Author: reynolds

Night at the Museum 2

I saw this movie.

Night at the Museum 2 made me want to punish all the children in the theater. To sneak up behind each, and as they expressed some moment of pleasurable engagement with the film, just to scream “What the fuck is wrong with you!” into their ears so that they jumped, or cried, and forever after hated Ben Stiller. Or, rather, to punish all children, to stand outside of every theater in the country, and as children came out, to box each upon the ears. A hard box–a Dickens box, not one of those wussy tv ear-pats but a good Mr.-Gower-making-the-ears-bleed kind of smack. Or, if they looked particularly satisfied, to punch them. The happier they look, the bigger the smile, the more painful the body part targeted. Fuck you, children, for making this movie possible. And fuck you, parents, for actualizing this movie. There’s a reason children don’t have disposable income–they’d waste it on shit like this. So shame on you. You all get kicked hard, in soft tissue. Or maybe I just take one kid hostage, one poor hummel-eyed waif, and I set up a website, and I vow to make that kid watch Takashi Miike with me until gangs of children hunt down Shawn Levy, blood-crazed with fear for my webcammed hostage to rip Levy into unrecognizable bits that’ll never work with Steve Martin or any funny people ever again.

I’d punish myself but sitting through it was penance enough. Ah, shit, I probably deserve more.

My fingers grew back!

Some day in the future, someone will write a treatise on the many conventions of the commercial blockbuster in the era of globalization, and they will hit on key elements of the formula: a mash-up of violence with sexual overtones; a heroic protagonist who seeks answers to and resolves that central violence, living on the outside of conventions, and looking damn cool; product placements for McDonald’s, Coke, Red Bull; a seepage of American “cool” aesthetics into everything, everywhere.

And then that someone, basking in the glow of their treatise’s Asimovian precision in explaining all film, will come upon Takashi Miike. And they will see all of the requisite conventions, and the film will still defy any and all commercial sense. Detective Story may somewhere deep down be a conventional serial-killer narrative, but even deeper down it’s got the loony heart of Hammer horror films and its protagonist channels the spirit of Robert Mitchum on mushrooms and while never being horribly gruesome or traditionally gory nonetheless features pureed organs and layers of viscous blood and urine. It is about 1000 times funnier and more enjoyable than every Saw film put together. It isn’t top-drawer Miike, but even as a toss-off its lunatic precision and constant small goofball details and tactics would keep most filmmakers in milk and honey for several films.

Martyrs

Give the French their due. They see an American genre wussing out, and they don’t just sit back and snarkez-vous. Take torture porn. (Please. *ahem*) Eli Roth, Hostel? Wuss-tacular. Let’s have Betty Blue try and get the fetus from a pregnant woman trapped in her home. Let’s have Monica Bellucci’s weird-looking boyfriend play inbreeding hicks (both genders!) enacting some barely-explicable satanic ritual on Parisian hipster douchebags.
Continue reading Martyrs

Crime/Labor

I have a fascination for heist narratives, onscreen or on the page: the lovingly-detailed build-up, where we delve into the lives of a varied group of criminals, the casing of joints, the hatching of plans; the equally painstaking attention to the execution of the gig, with and without hitches; the last-act which can diverge, in equally-satisfying ways, toward hair-breadth escapes and the caper’s happy-ending OR toward unplanned interference, the one detail missed which blows the escape, or the eruption of submerged tensions which tears apart the gang, or….

David Denby once, in an aside, thought filmmakers loved heist films because the elaborate planning and execution echoed the intricacies of filmmaking. (Denby so rarely says anything smart that it stuck in my head. [I only say this to get into the next edition of his book on _Snark_.]) I probably get sucked in by my own meta-narrative obsessions: heist stories are about the shaping of a tightly-defined, closed plot… and the impossibility of defining and closing such plots.

But another pleasure is less analytical: I enjoy watching these films because they are about work. How often do we see characters in film working? Sure, we may see an office, or occasionally a factory; there are occasionally subplots involving a big presentation or some event. But people defining an outcome, and then carefully doing all the little shit that needs doing to make that outcome occur — heist films, or more broadly certain variants of the crime narrative, are about workers and their tasks. Continue reading Crime/Labor

Music for the eyes

I have this probably false memory of seeing Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickolodeon as an ABC movie of the week, the film’s excesses–and there are a good number, usually to the film’s detriment–exacerbated by the noisy bombast of the intertitle ABC movie-of-the-week theme as we went to commercial, and the bullshit bombast of the slew of ads interrupting the film. Whether I saw it in that particular venue, the tone of that memory aligns with my more specific recollections of the film: many scenes of cluttered brouhaha, a tendency toward din rather than wit, lots of falling down. Burt Reynolds.

But while there are too many people falling down, a “comic” fight scene that is as long but about one-third as interesting as the alley brawl in They Live, an occasional bid toward wacky that makes one wince, and the leaden balloon that is Burt Reynolds playing wacky* [see below]…. the new director’s cut of Nickolodeon (which was I believe actually shortened from the theatrical release, but most pertinently transferred into a lovely black-and-white from the too-golden sugar-dust look of the color print) …. well, it’s lovely. It’s funny, just melancholic enough to be sweet and not saccharine, full of the trademark Bogdanovich eye for compositional perfection, replete with many bits of slapstick and screwball dialogue that work like gangbusters (the occasionally-great W.D. Richter co-wrote the film), and a genuinely moving sense of the silly wonder of moviemaking. I really enjoyed it. Continue reading Music for the eyes

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse

I just liked the title of that film. Not enough to rent, but I’d probably enjoy it more than the disappointing Ricky Gervais stand-up special. One neat bit, but mostly it seemed a little too planned and imitative. (I read an interview recently where he talked about his admiration for Louis C.K. I’d say grab some of LCK’s stuff.)

But the mash-up western horror The Burrowers is a helluva good little b-movie — atmospheric, carefully attentive to its standing in both genres, and with a smart, sly cast (and generally strong, if very lo-fi direction). It runs some very nice riffs on the captivity narrative, on the racism of the Western, but I don’t want to oversell–it’s mostly concerned with creepy, clever, carefully-paced fun. Two or three plot shifts caught me offguard, and it was well- and (for a great change) under-written. I suppose noting that it’s about creatures climbing out of the ground to grab humans will throw most of y’all off the scent, but it is well worth a gamble (and not too gory/scary).

Art of the puzzle

Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes has great patience in setting up its jigsawed genre workout: we watch a bald, schlumpy, bulbous-nosed, non-hero-type fellow return to a vacation home, noodle about trying to nap, catch a passing glimpse through his binoculars of a naked woman, and wander into a loopy, neatly-closed loop of a time-travel plot. The dreamlike quality of the first thirty minutes had me enthralled: each crazy event led to the next, and our hero Hector never stops to think through what X and Y means–he just sees X, and assumes that therefore Y must follow. (If we ever stop to think too substantively about the choices most characters are making, I think the whole thing fizzles. But, like a dream, if you just keep wandering along, it makes perfect sense.)

Quite enjoyable. I think Primer was nuttier and neater, but also far knottier, and Timecrimes is remarkably lucid if utterly improbable in its plotting. But I urge you to rent it so that you can pull up from the extras a short film by Vigalondo called “7:35 in the Morning,” which works a small miracle on the improbability of song-and-dance numbers. A woman wanders into a cafe for breakfast, where the regulars fail to respond to her greeting and seem strangely quiet…. and then a man bursts from behind a pillar singing the title song, to which everyone in the joint joins. The reason for such behavior neatly reframes our engagement with the musical number, teases out the creepy and uncanny tone underlying most musical numbers — and it’s funny, smart, and well-shot. Great little short.

Tell Everyone

to skip Tell No One, or at the very least ratchet down the hype and lower–no, more than lower: shove to the floor–your expectations. Imagine a more gallic Ron Howard taking a mediocre thriller, pumping it full of old r&b standards, long shots of hero doctor widower mooning about his allegedly-dead wife, scissoring the timeline so that plot revelations seem startling (when, in any kind of cold expository light, they are pretty damn loony). This is a cheesy late-night cable thriller with a personality disorder, mistakenly assuming it’s a vivid use of thriller filler as fodder for more serious explorations of mood, reveries about love, leisurely paced to please the NPR crowd.

I probably hated this more than it deserved, but… to quote Chris Howell, fuck I hate the middlebrow. At the 1:35 mark I gave up, couldn’t even bring myself to trudge through another 35 minutes of suspense just to get the painfully ludicrous exposition I had already mostly pieced together.