Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Silent Hill: Revelation’ (2012)

The movie “Silent Hill” has been a thorn in my side ever since it was released — first because it wasn’t good, and then because people kept citing it as the one video-game-based movie that was good. WHICH IT WASN’T. It may have been the least not-good of the bunch, but to call it “good” is a high compliment, by which I mean a compliment you can only make if you’re high.

I am vindicated by the sequel, “Silent Hill: Revelation.” Everyone agrees that this one is terrible, and according to the Internet’s Law of Retroactive Criticism, that means the original is terrible, too, having been ruined by the sequel through an anomaly in the space-time continuum unfamiliar to scientists but known to fanboys as the George Lucas Principle. So I was right all along, and everyone can eat it.

“Silent Hill: Revelation” picks up the story of “Silent Hill” six years later, or five years and eleven months after we forgot every detail of it. The little girl who was missing in that film, Sharon, is now 18 and named Heather (Adelaide Clemens), and she does not remember anything about her past. One of the things she does not remember, for example, is that a cult from the town of Silent Hill is looking for her so they can sacrifice her or impregnate her or whatever, because she’s the Chosen One or the fulfillment of prophecy or something. Heather and her dad, Harry (Sean Bean), have moved around a lot, and Heather thinks it’s because he killed somebody in self-defense and is running from the law, but the real reason is the cult thing. Heather’s mom (Radha Mitchell) is still trapped in another dimension, but Harry can see her in a mirror sometimes, so that’s nice.

Oh! I forgot to tell you: there are other dimensions in these movies. You can tell you’re in the bad dimension because there’s, say, a guy with a triangle for a head who wants to kill you, or a guy with circular saw blades protruding from his skull who wants to kill you. The way that you pass from our dimension to the bad dimension is by the screenplay just deciding to put you there sometimes. That is also how you travel back.

So anyway, Heather keeps popping back and forth between dimensions. One minute her high school hallway looks normal; the next minute it’s a decrepit cavern with faceless monsters lunging at her, and then also in some ways not a normal high school hallway. (No drugs.) Heather thinks she’s going insane, losing the ability to distinguish between dreams and reality. A classmate named Vincent (Kit Harington) tells her that dreams ARE reality, just different realities from the one you’re used to. This is a super-helpful thing to say to someone who’s afraid she’s losing her mind.

Heather is also afraid she’s being followed by a mysterious man, though this fear turns out to be well founded. The man is a private investigator hired by Silent Hill’s most popular cult to find Heather and tell her the truth about her past. The cult is hoping Heather will come back to Silent Hill on her own once she knows everything, but just to sweeten the pot, they abduct her father and write “COME TO SILENT HILL” on the wall in his blood. The persuasive technique is effective.

Heather heads for Silent Hill, accompanied by Vincent, even though Heather just met him at school today and doesn’t like strangers, or even people in general. (The movie went pretty well out of its way to establish this.) As they travel, Heather combs through the Silent Hill-related notebooks her father left behind and learns the whole story, not to mention a great deal about her father’s excellent penmanship.

Here’s where it gets confusing. By “here” I mean “when you decided to watch this movie.” Years ago, the cult in Silent Hill burned a little girl named Alessa who they thought was a witch, but she didn’t die, she just got really angry and created the hell dimension with the monsters. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NOT BURN CHILDREN (or if you do, make sure you finish the job). But before Alessa turned completely into an evil demon, the last innocent part of her soul was transferred to a random newborn infant, who turned out to be Sharon/Heather, and they can’t destroy Alessa until she’s made whole again, which I guess means mushing her and Heather together. And they can’t just abduct Heather and drag her to Silent Hill — she has to go willingly, because the movie said so.

Then it turns out Vincent is a child of the cult who escaped from Silent Hill for the purpose of luring Heather back. But now that he’s met Heather and likes her, he feels bad. Totes sorry. Heather wanders though Silent Hill searching for the other half of a medallion she found in her dad’s stuff, encountering various monsters in the process in a way that is suspiciously similar to a video game. There is no rhyme or reason to when these monsters appear, or what tactics they use to harass Heather, which probably means the answer is “You’d know if you played teh video games!!!1!!” (This is the answer to a lot of questions lately.)

When Heather at last comes face to face with Alessa, she is able to overcome Alessa’s evilness with her own goodness. To be precise, she hugs Alessa very tight, and Alessa disintegrates. Hugging was her kryptonite! Lest you think the movie would end with such an anticlimax, however, Heather then has to face Vincent’s mother, the cult’s priestess, played by Trinity from “The Matrix” in an Edgar Winter wig. The way Heather defeats her is by standing aside and letting the Triangle Head monster destroy her. Heather’s main powers, then, are hugging and getting out of the way. Is that how it is in the video game, too? That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if it isn’t, then I guess the movie is a faithful adaptation.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Adelaide clemens, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, John Snow, Kit harington, Radha Mitchell, Sean bean, Silent Hill, Silent hill: revelation

July at the Movies: The 10 Must-See Films of the Month (and the 1 to Avoid at all Costs)

Oh hai! July here, presenting you with the five indies and five studio flicks to consider checking out this month, for better or worse, and one movie to avoid at all costs, for better x1000. This month, we have the movie that won Sundance, the one that got booed at Cannes and, because it’s July, the one with the monsters fighting the robots. Don’t cancel the apocalypse quite yet, it’s time for a look at the best movies to see this month.

THE WAY, WAY BACK (July 5) // READ OUR REVIEW

This Sundance hit that closed the Los Angeles Film Festival last week comes to theaters riding all sorts of hype. Although ads tout the film as being from the “studio that brought you “Juno” and “Little Miss Sunshine”", “The Way Way Back” is more similar in tone to directors Jim Rash and Nat Faxon’s Oscar winning screenplay “The Desendants”, leaning heavily towards the genuine rather than the quirky.

“The Way Way Back” is firmly grounded in reality (although Steve Carrell playing such a horrible human being does take some getting used to), as it tells a classic coming of age tale surrounding a 14 year old boy as he starts working at a water park and finds a mentor in Owen, the enthusiastically loquacious man in charge, portrayed with usual vigor by Sam Rockwell. Don’t wait too long to catch this one, as it might seem rather slight when held up against its early praise. Ultimately, “The Way Way Back” has its heart in the right place and is worth a watch, even if it might not be the sleeper Oscar darling Fox Searchlight is hoping it will be.

PACIFIC RIM (July 12)

Already stirring up controversy due to low tracking numbers, Guillermo del toro’s $200-million robot vs monster action extravaganza finally hits theaters a full year after fanboys and girls lost their collective s**t at the Warner Brothers panel at Comic-Con 2012. In this action movie set in the near future, monstrous creatures known as Kaiju have begun emerging from beneath the ocean, causing chaos and destruction everywhere they go. Naturally, the human race develops giant robots called Jaegers to fight back. “Pacific Rim” specifically chronicles the end of this war, as hope begins to wane and few options remain, but somehow the secrets to victory involve Charlie Day, Ron Pearlman AND Idris Elba. Expect dymaic fight scenes and appropriately bizarre B-movie humor, plus all of the conventions in place you would expect from a movie of this size, but without the cynicism evinced in blockbuster fare like the Transformers series.

CRYSTAL FAIRY (July 12) // READ OUR REVIEW

In this indie flick that made the festival circuit rounds to relatively positive reviews earlier this year, Michael Cera plays an American on vacation in Chile determined to have a hallucinatory cactus trip on the beach. In a bold move, Cera portrays his most unlikeable character yet as Jamie, a self-involved, judgmental twenty-something in desperate need of redemption. The stand out here, however, is Gaby Hoffman, as the titular free spirited woman who Jamie encounters along the way. It’s questionable whether or not this arthouse flick would have seen the light of day without the attachment of Cera, but if you’re willing to go on the journey, you may find that “Crystal Fairy” has lot to say about how and why we look inward and outward, playing with notions of perception and introspection in an easy, hands-off sort of way.

FRUITVALE STATION (July 12) // READ OUR REVIEW

Keep an eye on director Ryan Coogler’s Sundance Grand Jury and Audience Award winner. If you want to be in on this conversation early, before the hype becomes too much to live up to, head to a theater this weekend to catch this fictionalization of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant (an outstanding Michael B. Jordan), the young man infamously and unjustly killed at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station by police officers in 2009.

THE CONJURING (July 19) // READ OUR REVIEW

This horror flick from James Wan (“Saw”, “Insidious”) has been appearing on the genre convention circuit since last year’s New York Comic Con, where its debut footage had 3,500 people audibly squirming and screaming. The film, based on the true story of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) who take on the case of a family allegedly being terrorized by dark forces, is apparently so scary, it received an R rating despite having absolutely no gore, intense violence, nudity, or harsh language to speak of. Early reviews have praised the old-fashioned effectiveness of thoughtful, visceral scares that rely more on tension and imagination than blood and guts.

R.I.P.D.  (July 19)

Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges star in this adaptation of the popular Dark Horse title, “Rest In Peace Department”, about deceased cops who carry their jobs over in into the afterlife, catching and returning souls who try to escape death by disguising themselves as ordinary people on Earth. The first footage, which debuted at Cinema Con 2012, looked pretty fun and humorously on the nose coming off of Bridges’ performance in “True Grit”. But can Reynolds, whose last credited live action role was February 2012's “Safe House”, still draw blood at the box office? Do we even care?

Director Robert Schwentke certainly has a strange enough track record as the man responsible for “Flightplan”, “Time Traveler’s Wife”, and “Red” (the sequel for which is coincidentally opening opposite “RIPD” this weekend) and critics are already worried as the film isn’t screening until the night before opening. But…Jeff Bridges! Don’t suck. Come on. Ugh. This is totally going to suck.

Available in probably unnecessary 3D.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES (JULY 19) // READ OUR REVIEW

Warning: Nicholas Wending Refn’s next movie, the most anticipated of his career following break out hit “Drive”, is not a crowd pleaser. “Only God Forgives” is strange, slow, violent, morbid, disturbing, and absolutely nothing like “Drive” beyond the fact that Ryan Gosling stars in both and, for the most part, speaks in neither. It follows a mother (a deliciously diabolical and undeniably fantastic Kristen Scott Thomas) seeking revenge for her eldest son’s murder, and the role her youngest son (Gosling) plays in this misguided mission. “Only God Forgives” is a full sensory experience that Winding Refn himself likens to an acid trip. It may fascinate you, bore you, piss you off, or some combination of the three.

Not in 3D. Thank god.

THE ACT OF KILLING (July 19)

This unsettling documentary first made its mark at last years Toronto and Telluride film festivals and further demonstrated its popularity with sold out screenings at SXSW and LA Film Festival in 2013. This month is your chance to finally see this powerful, surreal and chilling doc in which Indonosian death squad leaders reenact the mass killings they themselves have committed, in the style of their beloved American movies. To further the strangeness, these men are considered heroes in their country, a notion fundamentally counterintuitive to what we as a people believe and are capable of perceiving. But if you have ever wanted to see the perpetrator of mass genocide star in his own western/musical/gangster flick about committing said atrocities, well hey, now is your chance! Do not miss your opportunity to catch this brilliant piece of filmmaking while it is in theaters and don’t be surprised to hear of it a hell of a lot more come Oscar season.

Film.com recently premiered a series of exclusive images from this astonishing film.

THE WOLVERINE (July 26)

Hugh Jackman returns to what he does best in this non-sequel to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (which was itself a prequel to “X-Men”), this new film taking place directly after the events of “X-Men: The Last Stand”, that also might be universe crossing with “X-Men First Class”, a prequel to this entire universe, which has a sequel on the way that further crosses over with the later “X-Men” and “Wolverine” movies. What? You asked. This particular arc is based on the time Wolvie went to Japan and fell in love and crap, based on the 1982 arc “Wolverine” by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, a story that Guillermo Del Toro considers his personal favorite. The film doesn’t seem poised to be a critical success, but with director James Mangold (“3:10 to Yuma”) behind the camera, you have good reason to keep your fingers crossed.

Yes, it is in 3D, but post converted and eh.

THE TO-DO LIST (July 26)

In a move sure to rock indie romantic comedies everywhere, Aubrey Plaza makes the jump from quirky supporting character to quirky lead character in the feature length directorial debut of Maggie Carey, Funny or Die writer and wife of Bill Hader. Plaza plays a straight A square in the early 90s who decides she must become more sexually experienced before beginning college. Everyone ever who is funny appears in this movie, ranging from the Derrick Comedy boys (who Plaza worked with on 2009's “Mystery Team”) to Bill Hader, natch, to Clark Gregg to Adam Pally to Andy Samberg to Alia Shawkat and okay, maybe not everyone funny EVER, but lots of them, certainly.  Definitely go see it on a date with a fellow high schooler you hope to lose your virginity to.

TURKEY OF THE MONTH:

GROAN-UPS 2

Too easy, you say? Why this when “Turbo” and “Smurfs 2? and “Pacific Rim” (SHUT UP ALREADY!) are also opening? Because. This represents all that is sad about everything. Four comedians past their prime doing something stupid for money.  Not into it. And if it beats my baby “Pacific Rim” at the box office like everyone is predicting, I’m gonna have the biggest sad since “White House Down” opened nationwide at #3. We tried, Chan. We tried.

Ed note: Um, also there’s a new Woody Allen film this month! “Blue Jasmine” opens on July 26.

Categories: Features

Tags: Crystal Fairy, Fruitvale Station, July at the Movies, LoquaciousMuse, Only God Forgives, Pacific Rim, RIPD, The Conjuring, The Wolverine

Movies Streaming This Week: Spring Break, Spring Break, Spring Break Forevverrrrrr

With “The Bling Ring” in theaters you can make a fun double feature now as its distant cousin, “Spring Breakers,” is now available through streaming (decide for yourself which group of girls are the craziest). There’s also the first Vimeo On Demand release, “Some Girl(s),” adapted from Neil LaBute’s play. We also highlight some of the best titles from one of the most polarizing film genres in recent memory.

NEW RELEASES

‘Spring Breakers’
Harmony Korine’s celebration of… (how do I put this…) youthful exuberance, is highlighted by the performance of Disney gals Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens along with a crunked out James Franco.
Why Watch It: If you haven’t yet, you should, if you have already you should again. That’s all I can say.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant [On Demand 7/9]

‘The Call’
Halle Berry plays a 911 operator who after learning that a killer from her past has abducted a teenage girl takes matters into her own hands.
Why Watch It: It’s directed by Brad Anderson (“Session 9,” “The Machinist”) so there have to be some redeeming qualities.
Available On: Cable On Demand, iTunes, VUDU

‘The Host’
The latest adaptation from the “Twilight” saga author Stephenie Meyer, Saoirse Ronan plays Melanie who in a future overtaken by body snatching beings tries save those closest to her.
Why Watch It: Mixture of that old TV show “V” and, of course, “Twilight.”
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant [On Demand 7/9]

‘The Rambler’
Calvin Lee Reeder follows up his breakthrough debut, “The Oregonian,” with this trippy art horror starring Dermot Mulroney as an ex-con traveling cross-country to his brother’s and the strange trip he finds himself on.
Why Watch It: If you’re seeking something different in your moviegoing experience, this if for you.
Available On: Cable On Demand, iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play

‘No’
Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Gael Garcia Bernal plays an ad exec who during a forced plebiscite in 1988 of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is brought on by those against Pinochet to build a campaign for the opposition.
Why Watch It: An underappreciated performance by Bernal, but decide for yourself.
Available On: Cable On Demand, iTunes, VUDU

‘Some Girl(s)’
The first Vimeo On Demand release (also in theaters), Neil LaBute pens this adaptation of his own play about a guy (Adam Brody) who on the eve of his wedding sets off on a cross-country trip to tack down his ex-lovers in an attempt to make amends with them.
Why Watch It: Great ensemble that includes Kristen Bell, Zoe Kazan and Emily Watson.
Available On: Vimeo

‘Redemption’
On Demand same day as it hits theaters, Jason Statham’s latest has him starring as a disgraced ex-special forces soldier who finds a new identity but it’s within London’s underworld, leading him to trying to right wrongs.
Why Watch It: Let’s face it, at this point a Statham plot doesn’t matter, as long as he’s kicking ass it’s worth the watch.
Available 6/28: Cable On Demand, VUDU

OLDIES BUT GOODIES (Mumblecore Edition)
It’s one of the most polarizing movie genres (even denounced by many of the filmmakers who have received attention from it), but there have been some interesting work that have come out of these intimate, low budget tales of twentysomething awkwardness. Here are a few.

‘Funny Ha Ha’
We should start from the beginning. This film about a recent graduate and her struggle to take the next step in her life launched the career of director Andrew Bujalski and pegged him as the “godfather of mumblecore.”
Available On: Amazon Instant

‘Baghead’
The other giants in this space are the Duplass Brothers, Mark and Jay. Three years after making their debut hit “The Puffy Chair,” they return with this mumblecore horror or “mumblegore” about a group of struggling actors who go to a cabin in Big Bear to write a screenplay and end up being tourmented by a their creation—a villain with a paper bag for a head.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play

‘Hannah Takes the Stairs’
Joe Swamberg’s breakout film brought together the major players in mumblecore (Mark Duplass, Greta Gerwig, Bujalski, Ry Russo-Young, Todd Rohal) in this love triangle that revealed the raw talent of Gerwig .
Available On: iTunes

‘Humpday’
Perhaps the genre’s crowning jewel, Lynn Shelton combines its collaborative ethos with a strong story to create a funny and touching look at male friendship, or what would be termed from then on: “bromance.”
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant

‘Tiny Furniture’
Released after mumblecore became a cursed word in the indie film world, Lena Dunham writes, directs and stars in a touching semiautobiographical look at a girl trying to find herself after college. You kind of know how things turned out.
Available On: iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play

Categories: Columns, Streaming

Tags: Adam brody, Andrew Bujalski, Baghead, Brad Anderson, Calvin Lee Reeder, Dermot Mulroney, Emily watson, Funny Ha Ha, Gael garcia bernal, Greta gerwig, Halle berry, Hannah Takes The Stairs, Harmony Korine, Humpday, James franco, Jason statham, Jay duplass, Joe Swamberg, Kristen bell, Lena dunham, Lynn Shelton, Mark duplass, Mumblecore, Neil LaBute, No, Redemption, Ry Russo Young, Saoirse Ronan, Selena gomez, Some Girls, Spring Breakers, Stephenie meyer, The Call, The Host, The Rambler, Tiny furniture, Todd rohal, Vanessa hudgens, Zoe Kazan

Can Movies Save the World? The Best of the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Summer is the season of superheroes. We all know this. That new Superman movie is making plenty of money, after all. The comic book takeover of the blockbuster is now so complete that talking about it seems silly. The season’s big budget affairs are also not where to find the most innovative “heroic journey” storytelling. The movie heroes that stick with me from this June weren’t caped crusaders, even the ones with the most effective backstories. They’re the faces of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, the New York series of which came to a close this past Sunday.

Granted, this might not be immediately obvious from the program. Human Rights Watch, after all, implies a certain moral urgency. These films, mostly documentaries, tell the stories of underprivileged and outright oppressed individuals and communities around the world. It seems much, much more likely that a festival of this character would be full of victims rather than heroes, the very stereotype of the “issue documentary” designed to make you weep and offer your support. Yet, as is often the case, these non-fiction films are far from what you might expect.

Moreover, the simple fact of heroism among these documentaries is only the beginning. We’ve all seen the downtrodden fictional protagonist rise up and claim victory on the silver screen. Watching it unfold in the real world is often emotionally effective but hardly inherently interesting. When Gertrude, a young Cameroonian woman, comes out to the nun that raised her in “Born This Way,” we are touched. Yet the real accomplishment is larger, and is shared by other films in this series. It has nothing to do with the larger-than-life heroics of the fictional superman, and everything to do with humanity itself.

Take “In the Shadow of the Sun.” Harry Freeland’s powerful documentary tells the story of Tanzania’s albino population, a community fighting the worst prejudice imaginable. Local witchdoctors have been spreading a belief that the body parts of albino people will bring good luck and immense wealth. In 2006 this led to the murder of an albino woman, and the problem has only escalated. Against this backdrop of violence, Freeland paints a dual portrait of Vedastus, a teenager trying to complete his education, and Josephat, an activist determined to fight back against the false beliefs that are putting him and his community at risk.

At the core of both “In the Shadow of the Sun” and the situation it confronts is the most basic of human dignities. Albino people in Tanzania are referred to as “white ghosts” and “devils.” At one point Freeland films Josephat talking to one of the offending witch doctors, who quite frankly explains that albinos are not people. This makes Josephat’s mission all the more astonishing. He travels from town to town, introducing himself to the locals and taking their questions en masse in public squares. He is a hero not because he accomplishes superhuman feats, but because he insists on his own humanity.

The courage to tell your story becomes the center of both Freeland’s film and one other, Marc Wiese’s “Camp 14: Total Control Zone.” The latter is a portrait of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a man who was born in and later escaped from the Kaechon internment camp in North Korea. The psychological violence inflicted on the inmates of this prison camp is too complex and disturbing to detail here, but the overall impact is an individual assault on humanity not unlike the social de-humanizing of the albino community in Tanzania. Josephat and Shin have both devoted their lives to conversation, explaining themselves to communities both local and international. Their heroism is in the form of basic human interaction, speaking from the heart.

Crucially, the non-fiction form is the perfect way to engineer this sort of re-humanization of character. While the superhero gets to achieve the height of glory through special effects and a unique backstory, Freeland and Wiese are able to match the natural advantages of the documentary to the simplest of heroic acts. The same is true for “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” which devotes more time to the court appearances of the three members of the Russian activists than it does to their now-legendary performance. Directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin present a Russian Orthodox Church that has gone out of its way to treat women as second-class citizens. The result is a society that assumes lunacy and wickedness on the part of those women that fight back (a hardly uniquely Slavic phenomenon).

As a response, Lerner and Pozdorovkin delve into the personal histories of Katya, Nadya and Masha. They interview their parents, explore how they found their way to radical politics, and humanize them in the face of an unfriendly and cold Russian judicial system. Just as outside the courtroom the devout religious crowd is explaining that these women have metaphorically defecated on the heart of Russia. Too often the identities of activists are obscured by simplified and stereotyped perceptions of how they became radicalized. Political discourse falls apart when two sides of an issue stop seeing each other as people, and while these three women have become quite the touchstone of religious anxiety, Lerner and Pozdorovkin are determined to show them as people (and three very different people at that).

The mission statement of Human Rights Watch says quite clearly that the organization’s primary goal is to “protect the human rights of people around the world.” While a festival can hardly arrive on the site of a conflict and mediate, the films that make up this year’s program have done the immeasurably important work of telling the stories of perceived victims and raising them to the level of heroes. And if that isn’t inspiration enough, their engagement with the potential of documentary filmmaking as a form is equally worth celebrating.

Categories: Features

Tags: Camp 14, Daniel Walber, Film festival, Human rights watch, In the shadow of the sun, Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, The Act of Killing

The Blockbuster Artist: How Brad Pitt’s Refusal to Make Bad Movies Changed Movie Stardom

I first discovered Brad Pitt along with the rest of the world – leering at his tight blue jeaned butt with Geena Davis. Who would have predicted how he’d shake his money maker to help enable great cinema?

“Thelma & Louise,” Ridley Scott’s film of Callie Khouri’s ur-Girls Gone Wild tale, could not have plucked a more handsome specimen upon which to reverse the male gaze. Chiseled, rugged, with a crooked smile, sparkle in the eye and beautiful hair. Pitt’s character JD didn’t really have to act, he just had to turn everybody on. He succeeded.

Pitt was quick to gain magazine cover fame and he took to it well. In fact, a whole cottage industry exists writing (or, should I say, “writing”) about Jennifer Aniston in a post-Brad Pitt breakup context. It didn’t matter much to Pitt’s stardom that, by and large, most of his movies stunk, and acting was arguably not quite the most important part of his job description. (Indeed, James LeGros’ character Chad Palomino in the filmmaking satire “Living in Oblivion” is a none-too-subtle parody of Pitt.)

In 1995, though, he made two interesting choices. He appeared in David Fincher’s “Seven,” a pretty asinine thriller that somewhat redeems itself with a pronounced sense of style, and “Twelve Monkeys,” Terry Gilliam’s slick and entertainingly fatalistic sci-fi film. It was “Twelve Monkeys” that surprised people – in it, Brad Pitt actually did a character. He played an anarchic and psychotic eco-terrorist/spoiled rich kid and he took a lot of chances on the screen. I’ve actually watched the movie recently and, quite frankly, I think Pitt is the worst thing in it – partially that’s because everyone else is so good – but it was still a breakthrough for being taken somewhat seriously. 1995 was the year Pitt began to align himself with directors who could reasonably be called auteurs.

Time marched on and every forgettable “Sleepers” and “Meet Joe Black” was met with a “Snatch” or “Fight Club.” I wouldn’t exactly call these art films (no: “Fight Club” is not an art film, you’ll discover that when you aren’t 21 anymore) but they are films coming from directors with a distinct voice. Then came the “Ocean’s” films.

Steven Soderbergh, as we all know, is one of the finest filmmakers living, dead or yet unborn. The “Ocean’s” films are probably his least interesting, which is why they’ve made the most money and had the largest ephemeral cultural impact. Pitt’s involvement with the trilogy blessed him with some sort of nose for sensing true genius in collaborators, and in picking out projects that needed to get made, and probably wouldn’t get made without his star power.

Pitt’s resume since “Ocean’s Thirteen” have been important works of art and entertainment that, I think, will only grow more valuable over time. You can pretty much go down the list.

The cult of Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward of Robert Ford” keeps growing. In fact, people are still waking up to the fact that 2007 was a watershed year for cinema and its relationship to the West. (We had this, “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country For Old Men” all looking for our attention – plus we hadn’t quite shaken off the last season of “Deadwood.”) It is a formal masterpiece and an actors’ triumph. Casey Affleck upstages Pitt from time to time, but there’s no way in hell this movie would even exist if Pitt didn’t believe in it. It is gorgeous and thought provoking and not commercial in the slightest.

After the so-goofy-it-hurts Coen Brothers film “Burn After Reading” came one of the only two David Fincher films that is actually worth a damn: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” (The other is “The Social Network,” by the way.) “Benjamin Button,” a beautiful fantasia on loss, remembrance and human connection, is a weird movie to wrap your head around. A lot of people flat out don’t like it. (These are, I should point out, people who don’t know how to live, how to truly live!) It is one of those rarest things, a genuine work of art done with a large canvass, and it made money for everybody, no doubt because Pitt’s magazine face got butts in seats.

Next up was “Inglourious Basterds,” another masterpiece. Now, Quentin Tarantino could no doubt make magic with just about anybody, but Pitt’s performance (particularly the shootout in the bar and the interrogation of Christoph Waltz) is played at a perfect pitch. What you’ll find with so many of his current films is that the directors are finding a way to use Pitt’s (let’s call it) limited range and zeroing in on that – giving him characters that play to his strengths.

After “Basterds” comes one of the greatest stunts ever pulled on the mainstream American movie audience: Terence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” The fact that this movie played in mall multiplexes is nothing short of a miracle. It probably would have been more appropriate in the installation spaces of the Whitney Museum of American Art, but screw it: the people need to be exposed to beauty.

“The Tree of Life” is sublime. What’s that, you say? The movie is confusing? The plot is messy? Nothing happens? EVERYTHING happens, and if you think the parents are too vague (Mom is nice, Dad is a jerk) that’s because Malick has the insight and ability to strip things bare. Malick’s paintbrush needed broad stroke characters to tell his impressionistic story, and Pitt is perfect in it. (And he ain’t too hard on the eyes during magic hour.) Now shut up as I twirl and tussle in the ground.

Pitt felt no need to reconnect with the slobbering masses with a “Troy 2” after “The Tree of Life.” He jumped right into “Moneyball,” which is arguably the least rah-rah big game sports movie ever made. Some might argue it is the anti-sports movie, where the eggheads are the heroes and the determination of will, spirit and might are all coldly shoved aside against bloodless, cruel math. Hardly apple pie.

His next theatrically released live action feature was “Killing Them Softly,” again from Andrew Dominik. It is an up-from-within tone poem about criminal behavior that has remarkably elegant sequences of violence as well as hilarious monologues. It does all it can to shake off its traditional three act structure. This structure exists, but it colors outside of the lines so much it resists sinking your teeth into it. It isn’t a big budget picture, but I imagine none of it would have been raised without Pitt saying yes.

But the siren’s call of a potential Hollywood franchise ended the streak. “World War Z” isn’t a paycheck gig – it is very much Pitt and his production shingle Plan B’s baby. And it was a breech birth. While the end result isn’t terrible, it sure as hell ain’t marvelous. It is also documented as one of the more boondoggled productions of our time (see Vanity Fair’s expose.) Pitt was smart enough to see a train wreck coming, and knew enough to put his ego in check and allow for a team of specialists (including Damon Lindelof and Chistopher McQuarrie) to overhaul the film to something a tad less ridiculous. The current ending is flawed, but when you read about what could have been, it’s worthy of a standing O.

The reaction to “World War Z”‘s original cut is the decision of a mature, intelligent man – not some Hollywood haircut.  And when all the US Weeklys are left floating amid the melted ice caps, we’ll still be talking about movies like “Jesse James” and “Tree of Life.” Who’d’a thunk it: from a pair of tight blue jeans to great art patronage. It’s a hell of a package.

Categories: Features

Tags: Brad pitt, Fight club, Killing Them Softly, Thelma and Louise, Twelve Monkeys, World war z

June at the Movies: The 11 Films You Must See this Month

Maybe it’s the beautiful spring weather, maybe it’s the fact that we need some semblance of hope after this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, but we’re feeling pretty positive this month, electing to give you a preview of eleven movies to keep an eye on and no recommendations to avoid anything! Optimism! We even see the good in “The Internship”! $12 for two hours of air conditioning? Sounds like a good deal to us.

JUNE 7TH

“The Internship“

GGOOOOOOGLLEEEEYYY. Director Shawn Levy’s track record may be anything but comforting, but this movie was shot AT GOOGLE HEADQUARTERS so honestly who cares. I have strange criteria. No, but truthfully it seems as though the story behind the scenes here is way more worthwhile than the movie itself, which is already receiving poor reviews. Google agreed to let the film use its HQ and branding in order to appeal to a mainstream audience outside of the tech community. As the LA Times notes, Google perks including nap pods, beach volleyball courts, and free gourmet food all make appearances on screen. Since the movie is pretty much “The Wedding Crashers”, but Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson crashing Google instead of a wedding, the real appeal here is solely the Google element and might literally be the only reason anyone ever bothers to see it.

“Much Ado About Nothing”

Joss Whedon’s highly anticipated adaptation of the beloved Shakespeare play finally comes to theaters and the Whedonites of the world rejoice! This excellently executed take on the play emphasizes the dark, sensual side of the comedy and showcases another side to a slew of Whedon regulars, including Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Fran Kranz and Sean Maher and introduces the striking Jillian Morgese as Hero. The movie is everything you want it to be, regardless as to whether you see yourself as Shakespeare Fan, a Whedonite, both or neither. Enjoy.

Read our full review.

JUNE 14

“Man of Steel“

Zack Snyder directs this reboot of the Superman series, produced by Chris Nolan, starring Henry Cavil and Amy Adams as Supes and Lois Lane. Snyder has a lot to make up for in the fan community after “Sucker Punch” (although I liked it just fine WHATEVER) – could it be his sensibility paired with the serious, grounded tone of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy that brings Snyder back into the genre fan’s good graces? Luckily, early word is that the film delivers. Please oh please be true.

“This is the End”

How awkward is it that in a month with a new Superman movie, the sequel to my favorite Pixar movie and “World War Z”, my most anticipated studio film is a random end of the world comedy? The conceit is just too enticing: Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride and James Franco play themselves, trapped at James Franco’s house as the world comes to an end. Sure, the subject matter was recently (and successfully) tackled by “It’s a Disaster”, with a serious take hitting the big screen in “Goodbye World” at LA Film Fest this month, but the meta aspect takes this well-tread concept to a whole new level. It’s a fascinating idea to have a film starring characters we think we know already, playing on our expectations of celebrity and eliminating the need for much if any exposition and back story. How can this movie not be at least a little bit awesome?

Read our full review.

“The Bling Ring“

Some love it, many don’t, but what else is new, Sofia Coppola? Being described as the slightest and therefore most accessible of her work, Coppola fans may find themselves somewhat disappointed, but perhaps it also means the film may become more of a commercial success than her previous outings. Mainstream appeal and Sofia Coppola are somewhat diametrically opposed – much like “Spring Breakers”, the cast may attract an audience expecting something a little less artsy, so keep an eye on the film’s Cinema Score and make sure to be following your teen during the film’s rollout! Reaction should be interesting to say the least. But hey, at the end of the day, the film didn’t get booed after its Cannes premiere, unlike Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette”, so, victory!

“Call Me Kuchu“

One of my favorite movies from LA Film Fest last year hits theaters in very limited release and it is your duty as a human to go see it. “Call Me Kuchu” chronicles the life and death of David Kato, gay rights activist in the startlingly homophobic country of Uganda. Filmmakers Katherine Wright Fairfax and Malika Zouhali-Worrall happened to be in Uganda following Kato and his movement when the activist was murdered for his beliefs. The film is difficult but powerful, moving and necessary viewing.

Read our full review.

JUNE 21

“Monsters University“

Sully and Mike are back on the big screen, 12 years after their first outing in “Monster’s Inc”, my personal favorite of the Pixar canon. In “Monster’s University”, we learn how the two expert scarers met and eventually became friends. This is director Dan Scanlon’s first time with a Pixar feature, and luckily for him, early word is positive (though one must remember that early word was similarly positive for last year’s “Brave”, and we all remember how that turned out. Poorly, guys. Poorly is how it turned out. In case you don’t remember).

“World War Z“

Brilliant book by Max Brooks. Epic, seemingly interminable production mired in problems. What happens when the two come together? Directed by Mark Forster, starring Brad Pitt, and partially re-written by love him or hate him Damon Lindelof (with help from Drew Goddard….based on drafts by J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Carnahan…featuring on set doctoring by Chris McQuarrie…oh boy) this adaptation has become notorious for its countless reshoots, budgetary problems and poorly received original ending. Will it all be worth it? The film was received well enough by UK critics at its London premiere, but it ain’t over till the fanboy sings and our brethren is very protective over the source material.

JUNE 28

“The Heat“

Real talk time. Are we still trusting Melissa McCarthy’s taste in material after “Identity Thief”? On the plus side, “The Heat, starring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock as an awkward FBI agent and equally awkward Boston cop partnered together, is directed by Paul Feig, who brought McCarthy to stardom in the first place (though she’ll always be Sookie St. James to me), and written by Katie Dippold, producer/writer on the always lol worthy “Parks & Recreation”. Not to mention, we’re always down to support a giant studio movie starring two women. So let’s all just pretend “Identify Thief” never happened and look forward to “The Heat,” shall we?

“White House Down“

The “Fast and Furious Six” of June! Is there really any other explanation required? More?! Fine. Policeman Channing Tatum is on a tour of the white house when armed invaders attack and it’s up to Policeman Tatum to protect President Jamie Foxx and save the day. Directed by Roland Emmerich because duh. Fact: You’re either super excited for this movie and have been since it was announced or you are going to half-watch it on HBO sometime in 2014 after having your wisdom teeth and/or appendix removed.

“I’m So Excited”

Pedro Almodovar’s latest and the opening night film of this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival finally hits American screens (in limited release) at the end of the month. The film is a comedy about the people on an airplane after a technical failure endangers all of their lives (also, massive doses of peyote are involved). Current reviews for the broad romp are mixed, and compare it to Almodovar’s earlier work, which could be seen as either a good or bad thing. Just don’t go in expecting “Bad Education”, “Talk To Her” or “The Skin I Live In” and you should be okay.

Categories: Features

Tags: At the Movies, Call Me Kuchu, I'm So Excited, LoquaciousMuse, Man of Steel, Monsters University, The Bling Ring, The Heat, The Purge, This is the End, White House Down, World war z

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Suburban Commando’ (1991)

In 2012, professional wrestler and long-haired bald man Hulk Hogan was embarrassed when a video surfaced of him doing sexies with a lady who wasn’t his wife. I didn’t see the video in question — when it comes to wrestler-based pornography, I prefer the subtlety of Randy Savage’s “Snap Into a Slim Jim” — but it’s hard to imagine it was any more degrading than Hulk’s “Suburban Commando,” which was actually released in movie theaters.

This was Hulk Hogan’s second starring vehicle (after “No Holds Barred”), but it was the first time he’d played something other than a pro wrestler. He is Shep Ramsey, an intergalactic space soldier, possibly a mercenary, who zooms around the universe killing bad guys. He wears a grey unitard, plus silver gauntlets and boots, a bandolier and utility belt, and a codpiece. He looks like a pro wrestler who is going to Comic-Con.

Our introduction to Shep Ramsey comes when he infiltrates the evil Gen. Suitor’s spaceship to rescue a foreign planet’s president, then blows up the ship and saves only himself. For this abject failure he is mildly chewed out by his superior officer, who suggests that maybe Shep is a bit stressed from overwork. “I am NOT stressed out!!” Shep replies angrily. To emphasize how not stressed out he is, he punches his spaceship’s power console, thus destroying it and forcing an emergency landing on Earth, where he’ll have to wait for six weeks while his ship recharges itself. He complains about all of this as though there were a single element of it that is not completely his own fault.

This sounds like the setup for a comedy about an incompetent boob who keeps screwing things up but is rewarded anyway, like “MacGruber” or “Brett Ratner.” But “Suburban Commando” insists that Shep Ramsey is a hero worthy of admiration and praise, accompanying his every action with a valiant musical score. Maybe “Suburban Commando” didn’t see the first few scenes of “Suburban Commando”? In any event, now Shep is in generic American suburbia as the opening credits roll. Since it is 1991, these credits play under an excruciatingly white rap song, which was the style at the time.

So the deal is that Shep Ramsey will have to “blend in” on Earth for a few weeks, and since he is an alien he will misunderstand certain elements of human culture, and these misunderstandings will result in widespread hilarity leading to learning and growth. The only question is whether any of it will be funny or entertaining. The answer is no. It was hardly even a question, but I wanted to be fair.

Shep hides his damaged spaceship and disguises himself in Earthling clothes stolen from a mean man who mistreats his dog and thus deserves to have his clothes stolen. (That’s straight out of Leviticus.) Strolling through whatever town this is, Shep sees a flier on a telephone pole: “Apartment for Rent,” with an arrow pointing to the right. No address or anything, just “Apartment for Rent” and an arrow. This is very, very subtle advertising, but it’s enough for Shep to go directly to the right house a couple streets over. It is also a signifier that the people who made this film were, like Shep Ramsey, alien visitors unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Earth life.

The house belongs to the Wilcox family, headed by wimpy architect dad Charlie (Christopher Lloyd) and gaunt pop-eyed mom Jenny (Shelley Duvall), with a couple of kids who don’t matter. (Whatever other faults this film has, at least it is not about Hulk Hogan befriending children and teaching them valuable life lessons. That’s the next one, “Mr. Nanny.”) They’re renting out what used to be Charlie’s workshop but which Jenny has converted into a homey apartment. She did it all in one day, while Charlie was at work, without telling him first, all of which is impressive on a number of levels.

Charlie is suspicious of this huge, weird stranger with the bright yellow hair and cartoon mustache, but he soon comes to realize Shep’s value, which is that he is big and strong and can intimidate bullies. Yes, despite being a grown man with a good job and a family, Charlie is regularly harassed by other grown men in his neighborhood who park their cars in front of his driveway, mock him, and generally treat him like the wimp he is. His boss mistreats him, too. Charlie is a George McFly type, only instead of being taught to stand up for himself by his time-traveling son, he learns confidence from a tan, oily spaceman.

Interspersed with scenes of Shep being a positive influence on Charlie are scenes of Shep being a dimwitted ox. He assaults the mailman and the paperboy because he thinks they are enemy combatants attacking the Wilcox home. He walks past a video arcade and thinks the games depict actual space battles, and that for some reason children are entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the galaxy’s military force. He sees a street mime performing the “trapped in a box” thing and tries to free him from his invisible cage. The mime is performing at night on a side street in front of zero people, by the way — again, I think the filmmakers had heard of certain things that occur on planet Earth and wanted to include them in their movie even though they didn’t know the context in which they normally occur. This is what happens when you let pro wrestlers and aliens make movies together.

“Suburban Commando” can be seen on YouTube in its entirety…

Read the previous installment of Eric’s Bad Movies: “Sasquatch”

Categories: Columns

Tags: Christopher Lloyd, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, Hulk Hogan, Shelley Duvall, Suburban commando

Movies Streaming This Week: ‘Jack The Giant Slayer,’ ‘V/H/S/2′ & More

So what does Bryan Singer do when he’s taking time out from the X-Men gang? He’s adapting a fairy tale classic, of course. You can check out “Jack The Giant Slayer” now through streaming and later this month On Demand. Also available is the horror omnibus “V/H/S/2? as well as some great documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” and 2012 Sundance winner “The Law In These Parts.”

Today we give some love to Bruce Dern on his birthday, who just recently won Best Actor at Cannes (let the Oscar talk begin).

NEW RELEASES

‘Jack The Giant Slayer’
Taking time out of his “X-Men” duties, Bryan Singer brings to the screen this famous fairy tale (now supped up to Hollywood standards). Nicholas Hoult stars as Jack, the farm boy who climbs the beanstalk and uncovers a land filled with pissed off giants.
Why Watch It: Incredible CGI with some entertaining supporting roles by Ewan McGregor and Stanley Tucci.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant [Cable On Demand 6/18]

’21 & Over’
Following Todd Philips producing the “found-footage”-style house party comedy “Project X,” the writers of “The Hangover” get their turn with this party-like-a-rock-star buddy movie. In it three friends go on a memorable bender to celebrate the most button-down of the trio’s 21st birthday.
Why Watch It: Imagine the insanity of the kids from Project X, just a bit older.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU [Cable On Demand 6/18]

‘V/H/S/2'
The second installment of the popular horror omnibus enlists the talents of horror directors like Jason Eisener, Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard for the latest demented viewing of VHS tapes with special powers.
Why Watch It: Creative shorts as well as a more impressive narrative thread throughout the movie (which was lacking in the first film).
Available 6/6: Cable On Demand

‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’
Always fascinated by the polarizing figures in our culture, for his latest film Alex Gibney investigates the rise and fall of hacker turned free information pioneer Julian Assange and his whistleblowing site WikiLeaks. Gibney leaves no stone unturned as he navigates through the major players involved and how the site exposed the dirty business of secrets done by our government.
Why Watch It: Gibney not only gives us a side of Assange we never knew but sheds light on the little-known whistleblower Bradley Manning.
Available 6/7: Cable On Demand, iTunes

‘Chasing Ice’
Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski follows National Geographic photographer James Balog as he travels across the Arctic planting time-lapse cameras to capture the world’s changing glaciers.
Why Watch It: Still not sold on global warming? Watch this movie.
Available On: iTunes, Netflix, VUDU, Amazon Instant

‘The Law In These Parts’
Winner of the World Documentary Grand Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, this powerful documentary critiques the Israel’s military rule of occupied territories by questioning its architects.
Why Watch It: A compelling piece of work that’s heightened by the honesty of its subjects.
Available On: iTunes

OLDIES BUT GOODIES
A big happy birthday to Bruce Dern! In celebration (the 77-year-old also recently won best actor at Cannes and is on the fast-track to Oscar buzz) here’s some of the actor’s best performances you can watch now.

‘Coming Home’
Hal Ashby’s look at life for Luke (Jon Voight), a paralyzed Vietnam Vet, Dern gives an Oscar nominated performance as a Marine who’s battling his own demons and hits his breaking point when he learns his wife (Jane Fonda) has fallen in love with Luke. This leads to the memorable scene where Dern strips his close and walks into the Pacific Ocean, presumably to his death.
Available On: VUDU

‘The Great Gatsby’ (1974)
Dern once more plays a jealous lover, this time its Tom Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary book. The husband of Daisy, Jay Gatsby’s obsession, Dern plays Tom very much like he’s described in the book: a hulking jock with old money and a temper, which leads to Gastby’s demise. The performance earned Dern a Golden Globe nomination.
Available On: iTunes, Netflix, VUDU, Amazon Instant, YouTube, Redbox Instant, Google Play

‘Diggstown’
This playful grifter/boxing comedy starring Dern, James Woods and Louis Gossett Jr. has Dern doing what he’s good at: the heel. Playing a crooked businessman who is in control of the boxing-crazed town, Diggstown, he enters a wager with Gabriel (Woods) that he can’t find a boxer who can knock out ten Diggstown men in the span of 24 hours.
Available On: VUDU

‘The Trip’
This Roger Corman classic written by Jack Nicholson stars Peter Fonda, Dern, Susan Strasberg, Dennis Hopper and the other great actors of the ‘60s Corman era as they explore an acid trip. Fonda plays Paul, a depressed TV commercial director, and Dern is his friend who scores LSD and guides Paul on his first trip.
Available On: iTunes, Amazon Instant

Categories: Columns, Streaming

Tags: 21 and Over, Alex gibney, Bruce Dern, Bryan singer, Chasing Ice, Coming Home, Dennis hopper, Diggstown, Hal Ashby, Jack nicholson, Jack the Giant Slayer, James woods, Jon voight, Luis Gossett Jr., Roger Corman, Susan Strasberg, The Great Gatsby, The Law In These Parts, The Trip, Vhs 2, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Irony Man: Why Action Scenes Are Hurting Superhero Movies

The idea that you have to sit through mediocre “character development” to get to the combat fireworks is common to action films, but the first two “Iron Man”s inverted the genre’s traditional appeal: viewers slogged through unexceptional set-pieces to watch Downey be a smart-ass, enabled by capable actors on the same comic page. That was a semi-happy accident, a result of the movies moving into production without a locked script, as multiple actors confirmed; the resulting improv sessions wore their spontaneity transparently. The action sequences had to be figured out before-hand — CGI takes time — but they’re the least memorable components of the first two installments.

This method of construction isn’t unfamiliar: when Jackie Chan made “Police Story” in 1985, he conceived his desired martial arts sequences first, then had the screenwriter come up with a framework that could plausibly get him from one to another. Same process, different outcome: in the “Iron Man”‘s, you came for the comedy and put up with the action filler. With the exception of Jeff Bridges strapping on his gigantic-robot-villain suit at the end of the first film and Mickey Rourke causing racetrack havoc at the start of the second, it’s hard for me to remember any significant mayhem from the first two installments; the showdowns basically look like outtakes from “The Rocketeer.”

That’s no longer the case in “Iron Man 3,” whose plot that functions in ways that a screenwriting teacher would approve: there’s a prologue establishing (“planting”) characters that’ll re-emerge as villains, a first act establishing Tony “Iron Man” Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is suffering from post-”Avengers” anxiety attacks (a challenge to be overcome, though it’s forgotten halfway through), and a midway plot twist that simultaneously changes everything you thought about the villain while still keeping the movie on course towards an orgy of third-act CGI gasoline explosions and neatly resolved plot arcs.

Also check out: Our review of “Iron Man 3?

This isn’t to say that the first two films are an unqualified triumph (or that this new installment is suffocatingly mapped-out), but their comic sequences are surprisingly loose and delightful for overbudgeted superhero movies. Christian Bale’s Batman has angst, Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man has some really serious anxiety issues (so his tentative delivery suggests), but Robert Downey Jr.’s topspin on every piece of dialogue is predictable without lapsing into diminishing returns. The memory I hold onto from “Iron Man 2? is Downey and co-star Don Cheadle killing time until the ultra-big final showdown by cracking wise about who’s the big gun (Downey: “You have a big gun. You are not ‘the big gun.’”) This isn’t exactly Howard Hawks, but it’s closer to “Hatari!” than anything in recent tentpole history: narrative in the back, party up front.

It’s worth noting that this unintentional jaggedness went beyond production or elements director Jon Favreau could control. Mickey Rourke, for example, said that his “Iron Man 2? villain was conspicuously absent from much of the movie in which he’s ostensibly a major threat because “Favreau didn’t call the shots” and Marvel Comics cut his part. There’s no reason not to believe Rourke, since big summer blockbusters tend to work on a committee-times-ten basis. Accidental messiness is a welcome by-product of production turmoil, at least if you’re one of the perverse few who (like me) enjoys “Spider-Man 3,” in which Sam Raimi channelled his frustration with a top-heavy third installment spiraling out of control by shooting bizarro musical numbers or James Franco painting, resulting in an incoherent work with endearingly inexplicably moments attributable only to eccentric humanity.

This weirdness is a double-edged sword. “Spider-Man 3? and “Iron Man 2? are frustrated works that could have, at one time, hung together as coherent dramas, but instead come off as a series of comic tangents interrupted by obligatory, grudgingly executed action sequences. “Iron Man 2? went so poorly that Favreau simply didn’t return for another directorial round, but he returns to reprise his role as Tony Stark’s former bodyguard Happy Hogan. The big joke here is that Happy’s now in charge of security at Stark Industries, and he’s constantly worried about threats to everyone’s safety. The human element “in human resources is our biggest weakness,” he says, and he’s not joking, a statement that could double as the studio’s own nightmares about the franchise: Downey’s too distinctive a performer to replace (though Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard without too many complaints), but apparently Favreau can be swapped out no problem.

Also check out: Changing Suits: How “Iron Man 3? finally fixes superhero movies.

[People who are way too worried about SPOILERS for things that happen in the first 20 minutes may want to check out at this point.] Happy’s subsequently seriously injured in an explosion and rendered catatonic for the bulk of the narrative — as neat an in-joke as any about being forced to watch someone else take control of the franchise he helped build. (Tony’s nightmares about New York work as a similar in-joke, in which the centerpiece of one franchise is tormented by memories of anchoring a totally different blockbuster.) Where former actor Favreau was good with helping organize riffing and keeping a potentially unwieldy production on track, new co-writer/director Shane Black melds the particular sense of humor he established himself with in “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout” with a firm sense of structural cause-and-effect.

The trade-off is that the film, eventually, has to shut up and explode: the now-planned-out riffing of the first half ceases as the generic action setpieces take over. (The first two are memorable, the rest increasingly watery; the finale’s really close to that of the recent “A-Team” movie, which isn’t a good thing.) These are the breaks: you can have unplanned human spontaneity without memorable action sequences, or you can have too many of the latter and too little of the former.

Categories: Features

Tags: Iron Man 3, Jon favreau, Marvel, Op-ed, Robert downey jr., Superhero Movies, Vadim Rizov

Changing Suits: How ‘Iron Man 3′ Finally Fixes Superhero Movies

The problem with superhero movies, broadly speaking, is that they struggle to convey a sense of balance. This is because every superhero film needs to establish two contradictory things simultaneously: on the one hand, in order to justify the classical modifier, the hero of the film must be depicted as at least nominally “super”, which is to say somehow exceptionally proficient and powerful. But on the other hand, in order to maintain some vaguely plausible illusion of suspense, the hero of the film must also be depicted as vulnerable, which is to say credibly at risk of losing to whomever is defined as the principal threat. An audience wants to feel impressed by a hero’s power but concerned that their power may be overcome, and what this means from a filmmaking perspective is that a superhero has to seem both indomitable and fragile at the same time.

I used to complain that I could never take the second and third “Matrix” films seriously, not only for the obvious reasons, but for the simple fact that they reject the rules of their predecessor. At the end of “The Matrix”, Neo has finally awakened to the reality around him and in doing so has become The One, a transformation which various characters have spent the better part of two hours explaining will make him essentially invincible. But it’s a hard to write a sequel to action movie, let alone two sequels, when you’ve just made your protagonist impervious to physical harm, which left the Wachowskis with two choices: either rob the hero of his powers at the outset (a colleague calls this “Metroiding”) or introduce new antagonists whose own powers up the ante, sort of a deus ex machina in reverse. The Wachowskis went with the latter option, which is why, in the first moments of “The Matrix Reloaded”, it’s explained that, oh right, the agents are new and improved, and also, oh yeah, we forgot to mention this but there are also evil programs roaming about with just enough power to be a believable threat, and I guess we just didn’t see them in the first film because…something.

Though it’s more pronounced in the “Matrix” sequels, this is a problem that plagues superhero franchises—extending past comic book heroes to cover even the last few Bond movies—inherent from their inception and increasingly difficult to write around as the follow-ups pile on. Over the last several years, it seems as though Hollywood screenwriters have devised a new approach to the superhero strength problem, one as stupefyingly simplistic as it is mildly effective: rather than tidily reconciling a hero’s omnipotence with the looming threat of the hour, these films opt to beat their supermen into the ground early, making the central dramatic tension a case of reconstitution. Slant Magazine’s John Semley, writing about the recent prime example of “Skyfall”, calls this the “tear-the-hero-down-that-he-may-rise” narrative, an arc that neatly writes film-school musts like crisis, trauma and redemption into the prefab dramatic folds, addressing the issue of too much power by sidestepping it entirely. And so we are now treated to endless bouts of broken-warrior syndrome: “The Dark Knight Rises” takes its lead out of the picture with a broken back for half the running time, “Skyfall” nearly kills its man of action in the first five minutes, “Thor” made its Nordic god human, and so on. Taking his power when at 100% for granted, the question no longer becomes “will our hero prevail?”, but the marginally distinguishable “will our hero become a hero again?”

What’s irritating about these narratives—and I trust everyone agrees that the preeminent example remains “Spider-man 2”, which perhaps inadvertently kick-started the trend—is that, even if they manage to be dramatically compelling, they do so by effectively cheating the system. By making the crisis the hero’s temporary lack of power, they’re essentially proposing that the hero’s victory is guaranteed once their power has been restored; in other words these movies are making the task of creating an interesting conflict for an ordinary superhero even harder. This occurs through admission: a film like “The Dark Knight Rises” basically shrugs and says, look, if Batman were kicking around Gotham right now he wouldn’t let Bane get away with any of this, so in order for all of that to go down we’re just going to relegate him to a dungeon halfway across the world with a broken back. And once the Dark Knight inevitably Rises, the dynamic is restored: he handily defeats Bane and, after a few last-minute twists, stops the plot to destroy Gotham City.

Also check out: Our “Iron Man 3? review

From a conceptual standpoint, no superhero franchise has a harder time establishing balance than the “Iron Man” films. Part of the problem is that Iron Man only qualifies as a super at all when he rests comfortably inside that cherry-red suit—the man side of the equation, though charming, isn’t particularly capable on the battlefield—which, once donned, allows him to shoot rockets and lasers and break the sound barrier and generally just own. The only interesting conflicts in the first two “Iron Man” films, and the only interesting Iron Man-related conflicts in “The Avengers”, related to whether or not Iron Man was actually Iron Man. The thinking went thusly: Tony Stark is useless (and therefore boring to watch in a fight) and Iron Man is invincible (and therefore boring to watch in a fight), so the only way to make fight scenes interesting to devise increasingly complicated ways to briefly prevent Tony Stark from finding and getting into his suit. “Iron Man 2”, especially, never tired of obstructing the process for the sake of strained excitement: its most memorable setpiece, in which Mickey Rourke interrupted a bit of Nascar, was nothing more than ten minutes of watching Stark evade death until his wife and chauffeur could show up and get him dressed.

SOME “IRON MAN 3? SPOILERS FOLLOW.

“Iron Man Three”, rather than simply follow suit (and unsuit), reconceives the character, and in doing so becomes perhaps the first superhero film in years to effectively reconcile our sense of power with our concern for danger. The importance of getting this one thing right can’t be overstated: it fundamentally changes the nature of the franchise, transforming it from a low-stakes action film about a smarmy millionaire and his untouchable toy to a dynamic, well-balanced film about an innovative engineer and his problem-solving abilities. The genius conceit of “Iron Man Three”, as simple as it sounds, is that it reimagines Tony Stark as the superhero, not Iron Man; the suit becomes simply one tool of many in a creative technician’s arsenal, as useful as it is utterly disposable. And what’s remarkable is that not only is the film aware of this reconfiguration, it actively works the reconfiguration into the narrative fabric of the film: this is a film that’s actually about a man recognizing that he doesn’t need expensive future-tech to be heroic and to save the day. It’s about a man realizing his true potential through ingenuity and perseverance—not some vain attempt at “rebuilding” a hero but building a new one from the ground up.

One of the most striking things about “Iron Man Three” is its central visual motif, one very much in keeping with its major themes: breakdown and failure hang over everything, disrupting plans, wiping out public spaces, making it impossible to get from point A to point B. Director Shane Black—who’s written these kinds of film-wide conceptual girders before, to similar effect—charts a course not from breakdown to perfection but from breakdown to nothing, its arc building not so much to an improved model as to a rejection of the model altogether. This plays out a bit like Brad Bird’s “Mission Impossible 4”, which also used technical failures as a motif; but where Bird employed malfunction as a kind of running gag, played always for laughs, “Iron Man Three” takes its constant defects much more seriously, viewing them as much a manifestation of internal crisis as a lack of care or maintenance. The point of the film is that Stark has to cope without: he has to overcome his foes without relying on the invincibility of his suit, but he also, more importantly, has to understand that the suit itself has been a crutch.

And even in the most superficial sense, the motif proves enormously fun to watch: we’re so accustomed to seeing Stark dodge foes until his suit becomes available (at which point he swats threats down like flies) that finding him fend for himself with what he has at his disposal is every bit as refreshing it as it is amusing. The film still has recourse to get Stark suited up, but the important distinction is that he’s rarely fully suited (and only ever momentarily): the tech is always failing, being dismantled, coming together in bits and pieces. At one point he fights a helicopter brigade without flight or combat power, and so he downs one with a carefully shoved grand piano; later he takes on a group of gunmen with only his right leg and left hand suited, and he flies by spinning in an impromptu corkscrew. It’s the hero as makeshift-super, his powers cobbled together and unwieldy.

One of the most spectacular setpieces in the film is one of its most low-key: Stark is facing off against a seemingly invincible woman in a small-town diner, ducking punches while handcuffed, when he’s forced to hot-wire homemade explosives out of a microwave and a set of metal dog tags. We’re made aware that Tony Stark was never just an ordinary guy in a powerful suit: he’s an exceptional guy in a suit of his own design and creation, and his capacity to make something like Iron Man is not only what defines his character, it’s what makes that character worth watching.

Categories: Features

Tags: Calum Marsh, Iron Man 3, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shane Black, Superhero Movies

Movies Streaming This Week: ‘Jack Reacher,’ ‘Mama’ and More

This week we have Tom Cruise playing Lee Child’s famous book character Jack Reacher, Guillermo del Toro invites us to his latest supported horror talent with “Mama” and with the Tribeca Film Festival in its final week, some of the films from past years that you can watch on Hulu for free.

NEW RELEASES

‘Jack Reacher’
Tom Cruise plays the former Military Police Corps offer turned drifter who was brought to fame from the popular books by Lee Child. Based on the “One Shot” novel, Reacher is brought in as a lead investigator for a case involving a former Army sniper who shot five people at random.
Why Watch It: Decide for yourself if Cruise is Reacher-worthy.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU, Amazon Instant, Redbox Instant

‘Mama’
Jessica Chastain throws on the dark wig and attempts to raise two kids who have lived in the woods for the last five years in Guillermo del Toro’s latest executive produced-horror. If the obvious challenges aren’t strenuous enough, things get more complicated when Annabel (Chastain) realized the kids have may not have been alone out there in them woods.
Why Watch It: If it has the blessing of del Toro it’s worth your time.
Available On: iTunes, VUDU

‘Shadow Dancer’
Gaining prominence for his documentaries like Oscar winner “Man on Wire,” James Marsh switches over to narrative for his latest film. Starring Andrea Riseborough as Colette, an active IRA member who is arrested and forced to become an informant for the MI5. Clive Owen plays her MI5 contact who learns the promises he’s made to Colette may not be fulfilled.
Why Watch It: A thriller with a stirring performance by Riseborough.
Available On: Cable On Demand

‘Any Day Now’
This touching story starring Alan Cumming looks at a gay couple in the 1970s who are in a legal battle for the custody of a mentally handicapped teen. While battling with stereotypes of the era, the couple deals with their own internal issues of how they’re perceived.
Why Watch It: Cumming gives one of his best performances.
Available On: Cable On Demand, iTunes

OLDIES BUT GOODIES (Tribeca Film Festival Edition)
With the festival in full swing, here’s some films that have shown at the fest and you can see for free on Hulu.

‘Jesus Camp’
This Oscar nominated doc by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady gives a look inside the workings of a Christian summer camp where kids spend their time being taught such things like global warming is a political speculation and that they are the force behind Jesus’ return. The exposure of the camp by the film led to its closing.

‘The Exploding Girl’
The film that made Zoe Kazan the latest indie film “It” girl, in the film she plays an epileptic in New York City while on summer break from college. Film has a haunting feeling played up by Kazan’s wide-eyed innocent look, however, it’s also an intimate study of the confusion of a life in flux.

‘Air Guitar Nation’
Capturing the insanity (and artistry) of air guitaring, we follow some of America’s greatest talents as they vie for the honor of being the first World Air Guitar Champion from the U.S. If you need a night of some light-hearted fun, this is the pick.

‘Interview With The Assassin’
This sort-of “found footage” film by Neil Burger, his debut is a fictionalized account of the discovery of the “man on the grassy knoll” on the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination.  Rob, an unemployed cameraman, is asked by his reclusive neighbor, Walter, a retired Marine with terminal cancer, to videotape a shocking confession. This leads the two on a chilling journey back to Dallas.

Categories: Columns, Streaming, Streaming/On Demand

Tags: Air Guitar Nation, Alan cumming, Amazon Instant, Any Day Now, Clive owen, Google Play, Guillermo del toro, Interview with the Assassin, ITunes, Jack Reacher, James marsh, Jessica chastain, Jesus Camp, Mama, Neil Burger, Redbox Instant, Shadow dancer, The Exploding Girl, Tom cruise, VUDU, YouTube, Zoe Kazan

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Barney’s Great Adventure’ (1998)

Even the most desensitized aficionados of cinematic perversion cringe at the thought of “Barney’s Great Adventure,” a terrifying drama about three children who foolishly tamper with the dark powers of “imagination” and thereby conjure into existence an anthropomorphic dinosaur whose mirthless playtime revelry leaves them psychologically scarred and unable to cope with the realities of life. Draw near, if you dare, and pay heed as I relate the horrific tale.

The tone is established by the song that plays over the opening credits, in which young listeners are given this dangerous advice:

“If Barney the dinosaur
Comes knocking on your front door
Just go and play with him
Find your way with him
To the world of imagination.”

Having told impressionable viewers that they ought to run off with anyone who comes to their house claiming to be a TV dinosaur, the film begins its grim story in earnest.

It is summertime, and a family is headed to Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in upstate New York, where Mom and Dad will leave the kids for a week while they go off and enjoy some time far, far away from their children. The boy, Cody (Trevor Morgan), is a miserable little bastard who HATES the boring farm and is “too cool” to play along when his younger sister, Abby (Diana Rice), tries to engage him in conversation with her stuffed Barney doll. Cody absolutely despises imagination, creativity, and joy. Cody and Abby have a baby brother who doesn’t matter and I don’t know why he’s in the movie. Also, Abby has brought along her friend, Marcella (Kyla Pratt), who is African American and is in the movie so that the movie wouldn’t only be about white people.

Fun fact: Every person who appears in this movie is now a heroin addict!

As soon as they get to the farm, Cody runs off with the Barney doll and hides it in the bathtub. Has he realized that the doll is a pernicious token of evil? No, he is just being a brat. Abby and Marcella, unable to find the toy, use their imagination — whereupon the shower turns itself on, and suddenly, there in the place where the doll had been stands Barney himself. The girls summoned him, in much the same way that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the bathroom mirror will make Bloody Mary appear, or the way that mentioning “Star Wars” and hockey while eating Cheetos will conjure Kevin Smith.

Surely this is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to these children, right? I mean, it’s not even close, right? No matter what trauma or fear the kids might have experienced heretofore, it would be nothing compared to the shock of finding a fictional character standing in their grandparents’ shower.

But Barney, whimsical demon-spawn that he is, just laughs and asks for a towel. Appearing in bathrooms is not unusual for Barney the purple talking dinosaur! Why, sometimes he’ll show up in a child’s dark closet or under its bed in the middle of the night, just for kicks. Nothing delights Barney more than surprising the pee — the very pee — out of the children who love him.

Fun fact: To create the unique sound of Barney’s giggle, audio engineers mixed recordings of geese, donkeys, and the screams of damned souls in Hell!

Abby and Marcella are overjoyed to meet their idol, and instantly agree to do his bidding, whatever it may be, all hail to Barney. Cody remains dedicated to being surly. “Look, pal,” he says. “Real dinosaurs don’t talk.” HE’S GOT YOU THERE, YOU WIDE-BOTTOMED HARBINGER OF SORROW! But Barney replies, “I’m as real as your imagination!” — which 1) isn’t an answer and 2) means he is not real at all, since things that exist in one’s imagination are, by definition, imaginary. (To be fair, Barney is not accustomed to having existential arguments with anyone over the age of 5.)

Cody refuses to believe Barney is real. “If you’re here because of my imagination, then you’re about to disappear!” he exclaims, demonstrating more logical reasoning than anyone else so far. He closes his eyes and says, “I do not believe in you.” But it doesn’t work. Once summoned, Barney cannot be destroyed. “That’s OK, Cody,” the immortal plush reptile says. “I believe in you!”

Fun fact: In ancient Sumerian legend, Barney was a vengeance god who escorted disobedient children to the underworld, where he feasted on their flesh for eternity!

What transpires next, occupying the remainder of the film, is an adventure so nightmarish and surreal it would make Luis Buñuel throw up in his hat. A shooting star passes overhead and delivers a large, basketball-sized egg to the barn. Barney and the kids find the space egg and want to know what’s inside it, and though the movie is very pro-imagination, in this case it is necessary to use actual science. So they take the egg to a kooky lady named Mrs. Goldfinch, who has a house in the woods that serves as both a library and an egg museum. She is the local expert on birds, eggs, and the Dewey decimal system.

Mrs. Goldfinch and Barney and the kids sing a song about the mystery of the egg as they bounce merrily through the place, pulling books off shelves and making guesses. (“Maybe it’s a chimpanzee!” says one of the kids, stupidly.) At last the answer is revealed by one of the books: the egg contains a Dreammaker! Nobody knows what that is, but it sounds nice. It will hatch once the five rings on the shell change color, but only if the kids have returned it to the barn by then. That ought to be a very simple task, and it would be in the real world. In this world, however, all the people responsible for transporting the egg back to the barn are clumsy and butterfingered, and the egg itself is apparently coated with a lubricant, because it is CONSTANTLY getting away from them.

Doh! I dropped the egg and it rolled down the hill into the back of a wagon! Zoing! Now the wagon is driving into town, right in the middle of the Merrivale Apple Day Festival! Yikes! I got a hold of the egg, but then it flew out of my hands and landed in the marching band’s tuba, and the tuba player blasted a really strong note and blew the egg across the street through the open door of that fancy French restaurant! This egg is gigantic, yet invisible to everyone except us and evidently as light as a feather!

Do you like movies where the characters have to keep doing essentially the same thing over and over again? Of course not. Nobody does. The fiends who made “Barney’s Great Adventure,” in addition to disregarding the customary meanings of the words “great” and “adventure,” also intentionally devised a story that cannot be enjoyed. It is a Sisyphean ordeal, if Sisyphus had occasionally paused from his labors to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” and other songs from the public domain.

Fun fact: Even though it was an American production, “Barney’s Great Adventure” had to be filmed in Canada because of strict anti-obscenity regulations!

Cody gets over his aversion to imagination, at one point imagining an ordinary log into a biplane so that he, the girls, and Barney can catch up with the hot air balloon that now has the space egg. (Don’t ask.) The egg is recovered and taken back to the barn, where it hatches into an ALF-looking thing that shows everybody their dreams. Which seems pretty useless, since people generally already know what their own dreams are. And not to get technical, but if all you do is show people’s dreams, you’re not really a Dream maker, are you? Just one more damnable lie from this grueling, hell-spawned torment masquerading as a children’s movie.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Barney's Great Adventure, Eric's bad movies, WTF

10 Movies that Honestly Depict the Horror of Gun Violence

Francois Truffaut said it was impossible to make an antiwar film, because every representation is an act of romanticization and therefore an act of recruitment. In the gun debate, one often hears a similar argument: the movies make guns look unduly romantic and cool, transforming them into fetish objects to celebrated with mindless glee, contributing to a culture of acceptability and the naturalization of violence. Whether representation, even if flattering or romanticized, actively influences the behaviour of an impressionable audience is hard to say, but in any case it seems obvious that the cinema—and the American cinema in particular—has a fascination with gun violence so extreme and unrelenting that it borders on irresponsible. The problem isn’t so much that movies explicitly valorize guns as it is that they do nothing to suppress their appeal. It’s a tacit sort of endorsement, all the more insidious because, as with war movies, the advocacy remains only implied.

In the immediate wake of the Senate’s most recent failure to pass more comprehensive gun legislation, we’ve compiled ten films that make a point of doing the opposite: these are films for which guns are made to look deliberately unappealing, the violence that comes in their wake represented honestly as brutal, horrifying and something that we as a people can no longer abide.

1. “Elephant”

Gus Van Sant’s misunderstood Palme D’or winner has high aspirations and an unenviable task: this is film that attempts to make sense of a school shooting in order to suggest that one ultimately can’t. In “Elephant”, gun violence plays out as unqualified atrocity, its consequences as incomprehensible as the reason it occurred at all. The crowning touch is a moment of unbearable defeat: we follow a student as heads cautiously toward the sounds of gunshots, hopeful that he might save the day, only to watch helplessly as he is shot down the second he makes a move.

2. “A Bittersweet Life”

Handguns, of course, are considerably less hard to come by in Korea than they are the United States, which is why in this Korean crime film a mobster in exile just can’t seem to get his hands on one. A backroom deal for a single weapon becomes an arduous exercise in politics and negotiation, culminating in a quick-draw shootout that leaves the dealers shot dead. The irony is that, once his gun is acquired, the hero is closer than ever to meeting his fate, brought about rather than avoided by making the purchase.

3. “The Tin Star”

One of Anthony Mann’s superlative black and white Westerns, “The Tin Star” stars Anthony Perkins as a small-town Sheriff forced to learn to shoot in order to survive the mistrust and dissent of his constituents. Here Mann depicts the gun as a crude instrument, a terrifying source of power that must be wielded with caution and fear. Far from confirming its importance, “The Tin Star” suggests we’d better off—or in the very least much safer—without the weapons on which we rely.

4. “Full Metal Jacket”

If ever there could be a successfully anti-war war movie, Stanley Kubrick’s hostile, seethingly angry “Full Metal Jacket” must be it. What distinguishes this particular representation of war—and, by extension, the attendant gun violence—is that Kubrick never feels the need to pay his respects to those bravely fighting, opting against the romance and valor of duty and instead lambasting the soldiers as much as the institution to which they belong. Where a film like “Saving Private Ryan” self-consciously makes heroes of its protagonists, “Full Metal Jacket” depicts them as idiots and buffoons, contributing to the repulsiveness of warfare rather than trying to avoid it. When even Private Joker eventually succumbs to the brutality around him, the point seems clear: in war, everybody gets dragged into the muck eventually.

5. “Bowling for Columbine”

Michael Moore’s admittedly simplistic and reductive documentary might seem an obvious choice when discussing anti-gun movies, but it nevertheless remains an important one, broadening the conversation about American gun culture to the national stage and illuminating dimensions of a subject traditionally kept shrouded in mistruth. Where Moore fails as a rigorous documentarian, he succeeds as a populist voice, and it’s worth recognizing the value of his influence on an underdiscussed issue.

6. “Blood Simple”

The Coen brothers probably aren’t the first names that come to mind when one thinks of filmmakers averse to glamorizing violence—“Miller’s Crossing” is nothing if not in love with the look and feel of its tommy guns, and “No Country For Old Men” practically invented a new weapon—but their startling debut, the darkly comic noir “Blood Simple”, treats its guns as instigators of a sick cosmic joke, one which sees murders committed strictly in the name of misunderstanding. Guns go off, lives change, and nobody can walk away clean from the consequences.

7. “Taxi Driver”

“Taxi Driver” is the rare case of a movie that, like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Scarface”, is so commonly misperceived as endorsing the violent acts of its protagonist that one wonders how effective its true message could possibly be. De Niro’s iconic bedroom posturing made drawing a gun—or, y’know, mounting one to a custom arm rig—an act of movie-star cool, but the point is precisely that it’s all an act. It’s telling that the point at which he finally buys a gun from a black market dealer’s suitcase is also the point at which Travis Bickle makes the leap from on-edge to off the deep end, and one would be hard-pressed to describe the fallout from this purchase as anything but grotesque.

8. “Point Blank”

John Boorman’s postmodern crime film tells a decidedly oblique sort of revenge story. Lee Marvin plays Walker, a man on a mission for vengeance after a betrayal during a robbery-gone-wrong leaves him shot and left for dead. Boorman makes Walker out to be a veritable precursor to the Terminator, crashing through downtown Los Angeles on a hunt for the $93,000 he feels he’s owed by his former partners. Guns become a fixture of the skyline: snipers hide from sight, men fall without warning, and shots rip through the sky like claps of thunder. “Point Blank” reinstills guns with a sense of actual power, making them a force to be reckoned with and an object to fear.

9. “Starship Troopers”

Paul Verhoeven’s strategy for making the case against gun violence has always been to rub our faces in it, forcing us to recognize the repulsiveness of the spectacle we desire. “Starship Troopers” takes this approach into the realm of satirical science fiction, taking the American military-industrial complex to task for its continued exploitation of its own populace and the wars it draws them into arbitrarily. It’s a searing critique, one as much about the abhorrent excessive of on-screen violence as it is about the real world stuff that inspires it, though it so successfully adopts the look and feel of the pulp material it’s satirizing that many mistook it, rather ironically, for an earnest piece of schlock cinema.

10. “A History of Violence”

David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” tackles the representation of violence in two very different ways: on the one hand, this is a movie about inherited traditions of violent behavior, drawing explicit connections between violent acts and their long-term repercussions for both the people who commit them and those they commit them upon. But on the other hand, “A History of Violence” engages with the issue through its very form, growing increasingly violent—and increasingly absurd—as its running time continues and the body count rises. By the end of the picture, the film has evolved (or devolved) from naturalistic drama into what is essentially a live-action comic book or cartoon, in the process critiquing our tendency to conflate violence and heroics.

Do any other films make a compelling case against guns and gun violence? Let us know in the comments.

Categories: Lists

Tags: A Bittersweet Life, A history of violence, Blood Simple, Elephant, Guns, List, Point Blank, Politics

The Best, Worst and Weirdest TV Shows Based On Movies

Not to put a damper on all this talk about “The New Golden Age of Television,” but despite the glories of ABC and HBO, it suddenly seems like TV has been seized by the same strain of “prequelitis” that plagues movie studios. Did you want to know how and why Norman Bates mummified his mummy? Here’s “Bates Motel” on A&E, which will spin this serial killer’s origin story for as long as the ratings demand. Did you need additional backstory to Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon,” which introduced readers to an imprisoned Hannibal Lecter as the FBI’s go-to serial killer expert? You’re in luck, because NBC’s “Hannibal” will spin at least two seasons out of the relationship between Lecter and Special Agent Will Graham.

With news that “Gangs of New York,” “Fargo” and “Zombieland” are racing to serialize, it seems that our small screen will simply be full of stories we’ve already seen on the big one. While this deluge of small screen adaptations is certainly new, we weary cinephiles must remember that television has been gleefully ripping off the movies for decades. Many movies have found themselves repurposed into episodic bites. Sometimes, the result was so popular and successful that it outstripped the movie in pop culture, but more often than not, these television adaptations were hastily canned and buried, never to be discussed again.

Here are the good, the bad and the downright weird attempts to repurpose the silver screen for the television set. (For reasons of space and sanity, we’ve limited the list to live-action adaptations. Also because the cartoon “sequels” of everything from “Back to the Future” to “Men in Black” were pretty darn awesome.)

THE GOOD

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997-2003), based on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)

This is the rare example of a television show that completely, utterly and indisputably outstripped its cinematic predecessor. The movie was a modest hit, but it failed to make much of a dent in pop culture. When Joss Whedon was given the chance to resurrect it on WB, he jumped at the chance, and the result was a delicious mix of girl power, horror, and wit that ran for seven successful seasons. It remains beloved and inspirational to this day, and may be the only vampire show to have inspired a whole subset of academia.

“Alice” (1976-1986), based on “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974)

Martin Scorsese’s melancholy and hardbitten dramedy, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” doesn’t seem likely fodder for a television sitcom. But the television industry lives for the inexplicable, and so Scorsese’s film naturally inspired a sitcom called “Alice” that ran for nine seasons. While it lacked the pathos of Scorsese’s film, it could be surprisingly dark, never really shirking away from the stingy, greasy poverty that the waitresses of Mel’s Diner lived in. It could be argued it outstripped Scorsese’s film in pop culture knowledge, as more people remember Flo, her “Kiss my grits!” catchphrase, and her eventual spin-off than the finer points of the original “Alice.”

“McCloud” (1970-1977), based on “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968)

If you were to pick a Clint Eastwood cop flick to meander its way to the small screen, you probably would have expected it to be “Dirty Harry” or “The Rookie.” But it was “Coogan’s Bluff” that found itself repurposed into “McCloud.” The premise is the same – a cowboy cop finds himself in the alien streets of New York, busts heads, and seduces women – but McCloud stays in the big city, his good-natured ways, Western drawl, and cowboy hat at odds with the mean streets and cynicism of New York. It ran for 7 seasons, and found time for a John Denver appearance, which was sorely lacking in the original film.

“M*A*S*H” (1972-1983), based on “M*A*S*H*” (1970)

It’s rare that great movies spawn great television, but “M*A*S*H*” really did manage to equal its cinematic predecessor in terms of tone, characters, and social criticism. (In retrospect, it seems downright radical to have a show commenting on a war while America was embroiled in one.) It could be argued the show even outstripped the film in terms of cultural impact. If you were to ask who played “Hawkeye” Pierce, most people would answer Alan Alda, and not Donald Sutherland, while many probably assume that the movie was based on the show, and not vice versa. (Bonus: “M*A*S*H also inspired the successful “Trapper John M.D.” (1979-1986), which managed to transfer one of its characters to a postwar scenario, and remain thoughtful and interesting, instead of descending into campy humor.)

“The Dukes of Hazzard” (1979-1985), based on “Moonrunners” (1975)

“Dukes” and “Buffy” share a similar origin story. (A sentence I never thought I’d write, and probably never will again.) Like Joss Whedon, writer/director Gy Waldron had the chance to develop a television series with WB, and opted to expand the moonshine-and-hot rods world of his film, “Moonrunners.” Substantial changes were made (the Duke boys were only former moonshine runners), but the schlocky, B-movie tone remained intact. “Dukes” was a huge hit, far more than the film ever was, and the Duke boys became permanent pop culture fixtures. Strangely, the cultural recycling process went full circle when “Dukes” was remade into a 2005 feature film.

“In the Heat of the Night” (1988-1995), based on “In the Heat of the Night” (1967)

A crime thriller laced with a seething current of racial tension hardly seems the stuff of a television series. The decision to update the story of Virgil Tibbs, and recast him as a former citizen of Sparta, Mississippi was at odds with the original’s theme. Yet the show works – even if it became more of a showcase for Caroll O’Connor than Howard Rollins – and was fairly fearless in its depiction of hot-button issues and grisly crime. It ran for eight successful seasons, and while “Heat” never came close to shoving the original film from its cultural standing, it remains a nifty, intriguing little sequel that worked on its own merits.

“Parenthood” (2010 to present), based on “Parenthood” (1989)

The sprawling and tender “Parenthood” actually seems like a solid basis for a television series. Yet the first attempt, in 1990, was a critical and commercial flop and was quickly canned. It took Jason Katims of “Friday Night Lights” to rework the essence of the film – the constant dramas of being a parent and child – into a funny, sentimental, and honest story of a multi-generational family. It regularly reduces audiences to tears. Will it outstrip the original film in pop culture canon, or simply stand as a terrific example of adapting a story to the 21st century? Time will tell.

“Peyton Place” (1964-1969), based on “Peyton Place” (1957)

The lurid, rambling drama of “Peyton Place” was the ideal candidate for a nighttime soap opera, and it translated into a huge hit for ABC. It’s easy to understand why – sex sells! The Betty Drapers of the day just couldn’t get enough of the trashy shenanigans of this New England mill town. While it’s not as iconic as some of the other series on this list, it was certainly a cultural touchstone for its day, and a landmark for how television began approaching sex.

“The Odd Couple” (1970-1975), based on “The Odd Couple” (1968)

The title has become so synonymous with clashing roommates that it’s hard to remember it all sprang out of the brain of Neil Simon, and that it was an Oscar-nominated comedy long before it was a laugh-tracked sitcom. Nevertheless, it’s the show that persists in pop culture memory, despite the ludicrous guest-star lows it spun to, and it’s Tony Randall that has gone down as the epitome of Felix Ungar. Perhaps Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were simply too much of the “Odd Couple” in real life to let one movie stick to their reputations the way it did to Randall and Klugman.

ON PAGE 2: OUR PICKS FOR THE WORST TV SHOWS BASED ON MOVIES.

Categories: Lists

Tags: Alice, Bates Motel, Buffy the vampire slayer, Casablanca, Elisabeth rappe, List, Mash, McCloud, Parenthood, Peyton Place, Psycho, Shaft, The Dukes of Hazzard, The odd couple, Tv