by ·Comments Off on The GoodTimesKid (2005, Azazel Jacobs)

“Happy birthday, baby.
Come on, let’s start over.”

Movie is very patient. That is a generous way to describe it, but I see no reason to be mean to the movie. The movie means no harm. Is it mumblecore? Is that word meaningful anymore? It’s certainly better than Mutual Appreciation, but it’s one of those movies about underachieving twentysomethings with no plans.

Rodolfo Cano (Gerardo Naranjo, above, director of I’m Gonna Explode), lives in a boat where he dodges his ex-girlfriend every day, gets a letter from the government welcoming him to the army, but he doesn’t remember joining the army. Shows up at the recruitment meeting and finds another Rodolfo Cano (Azazel “son of Ken” Jacobs, below).

So Gerardo follows Azazel home, meets Az’s girlfriend (Sara Diaz, below doing some old-timey dancing in the kitchen in the movie’s most famous scene, if indeed it has any famous scenes) and hangs out with her for a while. She visits his boat. Az starts fights in bars. A Gang of Four song plays. Suddenly there’s another character, but I didn’t notice when he appeared. Finally, Army day comes, Az is passed out (and still never told his girlfriend he joined), Gerardo jumps on the bus in his place. The story isn’t too convincing but the overall tone of the movie is much happier than it sounds from any plot description, a comedy without ever straining to feel comedic. I’m hearing Jacobs’ latest feature Momma’s Man is even better – must watch sometime.

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Another head-clearing crap horror movie in between Pedro Costa movies. As hyped as this movie has been lately, it didn’t transcend the tag “another crap horror etc,” mainly because it played out the cliche-filled trailer without adding any centipede-based innovation. We’re left with “madman kidnaps, tortures young people, until stopped.” From that standpoint, the crap-looking Adrien Brody clonus horror Splice might end up being the more original movie.

Vacationing girls’ car breaks down – at night – in the middle of nowhere – in the rain – walk until they find a house, but it is the wrong house. Maybe Six is purposely setting up a cliche plot just to shatter expectations with his cra-a-azy centipede concept, but even if you hadn’t seen the trailer, you know you are watching a movie called The Human Centipede, so there is no need for the cliches. I think he just wrote it in a hurry.

A girl tries to escape, is punished by becoming the center segment, eww. Dude who only speaks Japanese (what was he doing in rural Germany?) is the head. Once the girls are in place, they never do anything again besides make noise and follow the Japanese guy as he tries to escape. Cops finally show up with warrant, get shot by madman, who himself gets definitively killed (but what about the sequel?), rear girl drops from infection and malnutrition and front guy kills himself, leaving the center girl unable to go anywhere. Ha ha, center girl! It’s not ironic or a deserved fate, and she’ll be found soon anyway since two cops with search warrants just disappeared at the house. The scientist (who is a fun actor, the main reason the movie doesn’t drag) is obsessed with splicing things for no apparent reason (I kept thinking of the Brando scientist in South Park and his monkeys with many asses), and doesn’t do anything with his Centipede besides, seriously, trying to get it to fetch the newspaper.

Filmmaking is quite good for a horror movie, but nothing to brag about. Really the greatest things are that the movie exists (a la Snakes on a Plane), that the cinematographer is named Goof de Koning and lead actor named Dieter Laser, and that the director might get around to doing something interesting in the sequel. Then again, those hopes didn’t pan out for Rob Zombie’s Halloween sequel, so I’ll wait for reviews.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes: 2008-2009

Between “My Year of Flops” and “I Watched This On Purpose,” the AV Club watches a bunch of known-to-be-bad movies and reports back on the experience. I also have an unhealthy urge to watch stupid movies, but I don’t have the kind of free time they’ve got. I just want to know if I’m missing out on anything, and if the movie’s got a built-up mystery, what’s the big twist at the end. And now, thanks to netflix streaming, I can watch any part of any bad movie instantly. So here’s a rundown on the last ten minutes of…

Delgo (2008, Adler & Maurer)
Our hero Freddie Prinze Jr. is inspired by princess Jennifer Love Hewitt to go fight the evil queen. Animation really is as bad as they said, does not look like something that should be in a theater in 2008. I looked for Avatar parallels – got the enchanted forest, peace-loving fairy inhabitants (not cat-people at all) who ride dragons, and the cliche-and-catchprase-littered dialogue. Chris Kattan (ugh) rallies all the planet’s species to attack evil there at the end, also an Avatar plot point. Oooh, Delgo uses the Force. Isn’t the Force trademarked? J.L. Hewitt kills evil stepmother Anne Bancroft (I’m sorry this was your final film, Anne Bancroft) and peace is brought unto the land. Full of corny-ass jokes and hot, forbidden interspecies love.

Pandorum (2009, Christian Alvart)
A bearded Dennis Quaid seems possessed by some supernatural sci-fi evil. This is way more talky than Event Horizon. Ben Foster (X-Men 3, Northfork), I assume, is experiencing some kinda psychological special effects. Oh they are not in space, but underwater – that’s the big revelation, allowed a couple seconds of floaty luminescent peace before it’s back to punching Dennis Quaid. He fights some girl who is not Carrie-Anne Moss. Now is Ben possessed by the ancient evil? Wait, nevermind, a crack in the hull. Oh, the evil is some kind of cat beast. Catmen from Pandorum – more Avatar references? Ben and the girl surface. Happy ending? I can’t tell. Director Alvart is a German making it big in Hollywood with writer Travis Milloy, who once wrote a Jason Schwartzman movie that nobody saw.

The Alphabet Killer (2008, Rob Schmidt)
Tim Hutton (Ghost Writer, The Dark Half) must be the killer here. He’s trying to sedate Eliza Dushku, but she uses her Buffy moves to bust his face and escape. She tries to trap him in a way that would totally not work, but totally does, and dude escapes, gunshot in the foot, into the river. Is she raving incomprehensibly, or is the string music just up too loud? Later, in the hospital, Cary Elwes (I’ve not seen him since Saw) proclaims that this is all his fault (I’m willing to accept that). She never recovers and Hutton gets away, ouch. Schmidt made one of the more enjoyable Masters of Horror eps, and writer Tom Malloy did something called The Attic which looks even worse than this.

Righteous Kill (2008, Jon Avnet)
Pacino is gonna get shot by DeNiro! Or is DeNiro gonna get shot by Pacino? The editing is confusing and every shot is a close-up. Now there’s a showdown in an 80’s-movie factory, both of them with guns. I don’t know what they’re saying because Katy made me turn off the sound, but Pacino is pissed, and his hair isn’t as bad as it usually is, and Carla Gugino (Watchmen, Sin City) is hanging around. Nevermind all that, Pacino got totally shot to death by DeNiro! He gave a long speech I didn’t hear, then some shit happens, I wasn’t looking anymore. From the director of 88 Minutes (and Fried Green Tomatoes) and the writer of Inside Man.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009, Patrick Tatopoulos)
Sooo dark! I see werewolves, and some Lord of the Rings business, but it’s all so dark. The action is very actiony. HooRAY, Bill Nighy of Shaun of the Dead is the self-serious lead bad guy in a ridiculous costume. He shall face off against a pissed, bearded Michael Sheen, who screams “I loved her,” which means that Rhona Mitra (Doomsday) might be dead. Wait, Nighy is a vampire! He got sunlit then stabbed through the head by a righteous Sheen, which Katy did not appreciate seeing. Oh and Nighy is still alive in the twist ending here, as is Rhona Mitra. The director was a creature designer on the first two movies, never a good sign. Jesus, nine writers?

Lies and Illusions (2009, Tibor Takacs)
Christian Slater does his hammy always-talking thing in the backseat of a made-for-1991-TV-looking full-frame car chase. Sarah Ann Schultz is trapped after a huge crash, while Christa Campbell shoots at some baddies who are not Cuba Gooding Jr. The sound mix is awful, very Slater-heavy with crap music, but wait, CGJr showed up and shot Slater, which STILL didn’t shut him up. Sarah Ann Schultz sneaks onto Cuba’s airplane, and parachutes out leaving the plane to crash, in the most hilarious special effects attempt of 2009. Tibor, of course, made the excellent The Gate and less-excellent The Gate II back in the 80’s – doesn’t look like he’s doing so well now. From the writer of nothing, and cinematographer of Trapped Ashes (but given a Magnum P.I.-era TV videocamera).

Angels & Demons (2009, Ron Howard)
Tom Hanks discovers secret cameras taping the board room! He sees a very sinister Stellan Skarsgard (ha ha, he is always sinister) saying quizzical shit to an incredulous Ewan McGregor. Apparently Ewan spread illuminati rumors to stop SS from trying to find scientific proof of God? Or something, anyway Ewan frames SS and gets him shot in flashback, to the despair of all the cardinals reviewing security tapes with Hanks and some girl who is not Audrey Tautou. Later, a guy who might be Armin Mueller-Stahl presides as scary Germans tail a bruised Ewan until he sets himself on fire. The evidence is destroyed, and the crowd goes wild. Where does Jesus’s granddaughter fit into all this? From the writers of Zathura, Secret Window, Constantine and Deep Blue Sea, ouch.

by ·Comments Off on Revanche (2008, Götz Spielmann)

Impressive revenge flick, building slowly to an excellent conclusion. Mostly static camera, no music at all, but these things don’t call attention to themselves like they do in, say, In Vanda’s Room, because of the propulsive drama.

Alex, a mustache ‘n sideburns-wearing ex-con who’s not as tough as he acts (according to his boss, who runs a brothel) has a secret love affair with Ukranian prostitute Tamara. Things are heating up, both of them are in debt and her boss is trying to move her to an apartment to cater to politicians and others who consider themselves too important to visit a brothel. When the boss hires a guy to beat up Tamara it’s the last straw, and Alex scoops her up to leave town, stopping in the small town where his grandfather lives to rob a bank he’d “staked out” (located an alley as an escape route, not very careful planning). But a cop notices the car and asks questions, then shoots as Alex drives away, killing Tamara.

Thus begins the revenge portion. The cop, Robert, is depressed over the death and only gets worse as he gets suspended from work while they investigate the shooting. They’ve got no leads, so Alex is safe, stays in town chopping wood for his grandfather and plotting how to kill Robert, eventually having an affair with the cop’s wife and deciding not to kill the guy after all. Oh and the wife has been trying to get pregnant but can’t manage with Robert, so guess what happens. Kinda sounds cheesy when you write it down, but I liked it an awful lot.

Accordian lover Hauser with Robert’s wife Susi:

A rarely moving camera, and zero music. The brothel meister was in Fassbinder’s Querelle, otherwise cast and crew are unknown to me. The combination of the young cop and the lead guy’s relationship with his decrepit father reminded me in flashes of Hunger, and the backlit wood-chopping scenes recalled flashbacks in Cache.

Criterion scares up comparisons to Kieslowski, Antonioni and Bergman in reviews.

A. White:

Although Revanche is Spielmann’s first film to be released in the United States, it is actually his fifth overall, so his style and tone come to us fully developed. He began his career as a playwright, yet Revanche is thoroughly cinematic in story, look, and pace.

Spielmann’s arrival on the American film scene is exciting for the way Revanche opposes the contemporary trend toward dark pessimism with a vision that contemplates light and, conditionally, belief. At one point, a repentant character is asked, “What would your God say?” and she answers, “He’d understand.”

White quotes the director: “Loneliness is probably an inextricable part of our modern lives, and yet I consider it an illusion. We always think of ourselves as being separate from the world, and in this way we deceive ourselves. This separation is just an invention of our imagination; in many ways, we are constantly and directly interwoven in a larger whole. Loneliness is an attribute of our limited awareness, not of life itself.”

by ·Comments Off on Survival of the Dead (2009, George Romero)

Romero is just making mediocre genre movies and putting zombies in ’em now. This one’s a dumb 80’s actioner (buncha dudes act tough and spit bad dialogue punctuated by explosions) crossed with a silly-ass Irish family-feud revenge drama… with zombies in it. Shamus Muldoon is warring with Patrick O’Flynn on a small island off Ireland Delaware. One wants to kill all the local zombies, the other wants to keep ’em around attached to chains, like the last few minutes of Shaun of the Dead turned into a pretend-serious idea… “pretend” because whenever the drama threatens to get heavy, the movie throws in some cartoony business to show it’s all in good fun. The comedy destroys the drama since the drama wasn’t so good to begin with. At least Land of the Dead had new ideas (the zombies starting to communicate and organize) and kept some of the satirical edge of the first three. The last couple have felt like GA Romero’s Cash-in of the Dead… funny, since they barely played theaters (but they look cheap as hell so surely still made a profit for someone).

The O’Flynn gang:

Oh yeah, so a four-man army-deserter group are in search of money (why?), team up with a mysterious teen (who turns out not to be mysterious), and follow an exiled O’Flynn back to the island (of the dead) to look for his twin daughters and fight Muldoon, who’s trying to make the dead learn to eat animals instead of people (why?). At the end, the lesson (told to us in voiceover) is that people fight each other for stupid reasons.

The only shot I really liked:

More than one actor in this was also in Boondock Saints II and the Saw series. Mysterious Teen appeared in Land of the Dead and played Rodrick in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Our beardy hero was also in Land, and I’m pretty sure there’s a plot reference early on to Diary, but any connections to the other films seem like an afterthought. In competition at Venice, either because of that European tendency to fake-appreciate poor American genre flicks, or because they hadn’t seen the finished product when they allowed it in.

Hilarious cartoon explosion-aftermath:

Hilarious cartoon burning-head-used-as-cigarette-lighter:

by ·Comments Off on In Vanda’s Room (2000, Pedro Costa)

Interlacing! Surly women argue over heroin. Nhurro takes a shower. Vanda sells lettuce. Bunch of one-shot scenes, disconnected from each other – I mean, they’re in the same neighborhood with some regular characters, but one doesn’t narratively follow the last. Sometimes the movie seems to be challenging me not to watch it, like when a man with a needle in his arm compares awful blood-clot stories with a friend, or when a girl will not stop scraping a tabletop with a razor.

S. Hasumi: “All of Pedro Costa’s shots have a vertical power that breaks the viewer free from the story’s linear cause and effect. The pleasure of exposure to that liberation has, ever since F.W. Murnau, been a privilege allowed only to film.”

It’s Carrefour!

Caught references to Cape Verde and to a woman who either sold, killed or abandoned her baby (the story is not well remembered – nothing around here is). Other than that, no Jacques Tourneur film-love or even a Wire bootleg on a boombox, just pure miserable reality. Of course it’s not exactly reality, as pointed out by the commentary – shots are staged, there were retakes, dialogue was thought out before the scene.

More than two hours in, Soon after the girls talk about their childhood in this neighborhood, when drugs weren’t around, or at least were better hidden, the song “Memories” is playing on a TV, cutting after the line “I remember the time I knew what happiness was.” What, is the movie belatedly remembering that it’s a movie? I didn’t enjoy the first half, thought it was getting worse, then felt increasing sympathy for it during the final hour.

Cyril Neyrat sees revolution while I struggle to stay awake and not to get annoyed:

Costa bought a Panasonic DV and went to Fontainhas alone, every day. Vanda and Zita had invited him into their room: “Come, you’ll see what our lives are really like. You used to ask us to be quiet; now we’re going to talk, you’re going to listen. That’s all we do, talk and take drugs.” Over six months, alone with his DV camera, a mirror he found on-site, and cobbled-together reflectors, Costa reinvented his cinema: facing the bed, he looked for frames and strove to master the light that came in through a single tiny window, as in a Dutch painting … After the six months, a sound engineer came to lend a hand from time to time. He recorded the girls’ speech, the murmur of Fontainhas, the sounds of the bulldozers and the mechanical diggers tearing the condemned neighborhood’s houses down one by one. The miracle of In Vanda’s Room is that of a new agreement between the world and the film, of a recovered equality between the two sides of the camera.

Costa reinvented a solitary, craftsmanlike cinema, operating at the pace of everyday life: going into the neighborhood each morning, looking, working, doing nothing, picking from the stream of life and energy flowing before the camera something that might give rise to a scene. And then repeat it, do it over—up to twenty times—until the beauty and the intellectual and imaginary power of a sculpted reality made dense and musical are revealed. With In Vanda’s Room, Costa strips cinema bare, but far from wallowing in an aesthetic poverty that would add to the humiliation of the underprivileged of Fontainhas, he rediscovers in this subtraction the aura of the great primitive and classic cinemas, and their ability to reveal and celebrate the beauty of the world, the beauty of sounds and colors, of a ray of light passing through shutters to illuminate three bottles set on a wood table.

“It looks like a film, it is a film in some sort of way,” opens Pedro defensively in the DVD commentary, before proceeding to tell us about the difficult sound work they did in post-production. “It’s a bit pretentious but the ambition with Vanda in sound, image, everything, was to recompose, offer, unveiling the secret that really doesn’t exist, going against the cinema-machine…” it’s a rambling commentary, but it’s a three-hour movie so there’s no hurry. It rambled me straight to sleep, twice in the first hour, so I finally gave up halfway through.

by ·Comments Off on Halloween 2 (2009, Rob Zombie)

I figure since Zombie made the already kinda boring Halloween series even more boring by going nuts on the psychological back story, this sequel was his chance to cut loose, to make a proper slasher picture. But no, more psychological crap, more fuckin’ Dr. Loomis, and another undistinguished movie. This time instead of Michael’s background and trauma leading to his becoming an indestructible serial killer, we focus on sister Laurie’s Michael-caused trauma leading to her becoming a serial killer (one assumes – I’m not gonna watch part three).

Dourif, an island of cool in the horror-movie muck:

I’m glad to see Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mom, but I’m not glad that she’s dead, appearing in Michael’s mind along with his own child self and sometimes a white horse (the psychological significance of which is spelled out by the opening titles). Also glad to see Brad Dourif, but I spend the whole movie feeling bad for him, since it’s bookended by the torture and almost-killing of his daughter two years earlier, and the final torture and killing of his daughter. Not even slightly glad to see Malcolm McDowell, but only because he’s playing Samuel Loomis, the least appealing regular character in any horror series.

McDowell admiring himself:

Picks up right where Halloween left off. The coroners truck carrying Michael hits a cow in the road, Michael wakes up and kills the surviving coroner, disappears for two years before rampaging back to Sunnydale or wherever on Halloween night to torment Laurie, who finally goes over the edge and kills (I hope) egomaniac Dr. Loomis.

Oh right, Haddonfield:

There’s an awfully long dream sequence (or WAS it) in a hospital where pretty much everybody is killed except Laurie. Lois Lane plays Laurie’s therapist, with a giant extremely-white-horse-looking inkblot painting on her wall, saying things like “he’s objectively dead, but he’s living in your mind and he’s living in your heart and your emotions.” Some movie talk: Brad Dourif gets excited over Lee Marvin and Cat Ballou. A dude gets his head stomped, and lotta people get killed from brutal, brutal pounding and knives aplenty. The girls’ slutty friend is predictably killed. Lots of unmotivated camera angles. And as Halloween night approaches, the movie starts getting boring right when it should not be getting boring.

The girls work at an indie coffee shop, a rare look at Rob Zombie the junkman collector who I’ve been missing ever since his first movie:

Scout Taylor-Compton (who filled time between Halloween movies appearing in a direct-to-video horror called April Fool’s Day) returns as Laurie and Danielle Harris (no stranger to crap horror videos herself) is her buddy Annie (Dourif’s daughter). Sabretooth returns as Michael. “Love Hurts” plays over the final scene, the final dumb nail in the stupid coffin.

Michael and his imaginary friends:

by ·Comments Off on Yatterman (2009, Takashi Miike)

A “live-action” children’s hyperactive candy cartoon full of dick and boob jokes. When you consider the American alternative (poop jokes) you stop minding so much. Ultra-energetic bright super-CG-assisted silliness, and mostly quite watchable (altogether better than Zombieland, or Miike’s own Sukiyaki Western Django).

Good guys standing in front of their underpants-looking symbol:

Baddies in disguise:

Based on a 70’s TV show, and flaunting it (a short TV-style credit open, dialogue referencing weekly occurrences). The titular team is #1 (pop star Sho Sakurai), his girlfriend #2 (Saki Fukuda) and their crew of robots, including a giant dog that gets beaten up more than it helps out. The baddies (more interesting than the bland heroes, as usual) are dazzling dominatrix leader Mistress Doronjo (Kyoko Fukuda of Kamikaze Girls, Dolls, Ring 2), pudgy pig-nosed Tonzra (Kendo Kobayashi), and carrot-nosed Boyacky (Katsuhisa Namase of the Japanese remake of Sideways) who is in love with his boss. It seems there’s a magic skull, and the two teams are scrambling to collect its pieces – team Yatterman by request of a sad girl, and team Doronjo by orders from “the god of thieves,” a skull-totem spirit which has possessed the girl’s father.

Spirit-possessed father: Sadao Abe, a Great Yokai War veteran:

Saki Fukuda busts up a split-screen:

Seems like a cross between Miike’s Great Yokai War, Pokemon, the Gundam/Robotech giant-robot series and all the other Japanese cartoons I don’t watch (plus rip-offs of Indiana Jones and who knows what else)… nothing too original, but it’s all so winningly performed, keeping a light tone despite the overpacked story, that originality hardly matters. There are musical numbers, dream sequences and increasingly absurd robots. Defeat comes accompanied by giant mushroom clouds. Not knowing the show, I have no idea how much of this pre-existed and how much is Miike’s contribution. The whole thing was well-shot and edited to make sense, which is not a given when it comes to hyper kids shows – would be interesting to see how it stacks up to the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer.

Pigman dream sequence:

Kitty sphinx head a’splode:

by ·Comments Off on Zombieland (2009, Ruben Fleischer)

From the acclaimed director of Girls Guitar Club and Between Two Ferns, and the writer/producers of a reality prank show. Supposedly there was uncredited script doctoring by the writer of Dreamcatcher. So it wasn’t going to rival Shaun of the Dead for quality, but it was lightly amusing.

I’m not familiar enough with recent teen-sex comedies to recognize stars Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) and Emma Stone (Superbad and The House Bunny). I might’ve known Jesse – he’s the older brother in The Squid and the Whale, someone or other in The Village and the main dude in Roger Dodger – but mainly he just reminded us of Michael Cera. Jesse is our nerdy rule-following narrator who meets badass Woody (really a sensitive guy who has experienced loss, and who loves Caddyshack) and then scam artist sisters Emma and Little Miss Sunshine (of Little Miss Sunshine). The movie’s world is impressively empty – no other packs of survivors except for a lone Bill Murray (and incidentally, I haven’t seen a celebrity-playing-himself get shot to death in a comedy since Harold & Kumar 2) and a cameo by Mike White in flashback.