Desert Island Movies, Part Two

ALLISON ANDERS

Anders began her filmmaking career as a Production Assistant on Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, and has since helmed such deeply personal, ambling, iconoclastic films as Border Radio (mandatory viewing for LA punk aficionados), Gas Food Lodging (mandatory viewing for anyone interested in the roots of independent cinema), Mi Vida Loca (mandatory viewing, period) & Grace of My Heart (ditto). She is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s coveted “genius grant”, has won & been nominated for numerous Independent Spirit Awards, founded & programs films for the Don’t Knock the Rock Film & Music Festival, is Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara & has directed several episodes of HBO’s Sex and the City & Showtime’s The L Word.

As befits her Kentucky upbringing, Anders is also a brilliant, accessible conversationalist & vivid storyteller…

FIVE NOT SO EASY PIECES:

1. A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

I have seen this movie at least several hundred times and I expect to see it freshly each time for the rest of my life. It thrills me to no end, and if I don’t scream outloud each time I see it, I am screaming inside over each glorious close-up of Paul McCartney and the collective positive pop culture energy that was Beatlemania. It is a supremely perfect movie, it never rings false, true to itself in every single frame and it never once drags or feels the least implausible-- even though-- it is. It gives a little taste of what a drag fame would be, and yet it quickly veers away from getting too droll and miserable about it. I will no doubt watch this film within days of the moment I leave this mortal coil.

2. Alice In The Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)

A beautiful postcard of the early 70s...and you will never be able to hear this Ozu inspired Can score anywhere else except by watching Wenders glorious movie.

3. Harold And Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

To view it as just a geriatric cougar and young Bud Cort is to miss the true gift of this movie -- which is a lesson in connections between people, yes, but also connections to the earth, music, humor, life. It is the most affirming film ever made. And if you were on a desert island, you would need this! I certainly would.

4. A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946)

This film lives inside my cells, it informed my ideas about romantic love from age 5 when I first saw it. Bette Davis in this movie as twins Kate and Pat is both of the women I found wrestling inside of myself when I was younger. And now that they are both at peace somewhere within me, I love the film more each time I see it.

5. Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

If I ever got lonely on a desert island, and needed company -- let it be Dennis Wilson and James Taylor in this movie: they wouldn’t talk much, would understand isolation, and would be very easy on my eyes!

Rough and Ragged Sixth:

6. The Man From Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)

I think if I were surrounded by water, I would really miss the rocky treacherous New Mexico landscape of Anthony Mann’s westerns. This movie would be my perfect fix.

MAX DROPOUT

Whip-smart Max Dropout, named, I presume, after his great grandfather Phineas Dropout, has, for years, been the first line of defense against squares & frat boys at Austin’s beloved garage rock headquarters, Beerland. His finely-honed bullshit detector is somewhat mitigated by the glint of joviality in his eyes & once you’ve shown yourself to be someone who can be trusted after six to ten tall boys & three or four shots of Jim Beam, you’ll always be family as far as he’s concerned…

This is a strange list, because I actually have films on here that do not appear in my top ten of all-time. If I were stuck on a desert island, I think I’d have to select films that have survived repeated viewings without much wear on their entertainment value. Several of these films continue to reward me by giving up new details I hadn’t noticed from previous viewings. Here are my top five in no particular order:

A Face In The Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957)

More of a murky gray than pitch black, my impressions of these characters has changed drastically as I’ve gotten older. With age, our perception of integrity, morality, and sexuality definitely matures, and this is one of those films that will continually yield fresh insight into human nature with each subsequent viewing. This film is steeped in punk rock ethos despite predating the movement. A very dark comedy featuring some of the finest performances I’ve ever seen on screen, while the photography manages to feel somewhat contemporary. There are a lot of odd shot selections that seem to spite the fact that it’s a black and white film.

Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner, 1985)

Bronson always manages to play a protagonist who’s a convincing badass despite yielding numerous unintentionally hilarious moments. This, of course, is the granddaddy of them all. Michael Winner manages to multiply the comic book factor evolves over the course the first sequel, and overdose the thing with a violence so over the top that it verges on stooge-ish at times. This film is ALWAYS a blast of fun to the face.

Lady In White (Frank LaLoggia, 1988)

A Rockwellian supernatural thriller, this is a beautiful and eerie film with a level of atmosphere than very few films ever manage to evoke. Despite a few unfortunate spots in the score, this is nearly flawless. Great cast, great script, unabashedly nostalgic, and stands up to repeat viewings.

The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao (George Pal, 1964)

Tony Randall turns in an amazing performance, as he manages to play seven roles throughout this story of a traveling carnival that enters a town on the verge of gentrification. Essentially, this is a tale about the death of the American spirit of independence, and it perhaps even moreso relevant today than it was during its initial release. Quite possibly the best film George Pal ever made; it is at the very least his most intellectual.

The Fearless Vampire Killers (Roman Polanski, 1967)

Sardonic hate mail to his critics who had labeled him a horror director, Polanski still manages to pay homage to the British horror genre with this delightful comedy. Roman himself demonstrates his worth as a physical comedian with a knockout performance as Alfred. As morbid as it may sound, Sharon Tate’s scenes in this film would wind up as the inevitable jerkoff material on the island

HARVEY SMITH

Smith’s highly personal, cerebral, politically astute approach to video games has turned him into a bit of a guru in both the gaming & computer media community at large & he’s won numerous awards for his work on such acclaimed, immersive role-playing games as Wing Commander, Deus Ex, Ultima & System Shock. Smith has also lectured extensively around the world on emergent media & the role of computer & video games in modern culture…

Question: Why are we so obsessed with deserted islands? Answer:
Because no one wants to be alone.

If I could take 5 movies with me (and none of them could be porn), I'd
choose the following:

1) Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998)

I love this movie because it evokes some of the same
multilinear feelings that I experience when playing a well-crafted
video game. In a game, you often stop and save your progress at a
specific point in the timeline. Then you can race forward, trying
various tactics and exploring new areas. And if you die or if the
exploration cost you too much in terms of resources, you can back up
to the point in timeline where you saved then proceed again. Often,
after backing up, you move forward optimally. (A side effect of the
unique way players experience their own narrative in games.) As a
result, when you get to the end of the game, you've got this long
linear experience, right? Your memories of what happened from
beginning to end. Except that what's missing are all the moments when
you advanced, then died and backed up to the point at which you saved
your progress. Those are like moments that happened, but didn't
happen. At the end of the game, your memories cannot be untangled; you
remembered the things that happened in the actual playthrough timeline
and things that happened in the discarded, aborted side timelines. Run
Lola Run left me feeling the same way. And I have an intense and
inexplicable love for German women like Franka Potente.

2) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

I love the nihilistic ethos of this film. And I
love the music. Brando here is one of the great villains. I like the
original version btw. The Redux version is too long and contains some
side threads that I found largely irrelevant.

3) The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

There's something about small, dying towns
that I love. If I ever survive an apocalypse, I will probably choose
to live in a small town rather than an urban center. Growing up, my
great grandparents had a farm in Moulton, Texas, and it was already
dying back then in the 1970s, so I've got an innate longing for the
spirit of such places. So much happens in this movie, and the scenes
and dialogue imply a lot more…years and generations of lives lived
with partial success and the accompanying regrets.

4) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

It's probably a cliché for someone of my generation
and tastes to choose this movie, but it's so undeniably great, such an
obvious labor of love and vision, that I've got to include it. Roy
Batty has some of the best lines ever delivered. There's some lesson
in here about a director or screenwriting elevating an actor. Half the
movie's appeal is the vision style and graphic design, but really all
the elements serve the whole in a way that's rarely accomplished. As a
16 year old boy, I wanted a Pris replicant of my very own. I'm
actually torn on which version I'd take; I know what I'm supposed to
say, but I feel there are strengths to both the original and the
director's cut. From the director's cut, the darker, more ambiguous
ending is a complete win for me. From the original, the monologue adds
a lot of depth to Deckard's character. Sure, we all loved the
director's cut *after* gaining familiarity with the original, but I
have to ask: Would the more stripped down version have been as
powerful without the context provided by the original, heavier-handed
version? I hate it that Ridley Scott feels like he's answered the
question definitively about whether Deckard was a replicant,
because—first—the director's intentions are far less important to me
than the audience interpretation, and—second—because the ambiguity and
doubt that the character felt about the possibility of false memories,
of not being *real* were more powerful than a definitive answer either
way.

5) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

I'll admit that I don't normally like movies made
before the 1970s. People like Scorsese, Cimino and Coppola brought so
much grittiness and depth to film that it's hard for me to go
backward. Casablanca is one of the exceptions. I love fiction that
focuses on a specific point in time, when a mixture of events and
pressures up the ante for all the standard elements of human life. The
love story still chokes me up.

I love Kubrick, and The Shining might have made the list except that
if I had to watch it over and over on an island, the nights would be
unpleasantly unnerving and I'd probably end up hanging myself from a
coconut tree with a rope woven from my hair. And—for the mood,
cinematography and sex—I might have included Eyes Wide Shut if, you
know, anyone actually got properly laid in the movie.

Desert Island Movies, Part One

Musician/Voodoo Crankshaft

for Boss Hog/Honeymoon Killers/The Chrome Cranks/Knoxville Girls/Jerry Teel & The Big City Stompers/Chicken Snake...

 

Jerry Teel has splattered more dixie-fried guitar & bass hoodoo across more outsider underground recordings than almost anyone. He stands in a rarefied league with James Luther Dickinson, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, Jon Spencer, The Cramps, Ross Johnson, Kid Congo Powers, The Gun Club & Don Howland. If it's raw, unreconstructed & primal as fuck, Jerry Teel has probably had a hand in it. Dig. 

 

 

 

 

JERRY TEEL

 

Musician/Voodoo Crankshaft

for Boss Hog/Honeymoon Killers/The Chrome Cranks/Knoxville Girls/Jerry Teel & The Big City Stompers...

 

 

 

 

Jerry Teel has splattered more dixie-fried guitar & bass hoodoo across more outsider underground recordings than almost anyone. He stands in a rarefied league with James Luther Dickinson, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, Jon Spencer, The Cramps, Ross Johnson, Kid Congo Powers, The Gun Club & Don Howland. If it's raw, unreconstructed & primal as fuck, Jerry Teel has probably had a hand in it. Dig. 

 

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If I had known that this was more than a 3-hour tour, I would have smuggled a couple more DVDs in my lifejacket, but if I only have 5...

 

1. The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

 

With Tennessee Williams as the writer & John Huston as the director, of course this is brilliant as well as beautiful. This film asks all the basic questions of existence and is an excellent choice for a desert island -- very tropical with palm trees and all. It's like lying in a hammock, reading a good book & drinking a rum coco. 

 

2. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

 

As a kid growing up in a small town in the South, this is one that made me want to move to New York. It's also one that could make me happy to be warm on a desert island. Loneliness is the theme - easy to relate...

3. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

 

Another film that starts in a small town in the South and stays there. Loneliness is the main theme. Hank Williams is on the radio, just like when I was growin' up - very reflective. I met Clu Gulager once. It was a thrill.

4. Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

 

This one also made me want to move to NYC, live in the Dakota & worship Satan. I saw Ruth Gordon on the street once, 5th Avenue & 59th Street. Another thrill of my life.

5. Performance (Nicholas Roeg/Donald Cammell, 1970)

 

Sex, drugs, gangsters & rock'n'roll in 60s London, with Mick Jagger & Anita Pallenberg. Great soundtrack. Enough to make me want to send up the smoke signals for a record player & a copy of Exile on Main Street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHNNY ZIEGLER

 

Guitarist, Vocalist & Songwriter

Brimstone Howl 

 

 

 

 

 

Brimstone Howl are the ragged, manger-raised progeny of The Gun Club, The Oblivians & bluesmen on murderous benders from time immemorial. Every bone-rattling Nebraska country road, coon dog yelp & boozy midnight hunch towards home is engraved into their sound like black ice on a serpent's tongue. After a deluge of great press, the Howl are currently touring Europe, where NME called them "Beatles-headed psych-nerds with a taste for razor sharp snake-rock," (pretty hard to know where to place the hyphens in that sentence...) & MAGNET magazine called their new CD, Guts of Steel (Alive Records), an "unholy hot-wiring of The Sonics, The Damned & The Blues Explosion." Oh, and Ziegler's also one helluva writer...

 

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1. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

 

Not much of an explanation needed here. Mostly subtle hints at the worst kind of danger and then unassailable waves of black horror. And I do mean the worst kind of danger, so it’s good that it would be handled somewhat delicately, (delicately enough), before the green vomit and congress of the crucifix occurs. The flash of the face on stove, the display of total Catholic stoicism in the face of the enemy of mankind… But maybe it wouldn’t be that fun to watch alone over and over again on a desert island. The next would, I think.

2. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

 

Paul Verhoeven's hilarious vision of a future where Detroit (a halo of wealth surrounding a flush hole of poverty) topples on the verge of economic breakdown, necessitating a new set of police SOP's. He even goes so far as to say that the mayor, ridiculously, might be implicated in all of the brutish miscarriages of public trust. The only thing separating this movie from reality is robots, faces melting from toxic waste burns, and stop-action sequences of robot police malfunctioning. Probably, if not already, prophetic in a sad-but-not-remarkable way. But that’s not why I’d take it to the island. I like the dialogue.

3. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

 

Written by Roger Ebert and directed by Russ Meyer. It's a cautionary tale, they say, but mostly a funny diatribe against false-prophet party favorers like Z-man. And it also has a lot of great songs written for the band, which are maybe the most sincere elements of the film. Really, the music is beautiful and doesn’t laugh at itself at all, unless with tears streaming down its face at the same time. This film maybe shouldn't occupy any list of top 5 movies on a desert island, and would be mostly worthless after 2 or 3 viewings.

4. Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006)

 

For sure, this movie would have received much higher acclaim had it not been for the director’s unfortunate tiff with police. I think this movie is paced perfectly, with a near perfect balance of action. And nothing, not the subtitles or the heavy-handed foreshadowing and symbolism, can really take away from the total effect. Spear-chucking, head rolling, face eating, rape, murder, celebratory human sacrifice. It’s bizarre enough that I think you can forgive the obvious lesson to be learned from the small armada of conquistadors’ boats pulling to shore in the final scenes.

5. The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978)

 

Another comedy here. This is a list about movies and presumably their directors, but it'd be hard not to trace some of the great discomfort I felt watching this movie to the same felt at watching Rosemary's Baby, partially to the credit of the author of both novels, Ira Levin. (It comes from the word first). In this one about Hitler cloning, the young American Hitler clone is about as ready for the shoes that his cloner has prepared for him as Dolores Haze is to fulfill Humbert Humbert's vision of love. Basically, manipulative American brats who just aren't ready for any adult’s plan for transcendental love or biblical evil, in spite of their predilection at a young age for sex and violence, depending on which we’re talking about. Of course that’s not all it’s about. The British Hitler has his faults as well.

 

 

JOHN RATLIFF

 

Austin Improv Comedian - The Smoking Arm/Ratliff & Jackson

Keyboard Player - The Diamond Smugglers 

Freelance Writer - Esquire, SPIN, Blender

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

A screwball comedy, yes, but also a political satire, a melodrama, a thriller, a farce, and a how-to instructional film for aspiring journalists. Possibly the fastest dialogue ever recorded in a Hollywood movie, but if the sound goes out you can follow what's going on by paying attention to the cigarettes. The awesome Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are backed by an equally awesome supporting cast, including a comic named Billy Gilbert who almost steals the whole movie during his three minutes onscreen.


Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Yeah, yeah, yeah: the toast scene in the diner. I love that scene too, but now I wish it had wound up on the cutting-room floor instead of reducing the entirety of Five Easy Pieces to a clip shoehorned between "You can't handle the truth!" and "Here's Johnny!" in Jack Nicholson montages. What you can't tell from that snippet is that in this movie he was actually acting, instead of whatever it is he does these days. Screenwriter Carole Eastman's smart, dark meditation on self-imposed alienation refuses to tell you how to feel about the complex characters -- though for some reason she does give them all hilarious names. (For starters: Rayette Dipesto, Catherine Van Oost, Partita Dupea, Palm Apodaca, Samia Glavia.)


Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996)

IMHO, a perfect political satire, anchored by a perfect performance. (Ohmigod, I am so in love with Laura Dern I could plotz, mostly because of this movie.) Both sides of the abortion debate are lovingly, rigorously reduced to smoking junk piece by piece, but thanks to a brilliant cast almost nobody comes off as an easy caricature. Like all great satire, CR gradually escalates a real-world scenario to a completely illogical place, but the heightening always makes perfect sense in context. Also, some interesting parallels to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but I don't want to spoil it for you. (Confidential to LD: Ben Harper? REALLY? You're killing me, just killing me.)


Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

In addition to an Oscar-nominated script by Scott Frank and a righteous David Holmes soundtrack, I make the following claims for OoS:

1. Best film version of an Elmore Leonard novel. (Okay, maybe a tie with Jackie Brown.)
2. Best hybrid of chick movie (extremely hot couple star-crossed by their respective careers of U.S. Marshal and fugitive bank robber) and guy movie (bank robbery; jailbreak; jewel heist; violent attacks with pistol, shiv, collapsible police baton, fireman's hatchet, flower planter, and large reference book).
3. Best supporting cast: Don Cheadle, Ving Rhames, Steve Zahn, Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina, Isaiah Washington, Catherine Keener, and Luis Guzman, plus a few uncredited cameos I won't ruin for you. And J-Lo brings it, for reals.
4. Best stoner in American film history: Steve Zahn. I would say this standing on Sean Penn's coffee table in a Hawaiian shirt.


The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I know this is supposed to be a list of movies, but I feel like this is a good place to say something that needs to be said: if you love the movie The Princess Bride, you REALLY NEED TO READ THE BOOK. I'm not knocking the movie, I'm just saying, the book completely blows it out of the water. You get back story for the Turk and Inigo and the Prince, plus it's a book within a book where William Goldman makes himself a character, except that you think he's not . . . it's fantastic. I used to read this book aloud to my girlfriends and then I found out that Bill Hicks used to do the same thing to his girlfriends and if Bill Hicks and me combined are not enough reason to make you want to read this book then I don't know what.

Also, just read more books in general. Thank you.

New DVD Releases for October 13, 2009

American Violet (Tim Disney, 2008)

Want to see a downbeat docu-drama on racist police practices in a small Texas town directed by the grand-nephew of Walt Disney? Here ya go.

For all the film's good intentions, American Violet just doesn't have enough grit to give it the texture of real life so essential to a big screen version of true events. The story itself is engaging enough. In the year 2000, Melody, Texas police were running violent sweeps on black neighborhoods based solely on the flimsy finking of less-than-savory informants. After the round-ups, unctuous Harmon County DA Calvin Beckett (a cartoonishly villainous Michael O'Keefe) would tell lazy public defenders the evidence against their clients was beyond refutation & offer probation or other light sentences in exchange for a guilty plea to drug charges. The overworked public defenders would then recommend the plea bargain to their clients, even though pleading guilty to these charges would render them unable to procure public housing, welfare assistance & decent jobs. Facing the threat of outrageous prison terms & having no idea that the evidence against them was so shaky, many of the accused understandably agreed to these "deals." In fact, 90 percent of those arrested took plea bargains instead of airing their cases in front of a jury of their peers. Though these practices are obviously horrific & unfair, it may be straining a bit to somehow link these events, as the film does repeatedly, to the 2000 presidential election madness in Florida. One admires the attempt to universalize this story somehow, to set the characters into some historical (moral?) context, but, in reality, the endless & often heart-breaking vote tallying that winter is neither here nor there & merely serves to blur American Violet's already tenuous focus.

Thinking she's being arrested for $782 in parking tickets, waitress & single mother Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie, in her first role) is hauled out of work by the police & is shocked to learn she's being held for selling drugs in a school zone, an accusation no one in her community believes for one moment. With the wheels of injustice in motion & bail set at $70,000, Dee is pressured by her mother Alma (a sleepwalking Alfre Woodard) to accept the wicked DA's offer. She doesn't & winds up spending several months in prison while her mother & her church congregation raise the bail money. In that time we're given a brief glimpse of what her children's lives would be like if she were to go to prison for any stretch. While Alma is a generally decent woman, she has little to no problem passing off Dee's kids to their alcoholic father & his abusive, probably insane, girlfriend & she does so regularly, despite warnings from Dee.

The ACLU, who've been monitoring the dubious crime & punishment statistics in Melody, find in Dee a reliable plaintiff & a lawsuit is filed against Beckett & his crooked machine. Thanks to some fine casting American Violet catches some wind here. The ACLU's lead lawyer, David Cohen, is played by Tim Blake Nelson (The Good Girl, O Brother Where Art Thou?) who may be Jew-ing it up a bit flagrantly here for an Oklahoma boy, but hey, if O'Keefe can do everything but cackle as he ties Dee to the railroad tracks, the side of righteousness should have a caricature as well & it does bring a little humor to the dour proceedings. The real trooper here, though, is Will Patton (Wendy & Lucy, The Punisher). As the local solicitor who reluctantly gets pulled into the fray because Cohen fears, correctly, that he may not play real well to Texans, Patton is an ambivalent hoot. He nails his Texas accent & mannerisms & does it with relaxed humor & grace, something this movie desperately needs more of. As a negative counter-weight, there's Charles S. Dutton as the minister of Dee's church. Dutton intones every line as if reading from a term paper & not a very sprightly term paper at that.

Despite the efforts of Patton & Nelson, American Violet's final half an hour simply cannot be resuscitated. In the nick of time the filmmakers must have realized that the only black people in the film were nobly poor, mentally ill, or criminals, so a black lawyer is shoe-horned into the story rather urgently AND he's allowed to be the one to trick Beckett into revealing his racist agenda. This seems unfair to Nelson & Patton & one feels it may be about three legal flourishes shy of the God's honest truth. 

Then there's the little matter of the film's title. Though it's mentioned once, in passing, that Dee raises & shows violets, whatever metaphor the director & screenwriter were hoping to conjure with this information has been lost either to last-minute editing or complete carelessness. This well-intentioned mess was originally called American Inquisition however, so the powers that be may at least have erred on the side of subtlety. 

The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008)

It's a world where place names are used for their musicality, as a way to evoke everything but the thorny truth about cities, countries & continents. A cynical wag might say, though, that they're really all the same -- that India is not all jodhpurs & incense, Eastern Europe not all midnight trains through the Carpathian mountains & suitcase exchanges by wee-hour gaslight. It's a world where people are named after -- or purloin the names of -- either dead authors or the characters those authors created. A cynical wag might say, though, that characters named Melville, Bloom & Penelope nudge whimsy into preciousness, even if these names do often turn out to be colorful sobriquets. It's a world where whole scenes appear as misty Brassai photographs & then a camel galumphs into the frame, where words like "grotty" & phrases like "I'll be in Montenegro, drinking" are commonplace, where Kipling, Bowie, Dostoyevsky, David Mamet, Anime, Samuel Beckett, Cat Stevens, hip-hop & James Joyce share a precarious, but equal, footing. A cynical wag might say there's no such perch & that anyone who attempts to scale even the most gradual narrative arc with such a load of literary & pop cultural baggage in tow, is a fool.

Well, The Brothers Bloom is a fool's movie. It's a fool's movie and -- to some extent -- we're fools to watch it. A movie about the titular, globe-trotting sibling con men (exquisitely mannered Adrien Brody & Mark Ruffalo), it is, itself, an elaborate con. Elaborate, but not particularly believable. The characters con because they are artists & the victims are conned because they do not believe in art. Brody, the sensitive Bloom, is disenchanted with the life of a confidence man & wants an "unwritten life." For 35 years, his brother Stephen has been concocting hyper-literary, inherently romantic scripts for the both of them, scripts in which the two play all manner of charming vagabonds from all manner of charming, mysterious locales & set into motion all manner of unlikely, clockwork scenarios in order to bilk unsuspecting dullards of their money. With Brody (who's called Bloom) on the verge of ditching this lucrative game, Ruffalo (who's called Stephen) comes up with one last score -- draining the coffers of wealthy New Jersey oil heiress Penelope Stamp (a real star-turn from Rachel Weisz).

But in the kind of contretemps that keep fairy tales in print, Penelope turns out not to be nearly as gullible as she seems. She is nice, of course & she is VERY lonely but, in the end, her strength is that she really doesn't give a tinker's damn what happens to her money, as long as it's not boring. Ms. Stamp spends her limitless spare time "collecting hobbies," seeing what other people do to occupy themselves & learning how to do it. She breakdances, knows Karate, unicycles, builds cameras out of watermelons & plays the banjo & harp. Bloom purposefully crashes into her bright yellow Ferrari on his Schwinn, knowing he can cement a connection to her while lying injured in a hospital bed. But nothing goes right from the get-go. Penelope keeps reversing the roles in the script & doing it so naturally & guilelessly that Bloom, Stephen & their Asian explosives expert Bang Bang have trouble keeping to the narrative. The con itself is a convoluted bouquet of gilded lilies featuring an ancient prayer book, a Belgian smuggler named Max Melville (Robbie Coltrane), an elusive Argentinian, more than a few explosions courtesy of the silent Asian & a certified check for a million dollars. It's the usual cinematic shell game, in which even one unplanned contingency would topple the whole tower of bullshit, but it's not at wearisome in The Brothers Bloom because this con game exists on an entirely metaphoric plane. Whether you find this a relief or not will depend entirely on how you feel about metaphor replacing coherent plot construction.

Like director Rian Johnson's promising directorial debut Brick, The Brothers Bloom is a movie trying desperately to talk itself out of being everything it longs to be. Brick wanted to be a legitimate noir & its best moments defy the po-mo artifice in which they're mired, but that film meandered & parried like a punch-drunk fighter to avoid the meat & potatoes of its genre. This new work would like to be an adventure story, a story for real boys & tomboys who dream of packing a trunk, hopping a tramp steamer & trapping rogue tigers in Bengal, but even Johnson knows such dreamers are few & far between these days (in fact, he's borrowing the boyhood dreams of an entirely different generation) & so he intellectualizes himself out of such visceral ambitions & becomes terribly bookish to make up for it. But at least in Brick, Johnson was every inch his own man, warts & all, whereas The Brothers Bloom could easily have been the work of either Wes or P. T. Anderson. The opening narration by Ricky Jay (abandoned completely after the first 10 minutes) is copped from Magnolia. An ecstatic scene in which Brody, after stealing an apple, is chased through a park to the strains of a Cat Stevens song is pure Rushmore. The rampant exoticism, montages set to 60s music, compositions that suggest tableaux, use of theatrical prosceniums, background comic marginalia & the very presence of Brody all evoke Wes Anderson.

While these flaws are glaring & serious, pointing them out is, itself, terribly bookish & Brothers Bloom does captivate if, like myself, you become pleasantly dizzy when someone at the next table in a bar mentions one of your favorite novels, distractedly hums one of your favorite songs, or begins sketching a Victor Horta staircase on a cocktail napkin. At one point Brody tells an admirer, "He (Stephen) writes his cons the way dead Russians wrote novels, with thematic arcs, embedded symbolism & shit." If you have more than a passing interest in dead Russian novelists, thematic arcs, embedded symbolism & um, shit, there's a good chance this movie will work some magic on you. Mid-point in Brothers Bloom, director/scenarist Johnson does have a few choice words for would-be critics, though they're delivered from Penelope to Bloom: "I think you're constipated in your fucking soul. I think you might have a big load of grumpy, petrified poop up your soul's ass." Like I said, embedded symbolism. And shit. 

It's Alive (Josef Rusnak, 2008)

It's always a pleasant surprise when the remake of a cult classic doesn't make you want to hole up in a dark room watching old creaky VHS tapes for the rest of your natural days & it doesn't happen very goddamn often. The last time I recall warming, even a little, to the "re-imagining" of a revered touchstone was Douglas Buck's daunting stab at Brian De Palma's Sisters in 2006. Buck didn't hyperventilate stylistically to compensate for not having De Palma's unique gifts & he didn't try to make Sisters "relevant" to a new generation of ghouls by littering the set with severed state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs & the soundtrack with Type O Negative or Marilyn Manson. It was a very mature retooling, with just enough formal aplomb to point fondly to the original without mindlessly aping it & enough new wrinkles to keep De Palma acolytes from being bored.

The same goes for Josef Rusnak's It's Alive, a confidently-mounted pass at Larry Cohen's 1974 trash classic about a mother who strives valiently to protect her monster baby from the vile people who think monster babies don't have the same rights as any other child. Apparently "No child left behind" meant nothing in the mid-70s. The original, starring Guy Stockwell, Michael Ansara & Hawaii 5-0 regular Sharon Farrell was an over-the-top cautionary tale of bad parenting, bad chemicals & bad genes. Like most benchmark horror films, It's Alive confronted the salient concerns of its time -- pollution, rogue youth, reproductive rights, flipper babies, etc. The original script title was even Baby Killer, a bleakly witty reference to the name allegedly shouted at returning Vietnam vets in the days following the My Lai Massacre. 

As with the films of his fellow exploitation maestro Jack Hill, it was often hard to tell when director/writer Cohen (Hell Up in Harlem, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent) was being intentionally funny & when he simply fell victim to no-budget shoddiness. Because of this uneasy mixture of comedy, wild gore & pointed satire, however, Cohen is now considered a pioneer of sorts & the off-kilter tonal shifts he all but perfected in his best movies are now commonplace in fringe cinema.

Strangely, most of the taboos Cohen feverishly trounced upon in the original It's Alive would still shock a good share of the population today. While gore is old hat now for most movie-goers, there's still something pretty unsettling about gruesomely perverting the entire mother/child relationship.  Thankfully, though, the escalation of gore is not what gives this remake its considerable impact. Not that blood & limbs don't fly once feeding time rolls around for our monster baby. They do & Rusnak handles the violence rather, um, elegantly. There's an icy even-handedness to the carnage & the vibrant, nearly hot pink, color of the blood has an industrial quality, as if the gore scenes were shot through a vellum filter. This approach to violence is in direct opposition to the ragged, kitchen blender mayhem of the original. 

The performances are considerably cooled off as well & having actors with some mid-range at their disposal instead of slumming soap opera actors who veer wildly between histrionics & catatonia, makes Rusnak more able to expertly smudge the lines between satire & serious horror.  Bijou Phillips (Choke, What We Do Is Secret), as the child's slowly unraveling mother, never overdoes it. We understand her motives instinctually, the same way she somehow comprehends the needs of her indiscriminately carnivorous infant. Raphael Coleman (Nanny McPhee), as the kid's deeply suspicious young wheel chair-bound uncle, steals some memorable scenes as well. Most of the other actors have a B-movie sturdiness that will encourage you to rewind scenes when they mutter something particularly outrageous in their off-hand monotones. 

One would think that making Cohen's original premise more cerebral might ruin the effect, but, on the contrary, it makes the viewer even more disoriented, less sure whether to laugh or wince in horror. The story still retains its absurdity of course: One minute there are grown, strapping men & women standing or sitting in close proximity to a gurgling infant, then the music becomes ominous, there's some animalistic shrieking & after some quick, confusing edits the entire room or car interior is painted in blood & giblets.  The logistics of this don't need to be explained. That would take all the fun out of it.

Appropriately, it's becoming a great month for horror on DVD, what with the release of The Children, The Killing Room, Trick 'r Treat & Shortcut. Here's another tightly-wound, fierce little gem to add to the list.  

The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009)

Note to screenwriters: Simply bandying about the names of Don DeLillo & Richard Russo doesn't mean you're writing a smart movie. Case in point, Anne Fletcher's (Step Up, 27 Dresses) seemingly infinite new movie The Proposal. As a variation on the successful Devil Wears Prada theme, the film begins winningly enough, with Executive Assistant Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds, once again MVP) anticipating the every need of tyrannical publishing shark Margaret Tate (a distressingly pale Sandra Bullock). Bullock's completely out of her element as a corporate bitch goddess, though. She can't seem to wait to get all squishy in the arms of her charming subordinate & treat us to more of her patented girl-next-door vulnerability. Her characterization feels flimsy & under-nourished because of it. 

The movie begins with Bullock's Tate on top of the world. She's just talked a bestselling, but reclusive, writer into appearing on Oprah Winfrey & immediately fires the lackey (a far-too-brief cameo by The Daily Show's Asif Manvy) who wasn't able to get the job done. Assistant Reynolds is the very essence of grace under pressure, cow-towing without groveling, managing sarcasm just subtle enough to slip under Tate's busy radar & already at-home with work strategies to keep him sane until he can be promoted to editor & publish some pet book of his that's "the real thing, a novel like the ones we used to publish," whatever the hell that means. Judging from the state of publishing, I'm guessing he means it's good & doesn't have too many spelling errors.

Tate's good fortunes & air of complete impregnability are shaken quickly though, when Tate is informed that a recent trip out of the U.S. to steal the aforementioned DeLillo from Viking was a violation of her Visa & she'll be deported in a fortnight. You see, Margaret is from Toronto, a city that -- as every American school kid knows -- has no publishing industry whatsoever. In fact, it's a wasteland of provincialism & illiteracy. It's no wonder Tate is forced to blurt out that she's in love with Paxton & intends to marry him. At first Paxton is apoplectic & no one handles a surprise bout with apoplexy like Ryan Reynolds. Despite it bearing no semblance of the world we actually live in, it's a great scene & bodes well for the rest of the film. I mean, if these two performers (well, just Reynolds actually) can skim over this dicey bit of plotting & get a laugh, what's to prevent a weary viewer from relaxing into an easy chair, shutting down the cerebral cortex altogether & letting Hollywood do the driving? Unfortunately the answer is, the rest of the movie.

Reynolds' Paxton seizes this opportunity to blackmail Tate, agreeing to marry her as long as he's promoted to editor & allowed to publish the book with all the good spelling in it. Even after he's threatened with a prison sentence & large fine by an understandably dubious INS official, played by the always reliable Denis O'Hare (Baby Mama, Michael Clayton), Paxton goes along with his mentor's hare-brained scheme & whisks the feral Tate off to his home in Alaska to meet his parents & wish his grandmother a happy 90th birthday. Once in Sitka, it's clear that Paxton isn't your ordinary farm boy who made it good in the big city. As Tate puts it, "You didn't tell me you were some sort of Alaskan Kennedy." Everything in his hometown bears the family name & the couple's engagement is greeted by the sort of brown-nosing huzzahs one expects from medieval serfs.

Father Craig T. Nelson is as skeptical of the whole affair as the INS official & all he wants is for his son to move back to Sitka & assume his position as king. Mother Mary Steenburgen doesn't want to drive the boy away & forfeit seeing her grandchildren now & again. Grandmother Betty White is completely unhinged. She hands the couple a blanket she calls "The Baby Maker" & goes off into the woods to dance around in full Inuit medicine man regalia.

After an eternity of nonsense, which includes the Paxton dog being plucked from the lawn by an eagle, a lap dance from Ramone (The Office's Oscar Nunez, burning off some good will), the town's very busy gay Mexican (he strips, caters parties & serves as Justice of the Peace at weddings) & Margaret rapping & shaking her badonkadonk to "Get Low" by Little John & the East Side Boyz around a campfire with Betty White, she & Paxton finally collide with one another naked & all that cranky reserve begins to melt away. Imagine that.

Director Fletcher, who's been the head choreographer on everything from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story to Catwoman & Scooby Doo 2: Electric Boogaloo, has absolutely no sense of timing & she prolongs this story way beyond its means. There has never been a movie this digressive that didn't originate in Sweden. By the time Margaret admits to Andrew that she watches The Psychic Network religiously, took disco dancing lessons, reads Wuthering Heights every Christmas & tattooed swallows onto her back after her parents died, we're really in no shape to care anymore. Her transformation is, at once, too quick & too long in coming. It just doesn't jibe with the manic rhythms of the movie, but it does seem to indicate The Proposal might be coming to a merciful climax. But then Grammy has what appears to be a heart attack & four or five more unresolvable plot points get to be swept around Sitka for awhile & then unceremoniously swept into a snowbank so we can FINALLY have our happy ending. Even this, however, is tainted by having to sit through an excruciating five minutes watching Betty White try her hand at "serious acting." When she mumbles to the heavens that "the spirits" can take her, we no longer care whether Andrew marries Margaret, Ramone or gets carried off in the talons of an eagle, as long as those credits roll. 

DVDs of 2009

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Dir. Sacha Gervasi, 2008)

By now most viewers of rock cinema know that this documentary is a real-life Spinal Tap, documenting the middling rise & long, sad career coma of Canadian metal doofs, Anvil. Just when Anvil's about to call bullshit on this Sisyphean, 30-year project, they receive just enough hope or encouragement to delude themselves for another few years. By film's end, when Anvil play before a giddy packed auditorium (at 11:30 in the morning) at some Japanese metalfest, it's hard to know whether to hug those screaming metal kids or slap each & every one of them upside the head.

In the early 80s two nice Jewish boys from Ontario, Robb Reiner (Yes, I know, the director of Spinal Tap with an extra 'b') & Steve 'Lips' Kudlow met when Lips heard thunderous drums & a record by Cactus blasting from Reiner's bedroom window. They fall in love -- there's simply nothing else to call their relationship -- and start a band. In 1984, three albums (Hard'n'Heavy, Metal on Metal, Forged in Fire) later, Anvil was headlining the gigantic Super Rock Festival in Japan, with Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc. Reiner was pioneering the now-ubiquitous double-bass drum technique & Lips took the stage in a bondage harness, playing his Flying V with a large dildo, to the delight of pre-pubescent boys on several continents. Eight albums later -- including more masterstrokes of alliteration like Pound for Pound, Strength of Steel, Worth the Weight, Plenty of Power, etc. -- Lips & Reiner are back in Ontario, barely making ends meet at a variety of menial jobs & playing shows at local beer holes where toothless Canucks drink beer through their noses & bang their heads to their hairy heroes.

While Anvil! The Story of Anvil is front-loaded with testimony from the likes of Slash, Lars & Lemmy (if you need to know their last names, you should just stop reading now), all praising the originality of the band & shaking their heads over the unfairness of the fickle music industry ("Everybody ripped 'em off & then just left 'em for dead," Says Slash), it would take a hessian more discerning than I to tell the difference between the thudding, idea-free riffery of Anvil & the failures-in-waiting that litter the open-stage nights of desperate bars throughout the middle west. Portrayed as Missing Links between something I strain to care about & something I don't care about at all, Anvil may well be armor gods, but I couldn't get Chuck Klosterman on the phone to ask. Lyrics like "Little peaches play/rubbing their beavs" & songs like "Thumb Hang" (Lips' learned discourse on the Spanish Inquisition will make you wish you'd dropped out of school when you were 17 too) & "Toe Jam" (I'm not even sure it's an intentional pun), don't do much to keep the Spinal Tap comparisons at bay. That said, Lips' centered optimism & gratitude concerning the contingencies of rock is truly inspiring for a guy who's had his dreams urinated on as many times as he has.

The entire mid-section of the documentary is devoted to an overseas tour booked by a fangirl Euro-Gorgon named Tiziana. The ambitions & lucrative promises of this outing would cause any reasonable people to make a few inquiries of their own, but Anvil whole-heartedly believes 1500 Euros per gig in 30 cities is just what they deserve. They put all their trust in the obviously naive & incompetent Tiziana and -- city by city -- the tour becomes a study in bad faith, bad directions & bad vibes. Having made little to no upward progress on the tour (though Anvil's bass player does marry Tiziana for her efforts),  the boys return to the snowy north and, of course, decide it's time to put out their 13th album, prosaically titled This is 13. 

For most bands a tour this apocalyptic would lead to a complete overhaul of expectations & a reassessment of priorities. And maybe, after a two-decade run of tepid luck, a band might be forgiven for not wanting to tempt the Hammer of the Gods by recording a THIRTEENTH record. But that's not Anvil's style. For them, disaster is another word for, well, something that isn't disaster. Mustering monies for the new opus really pumps up the pathos in the film & provides perhaps its best scenes, those in which Lips is forced to do sunglasses tele-sales ("the kind Keanu Reaves wears") and -- to his credit really -- can't sell a single pair. In the meantime, Reiner -- an Edward Hopper fan -- shows off his painting of a turd floating in a toilet bowl. You can't make this shit up & the scenes out-Spinal Tap Spinal Tap.

Director Gervasi doesn't miss an opportunity to visually or thematically reference the mockumentary classic. Hell, there's even a scene at Stonehenge thrown in, mostly for giggles. In fact, the entire directorial style is pretty manipulative here, but if it weren't, the film would just be sad, instead of that kind of sad that forms a lump in your throat which, quite surprisingly, emerges as a cheer. Gervasi creates a dramatic beginning, middle & end to a story which, in reality, shrugs along rather passively. Wouldn't most people rather see Grandpa's measure of the fish that got away, his arms outstretched as far as they will go, than see the actual fish he caught or know whether it even existed at all?

Assassination of a High School President (Dir. Brett Simon, 2008)

Like Rian Johnson's Brick from 2005, Assassination of a High School President gives the teen melodrama a hard-boiled makeover, the halls of its down-at-heel Catholic school, St. Donovan's, standing in for the decaying, corrupt urban purgatory of Film Noir. But where Brick also attempted to echo the nihilism & grimness of the genre, Assassination is played mostly for laughs. In fact, it's really more of a baroque Fletch than some Clearasil-slathered Out of the Past.

Reece Thompson (the stuttering debater from 2007's criminally under-valued Rocket Science) plays Bobby Funke (Pronounced "Funk," but universally voiced as "Funky"), a would-be high school Carl Bernstein whose most salient claim to fame is having been " tied to the snowman penis" as a sophomore. Funke is assigned to find out who has recently purloined all of the school's completed SAT tests & while investigating he runs afoul of teen drug dealers, point shavers, the dim -- but relatively noble -- high school president, a doe-eyed femme fatale (The O.C.'s Mischa Barton), a Gulf War-addled Principal (a very funny Bruce Willis) & more regal Italian surnames than in the Borgia & Medici courts combined. Director Brett Simon shovels on the quirks & with such a large ensemble, this gets exhausting after awhile. Mid-film, when we finally meet a character who behaves, talks & looks like someone we may have actually known in high school (a black student from a seemingly all-black high school), it's such a welcome relief from all the eye patches, unlikely renaissance frescoes & verbal pyrotechnics, we're tempted to change schools.

To compensate for the overwrought, over-heated script & some bizarre, arbritrary visual elements, Simon gives us atmosphere you can poke with a protractor, performers having such a blast it's difficult not to share in it, left-field cameos (Michael Rappaport shows up for no other reason than to deliver a salami/penis joke) & a deeply cool soundtrack (Soft Boys, Stellastarr, some great opera arias) that serves to jazz up the sluggish narrative drive. Instead of lashing out harshly at all the excess, it's best just to surrender & bask in the loopy gracelessness of Bruce Willis calling a convocation so the whole school can sing a song he just wrote about America ("You can all march if you want to!") & lines such as, "A single pussy hair can pull a battleship through the desert."

Bride Wars (Gary Winick, 2009)

In One Sentence: Beware a woman whose entire identity is dependent on the pageantry of her wedding day...

If you can get past the voice-over introduction to Liv & Emma (filmic signposts to misogynist oblivion) without wanting to roam the halls of 20th Century Fox with an M-16, you deserve to be engulfed in this morass of dependency disguised as friendship, upward mobility disguised as love, lip service disguised as avowal, greed disguised as entitlement, credit limits disguised as good taste & ugly envy disguised as door-slamming farce.

Anne Hathaway (knock-down brilliant in Rachel Getting Married) & Kate Hudson (On parole) play two life-long friends who (can you fucking believe it?) fall in love & become engaged at the same time. Both have dreamed since childhood of getting married at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel -- the biggest dream the screenwriters could come up with for them -- and it turns out they're competing for the same date. Needless to say, they become the sort of harpies that you'd run screaming from in real life but somehow pay $12 to ogle in the cineplex. This repellent Tom & Jerry cartoon doesn't even have one reliably funny character actor to inspire audience good will. Candice Bergen, as the Plaza's wedding consultant, should get the kinds of laughs & cheers Hector Elizondo gets in Pretty Woman, but instead she comes off as disposably smug.

I'm sure the filmmakers thought that Liv & Emma's comeuppance would make up for the grotesque shallowness & off-hand cruelty they exhibit remorselessly for the first hour of Bride Wars but, hey, they invented this Hieronymous Bosch-like fantasy spectacle of human devaluation, why should we be forced to coo at its warm, fuzzy & entirely onanistic conclusion? It's like applauding after a 14-year-old boy jacks off to a perfume ad in Cosmo, there's just no percentage in it.

This is pretty much as bad as it gets.

The Children (Dir. Tom Shankland, 2008)

Any true horror fan knows a real live creepy cherub is way scarier than some computer-generated spook & also that nothing in cinema is creepier than a European toddler, the British bad seed being damn-near a delicacy. You can have your Japanese zashiki-warashi. You can have your evil Patty McCormacks, Macaulay Culkins & Isabelle Fuhrmans. Pound for pound, the English & Continental tykes are the ne plus ultra of sinister nestlings. The alien telepaths from Village & Children of the Damned, those Diane Arbus twins from The Shining, the fed-up kids of Almanzora in Narciso Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), Harvey Stevens as the devil's own in Richard Donner's The Omen, the little hedonists pitted against Deborah Kerr's impregnable corsets in Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) & the lethal, pint-sized projections of Samantha Eggars' unconscious mind in Cronenberg's The Brood (Canadian, but what's the difference, really?) -- these children seem pulled directly from isolated private school detention rooms in the north of England, their rosy cheeks, forced manners & flyaway hair belying the evil brewing inside them. It's probably America's fear of exquisite manners that makes these children chilling to us. We assume any child who quietly reads a book in a straight-back chair & refers to its parents as "Mother" & "Father," must have something to hide. If anyone's going to manipulate our children into becoming homicidal drones, it's going to be us, goddammit.

Tom Shankland's The Children is a remarkable addition to this horror sub-genre, an excruciatingly tense, beautifully-scaled & psychologically potent tale of innocence run -- quite unexpectedly -- amok. The film's set-up is as English as it gets, a Harold Pinter play gone violently berserk. Two sisters, Elaine & Chloe, are united for Christmas at Chloe & her husband's isolated Tudor mansion. Well, it's not a mansion exactly, but the house serves to starkly underline the economic divide betwen the two siblings. While it's obvious the sisters are close, cracks are beginning to show in their relationship. Elaine (Eva Birthistle) has obviously made some rotten decisions in her life & has been uprooted enough to be terminally nervous, in high contrast to Chloe's (The L Word's Rachel Shelley) controlled, measured life. The two communicate with the weird mix of eye-rolling, passive aggression & eternal patience that is the special province of sisters and, while it's obvious they have a blood rapport, they are prone to whispering not-so-nice things under their breath. Most of these not-so-nice things involve Elaine's new boyfriend, Jonah, who comes to the relationship with two children of his own & Chloe's husband, Robbie, who all too obviously hounds after Elaine's teenage goth daughter Casey. All kinds of ambitious notions about child rearing are bandied about as if the tots are prize calves or giant radishes destined for the state fair. They're to be taught Chinese, home-schooled, weaned from this, that or the other...after all, at this age, they're open to anything.

But what the children are most "open" to is an ugly little parasite we see brewing only in a quick intercut of anonymous germs squiggling in viral bliss on a microscope slide. The moment Jonah's kids arrive at the manor, the young boy begins to wretch violently & behave in a disoriented manner. As the children sip from each other's cups of juice & cough in each other's faces, we can almost feel this germ, or parasite, or whatever, spreading. Shankland is a top-notch director & the film is so visually astute & subtle that it's hard to peg the exact moment you start feeling the mounting dread & exactly which visual cues are instigating the suspense. There's a scene mid-way through the film where one child begins to cry & the bawling becomes contagious. We've all experienced this before, but soon the pitch of this tantrum rises into a cacophany of sound & editing that makes us question the validity of what we consider "normal" in children. There are so many moments in The Children that echo this, moments where these kids are apparently doing something very kid-like, but something is heightened, rendered sinister & it's to Shankland's credit that we, like the parents, can't get a handle on it until it's too late. And when it's too late, it's far too late. Jonah's older daughter begins to see the changes first, though we only know this by the distressed look on her face as she sees the others make almost militaristic formations on the snowy plain in front of the manor house. As a witty accent to the idea of the children becoming somehow "militarized," they are bivouacked in a bright yellow tent in the snow & this becomes their de facto war room as the action intensifies. 

The film is full of witty touches, but it's the kind of wit horror films used to have in the late 60s/early 70s, when social criticism & sly satire was an integral -- but subtextual --  part of the whole ritual. These days, Tarantino-esque quips & cartoon pratfalls on slicks of blood pass for humor & drain the films of any real resonance. Shankland returns the mirroring element to horror, reminding us that what's scary is not how far-removed the monster or ghost or psychopath is from our daily life, but how very ordinary the supernatural intrusion can seem, right up until the moment it tears a bloody chunk out of your cranium. Of course, once the children are fully in the grip of this mysterious virus, it's blood on snow for a significant portion of the film & cinematographer Nanu Segal gives the whole bloodbath a chapped, raw palette, with splashes of yellow & pink keeping the killing fields from looking like one big raspberry snowcone.

Seemingly possessing some sort of hive mind telepathy, the sick kids go through the unsuspecting, liberal adults with shocking dexterity. But it's the violent effectiveness you'd expect from children reduced to animal instinct, facing off against parents who simply will not believe their little pride & joys are out to viciously murder them. When the adults finally decide to fight back (and there's not much of a response force left by then),  your eyes will be glued open for the duration of the movie. There's still nothing more shocking than watching adults forced to brutally retaliate against rogue children, whether they're possessed by alien forces or simply bad eggs. Just before death, there's a moment when they return to being little angels & there's nothing more terrifying than that. Very Highly Recommended.

Fired Up (D: Will Gluck, 2009) 

 

Well, there's nothing remotely nourishing about this air-headed little high school sex romp, but it doesn't hurt much & there are just enough laughs to keep me from slathering the display box with lamb's blood. In a plot that cops moves from so many other youth comedies that it could almost be mistaken for a quirky original, high school playboys played by Nicholas D'Agosto (Rocket Science, TV's Heroes) & Eric Christian Olsen (Beerfest, Sunshine Cleaning) ditch football camp for the obvious pleasures of bedding as many pom-pom girls & shapely acrobats as they possibly can at a competitive retreat for cheerleaders. Their plan is to go through them the way lions go through lame gazelle & then skidaddle to a friend's summer house before the final competition. But, of course, they soon learn to respects these hotties & their spunky craft. Elements of Road Trip, Bring It On, American Pie (a section of which actually appears in Fired Up) & a dozen other teen flicks cross-pollinate with lazy ease throughout Fired Up & the good-natured dunder-headedness will develop some viewer good will after awhile if you're the kind of viewer that doesn't mind dialing back critical thought for 90 minutes. The best moments here result from a series of odd cameos by the likes of master thespian Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia, Dogville), as a foul-mouthed, doddering football coach; the great John Michael Higgins (Arrested Development, Kath & Kim, A Mighty Wind) as the predictably homo hetero cheerleading guru; and -- the best reason not to use Fired Up as a one of the wheels on a Tinker Toy Truck -- relative newcomer David Walton. As Dr. Rick, the college boyfriend of D'Agosto's cheerleader love interest Carly, Walton ups the ante for all preppie teen movie slimebags to come & easily delivers the movies most earned moments of mirth. On the downside, Fired Up represents a new low for the "Unrated" versions of DVDs. For a movie so driven by adolescent lechery, the film is almost irresponsibly tame: Philip Baker Hall says "shit" about 20 times, we're treated to three seconds of some pretty unremarkable bare breasts & ten seconds of REALLY unremarkable Asian boy buttocks.

He's Just Not That Into You (D: Ken Kwapis, 2009)

Considering the sharp, often edgy TV shows Ken Kwapis has directed & produced over the years (the U.S. version of The Office, Grounded for Life, The Larry Sanders Show, Freaks & Geeks...), it's surprising what an underdeveloped, overcrowded mish-mash this movie is. Trying for the kind of large-ensemble interplay that worked so well in films like Love, Actually, Kwapis managed to assemble a pleasing cast, but there's just not enough character delineation to go around, leaving the majority of these sketched-out "types" stranded with a few cringe-worthy platitudes & fashionable clothing. It's a cast of hundreds with enough ideas for three & possibly a dog.

He's Not That Into You concerns the interconnected lives of a group of upscale Baltimorians, all struggling with varying degrees of lovesickness. The theme here -- though it's loosely developed at best -- is that, while there are social rules to the mating dance, almost everyone longs to be the exception to those rules. While that's probably true, watching ten characters deal with it results in a severe self-involvement overload & creates a world where people are either infantile & impossibly needy or cynically bound to a set of icy rules & glib witticisms.

Flighty Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers) is married to obsessive Jennifer Connelly, but he's obsessed with flighty Scarlett Johansson. Ben Affleck & Jennifer Aniston co-habitate happily but he doesn't believe in marriage & she begins to think that's a signal that he's not committed to her. Kevin Connolly (Eric on HBO's Entourage) digs Scarlett Johansson but he can't get her into bed to save his life & he's quite obviously her fall-back romance. Bar manager/ladies man Justin Long (Drag Me to Hell, Zack & Miri Make a Porno) becomes the cynical guru for unlucky-in-love (but eternally optimistic) Ginnifer Goodwin (HBO's Big Love), who soon develops feelings for him. While these are the main players shouldering through this heavy traffic, some brave casting director figured there was still room for Drew Barrymore, Kris Kristofferson, Luis Guzman, Busy Philipps, comedian Natasha Leggero, Bill Brochtrup & a host of other familiar faces, most of them television regulars. Jennifer Connelly's neurotic Janine is about the only fleshed-out character & in this antiseptic environment where everyone seems to be learning the same lesson at once, she seems like a freak, and this flesh & blood complexity makes her the only character whose romantic life isn't tied up with a shiny red foil ribbon by film's end.

While this is a passable confection, it's made for those who want the toppings ladled on with a snow shovel. 

 

The International (D: Tom Tykwer, 2009)

German director Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) has concocted the kind of slick, globe-trotting espionage thriller we haven't really seen much since the heydays of John Frankenheimer, Fred Zinnemann & Billy Friedkin. Harking back to epic thrillers like Sorceror, Day of the Jackal & The French Connection, The International is gorgeously mounted & has several eye-popping set pieces that combine action & angst in perfect measure.

The story, though it seems twisty at first, is really fairly simple. A big international banking concern called IBBC has taken to arms dealing in order to control the debt accrued from armed conflicts around the world. Though this pretty much sounds like something banks actually do, IBBC resorts to multiple assassinations in order to achieve their goals, making what would otherwise be simply unsavory into a worldwide criminal conspiracy being investigated by Interpol agent Clive Owen, a rumpled insomniac with a blotchy past & his U.S. counterpart Naomi Watts, who's all but wasted in this role.

The mark of a fine thriller in this mode is having the dialogue & verbal exposition be as ominous & thrilling as the gunplay & car wrecks. Like Frankenheimer's fascinating Ronin from 1998, The International achieves this perfectly (unlike, say, the Bourne films). Discussions of debt accumulation & the sullied history of international banking rivet the attention only slightly less than the insane Guggenheim Museum shoot-out that serves as the film's bloody & masterful centerpiece. Ricocheting from Paris to Milan to Istanbul to NYC, The International revels in location shooting, finding just the right sinisterly impassive corporate buildings, just the right winding cobblestone streets, just the right terracotta rooftops & Turkish minarets. The faces too, from bedraggled police officers to Armin Mueller Stahl & Ulrich Thomsen (The Celebration) as the devils of IBBC, rendered dead-eyed by greed & avarice, seem molded perfectly into the sprawling surface of this film. Special mention should be given to Irish actor Bryan F. O'Byrne (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Million Dollar Baby), whose nameless professional assassin is so enigmatically & subtly crafted here that you almost don't notice how much soul he's bringing to his scenes. He's sinister without raising an eyebrow or cracking a sneer.

If there's a problem with The International it's perhaps that all this sleek vision occasionally defeats the film's internal tension, which doesn't quite ratchet-up as it should. That, and that the presence of Watts (who deserves better) seems a mystery, even to the filmmakers. Beyond that, this is a high-caliber suspense classic-to-be. 

My Life in Ruins (Donald Petrie, 2009)

A soft-skulled mash-up of My Big Fat Greek Wedding & the 1989 hot flasher, Shirley Valentine, My Life in Ruins seems concocted entirely from the wish-fulfillment fantasies of dowagers, spinsters & sundry other disappointed dim bulbs. Dim because, as fantasy, this story could really use an animated talking grandfather clock & a shining castle on a hill made entirely of large humming vibrators.

Instead we get Nia Vardalos (Whose Fat Greek Wedding just goes on & on) as the expatriate college professor Georgia, the worst tour guide in in all of Athens. Georgia is brow-beaten by her boss, taken advantage of by a fellow tour guide (the unscrupulous Nico) & mostly ignored by her daily gaggle of tourists, who wish she'd talk more about shopping & sex than art history. Although you want to be on Georgia's side against all the gross, shrieking stereotypes she confronts every day, she actually is pretty dull & would it really kill her to sexy up her spiel? Well, when she finally does, it's bawdiness the way you'd expect it from a 7-year-old girl, not a woman who's ostensibly been around the plinth a few times. In other words, it's embarrassing.

To get this particularly life-changing day cracking, the estrus ex machina provides Georgia with a busload of character actors in various stages of decline. There's TV regular Brian Palermo as a pancake & pancake accessory-obsessed IHOP manager, the fat kid from a dozen crappy direct-to-DVD comedies (Jareb Dauplaise) as the fat kid in this crappy direct-to-DVD comedy, a couple of real comedians, Rachel Dratch & Harland Williams, slumming for a buck & Richard Dreyfuss as the...well, we do have a talking grandfather clock, after all. 

Though we're meant to think the pancake guy may actually be the object of Georgia's pent-up affections, he's a particularly clumsy red herring. In fact, there's really no reason in the world director Petrie (Mystic Pizza, Grumpy Old Men, Miss Congeniality) couldn't have saved himself some dough & actually cast a herring in the role. To anyone who's ever seen even trailers of movies, it's pretty damn obvious the real love interest here is the bus driver, Poupi Kakas (you heard me), a werewolf philosopher who slowly shaves down to lovability as the movie progresses. Poupi eventually gets into Georgia's polyester pant suit by telling her that her butt is too small.

Along the road to Delphi, Dreyfuss tells the story of his dead wife until his crotchety sensitivity drips from the screen & into our laps like Palermo's prized maple syrup. He teaches Georgia to lie to the tourists, which is understandable considering their inability to tell the cradle of civilization from a Wal-Mart, but it doesn't really make you want to stand up & cheer. He also pretends he's the oracle at one point & apparently heals another old man's stiff legs. Remember when you thought no one could annoy you the way Robin Williams annoys you? Think again. There are numerous intimations throughout My Life in Ruins that Dreyfuss' Irv will die in the end, leaving his pearls of geriatric dementia ringing in the ears of his new disciples, but this movie doesn't even have the tits to stand by that maudlin convention. It's actually become an annoying trend in recent romantic comedies to threaten an old person's demise & then fail to deliver (see The Proposal).

Without a death scene, Ruins is so toothless & inconsequential, a tour of your own closets will seem dazzling in comparison.