Cinevistaramascope

Top 10: 2001

2012-01-27T10:13:00.002-05:00

1. Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
2. Y tu mamá también (Cuaron)
3. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell)
4. A.I. (Spielberg)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson)
6. Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann)
7. Amélie (Jeunet)
8. Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
9. Gosford Park (Altman)
10. Ghost World (Zwigoff)

Top 10: 1991

2012-01-21T03:03:00.004-05:00

1. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant)
2. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme)
3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron)
4. Barton Fink (Coen)
5. JFK (Stone)
6. Cape Fear (Scorsese)
7. Naked Lunch (Cronenberg)
8. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise)
9. The Fisher King (Gilliam)
10. Point Break (Bigelow)

Recommended Island Viewing

2012-01-20T14:16:00.021-05:00

For his final Friday Night Seitz slideshow at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz answered the age-old question, "What movies would you want to have with you if you were shipwrecked on a desert island." Matt adds, of course, that "It is assumed that you’ll have an indestructible DVD player with a solar-recharging power source" and allows for ten feature films, one short and a single season of a TV series. Matt's challenge was taken up by others, including Jim Emerson and Damian Arlyn; their cumulative desert island library includes films by directors ranging from Martin Scorsese to Buster Keaton to the Coen brothers to Don Bluth.

My choices for desert island viewing differ from my all-time top 10 in that I think my tastes would run a bit lighter due to circumstance. While I'm generally drawn to "dark, cerebral movies" (as I believe Netflix has characterized my tastes) and that's certainly reflected in part on this list, if I was limited to the same 12 viewing options forever, I'd have a greater need for movies to lighten my spirits and help me stay connected to humanity. It's kind of like Will Smith watching Shrek every day in I Am Legend to remind him of the way the world was, except I'm a much bigger snob than Will Smith. And rewatchability is very important, of course. I thought about skipping movies that Matt, Jim or Damian had already chosen, but when you force movie geeks to limit themselves to twelve titles for the rest of their lives, I guess some overlap is inevitable.

All That Jazz - Bob Fosse's cinematic self-portrait is exhilarating in a way that very few films are. It's an incredibly entertaining examination of how an excessive dedication to one's craft gives one's life meaning even as it tears one apart. Roy Scheider was never better than as Fosse's surrogate, Joe Gideon, a chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing director juggling a Broadway musical, a feature film, current and past lovers, his relationship with his daughter and an impending heart attack, among other things. His hallucinatory trip through his own life and impending death is frighteningly insightful, often hilarious and punctuated with some of Fosse's best choreography, culminating in a glittery, show-stopping eulogy that can only be described as fabulous. I think it's impossible to get tired of this movie.

Boogie Nights - While There Will Be Blood is my favorite P.T. Anderson movie by a hair, Quentin Tarantino was right when he characterized Boogie Nights as an "exhuberant" film (as opposed to There Will Be Blood's formalism). It's one of the movies where, every time I watch it, I can't stop debating with myself whether my favorite scene is the current one, or the one before it, or the next one. Every character is my favorite character. For it's two-and-a-half hours, Boogie Nights radiates with the joy of movies and filmmaking. No matter how crappy I'm feeling, it never fails to bring a smile to my face.

E.T. - One of the very first movies I really loved, and the first one that got me thinking about what it means to make a movie. E.T.'s stock in the collective imagination seems to have fallen a bit since I was a kid - most of the time when I mention it to people my age, they dismiss it as a movie that frightened them when they were kids. But through my childhood, it meant more to me than Star Wars or any of the other staples of my youth. Even now, I can't think too hard about certain images or moments or even John Williams' score (his best) without getting a bit misty. I'd want it on the island not for nostalgic reasons but because it remains the most clear-eyed and insightful movie about growing up. And I imagine it'd be wonderful to revisit over and over under a canopy of stars.

Fargo - The Coens' best movie is the best example of their deadpan comic genius and ability to mine laughter and genuine pathos from flawed, sometimes banal people in desperate situations. It's also filled with a fondness for their home state that pokes a lot of fun at Minnesotans' earnestness while still demonstrating real affection. Very pregnant sheriff Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is probably my favorite cinematic hero - she's true to herself, good to her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch), unflappable while investigating a brutal double homicide and driven by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong. Her monologue to one of the kidnappers at the film's end ("There's more to live than a little money, ya know. Don't you know that?") and the coda with Marge and Norm in bed, talking about his three-cent mallard stamp, never fail to move me. Plus, it would be nice, on the island, to be reminded of snow.

Goodfellas - Scorsese's most entertaining movie. If I'm channel surfing and Goodfellas is on, even with the DVD about five feet away from the TV, it's almost impossible to stop watching. It doesn't have the kind of lightness of being that a lot of my choices have - it's a movie about very likeable assholes doing terrible things and learning nothing in the process. As such, it's one of the greatest dark comedies of all time, not to mention Scorsese - at a point in his career when he had a lot to prove - employing just about every cinematic trick at his disposal to tell this story and clearly having a blast doing it. Goodfellas is one of those movies that always reminds me what film is capable of. And seeing as I'll be on the island for a very long time, that gives me whole days to examine just the Copacabana tracking shot. Or the Billy Batts sequence. Or the "Layla" scene. Or the commercial for Morrie's Wigs...

Harold and Maude - One of those rare movies that, in the gentlest way possible, always reminds me how much of everyday life is bullshit and what really matters. Hal Ashby's laid-back stoner vibe is deceptive; it's an unpretentious movie, unafraid to be silly, but also very deep and true. Plus, a little Cat Stevens makes every day worth living.

Manhattan - This has long been my favorite Woody Allen movie, but it really came into focus when I was watching the American Masters documentary on Allen, thanks to Mariel Hemingway calling Allen a "mush." It's very true - as much as Allen's work is preoccupied with death, the non-existence of God and other sources of anxiety and existential despair, they're just as much a celebration of human relationships. Sure, they often end in heartbreak or betrayal, and Manhattan is unsparing in underlining the ways that people can be selfish and casually cruel, or how - as Allen laments in Annie Hall - love fades. But it's also a deeply romantic film, in love with the ways that people can lend each others' lives meaning, how a city is alive with millions of people living their own movies, and how a perfect, holy moment is always possible when you least expect it.

Nashville - Like Boogie Nights, a movie overflowing with potential favorite scenes and characters. It's a cynical film, but never the sort of empty, defeatist cynicism that tends to turn me off immediately; Pauline Kael put it best when she said that Altman "loves us too much to flatter us." I revisit it about once a year, and I've found that whatever is going on in my life at the time, it speaks to me right where I'm at. And you don't have to be a fan of country music to appreciate how Altman discovers poetry in the intersection of our popular culture, politics, ideals and delusions. No movie feels more like America to me than Nashville; I imagine that returning to it on the island would feel like visiting home.

The Shining - My girlfriend believes that, though I call Blue Velvet my favorite movie, my true favorite is The Shining, which I apparently talk about ten times as much. It's certainly the movie I've seen the most times and return to constantly; I've been working through its multiple mysteries, layers and ambiguities for over 20 years, and each time I revisit it, the film reveals a new shade of meaning. If someone asked me to name a perfect film, The Shining would be my answer; if I could only take one movie to the island, it would be my choice and I would happily watch it every night. Plus, I think it would be good to have a movie to watch that is almost entirely composed of interiors; over time, I would probably grow jealous of Jack Torrance and his cabin fever.

Synecdoche, New York - A movie that reminds us that, no matter how bad things get, they can always (and, eventually, will) get worse. While sometimes I need comfort food on a bad day like everyone else, a movie like Synecdoche, New York provides a different kind of therapy. It's about everything we fear and regret - failed ambitions, broken relationships, loneliness, the suspicion that everything is meaningless and, above all, death. And it confronts our darkest thoughts with eyes wide open, with wit and honesty and a stunning amount of empathy, reminding more strongly than any movie I've seen that we're all in this together. It's a movie filled with misery, and it never fails to make me feel better. No matter how dark things get on that island, I can always count on Synecdoche, New York to help me pull myself together.

The short film I would bring to the island is The Wrong Trousers. The toy train chase between Wallace and Gromit and the villainous, silent penguin left the nine-year-old me breathless with laughter, and it hasn't lost any of its charm.

Originally I was thinking I would bring a season of Lost, then decided I might not be in the mood as I'd be stuck on a frigging island. So I'll go with season one of Twin Peaks. I'll have the rest of my life to explore the mysteries of Bob, the man from another planet and all the other strange and mysterious elements that, thanks to David Lynch, seem completely effortless. And even if/when I tired of the show as a puzzle, I'd always have Agent Cooper, Sheriff Truman, Audrey Horne, the Log Lady and all the other residents of Twin Peaks to keep me company.

Top 10: 1981

2012-01-13T13:48:00.003-05:00

1. Blow Out (De Palma)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg)
3. An American Werewolf in London (Landis)
4. The Road Warrior (Miller)
5. Thief (Mann)
6. Modern Romance (Brooks)
7. The Evil Dead (Raimi)
8. Excalibur (Boorman)
9. Pennies From Heaven (Ross)
10. Escape From New York (Carpenter)

Top 10: 1971

2012-01-06T20:27:00.003-05:00

Update, 1/9/12: I can't believe I forgot Two-Lane Blacktop!

1. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
2. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman)
3. Harold and Maude (Ashby)
4. Macbeth (Polanski)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
6.The Devils (Russell)
7. Straw Dogs (Peckinpah)
8. The French Connection (Friedkin)
9. Carnal Knowledge (Nichols)
10. Two English Girls (Truffaut)

Hey kid, you want a toothpick?

2012-01-06T12:20:00.004-05:00

While James Sallis' novel Drive provides us with a backstory for its protagonist - a stuntman by day and getaway driver by night who is known only as "the Driver" - Hossein Amini's adaptation for Nicolas Winding Refn's film version of Drive gives us few details about who the Driver is. We know as much as his boss, body shop owner Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who explains that the Driver (Ryan Gosling) showed up at his garage a few years back and asked for a job. Stoic and elusive, the Driver never puts his experiences or motivations into words - he's a character defined entirely by what he does, rather than where he's been. What he does is drive, exceptionally well; in the opening sequence, we watch him on an assignment as a getaway driver, calm and focused as he eludes police cars and helicopters with astounding timing. The sequence is shot and edited with the same expert precision, culminating in a final reveal - deftly teased from the opening shot - that recalls De Palma at his best in the devilish pleasure Refn takes from waiting until the last possible moment to let us in on the joke. My pleasure at Refn's slight-of-hand never flagged during the following ninety minutes; Drive is, without a doubt, the best time I had at the movies last year.

Taking place on the lower rungs of the film industry and the margins of L.A.'s criminal underworld, Drive takes place in the hard, glossy urban terrain of Michael Mann, populated by assorted lowlifes who speak in the terse, clipped language of Walter Hill. This is film noir passed through the great contemporary American action filmmakers and taken to its logical endpoin. It's too emotionally direct to comfortably label "postmodern," but there is the sense, as the Driver and Shannon become involved with gangsters Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman) - first as partner's in Shannon's plan to make the Driver a stock car racer, then as adversaries after a robbery gone wrong - of a way of life and cinema, of defining the good guys and bad guys, giving way to a murkier future. Refn, whose earlier film Bronson transformed the world of British prisons and asylums into a Theatre of the Absurd scored by the Pet Shop Boys, creates a world whose pop surfaces portray in bold strokes both the end of an era in pulp fiction and the immortality of the archetypal hero's journey.

Refn also feminizes the action film in surprising ways, from the glossy pink opening titles to the synthpop-heavy soundtrack. Drive reminds of Carol Clover's bisexual aesthetic, balancing a masculine, fetishistic reverence for machines and process with swooning romantic interludes. It's the Driver's silent affection for next-door neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benecio (Kaden Leos) that sets the film's plot into motion - when Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Issac) is released from prison and finds himself quickly in hot water, the Driver helps him in order to help his wife and son. Mulligan is luminous in the film; there's a beautiful moment, as Desire's "Under Your Spell" plays on the soundtrack, when we watch Irene and the Driver silently yearn for each other on opposite sides of the wall dividing their apartments. Drive is as effective as it is because Refn is as invested in these quiet emotional moments as he is in the violent setpieces.

At first, I thought perhaps the relationship between the Driver and Irene was vaguely defined; later, I realized that an impromptu drive through the Los Angeles River is the closest thing to intimacy that the Driver is probably capable of. This is a character who is almost entirely motivated by a sense of romantic chivalry to the woman he loves; he's also a possible sociopath who hits another woman to find out what she knows and is capable of brutal assault and even murder without ever losing his cool. Gosling - who I used to find annoyingly mannered but who has, since Blue Valentine, has found the wit to match his obvious talent - does an excellent job of wordlessly conveying the Driver's internal extremes. The film's centerpiece, in this light, is a scene set in an elevator where an ecstatic emotional climax takes a jarring left turn into a violent confrontation that is a much more disturbing form of release. We're never sure if the Driver enjoys taking out the bad guys because he's sworn to protect Irene and Benecio, or if his self-appointed role as a knight in a Chevy Impala is a pretense for him to get off on beating the shit out of people. Of course, we could similarly question the motives of almost every action hero since Odysseus.

The entire movie strikes a similar balance, its approach to cinematic violence at once exhilarating and sobering. Its violence movies come in brief, controlled bursts, reminiscent of the climax of Sanjuro, that have a greater impact for their relative restraint. While Tom Hardy's Charles Bronson relished his role as an ass-kicking maniac in that film, here the characters are reluctant to kill each other for our entertainment. Even Bernie, the film's villain, assumes that role with great reluctance - he'd rather see the Driver race and is legitimately disappointed that his criminal partners have screwed that plan up. Brooks is a brilliant choice for Bernie; thanks to his warmth and our familiarity with his screen persona, we like Bernie and want to trust him, and can believe that he'd rather not hurt anyone. So when Brooks' acerbic wit gives way to cold, merciless self-preservation, he's one of the most frightening and memorable bad guys in recent memory. A moment when Bernie whispers reassurances to his dying victim that "It's all over now, there's no more pain" lingers in the memory more strongly than movies with ten times the body count. Drive is heavy with the sense of things we can't return to, and also alive with cinema's capacity for rebirth; when Gosling finally assumes the heroic status that Refn has granted him, with College's "A Real Hero" blasting on the soundtrack, Drive achieves pop transcendence. It's one for the ages.

You'll be grown before that tree is tall.

2011-12-13T15:57:00.003-05:00

I’ve avoided writing about the films of Terrence Malick thus far; frankly, I’m not sure I’m a good enough writer to convey what makes them special. They’re elusive in a way that is completely unique; where other directors on the same level of ambition might provide us with symbols, archetypes or formal cues to guide our interpretation of their films, Malick defies signification. In Malick’s movies, a tree represents a tree; they are visual, experiential, intentionally open to the viewer’s interpretation even as they resist classification. As with the two most recurring characters in his work – wind and water – they are at once physical and ephemeral.

Whether one likes or dislikes a Malick film, it’s undeniably challenging to put the experience of a Malick movie into words. One of the most powerful moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had was a double bill of Badlands and Days of Heaven at the Brattle; while I’m normally very chatty after a movie, I had little to say on the walk back to my hotel room that night. His movies evoke feelings and ideas that are difficult to put into words without being reductive, which makes the work of writers who find a meaningful way to engage with Malick (as Matt Zoller Seitz did with his recent video essays) quite valuable. Otherwise, discussions of Malick’s films too often split into two groups – detractors who accuse Malick of New Age-y pretentiousness and his fans of blind worship, and supporters who argue that anyone who doesn’t like Malick’s films is either being a contrarian or doesn’t “get” them; both responses betray a good deal of insecurity. I cannot claim to “get” every moment in The Tree of Life; I can only describe my own experience with the film, which is as beautiful, challenging, maddening and audacious a film as Malick has ever directed.

So. The Tree of Life.

I don’t think there has ever been a film that has better conveyed the process of memory. I’ve recently had several instances where old friends have, out of the blue, hit me with potent reminders of moments in my life, years ago, that I’d forgotten. While my friends may not have realized it, a simple reference to days I hadn’t stopped to think about in a long time have triggered potent emotional journeys that were probably imperceptible to anyone around me. That is, as far as I can tell, what The Tree of Life is about. On a perfectly normal day, Jack (Sean Penn as an adult, Hunter McCracken as a boy) is drawn into memories of his childhood, fantasies about the creation of the universe and imaginations or premonitions of its end, where he is reunited with everyone he’s ever known. While the the film’s thematic scope is literally universal, the scale of the story is shockingly intimate. The Tree of Life presents us with the beginning and end of everything and places its protagonist, and us, squarely at its center – our own small dramas are completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and at the same time simple things like our family and our neighborhood provide our language for experiencing the infinite.

Most of the film takes place in Jack’s memories of one summer of his childhood in small-town Texas. Malick’s characters have grown increasingly archetypal with each film – here, Jack’s father Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and his wife (Jessica Chastain) embody the conflict between what Malick terms “nature and grace,” and Jack is caught in a classic Oedipal struggle between these two opposing forces. We’re given a few details about Mr. O’Brien - he works as an engineer, is a talented musician and often expresses envy of those who are wealthier or more successful then him – and fewer of Jack’s mother. As others have pointed out, the parents are viewed through the young Jack’s eyes, and as such are defined in broad strokes – Mr. O’Brien as the hard, authoritarian figure, and Mrs. O’Brien as the empathetic, playful and nurturing parent. Pitt does an excellent job of balancing the father’s toughness with an underlying sense that he loves his sons and believes he’s equipping them for the challenges of adulthood. Chastain, in her first major film role, is tasked with finding a way to portray the embodiment of grace and, also, a 1960s Texas housewife; she pulls off the delicate balance that implies and is completely radiant. While Malick is often criticized for his lack of interest in traditional dramatic structure and character development, the scenes of family life in the film are completely believable and filled with small, truthful details that evoke our own experience.

The much talked-about sequence depicting the creation of the world isn’t strictly necessary from a narrative perspective, and yet it’s impossible to imagine the movie without it. The sequence serves a similar purpose as the “Dawn of Man” prologue in 2001, giving us a sense of the much larger context this story takes place in before settling into a particular moment in time for the majority of the film (Kubrick chose to leap to the present, Malick to the recent past). After beginning with the news of the death of one of Jack’s brothers, the film implicitly asks what is the meaning of our lives, then gives us this sequence as a possible answer. Though Malick is a Christian, his is a creation sequence that is true to our scientific understanding of our origins, while still acknowledging the questions that science cannot answer. Douglas Trumbull, the special effects legend behind 2001 as well as Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many others, came out of semi-retirement to work on The Tree of Life. The images do remind of the overwhelming quality of 2001’s final scenes; as we move from darkness through the formation of celestial bodies and life – first cells, then primitive organisms, always growing more and more complex – we’re reminded of our role in the greater chain of existence, no more or less significant than any other link. It’s awe-inspiring, and it also made me feel a bit lonely; if there is a God out there, he’s provided us with all the blueprints, but he’s holding out on the mission statement.

And so we have Jack and his family, and every person and family, residing at the heart of this great mystery, which gives every small moment a greater philosophical or spiritual weight. A moment where Jack commits a small trespass against an attractive older woman in his neighborhood becomes a fall from innocence worthy of Milton. When Jack participates in a naïve act of animal abuse with neighborhood kids, the moment speaks deeply to our capacity for cruelty. Whether we remember or not, we all have these moments in our childhood where some small event leads us into a larger world. Admittedly, some of these moments don’t have the clarity or emotional impact they could have – while Malick has always been elusive, The Tree of Life is the first of his films that contained moments that seemed simply vague. I don’t know why there’s a giant in the attic, I don’t know what the clown in a dunk tank is about and I can’t help but suspect these moments are more private than personal. Most importantly, I hoped for a stronger understanding of the relationship between Jack and his brothers – as it is, it took a second viewing for me to confirm which brother is the one who dies, and as his death triggers the existential questions behind the film, I wanted to connect with that loss. That said, it’s very possible that these details will become clearer upon revisiting the film, which I expect to do many times – as confounding as it may be in its individual moments, The Tree of Life has a cumulative brilliance that is nearly inarguable.

It’s been interesting to see how people seem to interpret the film’s conclusion based on what they bring to it. To many, the final scenes are about the relative insignificance of our personal experiences in a godless universe. To others, it’s a spiritual affirmation of an existence beyond this one. Or perhaps it is merely Jack imagining what may be – the shores not of eternity but of the persistence of memory. I tend towards the latter interpretation. That the film can support each interpretation speaks to its strength – like any great film, The Tree of Life has the ability to speak to you wherever you are in your own narrative. We have so few poets in American film at a time when most directors are preoccupied with prose; The Tree of Life reminds us what our cinema is capable of.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #1 - ALIEN

2011-10-31T20:53:00.004-04:00

This month I've been using Halloween as an excuse to introduce my girlfriend to as many horror movies as possible. Jen has seen hardly any, and it's interesting because it's extremely unpredictable what will actually frighten her - we've watched The Shining, The Exorcist and The Thing without her becoming even mildly startled, but she was quite upset a few months back when I took her to the unrelenting scarefest Super 8. Last week we were watching Alien, which she'd never seen and which, I'm happy to report, worked like gangbusters on her. I mentioned to her that the alien would be my number one character on this list, and she asked me why. I thought for a while, and I feel I should be honest and give the same answer I gave her.

I could say it's because of the brilliant design of the creature by H.R. Giger, which serves as a grotesque mirror image of our repressed unease with our own sexuality. I could point to the alien's birth cycle, one of the most potent and unforgettable examples of bodily horror in film. Or I could praise Ridley Scott's handsome directorial style, the authentic performances he elicits from his cast, how he set out to make "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey" and, when you're watching the film, you realize that's exactly what it is and Scott succeeded beautifully. Or I could refer to Stephen King's observation that the alien is like one of Lovecraft's outer gods, a visceral representation of our most existential horror, the mystery of what is waiting for us at the farthest reaches of the universe, life and the afterlife. I could say any of those things, and there's some truth to all of them. But the bottom line is, of any monster, maniac or villain that I might meet someday in a dark alley, the alien would be the absolute worst.

Because while I find it fascinating to consider the underlying reasons behind what scares us, at its heart fear is a primal, non-intellectual experience. We can articulate our fears to give them form, to understand them and hopefully be stronger and braver as a result. But when we're confronted with something really terrifying, we can't save ourselves by deconstructing it and, in any case, we're too busy shitting our pants or crying. So there's a sense that the horror movie is a test run for our deepest fears - we push ourselves to confront our darkest thoughts, with the objective distance of make-believe, and to experience the worst before rewarding ourselves with that final fade to black and a return to safety. I'm not saying anything that hasn't said before, but if you had to answer the question of why we enjoy being frightened, that's the most basic and honest answer - we watch stories about characters going through horrible, unimaginable shit and thank the heavens that it isn't us.

So yeah, the alien is the scariest character because of the way the incubating facehugger spasms inside its egg before launching itself onto poor Kane's (John Hurt) face. It's for the way it tightens its tale around Kane's neck as Dallas and Ash try to remove it. It's for Kane's ungodly cries of pain as he gives involuntary birth to the chestburster, and for Lambert's (Veronica Cartwright) authentic repulsion as a jet of blood splashes her face. It's for the moment the once-small alien appears behind Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and we realize that it's made an amazing growth spurt. And that horrible moment when Dallas (Tom Skerritt) realizes he's not alone when searching the vents for the alien, and for Ripley, the lone survivor, sweaty and wide-eyed with terror, trying desperately to make her escape. And because just when she thinks she's safe, she not. And because of the way she chants "lucky, lucky, lucky" herself before confronting the alien one last time and blasting him into space, vanquishing this uncanny monster back into the dark recesses of space.

And it's for the way that the alien and Ripley keep coming back, how she has to defeat the creature over and over again, first as a kickass action hero, then as a Maria Falconetti-esque martyr, then as a campy superwoman with a mean hook shot. The alien, like so many of the characters I've written about this month, keeps coming back because we need to be reminded - to look, once again, at our worst nightmare so that we might laugh and keep them at bay. Some people don't need horror movies; they're better off for not needing to dwell on their fears. For the rest of us, small doses of fear are the vaccine that keep the sickness at bay. I had a VHS tape of Alien and Aliens that my dad had made when I was growing up. As a kid, I struggled not to close my eyes during the scariest moments, I had frequent nightmares involving the alien, and I watched that entire tape after first grade at least once a week; I eventually wore that tape out, and have bought Alien in various formats four times since then. The alien, and all the characters I've written about this month, will never stop creeping me out. And I hope they never do.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #2 - Michael Myers

2011-10-31T20:20:00.004-04:00

John Carpenter's Halloween wasn't the first slasher movie, but it is the purest. The film that defined the slasher formula before it was a formula, Halloween perfected all the techniques and tropes - shots from the killer's POV, an isolated setting, young female victims, a climactic chase between the killer and the Final Girl, multiple false endings - that we now take for granted. As I said, other films had traveled this road before Halloween; the difference is that Carpenter, like Welles with Citizen Kane, brings these elements together with an assured, singular style and an absolute mastery of timing, lighting, spatial intelligence, music and every other trick in the book that a director can employ to maximize tension. Carpenter always seems embarrassed by Halloween, shrugging it of as a quickie exploitation film, and it's clear that other films he's made are much closer to his heart. But perhaps it is that lack of pretense that makes Halloween so wickedly effective - it's the work of a master architect plying his craft for a carnival spook house.

The film's killer, Michael Myers, shares with many of the characters on this list an impenetrability - we don't know why Michael, as a clown-suited 6-year-old, killed his teenage sister on Halloween night, or why he returns 15 years later to stalk and kill babysitters. We learn that his psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), has decided after years of careful observation and analysis that Michael's clinical diagnosis is "pure evil." And the movie proves Loomis' point - Michael is as much of an unstoppable force as the shark from Jaws. His only apparent interest is to hunt his prey as they drink, smoke and screw, and Carpenter is amazing at finding opportunities to hid Michael and the "boo!" moments in the background or margins of the frame, until we become anxious of the negative space in every shot. And the ending is a terrific punchline, as it turns out that the kids Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has been babysitting are proven right - the boogeyman is real.

I've always felt like Halloween II was a bit underrated - putting the silly decision of revealing that Laurie is Michael's sister (which Carpenter admits he wrote late one night, out of desperation, because it worked in The Empire Strikes Back) aside, it's the only sequel that comes close to the suspense of the original. After the failed experiment of Halloween III, which swapped Michael Myers for an evil Irish toymaker (and which is extremely entertaining despite its lack of any relation to Halloween), Carpenter bailed and the franchise's producers decided to replicate the formula as much as possible, and except for occasional highlights like the final scene of Halloween 4 or Jamie Lee Curtis' great performance in the late-1990s period piece Halloween H20, the results are mostly ho-hum. At best they're bland retreads of the original; at worst, they fail to understand that the incomprehensibility of Michael's actions is what makes him frightening, attempting to explain the character with pagan cults and mysterious cowboys. I do like Rob Zombie's entries, particularly the director's cut of Halloween II, which is quite visually haunting, has an unusual level of empathy for its characters and is actually a pretty insightful depiction of PTSD. In any case, at least they were different.

Jen has never seen Halloween; we're watching it tonight. I'll be interested in seeing if decades of movies that borrowed and stole from Halloween has taken away its power to frighten, or if the strength of the filmmaking trumps familiarity. For me, any way, it's become such a big piece of my cinematic experience; it just wouldn't be Halloween without Halloween.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #3 - Leatherface

2011-10-31T12:40:00.003-04:00

I could have easily put any of the members of the cannibalistic family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in this space. There's the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who sets our teeth on edge from his first scene - he's a very extreme version of the experiences we've all had where we're having a conversation with a stranger, realize something is not quite right with that person, and proceed to awkwardly extricate ourselves from the situation. There's the cook (Jim Siedow), the most seemingly normal of the family, whose admission that "I just can't take no pleasure in killing," along with the sheepish grin on his face during the climactic dinnertime scene, are deeply unsettling. And Grandpa - okay, Grandpa isn't as scary as the others, but the 100-year-old man's infantile joy as he sucks blood from a the hysterical Sally's (Marilyn Burns) finger has a powerful "Yeeechhh!" factor. Collectively, they make a potent collection of flesh-eating good ol' boys that should strike fear into the heart of any pinko homo lefty Yankee like myself.*

But of course, the scariest member of the family is Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). From his first appearance - suddenly entering and dominating the frame, swiftly whacking poor Kirk (William Vail) and dragging him back to his makeshift butcher's shop and slamming the door shut behind him with a loud clang - Leatherface is completely terrifying. A huge, childlike brute, Leatherface kills not because he loves doing it but because his brothers make him to or because his victim has frightened him by entering his house. Leatherface, like Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill, was partly inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, but the film does not recreate the extremely disturbing facts of Gein's murders and use of his victims' remains. We get glimses of this in the bony furnishings of Leatherface's house and his wearing of other people's faces, of course. But although Leatherface's murders are very brutal, director Tobe Hooper wisely spares us the goriest details - by employing suggestion, witholding the impact of his monster's weapons as Hitchcock did with Psycho), Hooper provokes our imaginations to fill in the gory details.

Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 shifts the tone from documentary-like starkness to campy humor - I rejected this combination at first, but it gradually grew on me. The movie is hilarious for its blunt acknowledgement of slasher movies' sexual politics (it may be the source of Heathers' infamous line "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw") and Dennis Hopper's scenery-chewing performance as a revenge-seeking, chainsaw-wielding Texas ranger. The next two sequels are mostly dull; the remake and its prequel are not as bad as their reputation suggest, and I'm particularly fond of the scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning where R. Lee Ermey's character calls a family meeting to inform everyone they're cannibals now. Still, the defining image of Leatherface will always be his "chainsaw dance" at the end of the first film - spinning in circles in a state of both brutal, inarticulae anger and ecstasy until the movie cuts to black, suspending Leatherface in his own holy moment forever.

*An analogy I suggested in a discussion about the Republican presidential candidates: Mitt Romney is the cook, Rick Santorum is the hitchhiker, Rick Perry is Leatherface and Ron Paul is Grandpa. Michelle Bachmann is Baby from The Devil's Rejects. This was before the Cain surge - Farmer Vincent, maybe?

Scariest Characters in Cinema #4 - Pinhead

2011-10-31T09:58:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, despite being obsessed with horror, there were certain movies I was afraid to watch. I would read any reviews and articles I could find on these films but was wary of actually renting them, believing them to be more than I could handle. One of these was Hellraiser; its intimidating title and VHS art compelled me to pick it up, then replace it minutes later, countless times over the years. When, in my teens, I finally got around to seeing Hellraiser, it was as grisly as I'd imagined, but it was also smart and strangely beautiful. While Barker's work can be extreme in its content, he's also one of the most richly imaginative writers of our time. And though Hellraiser sometimes reveals its low-budget seams, it's supported by an extraordinary, mythic backstory about a puzzle box that, when solved, opens a door to world where pain and pleasure are one.

The rulers and denizens of this otherworld are the Cenobites, human figures with pierced, mutilated bodies clad in leather. The word "cenobite" means "a member of a religious order," and these Cenobites do have the solemn purposefulness of a monastery in carrying out their dark deeds; like Jack Torrance in The Shining, they've unknowingly accepted the position of eternal caretakers of hell. In the first Hellraiser, they mostly serve as background to the story of the skinless, partially resurrected Frank (Oliver Smith) and his attempts, with the help of his brother's wife Julia (Claire Higgins), to feed on enough blood to rebuild his body. Frank and Julia are Hellraiser's true monsters; the Cenobites are only interested in preserving the rules of their world, and their business is only with those who have summoned them. And Pinhead (Doug Bradley), the most recognizable character of the original film and whole series, is so peripheral to the story that he's only credited in the first movie as "Lead Cenobite."

And yet Pinhead, despite his brief screen time, lingers as strong in the memory as the film's astonishing rebirth sequence and its brilliant score by Christopher Young. Much of this has to do with Pinhead's stunning appearance, the fearful symmetry of his piercings and the contrast between his black eyes and snow-white skin. And then there's Bradley's performance - Barker directed the actor to play the lead Cenobite like "a cross between an administrator and a surgeon who's responsible for running a hospital where there are no wards, only surgical tables." He brings to the role a calm authority and perverse elegance, that, coupled with Pinhead's imposing figure, make Pinhead a precise, businesslike administrator of pain and suffering.

If this makes Pinhead sound a bit like a professional dominatrix, this is not a mistake; Hellraiser, like much of Barker's work, is heavy with sadomasochistic themes. Certainly, the movie is filled with images of body modification, bondage and dominance and submission. The fact that Pinhead is, in a peculiar way, not only visually striking but perhaps even a bit sexy makes him much more frightening. When they are summoned by the Lament Configuration, the Cenobites aim only to deliver the sensory experiences their summoners believe they want - as Pinhead clarifies in the first sequel, "It's not the hand that summons us, it's the desire." One of the great things about Barker is that he's one of the few horror writers to openly embrace the sensual aspects of horror stories - our attraction to experiencing fear in small, "safe" doses. In a sense, anyone who has ever gone to a scary movie has participated in a little light S&M.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II is my favorite film in the series for its Grand Guignol atmosphere and for being the rare horror sequel that adds a back story for its monster that is actually interesting. Unfortunately, by Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth the filmmakers were making the mistake of showing too much of the Cenobites - the unpredictability of their appearances is part of their power, and once they starting added other Cenobites with compact discs and other things sticking out of their necks, they sacrificed that power. After this, the sequels become increasingly ridiculous - one revolves around a Hellraiser MMPORG - and Pinhead treated more like a generic movie monster. Bradley smartly passed on the latest DTV sequel; luckily, we'll always have the first two movies as a tribute to Barker's wild imagination.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #5 - The Thing

2011-10-30T19:51:00.003-04:00

The mimetic organism in John Carpenter's The Thing is easily the most mysterious character on this list. We never really see The Thing, only the people and animals it absorbs and imitates; the closest we come to a glimpse of the real Thing is in the grotesque states we see it in when its imitations are incomplete or threatened. We also never know what it's thinking - we know The Thing's goal is to assimilate all the lifeforms at the space station and (it's implied) all life on Earth, but we never know its purpose for this. In nature, mimesis is usually a defensive measure, which doesn't make sense for The Thing. While 1951's classic The Thing (From Another World) had a large, hulking alien as a stand-in for our fear of infiltration (Communist or otherwise), the amorphous alien of Carpenter's remake represents a more universal fear of the other. Of all the iconic extraterrestrials in film, The Thing is the most truly alien.

The overwhelming atmosphere of isolation and anxiety that Carpenter carefully builds is aided immensely by Rob Bottin's jaw-dropping makeup effects. The Thing was released in the heyday of latex-powered horror movies, films like An American Werewolf in London and Videodrome that relied on pre-CGI state-of-the-art makeup effects to create convincingly graphic scenes of the human body being transformed and/or mutilated. Bottin had the idea that The Thing would retain a cellular memory of organisms it had previously imitated, which would leave their traces in each stage of transformation. It's a brilliant idea that results in the be-all end-all of creature features - as Vincent Canby described it in his 1982 review in The New York Times:

It's entertaining only if one's needs are met by such sights as those of a head walking around on spiderlike legs; autopsies on dogs and humans in which the innards explode to take on other, not easily identifiable forms; hand severings, immolations, wormlike tentacles that emerge from the mouth of a severed head, or two or more burned bodies fused together to look like spareribs covered with barbecue sauce.

Canby means this all as a negative, but if you're a horror fan who somehow hasn't seen The Thing, doesn't that make you wish you were watching it right now? The reviews were very vicious when The Thing was released*, and the film bombed at the box office - it was released two weeks after E.T., and Carpenter has famously observed that Spielberg's film featured an alien that made people cry, whereas his alien made the audience throw up. But while The Thing's content was quite envelope-pushing for its time (it's still very strong), the negative reviews that complained it was an empty gore-fest were way off the mark. The effects are very much at the service of the story, and the strong performances of the ensemble and Carpenter's mastery of framing and timing to maximize suspense (including the most effective moment of misdirection, during the blood test scene, that I've ever seen) are crucial to the film's paranoid atmosphere. The film's cynical, ambiguous final scene suggests that The Thing is best-read as a stand-in for anxiety itself, that dreadful, amorphous monster that might be hiding in the most familiar of places. The tagline for The Thing was highly accurate - man is, indeed, the warmest place to hide.

*The critical consensus has improved a great deal over the years. I was amused, when watching At the Movies, when Roger Ebert recommended skipping the remake and watching Carpenter's film instead; he gave it a thumbs-down at the time.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #6 - Freddy Krueger

2011-10-29T14:31:00.011-04:00

I dressed as Freddy Krueger for my preschool class' Halloween party; it remains my favorite costume. My mom, from whom I inherited my love of horror, decided scar tissue makeup would be inappropriate for a four-year-old, but she found an appropriate hat and sweater and did wonders with a ski glove, drinking straws, tape and tinfoil. My teachers and some of the other parents were concerned about my interest in Freddy; ironically, my awareness of the character, besides having caught a few scenes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, was based largely on Robert Englund's appearance on Nickelodeon to promote A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (the highest-grossing film in the series until Freddy vs. Jason). A lot of kids my age were into Freddy, who was already as iconic to us as Frankenstein or Dracula. It's kind of amazing that at a character who began a vicious, terrifying supernatural killer in the low-budget original had, in the course of a few increasingly tongue-in-cheek movies, become an icon for an entire generation of kids.

And make no mistake - in Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy is a truly terrifying character, with one of the great backstories of any movie monster. A child murderer acquitted on a technicality (damn those movie bureaucrats and their inability to sign warrants!), Freddy is executed by a vengeful mob of local parents, only to return several years later to get his revenge by scaring their now-teenage children to death through their dreams. The character plays into our real and imagined fears - Craven has always been excellent at distilling our collective anxieties into a basic form, and Freddy is his greatest creation. As played by Englund in the original, he's a grotesque phantom, almost always concealed by shadows that show us just enough of his scarred, fearful visage. Freddy is terrifying for the surreal and creative ways he stalks his victims through the dream world, brutally illustrating that, as Night of the Hunter put it, it's a hard world for little things.

Yes, the wisecracking Freddy we see in the sequels dilutes the character's power, save for the thorny subtext of Freddy's Revenge and the just plain awesome Dream Warriors. But in his original conception, whether he's carving up a teenage girl or sucking Johnny Depp into his bed, Freddy is perverse, angry and completely monstrous. He's brought to life brilliantly by Englund, who - even in the sillier sequels - invests the character with a terribly distinctive physical presence worth of the silent horror greats. And while the series would eventually take it too far, Freddy's dark wisecracks make sense at first, as they're not meant as schtick so much as an extension of Freddy's toying with his victims. I met Englund a few weeks ago at the Rock and Shock horror convention in Worcester; he recognized my Let the Right One In shirt, exclaimed "Isn't that movie fantastic?!" and we proceded to talk about the movie and book for a few minutes. At the Nightmare on Elm Street Q&A panel, he revealed a vast knowledge of classic and obscure films, filmmakers and actors worthy of Quentin Tarantino. It was wonderful to discover that the most iconic boogeyman of my lifetime is as passionate a cinephile as I or any of us, and I think that love of film and performance shines through every moment Freddy is onscreen.

Incidentally, my daughter's preschool class' Halloween party is on Monday. She'll be going dressed as Cinderella.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #7 - Jame Gumb

2011-10-27T23:03:00.003-04:00

In his novels featuring Hannibal Lecter, author Thomas Harris subtly makes his cannibalistic psychiatrist less repulsive, even likable at points, by contrasting him against another, more off-putting killer. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is first accomplished with Lecter's neighbor in the asylum, Multiple Miggs - while Lecter may enjoy toying with FBI trainee Clarice Starling, he objects to Miggs' semen-flinging lack of hospitality and punishes him for the offense. Starling is sent to Lecter to help find Buffalo Bill, a serial killer at large who skins his victims; we meet "Bill" as he captures Catherine Martin, a senator's daughter who Starling will spend the book and movie trying to save. We learn that Bill, like Francis Dolarhyde, believes he is in a process of transformation, in his case by creating a "woman suit" out of the skin of his victims. As he instructs Catherine, famously, to put the lotion in the basket, he's repellent for all the reasons that Lecter is attractive - the former is inarticulate, weak and misogynistic, whereas Lecter is erudite, fiercely brilliant and enamored of Starling's feminine power (also, he opts for Bach's "Goldberg Variations" as a soundtrack to murder). Like Dolarhyde and Mason Verger, Bill (real name: Jame Gumb) is in a false process of transformation, whereas Lecter, in a completely dark and twisted way, has become more human than human.

There were complaints and protests by gay and lesbian groups, when Jonathan Demme's film of The Silence of the Lambs was released, that the sack-tucking Jame Gumb represented the same hostile stereotypes about "murderous gays" as Sharon Stone's AC/DC possible killer in Basic Instinct and the self-loathing gay killer in Cruising. But it's important to note, as Lecter does, that Gumb is not truly a transsexual - as Lecter points out, true transgendered people tend to be very nonviolent. Gumb is a psychopath whose abusive upbringing (explicit in the book, implied in the film) has led him to start his woman suit project as a response to his self-loathing and violent animosity towards women. As played by Ted Levine, who is fearless in moments like the now-iconic "Goodbye Horses" scene, he's the perfect monster for Clarice, who throughout the film is struggling to transcend the male gaze, to vanquish. Thanks to Jodie Foster's brilliant performance and Demme's marvelously empathetic direction, Starling is one of the strongest and most compelling female characters in cinema. And considering the horrible abyss her hero's journey leads her to descend into, it makes a perverse sense that one of her most affirmative relationships with a man is with a cannibal who believes in her. And Lecter has far too much taste to name his dog "Precious."

Scariest Characters in Cinema #8 - Jack Torrance

2011-10-27T12:04:00.004-04:00

I'm probably more familiar with The Shining than any other movie. I've seen it at least 100 times, read multiple books about Stanley Kubrick and the film, watched Vivian Kubrick's Making "The Shining" at least 5 times, read every possible review and interpretation of the film I can get my hands on and had countless discussions and debates about the film's possible meanings and whether it's better than Stephen King's book. I got excited earlier this year when someone posted a British TV ad from 1980 that had an alternate take of the "Here's Johnny" scene. I seriously thought about calling out of work and driving 6 hours to Rochester, NY to see what was advertised as a screening of the movie including the original, deleted ending (before they corrected their advertising - it was the 142-minute U.S. cut). If I ever ended up in the colony from the ending of Fahrenheit 451, but a colony to recite films instead of books, I would be The Shining.

So I thought a great deal about the many things that are frightening and effective about The Shining before deciding which character would represent the film here before realizing it would have to be Jack Torrance himself. After all, the Grady twins, the woman in room 237, the "WTF?" guy in a bear costume and every other ghost that resides in the Overlook is arguably conjured by Jack's tortured psyche and his tense relationship with his wife Wendy and their son Danny. To say that Jack Nicholson overacts in the role, or that Jack Torrance is crazy to begin with, is to miss the point, which is that the true horror of the movie is watching Jack's already-fragile mind slowly unravel. It's the greatest example in cinema of the movie's location mirroring the interior life of its protagonist.

The creepiest scene in the entire movie is simply Jack, with Danny on his lap, telling his son how much he loves him and looking like he could snap the boy's neck at any moment. In Kubrick's Overlook, evil is not an external supernatural force - it's something we all have the capacity for, and the Overlook's ghosts are a reflection of Jack's capacity for malevolence. Consider how easily he accepts the presence of ghosts in the Gold Room, or how, when he's talking to Grady's ghost, Nicholson's eyeline indicates he is actually talking into a mirror (volumes could be and have been written about the film's uses of mirrors and doubles). And when he snaps - raging at Wendy about the meaning of a contract, smashing through a locked bathroom door like the big bad wolf he's become and gradually devolving into a murderous animal - Jack's transformation is as startling as Regan McNeil's, and without any special effects. By the end, he's become one with the hotel and its murderous past - Jack and the Overlook's ghosts are one and the same. He's not a victim of the hotel; he's the caretaker, and he always has been.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #9 - Great White

2011-10-25T22:28:00.003-04:00

When I was younger (four or five, to be precise), my life revolved around my weekly trip to Depot Video in Sandown, New Hampshire on 2-for-1 Wednesdays. I could spend half an hour - longer, if I'd had the option - scrutinizing the VHS boxes on the shelves, making the careful choice of what I would take home with me that week. Or not so careful - sometimes it was Ghostbusters or The Road Warrior, sometimes it was My Pet Monster or Pound Puppies: The Movie. In any case, the trips to this little mom-and-pop video store housed in a former railroad depot held the same level of excitement and importance as a freebie trip through the Criterion closet would today.

An important part of this ritual was reorganizing titles in the categories I felt they belonged - the manager was kind enough to indulge a smartass preschooler telling him how he should run his business. And every week, I would inevitably move Jaws from action/adventure to horror. After watching the movie at my uncle's house and being scared silly, this was an inarguable fact in my four-year-old brain: Jaws is a horror movie. And over the years, when people ask me to name my favorite movies and I include Jaws, they tend to ask, "Is Jaws a horror movie?" My feelings have not changed: Jaws. Is. A. Horror. Movie.

It's a horror movie for its brutal opening - the swimmer cries of "God, help me!" swiftly silenced as the shark pulls her underwater. It's a horror movie for the merciless way it kills off a nine-year-old, the shark's second victim, whose death scene is punctuated by a geyser of blood. It's a horror movie for the way it builds our dread of the shark, even in its absence from the film. It's a horror movie for the way that Ben Gardner's grimacing, one-eyed corpse pops in to say hello. And while the second half of the movie definitely has a jauntier, Melville-as-popcorn-movie feel, it remains horror in the blood spurting from Quint's mount in his last moments and the stunning shot of Chief Brody swimming across the waterlogged cabin of the drowning Orca just as the shark crashes in, the water-level shot placing us in the point of view of soon-to-be-chum. For this and many other reasons, Jaws is a horror movie.

But while people debate where Jaws belongs in the video store, few are in disagreement that Jaws is a great movie. It has all of the technical and storytelling brilliance that we would come to identify with Spielberg, along with a mercilessness that has, for better or worse, mostly disappeared from his work. And the Great White is an amazing monster - perfect in its absences and the moments when its presence is merely suggested, and perfect when it suddenly reveals itself to a petrified Chief Brody. With its senseless and insatiable hunger, the shark has scared the hell out of millions since 1975 - I love hearing stories of people who saw Jaws when it was released and stayed out of the water for the rest of the summer. It also has very vindictive descendants with a long memory, at least judging by its sequels, which are practically Dadaist in their very existence. But like all iconic masterpieces, Jaws has survived and outlasted the sequels and ripoffs; it's horror at its most archetypal, universal and perfect. In a strange way, Jaws makes me proud to be a New Englander.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #10 - Captain Howdy

2011-10-25T00:48:00.006-04:00

A confession: while The Exorcist is an excellent film and I've always admired it, it's never been one of my favorite horror movies. There's no denying that the adaptation of William Peter Blatty's book is brilliantly crafted, but I've always found it to be cold, calculated and difficult to fully embrace. I've always felt that Stephen King's misguided assessment of Stanley Kubrick ("I think he really wants to make a movie that will hurt people") is actually true of William Friedkin, whose directorial style is bluntly manipulative and betrays little feeling for his characters. His direction is plot-driven in the worst way, barely stopping to allow the brilliant, empathetic performances by Ellen Burstyn and Jason Miller to breathe and never really engaging with the questions of the nature of faith that it raises. Hearing the stories of how Friedkin tortured his actors - firing shotguns to startle them, verbally berating them and, at one point, slapping the real-life priest who played Father Karras' friend to get a convincingly shaky reaction shot - just make him sound like an asshole with confused priorities. None of this means The Exorcist isn't a great film, but I roll my eyes when I see it at the top of "all-time best horror movie" list instead of movies that are just as well-made but are much deeper and richer in feeling.

That said, The Exorcist is still a pretty damn impressive of what Pauline Kael called a "boo movie" - its scares are perfectly timed, and I admire how little Regan MacNeil's deterioration from a cute 11-year-old to a foul-mouthed, demon-possessed monster happens at a gradual, almost imperceptible rate. By the time she's peeing on the rug, the film's horror has crept up on us; we're as startled as her mother Chris and her party guests at the girl's personality shift. Regan's possession by an unknown demon she calls "Captain Howdy" leads to the still-startling scenes of the young girl letting out torrents of profanity and having the most blasphemous Judy Blume moment ever with a crucifix. Dick Smith's incredible makeup work, the head-spinning effects and the projectile pea soup all add to the film's effectiveness, but it's the demon's vulgar sexuality as portrayed by an adolescent girl that is responsible for its enormous, enduring popularity. This isn't a new observation, but it's true that Captain Howdy's possession of Regan is the worst-case scenario of every parent's fear of what happens when their special little girl grows up.

Blair must have been a young woman of incredible maturity, and not just for making it through what was by all accounts an ordeal of a film shoot. The believability of the story depends entirely on the performances, especially Blair's, and she is totally convincing as the possessed young girl (Eileen Dietz as Regan's stand-in in some of the more explicit shots and Mercedes McCambridge as the demon's voice deserve credit too). Blair didn't fare as well in John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, which is fascinating in the way that complete trainwrecks tend to be. Blatty's own The Exorcist III, despite studio interference, is very effective, with the emotional resonance the original lacks. It also has its own memorable monster - Brad Dourif as the resurrected Gemini Killer - and one of the best jump scares of all time. The troubled story of Paul Schrader's troubled prequel and Renny Harlin's pseudo-remake has been well-documented, and while Schrader's isn't totally without interest, neither one is very memorable. None have touched the original in terms of cultural impact - though I'm nitpicking one of the best-loved horror movies, there's no denying that it was the right scary story for its time, or that Captain Howdy still has the ability to shake us.

Dawn of the Curse of the Abominable Centipede

2011-10-24T21:36:00.015-04:00

In case it hasn't been abundantly obvious, I love Halloween. Fall is my favorite season, and I love how, for one month, there are witches, ghosts and goblins on people's front lawns, horror marathons on TV and kids are excited to dress up as monsters and demand candy from their neighbors. Being a horror movie fan was my gateway into being a cinephile, and I love that for one month my interests, which sometimes strike people as a preoccupation with the morbid, are shared by everyone. So Dennis Cozzalio's surprised horror-themed movie quiz at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, presented by Vincent Price's disfigured, revenge-seeking Dr. Phibes, is a very pleasant surprise. Thanks, Dennis, for another fun quiz and an excellent way to get into the holiday spirit!

1) Favorite Vincent Price/American International Pictures release.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes, as a matter of fact.

2) What horror classic (or non-classic) that has not yet been remade would you like to see upgraded for modern audiences?
The Funhouse - such a great premise, and the original is a lot of fun but not so iconic that a remake would feel like sacrelige.

3) Jonathan Frid or Thayer David?
Jonathan Frid

4) Name the one horror movie you need to see that has so far eluded you.
The Curse of Frankenstein

5) Favorite film director most closely associated with the horror genre.
John Carpenter

6) Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?
Ingrid Pitt

7) Favorite 50’s sci-fi/horror creature.
The "Id Monster" from Forbidden Planet.

8) Favorite/best sequel to an established horror classic.
Dawn of the Dead

9) Name a sequel in a horror series which clearly signaled that the once-vital franchise had run out of gas.
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline

10) John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr.?
Lon Chaney Jr.

11) What was the last horror movie you saw in a theater? On DVD or Blu-ray?
In a theater, Fright Night. On DVD, Scream 4.

12) Best foreign-language fiend/monster.
Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu.

13) Favorite Mario Bava movie.
Black Sunday

14) Favorite horror actor and actress.
Donald Pleasance and Sigourney Weaver. For all the reputable movies as she's appeared in, her performances as Lt. Ellen Ripley remain her best work.

15) Name a great horror director’s least effective movie.
Ghosts of Mars

16) Grayson Hall or Joan Bennett?
Joan Bennett

17) When did you realize that you were a fan of the horror genre? And if you’re not, when did you realize you weren’t?
Around 4 years old, sneaking into the living room late at night and glimpsing a few scenes from Halloween. I had my had my hands over my eyes for most of it, I had nightmares for a month and I couldn't wait to see the whole movie.

18) Favorite Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) movie.
Earth vs. the Spider

19) Name an obscure horror favorite that you wish more people knew about.
Mario Bava's Shock (AKA Beyond the Door II)

20) The Human Centipede-- yes or no?
I haven't seen it yet. I will soon, at Jason Alley's request.

21) And while we’re in the neighborhood, is there a horror film you can think of that you felt “went too far”?
One of the purposes of the horror genre is to go to far - many of the very best horror movies explore transgressive ideas and situations. That said, I have a problem with the killing of real animals in Cannibal Holocaust and a few others.

22) Name a film that is technically outside the horror genre that you might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film.
Eraserhead

23) Lara Parker or Kathryn Leigh Scott?
Lara Parker

24) If you’re a horror fan, at some point in your past your dad, grandmother, teacher or some other disgusted figure of authority probably wagged her/his finger at you and said, “Why do you insist on reading/watching all this morbid monster/horror junk?” How did you reply? And if that reply fell short somehow, how would you have liked to have replied?
I had a few teachers, over the years, who "tsk-tsked" my reading Stephen King and EC Comics, or sharing VHS copies of horror movies with classmates. At the Christian school I attended for a few years, I was told more than once that Jesus would disapprove of my fascination with horror. If I could go back in time, I'd let them know that, a few years later, Jesus would be a subject of a grisly splatter movie that is also the highest-grossing Christian-themed movie of all time. I doubt they'd believe me.

25) Name the critic or Web site you most enjoy reading on the subject of the horror genre.
Stacie Ponder

26) Most frightening image you’ve ever taken away from a horror movie.
From The Shining: The woman in Room 237, cackling maniacally as she reaches out for a petrified Jack Nicholson.

27) Your favorite memory associated with watching a horror movie.
Watching The Shining for the first time with my mom and dad. It was one of the first movies that, before I had the correct terminology to describe what I was seeing, I started to notice what a director does.

28) What would you say is the most important/significant horror movie of the past 20 years (1992-2012)? Why?
Scream. Before it was released, horror had been mostly stagnant for several years. Everything since Scream is either influenced by, borrowing or stealing from it (the long list of postmodern or self-referential horror), or a direct reaction to it (the deliberate move away from the postmodern in the form of torture porn, J-horror, etc.). This is made obvious in Scream 4, which is partly about how the series seems like an ancient relic now that the genre and its fans have completely absorbed and integrated its sense of ironic detachment (I can't tell if I admire or hate Scream 4 for being about its own irrelevance).

29) Favorite Dr. Phibes curse (from either film).
Locusts!

30) You are programming an all-night Halloween horror-thon for your favorite old movie palace. What five movies make up your schedule?
The Haunting, Suspiria, The Evil Dead, Creepshow, They Live

Scariest Characters in Cinema #11 - Pennywise

2011-10-23T19:39:00.003-04:00

I'm a bit of a snob about TV movies, generally refusing to group them in with feature films - while Angels in America, for instance, was among the best movies of 2003, it's a miniseries, it's its own thing, and it doesn't make sense to me to put it on a ten best list with films that are essentially a different medium. However, I have to make an exception for this list, which just wouldn't be complete without Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown in the 1990 miniseries of Stephen King's It. The book is one of King's strongest, and Pennywise - the shape-shifting embodiment of the element of fear itself, which for some reason favors the persona of a clown as its default avatar - is King's most terrifying creation. Pennywise preys on the fears of children in the fictional small town of Derry, Maine before devouring them; set in the 1950s, the book is about a group of friends who manage to defeat Pennywise before having to return to the town 30 years later to face the clown again. Mixing moments of pulpy horror, a Lovecraftian mythology that encompasses universal good and evil, and a sensitive, Bradbury-influenced story of childhood's end, It is King's magnum opus (no small feat given he has never been into the whole brevity thing).

The miniseries is good but limited by the restrictions of network censorship, discarding the darker and more esoteric aspects of the book. Still, it's a strong effort with a good cast - the adult members of the "lucky seven" are mostly played by TV stars like John Ritter and Harry Anderson, and you can tell they're relishing being given the opportunity to play such well-crafted characters. And if there's one thing the miniseries gets absolutely right, it's the casting of Tim Curry as Pennywise. Curry has never balked at playing larger-than-life characters or creating a character beneath heavy makeup, whether the role is Dr. Frank-n-Further or Legend's Darkness. Beneath white grease paint and a flaming red wig, Curry makes hairpin turns from aw-shucks geniality to blood-curdling menace; he's one of the few actors who could be believable as a murderous supernatural clown. And director Tommy Lee Wallace, a protégé of John Carpenter, does a great job of making Pennywise's appearances unpredictable, often framing him in wide shots as the clown occupies the frame with the same uncanny quality as Michael Myers.

I watched It on its original two-night airing, when I was six; Pennywise was all I and the other kids in the neighborhood who had parents questionably permissive enough to allow them to watch It could talk about. While I can see the low-budget seams more clearly as an adult, Curry's performance still gives me the willies. I don't know whether coulrophobia was common before It - whether King was influenced by a collective fear of clowns or if his book was the impetus for the "evil clown" trend. In any case, It would make an excellent teaching tool to encourage one's children not to accept balloons from strange clowns.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #12 - Henry

2011-10-23T15:21:00.003-04:00

I didn't really like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer the first time I saw it. I was put off by the banality of the characters and story - inspired by the confessions (many of which were proven false) of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, the film follows its Henry (Michael Rooker) as he kills several people, takes his dopey roommate Otis (Tom Towles) under his ring and has the saddest almost-relationship imaginable with Otis' sister Becky (Tracy Arnold). I felt Henry's crimes were shot flatly, without suspense, and the film had little to say about why Henry is the way he is. Seeing it again on 35mm last year at the terrific, greatly missed Shaun Luu Horror Fest in Syracuse, I realized the banality is the point - director John MacNaughton aims for verisimilitude, and Henry and Otis' murders are presented as pointless, sad and difficult to watch. MacNaughton seems to be withholding analysis because, ultimately, there's no explanation of Henry's actions that justifies their ugliness. He just is what he is.

The movie's most important moment is the most depressing bonding scene ever, as Henry and Becky talk about the different ways they've been physically and sexually abused. Henry confesses to having stabbed his mother, listing the ways she abused him as a child. But as he wraps up his story, he says that he shot her; Becky questions this, and he flatly corrects himself - "Oh yeah, that's right. I stabbed her." While Henry has certainly been affected by his traumatic childhood, we can't hope to explain him; he can't explain himself. Rooker's performance led to higher-profile roles and his long-running career as a reliable character actor, and deservedly so; he's totally committed to the role, never winking at the audience or playing for our sympathies. Whether Henry's buying a pack of smokes or reviewing a video recording of the night he and Otis murdered an entire family, he's consistently emotionless, cold, without remorse or self-reflection.

That the film was given an X rating by the MPAA, despite being less graphic than your average Friday the 13th sequel, says a lot about how the ratings board works. By taking violence and its consequences seriously, Henry was deemed less appropriate for teens than movies that present violence purely for entertainment. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is definitely a difficult movie to watch and appreciate, but it's also an important one and, if you're in the right frame of mind, it's a fascinating, disconcerting experience.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #13 - Billy

2011-10-22T10:52:00.004-04:00

Black Christmas is, famously, one of the films that set the template for slasher movies. While great directors like John Carpenter built upon the techniques director Bob Clark uses here - scenes shot from the killer's POV, a Ten Little Indians-style story structure in an isolated setting, the use of a holiday as ironic backdrop - and other, less creative filmmakers simply imitated them, what's remarkable is how fresh Black Christmas still feels. The characters, young women living in a sorority house, are well-drawn and sympathetic; we feel they have lives outside of waiting to get killed in a horror movie (I'm partial to Margot Kidder as the boozy, raunchy Barb). The house itself is a marvelously gothic location, the lighting is cold and ominous, the (often handheld) camerawork and editing and atonal score work to keep us on edge. And Clark does an excellent job of creating a menacing atmosphere from the chilly underside of the holiday; Christmas carolers have never sounded so grim.

The prototypical slasher here is "Billy," a maniac who has been making obscene calls to the sorority sisters for some time and, as we see in the opening scene, is actually hiding in the attic. I'm not sure if this is the first movie to play on the old "the calls are coming from inside the house" story, but it predates When a Stranger Calls and it's certainly the best variation on that old campfire tales. We learn little about Billy during the movie; from his calls, we hear fragments of Billy adapting the voice of "Agnes" and other family members, wanting to know what happened with "the baby" - the clues we're given are more frightening because they remain unanswered (actually, there's a lot of Billy in Session 9's Mary Hobbes). And we barely see Billy, save for a few terrifying close-ups of his eye. He remains a complete mystery to us, even as the end credits roll; as Carpenter and other directors would later grasp, the scariest monsters are often the ones that remain beyond our comprehension.

Speaking of incomprehensible, Bob Clark's career went on to include A Christmas Story (where the only monster is Scott Farkus), Porky's I and II, the Sylvester Stallone/Dolly Parton vehicle Rhinestone (the only film he made that is scarier than Black Christmas) and Baby Geniuses 1 and 2 (scratch that last parenthetical remark). At least Clark, who died in a car accident a few years back, will forever have two Christmas-themed classics to his name. I haven't seen the Black Christmas remake; reading about the plot on Wikipedia, apparently Billy is given an elaborate back story that is, in part, about his being abused by his mother due to his severe jaundice. Yeah, that's clearly what the original lacked.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #14 - Mary Hobbes/Simon

2011-10-20T21:38:00.004-04:00

The Danvers State Hospital, the location of Brad Anderson's Session 9, was a real piece of work. A psychiatric hospital that opened in the late-19th century, Danvers State closed in the 1980s as mental health care moved away from institutionalization in favor of assisted living and community-based programs. There have long been rumors and horror stories about abusive treatment of patients, shock therapy and lobotomies used to control the hospital's populace, and since its closure it had the definite aura of a "bad place," as Stephen King would put it. Danvers is about 40 miles from my house, and it wasn't uncommon for teens to sneak onto the hospital's premises late at night looking for cheap scares.

Session 9 was filmed at the hospital, and filmmaker Brad Anderson uses the location to marvelously creepy effect. As the hospital's interiors are explored by a small asbestos removal company hired to clean up the building, the crumbling walls, labyrinthine corridors and overall decay mirror the hospital's dark past and the mental strain of the film's characters, who are dealing with financial pressure and trouble at home with their wives and spouses (this tension results in the best delivery of the line "Fuck you" in the history of cinema). The film has an almost unbearable sustained atmosphere of dread, particularly on the tapes that one member of the team, Mike (Steven Gevedon, also the movie's screenwriter) discovers and listens to over the course of the film. These tapes are records of nine sessions with a patient named Mary Hobbes, a woman suffering from dissociative identity disorder. As we meet hear from Mary's multiple personalities - the childlike Princess and the protective Billy - and their unwillingness to discuss another personality, the absent Simon, we're given suggestions that something Mary has done something terrible. This is mirrored in the main plot which, like Don't Look Now, is constantly giving us fragmented visual clues pointing towards something very bad that has happened in the narrative's present.

We eventually hear from Simon, who speaks in a low, masculine voice that is nothing like Mary's. This is something I can't really analyze, but disembodied, threatening male voices in a horror movie are one of the quickest and easiest ways to freak me the hell out. Even a pretty silly movie like Insidious can still prompt me to turn the lights on once Rose Byrne hears that creeepy male voice on her baby monitor (eeagh...). When we learn what Simon did, and what is really going on with our protagonists, Session 9 becomes disturbing in a very tragic way - when Simon tells us he lives in "the weak and the wounded," the line and everything it implies is very hard to shake. Session 9 is the scariest horror movie in the last ten years, and one of the few movies that I absolutely cannot watch by myself. As for Danvers State, it was torn down a few years back. There are now condominiums where it stood - tell me that doesn't beg for a sequel.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #15 - Anton Chigurh

2011-10-19T22:42:00.003-04:00

Way back in 2007, I described Anton Chigurh as "a villian of elemental violence who cuts a bloody path towards his prey with a dogged, businesslike precision." I'm hopefully a bit less prone to overwriting than I used to be, but otherwise I still agree with my assessment of the character. Revisiting No Country for Old Men recently, I admired how the Coens are unable, in a "serious" thriller, to go for the throat with a villain who would be equally at home in a slasher movie. Everything about Chigurh (Javier Bardem) - his pallid skin, his death rattle of a voice, his quiet determination, that damn haircut - is seemingly engineered to get under our skin, and Bardem gives us the impression that Chigurh is happy for the opportunity to do so.

That's the scariest thing about Chigurh - his complete disdain for humanity and any kind of code or order outside of the maddening, self-reflexive one he has created for himself (one arbitrary enough to hinge on a literal coin toss). Yes, it's scary that he's capable of pitiless violence and cruelty, especially since he has a device that can smash your brain before you know what's happened. That's upsetting. But it's scarier knowing that he's not a psychopath or a supernatural monster but a hired hand doing terrible things in the service of his own ghastly but logical-unto-itself way of life. He's nothingness personified (say what you will about the tenets of socialism, at least it's an ethos). And worse still, for everything Chigurh is capable of, he's not the worst we have to fear. As the film's pitch-black ending suggests, he's only the messenger.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #16 - Candyman

2011-10-19T00:51:00.004-04:00

One of Clive Barker's greatest talents is his insight into the significance of horror archetypes even as he employs them to terrifying effect. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), the protagonist of Candyman (adapted from Barker's short story "The Forbidden") is a grad student who, in conducting interviews for her thesis on urban legends, hears repeated references to the Candyman, a vengeful African-American ghost with a hook for a hand who, like "Bloody Mary," appears when summoned by repeating his name five times into a bathroom mirror. The Candyman is a mixture of standard tropes of urban legends and our uneasy knowledge of our national history of racism and oppression. As Helen's research on Candyman leads her into the most dangerous housing projects of early-'90s Chicago, the film has a good deal to say about the role of oral tradition in our culture, how supernatural fears can be representative of real-life fears anxieties over poverty, crime and racial tension (Candyman was filmed during the Rodney King trial and released months after the L.A. riots).

And just as the film has successfully deconstructed urban legends and put its boogeyman in a larger social context, the Candyman (Tony Todd) appears to Helen and us to assert his existence with a vengeance. Director Bernard Rose's elegant, restrained direction does an excellent job, as Candyman stalks Helen, of blurring the line between reality and nightmares. Rose even hypnotized Madsen for her scenes with the Candyman (a technique previously used by Werner Herzog for Heart of Glass) to give her performance a hallucinatory quality. As we learn more about the Candyman's origin, the story becomes an intersection of the darkest aspects of our culture's notions of race, gender and sexuality - the Candyman is a very real manifestation of our collective guilt. But Candyman isn't just a treatise - it's a great, gory, terrifying ghost story, with a boogeyman (played with gravitas by the gravel-voiced Todd) who both elicits our sympathy and scares the bejesus out of us. The sequels don't work at all, but the original, which kept me up all night after a slumber-party screening in the fifth grade, is still deeply unsettling.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #17 - Norman Bates

2011-10-17T23:44:00.004-04:00

Psycho is one of those movies I avoid writing about in this blog because, really, there's nothing I can say about it that you don't already know ("This just in: The Godfather is great!"). And yet this list wouldn't be complete without Norman Bates, so I'll just talk about my favorite thing about Psycho - namely, the accumulation of details pointing to its macabre punchline. There's Norman's bedroom, with its collection of toy horses, classical records and children's wallpaper, seemingly unchanged since his childhood. Or Norman's meal for Marian - sandwiches and milk - that he feels would be most comfortably enjoyed in the parlor. The way he trips over the word "invalid" when talking about his mother. The candy corn he munches compulsively during his interrogation by Detective Arbogast. And my favorite, the three (at least) meanings of the line "My hobby is stuffing things." All of these little details that seem at first endearing, once you've seen the film, reveal themselves on repeat viewings to be unmistakable signs of Norman's deeply repressed, nature and their manifestation in his relationship with his mother.

I don't mean to sound like Simon Oakland, but while Psycho is hardly a film of psychological realism (nor is it meant to be), it does pay fantastic attention to the details that make Norman, and what happens to him, completely believable and compelling within the context of the movie, as well as being darkly hilarious. Anthony Perkins is amazing as Norman, completely mesmerizing in the wordless sequence where he cleans up the mess Mother has made in the shower, culminating in that wonderful moment, before Marian's car fully submerges in the swamp, when we share Norman's tension that it will not sink, then realize how perversely Hitchcock has twisted our sympathies. As I said, you know this already, but Psycho is one of those rare movies that actually gets better with age and familiarity.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #18 - Francis Dolarhyde

2011-10-16T20:19:00.007-04:00

A common trait of the performances on this list is a stillness, a confident quietness that underlines the villain's sinister authority. This is definitely true of Tom Noonan's performance as Francis Dolarhyde in Manhunter, Michael Mann's adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon (the first and still the best of Harris' books featuring Hannibal Lecter). From his introduction to a captive soon-to-be-victim ("Well, here I am."), Noonan dominates the frame, both thanks to his large, imposing figure and the calm, methodical nature he uses to suggest the character's icy remove from humanity. Even when Dolarhyde is absent from the screen during FBI profiler Will Graham's (William Peterson) search for the man known as the "Tooth Fairy" by his pursuers because of the bite marks he has left on his victims (two families thus far), we feel his presence due to the elusive quality he brings to the character.

While films and TV shows often try to understand the mind of a killer - TV's "Dexter," for instance, has provided us with the title character's inner monologue for six seasons - and Harris provides a good deal of Dolarhyde's background in the book, Mann chooses to pare our understanding of the character down to the essentials. We know Dolarhyde has a corrected cleft palate, and can infer how this may have contributed to his emotional detachment from others. And we know, thanks to his stylish apartment, that for a serial killer he has outstanding taste in interior decoration (this says less about him being a serial killer than it does about him being a character in a Michael Mann movie). Other than that, he's an unknowable force to us, a mysterious Other that may well be the embodiment of the William Blake painting "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in The Sun," which Dolarhyde idolizes and emulates - the devil as a creature of perfect strength and purpose. When Dolarhyde flirts with an actual relationship with Reba (Joan Allen), a blind co-worker, Noonan does an amazing job with such a verbally inexpressive character, suggesting Dolarhyde's desire to connect but also the constant rage he can't suppress. He's reminiscent of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, isolated in his monstrousness.

He's the perfect counterpoint for Graham, who has warily left retirement to find Dolarhyde, disturbed by his uncanny ability to think like a monster. And also by Lecter (Brian Cox), who was caught by Graham and who, in Mann's film, is not the charismatic, darkly funny Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins; here, he's a reptile in a vivarium, and his contempt for all humankind (not just the rude and distasteful) is palpable. The good and bad guys share a brilliant understanding of their work process and a greater difficulty relating to others. This is a common theme in Mann's work, and it is evident in the methodical distance of Mann's filmmaking style (I used to regard this as a problem, now I see it as honest self-reflection on the director's part). While the 2002 film Red Dragon boasts an excellent cast, it's a hamhanded, clumsily staged film that never comes close to Manhunter's visual brilliance and thematic depth (director Brett Ratner was dismissive of Mann in interviews when the movie was released, though a couple of shots are lifted directly from the earlier film). And Noonan has played many other memorably creepy characters over the years, including (appropriately) Frankenstein's monster in the following year's The Monster Squad, the mysterious Mr. Ullman in The House of the Devil and, hilariously, Caden Cotard's lifelong stalker and imitator Sammy Barnathan in Synecdoche, New York. And thanks to Noonan and Mann, "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" has never been the same.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #19 - The Pale Man

2011-10-15T20:19:00.004-04:00

Of all the amazing monsters and strange creatures born from the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, the Pale Man is the most frightening. Although Pan's Labyrinth is more of a dark fantasy than a horror film, we meet del Toro's scariest creation during 12-year-old Ofelia's quest to complete three tasks the titular faun has assigned her to prove she is the reincarnation of the princess of the underworld. She is sent to retrieve a dagger from the lair of the Pale Man, a tall, gaunt figure with drooping white skin, sharp teeth, and clawlike fingers. Most disturbing are his eyeless, featureless face and the eyes that are set, instead, in the palms of his hands. When Ofelia disregards one of the faun's instructions and plucks a grape from the Pale Man's banquet spread, he gets pretty pissed about it. He wakes up, bites the heads off two fairies who were helping Ofelia and stalks her down the long hallway to her exit; Ofelia barely escapes.

The Pale Man's appearance only takes up about five minutes of running time, but he's unforgettable. On one level, he's a great metaphor for the decadence of fascist Spain during WWII, the movie's setting. On the other hand, he works because HE BITES THE HEADS OFF OF FAIRIES, he has a horrible, unnatural howl and, when he raises his hands to his face to see, the image has a perfectly uncanny quality. He's like a Fuseli painting brought to life, the horribly perfect end result of some strange alternate thread of evolution. And he's not going to share his grapes; he's saving them for later.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #20 - Eli

2011-10-14T00:50:00.004-04:00

Once I referred to the movie Let the Right One In as a sweet movie, and the person I was talking to said, "I wouldn't say it was sweet." Well, I said sweet and I meant it - Let the Right One In captures in aching detail the feeling of being a weird, lonely kid who, for the first time, thinks he's found someone who understands him. Based on the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist and set in a small town in 1980s Sweden, the film is about 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), who secretly acts out violent revenge fantasies against the schoolyard bullies who are cruel to him in the way that only kids can be. Oskar begins a tentative friendship with Eli (Lina Leandersson), a mysterious girl who lives in his apartment building, only comes out at night and isn't bothered by standing barefoot in the snow. Eli at first tells Oskar they cannot be friends, but eventually they start to form a peculiar sort of bond. She encourages Oskar to stand up for himself, and he helps her to have more fun being a kid. Which she's not, of course - she's a vampire who feeds on the locals, she's hundreds of years old and, as she informs Oskar, she's not even really a girl. None of this matters in the long run to Oskar, of course. Love is blind, particularly first love.

Eli is a sympathetic character, but she's also very monstrous and frightening. While we mostly see her as a beautiful young girl, director Tomas Alfredson perfectly times brief glimpses of the monster inside Eli. Her voice and face distort themselves subtly, only for moments, and we're reminded that Eli is primarily driven by her insatiable hunger. In Eli's human helper, a sad-eyed man in his fifties named Hakan (Per Ragnar), we are given ominous hints of what will happen to Oskar if he sticks with Eli. It's difficult to determine how much Eli is depending on Oskar to survive and how much she truly cares for him, but their relationship is a perfect metaphor for young love as a result - they boy's getting used, and he loves her for it. The title, taken from a Morrissey song, refers to the rule that vampires need to be invited into your home, and it's also an important word of caution to anyone falling in love. Besides, Eli is there for Oskar when it matters (those of you who have seen the movie know exactly what scene I'm thinking of). Matt Reeves' remake Let Me In is worthy transplant of the original to the American idiom, with strong performances and a stunning sequence set to Blue Oyster Cult. But Alfredson's original is one of the best films of the past decade, a movie that becomes deeper, more moving and more chilling every time I see it.

Also, it's like a thousand times better than Twilight.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #21 - The Tall Man

2011-10-12T21:55:00.003-04:00

Phantasm is one of the best examples of the virtues of independent filmmaking, particularly with genre films. It involves a scary morgue, killer dwarves, interdimensional travel, Dune references and smooth jams - somehow, all of these strange elements, which would have never survived the development process of the studio system, work together beautifully. Its many endearing idiosyncrasies feel like they have sprung whole from the mind of writer/director Don Coscarelli, who began with the goal of scaring the pants off audiences and, in the process, created one of the most unique ongoing mythologies in horror cinema. Even when the Phantasm sequels become a bit too silly (the shotgun-wielding 10-year-old in Phantasm III, for instance) they're never generic retreads; each film legitimately continues and expands the universe developed in the first film. They're so stubbornly rooted in 1979, like the movie adaptation of the greatest stoner rock album cover ever, that I can't help but kind of love them.

Phantasm is best known, of course, for two things - the deadly flying silver spheres that deliver impromptu lobotomies to their victims and Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, the mysterious mortician that has diabolical plans involving the aformentioned killer dwarves and parallel universes. The 6'4" Scrimm wore platform shoes to further emphasize the Tall Man's imposing figure; his disproportionate size, especially in contrast to the first film's adolescent protagonist (A. Michael Baldwin) emphasizes the way Coscarelli cleverly plays on children's fear of authority figures (Phantasm is the perfect horror movie for 10-year-olds). It's a nearly dialogue free-performance, and Scrimm's is a physical performance worthy of Max Schreck. He stalks through Phantasm's surreal universe like he owns the place - which, actually, he sort of does.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #22 - Asami Yamazaki

2011-10-11T21:10:00.004-04:00

I debated whether or not to include Audition on this list. It's a film I don't have a lot of affection for, one of a particular brand of horror films that have cropped up over the last ten or so years that emphasize pain and degradation over imagination and atmosphere. The common categorization of "torture porn" isn't totally accurate, as some of the films that could be called torture porn (especially Eli Roth's Hostel movies) do possess a certain twisted humor and affection for the genre. It's more the breed of misanthropic horror that is only about endurance, proving to your friends how much disturbing shit you can take (sort of the cinematic equivalent of Warheads). It's worse when horror fans attempt to defend these movies on a subtextual level - while horror is often rich with social commentary, in these films it feels like a pretense to justify an empty experience.

I have no doubt that, in Audition, director Takashi Miike meant for the torture middle-aged widow Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) endures at the hands of the mysterious, sadistic Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), to be some form of comeuppance for his earlier objectification of the woman in his search for a new wife. But I think it's also fair to say that Shigeharu's punishment far outweighs his crime, which makes it hard to take Audition seriously as a commentary on gender politics. While it's suggested that Asami may be damaged by traumatic experiences in her youth, none of it really explains where the movie ends up. She's just a crazy bitch - I won't accuse Miike of flat-out misogyny, but if he is truly concerned about sexism in contemporary Japan, Audition is a weird way to show it.

On the other hand, I can't deny that it's a very frightening, effective movie. The last 20 minutes are almost impossible to watch, at one point teasing us with the possibility of an exit before plunging us back into the nightmare. Miike, whose other films mostly seem like the work of a hyperactive, antisocial 9-year-old scribbling grotesque revenge fantasies in his Trapper Keeper, demonstrates a surprising mastery of sustained tension here. I admire the banality of the first 30 minutes, gradually developing a sense that something is deeply wrong, until the brilliant "bag scene." Shiina is beautiful, which makes for a disturbing contrast with her sadism - I still get chills when I think of her softly chanting "kiri kiri kiri" (a Japanese onomatopoeia for "pain"). And she's creepiest at the very end, after so much ugliness, as she clearly still adores poor Shigeharu. Ain't love grand?

Scariest Characters in Cinema #23 - John Doe

2011-10-10T20:00:00.006-04:00

The coolest thing Kevin Spacey has ever done - 15-year-old spoiler alert! - was to insist that he be uncredited in the (amazing) opening titles of Seven and kept out of the trailers and marketing materials. As John Doe, the serial killer with a Biblical agenda that Detectives Mills and Somerset (Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) are hunting, Spacey is barely seen or heard for the first three-quarters of the movie. When he enters the movie, covered in blood and calmly introducing himself to his pursuers ("Detectiiiive!"), it serves as much more than a "Hey, that's Kevin Spacey!" moment. For most of the movie we've seen the evidence of his grisly mission to cleanse his city of sinners, details of his brilliant, exacting and methodical nature (this is also our proper introduction to director David Fincher's flair for darkness [thematic and literal] and procedure-oriented drama). When he introduces himself to Mills and Somerset, our attention shifts from the grisly investigation to dread at how John Doe's surrender fits into his plan.

Much of the film is set up as a series of Socratic dialogues between Mills, who believes in his ability to do good in the world, and his older, more jaded partner, who believes that the world is beyond helping. When John Doe, in the back of a squad car on the way to uncover his final victims (claims) joins the conversation, he's terrifying because he clearly believes his murders are making the world a better place - he's the dark reflection of Somerset's cynicism and Mills' self-righteousness. For a murderous psychopath, he's pretty perceptive. Spacey is soft-spoken and centered (I love his delivery, when Somerset discovers a dead dog, of the line "I didn't do that"), and as he turns the tables on the detectives in horrible fashion, his obvious pleasure at the plan he's executed not only provokes Mills' wrath but ours too. The still-shocking ending (which Brad Pitt insisted in his contract not be changed by the studio) continues to disturb not just because of what's in the box but because of what it tells us about how we act upon our own morality. I'd do exactly what Mills does, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that knowledge, which is exactly as John Doe would want it.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #24 - Mystery Man

2011-10-08T20:12:00.004-04:00

While the films of David Lynch mostly defy genre classification, they're often as unnerving as any horror film. And Lynch's dark imagination has given us many memorable monsters - Frank Booth, Henry Spencer's baby, the monster behind Winky's - that seem as if they emerged straight from his and our collective unconscious. The scariest is the Robert Blake as the "mystery man" (as he is credited) who approaches Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) at a party in Lost Highway and informs him they've met before. Blake serves as the creepy center of one of Lynch's most elusive films, present in both storylines/universes and serving as - what? A conscience? A manifestation of Fred/auto mechanic Pete Dayton's guilt? The devil? I can't definitively put a word to what the mystery man is, which - as is often the case with Lynch's films and characters - makes him even more disturbing. We may not be able to diagram an explanation for everything that happens in Lost Highway with any certainty, but the feeling that the film is proceeding with a self-contained logic controlled by forces beyond our understanding - and the mystery man is certainly one of these - is what makes it such a disconcerting experience.

Beyond that, the mystery man is creepy because of his Kabuki makeup and lack of eyebrows, and because of Robert Blake's gravelly laugh, and because he might be at your house right now (call him). And while there's no doubt that the real-life murder of Blake's wife makes the character even more disturbing in retrospect, he's still creepy as hell even if one isn't aware of the real-life parallel between Blake and Fred Madison. There's a moment when the mystery man stalks through Lynchian darkness as he approaches Fred, camera in hand. With his other, he reaches towards Fred, laughing. Even though I know he won't touch Fred, it never fails to make me flinch.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #25 - Count Orlok

2011-10-07T20:30:00.005-04:00

Of all the many iconic cinematic incarnations of Dracula, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman, the best and most frightening remains the original, unauthorized version, Count Orlok (Max Schreck). In F.W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (a Symphony of Terror), Schreck portrays the count not as a seductive aristocrat but as a ravenous animal. With his unnaturally pale skin, clawlike hands and rodentlike teeth, he's a pitiful but nevertheless frightening creature motivated only by his hunger. The look of the character remains iconic, but the movie also remains effective 90 years later due to Schreck's eerie screen presence - Orlok's unnatural stillness, stooped posture, weirdly fluid movement and his joyless, purposeful expression as he feeds on humans make for a believably cursed and insatiable monster.

In Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of the film, Klaus Kinski gives Orlok a sort of poetic loneliness that is very affecting, and Herzog's film is in many ways the better one. And Willem Dafoe's Schreck-as-Orlok performance in the pseudo-making-of film Shadow of the Vampire is a hoot. But it remains Schreck, lurking in the corridors of his castle of the Carpathian mountains, that lingers most strongly in our memory. Aided by Murnau's masterful interplay of light and shadow, Schreck's performance is one of the key foundations for every movie monster that followed.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #26 - Reverend Harry Powell

2011-10-06T22:39:00.004-04:00

I never knew before reading up on The Night of the Hunter today that the book's author Davis Grub was inspired by Harry Powers, a real-life serial killer who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two women and three children. Powers was suspected of killing up to fifty other women; of his murders, he is reported to have said, "It beat any cat house I was ever in." Powers' fictional counterpart, the Reverend Harry Powell, is just as cold-blooded. A predator who uses religion to conceal his evil nature, Powell marries, then kills the widow of a recently executed robber (Shelly Winters) in order to get closer to the woman's two kids, John and Pearl (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce), believing they know where their dad hid his loot. In the dreamlike South of Charles Laughton's film (the only one he ever directed), Powell is a snake in the grass, a devil worthy of Milton, his charm and eloquence turning on a dime into terrifying cruelty.

Mitchum is the perfect choice for Harry Powell; as the story goes, Laughton explained the character to Mitchum as "a diabolical shit," and Mitchum responded "Present!" As with his Max Cady in the original Cape Fear, Mitchum is suave, strong and able to insinuate through the force of his presence that he is capable of terrible things. He's the perfect wolf in sheep's clothing, as he's described by Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), an elderly women who runs a home for orphaned and abandoned children and provides sanctuary for John and Pearl. Cooper is the light to Powell's darkness in a confrontation of Biblical proportions, and it's interesting that once Powell is drawn into the light of Cooper's home, he seems less frightening, almost ridiculous. That said, I've never quite bought the cozy Christmastime denouement and Gish's monologue about the strength of the innocents. It's hard to believe that Powell is truly vanquished, that the wolf in sheep's clothing isn't merely waiting for a new disguise.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #27 - Severen

2011-10-05T22:37:00.004-04:00

Any member of the family of bloodsucking rebels from Near Dark could have just as easily occupied this space. It's a movie that grew on me over the years, and as good as The Hurt Locker was, I still think this is Kathryn Bigelow's best movie. A sort of romantic vampire western, Near Dark has stood the test of time thanks to its stunning atmosphere and a strong ensemble that, guided by Bigelow's understated directorial hand, is at once fearsome, believable and totally badass. Lance Henriksen as grizzled paterfamilias Jesse, Jeanette Goldstein as matriarch Diamondback and Joshua Miller as the perpetually childlike Homer are all spooky and effective in different ways.

But it's always Severen that I think of the most when I think of Near Dark. Bill Paxton plays the hotheaded member of the family with a cocky swagger, a perpetual shit-eating grin and an all-around don't-give-a-fuck attitude. Severen is afraid of nothing and capable of anything, a self-assured predator, unfazed even when he's missing half his face. In an age of moody, self-pitying vampires who are more interested in romancing teenage waifs in the Pacific Northwest than in feasting on the living, it's kind of refreshing to watch a vampire who enjoys being a vampire as much as Severen does. And when all hell breaks loose in the film's classic barroom slaughter scene, Severen stays cool, delivering an absolutely perfect reading of the line "Finger lickin' good!" For this and so many other reasons, Bill Paxton has definitely earned a pinball machine made in his honor.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #28 - Decker

2011-10-04T22:34:00.006-04:00

One of three movies on this list based on the work of Clive Barker, Nightbreed is about a young man named Boone (Craig Sheffer) who (after being framed for murder) discovers Midian, an underground city populated by an eclectic community of monsters and supernatural beings. Directed by Barker and based on his excellent novel Cabal, Nightbreed was famously meddled with by its producers, and the movie definitely feels compromised (a two-and-a-half-hour cut was screened at a Horrorhound Weekend in Indianapolis last year). Yet it retains the strength of Barker's imagination and feels like a precursor to the films of Guillermo del Toro - as with many of del Toro's films, Nightbreed has a lot of sympathy for its monsters.

It's the human characters that are truly monstrous, particularly Dr. Phillip Decker (David Cronenberg), Boone's therapist, who frames Boone for the murders that he, in fact, committed. Casting Cronenberg as a murderous sociopath was a brilliant choice; the coolly rational director is different from most horror filmmakers in that he has little interest in the supernatural. No characters from Cronenberg movies appear on this list, because the horrors in his movies are rarely personified - the monsters in a Cronenberg film are things like disease, insanity and death. Cronenberg's soft-spoken, well-mannered presence is the perfect exterior for a character who uses reason to conceal unspeakable evil. And Decker's mask, faceless except for button eyes and a zipper mouth, never fails to creep me out.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #29 - ? (red hood)

2011-10-03T20:45:00.005-04:00

It's hard to explain the character pictured (barely) in this slide without spoiling everything that makes Don't Look Now such a haunting and memorable film. The film is about John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), a married couple staying in Venice following the accidental death of their young daughter Christine. They meet a blind woman (Hilary Mason) who claims to be clairvoyant and calmly informs Laura that she can see Christine. The subtle accumulation of visual clues and juxtapositions director Nicolas Roeg, in his signature fragmented editing style, uses to keep us off-balance for most of the film come together with devastating clarity when this character appears.

I first saw Don't Look Now eight years ago at the Harvard Film Archives. I was completely absorbed by the film - the way Venice is at once beautiful and threatening, the tender and realistic portrait of a marriage, the frankness of the sex scene (which was uncommon even 30 years later), and the escalating sense of dread that makes sense when this character turns and...it would be wrong to say anything else. If you've never seen Don't Look Now, check it out.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #30 - Samara Morgan

2011-10-02T19:16:00.005-04:00

A horror movie doesn't need to be great cinema to be effective. The Ring, the Gore Verbinski-directed remake of Hideo Nakata's Ringu, suffers from gaping plot holes and characters who make very annoying decisions. And yet it works, thanks to its ominous atmosphere, surreal imagery and the monster at the heart of the story, a dead 10-year-old girl named Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase). Samara's spectral projections are captured on videotape by some dudes, carrying a terrible curse that the ghost notifies the cursed about via telephone. Wackiness ensues.

You know the premise, and it's a fairly silly one, but one which Ringu made believably eerie. Nakata's film is probably the better one, but I must admit that it's the remake that gives me the willies. I love the chilling moment when Naomi Watts' clairvoyant, frustratingly cryptic son (David Dorfman) asks, "Why did you help her?" And, thanks to Rick Baker's outstanding effects work, Verbinski's attention to details like the water seeping menacingly from a TV and actor Martin Henderson's convincingly terrified performance, Samara's entrance remains one of horror cinema's most memorably creepy payoffs.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #31 - Hans Beckert

2011-09-30T20:40:00.008-04:00

Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of suggestion. A story about a manhunt for a child murderer, Lang's film never shows us any details of the murders. Instead, haunting symbolic images - a stray ball, a balloon caught between telephone lines - leave us to imagine the worst. And we don't get a full look at killer Hans Beckert until halfway through the movie - his threatening presence as he stalks his prey is intimated by shadows, glimpses of a shoulder and his creepy, persistent whistling of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King." Creating as much menace through his absence from the frame as with his presence, Beckert is a very unsettling cinematic phantom that proves there's truth to the cliche that what we don't see can be as frightening as what we do see.

Much of M is focused on the process of police, civilians and the criminal underground working to catch the killer, and today's procedural dramas, from Zodiac to the many CSIs and Law and Orders, owe a debt to Lang. When the vigilante mob catches up to Beckert, his mock trial presents a cynical view of our collective thirst for vengeance. As M was made during the rise of Nazi Germany (Lang would flee for France a few years later before ending up in Hollywood), the film's distrust of mob mentality is hardly surprising. As Beckert pleads his case to his "court," claiming that he cannot change his nature, the character becomes more human and more frightening for his pathetic submission to his terrible nature.

Peter Lorre is fantastic as Beckert; the childlike eyes and high-pitched voice that would serve him well in films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon and, later, Roger Corman's Poe adaptations are used to chilling effect here. When his gaze is fixed on a child, Lorre is able to communicate volumes about the monster beneath his deceptively benign surface and the unspeakable urges that drive him. And though Grieg has become a huge cliche in horror movie trailers, it has never been as effective.

Rise of the Transforming Penguins: Part II - What I Saw On My Summer Vacation

2011-09-28T17:58:00.021-04:00

This summer went by far too quickly. That isn't a complaint; actually, it was the best summer I can remember. After a hectic couple of years, I was finally able to relax and have a lot of fun with my family. This is why I missed writing more about summer movies as they were released; of course, it didn't help that the movies themselves were such a blur. Both the good and bad movies arrived, received a ton of press, and were on their way to the Wal-Mart bargain bin in a few weeks, replaced by the next big thing. Even the record-breaking final Harry Potter movie was gone from most of the local multiplexes by Labor Day. What little there was to say about the summer blockbusters had already been said many times over by the time I got a chance to see them. Now that things have slowed down and before the fall movie season kicks into high gear, I'll try to recap my impressions of the summer.

In May, my girlfriend Jen and I ventured to the Milfo rd Drive-In for the one-two sucker punch of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Thor. On Stranger Tides was the worst kind of blockbuster sequel, a completely soulless machine desperately trying to keep alive a series that ran out of interesting ideas two movies ago. The previous sequels were equally pointless, but they were at least mildly interesting thanks to director Gore Verbinski's knack for appropriately epic images and grandiose setpieces. Thanks to Oscar-nominated hack Rob Marshall, On Stranger Tides looks and feels like a half-assed TV show, just like his other movies (it's stunning that this guy is a huge Bob Fosse fan). The plot is instantly forgettable and the "humor" rests entirely on the mistaken notion that Johnny Depp is inherently hilarious as Captain Jack Sparrow - in order for the character to work, he needs a real movie to subvert, not a 140-minute sketch designed to worship him. It was painful that On Stranger Tides made a billion dollars, and worse that so many of my friends gave it a pass solely because of their affection for Depp. Stop being enablers, guys.

Thor wasn't nearly as bad, but I was sort of baffled about its glowing reviews. It's half epic CGI-loaded kitschfest - Flash Gordon without the irony - and half fish-out-of-water comedy that worked better in Star Trek IV. Director Kenneth Branagh could have made this work - most of his movies, good or not, are kind of campy. But it also has to set up the Avengers movie, meaning it stops in its tracks for lots of dull exposition about SHIELD (it's good to be Clark Gregg right now). Honestly, Jen slept through most of it and I nodded off for a good portion of the middle. It was still a fun night - it was the drive-in, after all - but it's not a good sign when the tall evergreens behind the screen become more compelling to look at than the feature.

As far as comic book movies go, X-Men: First Class was much more successful. The biggest surprise of the Matthew Vaughn-helmed prequel was how much fun it is - even at their best, X-Men and X2 had a weighty self-importance (or a self-important weightiness?) that kept me from completely loving them. The dumbed-down X3 certainly wasn't preferable, but First Class is fueled by a healthy appreciation for pulp, from the sick reveal of Nazi villain Kevin Bacon's office to the snazzy retro production design to the appropriation of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the backdrop for a mutant origin story. The cast is strong, particularly Michael Fassbender as a young, angry Magneto on his way to becoming the mutant freedom fighter played by Ian McKellan. There's a cameo that ranks among the all-time best. And how can I not love a movie where (SPOILER) Kevin Bacon can absorb energy? (END SPOILER)

One of the movies I was most looking forward to was Super 8, J.J. Abrams' homage to Spielberg's '70s/'80s aesthetic. The trailer promised a throwback to the magic of E.T., Close Encounters and Joe Dante's Explorers. And it hits that sweet spot in the relationship between young protagonist Joe (Joel Courtney) and his dad (Kyle Chandler) as they struggle with the loss of Joe's mother, and in Joe and his friends' quest to finish their no-budget zombie movie. The relationships between the kids are handled sensitively and believably, and it made me nostalgic for my childhood friends and our own earnest attempts to realize our dreams. The movie's not quite the classic it wants to be, mostly because the extraterrestrial aspects of the story never quite cohere with the kids' emotional journey (as E.T. does so beautifully). But it's still a lot of fun, and the scene where Joe and the girl he's smitten with (Elle Fanning) run lines for the zombie movie takes on unexpected emotional resonance.

Probably the biggest shock of the summer is that Transformers: Dark of the Moon wasn't completely terrible. The limitation of the 3D cameras force Michael Bay to tone down his ADD-spectacular editing style and design actual shots with a purpose. The result is some surprisingly striking images and one of the few 3D movies to justify the extra dimension (the others being Avatar and Piranha). Of course, the movie's still coked-up, obnoxious, crass and frequently stupid. But Bay traded the previous movie's Minstrelbots for a bronzed John Malkovich, so on the whole it's an improvement. Now let us never speak of it again.

Then there's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (or, as one local theatre's marquee called it, Harry Potter 2), which I heard more than one person my age describe as the defining movie experience of our generation. The midnight screening I attended certainly felt like geek Woodstock, and it was exciting to have that collective experience with a rapt audience. It's been hard to write about the Harry Potter series without repeating myself because the movies are so consistent - well-crafted prose with occasional moments of poetry (The Prisoner of Azkaban , Order of the Phoenix and the Nick Cave scene in Deathly Hallows: Part I remain the highlights). I was happy they left in Mrs. Weasley's best line, and genuinely moved by Snape's memories and Harry's meeting with the spirits of his family and teachers (both book and film series can be read as a gradual acceptance of the inevitable loss of all of our mentors). It may not be the defining movie of my generation, but it's easy to see why the boy wizard's speaks to grown-ups as much as kids.

If there's one thing that was disappointing this summer, it was the relative lack of solid counter-programming. There was The Tree of Life, a movie I've already argued about and will write about in greater detail once I can wrap my head around it. And Midnight in Paris, which I sadly missed. And Bridesmaids (which I wrote about here) was of course fantastic (I haven't seen The Hangover: Part II, and I hope it's better than I've heard). I thought One Day would be a nice, light romantic alternative, but it was surprisingly crappy. The biggest problem is Dexter (Jim Sturgess), the prick who is best friends with Emma (Anne Hathaway). As they engage in a 20-year will-they-or-won't-they, Dexter proved to be such a repugnant character, so completely devoid of any attractive or redeeming qualities, that I couldn't figure out why Emma would want to spend 15 minutes with the guy, let alone spending decades of her life pining for him. Hathaway's all-around loveliness can't save One Day from the couple's lack of chemistry, a gimmicky structure that thinks it's more clever than it is and a painfully cliched ending that renders the whole movie nihilistic (and not in a good way). Oh well, at least I have Hathaway as Catwoman to look forward to.

Besides The Tree of Life and Bridesmaids, the two best movies of the season were both late-summer surprises. After the brutal disappointment of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake, I tried not to get too excited for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I had nothing to worry about, as the Rupert Wyatt-directed prequel is everything I wanted it to be and more. James Franco stars as a terrible scientist who injects apes with genius genes in order to find a cure for Alzheimer's, completely fails at finding a cure and creates awful consequences for humanity in the process. As his pal Cesar, a super-smart chimp whose cruel mistreatment by humans motivates him to organize the ape uprising, Andy Serkis gives his best motion capture performance yet. The effects wizards at WETA do an outstanding job of making Cesar and his fellow revolutionaries believable characters. But what's terrific about the movie is that the effects and action setpieces are completely at the service of the story. The movie has a solid screenplay that intelligently engages with the "oppressed minority" subtext that made the original movies so great. By the end of the movie, you're actively rooting for the apes to beat the bejesus out of the humans; in an age of empty CGI spectacle, it's startling to be this moved by completely artificial characters. Here's hoping for a sequel - Viva la Revolucion!

I was also uncertain about Fright Night - I'm very fond of the original, and the remake's trailer was very iffy. Luckily, writer Marti Noxon and director Craig Gillespie remain expand upon the themes that made the original so memorable. Here, vampire-next-door Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is a sexy, charismatic threat to teenage nerd Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin). It's no coincidence that Charlie is a virgin; Jerry, who threatens to seduce and corrupt Charlie's out-of-his-league girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots), would be Charlie's worst nightmare even if he wasn't a vampire. The movie understands the anxieties of geeky teenage boys all too well; Jerry's monologue about his girlfriend's "scent" is one of Ferrell's and best moments; he's sleazy and horny and clearly having a ball throughout the movie. The script is clever, David Tennant (the former Doctor Who) is hilarious as a Criss Angel-esque "dark magician," the desert atmosphere of the Las Vegas setting is very effective and there are a handful of great "Boo!" moments. Fright Night died quickly at the box office, so here's hoping it eventually finds the audience it deserves.

The most fun I've had at the movies this year, hands down, have been the times Jen and I have taken the kids with us. Luna and Tom's first trip to the movies was in July, to see Winnie the Pooh, and it was the perfect choice. It's a wonderful throwback to the classic Disney shorts, and Tom sat, popcorn in hand, eyes glued to the screen the entire time. Luna was just as interested with the theatre itself, and spent much of the movie checking out the vast, cavernous auditorium. Their second trip was a bargain matinee of Mr. Popper's Penguins, and while they weren't as into that one, Tom is now very interested in penguins - Happy Feet has joined the daily rotation with other favorites like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Toy Story, Spider-Man and Tron: Legacy (both kids are fascinated at the concept of travelling INSIDE the computer).

Luna's tastes are a bit more sophisticated - she asks me to save episodes of Louie and Curb Your Enthusiasm to watch with her. But she's not too mature to enjoy childish things - my best memories of the summer are the time spent at the playground, the awed look on their faces when Toot and Puddle visited the local library, our first trip to the beach and the near-religious experience Luna had at her first carnival. And when we recently took them to see The Lion King, they were both riveted. Everything I love about movies can be summed up in the moment, as the lights came up, when Luna exclaimed, "That was great!"

Shoshanna, Serena, Lulu

2011-08-31T20:05:00.009-04:00

I'm finally turning in my answers, right at the tail end of summer, for the most recent movie quiz at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, this one administered by one Professor Ed Avery. I have yet to see Bigger Than Life, but I'm looking forward to it. All I know is that it involves James Mason scolding children, and that's enough for me.

1) Depending on your mood, your favorite or least-loved movie cliché.

In horror movies, the fake-out scare followed three beats later by the real thing. I love or hate it depending on the execution and my mood.

2) Regardless of whether or not you eventually caught up with it, which film classic have you lied about seeing in the past?

I'm a terrible liar, so I don't bother.

3) Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton?

Roland Young

4) Second favorite Frank Tashlin movie

The Girl Can't Help It

5) Clockwork Orange-- yes or no?

Yes, definitely.

6) Best/favorite use of gender dysphoria in a horror film (Ariel Schudson)

My first thought was The Silence of the Lambs, but as Hannibal Lecter explains, Jame Gumb isn't actually a transsexual. So let's go with Dressed to Kill.

7) Melanie Laurent or Blake Lively?

How can I not go with Melanie Laurent?

8) Best movie of 2011 (so far…)

The Tree of Life. Overwhelming, challenging, sometimes frustrating, beautiful and ultimately awe-inspiring.

9) Favorite screen performer with a noticeable facial deformity (Peg Aloi)

Michael Berryman

10) Lars von Trier: shithead or misunderstood comic savant? (Dean Treadway)

I wouldn't say "savant," but I thought the "Hitler" press conference was hilarious. He just kept digging himself deeper and deeper.

11) Timothy Carey or Henry Silva?

Henry Silva

12) Low-profile writer who deserves more attention from critics and /or audiences

Although Albert Brooks is certainly well-known, his work as a writer/director deserves the same attention given to Woody Allen. Modern Romance and Lost in America, in particular, are perfect screenplays.

13) Movie most recently viewed theatrically, and on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming

Theatrically: Fright Night. It's a blast, and worthy of the original. On DVD: Fiddler on the Roof. Way more entertaining than I remembered (though I last saw it when I was about five years old).

14) Favorite film noir villain

Noah Cross

15) Best thing about streaming movies?

The ease and availability of titles encourages people to be a little more adventurous in their movie-watching choices.

16) Fay Spain or France Nuyen? (Peter Nellhaus)

Fay Spain

17) Favorite Kirk Douglas movie that isn’t called Spartacus (Peter Nellhaus)

Paths of Glory

18) Favorite movie about cars

Two-Lane Blacktop

19) Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor?

Marie Windsor

20) Existing Stephen King movie adaptation that could use an remake/reboot/overhaul

It is one of the best books about childhood and the most terrifying book Stephen King ever wrote. The TV movie is creepy, the entire cast is strong and Tim Curry is of course outstanding as Pennywise. But it was limited by the restrictions of network TV, not just in content but in condensing some of the more esoteric aspects of the book's mythology. A three-hour movie or, perhaps better yet, an HBO miniseries that is more faithful to the book could be one of the all-time great horror movies. But the plans I've heard for a proposed remake (updating the timeline to present day, shooting for a PG-13) aren't very encouraging.

21) Low-profile director who deserves more attention from critics and/or audiences

Keith Gordon makes consistently interesting movies aimed at smart adult audiences that barely receive any attention. At least he's been busy in recent years directing episodes of Dexter.

22) What actor that you previously enjoyed has become distracting or a self-parody? (Adam Ross)

De Niro is the obvious answer, unfortunately.

23) Best place in the world to see a movie

The Brattle!

24) Charles McGraw or Sterling Hayden?

Sterling Hayden

25) Second favorite Yasujiro Ozu film

Floating Weeds

26) Most memorable horror movie father figure

Jack Torrance

27) Name a non-action-oriented movie that would be fun to see in Sensurround

Moulin Rouge

28) Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds?

I worked as an extra on a Chris Evans movie, and he seemed like a pretty good guy. And he's great in Scott Pilgrim ("That's actually hilarious.")

29) Favorite relatively unknown supporting player, from either or both the classic and the modern era

Dick Miller

30) Real-life movie location you most recently visited or saw

The first one that comes to mind is the Whately Diner, which I used in Black Light and, I found out later, was also used extensively in In Dreams.

31) Second favorite Budd Boetticher movie

I'm ashamed to admit I have to pass on this one (see #2).

32) Mara Corday or Julie Adams?

Mara Corday

33) Favorite Universal-International western

Winchester '73

34) What's the biggest "gimmick" that's drawn you out to see a movie? (Sal Gomez)

Probably the time Images Cinema had a 3D Porn Night.

35) Favorite actress of the silent era

Louise Brooks

36) Best Eugene Pallette performance (Larry Aydlette)

Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood

37) Best/worst remake of the 21st century so far? (Dan Aloi)

Best: Solaris Worst: The Fog

38) What could multiplex owners do right now to improve the theatrical viewing experience for moviegoers? What could moviegoers do?

Owners: Take a cue from a good theatre chain like Cinemagic or Cinemark and make perfect presentation a priority (forgive the alliteration). Moviegoers can turn off their fucking phones.

Do you want a bite of my big bear sandwich? It's got meat and cheeses.

2011-07-01T15:00:00.002-04:00

The marketing campaign for Bridesmaids successfully positioned it as "the female Hangover." While both are raunchy ensemble comedies revolving around wedding festivities, this is a misleading comparison. The humor of The Hangover was completely situational, stemming entirely from the "What happened last night?" premise. While Bridesmaids also has more than its share of sight gags, physical comedy and random humor, the laughs in Paul Feig's movie are much more character-driven. It works as well as it does because screenwriters Kristen Wiig (also the star, of course) and Annie Rummalo and director Paul Feig understand that, for all its broader jokes (which are very funny), the biggest and deepest laughs come from our sympathy/identification with struggling maid of honor Annie (Wiig) as she slowly unravels. Aided by a strong ensemble cast, Bridesmaids is the best comedy of discomfort in recent memory.

We're introduced to Annie as she's having awkward sex with boneheaded stud (Jon Hamm) with whom she's stuck in an unfulfilling "friends with benefits" relationship. Annie's boyfriend recently left her after the cake shop they ran together went out of business, and she's stuck in a rut. When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) asks her to be her maid of honor, she is quickly overwhelmed by the job and increasingly upstaged by Lillian's wealthy new friend Helen (Rose Byrne). Watching Annie unravel over the course of planning the wedding leads to several raunchy setpieces, most famously the collective bout of explosive food poisoning the bridal party suffers while trying on dresses. But what distinguishes Bridesmaids are scenes like the one where Annie and Helen repeatedly one-up each other in giving the most heartfelt toast at the engagement party. Feig smartly allows moments like these to breathe, running past frustration into disbelief at the escalation of all-too-relatable embarrassing behavior. At its best, Bridesmaids recalls early Albert Brooks in its precise observation of people behaving poorly.

At the center of it is Wiig's performance - she's been one of the best things about SNL for years (along with Bill Hader), and she's given strong supporting performances in Walk Hard, Adventureland and several dozen other movies. As Annie, Wiig reveals that she's not just funny but also a solid actress, finding laughs in each scene while also convincingly playing the emotional truth behind the joke. When Annie watches Cast Away, sobbing as Wilson drifts out to sea, we laugh because most of us know how that moment feels (maybe not specifically Cast Away, but that's beside the point). Bridesmaids is funnier because we can relate to Annie and want to see her dig herself out of her hole. And Wiig also kills in the movie's broader moments - when a food poisoning-stricken Annie eats an almond to demonstrate that she feels fine, the blend of repulsion, nausea and denial on her face is priceless. The best comedians can be hilarious without ever saying a word, and Wiig is quickly becoming one of the best.

Some critics have argued that the film's raunchiness is actually sexist; as Karina Longworth put it, "Comedy of humiliation is one thing; a fat lady shitting in a sink is another." To this, I say baloney. It's Feig's willingness to allow the female characters to make complete asses of themselves that makes Bridesmaids far less sexist than the many romantic comedies that pander to self-perpetuating assumptions about what women want. Besides, it's the men that are completely marginalized in Bridesmaids; I smiled when I noticed Tim Heidecker as the groom, but I'm not sure he had a single line of dialogue in the entire movie. The men who do make an impression are Hamm (I love his super-serious delivery of the line "Cup my balls") and Chris O'Dowd as a kind cop who may be the perfect guy for Annie because he's willing to tell her the truth. That said, it's Wiig, Rudolph and the stable of bridesmaids who own this movie, the standout being Melissa McCarthy as the tough, stocky, perpetually horny Megan. When Megan, giving Annie a pep talk, explains that her tough exterior came from a lifetime of bullying, the scene both earns its pathos and makes a later scene involving Megan and some Subway sploshing even more hilarious. Bridesmaids walks a fine line between empathy and belly laughs, and does so beautifully; unlike a lot of "chick flicks," it earns its late-in-the-movie sing-along.

Satan is ever ready to seduce us with sensual delights.

2011-04-01T19:37:00.005-04:00

This is my contribution to White Elephant 2011 at Silly Hats Only.

It's revealing to place Ken Russell's The Devils in context with two other highly controversial movies released in 1971, A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs. The shocking material in Kubrick's film was framed within a very cerebral movie-length dialogue about society and free will. Peckinpah employed the brutal rape scene in Straw Dogs to provoke audiences into considering man's savage nature. In The Devils, sex and violence are used to condemn organized religion and moral hypocrisy, yet the film (and I don't mean this as a criticism) doesn't really work as serious social commentary. Russell's film is more of a wet raspberry blown in the direction of God and the crimes committed in His name. Known best for his unapologetic directorial flamboyance, Russell is like Kubrick with a raging boner, and The Devils is like the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex dreams of flogging Jesus Christ extended to feature length. Its images of nubile, bare-assed nuns writhing in delirious fits of sexual ecstasy and religious hysteria do not just aim to provoke, but to shock, arouse, disorient and completely overwhelm us.

Based on the book The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley and the play The Devils by John Whiting, the film is set in 17th century France, in the village of Loudon, which is under threat of demolition due to a plan by Cardinal Richelieu to eradicate such small villages to stop the rise of Protestantism. After the death of thevillage's governor, Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) has been placed in charge of Loudon and has organized the village to stop its destruction. But after Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), who is obsessed with Grandier, reveals Grandier's sexual affairs to another priest (Murray Melvin), claiming that he has bewitched her, the baron (Dudley Sutton) tasked with destroying the town sends for Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard), an inquisitor and exorcist whose job it is to investigate whether Grandier has possessed the entire nunnery. Barre's interrogations amount more to brainwashing, as he compels the nuns through suggestion and bizarelly fetishistic rituals to believe that they are possessed. The subsequent scenes of the nuns tearing off their clothing and engaging in a variety of blasphemous acts is a potent statement of the danger of religion's repressive force - it is the power of the church's message of an ongoing war between good and evil that inspires' the nuns' depravity.

At the same time, Roger Ebert wasn't exactly wrong when he wrote in his review that "We are filled with righteous indignation as we bear witness to the violation of the helpless nuns, which is all the more horrendous because, as Russell fearlessly reveals, all the nuns, without exception were young and stacked." There's little question that Russell is getting off on having assembled so much explicit desecration of all things holy in every frame. There's a definite sense throughout The Devils of having gotten away with it; it's sort of endearing, in Mark Kermode's documentary about the film, to hear the middle-aged actresses recall the shoot with a giggly fondness for the naughty things they did when they were young. The Devils is as interesting a historical record as it is a story; it's inconceivable that a big-budget British-American co-production directed by an acclaimed English filmmaker would even remotely approach the level of disregard for good taste and mass appeal that Russell's film flaunts. Try to imagine Tom Hooper remaking Salo and you get the idea.

It's Russell's libidinous sensibility that drives the film's admittedly questionable but nevertheless potent thesis - that sexual repression is at the root of most violent conflict between humans. All of the historical figures depicted are homosexuals or sadists or rich weirdos. The deformed Sister Jeanne is fixated on Grandier, fantasizing about the priest as a bleeding Christ whose wounds she tenderly sucks off. Most potent is Father Barre - the intense, slightly androgynous Gothard (who could have played Alex in A Clockwork Orange had Malcolm McDowell not been available) seethes with madness as he compels the nuns to do increasingly strange things in the name of God. The bizarre exorcism climaxes, quite literally, with the infamous "rape of Christ" sequence, which was banned from the original release and only reappeared in Kermode's documentary a few years ago. The images of the nuns having their way with a large crucifix not only predate The Exorcist, they are a perfectly blunt, graphic and unforgettable representation of the possible dark underside of Christ's "marriage" to his followers.

My favorite thing about The Devils is the casting of Oliver Reed as the village's advocate for progressive thought and free love. A softer, more counterculturally oriented actor might have been a more obvious choice; instead, peace and love are embodied by a burly, hairy man's man who looks like he might bugger a lady without asking first if he's had a few too many. Grandier's persecution and martyrdom are tragic to Russell in that they represent the triumph of celibacy over full-bodied vulgar masculinity. Warner Brothers has famously cancelled the DVD release of The Devils repeatedly, odd given that they've released special editions of A Clockwork Orange and the director's cut of Natural Born Killers. WB's execs need to relax and embrace this significant footnote in the studio's storied history - that moment, 40 years ago, when nunsploitation briefly went mainstream.

Top 10: 2010

2011-02-11T19:11:00.012-05:00

2010 was a solid, if not landmark, year in film. The many year-end think pieces that bemoaned a rise in sequels and remakes missed the point. The issue isn't a trend towards high-concept movies that has been happening for 30 years as much Hollywood's increased reluctance to take a chance on movies aimed at adults. It's a shame, for Hollywood as much as for us; if original stories are harder to market than familiar properties, they also speak to an underserved audience. When I saw Inception, The Town, The Fighter and a few others, I could feel the audience's genuine appreciation for an interesting and well-told story with compelling characters. As my little league coaches were fond of saying, it's all about the fundamentals - tell a good story, and they will come.

While a few of the tentpole movies worked wonderfully, several of the films on my list are smaller, character-driven stories. A few are specifically about relationships - finding someone, losing someone, staying together. That these movies spoke to me says as much about what I needed from the cinema in 2010 as it does about the movies themselves. I started the year in a very bittersweet place, trying to figure out what to do with my life; now, I'm finally settled with my kids, happily in love, creatively energized and ready to take on whatever life brings. Through it all, as always, the movies were there for me.

1. The Social Network Long after Facebook is as much of a historical footnote as Mac or Atari, The Social Network will still resonate as a story of the evolution of the internet's role in business, culture and relationships. Impeccably written, shot and acted, the film ties its zeitgeist-defining subject to classical notions of ambition, hubris and betrayal (Maureen Dowd smartly connected the film to Das Rheingold). The image of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) hitting "refresh" over and over again is an embellishment that reveals a greater emotional truth - the more we have the world at our fingertips, the more isolated we become. Like The Graduate, Sex, lies and videotape and other generation-defining movies, The Social Network captures the exact feeling of what it was like to be young at a specific time and place. It's the first American classic of the new decade.

2. Black Swan The kind of movie we all hope Dario Argento still has in him. Love him or hate him, nobody is making the kind of movies Darren Aronofsky is making right now. Whether it's an archetype-heavy metaphysical love story, an intimate character study about a guy named Randy the Ram or a baroque psychosexual thriler set in the world of ballet, the guy is fearless. His movies can be punishing, and Black Swan is no exception; when Nina (Natalie Portman) was tending to her horribly broken toenail, I wondered to myself why I'll gladly pay $9.50 for the privelege of wincing. At the same time, it's the most entertaining movie I saw this year. When directed and acted as perfectly as Aronofsky and Portman have done here, the story of a sexually repressed ballerina going bonkers in the name of creative perfection is a far more thrilling and unpredictable rollercoaster ride than any CGI-riddled 3D extravaganza. It's also one of four movies on this list that contains cunnilingus, a trend in 2010 films that Walter Chaw first observed and one I can get behind.

3. Greenberg I read many anecdotal reports of mass walkouts at Noah Baumbach's latest, presumably by Ben Stiller fans who expected something more like Along Came Polly. It's a shame they didn't stay; it's not only Baumbach's best movie, it's also his warmest. Although the neurotic title character's behavior is sometimes off-putting, Baumbach clearly loves Greenberg and all of his characters, and shows it a little more easily than in his earlier films. The film owes a debt to Hal Ashby and Alan Rudolph not just for its hazy widescreen cinematography (by the great Harris Savides) but for its generosity of spirit. Both Greenberg and Greenberg are difficult to like, but they grow on you.

4. True Grit As I wrote before, it's astonishing how the Coens have made a movie that plays like gangbusters with mainstream audiences without sacrificing their distinctive voice. Their ironic sense of humor has long masked the truth that they are perhaps the most morally centered filmmakers working today; here, they've made a celebration of true heroism that is stunningly sincere. As played to grizzled perfection by Jeff Bridges, Rooster Cogburn is the perfect hero for our time - jaded, cynical, a bit buffoonish but ultimately a character we can count on to do the right thing. The relationship between Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld, and the way it develops, is unexpectedly touching. The Coens' trademark wit and Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography breathe new life into a long-dormant genre; who knew 2010 would bring us a classic Western, let alone an adventure story that truly thrills? Are the Coens on a roll or what?

5. Toy Story 3 It was moving the first time I saw it, but it was the second time, as I noticed how carefully the film sets up Bonnie and the ending, that I realized what a great film Toy Story 3 really is. In a genre populated by Gnomeos and Owls of Ga'hoole, Pixar yet again takes the lead by a country mile, making a movie about talking toys that is also about growing up, finding new love, accepting one's mortality and being at peace with the passing of time. The moment when the toys take each others' hands in the face of certain destruction is as profound an image of being and nothingness as I've seen in any movie aimed at adults, let alone a cartoon. Nobody understands children's fears and dreams as well as Pixar; add to their staggering list of achievements the first "part 3" that is better than the first two.

6. Shutter Island Look, I love Martin Scorsese's tortured masterpieces of Catholic guilt, self-loathing and existential dread as much as the next guy. But I also love that Marty has clearly been having a lot of fun lately. Shutter Island, his pulpiest movie, never pretends to be anything other than a bloody valentine to a laundry list of classic horror movies in service to a wonderfully dark and eerie detective story. It's technically perfect, wonderfully acted by the entire cast and posessing unexpected emotional resonance. But ultimately, it's Scorsese having a lark for his and our enjoyment - the greatest living architect of cinema setting up a haunted house for trick 'r' treaters. And I love haunted houses.

7. The Kids Are All Right The reason this works as well as it does has everything to do with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore; I totally believed, from beginning to end, that Nic and Jules were a couple with a 20-year history behind them. Even as the script took some questionable turns in the second half, I believed it because I believed them, and Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson as their kids, and Mark Ruffalo as the sexy, spacey but well-meaning sperm donor who turns their lives upside down. As co-written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right is one of the most truthful depictions of a family - any kind of family - that I've ever seen. It gets so many things about being a parent so right that it made me smile from beginning to end.

8. Blue Valentine Probably not the best choice I could have made for a date movie. The contrast between the wide-eyed early stages of the relationship between Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) and its bitter last days is downright abrasive, and understandably off-putting to many. An elderly man in front of us actually begged us to explain the movie afterwards - "First they're breaking up, then they're getting married...Was that the boyfriend or the other guy during the oral session? I'm sticking to cartoons from now on." It's a bitter pill, but I value it because, like Bad Timing, it's uncompromising in delivering some difficult truths about the ways two people in love can grow apart. It avoids simple conclusions or pat answers - I found it interesting that my girlfriend blamed Cindy for the relationship's failure, while I was mostly annoyed with Dean. Director Derek Cianfrance and his stars deserve a lot of credit for going as far as they have; the film is emotionally naked in a way that cinema rarely is. And as I can't listen to Penny and the Quarters without tearing up, it clearly touched a nerve with me.

9. Inception I didn't bother writing about Inception in July because it seemed like the critical response had already encompassed wild praise, thorough analysis, backlash and a backlash to the backlash by the time I caught the 9pm show on opening night. Do you really care, by now, what I have to say about the top? I'll just add now that it's sort of amazing to see a summer blockbuster driven, like several of Nolan's films, by a deep and ineffable sense of loss. How wonderful that Christopher Nolan has made an exciting, edge-of-your-seat thriller driven not by double agents or stolen microfilm but by the persistence of memory. I know that it's hip now to say that Inception only thinks it's smart, but I think it actually is pretty damn smart, with at least one scene (the zero-g hallway fight) that provoked applause from the audience I saw it with, and another (the ending) that elicited frustrated, delighted groans.

10. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World The first time I saw Scott Pilgrim, it made me feel very old. The second time, I was more tuned into its peculiar wavelength, and realized that my main frustration with the movie - that Scott (Michael Cera) is kind of a dick - was something that director Edgar Wright was totally aware of. Taken as the story of a self-centered bass player who, in a media-saturated, hipster-populated existence, actually manages to grow up a little, Scott Pilgrim makes perfect sense. And then I was able to really enjoy the movie's hyperactive charms. How can I not love a movie where two bands have an amp battle ending in their music materializing as giant apes and dragons that do battle, which is also a metaphor for the main character's emerging sense of self-respect? Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the cinematic equivalent of Hostess cupcakes washed down with orange soda - it's sweet, it'll make you spazz out and it's totally tasty.

Top 10: 2000

2011-01-31T10:01:00.002-05:00

1. Almost Famous (Crowe)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong)
3. American Psycho (Harron)
4. Wonder Boys (Hanson)
5. Traffic (Soderbergh)
6. The Virgin Suicides (Coppola)
7. Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier)
8. Memento (Nolan)
9. High Fidelity (Frears)
10. Best in Show (Guest)

Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!

2011-01-31T09:32:00.004-05:00

This year's roster of Best Director nominees includes three of the "Rebels on the Backlot," the filmmakers profiled in Sharon Waxman's book of the same name who emerged in the past 20 years and helped blur the line between independent and studio filmmaking. It's exciting to see the mavericks of my formative years of movie love - filmmakers like David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky - celebrated by mainstream Hollywood for making films that speak to wide audiences even as they retain their directors' distinctive voices. Among them is David O. Russell, the director of The Fighter, who has bounced back from the never-completed comedy Nailed to make a boxing movie that, in a subgenre riddled with cliches, is surprisingly affecting. Equal parts Rocky and Truffaut, with a pitch-perfect sense of character and location, The Fighter is the rare crowd-pleasing sports movie that never talks down to its audience.

Based on the true story of Mickey Ward, a junior welterweight from Lowell, Massachusetts, The Fighter begins with Mickey (Mark Wahlberg) struggling in the ring and stuck in the shadow of his half-brother and sparring partner, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). A former pro welterweight who became addicted to crack, Dicky’s old glories, along with his domineering mother Alice’s (Melissa Leo) mismanagement of his career, lead to Ward’s retreat from boxing. As Mickey is inspired by new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) to take control of his life in and out of the ring, The Fighter escapes familiar territory largely thanks to the film’s excellent use of Lowell as a location. Russell blends strong character work with a carefully observed portrait of the film’s working-class neighborhoods; the verisimilitude goes so far as to have Ward’s real-life trainer Mickey O’Keefe play himself. The film follows these characters and their city with a close-up, character driven visual style (influenced by the French New Wave) that brings to mind the handheld approach of The Wrestler (Aronofsky was originally going to direct The Fighter and retains an executive producer credit). What separates The Fighter from The Wrestler and most other sports movies is the light comic touch Russell brings to the material, presenting Dicky and the rest of Mickey’s family with a lightness that avoids the story’s potential for melodrama and shows a profound sense of respect for Mickey, his family and his hometown.

At the heart of the film is the relationship between Mickey and Dicky, and both actors are terrific. Interesting that it took playing a crackhead for Bale to lighten up; he captures the likeable, slightly naïve charm of the real Dicky. Wahlberg (who shepherded Ward’s story to the screen) hasn’t received as much praise as Bale, but he’s just as good as the slightly introverted Mickey; surrounded by bigger, louder characters, he demonstrates why listening is the most important tool an actor has. It would be clear to any director that the brothers’ relationship drives the film; what Russell brings to The Fighter that other directors might overlook is the importance the women in Mickey’s life. Alice at first seems monstrous, but Leo’s performance gradually reveals the great love she has for her sons, even if she puts it in the wrong places (Jack McGee is also great, and hilarious, as Mickey's henpecked dad). The veritable Greek chorus of Mickey’s many sisters are hilarious and completely believable. And Amy Adams is great as Charlene - turns out she’s as good at playing earthy and self-reliant as she is at playing princesses, and the scenes between her and Wahlberg are surprisingly sexy. It’s the three-dimensional portrait of Mickey’s complicated family that makes The Fighter work; when the inevitable climatic fight arrives, the victory belongs to the whole family. Russell has long specialized in examinations of dysfunctional families; it’s nice to see the director arriving at an honest, fully earned portrait of a family coming together.

Having started making movies in the 1980s, the Coen brothers are a sort of spiritual link between the maverick directors of the ‘70s and the new bunch. They’ve also found themselves being accepted into the mainstream in recent years; their newest film, True Grit, is their first unqualified blockbuster (as well as the first smash hit western in decades). Based on the Charles Portis novel previously adapted into the movie that won John Wayne the Oscar, True Grit finds the Coens bringing their unique sensibility to the story of 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who hires grizzled U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the dim-witted crook who killed her dad. Watching the original on AMC a few weeks ago, I was struck by how close the two films are, almost scene-for-scene, and yet the movies feel completely different - it’s a fascinating reminder that what matters most is not the story itself but how it is told. Whereas director Henry Hathaway staged True Grit as a sun-drenched adventure yarn, the Coens have made a rouge-edged, unsparing and thrillingly alive western, with a Cogburn that speaks in a often-indecipherable growl and finds his heroism almost accidentally (frankly, Bridges mops the floor with the Duke).

But while the brothers’ offbeat sense of humor is definitely present in the film (few other filmmakers would have included the “bear doctor” scene), its lack of ironic distance makes it a departure for the filmmakers. It’s not an anti-western in the No Country For Old Men vein; while it has a wry sense of humor about Cogburn and Texas Ranger Laboeuf’s (Matt Damon) macho posturing, it’s also driven by a very real romantic admiration for true heroism. Snobs have branded the film a sell-out for the Coens, but this stems from the common incorrect reading of their films as misanthropic – from Norville Barnes to Marge Gunderson, the Coens have always been on the side of the good guys, even when (like Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Bell) they prove outmatched. If anything, it represents the directors growing more diverse; as skilled as they are at being smartasses, it’s exciting to witness them go straight for the heart. They succeed largely thanks to Bridges and Damon, and especially Steinfeld, who is astonishingly assured as the strong, self-reliant Mattie. It’s a greatly entertaining adventure, beautifully shot by Roger Deakins (as if I needed to tell you that), and, in its final minutes, it reveals itself as unexpectedly heartwarming. After the socks to the gut that were their last several endings, it’s just as bracing to find the brothers arriving at a moment of grace; if that doesn’t represent growth in an artist, I don't know what does.

Top 10: 1990

2011-01-28T08:19:00.002-05:00

1. Goodfellas (Scorsese)
2. Miller's Crossing (Coen)

3. Wild at Heart (Lynch)

4. Edward Scissorhands (Burton)

5. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton)

6. The Witches (Roeg)

7. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Almodovar)

8. Total Recall (Verhoeven)

9. Cry-Baby (Waters)

10. Gremlins 2 (Dante)

There were also a lot of terrible movies released in 1990. Ghost Dad, Problem Child, Spaced Invaders, Rocky V...oy...

Top 10: 1980

2011-01-24T07:48:00.003-05:00

One of the best years in film ever. A list of eleven through twenty would be as strong as many years' top tens. Also, I realized it's the only year that my three favorite directors all released a new movie.

1. The Shining (Kubrick)
2. Raging Bull (Scorsese)

3. The Elephant Man (Lynch)

4. The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner)

5. Inferno (Argento)
6. Popeye (Altman)

7. Bad Timing (Roeg)

8. Dressed to Kill (De Palma)

9. Kagemusha (Kurosawa)

10. The Fog (Carpenter)

Statham, Scorsese, Svenson

2011-01-23T00:47:00.004-05:00

The latest movie quiz at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule (courtesy of Professor Hubert Farnsworth, pictured above) is the first I've been able to participate in for a while. Thanks, Professor (and Dennis) for managing to keep the movie quiz - which has become a sort of staple of SLIFR - so much fun for so long.

1) Best Movie of 2010

With a few outliers remaining to be seen, at this point it looks like I'm going to have to follow the herd and go with The Social Network.

2) Second-favorite Roman Polanski Movie

Repulsion

3) Jason Statham or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

The Rock is a likeable enough guy, but Statham has Snatch and the knowing homoeroticism between himself and Stallone in The Expendables that carries on the proud tradition of Tango and Cash. I'll go with Statham even though my girlfriend would probably leave me for him.

4) Favorite movie that could be classified as a genre hybrid

Alien

5) How important is foreknowledge of a film’s production history? Should it factor into one’s reaction to a film?

A movie has to be considered in the context of the time and place that produced it, but direct behind-the-scenes info seems peripheral to the movie's success or failure.

6) William Powell & Myrna Loy or Cary Grant & Irene Dunne

Cary Grant & Irene Dunne

7) Best Actor of 2010

Jeff Bridges, True Grit

8) Most important lesson learned from the past decade of watching movies

Despite the conventional wisdom that dumb is the safest commercial bet, most people really do want to see a good story told smartly when they go to the movies. It's just harder to sell smart than stupid.

9) Last movie seen (DVD/Blu-ray/theater)

On Blu-Ray, Natural Born Killers - so very 90s, but still effective as sensory overload, particuarly in hi-def. In theatres, Blue Valentine - painful to watch but brilliantly acted and beautifully shot.

10) Most appropriate punishment for director Tom Six

I suspect Six is a sadomasochist, so I'm not sure what kind of punishment he wouldn't enjoy. Perhaps to be met with indifferent shrugs?

11) Best under-the-radar movie almost no one else has had the chance to see

Black Moon, Louis Malle's 1975 post-apocalyptic retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Still unavailable on R1 DVD (it would be perfect for Criterion).

12) Sheree North or Angie Dickinson

Angie Dickinson

13) Favorite nakedly autobiographical movie

All That Jazz

14) Movie which best evokes a specific real-life place

I agree with Anonymous - the 42nd Street I've visited in my lifetime is nothing like the one in Taxi Driver, but thanks to Scorsese I feel like I've been there too.

15) Best Director of 2010

David Fincher, The Social Network
16) Second-favorite Farrelly Brothers Movie

There's Something About Mary
17) Favorite holiday movie

My new favorite is Elf.

18) Best Actress of 2010

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

19) Joe Don Baker or Bo Svenson

My my my my Mitchell!

20) Of those notable figures in the world of the movies who died in 2010, name the one you’ll miss the most

Dennis Hopper

21) Think of a movie with a notable musical score and describe what it might feel like without that accompaniment.

Without Cavalleria Rusticana, Raging Bull would be even bleaker than it already is.

22) Best Screenplay of 2010

The Social Network

23) Movie You Feel Most Evangelistic About Right Now

Synecdoche, New York. I could talk someone's ear off about everything I think and feel for hours or I can just pop that movie in the DVD player and spare us both a lot of time.

24) Worst/funniest movie accent ever

Thandee Newton as an alien in W.

25) Best Cinematography of 2010

Shutter Island

26) Olivia Wilde or Gemma Arterton

Olivia Wilde

27) Name the three best movies you saw for the first time in 2010 (Thanks, Larry!)

Fearless, Modern Romance, Zoolander

28) Best romantic movie couple of 2010

Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig, Greenberg. They're so obviously, uncomfortably wrong for each other, and yet they're probably meant to be together.

29) Favorite shock/surprise ending

Brazil

30) Best cinematic reason to have stayed home and read a book in 2010

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). I actually fell asleep in the theatre (IRONY).

31) Movies in 2011 could make me much happier if they’d only ______________

retire the orange/blue trend in color timing.

Top 10: 1970

2011-01-21T09:07:00.003-05:00

1. El Topo (Jodorowsky)
2. The Conformist (Bertolucci)
3. Performance (Roeg)
4. Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson)
5. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Meyer)
6. Brewster McCloud (Altman)
7. Catch-22 (Nichols)
8. Husbands (Cassavetes)
9. The Wild Child (Truffaut)
10. Gimme Shelter (Maysles/Maysles/Zwerin)

What happened to my sweet girl?

2011-01-18T21:34:00.008-05:00

The commercial success of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is kind of astonishing, not just because sexually explicit films usually scare audiences away but because it's the most thematically slippery mainstream hit in recent memory. A dizzying collision of high and low art, that owes an equal debt to Powell, Polanski, Argento and Verhoeven, Black Swan flirts with camp even as it reaches for transcendence. The film's mixture of close-up character study, literally black-and-white archetypes, overt symbolic archetypes, horror movie tropes and kinky sex should be a complete mess, and yet Black Swan is the most wildly entertaining movie of the year. I can list all the elements and influences that the film draws from, but ultimately I can't explain quite why the damn thing works. What a thrill that an an American film in 2010 should be so pleasurably elusive.

It's that indefinable spark of pure creation that eludes Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a dancer with a prestigious ballet company in New York. The hardest-working dancer in the company, Nina is given a big break when she's cast as the Swan Queen in the company's production of Swan Lake. A driven perfectionist, Nina is perfect for the role but struggles with director Thomas' (Vincent Cassel) insistence that she also play the seductive Black Swan. Nina, who lives with her controlling, emotionally unstable mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), is a deeply repressed, fragile innocent who cannot "let go," as Tomas repeatedly demands of her. To Tomas, a virile, possibly dangerous man who Nina is smitten with, to "let go" means getting off - ceding technical perfection to emotional release as one does during sexual climax. But Thomas' rather narrow concept of letting go does not anticipate how deeply Nina has buried so much of herself; as Nina begins to let go, her world begins to spiral dangerously out of control.

Like Repulsion and The Tenant, Black Swan is a film of interiors - from beginning to end, we rarely stray from Nina's fragmented point of view. The way that Aronofsky frames Nina's inner life is a fascinating extension of his previous films - the bold use of archetypal imagery of Pi and The Fountain married with the grittier, character-driven approach of The Wrestler. Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique relentlessly follow Portman's every move in the early scenes, the grainy 16mm images threaten to disappear right into Nina's mind at any moment. As the more hallucinatory elements of the film emerge, Aronofsky never shies away from following the black/white sexual dichotomy through to its logical end (one nice touch - the color pallette of the film, largely muted pinks and greys at the beginning, grows darker through the film). The result is bigger than life but not heavyhanded; Nina's perception merges with the elevated emotion of ballet in, its a way that does feel true to the creative experience.

Portman is stunning in the role, not just because she convinces as a professional ballerina but because she throws herself wholeheartedly into every moment of Nina's journey. In its own way, Black Swan derives as much of a charge from the parallels between Nina and Portman's public persona as The Wrestler did from Randy the Ram/Mickey Rourke. While Portman has always been a talented actress, there's a strong sense in much of her work ("Hotel Chevalier" aside) that she's quite inhibited in many ways, and she has confirmed as much in interviews. Here, as Nina begins her long descent, Portman's work is unflinching; not only is she fearless in scenes that would terrify just about any actor in their frankness, but she's also never been so completely emotionally exposed. The result is stunning - there are closeups of Portman that are worthy of Maria Falconetti. She's aided by a strong supporting cast - Cassel is wonderfully hammy, Hershey is frighteningly well-cast as Portman's mom, Winona Ryder kills in her few scenes as a bitter older dancer, and Mila Kunis is terrific as Lily, the sexually confident dancer who aims to take Nina's place (or so Nina believes). When the much talked-about sex scene between Portman and Kunis arrives, Aronofsky and his actresses have developed the tension between the two perfectly that it feels less like a hook-up than a collision. And though yes, it's a scene of two attractive young women having sex, it's at least as creepy as it is sexy, especially in light of what it ultimately reveals about Nina. The entire film is like that, seducing us into some very dark places.

So what, finally, is Black Swan really about? Aronofsky describes it as a movie about performance, a companion piece to The Wrestler, and it is most certainly that (though the final shot's callback to the earlier film's ending may be a bit too on-the-nose). But it doesn't quite fit, with its more horrific elements, next to The Company or All That Jazz as the real-life story of a dance company. At the same time, it's not quite a horror movie or, if it is, it defies our expectations of what happens in a horror movie. Is what Black Swan has to say about the creative process muddled by its pulpier thriller-movie tropes, or is it a thriller movie which its director is trying to elevate about its roots? Perhaps the answer lies in ballet itself, which strives for physical perfection and deeper meaning even as it embraces melodrama and emotional excess. Perhaps the world of ballet is the perfect setting for a director who, clever as he can be, is completely incapable of ironic detachment. In that sense this is a logical step forward for the director; he's blown my mind before, but this is the first time he's seduced me.

Top 100 (2011 Edition)

2011-01-06T21:06:00.011-05:00

It's been a couple of years since the last time I updated my list of favorite movies, and I'm in a very different place in my life, both geographically and emotionally. For the most part, my life has changed for the better; I'm definitely a lot happier than I've been in a long time. I'm not sure if or how that has affected this list, which isn't drastically different than it was two and a half years ago.

Most of the people in my day-to-day life know me as a "movie expert" and kind of a snob, while compared to most of my internet cinephile friends and the writers I enjoy reading, my favorites seem awfully American and new. I'll admit that when I was younger, this made me feel a bit self-conscious; now I feel like maybe the final lesson for a movie lover, after amassing an eclectic knowledge of film spanning genres, decades and countries, is to embrace the fact that you just like the stuff you like.

1. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
2. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
3. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
5. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
6. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
7. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
8. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
9. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
10. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

11. Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
12. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
13. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
14. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
15. Kill Bill vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
16. Kill Bill vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)
17. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
18. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
19. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
20. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

21. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
22. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
23. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
24. Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
25. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
26. Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
27. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
28. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
29. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
30. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

31. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
32. The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
33. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
34. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
35. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog, 1979)
36. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
37. Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
38. Aguirre the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
39. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
40. Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1962)

41. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
42. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)
43. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
44. Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)
45. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
46. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
47. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
48. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
49. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
50. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

51. Lolita (stanley Kubrick, 1962)
52. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
53. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
54. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
55. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
56. Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986)
57. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
58. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
59. Last Tango in Paris (Bernard Bertolucci, 1972)
60. My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

61. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
62. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
63. Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beneiex, 1986)
64. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
65. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)
66. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
67. Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)
68. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
69. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
70. Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

71. Y tu mama tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
72. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
73. El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
74. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
75. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
76. The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)
77. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996)
78. Orphee (Jean Cocteau, 1949)
79. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
80. The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

81. Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)
82. Miller's Crossing (Joel Coen, 1990)
83. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
84. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
85. Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
86. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
87. No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
88. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
89. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
90. O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)

91. Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2002)
92. Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)
93. Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma, 1974)
94. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)
95. Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994)
96. The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998)
97. Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)
98. The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
99. True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)
100. Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

Nope, nothing wrong here.

2010-10-17T16:33:00.003-04:00

This is an entry in Steve Carlson's Killer Animal Blogathon at Our Science is Too Tight.

When asked to name his favorite adaptation of his work, Stephen King frequently cites, alongside more prestigious films like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, 1983's Cujo, based on his book about a rabid St. Bernard terrorizing a Maine housewife and her 3-year-old son. Released at the start of a decade-long glut of movies of varying quality based on King's work (John Carpenter's Christine and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone were released the same year), Cujo might seem like an arbitrary choice, especially over films by Cronenberg, De Palma and Kubrick. King seems to value Cujo for its lack of an auteur's signature, and for its simplicity, describing it (I'm paraphrasing as I can't find the quote) as a machine that batters the audience mercilessly. Indeed, Cujo is a well-done B movie that succeeds in its modest ambitions. And if that sounds patronizing, I don't mean it that way at all - sometimes I just want to watch a movie that will make me jump when it says "boo," and at this Cujo succeeds admirably.

Director Lewis Teague's version of King's fictional Maine hamlet Castle Rock is very much located in the wondrous 80's-cinema version of small-town life commonly known as Spielbergiana, and not just because E.T.'s Dee Wallace plays a mom in Cujo as well. The film opens with a bucolic scene of the happy, uninfected dog bounding after a rabbit, accompanied by Charles Bernstein's magical John Williams-esque score. When Cujo, poking his nose down a rabbit hole, is bitten by a rabid bat who'd been sleeping in an underground cave, Cujo establishes the same understanding of reality familiar from E.T. and Poltergeist - that magic and mystery, both good and evil, exist just underneath the surface of everyday life. The first half of King's book focuses on the troubled marriage of Donna and Vic Trenton (Wallace and Daniel Hugh-Kelly) and Donna's affair with local hunk Steve Kemp (Christopher Stone). The infidelity plot is given less time in the movie; while the book suggests (rather heavy-handedly) that Cujo is fated to teach this family a lesson, in the movie is just a random bad thing happening to basically good people. There's no moral lesson to be learned, just the reminder to appreciate family and the simple things in life because one never knows when one will be attacked by a killer dog.

The back story is also condensed, presumably, because the filmmakers are eager to get to the action. With Vic out of town on business, Donna and son Tad (Danny Pintauro) find themselves trapped in their stalled Pinto at the end of a very rural route. Cujo has already killed his owner, mechanic Joe Camber (Ed Lauter), and Donna has to find a way out of the situation before heatstroke and dehydration take her son's life. Teague and cinematographer Jan De Bont (who would later direct Speed and Twister) make excellent use of the claustrophobic setting, and they are aided greatly by the team of effects artists. While Cujo's analog effects aren't seamless, they're quite impressive considering they're pretty much a combination of hand puppets, a guy in a St. Bernard suit and several wet dogs; you more or less believe that Cujo is beating the hell out of Donna's Pinto. The most important elements for suspension of disbelief, however, are the performances; luckily, Pintauro is a believably frightened little boy and Wallace (as in E.T., The Howling and numerous other genre favorites), brings an emotional authenticity to the character that goes above and beyond the character as written. When Donna, caked in dirt, sweat and blood, fights back against Cujo to save her son, Wallace displays a kind of primal warrior mama ferocity that is surprisingly compelling.*

The ending of Cujo deviates from King's book (spoilers ahead). While Tad finally dies of dehydration in the novel's closing pages, he is spared in the movie. While I normally hate it when downbeat endings in literature are made crowd-pleasing when brought to the screen, here I think it is the right choice. While horror stories, which are about upending life as we know it (as George Romero is fond of saying, "upsetting the apple cart"), are often more effective when they do not restore order in the end, Tad's death makes the events of the previous 300 pages meaningless, making it an uncharacteristically nihilistic book for King. The restoration of order at the end of the movie is more appropriate to the story; the movie freeze-frames at the moment the family reunites and all is well in Spielbergiana once again. Like the faulty red dye in Sharp Cereal, Cujo gives a good scare but nobody is really hurt.

*Sidenote: I coincidentally saw Dee Wallace at the Rock and Shock horror convention in Worcester this weekend; she was warm, friendly and endearingly eccentric. I particularly liked her story about being asked by Rob Zombie to voice one of three sexy she-devils in the animated The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. She told Zombie, "I'll only do it if I can be the one with the biggest tits."

You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that's what the angry do.

2010-10-09T21:35:00.006-04:00

"It's quite possible that I'm your third man girl
But it's a fact that I'm the seventh son
And right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I'm done"

- The White Stripes, "Ball and Biscuit"

The already-famous opening scene of The Social Network is the most hilariously brutal cinematic breakup since Happiness, opening mid-conversation as Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) lectures his date, Erica (Rooney Mara) about the importance of joining a final club. Zuckerberg is a genius who apparently knows little to nothing about how to relate to women and possibly people in general. As he jumps several conversational tracks at once with little concern for having an actual conversation with poor Erica, it seems that either Mark is completely oblivious to his date as a separate person or, worse, his verbal gymnastics are a painfully misguided attempt to wow her with his intellectual prowess. Erica finally cannot take it anymore, and calmly eviscerates Mark's pretensions, informing him that "You're going to be successful, and rich. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." The ironic suggestion that the most popular social networking site in the world is the invention of a guy who cannot relate to others is at the heart of The Social Network, a film preoccupied with the paradoxical/symbiotic relationship between technology's rapidly evolving role in facilitating communication and my generation's growing tendency towards (preference for?) social isolation. For anyone who has recently found themselves in a room of flesh-and-blood people talking at length about things other people wrote on Facebook and had to repress the urge to scream, The Social Network is frighteningly prescient.

Aaron Sorkin's screenplay (based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Merzrich) jumps back and forth effortlessly between the rapid chain of events that led to the creation of Facebook and Zuckerberg testifying in two different lawsuits filed by classmates - twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Arnie Hammer), and Mark's best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), respectively. While the courtroom format is a familiar one (the Sorkin-penned A Few Good Men but one example), Sorkin and director David Fincher are less interested in deciding whether Zuckerberg truly stole Facebook from the Winklevi or broke his contract with Eduardo than in observing their brilliant but often inscrutable protagonist. Mark's bitter, post-breakup creation of Facemash - a Harvard variation of Hotornot.com - is crosscut with shots of implausibly attractive coeds literally bussed into a party hosted by one of the most exclusive final clubs at Harvard. It's the chip on his shoulder at having been rejected by women and the WASP elite that starts him on the path to Facebook and his destiny. Later, when co-founder Eduardo is focused on ways to monetize Facebook, Zuckerberg is preoccupied with protecting the site's "cool" status and everything that implies; while Mark is almost always the smartest person in the room, the motivations behind his billion-dollar creation are stunningly adolescent and regressive. Eisenberg is terrific as Zuckerberg, convincing as he coldly demonstrates his intellectual superiority while subtly hinting at the tremendous insecurity barely masked by Mark's smug facade.

It's the pursuit of "cool," that obscure object of desire, that leads Mark to Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), famous in geek circles as one of the founders of Napster. Timberlake is perfect as a Gen Y Mephistopheles, tantalizing Mark with talk of Facebook's billion-dollar potential - Parker is venal, paranoid and ultimately sort of sad, able to provide a Machiavellian path to the future but lacking in any understanding or interest in what, ultimately, the future means. Many have noted/complained that The Social Network doesn't seem very interested in Facebook itself, but I think it's Zuckerberg's relationship with Parker and the damage it does to one of his few ties with humanity that indirectly comments on our relationship with Facebook. Scrolling down my Facebook wall, I might encounter one friend's open letter to President Obama; below that, another friend posting pictures of her child being cute; below that, thinly veiled sexual banter between a friend and her new boyfriend; below that, a heated debate on whether simulated necrophilia is protected by the First Amendment; below that, Farmville. Facebook makes all of us performer and audience to everyone else we know, but it has no inherent meaning besides what we bring to it; it's banal and possibly nihilistic and, like any ubiquitious internet creation, its ultimate meaning is a mystery even as its role and influence in our lives grows every day (the entire course of my life has been drastically altered because of YouTube - I know of what I speak). So it's more than just a witty in-joke that Mark's internet alias is TylerDurden - Zuckerberg is perhaps the ultimate rebel without a clue and the embodiment of the clever, vacant core of Geek Chic.

Putting aside my Jonathan Edwards impression for one moment, whether The Social Network actually intends to raise any of the issues it has provoked in discussion of the film, it succeeds completely on the basis of being a wonderfully entertaining and engaging movie. Sorkin's typically sharp-witted writing has, in the hands of other directors, turned out stagey and unconvincing in the final product; Fincher, however, proves to be the ideal director for Sorkin, his penchant for visual symmetry and technical perfection matching Sorkin's own obsessive precision and rendering the whole thing less show-offy than a logical representation of their obsessive subject scored to a coldly perfect soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (perhaps it is, as Walter Chaw suggested, "an asshole movie about an asshole"). Fincher's exacting direction also results in excellent work from his cast of relative newcomers - Garfield is heartbreaking as the one nice guy in the movie, Hammer is hilarious and weirdly endearing (and there are two of him), and Mara is so terrific in her three short scenes that I'm ready to forgive her for that abysmal Nightmare on Elm Street remake. At its best, The Social Network suggests a 21st century version of a Billy Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond collaboration, films which were also very much of their zeitgeist yet captured something timeless. It's remarkable that the inevitable Facebook movie, which could and logically should have been instantly dated and completely ephemeral, could well prove to be one of the first classic movies of the new decade.

Battle of the Aughts: James Frazier on Burn After Reading

2010-09-29T16:27:00.003-04:00

When I reviewed “Burn After Reading” upon release, I rewarded it a 3.5 out of 5. I wrote “‘Burn After Reading,’ the latest film from the Coen Brothers, is a dark comedy and spy farce that unfolds like a chemical reaction, its plot elements combining, mixing, then igniting briefly before fizzing out.” I got it right until that last part.

“Burn After Reading” is a quintessential example of those films that work like a stick of dynamite with a long fuse, sitting there gently for a while until they explode in utter brilliance. I’m willing to forgive myself (and anyone else) for not catching the genius the first time around; the Coen Brothers’ assemble a script whose characters are all unlikeable, narcissistic buffoons, cast them with A-list talent, and unleashes them into a labyrinthine plot that mixes pathetic infidelity, meaningless espionage, and one bizarre home-made masturbatory implement. It’s a version of what Roger Ebert deemed the Idiot Plot, only the Coens intended for their characters to be as moronic as possible. The brothers, off a career high from the enormous critical and commercial success of “No Country For Old Men,” exhibit a fearless willingness to tell the story they want to. Not many auteurs would employ Brad Pitt as a dimwitted gym trainer that meets a shockingly unceremonious demise halfway through their story, but it’s that kind of nerve that makes their work go beyond unconventional and into the realm of subversive.

Detractors are prone to accusing the film of existing without meaning to its action, themselves accidentally tapping into the theme: that life’s a mess, nothing adds up to much, and we can all play the role of the fool. The closing dialogue between two confounded CIA observers sums it up:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.

Life’s hilarious like that, sometimes.

- James Frazier

Battle of the Aughts: Final Round

2010-09-25T20:34:00.005-04:00

And the winner:

"[Children of Men] inspires genuine hope even in the bleakest of possible futures... Cuaron just made a huge leap from a great up-and-coming director to one of the most important voices in cinema today." - me

"Cuaron, like Kubrick in his later films, plunges the audience into the world of the film without pausing for exposition or character development, and it's a lot to handle on the first viewing. Heck, it's tempting just to groove on the film's visual design the first time around- with its production design combining crumbling cities with cutting edge technology and its cinematography which is both luminous and hardscrabble, this is the supreme technical achievement of last year. But as overwhelming an experience as Children of Men can be, it never once loses the audience, a credit to Owen's rock-solid presence and especially the visionary direction of Cuaron. In the end, Children of Men is a hopeful film, one in which life doesn't merely endure, but prevails." - Paul Clark

"A convincingly imagined dystopia and filmmaking that's both staggeringly virtuosic and emotionally involving. All this and early King Crimson on the soundtrack." - Glenn Kenny

"Cuaron fulfills the promise of futuristic fiction; characters do not wear strange costumes or visit the moon, and the cities are not plastic hallucinations, but look just like today, except tired and shabby. Here is certainly a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, and the film serves as a cautionary warning. The only thing we will have to fear in the future, we learn, is the past itself. Our past. Ourselves."
- Roger Ebert

"The miracle of Cuarón's films is that he presents the sanctity of our feelings for our children in ways as rugged, terrifying, and unsentimental as childhood. Children of Men is about a lot of things, including a sense of wonder in ourselves: how we're able to persevere in the face of our own mortality if we're just given (reminded of?) a cause worth fighting for." - Walter Chaw

Battle of the Aughts: Round 6

2010-09-21T19:56:00.002-04:00

With his latest film having been killed by Scientology, maybe P.T. is due for a victory?

Punch-Drunk Love (11)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (8)

Children of Men (12)

Inglourious Basterds (6)

Battle of the Aughts: Round 5 - QT vs PT (milk vs. shakes)

2010-09-18T01:13:00.005-04:00

Punch-Drunk Love (10)

Up (5)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (8)

The Royal Tenenbaums (5)

Children of Men (8)

WALL*E (5)

Inglourious Basterds (7)

There Will Be Blood (6)

Battle of the Aughts: Round 4

2010-09-13T20:24:00.008-04:00

Sadly, this round's parings don't really inspire any clever titles (Ed Asner vs. Stephen Tobolowsky was considered but seemed like too much of a reach). However, the pairs of directors and, in one case, a much-loved studio that have made it thus far give hope for more cleverness in the future. Unless PT, QT and Pixar are due to get knocked down a peg or two...

Punch-Drunk Love (11)

Mulholland Drive (9)

Up (9)
Memento (7)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (9)
Spirited Away (7)

The Royal Tenenbaums (11)
Pan's Labyrinth (5)

Children of Men (12)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (3)

WALL*E/There Will Be Blood (tie - 8 each)

Inglourious Basterds (12)
Yi Yi (6)

Battle of the Aughts: Round 3 - Chihiro vs. Ofelia

2010-09-09T20:57:00.006-04:00

9/10 Edit - By some misbegotten stroke of the delete button, two of the pairings seem to have been omitted. So if you haven't voted on Spirited Away/Pan's Labyrinth, Ratatouille/The Royal Tenenbaums or Jesse James/WALL*E, please do. My apologies to Messrs. Miyazaki, Del Toro, Bird, Anderson, Dominik and Stanton.

Punch-Drunk Love (10)
Dancer in the Dark (2)

Mulholland Drive (8)
Dogville (5)

Up (7)
No Country For Old Men (6)

Memento (7)
American Splendor (6)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (11)
I'm Not There (2)

Spirited Away/Pan's Labyrinth (tie - 2 each)

The Royal Tenenbaums (3)
Ratatouille (1)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford/WALL-E (tie - 2 each)

Children of Men (10)
25th Hour (2)

There Will Be Blood (8)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (5)

Inglourious Basterds (8)
28 Days Later (5)

Yi Yi (6)
Happy-Go-Lucky (2)

Battle of the Aughts Round 2 - Spike Lee vs. Spike Lee

2010-09-05T23:53:00.004-04:00

Note: Happy-Go-Lucky, which received the most votes out of any non-winner last round, returns to fill out an odd number of winners.

Punch-Drunk Love (9)
In the Mood For Love (6)

Dancer in the Dark (8)
Pulse (2)

Mulholland Drive (8)
The New World (4)

Dogville (8)
Jackass Number Two (1)

Up (10)
Flight of the Red Balloon (1)

No Country For Old Men (12)
American Psycho (1)

Memento (10)
Primer (2)

American Splendor (5)
8 Women (4)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (10)
Almost Famous (4)

I'm Not There (5)
A Prairie Home Companion (3)

Spirited Away (8)
Y tu mamá también (4)

Pan's Labyrinth (7)
No Direction Home (3)

Ratatouille (5)
Sideways (4)

The Royal Tenenbaums (9)
Amélie (3)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (7)
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (0)

WALL*E (8)
Before Sunset (3)

25th Hour (5)
Before Sunset (4)

Children of Men (8)
The Dark Knight (3)

There Will Be Blood (11)
Zodiac (2)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (8)
Beau Travail (1)

Inglourious Basterds (9)
Time Out (1)

Yi Yi (4)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (3)

28 Days Later/Happy-Go-Lucky (tie - 4 each)

Battle of the Aughts: FYC - Star Trek

2010-09-02T19:33:00.002-04:00

"I like to have fun when I go to the movies. I don't really notice the lighting or how a shot is framed until the second or third viewing. I want to be engaged with the characters and story first and foremost. Otherwise why go to the movies? Star Trek is why I go to the movies. After 10 movies and numerous t.v. shows, J.J. Abrams manages to reinvent Star Trek without losing its spirit. In every moment I feel the spirit of what Gene Roddenberry created. Every character is perfectly cast, from Captain Pike to Scotty. These actors bring the essence of the original characters without turning them into a parody, which could have easily happened. I am truly engaged with these people and care about their outcome.

"If that wasn't enough, the sets are amazing. They are grand without distracting me from the story. The ships are massive and complex, with beautiful lines. They're not the boxy models of yesteryear. They are smooth and sexy. They are impressive and truly makes me feel as if I'm in the future. The worlds are real but distinct. The action is also well balanced with the regular banter scenes. Its perfectly paced and truly an adventure. A joyful journey from beginning to end." - Annabelle Proulx

Battle of the Aughts Round 1 - Spock vs. Frodo

2010-09-01T20:41:00.008-04:00

I matched up the films in round 1 randomly, which makes the super-geeky titular battle much funnier. I'm happy that there are a number of offbeat pairs below - everyone who sent me their top 10 helped make this a very eclectic contest. Thanks, guys. Each round will last approximately 72 96 hours. I can't wait to see how it all pans out.

In the Mood For Love (5 votes)
Happy-Go-Lucky (4)

Punch-Drunk Love (10)
A Christmas Tale (0)

Pulse (4)
Reprise (0)

Dancer in the Dark (8)
Half Nelson (0)

The New World (8)
Run, Fatboy, Run (2)

Mulholland Drive (10)
Irreversible (1)

Jackass Number Two (4)
The Consequences of Love (1)

Dogville (5)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1)

Flight of the Red Balloon (3)
Electric Dragon 80.000 V (1)

Up (6)
Silent Light (1)

American Psycho/Primer (tie - 3 each)

No Country For Old Men (10)
Talk to Her (1)

Memento (8)
Secretary (4)

8 Women (4)
Shotgun Stories (1)

American Splendor (5)
In Praise of Love (1)

Almost Famous (4)
Blissfully Yours (1)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (6)
Synecdoche, New York (4)

A Prairie Home Companion (5)
Running on Karma (0)

I'm Not There/Y tu mama tambien (tie -3)

Spirited Away (4)
Hamlet (1)

No Direction Home (2)
The Best of Youth (0)

Pan's Labyrinth (5)
Adaptation (4)

Sideways (3)
Werckmeister Harmonies (2)

Ratatouille (5)
Exiled (0)

The Royal Tenenbaums (7)
Waking Life (2)

Amelie (5)
Gerry (2)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (4)
The Devil's Rejects (2)

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2)
Old Joy (1)

Before Sunset (4)
Zombieland (3)

WALL*E (6)
24 Hour Party People (2)

Inside Man (4)
Audition (3)

Children of Men (9)
Burn After Reading (1)

The Dark Knight (4)
The Son (2)

Zodiac (7)
In the Bedroom (2)

There Will Be Blood (5)
Bad Santa (3)

Beau Travail (1)
Survive Style 5+ (0)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (8)
The Brown Bunny (1)

Inglourious Basterds (8)
The World (0)

Time Out (2)
Black Hawk Down (0)

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (5)
Star Trek (4)

Yi Yi (3)
Southland Tales (0)

28 Days Later (6)
The Aura (0)

An end to inertia.

2010-08-17T23:35:00.004-04:00

I recently did some research on a self-help program that will go unnamed to help a friend determine if a family member had joined a cult (alas, no). In reading about this program's tenets - basically, a grab bag of Eastern and Western philosophy backed by an aggressive marketing strategy - I was struck by the distinction the program makes between "change" (bad) and "transformation" (good), words that I had believed to be synonyms. The difference, according to this program, is that change is defined in contrast to the past (like Mant), whereas transformation is a present-tense decision to start a new way of being independent of the past (like Brundlefly). Fascinating. So in an effort to transform, I've decided to skip the part explaining the reasons why I've let the blog stagnate (mostly mundane) and get on with one of the many ideas I've been procrasinating on.

So now then.

I wanted to wait on one idea until the flood of end-of-decade lists had slowed down and give time to some of my readers who, like me, needed the DVD window to fully absorb last year's movies. Those of you who have been visiting the blog for a long time might remember the tournament-style voting competition a few years back to determine the readers' choice for Best Movie Ever (the winner was 2001). I'd like to try to same thing to determine Cinevistaramascope's Best of the Aughts. As with the previous contest, a pool of films will be created from readers' top 10 lists, with more points awarded by ranking (unranked lists = equal points for each movie). The highest-scoring films - up to 128 - will face off over the course of five or six rounds until a winner is named. Hopefully, as with any "best of" list worth its salt, lively debate will ensue.

The only rule is that movies submitted must have made their non-festival (or commercial, if you prefer) theatrical debut between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009. The more diverse the selection of competing films, the more fun the contest will be (and with 128 slots open, it's very possible that one vote is all a film will need). So whether you wish to bring attention to the work of Pedro Costa or argue that Kangraroo Jack is ripe for rediscovery, please e-mail your top 10 to cvrscope@gmail.com. Please also indicate if you'd be interested in contributing a brief write-up of a film from your list, which I hope to run during the contest as well (I'd also appreciate suggestions for a contest title). Top 10s will be accepted until 12PM EST on August 29; the contest will start on September 1. Those of you looking for ideas should check out my friend Paul Clark's ongoing Top 25 of the Aughts, or the submissions from last year's Muriel Awards.

Speaking of the Muriels, the recently launched blog Our Science is Too Tight looks to serve as a sort of meeting place for the many talented film writers and bloggers who contribute to the awards every year. Nearly every day there are new links to Muriel voters' work as well as original content. I'm looking forward to writing for the blog - I'm looking forward to writing, period.

I gotta get off this rock, Chuck.

2010-05-31T21:44:00.006-04:00

At first I thought I was putting off writing about Shutter Island because it's impossible to really discuss without talking about its ending (consider that a spoiler warning). But after a few weeks, I realized I've never written about Scorsese; I managed to sidestep in-depth responses to The Departed and Shine a Light when they were released, and I've never written a proper review of any of his previous films. Writing about Scorsese is daunting, not so much because he is possibly my favorite filmmaker - he, Kubrick and Lynch are constantly battling for the top spot - but because, as Godard said of Nicholas Ray, Scorsese is cinema.

This is not to say that Scorsese is beyond criticism, but each new film, good or bad, is the sum of not only every film he's made but possibly every film he's ever seen. Shutter Island evokes and sometimes directly acknowledges Hitchcock, Kubrick, Powell and Pressburger, Val Lewton, Mario Bava and others I'm sure I missed on one viewing. This isn't just homage, it's flat-out worship of the entire history of cinema even as he expands the language of filmmaking in ways big and small with each new movie. The problem, then, is where to begin - whether I start by connecting Shutter Island to to Scorsese's body of work, the ongoing tension between his American and European sensibilities, his Catholicism, his ongoing exploration of violence, or his continued collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, I'm risking worse than finding I don't have Scorsese's breath support. At best I'm telling you what you already know; at worst I'm diagramming, grasping the words but missing the music, reducing Scorsese to a fucking mix tape. I'd better have something to say, in other words, and as there is no clear starting point, let's start at the ending.

More than any of the other filmmakers I mentioned before, Shutter Island explicitly quotes Kubrick and specifically The Shining, complete with Penderecki on the soundtrack and a cameo by the Grady twins (triplets here). Kubrick's film is an important reference point in understanding Scorsese's intentions here, beyond the surface similarities of two films set in creepy, isolated locations. Since The Shining's release, the most common criticism of the film is that it is obvious from the beginning that Jack Torrance is crazy, which deprives the film of any suspense. For fans of The Shining, however, it is Kubrick's decision to foreground his character's psychological instability that is the source of the film's almost unbearable tension - as Scorsese commented, "It's holding back this extraordinary, emotional, powerful dramatic punchline. You know it's going to come somehow, at some time, and it just creates such suspense." Similarly, Shutter Island has been partly criticized for the predictability of a "twist" that I don't think is meant to be a twist - it's obvious early on that the protagonist, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is insane. This will be obvious to anyone with a basic recognition of film language from the first scene; as Teddy and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) approach the titular island by ferry, the blatant rear projection of the backgrounds signals a level of unreality reminiscent of Hitchcock's use of the technique (which, in his later films, was on the verge of anachronistic even 40 years ago). Scorsese has always embraced a tension between realism and cinematic artifice; with Shutter Island, he emphasizes the medium's unreality to clue us in, early on, that we cannot trust what we are seeing.

Teddy and Chuck are headed to Ashecliff, a hospital for the criminally insane located on the island, to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient hospitalized after drowning her children. As Teddy interviews the hospital staff, including compassionate head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his more pragmatic colleague Dr. Naehring (Max Von Sydow), Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker employ deliberate continuity errors and off-balance editing rhythms to subtly disorient us. By the time Teddy confides his real motives for taking the case to Chuck, it's clear that we cannot take Teddy or his investigation at face value - the mystery Scorsese withholds is why an insane man is being given free reign of the asylum. DiCaprio is excellent as the tormented, justice-seeking Daniels, but the supporting performances are perhaps more important, as much of the film's success depends on the sustained feeling that everyone around Teddy knows something he doesn't (Ruffalo is particularly wonderful, playing the second banana role on the surface while revealing subtle hints of the compassion he feels for his "partner"). Few films have evoked the perspective of a deeply paranoid man as effectively; each scene of Teddy's investigation plays well as either a literal manifestation of the mystery unfolding in Teddy's head or, upon reflection, as the elaborate role-playing game it actually is. This is complimented marvellously by Dante Ferretti's production design, a neverending labyrinth of corridors, spirals and shadows that manifest Teddy's search for the truth just out of his grasp.

Though Shutter Island is, quite deliberately, one of Scorsese's pulpier efforts, it continues his ongoing investigation into the nature of violence. Teddy is a war hero, and his memories of the liberation of Dachau are borne directly out of a '50s pulp magazine - however, these sequences are marked by historical inaccuracies that suggest they may be a part of Teddy's delusion (I must admit I would have missed this were it not for Glenn Kenny's response to complaints from Bernard Henri-Levy). Characters throughout the film ruminate on the nature of violence with varying degrees of success (I found the dialogue between Teddy and a guard played by Ted Levine* a bit too on-the-nose). The film's strongest impact comes when we see the reality Teddy has buried. The film has some stunningly stylized moments, including the gorgeous dream sequences involving his dead wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) and the unforgettable shot of rats swarming a cliffside; however, when we see what Dolores did in the Berkshires, the scene is shot flatly, from a distance. It's one of the most chilling cinematic examples of the banality of evil, a horror born out of good intentions and human frailty.

This is not to overlook the awkwardness of the film's denoument - I must admit that I was a bit disappointed that the film's reveal requires Ben Kingsley pointing at anagrams on a whiteboard. I want to say that Scorsese elevates the material (Laeta Kalogridis is no Paul Schrader), but part of the reason the film works is that he never condescends to the B-movie origins of Lehane's novel. Shutter Island is a master chef making cheeseburgers and clearly having a lot of fun doing it; it's entertaining as hell, and yet it clearly merits discussion alongside his more "serious" efforts (to Scorsese's credit, I don't think he makes this distinction with his work). Teddy, like almost every Scorsese protagonist from Travis Bickle to Rupert Pupkin to Jesus Christ, is another incarnation of "God's lonely man," obsessives driven to repeat their psychic traumas over and over. As Kenny pointed out, "Even more than Raging Bull, Shutter Island can be read as a feature-length remake of Scorsese's harrowing 1969 short The Big Shave: it's a chronicle of a man who simply cannot stop hurting himself, cutting himself open." For this reason, the film lingered in my memory long after the closing credits (with their haunting mash-up of Dinah Washington and Max Richter). While hopefully none of us will ever be in Teddy's position, I'm sure many of us have risked destruction trying to solve an unsolvable problem; it's often our desire to be heroic that brings out our monsters. Why are you all wet, baby?

Home Entertainment

2010-04-09T22:20:00.014-04:00

I keep forgetting to mention here that the Black Light DVD is available for sale now at CreateSpace and Amazon. It's not Blu-ray, and I doubt it will be your new home theater demo. But it's got heart, dammit, and that has to count for something these days ($20, hopefully). I've included some stills below, along with the trailer for those of you who missed it the first time.

A Nightmare in Cherry Hill

2010-03-21T19:32:00.010-04:00

Is the sight of Malcolm McDowell, Dario Argento, Tom Atkins and Eric Roberts occupying the same space a sign of the end times? I can't say for sure, but I saw exactly that at Monster Mania 14. Held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the horror convention featured an astounding lineup of horror, cult and B-movie actors (including both Jake AND Gary Busey) signing autographs and meeting fans. It was my first horror convention, though it won't be my last - for a lifelong horror movie geek, Monster Mania is better than Christmas.

After a six-hour drive to Cherry Hill, a shower and room service, my travelling companion Annabelle and I headed down to check out the many vendors selling horror collectibles. There were out-of-print, R2 and bootleg DVDs, lobby cards, posters and stills, t-shirts and other apparel, and back issues of Fangoria as far as the eye could see. I was particularly impressed by the vendors selling horror-inspired art of their own, from paintings of Pinhead to horror-themed jewelry to my personal favorite, a Barbie redesigned to look like Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic (those in the Philly area should check out the Twin Peaks-inspired show, featuring work by 20 artists, at Piranha Betty's). Working on a limited budget for the weekend, I grabbed a Night Breed DVD for Annabelle but decided to think some more about what needed to come home with me. The best part of the night was the visible excitement on the faces of Annabelle's young cousins, who couldn't wait to tell their classmates they'd met Michael Myers. Indeed, witnessing Myers posing for pictures with Freddy Kreuger, the Predator and a Na'vi ranks high on the list of the most surreal things I've ever seen.

On Saturday morning I returned to the vendors, snagging a region-free DVD of Santa Sangre and two t-shirts from Fright Rags - a Wicker Man tee (Christopher Lee, not Nicolas Cage) and an absolutely gorgeous Let the Right One In shirt. I chatted for a few minutes with the Fright Rags crew; they're supercool and, in my opinion, way better than Rotten Cotton.

Then we headed to our first panel, a reunion of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 stars Mark Patton and Kim Myers. The Q&A actually led me to reevaluate my feelings about Freddy's Revenge; while I'd always assumed the film's blatant homoeroticism was unintentional and assumed the questions would dance around this, I was surprised that Patton was eager to explain why, as he put it, "Nightmare 2 is the gayest horror movie ever." The openly gay actor, who was out when he played Jesse (a rarity among young actors in 1980s Hollywood), was very aware of the film's gay subtext and insists screenwriter David Chaskin was as well. Patton talked candidly about his decision to leave acting, motivated by the pain of losing many of his friends to AIDS and frustration with the homophobia (often from closeted actors and executives) that closed doors for him in Hollywood. As he talked of tiring of the "fag-bashing" he found in many Nightmare 2 reviews on the internet and the increasingly positive response his performance has received from gay and straight horror fans in recent years, I found myself reflecting on how strange it must be for an actor primarily identified with one role in a genre movie to have his life defined and identified by that role. Patton, who owns an art gallery in Mexico and hasn't done any convention appearances or Elm Street interviews before this year, decided to meet his fans after a positive experience being interviewed for the upcoming series retrospective documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (the footage we were shown by the producers looked very promising). He expressed sincere gratitude for his fans, particularly those who told him that Freddy's Revenge helped them come to terms with their sexuality. I never expected to be genuinely movied by a Freddy's Revenge Q&A. You rock, Jesse Walsh.

After the Q&A I got in line to have my Inferno one-sheet signed by Dario Argento. The prospect of meeting one of my favorite directors, horror or otherwise, had me a bit nervous; luckily, Argento was extremely kind and, if anything, a bit shy himself. He was curious about my poster, asking what country it was from. I told him I wasn't really sure; he examined it again and said in his pronounced Italian accent, "Ah, Turkey, I think," he said, pointing to the image of a snake slithering through a skull's eye sockets. "In Turkey, they add snake. This not enough. They need snake. Yes, Turkey." I thanked him, told him Inferno is one of my favorite films - original, I know, but as Inferno is his most underrated film, he seemed to appreciate it. My limited budget kept me from meeting more people directly, so special mention must be made of Bill Mosely, who enthusiastically chatted up fans regardless of whether they were buying anything or not. That Chop Top is a class act.

More room service and cable, than the Malcom McDowell Q&A, who started off by requesting intelligent questions only; when the first was "What was it like to work with Stanley Kubrick," he groaned "Christ, here we go..." Luckily, after getting the usual anecdotes about "Singin' in the Rain" and eye torture out of the way, McDowell was filled with hilarious stories about filming the William Tell orgy scene (he kept giving one actress the ol' in-out to after Kubrick called "cut" to irritate the perfectionist director), hijinks on the set of Caligula (I had no idea Peter O'Toole was [is?] a pothead!), and injuries sustained while filming the nude wrestling scene in if... When asked about working with Rob Zombie, he referred to the director as "brilliant" and insisted he could be a successful director of non-horror movies (I hold out hope for Zombie - Halloween II was often ridiculous but somehow difficult to dismiss completely). McDowell had the audience cracking up and seemed to really enjoy talking directly with fans, particularly a young woman dressed as a Droog - "Look at you there, all dressed up as Alex and with your bosoms out! That's great."

Next was Argento, aided by an interpreter, who apologized early on that "I am not as funny as [McDowell]." He started by telling the audience that he'd travelled with his brother to the American premiere of Suspiria in Philadelphia (near Cherry Hill), where it got a very enthusiastic response, and the city has been dear to him ever since. When asked where he studied film, he responded "I studied in the cinema. Godard is my teacher. Bergman is my teacher." While his recent films have been disappointing, it was clear that Argento hasn't lost touch with his love of cinema, leaving me with hope that he still has more great movies left to make. The best moment was when a fan asked about the monstrous title character of Argento's Masters of Horror episode Jenifer, Argento said "I love Jenifer. I want to make love to Jenifer."

We took another quick look at the vendors the next morning before leaving; I thought about how good it felt to be among so many fellow horror fans. While I love all cinema, horror was definitely my gateway into film appreciation, and I'll always feel loyal to the movies that gave me nightmares when I was a kid, forever burning themselves into my frame of reference. While I don't want to overanalyze it, I suspect that horror fans are bonded by a more macabre outlook on life than most people have. For all the times I've been asked why I could possibly enjoy such grotesque movies, it felt good to be surrounded by people for whom the question was obvious. Also, after three days of being surrounded by alternachicks in clingy horror apparel (including the one by my side), I must say that horror fans are generally sexier than the average geek. I can't wait for my next con, and after seeing how kid-friendly the con actually was, it's safe to say that Luna and Tommy will be attending their first Monster Mania pretty soon.

Top 10: 2009

2010-02-20T20:35:00.015-05:00

I saw fewer films in 2009 than usual, which made me more appreciative of the good ones and more resentful of the bad ones. If there are more big-budget genre movies on my list than usual, it's more reflective of a shift in film distribution than in a newfound aversion to art films - as the studio indie divisions continued to fold and niche distributors relied more on Netflix and On Demand services, films like The Road and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans never made it to my neck of the woods (although the latter is playing at Images this week - thanks, guys!). It was also an unusually strong year for comedy, horror and children's movies, and even big-budget studio tentpoles - for every Trannys 2, there was a genuinely offbeat or superior crowd pleaser. While there are definitely some bleak films on my top 10, 2009 was possibly the most fun moviegoing year of the decade - the best movies of the year (it was practically a coin toss between the top two) inspired the kind of excitement I always felt as a movie-loving kid but is all too rare these days.

1. Where the Wild Things Are One of my favorite memories from working at Images is the letters we received from the local elementary school thanking us for showing Spike Jonze's brilliant adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak book. Where the Wild Things Are is not an easy film for kids to digest, and thank God for that - when most "family entertainment" is designed to pacify kids, a film that speaks to a child's understanding of the world is something of a revalation. Surpassing even his collaborations with Charlie Kaufman, Where the Wild Things Are is the grandest expression yet of Jonze's playful, endlessly imaginative approach to filmmaking. At once wondrous and haunting, Where the Wild Things Are is the most fully realized vision of the world through a child's eyes since E.T. I can't wait to watch it with my kids.

2. Inglourious Basterds By now, the experience of having a new Quentin Tarantino movie kick my ass is so routine that I feel spoiled. I must admit that it's a bit mystifying to me why Inglourious Basterds brought Tarantino the critical and commercial acclaim that has eluded him since Pulp Fiction, especially since his latest is very much a continuation of the cinematic ideas explored in Kill Bill and the much-maligned Death Proof. If anything, I would have guessed that a nearly three-hour WWII movie with no battles, lots of subtitles and a star that is offscreen for half the running time would have appealed mostly to cinephiles. Its popularity is attributable, I think, to two things - the joy of watching Nazis get brutally killed (something Tarantino subtly comments on throughout the movie) and the enduring power of well-done classical filmmaking. The film is a masterpiece of sustained tension - the audience I saw it with was dead silent during the opening chapter and the brilliant tavern scene, which almost drove me to frustration before delivering brilliantly. A cinematic orgy of great performances and already-classic images, Inglourious Basterds is going to be discussed and celebrated for many years to come.

3. Antichrist John Waters described Lars Von Trier's movie best, writing in Artforum that "If Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide, gone to hell, and come back to earth to direct an exploitation/art film for drive-ins, this is the movie he would have made." Equal parts Evil Dead and Hour of the Wolf, the film's mixture of psychosexual allegory and X-rated splatter was met with derision by many at its Cannes premiere, where the closing dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky was met with laughter. Yet Von Trier, who made the film while struggling with severe depression, shares with Tarkovsky a preoccupation with the struggle between the spirit and the flesh. Though Antichrist is employs many of the same Brechtian devices as the director's recent work, it's his most emotionally direct film since Breaking the Waves. As the conflict between the unnamed couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (frighteningly great here) turns shockingly visceral, Von Trier demonstrates a seriousness about the consequences of violence rarely seen in contemporary movies. Always the provocateur, Von Trier baits his critics' charges of misogyny with the ultimate example of the monstrous feminine, but the film is perhaps his attempt to either exorcise or (as the final scene suggests) make peace with his own chaos. Beautifully photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle, Antichrist is a difficult but important film that, love it or hate it, is bound to get under your skin.

4. Observe and Report Jody Hill is what Martin Scorsese calls a "cinematic smuggler." In his debut film The Foot Fist Way, the amazing TV series Eastbound and Down and this, his criminally underrated second movie, Hill uses the cover of deadpan slacker irony to deliver a pitch-black critique of the spiritually empty existence of his characters. For mall cop Ronnie (Seth Rogen, also underestimated here), a paranoid, reactionary ethos cobbled together from action movies and reruns of COPS is his only escape from his hellish life. If that sounds about as funny as Antichrist, the miracle is that Hill, like Todd Solondz before him, gives his protagonist a weird integrity; in his own misguided way, Ronnie is trying to make the world a better place. Hill and Rogen have both described Observe and Report as "Taxi Driver as a comedy," and like De Niro and Scorsese's own comic version of Taxi Driver (The King of Comedy), the movie is a barrel of nervous laughs.

5. A Serious Man A movie that gets funnier and more threatening the more I think about it. The way the film's impending sense of doom creeps up on you is astonishing; there's not a wasted moment in the film, every scene quietly building to the ending's final gut punch. The Coens have become possibly our greatest absurdists; while I admit I'm still working through the film's meaning, it seems to posit the idea that there is something governing our lives, but that something's nature is so unknowable to us that perhaps it's best too, as character suggests, "Accept the mystery." The Coens have never been more merciless, but any charges of misanthropy fall apart in the face of their obvious affection for their characters and the actors playing them; in its obvious sympathy for the little guy, A Serious Man gives me that Barton Fink feeling.

6. Watchmen I like this movie for all the reasons it was never going to connect with a mainstream audience. I like that it's cold and precise in its stubborn adherence to the source novel; I like that it's longer, more violent and nerdier than it needs to be, that its makers cared more about giving the fans the movie they wanted then in appealing to the widest possible audience. Of course, everyone who fell in love with the book can't help comparing Zack Snyder's movie against the one they'd imagined, so there's something noble in Snyder's swinging for the fences. The film isn't perfect - after Revenge of the Sith, no movie should feature a costumed character howling "Nooooo!" - but Watchmen stands next to Hulk and Superman Returns as a cerebral take on the comic book movie that I'll gladly defend in vain anytime. If he sees it, Alan Moore may lift his curse on Snyder; I know I did.

7. Adventureland Greg Mottola's coming-of-age tale is the warmest movie I saw this year. Mottola demonstrates real affection for his characters as they try to navigate their first adult relationships. Jesse Eisenberg (also good this year in Zombieland) and Kristen Stewart are endearingly awkward as co-workers at the titular amusement park struggling to say what they mean. Adventureland is bound to inspire laughs of recognition from anyone who remembers what it was like to be 20 and completely unprepared for the real world. Plus, the soundtrack kicks ass.

8. Public Enemies With each film, Michael Mann is driven more and more by an obsessive attention to the nuts-and-bolts minutia of his characters' lives that is frustrating to some audience members and mesmerizing to others. As with Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the contrast between the striking cinematography and the muddy sound design emphasizes the disconnect between historical mythmaking and verisimilitude. We're drawn to the seductive cool of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, willing as ever to subvert his iconic screen presence) even as the movie constantly paints towards his inevitable downfall. It's the most subversive gangster movie since Bonnie and Clyde, and while it never quite touches the greatness of that film (it's surprising how bad Christian Bale is here), it's nevertheless a fascinating film, particularly in its stunning final scenes.

9. Star Trek A movie that shouldn't work but does. A year ago, I was mocking Star Trek's trailer, which threatened what Paul Clark dubbed "Star Trek Babies." But while I remain opposed to building starships on earth, I was otherwise surprised by how director J.J. Abrams manages the balancing act of honoring fans' memories of these characters while also, impossibly, making Star Trek cool. The time-travel plot is completely ridiculous, but no matter; Abrams' understands that the key to Star Trek's success is the interplay between the characters, particularly the coolly logical Spock and cocky man of action Kirk (they, and the rest of the characters, are perfectly cast). With the Abrams-created Lost (series co-runner Damon Lindelof is one of Star Trek's producers) taking sci-fi to new levels on the small screen, the same love of genre storytelling has breathed new life into a dying franchise; it's sort of astonishing, after slogging through the last few Next Generation movies, to be genuinely excited for the next Star Trek.

10. Drag Me to Hell Quentin Tarantino pointed out in an interview that Sam Raimi's latest horror comedy shares with A Serious Man a gleeful willingness to torture its protagonist (Raimi and the Coens have collaborated in the past). Made in the macabre tradition of EC Comics, Drag Me to Hell is Raimi returning to his splatstick roots - this movie may be the closest thing we ever get to a big-budget Evil Dead 4. The film's laughs and screams are held together by its central sick joke - that its tormented protagonist Christine (Allison Lohman) deserves what's coming to her. It's a blast to witness Raimi get back in touch with the demented Looney Tunes style of filmmaking only seen in moments of the Spider-Man movies, while also revealing a near-Hitchcockian sense of timing. It's the rare mainstream horror movie that pulls no punches, and would be a much more bitter pill to swallow were Raimi not clearly having a fiendishly fun time making us jump out of our seats.

Speaking of top 10s, it's also time for the 2009 Muriel Awards; as always, the results promise to be better than the Oscars. This year has seen some best-of-the-decade awards as well as the usual anniversary awards - I never realized 1984 was such a great year for movies, but I couldn't even find room for much-deserved winner This is Spinal Tap in my top 5. The awards once again feature commentary by the eclectic group of film bloggers and writers who participated, including my notes on Best Screenplay winner Inglourious Basterds (so far, it's looking like an Inglourious sweep at the Muriels this year). To see the winners posted every day through February 28, head over to Steve Carlson's blog Down Inside You're Dirty.