Atonement
For me, good dramas fall into one of two categories:

1) Movies about original characters I’ve never seen on screen before, or;
2) Movies about old familiar archetypical characters placed in situations we haven’t seen them face.

Unfortunately, on either of those levels Atonement falls a little flat, since it’s about archetypical characters doing the standard Hollywood things. We’re introduced to two people who are attracted to each other, and they spend the rest of the movie biting their lips and staring meaningfully at each other whenever they can.

Atonement is a classic Hollywood war-saga, wherein Two Tragic Characters Are Separated By This Deuced Conflict And Write Letters To One Another To Prove Their Love. The set-up’s a little different in that the reason the Two Tragic Characters are separated is due to the woman’s jealous younger sister, who sees them attracted to each other and does something very foolish and petty to split them apart, but the effects of the war are really what drives the heart of Atonement.

That could be an interesting plot, I guess, except that I always felt ahead of the curve. I guess some might witness the sedate pace as building character, except that the characters – at least in the first two hours or so – never did anything that surprised me. (Okay, they did one thing, and it involved the “C” word, but then it lost me again with a goofy swap-setup that would put a sitcom to shame.)

Atonement wants to spend a lot of time looking at these people so we fathom their intentions, but we instinctively get what’s going on, and so I found a lot of it redundant. I said, “Right, those two are attracted to each other,” and after I got it we spent another ten minutes on studied closeups and smoldering glances. I said, “Okay, the sister is going to stumble in on them,” and after I got it we spent two minutes on a slow, close-up pan. I said, “Okay, this guy with the funny face and the bad mustache is supposed to be a creep,” and then we spent another several moments with the camera panning back and forth.

I guess the intent is to really show the nooks and crannies of their acting, but given that nobody’s doing anything we didn’t see coming after their first introduction, I must have missed the point.

Everything that happens is drearily predictable, right up until the end – which, like the ending of No Country For Old Men, is meant to subvert the intention of moviegoers who know how this movie must end. It plays thoroughly on what you expect, which is good.

That ending is superb. It stuck with me the next morning, where I was still rolling the taste of it around in my mouth, trying to determine how I felt about it. That ending’s why it won the Golden Globes.

But still, it felt like an ending that was far better than the movie it was attached to – and unlike No Country For Old Men, which was superb and lean all the way through, Atonement felt a little too flabby for me, a little too in love with its own shots (though there’s one beautifully-crafted war shot that puts Hitchcock to shame).

As such, it was redeemed. But was it the best movie of the year? Not for me, anyway. I’m glad I saw it, but that’s about as far as it goes.

I should add, however, that James McAvoy, who did a suitable if unexceptional job in Last King of Scotland (playing second banana to the real meat of Forest Whittaker’s role), seems to have an eye for solid roles. Some people take their Oscar-film-appearing boost and fritter it away on Catwoman, but he seems to be positioning himself quite nicely. Go him.

28 Weeks Later
I wasn’t a big fan of 28 Days Later, which was a good zombie film but not the second coming of the undead Christ, as many seemed to think. What irritated me about 28 Days Later was the way it transformed from a zombie film into Rambo, wherein an untrained civilian whoops the entire army with nothing but wits and fists.

But I’d heard good things about this, so I Netflixed it. And I found it to be thoroughly unpleasant, but in a fascinating way – this may have been the best horror film of 2007, mainly because it has moments in it that made me genuinely sick to my stomach. That wasn’t due to the gore, which is splattery but not graphic; it was due to what was happening.

Those horrific moments come at a cost, though.

See, 28 Weeks Later is actually more of a documentary than a film. We follow a new outbreak, looking at the changed face of an England ravaged by zombies, and as such there’s not the usual horror trope of a lead character who will remain alive until the end of the film. Anyone can die here, and they do, often in shocking ways. There were several setups where I went, “Oh, this person’s protected by the screenplay, someone will clearly come to rescue them. That’s what happens when… Oh, Jesus, what’s going on? Help that person! God! I – “

Then silence, as I sat back, stunned. There was no rescue. They got punked.

The unpredictability comes at a cost, though, since there’s not as much of an emotional core. You’re following a story, not a person, and as such there’s no one you wind up ultimately rooting for.

28 Weeks Later may be the purest zombie movie ever. Nothing is safe. Anyone is up for grabs. Trust nothing. That’s its strength and its weakness.

Gates of Heaven
Roger Ebert’s been pimping this documentary about a pet cemetery for years, and I finally got to see it. Wener Herzog famously said that if the director could get his film about the workings of dead animals shown in a theater, he’d eat the shoe he was wearing, which led to an infamous short film.

Ebert’s long claimed that Gates of Heaven is proof that you can make any movie interesting, and in part he’s right. The kind of man whose only dream is to make a nice place to bury pets is someone who has an interesting take on life, to say the least, and as it turns out he gets a lot of competition from the rendering plant, which boils horses and dogs and cats down into glue and fat.

The rendering plant guy is the star of the movie. He is the blustering ancestor of Fred Willard’s ignoramus appearances in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, a guy who can’t understand why people don’t want to discuss tallow-making at dinner and tells the gleeful tale of how they once rendered an elephant. He’s completely in love with his job, and completely ignorant of other people, so he’s a wonder to watch.

The latter half of the film’s a little slow as we watch the stoner brother and his go-getter brother, who reminded Gini of the self-help-hawking dad in Little Miss Sunshine. But it’s still entertaining.

The film hasn’t aged particularly well, though. It was made in 1978, and documentaries have learned a lot from regular movies since then; the default here seems to be to put the camera on someone for five minutes and let ‘em rip, which works when the person is interesting and is tedious when it’s not.

But the political machinations of pet cemeteries, complete with grand tales of backstabbing, lawsuits, and jealousies, turns out to be pretty good grist for the mill. Who knew? Well, Ebert, apparently.

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Q: How can you tell when the teacher is hung over?
A: It’s movie day, class!

Q: How can you tell when The Ferrett is tired?
A: It’s movie day!

A Night At The Museum
Occasionally, I watch a movie and am forced to reflect upon what a vast gulf exists between my tastes and the tastes of the average American consumer.

I follow box-office trends fairly religiously, and I know that Night at the Museum was not just a hit on opening weekend, but on future weekends, declining in such a way that indicated that either word of mouth or repeat viewings was getting people back into the theater. Millions of people loved this movie, scurrying out to purchase it on DVD.

I, on the other hand? I saw a dumb comedy, devoid of the things that even I want in a dumb comedy. The characters were one-dimensional and I didn’t care about them, the special effects were gratuitous, and the idea was sort of wasted.

There were good moments – I’m always thrilled to see Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke kicking ass with roundhouse kicks. It wasn’t a flat-out terrible movie, just the sort of bland, forgettable shit that Hollywood puts out when there are too many cooks stirring the pot.

To me, this was so “meh” that I doubt I’d even remember it a few weeks after I saw it. To America, it was a boffo smash hit to be clutched to its heart.

Then I remember that I am the one trying to sell a novel to this very audience, and I weep a little in my cereal.

The Break-Up
I’m usually not a fan when a movie bills itself as a “comedy,” but has practically no laughs in it. That can happen with, say, A Night At The Museum…. But it can also happen when a movie that’s actually a pretty heavy relationship drama gets misbilled.

Why? I dunno. Because Jennifer Aniston and Vincent Vaughn are funny people, and anything they do must by proxy be funny? Because comedies do better than drama? All I know is that I waited half an hour for the laugh to show up, and aside from the Tone Rangers, really didn’t – this is a big-budget art film, focusing on the very painful breakup of two people.

That’s not bad, mind you. I was surprised at how accurately they got the tones and moods of an extended breakup right. (And at how wrong for each other Jennifer Aniston and Vincent Vaughn were – why the hell did they ever think they’d make it?) But it’s a quietly depressing, very long movie that doesn’t quite deliver on the funny, making it a weird little notch.

Maybe I would have liked it more had it been honestly billed. And then it would have been a flop. Ah, Hollywood.

Bourne Ultimatum
Had my laptop not been dead, I would have raved about how this movie was perhaps the best third movie in existence. Generally, “III” is the dumping ground for utter crap, but Bourne Ultimatum actually plays with time in interesting ways, while providing a real thrill ride. I can’t give more away than that.

It’s not a perfect movie. There are way too many scenes of people barking into cell phones, and a few of the fights have humans enduring ludicrous amounts of punishments. But the tried-and-true formula of “Put Bourne in a situation that nobody could get out of, then watch him do it with nothing but cunning and improvised objects” does not fail here.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated
The most fascinating part of this film was the detective work they did to discover the identities of the members of the MPAA. I’d never seen a real-life detective go through the grunt work of slowly making her way to the heart of a guarded organization, and that was fascinating.

The info on the MPAA? Old hat to anyone who’s been paying attention. Apparently, the MPAA favors violence over sex, and straight sex over kinky sex. Who knew?

I’m not sure what they could have done to make it better than it was. The MPAA really doesn’t hold a lot of new info. But this was kind of disappointing, and I wish they’d just done a movie on PIs.

Roots
The brilliance of Roots – at least the first two segments – is that it’s possibly the most popular film ever to focus on helplessness.

Kunta Kinte, the man-turned slave kidnapped from Africa, is a brave boy who is as smart and cunning as Jason Bourne. But the slave trade has dealt with thousands of smart and cunning people, and has learned from every mistake. Every slave who gets free makes it harder for the other slaves, since another bug patch gets applied to the system… So by the time Kunta arrives, he’s facing a juggernaut of an organization that knows his every move.

That’s both fascinating and sad, all at the same time. You feel the emasculation and the fury. It’s brilliant stuff, even if the acting is now hokey and Ed Asner’s turn as the noble slave captain feels like a White liberal’s guilt-dream (“Some whites were wonderful! Really!”).

Then the second part of the film replaces reedy, Geordie Laforge-played Kinte with this beefy football player of a Kinte, to the point where it took me several minutes to go, “Wait, that’s supposed to be an older Kinte.” Then there’s a really bad romance and a coming to terms with slavery that’s really boring.

Just watch the first two parts. Skip the rest.

Sophie’s Choice
Supposed to be good. Unfortunately, I got a half-hour into it before the self-conscious realization that everyone on this film was Making Art forced me to eject the disc. I normally love Kevin Kline, but the dialogue was so stilted and the acting so Oscar-bait that I couldn’t stomach it.

This is the sort of art movie that makes people mock art movies. And I love art movies. Maybe it got awesome near the end, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m happy to let it go.

The Pacifier
Why did I even try?

Oh, right. Because I love Vin Diesel.

I’ll forgive him for this. I loved Kindergarten Cop, but this was not that.

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Ocean’s Eleven was, as my friend suzieboz informed me, “a comfort movie.” It was ensconced firmly in that Princess Bride/Galaxy Quest area, where you had a bunch of people who obviously liked working together, some great dialogue, and a plot that moved things along. Sure, there was a pleasant hipster vibe to Ocean’s Eleven, but there’s also the fact that its razor-sharp characterization and fine writing hummed.

It may not have been a great film, but it was a better good film than a lot of great films… If that makes any sense.

Unfortunately, then there was Ocean’s Twelve. I’m not sure what went wrong with Twelve, but Gini and I watched it at a friend’s house while we were babysitting… And we got about forty-five minutes into it before we turned it off in disgust. I can’t say precisely what I hated about the sequel, but it was pretty much the same thing that everyone else hated, since Brad Pitt and George Clooney were all but apologizing for Twelve in their latest round of interviews.

They did the George Lucas Penitence Crawl. “Yeah, we know the old movie had issues,” they said. “But we learned. Ocean’s Thirteen is better.”

The amazing thing is unlike Lucas, that they did learn. Ocean’s Thirteen is, astonishingly enough, arguably better than the first film – there’s better dialogue, a way better plot, and enough fun and style to go around.

The plot, such as it matters for a movie like this, is reasonably simple: for reasons I won’t go into, Danny Ocean’s gang decides they need to cripple a casino on its opening night, bankrupting it by making sure that everybody wins that night. They set out to do so… And I can’t tell you much more without giving it all away.

But it’s a brilliant writing device. Not only do we get the fun of watching people use all of their smarts to outwit Al Pacino’s gloriously-bewigged-and-fake-tanned bad guy (and there are a lot of insidiously clever schemes), but the payoff is what everyone wants: Haven’t you longed to see everyone on the floor of a casino winning? Can’t you imagine being there that glorious night?

There’s really little “plot” as we understand it; most of what happens is the gang developing elaborate scheme after elaborate scheme to head off some crazy problem, and there are no fistfights and damn few explosions. The formula is that they present you with a problem, give you just enough time to think, “Jeez, nobody could get past that,” and then they present you with a dubious-yet-almost-plausible method to overcome it. It’s a Rube Goldberg device slapped with a coat of gold Vegas paint and dressed up in a thousand-dollar suit.

That might fall flat in another film, but Ocean’s Thirteen balances style and character development with an assured hand. There are a lot of cast members to juggle here, but almost everyone gets a little character arc – a start, a problem, and a finish. And almost all of them are satisfying finishes, little detailed fillips that make you nod and go, “Yeah, that’s exactly what should have happened.”

I really didn’t think I’d enjoy this as much as I did. And of course, if you didn’t like Ocean’s Eleven, then why the fuck have you even read this review this far? But if you did like the original, and hated the sequel, let me reassure you that they’re back. In style.

It’s the definition of lightweight fun. Belly up to the bar, boys; Brad and George are serving entertainment, and we get to sit and watch.

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Drugstore Cowboy
Matt Dillon stars in a movie that’s about a bunch of boring junkies being junkies and dying like junkies. It was famed at the time for being realistic, but having watched actual junkies I can tell you that this is a) fairly close to the truth, and b) not at all interesting if you’ve seen it before.

It’s kind of like if they did a movie on cats that showed cats resting on a windowsill for half an hour, then pooping in a catbox. Lovely to cat fans and those in distant lands who’ve never watched a cat, a deadly toxin to those with the experience.

Stranger Than Fiction
Gini really wanted to see this in the theaters, but alas it was Oscar-bait that didn’t get nominated… And during Oscar season, we’re in such a rush to see every potential nominee that we don’t have time to see anything that doesn’t come with phenomenal reviews or an actual statue potentially waiting.

As it was, I came away disappointed and intrigued. The premise of the movie – that of a man who realizes he is being written into a book – is almost incidental; it’s like watching, say, The Truman Show and finding out that the whole “secretly having your life broadcast to a crowd of billions” isn’t all that important. In fact, given the hundreds of mind-breaking things they could do with such a plot, it’s strangely restrained. (I wonder what, say, Spike Jonez would have done with the idea, given his take on Adaptation.)

When you boil away that mild disappointment, you wind up with a movie that’s an earnestly sweet romance, comprised almost entirely of people who mean well; it’s straight out of the sixties, and I mean that in a positive way. There’s little irony or cynicism here, just a gentle hope for humanity that made my heart ache. And it was nice.

The only two problems I had were mild. One, it was slow-paced – not long, per se, since that would indicate that I thought parts needed cutting, but the camera liked to hold on long, awkward silences. The other was that the climax of the movie involves you buying the climax of the book, which I didn’t entirely… But I can’t go into that more without spoiling. Maybe in the comments. But for all that, it was worth watching, and Will Ferrell did a surprisingly good job with a small character.

Little Children
This is a Very Serious Movie where an Omnipotent, Slightly-Cynical Narrator tells you all the Important Things that happen to the Very Suburban Characters, and everything that happens to said characters is precisely what you would expect if you go on the premise that suburbia is toxic and awful and soul-destroying. Not a surprise in the bunch, which is surprising because this movie is trying so hard to be original.

I had hoped it would be a cool, sexy movie. Instead, I got yet another cookie-cutter movie trying to be American Beauty and failing miserably.

Election
I watched this a while back, and never got through it. Someone recommended it to me again, and this time I did.

It’s an interesting story; Matthew Broderick plays a school teacher who is supervising an election between a dim-witted jock and a hyperenthusiastic, neurotic go-getter played by Reese Witherspoon. Like Sideways, this is a movie filled with characters who never manage to be sympathetic, exactly – they’re all dislikable and obtuse in their own way – but it winds an interesting path as it goes to a finish that doesn’t really end but peters out.

It’s good for all that, because it’s different and well-characterized. I don’t know that I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I gave it a second shot.

Return of the Living Dead
I re-watched this because Yendi mentioned it in his movie reviews, and I had fond memories of it. Those fond memories were rewarded.

This is not your typical zombie picture, and it knows it. The reason it’s so good is because it breaks all the zombie rules; zombies don’t die when you cap them in the head. In fact, zombies can act with independent body parts. And zombies retain their memories and intelligence.

Roni and I briefly debated the “slow zombies vs. fast zombies” preference yesterday (she’s a fast, I’m a stodgy slow), but this is the movie that really showed what zombies can do when they have full action. And the fun of it is watching the characters, who know everything about zombies that you do, get proven so consistently wrong. This is just waiting for a remake, and I hope to God they do it soon.

Plus, you know…. Best zombie ending ever. I remember seeing it in the theater, and it was just so fucking unexpected and perfectly correct that I sat there slack-jawed.

Four Rooms/Jackie Brown
Dear Mr. Tarantino and company:

Not everything about the 1970s was good. These movies weren’t, either, relying on a lot of dialogue and very little action – and not even particularly interesting dialogue. And I had really high hopes going in, too.

Sincerely,
T.F.

Jesus Camp
“You’ll be horrified!” my friends told me. “This movie is terrifying!” And again, like Drugstore Cowboy, it’s only terrifying if you’ve never seen it.

This documentary’s about kids being sent to Jesus Camp to learn about Jesus (and the attitudes of their parents), but the opinions of the filmmakers are clear from the moment we first pan across a Middle American sunrise and hear the low, schlock-horror-film “BWOW-WOW-WOWWWWWWM” of the soundtrack rumbling ominously underneath.

Now, keep in mind that these people are, of course, borderline crazy. They have a religion that’s horrifically narrow, and they’re rejecting scientific evidence, and it’s not at all pretty. But at the same time, the message of this movie is an aghast, “They’re raising their kids to believe what they do!” with the not-so-subtle message that they shouldn’t, showing a cavalcade of dumb things that people say on camera.

But that’s what a documentary is. The whole reason shows like “The Office” (British version) and movies like This Is Spinal Tap are funny is because if you put a camera on someone and ask them lots of questions, eventually they’re going to trip up and say something colossally dumb. And I got the distinct feeling the crew here were hovering like vultures, waiting for the absolute worst moments to record.

I’m not saying, of course, that the people who send their kids to Jesus Camp are people I support. But I am saying that if I put a camera crew with an agenda in your home and had them follow your life and your kid-raising for four weeks, I’m pretty sure I could come up with something equally as horrifying. Every family has their hypocrises, every family has stupid ideas they circulate inside of them, and as such this felt awfully tilted to me.

The problem is, of course, that I’m not thrilled about the parents teaching their kids that Darwin is Pure Evil, but I’m also not thrilled about the idea of some outside force telling them how to raise them. I always remember that any gun I hand to the government will eventually be pointed at me, and if I seriously argued that “parents shouldn’t be allowed to raise their kids to believe ugly thing X,” I know it would be a matter of time before someone came around with a government official to inform me that I was telling my kid ugly thing Y, and it was time to cut it out or face jail time.

Yes, I know they want to stop my way of life. But that doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable engaging in counter-censorship, or control, either. I just wish there was a good way, but there isn’t one.

I’ve seen the kind of kids who get caught up in this shit. It’s sad, and I’ve seen it happen, but a surprising number – not a majority, but a sizable minority – do break out of it. I can only hope that the ones here do, too.

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(62 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Right now, Gini and I are broke as she starts her lawyers’ career. But dammit, my Uncle Tommy introduced me to Spidey, I’ve seen every other Spidey film on Day One, and dammit, we cannot miss this.

So feeling the stress of Peter Parker’s finances, we nevertheless scraped out the cash for a movie. And by God, I’m glad I did, because Spider-Man 3 is a once-in-a-lifetime movie.

It is the only superhero movie that does everything right except for the superheroics.

Think about it. How many times have you gone to see a big dumb SFX movie and gone, “Wow, the battle sequences were amazing, and the costumers were cool, but I wish they’d bothered to give the leads interesting things to do when they weren’t beating the crap out of people?”

Well, Spider-Man 3 avoids all of that. What’s riveting is what’s always been riveting: Peter Parker and Mary Jane, struggling towards romance. And the arc is clean and real: Peter, for once, is up, while it’s Mary who’s experiencing that post-high school letdown. It’s not that they don’t love each other – that’s crystal-clear – but rather that they’re in different head spaces and just can’t understand each other because they are in different worlds.

Oh, yeah, and there’s villains.

The problem with Spider-Man 3 is that I suspect it had Batman and Robin syndrome – supposedly, according to Joel Schumacher’s apologetic commentary, he was obligated to throw in a ton of villains by the toy companies and licensing bureaus of the movie studio, and everything had to be approved by the toy companies. Then there’s the fact that, as Sam Raimi lamented in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, he had to choose his villains right away so that the SFX crew could get started, and then wrote the script.

As it is, what you have is a great story arc for Peter and Mary Jane. For Spider-Man? Not so much. Unlike 1 and 2, where the villains were extremely well-defined, 3 has problems. The under-characterized Sandman works to the extent it does only because of Thomas Haden Church’s incredibly well-modulated sad face, and Venom, well….

…Venom is another example of this movie’s extreme problems with heroics. The character of Eddie Brock is introduced and defined extremely well, giving us an awesome portrait of who he is. But his transformation to Venom comes about three-quarters of the way into the movie, and as such we’re never given the time to buy Venom as a supervillain. In fact, the first time we see Venom proper in action is at the climax of the film, which is just a little odd because we’re getting to know Venom as a baddie when whoops, movie over.

Then there are the special effects. I jogged my two miles this morning to the opening of Spider-Man 2, and the great thing about both of the first two movies was how Sam Raimi chose to have Spider-Man soaring over open skies, at high noon in the blue, glass-reflected canyons of New York City. Even if you don’t buy the CGI Spider-Man, the shots look awesome. Whereas this, a darker film, is mostly shot at night or underground, which means that the SFX look faker simply because there’s less to focus on. When all you’ve got to work with is dark gray backgrounds, the CGI Spidey stands out like… well, like a spider on a white wall.

Finally, the action sequences in this just don’t have the emotional oomph that the previous two had. The genius of the previous Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?) was in how they found a way to merge the slam-pow action setpieces with the emotional hearts; the finish of the Green Goblin (“a humble stake of tin”) and his begging Parker to keep this quiet in 1, the way that Mary Jane finally realizes who Spider-Man is at the end of 2. 3 has a kind of finish that sort of wraps things up, but it’s not nearly as clever or insightful.

Mind you, for all of these complaints, Spider-Man 3 is still good. It’s a decent story, and it’s not the cataclysmic fall from grace that Superman 3 or (reportedly) X-Men 3 were. It’s got some awesome scenes that really advance the Peter-and-Mary plot, and some fun action sequences. I’m not going to give away what happens, but it’s decent.

It’s just not quite as good as its progenitors. Sam Raimi remembered where the heart was this time, as he always does; he just forgot to put in the muscle.

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It’s rare when you can merely hear about the concept of a movie, and know exactly how much you’ll enjoy it from knowing what it’s about. But Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is one of those movies. If it sounds good to you, well…. Watching it is every bit as good as you’d think it’d be.

Ready?

“A group of twelve year-olds take a Betamax camcorder and decide to recreate Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot for shot. It takes them seven years, and you watch them grow up on camera as they go balls-out to emulate the magic of Raiders using nothing more than their ingenuity and their allowance.”

This is not a documentary about this, mind you. It’s the actual movie that they made, complete with washed-out video, incomprehensible audio, and static fuzz.

But it’s one of the best fucking movies I’ve seen in years.

See, most movies have plots that involve the hero getting in some kind of jam. “Gosh,” you think, “The protagonist sure has painted himself into a corner. How is he going to get out of it?” And you know he will, because it’s a movie, and the plot is written in stone.

Raiders: The Adaptation, however, is an experience in audience tension. Because you know what’s coming plotwise, since this is a remake of one of the most famous movies of all time, and you know the kind of budget they have to work with – which is to say, “None at all.” The plot of Raiders is set in stone. You know the bar scene is coming up, where Marion is assaulted by Nazis and then there’s a roaming gunfight in a bar that’s caught fire, and these kids are going to try to do it.

How the fuck can they pull it off? you wonder. And then you watch them as these thirteen-year-olds set a room on fire and explode vitamin capsules full of gunpowder they plastered into the wall to simulate gunshots. And you realize that this may have no budget, this may have no experience or quality, but they’re going to fucking die trying in their attempt to capture this.

It’s not Jackass. The room on fire is obviously a set, and the actors are obviously kids. But they mean it with all of their hearts, and after you watch the director leap over a flaming bar, his own shirt blazing, you start to remember what comes next in the real Raiders.

There’s a monkey, you think. They couldn’t get a monkey down in Biloxi, could they? Well, hell, they found a plane for the last scene. Maybe they will get a monkey. And then they’ve got to have the pit full of snakes, and Indy sliding underneath the car….

In a normal movie, the protagonist gets into trouble and you wonder how he gets out of it. But this movie is incredibly suspenseful, because you know exactly what’s coming next and you wonder how in God’s name they’ll do it….

And they don’t, not always. One of Raiders’ biggest action sequences hits the dumpster. The snake pit? Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. But watching them go hellbent-for-leather to try to make this happen catapulted us out of our seats, made us burst into wild applause as they fucking did it, man.

Sure, it’s cheesy. The “desert” scenes take place in a construction pit, where you can see the trees on the horizon. The actors? Most of ‘em aren’t too good (as you’d expect – these kids are amateur teenagers), and if you’ve ever wondered what Indiana Jones would look like if Sean Astin (a.k.a. “Sam the Hobbit”) played him, then you’ve got your wish.

But when it was all over, the director (who also played Belloq) and the producer took questions from the audience. And the director admitted, after some prodding, that he hadn’t actually seen Raiders all that much when they made it – after all, these were the days before VHS, and they had to rely on movie magazines and Indiana Jones re-releases to try to remember what it was all like.

“It’s weird, though,” he said. “I know Indiana Jones is a far better movie, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve seen our version fifty times more. And now, when I watch Raiders, it seems like a big-budget remake of what we did.”

That’s the magic of this. Raiders? It’s the ultimate action film. But Raiders: The Adaptation? It’s the ultimate action filmmaking, and there’s something so spunky that you can’t help but fall a little in love.

Oh, and the monkey? They find a way. And it is made of awesome.

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Letters From Iwo Jima
I’m amused by the fact that Flags of our Fathers, the big hyped movie, bombed while this kinda-sequel done as a toss-off extra while they were there is the flick that seems to have caught the public’s attention. Clint Eastwood, the director of both, apparently thought that what would resonate with America right now was a film on how PR can sway the public’s mind in evil ways…. Whereas America is apparently more in sync with a movie about men being sent off to die for no reason other than momentum.

This probably says something about America, but I’ll leave it to others to do the dissection.

Anyway, Letters From Iwo Jima is a proud entry in the War Porn annals, a genre of film jump-started by Steven Spielberg. War Porn’s whole goal is to get you to feel the horrors of war by blowing men up in the bloodiest and most creative ways.

See, nobody’s upset by seeing someone getting shot these days; you can do that in a videogame. Nor do explosions do it. So to try to bring home the unique terror that battle creates, War Porn movies attempt to find some new and never-seen way of maiming soldiers to create that shocked, amazed horror in the viewer.

Pan’s Labyrinth? Beautiful movie. But it’s also War Porn; there is a scene where a character is shot in the face, and you get a glimpse of his eye collapsing and filling up with blood as he falls. “Guh!” you say. “That’s awful!” And the War Porn has just delivered another money shot.

Letters From Iwo Jima is fairly restrained as War Porn goes, but that’s mainly because the entire film is shot in a muted color scheme; if it can’t be faded into a shade of beige or black, you’re unlikely to see it at all. But there are moments engineered to make you wince as men clutch grenades to their chest or get stabbed with new and exciting squeals.

Iwo Jima has the other two hallmarks of War Porn — the Senseless War and the Chew-down. War Porn movies are almost always about how wars are bad, even if they’re kinda justified, so they’re inevitably staffed by weary soldiers who realize that the patriotic message is all hokum and they’re Just Doing Their Job. And War Porn wouldn’t have an ability to shock if the cast members weren’t going to get offed one by one as the movie goes on, making them a sort of Oscar-worthy Friday the 13th.

This makes it sound as if Letters From Iwo Jima is a bad film, and it really isn’t. Of the four movies I’m discussing today, it’s almost certainly the best, with a lot of great impact… Because in the case of Japan, the patriotic message is all hokum. The war is lost. Their support is gone. This is a totally senseless battle, designed to tie the Americans up for a few days because, well, they’re not emotionally ready for Japan to fall just yet.*

There are moments of absolute wonder here; I knew objectively that “air support” wins you the war, but one sequence here showed me exactly why planes trump soldiers in a way that I will never forget. And after spending an hour with these poor bastards, seeing their way of life crumbling around them, you feel sympathy for them… So when the Americans (their faces cloaked in shadow) hit the beach and the Japanese finally open up fire, you feel a surge of triumph for them as they fight back, then an abrupt horror as you realize they’re shooting our boys, and then a deep and gut-wrenching sorrow as you realize that you can understand both sides and Jesus Christ, someone stop this.

For all of that, however, the movie’s probably a good forty minutes too long. The trick to every War Porn movie is that it’s as studied as any slasher flick; the good guys get whittled away one by one in whatever method is going to cause the most terror, and the plot of Iwo Jima is a little ratchety. It could be a great movie, except with the slow pans and steadied cam-shots you have time to think about what’s going to happen next. A lot of time. Which makes it feel like the script ratcheting neatly into place and not organic at all.

It’s a good film. I don’t see it beating Scorcese this year, though. (If one movie does, that’s Little Miss Sunshine.)

Babel
This movie wants to be Crash, which I liked a lot, but it lacks Crash’s style or coherency. Critics have gone nuts over this one because it’s a beautiful take on how we’re all interconnected!, but really if this movie has a central theme it’s that “people of all races, creeds, and colors can make astonishingly bad decisions when the screenwriter needs them to.”

Take the first scene in Babel: Two young Moroccan sheepherders are given a high-powered rifle and told to go hunt jackals. They decide, instead, to test out the high-powered rifle by shooting at a bus, and are then shocked when it hurts someone.

Okay, fine, you say. These are teenaged boys. You expect them to be stupid. But nobody else in the movie is any brighter, each making ludicrously bad decisions that cross in weird ways. Older people make even dumber decisions, unbelievably.

This is a grim, humorless movie that has A Message to tell, and like a drunken bum collaring you at the bar you will hear all of it. Few people are likeable, and when they are likable they do such idiotic things that you clap your palm to your forehead.

The best part of this movie is undeniably Chienko, a deaf-mute Japanese teenaged girl (it is not enough that she is Japanese - she must be further alienated from society, of course) who is attention-starved and willing to sleep with anybody to feel any sort of love. Her story is the least connected with the rest of the movie, and yet it is by far the most moving. She deserves an Oscar nomination, hands-down, and if the whole movie had been about this strange, sad little girl I would have been entirely happy.

But it’s not. And I ain’t.

Half Nelson
This movie put Ryan Gosling in the “Best Actor” category, and it won no other nominations. This is entirely correct, since this is an artsy movie about a crack-addicted teacher and his students. What happens? Not much. This was an hour shorter than Babel, but felt almost as long, since while Babel is FILLED WITH MEANING, Half Nelson is A SLICE OF LIFE. Even the ending, while interesting, is not particularly satisfying.

It’s a good performance, to be sure. I just wonder why anyone even noticed it.

Notes on a Scandal
A good movie, but disappointing. The trailer suggested that Judi Dench (in a spectacular performance) is an Evil, Dried-Up Lesbian who will manipulate the Naïve Young Schoolteacher (as played by Cate Blanchett, looking radiant) into sleeping with her. It looked great.

The reality, however, is a little less interesting. The Judi Dench character is mostly passive, worming her way into Cate Blanchett’s life so she can then… Well, do pretty much nothing until the last fifteen minutes. She’s evil, of course, and petty, but the movie mostly consists of watching Cate Blanchett’s character mess up her own life in a way that would have been mostly the same had not Judi Dench’s character showed up. There is no blackmail, and no aged lesbian scenes.

It is Notes on a Scandal, not the scandal itself. And Judi Dench is the one taking notes.

That said, it’s a darned fine movie with killer performances. I just sort of wanted more from it.

* - Which may or may not be historically accurate, depending on who you talk to, but that’s the way Clint shows it.

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Children of Men is, hands-down, the best damn level of Half-Life I’ve ever played.

That’s actually a large compliment, because Children of Men is a fascinating film for many reasons. It’s a dense, dystopian movie about a future where humanity has ceased to have children, and it’s beautifully shot and acted, and filled with so many ideas and visions that Eric, Kat, Gini, and I cheerfully spent a whole dinner discussing what we had just seen.

But the thing about it that fascinates me the most is that it’s the first movie I’ve seen that’s directly influenced by videogames.

Now, I’m not saying that Alfonso Cuaron has played Half-Life, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he had. But the most suspenseful and memorable parts of this film — which is, essentially, nothing more than an inverted Logan’s Run-style ninety-minute-long escape sequence — involve techniques that were developed and refined in some of the best first-person shooters.

Movie critics wouldn’t notice this, because they don’t play videogames. They would say that the technique of a first-person hand-held camera is old hat, and that Cuaron is merely extending that tradition. But they’d be wrong, because the way that he uses the camera is so perfectly like the best first-person shooters that I was stunned at times to see how well it translated to the big screen.

(We shall not talk about Doom, which I did not see, but the previews for the infamous “first-person chainsaw” scene that I saw were silly and self-conscious. This is different.)

I’m not saying that he set out to make a first-person shooter; Children of Men is told intensely from the hero’s viewpoint, and we see almost nothing that he does not witness with his own eyes. (I believe, in fact, that there is precisely one scene that takes place out of his eyesight.) The movie begins and ends with Theo, and the fact that we wind up with this Half-Life style moments is merely one technique in a large arsenal that Cuaron skillfully uses to keep us feeling as though we’re right there with Theo.

Still. There are three vivid and terrifying and utterly exhiliarating FP scenes in the movie — two of them involving cars, one of them involving a mad dash through a battlefield. All of them have the camera locked into one place, right next to Theo’s head, just close enough to occasionally get a shot of his expression. You are, in videogame parlance, on rails.

And all three shots involve travelling through a place where things are continually happening, the place is busy with people, and there’s nearly not enough time to see everything with the constricted view of the camera and your desperate need for survival; you become aware of the chaos of events at the exact moment that the protagonists do. You hear someone yelling or a gunshot, and the camera whips around to give you just a glimpse of some carefully-constructed mini-scene where you have just enough time to take in what’s happening — sort of — before something else grabs your attention and the camera lurches to show you something else.

Sometimes, you’re quick enough to see everything that goes on. Other times, you get a maddening glimpse of some panorama that would make more sense if you only had more time, but no… You have to go.

If you’ve played Half-Life, you know exactly what this is like. And it’s eerie to see a master director apply the techniques of FPS to film, because Children of Men provides some of the most terrifying and gut-squeezing chase scenes that I’ve ever had the pleasure to witness.

Which is pretty much all Children of Men is: an extended chase-and-escape sequence. Other movies on dystopian futures want to make A Statement on why things are wrong, getting sucked into sometimes-tedious polemics on what precisely needs to be fixed in order to make things better, but such things aren’t a part of Children of Men’s agenda.

The point is that during times of survival, people will do awful things to each other — and these characters need to survive in it for reasons that are a lot larger than anything having to do with their own interests. Awful things happen, on a regular basis, in Children of Men; it’s filled with such beautifully-shot brutality that you come to realize that no one is sacred. And I’ll say, without spoiling either movie overmuch, that it borrows a critical technique from Serenity to raise the tension early on so that it never stops.

You see a lot. The sets are filled with newspapers and ads and tiny details that make this world feel alive and vibrant. But it’s so elegantly written and visually scripted that you get everything you need to know, even as you don’t feel like you know enough.

Which brings up the sets. Any time you have a science-fiction film about a future where Things Have Gone Wrong — and oh, how things have gone wrong in a world where the youngest living human is eighteen years old! — you’re going to have to go to Dystopia 101 Set School, where they sit you down with old copies of Brazil and Blade Runner and explain to you how to create a busy and futuristic, but not too futuristic, set.

The thing about Children of Men, however, is that it’s the first dystopian future I’ve seen that’s brightly lit. Unlike the dark and tangled scenes of Blade Runner or Brazil, pools of black gloom lit only by neon, Children of Men takes the opposite approach — it takes place mostly outside, lit in washed-out sunlight, everything faded. And for all that, it feels somehow bleaker.

The visuals, too, are perfect. Both Blade Runner and Brazil — the poster boys for complicated sets — had a touch of over-the-top about them in the way they packed the streets with just too much garbage, stuffed the living quarters with just one too many knickknacks. It was if Gilliam and Scott wanted to saturate the screen with every bit of spare parts they could find.

Whereas Children of Men never feels gratuitous; things are crazy with detail when they need to be, of course, but they never feel as if they were put there to make you squeal with awe at the lushness of what they’ve accomplished. It feels astoundingly, grittily real.

And terrifying. It’s not that far in the future. It's not that these events could happen - the over-the-top nature of the apocalyptic future is a little crazy at times - but if it did, it would look like this.

The sad thing about Children of Men is that because it came out so late in the year, it missed out on Oscar buzz. Entertainment Weekly has already said that if they’d seen it sooner, they would have included it in their Year’s Top 10 list, and I suspect that had it come out in, say, late November, we’d see it picking up the Best Picture nomination it deserved. You need time to process this movie.

But that’s irrelevant. Because it matters to Alfonso Cuaron whether he wins an Oscar, but it matters to me that I saw a brilliant film. I’ll be buying this on DVD the day it comes out, and putting it with pride on my shelf. It’s that good.

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I saw V for Vendetta last night, but I can’t tell you how good it is. See, I’ve read the graphic novel – and while the movie has many things in common with the comic book, it also has a ton of things that are radically different. As such, I didn’t see a movie so much as I saw a bunch of scenes from one of my favorite stories, interlaced things that were clearly not a part of the V for Vendetta that I remembered.

So mostly for my own edification, I reread the graphic novel and wrote a point-by-point comparison where the movie and graphic novel (hereby referred to as “the book”) differ. They’re both quite good in their own ways, but they make very different points. Hopefully, this will help you see the differences.

A Note on the Book:
The graphic novel of V for Vendetta actually wanders quite afar from the central story of Evey and V, spending a lot of time on small-time crooks, politicians and their wives, and other players who don’t even show up in the movie. I don’t go into detail about them, but the “people live out their lives” is a major portion of the graphic novel, and it makes it far less of a drama play than the movie is.

( The Book-To-Movie Comparison: Here Lie Spoilers! )

The movie’s good… I think. But as you can see, the wild differences between book and movie make it hard to judge. See for yourself.

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On Christmas Day, I saw two movies that had two things in common: both of them have massive Oscar buzz and are sure to win nominations, and both of them have been cited as evidence of Hollywood’s liberal bias.

But only one of the two movies was the kind of liberality that I wanted to see.

George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck” is, in a sense, nothing special. It’s the tale of Edward R. Murrow’s fight against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt, wherein Joe McCarthy accused several people of being Communist traitors, without presenting evidence. At the time, McCarthy had such power that even the accusation of being a Commie rat was enough to get you blacklisted, so that you were effectively barred from getting a job once he noted you.

The movie is, ironically, both a triumph and a failure. It might as well have been a documentary, since about 30% of the movie is nothing more than actors standing around reciting Edward R. Murrow’s TV broadcasts, word for word. The backbone of Good Night and Good Luck is old news footage, and no actor stands in for Senator McCarthy; you see David Strathairn as Murrow, but Joe McCarthy’s unshaven cheeks and twisted eyebrows are taken directly from life.

There are no fireworks in this movie. Aside from McCarthy, I don’t think anyone even raises their voice. The camera just sort of lays there, and Good Night has the faintly musty air of a stage play even though it was written for the screen.

Yet somehow, this movie has more F*@%k Yeah! moments than any other movie I’ve seen, even though nobody throws a punch.

Joe McCarthy raves about Communism and its very real threat, but Edward R. Murrow dissects McCarthy’s arguments with the grace of a dancer and the clean logic of, well… Edward R. Murrow. He draws a fine distinction between “The threat of communism” and “The danger of accusation without evidence,” saying repeatedly that our laws are strong enough to fight Communism, if we use them wisely. We don’t need to have sealed evidence in order to do the job, for that leads to corruption and false accusation and a betrayal of our principles. Every time it looks like Murrow’s been cornered, he speaks with such clarity and force for the principles of Democracy that every word is a body blow punch from Muhammed Ali.

In the end, Murrow believes that people are smart enough to fathom the news as it is; he thinks that people will listen to a dry dissection of the relevant issues, even if it’s not spiced up with flash-cuts and pictures of girls in bikinis. The fact that this movie, an endless series of talking heads, somehow manages to be riveting, is proof of his concept.

(Even as, I note dryly, it won’t make a tenth of what King Kong will.)

Good Night could have been an easy wet dream for liberals, but there are moments of ugly concern that force you to remember that the other side has a point; one of the reporters lies awake in bed at night, worried that he might be helping the enemy. The colonels who come to try to quash Murrow’s initial story sound like reasonable men. There are tough arguments to be had here; mankind’s inalienable rights are all well and good, but we have to make sure that our enemies don’t eat us alive when we’re standing for our principles.

Yet the message in the end is clear: It’s hard, fighting for Democracy and the law, but it works. If you’re willing to take a stand and you’ve lived a life of integrity, you can make a difference.

And then there’s Munich. Hard-liner conservative Jews have already condemned Munich for being anti-Israel, and they shouldn’t; they should condemn it for being boring and predictable.

The problem is, Munich isn’t for anything. It’s just against.

The story of Munich is also very simple, but it takes three hours to tell. In 1972, eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by terrorists. In an act of revenge, our protagonist is assigned by the Israeli government to assassinate the eleven men who organized the Munich attack. He’s taken off the official Israeli payroll and given a team of four men.

Of course, in the quest for it he loses his humanity. With each assassination, some small thing changes; first, there’s the danger of killing an innocent bystander, then innocent bystanders get hurt, then they kill the first guy who’s not on the list, and then they just murder someone who killed one of their own. As the assassinations fly by, the hero becomes more paranoid, more willing to kill, and more involved…

And yet nothing seems to get better. If anything, the people he kills are replaced with even worse men, and in the end, what difference has he made?

This is not a three-hour story. And it would have been nice if the lead character’s personality had been established, aside from a brief rundown of his history and a short scene with his wife to show us that he likes his wife. There’s a lot of time spent on setup, but “setup” is not “suspense”… And for someone as strikingly visual as Spielberg, this movie is an endless series of drab, green-lit hallways and darkened alleys. It trots across all of Europe, but everything’s the same.

Like Good Night, that may well be the point, but here it doesn’t work.

In the end, Munich throws up its hands and says, “Well, Israel’s definitely worth fighting for, but fuck if I know how to do it.” It suggests that diplomacy is useless when you're dealing with implacable enemies, but so are warfare and covert operatives. “What’s all this killing for?” it asks, but it has no good answers.

It’s not necessary for a movie to answer the questions it raises, of course – a lot of good movies end with the same hand-fling – but I found the two world views to be particularly interesting in light of the current state of the Democrats in America.

Right now, the Democrats are Munich. They haven’t settled upon a solution to what’s happening in Iraq, since both the pro-war and pro-pullout elements are being quashed so they don’t lose the election. Individual Democrats have clear ideas, but the party as a whole hasn’t taken a stance on Iraq.

Which is what a lot of the Democrat talk seems to be these days. “There are bad things,” they seem to say, “And no good solutions.” I’m reading Al Franken’s The Truth right now, one of the best-selling liberal authors, and all he’s done two-thirds of the way through the book is to tell me how awful things are. He lists the broken things about the Republican party with glee, but apparently “telling us what we should be doing” isn’t important enough to set to text. All that’s important is that these are wrong. Sure, Bush’s Social Security plan is fucked – I know that – but what do you want?

Whereas the Democratic Party I want to see is embodied in Good Night and Good Luck. I want a party that says, “Yes, things are bad… But we can fix them. It’s gonna cost you, and it’s not easy or simple, but here’s how you do it.”

I want someone who can stand up and say, “We can make America great.” There’s a considerable difference between saying that and, “Here’s where America sucks.”

Just pointing out the bad doesn’t do it for me. I want that ray of hope.

Right now, I’m hoping that I’ll get it before 2006.

Tags: democratic party still needs a clue, movie reviews

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I was watching Singin’ in the Rain recently, and it occurred to me that if I had to try to teach human emotions to an alien, Singin’ in the Rain would be the movie I’d use to try to express the concept of “joy.” There’s just a lot of exuberant fun in there; I’m not even a fan of musicals, and watching Gene Kelly splashing around with a goofy grin is the epitome of joy.

Which led me to wonder: what other concepts could be expressed perfectly in a movie? I’d be curious to see your answer to these questions, as well as suggestions for other emotions. (I chose some of these concept from Eric Conveys an Emotion, which is perhaps the finest expression of expressions.)

Joy.
Like I said. “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Love.
Oh, there’s a toughie. And I gotta cop out and go with the mainstream answer:

“True love.”

Yeah, it’s “Princess Bride.”

Friendship.
Surely there must be a good movie for this, but I’ve flicked through my DVD collection and found nothing. It’s one of those irritating moments where there’s a movie tugging at the back of my mind, but damn if I know what it is.

Sacrifice.
A lot of movies deal with sacrifice, but they’re mostly in the sense of dying – which is, really, the easiest sacrifice to make. You don’t have to live for a long time and be sad about things; hell, suicide bombers can sacrifice their lives on a regular basis. It’s a big sacrifice, to be sure, but in a lot of ways I feel sorrier for the veterans who’ve lost legs and arms than the ones who’ve just been killed outright.

As such, the movie that epitomizes sacrifice to me is “Casablanca.” What Rick and Ilse give up in order to further their cause is gigantic, made even more stunning by the fact that nobody else but them will ever know about it. They made a big choice, and they have to live with it… And yet even then, it’s worth it.

Sadness.
The typical answer would be a three-handkerchief chick flick…. But though I weep at Steel Magnolias, I don’t find it to be the saddest movie ever. Fatal illnesses are terrible, of course, but they’re also random and unstoppable (and, perhaps, the fact that I lived thirty years of my life in close proximity to a man who suffered from not one, but two fatal illnesses has inured me).

What I find sad is when people who are trying their best to happy can’t manage it despite an otherwise-good life; the whole “cancer comes out of the blue” is sad, but not as sad as someone with potential who’s screwing up despite his best attempts to get his life together.

As such, “The Fisher King” always decimates me. It has a happy ending, sure, but the characters are handicapped only by their inability to understand what it is that’s driving them crazy. They’re all trying to help each other, but…

*snif*

Frustration.
This is a tough one, because how do you measure “Frustration”? Heck, I could name “A.I.” as a movie that frustrated me because it had so much potential and then wandered off into la-la land. I could name “Trees,” because as a thirty-minute art film about trees filmed from underwater, which I saw in a theater where I had no where else to go, because I wanted to punch the filmmaker when it was done and he wasn’t there.

But it’s not about what made me frustrated, but what conveyed the best feeling of being frustrated. And as such, “Fight Club” – which is, perhaps, the best movie to come out of the 1990s – is all about frustration. The characters start up Fight Club because they’re furious and powerless, and even as they achieve power they discover the vital lesson that life is never going to be what you want it to. From start to finish, there’s nothing glorious or beautiful about Fight Club; even the Club itself is a stopgap solution that doesn’t really work the way it should.

Terror.
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it still has to be Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, one of the few movies that actually shows killings and rape from the victim’s perspective, not the killer’s.

An example of this came recently, when I was watching Boondock Saints. There’s a scene where one of the characters – a goofy, incompetent sort – winds up killing an old enemy with a cue ball, straddling him on the couch. The camera focuses in on the goofy character as he completes his murder, showing his rage and yes, satisfaction as he proves his competence.

I wondered, though, what it would have been like if the camera had lingered on his victim, watching him struggle and weaken through the whole scene as he tried to save his own life, unable to help himself, and we’d witness the terror in his eyes as he realized that this was it, it was all over, his opponent had won in the worst and most final of ways.

Extend that scene for about two hours, and that’s Henry.

Fear.
”Fear” is different from “Terror” in that fear is that quiet, creeping feeling that something’s wrong, but you don’t know what it is yet. The 9/11 attacks terrorized us, and now we live in fear of the next attack.

Interestingly enough, each generation seems to have a new movie that brings fear to the screen, because to truly work, fear must break all the rules. You had early movies like Dracula, where the villain was actually attractive; that wasn’t supposed to happen. Then you had films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, where the villain triumphed; that wasn’t supposed to happen, either.

Today, we have films like “Ringu” (or, for the almost-as-good Americanized version, “The Ring”) that once again shatter the rules of what we know. Samsara doesn’t follow any rules that we know of, and that’s creepy as all hell; I rewatched “The Ring” earlier this week and was surprised at how few “jump out of your seat” moments there were. Once you’ve seen the trick, it’s a rather slow movie with few payoffs. But the concept is so alien that you fear it.

So what else is there?

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Inspired By rollick

rollick

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