Review // THE AMERICAN

The American is a very handsome letdown.
As far as HD Blu-Ray's go, you can't do much better than this gorgeous transfer of photographer-turned filmmaker, Anton Corjbin's take on the Lonely Hitman movie. It's precisely the static, patient shooting style of Corjbin that distinguishes him from the pack of new directors pulled from the music video world, and it's what makes this film pop on disc. There isn't a lot of flash or frenzy like there is in most modern spy/assassin movies. This is no Bourne movie with steadicam blurs and headache-inducing "verite". Corbjin prefers to rely on his expert eye and sense of exquisite composition, grabbing and holding your attention with his striking images. However, it's only the images that are worthy of attention because the story of a disconnected hitman is dead-on-arrival.

Like I said, the movie looks fantastic, transforming your flat screen into a window onto old-world European vistas that will make anybody want to strap on their backpack and dust off their copy of Europe On $10 A Day. The problem is that the movie can't succeed on beauty and window-dressing alone. The American is cold right through to the center and unsatisfying for not breaking with the cliches of the moralizing hitman movie formula. If The American had've been released in the late 60's, it would probably be hailed as a classic. But in 2010, it feels old-fashioned and more than a little derivative. The Lonely Assassin cliche has continuously popped up in pop culture in either subtle hints (Day of the Jackal), sentimental character explorations (Leon, Road to Perdition) and even comedic deconstructions (Gross Pointe Blank). The American is definitely the brooding, sentimental type and casts Clooney as a killer and fixer who lives apart from humanity, darting in and out of the shadows of society's fringe. We are meant to pity his solitary life filled with paranoia, night terrors and haunted conscience. I think we are even meant to pity the fact that this chosen life has forced him to murder his girlfriend in order to ensure his own survival, which is a bizarre request to make of an audience in return for only the handsome despondency of Clooney. And when again Clooney reaches out for human contact, to a stunningly hot prostitute no less, I believe we are meant to approve of his character's almost defiant grasp to regain his humanity. I don't know about all that, but I certainly approved of his love interest's full 70's bush.

The American wallows in the loneliness of a hired killer's life, trying to create a mood piece, but really just delivering a downer. And Clooney reaching out to a priest and a prostitute--thin archetypes--strips the film of even more credibility--I may not have, but I feel like I've seen this character triangle a hundred times before. Clooney's character wears a constant mask of sadness and self-pity, making him a slave to emotions that he should feel, not necessarily the ones he would. If at least 50 years of cinema has taught us anything, it's that assassins are fucking cool, if maybe a little warped, and yes, sometimes lonely, but fucking cooool. But Clooney's assassin, while skilled and cunning, is such a sad-sack that it calls into question the very motivations of an assassin or why anyone would turn to it as a life choice. The American takes the implied sense of isolation and dislocation to such melodramatic heights that it actually made me see the absurdity of the profession for the first time (and like everyone else I've seen a shitload of hitman movies). Sleeping on dusty cots in rustic quarters, waking suddenly in a cold sweat with a gun at the ready, murdering the woman you love just to cover your tracks--WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS JOB?

I like Clooney as a movie star and I think this type of movie is exactly what he should be doing, but The American needed to match its gorgeous visuals with something new to say. Telling us that the shadowy people who kill for a living get awfully lonely is something most of us already grasped 30 or so movies ago. The "twist", which is telegraphed in its lead up, is also heavy-handed and makes you call into question quite a bit of what you've seen previously. By the time the climax rolls around, with Clooney chasing his prey through the village's religious ceremony, the sense of deja vu and disappointment becomes overwhelming.

2010 RECAP

I started this blog at a very odd time. About 3 weeks after my son Harry was born, out of nowhere, I sat down at my computer, signed up on Blogger and wrote my first review.
Maybe it was a rebellious response to the encroaching responsibility and stress that our little bundle of joy represented. Perhaps my inner child was fighting for dominance, trying to retain some corner of my mind while the rest filled up with thoughts and worries about Harry. Whatever the reason, this blog was an important outlet for me in those early days of fatherhood, a way to keep my mind active while the rest of my life morphed into a series of responses to the needs and nurturing of a newborn. But as the year went on it became harder and harder to maintain the pace of reviews, and frankly, less and less important to me. My wife and I survived the first year of parenthood, perhaps even thrived to a certain extent, and so Cinema Con Carne lost some of its significance as a coping device. There just wasn't enough time to write about movies. It got to the point where I didn't want to watch any movies because I knew I had to write a review of each one and I already had a consistent backlog of 5 or 6 reviews to write. This started to really annoy my wife Jenn because movie-watching became an even more important relaxation outlet for us once we became parents.

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with new posts, because I enjoy thinking and writing about movies--always have. But with this blog I had a mission statement: to write a review for every single movie I watch. But as I said above, I failed at this. As I start to work on new posts, all the unwritten reviews are haunting me and fucking with my OCD. So this post is a recap of all the rest of the movies I saw last year that I failed to writer proper reviews for.

The Other Guys
Will Ferrell and Mark Whalberg as hapless cops fumbling their way through a big case. The Other Guys is a cop movie spoof shot through with nostalgia for the buddy cop movies of the 80's like Lethal Weapon. This is a return to form somewhat for Ferrell and reunion with his most successful collaborator, director Adam McKay. Ferrell took a public whipping last year and saw his celebrity stock price fall for the failure of Land of the Lost, the ridiculously big budgeted remake of the the cult 60's show. The studio and filmmakers should have seen its failure coming, the whole package just made no sense, but like most cinematic whipping boys, the critical backlash against Land of the Lost is mostly unwarranted. There are laughs to be had and genuinely weird moments aplenty. Anyway, The Other Guys is Ferrell on much safer ground and trying to win back the public. Like most of Ferrell's McKay movies, a lot of jokes are thrown at the wall and some stick and others slide off in silent, laugh-less void. But the percentage of decent jokes is fairly high. I'd rate it better than Talladega Nights, but not as good as Step Brothers.


Jagged Edge
One of the big things, well actually the biggest thing, that happened in terms of movies this year for me was the introduction of Netflix to Canada. My passionate and fiery (and sometimes abusive) relationship with Netflix should really be explored in its very own post, but let's just say that it has significantly changed the way I watch movies and many films on this list and in reviews to come are going to be things I streamed off this service. Jagged Edge is one of those movies that I would never in a million years rent (it would probably prove difficult to find anyway) but when I saw it on the Netflix list I jumped at the chance to check it out. I actually have a weird early relationship to Jagged Edge that provided a funny context for this viewing. One of my most vivid childhood memories is when my parents rented this back in the 80's, but wouldn't let me watch it, waiting until after I had gone to bed before starting it. My bedroom was across the hall from the TV Room, so when they fired up the VHS copy, I snuck out of my room and watched the movie in the reflection of the window directly across from the TV. Maybe it was the danger of sneaking around, or maybe it was the slight distortion of the picture reflected in the glass, but for whatever reason Jagged Edge completely terrified me from the opening scene, which features the brutal knifing of a woman set to a very pounding score by John Barry. In fact, this opening scene messed me up so much that I abandoned my plan to watch the whole thing reflected in the window, and I actually ran back to my bedroom and crawled under the covers, shivering with fear. But the sound of the movie followed me into my bedroom and I lay in a cold sweat, paralyzed and terrified, unable to escape it. I wanted to get up and run into the TV room and beg my parents to stop the movie, but I was actually too scared to move. Watching Jagged Edge 25 years later, my terror obviously seems ridiculous. It's not a horror movie, its a Glenn Close legal thriller for godsakes. But during the opening scene, when the score kicked in and the black-gloved hand begins stabbing the woman, I got weird tremors of remembrance. This is a pretty unremarkable movie in every way and is perhaps only notable because it was the first time sleazy screenwriter Joe Eszterhas tried out his Sexy-Murder formula that he would later perfect with Basic Instinct, Sliver and Jade (depending on your definition of perfection).

Death Wish 3

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this, considering the nerd-fervor surrounding it thoroughly turned me off during its release, and also the fact that I considered director Edgar Wright's last movie, Hot Fuzz, a major letdown. Maybe it was the fact that it's one of the only Hollywood movies to unabashedly declare its love for Toronto, shooting in our streets while still retaining their names. It was somehow weirdly cathartic to see the CN Tower un-cropped from the skyline for once. The movie's hyper, giddy un-reality uses cutting edge CGI in the right way, lifting the mundane into mythical. There's just an infectious goodtimes vibe that survives even the slightly long run time, and for once the patented stuttering awkwardness of Micheal Cera doesn't wear thin. Unfortunately, the love story between Cera's Pilgrim and indie-rock goddess Ramona Flowers is supposed to be the fuel that propels the story through hyperdrive, but its the most underdeveloped part of the movie. Ramona doesn't seem particularly worth fighting for and their relationship has no spark, making each and every battle with her seven evil exes feel more like an overly constrained plot function and not the hyper-real relationship odyssey it's supposed to be. The other thing that kinda irked me was that the video game aesthetic that defines the movie seems arbitrary and doesn't have any real connection to the characters and the story. Perhaps this connection was explored with more satisfaction in the comic on which its based, but the film doesn't provide it with a meaning and treats it as a given that people of a certain age see their lives through pixelated nostalgia. Besides Scott Pilgrim mentioning Pacman once, he doesn't seem to be a character shaped by videogame culture. In fact, he has a much more tangible connection to indie rock and music culture, which makes the visual references to videogames all the more perplexing. I liked the aesthetic, I just felt letdown that it seemed to be coming from a place of nerd-appeasement and not one of character.

Max Payne
Scott Pilgrim is informed by videogame culture (for some reason), while Max Payne is a videogame adaptation. Scott Pilgrim is proudly set in Toronto, while Max Payne uses and abuses Toronto like every other Hollywood production, stripping it of character (it has character right? sorta) and molding it to look like Anycity USA. What's odd about Max Payne is that for a videogame adaptation, and especially one with such a clear visual motif (bullet time) it doesn't seem particularly interested in adapting videogame aesthetics. It has two very exciting and memorable visual sequences, but neither of these draw inspiration from either the Max Payne series of games or even videogames at all. One is a typical fight scene in the hallway of Payne's apartment. Darkly lit, briskly edited and unremarkably choreographed. But with each impact, director John Wells adds flashes of red frames amidst the blue-black light of the scene. It's more comic book-y than even Sin City achieved and in a weird way recalls the pop art visuals of the 60's Batman show. I wanted it to continue throughout the movie, but sadly it didn't. The second sequence is even more brief, but really mesmerizing and struck me as one of the first real, meaningful additions to the visual language of action films in long, long time. Max Payne (Marky Mark Whalberg) is hopped up on a pharmaceutical drug that turns people into viking killing machines (don't ask) and he charges out of the shadows of a parking garage firing at his enemies. In my lifetime I've probably seen 100 parking garage shootouts, but none quite like this. It's hard to describe what Wells does, but it's almost like he manages to fix the camera to Whalberg but yet at a distance and not in a steadicam rigging as we've seen before. And as Whalberg runs and fires his double pistols, the muzzle flares become the only light and give off a strobe effect, amplifying the speed and violence of his attack. It's nuts. The rest of the movie is not as inventive, shifting between shit we've all seen a hundred times and new, bad ideas that never should have made it into production. And the villain is Beau Bridges. You know a movie is fucked when Beau Bridges is the main bad guy.

It Could Happen To You
Thanks to Netflix, I watched this 90's rom-com again for maybe the 5th time. I realize now that I've seen it at least 3 times too many. Before watching it I kept telling my wife that it was one of my favourite "90's movies" and a really sweet little comedy. It weirded her out a little because there's no twist to the rom-com formula, no cool element that makes it worthy of repeat viewings. It's a totally straight-ahead, sappy love story. While watching it, she kept asking me, "so how many times did you say you've watched this?". I can't explain it. It just always gets me. And this is the rare Nic Cage movie where he plays it totally straight and doesn't ever get Cage-y, which is unfortunate, but also still weird in its own way to behold.

The Juror
Now this is what I'm fucking talking about! Bless you Netflix. I had zero interest in this when it came out in '96. Demi Moore was garbage to me and I had wrongly assumed by its name alone that it was a trashy Grisham adaptation. Its boring poster and boring name basically kept me away, but when I saw it on Netflix I jumped at it because I've been kinda wanting to go on an Alec Baldwin binge and this was the perfect place to start. This movie rules! It's not an outright courtroom thriller as I'd expected and obviously its still part retarded, but it feels just odd enough to distinguish itself from the pack of 90's studio thrillers. And a big reason for this is Baldwin's performance and character. He plays a fixer for a New York mob family, a shadowy enigma called simply "The Teacher" and it's his job to fix a jury that's going to decide the outcome of an upcoming state case against a mob figure. From the list of jurors, Baldwin picks out Demi Moore's single mom artist as the perfect candidate to become his puppet wit in the jurors chambers. He threatens and intimidates her until she agrees to try to sway her fellow jurors toward a "not guilty" verdict. This is pretty familiar stuff, but it's just a jumping off point for a much more interesting exploration of the delusions of power. Baldwin falls for Moore, but he is unable to comprehend how his threats of violence cause revulsion within her. He also genuinely believes that he is the only one who can protect her, despite the fact that he is exactly who she needs to be protected from. Slowly a portrait of a lonely, detached weirdo begins to emerge and Baldwin's character goes from creepy one dimensional psycho to a far more interesting sad case who doesn't know he's a psycho. When I started this movie I had no idea I would be so entertained or that this legal thriller with mob bosses and hitman would end up in the jungles and ancient temples of Gautemala. It's also worth noting that Demi Moore actually looks like a real woman in this movie, perhaps for the last time because she followed this up with both Striptease and GI Jane which saw her wildly vacillating between two extreme visions of femininity. Here she wears baggy cargo pants and has curves and is quite plain. A far cry from the bizarre Frankencelebrity she has become.

Only You
Cute pixie Marisa Tomei and unpredictable live wire Robert Downey Jr. stumbling across Europe and falling in love. From a middling rom-com standpoint, it sounds like a relatively safe concept. But veteran director Norman Jewison fucks it up in pretty much every way possible. This really sucks. Everything about it is awkward and all of its convoluted plot contrivances aren't properly paid off. Coincidences and mistaken identities are all standard, accepted cliches in this genre, but Only You carries them off in deflating ways. It's hard to believe this is from the same director as Moonstruck, which steeped itself in Italian-American romanticism and became a beloved classic. With Only You, Jewison decides to double down on the romantic Italian atmosphere by actually shooting in Italy, but that seems to be his only stroke of inspiration. Also, Downey is kinda subdued here, and much like Cage in It Could Happen To You, he doesn't really sketch outside the lines in any ways that would make it worth bearing the rest of this boring package.




Go
Yeah, this hasn't aged well. I remember at the time this was described as the "Pulp Fiction for the rave generation". Well it basically sucks as much as that sounds. It piles on the irritating character quirks and non-linear plotting that fucked up the latter half of the post-Tarantino '90's and it has a Fatboy Slim song and Taye Diggs. So yeah, not good.






Jennifer's Body
I can't exactly pinpoint why this movie was spurned by the mainstream. Critics savaged it and audiences ignored it. This is odd for several reasons. For starters, writer Diablo Cody, one of the few celebrity screenwriter personalities in Hollywood, was fresh off a whole shitload of acclaim for Juno (dubious as that is) and even won an Oscar (dubious as that is). Critics who had lined up to fawn all over her work just two years earlier, reacted to Jennifer's Body with near unanimous disdain. Plot and thematic differences aside, I see very little distinction between the gratingly clever Diablo-speak that critics championed in Juno, but chafed at in Jennifer's Body. And I don't think that Juno is any more effective as a dramedy than Jennifer's Body is as a horredy (new term?). The other reason that Jennifer's Body's failure is surprising is because of the Meagan Fox factor. I've never really got the Megan Fox thing. She always struck me as like the prettiest girl at the midwestern mall foodcourt-type, and not a starlet worthy of the legions of boners she's managed to inspire. But for whatever reason, Meagan Fox became and American sex symbol in just two movies. Those two movies, Transformers and its sequel, ogled her body in a very PG way and gave her nothing more to do than hold Shia Laboeuf's hand as he pulled her through explosions. Her role as useless female sidekick didn't tap into her badgirl image or the bitchiness that came out in her public persona. And yet along came Jennifer's Body with Fox as a slutty, literally man-eating cheerleader possessed by a demon and teenaged boys did not come out in droves to make the movie a hit. There was even a lesbian scene between her and Amanda Seyfried, the curvy blonde yin to Fox's bony brunette yang, and it still didn't strike box office gold!
The obvious answer seems to be that Jennifer's Body is just bad and deserved it's failure, but I call bullshit on that. It's not great, sure. But it's certainly competent and by times clever and biting. It was clearly inspired by the dark teen comedy of Heathers, but was never even close to unseating that film's status, but it's pretty good for what it is. The Diablo-speak, which was a deal-breaker for me in Juno, is much more at home here and there were some genuinely funny lines, especially the ones delivered with absolute relish by Meagan Fox, who is in full camp mode here. Zombieland made 10 times the money that Jennifer's Body did and it's not nearly as funny. It also doesn't have a lesbian kiss. No, I think the reason this movie failed to connect with audiences was that even in the trailers (and obviously in the title) a strong feminine perspective came across. When looking at Jennifer's Body, people didn't see a trashy horror movie, they saw feminism dripping corn syrup and red food colouring. To audiences, Jennifer's Body could've literally meant Megean Fox's weirdly hard fake tits, or just as easily be a metaphor for menstruation. So people stayed away, including women. In retrospect, I guess this movie's failure isn't so surprising.

Havoc
Holy shit. This is so funny. I think everyone involved believed they were making a searing account of teenagers living on the edge. Havoc is probably technically considered a drama about a culture clash between affluent whites and gangsta street culture, but it's unintentional camp comedy through and through. I mean it's funny right from the opening scene and just keeps getting funnier. Anne Hathaway was looking to tarnish up her Disney princess image so here she plays a spoiled rich brat who snorts coke and fucks losers from both sides of the tracks. She even shows her tits like 7 times for good measure. It's too bad she isn't acting in the impactful drama she signed up for though. Havoc reminded me of Reefer Madness in its hopelessly simplistic view of just about everything, and its hysterical, moralizing tone. I'm also pretty sure its final thesis was that pretty, rich white girls shouldn't mix with latin crack dealers because they'll get gang raped in the ass and feel really sad about it for awhile aferwards. As a moralizing character drama about children of privelidge cross-pollinating with gangsta culture, Havoc is a fucking disaster. As a laugh-out-loud comedy, it's a smashing success. Havoc takes itself very seriously, but after watching its failed attempt at documenting this cultural offshoot (or abortion) I would be amazed if anyone could make a serious film about Wiggerism (new term). It's an inherently funny subject and its roots and causes are so obvious that it seems almost pointless to document them. Strangely, Havoc pulls its punches by avoiding the obvious (and juciest) cultural collision between white trust fund kids and black inner city hustlers and instead opts for latino gangstas, which as far as I know, no wigger has every modeled himself after.

Out of Sight
For the last, oh 7 months or so, I've been engaged in a foolish quest to read every single Elmore Leonard novel. I read 13 of them so far, but he's written over 50. I'm going to continue, but my progress has slowed a little. I read Out of Sight and then of course wanted to return to the movie, which I remember as one of my favourites from the 90's. It held up. This is maybe Clooney's best role and it's sure as shit Jennifer Lopez's best work. It's actually a really interesting movie because it wears the skin of a hip crime film, but it's actually more of a date movie at heart. You're always more engaged by the romance between Clooney's veteran bank robber and Lopez the US Marshall than you are with the heist that drives the story forward. Forget the guns and the double-crosses, this is about opposites attracting at its heart, which is really the bread-and-butter of rom-com's, not crime films. And yet when Clooney and Lopez share scenes together (which isn't often because the plot keeps them apart), the movie plays with the heightened sexual and romantic tension of their situation better than most, if not all the rom-com's that have come after it.




The Paper
Man, this is sooo '90's and sooo Ron Howard. It's always nice to see Michael Keaton and everything, but this movie is bullshit. Also, it has Robert Duvall in all his over-acting glory.






500 Days of Summer
500 Days of Summer presents itself as the quirky, youthful alternative to Hollywood's traditional, stuffy, high concept romantic comedies. After suffering through this bullshit, I'll take the middling old school rom-com any day. This somehow accomplished the feat of being worse than I thought it would be, and I really thought this would suck a lot. I knew from the trailer that it would disgustingly quirky and artificial, but for some reason I thought it was going to also be somewhat visually inventive, perhaps even innovative. But it's pretty drab and has all the visual flair and humour of a Mentos commercial. Actually, I take that back. That's an insult to Mentos commercials, which are actually funnier than this. The movie is littered with pop culture references ranging unadventurously from Joy Division and The Smiths to Star Wars, all of which seem engineered to give boring people moments of recognition. There is a scene early on where Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zoey Deschanel (those names were annoying just to type) are in an elevator together and he's listening to The Smiths on his ipod and she begins to annoyingly coo the words of the song, much to his amazement. He's all, "oh my god, you like The Smiths too?" and she's like, "Oh yeah, I love The Smiths, they're great". And then she walks out of the elevator and he's totally bowled over by the encounter. HOLY SHIT, 2 PEOPLE LIKE THE SMITHS, WHAT ARE THE ODDS??? It drove me fucking insane. This movie is an anti-love story. He's a giant pussy asshole and she's a total aloof cunt and you hate them both immediately. Not only did I not care how and why they fell in and out of love, but I was left wondering how even their parents could love them.

The Burbs
I actually saw this out in the "burbs" when it was released in the late 80's for a friend's birthday party. I hadn't seen it since, but it totally held up. Joe Dante doing spooky comedy. Tom Hanks when he was actually funny and before he had designs on respectable dramatic career. Corey Feldman making teenaged blow money in a Universal picture about nosey neighbors and homicidal shut-ins. Fucking great stuff. Seriously, Tom Hanks is so funny in this. He gives such a terrific, physical performance, it'll make you even more resentful of the 50 Oscar Bait movies he's made since this.




Prince of Persia
Jerry Bruckheimer--the man, the brand--is one of the most winning producers in Hollywood. As sure as the Earth revolves around the sun, one can expect at least one mega-hit Bruckheimer movie every summer, a pact with popcorn munchers he has been observing since his former partner Don Simpson kicked the bucket and he began following his bliss straight to the bank. It's pretty clear that with Simpson out of the way, Bruckheimer was freed up to put more films into production and starting in the summer of '95, he began carpet-bombing multiplexes with high-gloss, effects-laded confections. This run started out pretty great with Bad Boys, The Rock, Con Air and Armageddon. But then shit began to go pear-shaped with Gone in Sixty Seconds, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and straight through into Prince of Persia, which has to be the worst thing he's ever put his name on. There's no point in talking further about this. If you've seen it, then you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't than you have exactly 2 hours more life left to live than I do.

Clash of the Titans
This is nearly as bad as Prince of Persia with lead star Sam Worthington coming off merely bland as the hero, whereas Jake Gylenhaal with muscles and a sword is hilarious. The one saving grace comes from both Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson hamming it the fuck up as a gods in what looks like a shitty Linkin Park music video. Seriously, everytime Fiennes is on screen we were howling with laughter. Than we realized that both Fiennes and Neeson probably made something like 20 grand per word of script they spoke, and we stopped laughing and got super bummed out.





52 Pick Up
This is another entry in my Elmore Leonard adventure. I read the book then wanted to check out the movie. The book is better obviously, but this is definitely an under-appreciated crime film from the 80's with a great fucking cast, including Roy Schieder, John Glover and Anne Margaret. Gritty shit.








Chopping Mall
I never got to see this as a kid and finally caught up with it thanks to the generosity of my friend Andrew and his stellar DVD library. This is pretty fun shit, with experimental security robots going haywire in a mall, hunting a group of teenagers who have stowed away in the shopping complex after dark to party and fuck. I was surprised to find some early, satirical scenes that felt like a precursor to Robocop, with arrogant corporate interests willing to place the keys of society into the robotic hands of cyborgs.








Sleepaway Camp
Most of this was pretty standard slasher shit. Uninspired and a little boring. But the final shot... holy shit! It's so fucking nuts you just have to sit through the whole movie to get the full pay off.






House
Look at that poster! Look at it!
The actual movie is even crazier believe it or not. A bunch of Japanese schoolgirls head to an aunts house out in the country and all manner of fucked up weirdness occurs. I'm not even going to try to attempt summarize the events in this movie because most of what I'd write would make no sense. You just have to see it (and Criterion just put out a gorgeous Blu Ray transfer of it). House looks like an obvious inspiration for Sam Raimi and his Evil Dead films, marrying manic, slapstick comedy with traditional haunted house horror and a liberal sprinkling of surreal absurdism. The fever dream visual style and inventiveness of this film is really something to behold. I've never seen anything quite like it. And in the tradition of a particularly dominant strain of Japanese pop culture, House has a steadfast commitment to sexualizing school girls in the most hilarious of ways, with wisps of wind blowing the clothes off the terrified girls and forcing them to fight ghosts half-naked.

Knight and Day
Last, but certainly not least, is the summer action movie Knight and Day, which is the Cruisers latest attempt to climb back up to the peak of Blockbuster Mountain. It failed to put Cruise back on top of the pack and it's a now characteristically desperate display of water treading. I wonder how many nights he's lain awake, tormented by the memories of the Oprah couch-jumping incident that totally fucked up his career. I imagine him having duplicates of that Oprah couch manufactured just so he could blast them apart with shotguns in some Scientology compound in the desert. I bet that would be a cathartic, Thetan-cleansing ritual for him. I really wish that Knight and Day was the movie to put Cruise back on top, but it obviously wasn't. Cruise is a great fucking movie star and I think we'll mourn the loss of his ilk when he's finally replaced by the Channing Tatum's and Robert Pattison's that pass for movie stars these days. But Knight and Day simply isn't good enough to re-launch Cruise as the big star in the stratosphere, it really didn't deserve to be a hit and when you get right down to it, it's a bit of a mess. There's definitely some fun sequences, but the whole thing seems scotch-taped together.

Review // INCEPTION - Dreaming small

There are many, many moments in Inception where characters spout pages and pages of gobbeldygook exposition that is so silly and leaden it could rival the biggest groaners in any second rate sci-fi movie. And yet these attempts at metaphysical and liminal exploration, however clunky, can almost be applauded for at least trying to inject some brains into the summer movie blockbuster mould. Almost.

The real problem with Inception is that it asks much more of you than simply suspension of disbelief, it requires you to endure an almost total suspension of entertainment. It lays out its inelegant concept in words, not actions. Inception seems relentlessly hellbent on avoiding anything resembling fun, and for a movie about dreams (a cinema sub genre itself) it's shockingly unimaginative. When characters (and I use that term lightly) aren't talking in streams of nonsense, which is rarely, there is a surplus of un-special effects on display, all in service of dreamscapes that surely must be the drabbest ever committed to film. The dreamworlds of Christopher Nolan are beige and muted and un -fantastic. There is no attempt on his part to interpret the language of dreaming into a visual or auditory hallmark for the film, as others have tried (and perhaps failed) to do. This is why the film wont' be remembered.

Like all Nolan's movies, he continues to needlessly tie the fantastic and ridiculous to some grim, semblance of reality. This is his vision and voice as a filmmaker thus far. Whether it's Batman stalking an un-Gothic Gotham or Leonardo Dicaprio rummaging through the bland hotel rooms of people's subconscious, Nolan seems to want to keep fantasy cloistered from whimsy and playfulness. I think for a time this was even interesting in comparison to the rest of the landscape of mainstream film. But after yet another appearance of MichaelCaine (I have an irrational dislike for him) and another high-concept tethered to the ground, I think it might be time for Nolan to change up his game.

Beyond all its metaphysical leanings, Nolan also wants Inception to be an exciting action movie (or perhaps Warner Bros. did), but the story and very concept don't support it. When faceless men with guns show up in the dreams of the mark (Cillian Murphy) that Dicaprio and his team are working on, it's a very deflating and disappointing turn. Perhaps if the men had literally been faceless it would've been a more interesting addition. To reduce subconscious defenses to henchmen firing machine guns seemed like a particularly lazy shortcut, and yet another way that Inception doesn't try to define itself or differentiate from the typical or rote. It feels like the ticking off of a checklist for nervous studio heads investing 200 million on a brand-less idea.

1. Must have guns and explosions.
Check.

Nolan continues to try his hand at action when he has no real affinity for it. His direction of gunplay or car chases feels like a phoned in 2nd unit performance. There is no sense of space within the choreography like there is in a McTiernan picture or the movies of John Woo. Characters are constantly shooting at each other from the sides of successive frames. Danger never seems to be inhabiting the same frame as the characters. Current Brit du jour , Tom Hardy becomes a one-man army at the end of the film and Nolan keeps the camera close on him and constantly cuts into his heroics late. It's supposed to be a balls-to-the-wall sequence, but it's drained of all context and excitement. Nolan also seems to be cribbing from the playbook of the Scott brothers, which is simply to shake the camera a whole shit load in order to simulate visceral movement, instead of building in visceral movement organically. It's clear from his movies that action scenes are a necessary component, but a component that doesn't seem to interest him all that much. His interests clearly lie in developing a legacy as the intellectual alternative at the multiplex. And yet nothing here matches the smarts, freshness or pure joyful inventiveness of The Matrix, perhaps the definitive Hollywood movie to meld action and metaphysics. The Matrix was a game-changer. Inception changes nothing. The next ten years of mainstream film will not bare the marks of Inception, the way that the 00's owed themselves to the Wachowski's vision. Compare the storming of the high rise at the end of The Matrix to Inception's third act siege on a snow fortress, which surely must count as one of the most lifeless and dull sequences of the year. Nolan could have dreamed up anything for this set piece, it exists in the subconscious of a character after all, and what we get feels about as exciting and relevant as an episode of the old GI Joe cartoon.

Inception is a movie that takes place almost entirely in dreams. So why is this movie so damn dull? The characters are constantly expressing wonderment over the images Nolan is creating, despite the fact they aren't particularly worthy of wonderment. There are very few, if any eye-gasms to be had in the 2 and half hours of Inception. This is really an unforgivable sin. A city block folding in on itself is as grand as things get and somehow the conclusion of this image even becomes quite unremarkable. Some will argue that there's a practical, story-driven reason why Inception never breaks loose inside it's dreamscapes. Their reasoning, and perhaps Nolan's, is because the dreams are supposed to replicate reality in order to trick their marks into giving up their secrets. Except this doesn't hold with what we know about dreaming and what the characters themselves tell us about dreaming in some of that endless exposition I was talking about. While dreaming, we accept what we're seeing and feeling as real. One minute you could be talking to your boss in the office lounge and the next you could be marrying a neon blue ox and both events feel as real to you in the moment as anything you experience in your daily life. This is why we get upset in our dreams. They aren't just movies playing in our minds that we passively watch. We feel fear, we feel remorse, we cry in a dream and wake up crying. We feel pain inside dreams. The events of our dreams, no matter how far-fetched or fractured, always tap into some emotional part of our true selves and we interact with them accordingly. The dream is not a dream while you are dreaming it--it is reality. LeonardoDicaprio says as much in one particular scene. This simple fact of dreaming, something that even a child knows, gave Nolan free lisence to let his imagination run wild. But there is precious little imagination on display, especially when it comes to the visuals. There is plenty of philosophical musing and subtext, just as there is in The Matrix. But while the Wachowski's sheer force of vision made you practically giddy to explore their first year university philosophy, there is no such excitement prompting you to muse the myriad questions of Inception's premise.

Look at this trailer for the great Terrence Malick's new film, The Tree of Life. It's not a dream movie (at least I don't think it is) and yet like all Malick's films, there is a dream-like quality and poetry to the images. Something that is sorely lacking from Inception.



There are flashes of a great dream movie to be had within Inception. Dicaprio's character being dunked into a tub of water in one level of dreaming translates into geysers of water crashing through a building in another level. This image of him centered on screen with great tidal waves spraying from the corners of the frame comes early in the movie and is one of the only wow moments to be had. It also connects with what we know about dreaming. Your alarm clock going off from your bedside table can become a booming voice from god in your dreams. Another great and relevant idea is the constant rain that's pouring down in the shared dreamscape of the team's Chemist, all because his sleeping body is registering a need to piss. This is what I was looking for from the movie, more dream piss. Also how can you make a movie about dreaming and not have one of the characters appear naked in a public place?

There were consistently two things being said about Inception at the time of it's release:
1. It is a masterpiece.
2. It will confuse dumb people. If you are confused, you are a dummy.

Well, Inception is no masterpiece. I have a hard time believing that it will morph over time into some cultural touchstone that appears on list after list for the next 50 years. And as for the conventional wisdom that it's complicated or confusing or somehow draws a line in the sand between the idiots and intellectuals among popcorn munchers, well this is also bullshit. Inception doesn't so much fill you with questions, as it more bores you with answers to questions you didn't really care to ask.

I really wanted Inception to be the masterpiece people were talking it up to be and I really do want Christopher Nolan to be the great white hope of genre movies. I was rooting for this movie and for him. It may be a Leonardo Dicaprio vehicle with a 200 million dollar budget, not exactly an underdog, but it's also an original idea (not based on a preexisting brand) and that's sadly a rare thing these days. But Inception is a major let-down. However, under the dark cloud of the mainstream's current creative bankruptcy, I can see why this film was mistaken for a ray of light. In our Ratner-ified era, I can see why a director like Nolan is being hailed as a genius. I can sorta see why people want to build him up to take on the mantle of the next Stanley Kubrick or something. Nolan certainly shares Kubrick's chilly, impersonal cinematic demeanor. He even nods to one of Kubrick's iconic images from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that of the bedroom where Louis XVI decor meets futuristic panels of light. But the culture's readiness to compare Nolan to Kubrick says less about Nolan as a filmmaker and more about how hard-up we are for anything resembling genuine inspiration. We desperately need the mainstream to be driven by a singular creative voice. We want our auteurs back. But sadly, the era of the auteur intersecting with the mainstream doesn't appear to be coming back any time soon. Inception is not the herald of a change to come, no matter how hard we wish it to be.

Review // IT'S COMPLICATED - The complications of being really, really white and really, really rich

Let me just start by saying that I'm not against these types of movies out of any kind of principle. My masculinity (what little there is of it) does not cause me to chafe against product that is clearly intended for the fairer sex. The fact that I have a dick and an Adam's apple does not preclude me enjoying films of this ilk. Chick flicks, I believe their called. No, I watch these kinds of movies here and there and I was fairly interested in this one in particular. It has Meryl Streep, Steve Martin (without a bad French accent for once!) and Alec Baldwin. That's a pretty stacked cast in my books. So the problem isn't that I just happen to be outside the target market for the movie and therefore immune to its charms. I was ready and willing to be charmed. The problem is that its charmless. Don't get me wrong, its very engaging. But only because you find yourself engaged in the act of wishing, praying and chanting for horrible calamities to befall the characters in the film, anything to weaken the vice-like grip they have over their sense of entitlement.

It's Complicated really lives up to it's title, though not in plot, but in intent. It's a dramedy that's meant to make you sniffle through the laughs, but it's neither dramatic nor funny. It's a romantic comedy that is more creepy than romantic and with laughs that are in most cases unintentional. It's also supposed to be a Feel-Good Late-Bloomer movie, except Streep's character seems to have everything in the world so it's impossible to empathize with her want for more. (Her character is designing her "dream" kitchen with the help of Steve Martin's lovelorn architect, despite the fact that her existing kitchen would make Martha Stewart pant with orgasmic abandon.) The most complicated aspect of the film is sorting out what if anything writer/director Nancy Meyers wants us to feel for these characters, because everything they say and do seems calculated to illicit overwhelming hatred --so obnoxious, spoiled an disconnected from reality are the blindingly white rich brats that populate this sunny, sterile utopia it feels like a parody of affluence. I kept expecting/wanting a dashiki-clad Jim Brown to kick in the door to Streep's cottage-style mansion and scream "die whitey!" before blowing everyone away with a Mac-10. And therein lies the real complication: does Meyers want us to hate these jerks on purpose or is she just one of them and therefore oblivious to how abhorrent they are? It would be much more fun to believe Meyers is a clandestine agitator hiding in plain view, mercilessly mocking and assailing the mindsets and lifestyles of the people who make up her target audience. But sadly I don't think this is the case.

When we meet Streep's character she is trying to balance her career as an upscale bakery owner with the stress of renovating her insanely gorgeous home. You know how it is. She's also trying to juggle both the hurt and duty she feels towards her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) and observe the tenuous peace treaty they must uphold for the sake of their children. Normally this would be a palatable dramatic dilemma, but the divorce took place a decade ago and the children are grown fucking adults with financial safety nets made of silk and satin. Everyone in this movie is a whiny asshole and its impossible to care about any of them, including Streep's character, Paisley McRichLady. I've expressed my totally uncontroversial love for Streep on this blog before, but It's Complicated represents a new low, even for her current frivolity-focused career readjustment which includes such gems as Prime and The Devil Wears Prada. The plot revolves around a drunken one-night stand between the two exes, Streep and Baldwin and the "complicated" affair it leads to. Baldwin has entered into full-on midlife crisis mode and remarried a younger, hotter chick (who is also a one-dimensional bitch to boot) and naturally this doesn't sit well with Streep. When they find themselves back in bed together she is simultaneously vindicated and guilt-ridden at suddenly becoming the "other woman". The scene where Baldwin and Streep get it on, or I should say the post getting-it-on aftermath provides the first genuine laugh in the movie and it's all because of Baldwin's late-career commitment to self parody. As they lie in bed together--Baldwin satiated and Streep horrified--he reaches over and grabs a handful of Streep pussy over top of the sheets and sighs "it's good to be home". It's an amazing little moment and prevented me from turning the movie off, but it probably wouldn't have worked with any other actor doing the scooping, or being scooped for that matter.

Alec Baldwin is no longer an actor. He no longer plays characters. Alec Baldwin only plays Alec Baldwin anymore. He's his own brand. At one point Baldwin seemed poised to be the Next Big Movie Star. He had leading man looks, he had chops and he had a potential franchise in the Jack Ryan character. But let's face it, those leading man looks can play more like creepy-asshole in the wrong light and he's got as much attitude as hair on his chest. He's famous and rich so it all worked out fine, but in some parallel universe he's doing his 7th Jack Ryan movie and James Woods is in 30 Rock. 20 years ago Baldwin's voice, like fine cognac cascading over gravel, was the key to his short-lived sex appeal. But presently, that same voice has become a car commercial brogue--he's speaking English, but its just so comically husky that you can't take anything he says seriously. It's one of the key reasons he's fucking killing it on 30 Rock. With It's Complicated, every line he utters becomes a joke, even if its not written as one. If he doesn't exactly save the movie, he keeps you watching despite your instincts telling you to run.

Anyway, as Streep's planning out the kitchen of her dreams (as it turns out us regular folk don't dream big enough) she's courted by Joe Pesci's white-haired Asian cousin. No, no, I'm mistaken, that's Steve Martin. WHAT THE FUCK STEVE MARTIN?!? You were one of the good ones! I remember you hilariously ripping the phoney, superficial Hollywood elites at the Oscars like it was yesterday. And you go and slice up your face and get it all g-forced? Comedians are allowed to get facelifts now? When did this happen? When was it decided that people who made their livings out of making fun of things were allowed to make their actual faces into jokes? Christ, I'm so depressed now all of a sudden. So, Steve Martin with a facelift plays Streep's wussy architect and they begin courting each other despite the fact that she's still riding the Baldwin train in secret. Naturally this leads to all sorts of complications. One of hese complications is Streep's kids finding about the unusual affair and getting all confused and conflicted. There is literally a scene where Streep spends the day in bed consoling her sobbing, adult children because they are all confused that daddy stuck his dick in mommy again. The kids are all like 30 and it's actually played for dramatic effect with swelling strings and everything. It's insane!

You don't know who Nancy Meyers is. Her name doesn't register the way that Nora Ephron's does (or did). But in just 4 movies Nancy Meyers has made half a billion dollars in box office and, intentionally or otherwise, created two sub genres of chick flickage: Baby-boomers-Gone-Wild and Real Estate Porn. It all started with What Women Want, so far her biggest hit to date, but more than likely just a work-for-hire gig. Get this: it starred Mel Gibson as a high powered executive who suddenly is able to read the thoughts of women. It was insane back in 2000 when it opened, I've seen it 3 times, and I'm sure it's only appreciated in value in light of recent events. From there she made Something's Gotta Give, with Diane Keaton as a super white, super rich lady pinballing between the throbbing cocks of Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. After that she made The Holiday, which was a depressingly bad rom-com that posited Jack Black as a perfectly suitable love interest for Kate Winselt. This is nothing against Jack Black. But it's everything against Kate Winslet. And now with It's Complicated, the spiritual sequel to Something's Gotta Give, Meyers has made her definitive anti-statment. It blends the elements of the two sub-genres I mentioned, with the 60+Meryl Streep tapping her inner slut against a backdrop of House and Home boner-popping centerfolds.

I'm sure Myers' next movie will be called It Is What It Is and star Meg Ryan as the CEO of a perfume empire trying to decide which of 3 mansions she should buy, meanwhile she's fucking her son's college roommate played by Robert Pattison, and loving it!

Review // SHUTTER ISLAND - Scorsese tries on spooky

I generally find Madhouse movies pretty boring. The fact that they deal in insanity, hallucination and denial usually means there are no graspable handholds in their stories. You can't trust what your eyes are seeing and you can never trust what the characters are saying, only not in an interesting way like in noir movies. Anything goes in a Madhouse movie and the filmmakers can always plead insanity and get off the hook. Madhouse movies almost always feature the same central character, the seemingly sane man/woman set adrift suddenly from their former world of order and control. They are constantly asking themselves the question, "Am I going crazy?" and the answer is always "yes". There's nothing to figure out. I usually just hold on, discounting everything from the first 2 acts until the lengthy explanation is trotted out--the rare psychological disorder, the split personalities, the dissociative condition that allowed for the plot to leap over its own holes. They all seem to inflate their running times with red-herrings that are meant to distract you along the journey to a destination you always should know is coming.

Shutter Island is no different than other Madhouse movies, but its pedigree tricks you into thinking it will be, and this works against the movie greatly. The disappointment the films final act engenders is directly in proportion to the talent and reputation of those involved. Every moment of the film, with its top-flight production values, lush photography and playfully assured direction seems to be telling you that you're in the hands of a master. So when you're finally delivered into territory that so many b-movie hacks have already journeyed to, it intensifies the letdown. The only difference is that it took much longer to get there, as the films running time seems to echo the expectations of its prestigious package. Scorsese gets the best of everything here, what he does with it ultimately, is retrace the steps of others, instead of blazing a new path.

I've never had a thing for Scorsese. It's not that I don't think he deserves his reputation, its just that none of his movies have connected with me personally the way other films from his peers have. I don't have a favorite Scorsese movie, like I do a DePalma or a Spielberg. Because of this I never bring much personal expectation into a Scorsese movie, and the same was true with Shutter Island. In fact, based on my reactions to the premise and trailer, I came in with low expectations and most of my viewing benefited from that. While I allowed myself to be tricked, I did feel like I was in the hands of a master, and for a time I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Here Scorsese seems to be indulging the film historian in him, playing with old movie conventions and evoking the feel of a bygone era. As soon as the movie begins, a purposely overwrought score pounds on each frame, the same way that old black and white movies tend to open with a blaring musical motif meant to communicate the intended tone. The tone in Shutter Island is dread, and an army of horns bellow while violins trill, working at your nerves before anything actually nerve-wracking has happened yet. This purposefully heavy hand is actually one of the things I liked about the initial tone of the movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffallo play US Marshals assigned to the case of a woman who has gone missing from Shutter Island, a high security mental institution that is so spooky and foreboding that it seems like the worst place to send people wrestling with mental demons. There's hardly any point in describing more about the plot or characters since it's clear, even from the trailer, that they are not to be trusted. The "twist" reveals the true purpose of these elements, which are to distract you from what you suspected (or flat out knew) in the first place. By virtue of the sub-genre (see Madhouse movies) Scorsese is working in here, I already had to ask myself in the first five minutes whether Leo was in fact a US Marshall at all, or just another looney patient. But again, the stature of Scorsese, his bottomless film knowledge and gigantic budget led me to believe that more was at work here. I think I had the same reaction as many, "surely they aren't doing what I think they're going to do?" They did. It's a perplexing decision from a "master" since it affirms audience expectations rather than subverting them. It also renders most of the movie a tedious game that has little or no value after one viewing. To call it a "twist" is practically an insult to twists really. M. Night Shyamalan probably had a shit when he saw it. "That's it?That's their twist?".

Maybe it seems unfair or narrow to focus most of my attention on the twist and its ineffectiveness, but I really think it guts the whole experience. Spending the whole movie telling myself, "nah, they wouldn't be so lame" and then finding out they are really overshadows any of the positives I may have responded to. Perhaps it's that Scorsese, while playing with old movie conventions and dipping into the Madhouse subgenre, was also trying to pay homage, and therefore didn't want to break with tradition. His unsurprising surprise and leaden epilogue filled with backstory and extraneous explanation suggests that he wanted to color inside the lines of the Madhouse movie. But I don't buy it. Even though its clear that Shutter Island is nothing more than a spooky asylum movie, it never fully concedes to this. There are far too many flashbacks to WW2 atrocities and Holocaust death camps to ever mistake this for a straight-up chiller. And when the film spends the final 30 minutes wallowing in the bleak origins of Leo's madness, any fun is sucked out and replaced with dead children, method crying and plenty of screaming to the heavens. The movie always has one foot holding the door open to respectability and it deflates the punch of its borrowed B-movie elements. With all this Oscar-baiting material, its hard to believe that Scorsese was merely shooting for an homage to spooky b-movies.

DiCaprio has spent most of the last decade allowing himself to be miscast, throwing his method weight behind characters his frame can't support. I mostly understand why he makes his choices, smartly avoiding comic book movies and other bullshit. But playing cops, mercenaries and other assorted hard guys just doesn't work for him. He's become a prestige picture player, but he's almost always wrong for the specific roles he takes and his US Marshall/Mental Patient in Shutter Island is no different. It's not that DiCaprio isn't good, he almost always is, its just that it always takes a good 20 minutes or more to get over the Leo-factor and buy him as whatever character he's brooding through. He would be much better suited to model-fucking millionaire playboy roles (one half of The Aviator I suppose) and would do well to stay away from anything that requires him to shout with a gun in his hand.

I generally like when Scorsese strays away from mobsters, violent machismo and New York. The Scorsese movies I like the best (After Hours, King of Comedy, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence) are the ones that break from the styles and subjects that made him a film snob favourite. Shutter Island is Scorsese doing horror-of-the-mind and there isn't even a single Rolling Stones song on the soundtrack. While I think he should be commended for playing outside his comfort zone, the results are underwhelming and fall short of a director who has been given the mantle of a master.

Review // THE CRAZIES - Now this is a little more like it

What do you do if you're responsible for one of the most critically reviled, audience-ignored studio flops of the decade? Well first you keep a low profile for about five years, i.e don't direct any more terrible movies. Then, once people have mostly forgotten about the debacle of your last $130 million mistake, you come back and make a small, focused movie that only costs about as much as your last movie likely lost at the box office. For silver-spoon director Breck Eisner (ex-Disney honcho Michael Eisner is his daddy) this strategy seems to have gotten him out of Hollywood purgatory. But with his IMDB page listing a bunch more big budget remakes on his horizon, only time will tell if Eisner has truly learned from his mistakes (he has the foolish balls to remake John Carpenter's Escape From New York, so probably not).

The mistake in question was Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, but to place all of the blame on Breck Eisner is of course not fair. Paramount was looking to set up a money-machine franchise with McCon based on the 13,000 novels by trashy writer Clive Cussler, featuring his main hero Dirk Pitt. Yes, Eisner was the captain of the sinking ship, but it was Paramount who bankrolled the ill-fated voyage and Paramount who ignored the signs of stormy weather to come. I mean, their iconic hero-to-be was named Dirk Pitt and yet that somehow didn't throw up any red flags. I was one of the few people in North America to see Sahara in the theatre and it was truly awful. Naturally I loved it. When it finished I remember thinking, "wow, this Eisner kid is not going places". Well as it turns out, I should never have bet against the son of an insanely rich Hollywood player. Eisner has returned with The Crazies, his low-ish budget remake of the George Romero ultra-low budget original and it's pretty good for what it is. But mostly I think it stands as a prime example of how studios should proceed in our lean economy as well as how a remake/reboot/re-imagining should be handled if Hollywood remains intent on this creatively bankrupt course of action.

Ogden Marsh is a sleepy farming community with a small population of 1,200 nestled amongst corn fields and long expanses of flat horizon. This is America's heartland, typified in the opening scene by a little league game played on the edges of farmland. The wholesome comfort of this image is turned on its head when a man with a shotgun stalks across the field with murder in his eyes. The towns good-natured Sherrif, David Dutton is forced to shoot and kill the man. Naturally this sudden violent moment reverberates through the town and internally for the sheriff. He doesn't have long to dwell on it though, as another gruesome event shakes the close-knit foundations of the community. A husband traps his wife and son in a closet and then sets fire to the house. When the police arrive, he's casually mowing the lawn. He too is dead-eyed and unresponsive, just like the poor farmer Dutton killed on opening day of baseball season.

Dutton and his loyal deputy, Clank are then led into the marshes of the towns name and find a dead military pilot and his downed plane in the water that feeds into the towns drinking supply. Just as the possibility of a viral outbreak crosses Dutton's mind, all hell breaks loose. The military invades Ogden Marsh and begin setting up quarantines, separating husbands from wives and children from parents. Dutton is herded by gas-masked soldiers like all the rest of the citizens, his Sherriff's badge a trinket in the face of terrifying martial law. His pregnant wife Judy, the towns doctor, is ripped from his arms when she is suspected of showing symptoms of the virus. He is forcibly subdued and when he wakes up, he is riding in a cattle-car to an extraction point with other terrified citizens. Dutton has seemingly been delivered to safety along with hundreds of other town residents who don't show any signs of the virus, one that turns it's hosts into murderous "crazies".

From here The Crazies reverses the order of the apocalypse movie, with Dutton breaking back in to the condemned town in order to find his wife, whose symptoms are related to her pregnancy and not the spreading crazyitis. Nothing overly surprising or innovative follows, but The Crazies nevertheless follows a straight and solid path, satisfying most when putting its characters through the wringer of survivalist dread. David and Judy Dutton go through hell, and the actors who play them, Timothy Olyphant and Rhada Mitchell, gamely rise to the challenge of being abused. Timothy Olyphant is always a strong, reliable presence in B entertainment, ably playing both straight-backed heroes and unhinged weirdos. He's one of my favourite character actors working today and I'm always happy to see him get top billing.

In terms of genre entertainment these days, frankly not-fucking-it-up-badly constitutes a win and The Crazies, with its limited budget and smaller scope manages to satisfying more than it irks. The rules of the virus aren't effectively defined and I was disappointed that Eisner opted for creature makeup for his "crazies" as opposed to relying on straight performance, but by the time the Duttons are outrunning a nuclear blast in the cab of a stolen transport truck, you won't really care. The Crazies is just fine. It'll do. What I'm responding to more is the implications of its model, or the example it sets, however slight. Eisner trades the 100 + million budget that sunk him on Sahara for more control and less studio involvement (although this was likely not by choice). He gives up the A-list actor meddling and ego for solid performers with proven track records. Yes, this is a remake, which normally I hate as a general rule. But in the case of The Crazies, it's one of the few remakes that kinda makes sense, seeing as very few people have seen or even heard of Romero's original. It doesn't leave the same bad taste in your mouth like the films that trample over beloved territory or simply update a two year old Swedish film minus the subtitles (I'm looking at you Let Me In or whatever the fuck you're called). It's not much to get excited about, I know, but if the decent box office for The Crazies signals a back-to-basics genre resurgence, I could certainly get behind that.

Review // FROM PARIS WITH LOVE - Wow!

Okay, this is easily one of the worst movies of the year and maybe the worst of Travolta's career. And that's really saying something. Now that there's no question as to how I feel about the quality of the movie, I can talk about all the things that make it great and it's actually all the same things that make it terrible. Confused? I am too. But this is how it is in 2010. Up is down and down is up. Movies have become so terrible that we have no choice but to sift through them to find some semblance of the things we used to crave. And in many cases their badness crosses some uncharted threshold and enters into the avant-garde.

From Paris With Love (great title for an action movie by the way, I can't imagine why it didn't catch on with audiences) makes it nearly impossible to tell whether the filmmakers intentionally went out of their way to make the funniest comedy of the year or are just terrible at their jobs. The "story" of American super spy Charlie Wax (Travolta) who is paired with spy-in-training Johnathan Rhys-Meyers to bring down terrorists in the city of lights is a loose collection of dated shootups and supremely lame jokes that may or may not be winks to an audience who were expected to be stoned. There are many, many WOW moments in the film, but none of them are attributed to cool action choreography or kick-ass set pieces. They're more like "Wow, what the fuck am I looking at?" moments.

For starters, Travolta appears 20 boring minutes into the movie and looks like this:

Wow!

Then he proceeds to kill a shitload of gun-toting waiters in a Chinese food restaurant before making a bunch of racist comments about Asians, which are never addressed by the filmmakers, and instead allowed to stand. Asian racism is the most socially acceptable form of racism in entertainment and From Paris With Love has a ball with this. After killing everyone in the room, sidekick Johnathan Rhys-Meyers asks Travolta if he thinks there's any more. He replies, "At last census-count? About a billion".

Wow!

Then Travolta shoots holes into the ceiling, all of which begin pouring streams of coke. How did he know this was going to happen? What does coke have to do with the under-written terrorist plot? I have no idea. Rhys-Meyers grabs a nearby vase and fills it with the coke and then proceeds to carry it around with him for the next 20 or so minutes, clutching it like a baby as he stumbles bewildered through one lame action scene after another. My wife Jenn asked me why Rhys-Meyers kept bringing the coke vase with him, even when he could have just left it in the car. I had no idea. I still don't.

Wow!

Throughout, Travolta employs an insane Matrix-style Gun-Fu with the aid of burly stuntmen, shaky cam and extremely quick cutting. The puffy, 50+ star dives and flips through action scenes like a super hero with a carb addiction, gleefully killing piles of faceless enemies while lovingly caressing his gun as if it were his life partner. At one point he shoots a man point blank in the face and then sensuously sniffs the gunsmoke before breaking into a rapturous post-coital smile.

Wow!

With From Paris With Love, Travolta is nakedly and desperately (and pathetically) grasping for the iconic cool he luckily achieved in the '90's with Pulp Fiction, a break he then spent 15 years squandering with one shitty movie after another. His role as super agent Charlie Wax once and for all proves that his comeback had absolutely nothing to do with any particular skill or charm of his own, and everything to do with Quentin Tarantino. The really, really bad script for Paris seems tailored and rewritten to appease Travolta's desires to conjure memories of his role as Vincent Vega. Charlie Wax says "mother fucker" a lot, sings to 70's FM pop songs and in one scene babbles on about Star Trek. It's pretty sad stuff, but it becomes crushingly embarrassing when Travolta flashes a shit-eating grin and winks for the audience as he chomps down on a "Royale with cheese" in not one, but two separate scenes.

Wow!

While sucking tremendously as a super killer spy and movie star, Travolta is at least fantastically entertaining in every single scene he's in. His negative attention-seeking performance is a cinematic car crash worthy of some serious rubber-necking. The buddy he's paired with on the other hand, Johnathan Rhys-Meyers, is one of THE worst, if not worst action heroes ever committed to film. The moment you see his thin stubble mustache you want to punch his face until your arm gets tired, and that's before his character devolves into the whining, white-man version of Murtagh to Travolta's gay-bear Riggs. While technically "pretty", Rhys-Meyers has a blank, unlikable face (sorry he does!) and when paired with a terribly underwritten stock character, he becomes a black hole of boredom sucking the rest of the movie toward his petulant core. In the middle of the movie, my wife informed me that Rhys-Meyers has been in and out of rehab for various substances. At the same time, on-screen Rhys-Meyers was being goaded by Travolta into snorting coke from his precious vase while crammed in a packed elevator rising to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I replied to her that he was definitely heading back. After some quick research: Paris opened in February. Rhys-Meyer's checked back into rehab in May.

Wow!

Out of nowhere and completely unexplained, Travolta and Rhys-Meyers (who is still stained with the blood of his first kill) show up to a dinner party at his apartment where his fiancee and her female friend are waiting. Travolta begins flirting with the friend who is of course a paid actress, so she gamely pretends to not be disgusted by his advances, despite the fact that the very sight of him could cause sudden, acute lesbianism. After dinner, with everyone laughing at jokes we didn't hear, the friends cell phone rings and its a wrong number, someone asking for "Rose". Much like his intuition that the Chinese are insulating their ceiling with cocaine, Travolta knows for certain that the friend is a terrorist and shoots her point blank in the head without a word. It really kills the mood of the dinner party.

Wow!

There is a single succinct, genuinely hilarious moment in the film that I think proves that director Pierre Morel (Taken, District 13) and French trash mogul Luc Besson are in on the joke of their film, proving that they are laughing with us, instead of us at them. It's a moment that justifies the entire existence of the movie and may in fact elevate it into the realm of brilliant social satire, so evocative and prescient as it is in our bizarre post-9/11 times. The moment, which is really just the utterance of a single loaded word, might go unnoticed however, which is a shame. Travolta and Rhys-Meyers ride in a gas-guzzling American SUV (surely a political statement, as it's the most unlikely of Parisian vehicles) from one confusingly violent encounter to the next. Travolta has once again convinced Rhys-Meyers to sniff some more coke from the vase (another tip that this action movie is not completely on the level) and begins revealing more of his mission, which is not just to kill Asian drug dealers, but to bust a cell of Middle Eastern terrorists. As the drugs pound Rhys-Meyers cortex, the image blurs and swirls and the T-word rings in his ears until his face is blasted with fear and he exclaims "TERRORISTS!". It's fucking hilarious. Travolta reinforces the paranoid notion saying "fuck yes, terrorists. It's always been about terrorists". From here the movie shifts it focus from bashing European decorum and the Chinese, to full-on, shameless demonizing of brown people.

Wow!

The plot is thread bare and exists only to be punctuated with bizarre touches that seem made up on the spot. Stuff like the vase of coke that becomes almost a third character for nearly half the movie, the action scenes that play like Abrahams/Zucker parodies of action scenes from 10 years ago, and basically every fucking creepy look on Travolta's creepazoid face. Maybe my addled brain has just absorbed too many junk movies, but with its tacky Eurotrash style I couldn't tell if Paris was actually being presented as cool, or was a knowing attempt at mocking the over-revved machismo of buddy action films. Either way, wow!