Blip on the Radar

The 20 Best Movies of the Decade

2009-12-03T15:14:00.030-04:00

20) Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino)

19) Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)

18) The Prestige (Christopher Nolan)

17) George Washington (David Gordon Green)

16) The Company (Robert Altman)

15) Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)

14) Apocalypto (Mel Gibson)

13) The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola)

12) The White Diamond (Werner Herzog)

11) In America (Jim Sheridan)

10) 2046 (Wong Kar Wai)

9) War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg)

8) Hero (Zhang Yimou)

7) The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)

6) Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson)

5) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

4) The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel Coen)

3) Munich (Steven Spielberg)

2) Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)

1) AI Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg)

ADDENDUM:

Due to perceived conflict of interest, I no longer opine on Torque in any critical forums. Suffice it to say, it has impacted my decade significantly.

Update my heritage, Hollywood!

2009-03-05T23:47:00.027-04:00

Night falls on Halifax.

I've been returned some DVDs that I loaned to a friend last fall, and decide to shelve them. The new Morrissey record, which I received in the mail this midafternoon, spins on my turntable. There is no thunder or lightning. This, dear reader, is the atmosphere of the setup for this particular blog.

As I proceed to alphabetize my movies (which is something all passionate people do, but only those at my level of commitment alphabetize them by their directors' last names), I notice that something is off.

My films no longer all fit on the shelves.

The time had come to weed out my VHS. This task surprised me. Why the hell do I still have 122 VHS tapes of movies that I haven't replaced on DVD or Blu-ray?

But more importantly, 122?!

I guess I never found the inclination in the DVD years to upgrade my copy of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But there's no excuse not to have Face/Off or the first Austin Powers on DVD yet.

With my shelves given their long-needed VHS enema, I still have a vulgar amount of movies on them. I calculate the dough spent on these discs and feel some pride and some upset. That's money I could really use.

But at the same time, it's in my wiring to keep them. These movies are my heritage. They're integral to the fabric of my being. If I display my guts on the wall next to my television like this, that's worthy of respect. I'm just the most honest person in the universe like that.

What this is getting at is the notion of Pop Heritage. It's the reason people are so protective of their favourite movies being remade, and the comic book properties they love getting turned into movies.

I'm not completely against remakes. And I think literal comic book adaptations miss the point of comic books and of movies. But I understand the protectiveness.

Watchmen is a perfect example. It's not a book I've lived with for 20 years. I only first read it 2 months ago. So when I hear people saying, "They better not fuck this up," I think, yeah, that would be a shame. Because, of course, I hope it's good.

But I hope all movies are good.

And who knows, I explained, maybe we'll all be surprised and the great movie this spring will be something like Race to Witch Mountain. A great movie is a great movie. What does it matter which one it is?

I have conflicted feelings about Zack Snyder's Watchmen, enjoying it to some degree. It's faithful to the graphic novel to a fault where the faithful indulgence (yes, I know the specifics of the ending are different) makes the last hour a drag. And Snyder doesn't figure out how to make the comic heroes not appear silly in this medium. A lot of what's interesting about the movie was already interesting about the comic.

For a basically faithful adaptation, it sometimes has a sense of film style, establishing some interesting elements as a movie.

So what do the comic fans want from this?

The problem with a Watchmen movie is this: The only way the film won't be an artistic letdown is if it isolates some purists and finds its own footing. It has to blow minds the way the comic apparently did for all these people 20 years ago. That won't occur just by replicating the comic. It has to happen a whole other time, in another way, as a movie.

At the end we get something sort of all right. It shouldn't dignify anybody's 20-year obsessions. But it's better than it likely could have been.

So the best way to approach movies like Watchmen is not to invest in the hype. If it ends up sucking, it doesn't really matter beyond the time and money the consumer spent on it. The comic everyone loved is still around. Warner Bros. isn't sending a hit squad to take the graphic novel out of peoples' houses.

But, in another way, it does matter!

It matters because we all care too much about what other people think.

If the Last House on the Left remake is watered down ultra-slick baloney, the title is tarnished by the Friday night date crowd. They'll be going around for the rest of their lives saying " Last House on the Left was soo gay!," but they won't have seen the more hardcore other movie with that name that came first, and which looked like it was made by sociopathic junior high students.

That's the fear of remakes reselling one's heritage in "updated" versions that are BASED ON A TRUE STORY even when they didn't used to be.

The bottom line with remake-distaste is simply how they're titled. If Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes were called Showdown on Planet Monkey it would have a better reputation. It would be a ripoff rather than a remake, which is the acceptable way to go. Most movies that aren't acknowledged as remakes are remakes in disguise. There's not really that many stories left to tell in Hollywood, without getting weirder than Hollywood allows.

With the recent Friday the 13th, nobody much cared to protest on message boards, because the original wasn't that great anyway. It was heritage that not that many film geeks really geek out about. That movie's problem isn't inherent to remakes. It's the same problem that all sorts of films have right now. It has no personality. It doesn't feel like it was written by real people.

The established-property trend is lazy, but let's be open-minded.

It doesn't matter where movies come from. An adaptation might find its own way to be interesting. A remake can still be creative. And Fired Up! might really just be American Pie 9: Keep Bringin' It On.

A Manifesto: Indulgent film-crit talk, part 1 of 14

2008-11-11T14:33:00.000-04:00

Roger Ebert recently posted a list of guidelines for being a critic. These are his rules to live by.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/eberts_little_rule_book.html

It's an entertaining read, but Ebert is only scratching the surface. Some points, such as that critics shouldn't ask stars for autographs, have really no effect on one's reviewing capability, and are just about appearances. I don't care about that. Critics are free to act like sycophants, just as rock stars are permitted to snort coke off hookers. Let the work speak for itself.

A lot of his list seems obvious, but I like that Ebert points out how hyperbolic critics like to get. We should be careful when handing out words like "masterpiece."

I'll add some more. These are some of the words that I try to live by.

- Don't brag about how brave you are for watching a movie few people in your age bracket would generally go to. It's your job to keep up with movies, and most people envy your job. If you write about how when you went to see Pooh's Heffalump Movie by yourself, the parents all shielded their kids because they figured you were a pedophile, that's good. Just don't look for sympathy. Sometimes a day at a movie theatre is just like anyone else's office job. (Example: The AV Club: "I Watched This On Purpose," Ain't It Cool).

- Also, don't publicly complain about work conditions. Nobody feels sorry for Ebert and Roeper if there isn't an early screening of The Amityville Horror they can attend. I live in Halifax where I have to see most movies with paying customers after they're released. That is not the sound of me complaining. (eg. Ebert and Roeper)

- Never review a movie you haven't watched in its entirety. This is basic.

- Don't bash movies you haven't seen, even off-handedly. Any idiot can do that. The point of your job is that you're not supposed to be an idiot. (eg. Jeffrey Wells saying Pride and Glory was by far the best movie opening in its week when he clearly hadn't seen Saw V and High School Musical 3. Now, neither of those movies are that good, but I only know because I saw them. They're both better than Pride and Glory.)

- Have an open mind. Don't walk into Gigli planning to hate it. The more your prejudices rule you, the more you're irrelevant.

- Accept that "critical consensus" is swayed by hype. A critic should never use the phrase "that's supposed to be good" as a recommendation for a movie he/she hasn't seen.

- Understand that movies are artworks. I know that they're there to sell tickets, but it's not your job to look at them that way.

- Do not distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow art, you pretentious New Yorker wannabe. You should be able to recognize that there's more artistic merit in Resident Evil: Extinction than in Blindness.

- On a related note, important subject matter should not be mistaken for important movies.

- Stop worrying that a movie "doesn't know who it's made for." This is a marketer's concern, not yours.

- Nobody likes a hater. I make a conscious effort not to single out individual people for the reason a movie isn't working.

- Know why you're doing this job. Figure out what makes you different than the 500 other film writers out there. Have something to contribute.

- Know your subject. In the words of Armond White, "I'm not interested in the opinions of people who don't know what they're talking about."

- Know what the hell you're talking about.

- Have style. Memorizing these rules isn't going to teach you how to write.

However, I will give you the following three points:

-Don't write more than you think. This problem is huge amongst critics.

- Quit referring to stars you're not close friends with by their first names. This tends to sound dumb even when non-critics do it in conversation. "Oh, I loved that Dane and Jessica film, but thought Brad's new movie would have been better if they cast Angelina instead of Frances as his co-worker."

- Writing in cliche is a symptom of thinking in cliche. Avoid pseudo-intelligent phrases like "the fact that" when a "because" will suffice, and avoid backwards sentences like "explosions and nudity do not a good movie make."

- Be consistent. Don't pretend to suddenly hate Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull after the online community turns against it. Have some morals.

- Be honest. If your review of A Beautiful Mind ends with, "This movie taught me that schizophrenics are people too, and from now on I will always think about their plight," no one will take you seriously. (eg. A review of A Beautiful Mind that I once read. Author forgotten.)

- Be patient. Don't declare something "THE BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR" if it's still June.

- In fact, stop thinking of everything in terms of years. You just end up promoting the system that gets movies made so they can win Oscars.

- Realize that movies aren't invalidated simply because they're not tailored to your demographic. Case in point, IMDb voters who hate movies about sports and black people.

- Don't aspire to predict what people will think, or to reaffirm popular consensus. This forum has been given to you, not Joe the Plumber. Critics are being fired all across America because newspaper editors can just as easily hire the sports section guy to tell people what they think. I don't ask my dentist for opinions on sculpture. But every idiot thinks they're versed in movies.

- Remember why you liked movies in the first place.

The Once Halibut Theory

2008-03-26T21:49:00.000-03:00

I've been cooking with habanero peppers lately. The habanero is the third hottest chili pepper in the world. It is so hot that if you don't wash your hands after handling one, your hands will start hurting in 20 minutes. And if you don't wash your hands and then have to go pee, you will begin to envy the monotony of female bathroom technique like never before.

Now, the reason I'm doing this isn't to defy Joseph Kahn's insistence that white people prefer food with no flavour. In truth, it's because I'm rather impatient and don't want to waste consumed calories on foods that are "subtle." I have a right to flavour-experiences. I will live in the extreme.

I try to eat a lot of fish. Fish have Omega Supreme Transformative powers, as well as the extraplanetary potential of Mercury Poisoning, and they're good for your skin or something. If you want to conquer Earth and shit diamonds, eat a lot of fish.

The problem is that some fish doesn't have much taste. I encounter this problem mainly with halibut. My mom claims that she remembers halibut used to pack more of a punch than it does these days. I won't vouch for the accountability of someone else's memory, but this got me thinking...

As a survival mechanism, wouldn't it be beneficial if species evolved to lose flavour? I mean, sure, we're several inches taller than the people our age were in the 1940s, but if we're ever in a plane crash with a bunch of rugby players in the middle of nowhere, something should have to protect us as soon as the fattest guy gets hungry. Those that would be picked to get eaten last would be those that evolved to have tasteless flesh. Like halibut.

From what I know about animals (speaking as an owner of a black lab, who knows enough to know that saying "My dog is black" is a poor way to win race relation disputes), I don't believe that animals are ever naturally spicy. One time I was at a party and some dude brought a tray of bison sausage, and I thought, damn, no wonder those bison got shot, they're spicy as hell. The guy informed me that those spices were artificially added later. This makes sense. It's also techniques like this that make it integral for beings to evolve to taste like as little as possible.

Having no taste makes survival easier.

How else could I have been thrust into a 9-month long Twilight Zone episode where people keep coming up to me and telling me that the movie Once introduced them to the concepts of Art and Humanity? There's one explanation: People are evolving to like boring shit. Don't try to be all open-minded by denying it. Be truthful, and admit it. Fans of Once display a scary passion where they'd kill for it.

If Once Lovers lived on an island commune, and I visited that commune, they would burn me in a Wicker Man.

In a way, I understand this passion. Raised without religion, the movies I love inform my identity. I'd rather talk in-person with people about movies we agree on than get in fights over ones where we don't. Some films are just too integral to one's identity. So when you say, Blue Velvet sucks, you're insulting me. I know what that's like.

It's also why it's so puzzling. What is it about Once that makes people look at it and think, "Yup, that's me"? When I watched the movie, I found it mediocre. I didn't hate it, but considered it too inconsequential to even be worth reviewing. Now that people in their 20s are losing their shit for it, I'm sort of embarrassed for them.

Nothing that makes movies incredible is contained in Once. The Irish drama stars Glen Hansard as a musician/vacuum cleaner repairman who falls for a girl played by Marketa Irglova. They record songs together, so the movie becomes a naturalistic musical--only director John Carney has not studied musical setpieces or short form videos, so his music and images create no emotional thrust.

The handheld camerawork doesn't leave room for thought-out compositions. And the songs themselves are dead-eyed indie rock boilerplate. Movies don't get more hermetically and stereotypically white than Once. It's anti-matter--a movie for those who wish to be manipulated, but in a naturalistic way so they don't realize it's happening, and who wish to define themselves through musical fashion, but try to steer away from rock star personalities. Did modern indie rock fans have any fun in high school, or did they listen to the mid-90s equivalents of City and Colour and Coldplay back then? Maybe they listened to the Fresh Prince and gangsta rap in junior high like I did, then they moved on to Soundgarden, KMFDM and White Zombie. Then it was Robbie Williams in their college years. Then Death Cab and the Once soundtrack. Tomorrow Yanni. That's not just a softening of musical style: Some of those acts are real artists.

Certain people evolve to tastelessness when they grow older. It's easier, I guess.

But I want to live.

I don't mean to pick on Once fans so much. It's just that they're fucking everywhere. When you review movies people you don't know always want to tell you about awesome movies they just saw. I recently did a year-end radio show where this was the whole premise for an hour.

As one of two guest critics, I was in the reverse-spot position of having callers tell me about the best movies of 2007. I like doing this show, but something was in the air that day. I knew it was gonna be a long hour when the first caller was raving about Mad Money. Other recommended best movies of the year were Shooter and A Beautiful Mind (which came out 7 years ago, but I let it slide.)

But the amount of people talking up Once eclipsed any other title. Even my perfectly sane co-guest was gaga for it. Genuinely curious (and determined to be polite), I responded to callers' raves with, "What did you like about it?" The answers would be along the lines of, "It was so beautiful. And when they're in the studio together, recording that song, that scene is just, ohh myyyy..."

OK.

Then last week, Sarah Riley, who usually has some of the best movie taste of anyone, just had to write me about Once.

"I cried like five minutes in. It's a beautiful film."

"Not you too!," I wrote back. There goes another one.

This much is clear. The movie Once does not care about me, for it has caused me much confusion about Darwin and halibut. For that, I cannot support it.

Never back down.

Stuff They Won't Teach You in School

2008-02-28T22:39:00.000-04:00

A 10 year-old girl from Montana named Maryn Smith won a National Geographic contest for creating a mnemonic to remember the order and names of all 11 planets in our solar system.

11!?

I thought Pluto was cancelled as a planet, and it seems unfair that National Geographic would throw dwarf planets Ceres and Eris on top of that.

So what did Maryn Smith come up with?

"My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants."

I'm sure Ms. Smith is a nice person, or whatever, but her mnemonic is making the cosmos more confusing.

First off, it has a clear Earth-bias which I feel is inappropriate for the subject matter. As a mnemonic line, it's hard to remember. This may be remedied, as the mnemonic is now being made into a pop song by Lisa Loeb (best known as the girl who encouraged geeky guys to come out about their glasses fetish with the Ethan Hawke directed Reality Bites video "Stay").

Until the day when Loeb teaches us how to sing about sailing under palace elephants, Smith should be proud of her win. She just hasn't yet convinced me she's a great writer.

I know. She's 10. I'm jealous. I never got anything published at that age.

Smith isn't alone in her lack of mnemonic poetry giftedness. Most people talk in a way to reveal that they're their own bad writers. Their concept of good writing is generally wrong too. I believe Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody can write well. She just doesn't consistently. That's what fuels her irrational haters to block out the bits of Juno that are well-written.

The exchange (scratch that, monologue) that strikes me as most awkward has the title character quipping that she'd give Jennifer Garner her baby earlier, but it would look like a seamonkey. It's the strangest thing, because nobody in the movie prompted Juno to begin this routine. It's a mistake on Cody's part--for the record, she wrote a better script than Tony Gilroy's overpraised Michael Clayton--and the clip is even in the trailer. This moment of a writer's indulgence rejects the natural flow of the situation.

I'd lend you $300, but I'm employed by The Coast.

See.

For all the Maryn Smiths out there, with bright futures ahead of them (perhaps writing films), here are some lines that should never be heard in a movie again.

"I'm ____, by the way."

This is how characters often introduce themselves in movies. I used this in The Killing of Kings, and then started noticing how prominent it was in everything else. It's a way to make the mandatory meet-and-greet exposition of two characters who the viewer is already aquainted with seem more casual. The "by the way" doesn't work. If you ever say this in life, it means you're narcissistic enough to consciously talk like you're in a movie script.

"God has nothing to do with this."

I was watching a season 1 episode of Battlestar Galactica last night, and this line came up. I've heard it in dozens of movies before, almost always following another character exclaiming, "Oh my God." When one writes, "God has nothing to do with this," it must look pretty badass on paper. When it's verbalized, it sounds like you're insincerely referencing a 1970s giant insect movie. The most hardcore line so far this year is in the otherwise uninspired Rambo. "Fuck the world!" It doesn't get more nihilistic than that.

"I'd like that."

Please, no.

"It's not what it looks like."

I've heard that one before.

Be careful not to try making every line of dialogue iconic, either. You'll end up writing Jerry Maguire.

"Good to meet you."

This one looks benign, just beware. Only ever write this in a Canadian film. Last time I was in LA, I kept shaking peoples' hands and saying "Good to meet you." They'd respond with, "Nice to meet you," and I was one-upped by their moral superiority.

I'm interested in where people get their voices from. I'm not gonna be an asshole and try to take credit for inspiring anything.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/63-expensive-sandwiches/#comments

But influences are revealed through the things one says.

A couple of Fridays ago, I went to a matinee showing of The Eye, a rote American remake of a Hong Kong thriller. It stars Jessica Alba as one of those blind violin prodigies that are all the rage.

The theatre had only about 25 people in it. Among them was an average-Shmoe middle aged dude, who sat by himself. I took note of this because while walking into the auditorium, I was whistling something and he shot me an incriminating look that suggested, "This guy's gonna be trouble." I felt bad for the guy anyway, because I had a scenario in my mind that he was going to a teen-skewing Jessica Alba flick alone to distract himself from a divorce. He sat on the aisle.

The real teens in the theatre sat still and watched for about 45 minutes before announcing their boredom. Two of them raced from the back of the theatre to sit in empty seats in the front. Their friends, still at the back, laughed.

Then, another one of them ran to the front of the theatre, making sure each step hit the ground as loud as possible.

I looked over at the middle aged dude. He was making some movement like he was shadowboxing the air.

The stompy kid immediately decides he liked his old seat better, and run-stomps back to it. This requires him to pass by the middle aged guy's aisle seat. As the sporty hooligan passes him, he stands up from his seat and bodychecks him. It did happen! The kid falls down.

Now pay attention to the naturalism of the resulting dialogue exchange. This great situation brought out the best in everyone's inner-writer.

Stompy: "Fuck! Someone bodychecked me."

Right off the bat, you know they're inspired. That would make a great opening line to a screenplay. You can't use it.

Middle-Aged Dude: "I didn't see you."

Stompy's Friend: "What's your fucking problem, man."

Stompy: "I got knocked the fuck out."

Middle-Aged Dude: "I was just going to the bathroom."

Stompy's Friend: "Oh yeah. You totally bodychecked my friend."

Angry man at the back of the theatre: "Shutup, you idiots! Shutup or leave!"

Middle-Aged Dude: "Now, I told you I was just getting up to go to the bathroom. I didn't see him there."

Stompy: "You decided to go the second I walked by."

Middle-Aged Dude: "It's very dark. But now that you mention it, you guys have been running around like a bunch of... MANIACS. People are trying to enjoy this movie."

Stompy's Friend: "Let's step outside."

Middle-Aged Dude: "Yeah, we should go talk to the manager. Maybe we won't have to get 9-1-1 involved."

They leave. Stompy limps out. I don't know if he was faking.

Stompy: "THIS MOVIE SUCKS!"

Angry man at the back of the theatre: "SHUT THE FUCK UP!!"

This is a close approximation, to the best of my memory. I replayed it in my head many times so I wouldn't forget. The situation would have normally pissed me off, except it was by far the most exciting part of The Eye.

The passion and fury of their exchange was tight, motivated, and exciting.

When all else fails, throw in another photo of Jessica Alba.

Writers take note.

2007

2007-12-20T15:15:00.000-04:00

(A portion of this entry was written for the upcoming issue of The Coast.)

2007 began and ended with audience disinterest. In April, the anticipated-on-the-Internet Grindhouse opened and quickly reminded everyone that people who spend their days online are not the real world. In November, Beowulf couldn't reach the audience an epic of its size depends on.

The response to both these movies is made worse because, as flawed as they are, they absolutely had to be seen in the theatre. Since Grindhouse's two halves were released as separate movies on DVD, the original continuity of the film is unavailable. Beowulf on IMAX 3-D is a movie-going experience more than it is a great movie. Though not among the year's best films, on the big screen, these were the most indispensible movie outings.

Let’s take this opportunity to look at what 2007 stood for. It’s a fallacy to complain that movies are getting worse. It just seems that way because it’s mostly good movies that are remembered from past years. It's equally deluded, or else just a huge difference in standards, to think '07 delivered a lot to be excited about. That it was a weak movie year is evidenced in its place in the cycle where Hollywood gets deathly scared of taking risks and makes sure most of its tentpole releases are part 3s.

THE THIRD IN A SERIES IS RARELY EXCITING

Ocean’s Thirteen was the best of its franchise. So was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. But neither film was especially good, as they arrived when both of those series were exhausted. Shrek the Third, Rush Hour 3, and Spider-Man 3 were likewise hits that didn’t inspire much enthusiasm. The threequel summer was a drag reflecting a lack of creative inspiration. It was surprising that a filmmaker of Sam Raimi’s esteem didn’t even visually distinguish Spidey 3 from part 2. Soderbergh’s lower estimation Ocean’s Thirteen was the only third chapter to reimagine itself in visual terms. The one threequel that was embraced by critics was The Bourne Ultimatum, a good movie nearly destroyed by its visual style.

BARF-CAM FOR DUMMIES

The Bourne Ultimatum may be celebrated as an adult thriller, but its attitude is patronizing. It’s part of an increasingly common approach in genre filmmaking where hand-held shakey cam is supposed to constitute realism. This is a problem for a number of reasons. For one, action movies like The Bourne Ultimatum by Paul Greengrass and The Kingdom by Peter Berg (who sells this same barf-cam “realism” on TV’s Friday Night Lights) assume their viewers are too cynical for the manipulation of classical filmmaking. So they make movies where no shot composition has to mean anything. It’s just spastic edits, random close-ups, whip pans, meaningless zoom-ins, and shaking. (The funniest audience comment of the year happened in The Bourne Ultimatum, when someone interjected during a fight scene, “I think that was a fist.”) I’m not sure how people began to equate barf-cam with realism anyway. The world simply isn’t that shaky. If you’re running, your head is moving with your sight line, so you can still tell what’s going on better than in most of Bourne, The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart and 28 Weeks Later. It’s a gimmicky approach to realism of which 2007’s less remarked-upon achievements in realistic drama, like Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Preston Whitmore II’s This Christmas, don’t succumb. Finally, it’s just not that hard to hold a camera steady.

THE HITS ARE ALRIGHT

Apart from the respectable box office of No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille and Hairspray were the two instances where hugely popular movies ranked amongst the year’s best. As for the event-films, the best in a usually soulless enterprise were Transformers, Michael Bay’s sundrenched Americana about boys and their machines, and Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend. Lawrence isn’t as distinguished, skilled, or (in some ways) as frustrating an artist as Bay, but his version of the Richard Matheson sci fi yarn makes up for its familiarity with actual emotion and social interest. The whole movie lives on the strength of Will Smith’s underestimated performance as the last man on Earth. As ideal and likable a movie star as he is, for all the bank it makes, the film may prove too slow and downbeat in the public’s estimation. Still, it’s exciting to see a blockbuster that at least has stretches of inspiration.

WORST THROWAWAY

Warner Bros. efforts to not let anyone see its best release all year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, involved quickly yanking the movie from theatres after pleading ignorance about how to market a Brad Pitt film.

WATCH THAT C-WORD

2007 might be the momentary end to torture-based horror films. Dwindling interest in this year’s titles The Hills Have Eyes 2, Captivity, Hostel Part II and Saw IV (most of which were no worse than years past) indicates that viewers were beginning to question their own taste in porn. Yet there was a weird connection between the horror genre and Oscar prestige. Both the horror movies Hostel Part II and P2 (about a woman terrorized in a parking lot on Christmas Eve) as well as the Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement feature a violent dramatic shift around a female character reacting to a male using the word ****. Lesson learned from watching otherwise unrelated movies: Saying (or spelling) **** results in everything from military exile to castration.

XENOPHOBIA REIGNS

I often suggest that people watch movies that aren’t aimed at their demographic. The reasoning is that one of the basic values of movies is their ability to show how people are the same—the ways in which people whose lifestyles seem different than your own are in other ways a lot like you. This connection brings insights into humanity, and then to ourselves.

But it’s an ideal that gets buried when studios assume viewers are ignorant and then sell them movies about themselves. The malebashing in Waitress only reaffirms stereotypes of Southern men as abusive and uneducated. It’s an annoying but familiar prejudice that’s somewhat forgiven by the film’s goodwill toward female uplift. The light comedy in Waitress has distinct attitude. As a movie, it’s good TV. That’s far preferable to Shoot ‘Em Up, the most blatantly misogynistic movie this year. The 15-years-out-of-date action spoof has Paul Giamatti fondling a female corpse, not just to establish him as a villain but because somebody on board thought it was cool. You can almost picture a bitter movie exec doing lines of coke while watching it.

Superbad actually got adults to see a movie about teenagers, which is an amazing feat. I say this because teens are the one group that most people think it’s dignified to complain about, as though they themselves were never 17, and as though adolescents don’t have a more powerful foothold in cultural trends than they do. I think about it everytime I hear people in their late 20s bash emo kids. But because Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan want to believe there are no Hispanic or Black people in Southern California, and that the hottest girls in school will inevitably fall for the dorkiest guys simply because the guys want it, Superbad’s achievements aren’t worth too much.

Juno, another comedy about teenagers I'm mostly positive on, is guilty of some of the same casual racism. I don't know how a movie this universally white can justify that its most despised characters are the supporting parts of the East Asian pro-life high school girl, and the nurse who gets told off by Juno's mom. Then again, people are so used to it, I'm sure not many will notice.

If you’re a 40 year-old white male who likes Velvet Revolver, you should go to a crowded Friday night showing of This Christmas. If your whole idea of action-adventure is Heroes and Live Free or Die Hard, rent Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. If you like bashing Tyler Perry or Amanda Bynes, try watching one of their movies first (neither Daddy’s Little Girls or Sydney White is completely without interest.)

28 year-old Sarah Polley directing Away From Her, a movie about senior citizens, means she’s probably rather strange. But she’s reaching beyond herself.

MUSICALS WERE BETTER THIS YEAR

This connective value of movies had been lost in recent bloated movie musicals. The award-winning Chicago celebrated petty narcissism, Rent faked edginess, and Dreamgirls fumbled music history.

In 07, they got their mojo back. Hairspray adapted the stage musical of John Waters’ cult film without many theatrical bearings. Adam Shankman’s version moves like a movie, carrying its tunes through levels of nostalgic comedy, teen empowerment and social drama.

The stripped down DV look of Once complimented its realist folk music love story. If only its director John Carney had studied the cutting rhythms and visual expression of real music videos beforehand (and not just conservative indie rock ones) its quaint approach would have left a deeper impression.

This lack of music video directing experience conversely helps Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe—she’s such a gifted visual filmmaker, she lets the numbers speak their own language. As everyone loves to say, Across the Universe is a mess. But that doesn’t invalidate the rush of its best moments. Even small touches, like the vocal quality of T.V. Carpio’s rendition of“I Want to Hold Your Hand” were movie-year standouts.

Most bigtime filmmakers don’t have a good ear for pop music. That’s why “Kung-Fu Fighting” shows up in so many action sequences. And it’s partially why new movies by Wes Anderson and The Farrelly Brothers are to be valued, even in a year when they only give us The Darjeeling Limited and The Heartbreak Kid.

Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Anton Corbijn's Control also notably stretched the resurgent musical format.

2007 HAD NO ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE

Not yet. But 2 films came close.

5 STUPIDEST MOVIES THAT ACT SMART

1) Into the Wild
2) A Mighty Heart
3) Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
4) The Mist
5) Smokin’ Aces

5 SMARTEST MOVIES THAT ACT STUPID

1) Hot Rod
2) Stuck
3) Bug
4) Captivity
5) Freedom Writers

5 STUPIDEST MOVIES THAT ACT ACCORDINGLY

1) Epic Movie
2) Dead Silence
3) Bratz: The Movie
4) License to Wed
5) Balls of Fury

*********

Now here's every 2007 movie I saw in 2007, ranked. The list will be updated until at least January 1. Everything given a B- or higher, I overall liked. Films that are considered 2006 North American releases that were made unavailable in my market until 07 (such as Little Children and The Curse of the Golden Flower) are not ranked. Otherwise, Idiocracy and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer would have made my top 10.

A RATINGS

1) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

2) No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen & Joel Coen)

A- RATINGS

3) Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)

4) Stuck (Stuart Gordon)

5) Hairspray (Adam Shankman)

B+ RATINGS

6) Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog)

7) Ratatouille (Brad Bird)

8) Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer)

9) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton)

10) Control (Anton Corbijn)

11) Paris, I Love You
12) The Lives of Others
13) Redacted
14) Beowulf
15) Grindhouse (Planet Terror C+; Death Proof B-; Full experience B+)

B RATINGS

16) The Orphanage
17) Hot Fuzz
18) Transformers
19) Across the Universe
20) Reign Over Me
21) Bridge to Terabithia
22) Bug
23) The Wind That Shakes the Barley
24) Freedom Writers
25) The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
26) Lucky You
27) I Am Legend
28) TMNT
29) The Tracey Fragments
30) This Christmas
31) 28 Weeks Later
32) The Simpsons Movie
33) The Lookout
34) Dan in Real Life
35) Knocked Up
36) Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

B- RATINGS

37) The Darjeeling Limited
38) Zodiac
39) Amazing Grace
40) The Bourne Ultimatum
41) Juno
42) Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls
43) Alpha Dog
44) Paprika
45) Waitress
46) Halloween
47) Vacancy
48) Awake
49) Atonement
50) Captivity
51) The Nanny Diaries
52) Disturbia
53) Superbad
54) Enchanted
55) Live Free or Die Hard
56) Elizabeth: The Golden Age
57) Norbit
58) Zoo
59) Talk to Me
60) Ocean’s Thirteen
61) Black Snake Moan

C+ RATINGS

62) 1408
63) The Host
64) Michael Clayton
65) You Kill Me
66) Sunshine
67) American Gangster
68) Eastern Promises
69) Fido
70) Bee Movie
71) Once
72) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
73) Shrek the Third
74) Sydney White
75) The Heartbreak Kid
76) 3:10 to Yuma
77) Murder Party
78) Nightwatching
79) Arthur and the Invisibles
80) Meet the Robinsons
81) I Think I Love My Wife
82) Reno 911!: Miami
83) The Astronaut Farmer
84) The Messengers
85) Ghost Rider
86) Resurrecting the Champ
87) The Invisible
88) Mr. Bean’s Holiday

C RATINGS

89) Weirdsville
90) 300
91) In the Land of Women
92) Spider-Man 3
93) Are We Done Yet?
94) Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
95) The Golden Compass
96) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
97) The Reaping
98) Evening
99) Stomp the Yard
100) Shooter
101) Wild Hogs
102) Music & Lyrics
103) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
104) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
105) Fred Claus
106) Year of the Dog
107) Hunting and Gathering
108) The Stone Angel
109) The Hoax
110) Next
111) Gracie
112) The Brave One
113) Alvin and the Chipmunks
114) P2
115) Who Loves the Sun
116) Lions for Lambs
117) Balls of Fury
118) Rise: Blood Hunter

C- RATINGS

119) Sicko
120) Perfect Stranger
121) War
122) Severance
123) Hostel Part II
124) Blood and Chocolate
125) Catch and Release
126) Primeval
127) Dead Silence
128) A Mighty Heart
129) Fracture
130) 30 Days of Night
131) Lady Chatterley

D+ RATINGS

132) Mr. Brooks
133) Nancy Drew
134) Blades of Glory
135) National Treasure: Book of Secrets
136) The Hitcher
137) The Hills Have Eyes 2
138) The Last Mimzy
139) The Number 23

D RATINGS

140) Smokin’ Aces
141) Bratz
142) Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
143) The Mist
144) License to Wed
145) Shoot ‘Em Up
146) The Kingdom
147) Into the Wild

D- RATINGS

148) Good Luck Chuck
149) Southland Tales

F RATINGS

150) Because I Said So
151) Hannibal Rising
152) Happily N’Ever After
153) Saw IV
154) Epic Movie

Lessons of Stupid

2007-10-21T05:48:00.000-03:00

Last week I was in Vegas, because my friends were going and I'm trying to uphold my rep as the Nicest Guy in Hollywood. In my 2 day stay, I discovered that Las Vegas is at once America at its finest (and by finest I mean lowest), and kinda cool provided you can ease yourself into a level of stupidity that lets you get off on its extravagance.

Since I have high empathy levels, and can usually engage in non-condescending discourse with people far dumber than me, this wasn't really a problem.

Joseph and I are in the hotel elevator when a drunk guy strikes a conversation. (Take note: He was holding a glass of whiskey. I wouldn't typically accuse someone of being drunk just for lacking social inhibitions.)

"Software guys, huh?"

"Pardon?"

"You're software guys, right? I can tell."

"Yeah, Microsoft," Joseph lies.

"See, I knew. You guys dress however the hell you want."

I'm wearing a Disneyland t-shirt and Joseph is wearing a Star Wars tee and shorts. Admittedly, this is not proper fancy hotel attire in a city where everyone is trying to prove they're high stakes players. But it takes a level of stupidity to openly negatively stereotype someone based on their wardrobe.

Today's topic of discussion: The Stupid.

They may be the most unfairly, routinely, and without the aid of rights-activitists, universally bashed legal group in the world that isn't founded on sociopathy. For some reason, it's considered alright to bash midgets in movies too. But midgets have some activists on their side. Nobody likes The Stupid. It's politically correct to hate them. Even stupid people hate other stupid people.

Let's start by distinguishing 3 prominent groups of stupid people. (For the sake of brevity, I'm leaving out purely hateful idiots: Terrorists, racists, etc.)

1) Those who know better but choose to be stupid anyway.

These are the people of whom it's most OK to disapprove. They're the university kids who go out on city streets at night and think they're being clever by yelling "Drugs!" really loudly. They think it's cooler to not care about anything, and write letters to the paper complaining that my reviews aren't dumb enough. They're the people who have been alive for 80 years, and still haven't found the time to learn what side of the street they're allowed to walk on. Fuck these people.

The second group isn't much better.

2) The stupid people who try to sound smart in really insincere ways.

In some ways, this group ranks among the most horrible people on Earth. We call em pseudo-intellectuals ("pseuds" for short.) You can identify one right away if he or she claims to have no regrets. No sane person has "no regrets," and the majority of people who say they don't just talk without thinking. Anybody over the age of 3 who sincerely doesn't regret anything either has no life experience or is a narcissistic asshole. The people in this group also talk about movies like they're quoting things they read out of a magazine. They give their opinions loudly in public places so everyone can think they don't kowtow to the party line if they adore Wes Anderson and hate Spielberg. They love the idea of "indie", but secretly despise truly independent thought. They use backwards sentence endings like, "Explosions and nudity does not a good movie make." And they throw around the always unnecessary pseud-phrase "the fact that" verbally and in writing.

(If you want to work at hiding your pseud-status, I'd also recommended always saying "I feel" in place of "I think." "I think" indicates uncertainty; the way you feel can't be wrong. I'm just helping out my fellow man.)

I remember when I was 19, standing in a short line with 2 friends to take in Bride of Chucky on a weeknight. This line was parallel to a much longer line. In the longer line, a guy was trying to impress his girl by snickering at our line's apparent poor taste in entertainment. What was that other lineup lined up for? Practical Magic! The movie about Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sister witches with dating problems. At least going to see Bride of Chucky is an honest stupid way to spend 2 hours.

The third group is the most innocent.

3) People simply of below average intelligence.

They don't want to be stupid any more than the blind want to be blind. But people hate them for it, as though they can magically start being smart. It's like when clinically depressed people are told to just snap out of it. Or like asking a wheelchair-bound person if they've ever tried walking. No. They can't do that. With those groups, we realize such attitudes are wrong. The Stupid, on the other hand, are treated as a blight on our well-being.

Let me add to this that I truly believe that most people are smart in their own way. There are people you think are dumb that are better in some situations than you are. On the other end of things, people who are basically smart are stupid about certain things. For instance, just because you major in biology doesn't mean you know how to get a date. And just because you can crush a beer can on your head doesn't mean you can program a computer.

But people who are thought of as stupid are usually stupid frequently and in pronounced ways. And it's not curable by just accumulating more knowledge. They're dopey like some people are clumsy. It's a poor sign of one's character to hate them for it. There are other qualities as valuable as intelligence.

The irony here is that society is designed for The Stupid. You don't have to look around much to see this is true. Just turn on the news and listen to commentators theorize that Barack Obama has no chance of being President because some people consider him too smart. Being too smart is an issue?! If you're smart you get what they're skating around: Obama has no chance because some people consider him too black. The media doesn't need to be truthful, because it has already assumed you're an idiot.

This is an example of why the smart fear the social influence of The Stupid. And as Yoda taught us, fear turns to hate.

But can't we just accept that some stupid people are not malicious and just lack the brain-function of the rest of us? So long as they're not ruling a country, just put up with it. Our basic humanity accepts that the ugly are valuable, so why not The Stupid? My dog isn't evil because he isn't as smart as me.

Perhaps my altruism comes from feeling a kinship with many stupid things. I know some episodes of Beavis and Butt-head line-by-line. I enjoy twisted stoner movies, humour, and cartoons in a sober state. Within limits, I enjoy hanging out with drunk friends. At the same time, I hate elitist elegance, and anything stupid that's trying to appear smart.

I have, however, always had some problem with Jackass that I couldn't pinpoint at first. Now I know. It was a show designed to kill The Stupid.

Copycat Jackass stunts have resulted in death and injury to many stupid people. This is usually defended by people saying it's a way of cleansing the gene pool, or it's evolution in progress. The old to-the-point standby in dismissing an accidental death is, "Well, that person was stupid for doing that anyway." The problem is there is no level of stupid that's too stupid for Jackass. The Stupid is an ideal audience for that show. It preys on them. So of course idiots will watch it and die. Just because you're stupid doesn't mean you don't deserve to live.

The supposedly educated public (ie. the ones whose prefered topics of discussion are the things they read on Perez Hilton that day) secretly enjoys it when unstable celebrities die. They take it as a win for intelligence whenever this happens. This smug elite killed Anna Nicole Smith. They created a demand for a reality show about how stupid she is, which made her lose any shred of her self-esteem, leading to an increased negative media spotlight, and then to her suicide. Score.

But sometimes the world surprises you...

To Be Continued in LESSONS OF STUPID: PART II - MARK PALERMO GOES TO A MORRISSEY CONCERT AND OBSERVES DIFFERENT THINGS.

Joseph Kahn Hates Sandwiches

2007-10-09T04:33:00.000-03:00

Seriously! What kind of shit is that?

A sandwich is a compact, portable food that can encompass all 4 food groups within one convenient food item. It can employ limitless taste combinations and sensations with the fresh ingredients of one's choosing. Plus, sandwiches are historical. Did you know that Leprechaun was the first R-rated film to have tie-ins at a fast food joint? That fast food joint was called Subway. The invention of the Internet directly followed.

I'll tell you what this is really about. Despite everything I just said, Joseph thinks sandwiches lack flavour and are white people food.

To illustrate, here are some pictures of white people eating food.

Now, it's true that Mexican, Thai and various other food types are spicier than the average tuna on rye. And in a weird way, I know and agree with where Joseph is going with this. I just don't entirely believe his sandwich dismissal. My friend Mike Gillis is terrified of pies to the point where he won't be in the same room as one. It's much different than Joseph Kahn's anger at sandwiches.

I suspect I was just challenged by some mixed messages I was struggling to interpret. Joseph once told me that I have more soul than any other white person he knows. Then, when sitting in class last week, he told me that I should embrace my whiteness more through the way I dress and act. I never realized I was denying it.

This isn't to say that certain races are prefered over others, just that it's taken as a sign of confidence when people comport themselves to their own station in life rather than to someone else's. I'm opposed to this thinking for several reasons, principally because I'm not sure how it applies to me. But then, I hope I don't come across like Fergie either.

"Look," Joseph explained, "I'm a Korean American. When I was growing up, I had no idea how to get girls until I reinvented my look as an Asian rock star. But it put me in a position where I noticed what kind of white guys girls go for. I know more about what it takes for white males to score than white males do. Trust me on this. I directed 2 Janet Jackson videos, 2 Britney Spears videos, and 2 Eminem videos."

If you look around in LA, the trendiest white guy hairdo is something we'll call Extreme Bedhead. This goes along with collared t-shirts, and five o'clock shadow. In other words, to be the most desirable white guy one must look like actor Ryan Gosling.

So I did it up.

The next step in my white identity project was to buy some indie rock. Joseph was in Seattle for his cousin’s wedding, but left me to look over his Hollywood home for the weekend and gave me permission to his car. If Joseph saw the Dana Carvey epic Opportunity Knocks he would know this was a terrible idea. But anyway, I drove down to Sunset, parked and began walking to Amoeba Music. The plan was to get the trendiest indie rock possible.

It seemed like a stupid idea at first. But then, walking out of the store, I noticed Mary Elizabeth Winstead, star of Death Proof, Live Free Or Die Hard, Sky High and Final Destination 3. It’s hard to recognize celebrities immediately because when you see them in person their facial characteristics are in check, but they’re slightly differently proportioned than how they look on screen. Actors have giant heads because they’re easier to light that way.

This was definitely her, though. She’s cute as hell. And my mission was validated when I noticed her hand-in-hand with a white boyfriend who is clearly uglier than me. (This isn’t just the ego of the world’s best-looking film critic talking. It’s observed fact.)

Winstead looked at me, in my new sell-out get-up and hair-dew, and smiled. It didn’t matter that my soul crushing make-over made me feel like an absolute dork. In that brief moment she totally eye-fucked me.

There were a lot of people in Amoeba Music that day. I decided to just stand in line at the register to ask for assistance.

“Can I help you?, a white woman with dreadlocks asked.

“Yes. I’m wondering what the hippest indie rock CD is right now?”

“Hmm. Have you heard the latest TV on the Radio?”

“No. I need something more white?”

“Excuse me??”

“I’m trying to impress this girl who thinks I’m racist against white music, which is a thoroughly untrue and inappropriate supposition for her to make, but still I’d like some help.”

“There’s The Arcade Fire. They’re a collective without a real group leader. Like the white Wu-Tang.”

“That’s not white enough.”

At this point, the true silliness of this race based presentation exercise was starting to hit me again. Taking interest only in the small piece of the world one's born into has always seemed ignorant to me. Yet this is how so many people choose to live. I rail against xenophobia a lot in my writing because life is about the experience of branching out—understanding yourself, your situation, and others’ by taking interest in the world around you. Almost as annoying to me as outward racists are people who think they’re combating racism simply by ignoring it altogether—denying its presence in everything.

More specifically, where are the people complaining about Superbad? Sure, it’s just one in a long line of teen movies to relegate adolescence to an all-white experience. But in 2007, this view is reflective of nothing. The only black character in Superbad is the liquor store cashier. The only Asian is Evan’s male cooking class bitch. There’s a substantial number of white kids for whom this media fabricated view is their embraced reality. Check out the movies and music on many 20
-something caucasians' MySpace pages for proof. It’s a sickness of hegemony—a subliminal racism wherein the non-white world just doesn’t exist. And I’m not trying to come off as righteous. It seriously bothers me. Who casts a movie with only white people, and then sees nothing wrong?

Let me make this much clear: Joseph Kahn has nothing against white people (he likes some of them more than I do), though his sandwich-hate is perhaps unconsidered. He simply has an outsider-understanding of how white America works and wants to let me know that game can be played to my advantage if I want.

Which brings me to the next topic. The most cruelly discriminated against group (by the educated elite, no less!), with the least support from anyone, isn’t a race at all. It’s The Stupid. Next blog.

Planet Canada

2007-09-09T14:31:00.000-03:00

The Burj Dubai is about to surpass the CN Tower as the world's tallest freestanding structure. Although Toronto's CN Tower has, until now, been taller than all buildings, it could never take the tallest building claim. It is not inhabitable from the bottom to the top--lacking attractions and amusements like floors and office space. Henceforth, it doesn't qualify as a building. That's your architectural lesson of the day.

I’m told the CN Tower has some communications purposes. But let’s be honest. It was built just to be taller than everything else. Thanks to the Burj Dubai, it is now completely useless.

Though Canadians will never let it on, this comes as a devastating blow to our morale. Canadians are like United Statesmen in some ways. We generally participate in the same culture. But where those neighbours to the south get to choose between football and baseball, Canadians who dislike hockey are unpatriotic. They get to pick between My Chemical Romance and Velvet Revolver, but if you’re Canadian, fuck you if you don’t support The Tragically Hip.

Many Canadians grow up with feelings of marginalization, so they band together and pretend to like all the same stuff. You can see this in comedy that comes out of Canada. Canadians are funny people, and their humour is based largely in outsider characters. In the States, they don’t shed a tear when they see the NBC logo, but the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is like our Statue of Liberty.

I never wanted to be a part of that. My perspective is based in being completely addicted to US pop culture, while also feeling outside of it because of where I live. Things that are uniquely Canadian tend to make me uncomfortable. I like sketch comedy fine, but you will never see me reenacting Kids in the Hall at a party. I haven't eaten maple syrup in over a month. I have never ordered poutine (the national food of Canada, made of fries, cheese curds and gravy) at a restaurant, despite having eaten it several times through means that I guess didn’t require me ordering it. To my knowledge, I have also never been fishing. And I have certainly never caught a fish. On the rare occasion that I drink, I prefer hard liquor to beer. It feels more hardcore, and I like that brief moment after you take a swig where you can gaze through space and time. Beer is for fat guys who don't wear shirts at barbecues.

In my first year of elementary school, the guys in my class were always talking about the NHL. I didn’t know who the fuck Gordie Howe was, and couldn’t understand why other 5 year-olds weren’t more into Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

This is a way of saying that I’m a fraudulent Canadian. But I will patriotically defend that title till my death!

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the most violent city in Canada. I know it here. I like it here. Nobody has tried to kill me. The only times I've come close to getting in a fight in my life was due to the aggression of other Canadians who drank too much beer. This feels like a peaceful city. There's no huge difference between Canadians and Americans as far as I can tell. The difference is more evident in what the two countries produce. Minor variants in our pop culture taste are also apparent. For instance, pop-punk (even US-made) was popular for longer over here. For some reason, the US seems more accepting of Nickelback than my fellow countrymen are.

But since I frequently do work out of the US, I'm never sure how the other country perceives me. Joseph Kahn insists my accent is Canadian, though I believe he is mistaken. I have more of a Brooklyn accent. It's a result of French immersion schooling, which had some effect on how I talk, and watching a lot of gangster movies while realizing my Italian heritage. The common thing that happens when an American finds out you're from Canada is they'll try to be funny by saying something to you and ending it with an "eh." Yes, that's fucking hilarious! I can't tell you how many Canadians I heard say "eh" this afternoon.

And we say a-boat, not a-boot, motherfucker. Even the South Park movie got that wrong.

A primary speech difference is in localized "urban" speech. Canadians are more likely to end a sentence with "cuz," while Americans will end it with "dogg." There has recently been some international crossover with these terms. A Nova Scotia variant to the hip-hop greeting "What's happening?" is "What are you saying?" I hate "What are you saying?" because it's confusing no matter how often it's asked. There's no possible way to answer it except with a "Not much."

Rappers in the States are more frightening than rappers in Canada. Canada's biggest current rap star is K-Os. He's one of those socially conscious rappers who is often photograped showing that he's smart by tapping his index finger on the side of his head. 50 Cent could kick his ass in a fight. Probably because my interests lie between these two worlds, my fave rapper is Mos Def, who spits rhymes about the hood but doesn't identify as a thug.

When you tell an American that you're a Canadian, their internal response is "OK, this person's almost like me, but there will be something weird about him." That's a valid reaction, because it's absolutely correct. Canadians are Americans who are weirder. They develop extra quirks from the displacement of knowing their country isn't a superpower. It's an ego thing when you're aware that you resemble the top of the food chain, but aren't really there. It's like why vegetarians have slightly lower self-esteem than people who eat meat.

This displacement perspective is an advantage I have. For whatever I'm doing right (if I'm doing something right), I think my interest in pop, combined with my displaced Canadian perspective, is a piece of why it's interesting (if it's interesting). I like Canada AND the USA. It's the ways the two countries mythologize each other that never helps.

I'm sure Michael Moore thinks he's complimenting Canada whenever he portrays this country as the land of liberty, free sex and unicorns. His most recent film Sicko pined for our socialized health care system. Don't get me wrong, I would not trade in this system. It's just that this fake divide between the countries gets stronger when people speak in extremes and can't weigh things intelligently. The negative reality of socialized health care in Canada is that there's a long wait for almost any hospital procedure. To make up for this, doctors like to tell people they're suffering from anxiety. Granted, most of the time the doctors use the anxiety excuse it's because they don't want to send you home by saying, "I'm sorry, I really have no idea what's causing this." But it's also an easy way out. The few patients who have legitimized this system by really seeing their doctors for anxiety reasons will burn in hell.

It hurts to think in extremes.

Most Canadian who were kids in the 80s have specific prejudices against this country's film and TV. Canadian TV back then didn't look right. It wasn't as slick as Dallas and The A-Team. The film grain was more pronounced. The acting was different. But as much as the States also looks down on our entertainment, we made them richer. It was Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High that was the blueprint for the prime time teen soap opera. Canadians who are my age learned half their values from Degrassi. It directly led to Fox's interest in starting Beverly Hills 90210. Which of course led to Dawson's Creek and The OC and all the rest.

A lot of our film genres are owed to the recently deceased Bob Clark. Canada is the creator of the teen sex comedy. It doesn't matter that Porky's sucks; Superbad owes us. We invented the slasher film--the first was Black Christmas, not Halloween.

Because of Porky's, Americans always think they will have an easy time getting laid in Canada. Remember in Planes, Trains and Automobiles when John Hughes shows John Candy in the airport reading a book called The Canadian Mounted? Our movies have created a mystique around the sexual power of Canadian women.

The grunge movement owes Neil Young. Alanis is owed for other white girls getting angry. I don't even listen to that much Canadian music, but I have some inkling of patriotism about this stuff. I may not be a huge Rush fan, but when I read about Primus or Fishbone giving them props, or hearing "Tom Sawyer" in Rob Zombie's Halloween, that means a lot to me. Canadians pop contributions are too often overlooked and downgraded.

In terms of movies, this happens because the Canadian film industry is presently a joke. The funding goes to the most boring ideas and the filmmakers who have been in the game longest. The current importance placed on Atom Egoyan (last really great movie: 1994) and David Cronenberg (1986, and yes, I've seen Eastern Promises) is overstated because no one's looking for alternatives. As long as stars stay within their expected sphere of Canadiana, they never go away. It's why all Canadian movies star the same three actors.

This is where it gets weird. If you're a Canadian who is talented, and is ambitious with that talent, it's easier to get recognized by the States. Despite how people talk about it, the Canadian film industry is more conservative than Hollywood. Your talent can easily fall out of the range of how Canada wants to portray itself. Tom Green gets to be a big star in Canada for about 6 months, until the USA takes to his talent. He becomes huge on MTV, and then Canadians start hating him. This overseas-concentrated interest has happened to some friends of mine too, and it's happened to me.

The biggest recent breakthrough star in Halifax is Ellen Page. She became big in Canada first, and then got recognized in the USA where she made Hard Candy and X-Men: The Last Stand. Page was smart by jumping on board when the US became interested in her work. By still alternating with Canadian productions, Canada doesn't feel she's outside of the scope of what this industry is about.

The Canadian film industry has a very narrow view of what kinds of movies should be made. An easy rule to live by is never to expect great things from any movie that begins with a shot of a body of water unless it's AI: Artificial Intelligence. Some OK movies have begun on water, such as the generic helicopter shot from water to land that opens The Lost Boys and Snakes on a Plane. Usually, though, it's a sign of desperation in movies that don't really have anything much to do with water in the longrun. This rule especially holds for movies made in Nova Scotia. When one of those starts with water, it's a deathtrap. It will likely end with the characters ODing or committing suicide.

Did you know that The Rock is from Amherst, Nova Scotia? Me neither, until a week ago. That makes it somewhat more ingenious that I compared my likeness to his in a past blog entry. I don't remember Halifax throwing a party for The Scorpion King's opening. What kind of movies would The Rock even be making if Canada wanted him?

Canada needs a unique movie, made by its traitors who went Hollywood. We'll keep it mainly based on Nova Scotia exports. I'll write and direct. The main stars are The Rock and Ellen Page. Tom Green can also star. That's an amazing cast! If you saw The Rock playing frisbee in a park with Ellen Page and Tom Green you would think it was the coolest thing ever and would draw a picture of it on the bus ride home. I don't even have to know what it's about. This is already one of the greatest films of the sound era.

That's because it defies expectations on what's Canadian. It's bad enough when countries define each other, they don't need to define themselves. Don't let your weirdness be figured out.

Rock for Relevance

2007-07-18T20:05:00.000-03:00

Soundscan reports that in its first week the Smashing Pumpkins reunion (that's Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin) album Zeitgeist sold 149,000 copies. It's number 2 on the US chart after TI. The Pumpkins are number 1 in Canada, because many Canadians are strangely confused by urban pop music, and the logging industry inspires people to want to rock.

This is a band that's a decade past its heyday, and goes in and out of fashion with record critics with regularity. Album sales are half of what they were 10 years ago, except for country music (presumably because its listeners are less prone to use computers, but I'm not going there.) Number 2 seems pretty good. But MTV news is calling the sales a disappointment. And the reviews have been harsh. I think Zeitgeist is fairly solid, and unselfconscious about how a new Smashing Pumpkins is supposed to sound.

I have a theory about SP albums that I haven't heard from anyone else. It's that they're each about a different age.

Gish doesn't count, since it's just the band releasing its first material. Siamese Dream is an album about
childhood. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is about adolescence. More specifically, it's about high school. And frankly, I can barely say how important that CD was to me in grades 11 and 12. Everybody had it too. Adore is set during a person's mid to late 20s, after the hardest most soul-defining break up of their life. Machina I and II are next about man's relationship to God.

Zeitgeist is about the person trying to remain true to himself when ideals like country, government and God have all come to mean something that he opposes. If anything, it's about reclaiming those terms. The adult is brought back to a state of adolescent idealism and rebellion. That's why the line in "Doomsday Clock" that goes "These lonely days, will they ever stop?" has pertinence. It's an adult character frustrated that he's still plagued by teenage feelings.

The same goes for "7 Shades of Black." There's a 90s feel to these first 2 songs, and I think that's in the way their sentiment reaches out to listeners. It's angsty, but more poetically phrased than Linkin Park. This track would be killer if the guitars were louder. It's not quite "Bodies."

The really good songs on Zeitgeist are "Doomsday Clock," "That's the Way (My Love Is)," "Tarantula," "Starz," "Neverlost" and "For God and Country." I first thought the album hit a slump after midpoint "United States." But then I was listening to "Neverlost" in my car the other night and really liked it. Maybe because it was the first time I understood it. It's the kind of song you need to hear when you're driving alone at night. The only really weak track is "Bring the Light."

Does Zeitgeist come close to being the new Mellon Collie? Of course not. It's not that good. What albums are?

So yeah, I think it's a solid CD. It had the potential to be great, but for some reason 3 key tracks were left as B-sides, each separately available on special editions of the album. The solution is to purchase the album, download the songs "Death From Above," "Stellar" and "Zeitgeist" and then make an expanded version (based on where each appear on their special editions the songs should be placed respectively as tracks 9, 12 and 15.) Without them, Zeitgeist has thematic coherence, but plays like so many albums this year as a collection of potential singles. In the iPod generation, record labels assume nobody listens to CDs from start to end anymore. These songs give Zeitgeist its shape and texture. It becomes epic and pretentious, like great Pumpkins albums should be. "Stellar" even contains some of the most heartfelt lyrics of the album. Corgan asks, "Is it wrong to say / There's God and then there's faith? / Is it wrong to say so?" -- a plea for freedom of expression in a world with strict tabs on what constitutes acceptable thoughts.

The summer of 07 has found a surplus of 90s rock stars vying for a share of the new marketplace. Many of them seem out of place in the American Idol, High School Musical and faceless indie rock climate. Sales and reviews have reflected this.

It probably shouldn't be too surprising that Chris Cornell's second solo CD Carry On hasn't fared too well commercially. But that doesn't excuse the way music critics misread Cornell's efforts and intentions against past totems. Let's be honest with ourselves, and all agree that Soundgarden's Superunknown is the best rock album of the 90s. Great. Now let's also admit that we'd be laughing at Cornell if he was trying to make his present work sound like Soundgarden.

Carry On's song structures are often too simple, and its tone sometimes misjudged. It should also be noted that the final song, Casino Royale theme "You Know My Name," does not fit here. But what's right about it outweighs what's wrong. I sometimes think Cornell is the most misunderstood major rock vocalist. I'd probably place him as one of the top 5 writers who have influenced my own writing. He's made a record about the strains of aging with regret. Its the pop sensibilities critics harp on. But it's Cornell's faith in pop that makes it matter.

The single "No Such Thing" recalls the danger of youthful nihilism, with experience. The lesson "there's no such thing as nothing" communicates that the wish for invisibility is impossible. "Laughed at love / It was a big mistake / In the absence of / I filled it with hate."

If Carry On disappoints, it's in the same way the summer's other rock star returns do. Those of us who were in their adolescence when they were at their height want them to return to that place where they can take over the world. Part of it is the musicians, and the listeners, getting older. While the music can still have pertinence, it will be a different pertinence. We can never look at rock stars the same way we did at 17. If we do, we're in trouble. Cornell's on the right track by not trying to recapture past glory.

Mike Patton has never stopped keeping at it. His new project with outfit Tomahawk, titled Anonymous, is an album of electric renditions of Native American tribal chants from the late 1800s. The music succeeds as atmospheric pop, although Patton's ritual chanting can be silly. I like most albums the guy puts out, but I'm still waiting for one to occupy my mind and time since the last Mr. Bungle release. Mike Patton has become the master of new ideas that end up sort of like all his other ideas. How often do you listen to, for instance, the third Fantomas album? He's a genius whose music, now more than ever, needs to find its soul. For a challenging artist, that will be the real challenge for his fanbase.

I don't know what I wanted from the new Marilyn Manson. His first CD in 4 years Eat Me, Drink Me uses imagery of Lewis Carroll and Armin Melwes (the German cannibal who met his willing victim through a website), but evolved from Manson's breakup with burlesque dancer Dita von Treese. This has been the hardest Manson album for me to form an opinion on. It's his catchiest and most personal. But it's also the first that isn't larger than life. It's been interesting that 2007 saw Trent Reznor making Year Zero, a world weary Marilyn Manson album, while Manson makes Eat Me, Drink Me, an inward-reflective Nine Inch Nails album. This one also shares a lot with the new Pumpkins. It feels like a collection of potential theme-based singles which should be about 3 songs longer (though I told you how to make Zeitgeist more complete). I like every song on it but one (in this case that's "The Red Carpet Grave"). There are only 2 musicians who play on it. And Manson once said that Billy Corgan should wear a yellow shirt with a black zigzag and he'd look just like Charlie Brown.

Music critics have not been kind to Manson, or Cornell, or the Pumpkins this year. They'll take Patton, I suspect because they're afraid of his listeners. Music criticism is even more fashion-centric than movie criticism. Basically, it works like this: If your band is in vogue, you're cool. If you're last week's news, sorry. If, however, you're last week's news but can now be seen as ironic or heavily nostalgic (worthy of some renaissance), you're in luck. The monopoly of opinion from music reviews infiltrates to serious music buyers. Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com) is the worst for this. Beyond the site's predictability, elitism, and extreme whiteness, it became a giant force in indie music as soon as it got rid of its Reader Mail page--a very calculated move. Now there's no way for readers to respond, except in blogs and unrelated sites. Pitchfork is accepted as the unchallenged voice of authority.

Fashionability informs critics too much (it happens with movie critics as well, but in a different way), because the new CDs by Queens of the Stone Age, The White Stripes and Bad Brains aren't really that interesting.

I don't have much to say about Queens' Era Vulgaris. I've heard it. I'm fine with it. So I'll start with the Stripes album Icky Thump. It's good. But it's exactly as good as you expect it to be before you hear it. It's 13 new songs by The White Stripes. Because this is an extremely likeable rock band, the title track, "Rag and Bone," "Catch Hell Blues" and "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" know how to kick it without watering down their gut crunching heavy joy. But it's less interesting a collection than 2005's minimalist Get Behind Me Satan, and the CD mastering is awful.

The White Stripes are becoming a reliable confort band like The Ramones. The world turns thousands of times, and they're still the same White Stripes. I hope they don't die like The Ramones, though--they broke their fan contract when that happened. Jack and Meg White have real stage presence too. I like how when Meg plays drums she wears an expression like she's drifting to a far off place while thinking about Tori Amos lyrics.

It's saying something though that The White Stripes best song, "We're Going to Be Friends" off White Blood Cells is one of their least typical. The simplicity of that song belies its genius. It's a song about school and friendship without a trace of cynicism, told from the perspective of a kid. Not a teenager, 12, or 10 year-old, but a 5 year-old! Think about how fucking ambitious that is in a song intended for adult listeners. It's at once the band's happiest and saddest song, because it puts our own jaded views in perspective. Without being sappy, it's purely emotional--a connective feeling to a part of life we've all lived, that's inherently a part of us, but few of us ever think about in any detail. That's the eye-opening feeling I'd like to get from The White Stripes again before rushing to call each of their records their best in years.

People are obviously so excited there's a new Bad Brains out that they're happy to call it the best since 1986's I Against I. Hardly. I wouldn't even necessarily proclaim the new Build a Nation better than God of Love.

Too many of the lyrics consist of a song title repeated ad-infinitum, though the album is quite addictive once you've pressed play. Between listens, I tend to forget how great these guys sound musically here. There's a weak shift in the band's focus on more recent releases that can't be ignored. What makes Bad Brains songs of yore important is that, like Fishbone, they acknowledge the world at its most unjust and then refuse to let it stand in their way. It's an attitude of optimism as a state of defiance. Bad Brains penetrated that with innovative hardcore. The songs on Build a Nation will never affect anyone like "Banned in DC," "Sailin' On," "Pay to Cum," or the rebellious cry of "Never give in" in "At the Movies." Now that vocalist H.R. is only about Jah, so are the songs. Bad Brains must realize, though, that it's a tiny fraction of their audience that seriously gives a shit about Rastafarianism in any major capacity. They speak what they believe, but they don't translate it like they used to.

Music is in some ways more personal than movies. You walk around with a song in your head more intimately than how you walk around with a movie in your head. It's purely emotional, in a way where I sometimes find discussing music about as futile as trying to find an intellectual reason for falling in love. But when music I like becomes relevant to others, that's special. It's the connective potential of pop, which is the reason why it's worth caring when bands are "relevant." But they lose that relevance. Something they pick it up again. It's not only the rock stars actions that decide it. It's them, or it's us, or it's the music media telling us what to think.

The New Sadism postscript

2007-07-17T23:21:00.000-03:00

Following my writeup on The New Sadism last month, I thought it would be worth posting my review of Captivity. This has been the most notorious of the recent torture-focused horror movies, even before anyone had seen it. Now that about 3 people went to it on its first weekend, it's still the most hated. But I see a clear difference in what's going on in this film than in Saw. Just don't ask me to watch it again.

The Review (as written for The Coast):

Let's assume Captivity is smarter than anybody but its makers recognize. This isn't too outlandish a supposition. Captivity has been the target of scorn for months. Its controversial LA billboards led to numerous op-ed pieces about the state of horror films. The trailer just leaves one puzzling over who'd want to see such a thing. Even with all this hatred lowering expectations, the reality of Captivity is that it's so unpleasant, the few people prone to look for virtues in it either won't go see it or will be too appalled to make the effort.

Captivity is a stupid movie made by smart people, meaning it's not as dumb as it looks. Roland Joffe and screenwriter Larry Cohen stage their critique of celebrity-obsession. "You know something is real when you can touch it," is the movie's repeated mantra. Because celebrities are untouchable, that makes them not real, and henceforth "victimless" targets of society's impotent rage. Celebrated New York fashion scenester Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) wakes up to find herself trapped in a cellar where she's toyed with through video images, torture devices, and merchandise of herself.

It's almost a one-woman show, punctuated by a repeated pattern where Jennifer freaks out, and then Joffe breaks the scene with a fade-out. It's agonizing, but appropriately so. The film serves as the third in writer Cohen's Phone Trilogy, following Phone Booth and Cellular. Captivity has Jennifer text messaging her high society friends at the start, only to go crazy in a space without any communicative means.

The irony is that Captivity is ABOUT the things it's hated for - a culture that views women as objects, fascination with death and mutilation, turning to the misery of others for our entertainment. When it develops a sly sense of humour in the final half there are even a couple great B-movie shocks. The end plays more honestly as a feminist horror film than Hostel Part II.

If Captivity can't be endorsed, it's because it's cheapened by its most gratuitous gore. When producers caught wind of the controversy the movie was generating, they shot more violence to meet the hype. Scenes of force fed cannibalism and the consumption of battery acid are nasty in any context. Especially when they have none.

2007-07-12T21:01:00.001-03:00

Your favourite movie hates you!

2007-06-28T00:53:00.000-03:00

The amount that I find myself at a frat house party is less and less these days. But Scarface posters haven't left my vision completely. On one level, it's really cool that people who use their mantles to build shrines for emptied beer bottles have such passion for one of Brian De Palma's seminal works of 80s cinema. Yet the love isn't without irony.

How Scarface is so misunderstood by so many of its biggest fans is one of life's mysteries.

Maybe people just see what they want. They love that Tony Montana rises to the top by not taking no fucking shit. So what if he's a pathetic figure by the end, who's gunned down in his own house after dunking his face in a mountain of llello? Until then he made crime a profitable business.

"This movie's the most closely impactful for out generation. Our generation was really put here with nothing."
- Diddy, on the impact of Scarface in the Def Jam documentary Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic.

It's frankly so impossible to miss the message of Scarface, an over-the-top satire of Reagan era excess, that you just have to toss it up to people choosing to look around it. I love this movie. I have a Montana action figure standing on top of my TV. I admit that its drugs and violence fueled melodrama is completely badass. Those who dislike Scarface don't accept it as a modernized Shakespeare tragedy. It's as quotable as Hamlet. What's scary is how many corrupt entrepreneurs this movie has created. There's not a minute of the film where Montana isn't an asshole.

So why the adulation?

I blame Oliver Stone.

There's nothing inherently evil about Stone's script. But the guy has some weird voodoo curse on him that seems to affect his movies like nobody else's. Stone's films are doomed to be most loved by people who (sometimes deliberately) take the completely wrong message from them. I'm not trying to sound smarter than anyone; if there's one thing Stone is not, it's subtle. Critics weren't uncomfortable with Alexander on grounds that it wasn't gay enough.

I was recently informed of an attorney who just had a gold bracelet made with the name Gordon Gekko inscribed in it. Gekko is the bigwig stockmarket villain played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He's a man who has sold his soul before the movie has even started. His motto is "Greed is Good." He's the Dark Side ruler whose temptations must be resisted by the film's hero. So why does this person think Wall Street shares his philosophy? The movie is opposed to his way of life.

Isn't separating the attitudes of characters from the attitudes of the story something people learn about in tenth grade English?

Angus Wallen and Kara Winn were 27 when they killed Brandon Murphy in a murder similar to that of Mallory's mom in Natural Born Killers. Like the 8 other alleged NBK-inspired killers (including Columbine duo Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), Wallen and Winn must have missed that the movie considers their actions part of the downfall of civilization. This isn't a hidden message either; it's about 115 of Natural Born Killers 120 minutes. And it's as subtle as a sledgehammer. They're paying respect to a movie that despises them.

When you look at it, the movies that become common youth obsessions (to the point where when you see its poster you know the beer bottle shrine isn't far away) deal in antisocial themes. If it's not Scarface on that wall, it's A Clockwork Orange or something by Tarantino. It would be funny if college age kids chose to idolize different Oliver Stone films. They could post pictures to Facebook of doing bong hits in front of their Nixon posters. "I'm going to university, so I can be a fucked up President too!"

The idea of art sometimes opposing its fans always reminds me a little of when Schwarzenegger ordered the execution of The Crips' co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams. Just think about how fucked up that is. As a notorious leader of the South Central LA street gang, it's highly likely that Tookie was a fan of Predator, The Terminator and Commando. And then one day, this guy whose movies Tookie felt a connection with decides he should be dead.

Imagine the world's biggest Woody Allen fan. He grew up watching Annie Hall, landed the woman of his dreams by studying Manhattan, and he tends to quote Love and Death in casual conversation. Then one day Allen decides he doesn't like something about this guy, and has the power to kill him. That must be the ultimate betrayal!

"Arnie partying with Tookie / Smokin and drinkin till they lose their cookies / Crips are cousins / Bloods are brothers / Family killing one another" - Fishbone, "Party With Saddam"

Sometimes a movie will deliberately turn its back on a significant part of its audience. I'm talking about critic hatred here.

It manifests in last year's Lady in the Water and in this year's Ratatouille. I don't for a second doubt that M. Night Shyamalan making a critic an antagonist in Lady in the Water is a big factor in that movie's critical thrashing. (Another factor is that critics universally decided it was time to be fed up with Shyamalan--something that's happened to Oliver Stone more than once.)

I didn't react negatively to Bob Balaban's portrait of a know-it-all movie critic in Lady in the Water for several reasons: 1) I'm able to see the humour in this job. 2) I don't identify much with most other critics, and have no aspiration to speak for the "critical communty." 3) There really are plenty of critics like the one Balaban plays, and they deserve to be called on it. Shyamalan has a thin skin, but there you go.

Ratatouille is a little stranger. Pixar movies pre-Cars have only ever gotten glowing reviews. In this case, it's a food critic named Anton Ego, but the general swipes would still apply. Writer Brad Bird includes a bit of voiceover dialogue where the critic admits that it's easier to destroy than to create, or such bullshit. And that his work will never be as important as the stuff he's tearing down. I wish filmmakers would acknowledge that they're critics too. Art is a commentary on life. And criticism is a commentary on art. Only the medium is different.

Still, I can't really take offense at Ratatouille. The movie's pretty great, and the other characters don't escape such exaggerations either. But you should see this food critic's mansion. Jesus! How much do these jobs pay in France, and why don't I live there?

The New Sadism

2007-06-07T11:32:00.000-03:00

"Did you invent the term 'torture porn'?," my friend Phil asked me.

This question was posed around the time of last Fall's release of Saw III, and 'torture porn' was becoming a common internet term for horror movies (often in the mainstream) that are increasingly focused on their protagonists' mutilation.

"I don't think so," I answered. But thinking about it now, maybe in an offhand way I did. I addressed the issue in my early 2002 review of Final Destination 2--probably the most negative review that movie got. And several months later, in a mid-year report article, I refer to said film as "death porn." My Saw II review was among the very first to hit the net, and there my Rotten Tomatoes headline quote is, "Real porn is more dignified than this."

I can't take direct responsibility for everyone on the Ain't It Cool talkbacks adding 'torture porn' to their lexicon.

Besides, I prefer branding these movies with the term "The New Sadism."

The New Sadism implicates the audience's culpability in these films' attitude in ways that Torture Porn does not. The New Sadism is an overground movement. Torture Porn sounds like its locked in the basement dungeon of a backalley video store. The New Sadism lets you see graphic and prolonged disembowlings and castrations at a mall multiplex. You can watch them in an audience with 14 year old girls still standing beneath Rihanna's Umberella-ella-ella-eh-eh.

An easy mistake is to dismiss all these films outright. The New Sadism is the horror movie equivalent of Nu-Metal (which was big at the turn-of-the-millenium). It's seen by many as a perversion of a genre's purity, and by others as a genre at its most accessibly hardcore. The bottomline is that, even at a low playing field, some of these movies are better than others. The people who are most militant and unwavering in their dismissal of horror movies are always the ones who never watch them.

But I can say that, as a trend, I don't like The New Sadism.

It's the dominant movement in horror movies right now--just ahead of the Japanese People Are Scared of Mute Ghost Children genre.

Here's how it happened:

In Christmas 1996, Wes Craven's Scream opened. It grossed $100 million and reignited popular interest in horror films. Scream is a postmodern take on the teen slasher films of the 70s and 80s, given a very hip sensibility. It's hard for many to admit now, but 10 years ago Scream was seen as enormously cool. (Christmas 96 rocked for mainstream counterprogramming. We also got Mars Attacks! and Beavis and Butt-head Do America.)

Scream had so much crossover appeal because it's a feminized horror movie (more on that in a bit.) It was about 10 times as smart as it needed to be, thanks largely to a script by newcomer Kevin Williamson. It made stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and Drew Barrymore seem cool. It spoke to teenagers, as well as people who just love slasher movies.

As a 17 year old who was into horror (and most other genres), I was obsessed with Scream for a while. In my years at high school it was (barring Kids and Romeo and Juliet) one of only two teen movies released in that whole period. The other was Clueless, which I never cared about.

Inevitably, other movies tried to cash-in. The forgettable Urban Legend and its even more forgettable sequel Urban Legends: Final Cut followed. The market looked right for another Chucky movie. We got Wes Craven Presents Wishmaster, Disturbing Behavior, Halloween H20, and The Faculty.

The most popular of these late-90s follow-ups, besides the good but overstuffed Scream 2, was I Know What You Did Last Summer. That movie's pedigree was due to several factors. For one, it brought Scream scribe Williamson back. I don't know what's since happened to that guy. He was in some ways the horror version of John Hughes. The first two seasons of Dawson's Creek are also better than you think. I Know What You Did Last Summer has one of the fucking best horror movie titles ever. Conversely, its sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer has one of the worst. But Williamson's typical dignity for his teenage characters was missing in I Know What You Did. These kids were sort of dispicable. And the intriguing premise, of four youths trying to bury the secret of a man they accidentally killed, is too slickly directed by Jim Gillespie. It looks beautiful, but it needs a stripped down grit.

The teen horror phase ended around the time of 2001's Valentine. Judging by the voices on the Internet back then, nobody wanted it back. These movies, which were most often not that good, were derided for casting TV stars, occasionally getting PG-13 ratings, and often wussing out from being truly violent.

Enter The New Sadism.

I pick Final Destination 2 as the transitional movie between the teen and sadist subgenres. The original Final Destination, of which I'm a big fan, places squarely in the teen horror genre.

The major difference goes back to the issue of Scream's feminization. In Scream, Sidney's (Neve Campbell) fight for survival is a mirror of her personal struggles. Following her mother's murder, she wants life to leave her alone. The ghostface killer isn't allowing that to happen. The series is about a character's blossoming, with the horror element mirroring that story. There's a touching innocence to Scream if you watch it today. It's really great.

But it's actually typical of most slasher films before it and of its time, in that it's primarily concerned with survival. These movies are about claiming one's dignity. We want Jamie Lee Curtis to beat the Boogeyman in Halloween. We want to see the special needs kids vanquish Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm St. 3: Dream Warriors.

The New Sadism doesn't care about survival, only execution. As horror movies become more popular (Craven speaks on the Nightmare DVD boxed set about how he'd mainly see kids who didn't fit any mold at his movies on opening night), the formative process of horror movies is reversed. It's a countdown to extinction. The bloodier, the better.

What this means is that horror movies have lost their appeal as an empathetic outsider pop art--something detractors never understood about them anyway. In the 2005 remake of House of Wax, glamourous young stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray and Paris Hilton are convinced that all backwoods people are crazy imbred hillbillies. At the end, it's revealed the deformed redneck trying to kill them was abused during childhood. Fear those who are different than you, especially if their lives have been harder. That means they will kill you.

The New Sadism is typically about regular people caught in an animalistic land of primative psychopaths. It's not about who's gonna live, it's about how they'll die. This was the basis of Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, which was celebrated by some as the antidote to years of Scream-wrought horror. It was also the focus of Marcus Nispel's corrupt remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wolf Creek, Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes remake, Turistas and Severance.

Saw II was the point where I really objected. The increasing nihilism of these movies was getting defended as keeping with the spirit of horror movies. That is total bullshit. Horror got overtaken by people who like the genre far more than they understand it. The attraction to wanting to make these films is simple. If you're studying film craft, it's easier to detect and practice the overt style of horror sequences than other genres, which are often less pronounced. Horror gives newcomer directors a chance to get noticed by showing how "uncompromising" they are. It's why there are now almost as many zombie movies coming from film students as the typical film school projects about suicide and drugs. It's why Saw II, Hostel and Turistas feel like a pissing contest between Darren Lynn Bousman, Eli Roth and John Stockwell, each out to prove which of them is the most hardcore.

The thing defenders of The New Sadism don't grasp about some detractors is that the objection is not about the level of violence in a film. It's 2007. I can take it. I'm used to it. I've imagined far worse. What offends is a filmmaker's attitude about violence. The greatest human plague facing us today is the spread of evil. Everybody feels this. Witnessing audiences laugh as a boy gets crushed into a pancake by a plate of glass in Final Destination 2, or cheer as Nispel's camera pulls out of a gunshot head-wound in TCM03 is a way of coping with this vulnerability. Laughing at death is a way of proving you're above it. Not caring about things is always easier.

But a good horror film, like any worthwhile movie, has to connect us to the world (if not to ourselves) to have significant value. The other route is to tune out--to fetishize cruelty. The popularity of the first few episodes on a season of American Idol work this way. Contestants make fools of themselves publically and the shallow viewer finds self-worth in their humiliation. It's that simple. Jackass defenders frequently bring up that the stars are willingly hurting only themselves. This is true. But the audience's relation to that show is no different than if they were hurting others. Pleasure is derived from seeing people on the screen in pain. It's sadistic either way.

My favourite defense of movies in The New Sadism (favourite, as in the stupidest) is common among IMDb message board users. "If you don't like it, don't watch it."

Great. And if I don't like that there's a war in Iraq, the solution is that I don't watch the news.

Another common response on The New Sadism's behalf is that society has always objected to horror movies, and this is no different.

This is compelling, but not really true.

Controversy, and in some cases outrage, has accompanied horror movies before. The difference is that the ones these proponents are talking about never had much popular cultural impact. Maybe that shouldn't make a difference, but it does.

1972's The Last House on the Left and its more exploitative 1977 retread I Spit on Your Grave played in drive-ins and seedy urban areas. They were niche films. Their appeal is precisely that they weren't in synch with the standards of dominant culture. They were a reaction to it. That's why those movies were important. They didn't fit the sanctioned template. They felt defiant, and that made them political.

Sure, there's a satiric element to Hostel. It's a cheeky/gruesome take on American perception of foreign cultures. But Hostel's popularity amongst the under 35 demographic means that it is part of dominant American culture. It no longer has a defiant value. Saw II counters what Dawn of the Dead and The Last House on the Left meant by pitching its extreme nature as something institutional and corrupt. That shit is so basic to me. The desire to see unorthodox cult movies infiltrate the ultramainstream is just insane.

The New Sadism isn't necessarily a curse. Though perhaps the most brutal entry in the subgenre, I thought Alexander Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes was terrific. It was imagined in vivid visual terms, its violence was never pacifying, and it had moral and social context. Aja really knows what he's doing, and that's a crucial difference. Those who doubt he's the most talented new horror director need to look at this thing again.

Otherwise, hey, Hostel Part II opens tomorrow.

I've said all this as somebody who cares about the horror genre enough to believe it's worth more. When you're yelling "Awesome!" at a guy cutting off his own foot in Saw, what exactly are you rebelling against?

WRONG!, Parts I and II

2007-05-31T00:28:00.000-03:00

Every time I'm at the multiplex these days, I get an uneasy feeling. I wasn't sure why at first, but I've since discovered that the culprit is the poster for the new Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up.

It looks pretty benign at first. But as the great philosopher Kevin Spacey once taught us, look closer. See it now. Read the tagline. This movie is assuming that I'm a woman.

Ideally, this shouldn't be a problem. The film theorist Laura Mulvey has reasoned that it is always unquestioningly assumed that a movie's audience is male. So maybe it's a breakthrough whenever a poster decides to target the overlooked remaining 51% of the population.

Except, it's not that simple either. Not only is Knocked Up assuming I'm female, it presumes I'm the kind of female who would never give Seth Rogan the time of day. Despite not really relating to Rogan in any overwhelming way, my oversensitive empathetic side took over. I had to voice my unreasonable complaint on the IMDb message boards... as a character who isn't myself, of course.

BOYCOTT!! - Offensive Poster!

The poster for the new movie KNOCKED UP asks the question, “What if this guy got you pregnant?” Below the question is a picture of the star Seth Rogan’s face.

I am offended by this for 2 reasons.

1) It is assuming that I am a woman.

And 2) I look exactly like the guy on this poster.

This is very frustrating since it gives the general public the impression that I have not laid pipe plenty of times.

Now, I don’t look exactly like Seth Rogan does normally. I saw him in the movie DONNIE DARKO, and he did not look totally like me there. But on this poster, where he strikes the Morgan Spurlock-minus-fries-in-his-mouth pose, well, that DOES look like me. I have the same golden curly hair, halfway-bug-eyed look, confused eyebrow pose, mouth, and other less descript general facial characteristics, although I just shaved. My friends make fun of me every time we walk past this stupid poster to get a latenight milkshake. Every time we walk by a fine looking lady, someone in my crew will say, “Hey, what if Gord got you pregnant?” Last night, I even punched my buddy Dave for carrying on with this $&!#.

I want to be very clear on this: Just because I look like that guy on the poster doesn’t mean that girls don’t want to have sex with me. I have given the beef injection to women who are prettier than Katherine Heigl.

There was a promo for this movie before THE INVISIBLE, talking to its stars. When Ms. Heigl came on she said that the premise is every girl’s nightmare. That’s fatuous! I know girls like Ms. Heigl and they only want guys who look like Mark Paul Gosseler, so what could she even know about what it means to be another satisfied customer!?

Frankly, I have had something against this chick ever since I saw her on Leno promoting the Gerard Depardieu epic MY FATHER THE HERO, where she said that she likes to toilet paper peoples’ houses on Halloween. Somebody should let her know that someone has to clean that $&!# up!

In conclusion, please boycott this movie! It is propaganda telling people not to have sex with me.

Gord

Now, in reality I don't look anything like Seth Rogan. I'm really a very masculine amalgam of the more flattering physical qualities held by Keanu Reeves, Chris Cornell, Anna Kournikova and The Rock. For all I know, Knocked Up could be great (I haven't seen it yet.) It's just that the motivation behind this ad is very clear, and fairly unimaginative. Knocked Up is attempting to market itself to a female audience who wouldn't typically go for a fraternal ribald sex comedy--the kind of cross-over effort the Farrelly Brothers achieved in There's Something About Mary.

But mostly, I just have the need to point out that THIS POSTER IS WRONG. By addressing its reader, even if its question is rhetorical, it is mildly discomforting. I've seen Minority Report; I know it's a bad future when ads start talking to me. And by misguessing my sex, I have an urge to pretend I'm insulted.

************

There's a new reality show on Fox this summer called On the Lot. It's basically American Idol with aspiring directors competing for a film deal. This marks a crucial difference with the other show for one reason. Beyond the monetary potential, the appeal of being the next American Idol is the possibility of a multitude of complete strangers masturbating to the idea of you. Filmmakers are less sexually lusted over than singers, but movies themselves are pure sex. That means that the people on On the Lot are in love with the idea of people getting off on their product rather than on them themselves.

That's really everything you'll ever need to know about movies. But I'll keep going anyway.

We feel (provided we possess a moral base) more comfortable judging the worth of movies than the worth of entertainers. This is because movies are products and not people, so any insult that comes back to a person is indirect. Or the blame is at least partitioned among a group of people. This is why when the judges on On the Lot don't like a movie, they always point out that the director is still talented without sounding like they're lying. A bad movie is just one instance of bad sex. Everyone feels entitled to say so, yet many haven't really investigated that opinion. More often critics just rely on cliches. On the Lot is proof of this.

On the second episode to air, judge Brett Ratner (director of the Rush Hour movies and X Men: The Final Stand) dismissed a filmmaker's one minute short because its use of text on the screen was too arty. Ratner said it was "style over substance." My friend pointed out that this text complaint means Ratner would likely hate my own movie Later That Stevening.

Curious as to how the consensus-defining Internet was reacting to Ratner's criticism, I did a combined google search on the terms "brett ratner" and "style over substance". Instead of getting anything related to the show, I ended up with dozens of links to reviews accusing Ratner's own movies of their style over substance.

This would be a poetic justice, except how is it even possible? How much discernable style do Ratner's movies possess? And how is it overwhelming the substance? Isn't the whole point of getting Brett Ratner to direct a movie that it isn't going to be personalized?

Saying that a movie is style over substance is a bizarre complaint anyway. I can't think of many movie-smart people I've ever heard say this. Interpreting style reveals substance. The two are connected most of the time. In cases where they aren't entirely, the issue of the "style over substance" charge is really just that the movie doesn't contain adequate substance. So the style is a virtue. If you take the style away too, you're not left with much. Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, for example, is a letdown thematically and conceptually. But it's a gorgeous movie. Every frame looks like a painting. The filmmaking style isn't a detriment, it's the major thing the movie has going for it.

THE "STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE" STYLE MOVIE REVIEWERS ARE WRONG! In my opinion.

Wearing Movies Like Prada

2007-05-11T18:09:00.000-03:00

So last night I'm sitting in a gourmet hamburger restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. thinking hard about the usual LA concerns--money, networking, my abs--when a small posse walks in. Beyond the nobodies that make up 5/7 of that group is Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

"Excuse me," Kimmel says approaching my table. "Have I seen you in anything?"

"Yes, I get that a lot," I reply, trying to sound as polite as I can.

"Grindhouse, right?. You're Freddy Rodriguez."

As Rodriguez has stolen my beard style and haircut, yet looks a whole foot shorter than me, I find this vaguely insulting.

"No. I'm not Freddy Rodriguez."

"Are you sure? From Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse. Oh man, it's great. You need to see it."

On a sociological level, what's most interesting about this exchange (which may or may not have transpired exactly as documented) is the way Kimmel made no effort to conceal his love of Planet Terror. He wanted me to know he loved it. People try to shape their image through telling people what movies they love.

It's that whole thing about checking out your girlfriend's CD collection before judging whether she's worth your time. Except that music purchases are less reliable. Just because I took a chance on buying something doesn't mean I like it. It doesn't compare to the utility of including 35 titles on my MySpace top movies listing.

It's not worth anything to like a movie if others don't know how cool that makes you. That's why people wouldn't stop telling me how great they thought Little Miss Sunshine was. It's a sensibility that says, "Not only is this movie off the beaten path of my viewing habits, it defines me."

This is one of the reasons I don't like arguing movies with people I don't know. Beloved films become so tied in to one's identity that it's like arguing religion. People like what they like. I found The Royal Tenenbaums shrill and precious, but when I debated its merits with a friend it was like convincing him he was worshipping a false god.

Here's a true story: A couple weeks ago I was on a roadtrip with a bigtime filmmaker, his girlfriend, and a British guy who unforgiveably tried to cockblock me later that afternoon, but failed, so I can't be too upset.

Anyway, we have the radio on, and some sleazy film journalist is interviewing the director of a popular new English take on American buddy-action films. The interviewer comments that he thinks it was funny that the police force in said movie is called NWA--based of course on the trend setting gangsta rap unit.

"Yeah," the director responds. "I wanted to have a scene where somebody says "F-the Police", but they already used that joke in [$30 million-grossing biker movie that the director sitting in the car directed]."

"Holy shit!," the car passengers exclaim in near unison. This guy knows his modern B-movie history.

"Now we're getting into the classics," the snide interviewer says.

"[$30 million-grossing biker movie] is one of the greatest bad movies ever," clarifies the English director.

Now, I get a clear impression that this unnamed director is a fan of this unnamed movie. (Both are unnamed because as a reader of this blog, I like to keep you working hard for my insightful rewards.) Yet he's still hiding under the veil that this movie is ultimately a guilty pleasure.

Funny thing about people who qualify some movies as guilty pleasures: You can't trust them.

"Guilty pleasure" is one of the most overused terms in the popular film lexicon. Like "The worst movie ever made," which I suppose is the opposite of "The worst movie ever not made." It's a free ticket to snobbery. What kind of hypersensitive fool would feel guilt for liking a movie? It goes back to the film as fashion issue: Movies as identity projection.

"Well, I have a guilty pleasure," British cockblocker adds to our debate. "Troy. As a kid I always liked those kind of sweeping epics, which is what this movie reminded me of."

"That isn't a guilty pleasure," filmmaker counters.

"It's MY guilty pleasure."

"Why are you guilty about liking Troy?," I ask.

"Because it isn't very good."

"So what?"

The thing is, if a Hollywood movie gives you "pleasure" it probably isn't worth feeling guilty about. And in most cases, people who call these films guilty pleasures are just trying to disassociate themselves from the way they look by liking them. It's a way of kowtowing to society's standards of what's good and what's bad.

If you're willing to tell people you barely know that it's a guilty pleasure, it isn't a real guilty pleasure. It's not like saying you fuck sheep or fantasize about eating shit off Scarlett Johansson's chest.

"Well, I have a real guilty pleasure this time," British, basically good-natured, guy qualifies. "The movie Dune."

I'm not sure when we became so self-conscious about how movies look on us. I have absolute faith in my tastes in movies. Afterall, they're mine. But I also won't deny that I've seen Idle Hands and Not Another Teen Movie probably a combined dozen times.

The worst instances of guilty pleasure discussions come when people try to show how absolutely superior their taste is by condescending to a universally lauded film as something beneath them. Example: "I only watch Fellini and Antonioni films, but when I just want to relax, Casablanca will do... you know, as a guilty pleasure."

What's interesting is that the fashion statement aspect of movies has reached a stage where movies are now consciously defining their viewers.

By the mid 90s there was a surge of action films with interchangeable, but no-nonsense titles like Maximum Risk, Sudden Impact, Executive Decision. Those films sound like brute cologne. And there was a market for that stuff that lasted about 5 years.

But the funniest instances are with recent Women's Films. There has not been a more expertly titled movie in the past year than Because I Said So--the mother/daughter Diane Keaton/Mandy Moore Thing. I don't even know what that title has to do with the movie (and I've seen the thing), but it speaks very specifically to a female audience. Something's Gotta Give has a title that falls into the same camp of comfort films for women who can't get the respect they want from men. Soon we'll be seeing You Promised to Call, I Told You Already, and the urban equivalent Oh No You Didn't.

Pop comfort

2007-05-01T15:22:00.000-03:00

"You don't feel at all sorry for Britney?," Joseph asks the teenage girl sitting at our table on the first day of Coachella.

"No!! Why? She messed herself up. And she didn't donate anything to help out after Katrina."

Joseph nods--a nod of acceptance rather than agreement. The girl doesn't know that this is Joseph Kahn, someone who helped shape Britney's pop image in her heyday.

I do feel sorry for Britney Spears.

It's less a mere case of her abandoning her fans than it is of her fans turning their back on her product. Everybody needs somebody to hate. It's a fool's version of self-worth. Celebrities are prime targets because it's easy to not look at them as real people. Those with success are the easiest targets of scorn. When the world's impotence gets directed at Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, of course it makes them lose their minds. They're built as products by the people, and destroyed with even more glee.

If I walk down a busy street in Halifax, maybe 1 in 100 people will let me know they recognize me from that drawing in The Coast where I look like a stoned Rabbi. Everybody in the world knows who Britney Spears is.

You're also responsible for killing Anna Nicole Smith.

As I wrote in my review of Vacancy, our Culture of Celebrity is also a Culture of Death.

After the Britney Spears chat at Coachella, we got up to see Peeping Tom, Mike Patton's most recent musical act. Peeping Tom's CD is ok, but on stage they're really on fire. Patton's variation of cooing, barking metal, and Jim Carrey elasticity is backed up with a female chorus and Dan the Automator.

"You guys want to hear a funny joke?," Patton shouts into the crowd. "The Arctic Monkeys!"

But this represents a troubling pop attitude as well. Speaking as a Patton fan, and someone who 8 years ago would identify as a big Patton fan, I'm troubled by the tendency to place the artistic value of one brand of pop music over another, based on its compatibility with a person's taste. Patton is a master at what he does, but the artistry involved calls more attention to itself than what Kelly Clarkson does. It's the whole Spielberg-dilemma: The filmmaking mastery is often invisible, so dull critics assume it isn't there.

Just as it was necessary to digitally adjust the size of Clarkson's booty in a video, Mike Patton delivers to an audience that expects a certain thing. It's a hard style of music to catch on to, but once you manage it becomes comfortable. A real challenge for Patton's listeners would be to give them a song that could make them cry.

The same goes for Bjork, who headlined that night. First stepping out on stage wearing a dress flowing from a white, spotted cushion hat, that made her look like a cross between ancient royalty and the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man, she got the crowd into her weird trance with her new single "Earth Intruders."

Surrounded by a sea of people, I looked around me to see what other Bjork fans look like. I was expecting something weirder; they're the general Coachella population. Bjork was giving us our anticipated dose of Icelandic quirk... exactly what we want from a Bjork concert.

After certain songs she would enthusiastically intone into the microphone a too-cute, "Zhank you!!"

It was a great performance, but I was more challenged trying to make my way out of the crowd to get an early start on the parking lot exodus than I was by anything on stage. (A plan which turned out to be completely futile, since finding where you parked at Coachella is the reason Al Gore invented the needle in the haystack analogy.)

It felt like a half-mile walk out of that crowd. The three most difficult factors with trying to squeeze out of a festival performance early are the assholes who will do anything to not let you by, not knowing how frequently you're expected to say "Excuse me," and avoiding the stoned people that think it's smart to lie on the ground at night. Girl I stepped on: I'm sorry, but you're stupid.

The music from the stage was a strangeness that felt much more comfortable.

In a world where not everybody loves zombies and 70s exploitation...

2007-04-19T00:17:00.000-03:00

I meant to write about this a couple of days ago, but got preoccupied with reading about the Virginia Tech murders. I find that stuff pretty overwhelming. Despite all the people who said they couldn't understand why Columbine happened, the social politics behind it were clear as day. Virginia Tech is less defined, except to say that the modern world is making people lose their minds. Some kid couldn’t take it, and now 33 people are dead. The reasons for the box office failure of Grindhouse suddenly seemed pretty trivial.

Then, I was gonna post this again last night, but got held up again when I noticed that the new Nine Inch Nails CD changes colour in heat. That’s awesome.

So, yeah, Grindhouse is a bomb. And a lot of people are asking why.

Despite what Harvey Weinstein claims, about $100 million was spent on this movie ($30 million of which went to advertising.) The business aspects of box office grosses are of no interest to me, but the social aspects are. It's been interesting reading speculation on why this movie failed to capture a large audience.

Here are a couple of the wrongest theories I’ve read:

- It opened on Easter Weekend, a time when people observe the value of family.

This is true for Easter Sunday morning, but really, nobody who wants to see Grindhouse is so sanctimonious about the Easter holiday weekend that they won't watch violence on Friday or Saturday.

- The feature films contained within are in the wrong order. The more action-oriented Planet Terror should have played after Death Proof.

This shouldn't affect opening weekend box office in any way. Furthermore, it's 100% wrong. If you pay attention to how most long movies are paced, there’s a notable slowing down in the third quarter. Note the poker game in Casino Royale. Its placement makes the film move more briskly, while giving viewers time to catch their breath. The relentless action of Planet Terror makes the breather of the first half of Death Proof a nice chill out period before getting back into the mayhem.

Now here’s a filmmaker’s take on how Grindhouse’s failure reflects on how stupid your nextdoor neighbours are.

“What is wrong with American moviegoers? Is there nothing NEW that they're willing to embrace? Jesus, it's the worst kind of erosion. We're making dumber and dumber films and they're becoming cash cows. God Bless '300', at least it's got balls and the director WENT for it. THAT movie is good for the business, it's good for everybody”
– Joe Carnahan, director of Smokin’ Aces.

Grindhouse is a throwback. It doesn’t represent anything new. Though it is a better movie than most recent films the general public has embraced (like 300), it’s not at an intellectual level they’re incapable of meeting. People weren’t interested in seeing it. When movies like Grindhouse and Smokin’ Aces are hits, it isn’t good for everybody. It’s only good for people who worked on them and people whose entertainment tastes crave seeing more movies like Grindhouse and Smokin’ Aces.

Nobody should really be surprised that Grindhouse isn't more popular. It’s a homage/entry in trash and exploitation cinema. Part of what makes cult films is that they aren't massively popular.

The Internet skewers peoples’ perception of what the rest of the world is interested in. The handful of people who frequent sites like Ain’t It Cool News can spend months salivating over Grindhouse. They’re the audience for that movie. When you move past that circle, to the people who don’t live on the Internet, not many of them give a shit.

A similar thing happened last summer with Snakes on a Plane. You can excite a certain niche with movies like this, but in the broader scope, they're not Spider-Man 3.

It didn’t help that the advertising for Grindhouse was so exclusionary. The trailers, posters and TV spots sold an attitude—an idea that this movie is the epitome of cool, without translating that appeal to those who aren’t in the know.

Advertising the movie on the names Tarantino and Rodriguez, rather than stars like Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell, isn’t making things easier. With a couple exceptions, general audiences don't think to ask who directed a movie. Nobody went to see Four Rooms either, and the Rodriguez/Tarantino pair-up From Dusk Till Dawn wasn’t a big hit. Why expect more from the 3+ hour Grindhouse?

I’m suspicious of the attitudes of people who wish the niche, cultish films they love were popular hits. Isn't it good enough that you love them? Part of the appeal of movies like this is that they’re an escape from what the mainstream deems exceptional, and sometimes acceptable. If Evil Dead 2 becomes the dominant culture, what’s left for the cult-circuit films? Underground filmmakers will start establishing their outsider status by making Dirty Dancing sequels.

Maybe this does speak of the sinking levels of the Average Joe’s taste. For whatever problems I have with it, I consider Grindhouse a good movie, and far better than Wild Hogs (and Blades of Glory, Meet the Robinsons and Are We Done Yet?—the films that outgrossed it on its first weekend.) It just shouldn’t crush the dreams of aspiring-future-director-millionaires that more people are showing up for the Ice Cube family comedy.

A point I often try to make is that movies like Wild Hogs and Are We Done Yet? don’t have to be bad. Some of the most satisfying filmgoing experiences happen when a seemingly hopeless premise produces a good movie. And aspiring filmmakers should be relieved to know that coming up with a terrible premise that will appeal to idiots isn’t really that hard.

I have an exercise for producing movie concepts called 60 Minutes in an Hour. This means there are 6 groups of 10 minutes in an hour. Set aside an hour of your day, and sit in a chair. Use this time to think up 6 different movie premises. You have 10 minutes for each one. Don’t worry about them being good right now.

Here’s two surefire hits I thought up in only 20 minutes of my time:

More Jolly Than Roger

This movie stars Billy Bob Thornton as an asshole named Roger. He gets arrested for religious intolerance. He agrees to community service instead of serving his prison sentence. The community service consists of him spending 3 months as a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness. He really hates this job. To make matters worse, his partner is a super-happy Jehovah’s Witness named Drew (played by Jon Lovitz). They’re a real odd couple. Drew is more jolly than Roger. They fight a lot. Zooey Deschanel should be in it as the nice girl who melts Roger’s heart when he knocks on her door.

Civil Knight’s Movement

The next movie is a comedy with serious overtones. It stars Chris Rock as Winston Lockhart, the most powerful lawyer in Detroit. One day Winston’s driving home from work when his Porsche gets rear-ended by a bulldozer. He goes into a coma. Winston’s family loves him, but they lose hope that he’ll ever wake up from his coma. His wife gets remarried, and his kids’ football coach becomes their stepdad.
a>Several years later, the hospital is scheduled for demolition. But because Winston’s in a far away wing of the hospital that nobody ever checks, they forget to move him out of there, Suddenly, Winston has some body movement (like in the title)! He wakes up from all the noise of the building getting torn down, and has to make it out of the falling hospital alive. The same bulldozer type machines that put him into a coma are trying to kill him again. This is how the movie double-backs upon itself, creating a motif. In screenwriting, the technical term for this is brilliant. He then gets to fight the ruthless contractor. The movie ends with Chris Rock giving a heartfelt speech about civil rights.

Now, both of these movies sound awful. But it’s up to you to find the worth in a premise. Writing a great script requires talent. So if you're worried about money and integrity, figure out the common ground where More Jolly Than Roger gets you as excited as Grindhouse.*

*Note: More Jolly Than Roger and Civil Knight’s Movement are the intellectual property of Mark Palermo. Do not try making either without consulting him. You will be sued.

Saturday the 14th issue

2007-04-14T14:19:00.000-03:00

There's a brief shock moment at the beginning of Disturbia that startled me into muttering "What the fuck." It didn't last long. Disturbia is a mostly lifeless, rather xenophobic teen thriller. But the bit caught me off guard because I rarely anticipate those "Oh my God!" moments at horror movies.

It may be that it's a genre I'm well accustomed to. Being unsettled by something is just a question of your emotional involvement with what's going on. For instance, a person could get too involved with the storyline of Pretty Woman to manage to watch it to the end. When I was very young, I couldn't finish an episode of Canadian TV's Mr. Dressup wherein the puppet Casey breaks a pair of Mr. Dressup's glasses, and tries to hide them from him. I was worried that when Mr. Dressup found out he would beat the shit out of that puppet. But that wasn't the innocent show trying to scare me; it was my imagination working on overdrive.

With horror, the frightening impact is more often something that hits me in retrospect, when an event of my life causes me to compare it to an event in a movie.

Just last Wednesday morning, a girl I sort of know messaged me on a friend-networking site to make sure I was still alive. Apparently, she'd just had a dream where I was dead. I assured her that I was unable to walk through my walls, but I then spent all day feeling like I was in a Final Destination movie. I was driving extra carefully, and keeping my eyes open for potential catastrophes.

For this extra special Day After Friday the 13th issue of Blip on the Radar, I'm reflecting on the movies that in some way frightened me as I was watching them. From time to time, I get asked what the scariest movies ever are, and my answer is always the same, "I'm a grown man!"

And so several of my answers are children's movies. When you're a kid, everything has the chance to be scary because you don't know anything yet. Movies used to take advantage of this. Kiddie flicks today (outside of George Miller's stuff) are less sadistic than they were 20 years. They're not the formative experiences they used to be, and that's a notable loss.

Movies that freaked me out to some degree, in the order in which I saw them:

Return to Oz (1985)

My introduction to horror was, like a lot of filmbuffs my age, through Spielberg movies. There's a horror element in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Gremlins , which I saw theatrically at the age of 5 (something that horrified my mom, who thought she was taking me to another movie like ET, more than it bothered me) that had built me a taste for this stuff. Certain Disney cartoons used to have this effect as well. But Return to OZ is a whole new level of childhood trauma.

Walter Murch's box office bomb enraged Siskel and Ebert so much that they dedicated the bulk of an episode to warning families away from it. Their main complaint: Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) never smiles. That Return to Oz has reached cult status today is testament to just how uncompromisingly it treats childhood disappointment and cruelty. How can you watch an Oz movie directed by the editor of Apocalypse Now that begins with Dorothy getting shock treatment, and just toss it aside as junk? Return to Oz is messed up! Arched-back freaks called Wheelers hunt the heroine. Princess Mombie (Jean Marsh) has a hallway full of replacement heads that scream at Dorothy to give away her location. Of course, this L. Frank Baum partial-adaptation has its happiness and "value of friendship" stuff as well. But the Yellow-Brick Road is surrounded by fire and brimstone.

Garfield in Disguise (aka Garfield's Halloween Adventure) (1985)

Yes, it's in fact a TV special. As a kid who knew how to program a VCR, I awoke before sunset to see the new Garfield special. 2 things: 1) Garfield was enormously cool among grade-school kids in the 1980s. 2) Horror-themed programming is for some reason scarier if you watch it before everyone wakes up rather than once everyone's gone to bed. This thing is fine most of the way through. Garfield theorizes that Halloween is the greatest of all holidays because it's celebrated with candy rather than fireworks. He and Odie go trick-or-treating. Then, in the last third, it turns into a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog, replete with zombified ghost pirates. There's even an old man who sits in a chair. Old people still frighten me a little.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

My parents used to go grocery shopping on Friday nights, and I'd usually tag along. My incentive was that the grocery store (Sobey's Food Warehouse in Bedford) had a video rental outlet in it. While my parents bought food, I would look at the back of VHS covers of horror movies (some of which were pretty fucked up) and think, "If I ever watched this movie, it would probably kill me." Nothing too crazy went on on the Friday the 13th covers, but the summer camp premise, and the menace of Jason, began appealing to me. Also, they were released by Paramount, who I'd convinced myself could do no wrong since they released the Indiana Jones films and the first R-rated movie I ever saw Beverly Hills Cop. Additionally, I was Jason for Halloween when I was 8 years old.

One night, I was excited to notice in the TV paper that the fourth Friday the 13th was airing. Again, I set the VCR and woke up very early the next morning to watch it before my parents got up. I can't say I was too scared by the film, just that it was a big deal to me at the time. It wasn't as crazy as I'd imagined a real horror movie would be, but it wasn't lame either (at least not until I watched it again in high school.) This Friday the 13th is notable as it featured not only Crispin Glover but Corey Feldman, BEFORE he was cool. Feldman sticks a machete into Jason's eye at the end. But final chapters don't stay down for long. In one of the cheesiest series recoveries ever, part 5 was called A New Beginning.

The Fly (1986)

By far the ickiest movie I saw in the first 10 years of my life. Even with my brother yelling, "Stupid flies!!," every 10 minutes. it didn't really lose its nasty appeal. The power of David Cronenberg's remake is that it uses s simple sci fi premise (a man turning into an insect) to get inside the uncomfortable realization of disease and decomposition--that as humans, we're not just gonna grow up, get big and win marathons. We'll eventually start to decompose. Also, a baboon gets turned inside out at the start. And what is Cronenberg's problem, anyway?

Carrie (1976)

I rented this in the summer between ninth and tenth grade as I was becoming a fairly obsessive fan of Brian De Palma. Carrie never had much prior interest to me, so it was a revelation to discover that it's the director's masterpiece. It's the film's capacity to play as realistic melodrama that made its eventual horror element knock me on my ass. By engaging our sympathies first, it's actually emotionally upsetting when the movie goes to hell. The final 20 minutes are the most relentlessly intense stretch of genre filmmaking I know. Carrie has the greatest shock scene of all time, and is the best teen movie, period. I saw it theatrically a couple years later at a midnight Halloween show, and it was amazing hearing the entire audience gasp collectively. Those are horror movie-going moments that are too rare.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

A friend lent me the DVD of this with the warning that the ending is fucked up. As I began watching the film, I thought, "If the ending is what I think it is that's the most obvious twist ever." I only knew the half of it.

Sleepaway Camp is a cheap Friday the 13th ripoff most of the way. Except it's more laughable, because the kids have the most gratuitously vulgar dialect in slasherdom, the shorts are just too short, and in one scene a man's moustache is clearly made of duct tape. Then the ending happens, and it's ridiculous, but somehow so disturbing that the image burns itself onto your retinas and you spend the next two hours online reading if anyone else was as affected by it as you were. I've had some disagreements over whether the movie is best watched in company or alone. I say alone, maybe cuz that's how I watched it when it first hit me, but both have their virtues.

Opera (1987)

Dario Argento's last great movie is also his most merciless. Opera is based around the rumour that the stage opera of MacBeth is cursed, as killings plague the production. The film is Argento's heavy metal music video of suffering--it would almost be too sadistic to endure if it weren't so beautifully stylized. But though Opera is often muddled in its storytelling (what Argento movie isn't?) and the amazing Sound of Music ending is the most frequent point of debate among the director's fans, it's also a literate examination of a horror filmmaker's position as a madman, and the viewer's role as a sadist. It's the darkest place Argento has ever tread, and the experience bothered him enough that he briefly went to Italy in filmmaking-exile immediately afterward.

Resurrection of the Antichrist

2007-04-12T16:47:00.000-03:00

To understand Marilyn Manson, it’s key to accept that he’s a pop artist who makes music for teenagers. It’s an aim which ironically makes his work more credible, exciting, and serious than if it were packaged to people in their late 20s. Or, more precisely, Manson makes teenage art with which certain grownups can identify. Just as some 30 year-olds in the late 90s era when Manson was a major pop force could find identification or emotional memory in Dawson and Joey’s unacknowledged love affair.

When Manson’s Antichrist Superstar hit in 1996, the huge media attention tied largely into parental outrage. But an equally vocal attack on Manson came from jaded listeners. They saw Manson as a fraudulent act: A poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.

I know. I was one of them.

The outrage that surrounded that band eclipsed that of every other rock act of the 90s. Eminem picked up the controversy baton once Manson’s star began fading. Since him, there’s been no replacement. And Eminem’s controversy was more a matter of media convenience than any perceived negative youth impact being picked out. Both stars gave the kids who listened to them a degree of dignity. But the shockwaves Manson set off revealed more about our culture’s groundwork. As an old Rolling Stone review of Mechanical Animals pointed out, there was no more insane talkshow spectacle that decade than the repeated habit of Jenny Jones seating those young Manson fans (with their appalled moms) on her show, and “cleaning them up” into the exact unhappy dorks Manson helped them escape from being.

Despite all this, the actual degree of “shock” in the star’s “shock rock” was grossly exaggerated. It’s interesting to look at Manson as rock’s version of the Farrelly Brothers: He wraps positive, humanist messages in immoral packaging, thereby enraging people who won’t look beneath the surface... exposing intolerance in those who accuse him of that very thing.

This isn’t necessarily profound. It’s afterall the star’s conviction that truth is usually uncovered in dark areas that makes him an artist for teenagers. Though the songwriting improved after the first two records, Marilyn Manson is a vocalist of middling talent.

But the phenomenon of Manson ties into his product almost perfectly. Almost all of his albums are stronger than the best song on them, because they're conceptually so perfect. The best of both worlds exception is Mechanical Animals (a fine premise: His glam rock metaphor for drug-pacified Hollywood told in the sci fi vein of Alduous Huxley's Brave New World) where the closing track "Coma White" is the greatest thing in his catalogue, and one of the best last songs on any record I know.

My initial teenage disregard for Manson was that I was looking for something more grown up, and missing its vitality. Today, I play Manson’s catalogue all the time, but the only Nine Inch Nails CD I ever have an urge to listen to is Broken. What seemed more serious about Trent Reznor’s music (that it had less of a theatrical element), is now why it's more difficult for me to take it seriously.

By wallowing in these ugly areas, Manson slowly grew into a moral voice. The first CD Portrait of an American Family has shock value, but the latter ones do only in their bluntness. For instance when Manson sings the line, "I killed myself to make everybody pay," on Holy Wood (a record largely inspired by Columbine, and the blame directed his way for it) it has the veneer of shock. But for the kids who need to hear that stuff most, it has nothing to do with that. It's empowering. As most worthwhile outsider art does, it lets them know they aren't suffering alone in those feelings.

Marilyn Manson sums himself up in the song "(s)Aint", singing, "You said I tasted famous, so I drew you a heart / But I'm not an artist, I'm a fucking work of art." Of course, I think he is an artist, but there's something very right about that too.

The act has a new album out June 5 called Eat Me, Drink Me. Somebody recorded the debut of the first single “Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)” off a French radio station yesterday. The quality therefore isn't great, and the song skips forward a couple of times.

http://www.myzufu.com/MarilynMansonHSG.mp3

But for a star that reinvents himself with every album, the track's direction isn’t unexpected. It’s a poppy summertime love/hate song with a mid-80s sound. Manson’s called this his most sexually frank and wounded album, but an honest adolescent sensibility prevails in the first single. The chorus even recalls the moment in Some Kind of Wonderful where Mary Stuart Masterson threatens Lea Thompson with, “Break his heart and I break your face.”

Some of it sounds uncannily like Animotion’s “Obsession” (recognized in Canada as the theme to Fashion Television.) I can even hear Jerry Goldsmith’s Gremlins score in there.

Are We Reaping Done Yet?!?

2007-04-12T00:33:00.000-03:00

Bienvenue to the inaugural post celebration of Blip on the Radar. This is a place for discussing various things in pop culture of momentary, longterm, or permanent interest. We'll see where it goes.

As of now I'm a bit tired of talking about Grindhouse, and it will be the full column in tomorrow's The Coast anyway. Instead, I'm gonna break this blog in with reviews of movies of less interest among people who spend all day on the Internet.

The first is Are We Done Yet?, a sequel to the 2005 Ice Cube comedy Are We There Yet?. There are people I know who wouldn't fathom going to see this, but it wasn't an experience I was particularly dreading. For one thing, I'm among the 12% of Rotten Tomatoes-certified critics who liked the first movie. On top of that, I feel Ice Cube is unfairly judged as an actor--close to how some critics feign offense to Cuba Gooding, Jr. appearing in light comedies, except that in their eyes Ice Cube has the added demerit of an opportunistic rap star.

Cube’s family man persona in recent movies can be twisted into evidence of the once incendiary entertainer losing his relevance. What the mainstream media never acknowledges is that the success of Cube’s Friday, Barbershop and Are We There Yet? series means he has more recent popular comedy franchises to his name than any of his contemporaries. It’s a feat that would only be beaten if Scary Movie, Austin Powers and American Pie had a unifying star between them.

That Are We Done Yet? is a half-hearted sequel—a purported remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House that’s closer in tone to The Money Pit and Funny Farm—has little to do with Ice Cube’s efforts. Projecting humility and frustration as Nick, the husband to Nia Long and surrogate father of her unruly kids, Cube is a charismatic screen presence. The torment Nick endures is tamer than in the first film, and strangely empathetic.

Since Nick is the only character with whom it’s possible to identify (his wife basically only speaks up to complain that his unwillingness to get ripped off by a contractor is taking his attention away from the kids), the slapstick isn’t sadistic. But that doesn’t make this sequel’s propensity of scenes where animals attack Nick, and moments where he learns the difference between a house and a home, more than inoffensive.

There’s something curious about a movie where Ice Cube resolves tensions with his arch nemesis by drinking coffee with him. That’s a leap in anger management from a rapper who boasted, “I’m meaner than a motherfuckin hyena chasin antelope/Put my chrome to your dome, watch it bust like a cantaloupe.” Whether it’s an advance in his comedic taste is another debate.

The "you owe us more" attitude follows Hilary Swank, because unlike Ice Cube (who comforts the white elite by rarely making movies they want to see), she has two Oscars.

As Katherine Winter in The Reaping, she's the house calls version of Richard Dawkins. Proving to communities that believe they’re blessed and cursed by spiritual interference are really succumbing to scientific phenomenon, her lack of faith is tested in the southern town of Haven. Rivers of blood, raining toads, and locust storms make for interesting set pieces in Stephen Hopkins’ (Predator 2) otherwise routine plague thriller. But the question remains, if God’s presence comes through in a movie, is it acceptable that the movie have no personality?

Katherine takes up residence in the white rural mansion that’s in every movie about the southern US. A story of a spiritually broken woman’s awakening shouldn’t skimp on character detail to the point where everybody is taken care of with a couple of defining traits. The story overshadows human interest. Between effects-shots is a whole movie of people discussing how fascinating things are.