Forager's 2008 Big List of Stuff

I usually don't get around to finalizing my annual "Best" lists until after I've had a chance to catch up with all of the year's releases. Going by past experience, that means my 2008 Best lists wouldn't be ready until May 2009.

Here's something different for this year: a big, fruit salad list of my favorite arts/culture stuff from 2008* that I've seen/read/experienced in 2008.

I wanted to annotate each of the entries, but I also wanted to make sure I posted this before I went on my Christmas vacation - so there are some "blanks" here that I might come back to fill in later.

No music here, because I've mostly given up on listening to new releases, although I did like the Coldplay album quite a bit. No novels here because I'm a couple of years behind there, too. No a(r/l)t comix either, for the same reasons: I'm always playing catch up!

I'm on Christmas vacation now, so I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to respond, but questions and comments are always appreciated.

1. Lost Season 4 - In certain RPG circles there's a recurring debate that goes something like this:

On the one side, you have people saying that Star Wars is cool because of all the spaceships, aliens, and powers, so an RPG about Star Wars needs rules for all of the cool spaceships, aliens, and powers. On the other side, you have people saying that Star Wars is compelling because of its underlying dramatic and thematic concerns, so an RPG about Star Wars needs rules to help address these dramatic and thematic concerns. People on this side of the debate tend to dismiss all the powers, spaceships, and aliens as "mere color"- i.e. trappings that you could get rid of and still have something that was Star Wars-like (i.e. something that had the same kind of pulpy feel and mythic reach).

I take a middle ground: Star Wars is compelling and cool because of the virtuous cycle set up between its unique sci-fi trappings (the specific spaceships, powers, and aliens) and its thematic concerns. I think all of the best fantasy and sci-fi manages to find this kind of "sweet spot" where the "rules" of the mythos (i.e., how the Force works, how the Republic is organized politically, etc.) creatively constrain and shape the action and themes.

Sometime during it's second season I started describing Lost as a series that moment-for-moment was one of the most entertaining shows on television, but on a larger, "seasonal" scale was extremely unsatisfying. In other words, they couldn't find that sweet spot. All the little bits and pieces worked, but they didn't seem like they added up to anything and it was frustrating because it seemed like they were supposed to add up to something. In his piece on the Season 4 finale, Sean argued that getting too concerned about the big picture was, perhaps, not the best way to watch this show. But it's hard not to get caught up in all the details of the Lost mythos, since they're interwoven so completely into the action. Anyway, I think it wasn't until the end of Season 3 and (especially) the entirety of Season 4 that the Lost team perfected the balance between micro and macro: moment-to-moment the show was as strong as ever and the slowly but steadily emerging outlines of the "big picture" helped to ground these moments and give them greater thematic resonance because of the way they fit into the mosaic of the mythos.

2. Profit motive and the whispering wind - I want to write something of my own, but for now read this.

3. Cartooning class with Matthew Thurber - Taking this course was definitely one of the best decisions I made all year. Matt is a very good teacher and the class was laid back and a lot of fun. Plus, I learned a lot and even ended up getting to make my own minicomic. I've been a comics/cartoons fan for just about as long as I can remember, but the last time I ever really tried to draw a comic was back when I was in the third grade. What's interesting to me as a guy who spends a decent percentage of his spare time thinking about/writing about comics is how much insight making even a pretty basic minicomic gave me into comics in general. It was an eye-opening experience. Like - I love that part in Donald Phelps' essay on Gould's Dick Tracy where he talks about the way Gould uses blacks, but it wasn't until I tried (and failed) to get a similar effect that I was able to grasp exactly what Gould had achieved.

4. The revival of Last Year at Marienbad at Film Forum - What a difference a print makes! Fred Camper, one of my favorite film critics, always emphasizes that if you've only seen a movie on video, you haven't really seen it. After having first seen Last Year at Marienbad, years ago, on a pretty lousy VHS tape, watching it on a beautiful print at the Film Forum was a revelation. On video, the image was cramped and fuzzy. The subtitles were barely readable and incomplete: I could comprehend French well enough to know that stuff was left out, but not enough to follow the twisty-turny narration. At the Film Forum, everything was clear. This is a beautiful, clever movie - and it's also pretty funny.

5. The Fold - A funny, super smart erotic, sci-fi thriller webseries (co-written and produced by my friends Ray and Polly, but I'd recommend . Erotic, not so much because it's made to turn you on (although it might), but because, unlike most fiction, it acknowledges that the part of us given to erotic fantasizing isn't completely compartmentalized from the rest our lives. It's filled with lots of smart, sci-fi-ish observations about the way Web 2.0 has affected our sense of the border between public and private life and how that, in turn, has affected those fantasies.

6. Burn After Reading - I wrote about this movie already, here.

7. Tim and Eric's Awesome Show Great Job Season 3 - I've written a little bit about Tim and Eric before, here. This season of their show had some of their funniest moments, but it's also probably their most inaccessible body of work, in that it's more self-referential than ever, more focused on exploring its own little world. This has a downside - guests and bits trotted out seemingly as "fanservice" - but it also allows for stuff like the "Jim and Derrick" episode, one of the best takes on MTV-style youth culture since Beavis and Butthead.

8. Wall-E - I like that A.O. Scott has to qualify his praise of Milk as being the best live action mainstream American movie he saw all year.

9. Slam Dunk Vol. 1 - I've gotten back into reading manga, but on most of the series I'm following I'm waaaaay behind. Slam Dunk is the only "new" manga I've started and Vol. 1 is the only manga I've read that was actually released this year. So this was the first year ever that the bulk of my comics-reading enjoyment came from manga, so I'll Slam Dunk stand in for all of the stuff I read and enjoyed.

10. Jason Statham - Almost singlehandedly keeping the action movie alive.

11. The "Brand New Day" and Beyond Era of The Amazing Spider-Man - I read some comics that I thought were better than these and a few comics that I enjoyed more, but I really dig what the writing/editorial team is doing with this book. Which is, as I've written before, trying to elaborate and expand on the John Romita/Stan Lee run without straying too far from what makes the character and concept work. In theory, I'm all for wild and woolly super-hero comics that make no sense to outsiders and I genuinely like those idiosyncrasies of super-hero comics that get filed off when they get turned into super-hero movies, but, in practice, the decisions made by the Spidey Team have led to better super-hero comics (in just about any way you want to define "better") than the weirder/more ambitious ones made by the folks over at DC or in Marvel's "Event Department".

Anyway, this has gotten me back in the comic store on a weekly basis, something I couldn't have imagined happening at this time last year.

12. Rambo - I want to write about this movie, but don't have time to do it justice right now. I'll just say that I think this movie is a kind of inversion of Saving Private Ryan, esp. in terms of how salvation relates to warfare and in terms of how it addresses the question "what good can come of the kind of mechanized violence that rips people to shreds". It's The Wild Bunch for the new millennium. (And this reminds me that I still need to see JCVD.)

13. The Happening - I wrote about this a couple of times.

14. Black Summer by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp - I wrote about this comic already, here. I'm not as into their follow-up, No Heroes - it's #0 issue was really great, the next two issues were a bit of a let down - but I still think Ryp is one of the few guys drawing super-hero comics who'd be worth following no matter who was doing the writing. Frank Quitely would be one of the others. Luckily, they both tend to work with guys who know how to write these kinds of things.

15. All of the classic comic strip collections that I hope to either get as Christmas gifts or get for myself with any B&N gift cards I might recieve - Kind of cheating since these aren't things I've actually read. But it definitely makes me very happy that there's the distinct possibility that I'll be able to spend New Year's Eve pouring over that Scorchy Smith collection.


*More or less: I always allow for some wiggle room.

Halloween Grab Bag: John Bolton's Army of Darkness Adaptation

I suspect that movie adaptations are more likely to turn into period pieces than other kinds of comics, but, even so, this is more interesting as a pop culture artifact than it is as comics.

This is a pre-Spider-Man Sam Raimi, back when he the B-movie version of Joe Dante. (Poor Joe Dante: one of the great sins of modern Hollywood is that he's not directing movies like The Transformers or Tropic Thunder). Based on the Bruce Campbell scene and the dance interlude in Spider-Man 3 I suspect that Raimi would like to get back to his roots in more disreputable (or should that be "less reputable") movies. (My inner-Ambush Bug fan is a little bit alarmed that super-hero movies have become "reputable" in quite the way the have over the last few years.)

Plus, it's painted! Maybe it's just for the prestige value, but John Bolton's concept - undercutting a traditional heroic fantasy illustration style with Ash's smart-ass narration - almost makes it seem like it has genuine aesthetic and thematic purpose, too.

And if Bolton had made this story his own - had been able to rethink it from the ground up - this could have worked. But he doesn't - he's stuck with the Raimi Bros.' script, a good script, but one where undercutting heroic tropes is just one kind of gag or, rather, the pretext for one kind of gag. So what happens is that Bolton's concept ends up making sense (in that I can see what he's up to and why he decided to do it that way) but is still not true to the spirit of the material.

Army of Darkness - the film - is really just a collection of gags using characters and conventions of B horror and fantasy movies. It's loose and jokey, and anarchic. But "painted comics", if not by nature than by association, are the opposite of loose, jokey, and anarchic.

And it isn't just that Bolton's work misses the spirit of the movie, it misses the spirit of the lead performance. What Bruce Campbell does in Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is as central to making that movie work as what Jack Nicholson does in The Shining. In that movie Campbell gives one of the great physical comedy performances in contemporary cinema (up there with Steve Martin in All of Me): a definitive take on the body rebelling against the mind with equally hilarious and hideous consequences. Though his work in Army of Darkness isn't as inspired, it still builds on what he did in the earlier movie.

But, like I said, it's a physical performance: all about movement, about creating a character that behaves like a cartoon, which would be ideal for comics but not for painted comics. It's Bolton's depiction of Ash that really ends up sinking the book: he's too stiff and there's (overall) no sense of movement.

Since none of Ash's characteristics come through in the art, it all has to happen through the narration, and it just feels like there's way too much of it. In fact, because the narration is in something that's recognizable as Ash's voice, it makes the absence of character in the art all the more apparent.

Halloween Grab Bag: 2 Warren Ellis Horror Comics

In Fell Ellis is using his stock set of characters and themes and in Black Gas Ellis isn't doing much beyond recycling bog-standard zombie movie moments, but with Ellis I think that the specifics of any given book are more important that the generalities underlying all of his work. And by "specifics" I mean how Ellis and his collaborators turn his ideas into comics.

With Fell, I love how Ben Templesmith gives all his characters these shifty, squirelly eyes: everyone in Snowtown - the Feral City of the book's subtitle - looks like they're on the verge of having some kind of psychological or emotional breakdown. And for his part, Ellis has come up with the perfect setting for Templesmith's expressionism: this has one of the most effective "generalized-sense-of-unease-and-dread" vibe as any horror fiction I've seen lately* and, at times, it reaches the level of a genuine - if pulpy - moral vision of the world.

Blackgas is a lot less ambitious and wasn't nearly as satisfying to me as other "B-movie" horror comics I've read recently(like Girls or The Walking Dead). Ellis doesn't give Max Fiumara all that much to work with and most of what's here is conventional decompressed storytelling: there's nothing especially inventive or interesting thematically. But what Fiumara does have going for him are the explosions of graphic, gory zombie movie violence. As far as I can tell, these relatively few panels of violence are the raison d'etre of the series.

Well, that's not entirely true. It seems like Ellis is really trying to emphasize the idea that these "zombies" are people that the hero used to know: that they're his whole life and that having to kill them to survive is somewhat traumatic. But none of this is built up effectively. For one thing, all of the characters, all of their relationships, are stock B-movie elements. For another, we only have an issue's worth of "normal" behavior before it turns into Night of the Living Dead, which just doesn't give enough space to build any investment in these stock elements. While I enjoyed it as a piece of splatterstick, I couldn't help feeling that the book came up short.

*Up there with HWY 115.

HWY 115 by Matthias Lehmann

HWY 115 seems to belong, with Gilbert Hernandez's Sloth and David Lynch's Lost Highway to a specific, contemporary noir/fantasy sub-genre. Stories in this sub-genre take place in a nightmarish world, they have multiple "realities" or levels of reality, and they also have a circular, ourobosian narrative - like a recursive waking-up-from-a-dream dream.

They are self-consciously artsier elaborations on a certain kind of Twilight Zone-ish, "trick ending" suspense story.

Sometimes, figuring out the puzzle - determining how the different realities all fit together, deciphering the dream symbolism of the nightmare world, and discovering how cause-and-effect works in that world - is part of the appeal for me of these kinds of works. That was definitely the case with Lost Highway and Sloth - a comic that has grown on me a lot since I first read it (although I still don't like it as much as the still criminally underrated Grip).

With HWY 115, though, I wasn't too interested in "figuring it out" (although I presume it's possible): rather, I was content to just drink in the grungy, noir atmosphere.

The story follows a P.I. and a writer who are on the trail of a serial killer, whose M.O. is to kill his victims by forcing them to choke on various random (?) objects. Their investigation leads through a series of interviews with some of the killer's former fellow inmates at the insane asylum he's just escaped from. Each one tells their story - why they got locked up (which is basically: who did they kill and why) - and provides a clue - part of a dream that the killer had recounted to them. The comic moves among all of these levels: the investigation, the stories of the former asylum inmates, the killer's dream, and, at one point, the P.I.'s nightmare.

The strongest part of the comic might be the inmates' stories: these episodes aren't just creepy, they're viscerally, under-your-skin unsettling.

Something else I like: the unrelenting social bleakness. All of these characters seem to be barely hanging on. Everyone is an outsider and the onlything in the comic that comes close to representing of some kind of "social order" is the dingy, rundown insane asylum. (It really fit my mood this week).

It's quiet here...

...but I've been busy elsewhere.

Here are some comments I (double) posted on Guillermo Del Toro on Sean T. Collins's blog.

And here's a thread I started about the Universal "Gill Man" movies on nerdnyc.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's a scream

I missed this post from last month on Vincent Baker's blog, but I thought other horror fans might be interested in the discussion:

There's this outtake from The Devil's Rejects where there are two people in horrifying I've-been-tortured-to-death makeup slumped on the floor of a motel bathroom. The maid comes in and snarls because the lights won't turn on and opens the window shades and then opens the bathroom door - and the two actors burst into song and mug for the camera.

It's funny. The on-screen of the movie is apalling. But the more I watch horror flicks and the more carefully I watch them, backed up by interviews, outtakes and commentary, the more it seems that off-screen the actors, the writers, the directors, the effects people - the more it seems that they're having the most fun.

Summer Reading: Insomnia by Stephen King

I'm not sure that I'd self-identify as a Stephen King "fan", because I've only read around half of the books he's written and I've never really felt the kind of intense connection/devotion/desire-to-read-them-all that I do with books by authors who I am a fan of (Donald E. Westlake, Philip Roth, Ross MacDonald). But I am a Stephen King defender: I'm a big booster of three of his novels - The Shining, Pet Semetary, and The Dark Half - and I've (more-or-less) enjoyed most of the other ones that I've read (especially The Stand, Bag of Bones, It, Dreamcatcher, and From a Buick 8). While it's not an argument I'd want to get into with people who think like Harold Bloom, I do think that King is one of America's greatest, contemporary pop novelists.

But if Insomnia was the only one of his books I had ever read, I'd probably agree with his critics. It isn't a terrible book as far as these things go: it's an easy read if only intermittently compelling. It did have one moment that genuinely freaked me out. For the most part though it was disappointing. However, it's flaws are characteristic of the problems that even King's best books have.

Like:

King is really good when he's writing about creative guys who are more-or-less his own age from more-or-less his own background (see Jack Torrance in The Shining, Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half, Paul Sheldon in Misery). He's, um, less good at writing characters that are different from him - working man characters (Paul Edgecombe in The Green Mile), African-Americans (John Coffey in The Green Mile), or, in the case of Insonmia, senior citizens. Specifically, his problem seems to be that while he keeps a critical distance from characters that are "Stephen King-like" which allows him to bring real insight to bear on them, he tends to get sentimental and fuzzy about characters that are different from him.

If this was the only problem with the book, I might be willing to overlook it. For instance, his Hard Case Crime novel The Colorado Kid is unfortunately marred by his dopey and sentimental characterization of some way down east Maine old-timers. But The Colorado Kid is otherwise a very nice meditation on mystery novels and it is very short. Insomnia is long and, even apart from the sentimentality, most of it is just "bleh".

King is such a prolific writer - both in terms of the number of books he writes and the size of each book - that it's not surprising that he isn't always "on", but it's when you're halfway through something like Insomnia that you wish he didn't feel he needed to publish everything he writes. Especially, since lots of Insomnia read like a warm-up for the (much better, not to mention more consistently frightening) Dreamcatcher.

Still, even some of his best books have too many pages. Dreamcatcher would probably have been helped if it had been 100 to 200 pages shorter than it was.

But King's biggest weakness may be that his set-ups always tend to be a lot more interesting, exciting, and engaging than his endings - which often feel too similar to each other: the action wrapping up with some vague supernatural, super-powered, mumbo-jumbo-flavored battle.

Hey - slogging through the final scenes of Insomnia I was reminded that I had a very similar problem with Neil Gaiman's American Gods and then an epiphany: as you take the overtly scary stuff out of King's books they start to look an awful lot like a Neil Gaiman story. So much so that a book like Insomnia - which really doesn't have many scary moments at all - might as well be labeled "fantasy" instead of "horror". Anyway, both King and Gaiman have an annoying habit of reverting to a lot of hand-waving whenever they start to deal with magic/psychic/supernatural effects. I'm not suggesting that their books need a fully-worked out "magic system", but I think they would benefit from their authors writing about magic with a bit more specificity and a bit less of the philosophy that magic just happens to do whatever is most convenient for the story at that point.

Movie Chat: The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes

I tried to watch The Last House on the Left years ago and couldn't get through it. Not because of its unpleasantness or my squeamishness, but because of the bad acting. So I had always avoided The Hills Have Eyes, fearing that it would be more of the same. But I ended up wanting to watch it for some research I'm doing and I was (un)pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.

It's definitely a "horror" movie, but watching it, I couldn't help thinking about how different it is from most other horror movies - especially current ones. There's some gore and general gruesomeness, but Wes Craven doesn't really focus on it (a la Seven) or fetishize it (a la The House of 1000 Corpses). His take on it seems much more matter-of-fact: it's upfront about the effects of violence, without reveling in them.

And though the movie has its share of suspense sequences (will the mutants attack? will the guy with the gun get back in time to use it?), creating suspense seems less important to Craven then ratcheting up the tension. It feels a little bit like a post-apocalyptic survival movie - Panic in Year Zero!, say - where the question isn't so much "What horrible thing will happen to these people?" and more "Given that they're facing this horrible thing, what will they be driven to do? To what lengths will they go to get themselves out of trouble?" (Hey, that also turns out to be one of the central questions of The Descent!)

More importantly, Craven doesn't make too much use of shock/scare/boo! moments, which may be the biggest difference between this movie and the current horror crop. What's shocking and horrific about The Hills Have Eyes is the situation itself: the brutal attack on the family that Craven refuses to make easy on us, by , say, sparing the likable characters or leaving out the survivors' grief.

Also notable: the "monsters" in this movie aren't really superhuman. This makes the movie feel a bit more like Straw Dogs, Deliverance, or Southern Comfort, rather than most slasher/zombie/monster flicks. But the knowledge that the stranded family members could sruvive (if they get their act together, self-defense-wise) makes things, in some way, much more horrible than if they were facing an unstoppable creature. I can only assume that The Last House on the Left works somewhat the same way and now I'm interested in giving it another chance. I'm also interested in checking out the remake of this movie, if only to confirm my suspicions that it's full of gore-for-its-own-sake, "boo"-scares, and other current horror cliches*.

One last thing: seeing a "real" grindhouse movie like this one makes me even less impressed with Planet Terror (I still like Death Proof, though). The Hills Have Eyes is an example of great B-movie filmmaking: Craven gets everything he can out of a fairly simple set up, without any needless excess. And, I'm not sure exactly how to put this, but the attention to the specifics of how the events unfold during the central R.V.-invasion sequence is pretty impressive. It shows a canniness and intelligence that is lacking from a lot of contemporary horror productions, which get by on big gestures rather than on smart details.

*Although, per this Sean Collins post, it probably isn't really a good idea to judge a movie before seeing it. FWIW, I think Hostel is all-over-the-place, though it has its moments.

Movie Chat: The Host

The Host

Like Sean Collins, I'm always a little suspicious about the way "mainstream" critics will latch onto a horror movie if they can read it as political allegory. While it's true enough - a lot of horror movies do have political commentary in their sub-or-not-so-sub-text - that tends to be the least interesting/enjoyable part (for this horror fan at least). For instance, I know that George Romero's Dawn of the Dead is meant as a critique of consumerism, etc., but it's a one-note, one-joke critique and while it adds something to the movie, it's not exactly the icing on the cake (i.e. something superficial that nonetheless holds the movie together). It's more like knowing that the baker used Splenda and egg whites while making the cake, so you don't have to feel so guilty about eating it.

(For the record: what I like about Dawn is the way it gets at the dynamics of people coming together and falling apart when they're under pressure). (Also for the record: this is probably why I was a bit "meh" about Romero's Land of the Dead, which is lots and lots of political commentary and skimps on the "people under pressure" details). (Final for the record: I think all the attention paid to the social/political messages of Romero's movies has obscured his status as one of the most interesting religious filmmakers out there). (Sorry, I lied: I feel sort of the same way about a lot of the critical takes on Carl Barks's Duck stories: yes, a lot of them (cleverly) make some (very clever) political points, but that seems (to me) to be such a small part of what makes them great, that the fact that critics spend so much time pointing that out seems (to me) like they're performing some kind of penance).

Anyway, I bring all this up just to say that though there's some political (anti-American) stuff in The Host, it seems like a relatively small part of the movie. Although maybe that's because the movie is such a mix of genre, tones, and moods that any single element is going to seem small when compared to the whole. Any element except for the creature, that is, which is everything I'd want from a movie monster.

I should also note that I usually have some trouble responding to the seemingly, wildly incoherent tones and styles of a lot of the Korean movies that I've seen. For instance, I liked parts of Welcome to Dongmakgol, but I honestly did not know what to make of its sudden shifts from the realistic military violence of Saving Private Ryan to the magical folksy sentiment of something like I Know Where I'm Going to the cartoonish slapstick of a Will Ferrell movie and then back to Saving Private Ryan for a bloody, depressing ending (which, FYI, is much more anti-American than anything in The Host). Even the Bollywood movies that I've seen - with their plots about terrorists and big romantic musical numbers and over-the-top action sequences - seem to have had a more coherent vision than Dongmakgol.

The Host is also kind of all over the place tonally, but the director manages to pull everything together by (a) keeping a coherent visual style and (b) tempering everything else with a sense of sympathetic, bemused irony.

My two "gripes" that aren't really gripes, but more like nitpicks:

1. Structurally, there's a slight problem in that the movie's most technical brilliant and viscerally moving sequence comes really early and though everything that comes after is still really good, that there isn't more that's also breathtaking is a bit of a let down (see also The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan).


2. This is much more personal, but my girlfriend was able to watch The Host pretty much all the way through, which means that, for me, for a horror movie, it was lacking in both the gore and scares departments. Last year's (IMHO) underrated Slither isn't as good a movie as The Host, but it's constant one-upping of the "ick" factor is more what I'm looking for from a movie about slimy mutant creatures who are trying to eat us. Also, the trailer that I saw quoted some critic comparing this to Jaws, but both Jaws and Jurassic Park are more suspenseful/scary than this.

Still, I liked it, and for those keeping score at home, currently my favorite movie of the year.

Movie Chat: Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth

It's certainly an impressive movie (although I'm getting less and less impressed with "impressive movies" since wowing an audience seems to be so easily done these days).

I had a few major problems with it, though: not just a negative "gut feeling"-type reaction, but more serious philosophical reservations about what Del Toro does (and fails to do) in the movie.

My big issue: the way the movie portrays the Fascist Captain. Del Toro isn't content to just make him a bad guy - he has to be a Truly Eeeevil Man, and, in virtually every shot that he appears in, Del Toro hits us over the head with his nastiness. And he doesn't do this with any sense of irony, let alone humor, like in The Stepfather, for example. No - the Captain is a Fascist, which seems to mean that he is subhuman, undeserving of even the most fleeting or shallow sympathetic characteristic.

This wouldn't be so bad - just a little bit lazy and cheaply melodramatic - except that Del Toro decides to add realistic, graphic violence to this humorless cartooning (most egregiously in a series of torture scenes).

I'm not a big fan of this kind of triple threat: (1) a completely Evil Bad Guy with no redeeming features, (2) a filmmaker who keeps reiterating this evilness through the least sophisticated means possible, and (3) realistic, graphic violence of the post-Saving Private Ryan variety.

Del Toro wants us to hate this character so much that we're supposed to cheer when he's finally killed and think that it's fitting that his killers refuse to honor his final request.

Some of my friends, who liked the movie a lot, defended Del Toro's handling of the Captain by arguing that the story is being told from the perspective of a little girl, who sees him as a kind of fairytale monster. I get this: Del Toro has made a movie that mixes fantasy and reality where the "real" scenes have a simplified - almost black and white - view of the world, while the fantasy scenes have more nuance and ambiguity.

I still have a big problem with this explanation: it only works if, deep down, you actually agree with the little girl's simplification - i.e. that the fascist Captain is, ultimately, sub humanly evil and the Communist partisans he is fighting are super humanly good. And, honestly, I think this is what Del Toro believes: his own view of the world seems to be as simplistic as that of his heroine's.

Let's politically recast the movie for a second, just to see how well the "from a little girl's point-of-view" reading holds up:

Imagine exactly the same movie, except set it in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The sub humanly evil Captain is a radical, Republican reconstructionist, and the super humanly good guerrillas are D.W. Griffith's romanticized Clansmen. If you would still be willing to give that movie a pass, then I guess I won't begrudge the "fairytale" defense of Del Toro's handling of the Captain.

But things are much more ambiguous. People who hold horrible political beliefs don't always act like monsters - they certainly don't act like monsters all of the time. Amon Goeth, the Nazi villain in Schindler's List, is certainly a monster, but Spielberg, unlike Del Toro, doesn't beat us over the head with how evil this character is. Spielberg's technique is much more nuanced, even if the two characters are both the definitive villains of their movies.

The Night of the Shooting Stars has an example of this kind of thing done just about perfectly: the father and son killers, who spend the movie stalking the refugees, are given one of the most wrenching and emotionally complicated death scenes in the history of movies. As evil as we perceive these characters to be, the Taviani Brothers do not let us celebrate, in any way, their deaths, but rather force us to see it as just another aspect of the obscenity of war.

It's this central failing that makes the rest of Pan's Labyrinth fall apart for me. As beautiful and magical as some of the fantasy sequences are, they don't redeem Del Toro's simplistic and brutal take on reality.

And it's because of this reaction that the movie's smaller flaws - flaws that I'd usually be willing to overlook - stick out at me. Like, why exactly do the guerrillas use a key on the lock, when that will give away the fact that they have a spy in the Captain's house? Or, why does the little girl eat the food in the banquet hall when she's been explicitly instructed (at least twice!) not to? And why does the Fawn tell her that since she ate the food she has completely failed in her quest, only to later tell her, no, wait, she still has another chance, even though she doesn't do anything in the interim to redeem herself?

This is nit-picking, but each of these problems is indicative of the essential arbitrariness of what Del Toro is up to: why do these things happen? Well, they have to happen, so he can get move his plot along and/or get his point across. (By the way, his point seems to be: Fascists are evil).

Reading back on this, I realize I've been a lot more combative here than I really like to be. After all, it's only a movie and I'm not going to lose any sleep over people liking it. (And if you're a fan of the movie, please feel free to post any kind of rebuttal/defense you'd like). But this is one of the few movies I saw this year that really pushed my buttons (in a bad way), and I'm surprised that the response to it has been so overwhelmingly positive.

Really though, my main point here isn't to make an argument against the film, but rather to dig into why it doesn't mesh with my sensibilities. I keep coming back to the feeling that the movie is just too obvious and deliberate - in terms of its relentless one note characterization of the Captain, its black and white reduction of the political situation, its steamrollering over inconsistencies in the service of the plot. I didn't feel like Del Toro made any room for the audience.

I like to think about this in terms of two kinds of surprises. We have surprises in movies themselves. I'm not just talking about "jump-out-from-behind-the-door-and-go-boo" surprises of something like The Grudge and I'm not talking about "where-the-hell-did-that-come-from" surprises like at the end of Don't Look Now. To go back to that scene from The Night of the Shooting Stars: it is surprising to me that I'd end up feeling that badly about the death of the two most despicable characters in the movie. (And it is surprising to me that the Taviani Brothers are able to pull this off!)

There's another kind of surprise, though, or rather feeling of surprise, one that isn't really "in" the movie, but the audience may be able to sense it anyway: it's the surprise of the people making the film. In other words, the sense that the process of making the film was surprising to them in some way or that they ended up in a different place from where they started. I get this sense most strongly from watching movies from Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard (early on at least), Howard Hawks, and Francois Truffaut: that the people making the movie are working through something in the same way that the audience is.

Maybe this is too metaphysical, but, for me, Pan's Labyrinth has neither of these kinds of surprises: its deliberateness seemed to suck the life out of it.

(Sean Collins seemed to like the movie a lot more than I did, but he goes into more detail about the plot holes than I did.)

Movie Chat: Monster House

Monster House

I'm not the biggest fan of these CGI animated movies (which is a nice, non-confrontational way of saying that Shrek makes my eyes bleed), so I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did. It's a fully-realized, note-perfect, nicely cast homage to Joe Dante's 1980s movies, like Gremlins and The 'burbs, set in a Suburban America somewhere between E.T.'s and A Nightmare on Elm Street's.

Still, though, by the last half of the movie, the CGI had gotten on my nerves.

Since they were making a movie that owed so much in terms of plot, characters, tone, and style to those Dante movies, I wonder why they didn't, you know, use some of the same techniques - live actors, models, puppets, with computer FX to tie everything together. While I was watching it, I couldn't help thinking that the choice to use CGI was an empty one - aesthetically, at least. I mean, I suppose that the CGI allowed them to show the monster and the "actors" in the screen at the same time without any line separating FX from "Real People", but, for me, it wasn't really worth it. There's lots of impressive moviemaking on display, but every few seconds something would happen that would drive home the point that I was watching little computer people in a little computer world. For instance, when the two kids play basketball, the bounce of the ball just seemed off somehow.

It also doesn't help that most of the scenes inside the monster house look like they could be taken out of a junior version of the Alone in the Dark video game.

It's not like this movie is aimed at little kids (it has a PG rating for scary situations, crude humor, and "brief language"), who have been trained by Pixar to respond only to shiny, flashy, loud computer graphics. If I were 12 years old, I would definitely appreciate being able to watch a flesh-and-blood Maggie Gyllenhaal in a tight, punk rock T-shirt.

Slightly more seriously, by going with computer animated actors, they lose the, um, liveliness that a living, breathing performer brings to a horror movie. With horror movies, more so than with any other kind of movie, I want to have a direct, emotional connection with the actors. That's why Jennifer Connelly is so great in a movie like Dark Water: she opens up to the camera and we can read and respond to all the subtle - and not so subtle - shifts in emotion on her face. She lets us tune into her character's vulnerability and gives us the illusion that there's actual human emotions at stake.

So my thinking here is that the decision to use CGI here is not so much a creative choice as a marketing one: it lets an otherwise conventional movie stand out from the crowd and it gives some filmmakers a chance to show off their latest toys. (Polar Express, anyone?)

Now, compare Monster House to A Scanner Darkly, where, even if it doesn't work for you, the choice to go with rotoscope animation was made for a substantive, creative reason - it's meant to get across the way that doing drugs can affect your perception of the real world.

Heck, compare Monster House to Over the Hedge, where the choice to go with animation makes sense because actual raccoons don't take direction that well.

Ilkka on Final Destination 2

I like reading Ilkka Kokkarinen's blog Sixteen Volts, mainly because his take on things is so different from mine. I feel especially out of sync with him when he writes about art and pop culture. For instance, he judges sci-fi novels in terms of the accuracy of their predictions, which I think is kind of wrong way to approach science fiction.

However, today he wrote about the movie Final Destination 2 in a way that almost makes me want to see it - I've avoided it mainly because I thought the original Final Destination (which I saw in the theater) was one of the lamest movies I've ever experienced. Anyways, here's Ilkka on FD2:

The very premise of the movie, that there is no monster in a rubber suit lurking around but the whole physical reality itself is the monster that tries to kill our main characters as impersonally as gravity pulling down a rock thrown in the air, acting teleologically but constrained to obey the laws of physics (for example, a knife can't just jump out the drawer and fly through the air to slash your throat), is absolutely brilliant. If the Matrix movies inspired books of philosophical essays, the premise of this movie should also inspire at least a few blog posts.

No matter where you run, you can't escape the fact that you are still inside the physical reality. Thus the only way to try to survive is to live in a specially constructed safehouse that doesn't contain anything that the physical reality could potentially use as a weapon. But is this really living? Add to this the excellent special effects when the death eventually catches the teens one by one, and the result is a truly excellent movie.

Anyone else feel this way about FD2? Anyone know of any other horror movies that work in a similar way?

Horror Haiku

My friend Nick has started a "Horror Haiku" blog. Appropriately enough, the entries remind me of Hideshi Hino's horror comics, even though I know Nick has never read them. (This might be a testament to the extent that Japanese Horror has thoroughly infiltrated American pop culture). Check it out.

Playing Catch-Up

When I took a break from blogging, I also cut down on my blog reading. This gave me more time to do important stuff like reading Robert Heinlein novels, playing tabletop RPGs and tinkering with RPG design, posting on message boards, and watching lots of TV shows on DVD.

Now, I'm playing catch-up with all the great writing on blogs that I've missed out on over the last few months. It's a quixotic undertaking, but I'll keep at it in the hopes that I'll find more stuff like this excellent Sean Collins post from last month. Sean is again dealing with one of his favorite topics - violence and torture as part of our arts and entertainments - and, as usual, he's sharper (not to mention less hypocritical) than most other pop culture pundits.

This time, Sean comments on Eli Roth's claims that the graphic torture scenes in Roth's movie Hostel are meant to make the audience feel guilty about the current state of world affairs (Roth specifically mentions Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina).

Sean's response is one that I wish I had come up with:

The notion that your society, your era, your government, your audience is uniquely prone to evil--a notion almost always accompanied by the sort of clean-hands finger-pointing exemplified by Roth [and others]--is to me the absolute laughable height of narcissism in pessimist's clothing; it's the art-critical equivalent of doomsday prophesying. The fact that filmmakers and critics now feel they have free rein on the subject of torture and brutality because they see our government involved in it yet apparently had little or nothing to say on the subject when it was status quo in countless other countries across the globe for years and years and years (which it still is) is exhibit A.

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That's what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn't understand the belief at all.

Well, I probably wouldn't have gone so far as Sean does here (it is the potential for terribleness that isn't unique to any time or place or culture) but I like the way Sean takes this right over the edge.

He also talks a lot about The Sopranos in this post, and what he says has helped me to get a better handle on my increasingly ambivalent feelings about this show. But that probably deserves a post of its own.