by ·Comments Off on Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie)

A Halloween remake (ugh: “re-imagining”) directed by Rob Zombie could not POSSIBLY be bad, could it? No, but it could be average/unnecessary, and that’s unfortunately what it turned out to be. Zombie doesn’t bring his super-gritty foul drive-in approach down here, just serves up a pretty straightforward horror/slasher with maybe a good cast and some good violence, but with no strong artistic stamp or reason to exist.

Malcolm McDowell is at least better than the awful Donald Pleasence as Myers’ psychiatrist, Tyler “Sabretooth” Mane is a fine Michael and regular TV guest-star Scout Taylor-Compton does no harm as Laurie Strode. All the fun is with the side characters: Danny Trejo as the asylum’s janitor, Sheri Moon Zombie as Mrs. Myers. I missed a ton of cameos (Ken Foree, Mickey Dolenz, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Sid Haig – what was I looking at??) but at least I recognized Dee Wallace (of The Frighteners and The Howling) even if I didn’t know from where. I’ve gotta pay more attention to Sheriff Brad Dourif – he’s been in a buncha movies I’ve enjoyed.

Tons of added back-story about Michael as a troubled young man does not help. I’m sure Zombie has seen plenty of horror sequels along with the originals, and so he oughtta know that eventually every monster gets a humanizing back story (Hellraiser 3&4, Elm Street 6, Phantasm 4, etc) and it never helps – it’s just an excuse to make another movie, a lure to fans that dilutes the mystery of the original concept. Not that the back story segments here are bad exactly, or that the Halloween series could be hurt by them. I’ve considered it to be one of the very worst horror series from part 4 onward, so this movie only helps the series as a whole. It’s just a shame to see the filmmaker behind “The Devil’s Rejects” doing uninspired junk like this in the first place, throwing down with the ceaseless-remake crowd with a dull entry like this one, not even hitting as high or as hard as “The Hills Have Eyes”, or making the Halloween franchise fun and interesting and inventive again like “Bride of Chucky” and “Freddy vs. Jason” and “Alien Resurrection” did. I thought the best, most thrilling part of Halloween was the use of the original theme music written by John Carpenter. Let’s hope that “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto” fares better.

by ·Comments Off on Fever Pitch (2005, Farrelly brothers)

Romantic comedy about baseball starring cute Drew Barrymore (of Curious George, hopefully not of the Grey Gardens feature remake) and not-so-cute Jimmy Fallon (of Doogal). I failed to recognize Ione Skye (of Girls In Prison), JoBeth Williams (of Poltergeist), Andrew “Future Man” Wilson and Stephen King.

So we’ve got a writer I like (Nick Hornby) being adapted by the screenwriters of “Robots” and “Mr. Saturday Night”, run through thirteen different producers and directed by the Farrelly brothers… whole thing comes out as a passably watchable baseball-themed romantic comedy that didn’t hurt at all. Fallon is a cute guy whom career-minded Drew kinda likes, but then he reveals his utter obsession with the red sox and their relationship threatens to unravel, culminating with his attempting to sell his season tickets and her running across the field mid-game to stop him, because if he cares enough to do that for her, then she cares enough not to let him. Cuteness. Katy likes it.

by ·Comments Off on Hotel Chevalier (2007, Wes Anderson)

Jason Schwartzman is a sad man who has exiled himself to a Paris hotel after breaking up with his girlfriend. Natalie Portman is the girlfriend who finds him and comes to visit.

The main reason to watch this short:
nudie portman

Jason has his personal artifacts very carefully littering his room and he plays a specific song on his iPod speaker system when he hears Natalie coming upstairs. He’s got the typical Wes Anderson sadly introspective male performance, and she delicately shows off her quirky side by brushing her teeth with his brush as soon as she arrives. The camera compositions are meticulous and familiar.

So… why? I know it’s a back-story bit for The Darjeeling Limited, but why? Is it a marketing gimmick? It’s not a deleted sequence from the film itself – was shot separately. Does Anderson now think of it as part of the Darjeeling film? Does he wish it’d been included? No, because the short is on iTunes but won’t be included with the film release in U.S. theaters. So maybe I’m being a jerk about this, but a short should stand on its own as a short, not be a clever taster for the new theatrical product or a bonus to sell more DVDs. That’s an advertisement. This one doesn’t really hold up as a short. If there was no Darjeeling Limited and this was just released on its own, it’d just be a further downhill slide in quality after the crowning peak of The Royal Tenenbaums, and even that great movie threatens to get sullied each time Wes makes another sad dysfunctional-family-with-father-issues comedy with his now-trademarked music and visual style. Hopefully Darjeeling ends up having a reason to exist, and can provide this short with one, too.

by ·Comments Off on The Music Man (1962, Morton DaCosta)

The last movie Katy and I watched together in our old apartment.

A small-town nostalgic escapist flick, the inspiration for the monorail episode of The Simpsons, which we watched afterwards. Unfortunately they’re not all that similar. For one, Music Man is two and a half hours long. Writers of musicals seem to write full-length movies and then add the music, making all their movies two and a half hours long. It’s a shame that there are so many non-musical movies that seem way too long at 90-120 minutes. When that happens, the producers should really chop out the boring bits and add some musical numbers, sort of the opposite of what happened to “I’ll Do Anything”. Ah, in a perfect world.

Sham salesman Harold Hill (Robert Preston) moves in on a small town and convinces them that all their problems are due to not having a boy’s band. Coincidentally, Hill can solve these problems, because it just so happens that he is a salesman of musical instruments and uniforms, and he soon signs everyone up, with the help of his local ex-partner Buddy Hacket. But Hill falls for Marian The Librarian and decides to stay in town instead of running off with the money. Songs that I can still remember include “76 Trombones”, “Gary Indiana”, “Wells Fargo Wagon” and “Till There Was You”.

Really quite a good movie, one of the better musicals we’ve watched. The music is written cohesively, all flows very nicely with the themes from one song showing up in the next song and in the incidental music.

Music Man Robert Preston was a 40’s actor who popped back up in ’62 for this and “How The West Was Won” then disappeared again. Shirley Jones was in John Ford’s “Two Rode Together” the year before. Buddy Hacket voiced the seagull in the Little Mermaid movies, and little Ronny Howard grew up to direct “Ed TV”, “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The DaVinci Code”.

by ·Comments Off on Eastern Promises (2007, David Cronenberg)

Earlier I wrote: “Movie was good. Not holy-wow-mindblowing, but Cronie knows how to shoot a movie, so despite any narrative failings the whole thing was a raw pleasure to watch.”

And it’s not a “failed” narrative, but everyone seems to agree that there isn’t much there. Cronenberg seems to have bought a barebones nothing-special script about the Russian mafia in London (written by nothing-special author Steve Knight of Dirty Pretty Things and Amazing Grace) and given it a few Cronenberg touches (an extreme fight scene, heavy focus on tattoos), then directed the hell out of it. Ever since re-watching Existenz recently I’ve been thinking about how watchable his films are, how I feel a high-quality tension from them that I never think to analyze in terms of camera placement and shot length, but just relish and enjoy. So while it’s no History of Violence in his overall career, it’s not a disappointment either. The guy does not know how to disappoint.

The great acting doesn’t hurt, either. Viggo Mortensen is back from HoV, playing a deep-undercover cop infiltrating the Russian mob. Naomi Watts (remember King Kong?) is an overly concerned hospital midwife trying to find a family member of the young girl who died giving birth so it won’t go up for adoption. Armin Mueller-Stahl (X-Files, 13th Floor) is the mob head and secret father of the baby. In the intense-unstable-closeted role is mobster son Vincent Cassel (Blueberry, La Haine, Brotherhood of the Wolf), and as Naomi’s racist russian uncle is Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish 60’s filmmaker (who also acted in Before Night Falls and Mars Attacks) currently shooting his first film in 17 years with Isabelle Huppert and Dennis Hopper [edit 2011: this was cancelled and he made Four Nights With Anna instead].

At the center of the story is the dead girl’s diary which implicates Armin and Vincent but is written in Russian. Jerzy translates it, so Viggo has to kill him (actually sends him to a hotel, being a cop and all). In the end, presumably Armin is locked up on a rape charge, with Vincent in charge of the family (he gets to live despite almost murdering a baby) and Viggo about to take it down from the inside, Naomi’s family happily together again.

As for Cronenbergian script touches, you’ve got your naked sauna knife fight, your life written on your body in tattoo form, your finger-chopping body-disposal man and three other big bloody scenes. And since, despite all my writing online I still haven’t learned how to analyze and discuss a movie, I can’t put my finger on why (couldn’t be empty boosterism of my favorite directors, could it?), but I feel it’s a quality movie, exquisitely filmed and paced, and thrilling to watch.

Interestingly, in Reverse Shot’s review, Andrew Tracy directly addresses the question I ask above, saying it is boosterism, and that it’s hurtful to the world of film criticism to pretend that Eastern Promises is a good movie. He says “unequivocal praise or panning is the unfortunate rule of these latter days of criticism”, then aggravatingly calls it “a failed film”. I don’t know that anyone considers it a masterpiece, and by the AV Club rating system I’d only give it a B or B+, but I reserve the term “failure” for a D-grade or below. “Failed film” sounds like “if it isn’t great, it’s rubbish”, and a good B+ thriller with some great acting and a few outstanding scenes isn’t rubbish. Rather it’s a movie I’m very glad I saw, instead of going to The Brave One or Shoot ’em Up or Halloween, all recent additions to my endless to-rent list.

Nice one from Reverse Shot:

With the aid of Mortensen’s granitic face and body—which is not simply a given quality but an acted entity—Cronenberg depicts flesh as armour, the shell of a man who lives entirely through his outward gestures. Mortensen’s impeccable overcoat, suit, gloves, and slicked-back hair are further layers of a constructed identity that begins with the skin, which itself is covered with the tattoos relating the story of his life to his underworld masters. The progressive stripping, both literal and metaphorical, of Nikolai throughout the film reveals not the person beneath the artifice, but the meticulously constructed series of artifices which constitute the person himself.

by ·Comments Off on Little Shop of Horrors (1986, Frank Oz)

There were two goals here. I nervously wanted to revisit one of my favorite movies from the 80’s and see if it still holds up for me personally (it did), and I wanted to show it off to Katy and see if she’d like it half as much as I do (she doesn’t).

Reverse Shot deconstructs:
“Though it’s hard to outright accuse Oz of actively perpetuating racism… his insistence on exaggerating the Motown aspects of the three girls and the svengali qualities of Audrey II seem a light mask for the white fear of a black threat ready to corrupt the safe American dream. When weighing Audrey II and the doo-wop girls against the cartoonishly antiseptic suburbia about which the protagonists fantasize, the fight against the plant takes on epic proportion, and an unpleasant metaphorical cast.”

I still dig the music and the movie, campy and racist though it may be. James Belushi, John Candy and Bill Murray are kind of wedged in there, but Christopher Guest’s wide-eyed easily-impressed rose-buying customer slides in perfectly. One of the doo-wop girls played Chris Rock’s mom (?) on “Everybody Hates Chris” and another was on “Martin” and a recent Damon Wayans show. Mr. Mushnik, who died in 1992, was in the 1978 “Heaven Can Wait”. Ellen Greene was Mathilda’s Mother in “The Professional” and appears these days on Heroes and Pushing Daisies. I don’t get why Rick Moranis didn’t outlast the 80’s – he does voices for Disney cartoons now.

EDIT: Dec 2011
Katy likes it better now, thanks to some soundtrack exposure. Maria enjoyed the songs. I dig the fake skies and long shots (with some subtle off-camera costume changes and transformations), but now that I know the ending was changed after test screenings, I can’t help but see the cheap, last-minute alterations (like Audrey 2’s stock-footage explosion) when the whole movie had been meticulously composed up until then. Gotta look up the deleted ending on youtube some time.

EDIT: Sept 2021
This time we showed it to Katy’s mom, who liked it so much that she wants to watch the Roger Corman version next, against my advice. Went with the theatrical version since it was $4 to rent and the director’s cut was $20, but maybe someday.

by ·Comments Off on Pierrot le fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)

This is now the most recent Godard film I’ve seen up until Notre Musique 40 years later. Wow. Came out the same year as Masculin Feminin AND Alphaville. Same year as Simon Of The Desert. Right after Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Soft Skin and The Naked Kiss… and before Blow-Up, Balthazar, The War Is Over, The Nun and Tokyo Drifter.

Unfortunately, I didn’t write about this right after seeing it. Now it’s almost a month later, and I remember nothing but a mash of genres, a funny musical scene, some low-key crime and body disposal, a parrot, a funny Samuel Fuller cameo, and a bunch of too-cool people on an adventure. I think in the end, Pierrot shoots the girl and blows himself up. I liked the movie better than Jimmy and Katy did.

I missed Jean-Pierre Léaud in the cinema scene. Anna Karina (of The Nun and a buncha other 60’s Godard films) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (of Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Magnet of Doom, Le Voleur and Stavisky) star.

Janus Films’ description: “After abandoning his wife at a Parisian party, bored Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) flees his bourgeois existence with his babysitter and ex-lover, Marianne (Anna Karina). Taking it on the lam to the south of France, the couple becomes an existential Bonnie and Clyde, battling gunrunners, gas station attendants, and American tourists as they come face to face with their own roles as characters in a pop-cultural landscape. A profound turning point in Godard’s cinema, Pierrot le fou recalls the gangster cool of Breathless and Band of Outsiders while also pointing towards the increasingly essayistic, apocalyptic visions of Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Weekend.”

“I saw Pierrot le fou by chance … I decided to make movies the same night.” – Chantal Akerman

by ·Comments Off on The Girl Can’t Help It (1956, Frank Tashlin)

Frank Tashlin wrote, directed and produced Looney Tunes shorts before turning to comedy features (many of them with Jerry Lewis, a cartoon of a man), and his movies can be very cartoonish… in a good way, of course.

This one is sort of a loose ride through some current pop hits, with full-length songs like “Be Bop a Lula” (Gene Vincent), “She’s Got It” (Little Richard), “Blue Monday” (Fats Domino) and “You’ll Never Never Know” (The Platters) lip-synched on screen by their respective performers. The plot has washed-up agent Tom Ewell (from The Seven Year Itch) trying to make ultra-curvy Jayne Mansfield a singing star at the request of her thug boyfriend Fatso Murdock (Edmond O’Brien)… but Tom and Jayne fall for each other, and Jayne can’t sing. Ends up with everyone happy, Tom and Jayne together, Fatso a TV star with his hit song “Rock Around The Rockpile”, and Fatso’s rival gang of jukebox mercenaries signing him instead of shooting him.

Some really well done comic parts, but mostly the movie is there for the music. A good movie, would watch again for sure. Katy protested that it wasn’t a proper musical, but still kinda enjoyed it.

by ·Comments Off on My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor)

Katy might have misinterpreted my comment that I hate the characters and don’t like the story but thought the movie was pretty good. Well, I’m not here to expain, only to repeat.

Big wide colorful movie with long motion camera shots, some catchy musical numbers, definitely preferable to the non-musical version of the Pygmalion story.

Audrey Hepburn is the best part as Eliza Doolittle, cute and expressive. She nails the early scenes where she’s gotta howl hideously. Got no problem with actors Rex Harrison (lead actor in Unfaithfully Yours) as the thoroughly unlikeable Henry Higgins or Wilfrid Hyde-White (of The Browning Version, The Third Man, Let’s Make Love) as Henry’s more pleasant colleague, though their non-singing scenes were a little wearisome since I don’t like either one of ’em and I know how it’s all going to end up. More enjoyable (but with less screen time) were Stanley Holloway (of Brief Encounter) as Eliza’s singing, drunken father and Gladys Cooper (of The Pirate and Rebecca) as Henry’s posh mother.

I guess George Bernard Shaw is mostly known for this story, though I wouldn’t know why. Alan Jay Lerner, who made the musical version, also did Camelot, Gigi, Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon and An American In Paris. Director Cukor did a lotta things, incl. musicals A Star Is Born, Let’s Make Love and Les Girls, and almost directed Gone With The Wind. He won his only Oscar for this movie. Pretty much everyone involved in this was at least nominated, except for Audrey (Julie Andrews, who played Eliza on Broadway but wasn’t offered the movie part, won for Mary Poppins).

Good songs: “why can’t the english learn to speak english”… “i could have danced all night”… “with a little bit of luck”… some lesser ones: “you did it” and “get me to the church on time”.

Funny, at the end Eliza has been “bettered”, become classier, can’t go back to the street where she lived, the flower shops, and (until the final scene) she is miserable for it. And her formerly poor, happy-go-lucky drunken father has come into money unexpectedly and is miserable for it. Second musical I’ve seen in a row (after Hallelujah I’m a Bum) where people get rich and wish they hadn’t.

I get Henry’s character and his lame “i’ve grown accustomed to her face” late realization song, but I don’t get what Eliza’s still doing with him at the end of the film. Not a very romantic romance movie. When it comes to movies about obsessively re-shaping young women, I prefer Vertigo.