FOUR 1-2, GHOST RIDER, DAREDEVIL and GARFIELD. You know, I've read about how they're trying to do the separate movies to set up all these characters and later they're gonna have them assemble into a team in one movie. It's an ambitious plan that I honestly thought they were gonna blow already with this one. Nobody would like the movie and they'd have to figure out Hulk actor #3 for the team-up movie, or maybe just have him be Hulk for the entire thing. But the movie seems to be going over well, so good for them.

take your vitamins and say your prayers brother

MY SUMMER VACATION IN THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

or

AH, FUCK IT, LET'S GET THIS OUT IN THE OPEN: I LIKED INDIANA JONES AND THE LEGEND OF THE CRYSTAL SKULLS, AND I DON'T REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT EVERYBODY IS GRIPING ABOUT

Last July this thing happened called TRANSFORMERS. It was one of the biggest movies of that summer, but I thought it was a terrible one. My main problems were the characters, the story, the comedy, the action sequences, and (this is a first for me) especially the design of the characters. The CGI characters were so overcomplicated and indistinguishable from each other that they actually made Michael Bay's notorious camera placement and editing beside the point, because even if it was two robots in front of a stationary camera in one continuous shot you still might not have any clue which one is which, what they're doing or which direction they're facing. That's actually the biggest problem of many big problems in the movie and I'm pretty sure it's a cinematic first - using the latest technology, Michael Bay invented a completely new way for a movie to suck. So I figured it was a bad, bad movie.

The internet begged to differ. As the writer of the only harshly negative TRANSFORMERS review on The Ain't It Cool News I got my biggest and angriest talkback ever. They told me I went in expecting Hamlet or SCHINDLER'S LIST, this isn't supposed to win Oscars (good, because it didn't, not even for special effects) and what do I expect, it's a big summer popcorn movie, it's just supposed to have some explosions in parts, only some kind of snob would go in holding it to some type of standard of quality, fuck you you cocksucking faggot bitch, etc.

This was upsetting to me because actually I'm not a snob, I think you have me confused with somebody else. I'm Vern - remember, I wrote that book about Steven Seagal movies. I'm the dude who would seriously consider busting Wesley Snipes out of the joint if promised a greenlight for BLADE 4. I'm way more interested in PREDATOR than GONE WITH THE WIND. Summer popcorn movies and explosions are important to me and I couldn't figure out why everybody had agreed on this fake story about how summer movies are supposed to suck and you have to like them no matter what and only an asshole doesn't. I mean couldn't you use that same argument for BATMAN AND ROBIN or LEAGUE OF THE EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN or etc.? Why aren't you a snob for not liking those ones? Check your brain at the door, dude! Fun! Popcorn!

And more importantly, haven't you guys seen GREAT summer movies before, some of them directed by the very individual who besmirched his name by producing TRANSFORMERS? I mean you guys know the first summer event movie was JAWS, right? And you're telling me they're not supposed to be good? Then why the fuck wasn't Spielberg thrown out of Hollywood for making JAWS? You'd think he'd have to be because JAWS is fucking good!

That's what kept spinning in my head. Number 1, how did he go from JAWS to this shit? Number 2, have we really come that far, from a great movie like that kicking off the whole concept of the big summer movie to all of society agreeing that only a huge prick would even suggest that you should go into a summer movie hoping for it to be legitimately good? Have standards for summer entertainment lowered in the thirty-some summers since JAWS? I really wanted to study this and for a long time I seriously considered ways to investigate this issue and write my next book about it.

But here we are just 3 movies into Movie Summer 2008 and we have a huge monkeywrench thrown into my argument. Because here we have Spielberg returning to summer movies as a director with INDIANA JONES AND THE ADVENTURE OF THE FORBIDDEN whatever it was. But this time it's ME writing the positive review, and it's the talkbackers who hate, despise, want to murder this movie. (What did they expect? Hamlet?) That's the problem with subjectivity. Last summer I'm wondering "why have standards gotten so low?" and now I'm stuck with "Why are everyone else's standards way higher than mine?"

Most of my circle of movie lovers I talk to really liked the movie. But on the internet it is widely agreed that it's an outrage, so much so that nerds are trying to replace that stupid "jump the shark" phrase with a reference to one of the sequences in the movie. Recently talking to a buddy I don't see that often I said I liked it and he said, "Really!? You're the first person I've heard say that!" I was afraid to even ask if he had seen it and changed the subject.

The night I saw the movie I was able to live in a positive bubble. The crowd cheered wildly, I didn't hear any douchebags rattling off nitpicks as I left, it was a good vibe. The next day when I checked and saw the talkbackers cutting it apart with razors, analyzing it with high powered microscopes and sending in tissue samples for lab testing it was kind of a kick in the nuts. It felt like going to your car after a Prince concert and finding out somebody jacked your stereo.

So why the fuck did I like this outrage, this affront to all that is sacred, this metaphorical crime against a fondly remembered chronologically early portion of your life history? Because I thought it was fucking good, that's why. I mean I see some of the complaints, there were things I didn't like, things that could've been stronger for sure, but no dealbreakers. What I didn't like was far overshadowed and outnumbered by what I did. I thought it was the same enjoyable tone as the previous sequels but also taking the series to a new place just by virtue of dealing with Indy's age (how it holds him back, how it changes his outlook on life) and with a new time period (since it is now 1957). I liked the characters, I liked the story (simple as it is), and I liked how it strung together a bunch of thrilling, expertly staged, constantly escalating action sequences.

That's the most important one: GREAT FUCKING ACTION SEQUENCES. I know, I thought those were illegal in the 2000s, but I guess Spielberg hates cops and rules so he made this movie as a huge fuck you to the Man. He says:

I will not apologize for the steadiness of my cam. I will not be ashamed of the momentum, suspense, surprise and payoff created through a carefully planned series of moving images. Gentlemen, I want you to be able to watch this and not only understand what the fuck is going on, but be excited about it! I'm not out of order, you're out of order! Your whole shot sequence is out of order!

You know, I'm not sure why I wrote that. I actually don't have to make up a fictional Spielberg quote about action filmatism because I have a real one. At this point I would like to refer back to February's Vanity Fair, in which Spielberg described his approach:

"I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy's on and the bad guy's on, but which side of the screen they're in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from."

and about scripts he said:

"Part of the speed is the story. If you build a fast engine, you don't need fast cutting, because the story's being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a script that's written in the express lane, and if it's not, there's nothing you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for character, you need room for relationships, for personal conflict, you need room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk."

When I first read that I think I must've yelled at the magazine. "Exactly! Exactly! FUCKING EXACTLY!" I couldn't figure out why the fuck Spielberg had not printed these exact words on a giant placard and held it in front of Michael Bay's face wherever he walked. That would've been earning that producer's credit.

Now, having seen the movie that he was working on when he said those words I can say that he lives up to them. Sure, it drags a little in the middle, maybe it was not in the express lane for one section, or maybe there was an accident that caused a major backup. But otherwise he practices what he preaches. I don't care what everybody else says, this is a good example of the kind of movie I wish there were more of in these summers.

(now I'm gonna start talking specifics. NOW ENTERING THE TEMPLE OF SPOIL.)

I love the opening of the movie, because just like TEMPLE OF DOOM's opening it completely threw me off. I did not expect it to open with a dynamically-shot drag race scene set to an Elvis tune. As it branches off to follow communists disguised as American soldiers making a hostile entry into an air force base it actually starts to feel like some weird period piece version of an UNDER SIEGE movie. I saw one talkbacker who hated the movie explain that the movie was derailed as soon as they introduced Indiana Jones by taking him out of the trunk of their car.

I would offer that as exhibit A that certain people could never enjoy this movie no matter what. Because what kind of a fuckin nut has a problem with that? That is the perfect entrance for this movie. Somehow you expect to see him introduced as some badass, panning up from his boots, he's got his hat and his whip and does some badass thing. You probaly shouldn't really expect it though because in TEMPLE OF DOOM they played with this by putting him in a white suit at a night club, and in part 3 they introduced him as a boy scout. In this one they introduce him as an old man being dumped out of a trunk, all disheveled. And you get the iconic shadow, but he has to straighten out his hat. It's fucking perfect! This is 20 years later, a head of hair grayer, he's in a bad situation and we want to see how he gets out of it.

My colleague Moriarty read a bunch of different drafts of the script and is personal friends with the guy who wrote a draft who did not get credit and says he will never work with Lucas again. So he criticizes the script as a Frankenhooker or Leatherface's mask type creation stitching the various scripts together. Well, okay, and I would love to see that Frank Darabont draft. But we as normal people who watch a movie when it's completed and do not follow every stage of development are allowed to see it as it exists instead of as the unfortunate alternative to what might have been. And from that perspective I gotta admire alot of the writing. For example, in the very opening they're told they can't come into the base because of weapon testing. You know what that means, but then the story starts, Indy is introduced, alot happens and you forget all about it. Until Indy has escaped and wanders into a suspiciously perfect looking suburban neighborhood. Your first thought might be "I never thought I'd see Indiana Jones in a '50s suburb" but your second will be "wait a minute, I know what this means. I've seen HULK. I've seen HILLS HAVE EYES the remake. OH SHIT INDY, GET OUT OF THERE!"

I thought this was a great moment, because for the first time you genuinely cannot figure out how the fuck Indy is gonna get out of a situation. You can outrun a boulder but I don't know about this one. His solution is completely desperate as it should be. Yes, he survives a ridiculous scenario. But he does it Indy style. I must formally object to this idea that we all agree that scene sucks. Maybe "nuke the fridge" should mean "scene in a movie that you are surprised to find out nerds hate for some reason." For example the Wachowskis nuked the fridge when they had people dancing before war in THE MATRIX RELOADED. I thought it was the perfect thing for dirty, sweaty, horny humanity in a big cave to do right before their last stand against emotionless, squid-like killer machines. But it turned out it was the worst thing ever, at least until surviving a nuclear bomb test.

I'm all for the bomb test. It's 1957, you gotta get a bomb test in there. When I heard they were making a new INDIANA JONES I figured it had to take place in the '50s, and I wasn't sure if that could work. I associate that dude so much with Nazis and World War II. But it turns out that working in all kinds of '50s themes was one of the things that made the movie so fun: the hot rods, the Elvis song, communist villains, greasers, McCarthyism, rumble at the malt shop, Area 51, flying saucers. It turns out to all fit so naturally. The outside world is slowly changing but it doesn't really matter because the outside world is only Indy's day job. His adventures take place in ancient temples, tombs and hidden chambers that would look the same in 1957, 1942 or 1236.

The other aspect I was concerned about from the advertsing was the character Mutt Williams, played by Shia LeBeouf (star of TRANSFORMERS). I didn't see why Indy needed another sidekick. And if he did why can't it be a guy he already knows at the beginning of the movie, like Short Round. When they introduced him on a motorcycle dressed like Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONE I was worried. Why couldn't they have cast a young guy who's more badass, like James Franco or somebody? But as soon as he dipped his comb in that guy's drink he won me over. I think he's a funny character with his bluster, his hair combing obsession, the way he mentions his fencing training and you know what that means. Shia does a good job of making his character funny and his stunt doubles do a good job giving him a little Jackie Chan physical humor and Errol Flynn grace.

The one universal complaint about the movie I can understand is the little Tarzan moment. Mutt gets stuck in a tree surrounded by monkeys, he notices how they're swinging on vines so he copies them and they follow him. And the vine swinging is not shot to look realistic, but phony like those old Tarzan movies. I do agree that this pushes things a little bit farther than the other sequels do. At first I thought "what the fuck are they doing?" But I cannot lie. Like the universally hated dance sequence in SPIDER-MAN 3 I was kind of charmed by the sheer goofy audacity of it. The payoff of Cate Blanchett trying to continue driving at high speeds along the edge of a cliff while covered in a pile of monkeys won me over. So I like the Tarzan scene more than I like little Short Round beating up a bunch of adults in TEMPLE OF DOOM. It's a finer vintage of ridiculous. But I don't blame you for being haunted by it in your sleep.

That whole chase section is probaly my favorite part of the movie. One complaint I've seen is that it's too much effects, it's not organic like the truck chase in RAIDERS. Okay, I agree, organic is definitely better. But RAIDERS is a little more real and less jokey and cartoonish than any of the sequels. If I had read somewhere that Spielberg planned to ignore twenty-however-many years of history and make a sequel more like the first one then maybe I would've been disappointed, but I never got that misleading memo. This is a chase in the tradition of the speeder bike chase in RETURN OF THE JEDI (a movie that has a way worse Tarzan reference, by the way) and the mine cart chase in TEMPLE OF DOOM. Yes, it is over-the-top, yes it involves alot of special effects to make it happen, but the way it's constructed for me is completely thrilling.

And speaking of effects, I just cannot handle this whining about there being CGI in the movie. You got a better way to depict a swarm of ants devouring a guy? I don't think puppets are gonna work. They probaly tried little people in costumes crawling all over a rubber head the size of a house but decided the talkbackers would say it looked too fake. Why would there be a rule that the new one cannot use technology not invented yet when the other ones were made? Since the beginning these movies have tried to push the technology of special effects, and in this one it seemed to me like they actually held back with the digital. (I even thought they had intentionally made the backgrounds on the jeep sword duel scene look like old fashioned blue screens, but I'm not sure. I've since heard that was supposed to be done for real but couldn't be because of the combined forces of a hurricane and a set-in-stone release date.)

Okay, so it was weird to have a CGI prairie dog right at the beginning of the movie, but I'm not gonna throw a movie out on the basis of 5 or 10 seconds of prairie dog.

The big question to me I guess is why this is such an enjoyable movie to me and not to so many others. I mean, I think everybody is wrong about HULK but I can't be completely surprised because part of what I like about it is the ballsiness of Ang Lee making half Hulk kicking ass movie, half serious drama. This isn't like that, this seems to me like a really well made if fluffy version of a mainstream crowdpleaser kind of movie. But the pitchforks and torches are out. I don't quite get it.

I've asked around about this and the answer I usually got was "expectations." Most people could go into TRANSFORMERS with no expectations and when they were given a load of moronic horse shit they just though, "well, I guess that's what TRANSFORMERS is supposed to be." But with INDIANA JONES everybody has memories of those movies, everybody wants a certain thing out of them, wants this one to be perfect, or doesn't want this one to exist unless it can be magically transported to their childhood and they can remember it fondly while polishing the vintage CRYSTAL SKULL Burger King glasses they got on ebay.

I think it's a good theory, and I can definitely picture this one being more appreciated when it becomes old (just like TEMPLE OF DOOM was). I guess those expectations are a bitch. I get it with the STAR WARS prequels. I get a kick out of those personally but they are way more objectively "bad" than this one is, and more importantly they're a very different type of movie than the originals. The whole look, scope and technology used in making them is so different, so it's easy to understand loving the one trilogy and hating the other. With this one I can't see it though, it's so much a natural extension of the other ones, another similar adventure in a similar tone but with some twists and angles based on the character's age and the time period it takes place. Another Indiana Jones adventure. If the guys in talkback hate the duck going down the waterfalls, how do they feel about the raft falling out of the airplane in TEMPLE OF DOOM? It seems to me like a selective enforcement of realism standards.

Anyway, if that is the answer then that's fine, that would make it a phenomenon specific to INDIANA JONES, a series I think is great but that has never had the religious significance to me that it seems to have to many people. I never got a costume and learned to use a real bullwhip, like the dude who kept going to the front of the Cinerama before the midnight show. I guess George Lucas was right in that interview that pissed everybody off where he said that no matter what the fans would hate the movie because they already have it written in their heads and unless it matches that exactly they will say that it molested them.

But I have this other theory that's way more depressing to me. It came about when I read some of Chud's "Tag Team Indiana Jones Post-Mortem." Those guys all separately reviewed the movie, hated it, then later came back as a combined force to continue reviewing it and continue hating it. I don't mean to imply that their opinions aren't valid, but alot of it reads as the kind of joyless, humorless, nitpicky criticism that makes it seem like the writers don't even like watching movies anymore. It's the curse of a movie series being this beloved I guess. You saw RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as a kid, you had no idea what it was and it knocked you on your ass. Now you're all grown up and full of opinions and you followed this movie through every stage of development and rumored development and had an opinion on every plot point before you sat down to watch it. You go in already knowing everything about the movie and come out outraged that it didn't rekindle your childlike sense of wonder.

Anyway, Nick Nunziata (producer of GRIZZLY PARK) wrote:

"These are not the premier craftsmen of rewarding and honest mainstream entertainment anymore. That mantle has been passed on to men with last names like Raimi, Jackson, del Toro, and Nolan. Steven Spielberg has made some extraordinary dramas since his heyday as the master of the summer movie, but he's really wasting his time in this kind of fare. Although they set the standard in many regards, it may just be that this kind of material works a lot better when the participants have something still to prove."

(Kind of weird that he put Raimi in there. I mean, I'm the guy who didn't think SPIDER-MAN 3 was that bad. I still love the guy but if you gotta match up "past his heyday, worked better when he had something still to prove" with either Spielberg or Raimi, I'm gonna choose Raimi.)

See, I gotta disagree because I feel like Spielberg is showing these other guys how it's done. Yes, I like all of those directors listed, but they aren't making the same flavor of "rewarding and honest mainstream entertainment" that Spielberg is doing here. Raimi did the SPIDER-MAN movies, but I don't think they're any better than this, and all nerds have now disowned him because of part 3. Jackson - do you expect to see summer fun time movies out of this guy ever again? I thought you guys all hated KING KONG. Del Toro is a genius, no doubt about it, but HELLBOY is not as good as this, BLADE 2 seems like a one-off and the other stuff is not mainstream entertainment.

And I'm really glad he mentioned Nolan. He has so far released one "mainstream entertainment," BATMAN BEGINS, I don't think he's ready to take the torch yet. BATMAN BEGINS is great, but its flaws are the same flaws as most other "honest mainstream entertainment" and also the exact things that Spielberg excels at and has brought back to the big screen with CRYSTAL SKULL. BATMAN BEGINS is a movie about a character whose quest in life is all about fighting and swinging around, and yet rarely has a compelling scene about those things. He outrages a clan of ninjas in a burning temple on top of a mountain, but instead of a classic fight and escape scene he slides down a mountain. He gets in multiple fights and instead of choreography we get shakycam. Then at the end there's a big action climax on a CGI monorail - I've seen it several times but don't remember much about it. Every time I read people excitedly saying that Nolan is great because he doesn't have a second unit director on DARK KNIGHT I think "No! You don't understand! You NEED a second unit director!"

(in defense of his action skills, the Batmobile chase scene is really good.)

To me BATMAN BEGINS is miraculous because it's a super hero movie that is great because of the characterization, the drama, and the approach to realism, despite having kind of a stupid looking costume and lackluster action set pieces. I agree, that makes Nolan very respectable, and you could definitely argue that those are more important things to be good at. But as a fan of these "summer popcorn movies" that everybody has such low expectations for, and of action movies in particular, I have been pushing for a resurrection of the art of the exciting action set piece. Some of the movies by those directors named do have those (the Spider-man's have some pretty good ones, and of course BLADE 2 has some classic fight scenes) but for the most part in modern movies they're few and far between. If BATMAN BEGINS had action scenes as exciting as the ones in CRYSTAL SKULL (in a realistic tone that fit the movie) it would be up there with T2 and what not as one of the all time classics.

CRYSTAL SKULL brings back that geography (which side of the screen is he standing on?), it brings back the thrill of the chase, the love of inventive action beats (who cares if it's cartoonish, how could you hate Marion driving off the cliff, onto the tree, the tree cushioning their fall and then catapulting back up to knock the climbing communists off of the cliff?). It's a return to the art of speed, thrills and excitement that have a rhythm and build to them so that you are excited to get to the climax of the scene and not just exhausted. And when it gets to the end of the movie it feels like it has gotten to the end, it doesn't feel like it's been the same pitch from beginning to end (see Sommers, Stephen).

So what that quote from Mr. Nunziata makes me worry is that maybe he's right - maybe Spielberg making these kind of movies is obsolete, but not because he's lost his touch - because people don't want to see these kinds of movies anymore, not even grown adults who write about movies for a living. From what I can see, Nunziata didn't review TRANSFORMERS, but the other two in the post-mortem (both intelligent individuals) gave it higher ratings and way more positive write-ups than CRYSTAL SKULL. And they might even like it better in retrospect, because Devin Faraci recently referred to it as "really good." And I still can't figure it out, but he's definitely in the majority on that one.

Oh shit. This is the I AM LEGEND ending. This is where I realize that I was the vampire all along. Maybe the Shakycamites are the new civilization, and I have no right or hope fighting it. Maybe the type of movies I like, the type that Spielberg describes in those quotes, are something quaint that only people like me want to see. Eventually "good action" will be a nostalgic novelty niche like "Grindhouse." Somebody will put a bunch of money into a really kickass action movie some day and it will flop and the genre will be dead forever. And directors who dare to hold a shot for longer than 2 seconds will be beaten and hung.

Well, hopefully not. I would like if they at least have access to lawyers. We'll see what happens.

6/9/08

INFESTED

Well as you know I am always searching for straight to video movies that don't suck. And even I sometimes forget why that is my mission, so let me put it down in writing here as a reminder. See, in the old days you had b-movies, you had exploitation movies, etc. And the idea of these movies was low budget, lowbrow, easy investment quickie moneymaker. Like squeezing out sausages. And there was alot of disposable garbage made, because that was the whole point. But within that world there were people like Roger Corman, William Castle, Jack Hill etc. who sometimes made movies that transcended just being a product, movies that some people still watch and hold dear today. Lots of directors like John Sayles, John Demme and maybe one or two other guys got their start working on cheapo Roger Corman movies about women in prison or giant alligators. Also unfortunately Ron Howard but that doesn't count. And people like George Romero and Sam Raimi started with low budget independent movies made for the drive-ins, movies that nobody would expect to still be considered great all these years later.

So my theory is, there has got to be SOMEBODY out there with an imagination that somehow ends up making a straight to video movie. So maybe they get hired just to shoot some tits and pretend it's a sequel to Cruel Intentions or Wild Things so they can make a profit on pre-orders to Blockbuster and nobody will have to actually watch it. But they decide they're still gonna put their personal stamp on it and somehow they make it great. Or they have a unique vision but they don't have their foot in the door yet so what they manage to do is make a no budget movie that at least gets released on video. You know that's GOT to happen, but you don't see it very much. But I'm looking for it.

Well the latest lead I got is this guy Josh Olson who wrote David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, one of the best movies I've seen this year. But it turns out before he got that script to Cronenberg, all he had done was straight to video movies starring Eric Roberts and Casper Van Dien! He claims they're terrible, but who knows, this could be my guy. The jury is still out.

I started with INFESTED because he directed this one and the story behind it is pretty funny. Apparently he was discussing the movie THE BIG CHILL with somebody and he came up with this theory that it's a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie where Jason never shows up. You got all these people and couples hanging out together, discussing relationships and crap, but nobody ever gets killed. Well I never seen THE BIG CHILL but according to my research this is pretty much a straight ripoff - a group of old friends are reunited for the funeral of their friend who committed suicide. They all have different philosophies, one is a TV star, one is a drug dealer, they got old attractions, they worry about if they chose the right path in life, etc.

But then the difference is, they get bit by killer flies and turn into horrible zombies that shoot swarms of bugs out of their mouths. So it's like THE BIG CHILL meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, they gotta hole themselves up in a house and figure out what to do.

So it's a fun movie, definitely more watchable than the vast majority of DTV movies. You do have to be forgiving though because it is cheap and amateurish in way that it doesn't seem like the real BIG CHILL or NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The CGI bug effects are probaly the worst I've ever seen. Not that I can blame them, I'm sure they did the best they could with no money, and there are some good weird fucked up ideas for what happens with the bugs. But believe me, they look phoney.

I also think they miscast Zach Galligan as the hunky TV doctor. I mean don't get me wrong, Zach Galligan has had a wonderful career ranging all the way from GREMLINS to GREMLINS 2. But he doesn't look like a TV stud. There is another guy in the cast, a square jawed hunk, who does look like a TV star, but is not playing one. So it's kind of weird.

But if you ever wanted to see the guy from Gremlins stabbing a huge festering wound on his leg with toe nail clippers trying to kill mutant flies that are crawling around under his skin, this is your movie.

The main character or "final girl" surviving female character is played by Amy Jo Johnson who is apparently "the Pink Ranger" from Power Puff Rangers or whatever. Also she may have played Julie Emrick, the troubled, guitar strumming best friend of Felicity who was searching for her birth mother and also stole Ben from Felicity even though she knew Felicity moved to New York and went to this school solely because of her high school crush on Ben. I heard. Anyway pink ranger is actually a decent actress and is the most sympathetic character in the movie, because she makes fun of the others for being whiney yuppies.

I'm a sucker for these rare movie premises that are all about fucking with you. "What if it's THE BIG CHILL but then all the sudden one of the characters gets his head cut off and bugs crawling in his veins?" "What if it's a getaway movie but then halfway through the movie out of the blue they get attacked by vampires?" Or "What if it starts out as a documentary about Michael Medved going on a book tour but then all the sudden it turns into a hardcore gay porno?" Or whatever. The problem is, for business reasons, they can never quite release the movie keeping it a secret. So they had to call this movie "INFESTED: THE INVASION OF THE KILLER BUGS" and show killer bugs on the cover. It's like AUDITION, it would be so much better if it just had a generic title and you saw it on Lifetime not knowing what it was gonna be.

So it doesn't really work as well as you want but you gotta give the guy points for trying. Nobody else does. It's definitely more watchable than the vast majority of the straight to videos I've seen. Although it woulda been better with Wesley Snipes. But you could say that about anything.

INSIDE MAN

INSIDE MAN has gotta be Spike Lee's most mainstream joint ever. It's a gimmicky bank robber thriller, not the type of story and characters he as a jointmaker is known for. You can go down his entire jointography and he's never done this type of movie - it's not as gritty and realistic as CLOCKERS, it's not as meandering and novelistic as THE 25TH HOUR or SUMMER OF SAM, it's not something he seems to be as passionate about as say MALCOLM X or the Jackie Robinson movie he's been talking about doing for about 500 years that now is gonna be a Robert Redford Joint. (Yeah right Robert Redford, you had no idea Spike Lee wanted to do a Jackie Robinson movie. Who would've ever known Spike was interested in that sort of thing?)

So it's not pure 100% grade A Spike Lee Joint which accounts for its lack of greatness, but I think it's also kind of a good thing for Spike. He's never made a movie completely lacking in merit (well, I haven't seen SHE HATE ME yet) but he seems to get less and less focused as he gets older. Maybe doing one mainstream thriller will get him back in the mode of telling a somewhat concise story. I don't know.

It's one of them casts that Entertainment Weekly or somebody would call "high wattage": Clive Owen is the leader of the bank robbers who storm in in painter's outfits and take everybody hostage, Denzel (no last name required) is the lead detective, Willem Dafoe is the tactical cop dude that detective Denzel mildly clashes with, and Jodi "this and Flight Plan will probaly be the only times you see me in the next five years" Foster comes out of her bunker for a supporting role as a scary corporate somebody or other who does some sleazy, non-official negotiating between the robbers and the owner of the bank (Christopher Plummer).

Even the style of the movie is kind of watered down by Spike standards. You don't get the in your face colors of a DO THE RIGHT THING or the crisp, vivid photography of a HE GOT GAME. And he doesn't even go for his more realistic style. If you look at CLOCKERS and GET ON THE BUS today you can see that Spike was an early adopter of the handheld/changing film stocks/documentaryish/reality style that pretty much everybody does now. INSIDE MAN is not that, it looks more like your usual New York drama that has existed since the '70s.

But don't get me wrong, it's got Spike Lee moments peppered all around. There's at least 2 or 3 trademark Spike Lee shots, including a moment where instead of showing Denzel running toward the bank they have him attached to some kind of machine so that he appears to fly toward the bank. I don't know why Spike Lee is so into that gimmick, but I love him for it.

Ken Leung, who was one of the main characters in Spike's cable-pilot-turned-DTV-joint SUCKER FREE CITY, has a small role in this one. There's also a shot most people won't be able to decipher where a guy is asleep holding what appears to be some kind of rocket. If you've seen SUCKER FREE CITY though you know it's The Bomb, a popular malt liquor that comes in a bottle shaped like an atom bomb. I think Spike is getting better at satirizing pop culture than he was a few years ago when he did BAMBOOZLED. Somehow in this one he manages to work in a great jab at Grand Theft Auto type video games.

Later there's a scene where some hostages have been released and instead of feeling safe they're then cuffed and manhandled by the cops who need to interview them, and they're thrown on a bus just like they would've been if the thieves had gotten the bus to the airport they demanded. You don't see that in your usual hostage drama and I thought, "a ha, this is a Spike Lee joint."

There's one regrettable part where for some reason they have to make a joke about a rabbi being an expert in diamonds. Get it, because jews know about diamonds. If you see the movie you'll see why it's even more out of place than it sounds. In other ways though the movie makes attempts to reach out to other cultures. There's a character who's a Sikh who's very pissed off about being lumped in with Arabs and about getting his turban pulled off by cops. Unfortunately not everybody in the audience is ready to accept this message. A gal in front of me laughed hysterically, I think she even thought it was supposed to be funny.

(Note: NEVER go to an opening night show of a Denzel Washington/Jodi Foster movie. When you think about people talking at movies maybe you think of obnoxious young people, but in my experience the worst are always us so-called grownups. A movie with a cast like this attracts all the retards that go to movies once every five years. The people who have to ask out loud "What is he doing?" and "Why is he doing that?" and "Wh-uuuut?" and "What did he say?" instead of, you know, watching the god damn movie and finding out what will happen like everybody else.)

For the record, this movie has the all time greatest use of a photograph of George and Barbara Bush in the background of a shot. I invite anybody to try to top it, but this one is good. There are alot of good little moments. Maybe my favorite scene isn't important to the plot at all. It's where Clive Owen has a friendly (and not even threateningly friendly, I don't think) conversation with the video game playing 12 year old Brooklyn kid who is the youngest hostage. They eat pizza together sitting in the vault, using blocks of money as stools. That's the biggest hint that the robbery is something other than what it appears. If the trailer didn't tip you off. Or the fact that this is a movie.

See, although it has alot of nice touches of realism and insight, ultimately this is not the real world. This is Hollywood New York, where people can stage elaborate and fanciful robberies if they've got enough gimmicks and plot twists and surprise motivations in their arsenal. It doesn't feel like a CLOCKERS type deal where it's heavily researched and presents a different version of police work than what you've seen in other movies. It feels more like a standard Hollywood thriller with that sort of thing glazed over the top.

So the success of the movie comes down to the exact thing those talking knuckleheads above probaly came to the movie for - the High Wattage Cast, especially Clive and Denzel.

I never noticed Clive until SIN CITY but between that and CROUPIER I think we all know he knows what he's doing. This character is lightly sketched but he adds alot to it with that deep narrator voice (handy for some Spike-Lee-talking-right-to-the-camera scenes as well as making his demands to negotiators) and although he's a serious villain I think he also gives an indication of being actually a pretty nice guy when not taking innocent people hostage.

And then there's Denzel. I don't know what to say about him that you don't already know. Obviously he's gonna be intense and intelligent, self righteous at times, funny and charming at other times. He tones down the intensity a little from TRAINING DAY mode but is still playing a typical Denzel character. This is one of his characters who wears nice suits and hats. You know the type. What makes it stand out though is this time he's teamed with Chiwetel Ejiofor, the bad guy from SERENITY. They're well matched partners with complete respect for each other, they have a rapport where they joke and make each other laugh like real friends, not like wacky partners in a movie. They're always on the same page, they never get in dramatic arguments or shit like that. There's nothing revolutionary about their characters but the chemistry of the two of them together is so good I'd almost like to see their characters return in another movie with a completely different case.

But the best thing about the movie: coughing. I've been looking for this, I've been demanding this since my FINDING NEVERLAND review. I want a movie where a character coughs and it doesn't mean that he or she is gonna die. INSIDE MAN is that movie. There's at least two scenes where Denzel stops to cough between lines, and it has no plot purpose. It's just him coughing. As people sometimes do.

the end (cough)

3/21/09

The disappointment of that Planet of the Apes remake nonsense got me thinking about the old days. How you used to be able to make movies about talking gorillas that were still intelligent type pictures. You got all the rubber makeup and the spaceships and the fighting and what not that the nerds love but you also got some social commentary in there or some politics or some insights about our world and what not. You got vietnam and the civil rights movement going on in the real world and the apes really strikes a ball or whatever with people because of the obvious parallels. These were expensive studio movies but they were willing to give something back instead of just selling a product and then running like hell.

Then out of the blue I got an anonymous tip, telling me Vern, there was a movie in the mid-'90s which attempted this same thing. You got the rubber makeup and you got the sci-fi nonsense. It's even a remake of an old movie based on a classic book, just like the apes picture. The one catch is that everyone in the world claims this movie is a worthless piece of utter garbage. but you should still watch it, Vern.

Well all I gotta say is that the world is wrong. Dr. Moreau's Island is one of the greatest genre type pictures I have seen in my post-incerceration catchup period. And I'm gonna explain why. And you're gonna sit here and you're gonna keep your yap shut and you're gonna just listen.

This is a picture that opens with a knife fight on an inflatable raft.

I repeat. THIS IS A PICTURE THAT OPENS WITH A KNIFE FIGHT ON AN INFLATABLE RAFT. Two minutes into the picture, a guy has been eaten by a shark and David Thewlis has beat another guy's face in with a plastic oar. And then we find out that he is the last survivor of a "U.N. Peace Keeping Mission."

Admittedly the narration in this scene is a little heavy handed. We didn't need it pointed out that these men were "behaving like beasts." But just bear with us here.

Next thing you know Mr. Thewlis is rescued by Val Kilmer and brought to an island where maybe this "U.N." organization whoever they are can go pick him up. Val picks up a wild bunny rabbit and shows it to Mr. Thewlis. Thewlis thinks it's so cute he gives it a little kiss, and then Val breaks its neck and says it's for dinner.

(This one act leads to the downfall of the island when mutant animal people start killing the bunnies and then the humans. I'm not sure if this is a vegetarian statement or just a statement against rabbit meat, but either way it is a subversive message I've never seen in an expensive studio picture before.)

You see, Mr. Thewlis walks in on a lab full of weird mutant animals. He sees a disgusting cat lady with six titties giving birth to a cat eyed baby. Turns out Marlon Brando is an eccentric nobel prize winning scientist who lives on this island and injects human dna into animals to turn them into weird mutant animal people. He implants them with stun gun type devices that he can activate in order to keep them in line, and he drives around in a popemobile with his face painted white like Michael Jackson and makes glorious speeches to the beast people.

After this whole spectacle Marlon feels kind of bad so he tries to smooth things over with Thewlis by inviting him to dinner with his "children," who dress in suits and bowties but look like that werewolf kid you see on the cover of documentaries about sideshow freaks. And then he makes Mr. Thewlis shake hands with Majai, a wrinkly two foot tall man who wears the same clothes as Marlon and later does a piano duet with him.

DAVID THEWLIS: This is the most outrageous spectacle I have EVER witnessed. LOOK at yourself!

MOREAU: I understand that I must be... shocking to you. However, I must also point out that I have an allergy to the sun and that's why I put this medication on.

Mr. Brando is the best thing about this picture. He is absolutely perfect playing a friendly, but completely out of his fucking mind, mad scientist fucko. He plays the role very realistically, acting the way he or Michael Jackson or Ol' Dirty Bastard would probaly act if they were mad scientists.

In the middle of his big speech about how he is trying to perfect the genetics of the human race, Dr. Moreau turns to little Majai and says "No, please don't do that!" because he has his little bumpy feet on the table.

In one of the other best scenes of this movie the beast people break into the house, obviously to kill him. He offers them a biscuit and then starts playing piano, telling them about Schoenberg and Gershwin.

Well lets just say that unfortunately Dr. Moreau is not in the second half of the movie. Then we get more into the world of these beast people who are done by that stan winston guy from the jurassic park. They are half tiger and half warthog and what not and the makeup is very impressive. And like in the new apes movie the actors walk and move in very animal like ways. Then there is alot of fighting, etc. as the animals act more and more like fucking humans and their whole world goes immediately down the shitter.

I could not tell you why this movie is so underrated. This is in no way Badass Cinema but mr. brando's performance is infused with the outlaw spirit that outlaw awards are made of. And it is a movie that actually has some things to say about the way our world is going. Of course there is the obvious technology theme. You don't need this movie to tell you that scientists are growing human ears on the backs of mice and restaraunts serve a new combination of asparagus and brocolli. And the narration is a little too obvious pointing out that the people of the real world are more animal-like than the beast people in the movie.

But then there is the whole idea of Dr. Moreau and Val Kilmer creating laws, and enforcing them, but hypocritically breaking them (by killing the bunny) and how this affects the once law abiding beast people. Even without the hypocrisy it makes you uncomfortable to watch these freakos lord over the animal people, and it makes you look at the way the freakos of the real world lord over both animals and peoples.

And then if you want to get even deeper this brings up religious questions. The beast people are created by Moreau, they call him the Father and he calls them their children, but they wonder why he causes them pain. And if there is no pain, is there no law? Should they still follow these codes when they have nothing to lose?

Yes, Dr. Moreau's Island is one of the great misunderstood movies of the '90s and I would like to thank both director John Frankehnheimer and fired original director Richard Stanley for making it. Some day, when my influence is greater, people will come to understand your work. Then you can stop making all this "reindeer games" garbage and make more REAL pictures with Mr. brando. thanks boys.