There Are No Walls in the House of Jearl
Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Infernal Jeer" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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11:01 pm
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Mystery DVD #199
Backslash
A stalker is killing the stars of a student's slasher film -- the same girls featured on the student's "Hottest Girls on Campus" Web site. Freshmen Martha (Gretchen Akers) and Amie (Laura Bruner) become the psycho's next targets as they're unknowingly put at the center of a twisted online reality show. But the killer's not expecting the duo to turn the tables and fight back. Writer--director Kevin Campbell co-stars as the mysterious slasher.
I realize I've been conditioned to expect a certain level of polish, and the lack thereof sets off the Cheerleader Ninjas alarm (never forget, never forgive). Since there's no Mega-Zord fight in Backslash I think these guys had even less money, but they made a better movie. I don't know a lot about cinematography but even I could see that they were working with a really limited set of equipment; either that or the director only knew how to frame two kinds of shots and would sometimes cross his fingers and do a close-up. It also suffered from having just terrible video quality on the DVD. Kevin Campbell is a better writer than director; he just punts a lot on the storytelling beats; there are all these very abrupt jumps followed by exposition to move the plot along.
What I'm driving at is that it was really hard to calibrate expectations, and thus, judgement, on this one. On the one hand, it's pretty bad! It's super cheesy and the acting is...uneven is about as nicely as I can put it. On the other hand, for a low-budget sendup of the slasher-movie-in-a-slasher-movie trope, that felt poised to veer into terrible softcore porn at any moment, it was surprisingly good! It was smart enough to know that it was silly, but it took itself...just the right amount of seriously, I think. The two heroines reacted to their situations in sort-of plausible ways and some of the nudity was not even completely gratuitous! Sadly this was undermined by the winking 'look at our gratuitous nudity, we are directing the actresses to be especially gross about it because we are mocking this genre, but seriously, look, boobies.' Light your boobs better, people. Go the distance. Aside from squicking me out with it's double-inverted bad naked irony, I think it actually sends up slasher-movie cliches better than the Scream movies. And the ladies actually, like, got people to teach them to fight and bought guns and stuff. It passes the Bechdel Test, for crying out loud! By the end I was totally in this movie's corner, and not just because there is a completely crazy knife-fight in which someone solemnly intones this line: "I didn't want to live without my dick anyway," but that did score it a lot of points.
Warnings: Buckets of fake blood, threats of sexual violence, emergency dickectomy, actual murders with organ removal, highly implausible knife-fight endurance.
Tags: dvd review
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12:50 am
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Mystery DVD #198
Boy Meets World: Season 3: Disc 3
Just because they're in high school now doesn't mean life's any less interesting for Cory, his best friend, Shawn, and his girlfriend, Topanga. In fact, adolescence only gets more complicated. This disc includes the following episodes: "Stormy Weather," "The Pink Flamingo Kid," "Life Lessons," "I Was a Teenage Spy," "I Never Sang for My Legal Guardian," "The Happiest Show On Earth" and "Brother Brother."
So, this is still rather stream-of-consciousness; sorry, or you're welcome, depending on how you prefer my tears. To recap, the Arranger has dragged me through these miserable thickets of watered-down Americana before, reviewed here with Season 3 Disc 1 and here with Disc 2. I am actually getting kind of attached to the characters, Shub help me.
( seven episodes, behind the cut for sanity )
Tags: dvd review
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05:19 pm
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Mystery DVD #197
Face/Off: Disc 2 (Bonus Materials)
The bonus material for this John Woo blockbuster action thriller includes the featurettes "The Light and the Dark: Making Face/Off" and "John Woo: A Life in Pictures"
Often my eagerness to watch these is inversely proportionate to the blurb accuracy, especially when the Arranger is so obviously trolling me. I had low hopes, but it wasn't so bad. "The Light and the Dark" is the standard, possibly inevitable, 'making of' feature where some unseen cultural historians interview everyone from the scriptwriters to the armorer and they all gush about each other. Main takeaways: 1) the script started out as a way more expensive and futuristic production, like, Minority Report crossed with Fortress*, but sane people talked it down to just having future secret face-switching medical science, 2) there is a consensus among the cast and crew that Joan Allen makes the movie**, and 3) John Woo is a lovely man. Secondary tidbits: Michael Douglas had some shadowy matchmaker role and the gunsmith does a very funny Nicolas Cage impression.
I certainly wouldn't have gone out of my way to watch this, but these things inevitably suck me in and make me more affectionate towards the film they're about. Plus, more explosions! Oh and somewhere out there exist horrifyingly lifelike silicone effigies of Travolta and Cage, left over from the surgery scene. They are animatronic. It is not okay.
"John Woo: A Life In Pictures" - wow, yeah, John Woo is adorable. He can have all the doves he wants.
* I can only vaguely remember the plot to Casablanca, but Fortress left a regrettably permanent impression.
** They make a strong case. She and the daughter ruled the chapel fight scene, but I'd forgotten it due to rocket boat trauma.
Tags: dvd review
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08:37 pm
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Mystery DVD #196
Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)
More Scandinavian Semi-Horror.
Twelve-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), the constant target of bullies, spends his time plotting revenge and collecting news items about the grisly murders plaguing his town. Things change for Oskar when he meets new girl Eli (Lina Leandersson), a misfit vampire who steals his heart. As a serial killer continues to prey on teen boys in the small village outside Stockholm, Sweden, Eli helps Oskar find the courage to stand up to his tormentors.
Urgh. That was so chipper, blurbwright. Did you watch this? Have you heard of Sweden?
Indeed, Oskar is a socially isolated twelve-year-old boy living in a little Swedish town, where he serves as the entertainment for the local bullies, and amuses himself with knife-based revenge fantasies and morbid scrapbooking. His parents are apart; his mother seems to have little time for him and his father, who he idolizes, disappears into weird adult social obligations, shutting him out. His grim exurban misery is interrupted by the arrival of the strange girl and her grizzled, adult keeper.
I approve of a postmodern monster movie where the monsters are really monstrous. Vampires aren't people and it's not always possible to find a comfortable common ground. Their friendship is sincere, and real, and I wanted to cheer it on; Eli's an innocent in her own way. But she is a purely toxic force; by befriending Oskar she renders him unable to have any friends but her. Innocent people die grotesquely, without even committing any horror-movie crimes like having sex or showing unkindness to animals. Oskar and Eli ride off together into a beautiful evening, but you know that he'll be the wrecked old man one day, living with her in bare apartments and murdering children in the woods.
The real tragedy of Let the Right One In is that it's not like Oskar had anyone better to choose from. He's friendless at school, and his father turns into a stranger when other adults are around...without Eli, he'd probably have survived the bullying, but how could he know that? How could he not reach out to the only person who seemed to understand him? Once he does, everything else that happens feels as inevitable as snow piling up.
I must point out that I love that Eli's helper is just...incompetent as a monster. He wasn't born to be this guy that hunts for a vampire, he just had the bad luck to fall in love with one, and here we are. Good movie. Please try to forgive them for the terrible cat attack scene.
ETA: urrrgh, edited to fix numbering and egregious double negative.
Tags: dvd review
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09:21 am
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Mystery DVD #195
Well, here's something that occurred to me awhile ago, but this seems like a good time to acknowledge it publicly. In the review for Edges of Darkness I groused: 'It's a zombie movie, right? I'm not watching it for the Sartre references.' And what do I get? Zombie Strippers, which is set in Sartre, Nebraska and is groaning with random philosophy references. This is me genuflecting in the Arrangers' direction; I am sorry for my disrespect of the Work.
Here's another zombie movie! It is probably also full of philosophical references which I missed by not being Norwegian.
Dead Snow
A group of Norwegian friends get the scariest history lesson of their lives during a weekend getaway to the snowy town of Øksfjord, where the party is interrupted by throngs of Nazi zombies who once occupied the area. Armed with a machine-gun-equipped snowmobile, the gang fights for survival in director Tommy Wirkola's quirky horror, shot on location in the mountains of Norway. The film had its U.S. premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Pretty accurate! Les blurbeurs are good at writing up zombie movies. Four young men and three young women trek up into the mountains on Easter break to frolic and get it on, but there are Nazi zombies. There is a fourth lady but she is skiing separately so as to encounter the zombies early. Our heroes are presented as callow brats misspending their youth, but they don't seem like terrible people to me. Obviously if they do something so foolish as to have any sex they deserve to be eaten by zombies, that's just the oldest law. They enjoy some obligatory self-referential discussion of horror movie tropes on the way up to the isolated lodge. A cranky old hiker shows up to freak them out about Nazi evil and stolen gold, steals their beer and calls them jackasses. Awesome.
The Blu-ray menu screen announces its cheese all the way to future space colonies. Which is a shame, because it's played pretty straight for the first half, only erupting into full camp when one of the kids, searching for Missing Ski Girlfriend, essentially puts on an impromptu advertisement for the Norwegian Army Reserve. This guy gets punched out of a cave by a Nazi zombie and then defeats it in a biting contest. For starters. Basically the kids are totally ferocious once the action gets going; unfortunately they are also hilariously stupid and unlucky.
It's not bad! If you're looking for Evil Shaun of the Dead In Norway II and don't mind subtitles. There's a lot of craft in it; the editing is crisp, the comic timing is on. However, the zombie effects are pretty silly and all in all it's very formulaic. I don't think formulaic is a terrible thing for a movie like this; just saying, don't expect stunning plot twists. There is also a strange fondness for disembowelments. Really thoroughly thought out, tactical disembowelments. I don't know.
Tags: dvd review
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05:31 pm
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Mystery DVD #194
Ponyo
Ponyo is a Studio Ghibli film about a magical sea princess who falls in love with a human boy.
Oh-- oh right, I guess it's possible someone might read that and not immediately go to watch or re-watch this film as soon as possible. Okay. In that case: Ponyo is the most enchanting and adorable story ever animated by the hands of wonderful Japanese people and pressed to highly-produced and cute-ified media by Disney. I have a bad history with Disney media, I mean literally, the media will often not play in my hardware, but I guess they have come to an understanding with Sony. I do not have a bad history with the works of Hayao Miyazaki, that guy can do no wrong.
There is a fish princess named Brunhilde, the daughter of a grumpy wizard and the sea goddess. Eager to see the surface world, she sneaks away from her father as he works, and runs afoul of a fishing boat. A five-year-old boy named Sosuke rescues her, thinking she is a magical goldfish, and names her Ponyo. She falls in love with him, and in her determination to become human, inadvertently causes the Earth to go out of balance. Divinely ordained heroic questing ensues.
There are no villains here, just decent people who are sometimes wrong. It's wonderfully balanced between ordinary human troubles and concerns and immense, awe-inspiring divine forces. The sea wizard is a fantastic mix of powerful and bumbling, a respectable but phenomenally dorky antagonist, with evocative watery minions that are pretty much their own comic relief. Humans respond to magic with a welp, magic is real, I better reorient myself accordingly attitude that I find really endearing.
Visually stunning and, did I mention? incredibly adorable. Not boring, or dumbed down, or cloyingly sweet. However, while it seems very childish? child-like? I don't honestly know if it's for children. It's not really scary, although there are some tense storm scenes and giant monster fishes -- I just think they'd find it boring. It's a very dreamlike story and the human subplots depend on understanding some social cues and obligations. Can any parents weigh in on this? Do small children enjoy this kind of story? I'm curious.
Tags: dvd review
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10:28 pm
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Mystery DVD #193
The Wicker Man (2006)
Man, this one...I don't know what to say about movies anymore, if I ever did. I don't know how to watch movies anymore. Bees. Fire. What does it all mean.
I mean... Is that all you got, Arranger? I can watch more Nic Cage-- if you GOT any! I'll watch it with YOUR MOM!
So, I watched The Wicker Man in all its screaming Nicolas Cage glory, and I wasn't sure where to start, so I watched the 1974 original. This was probably a mistake, because now all I really want to do is draw comparisons between the two versions, which would be fine for a discussion group but is not especially useful in a review. Also, hopelessly spoilery. So I watched it again, and have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is terrible. Many would find this film hilarious in its enormity, but I felt myself gripped with helpless, ashamed sympathy for its shouty, wild-eyed protagonist.
If you are not going to see either version, here is a YouTube clip of the Cagiest moments, that while really spoilery and frankly unfair to the main character, is funny if you enjoy man's pain. You monster.
All right, so, Cage plays Edward Malus, a simple, dutiful California police officer. After being traumatized by a freakish accident, he's on leave recuperating, and gets a letter from his ex-fiancee about a missing girl. He flies off to Summersisle, a private, insular community of Cirinists* in the Pacific Northwest, and is baffled and driven to emotional extremes by their ruthless head games as he searches for the girl. I mean, ANSWERS. and the girl.
It certainly is a striking film. They really cast a lot of women who were able to look smug as hell about torturing a dude. I should mention Ellen Burstyn as the leader and Frances Conroy as the village doctor as special menaces, but really Molly Parker's Sister Rose seemed like the most effectively vexing. Maybe too vexing -- I think the tension curve could have been handled a little better. The hero is on Full Alert for more than half the movie, so when things are really coming to a head there's nowhere else to go, and the musical cues go over the top - there's one moment fairly far in: Malus, already pretty frantic and running around town searching everywhere, turns a corner and HIS BICYCLE!! IS MISSING!!! The worst and most heroic moments for him end up making him seem absurd. Which may be fitting, but that would get into spoilers.
That's all I have. Let's open this discussion group up. I swear to Shub I will regain the ability to respond to comments any second now.
* Cirinist: 1. evil, matriarchal feminist existing in/promulgating a bee-like communal hierarchy. 2. object of a straw-woman argument.
Tags: dvd review
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03:25 pm
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Mystery DVD #192
I am sorry I didn't respond to any of the interesting comments on The TIme-Traveler's Wife, but my weird internet muteness continues. Yet I am called forth to view these odd films and there's so much Nic Cage still out there, so I'll do my best to shake it off.
Cry-Baby
Helmed by director John Waters -- the king of kitsch -- this campy comedy set in 1950s Baltimore stars Johnny Depp as Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, a leather-clad street tough who leads a gang dubbed the Drapes. When Wade falls for a goody-two-shoes (Amy Locane) and steals her from her mossback beau (Stephen Mailer), the romance sparks a battle between rival factions Troy Donahue, Joey Heatherton and Patty Hearst appear in cameo roles.
Okay, the blurb has a lot of problems, but I'm just going to let it go this time. The important points are: Depp is a 'juvenile delinquent' because of his hair and clothes, and other people are 'squares' because of their hair and clothes. Romance as anthropology ensues. It's pretty fun!
You know when the female lead steps into the frame and sighs, "I'm tired of being good." you are dealing with a musical and should just recalibrate your acting expectations. Cry-Baby is wonderfully cheesy in this lovable overacted musical way, and everyone does a great job chewing the scenery appropriately. You can tell Waters just loves this whole period and loves the clothes and above all the music -- there's a long dance scene on the Drape side of town that's just fantastic. There are a few great dance numbers but this one is just wildly athletic and super-1950s-weird, with dudes and ladies just flinging each other in the air -- awesome.
I think my other main takeaway, and what I love about John Waters, is that he finds so much delight in the weirdness of all people, and goes and draws it out and puts it on display, but with kindness and celebration rather than any sense of gawkery. Yeah, sometimes he veers into creepy or gross, but sometimes people are creepy and gross but they still need your empathy! The Drapes are pretty weird and sort of crazy, but they love each other and are musical and awesome, and hey, the Squares are pretty weird people too, with their white gloves and talent shows and mottoes and careful hair-hygiene. They're sort of set up as the monolithic villains of the piece, but it's subverted almost immediately -- the grandmother is open-minded enough to turn her opinion of Cry-Baby right around when she sees how sincere he is, eventually dances around to his devil-music in the most painfully endearing way. On the other hand the Square boys are simple douchebags. As with Hairspray, Waters seems to say, "Look at all these wonderful people, so crazy, so beautiful. Some of them are assholes, oh well!"
This one's also noteworthy for some stunty casting, with Tracy Lords and Patty Hearst. They both seriously rule. I have deep affection for Patty Hearst for her role in Serial Mom, but she's fun in this one as well. There was a heartwarming story in the DVD extras, in which the FBI was looking for Tracy Lords to question her and she was freaking out, and everyone in the cast and crew told her all about times they'd been arrested, to reassure her that it is no big deal. Everyone has been arrested for something, it seemed, even Ricki Lake, who is young but totally ferocious in this. Eventually someone asked Patty Hearst if she's ever been arrested for anything, which, yeah, awkward. John Waters and friends: so adorable. Oh man, and Iggy Pop. He was not fooling around.
Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching: Susan Tyrell, last seen as the scary queen of the Forbidden Zone, is here as the equally scary matriarch of the Drapes.
Tags: dvd review
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06:27 pm
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Mystery DVD #191
The Time Traveler's Wife
I wish I had the personal resources (time and energy) to really research every DVD. I must be missing so many patterns. The blurbs alone are a rich area of study. Check out this sensitive soul, so much different from the bored and careless clod of my imagination who blurbalizes the explodey films:
Due to a genetic disorder, handsome librarian Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) involuntarily zips through time, appearing at various moments in the life of his true love, the beautiful artist Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams). Also starring Ron Livingston as Gomez, the soul-stirring romantic drama was adapted from the best-selling Audrey Niffenegger novel by Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter behind the beloved weepy Ghost.
"Beloved weepy?" Is a thing? Come here, blurbista, let's hug this out. Dread sincerity, ahoy.
So, Henry is unstuck in time. Every so often he disappears out of his clothes, appears naked, somewhere and somewhen around Chicago, and has to pick up the pieces and carry on. One day he meets Clare, who shyly, clumsily, endearingly explains to him that they are friends, that they have been for many years in her past, and in his future. And so, since it happened, it has to happen.
It is the time-travel story opposite to Primer, evading the intellectual grasp to the same extent, but by being emotionally transparent rather than narratively opaque. It kept making me think about puzzleless interactive fiction, in the sense that it had no 'plot' -- well, I mean no driving external conflict. A steady diet of mayhem flicks has atrophied my ability to discern the fine structure of a series of emotional vignettes between people who are always knowingly on different pages, interesting and beautifully shot though they are. Just vignettes held together by the premise and animated/given tension by its inherent strangeness. Does that still count as a story? Anyway it was very pleasant and I liked the people and worried for them, and Rachel McAdams is painfully radiant.
The deep strangeness in how little the film confronts its own basic story problem is eating my mind up here -- I don't mean there's a flaw in the story, I'm trying to explain how it deliberately sidesteps any discussion of time paradoxes, causality or free will, instead just focusing on how Henry and Clare behave. Not even really what they think of things, because so much exposition would suck all the oxygen away, just the living, the struggle to act as normal as possible. I don't know yet how the novel handles this, if it does at all. I don't know if any film could do it better than this. There is only one line that acknowledges this suffocating strangeness. But you could tell that it was on their minds, that they felt this dread. It was like the real movie that my nerd brain wanted to go watch and have an argument about was being screened for them, silently in another room, white the more filmable, more relevant story was left for me. A victory for restraint and trust in the characters.
Tags: dvd review
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05:45 pm
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Mystery DVD #190
Drive Angry
My Nicolas Cage indoctrination continues. I hope Con Air is up soon, I still have never seen it. I understand this one was released in 3-D. I saw it on Blu-Ray. My loss, I'm sure. The DVD menu has to be seen to be believed. Nic Cage glowers in the rear-view mirror behind a windshield, the point of view careening down a crumbling back road under a heavy red sky, as insects and artifacts of the story fly into the glass. Magnificently cheesy.
Cage looked back at Ghost Rider and decided to give it another shot. This is a total comic book movie, in the adolescent grimdark ultraviolent vein. Human bodies are set up and destroyed in the most nihilistically casual man-shooting/stabbing/crushing action I've seen since Robocop. It's a good second try, though -- Drive Angry is a better movie than Ghost Rider.
He plays Milton, a driven man who escapes from prison to rescue his infant granddaughter from a Satanic cult led by Jonah King (Billy Burke). Pursued by the police and a mysterious, implacable badass (William Fichtner, awesome), he befriends feisty waitress Piper (Amber Heard), and drags her and her bitchin' Dodge Charger into his brutal cross-country adventures. Together they punch, shoot and run over many a villain and also some cops, while sharing their opinions about love, demon worship and motel hookups. Physics is optional.
Supernatural elements are introduced early on and then allowed to gradually unfold and reveal themselves, rather than be explained by a helpful and hamfisted expository character. I find this simple gesture of trust in the audience so endearing. It put me on the movie's side, when everything else about it was begging to be kicked and reviled.
Also, I have to admit, once I put my shame away it was just filthy trashy fun. Not to excuse the terribleness and plot holes, but at some point I just had to acknowledge that this is the kind of movie it is, God has abandoned this story and vice versa, it's going to treat everyone as a monstrous caricature, every line will be jumped over twice, let's just put all that over on one side of the balance sheet and watch the explosions. They are excellent explosions. People standing right next to the explosions are so cool. It was fun. Just...don't worry about how people catch up with cars on foot, fix smoking engines with one deft twist of a bare hand, or drive under flying hydrogen tanks. Shh. Shhhh. Comic book. There's a multi-state four-party car chase to get back to.
There's a whole sidebar discussion to be had regarding how women are treated. I don't think you will be surprised to learn that it is 'not all that well.' I have problems (anyone with a soul would have many problems, but here's just one) with the Piper character. Okay, she's this sassy, ass-kicking, f-bomb-dropping Hot Chick, but she's still treated like a walking pin-up for certain gazes to leer at. She's assertive and fighty and that's cool, but her face has convenient movie armor and so does her sexuality. The implication is that she's a sexual agent, that she knows what she wants and goes for it, but the movie uses assorted zig-zags to keep her chaste. Which is fine too, what I'm getting at is that I just felt like the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it, in terms of sticking with prescribed female sidekick movie rules. While that's going on, Milton has a sex/fight scene that is so crazy that one more word of description would spoil the effect completely, and I don't want that. If you were still into it after the Robocop reference you may well enjoy this film. (It's hilarious.) The bottom line is it treats sex as defiling and degrading, and much worse than killing lots of people horribly, the most adolescent and testosterone-poisoned message. Oh well. Explosions! Satanists! Don't explode the baby!
Tags: dvd review
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