The impossibility of knowing what the fuck is going on in other people's heads...

I really liked Burn After Reading (The Coen Bros., 2008) and have no reservations ranking it among the Coens best work - Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It feels a little more open than these earlier movies, though: the performances aren't as tightly controlled, the compositions are a little looser, the Rube Goldbergism of the plot is softer. I'm tempted to describe it as John Updike's version of a Ross Thomas novel, but I'm not sure that anyone but my brother Mike would know what I mean by that.

A couple of weeks ago I had a dream that I had seen the movie and I was explaining to a friend that it was about "the impossibility of communicating with each other", which is actually part of what I think Fargo is about. It turns out that Burn After Reading is not quite about this, but is, rather, an allegory about the failure of the American intelligence system. Communication here is a problem only in as much as no one ever really knows what the fuck anyone else is really thinking, which means that everyone is operating with a severe lack of information. The Preston Sturges influence comes through in that the absence of understanding doesn't stop anyone from making their moves. For a lot of these characters, just standing still would solve all their problems, but standing still is not the American Way.

I have to admit that I found a lot of the writing on this movie pretty puzzling. Going by many of the reviews at Metacritic (where the movie has a 62 aggregate rating), you'd get the sense that this was just a little bit of a step up from The Ladykillers (which had a 56 aggregate Metacritic rating). I like The Ladykillers well enough, but that movie is definite "Minor" Coen Bros. and Burn After Reading is definitely "Major".

I suspect that critics would be a lot more enthusiastic about this movie if it had a helpful voice over to explain its themes to them.

I also suspect that most critics had already figured out what they were going to say about it - some kind of variation on "Coens taking a break with a minor genre spoof after the majestic No Country" - before they even saw it.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. Volume 1: This Is What They Want by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, and Wade von Grawbadger

Big budget action movie adaptations of super-hero comics tend to be (a) more focused than actual super-hero comics - the continuity is stripped down to its essentials - and (b) a lot less farther out than actual super-hero comics - there's not as much tolerance for the kinds of conceptual inconsistencies that super hero comics thrive on (i.e., the willy-nilly mixing of fantasy and sci-fi, the cosmic and the mundane that gives those Kirby/Lee their particular kick). Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., a slapstick variation on Ellis' Planetary, belongs to a (relatively) recent trend of super-hero comics that take the aesthetics and the focus of the big-budget Hollywood adaptations, but don't shy away from the farther out aspects of the genre.

In terms of execution of concept, Nextwave is just about perfect: Ellis' writing is sharp and the in-jokes - mostly at the expense of Marvel's bigger books - are pointed; Stuart Immonen knows how to handle action sequences and he can draw giant monsters AND giant robots; Wade von Grawbadger helps to give it a manga-esque flow. Despite all this, Nextwave is a book whose qualities I appreciate, rather than one that I really like. I think it's just as well made as The Immortal Iron Fist, but while that book really resonates with me, I'm not on Nextwave's wavelength.

Now, three or four years ago, I could see myself really enjoying a book like this: today, not so much. Not because I've somehow matured beyond it - the book is certainly no less mature than Iron Fist - but because I'm a little weary (and wary) of irreverent super-hero comics that nonetheless rely on you actually knowing quite a bit about super-hero comics in order to really grok. But that's a personal preference thing and not any kind of moral/aesthetic pronouncement.

Still, if I were going to expand on this point of personal preference, I'd say that Nextwave is too cynical for me to enjoy in the way I enjoy Iron Fist or early Ultimate Spider-Man, but not thoroughly cynical enough to take on the genre with real teeth like The Boys or Rick Veitch's super-hero books. (Is there some kind of cute name for The One, Maximortal, and Brat Pack? The Veitchverse? Please let me know.) Nextwave feels a little bit like Frank Miller-Lite.

All that said, I'm planning on tracking down the remaining issues. Ellis is funny, Immonen does know how to draw super-heroic spectacle, and, who knows, maybe I was just cranky this weekend.

Grendel Archives by Matt Wagner

I'm not sure how fair it would be to talk about these comics in terms of how they work as comics and not in terms of why they might be interesting as a historical curiosity. It's the (a) mix of sex, violence, werewolves, exotic weaponry combined with (b) the ultimate male adolescent wish-fulfillment characters - he's the world's greatest fighter and the world's greatest novelist and he lost his virginity to a smokin' hot babe when he was just 14 - that gives the book the early role-playing game feel that both dates it and makes it compelling.

It's dated not just because it's of its time, but because it's a primordial, immature work - immature used here in a descriptive sense and not necessarily a pejorative one.

It's compelling because - as in a lot of the best teenage RPG-play - despite the fact that everything is built on a series of cliches - the specific ways that Wagner enacts these cliches have a distinctive, personal kick.

Wagner has a pretty good sense of page design: there's a great one that features a huge close-up of Grendel giving an "I'm the Top Dog"-style speech to a mob boss, with the boss's changing reaction to the speech - fear, bluster, defeat - conveyed through small panels running counter-clockwise along the edge of the page.

And you can tell Wagner is going for something fairly ambitious story-wise: the Grendel series proper starts in media res at what might be the beginning of Grendel's final battle and then starts into a series of flashbacks.

Of course there's no ending. Wagner would go on to rework this material, so this isn't exactly an unfinished classic or lost masterpiece. I'd probably argue that Wagner was smart to cut things off at this point and do a kind of reboot (even though I'd argue that Dave Sim was smart not to do a reboot of Cerebus when that series reached a point where his then-current ambitions seemed to outgrow his original concept). Of course, this gets us back to talking about these comics mainly in terms of their historical interest...

Legends #4 - "Cry Havoc..."

Writers: John Ostrander & Len Wein
Artists: John Byrne & Karl Kesel

It seems to me that one of the points of DC's big crossover events is to throw together a number of disparate and even incommensurate elements and then try to make them work. When they do work (as with, IMO, the original Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and 52), it isn't because all the different elements get smoothly mixed in together but because the disparities and differences themselves are used evocatively - they become thematically compelling.

Legends is almost there, but it's a case where falling short by inches feels like falling short by miles. On a big picture level, Ostrander and Wein have come up with a thematic reason for their story, but scene-by-scene the comic doesn't earn that theme. It feels like a failed attempt at reverse engineering a meaningful story: they know what it should be about, but they rushed the part where they were trying to figure out how it should be about that.

The best scenes in Legends - like the one at the beginning of this issue, Black Canary, violating the President's order and still playing super-hero, is framed for murder after a police officer who is trying to arrest her accidentally shoots and kill his own partner - offer an interesting set-up that ends up going nowhere. My guess this is partly because of (a) the top down approach and (b) the requirement to hit all of the line-wide "marketing"* needs.

Speaking of marketing, Darkseid is shown playing with what looks like action figure versions of Earth's super-heroes (again, actually: the first issue had a scene like this, too). This is a pretty blatant attempt to tie Legends to the Super Powers cartoons and toys and probably explains some of the choices for why certain characters show up in the series.

Hey - another problem with this series is that even from a marketing p.o.v. the details don't make sense. You have the appeal to fans of Super Powers right next to the attempt to launch an "edgy" book like Suicide Squad.

And there seems to be little thought into which characters are thrown into this crossover. Warlord shows up for a panel or two, I guess to set up a crossover story in that comic. And all of a sudden Dr. Fate seems to be a very important character in all of this.

*Using marketing very loosely here.

Transcending the Gimmick

I finally caught up with Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) on DVD. I thought it was effective and diverting, but that, for the most part, it's central gimmick - that the whole thing is meant to be "found footage" - never stopped being just a gimmick. The film would work almost exactly the same way without it. It does add a "conceptual" layer - i.e. it provides a topic for conversation and/or "think pieces" - but it's a surface layer: there's no depth to the concept built into the movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Cloverfield is weak sauce compared to The Blair Witch Project - a movie which I don't particularly like and didn't find all that scary, but where the same gimmick becomes more than just a gimmick because that choice - that the movie is meant to be "found footage" - influences every other choice made by the directors - acting style, cinematography, staging, temporal-spatial integrity, etc.

And as for the marketing angle: the guys who made and sold The Blair Witch Project were genuine independents going for a grassroots approach. That's certainly not the case with Cloverfield.

More on intentions...

I thought Jim Emerson's post on The Happening was interesting and valuable: Emerson goes into detail about Shyamalan's filmmaking choices - his compositions and staging and editing - which is something critics rarely bother to do anymore. (I don't do it either, but I'm not a professional). I still think that he's talking about the movie as a failed attempt at doing something it's not trying to do. Jim's comments seem to be about how he would have filmed the same kind of material and what he needs from that kind of movie. Fair enough - but I think he gives short shrift to the way Shyamalan is consciously going against the grain of how scenes should be filmed (per the conventions of contemporary filmmaking) in order to work out his own visual ideas. For instance: the first classroom scene is constructed to set up the groups vs. individuals motif that runs throughout the movie.

Keith at The House Next Door seems to like The Happening more than anyone else but me and Roger Ebert, but his take is very mixed. Keith's points are interesting because he's definitely a Shyamalan partisan. Like me, he has a lot of admiration for The Lady in the Water. He sees The Happening as a movie partly done in by the compromises Shyamalan makes between his own personal way of making movies and his attempts to appeal to a popular audience. I agree that The Happening is a step back from The Lady in the Water and The Village to something that tries to be more "audience friendly" - like Unbreakable - but, for me, this is kind of relative. After the drubbing he took over The Lady in the Water, it's understandable that he'd do this, but he doesn't pull back too much. The Happening is still very much against the grain.

On the level of interpretation, I don't think the various theories the different characters come up with about the event in The Happening represent an attempt to spell things out to the audience. Rather, I think this plays into Shyamalan's concern with interpretation (a kind of storytelling) in general. I think Signs and The Lady in the Water develop this theme in a more interesting manner, but I don't think the way it is played out here is "preschool".

Talking About The Happening

The Happening is one of only two movies I've seen so far this year about which I feel evangelical (the other one was Boarding Gate).

I went into the theater knowing almost nothing about the movie: I had avoided watching the trailers and hadn't read anything about it. I didn't want to get caught up in the continuing anti-Shyamlan backlash (which seems to have been gorwing ever since Unbreakable). I had wanted to recommend the other people see the movie in the same way - going in clean, if you will - but I also wanted to make sure they were on the right wavelength, so I started bringing up Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur in all my conversations about Shyamalan and the movie. I'm not sure that is "strong" enough, though, so my new suggestion is that people who are watching it make the leap of faith that it is, on its own terms, a complete success. In other words: everything in it is the way it is because that's how it's supposed to be, not because Shyamalan was trying to do something else but failed.

For instance, I don't think Shyamalan was trying to write "realistic" dialogue and somehow screwed up. I don't think he was trying to direct his actors to give gritty, naturalistic performances à la 28 Weeks Later, but couldn't get that across. I don't think he was trying for a thrill-a-minute feel and stumbled into making a movie that was more creepy/dreamy than thrilling/intense.

This isn't to say that because I think it is a success on its own terms, everyone has to like it. Taste and all that is certainly still important: you might not like the way he uses stylized dialogue, you might not respond to the performances, you might think that the creepiness isn't realized as effectively as it could be.

The first shot of Blind Date (Blake Edwards, 1987) is worth more than all of the frames of every Judd Apatow movie, ever.

I.

First a quote:

Here's a highly speculative thesis, and one I'm not especially prepared to defend, though I've long suspected it has some truth. Starting in the late 1960s audiences became more self-conscious that they were going to the cinemah. They became more conscious viewers, more appreciative of distinctly cinematic flourishes. Even highly commercial films began to project their "style" -- flashy cutting, nice decor, self-conscious acting -- in a way that got viewers' attention, because viewers now were a little bit more demanding than the average viewer of "Red River" or "All That Heaven Allows." Superficially, this new situation might seem to encourage creative and "artistic" film directing. But the great masterpieces of classical Hollywood always worked on two levels: "Red River" was an "oater," a standard Western that fulfilled naive entertainment functions, as well as a film about the interrelationship of landscape to character. On the genre level Hawks or Sirk had to do certain things, whereas on a sub-rosa level (and in Hawks's case, perhaps without even being consciously aware of it) they could do something quite different. And since no one in the studios was really able to see or understand the "sub-rosa level" (if there were such people, then perhaps Harry Cohn could have written "The American Cinema" a decade before Sarris), there were no Harveys who know they understand "cinema" because they cut their teeth viewing a Truffaut movie telling Sirk to cut down on the weirdly-positioned flowers at the sides of the frame, and he had almost total freedom.

But as audiences became more demanding, their demands were not so much for the profundity of Sirk but for the self-conscious and simpler stylizations, of, say, "Far From Heaven," to choose a film that I quite liked. This, paradoxically, encouraged directorial stylists whose flourishes were more obvious, and in which the two levels are collapsed into one, one that because it needs to be able to appeal to mass tastes is almost by definition less profound. Hence we got more "style" but less real art. This is a shift that may have helped Tarantino, but it sure hurt Monte Hellman.

This is one of Fred Camper's posts to the A_film_by discussion group which links up with some of my own observations/speculations inspired by watching The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957) and Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941).

Both of these movies are what I'd describe as Men's Adventure Movies. "Men's Adventure Movie" is also the phrase I used to describe parts of No Country for Old Men.

To what extent this is a real genre - using my definition of genre as dynamic conversations between audiences and artists - rather than a category that makes sense just to me is open for debate, although I'm not sure that I feel too strongly one way or the other and, more importantly, I'm not sure that it matters much. However, I think I should point out the main reason why I'd link these three movies under that heading: they present a male hero, accomplished at manly pursuits (hunting, tracking, wilderness survival), up against a dangerous antagonist, and trapped - by choice or chance - outside of the protective circle of civilization.

(Incidentally, this links into why I don't think the movie version of No Country for Old Men is really much of a Western. That is: it seems to take part in the Western Movie conversation on a fairly superficial level, while jumping right into the center of Men's Adventure Movie concerns).

Using Fred's language Man Hunt and The River's Edge are examples of movies that are working on "two levels", although I tend to think of them as "movies with a wealth of subterranean interest". That is: simply parsing what's on screen in these movies for story stuff - plot, character, literary themes - is going to leave out a lot of what is interesting about these movies - i.e., the way that their directors use design, staging, and composition to create a thematically and aesthetically coherent vision. To put it another way: it isn't exactly that "what they mean" is less important than "how they mean", but that the what's importance is subordinate to, because organized by, the how's.

Watching and thinking about these movies (and then coming across Fred's quote) has helped to me get a clearer understanding of the problems I had with No Country for Old Men.

In these terms:

The Josh Brolin sections of No Country for Old Men mimic this kind of Lang/Dwan "two-level"/"subterranean" movie, but his abrupt exit collapses everything into one level, at which point all of the built up underground meaning is thrown away in favor of an on-the-surface meaning derived from contemporary literary fiction. The problem isn't so much that it's too literary, though, but rather that's it's too literal: that it is on the surface and so comes across like a gambit on the part of the Coen Brothers.

(Comparing/contrasting with Psycho would be an interesting exercise: Hitchcock doesn't back away from playing games with the audience and these games are certainly sites of deeper formal/thematic/aesthetic meaning. What the Coen Brothers are doing is the sledgehammer approach and seems, to me at least, to come out of a certain strain of literary fiction (see Mao II, where the lack of narrative closure is meant to stand in, symbolically, for - broadly speaking - the unknowability of the world).

Anyway, I recommend checking out both Man Hunt and The River's Edge if you get a chance.

II.

I'm always at least a little bit skeptical of critics who use a set of "essentialist" criteria to evaluate art. In popular/folk/semi-popular music, this is often tied into the idea of "authenticity". In movies, we get the people beating the media-specificity drum.

Maybe I should have said I'm only a little bit skeptical, though. I've gone back and forth about this since I started getting seriously into movies when I was in high school, but over the last year I've seen so much praise being heaped on films made by people who are barely filmmakers that I'm becoming less and less skeptical.

The Coen Brothers are certainly not "barely" filmmakers, but I'd like to use them to help tease out some ideas not so much about the decline of filmmaking qua filmmaking but the short shrift it continues to get in lots of discussions about movies as art.

Since re-seeing The Pink Panther last month, I've watched a number of Blake Edwards's other movies that I hadn't seen (Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany's) or hadn't seen in a while (The Party, A Fine Mess, The Great Race, Blind Date). Although I loved The Party when I was in high school (I owned a tape that I watched over and over again), I never really thought of it as a particularly well-directed film: I was mainly into Sellers's performance. (I can only guess at how much this had to do with watching a pan-and-scan copy). As with The Pink Panther, seeing these movies in the light of Play Time - see my comments here for an explanation - was a revelation.



One thing I started to think about while watching these movies: if you turned these stories into novels, you would lose what is great about them as movies. And it strikes me that that really isn't the case with the movies made by the Coen Brothers. There are a lot of nice things in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? that a hypothetical "novel version" would have to leave out - the music, for example, or George Clooney's line delivery - but a lot of the "meat" would remain: the way the movie links folk culture, pop culture, and politics and the way it draws on archetypes from "classical" literature, tall tales, and folk songs could make its way unscathed into the O Brother book.

Now, while I can imagine a great short story on the same subject as The Party, I think that the things that are great about that movie (which mostly have to do with a Tati-like milking of the set for thematically apt gags) would simply not make the transition. In other words, the novel of Oh Brother would resemble the movie of Oh Brother more than the short story of The Party would resemble that movie.

I'm not sure that this means that The Party is a greater movie than Oh Brother, but I do think the likelihood that such a claim would provoke derision or (more realistically) that such a claim (or the reasons underlying such a claim) would be dismissed out of hand by a large portion of contempo film buffs/critics/etc. is worth thinking about. (I could be exaggerating this "likely derision", but it is based on my own experiences talking with other film buffs.)

III.

For more insight on the title of this post, see here and here.

Speed Racer

There's simply no way that Speed Racer (The Wachowski Brothers, 2008) could be the kind of revelation that The Matrix was. That movie - which set its digitally-created fantasy world inspired by the aesthetics of anime and the physics of Hong Kong action movies against a "real world" inspired by James Cameron's blue-collar sci-fi actioners - consciously drew the line between old school and new school special effects, not just analog vs. digital, but covertly-digital vs. overtly-digital. During the summer of 1999, it was hard for me not to see The Matrix, with the way its use of digital fx became part of its unifying aesthetic and thematic vision, as pointing the way forward, while The Phantom Menace - which showed George Lucas embracing digital technology with as much, if not more, enthusiasm than the Wachowski Bros. - felt old-fashioned. It looked like Lucas was using the new technology to make a shinier version of the same kind of movie he had made twenty years earlier. If anything, for me (and I don't think I was alone), the CGI seemed to sap the charm out of Star Wars.

Ten years later, things don't look quite the same to me. While my appreciation for The Matrix has grown, most of the movies that followed in its footsteps - including its two sequels - learned only the most superficial lessons from it (its most impressive descendants, Sin City and 300, got as much of their oomph from the visuals from Frank Miller's original comic books as they did from their directors' deployment of digital filmmaking), while the stubbornly old-fashioned tack taken by George Lucas in Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith gives some retroactive grandeur to The Phantom Menace. I bring this all up because, walking out of Speed Racer, I couldn't help feeling that this was the Wachowski Bros.'s attempt to make a George Lucas movie: their version of The Phantom Menace. More specifically, I think this is their way of "correcting" The Phantom Menace, by making that movie's covertly-digital effects overtly-digital.

For example, the racing sequences in Speed Racer are elaborations on the pod racing from The Phantom Menace. Both draw from video games (especially the F-Zero series), but the Wachowskis not only play up that connection, they take a common element from video racing games - the "ghost car" and use it narratively and thematically.

Somewhat more esoterically, while there always seems to be a disconnect between the human actors and the CGI-covered green screen background in The Phantom Menace which gives off the effect of watching a "cut scene" from a Japanese computer RPG a la Final Fantasy, the Wachowki Bros. emphasize the disjunction between their human performers and the CGI world they inhabit.

The important paradox of Speed Racer is not that it's the multi-million dollar centerpiece of a (failed) marketing campaign whose message is anti-corporate and pro-small-time-independent, but rather that it is a multi-million dollar movie made by an army of technicians that, nonetheless, draws from and aspires to being a kind of "hand made" work along the lines of Tim and Eric's Awesome Show. What's surprising is the extent to which Speed Racer's status as a "personal movie" is written on its surface, like Tim Burton's Batman Returns and Mars Attacks, as opposed to a "covertly" personal blockbuster, like Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible or Mission to Mars. However, like Mission to Mars, Speed Racer seems to be fundamentally concerned with the contradictions of how (if?) such an industrial system can be used to convey a personal vision.

As a side note: I can certainly understand not liking Speed Racer, but the negative tone taken towards the movie by many film critics, which seemed driven by mean-spiritedness as much as anything else, was troubling. Compare the Metacritic page for Speed Racer with the one for Transformers. Transformers isn't a completely unlikable movie - the ersatz Joe Dante moments making up for the ersatz James Cameron action/suspense sequences - but, even by Michael Bay's standards it is sloppily made and has no ambitions beyond the marketplace. Speed Racer does: as with The Matrix, the Wachowski Bros. are trying for a unified aesthetic and thematic vision, which seems much more personal this time around. Or rather, personal in a different way: The Matrix looks like a collection of their tastes as movie buffs, whereas Speed Racer is their personal statement about being filmmakers. Is this what made Speed Racer more of a target? If so, that's pretty disheartening: essentially arguing for unambitious, paint-by-numbers escapism over any kind of large scale personal/popular filmmaking.

For what it's worth: from a moviegoer's perspective I'm not quite sure to what extent Speed Racer is a success. I certainly enjoyed it and though it was visually and thematically interesting. The acting, overall, is better than in the Matrix trilogy - especially the supporting/background performers. Still, it felt shallower - emotionally and thematically - than The Matrix (let alone Mission to Mars). Although, since this is a family film, a better point of comparison might be: it felt shallower than Brad Bird's Pixar movies. On the other hand, that's just a first impression and unlike 90% of the summer blockbusters I've seen over the last 10 years, Speed Racer is a movie I'm interested in returning to at some point.

I mean, it's practically begging you...

Another "Not Quite a Movie Recommendation":

So, when I finally got around to watching M. Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water (2006), I found that I actually liked it and thought that it was a pretty good movie. Which is not to say that I think it was unfairly panned by critics or that it was "underrated". Actually, even though I like the movie, it does three things that are impossible not to criticize and, while I was able to more or less ignore these things, if you can't ignore them or don't want to ignore them, my guess would be that the movie would drive you batty.

M. Night Shyamalan's First Annoying Thing:

He names the two species of fairytale creatures "Narfs" and "Scrunts". These words look silly enough on paper, but it is even sillier to hear actors say these words while keeping a completely serious look on their face. The silliness turns to something genuinely annoying, because we keep hearing "narfs" and "scrunts" over and over again. And while "narf" is just sort of ridiculous, someone involved in making the movie should have told M. Night not to give a fantasy creature a name that sounds like the combination of "scrotum" and "cunt". I expect this is fundamental to what killed the movie with the general audience.

M. Night Shyamalan's Second Annoying Thing:

In a rather petty, adolescent move, he makes the "jerk" character a movie critic (named Farber), I guess to get back at critics who didn't like Signs and The Village (or something). M. Night has always been bigger with the people than with the critics (although his first two films were fairly well reviewed for genre movies), but one would have hoped that he'd be able to rise above this kind of mean-spiritedness if only because he's been so successful despite what critics have had to say.

M. Night makes it even worse by giving his hero a speech that goes something like "How dare that critic interpret a story! How dare he assume that his interpretation is the only correct one!" This is so absurd because all of M. Night's movies are allegorical: they are crying out to be interpreted and at their best (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), like any good allegory, they support multiple readings!

M. Night Shyamalan's Third Annoying Thing:

Maybe he could have gotten away with it if he had stopped with the first two annoying things, but I think this one really pushed him over the edge as far as movie critics were concerned. It's one thing to suggest that all critics are know-nothing parasites, it is another thing, though, to cast yourself as an author of a book of such world-changing importance that magical creatures go to war over your very survival. It's not even cocky or conceited or arrogant: it's just absurd! I mean: though M. Night has appeared in his other movies, it's always in small (though not insignificant) roles. Here, while he's not the protagonist, he's at the center of the film and you can't help putting the pieces together. That is: he casts himself in the role because he believes (on some level) that he is the author whose work will have world changing importance. How's that for setting yourself up as a target of ridicule and scorn?

My favorite goofy character in the movie.

Actually, it's the size and obvious deliberateness of these "Annoying Things" that make it possible for me to ignore them (more or less) and like the movie anyway. In a perverse way, I might even like the movie more because of them: not because they aren't really annoying, but because they are such obviously bad ideas that they're almost too easy to beat up on. It's like he's asking for the abuse.

So - what exactly is there to like in a non-perverse way?

Well, have you read any of James P. Blaylock's novels? He's one of my favorite fantasy authors (I recommend The Last Coin and The Paper Grail). I tend to describe his books as being like Stephen King's with the horror/scare-factor dialed way down, although they're a lot more modest. They're generally about a contemporary American everyman bumping up against the fantastic in the middle of everyday contemporary American life. Despite some of the megalomania that manifests itself in Annoyances 2 and 3 (not to mention the huge budget), The Lady in the Water is similarly modest movie. "The Everyday" is never overwhelmed by "The Fantastic": rather, "The Fantastic" is always creeping around the edges. And, as in Blaylock's books, the characters are all refreshingly low-key.

(Alas, the climax of the movie features the kind of half-assed mumbo jumbo hand-waving as most recent Stephen King novels.)

From a film geek perspective, I like all of M. Night's long takes and his willingness to give his actors room (both time and space) to develop their performances. And I also like the way he works in self-imposed limitations, like never taking us outside of the apartment complex. It's a bit of a stunt, but (somewhat paradoxically) a low key stunt that doesn't call attention to itself. It's more noticeably in retrospect. I like seeing someone making a big budget movie for popular audiences that doesn't pander and doesn't ape all the standard conventions of big budget filmmaking.

That said, Adam at Film at 11 is probably right to put the Strained Seriousness label on M. Night.

Movie Recommendation: Hallelujah I'm a Bum

Hallelujah I'm a Bum (Lewis Milestone, 1933)

Hallelujah I'm a Bum, like Rene Clair's A Nous la liberte or Le Million, is, from a film history perspective, interesting as an example of a movie that suggests alternatives to what was then becoming the conventional way of making sound pictures. That is: (1) Milestone's staging, which often made use of elaborately choreographed camera movements, and the strategic use of rapid-fire, rhythmic editing feel like techniques carried over from silent filmmaking; (2) the relationship between sound and image, though not as playful as that in Le Million or A nous la liberte, has more variety than that in conventional "talkies" (its most noticeable feature in this regard is the spoken-sung dialogue written by Lorenz Hart).

Its status as a kind of "transitional" film between the silents and the talkies comes through in the casting: Harry Langdon facing off against Al Jolson. Its take on socialism vs. capitalism also makes it interesting as a piece of history, but the movie has virtues that go beyond these curiosities. Namely: a fully-realized star performance from Al Jolson, a great supporting cast that includes vaudevillians Frank Morgan and Chester Conklin; some of Lewis Milestone's most inventive filmmaking. Milestone is operating here as what I tend to think of as a "full" filmmaker: that is, one who makes use of a wide variety or techniques and styles, rather than working with a more limited palette. ("Full" here isn't meant to imply that filmmakers who make use of fewer available options are somehow "lesser" filmmakers: both approaches are valid, but I do think they represent a difference in philosophy).

Movie Chat: The Tripper

The Tripper

My wife was away last weekend, so I took the opportunity to have a movie watching marathon. I went out to the theater to see Beowulf and Michael Clayton and watched The Invisible, Exiled, Hostel, Hostel Part II, L'Iceberg, Mr. Brooks, and The Tripper on DVD. Out of all of them, the movie I'm most interested in talking about is The Tripper.

So, The Tripper is David Arquette's homage to Z-grade exploitation movies: part sub-Friday the 13th slasher flick, part psychedelic freak-out a la Psych Out or The Trip (duh). It's a designer cult movie, like Planet Terror or The Devil's Rejects: it's transgressions of good taste and the rules of good filmmaking are all calculated.

Arquette really nails the feel of these movies, but I couldn't help wondering exactly what kind of achievement that is. How impressive is it to purposefully make a really bad movie? More importantly, how enjoyable is it to watch a movie that's trying to replicate that really bad movie experience?

My answer to both questions is: sort of.

(1) What Arquette pulls is sort of impressive. For one thing, he manages to achieve a consistent style and tone. For another, he gets lots of little details right: the awkward editing during the action sequences is awkward in exactly the right z-movie manner, as if each shot is always a few frames short of what it should be. Or the way the location seems like it was chosen because it's on land that one of the filmmaker's relatives owned and not because it really makes all that much sense in terms of the story.

And though the whole thing is, of course, tongue-in-cheek, the wink-wink, nudge-nudge stuff is, as these things go, subtle. The sense that what you're watching isn't a real bad movie mostly come from some of the actors giving believable, low key performances (Lukas Haas). Luckily, a lot of the actors give appropriately lousy performances to make up for that (Paul Ruebens).

Still: is this an example of a filmmaker realizing some kind of "artistic" vision or more an example of a filmmaker making a virtue of necessity? That is: if you don't have any hope of making a good movie, try your hardest to make a bad one instead.

(2) I thought that the movie was only sort of enjoyable to watch.

I started comparing this to Grindhouse:

Death Proof took a z-movie idea and filtered it through what I would consider an almost European art film sensibility (i.e, the overly talky scenes, the repetition, etc.). That is: it doesn't function like a z-movie at all, really. It helps to have some knowledge of z-movies to pick up on its references and to appreciate the way it plays its variation on the crazy macho killer theme, but, to me, watching it felt more like watching an art house movie* - more late-David Cronenberg than early-David Cronenberg.

The Tripper, though, functions and feels just like a z-movie. On its surface, it really does look like the kind of movie you might find on MST3K.

Planet Terror was a mash-up of every crazy z-movie trope, but it was kind of a mess: it was all high points and it also went out of its way to let you know how funny it thought its jokes were.

In some ways, The Tripper is a better film: lower keyed, better paced, with more consistency of style and tone. It's a better recreation of genuine z-movies. But as bad as I thought Planet Terror was, it served its function of getting the audience revved up. The problem with The Tripper is that it ends up being uninteresting in the same way that a lot of actual z-movies are uninteresting. What can be fun about watching z-movies is that every once in a while something completely, accidentally cool/gonzo/ridiculous/beautiful/amazing/hilarious happens. But it's not as much fun (for me at least) when these things are done on purpose, especially since The Tripper doesn't really give me anything else (i.e. interesting characters, elaborate set pieces, etc.). So, while Planet Terror is, I think, not as thoughtfully made, The Tripper calls into question the whole idea of "thoughtfulness" when it comes to making a z-movie pastiche.

*This may be why this movie wasn't really a hit with audiences.

My Yearly Crisis of Faith (A Self-Reflection)

Note: If you have a low tolerance for navel-gazing masquerading as soul searching, skip this and check out my angst-free post on David Arquette's The Tripper.

I.

I think I might have turned into too much of a wimp to be a good film critic. I mean: even when I see a movie that I really don't like - Spider-Man 3, say - I'm perfectly willing to lay out what I didn't like about it, but I'm just not interested in arguing with someone who did like it. And while I definitely enjoy writing about movies and I enjoy reading other people's writing about movies, I'm just as definitely not writing to convince anyone of anything or reading anyone to be convinced of anything.

A couple of things from The House Next Door triggered this. (1) This negative review of Juno and some of the responses in the comments. Is letting people know that I like/don't like Little Miss Sunshine so important I have to be nasty about it? (2) This line from Steven Boone inhis piece on Armond White: "A.I. is just one of those tests I use to separate the blind from the sighted." Man - I like A.I., but that's such a pompous, infuriating thing to write. I mean, I think the idea of holding up any movie as a litmus test is pretty obnoxious, but if you have to, choose Grand Illusion or The General, but certainly not a movie like A.I. that divides even Spielberg's biggest fans.

II.

I'm looking at all of the "Year's Best" lists that are flooding the internet right now. I'm torn: God knows I love making these kinds of lists myself (and am working on my own for this year's crop), but seeing them all together (like, for example, this pdf) is a little bit depressing. The same movies pop up again and again, or, if not the same movies, the same "gambits", i.e. "I'll include a dumb teen comedy to prove my credentials as a populist."

My standard take on these lists is that they're best seen as a way to start a conversation, but reading them one after another gives the impression that these critics are engaged in a ritual that, while public, is essentially solitary. It seems to be less about engaging with all these movies and with all these other movie buffs and more about staking out your claim. It's territorial, even.

III.

I've been keeping up with new movies as best as I can. Mainly, I bother because the annual list party I go to has consistently been the most fun/interesting/engaging/enlightening time I have all year. I like blogging about new movies, here, too, and I certainly enjoy the internet discussions I get into, but without a face-to-face social event to spur me on, I'd probably be writing more posts like this and this and fewer posts like this. Without the social element, watching all these new movies would be too much of a mechanical exercise: keeping up with new releases can make me feel too much like a cog in the machine.

Still - unless you're a professional critic (and thus have access to special screenings/screeners), it's nigh impossible to come up with a Top Ten List anytime before March or April of the following year. I bet at least 50% of my work-in-progress list will change by March of 2008:

1. No Country for Old Men
2. 28 Weeks Later
3. The Hoax
4. The Simpsons Movie
5. Superbad
6. Grindhouse: Death Proof
7. Offside
8. Curse of the Golden Flower
9. The Host
10. Zodiac

IV.

What kind of conversation do I want to start with that list?

Well, for one thing, I'm becoming more and more accepting of my own fairly mainstream tastes. I used to be really concerned about posturing and/or making a statement with these lists. All part of the normal process of getting older?

And, no, this really isn't meant as posturing now. No Country for Old Men and 28 Weeks Later really are my top movie experiences of the year. Do I think they were the "best" movies I saw all year? Eh - I don't know. They're certainly the two movies I'd be most likely to recommend to people who don't mind violent movies. (The Hoax and The Simpsons Movie would be the two movies I'd be most likely to recommend to just about anybody).

Another thing: looking at this list and thinking about my favorite directors of the last 15 years of so (that is, of most of my career as a movie buff) - the Coen Bros., Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, i.e. the usual suspects, no surprises that a white 30-ish American college educated quasi-artsy comic book-reading guy would be into them - I wonder how much of my "taste"/"sensibility"/etc. is just a by-product of my time and place. That's partly why whenever I have one of these "crises of faith" what I want to do is go watch a bunch of old foreign movies.

Also - I think it's funny that my blog post dealing with my "#1 movie" consists of me complaining about it.

V.

But I do like lists. I can't help it! Part of it, though, is that I think (or should that be I hope) they can help to get across the idea that I like different things about different movies. I mean: there's no single movie that magically sums up everything I like about the movies and if I had to give one - twist my arm and I'll say The Night of the Shooting Stars - I'd feel like I betrayed all those movies I like for completely different reasons - like Caddyshack, for instance.

VI.

To get back to how I started this post: I do like reading other people's take on movies. But I'm finding that the people who's takes I most enjoy reading are not necessarily the people who I actually agree with all that much. For instance: Michael Sicinski is currently my favorite movie critic-type guy, but I rarely actually agree with him. Or, rather, while I think he almost always makes interesting points, his overall judgments don't really line up with mine. They kind of do: my favorite movies he tends to rate 6/10 and his favorite movies tend to be the ones that I admire but ultimately don't care for very much. I can't imagine, though, reading his negative review of Hostel and telling that not liking Hostel proves that he's blind or even that he's wrong not to like the movie. I understand what he's saying about that movie and why he's saying it, even if, for me, the movie doesn't work that way. I can talk about how it works for me and maybe why it works for me, but, right now, that's as far as I really want to go. It would have been a different story back when I was an undergrad.

Little Miss Sunshine, Take 2

I saw this again (on cable) and I have to say I was both right and wrong in my first post.

Right: going into the movie with expectations that its some kind of masterpiece is a recipe to be disappointed.

Wrong: I think within its modest scope, it's pretty damn beautiful. Maybe it was having read this line from David Edelstein:

The key to Little Miss Sunshine is that every single one of these people is going to come up against a major obstacle and, in the great American tradition . . . lose. Lose crushingly. Lose enough to make a person want to pack it in. But when life hands them a lemon, they don’t just make lemonade. They learn to spike it with whiskey and dance their friggin’ heads off.

Or as Smokey Robinson told us: You gotta dance to keep from crying.

My favorite bit this time around: the desperation-inspired, Clark Griswold-like insanity that overcomes Greg Kinnear as he makes the decision to steal his father's body from the hospital.

Movie Chat: Superbad

Superbad

Sweeter than Knocked Up and, more importantly, shorter: it's also better made and at least as funny. But though the general M.O. is the same here as it is throughout the Apatow-Rogen-et al. ouevre - celebrating the contemporary male adolescent lifestyle while at the same time pointing out its limits - the specifics aren't quite as relevant as those in Knocked Up. That is: Knocked Up, despite being made just well enough to get over and despite running at least a half an hour too long, gets a lot of points for trying to deal with an interesting cultural question - what the hell does adulthood look like nowadays? - while Superbad is only a movie about high school kids trying to get laid.

That "only" isn't meant to be damning: minute-for-minute, scene-for-scene, this is probably the funniest movie I've seen all year and, apart from watching Grindhouse late at night in a packed theater, the most fun I've had watching a movie all year.

Still, its focus on (nerdy) guys being guys make it a little more narrow than, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Freaks and Geeks. And its setting - American Suburbia Circa Now - makes it feel more generic and less realized than, say, Hollywood Knights or Dazed & Confused (or even John Hughes's Chicago or Kevin Smith's New Jersey), where the strong sense of time and place gives the movie an added emotional/thematic heft.

Go ahead and accuse me of being a bit of a stiff, but, at this point, I can't help but feel that the Apatow Crew could do better. Moreover, that they should do better, and not because I'm some kind of killjoy who thinks that dumb comedies should strive to be high art or anything, but because they actually have done better - see Freaks and Geeks. They set the standard that they're not living up to. They've gotten funnier and they've built up an impressive "stock company" of (male) comic performers, but the scope of what they're interested in has narrowed. (Maybe because making a TV show requires you to reach out for a broader audience? Maybe it was just Paul Feig?)

So, as good as I think Superbad is for what it is, I hope that their next effort isn't just more of the same.

Movie Chat: The Transformers

The Transformers

There's no real connection between The Mist and the movie version of The Transformers, except that I saw them on the same day. But, IMO, that's a strength (and part of the point) of blogging as opposed to writing "real" movie criticism.

Anyway - after going out to watch The Mist during the Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and my brothers-in-law went home and put on a DVD of The Transformers. To recap: none of them had liked The Mist (at all) and, in fact, had found the experience of watching it mightily unpleasant.

None of us thought The Transformers was all that good, but everyone had a good time watching it. It's goofiness and mindless, flashy action turned out to be a good antidote to The Mist's seriousness and pessimism.

I started out wanting to blog that of course a Transformers movie needs to be goofy and of course taking its subject seriously would be a recipe for disaster. But as I composed that post, I remembered the original, animated Transformers movie. That had its light touches, for sure, but it was also kind of serious and (for me at that time) genuinely, emotionally affecting in a way the new movie isn't.

Some more thoughts:

1. My (not original) observation was that there's a good, 90-minute Joe Dante-esque movie hidden inside Transformers. (Or, as my friend Nick said: "It's like Small Soldiers with fewer good jokes." I swear I could edit the thing down myself.

2. I could hardly stay awake during the final battle sequence, even though we were watching it at 5 in the evening. All the CGI action seemed to blur together and I couldn't make much sense of what was going on.

3. Relatedly: the movie's biggest fault, IMO, is that the Transformers are always moving so quickly and their action scenes are so choppily edited - purposefully, it seems, to suggest their high tech, high speed nature - that I never really got a chance to just enjoy looking at them. This isn't some Z-movie where they had to cover up the low budget by only showing the bits and pieces of the creatures: they spent oodles on the design and realization of these robots, but they never give the audience room to just appreciate their work.

4. Relatedly 2: Michael Bay's biggest fault is that despite some good instincts - mainly with regard to casting and directing actors - he's too into the hard sell. His movies would be a lot better if they were shorter, slower, and softer.

5. The screenplay for Disturbia gave Shia LaBeouf something solid to work with: his role there was conventional (maybe even cliched) - troubled but basically good boy in over his head - but it gave him broad outlines within which he was able to sketch a believable, detailed picture of suffering teenager-hood. The screenplay for Transformers gives him almost nothing - horny teen with giant robot - but it was fun to watch LaBeouf (and Michael Bay) make something out of nothing. It was a much more impressive example of movie magic than any of the CGI effects.

Movie Chat: Next

Next

Next would make a great double bill with Deja Vu with the theme of Time Travel Thrillers That Were Better Than I Expected (but I'm Still Glad I Waited to See Them on DVD).

Or you could double bill it with Ghost Rider under the theme Star as Auteur. Or should that be Starteur? Anyway, Nicolas Cage seems to be making movies about guys who are flashy showmen onstage and withdrawn and alienated weirdos off. They just need the love of a beautiful woman to convince them they need to interact with the world.

I think Cage is pretty good in these roles, although maybe "good" is the wrong word since what he's doing is a little bizarre and we might question the validity of the entire project (i.e., working out personal issues through big budget action star vehicles). Still - he ends up giving these movies, well, not depth, but at least some genuine humanity amid all the neat CGI effects and explosions.

But the best part of Next is (slight spoiler) that just when you're worried that they're going to keep the thing going for another twenty minutes, they wrap it up. Nothing pushes a big action movie from Mediocre over the line into Pretty Decent like a 90 minute running time.

Movie Chat: The Mist

The Mist

Sean Collins thought the creatures weren't scary enough.

And the folks I went to see it with thought the whole premise was too goofy to take seriously.

For me, well, this is one of those movies where my appreciation for what it's doing is so great that I was with it all the way, even when it isn't 100% successful. It has flaws - a wobbly performance/characterization of one of the central roles (Marcia Gay Harden's), a final scene that works juts fine conceptually but plays out clumsily and ends up feeling like as much of cheat (although in the opposite direction) as the ending of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and, yes, creatures that aren't that scary - but I don't really see the need to nitpick. I could and I probably would if it had been a big critical success like No Country for Old Men, but considering everyone else seems to be piling on (or just plain ignoring) The Mist it's more fitting that I step up to defend it.

Here's a little moment from the movie that kind of sums up everything I liked about it:

David Drayton - our hero - goes into the back room of the supermarket and sees, or rather, smells, that the generator is backing up and spewing fumes. He rushes over to turn it off - a good move - but, of course, that means the lights go out and he ends up bumping his head on an overhanging bar and tripping and stumbling over boxes on his way out. It's played as low key physical comedy and shows how despite our best intentions, the world gets in our way. David does the right thing, but that doesn't mean those boxes aren't there waiting to trip him up.

Actually, "waiting" is the wrong word, because that implies they have some kind of motive and, of course, they don't, which gets right to the heart of what makes this a horror movie: the complete and total indifference of the physical and natural (or in this case, extra-natural) to human intentions - whether those intentions are virtuous or vicious.

That also seems to be the point of the extended battle in the supermarket between the trapped humans and the little flying dragon thingies (I keep thinking of them as Lockheeds, after the X-Men character). The dragons break into the supermarket only because they're following their food source - those little bugs. For the most part, the seem to ignore the people, except when they're in the way. And, as it turns out, the ways the people come up with to fight the monsters - trying to hit them with flaming torches, shooting at them in a crowded store - are almost as dangerous as the monsters themselves.

I want to say that the fire "turns" on one one humans and burns him, but, again, there's no intention here, just indifference. They try to harness the fire for their own purposes, but their mastery over the physical world falls tragically short.

For me, that's where the horror comes in and that's how the movie earns its scares: not through fear of the monsters, per se, but through the fear of our inadequacy when faced with them and the fear that being forced to wrestle with the massive indifference of the universe will either drive you crazy or crush your hope for the future.

These aren't necessarily original themes, but the movie dramatizes them with what I thought was a nearly staggering amount of emotional force, which is, in turn, grounded in very specifically-realized details*. Though on a smaller scale, this made the movie feel a lot like one of Steven Spielberg's (esp. War of the Worlds). But it diverges from Spielberg in its pessimism and refusal to hedge its bets (as my friend Nick texted me: The Mist is "ballz to the wallz")**.

As for the goofiness issue: different people will bring different standards to the table, and, I've noticed, very few people are consistent about it. That is: some people will balk at taking stories about super-powered mutant heroes seriously, but have no problems with stories about the living dead. Other people might be completely down with the whole flying dudes in tights thing, but just can't believe that anyone over the age of 12 would be interested in stories about a teenage wizard. In general, I'm pretty accepting of any kind of fantasy element and while I recognize that it's pretty common for folks to draw a line somewhere or other, I can only just wrap my head around doing that.

In terms of The Mist, my guess would be that if you're at all resistant to the idea of taking a movie with creepy, crawly creatures seriously, it just won't work. I'm not sure this is the fault of the movie: the creatures are pretty nicely done, but they're also drop dead serious. There's not as much for goofiness as there was in The Host, say, or Gremlins.

*28 Weeks Later (my other favorite horror movie of the year) deals with a lot of the same stuff. It's a leaner film and is, I think, overall better made: very little of it doesn't work. Still, for me, The Mist packed more of an emotional punch, maybe because, at heart, I'm more of a Spielberg-kid than a Romero-kid.

**Nitpick: I think the ending works conceptually, but it doesn't quite play out in a satisfying way. It makes the events of the final sequence less a tragedy about the loss of hope and more about bad timing. My guess is that Darabont would have needed more time to really pull it off correctly. As it stands, it felt a little like the Mirror Universe version of the War of the Worlds ending - a downer, for sure, but not one that felt completely earned.

Movie Chat: Imprint

Masters of Horror: Imprint

Showtime didn't want to air this? Cowards.

Eh, just kidding. This is one disturbing movie. It's also the best-written and most fully-realized of the Masters of Horror episodes I've seen so far. To a certain extent, this movie is Takashi Miike self-consciously making a Takashi Miike-style horror movie: there's the torture scene out of Audition, the sadomasochism of Ichi the Killer, the nightmarish family dynamics of Visitor Q. Maybe a better way to put it is that this is Miike putting together a "Greatest Hits: Horror Edition". Or even: "Takashi Miike for Beginners".

So, this is the kind of movie that makes me wary of the way the term "torture porn" gets thrown around. The movie's elaborate torture sequence is assaultive: watching it was physically uncomfortable. I don't think we're meant to enjoy seeing a sympathetic character graphically experience that kind of pain. Rather, we're shown all of the pain she feels along with the details of how it's doled out (two words: acupuncture malpractice) in order to raise the stakes.

I know that this tactic is sometimes looked down upon. The argument goes: (1) real filmmakers wouldn't need to stoop to these stunts, (2) they don't actually need to show graphic violence, and (3) in fact it's actually scarier if they don't (invoke Val Lewton and the shower scene from Psycho here).

Well, ok - the thing is that, with movies, sometimes the point is to show it - to see it. Miike knows enough about making movies that he could no doubt achieve some effectively horrific moments, solely through clever editing and the performance of his actors, without showing any actual torture or, more importantly, the graphic results of the torture.

So, why show it?

Well, honestly, I could give you a line about how Miike is (a la Cronenberg) emphasizing the physical, organic nature of our bodies and assaulting the notion of mind/body duality. But, really, Miike shows it to make you cringe, to dare you to look away, to catalog the various inventive ways human beings have come up with to hurt other human beings.

(Although I actually think the most shocking/disturbing images in the movie have nothing to do with the torture scenes).

Anyway -

The movie is mostly well-made. The overall structure works, the staging is effective, the set-pieces are appropriately horrific, and, with one exception, the cast does a good job. Unfortunately, that one exception is the lead. Now, I can understand why they cast Billy Drago - he has an effectively creepy presence when he's lurking around the edges of a movie as in The Untouchables or Mysterious Skin - but he can't quite pull off this central role, which requires him to go through several stages of grief, drunkenness, and insanity. I'd be happy to see Drago come back as some kind of dangerous psychopath, but it was hard to buy him as a sympathetic would-be romantic lead.

I had heard bad things about this episode, so I was pleasantly (?) surprised by how much I ended up liking it. If the lead performance were a little better, I might recommend this as a good introduction to Miike's horror stuff. But as it is, you should probably check out Audition before moving onto this one.

Movie Chat: Pick Me Up

Masters of Horror: Pick Me Up

This is the third Masters of Horror show I've watched. Based on having seen this, Homecoming, and Cigarette Burns, my impression of the series is that while the episodes have a strong starting concept, the scripts don't do that good of a job of building on the initial ideas and the directors seem to struggle with hitting the right tone and achieving a consistent style - my guess is the shooting schedule is so abbreviated that they have to go with the first take a couple of times too many. Also, I have nothing against graphically violent movies, but in this one and Cigarette Burns there were scenes of graphic violence that seemed to be there just because the show is on cable. (With this in mind, I'm interested to see what Dario Argento and Takashi Miike do with their episodes.)

That said, this is probably my favorite of the three, though it's in many ways the sloppiest and least ambitious. This is billed as a Larry Cohen episode and watching the credits I was disappointed that Larry didn't write the screenplay, but was just the director. I like a lot of his movies, but I generally consider him to be first an foremost an "idea guy". As a director he gets by, but the filmmaking in his movies is usually pretty basic. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but watching Larry Cohen bring his almost non-existent horror stylings to bear on a script by Some Dude wasn't exactly the experience I was looking for.

Oh wait - Some Dude is David J. Schow, who wrote the screenplay for The Crow and according to Wikipedia may have invented the term Splatterpunk. Maybe not a "Master of Horror", but certainly a "Pretty Damn Good Practitioner of Horror".

Anyway - my short, spoiler-free conclusion: despite a rocky start and erratic performances, the movie really does come together in its last act and does a good job tweaking some genre conventions. It also has a couple of creepy bits and a few scares, although nothing that really ranks that high on my "horror" scale.

Some more thoughts (with spoilers):

It makes sense that Cohen would want to work with Michael Moriarty again, but Moriarty seems to be in pretty bad shape. The role requires a certain consistency of style that he can't quite muster, so his performance just goes all over the place. It's actually kind of sad to watch him and it shouldn't be, because his character is supposed to be a kind of a bad ass.

Warren Kole is a lot better in the less showy role of the psycho hitch-hiker.

Now, the idea of these two psychos going after the same prey and ending up going after each other is a pretty good one, but the set up is so haphazard that I didn't realize that it was a good idea until the end of the movie when they're finally facing off. Funnily enough, even though this was just an hour long movie, it felt like it should have been shorter. There's some business - Moriarty's scene with Lauren Landon and the torture scene - that just gets in the way of what should be a straightforward tongue-in-cheek send up of the Roaming Psycho genre.

Still - this is the only one of the Masters of Horror episodes that I've seen that's got better as it went along.