Netflix Fix -- Metropolis (1927)

How this film was made in 1927 is something that I'm truly confused by (in a less-than-literal sense), because Metropolis (1927) has such a behemoth scope and is full of so many forward-thinking themes that it'd be impossible for today's filmmakers to ever up its ante with any remake or revision. Considered one of the, if not the, most influential of all silent films, Metropolis is a film that any person in love with science fiction, or just fantasy storytelling in general, must see at least once in his/her lifetime. Which is exactly why I recently bumped it to the top of the Netflix Queue, a necessary action to rectify the sad issue of having slept on it for so damn long.




German director Fritz Lang's "masterpiece" (as its hailed by film scholars and writers alike, rightfully so) is such an artifact that its original print is long gone, but thankfully a close representation of that print has been pieced together for DVD through negatives and other crafty means. For instance, scenes lost from the original print are explained in on-screen text, often times four individual paragraphs in a row for extended chunks of missing reel. This doesn't hurt the experience, fortunately. What Lang captured was so massive that, no matter what year or under what context the film is seen, Metropolis feels like a big budget spectacle. Realize that this was conceived in 1927, though, and it's downright mindblowing. The explosions are all convincing, the finale's huge flash flood that engulfs hundreds of acting extras is flawless, and the pre-Frankenstein laboratory lightshow scenes are visually extraordinary.

Even the plot is ahead of it's then-time. Set in the year 2026, the film takes places in Metropolis, a progressive fictional city run by Joh Frederson, a wealthy leader who operates with subdued coldness rather than any unhinged tyranny. Frederson has divided the city into two factions: the slave-like workers who are forced to live underground and the upper class that gets to enjoy the fruits of Metropolis' utopian-like landscape. His son, Freder, wants to unite the two groups, though, and decides to live amongst the lowly workers. But when a revolt begins brewing within the workers' society, Frederson and a mad scientist named Rotwang intervene in pretty wild sci-fi ways. Metropolis: Rise Against the Machines would've been a fitting longer title.

Metropolis is also a haunting beast to sit with, due in no small part to its black-and-white, silent film aesthetic. Call me a bit soft, but silent films tend to creep me out more so than loud fare. No film has given me more nightmares than the FW Murnau/Max Schrek paralyzer Nosferatu (1922), and not many horror flicks can rip into the depths of my skin like Carl Dreyer's expressionist creepshow Vampyr (1932). Metropolis isn't scary in the same sense of those silent films, but Lang's movie features several images that are tough to forget. There's a Grim Reaper figure that stands alongside a lineup of minions that came out of nowhere and took Metropolis into an unexpected, momentary supernatural zone. The vacant black eyes of the cast, paired with the exaggerated acting needed to convey emotions in silent films, give the film an otherworldly quality inherent to unease, a trait used to perfection in a shot that fills the entire screen with floating, peeled-open-in-amazement eyeballs.

The lab scene (though with different music; this isn't the score heard in Lang's film):



Metropolis is two hours long (including an "Intermezzo," or intermission), but it doesn't feel that long. I'll admit, the two-hour-length was intitially intimidating. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it through a silent film of such length, only because it's been a long-ass time since I've watched a silent. In no way was I expecting the film to be as convincingly brolic in scope as it is, though, so its runtime became frivolous once the show got on the road.

It may have taken me much longer than it should have to sit down with Metropolis, free of distraction, but since when is lateness irreconcilable? Besides, I'll have plenty of time to catch up now that I'm unable to shake the film out of my brain.

Netflix Fix -- Laid to Rest (2009)

As much as I consider myself to be a real "horror movie head," I also pride myself on the fact that I'm a realist. Not jaded by the trappings of the industry, and able to separate the good from the good-because-others-say-so-and-it-was-made-by-friends-or-colleagues. I get it, though. Working at a major lifestyle magazine for five years gives you a pretty clear perspective on politics and the influence of opinion. Doesn't make it right, but it's a reality that won't adjust itself any time soon.



For months now, I've read a slew of positive pre-release-buzz about a new slasher flick called Laid to Rest, written and directed by makeup effects veteran Robert Hall. The early word waa that the film was the next great slasher flick, one that'll reinvent the wheel and breathe new life into the stagnant horror subgenre. Similar to Adam Green's Hatchet back in 2007e major difference being that Laid to Rest is a straight-to-DVD release that's devoid of rampant tongue-in-cheek humor. Hatchet, on the flipside, was given a crickets-and-tumbleweeds limited theatrical run that only keen horror heads knew about. My biggest problem with Hatchet is that the tone of the film is way too hokey. Green worried so much about keeping the self-referential/'throwback-to-sleazy-'80s-slashers vibe intact that the film becomes more comedy than horror, and sadly the jokes are rarely very funny.

Hall's effort thankfully keeps the humor to a minimum. If I want to laugh, I'll watch a damn comedy; besides, not many can execute what Edgar Wright and company pulled off so perfectly with the horror/laugher hybrid Shaun of the Dead. Laid to Rest does have another big thing in common with Hatchet, unfortunately, and that's the feeling of "totally overhyped" it left me with as the final credits rolled. Which pains me, because Laid to Rest's trailer was an ass-kicker, a hopes-elevator that "promised" some serious carnage and style to spare. Expectations were higher than Cheech & Chong, but sadly the film let me down quicker than a concluding flight simulator. All gore, no point. Weakly drawn characters, and very little scares. A scorching-hot main girl (Bobbi Sue Luther) and a cool-looking, intimidating masked killer (called Chromeskull, a slightly-goofy yet memorable tag). Random characters wander in only to be killed off within minutes, which is fine for a slasher film but only when the entire proceedings are handled well. On the whole, Laid to Rest is not.

Chromeskull



Laid to Rest, while loaded with hardcore bloodshed and dismemberment, drops the ball more times than it scores. A few sudden murders did catch me off-guard, particuarly the death of actor Jonathan Schaech thanks to a thrown jagged-knife that splits his skull open from mouth to forehead. But nailing a few stomach-churning scenes isn't all that Hall was trying to accomplish; as heard on the DVD's "Laid to Rest: Postmortem" making-of special feature, he was looking to create a nostalgic '80s-slasher-revisited film full of intriguing characters and a strong mystery (Who is this girl who woke up in a coffin? What's her big secret, and why is Chromeskull so focused on killing her?). Could've fooled me. Laid to Rest feels more like a Saw entry than anything made two decades ago. And there wasn't one point where I genuinely cared enough about Luther's character to ponder her true identity. I'm glad I didn't, too, because the "reveal" that Hall's script cooked up is the lamest. "That's it?!" material. A tepid, forgettable ending.

It's a shame, because the moments that work in Laid to Rest show that Hall is more than capable with raw horror. Hopefully, he'll give the genre another try sooner than later and capitalize on the potential seen here.



As for this flick sparking the resurgence of the slasher genre.....mission failed. Isn't it sad that the best example of that subgenre in recent memory is Eli Roth's fake Thanksgiving trailer seen in Grindhouse? Barely two minutes long, yet Roth encapsulated all of the '80s-mood that these other full-lengths features can't completely manage. If Roth actually does make a feature-length Thanksgiving, that could be the great modern-day slasher movie that we've all been waiting for. Well, at least that I've been awaiting.

Bonus Thought: How about today's filmmakers concentrate on simply making a good slasher flick, rather than obsessing over this unnecessary need to reinstate the '80s? It's becoming such a crutch for otherwise-marginal films. Something's got to give.

In appreciation of Lucky McKee's May.....

It's not often that a horror film made within the last ten years blows me away solely with its originality, but that's exactly what Lucky McKee's May (2002) has done. May is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a film unfairly hurt by the prejudice-ready trappings of its central plot. Awkward outcast female yearns for social acceptance, falls for a guy, gets rejected, flies off the deep end, and breaks loose some gruesome hell. At first, the film feels like "The Post-College Adventures of Stephen King's Carrie." But McKee has several tricks up his sleeve here, the most important of which being the patience to develop his May character to the hilt before unleashing her psychotic side. By the time her inner darkness is exposed, the character totally charmed my socks off with her goth-chick cuteness and compelling weirdness. Even as she sliced and diced, I was right there with her, cheering her on and hoping she'd emerge alive and happy.

This being an independent horror film devoid of big studio involvement and a need to please the masses, that of course doesn't happen. May works so well because nothing that happens from the 45-minute mark forward is expected. McKee consistently surprised me with May's plot turns and sadistic derailment, made all the more enjoyable thanks to a stellar lead performance from otherwise-unknown actress Angela Bettis, who owns this film from Fade In to Fade Out. Bettis handles a rollercoaster of a role with constant command, making May's pleasant moments seem believably sweet and her darkest actions feel completely warranted.

The way McKee develops the character, May comes from a friendless childhood that resulted from a terribly-lazy eye. Her sluggish eyeball gave her douchebag kiddie peers ample fodder to ridicule May, and she ran the course of life with no friends or companions other than a creepy white-faced doll that her mom handmade for her, which she calls "Suzy." Only, Suzy talks to May (the chick is crazy, you dig?) and tells her what to do in certain situations, most consequential being the intimate moments May shares with her crush and first-ever suitor, Adam (played by Jeremy Sisto, who you'd know from Clueless and Wrong Turn).




I don't want to spoil the surprises that May's story has in store, so seek this one out to see where tragic outcast May's tale goes. Trust me---it's not where you'd suspect, and it'll make you squirm and sympathize in equal measure. For the first hour, May is in no way a horror film; it's a dark, dramatic character study of a girl lacking in any social skills whatsoever. So much so that every encounter she has, whether it be with Adam or a group of blind children she volunteers to look after, left me feeling uneasy, unsure of what she'd do at any given second. I couldn't trust the character, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like her.

May is Snicker-thick with moments that payoff beautifully by story's end. As the resolution was unfolding, I found myself clicking back to small details packed within past scenes, thinking "Oh shit!" as loose ends tied themselves. Earlier moments that felt random all began to make crystal-clear sense. McKee's script turns out to be one that required much fine-tuning. Like a giant puzzle that's constantly falling into place without the viewer ever realizing it until the final frames.

Bonus points go to McKee and May for utilizing a young Anna Faris tons of scenery to chew on. Playing a promiscuous lesbian co-worker of May's who has a big thing for our heroine, Faris is a spark plug here, off-setting the film's thick grimness with her slutty flirtations and naive airhead ways. Oh, and Faris is hotter than ever here. Case in point:




If you've ever felt closed off from the cool kids, or simply unable to establish quality friendships, May will definitely strike a chord. You'll have to clutch your stomach and endure the endgame carnage, all played with a nice touch of realism rather than any Grand Guignol, but it's well worth the gag reflex. Going into the film, I wasn't expecting to love May as much as I now do. A slew of positive horror-writer reviews and McKee's commendable adaptation of Jack Ketchum's novel The Lost were all I had as reasons to watch on a quiet Friday evening. In the end, though, May and her poetic descent into the macabre left me feeling a mess of emotions. The most prominent being "empathy."

For a horror flick, that's a job well done.

Rashomon, or the beginning of my Kurosawa phase

Seriously, how bad was last year's Vantage Point? What a case of cinematic blue balls. Easily one of 2008's biggest letdowns on my end, a film that first surfaced with a live-wire, eye-opener of a trailer but then materialized with uneve acting, a muddled script, and an irritating creative decision to rewind the tape every time the perspective changed between characters. The first time the film went all fast-paced backward, I cringed but figured that Pete Travis, the director, wouldn't be misguided enough to do it again. But then it happened again, and again, and then once more, and then about three more times. Until the audience in my theater began laughing and/or sighing in disbelief at each "rewind." Didn't help that Matthew Fox turned in a painfully bad performance, Dennis Quaid just looked one-note pissed the entire time, and cutie Zoe Saldana was killed off in the first ten minutes.

Be gone, Vantage Point. Be gone.



Now having finally watched iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's awesome Rashomon (1950), I've seen what Travis and company were admirably trying to do but failed on all fronts. Really, Rashomon makes me hate Vantage Point even more. It's not exactly fair, though, to compare the two films; it's like trying to draw a parallel between Robert Wise's The Haunting and The Haunting in Connecticut. Just plain ridiculous. Rashomon is one of the finest, most influential films ever made, so Vantage Point never stood a chance, anyway.

The same narrative trick is attempted in both----trying to solve a crime by showing the event through the eyes of multiple characters, only to reveal that "truth" is merely in the eye of the beholder. One of the many reasons that Rashomon so greatly pulls this storytelling okie-doke off is that the actual truth is never given. All we're left with is four vastly different accounts of a rape/murder in the woods. The final version could be regarded as the most reliable, only because it's from an objective witness with no ties to the bandit, the rape victim, and her now-dead husband. Or, does he? The witness turns out to have some unexpected stake in the case, which blurs the lines of reality even further, and leaves Rashomon's central verdict open-ended as the Fade Out comes.

It's pretty astonishing to think that Kurosawa executed such a groundbreaking, twisty tale nearly 60 years ago. Truly light years ahead of his time with this. Early on, I thought I was in for a murder mystery, but then the killer's identity is confessed by the deviant himself, which threw my frame-of-mind off the rails. So he's the killer then? So what else is left to figure out? What a fool I was to think that. As soon as the hysterical rape victim begins offering her recollection to the courthouse, I started asking her questions, but in my head. "Why are you so upset when the bandit just told us that you were fierce and heroic?" A wonderful little device used by Kurosawa here came into the light at this moment---I realized that we're never going to see the interrogator, only the defendants. As if they're speaking directly to the viewer. Answering our questions, confusing our thoughts with each changing speaker. Truth is totally subjective, and it changes through small yet thematically large details with each new defendant.



Rashomon is a film that I can't recommend enough. For those partial to martial arts and fight scenes, you get some pretty badass sword fighting. If you're a movie-watcher such as myself who loves a good wildly-structured headscratcher, it's tops. But ultimately, it's worth seeing just off of GP alone. You'd be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who won't admit to being heavily influenced by not only Rashomon, but Akira Kurosawa himself.

I may go watch it again now. Or tomorrow, definitely. Hell, the film even managed to creep me out quite a bit thanks to an eerie testimonial from a freaky-deeky female medium giving the murder victim's side of the story. And I wasn't expecting this one to give me any willies at all. Many so-called "horror legends" can't even do that.

A Night with Vinyan; A Buck-Shot to the Senses

I wouldn't call it a beautiful mind exactly. More like a grotesquely-attractive one. A thoughtbox that has twice now managed to leave me in a slightly comatose state after being subjected to its creative, visual, and narrative sides, all at once, twice now. The guy has only made two films, but both shatter all conventional genre tricks, taking their time to stack up the dread and astonished confusion to Jenga Champion heights.

The fella's name is Fabrice Du Welz, a Belgian filmmaker, and I've finally seen his sophomore head-raper Vinyan, after nearly a year's worth of anticipation.


Fabrice Du Welz

After I watched his debut, Calvaire (The Ordeal), early on in my Netflix lifespan, I couldn't shake the cold, distant-from-reality feeling the film left me with. Some idiot writers have dubbed Calvaire the "Gay Chainsaw Massacre," due to its sporadic homo-psychotic scenes and the plot's skeletal cloning of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While those jackasses trivialized it into a heap of puns, I fell right in Calvaire's existential malarchy trap, knees deep and loving every fucked-up second. At not one point did Du Welz take an expected plot turn, stage a seen-that-before scene. Even when the images made no sense and felt bizarre simply for bizarre's cheap sake, I couldn't help but love the shit. Like this random folk dance sequence, which I'm sure is meant to show the audience that the townsfolk in Calvaire aren't the most trustworthy, but really just comes off as some inexplicable hypnosis. You'll either laugh at the absurdity or be left in unease. Myself, a fascinating mixture of both:



Du Welz won me over with Calvaire, no doubt, so once word spread that the writer-director's next one, Vinyan, is a stylistic leap forward, I instantly become enthralled with the chance of some day soon seeing it. Of course, the film played well at the film festival circuit last year and had heads talking due to its eccentricity and holy-shit final act, which naturally meant it would linger in release purgatory before hitting DVD shelves with zero fanfare. Other than to those such as myself who put ourselves in "the know." All I had to work with was this mesmerizing underwater opening credit sequence, a "Huh" slice of coolness that leaves me with the same bewilderment that the opening credits of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible does:




So what did I get out of Vinyan? A viewing experience that made that of Calvaire seem only satisfactory. Where to begin? With the film's plot, perhaps: Paul and Jeanne (actors Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart, both quietly dynamic here) are on a vacation near Burma when they come across a tourist video that features a little jungle-living kid that Jeanne swears is their son Joshua, who was lost at sea during the 2004 tsunami and presumed dead. After some debate, Jeanne wins, and the couple doles out their entire life savings to hop on a sketchy boat to the Thai-Burmese border, where the video was shot. As the trip continues into a downward spiral of dead-ends and growing bleakness, the boat's guide gets lost and docks on a nondescript, dark, creepy isle full of silent little naked kids covered in hardened mud and preying around the jungle in stalker-mode.

The little bastards look like children straight out of a National Geographic issue guest-edited by the team from Fangoria. And once the couple's boat becomes off-course and stranded, Vinyan turns into Apocalypse Now crossbred with Who Can Kill A Child? scripted and directed while on an acid trip. That's a seriously twisted and potent elixir, and I'm not fibbing when I say that the final 15 minutes of Vinyan had me paralyzed to my couch. The paralysis first kicked in during this dream sequence that Jeanne has; she's been mentally deteriorating throughout the film, and by the time they're stuck on the tribal island, aka the Fifth Circle of Earthbound Hell, she's totally gone. A walking slab of jelly, only motivated by the sad, tragic hope of finding her obviously-dead son. In this dream, she's surrounded by a group of kids wearing the same red shirt her son wore on the day he was taken by the tsunami wave. Only, the kids' faces are all stretched-out and mask-like, and the camera zooms sideways and in-and-out rapidly as faint screaming sounds (the same ones heard at the tail-end of that above Vinyan opening credits). It's unsettling along the lines of that nightmarish Aphex Twin video for "Come to Daddy." Heebie jeebie central.




Vinyan isn't a film I'd honestly recommend to too many people. I'll be delicately picking and choosing who gets the "You should really watch this" heads-up. If your attention span is that of a pencil and a simple growling stomach makes you stand up and leave the room while a DVD is playing, do yourself a favor and stay the fuck away from this one. It's not meant for you; go watch The Love Guru or something. Du Welz moves this thing along at a snail's pace, but in a good way. I never lost interest, and was rewarded by Vinyan's haunting final act, but the only-marginally-patient watcher will most likely tune out or get bored by the 20-minute mark. If so, I'm sorry. You can't win them all. Only people like me who love this kind of bizarre shit. And also, lovers of intense, stark, gorgeous cinematography and some of the best jungle scenery presentation since Francis Ford Coppola and the already-referenced Apocalypse Now.

It takes some balls and some truly disturbed sensibilities to dream up and then so strongly execute Vinyan's final 15 minutes. But this dude Du Welz has done it rather convincingly. I'd really love to see him get the green-light for an American studio film, just to witness either his un-compromise or disappointing descent into studio politic bend-over bulldonkey. Because there's no way in Hell that he'd get away with making a film such as Vinyan on an American studio's watch.

Unfiltered DVD releases of international cinema, bless y'all.

Vinyan trailer (that actually makes the film seem much more accessible than it is, believe me. Don't be fooled, this is only to give a sharper feel for the film):

Netflix Fix -- And Soon The Darkness (1970)

Just the other day, a friend and I were talking about the possibility of ever taking some kind of solo European vacation. One of those trips where its person, alone, exploring a far-off country. Full of self-discovery, adventure, intrigue. But then also a true test of one's survival skills, and street smarts. Personally, the idea of a one-man vacay overseas is rather compelling, though I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever pull the trigger and actually take one. Besides, I've seen enough movies to know how susceptible an American tourist in unfamiliar terrain. The old "fish out of water" plot device is one of the most abused and overused tricks in the thriller genre, with "good" flicks such as Hostel far outweighing the forgettable misfires, like, say, Turistas (anybody?).

And those are just a couple of the recent examples. Tomorrow, in fact, I'll finally get to watch Fabrice Du Welz' Vinyan on trusty DVD, and that's yet another entry into this subgenre. And Soon The Darkness, a largely looked-over British potboiler made back in 1970 by director Robert Fuest, has set the bar for Vinyan Mary-Jane-high.


Loving this poster. Looks a lot like that old Last House on the Left one I've always thought was/is top quality.

A few weeks back, news surfaced of an in-development remake of And Soon The Darkness, starring two starlet-apples in my eye, Amber Heard (Pineapple Express) and Odette Yustman (Cloverfield, The Unborn). The notion of remaking an obscure British film with a pair of America's hottest young actresses immediately got me going; I'd much rather see a little-known foreign throwback get the recognition over yet another iconic slasher series from here in the states.

Prior to the news of an Amber Heard/Odette Yustman sexy sandwich, I'd never heard of the original And Soon The Darkness, so the film instantly hopped into my Netflix. Finally came around to watching it late last night, and I'm glad to opine that its one hell of smart, suspenseful little number. Plays up all of the necessary "fish out of water" puzzle pieces to effective levels of unease.

Cathy (actress Michele Dotrice) and Jane (Pamela Franklin)

....and now, Amber Heard and Odette Yustman. Quite a difference, eh?


The story centers around Jane, a cute, short-haired, innocent-minded college-age tourist from London who has just seen her bicycling trip across France take a mischievous turn. After a verbal scuffle with her wilder, blonde bombshell of a best friend, and travel partner, Cathy, Jane rode off in protest, leaving Cathy alone near woods on the side of a road. But when Jane goes back to check on her friend, Cathy is gone. This leads to an investigation complete with shady strangers giving Jane prolonged stares and speaking in foreign languages that she frustratingly can't understand, and an unearthed murder mystery that brings with it eerie similarities with Cathy.


Now that's how you cut together a trailer.

The film's script (written by fellas named Brian Clemens and Terry Nation) is the real MVP here, a tightly-structured pressure cooker that loves fucking with the audience. His strongest constant-okie-doke is a character named Paul, a suave Frenchman that catches Cathy's eye intitially but then begins to look more sinister by the second. His motives remain unclear, difficult to pin down. It doesn't help the viewer's private-eye side that Fuest consistently flips our perceptions of Paul. We're made to believe that he's taken to Jane out of sympathy, but when he drives near the spot where Cathy disappeared on his motorbike, we see tire tracks next a pair of Cathy's missing panties. Instant connection made. And then later Paul reveals himself to be a detective, yet the head of the local police department claims to have no idea who Paul is moments later.

If And Soon The Darkness was simply a clever whodunit mystery, I would've been happy enough. But Fuest shows flashes of Alfred Hitchcock here that give the film a nice slice of nail-chomping atmosphere, amplifying the isolation of a scared, confused non-local impressively. The subtle creeps, all around. Two scenes in particular achieve a pretty strong anxiety: First, the last time we see Cathy before Jane's investigation begins; as she wakes up alongside the road from leaves rustling, Cathy cautiously begins to pack her belongings and get ready to ride and find her friend, but Fuest uses nifty sight tricks (a pair of panties there one second and gone the next; the sound of spinning bike-tire wheels; switching the camera's point-of-view to inside the bushes peering out at Cathy) to his advantage, and the end product is a damn tense sequence with little sound. Secondly, a scene near the film's end that finds Jane hiding in the closet of a trailer truck as the suspected villain snoops around; its a standard cat-and-mouse setup, but then we're hit with a total "Oh shit!" jump scare that is both revelatory and shock city.

File And Soon The Darkness under "Awesomely Pleasant Surprises." I went into this Netflix Fix hoping to merely meet a personal quota, seeing a film that the remake of which has become an anticipation-item of mine. I wasn't expecting to love this humble British flick as much as I now do. Looks like Amber Heard, Odette Yustman, and who-the-fuck-is-he director Marcos Efron have their work cut out for them. The Heard/Yustman And Soon The Darkness was honestly little more than a hormone-driven must-see, but now I'll be watching with a heavy "They better not fuck this up" microscope.

It's already been said that the remake will relocate the setting from France to Argentina, for whatever that's worth. Now, how about explaining what the hell the title And Soon The Darkness means exactly? The original takes place entirely during the daytime, and the impending nightfall is never referenced in any sort of menacing way, so what gives? It's an awesome title for a film, though. Just wondering, "Why?"

Childlike Insanity, A Disney-ish Road to Hell

I've been racking my brain for the past hour, trying to think of a film that depicts the descent into madness with more verve and imagination than Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994), and I'm failing miserably. Admitting defeat now. My watching this one has been in the making for years now, evolving from innocent thoughts of "I'd like to check that out, sounds interesting," to repeat "not in stock" letdowns at Blockbuster, to, most recently, a "very long wait" status on Netflix.



Finally, by some divine hands reaching down into my Queue and lighting fire into the DVD's donut-hole-center, Heavenly Creatures arrived in my mailbox the other day. This was the rare instance of me going into a movie with virtually zero prior knowledge or spoilers read. All I knew was that Jackson co-wrote the script after researching the hell out of a 1954 murder case out in New Zealand, in which two teenage girls killed the one girl's mother but were soon captured after the daughter's diaries were discovered. What I didn't know was that the two girls, Pauline (middle name Yvonne, which she's frequently called) and Juliet (played by Kate Winslet, in her feature film debut) , shared a lesbian love that was rooted in deeply disturbed delusions, heightened through a fairy tale novel they were dreaming up together. Peter Jackson, who had previously proven himself a master of over-the-top gore spectacles with flicks such as 1994's Dead Alive, used Heavenly Creatures as a creative departure of sorts---a slick choice of subject, too, since this film does include a few scenes of carnage, and an overall sense of growing disturbia that Jackson plays like a colorful toy.

Watching Heavenly Creatures, you can see the seeds being planted for Jackson's eventual Lord of the Rings-era excellence. Particularly in two sequences: the first, a daring, unique tracking shot through a sand castle, with the camera zooming through the sandy corridors and up the staircases at a dreamlike clip; and especially in scenes where the girls daydream of prancing around with the mythical characters of their novel, medieval power-players depicted in life-size clay form in Jackson's eyes. Rarely has losing one's mind felt as innocently wonderous as it does here. As if it's Laurel Hardy's March of the Wooden Soldiers (a childhood holiday favorite of mine). This one comes during Pauline/Yvonne's first sexual experience:




The most impressive aspect of this film, however, falls more into the writing department than solely directing. On paper, this story most likely reads as an international equivalent to something along the lines of Harmony Korine's Bully, another "escalating revenge plot" based-on-true-events narrative. Bully took a much more straightforward, bleak approach to its rising homicidal tendencies; Heavenly Creatures, on the other hand, basks in the---mostly in Yvonne's unhappy head--- are presented as joyous, transcendent forms of escapism. Playful, even. As the story progresses, though, and the murder plan starts to show itself, Jackson slowly pulls back from the fun-side and embraces the darkness. It's so subtle how he does it. Until the final 15 minutes, it's invisibly handled. Only when the girls go off on a day-trip with Yvonne's mother does Jackson show his death-in-all-its-horror card.



The focus on expanding insanity can also be seen as an ironic counterpoint to the age-old, Proposition 8-related idea that homosexuality goes hand in hand with madness. Total bullshit, of course, but a discussion that Jackson comments on with a firsthand sense of objectivity. Heavenly Creatures seems to agree with the anti-homosexuality prosecution whenever the girls' parents take centerstage, but then switches back to defending such a sexual choice through euphoric exchanges between the female leads. It's an interesting back-and-forth, one that is up for debate (if anybody out there has seen this film and is down to chat).

I'd love to describe the entire final sequence in all its blindsiding force, but I'd rather allow others to check the film out for themselves and feel similarly pistol-whipped from their closed-eye's side. Just know that Heavenly Creatures is one of the most peculiar, fascinating, and creatively diesel studies of madness that I've seen. Even inspirational in many ways, as well as motivational, but I won't get into the reasons as to why here, now. Saving that for later. Jackson's best film (in my opinion, this one is better than the Lord of the Rings series, but that's a matter of preference) shows that pitch-black issues can be covered in shiny cloth and still maintain the integrity. Well done, sir. Well done.



I'm now even more intrigued to see Jackson's upcoming The Lovely Bones adaptation; Heavenly Creatures is about the closest piece of evidence available that the man is capable of bring Alice Sebold's equal parts melancholy and hopeful book to life. I'm ready. Bring it on.

Dear Matt: A Letter to a Friend from a Friend

Just reread that last post. This one right here is the definition of a much more "sober" state-of-mind.

Offering thoughts that even blink at a "review" about something like Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father seems wrong. Unfair. Foolish. High-horse douchebaggery. How can any critic/writer ponder the faults of a documentary that's totally rooted in the filmmaker's personal tragedy, constructed from a brutally heartfelt place, and intended for a grieving family member? Fuck out of here. All you should ever do with something like this film is experience it and allow it to move you in ways that its balance of pain and love could only execute.



Fortunately for the critical world's sake, though, Dear Zachary has received universal acclaim and adoration. I'd read about the flick all of last year, but was never able to check it out until today, courtesy of trusty Netflix. And wow, I lost count as to how many times I was on the verge of tears. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne pulls off such a well-rounded, flawless study of a beloved friend and the aftermath of his murder at the hands of a mentally-unstable older-lady lover that you leave the flick with a "I feel like I now actually know this Andrew Bagby fella, and what a great guy he was" sensation. Kuenne travels cross country and up into Newfoundland to interview practically every person Bagby came into contact with throughout his 28-year life, and through these candid, fearless sitdowns I immediately realized just how cherished he was by everybody in his life.

And then, the way Kuenne shifts the tone from happy retrospective to a dread-soaked murder recount is so sudden, so effective. I'm opting not to dissect Dear Zachary here, simply because I think it's a film that deserves to be seen firsthand, rather than relayed from my eyes.



While watching, I was reminded of something that happened to me back after my college graduation. One of the top five most amazing things that anybody has ever done for me, and easily the greatest graduation gift a dude could ask for. I'm not currently in the mood to write the page into a tizzy with an all-encompassing "college experience" account, though, so I'll just drop you into the days surrounding graduation from St. John's University, out in Jamaica, Queens, which I really do miss a bunch. When I look back on that four-year saga, there are many people who stand out for good reasons---friends I've sadly lost touch with, friends I'm still close with, and friends I wish I could've gotten to know more.

The one person who truly left her mark, however, was Ms. Day (which I'll keep referring to her here as, to keep identities somewhat disclosed to those who don't who I'm talking about). Nearly three years of some the biggest heartbreaks I've ever experience. Some of the closest feelings to "love" that I've ever been met with. Some of the toughest life-changing, eye-opening happenings I'll ever endure. I wouldn't take back or change a thing, though. She and I grew up so much together that all of the good and bad feels necessary to this day. Lessons ranging from racial acceptance and awareness to basic dating-ritual rights and wrongs were mutually absorbed. It was a hell of a relationship.


Ms. Day isn't in this pic, but it's still fitting. SJU, circa 2004.

The "She's truly something special" deal was sealed the moment she gave me my graduation gift: my very own "Matt DVD," which is this documentary-styled short film she and one of our on-campus co-workers put together by interviewing a slew of my closest friends and associates at St. John's. Asking each person all about me, capturing their kindest words and funniest memories. Due to time constraints and the general flakiness of mankind, they weren't able to interview everybody that mattered to me, but I'd say they managed to compile an impressive 70%.

The first time I watched the Matt DVD, I actually shed a few tears. Facial raindrops. One thing about myself that I hardly ever share with people is just how insecure and self-conscious I can be, a truth that has recently faded away piece by piece thanks to my successess and realizations of just how fortunate I am. But back in college, shit wasn't as sweet. Nowhere near. I can specifically recall times when I'd cry alone in my room, asking myself What was wrong with me? Why is it so difficult to look in a mirror? So to have somebody go through the efforts to make a multi-person testimonial in my honor was mind-blowing. Unbelievable. Therapeutic. Amazing. Life-changing (there it is again). I'd never realized that people at SJU really fucked with me on a respect-level. Heads who you would've considered to be the "big men on campus," or the "ladykillers," and even the "hot chicks."



I'm confident in saying that the Matt DVD was my first real step toward self-acceptance, and I have Ms. Day to thank for that.

Time to time, I toss the Matt DVD back into my DVD player and go back to Queens, in spirit. People looked so much younger. Things were much more innocent. I just finished watching it again, promptly as Dear Zachary came to its conclusion, and that knot in my throat, the jiggling of the eyelids returned. The Matt DVD is completely positive, and in no way on par with Dear Zachary's profound impact. But in a way, the two "documentaries" are kindred entities. Both were made out of love and appreciation, and both are intended to serve as letters to their focal subject(s).

And both do chin-ups on my heart.

Netflix Fix -- The Panic In Needle Park (1971)

As on-the-surface and/or obvious as this may sound, I'm so infinitely happy that I've never had the urge to fuss around with hard drugs. I've kicked it with Mary Jane a few times, granted, but I'm talking the truly-damaging junk. The hard white. Crack attacks. The such. One part "having hung around a solid group of straight-and-narrow" friends and another dose "having common sense," my drug-free life has been a good one, and the mere thought of what a drug-happy existence could be like scares the piss out of my sack. Nothing going right, family hating me and crying at my sight. Not being able to be around Gianna and my man Nick, probably stealing paper from my pops in order to score. In some fucked-up alternate Twilight Zone, it'd be the "Strung Out In a Desolate Modern Wasteland" episode, based on true events.



Having recently seen The Panic In Needle Park in its entirety, I can't help but revel in my own no-drugs world. What a bleak, road-to-nowhere existence that its two protagonists, Bobby (played by a young Al Pacino, in his breakout performance) and Helen (played by Kitty Winn, a phenomenal actress who I can't seem to place from any other films without IMDB's assistance), trap themselves within. The setting for such a hellhole being Manhattan's Upper West Side, W.72nd and Broadway, known back in the '70s as "Needle Park" by its large heroin addict population. The Panic In Needle Park is, essentially, a drug ballad, a love story following two lost souls in search of an exit that they can only seem to navigate while strung out. Through a mutual friend, Helen, a painter from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, meets Bobby, a degenerate ex-con/heroin addict going nowhere in life yet getting by on basic sweet-talk. They quickly fall in love, and we ride third-seat as their lives disintegrate into deeper fixes, prostitution, snitching, jailtime, and overdoses.



Not exactly a romance to watch any time near Valentine's Day. Shot in grainy, almost-documentary-like fashion and using no underlying soundtrack, The Panic In Needle Park is brutally frank. Raw like ground chuck. Visceral without trying hard at all. The scenes where the camera closes in on arms' veins being injected with the heroin are hard to sit through, since they look painfully authentic. Figures, then, that, after some research, I've learned that the director, Jerry Schatzberg, reportledly cast 'actual' heroin "Fuck no" if it were today, but considering that this was a no-dollars-spent indie made in 1971 it could've been possible.



The voyeuristic feeling given off here is one amazing thing, but the acting delivered by the two leads is something else entirely. No wonder Pacino went on to snag some meaty roles back in the mid-1970s---he's dynamite here. Like he's not even "acting," but being himself in front of some dude with a camera. Not saying that the guy was a heroin addict (as far I know), though; he's just so believable in Bobby's back-and-forth from sympathetic and loving to animalistic and cunning. In one of Pacino's best moments here, Bobby learns that Helen (who he plans on marrying) was having sex for drugs while he was away on a brief prison stint. The ravenous force that he confronts her with is rough enough to leave Tony Montana shaking.

And then there's Kitty Winn, who, again, never even existed in my "mental actress rolodex" until The Panic In Needle Park's opening credits rolled, and I haven't the foggiest as to why. She's even more unforgettable than Pacino here, in my opinion, and that's saying a bucketful. Before Helen submits to the drugs all around her, she's a clean, innocent, lonely dreamer clinging to the affections that Bobby, and only Bobby, shows. During this portion of the character's development, Winn had me wishing I could meet such a cute ride-or-die chick, a girl able to look past a man's crystal clear faults and focus on her love for dude. Of course, at her own peril, which this film never lets Helen get away with, at all. Once she's gotten her first fix, Helen becomes even more erratic and unstable than Bobby, and its in this latter section that Winn had me wondering if she'd received an Oscar nod for this performance (she didn't, though she did rightfully win Best Actress at '71's Cannes Film Festival).



One scene where Winn really broke my heart was also one that was a bit tough to watch for a dog lover such as myself. Deep into the story, when both Bobby and Helen routinely "get off" on their fix of choice, there's a momentary lapse of stupidity, and they flirt with the idea of living a better, wiser life. Their first step is to buy a cute puppy, which Bobby names "Rocky." On their way home from getting Rocky, they're on a ferry, petting the new dog and generally feeling good. Dumbass Bobby, unfortunately, forces Helen to get high with him in the men's bathroom, during which she leaves Rocky out on the wing of the ferry. As Helen stumbles out of the shitter higher than a kite riding wind, she sees Rocky run off the edge of the ferry, into a choppy water grave. Tears flow, disbelief sets in, and sadness cracks through a drug-clouded mind. It's a small scene within the film's larger context, but it totally wiped me out.

Dog scene included in this Youtube-available portion, if you want to test your heart's stamina with it:


The Panic In Needle Park is easily right up there next to films like Requiem for a Dream in the "watch this if you're ever tempted to start down a drug path, you weak-minded fool." It wouldn't be too risky of a guess to say that filmmakers hailing from New York City must love this flick; without even trying, it drops you smack-dab in the heart of Manhattan. I wasn't even a thought in Anne Barone's head back in 1971, so I can't say that The Panic In Needle Park is an "accurate depiction of NYC at that time." I can say, though, that the film felt totally real in relation to the NYC of 2003-and-beyond that I do know firsthand. Which is quite a testament to director Schatzberg's work here.

Before closing.....I can't help but wish I could chat with We Own The Night's writer/director James Gray about this flick. There's a scene here that has Pacino's Bobby acting as a spectator in an apartment's living room "cocaine factory," and like the similar moment in We Own The Night, its a quiet, paranoid nervewracker. Almost as if Gray directly lifted it for his own film nearly 20-some-odd years later.

Netflix Fix -- Nightmare City (1983)

I've yet to actually watch this one, plan on giving it a go later tonight. But I can already tell that analysis will be futile, serious and/or comical musings obsolete. This one is pure, trashy-tasting cheese, in the strictest sense. All I know about Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is that its structure gives the impression that Robert Rodriguez used it as one his many influenes while conceptualizing Planet Terror, and that its a mutant-zombie flick that includes some of the worst makeup effects imaginable.

Something to do with a news reporter tracking a sudden mutant-zombie apocalypse, one that leaves its victims-turned-assailants' faces into spreads of boils, zits, fungi, and Spencers'-gag-quality Halloween accessories. And these creeps are real perverts, copping feels on sexy ladies before slicing their nipples off, sometimes even licking a breast or two for kicks. Yeah, it's that kind of movie.

At the very least, I'm hoping for some cheap laughs and good times. Anything resembling a "good film" will probably send me into shock, but I need not worry. Just check this clip out, it pretty much sets the stage as convincingly as any scene could:



Should come as no surprise that Quentin Tarantino seems to be a fan. One of the characters in Inglourious Basterds is named "Hugo Stiglitz," also the name of Nightmare's City lead actor. Some nerd trivia for that ass, free of cost.

Netflix Fix -- Inferno (1980)

You know a film is pretty awesome when even after your third time seeing it you still can't figure out what in the hell is exactly going on. Well, at least I know it's awe-to-the-you-know-what. Inferno, a sequel of sorts to Dario Argento's could-be-a-horror-masterpiece Suspiria, falls splat in the center of that category. As far as I can tell, and realize that this is the same explanation I mustered after my first time seeing it years back, the second Mother, "Mater Tenebrarum," doesn't want any of these too-curious New Yorkers to discover her, and she's hellbent on slaughtering them in some truly stunning ways.

Such as this, which happens early on and too-quickly concludes the screen time of one Eleonora Giorgi, who is dynamite to look at and actually gives this character a nice weight of anxiety (sorry about the Italian language....it's all I could scrounge up). Something tells me that Brian Bertino, the man behind last year's great The Strangers, was influenced by this scene; it's all in the eerie, off-putting record skips:


Beware the Following Geek-Out (Any Ladies Reading This....Please Don't Hold This Knowledge Against Me): Oh, yeah, "There's more than one Mother to warrant calling this one the second?" the unseasoned Argento/horror head may ask. Basically, Argento has arched three of his flicks around a mythology known as The Three Mothers, three witches living in a trio of locations: Mater Suspiriorium, "The Mother of Sighs" and formally named Helen Markos (seen decrepit in 1977's Suspiria), lives in Germany; Mater Lachrimarum (who shows up in last year's so-bad-it's-kinda-good Mother of Tears and is a true hottie, evil or not) lives in Rome; and this film's Mater Tenebrarum, "The Mother of Shadows," lives in New York. Yes, I'm a huge nerd for knowing this, but any self-respecting horror lover should. Wanna fight about it?

The thing is, this was all so much easier to follow in Suspiria, the best of the trilogy by far stretches. The mythology wasn't airtight in that one either, but at least I only scratch my head for a few seconds; here, in Inferno, however, whatever fingernails I have left from not biting them off completely end up dull and edgeless as a result of the incoherent narrative. If there's one thing I never turn on an Argento film for, though, it's a storyline that makes total sense, since his earlier films all looked absolutely magnificent and not many filmmakers can stage a murder scene as fluidly and eye-poppingly as my boy Dario. In some ways, I hold Inferno up in the same league as David Lynch's films---the type of movie-watching that never even-partially exposes its true thread but never lessens its vice grip on my attention.

Oddly, my favorite moment in Inferno is one where the character manages to survive a run-in with the Mother. The film's opening stretch follows the poet sister as she first investigates the cellar of the apartment building, believing in this Three Mothers story and wanting to see for herself just who hides out "beneath the soles of her shoes." Turns out, the cellar is flooded, and she, being a dumbass, drops her keys into a watery hole in the floor. Naturally, she jumps in to retrieve the keys, and the underwater sequence that follows is pitch-perfect in its hallucinatory creepy.



Yet, so many inquiries remain: Why are there so many damn cats running around this apartment building, and why is that old dude on the crutches drowning a sack full of the felines? Why isn't there at least one sympathetic, even-partially-developed character for me to root for? How fake is the crutches-guy's "accidental" fall into the water? Whoops, my ass cheek. Did Argento write this script by simply designin the many elaborate death moments and then just add a few connecting scenes of dialogue and boredom while he was on the can? And finally, do we really understand why Mater Tenebrarum is even bothering with such a lame crew of intruders?

How does Mater Tenebrarum magically travel to Rome in a matter of minutes to kill the lifeless, cardboard male protagonist's sexy-poet sister? Fuck if I know. You could leave it at "She's a f'n supernatural demon witch, so she can do whatever her cold heart pleases," but still, I would've appreciated even an attempt to explain. Nevermind, ultimately, because what results from this inexplicable location jumping is this murder-set-piece, which is stellar:



Oh, and I can't let this one slip by: why does crutches-guy inform himself that "Rats are eating me alive!" when nobody is around and, yes, rats are eating him alive. Meaningless, an answer is, because the scene as a whole rocks harder than Pantera, especially when the random deli butcher runs over and drives a meat-clever into dude's neck.

So many questions, so little reason to truthfully want, or need, answers. Inferno is the most nonsensical script that Dario Argento ever scribed. Zero sense is made. The skeletal costume worn by Mater Tenebrarum looks like some $50Halloween get-up you could buy at Ken's Magic Shop., and the ending confrontation between the Mother and our "hero" very anti-climactic. If not for the plethora of gorgeous-looking, slickly-paced murders, the film would be laughably terrible. Pure Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder. It could be the ultimate "film that's just an excuse to show repeated whoa moments" experience, but when would that ever be a bad thing?

And now.....flying cats, anyone?

Netflix Fix -- Bad Lieutenant (1992)

When I was interviewing filmmaker Jody Hill (writer/director/producer of stuff such as Eastbound & Down and The Foot Fist Way) a few months back, he went on and on about his love of older cinema. We're talking flicks from 15 years back or more, the films that played by no rules and had no qualms bombarding the senses with images and characters that defied morals and decency. Stories didn't play their cards safely. Endings didn't have to be pleasant. Hollywood couldn't give two shits about good taste.

And all was right in the world of moviemaking.

Hill's sentiments mirrored mine quite closely, though I'm a few years younger than he is. Like him, I'm an addict of renting the films of yeateryears to play catch-up, mainly because I know that I'm in for something I've never seen before, or at least predecessors for things that modern-day films try to pass off as their own. The vow that Hill made was to inject unhealthy doses of this nihilistic approach into the comedy genre, and as evidenced by Eastbound & Down and the red band trailer for his upcoming Seth Rogen vehicle Observe & Report, he's remaining a man of his word thus far.

In our chat, Hill kept referencing Taxi Driver as a prime inspiration, but I'm willing to bet that Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) is right up there next to Travis Bickle's time under the New York City streetlights. Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Kietel at his most badass-est , an no-blinks character study of the nameless Lieutenant, a Queens police head who regularly snorts drugs, solicits prostitutes, poorly runs his dysfunctional family, gambles on Mets games, and engages in other random acts of bad behavior who (finally) begins questioning his world after a nun is viciously raped in the middle of a church.



Pretty much the worst lieutenant ever conceived, and exactly the kind of despicable, zero-saving-graces protagonist that somebody like Hill (I hate to keep dropping his name here, so bare with me....he just drives home the point of this post tightly for me), and myself, seems to gravitate toward for inexplicable reasons. It digs deeper than just pure entertainment value, or admiration for a steroid-strong acting performance. Characters like The Lieutenant never stop fascinating from Fade In to End Credits, mostly because they represent the type of person you'd never want to spend more than two minutes with in real life; yet, when seen through the disconnect of television screen, they're like magnets. Undeniable in their compelling nature, and effective messengers of life's fucked-up facets that go otherwise glossed over as "taboo."

Late into Bad Lieutenant, there's an emotional climax that would send religious activists and closed-off thinkers into panty-bunched hissies. It's such a great scene, because it demonstrates just how morally corrupt Keitel's character is even in his rare "sympathetic" moments. [Spoiler Warning] After some drug-induced soul-searching, he confronts the raped nun in her church as she's praying. He tells her that he's going to say "Fuck the law" and kill the deviants who raped her, for her. She, however, informs The Lieutenant that she's already forgiven the rapists, which sends The Lieutenant into a rattled, confused frenzy. Even when he thinks he's avenging his own sins and cleansing his soul through vengeful intentions, he's defying the higher power. It's a can't-beat-my-darkness pickle. Jesus himself approaches The Lieutenant once the nun exits, and all our our shattered man can do is call Jesus a "rat fuck" and question why he wasn't there for the nun in her time of protective-need.

Religion is treated as both a necessary form od redemption and a cause of constant grief. When was the last time you saw that kind of double-sided coin morality in a flick?



There's a modern-day extension of this great flick currently in the works, a New Orleans-set new installment for Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage. Now a believer in the power of Abel Ferrara's original, I can say without hesitation that a new spin with Cage in the driver's seat is a shitshow waiting to happen. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, since the venerable Werner Herzog is behind the camera, but there's just no way that 2009-era Nicolas Cage will even come within miles of Harvey Keitel's 1992 work. It's not even worth attempting, so go and make another National Treasure film, sir Cage.

My hope, and call me a pessimist all you want, is that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans sucks as much as I'm anticipating. Because if it doesn't, my head might pull a Scanners due to "Have I been wrong all this time?" self-analysis. I'm convinced that skeevy, thoughtful, uncompromising character descents such as Bad Lieutenant can't be duplicated or even approached-by-a-long-ways today. And as long as that remains the truth, I'll forever have older gems to seek out and ponder.

Unwrapping stuff like this flick never loses its luster. Up next in this particular conquest will be early Robert Deniro's The Panic in Needle Park, and I'm sure I'll more than enjoy. Until then....

This scene is certified NSFBE (Not Safe For Baby Eyes):


And that's one of the "kinder" things he does.

Netflix Fix -- Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

No, this isn't the one with Laurence Fishburne and Ja Rule. It's the far-superior original, from the brain of the great John Carpenter.


Loving this poster.

I'm opting to just post an awesome clip this time, rather to write an endless stream-of-thought about the flick. It must be said, though, that this is one I've waited far too long to check out, and it now completes my "John Carpenter catalog" domination.

And it's a very-enjoyably barbaric, chest-thumping, fearless action shoot-'em-up-like-heroin show from an era of synth-heavy soundtracks and glowing-red blood spurts. The best of times, in other words. Nobody (for my $$$) has ever used unconventional music in films as amazingly as Carpenter has. This Assault on Precinct 13 clip backs me up:

[What makes this scene so effective is the way that Carpenter sets this little girl character up. The couple of scenes she's in prior to this one feel totally random and unnecessary for the plot's sake, talking with her father in a car about pointless shit. Seasoned viewers should be able to sense that something bad is in her future, however, despite her mundane presence]


Goes to show....just be happy with your basic vanilla cone, kids.

Full Assault on Precinct 13 trailer:

Just watched Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.....

....and now I'm totally crushin' on

Kat Dennings

....while also feeling something special for

Ari Graynor

On the whole, pretty cool little film. Wasn't laughing out loud much, but I was pleasantly entertained and charmed throughout. Michael Cera's whole uncomfortably-sweet routine is getting a bit old, lucky for him he had Ms. Dennings and her adorableness to save the day. And I'd hit the bar with Ms. Graynor any day, and then even whip up a turkey sandwich for her.



Since Cera is in both, I'm justifying I initially deemed "lazy and cliche": comparisons to Juno. That being said, I think I'm preferring Nick & Norah over Juno. Yeah, I totally am. Cera's "Nick" is from Hoboken, too, so its inevitable, really.

No worries, Ellen Page. We'll always have Hard Candy.

Netflix Fix -- The Brood (1979)

Going to approach this post-Netflix-Fix-watching post a bit differently than usual, mainly because I'm dead-exhausted and need some shut-eye. But this one was a really good flick, and deserves some recognition. So rather than discuss the plot and what points made it work, and which areas could use improvement(s), I'm simply calling out one specific scene that's the goodness.

Quick plot summary, though, to give the scene some vital context: Frank Carveth is a loving father of five-year-old Candice; Candice's mother, Nola Carveth, is a nutball who lives in a secluded psychiatry complex where she is undergoing some radical new treatment at the hands of controversial Dr. Raglan. This treatment, a facing-of-personal-demons hypnosis, has heightened Nola's inner rage, spawning a woodshed's worth of deformed "children" all from her subconscious; monstrous-looking dwarves who kill all of those she feels anger toward at the moment, without her even knowing. Miniature slashers cut from that old-lady-dwarf from Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, looking like shrunken Beasts (from Beauty & the Beast) in the faces. Mugs not even a mother could appreciate.




All sounds a bit complex, bizarre. But then again, it's an early David Cronenberg flick, "written and directed by." Cronenberg pretty much cornered the market on his own unique subgenres of horror: how the mistreatment and misunderstanding of one's own body and flesh can prove hazardous. The decaying of flesh, a person's body betraying them in usually-gory yet beautifully-staged-and-shot ways. See: Shivers; The Fly; Scanners.

This particular scene from The Brood, though, isn't an example of this "body does you bad" conceit. It's nothing more than an exhibition of Cronenberg's razor pacing skills and fearlessness. Murder in a packed kindergarten classroom? Now that takes some balls.



Great stuff right there. The Brood is highly recommended. Psychologically involving, and wildly inventive.

Up next in my Netflix Queue is another Cronenberg effort....The Dead Zone, with Christopher Walken, based on Stephen King's book. A flick I've seen many scenes from but have yet to sit down with from start to finish, properly. That'll soon change.

Netflix Fix -- A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003)

This weekend, there's a new cute-teen-girl-haunted-by-ghosts-with-long-black-hair flick coming: The Uninvited. While watching the trailer, it only takes a cool 35 seconds, give or take a millisecond, to realize that its nothing more than a brain-drained, PG-13, Hollywood-lessened remake of a solid Asian horror exercise. The list of terrible examples is frightening (for all the wrong reasons): The Eye; Pulse; One Missed Call; Shutter. Remember any one of those? I'd hope not. The only worthy exceptions have been The Grudge (the passable first one, and just-barely the slightly-less-than-passable sequel) and the first of this kind, The Ring, which genuinely won.

And don't even get me started on Alexandre Aja's dreadfully-moronic Mirrors.

The ingredients found in The Uninvited's trailer would all shout "Present!" if the theater its playing in were a high school's homeroom: the above-mentioned ghosts with long dark locks, haunting an attractive, tormented young girl or two, most likely within the walls of a spook-house that was innocently seen as domestically-snug. The ghosts contort and crawl around awkwardly, as if the limbs are twisting and broken. And by trailer's end, a seasoned moviegoer is most likely groaning, "How many times have I seen that shit before?!"

See, and groan, for yourselves (in case you've yet to):


It wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that I won't be seeing The Uninvited this weekend, or any time after (until the DVD hits, potentially). No use in wasting cash on something you know is going to be derivative, and, besides, I think it'd be excruciating having to watch the gorgeous, comedically-gifted Elizabeth Banks unsuccessfully try to act "scary" or "sinister"; it smells of Ryan Reynolds' unconvincing work in that crappy Amityville Horror remake, something foul.

I'd be better off just watching the Korean flick this generic ho-hummer is based on, I thought late last week, which is why I bumped A Tale of Two Sisters to the tippy of my Queue's pecking order the other day. The critical love for Two Sisters, made in 2003 by filmmaker Ji-woon Kim, is across-the-map glowing, some film-heads claiming that it's one of the creepiest movies to have come out within the last decade. That's a bold enough statement for me to be compelled. Sold!




C'mon....All you need is that preview to accept that The Uninvited is merely America's bloodless, overacted, miscast, neutered version.

Having just watched A Tale of Two Sisters, I don't need to actually "see" The Uninvited to know that its source material has been truncated and streamlined; A Tale of Two Sisters is heavier than an anvil hat on the brain. The Hollywood suits would never test the intelligence of the film's teenaged target audience the ways that Ji-woon Kim does here. The last 25 minutes alone had my head spinning and think-box grinding away, trying to decipher the twists and flip-flops that kept coming at me faster than Lost being fast-forwarded. The final shot, before the credits do their thing, brings the explanation home, though I'm still a bit cloudy on a few points that I won't go into here---I'd be better served discussing this flick with somebody else who has seen it, rather than circle-jerking myself off with a one-man analysis.



The skeletal story seems elementary: teenage Su-mi returns home after a stint in a mental insitution, and right off the bat we can tell that's all not well on the homefront. Daddy is shacking up with a stepmother, a replacement for Su-mi's birth-mom who seems to have died years before. Su-mi, defiant and confrontational towards her stepmum, only has one ally, her meekish and quiet sister Su-Yeoun. Before the Su's even know it, supernatural happenings start plaguing the house, sketchy goings-on that cause the stepmom to gradually increase her bitchiness yet leave the father strangely apathetic, ignoring the problems under his roof.

Like all the best Asian horror flicks, A Tale of Two Sisters never rushes itself to get to jump-scenes or gotcha!-moments. Ji-woon Kim lets the very-layered story unravel with real patience and very little music. Really, only about three or four official "scare scenes" are to be found, but that's inconsequential thanks to an overall mood of gloom, remorse, sorrow, and devolving pleasantness. There's also this strong sense of claustrophobia being that the entire movie (save for a few twenty-second instances here and there) takes place in the house. Each room becomes unusually familiar, and seemingly-unimportant objects we can see on dressers and under tables later reveal themselves to be crucial elements.



As for the horror pieces here, one part in particular stands out like a third nipple: it's a dinner scene, the stepmother and father having invited the girls' uncle and his main squeeze over for some supper. Ji-woon Kim plays this one perfectly, lulling the viewer into a state of numbness with an extra-long, one-sided, bizarrely-staged conversation that goes on and on, before suddenly the meal erupts into total mayhem:


A Tale of Two Sisters is definitely one that I'll have to watch again at some point; one sitdown doesn't feel like I'm doing the film justice. The twist(s) that the flick drops toward the end demand deeper looks. And the film's powerful melancholy vice-grip has me thinking that it'll be one I ponder for some days to come.



I may actually need to see The Uninvited sooner than later, come to think. Just to witness firsthand how badly they've sliced and diced Ji-woon Kim's R-rated, cerebral work. Sucks that Paramount Pictures isn't having any early media screenings....though that in itself is a red flag for the film's probably-fecal quality. Oh well.

Netflix Fix -- The Piano Teacher (2001)

Though in a strangely masochistic way I wish it could happen more, rarely do I finish a film with a genuine "sick" feeling. Not to the point of vomiting, but more the degree where that pit at the bottom of your throat feels hollow, and random cringes make it appear as you're convulsing ever-so-softly.

It happened when I saw Inside for the first time at the Lincoln Center theater last year, and it just happened now as I reached the coldly tragic end of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher.



I've read all of the predominantly polarized word on Haneke's films: how they're brutal without showing much, and effecting through sporadic images of violence and extremities. The Austrian filmmaker has a pretty uncanny knack for upsetting his audience; the only other films of his I've seen are both versions of Funny Games, meaning the Austrian original and last year's remake with Naomi Watts. While the virtually shot-for-shot remake admirably didn't lose much in translation, Haneke's 1997 first-run is still my preference, because the first time experiencing Funny Games is a pretty off-putting, nihilistic ride, whether you're a fan or a plain-old hater. I'm not exactly ecstatic about it, but it's certainly a film/story that I respect in many ways.

The Piano Teacher, though, I'm totally unsure of. What I am certain of is that it's easily one of the most perverse, bleak character studies I've ever seen, and that's saying something. It's a quiet, focused, twisted look at Professor Erika Kohut, a middle-aged piano teacher who lives with her somewhat-domineering mother. She's ice-cold, shunning off warm conversations and remaining all about her business. But she meets a young, good-looking dude named Walter, who also happens to love classical music and enjoys playing it. He's taken aback by Erika's key-playing, and becomes smitten with her, signing up for her class just to get closer to her. Too bad she's the most sexually-confused-and-deranged women this side of a porno star locked away in a looney bin.



As he keeps trying to wiin her over and she repeatedly shuns him before going down on him and giving him the worst case of blue-balls imaginable, we start to see the cracks in Erika's sexuality. She sneaks off into a grungy peep-show booth to watch porno movies where girls give guys' head, watching the smut with her mouth covered by a cloth; she shuts her bathroom door with a mirror in her hand, and then cuts near her vagina while watching the incisions through the handheld mirror; after being rejected by Walter, she jumps on top of her mother in a desparate plea for love, crying while she tries to make out with her mother (eww, gross....exactly....she even says to ma dukes: "I saw the hairs on your sex." Spewing, allowed); and then, in a tide-changer of a scene, she gives Walter a letter that lists all of the things she'd like him to do to her sexually, which includes tying her up, beating her, and talking to her as if she's some trashy slave. Yes, Erika harbors some holy-shit intensely sick S&M fetishes, which disgust Walter. He rejects her, and from this point on is when The Piano Teacher gets really tough to watch.



Erika is played by Isabelle Huppert, and she gives a blazer of a performance. It's a seriously tough character to play, one that demands layers upon layers of subtle vulnerability and silent domination. The scenes of sexual dementia between Huppert and Benoit Magimel, who plays Walter, are all believably revealing. Especially the climax when [SPOILER WARNING] Walter, infatuated by Erika, storms into her apartment, locks her mother in a room and proceeds to beat Erika, in hopes that his carrying out her sexual requests will serve as some sort of aphrodisiac. It doesn't, however, and Erika is frightened and left speechless. Walter, confused and frustrated, basically rapes her, Erika remaining motionless as Walter thrusts upon her and continues to absolve himself by trying to console her. It's a chilling scene, filmed with nearly the same amount of unflinching voyeurism as the subway tunnel rape in Irreversible.

The Piano Teacher is actually an adapatation of a book by an author named Elfriede Jelinek, so I guess the "you're one sick fuck, dude" reactions should be hurled at him more than Haneke. But the film version is what I've just taken in, so Haneke is my target. And that's not to say "target" as an implication that I didn't like The Piano Teacher. Any time a filmmaker can craft a character study that both fascinates and appalls me, I must applaud. With an ending scene that really sucker-punched my gut, the film is definitely one I'll be thinking about for the next couple of days. Not one I'll rush back to watch again, but a movie that I'd love to discuss with some other heads who've seen it. Good luck finding them, I tell myself. You should've went to film school, you tool; if you had, you would have tons of friends who'd also spend an otherwise relaxing Monday night watching a woman vomit after a dude busts in her mouth.



Would I recommend The Piano Teacher? Sure, but only to those who share the same diesel sense of "the more strange and dark the film, the better" as yours truly.

Don't all stand up at once, now.