Confessions of a Flick Junkie

I tend to avoid the movies I really expect to hate, so don't be surprised if there are some big ones missing (i.e. Hostel 2, Norbit, Wild Hogs, and the like).

1. Bratz
There's not really a lot to say about this one. I couldn't even enjoy hating it as much as a lot of other stuff. There's such a lack of effort here that any criticism I could give is pretty much irrelevant compared to the film itself.

2. Southland Tales
This one just plain hurt. For weeks after seeing it, I gave myself a huge headache over what the hell Kelly thought he was saying. It's the type of film you recognize as extremely ambitious, but when it comes time to back it up, you have no idea what the ambition was in the first place. This begs an interesting question: Do a film get extra points for the effort, or does the ambition only make it fall harder.

3. Zeitgeist
When the list of a documentary film's corrections is longer than its bibliography, you know you're in for trouble. If this is indeed meant to inspire "a critical perspective," then it should simply say at the start that they didn't fact check, jump to conclusions, and shouldn't be taken seriously in the first place.

4. Fay Grimm
An action film with no action, a thriller with no thrills, a talking heads film with no brains: this is the appeal of Fay Grimm. The cinematographer and director really overestimate the effectiveness of Dutch Angle (tilting the camera) by using it during every single shot, most of which feature nothing happening at all. The effect is dizzying and infuriating.

5. Old Habits Die Hard
I walked out of this one after about thirty minutes, so feel free (or die hard!) to ignore me on this one. At first, I was just bored by all the high-techery, rapid cutting, and boring action. When they threw in the pop culture dialog, I groaned in the knowledge that I wrote almost the exact same scene in my freshman year of high school. When I said to myself, "Insert car chase here..." and a car chase began, I'd pretty much had enough. I'm told the second half is better.

6. Sicko
As much as I dislike Michael Moore, I can at least usually get behind his films at least to a point. Since I support universal healthcare, you'd think I'd be a huge fan of this one. But Moore has never been more longwinded or dull while still failing to make much of an argument. The anecdotal points often try to highlight how easy their systems are to exploit. His idealized version of France overlooks the intense social turmoil in the country (notice how he only interviews white Christians?). What really pissed me off though were the cheap exploits toward the end which did little more than illustrate how low Moore is willing to sink for a political message.

7. Shrek The Third
All the fresh humor of the first two is gone. In its place is an incredibly generic script and a bunch of fart jokes. Unfunny fart jokes! I actually fell asleep in the theater (something I never do).

8. The Messengers
You know that really cheesy bad independent horror film that makes no sense, but has a couple cool sequences? This is that film with a budget.

9. Spiderman 3
Remember how exhilerating the first two Spiderman films were? Yeah, that's all gone. This plays like a modern day chamber drama, except the characters aren't rich and a few get replaced by cartoons every once in a while and fly around. Spiderday Night Fever jokes aside, the characters are all whiny annoying pricks who have no other motivation than to advance the plot. It's only saving grace is its moderate camp value (and if that's what you go for, you'd be better off seeing Ghost Rider).

10. I Know Who Killed Me
This film was made by a Twin Peaks fan. I know this because the director makes a point of reminding me at least once during every scene that he's a Twin Peaks fan. And like many fanboys turned filmmakers, he takes for granted the references will stand on their own. It's a classic case of "He's seen it too many times, but not enough times."

I know it's a little early, but all the critics are publishing their top 10 lists this week. With my Kentucky visit being as boring as ever, the timing felt right.

Here are my favorites:

1. No Country For Old Men
With a plot straight out of the Spaghetti West and direction out of a Hitchcock nightmare, the Coen Bros have crafted their greatest film. As divisive as the ending was, there's not a moment of this film that didn't haunt me to know end.

2. Eastern Promises
As visceral as any film Cronenberg has ever made, this film grabs you by the balls and thrashes you around the room without ever letting go. The film plays like a mirror image to A History Of Violence, and manages to address all its thematic elements and then some without ever flinching. This film is not only it willing to get its hands dirty, but it's willing to risk their being completely severred.

3. The Orphanage
A grotesque story about a group of children who never will and never can grow up, Bayona's debut feature film is on par with some of the greatest horror films of all time. Belen Rueda turns in one of the year's best performances as the mother who must push herself to psychological, physical, and metaphysical extremes for the chance to rescue her son from forces beyond her understanding.

4. Zodiac
Serial killers are some of the few authentic celebrities our culture allows. Unlike movie stars picked from a stockpile of literally millions of candidates, serial killers are truly unique. Zodiac is one of the few who seemed to run his own PR campaign, using print, television, and film media to gain a household name and play boogeyman to the population of an entire city. Fincher's film doesn't tell his story so much as the people his story impacted. This film sends chills up my spine, even though the characters are never in any physical danger.

5. Rescue Dawn
Little Dieter Needs To Fly remains one of my favorite documentaries of all time. Werner Herzog's fictionalized remake of his own film never quite reaches the level of fascination as his portrait of the real Dengler, but by taking the same kinds of physical risks as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, he still manages to craft one hell of an escape film.

6. Michael Clayton
You know it's gonna be a great movie when they can make you paranoid before the opening shot even starts. Armed with a script that screenwriters drool over and one of the best ensemble casts of the year, Tony Gilroy pulls off one of the tensest psychological thrillers this side of David Fincher. Along with great dialog and characters, this features what might be the coldest and most efficient murder scene I've ever encountered.

7. Grindhouse
The nerd in me never stopped smiling during this film from the fake trailers to the sex scenes that melt film stock and burn down sets to the heartstopping chase sequences, even the overlong conversations of bad dialog. They're all part of why I love these types of films, and Tarantino and Rodriguez find the art in every bit of the experience.

8. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
I find it so refreshing to see a film that uses a huge budget to glimpse the abstract. Shots of ships sailing through the stars, musical numbers featuring defiant prisoners dancing from the gallows, and a crew of mad scalliwags (including 50 Jack Sparrows and a peanut) make this the perfect film for anyone addicted to bad ideas and all the beauty in this or any other world. Hang the critics and release the manics; this is nothing short of a masterpiece.

9. The Lives Of Others
One of the big challenges of government surveillance is how to keep spies from developing a vested interest in the people they monitor. Captain Weissler does just this and begins to take dangerous risks to protect his subjects from the tyrants he's meant to represent. Meanwhile we who spy on Weissler take a vested interest in his outcome. This is the stuff films are made of.

10. I'm Not There
Feel free to ask, but expect no greater answer than the collected sounds of a lyric of a song, the wail of the harp, and a few crying strings. Why worry your head over the meaning when the sounds and images are so damn cool by their own right? It's a long hard walk to the moving train, but I wouldn't mind escaping myself if I wasn't always on my tail. Two things are for sure: Bob Dylan is not made of plastic. And the sky is not blue, it's chicken!



Runners up:
Ratatouille, Superbad, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

Honorable mentions:
28 Weeks Later, Across The Universe, 1408, Harry Potter, Hot Fuzz

Gaps in viewing:
American Gangster, Dan In Real Life, Into The Wild, Juno, There Will Be Blood, Blade Runner, Atonement, Beowulf, Persepolis, The Kite Runner, The Golden Compass, Sweeney Todd, The Darjeeling Limited, No End In Sight, Helvetica, The King Of Kong

A shot from Mulholland Drive:


1. The way you hold my hand...



The scene begins. Close-up on a character as she begins to sing. We don't yet know where she is or why she sings. The camera begins to pull out.


2. Your laughing eyes...



As the camera pulls out, it reveals objects beyond the edges of the frame. She is not singing before an audience but at a recording studio, presumably to put on a CD or record. The window creates another frame around the singers within the frame of the film itself. The camera continues to pull out.


3. The way you understand...



In the bottom left corner, something peeks into vision. We see the matte box first, then the whole camera, filming the singers through the very window we were just looking.


4. Your secret sighs...



They're all part of 16 reasons why I love you

The camera cranes up to reveal an entire soundstage, lively with people working tirelessly behind the scenes to keep the illusion alive on the screen. The singers within the frame within the film within the frame within the film are only a small part of the picture, and while the actors might recognise the deception, the characters can't see beyond the edges of the frame, and if the shot were to continue, there would be another film crew filming the filmmakers we're watching and so on into infinity.

David Lynch's work often revels in teasing the audience's sense of association with what's going on, usually by applying the logic of dreams. Mulholland Drive may be the quintessential example of this. This logic becomes important later on, when a magician uses a tape recording of a Roy Orbison to prove to the main character Betty that her world is a lie. At that point, the movie starts to get a little weird, but isn't that part of the fun?

I think the greatest shot ever captured seems like a good place to start:




Ofelia begins to tell a story to her unborn brother. With a hidden vertical wipe, the camera scrolls down into her mother's uterus, engulfing the screen in the warm tones of Ofelia's imagination, her projection of an unseen space.



The camera pans right to show the blue rose upon the thorny mountain which she describes in the story. Are we now seeing what the child sees? Is this an imagination within an imagination?



The sky is still a uterine red as we crane down through the thorns to where the insect lands. This bug appeared earlier in the film and is as real a thing as anything else in Ofelia's world.



Notice the tone change as the insect flies up. The sky and moon are now the cold, harsh blues of the real world.



It flies over trees and hills to land on the windowsill of a house...



Wherein lies Ofelia, asleep within her own imagination, where she lives forever, even as the world falls apart around her.



With a single shot, we witness numerous layers of reality unfold before our very eyes. Ofelia's voiceover descibing how fear of death obscures the promise of immortality, combined with the way images link the purity of pre-birth and imagination teaches how to watch the rest of the film, while providing the most exhilerating film-going experience I've ever had.

They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically - how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap - well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can't know the reality of what happened, or what would've happened if you hadn't-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no "what happened." Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds... our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the "Uncertainty Principle." Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on to something.

This quote from The Man Who Wasn't There perfectly establishes what is simulataneously one of the crucial problems and solutions of watching a film. Intention versus interpretation. Reality versus perception. Is the film we feel the same as the film we see?

In the context of the film, a lawyer says it to illustrate how facts can be twisted to win a case. It also is central problem of any serious philosophy, but for the sake of this and several following essays, I intend to change the meaning of this speech to apply specifically to the ever-changing perceptions of a viewer to a film, as well as how these themes can be explored and manipulated by filmmakers.

These essays will pay special attention to scenes which break the proverbial "fourth wall" and remind you there's a screen lying between you and the fictional reality projected before you.

Here's something to keep in mind when considering this monolog. Fritz Lang and Werner Herzog are the two greatest directors to ever come out of Germany.

QT & RR have selected three finalists among the entries vying for a spot in their upcoming double-feature, Grindhouse. Like everyone else, I have my own favorites among the trailers I perused on youtube, and although I appreciate their reasoning behind these, I was disappointed at several obvious choices that were overlooked.

I found none of the final three particularly memorable, but my favorite of them is The Dead Won't Die. There's nothing too terrific about it, but it's the only one that feels really comfortable in the company of the other trailers and features. It seems to tell the story of a young woman who is kidnapped by a psychotic family in the thread of Texas Chainsaw. They keep her alive to subject her to rape by zombies for them to breed. She escapes and exacts revenge with a chainsaw. The best moment involves a woman who pauses mid-fuck to shoot an attacker, then continues as if nothing had happened.

I expect the outstandingly titled Hobo With A Shotgun will win the final selection (which I just read it did), since it seems to have generated the most press and probably has the greatest immediate impact to its viewers. It also has the most memorable campy title since last year's near-masterpiece Snakes On A Plane. As much as I like the trailer, it feels more like a youtube hit than an actual Grindhouse film. What impressed me about Snakes On A Plane (apart from the hilarious political satire everyone else seemed to ignore) was the way it continuously built on its own idea. I never thought they could successfully stretch it to 90 minutes, but they did so. Hobo With A Shotgun doesn't reflect the sense of pace that Snakes did. The clips looked tailored for a 3 minute trailer, not a feature film. I must admit though, I did love, "I'm gonna sleep in your bloody caucusses!"

Maiden Of Death has absolutely no place among the champions. Its creators clearly had much more money and resources to draw from than the average contestant. Plus, with the exception of several shots, there's nothing Grindhouse about it. The special effects seem as sophisticated as any Hollywood film, and the plot seems more like a female version of The Crow. By no means is it bad: it ranks far above most amateur films I've seen. It just has an entirely different appeal than that the film should be going for. This should be a graphic novel adaptation viewed in IMAX. Not something that needs a new 35mm print.

"They didn't have the budgets to hire stars, so they had to go with their subject matter, had to have what you would call 'exploitable elements,' these thing that you could not see in a studio picture." - Robert Rodriguez

One of the things that I admire most about Rodriguez & Tarantino is that they can look at a bad film that no one would dream of defending, and see a masterpiece within. Watching their films, one feels the great affection and influence they had from these crapfests. It's just like the Thursday Night Movie Nights my friends and I have weekly. Snobs like me get together and tease these films perhaps even scoff at them, but deep down, I think we admire the lack of restraint that goes against what films are supposed to be. I'd rather see a great bad film (Ghost Rider) than a nonoutstanding good film (The Queen). Of course, not all bad films are great (Lady In The Water), and many good films are outstanding (Pan's Labyrinth), though I think many in my film courses might disagree.

Two trailers that I saw went that extra mile that would forever burn them into my mind as a bad movie fan:

1. EL GIGANTE VS ZOMBREROS



This is the one I was pulling for. The appeal of the luchadore is something I don't fully understand but still fully appreciate, and seeing one interrupt a wrestling to pick up the hotline made me drop my jaw in wonder. Plus, who couldn't love an ecstaticly absurd one-liner like "I will use your zombies to clone the President and take over the world!" delivered in Spanish by Ken Watanabe's doppelganger. Out of all the trailers I saw, this one felt the most like it actually had a full movie behind it, involving various twists and turns including the true identity of the man behind the skull.

2. I'MA KILL YOU BITCH!



Okay, so the same criticism applies here as Hobo With A Shotgun, but I can't recall the last time I laughed as hard. This is the reason fake trailers were invented. "Warning: I'ma Kill You Bitch has been described as sick and depraved, a film featuring violence, gore, and sex, sometimes all at once!" What makes it work as well as it does is the terrific voice acting of the narrator as he describes a film which has no right to exist under any benevolent God. Like the creators of Grindhouse, it finds poetry in the way shit looks on the ground, and expresses it to those who might not oherwise appreciate it. Plus, how can you go wrong with the creators of I'ma Rape Ya, I'ma Kill Ya, And I'ma Rape Ya Again?

I just returned from Rutgers University where I spent the last several hours chillin with bros and attending a lecture from pop-culture analyst Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs). While waiting for the event to begin, I overheard two guys in the row behind me having a conversation on hushed tones. What they said intrigued me.

Apparently one of the guys had a friend from his home town who was selected to appear on the reality show Survivor. All of his friends were really excited, so they threw him a big going away party and everything. He returns two weeks later, and they try to comfort him for getting kicked off and they're still eager to see him on the show. He tells them it's not going air. They ask why not, but due to some confidentiality agreement, he can't go into detail.

The guy claims to have gotten the whole story later on though. During the opening weeks, they do a kind of historical/cultural perspective on the island and its people. In one of the get-togethers they have on the show (I forget what he said they were called), they christened the new season with a toast of a local drink.

I guess someone didn't do their homework, because the drink apparently contained peyote or something. Insanity ensues.

I started taking notes at about this point, but he was going too fast to really get much. I did record that the word "masturbation" was definitely spoken.

I wouldn't have taken much notice of this except that I remember hearing something about it a while back. Who knows how these things get started, but this guy would've been a really actor to pull off a lie like that as well as he would've had to.

I remain very doubtful, even if there are few degrees of separation in this case, but assuming there is some truth to this, I don't understand why the Network (whichever one it is; I don't follow TV) didn't run with it. Here we have a show about yuppies eating rats for attention, depending on each other for "success" but expected to doublecross their comrades to keep that precious addictive spotlight. I checked Wikipedia to confirm or deny these reports (it had no comment) and discovered other examples of controversy surrounding the corrupt show. We all know about the guy who faked his personality and the contestant who paid for the company's failure to deduct taxes from his winnings (c'mon, even the assholes who run my theater have the decency to do that). I didn't know of the racism scandals involving the selection and assignment of cast members. The more I learn about the show, the less farfetched this story sounds.

"Beware the stare of Mary Shaw.
She had no children, only dolls.
If you see her do not scream,
Or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam."

-Creep E. Puppet, from Dead Silence trailer


"'You nasty thing from beyond the dead,
No matter what you think or do,
Good things will never come to you.
And if evil is your black design,
You can bet the goodness of the Light Ones will kick your bad behind'?

"For chrissake! That's it? That's the chant against evil from the "Book of Souls"? Oh yeah, right, boss. And what kind of decoder ring comes with that, man? Shit, it don't even rhyme well!"

-Elvis Presley, from Bubba Ho-Tep

Today I saw Zodiac. David Fincher's return to legitimacy is the first great film of 2007 and the director's most observant and haunting film yet. During and after the film, I mentioned several films it reminded me of (including M, JFK, and season 1 of Twin Peaks). A friend noted that I'm all about making those connections, and I must admit that this is true. There are several reasons for this:



1) Inspirations - Zodiac itself contains two references to other films which cooexist with the universe it inhabits (the real world, in this case). The first is The Most Dangerous Game, which it is suggested may have inspired the Zodiac to rampage as he did. The second is Dirty Harry, made in an effort to release the city from the grip of fear by sacrificing a fictional character based on the real Zodiac. These films flow into one another, each drawing inspiration from the others. If I return to Dirty Harry now, it won't be the same movie. I'll be watching an extention of Zodiac, just as a second viewing of Zodiac will be an extension of Dirty Harry.

2) Impulse - Robert Goldsmith was handed a piece of parchment at work one day and copied its coded message in the hopes of solving whatever mystery it might hold. Why? Because he saw the code and intuitively felt like solving it. I see an image and my mind might decide to go off in several directions. As any of my friends or family will tell you, I have something of a one track mind which occupies itself primarily with the art of moving pictures. To cite an example, when the Zodiac poster first materialized at the theater I work at, it caught my eye. Seeing the Golden Gate shrouded in fog like that called to mind several images from last year's surreal documentary The Bridge, whose mere mention, in turn, calls to mind a shot from Vertigo. As that horrible song that blasts day-in & day-out at that shithole proclaims, "It just comes natural."



3) Insight - I've developed an interest in not only watching films but reading them. I find it very rewarding to analyze the poetry of imagery what I'm looking at the same way scholars might analyze poetry of Shakespeare. A big part of that is looking at work by others. By knowing that Zodiac, The Bridge, and Vertigo make similar aestetic use of the Golden Gate, one might also notice that the three films also share a common theme of being lost within a labyrinth of despair. Then I might note differences in the sources of their despair. In The Bridge, suicide jumpers lose themselves within the reality of a world too huge to notice their absence. Vertigo (and in some respects, the Bridge) is about someone losing himself in the fantasy of a departed loved one.




Zodiac's characters become lost at an uneasy boundary between reality and illusion (a "bridge" if you will), where the perception of a real threat becomes more dangerous than the thing you fear in the first place.

Notice now that making these connections may shed light not only on the film in question, but on the films they recall.


Returning to my first points of interest, M and Zodiac follow a very similar narrative structure. We witness the murder of an innocent victim picked at random, then witness as a group of sane individuals try to find the madman before too much damage is done. But the search burns into the souls of the searchers (perhaps more parallels there?), and they go mad themselves. There is a single shot toward the start of M that casts the whole film into a different light.



We see the face of the killer, looking in reflection for the monster that overtakes him, and we realize that he's as much a victim of his compulsions as those who live in fear of him. Because we see the killer as a man rather than an abstract idea, we don't identify with those hunting him. In Zodiac we're right there along the main characters, becoming obsessed along with them. There is a similar scene toward the end of Zodiac, in which Goldsmith stands face-to-face with the prime suspect and tries to determine his guilt by looking in his face.

I do not regard my second example as highly. JFK flirts with the potential for two better films without ever deciding which it wants to be. It sells the idea that Kennedy's assassination was part of a military coup-de-etat by which Lyndon Johnson took over the country, but the evidence it presents is so incoherent and points in so many directions that no conclusions could be drawn from them. This seems to imply another reading, that the chaos which erupted in the wake of that event clouds all hope at finding the truth. "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin' shooters don't even know! Don't you get it?" Stone's film is like a lawyer, trying to confuse one moment and clarify the next, mixing pure fiction with half-truths and calling it factual. It never finds a firm ground to stand on.

Zodiac, on the other hand, achieves what JFK strove for, managing to entrall the viewer in the fantastic mysteries surrounding it while simultaneously revealing the facts behind (& within) the illusions. It understands that the two are inexplicably linked. Every new piece of evidence, every fact, every answered question, only succeeds in providing more mystery, more questions that must be answered before you can be at piece. As is the case with Twin Peaks, we watch the web of possibility spider out until the point where we're less worried about who the culprit is than how to untangle ourselves from this net and escape the demons who trapped us there in the first place.