"The Watchman" Ends!

Well, that wasn't a bad run for my first time as a paid columnist. I mean, it could've been better, sure, but the fact that I was able to do it for approximately eight months and complete 17 articles (and one unpublished one) is, by my standards, quite the accomplishment. I figured when Laura arrived, I wasn't gonna get shit done, so, yay for me.

And I think some of those articles are darn good. I got a lot of kudos for my Dark Knight review, and I think the Iron Man and Hancock ones aren't too bad. I think the one I'm proudest of is my Tick retrospective, if only because I know just how much blood, sweat and pixels went into writing it. They aren't all good. The Wanted one is kinda lame -- I was hamstrung by my intense loathing of both the source material and the resulting film, and the Heroes one is (sorry, David) phoned in, which, admittedly, is more effort than the show's writers are putting into it. (Seriously, I stopped watching it about six episodes ago, mostly for time reasons, so I had my wife, who's keeping current, summarized what I missed. Five minutes later she was done, and I was still waiting to hear the cool parts.) But still, all of that was more writing than I had ever done since college.

So what happened?

I'll tell you what happened.

The fucking Spirit happened.

I went to the first showing Christmas day to get a head-start on the column, thinking I could get it out in two, maybe three days. Two hours later, I walked out of the theater, and even though I couldn't admit it to myself at the time, I knew I was done. It's not that the movie's bad -- oh, it's terrible, make no mistake -- it's that it wasn't bad in any interesting way. For nearly a day, I thought about it and thought about it, without putting a single word down, looking for something, anything to say about it that the average viewer of Frank Miller's directorial debut wouldn't find insultingly obvious.

And I couldn't think of anything.

This probably wouldn't be an issue for most reviewers. My problem was that my mandate was to write a column, not reviews, so I always tried to find something larger to write about, something beyond whether it was good or bad. (I'm not saying I always succeeded, I'm just sayin'.) But with The Spirit, there was nothing there but a list of the atrocities Miller committed against Will Eisner's seminal creation. It might've been good therapy, but it wasn't a column.

This wasn't what killed The Watchman for me. What killed it was when I realized that my experience with The Spirit was likely to be norm, and I'd just been very, very lucky until then.

Maybe I could've rolled with that, found a way to work through it, but The Watchman was supposed to be a side thing -- y'know, something to bring in some dough while I work on my art, man. But it began to take all my time, mostly because I feel if I'm gonna get paid for a piece of writing, then I damn well better put everything I got into it. That's an honorable attitude, I suppose, but an exhausting one too, and ultimately something had to give. I decided it was The Watchman. David Steinberger and Peter Jaffe were excellent to work for, and I have to thank them again for the opportunity. I hope they find someone who can take over the job, and maybe be the Johnny Carson to my Jack Paar.

Thing is, The Watchman wasn't the only casualty of my decision to focus on my writing. I'm giving up movies as well. Not completely, of course; I wouldn't miss the big screen adaptation of Watchmen for the world (my one regret is that I won't be writing about it for the column), and if I can find the time, I'll happily go to the theater. But the days of trying to cram down 200-300 movies a year (mostly to participate in the Muriel Awards) are over. These days, most of my free time will actually go towards books -- my ignorance of the classics makes me functionally illiterate, and since I plan on writing novels along with screenplays, that oversight needs to be corrected, posthaste.

So here's the new deal. Martin and I are coming along quite nicely with our screenplays and novels, and as a result, we've decided (foolishly?) to reactivate Spitball!, our old screenwriting blog. We're not doing the "let's write a screenplay together through a blog!" thing -- we finally realized that that was kinda retarded. Instead, it's going to be a general purpose blog about writing. Or something. We're still figuring it out. Go there and read up and find out for yourself.

The future of this blog is a bit hazy. I'm going to publish my last Watchman piece on Punisher: War Zone that never went up on ComiXology. (Thankfully so; I realized about a week ago that I made a huge error of attribution in it. Apparently, there being more than one director named Jonathan is very confusing to me.) The hipster part of me wants to turn it into a Tumblr-style blog, but then the smart part of me wonders what the hell difference that would make. I'll probably put some thoughts on Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie up here, and maybe some Muriel Awards stuff, but since I've decided that movies aren't really a part of my life anymore, I really don't know what's going to happen with it.

Uh, welcome back. Thanks for reading.

"The Watchman" Debuts!

(Well, it actually debuted two weeks ago a couple months ago, but I've been busy.)

In case you read this blog and don't follow me on Twitter (and if so -- who are you?), I've been hired on at the new comic book site Comixology to cover comic book-related movies, TV shows and DVDs.  It's called The Watchman, and I'm pretty damn excited about it -- not to mention it gives me an excuse to actually get out and see stuff in the theater for once, dammit.  

Here's what's gone up, and what's coming in the next couple months [UPDATED 7/27/08]:  

3/19 The Story of a Return (a look at Persepolis, the comic and the movie)

4/2 Slouching Towards Metropolis (The DTV Justice League: The New Frontier)

4/16 Joey, Do You Like Movies About Superheroes? (Superhero Movie and four-color comedy; this should've been on 4/2, but I fucked up.)

5/7  He's So Money (The Iron Man movie)

5/12 He Ain't Heavy, He's Racer X (Speed Racer; first-run movies are now going up immediately on the Monday after their debut.)

6/2 The Paperback DVD Supplement (The Fountain + Southland Tales)

6/16 Anger Management (The Incredible Hulk)

6/30 The Weavers: Wasn't That A Waste of Time! (Wanted)

7/14 Feeling Bullish (Hellboy II: The Golden Army)

7/26 Windows on the World (The Dark Knight)

And of course, I'll be covering the other big superhero movies, like The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy II, and Hancock [UPDATE 7/27/08: Done, except for Hancock, which'll likely be posted when the DVD arrives.]  Also, near the end of the year, I'll have columns up covering the filmed work of Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller (keyed to The Spirit), and Alan Moore (keyed to Watchmen, natch).  

So please head over there and give 'em a read, and poke around the main site, too.  Tell 'em the Dingus sent ya.  

The Whitest Kid You Know

(Seen for the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon.)  

1.  10 Tracks of Wack:  Kickin' It Old Skool (2007, Harvey Glazer) is a painful, painful movie.  Not because it makes the easiest, laziest jokes every single time, or because it's full of stupid plot points, although it's that too.  No, it's painful because it revealed that I have something in common, deep down, with Jamie Kennedy.  

2.  There's nothing wrong with the premise.  Hell, I kinda like the premise.  1986:  12-year old Justin loves breakdancing and 12-year old Jen, and wants to win the big talent show with his crew but has to defeat his nemesis Kip in a dance-off.  He tries to seal the deal by doing a super-tricky move, and ends up falling off the stage and into a coma.  Twenty years later, he wakes up to find his parents in debt, his friends mired in mediocrity, and Jen betrothed to Kip.  Can he win the big dance contest with his out-of-shape friends, against a new generation of dancers, breaking to a new generation of music?  

3. It's hard to be a white, male, middle-class rap fan and not feel on some level that, as much as you might love the music, that you're always on the outside of it.  A slight inferiority complex.  Am I really getting it?  It's like there's an invisible circle around the music, and it's not impermeable, but it's damn uncomfortable to stay there.  To stay there is to be conscious of one's whiteness, and white people don't like to be reminded they're white.   In one of the funniest and truest moments in Office Space, Michael Bolton rocks the Geto Boys while driving to work, but turns it down when he passes a black man on the street.  Michael enters the circle and then quickly, quietly, exits.  

4.  You have a thirty-two year old protagonist who's just woken up from a coma, and the last thing he remembers is being twelve.  Do you a) show the moment when the protagonist realizes that he's now an adult, that his life has irrevocably changed, that his body has irrevocably changed?  Or b) blithely ignore that, cut from your bearded and groggy protagonist to your now clean-shaven and fully-recovered protagonist and go straight for the "MTV doesn't play videos anymore" joke?

5.  Jamie Kennedy is two years older than me.  He's made a film -- written and directed by others, yet it feels like an intensely personal project -- where the old triumph over the young.  In one scene, an old homeless man (filling in for Kennedy -- don't ask) literally pisses on some young black krumpers.  In the final battle, Kennedy has to out-dance a kid -- a kind of prodigy, cocksure in a way I don't remember kids being, real or cinematic, in the 80s.  He's of his time.  The kids I grew up with turned into the so-called Generation X, the first slackers.  To display that kind of confidence, that kind of arrogance -- it wouldn't happen.  But then, at that time, we were listening to Arrested fucking Development.  

6.  Why don't I keep up on rap music?  Why have I drifted so far from it?  1986:  Run D.M.C.  Beastie Boys, License to Ill.  Whodini, "Fugitive/Funky Beat".  That's where it starts for me.  That's where it started for a lot of white guys my age.  That's where the memories are.  It's easy to say that once it got all gangsta, we fell away from it, that we were only in it for the "fun", but we listened to N.W.A. too.  So that can't be it.  Is it simply because it's a young person's music, and we are no longer young?  Nobody in America wants to admit they're too old for anything, least of all self-proclaimed music fans.  

7.  I can't even get my head around the scene where Justin's friend Aki (Bobby Lee) refuses to get back into the crew and proceeds to lay out what is essentially the entire history of racist Asian caricature in film, only to take it all back.  

8.  Logically, your protagonist, having spent twenty years of his life in a hospital, will not have any clothes at home that fit him.  You're making a comedy, so you think it would be funny if he walked around in the kind of cheesy and iconic 80s outfits that people who lived in the 80s didn't actually wear.  (You'd be wrong -- it wouldn't be funny -- but that's not the point.)  Do you a) show your protagonist going to some kind of ironic, "Hot Topic"-style boutique, maybe spar with some emo sales clerk and actually buy his outfits?  Or b) just put him in whatever the fuck you want, a new outfit for each scene?

9.  Michael Rosenbaum, who plays Kip, the villain, is the secret hero of the piece.  He's a prick, yes, but he's an adult.  He responds to the prodigy's unearned swagger by spraying breath freshener in his mouth.  He's contemptuous of Justin and his manchild routine, as he rightfully should be.  That he's the only actor that appears to be alive to the possibilities of performance is probably not coincidental.  

10.  Do us aging white guys hold onto 1986 so hard because we feel rap moved away from us, or did rap move on because we held on so tightly to it?  Columbus sails here and "discovers" it, much to the bafflement of the Native Americans.  A signal that started in The Bronx finds its way, eight years later, to Modesto, CA and we claim it as our own.  Justin wins the contest, "our" music and culture winning over "theirs".  Stupid fucking white man.  

Muriel Awards 2006: Best Breakthrough Performance

(A little over a year ago, I wrote that I'd be posting my ballot for the 2006 Muriel Awards. I said "coming soon", and a year's pretty soon if you look at it, y'know, from geological point of view. Anyway, I'm going to post last year's equivalent category when the 2007 appears on Paul's site, with a few notes, including but not limited to "what the hell was I thinking?".)

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
1. Ellen Page, Hard Candy
2. Rob Brydon, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
3. Martin Campbell, Casino Royale

Yeah, this looks about right. Page, of course is getting hosannas (and an Oscar?) for Juno, but as good as she was, Hard Candy is the performance -- especially amazing considering the film is utter garbage, revenge porn shot like a fashion spread by David Fincher's little brother. I didn't know anything about Brydon at the time... and I still don't know anything about him. I suspect he's a known quantity in the U.K., but he was a fresh face to me. It probably helped that he reminded me of a British actor I know and worked with and admire. Also: does the better Pacino. Putting Campbell down as a director was a no-no at the time (it was intended for actrons) but I'd like to think my innovative and out-of-the-box thinking helped blaze a trail for this year's winner, Ben Affleck. Really doe, considering his slick work of the past, I really thought there was a roughness to Royale, a willingness to try something new, and I wanted to honor that. Let's see if he follows through with the next Bond, I'ma Feel Tiny Bit Better Once I Kills You. Other contenders I had written down: Dax Shepherd, Idiocracy (Funny, but y'know, David Herman woulda been better); Marina Vovchenko, 4 (Strong work, but I suspect I went with what I thought were more well-known names rather than "throw my vote away", so to speak, and I'm thinking that was dumb) ; and John Gulager, Feast (um, what?).

The Muriel Awards are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!

But enough about that small-time Onion thing. The real deal is upon us -- The Muriel Awards. The Muriels are run by one Paul Clark, a former mob hitman and commodities trader who, after a fateful screening of Jules et Jim, traded it all away for the life of a cinephile. Now he roams the internet, extolling the virtues of foreign cinema and There Will Be Blood, conquering the planet one convert at a time.

Oh, and the Muriels -- simply the best year-end poll not named after a Canadian screenwriter. Actually, better, because I'm involved. The fun begins February 13th, in honor of my daughter's birthday, over at Paul's site, Silly Hats Only. I'll be introducing this year's winner of the Best Body of Work, as well as a few words on my more... unusual nominees.

So: Muriel Awards. 2007. February 13th. Be there. Or be octagonal.

Necessarily The 3rd Annual Onion A/V Club Film Poll Ballot

(First off, congratulations to Dread Pirate Steven Carlson and Paul Clark for getting quoted in this year's A/V Club Film Poll, and congratulations to the three guys who won Best in Show. Wish it was one of us, but whaddya gonna do. So here's my ballot. I was genuinely surprised I got two mentions [Joshua and Superbad] -- while this year's blurbs were definitely better than last year's [save the one the made the final cut], there was a lot of... effort that went into these. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but you can see the sweat stains here. Generally, I prefer the more casual kind of blurb, akin to the Dread Pirate's killer "Sacajaweas" line from last year. But the ones I can do that with rarely, it seems, are the ones that make my Top 5. Oh well, boo fuckin' hoo.)


1. Joshua: Joshua takes the universal experiences of having a baby -- the sleepless nights, the emotional ups and downs, the constant gnawing knowledge that you've been charged with protecting the defenseless -- and flips it into a horror movie.  That would normally be enough, but director Ratliff takes it further, and suggests that these same babies may grow up to hate you for no good reason.  We don't know what fuels Joshua's step-by-step dismantling of his nuclear family -- many clues are offered, but they all feel like red herrings -- but I think the key is his father, played by Sam Rockwell.  Rockwell lets his natural, swinging-dick persona inflect his portrayal of an upstanding family man, letting us sense the self-involved lout underneath the caring husband.  Coupled with his finance-industry job, it becomes clear that Joshua's goal isn't the destruction of his baby sister, but her salvation -- from their gauche parents, the kind of people who would create someone like Joshua. 

2. The Host: Raised in the shadow of Jaws, we've been led to believe --  nay, told --  that the best monster movies withhold the creature until the last third.  Leave it to the audience's imagination as long as you can, right? Bong Joon-ho bravely and brazenly demolishes this notion about ten minutes into The Host.  A giant mutant tadpole emerges from the Han River and munches on riverside picnickers, creating a panic, all in broad daylight.  It's a bravura sequence, crisply edited and shot with a steady hand, and displays more thrills and twists in a matter of minutes than most movies can muster in two hours.  That Bong follows this sequence with the story of one family's loss and subsequent triumph while maintaining the excitement of a monster movie is nothing short of masterful.  

3. Superbad: We witness a kind of apocalypse in Superbad, but it's a quiet, invisible one.  Seth and Evan's world is a self-contained bubble, where life is an ongoing conversation, moving from phone to car to high school with the fluidity and weightlessness of a dream, and not even soccer balls are allowed to impinge on it.  While there have been accusations of misogyny, they don't belong to the film -- Seth and Evan's world ends, not because of some tantalizing siren tearing them apart, but because their dreamworld dissipates on contact with the real thing.  All that's left is to step onto the escalator and go down, down, down into the deep dark waters of commitment.  Welcome to adulthood, guys.  Go buy something.

4. 28 Weeks Later: I had trouble breathing by the end of 28 Weeks Later.  It wasn't the relentless pace or the dread that seeps into every frame, although those didn't help.  No, it was the claustrophobia -- the film is all boarded-up cottages and underground military facilities, enclosed streets and subway tunnels.  Even the open countryside feels like a nightmarish trap, everywhere to run but nowhere to hide.  But the worst of it is in not one but two jaw-dropping sequences, where we're constrained to the sights of a rifle and forced to witness death, almost participating in it -- once from far away, and once sickeningly, perversely close.  Despite a final image that feels like a studio-enforced attempt to leave it sequel-ready instead of the grim note of uncertainty that it needed, 28 Weeks Later shook me like no other film this year. 

5. Once: I suppose it isn't surprising that, in this age of dogmatic fandom, some people would think that loving Once is an endorsement of MOR folk-rock.  What is surprising is the notion that, since Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová's songs aren't the second coming of "Thriller" or "OK Computer", any success or goodwill their characters receive is an outrageous contrivance. (As if, say, Celine Dion never sold millions of records.) Sorry haters, but the songs aren't really the point; the point is what they mean to the characters and how they feel when they perform them.  What makes the film heartbreaking is that, for all the fearless soul-baring they do in their music, they just can't seem to open up to each other.  It's a movie where the words "I love you" are never spoken, and their absence is a crushing void.

Not Necessarily The 3rd Annual Onion A/V Club Film Poll Ballot

(Note: I was going to give up on sending comments to the Onion film poll this year, because I'd tried to write some blurbs this past week and just ended up frustrated. But today's the due date, and I thought I'd give it a Hail Mary by writing out some ugly paragraphs first and then working with that, maybe winnowing it down and rewriting 'til I had something good, or 5pm rolled around, whichever came first. So I sat down and ended up the with the results below. By the time I got to the third entry, I found myself, unintentionally, writing in the style of early Vern, but I went with it anyway, because Vern is brilliant. [My writing isn't brilliant, that is, but Vern is.] But I didn't want this first draft to go to waste, especially since it includes a bit about running zombies I've been meaning to write for about 3 1/2 years now. Enjoy. Oh, and serious SPOILERS, of course.)

Joshua is great because it is ambiguous. Is the formula poisoned, or is the dad just paranoid. The kid probably killed the grandma and the dog, but we never see it. Sam Rockwell plays the dad, and he's great because he's still the same Sam Rockwell type character, but now with a family and he tries hard to be a family man, but you can tell he's still a swinging dick, like Zaphod. He has some fancy important Wall Street investor job, and he admits he would've beat up his son in elementary school. I think the kid isn't a sociopath at all, but is pretending to be one. Like the piano recital where he intentionally plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star all atonally. We're supposed to think he's going to kill his little sister, but he's just trying to free himself from his family -- and her as well. He doesn't think they love him. It's possible they don't, really. I think he wants to save his sister from being raised by this family. He hates this upper class without the class thing. The irony is the parents do, too.

The Host is great because it is scary and funny, like Jaws. It is the 21st Century Jaws. It's cool because, unlike Jaws, they don't hide the monster for 2/3 of the movie because they couldn't get it to work. They show it right from the get-go, attacking people on a bright sunny day by the river, where everyone is picnicking. It's well done and hardly ever looks like crappy CGI. What does CGI mean anyway? Computer, Graphics, and then "I". Incorporated? Institute? Anyway, instead of three guys on a boat who have to work together, it's a family without a mom that needs to come together to defeat the monster after it takes the youngest daughter. People have compared the family to the one in Little Miss Sunshine, but the grandpa doesn't snort heroin. He does die, though, and it's real shocking and sad. I don't know why it's called The Host. There's a subplot about how the Monster has a disease that's infecting people, but it becomes pretty clear that it's not true. I think it's just a story concocted by the government so the American government can come in and test this biological bomb called Agent Yellow, which is funny because they may as well have called it Agent Kill The Slants. (the movie is Korean.) The bomb and the Monster are even shaped the same, and both are from the American government (because some dipshit U.S. scientist made a Korean intern dump a bunch of chemicals down the drain into the river, which made the Monster). But that part isn't really important, what's important is that the Family is fairly normal and they get past their sibling squabbles and try to get the little girl back, but there's a twist at the end that says that Family isn't about being related to people but the people you bring close to you and are important to you.

Superbad is great because it is very funny. You can look at the poster and know everything you need to know about the movie. Three high school kids, looking awkward with their mouths hanging open, looking anything but super or bad, but there's the title right there underneath them. It's about how these three kids try to get booze for a late-night party to impress some girls. What's great about it is that while the three kids are dorky in their own ways, there's none of that movie high school clique bullshit where there are Jocks and Nerds and Cheerleaders and Goths and Foreign Kids and it starts to look like a White Wolf role playing game. The girls might be a little more popular than the three guys, but it's kinda hard to tell. One of the guys has that distinct Revenge of the Nerds look, but he acts like he doesn't. In fact, his part of the movie is how he learns to unlock his inner Superbad. The part of the movie about the other two kids is about how they're the best of friends but they're gonna have to move away from each other and take a step into maturity. I love how they're such close friends, one of them can walk into the middle of the other's P.E. soccer game and start a conversation like they were in the hallway or something. And everybody yells at that kid like he's done it a million times before. And then that kid kicks the soccer ball out of bounds, like ah fuck you. The two kids are Michael Cera from Arrested Development and Jonah Hill. Cera is always great, but I was really impressed by this Hill guy. He supposedly was in Knocked Up, but I don't remember him at all. I guess he couldn't make up enough "wacky" improv shit and was cut from the movie. Maybe he was trying to actually play a character, I don't know. But here, you can't help but notice him. The word that gets thrown around here is "volcanic". Cuz he's fat and loud. But it's true. He metaphorically explodes. It's like a filthy teen version of Laurel and Hardy, with Cera's sad bird-like face and Hill all sputtering fury. Oh, and I almost forgot to say something about the two cops. They're awesome. They don't take their jobs seriously and fuck with people and share in-jokes like they were still in high school. It's clear that they are the future versions of Cera and Hill if they don't move apart and grow on their own. They'll be in jobs they aren't suited for, kinda joined at the hip and not going anywhere. Funny enough, the cops hardly ever interact with Cera and Hill.

28 Weeks Later is great because it's fucking scary as shit. It's a sequel to a zombie movie that I think was one of those painted-on-film deals, like the Beastie Boys' "Shadrach" video. This is just film, tho. It's about running zombies. I'll come out and say it: I like running zombies. I know people bitch about them all the time, but they're scary to me. I think history and technology has passed the slow zombie by. There was a time when we didn't have 24 hour news channels and iphones and phone cameras and shit, and back then, you could believe slow zombies could fuck up the world. If you wanted to tell somebody about the slow zombies, you had to use a phone with a rotary dial. You know, you would dial a number then have to wait for the thing to spin back around before you could select the next number. (that's where the word "dial" comes from.) So of course, some slow zombie would eat your ass before you could get that last "1" in "911" out. But if slow zombies attacked today, it would be terrible for about five minutes. But by the next five, it'd be over. The cops and the firemen would take them out, there'd be phone camera pictures on the internet, people would send text messages to each other -- OMG ZOMBEEZ LOL -- and that would be that. Zombies have to be able to be faster than the fastest communication devices available. But running zombies? Especially the ones in that Dawn of the Dead remake, where a dead body would turn into a zombie instantly? Fuck that, it's over. You can't text shit, they're on you already. These 28 X Later zombies are like that. One drop of blood gets on you and you're a zombie. And then they fucking run after you. See, I'm a fat guy and can't run, so this is terrifying. I'd be like Uter in that episode of the Simpsons where he's trying to get on the bus before the Civil War re-enactors get him, and he can't make it because he gets that pain in his side that fat people get when they run. I been there. It sucks. Not the beating up, just the side-pain thing.

Anyway, what makes this zombie movie so good is that a) it's really fucking scary, like I said, b) the acting is particularly good, especially Robert Carlyle who's a guy who left his wife to die by the zombies so he could get away. He's rewarded for his cowardice twice -- once by being set up as a big-wig for the reconstruction of England, and once by getting himself infected by his wife, who turns out is immune to the zombie disease but can carry it around in her eye. This is also one of those movies that plays with your expectation about who lives and who dies. The filmmakers know you know who the big stars are, who's being made out to look like a hero and a badass, who you think is going to be sympathetic, and then they proceed to fuck with you in a surgically-precise manner. So between the running zombies, the way they kill off people unexpectedly, and just the atmosphere of hopelessness, this is one incredibly tense flick, almost suffocatingly so. I watched it in broad daylight on my TV and was shaking by the end. Oh, and there's one horrifyingly great scene that shows this is probably one of those Iraq War metaphors (what with the U.S. army coming in and occupying a place it doesn't really understand), where the zombies get loose in the "safe" area and sharpshooters are ordered to start picking off people, even though they can't tell who's a running zombie and who's just running cuz they're panicked and don't want to turn into a running zombie. That's fucked up.

Once is a great movie because it's a love story without the love story. That is, it's an unrequited love story. Well, no, it's not exactly unrequited, but nothing happens. People compare it to Before Sunrise, but I never saw it, so couldn't tell you. I think the biggest sticking point for people about this movie is the music. See, it's about a street musician who has some songs and some big dreams who meets this Czech chick who plays piano, and they enter a musical relationship that helps them both. Some people seem to think that, unless the music is the second coming of Thriller or OK Computer or something, then the whole thing is hogwash. Like no one anywhere liked anything that wasn't less than perfect. Like Celine Dion and Creed never sold millions of records. I'll be honest -- the music isn't anything I would ever buy. I don't hate it, it's just not my thing. But again, that's not the point. The point is that it means a lot to the guy and girl who wrote it. It expresses the stuff they couldn't express otherwise, I mean if they could, they would and wouldn't bother with songs or chord changes or stuff like that. You can see it in their faces when they perform. That's the point of the movie. The best part of the movie is when they first get together in a music store and he teaches her a song he wrote. She picks up on it almost immediately, and he goes from sitting in a music store strumming a guitar to all-out performing, forgetting where he is, getting lost in the music. I've never heard of this Glen Hansard guy before, but what makes it great is that he seems like a real musician and not an actor, probably because he is a real musician and not an actor. He comes across like some guy you might meet in a pub (British for "bar"), just a really friendly and down to earth guy who's got his problems but is too nice to worry you with them. I'm not as sold on the girl -- it gets kinda blurry as to whether she's playing the foreigner who doesn't know English and the foreigner who doesn't know English and so is having trouble with her lines -- but she sure can play the pianninny and you get, after that music store scene, why he might fall for her.

The irony is that while they meld perfectly when they perform and open themselves up emotionally, they can't seem to do the same when not performing, and two people who belong together end up apart. All it probably would've took was an "I love you", but they couldn't pull the trigger. It's a sad movie, but not too sad, and I think people have a problem with that, too. Like the two should've been crazy, throwing shit at each other when they weren't performing, but we've seen that before. There's probably truth to that kind of drama, but that seems like movie bullshit to me. This is more realistic I think. I'd call it a mumblecore musical, but the word "mumblecore" doesn't exist and is not a marketing term devised by hipsters to create a buzz around indie movies shot for $4.99.

Catsup, Part 2

Part two in my attempt to recap all the movies I haven't already written about. I'm allowed to keep it to one sentence if I want. Funny that hasn't happened yet.

The Return of Count Yorga (1971, Bob Kelljan) [68]: Kelljan died too early with too few features under his belt to get a Taratinoized rebirth, but dammit, he deserves it. His three vampire films -- Count Yorga, Vampire, Scream, Blacula, Scream, and this, the Yorga sequel -- are all crude and shocking bits of pulp that hit like barbed wire wrapped around a two by four. What Kelljan lacked in subtlety, he made up for in aggressiveness -- his slo-mo running vampires, shock cuts and freeze-frames feel like they're dipped in nightmare. But while the first Yorga is severely crippled by the awful lighting and lumpy screenplay, the sequel (written by Yvonne Wilder, who also plays the deaf-mute housekeeper) is comparatively elegant. There's a definite feminist subtext going on, with focus on the Mariette Hartley character and the gaslighting of the housekeeper (quite similar to the same year's Let's Scare Jessica to Death), that contrasts well with the sexist original. There are lulls, and it doesn't always hang together perfectly, but the set-pieces make up for it. Kelljan tops the first Yorga's tense, gut-wrenching ending with a climactic sequence that's both exciting and dread-inducing, ending with two of the most terrifying freeze-frames in horror film history. That Kelljan never got to grow as an artist, and that his contributions to the mechanics of suspense are ignored by modern filmmakers, is a fucking tragedy.

Day Night Day Night (2007, Julia Loktev) [76]: Key image for me was watching our confused emo protag try on different outfits for her big day, and briefly donning a jacket with "Baby Girl" on the back. She rejects the jacket, but the she never really shakes off the label -- despite the deathly seriousness of her task, she's still a kid, really, incapable of understanding that she's not doing this for any great cause (pointedly, we have no idea what the cause is), but simply because she hasn't figured out who she is (pointedly, we have no idea who she is). This would've been impossible for Loktev to convey (at least, not without making a terrible film) without lead Williams, who does more with her body before six a.m. than most actors do all day. The first half is the best, all controlled, claustrophobic angles, yet comforting in their directness, not unlike the obscure cause that's been embraced by these masked men. Then she's let out into the "real world", the camera goes handheld, strangers start looking at the camera, and the tension, rather than heightened, is diffused (defused?) by the hustle and bustle. It's air squeaking out of the balloon, and while that's mostly the point -- the group's ideology crumbling against the chaos of modern existence, a life intended to be meaningful through sacrifice that suddenly loses meaning in the anonymous crowds -- it's still a bit of a drag. Good job with that last shot, though.

Zombie (1979, Lucio Fulci) [34]: Boring boring cool cool boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring cool cool how'dtheydothat cool boring boring boring boring boring gross gross gross boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring nice nice nice boring boring boring boring stupid stupid stupid boring boring boring boring boring boring dumb dumb oh thank god it's over.

Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland) [71]: Yeah, I know. This has 80s written all over it, from the hair and clothes, to the way the narrative is honed-down, in the Syd Field manner, to its bare essentials -- there can't be more than eight characters in the entire thing. Still, it enraptured me when I was 13 and still does today. Probably has something to do with a fondness for the Savant-as-Hero, the guy whose head full of useless trivia becomes a weapon against monsters. (Today we'd recognize both Charlie and Evil as a bona-fide geeks, but the movie can only situate them, vaguely, as outsiders, which is probably why we never meet any other kids, apart from Amy). But a monster movie is only as good as its monster, and Chris Sarandon's suave and menacing neighborhood vampire is just as worthy of an Aurora model kit as the Tall Man in my opinion. (Love how the film demonstrates his toughness -- stripping the wood off a banister with his fingernail.) And the disco scene, while a homage to Polanski's ballroom scene in The Fearless Vampire Killers, outdoes its predecessor in sensuality and just plain cinematic snap. Watch Amanda Bearse's Amy become a woman over the course of a cheesy synth-pop number! (Must I turn in my Hipster's Learning Permit if I admit that I found Bearse, pre-Married With Children shrew, kinda hot? Is it significant that we now know she's a lesbian?)

1408 (2007, Mikael Håfsröm) [22]: Here's what's wrong with this movie: the haunted room is omnipotent. It can do anything it wants with Cusack; he's powerless. How can there be any meaningful conflict if one character has literally all the power? The movie tries to make up for this lack of conflict by making the experience about whether Cusack will come to terms with his dead daughter, but you know what? That's not horror. That's Lifetime. Oh, and don't get me started on the Jackson/Cusack scene. Suckas act like it's the second coming of True West or some shit, when it's just a frickin' speed bump on the way to the CGI. Oh, and don't get me started on the CGI. There's a ghost from the thirties, and one from the fifties? Let's make them look like scratched up B&W film and Technicolor, respectively! Woo! Fucking hacks.

30 Days of Night (2007, David Slade) [65]: Here's what's wrong with this movie, and really, it's the only thing that's wrong (without necessarily implying that the rest is "right"): Thirty days is just too damn long for drama. The film does a terrible job of showing how weeks of avoiding vampire-induced death affects the characters physically and mentally, and just a terrible job of demonstrating the passing of time in general. (A "Day 15" title card just don't cut it.) There's very little difference between Day 3 and Day 30, and considering the ferociousness of the vampires, it starts to beggar belief that anyone would make it past day two. But then, what about the vampires? You tell me they got thirty days to eat everyone, and they haven't razed the entire town in a week? What, did they break into someone's house and find a copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz and think, "Well, when are we gonna be back here?" Yet, change the title to "Three Days of Night", and you got a winner. But I guess that isn't horrifying enough.

Hostel Part II (2007, Eli Roth) [59]: So Martin suggested that David Poland was paid by someone to have a shit fit over this, and damn, he might be onto something. Feels like Roth lost his nerve -- he could've really earned that shit fit, but instead backs away from most of the carnage (I can't even remember what happened to Bijou Phillips). All of the ideas here are good ones, from the gender switch to the focus on the torturers' perspective to the "money talks" ending. (Probably the best idea is simply showing the contrast between the boys' trip in the first movie -- an abbreviated sex comedy -- and the girls' trip, which is threatening long before they reach the hostel.) But Roth ultimately doesn't know what to do with his ideas, so the whole thing lacks any kind of depth. Everyone hits their marks, torture set pieces come and go (quickly), and then it's over. Bart tries valiantly to make his character work but can't make his third act change of heart believable. Best scene isn't even in the movie: on the DVD, check out the deleted scene "Rape Shower". Yeah, yeah, I know, sounds tasteless, but it's just two of the women talking. It's pretty funny and lends credence to the rumor that Tarantino has a hand in Roth's scripts.

Catsup, Part 1

Whoah! Dusty in here. Smells funny, too. That's what happens when you leave a blog sitting out for so long, I guess.

Gonna attempt to cover all the movies I've seen since the last update, going in reverse chronological order, why not. Everything will get at least a sentence, in the approved Michael Atkinson mode, but that might be it.

WARNING: Some films may be SPOILED ROTTEN, of course.

No Country For Old Men (2007, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) [82]: Terrific film, yada yada yada. Let's get to the real debate: Who's the protagonist? Now, understand that I'm talking about "protagonist", a pretty specific and wonky term (so be warned), used here in the context of studying screenplay structure, so I'm not talking "main character", "key character", "lead" or "supporting" characters or anything like that. And I say it's the Brolin character, if only for the simple fact that there's no story without him. The inciting incident (finding the money) and the first act twist (getting caught by the drug dealers) are about him. Without Brolin, Bardem has nothing to do but flip his gorgeous locks, and Jones can only putter around and philosophize. (Oh wait, that's what he does anyway.) That's what makes the last part so discombobulating. It's almost like the film itself starts looking, across space and time, for a protagonist to hang itself on, like a amnesiac child on a cosmic quest. Are you my protagonist? No, I'm just the wife of the protagonist, a side character. Are you my protagonist? No, I'm the antagonist, and all I can do now is kill side characters and get offed myself, now that I have no purpose. Are you my protagonist? I should've been, sonny, but I couldn't find the nerve.

(Of course, Martin McClellan will come in and destroy this argument. And God knows what Todd Alcott's gonna say when he gets around to it.)

The Mist (2007, Frank Darabont) [77]: Nice to see Darabont back to doing disreputable genre work, even if it is another goddamn Stephen King book. Script isn't as tight as his job on the 1988 remake of The Blob, and the "Do We Need The First 10 Pages" question rises again. (I left the theater during a preview to complain about the volume -- the trailer for Awake fuckin' shook the seats -- and when I got back, the family was outside with the tree. Didn't get a proper intro to the characters, but plotwise, nothing lost.) Tense and exciting, but Acting saves the day -- Braugher's character is incomprehensible, but holds it together through sheer talent, and Harden makes an intolerable character tolerable by playing to the cheap seats. Neither performance should work, but do. And great cinematography as well -- verité in the accepted shaky-cam style, but keeping spacial integrity, so fuck you Greengrass. Unfortunately, the ending doesn't work -- the decision comes too quickly, too easily, and then lead Jane is left to express something that's quite frankly inexpressible, yet gives us a rather unimaginative and empty Wail O' Anguish anyway. But 50s-inspired giant bugs are good enough.

Spider-Man 3 (2007, Sam Raimi) [73]: Why the hate, yo? So much better than number two, which was so tonally inconsistent it may as well have been South Korean. Feels like a random issue of the comic book, pulled off the rack circa '81, with a central conflict (Parker and Mary Jane's trouble relationship) that sings compared to the previous one, which was about... what was that about, again? Bitching about the landing of the black goo is stupid; it's clear that Pete's gone dark long before the suit does, making its arrival the period at the end of the sentence. Grace and Howard are well-cast, the former for his ingratiating smarm, the latter for her empty-headed cheer.

Hairspray (2007, Adam Shankman) [55]: More cheeky than I was expecting -- Watered down, if you will -- but Blonsky is awful. She has one look (naive wonderment), one move (a shoulder shake), and no presence at all. High school musical, indeed. Speaking of which, that Efron kid is the real deal (so I get why all the gay five year olds are crazy about him), and I like Bynes all grown up, thank you very much. (Not sure about the deep tan, though -- a foreshadowing of her character's sexual awakening, or just too long at Desert Sun?) Also: no dedication to Divine? For shame, filmmakers.

Mr. Brooks (2007, Bruce A. Evans) [57]: Hi, my name's Bruce A. Evans, and I have directed a feature film called Mr. Brooks. Perhaps you'd like to hire me to direct your next film? I can do low-key drama (roll scene of Costner and wife bantering in car), psycho thriller (roll scene of Costner killing couple in bed), action (roll scene of Moore fighting killers in van), stylized action (roll scene of Moore shoot-out in hallway) and wish-fullfillment (roll scene of Dane Cook getting throat slashed). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, when you think "directing", think Bruce A. Evans.

Grave of the Vampire (1974, John Hayes) [37]: I've seen this shitty movie three times. Three times. Why. Why. It's Danny Peary's fault, actually -- the glowing write-up in Guide for the Film Fanatic writes checks the movie can't cash, especially in the awful public domain version that seems to be the only way to see it. It's a good premise, admittedly. (Note to writer, Sopranos creator David Chase: Make this your next TV show.) But the Poverty Row production values, stiff acting, and point-and-shoot direction from John "Fomaldehyde Zombies" Hayes just sinks the entire show. One good bit, which we can blame on Chase: the half-vampire son opts to romance not the attractive, age-appropriate woman but the matronly, less pretty one -- yet it's clear to us, if not him, that he's just trying to get back at Vampire Dad.

Interview: Dan Gildark & Grant Cogswell of Cthulhu

(This interview was originally done for ScreenGrab, and it appears on that site in a shortened form here. Many thanks to Peter Smith for letting me crosspost!)


Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell premiered their debut film, Cthulhu, at the Seattle International Film Festival this last Thursday. A poetic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", Cthulhu tells the story of Russ, a gay professor who returns to his hometown for his mother's funeral, only to discover that his family, and the town, conceal a terrible secret. Shot by cinematographer Sean Kirby (Zoo and Police Beat), It's one of the few recent horror films that doesn't draw directly (and solely) from the U.S. government's recent embrace of torture as foreign policy. Which isn't to say it's apolitical -- on the contrary, it's downright angry, finding the connections between religious extremism, homophobia, suburban sprawl, and global warming, but expressing them through the metaphor of Lovecraft's cosmic monsters.

Director Gildark is a graduate of the Northwest Film Center's film program in Portland, Oregon, and, according to the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, created a series of film clips that MTV allegedly stole for the opening of 120 Minutes. Screenwriter Cogswell is a poet and author, and is the subject of Phil Campbell's book, Zioncheck for President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics, which details his failed run for a seat on Seattle's City Council.

How did you meet?

DG: Those sex pages in the back of The Stranger. (Laughs) We've known each other for about fourteen years now. We met when we were both driving the bicycle cabs down on the waterfont. We became good friends, stayed friends over the years, went our different ways, got reacquainted...

GC: In 2003, my girlfriend broke up with me, I lost my job and my apartment, and I was living on his floor. The Iraq war was starting, and we were watching it on a little cheap black and white TV, which made it feel like Night of the Living Dead. I was at a point in my life when I was very open to doing whatever was next, and he said "I want to make a movie and I want you to write it." If I'd known how much work it would be I probably would have said no!

It's clear from Cthulhu that you had a lot to say, politically. Why did you decide to adapt Lovecraft for that purpose?

GC: We wanted to make a piece of art that said something about our alarm over the political condition of the country. And we wanted people to see it, we wanted it to be visceral and intense, but as a horror film, we didn't want it to be the same ol' kind of horror film, and stuff like Hostel -- that's torture porn. But I didn't feel there was a story coming on in me, so we started looking for things to adapt. I immediately gravitated to Lovecraft, who I read for the first time in 2000. I think he really reflects a kind of apocalyptic flavor of the times. My favorite story was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and the one that I felt would work best. Some are more atmospheric or beautifully written, but they're not movies. "The Colour Out Of Space" is his best story, but it's not a movie.



It seems to me that "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has one of the Lovecraft's stronger protagonists, because what happens to him has such a personal cost, which you can't necessarily say about the other ones.

GC: Absolutely. What the story reminded me of, more than anything else, was friends of mine who are gay, who come from these backwoods towns and then escape to the city to make an adult life. And then, fifteen or twenty years later, they're in their thirties, and a parent dies, or the sister has a child, or whatever, and they have to go back and engage with that family and that place. One of Lovecraft's major themes, and I think "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" expresses this best, is the horror of heredity. So I was writing from that feeling of threat, but also the issues of heredity, of anxiety about having children, and I decided to merge the two things.

I also think it's interesting because Lovecraft was very conservative, so to take that and flip it...

GC: Lovecraft thought, perhaps correctly, that immigrants coming to New England were eroding the local culture that he felt a loyalty to. I don't personally have a problem with that (laughs). What I find eroding our world is the militarism and the entertainment state and the willful, blissful ignorance of global warming, which is really gonna bite us in the ass. It's not gonna make the planet unlivable, but it's gonna make it hard to live and civilization is going to be in a lot of trouble in the next 50, 60 years.

Unless you happen to be a fish person.

GC: Right!



Do you consider Cthulhu do be a horror film or a gay film?

DG: Yes. (Laughs)

Are you comfortable, then, with it existing in a kind of middle space?

DG: The genre films I'm most interested in are the ones that are indescribable, that move back and forth across genres. They aren't true horror in the traditional sense; they kind of skirt the edges. To call our film a gay film is misleading, but to call it a straight horror film is misleading as well, so it really is kind of a bastard version of those genres, which I'm totally comfortable with. It makes it hard to market, but anything interesting takes from different fields and doesn't try to be a purist art form.

Lovecraft is usually associated with the East Coast -- Massachusetts, Rhode Island. Why did you choose to film in the Pacific Northwest?

GC: Well, we live here, of course, but it's bigger than that. The film grew out of the town of Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia river. It's the oldest American town on the Pacific. It was founded right after Lewis & Clark came through. It's old, it's weird, it's creepy, it used to be a lot more important and now kind of a little meth town. Very Lovecrafty.

Furthermore, Diabolus Rex, the head of the American Church of Satan, grew up in Astoria. He dresses in immaculate black Victorian goth clothing, and he's got two four-inch long subcutaneous horns in his forehead. And he's really the nicest guy you could possibly imagine -- he does work with pitbull rescue and stuff. At the first public reading of the script in Portland, he approached me and asked, "Where are you filming this?" and I said, "Astoria" -- we were picking out locations as we were writing it. He said: Astoria is Innsmouth, and I'll tell you why. And he listed off forty-some parallels between Astoria and the town of Innsmouth, all true. In the the story and the movie, there are hidden tunnels underneath the town. Turns out, when Diabolus was a kid, his bedroom, which was in the basement of the house, entered into a series of tunnels the Chinese built in Astoria. I thought I'd made that up.

DG: It was very interesting for me to film the Northwest in general because everything you see is either L.A. or New York. To see imagery of another part of the country is a huge production value. A lot of productions are afraid of rainy locales because of continuity, but when it rains all the time -- there's your continuity. When I first started talking to my DP, we talked in terms of imagery we both understand and filmmakers we both liked, but we also talked about the painting that kept coming to mind: Goya's Laocoön. Very blue and grey. It has a very Northwest vibe to it.

GC: Naked guys wrestling with snakes-- that's what the movie's about!

In my previous post on Cthulhu, I wrote, "This is also the film that gained some notoriety by casting Tori Spelling, which turns out to be a wry joke if you're familiar with Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Was that intentional?

DG: The "Innsmouth look"? That's what you're alluding to?

Yeah.



GC: I think she's the sexiest woman I've ever met in my life! I really do. She's an unsual looking person, but there's a lot of unusual looking people.

DG: I knew she'd be right for the role. She can be funny, and serious, and we needed this seductress to come in. It's kind of a campy role, but we needed someone who could also take it seriously, and have the weight to carry it. I feel like she's a good actress who's been severely overlooked. She does these crappy Lifetime shows all the time, but she honestly could be a major contender and serious actress if she chose to do that.

GC: It's kind of a minor role, but it really is the pillar of the movie, in a way. If it were done badly, it would wreck the movie.

You're currently looking for distribution.

DG: Hopefully after the premiere we'll have some conversations. Know anybody? (Laughs)