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Posts Tagged ‘Nick Stahl’

Disturbing Behavior

Tuesday, August 28th, 2018

July 24th, 1998

is when SAVING PRIVATE RYAN came out. I wrote about that a while back. Here’s a review of a different movie that came out that day.

I don’t consider DISTURBING BEHAVIOR a very good movie, and I’m not aware of anybody it’s meaningful to, but in a certain way it’s a decent time capsule of where we were at in 1998. The gloomy drizzle and ferries made me wonder if fictional Cradle Bay, filmed in Vancouver, B.C., was meant to evoke Washington state. It would be fitting, because it sort of plays like the disaffection of the so-called grunge scene trickling out in late ’90s teen sci-fi, like chemicals that were spilled into a sewer, overflowed into the Sound, made their way into the plants growing along the shore and were eaten and shat out by animals.

Steve (James Marsden, ACCIDENTAL LOVE) is the new kid in school, moved into town eight months after the trauma of his brother (Ethan Embry from CAN’T HARDLY WAIT)’s suicide. In the cafeteria, stoner outcast Gavin (Nick Stahl, MIRRORS 2) appoints himself rope-show-er and gives him an elaborate take on that time honored teen movie trope, the explanation of all the school’s cliques. Screenwriter Scott Rosenberg (BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, CON AIR, ARMAGEDDON, HIGHWAY, PAIN & GAIN) seems to be going for a cross between Shakespeare and Daniel Waters, in my opinion missing the mark on both. He uses a structured format where Gavin lists the awkwardly named groups (“Blue Ribbons,” “Micro Geeks”), describes them, says their “drug of choice,” and then his spaced out sidekick U.V. (Chad Donella, FINAL DESTINATION, TAKEN 3) makes a rhyme about what kind freak they are: “freaks who fix leaks,” “freaks who squeak,” “freaks in sneaks.”

(read the rest of this shit…)

Mirrors 2

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

tn_mirrors2The original MIRRORS (Alexandre Aja’s American remake of the Korean movie INTO THE MIRROR) was a pretty good little b-movie. Kiefer Sutherland played a troubled night watchman at a fire-damaged department store who starts seeing creepy things in the building’s mirrors, causes his estranged wife to believe he’s lost his mind, solves a mystery and faces down a curse or something. But that story left alot of questions unanswered, for example “What if a different troubled individual worked as a night watchman in a different not-currently-open branch of the same department store chain where a different bad thing happened, so he has to solve a different mystery about what the mirror wants, and kind of on a smaller scale as if it were being filmed on a smaller budget?”

Well, wonder no more, friends. MIRRORS 2 answers that question with fierce adequacy. (read the rest of this shit…)

Bully

Wednesday, January 30th, 2002

You wanna REALLY outrage your parents, kids? Take them to see Bully. Don’t ask me how you get them to go to the arthouse theater to see an unrated movie, that’s your job.

“Mom, this movie is what my generation is about, and I want you to understand.” Trust me, that’s what you should say.

This kind of seems like a love it or hate it movie, except I’m not sure which side I’m on. It’s an ugly, violent, nihilistic, pornographic, cynical story about unsympathetic, idiotic, pot smoking, acid sucking, trick turning, nymphomaniac, sadomasochistic teens in Florida who decide to kill their asshole friend. (read the rest of this shit…)