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Planet Boringtown. Population: Stupid Rose McGowan's stupid limp.
Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
April 4, 2007 - 35mm/AMC Empire 25
Right at the outset of the Grindhouse double-feature, during Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Naveen Andrews (the only half-way redeeming actor on that show nobody watches called Lost) whips out a big container of balls! Balls! This container of balls gets busted and later becomes a big bag of balls! Ewwwww, balls! Testicles in a bag, that’s so, oh I don’t know, I’m reaching for the word… GGGRRRRRRRRIINNNNNNDDDDDDDHHHHHHHOUSE. Planet Terror is not the first instance of big-budget teste-heavy filmmaking. That credit goes to Robert Zemeckis’ simply testacular Christmas fable The Polar Express, featuring Santa’s gigantic scrotum of Christmas joys and toys for the kiddies. Did I mention Planet Terror has jokes about a big bag of balls? Sometimes the balls fall out of the bag, and it’s so gross! It’s so gross I forgot to react at all, due to Planet Terror being the most powerful roofie of a movie since Mr. Rodriguez took advantage of me with Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
If Robert Rodriguez turned in Planet Terror for his homework assignment from the prompt “Grindhouse,” he would receive a D+. There thankfully has never been a grindhouse movie resembling Planet Terror in any shape or form. There are jokes about testicles, guns, dead bodies, explosions, lopped limbs and rolling heads, far more reminiscent of Michael Bay and Tony Scott R-rated actioneers than any low-budget exploitation picture. The creativity and sparse genius of many of these exploitation/genre/grindhouse pictures has a great deal to do with the restrictions of working within the limits a small budget, short schedule and a specified genre. The filmmakers of yore would have to rack their brains and creative marrow to make their pictures stand out from the deluge of work being produced on the cheap. Whether the movie falls into the “Women in Prison,” “Car Chase,” “Revenge Western,” “Zombie,” “Haunted House” or “Heist” category is secondary to what the craftsmen actually squeeze out of it. It is not enough to make a “Women in Prison” movie, there are a billion of those. It's about making the best, craziest, most visually exciting "Women in Prison" movie you can make.
With Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez works with no boundaries, save the debilitating limitation of his talent. He throws a load of crap up at the screen and every once in a while something sticks. It is bound to happen. This is a popular mode of expression. The animated television series The Family Guy is based solely on that principle, and is therefore funny 10-15% of the time. Planet Terror’s 10-15% ratio comes mostly from the strong, funny performance of Josh Brolin as Dr. Block, a few bits from Terminator star Michael Biehn and a brief appearance from the always entertaining Nicky Katt. The most unremarkable performance comes from the wooden (pun intended) peg-legged Rose McGowan. She is the hero of a story built around the concept of her stolen leg being replaced with a machine gun. Auteur Mr. Rodriguez came up with a thought (Machine-Gun-Leg!) and attempted to stretch it into an idea and finally a movie. It remains a thought, or an afterthought as one struggles to remember one memorable moment of a movie filled to the brim with unfinished thoughts doubling as “moments.” The result being repetitive jokes about balls and peg-legs, “gross-out” snippets of boiling bubbly flesh (which pale in comparison to similar moments in Slither) and a greasy BBQ restaurateur all seen through “Grindhouse vision.”
Planet Terror’s understanding of grindhouse aesthetics appears to be a movie print that has been scratched to all hell by projectionists that are more likely to be porcupines, rather than chimpanzees or humans. It is a nauseating, unnecessary effect that is very, very fakey and far from authentic or organic. I speak on this matter with experience as a projectionist with beaten up film prints. They look nothing like this. When a print overheats and burns out, there is no silly sound effect, and the movie does not continue. But hey, it’s all in the name of fun, right? Planet Terror’s computer generated scratches are an attempt to make the movie feel sleazier, but nothing can permeate Rodriguez’s slick, antiseptic green-screen playground.
Planet Terror is a visual, technical, emotional failure. It fancies itself a non-stop, heart-pounding romp, but is a self-satisfied bore. There is a funny idea now and again. I suggest you relish those moments, rather than feel guilty about enjoying the utter stupidity. After all, Planet Terror is not as egregious as 300, but it comes damn close. Balls! Testicles! Bruce Willis! Nuts!! Balls!
dir. Jim Sonzero
It sure was nice of Sir Ben Kingsley to get all made up for this one.
April 3, 2007 - DVD
I hate Gore Verbinski. That fucker and his boring ass ring movie have ruined the teen horror genre. Lately, I’ve found myself perusing the new release wall pining for the days of Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer and all of those really mediocre middle to late ‘90s Scream rip offs. Instead all we get are fucking innocent blonde ladies being terrorized by fucking children and houses; and in this movie, internet savvy ghosts. That’s right, in this one Death goes High Tech! Pulse stars a who’s who of young Hollywood: Veronica Mars, That Guy With the Weird Hair from Old School, the Jewish guy from Freaks and Geeks, some dude from Lost (speaking of which, who the fuck watches THAT show?), and Christina Milian who I think I heard mentioned on TRL one time when I was drunk. So yeah, that’s the cast. Excellent, excellent cast. I’ll let the hysterical old lady from the middle of the movie explain the plot:
“They came through the computer! We heard it’s safe in the dead zones! Anywhere there’s no computers, no phones, no Wi-Fi! Anywhere they can’t come through!”
Thanks for summing that up for me, screenwriter. This movie somehow manages to be a boring Japanese horror remake mixed with crappy 28 Days Later empty streets paranoia. All leading up to a hilariously stupid race against cell phone signal bars. Read that last sentence again, because it’s not a typographical error.
THE THRILLING FINALE OF PULSE IS A RACE AGAINST CELL PHONE SIGNALS!
Who wouldn’t want to see that? In fact I take back everything thing I’ve said, Pulse is great! Ms. Mars is a cute as a button leading lady. The choice of never properly lighting the scenes is genius. Freaks and Geeks guy is Rob Schneider in Judge Dredd-esque as the comic relief. And this movie is literally pulse pounding! (har har har)
If you want to find yourself asking questions like...
“Why doesn’t anyone turn any lights on?”
“Is Ted Raimi in Grudge or Grudge 2? "
"Did I even see Grudge 2?”
“Man, are the Japanese versions just as crappy?”
“What’s worse, this or The Skeleton Key?”
"Didn't I sleep through most of The Skeleton Key?"
and most importantly, “What hath Gore wrought?”
...then by all means, see Pulse. It’s totally boring and stupid.
~Joey “Sure, I’ll contribute to your website, but only if I get to write about mediocre and crappy movies no one cares about” Devine
dir. John Frankenheimer
Who needs 3D when you got James Wong Howe?
March 31, 2007 - DVD
In addition to being an amazing movie, Seconds has one of the great titles in film history. It implies a certain greed, or a general dissatisfaction with what you’ve been given. Even when the “second helping” is insisted upon instead of requested, it’s in the act of taking that a person’s self-interested nature reveals itself. At the same time, this movie is savvy enough to sympathize with the taker, and it aims to investigate the larger problem, which is a society that knows an individual will take everything they’re offered, and irresponsibly keeps… on… offering. When a pet goldfish eats itself to death, who’s to blame?
Whoa. But I’m getting carried away. First, the set-up. The story is one of those things that begin with a successful man, perhaps in his mid-fifties, who lives his life as a ghost. He and his wife sleep in separate beds, it’s awkward when they kiss, and he finds nothing very worthwhile about his comfortable existence. One day he receives a phone call from a friend he thought was dead, and he’s given vague instructions that will lead him to an opportunity to live an altogether new life, as a new man, complete with a new face, new personality, new interests, and even “a new signature!” For more, check out the trailer.
This Twilight Zone-y premise is just the beginning, though, and Frankenheimer steers the story through some of the most harrowingly photographed psychological set pieces I’ve ever seen (special fun note: big fans of Requiem for a Dream might be surprised when they see shots that predate Aronofsky’s cheeseball “camera-attached-to-the-character” business by almost 35 years, and do it with infinitely more success, purpose and panache). Cinematographer James Wong Howe attacks this stuff like a man unfettered, often jamming his lens so close to the features of the actors that the camera shadow jags across their face. More than once, physical instinct had me leaning backwards, thinking Rock Hudson’s forehead might smash through the screen. It’s like a latter-day Orson Welles picture (or maybe one of Larry Cohen’s cracked bits of pulp genius) in its seemingly limitless supply of funhouse angles, some of them magnificently sloppy, and all of them supplementing the movie’s surreal, manic atmosphere.
Seconds was apparently met with a lot of confusion and derision upon release, and even now is generally seen as a fairly minor, “flawed” cult film. This is insane, of course, because the movie’s an awesome success, but I think I have a theory as to why the uncertainty remains. Like The Beguiled, this film uses our knowledge about other movies and about ourselves to assume that we’ll take certain notions as a given. Take the dissatisfied middle-aged man element, for example; Seconds makes no real effort to probe the main character’s psyche and find out what, specifically, is wrong with him. Instead, we’re talking about a general, familiar malaise, and it’s with this kind of vaguery that the film asks the audience to fill in the character gaps by projecting their own minds and experiences upon him. This kind of thing makes viewers nervous—it’s getting a little too personal. Couple this with truly invasive cinematography, and suddenly Seconds is "psychologically shallow" and "overly stylized."
And let's talk once again about that style. There are two scenes in particular that come hand in hand, one after the other, which I believe earn Seconds most of this type of criticism. In actuality, these are probably the best scenes in the entire movie. The first is set at a weird kind of wine festival, and the second occurs at a cocktail party in the main character’s house. Both of them are long, essentially plotless pieces of pure movie mania; in the first, we watch a stodgy, proper man gradually lose all his inhibitions. It begins as a fairly innocuous-seeming, renaissance-style grape stomping party. Quickly, though, it evolves into a full-blown, drunken, naked free-f0r-all (I mean, full-frontal... and this is 1966!), and by the time Rock Hudson is grinning like a mental patient and screaming "YES!! YESSS!!" we totally feel the release. Interpret that as you will. In the second sequence, we watch this same man crumble under the weight of his new (and, at its core, false) personality. We watch a man drown himself in alcohol, stumble around embarrassing all his guests, and eventually hit rock bottom (ho, ho) as he realizes that no matter what he does he's the same lost and dissatisfied man as he was in his old life. Calling this second sequence "uncomfortable" would be an understatement... it's brash and ugly and insane. And it gets us exactly where we need to be, down and out and massively depressed. Because of the elation we felt in the earlier sequence, this actually kind of feels like a personal failure. It tears at us as viewers, not just at the Hudson character, and it's this kind of invasiveness that, I think, freaks the shit out of some people. It's a more advanced level of filmic interaction, but if you can deal with it and acknowledge that it's achievement is pure and direct, and that the uncomfortable feeling is just the film working its magic, then this movie may be among the most powerful you'll see.
And in the end, it all comes down to greed. This is a film about a man destroyed by accepting an offer for "seconds," and thinking that the answers to his problems lay in a different assortment of company and products. I've read some reviews (and, indeed, Frankenheimer himself has agreed with this assessment) that at it's center this is a "be careful what you wish for" sort of film. I completely fuckin' disagree, even despite the director's interpretation of his own work. This is a man who only "wishes" for something after he's told it will fix all his problems. When it doesn't, as it certainly never would, he gets blamed for the failure, and the punishment he receives is nothing short of permanent and ever-repeating. What a crushing, fantastic movie.
A rare appearence of Haagen Dazs in a movie that, like this reviewer, prefers Ben and Jerry's.
Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
March 5, 2007 - 35mm/Broadway Screening Room
During the invasion of the nearly finished dreamhouse of Cuban drug kingpin Johnny Tapia (Jordi Molla), some hot-shot detectives and CIA super-soldiers happen upon the drug lord’s elderly mother, who in turn pulls a shotgun on them and starts unloading. It is one of the most annoying and unfunny moments in the string of overblown meanness that is Bad Boys 2. That is not to say the Bad Boys saga is not peppered with moments of overblown creativity and humor. The simple state of absolute excess in all areas is bound to yield a degree of brilliance, and in Bad Boys 2’s case, it does. Alas, this minimal, but fierce brilliance is beaten to a pulp by filthy, filthy, aggressive garbage (such as the camp of an old lady firing a shotgun).
With a firm grasp of its wits, a full heart and open arms, Hot Fuzz embraces Bad Boys 2 and the likes of many, many other movies like and unlike it, primarily those concerning police officers. In embracing these pictures, like with the team’s previous movie, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz takes a Bob Beamon leap from the spoofier side of the tracks and creates a movie that simply, eloquently becomes a member of the genre it initially appears to be spoofing. It is the stuff of reverent homage, made with the virile aggression of Bad Boys 2, but displaced to the English countryside with scenes of dialogue that are directed rather than presented as an annoying necessity separating car chases.
Again (and again and again), like Bad Boys 2 and Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz is a buddy comedy featuring a straight-laced man of action (Simon Pegg) and his doofy doting sidekick (Nick Frost). The buddy cops patrol the rural, isolationist town of Sandford, where the community’s primary concerns are hooded youths and a “human statue” street performer. Needless to say, things are not what they seem and violence ensues, but it is these early character-driven and positively meditative by action movie standards scenes that allow for the success of the chaos to come. Jokes are tossed back and forth between the two buddies and an alarmingly prestigious supporting cast featuring the likes of Jim Broadbent and a mustachioed Paddy Considine. These scenes and jokes (catching an escaped swan, eating ice cream as punishment and so on) are only mildly amusing, but due to their modest existence, when this movie takes off and fully explores its action roots the image of an elderly woman firing off a shotgun actually becomes funny! The smalltime, composed jokiness of previous scenes juxtaposed with full-throttle old lady artillery equals funny!
While these “smalltime” scenes are moments of quiet, the transitions between them are anything but. In Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright utilized a series of three or so quick cuts as transitions from scene-to-scene. Used again in Hot Fuzz, these quick cut, loud-as-all-hell bits drag on and on in the queasy, mean-spirited style of every single scene in Bad Boys 2. The bits eventually develop into the stock “lock and load” gun montage, which, again, is funny though extremely loud and lacking the cocksure bravado Edgar Wright displays when the triggers of those guns are being pulled.
Cars explode, our heroes fire every variety of gun known to humankind and most importantly, bodies start flyin’ and start droppin’. The deft balancing act between the complicated, creative action and inventive and referential comedic one-liners tips Hot Fuzz to the rim of greatness. The movie takes a giant leap forward anytime its characters grow tight-lipped and straight-faced. In other words, the picture gets a whole lot funnier when the characters get serious and curb the chucklesville joke-time.
As the picture wraps up it returns to chucklesville, population: cameo. As brilliant as the likes of Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy are, the movie belongs to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. They outshine even the otherworldly talents of Jim Broadbent and Paddy Considine, and because of their spark and Edgar Wright’s extraodinary chops as an action director, Hot Fuzz excels. Comparisons will unavoidably be drawn to Shaun of the Dead, as Hot Fuzz is quite close to stylistically being the same movie. They’re both welcome, ambitious additions to their respective genres, and if you like one you’re likely to enjoy the other, but more importantly if you like Bad Boys 2 at all (and damn you if you do!), Hot Fuzz’ll be worthy of more than a hearty Mike Lowrey/Will Smith “WOOOOO!”
Carice, starlet (not to be confused with Clarice Starling)
Carice Van Houten stars as Rachel Stein, a Dutch Jewish girl who, upon the execution of her family, joins an underground resistance against the Nazi occupation. There in lies one of the many fascinating grey areas this movie addresses. Is our heroine fighting for revenge or some political cause, and more importantly, does any of that even matter as long as she’s fighting/fucking? Fucking? In order to infiltrate a German base and liberate a fellow resistance fighter, Rachel Stein becomes Ellis de Vries and seduces the handsome Ludwig Muntze, head of the Nazi Intelligence (the Sicherheitsdienst or “SD”). In the typical and always refreshing style of director/co-writer Paul Verhoeven, our heroine is presented in a way that breaks down the term “sex-symbol” giving us a character of immense sexiness borne not only from statuesque beauty, but of human, earthy strength and frailty. A great deal has already been written about the transitional Rachel to Ellis scene where she dyes her hair blonde, including (gasp!) her pubic hair. Paul Verhoeven, never one to shirk the details, presents this scene with a frank matter-of-factness that only enhances the sexiness of his lead. Mr. Verhoeven’s inclusion of not just that scene, but scenes such as one where Ellis and another Nazi mistress swap dialogue over peeing lends profundity and a sense of human realism that lacks from not just World War II movies but historical movies of all kinds.
The sexual and physical realism brought to the table by Mr. Verhoeven and his brave actors gives the "War thriller" narrative a sense of urgency as the plot careens forward through double-crosses and side-swapping. At times it seems the Nazis may as well be gangsters who have taken a hostage and a sexy police officer goes undercover to get to the bottom of it (see The Departed). Yet, the stakes are greater, and more often than gangsters the Nazis appear to be the American military complex colonizing nations with a presence of boastful cocksure instability.
For the Verhoeven aficionados and obsessives out there (I know I’m not alone! Top five living directors!) the authorial trademarks are ever present. His attitude toward WWII and war in general has wavered little since Soldier of Orange, though his rollercoaster ride through Hollywood has made him a slicker narrative beast, with Black Book his most cohesive (only in the narrative sense) picture since Basic Instinct. His anger toward his native Holland’s role in The War is reiterated, and Black Book is an excellent companion to Soldier of Orange, maybe its big sister (Katie Tippel would be its cousin). While Black Book will be toted as Paul Verhoeven’s “return to form,” he did not go anywhere. He made one, and only one, self-described bad movie in Hollow Man after a string of consistently brilliant efforts. Black Book is another great one, consistently brilliant throughout, thrilling, sexy, bold, smart, brash… all of that good shit, but mostly, most of all, human, and human in the face of the craziest big picture moviemaking around.
300: the IMAX Experience
Dir. Zach Snyder
Balls.
Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITY
March 22, 2007 - IMAX/Loews Lincoln Square
Aw, hell. It's:and (Ann Coulter at her worst),and,
(I apologize to you all for the shallow nature of this post. 300 is the kind of pap -- sometimes called "art" -- that sucks the lifeblood of culture and leaves a burnt shell containing only scores of massacred brain cells. It's by far the worst movie I've ever seen. America needs to wake up now, and 300 is putting us all back to sleep.)
(Click on the comments below. As always, Jeff GP has a far more erudite and accurate portrayal of 300 than I could ever hope to write.)
dir. Giulio Petroni
J.P. Law heads out for a cold dish.
Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITYFebruary 13, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum
On the off chance you or anyone you know decides to massacre a family in the Western part of the United States of America in the 19th century, make sure they kill ‘em all. Death Rides a Horse takes the familiar trope of a young child, witness to his family’s death, growing up to wreak havoc and take revenge, bloodying the landscape along the way (see Once Upon a Time in the West). Unlike Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, John Philip Law does not take his time in becoming the baddest most feared of all gunmen. His pride won’t let him admit that, but he reluctantly takes the aid of an old outlaw, played by Lee Van Cleef, who happens to be hunting the same gang of rapin’ murders.
Young, handsome John Philip Law will have nothing to do with compromise or bribery and will stop at nothing for his revenge. His fury has warped his perspective of his familial tragedy. The images have been playing in his mind for 15 years to boiling point. Anytime one of the gang members are in sight, passion takes over in the form of a red-hued replay of that specific gang member’s part in the massacre over Law’s steaming eyes. Ennio Morricone provides a thumping, rhythmic, primal score to these moments that is the stuff of dreams and has since become the stuff of legend. I’ve done well to not specifically reference how his scores have been used in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, though in this case, Mr. Tarantino borrowed not just the music cue, but the fury of revenge close-up/red-hued flashback, and to great effect. In a picture more subdued, such as Death Rides a Horse, the insanity of a gut-curling score and stylized close-up pack an emotional wallop.
Lee Van Cleef delivers another brilliant and emotionally complex performance here, as the convict who is not all he appears to be. His swagger as he trots his horse around a buried-to-the-neck Law is both charming and mean with a balance of manner practically unique to his on-screen persona. While The Big Gundown is his swan song, the legendary “Bad” makes us love him yet again.
It would be an understatement to call this trailer "awesome." Watch it.
dir. Maximilian Schell
Wedding Crashers, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen WilsonJeff GP, NEW YORK CITYFebruary 14, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum
This tired, unnecessarily moody thriller, featuring a barely existing, unnotable score by Ennio Morricone is the low point of narrative contrivance in an otherwise nearly perfect selection of challenging, complex and mostly unseen classics in the Ennio Morricone program. Director Maximilian Schell takes a little whodunit and throws so much disinformation at you that it becomes bogged down with nonsense.
Jon Voight plays a young go-getter detective taking and shunning advice from a dying old detective. They’re investigating the very mysterious death of yet another detective. The corpse of the murdered detective is played by Donald Sutherland, the lifeblood of so many fantastic ‘70s pictures. The case and point being the lack of pulse in End of the Game. Mr. Voight, who plays innocence wrapped in a rough exterior very well, is unaware of the very personal battle being waged between his old, doddering partner and the suspected murderer. The movie opens many years earlier as the two friends pick up a young lady.
“I could murder her right in front of your eyes and you couldn’t prove it.”
Both the tagline of the picture and the overarching thematic “haunt” of End of the Game lies in that line, spoken by the murderer to the detective (best friend to best friend, rival to rival). The movie would be better off as a tale of cruel obsession with pride, and if it were more focused on the dying old man, it would be a better picture. Instead, Jon Voight unnecessarily takes center stage and observes. Madness, friendship, themes of regret and frustration for a life lost and lives lost; these are all interesting things presented in the blandest possible package. Fog rests heavily over the countryside as the two detectives explore the crime scene, but the heaviest fog distorts what could, in fact, be great if it were less Love Me If You Dare and more The Conversation.
This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.
Planet Boringtown. Population: Stupid Rose McGowan's stupid limp.
