Fulci Fest

I'd be derelict in my duties if I didn't point you towards the awesome array of Lucio Fulci posters that the amazing Stacie Ponder has displayed on her site.



Do yourself a favor and check that shit out.

Push

Push is the kind of charming B movie that hardly ever gets made any more. Small scale, you could almost call it intimate, it’s a programmer in the best sense of the word. The type of decent genre fare that hardly ever gets made anymore since this type of film almost inevitably get’s needlessly roided up to a 200 million dollar film. Why this is bad for the film has been written before, and I won’t rehash, all I can say is a lot of good movies aren’t getting made because of this thinking. There’s a reason John Carpenter and Joe Dante haven’t had a new movie out in almost a decade, their niche has been taken out from under them.

To be fair I’m in the minority here. I remember Push coming out and thinking that I should see it, and then shit just getting in the way. So I apparently didn’t notice that it ranks somewhere lower then Battlefield Earth for most critics. 36 on Metacritic (for comparison 12 Rounds the Renny Harlin, John Cena master work has a 38) and a freaking 22 on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviews have been vicious and I can’t really figure out why.

I mean the film’s not perfect, it’s definitely jargon heavy, playing like it’s already a sequel, the budget is definitely limited (which is once again kind of what I like about it). It’s more or less live action anime, for all the good and bad that implies, stylized, built around gimmicks, mythology heavy, and fast moving.

The story under the film’s dense terminology is pretty simple. Focusing on a group of psychics battling to keep a test subject and wonder drug out of the hands of an evil Government Agency and the Hong Kong Crime Families.

Still there’s a lot to like about Push. It’s fast moving, and has a creative sense of how to play with it’s powers and ideas. The Hong Kong setting gives it a unique exotic flavor, and the actors don’t condescend to the material. Djimon Hounsou clearly relishing not having to play noble, tears into the bad guy. Chris Evans, an actor who gets a bad rap by virtue of the fact that most of his movies are awful, sells his role as the lead. Particularly when he’s playing off of Dakota Fanning, in a performance that tips nicely towards the Jodie Foster rather then Brad Renfro side of the scale, with whom he develops a nicely believable fraternal bond that gives the film it’s heart.

The film moves fast, has a good sense of action, and has a lot of fun thinking of creative ways to tweak the subjects powers. It’s nice to see a movie refuse to stop at point A for once.

Push is a charming experience, an old school Saturday matinee that made me more then a little nostalgic. It’s a movie I have a lot of affection for, the kind of movie I grew up loving. And I’m happy to put it on the shelf next to Highlander, Hellboy and Christine

Public Enemies

Well played sir well played.

It’s been five years since Michael Mann went off the rez and decided that film was dead. And now he’s finally made a film that communicates why he thinks that. Collateral was a good little genre picture, and when I first saw it I was blown away. Which helps explain why I was so thoroughly confused with Miami Vice. Taking away the fact that it’s a terrible terrible movie, Vice also had a degraded image when compared to Collateral. Rather then Collateral’s soft sodium film like glow, Miami Vice looked like it was shot on a particularly harsh camcorder. I didn’t understand the backslide.

Part of the problem with Michael Mann’s defection to video is like David Lynch, he just made film look so purty. When say Bryan Singer or Robert Rodriguez decides they want to start shooting their projects in HD, it’s no big deal. While both are good storytellers and energetic directors, the degradation of image doesn’t hurt what I think of when I think of a Singer or Rodriguez film. Mann’s another story, go back and watch Last Of The Mohicans’s sometime the deep focus and saturation of color makes the film damn near 3D. (Not to mention, The Keep like a motherfucker)

I expressed as much when the Public Enemies trailer was released. Now having seen the movie I can actually understand for the first time why Michael Mann does what he does..

Public Enemies is like no “Period Film” you’ve ever seen. It’s like Mann happened to stumble across a time machine took an HD camera with him, and shot a documentary. It’s a movie that bustles with anarchic energy and immediacy that’s almost shocking. It’s easily Mann’s best film since Heat.

A lot of that has to do with the actors. Johnny Depp is the fucking man in this thing. Walking out of the theater I was confronted with the poster of him as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice And Wonderland. After watching him for two and a half hours as the cold blooded Dillinger, it was a shock to see him in a red fright wig, Kabuki make up, green contacts, and buck teeth. The fact that the man can play both roles makes him a national treasure.

This might be the “straightest” role Depp has ever played. I don’t think he’s ever played someone so unambiguously cool before. Even in the first scene as he’s lead out in shackles admist a bunch of prison grays, he commands the frame with an authority I’ve never seen him play before.

With such a magnetic figure at the center it would have been easy for Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis to come off as Captain Bringdown on an epic scale. Mann’s very smart with how he plays it though. Dillinger is a romantic figure but Mann doesn’t shy away from the damage he leaves in his wake. The Violence isn’t gratuitous but it is matter of fact and Mann doesn’t shy away from it. Everytime the aftermath leaves bodies on the floor, Bale’s boy scout straightness and moral certainty seems a little less priggish and a little more necessary.

To me the one who really makes an impression is Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover. It’s hard to connect the Crudup here to the boyish Russel Hammond in Almost Famous. He’s aged in fascinating ways, his face is less defined, his neck a lot thicker. He plays Hoover like a thuggish Bull in a pinstripe suit. Someone not to be fucked with under any circumstances.

The story of Public Enemies is one we’ve seen before. That of the noble outlaw whose unlucky enough to have outlived his time. Every day Dillenger’s out Organized crime becomes a bit more business like and a bit less tolerant of an outlaw like him. Every day he’s out people like Baby Face Nelson (Played in an unforgettable performance by the great Stephen Grahmn, who between this and This Is England should have the market cornered on terrifying cowardly psychotics) push things a bit further, stripping away years of careful planning and hard one public sympathy.

Dillinger sees all this coming but can’t quite bring himself to step out of the way of the moving train. And Depp makes his doomed defiance really hurt.

Of course when he’s got such an obscure object of desire as Marion Cotillard it’s easy to see why. While Public Enemies does kind of belong to the men. Cotillard has a fresh faced natural beauty and charm that makes her easy to buy as the object of Depp’s affection, as well as tough inner reserve that makes her big scenes really shine. The best thing you can say about her is you want to see much more.

Simply put this is a great crime, and a welcome slab of adult entertainment in the middle of a summer that’s turning out to be a fucking wasteland.

Southland Tales: A Year After The Apocalypse

Southland Tales remains an intriguing conundrum. I don’t even know if you can say it has a proper cult so much as a few intrigued apologists. It’s certainly not a film that I would recommend or defend as good in any objective sense. As a piece of filmmaking it’s meandering, it’s story, script construction and editing are damn near dadist. And the whole thing has such a self satisfied air to it, as if it had already decided it was a classic before it was even half way shot make it pretty hard to like. And yet it’s a movie I’ve watched at least a half dozen times and one that I’m likely to keep rewatching despite the fact that I realize it’s not any good at all.

Why?

A word like unique gets tossed around a lot. Used for stuff that’s merely quirky. Southland Tales though is truly unique. It’s like a movie from another dimension, one with a style of film completely alien to our own. Not bad filmmaking but filmmaking that’s developed on a separate evolutionary track from ours. One where every shot is a few seconds too long, every scene has got a few too many beats, every transition is a bit too abrupt, every revelation a bit too hazy, where the CGI is so bad I can only hope it’s intentional, one where a dwarf singing Jane’s Addiction Lyrics is a suitable payoff for a scene, one where The Rock’s and Seann William Scott’s strangely sympathetic childlike performances are acceptable, and there is nothing odd about cutting to a random computerized model of the human muscle structure at random intervals during a conversation. It’s not exactly a place I’d like to live, but it’s fun to visit.

The film is hypnotic. Roger Ebert famously wrote that I Heart Huckabee’s seemed to be the first movie that could exist without an audience. Southland Tales might be the second (Tideland is probably the third).

Part of Southland Tale’s problem was Richard Kelly, in the run up to the films Cannes release he kept name dropping the likes of Dr. Strangelove and Brazil. Now those are pretty big shoes to fill no matter who you are. If you happen to be a wunderkid director whose looking fixed for a comeuppance after writing freaking Domino and cutting an underwhelming “Definitive Version” of the beloved movie that sent you to stardom. It starts to look like you’re painting a bulls eye on your forehead even if you have a masterpiece in the can. Which, as we have established, was simply not the case.

It’s the wrong comparison to make anyway. Brazil and Strangelove are both intricately constructed satires. Southland Tales has the skuzzy charm of something that grew inside a beer can. It’s organic, bizarre, spontaneous not made. It’s closer to something like Repo Man, from which the film takes it’s biggest steal (and considering there are some pretty egregious lifts from Muholland Drive, and Donnie Darko itself; shots through the eye, time travel, the end of the world at a distinctive date, and the long ass tracking shot in the mega zeppelin that’s a total rip off from the high school shot in Donnie Darko; that’s saying a whole hell of a lot).

Because it’s impossible to deny that there are some chunks of the film that really work. The sequences involving Sara Michelle Gellar’s cultural Icon Porn Star (And maker of a really good tasting drink) and Wallace Shawn’s effete Anti Christ, not to mention the unforgettable fucking cars, hit the level of Social Satire done by the Looney Tunes that the rest of the film is so desperately aiming for. A lot of the film is visually striking (The perpetually clear streets of Hermosa and Venice shrouded in Fog are a remarkably creepy image)And The film’s twin musical sequences set to The Killer’s All These Things That I’ve Done and Rebecca Del Rio’s National Anthem, as well as the raids on The Neo Marxists and USIDENT, and the opening Nuclear Attacks on the good ole suburbia of 2005, verge on being, dare I say powerful.





That’s why despite the fact that it contains toxic amounts of Cheri Oteri and Jon Lovitz, despite the fact that I literally have no idea what’s happening in the final fifteen minutes of the film, despite the fact that I have no idea why Curtis Armstrong and Kevin Smith are present, and yes despite the fact that Justin Timberlake has a five minute monologue about speaking with angels. I’ve seen this movie six times and will probably see it six more. It’s not a movie it’s an artifact. One from a world of Nana Mae Frost threatens to criminalize teen horniness and the wave of mutilation rolls merrily through the southland. And it’s One I can’t help but keep examining.

Happy Independence Day

Let's celebrate by watching Buster Keaton outrun a fucking Pitbull.



You just watched Buster Keaton straight up outrun a Pitbull.

Princess Mononoke AKA How To Freak Out A Movie Geek With Signs Of His Mortality

I’ve recently moved from LA and with it the best revival theater scene in the world. Still the local theater has eased the pain somewhat with its excellent Palm Wednesday program. Last Wednesday I went and saw Princess Mononoke. In the same theater I saw it the first time. Over ten years ago.

It was a little freaky.

Princess Mononoke remains of course a freaking tremendous film. Seeing it on the big screen only increases it’s grandeur. The film is amazing for the first hour and then slips into the transcendent gear starting with San’s raid on Iron Town. Scene after adreniline pumping, eerily beautiful, just plain awe inspiring scene pass by. It doesn’t break it’s streak, never gives you time to breath, every new sequence just casually seers itself into your brain. Princess Mononoke isn’t just a movie I like, it’s what I like about movies.

That’s how it felt when I was fourteen. That’s how I feel at twenty four.

But still it’s an odd feeling watching a movie that I was young enough to see on it’s first run playing in a revival circuit. Just another reminder that I’m getting older. And that even a hand grenade like Fight Club is going to be turning freaking ten years old this year.

Brrr…

Since most of my taste is so retro (a professor once described me, with a depressing amount of accuracy as being 23 going on 55) I haven’t really had to deal with the fact that the stuff I like is getting old. For the most part it already is old. But I can’t run from it forever. The stubborn fact is that there are actually things made in past the date 1980 that I enjoy. And they’re not getting any younger. Soon even my current taste will probably be retro.

But you know what. That’s fine. That’s the whole point. If you’re lucky your taste is good enough that the stuff you love lasts. And you can start looking backwards at it and still see it clearly.

And if you’re extremely lucky you can sit in the same theater where you first felt the slap of something great and feel the pleasant shiver as you realize in ten years you’ve changed.

But not too much.

Friday The 13th (2009)

So I watched the new Friday The 13th.

Yeah…

It was, not good. That’s why you come to this blog right the eloquence? The ways in which is was not good are long and varied. They’ve been listed before and I will not list them again. All I can say is it finally proved my greater Friday The 13th theorem wrong which heretofore had stated that a six pack of Budweiser, a pizza, and a Friday The 13th movie would always equal a good time.

On the surface it’s the exact type of movie I keep bitching at Hollywood to make. Unabashedly R rated with blood and boobs galore. But damnit it just wasn’t any fun.

It did bring up an interesting point though, which caused more personal reflection then any shitty horror remake would. Which is to say that the way that Friday the 13th was not good is the same way that the other films in the series are not good.

Let’s take a step back, Halloween. Love it or hate it Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween is a completely different beast from the original. So if you don’t like Rob Zombie’s Halloween and you don’t like John Carpenter’s Halloween, it’s not going to be for the same reasons.

Objectively though, I have to admit that Friday The 13th is pretty damn similar to the original 80’s films. A cast of idiots go to the woods drink, smoke, fuck, and get killed by a giant undead backwoods mongoloid. This is not a bold reinterpretation of the work, this is a step by step recreation. Of what I consider to be the prototypical slasher movie.

So why didn’t it work for me at all?

It’s possible that I’m just an old fogey and the sight of stupid twenty something pretending to be stupid teenagers and then getting killed no longer has the same allure that it once did. But whose kidding who, I’m the guy with a poster from The Burning hanging on my wall. I love the sight of stupid twenty something pretending to be stupid teenagers and then getting killed.

One possible explanation is that I may have underestimated the kitsch factor that those eighties films had. Sure those films may have been stocked with characters just as unlikable as those in this one (Well maybe not quiet as douchey). Am I able to except those guys simply by virtue of the fact that they’re wearing knee socks rather then trucker caps?

I think part of the problem is the film just isn’t fun. Though it’d be wrong to call the Friday the 13th series tongue in cheek (at least in the beginning). It always managed to have a loose appealing energy to it. Here’s what I wrote in an earlier column.

The Slasher movies tended to fill that hour with nudity, sex, herb smoking, drinking, practical jokes, Hell if you subtract the killings most Slasher movies are films about a bunch of friends having a good time.

It’s this lack of lightness this dedication to being Totally eXtreme, squeezes all the fun out of it. I wouldn’t share a cab with anyone in the film, why should I want to watch them die?

I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time wondering why I didn’t like a bad movie. The answer seems fairly self evident, it was after all, a very very bad movie. But it’s also a movie that proved as much as I may like to deny it, that I have a Dogma, one as strange as exacting as any movie critic. And brother, this one doesn’t fit.