The horror....the horror...

It's time for the newest movie minute marathon. What better to celebrate the changing of leaves, the longer nights, the inevitable approach of trick-or-treaters soon to be at our door, than with a batch of gruesome and grisly horror movies.

You may or may not be familiar with the fact that the 70's marks the birth of a new kind of on-screen teenager in american cinema. I'm talking about the kind of teenager that is arguably the best kind of all. A set-up, a plot device, for gore and mayhem. The 70's saw more teenagers slain on screen from telikinetic 'she-devils', masked knife wielding lunatics, and mutant flesh-eating zombies than from all war movies combined.

The 70's however, also brought some interesting horror aueters from around the world that are worth noting as well. This marathon will focus on 70's horror from around the world, some well known, others not so much. The line-up is as follows:

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage - (Italy) - Dario Argento
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - (US) - Tobe Hooper
The Wicker Man - (GB) - Robin Hardy
Don't Look Now - (G.B./Italy) - Nicolas Roeg
Dawn of the Dead - (US) - George A. Romero

Let the gore begin!

no it's not late night on cinemax..it's the latest from ridley scott...Body of Lies

With the height of the political season upon us, it is hard to believe that a film dealing primarily with the role of US operatives in the war on terror could hardly function as “escapist” entertainment for millions of Americans. Perhaps that is what makes Body of Lies, from esteemed blockbuster director Ridley Scott so enjoyable. It manages to do what recent Iraq war themed movies left behind in the box-office dust have failed to do so miserably: To say something about the plight of war without being overly preachy. Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe star in this popcorn action thriller that is very entertaining despite stretching the limits of believability.

Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) is a covert CIA operative who has been sent to seek out and destroy a ring of terrorists responsible for the bombing of civilians. With the help of his boss back in Langley (Crowe), he devises a plan to infiltrate the network of terrorist mastermind Al-Saleem. Crowe, overweight and grey-haired in this movie, is seen back home thousands of miles away with an ear-mounted device almost permanently planted into his head, feeding instructions to his co-worker. He spouts out rhetoric regarding the harsh nature of their work ("which side of the cross are you on kid? I need nailers not hangers.") interjected by directions for his kids to help with the groceries or aim for the toilet, not the floor. Ferris also enlists the help of Chief of Jordanian intelligence, Hani Salaam. Soon the three main players develop operations that create a web of deception that makes stopping the true forces of evil a mix-up of right and wrong.

The film's biggest flaws come from the elements it doesn’t need. Despite Crowe and DiCaprio both being seasoned actors, they seem to be phoning in elements that neither of their respective characters actually demand. Can anyone tell me why Leo has a phony southern accent in this movie? And someone really ought to tell Crowe that they don’t just hand out Oscars for putting on 30 pounds, you actually have to be somewhat memorable on screen as well. Just ask DeNiro. The love interest for DiCaprio’s character brings virtually nothing to the story, and is merely manufactured into the plot to create stakes for a finale that is somewhat predictable. The qualms are relatively few and far between though for a film that doesn’t rely on power of believability. It’s a tight script with sharp action sequences and a plot that is pushed steadily along throughout that make this film worth seeing. Even if it means dealing with subject matter that still rings loud in our ears.

3/5

For What it's worth....

So I realized recently that between working a job you hate, eating, sleeping, and trucking through the heavy-hitting political debates (tongue very much in cheek at this point), there are actually hours of entertainment one can sift one's way through (God bless you Netflix. And no this is not a paid advertisement). So if you are idly pacing the floor of your house/apartment/bungalow/communal living type quarters day in and day out feverishly stewing over the impending doom of the economy, why not try a little escapism? If you are looking for something new to rent, this is where I tell you (as if you care) what I have seen lately in hopes that, if nothing else your attention might be turned to possible entertainemnt choices. My hope is that this post will include a little something for everyone. So....here goes..

The Fall - A grownup fantasy movie from the same mysterious writer/director who brought you The Cell back in 2000. For those of you who don't remember that movie, it's the best of Jennifer Lopez' work ever devoted to celluloid. I realize that's not saying much about the movie, but it is saying something about her career. The plot of The Fall goes roughly as follows. A little girl in a hollywood hospital stumbles across a man recently injured in an accident who has become a paraplegic. The suicidal man pursuades the little girl into swiping meds from the cabinents by telling her an elaborate fairy tale that takes place in several continents. A couple reasons to see the movie:
1. Catinca Untaru - Plays the little girl Alexandria, and delivers one of the best child performances I have ever seen.
2. The movie is visually stunning - shot on location in 18 countries, and apparently contains no CGI shots.
3.5/5

La Vie En Rose - Really interesting biopic of singer Edith Piaf. The film is spetacularly lit and shot. It's the kind of tragic epic in which you know that the heroine is absolutely doomed from the moment you meet her. This is the film for which the best actress award was given to Marion Cotilliard last year at the Academy Awards, and what a performance it is. I have the feeling though, that knowing virtually nothing about this character before seeing the film helped me find her much more intriguing. Special thanks to my friend Luc for finally getting me to see this movie.
4/5

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - Occasionally I let my wife choose what DVD moves to the top of the netflix queue and thankfully I married someone with good taste. For those guys out there who have to sacrifice a movie watching night of her choosing, you can't really go wrong with this one. Frances McDormand and Amy Adams star, and these are two actresses that I can honestly say I would be willing to watch in almost anything. Frances Mcdormand plays an English nanny who finds herself in the company of an American movie star (Adams) for a day. The exploits and love affairs ensue and the two women soon find themselves trying to (what else?) empower one another.
3/5

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - Just when you thought team Apatow couldn't manage to cram more foul mouthed twenty-somethings, gross-out humor, and plenty of male frontal nudity into one film, Jason Siegel goes and pushes the censors to the limits. Seriously. They really pushed the envelope with this one in about the first 10 minutes of the movie. Peter Bretter goes to Hawaii to try to get over his recent break-up with TV star girlfriend Sarah Marshall only to find (you can pretty much see this one coming) his ex is vacationing at the same resort, on the same island with her new beau. Mila Kunis of that 70's show (and my personal fav. the voice of Meg on Family Guy) is excellent here. For me though, most of the really long laughs came on the DVD bonus features.
3/5

Snow Angels - This film from David Gordon Green is worth seeing for a few reasons:
1. Kate Beckinsale gives a really strong performance
2. Sam Rockwell (who solidified himself as one of my favorite character actors some time ago) gives an absolute knock-out performance.
3. Cinematography and editing are amazing, both elements of the film really push the story-telling aspect a lot.
4. The fact that this film is so gritty and depressing, Makes the fact that David Gordon Green directed The Pineapple Express for his next project really intriguing.

This movie is an interesting case study in the fragility in human relationships. It also underscores the fact that sometimes the difference between the middle-class and the poor may be close in reality, but drastically affect the outcome of different people's social struggles. It's got the mosaic-like aspect we have come to see in dramas in the past few years where there's a lot of different character plots that intersect and collide by the end of the film. Not easy to watch, but fairly well crafted.
4/5

A night on the town with Nick and Norah..

"I told em to give me the ellen deGeneres haircut" - Nick (Michael Cera)

I am told that the 1950’s first marked the beginning of a new era. The rise of the “teenager” gave birth to a type of youth empowerment in America the likes of which we had never seen before. The teen has been given prominence all throughout the history of the silver screen as well. Remember James Dean in the 50’s classic Rebel Without a Cause? The brilliant portrayal of a small town high school full of disillusioned dreams in The Last Picture Show? John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club still offers the blueprint for typical high school archetypes in the films that have followed it. Which begs the question: does anyone else feel that Michael Cera would be perfectly casted as Anthony Michael Hall’s character in a Breakfast Club remake? I’ll leave it to the few of you who have never seen the movie even once out of the 10,000 times it has been on cable to do the research yourself. Fast forward to 2008 where recently I had the chance to screen the newest film of teens in their element.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist tells the story of a young teen searching for love against the backdrop of the indy music scene in New York City. Nick (Michael Cera) has just broken up with his main squeeze after 6 months, and needless to say is feeling a little down. With the help of his bandmates, and new-found love interest Norah (Kat Dennings), the group sets out to find a local band playing a show at an undisclosed location, and hopefully bring fulfillment to Nick and Norah’s love life.
For the most part this film plays like the bulk of the characters in it: empty, and directionless. Nick loves his girlfriend, but she just doesn’t like him like that. But then, OMG! She keeps “bumping” into him in the city with her new squeeze. Should Nick totally go back to Trish, or hook up with Norah? Yeah, that’s pretty much the whole movie. It’s kind of like Lost in Translation for kids who were only 11 when that movie came out. Except here, there are some surprisingly decent comedic actors given very little to do or say. The all too familiar territory makes it a story about a few kids who are often endearing but rarely interesting.

The film does a masterful job of portraying the times that the American teenager finds itself in. There’s so little going on in the script that the general ambivalence towards anything of social relevance is captured by these real-life twenty-somethings accurately. They are independent, sexually active, and anchored to their cell phones. The kids portrayed in this film pick and choose from a myriad of ideologies and religious beliefs to interest themselves in, while there seems to be no one thing that defines any of them. Norah says “I heard a Jewish saying once that says….” To which the response of her indy geek love interest says something to the effect of “like….totally”. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that a movie has to try to be deep to be effective. Some films wear it on their sleeve like Garden State, which this film does not try to be, save from the indy music soundtrack. At the end of the day, I just want a little something to keep me from looking at my watch every 20 minutes.

2.5/5

Coen Bros. Marathon pt. 4: Blood Simple

What do you get when you combine a jealous hitman, a cheating wife, a crime that spins way out of control, and a few murders along the way? Answer: A film that is not so "simple" to categorize (as the world first learned when the Coen brothers debuted it in 1984), but is tremendously entertaining to watch. Blood Simple is not only fascinating to watch for the formidable talent it would introduce to the world, but for being a well executed take on the thriller/crime genre it and so much of the Coens' extensive body of work owes credit to.

When we first meet Abby (a young fresh-faced Frances McDormand) there is not the slightest inkling of anything wrong with her marriage to her husband Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya). Her love affair with one of her husband's employees is about to change all of that. Her rich, jealous husband hires a private investigator (M. Emmet Walsh) to tail the two, and eventually to murder them. The double crosses ensue however, when the private eye hatches a scheme of his own.

Blood Simple was probably the funnest time I had watching any of the Coen brothers' films this past month. It's fun to see it for what it was at the time (a genuninely clever thriller, albeit a flawed one), and for what it still is. There are so many memorable scenes that are worth the price of admission alone that I am inclined to list a few:

1. M. Emmet Walsh's character sneaks into the home of an unsuspecting Abby and her lover with nail-biting suspense.

2. John Getz' character lugs an assumingly dead Julian Marty down a dark and ominous highway only to find he's not as "dead" as he thought he was.

3. The last 15 minutes of the film: vintage Coens. Masterfully executed suspense with a breath-taking closing few frames. Disclaimer: If you have a healthy fear of knives or generally pointy objects, the last few minutes may make you squirm.

The film is far from perfect, but it is clear that Blood Simple was a forerunner to so many of the Coen bros. masterpieces. Barry Sonnenfeld's cinematography is honestly distracting at times, and I found little that would seperate it from the feel of Raizing Arizona. This seemed to be counter-productive to the mood that most of Blood Simple tries to convey. Pound for pound though, this film is much too fun to be swept aside as merely average. Performances are strong and the suspense is genunine. I suspect though that having been a fan before seeing the film, it might have been just too "simple" to please me. I would like to think not...

3.5/5

St. Anna not nearly as captivating as it tries to be

One of the reasons that Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing works so well, is that it is a film that doesn’t necessarily require the type of dialogue that constantly preaches at us. Lee can implement great stretches of dialogue in which the African-American character can go to great lengths to question the Italian American character for his hypocritical view of race relations. Lee uses scenes like this not as much to heighten the tension (the film brilliantly does that without always requiring dialogue), as much as to push the story along. While it may be unfair to compare a film like Miracle at St. Anna with a film like Do the Right Thing, given the nature and history of Lee’s work it seems inevitable. Maybe that’s why in the back of my mind I thought that St. Anna had a lot to live up to, and why ultimately I was disappointed that it didn’t.

St. Anna opens up with enough deep-seeded intensity to rival any crime thriller in recent memory. A black postal employee whom the audience has met only a few frames before, unhesitatingly shoots a man standing in his line. It’s a scene that the film arguably doesn’t need and will soon get lost under the sea of far too many plot lines in the minutes to come. Nonetheless, it sets up the media’s investigation of this reclusive old man, the vastly expensive ancient Italian artifact hidden in his closet, and his story of the second world war told through the eyes of the group with whom he experienced it with: The all-black 92nd infantry division. The group soon finds themselves trapped near a small Tuscan village when one of the soldiers risks his own life to save a young Italian boy. From here the story texts many different turns, going round and round in countless directions before it finally falls haphazardly at the audience’s feet nearly 2 ½ hours later.

The biggest crime Lee commits is that the story’s central characters are much too uninteresting to spend such a significant amount of time with. The multiple plot lines meander every which way, never offering even a remotely satisfying pay-off. To be sure, the film has several great scenes to boast as well. The action sequences employ the stark realism we have come to expect in war films since Saving Private Ryan first “unglamorized” war 10 years ago. The sequences involving race issues are often-poignantly yet prophetically displayed. In the first glimpses we get of the film’s leading character he is watching an old John Wayne war film in which the Hollywood cast is predictably all white. He can be heard muttering to himself, “we fought that war too”. The film is so uneven however, that most of the messages that could speak volumes get shuffled under the mixture of over-blown plot and poor execution. St. Anna tries to be important, and while at times it calls us to change, it lacks the prophetic element that truly causes us to question.

2.5/5

Black is White….Coen Brothers Marathon pt. 3: Miller’s Crossing

Look into your heart…that’s the advice that Bernie (played by John Turturro) pleads his executioner (Gabriel Byrne) to heed, in the deep fog-laden woods of Miller’s Crossing. The heart-stopping scene in which the whole film revolves around is more or less alluded to as each of the film’s central players all at one point or another are forced to look inward into their own hearts and battle the blackness that stares back. Unfortunately, at Miller’s Crossing, the blackness wins out most of the time.

The Coens have quite an affinity for genre. This may come as no surprise seeing as how most of their films are a “smash-up” of many well-known genres, with a Coen brothers’ twist that allows them to follow the rules for a little while, only to break them by picture’s end. Miller’s Crossing is a sleek, and handsome film noir drama that captures the icy haze of 30’s gangster pictures. It’s a gangster picture however that relies more on substance and it’s wormy characters than actual “whacks” and shoot-outs. It’s a stylized world that the Coens’ pull us into it, but it’s one that as Caspar says, raises age-old questions of ethics.

Tom Regan (Byrnne) plays advisor to a Prohibition-era crime boss played by Albert Finney. When Tom gets caught up in the crossfire between neighboring crime rings, his loyalties quickly become divided. His relationship with the boss’ dame (Marcia Gay Harden) makes the situation all the more sticky when the double, triple crosses, and back-stabs begin to pile up. The film is beautifully photographed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who shot the first three Coen brothers pictures. His work here is much more subdued than it is on Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, and it’s probably for the better. The narrower scope of the lenses, the light shading all of the brimmed-hat gangsters at one point or another don’t allow us a full glimpse into the souls of these men until we realize too late what their true motives are. The techniques work without forcing us to think a certain way, because after all, nothing is what it seems at Miller’s Crossing.

4/5