In the past 36 hours I’ve seen 10 movies. It's like running a marathon of film. As sad as that may sound it may not even be a record for me, although I can proudly proclaim I’ve never sat through the 312-minute TV version of Fanny & Alexander or the 15-hour snooze-o-rama Berlin Alexanderplatz. See I have Sundays and Mondays off. I started late into the night Sunday and just kept going and going and going. Duracell, I’m expecting a check.
I started with some older movies I had Netflix’d, and then Full Metal Jacket, which was sent to me as part of the recently released Stanley Kubrick collection. By the next morning, Monday, I had a 1:20 p.m. screening of Local Color, a 4:05 p.m. screening of No Country for Old Men, and then a 7 p.m. screening of The Mist. The first two screenings were at the same theater, but No. 3 was about seven miles down the road and into another city. By the end of the night, my lower half was sore, and my neck was aching, but that wasn’t it yet because I still had Redacted and Benny’s Video, which I snoozed through at parts. And if all goes well tonight, I’m going to drop in to see Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and American Gangster, two films I’ve missed screening with the press.
Here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve seen, in no particular order:
• Funny Games — Michael Haneke’s brutal Austrian/German torture porn before the genre torture porn was even invented. In it two twisted teens take a family captive and play some not-so-funny games with them. Example game: “I bet you won’t live until tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.,” one of the teens says. And off we go. I’ve been reviewing Haneke’s work and I’ve noticed he likes to indict the audience in the crimes of the characters. He’s the only director I know who wants you to feel guilty for watching his work. Still, though, it’s terrific. I was thrilled to see an ad for the English version of Funny Games, also by Haneke and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, run during the trailer pack for No Country For Old Men.
• The Mist — Stephen King has turned into a hack writer. And his movie adaptations have lately been pretty lame. But this one is spectacularly enjoyable. See the full review in the next post.
• Bug — Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon claw at their skin in this psychological thriller from William Friedkin. Usually when I hear the label “psychological thriller” I cringe because I know that everything that takes places exists in a character's mind. It’s all imagined. That applies here, but in a different way. The movie doesn’t exploit the fact that there are no bugs, but it uses it to show you how far into madness Judd and her new friend are going. Very trippy thriller.
• No Country For Old Men — Perfect in every way. Yes, it is just as good as everyone is saying it is. Go see it. Now.
• Benny’s Video — In No Country, the Javier Bardem character kills his victims using a captive bolt pistol, which is a device that shoots a piston out of a gun like a bullet and then retracts it back. In the right hands it can kill cattle without stopping their hearts. In Haneke’s Benny’s Video, teen Benny (who also stars in Funny Games) uses one on girl … in his parents house … and videotapes it … and then shows it to his parents. Not the brightest kid. Not Haneke’s best.
• Full Metal Jacket — It improves with age.
• Redacted — Brian De Palma’s angry love letter to the Iraq War and all branches of the military is poignant and haunting … in theory. The film itself is boring and poorly acted, regardless if it’s supposed to feel real and gritty.
• Local Color — A boy wants to paint so he enlists a local celebrity artist, who paints representational art when the world is clamoring for abstract nonsense. The old foul-mouthed painter is Armin Mueller-Stahl, who also appeared in this year’s terrific Eastern Promises. Ray Liotta has a role as a homophobic dad that’s pretty funny: “You want to go into the woods with an old man?!?” he screams to his son. The movie is good intentioned enough, but it’s as sappy and sentimental as Patch Adams.
• The Squid and the Whale — Wow! This movie is awesome. The dialogue is punchy and fast, and the settings and locations are perfect. The costumes, wonderful. The mood and tone, exquisite. I wanted to watch it again as soon as it was over.
• Bottle Rocket — Wes Anderson’s first movie, and it’s decent. It’s no classic, but it’s enjoyable and really quite funny. The character Owen Wilson plays is basically the same one he plays in The Darjeeling Limited: a controlling, obsessive loner with a motor mouth. My favorite scenes were with Luke Wilson and his sweetie, Inez, the housekeeper at the crap motel he stays at throughout the middle of the movie.
The greatest horror movies are human dramas. The monster exists to punctuate mankind’s limitations, not star in the show. By those rules, The Mist is a great horror film. It should make for a delightful case of indigestion after your turkey feast.
A hurricane-like storm knocks a small town on its hind end. The people, eager to start putting the pieces back together, head into town for supplies. A number of them are in the grocery store when the mist arrives. It comes rolling in off the lake as a thick fog. Standing at the front of the market’s large front windows, a group of 60 townspeople can hear people screaming outside as the wall of moisture crashes into the store. And then they hear bones crunching. So begins one of the better Stephen King book-to-film adaptations.
Like Jaws before it, The Mist finds its horror in the unseen evil, the vast nothing of humidity outside the store’s front windows. Shoppers wander outside at first, convinced there is nothing to hide from indoors. When they return in pieces, panic sweeps through the store, from the dairy (Aisle 5) to the produce section (Aisle 2).
The monster movie, very quickly from this point on, turns into a human drama — a la Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds — with people fearing the unknown in their own unique ways: the macho mechanics downplay the seriousness until they get someone killed and then they cower in the corners sipping warm beer (Aisle 4); the quiet clerk, with his round little belly and thinning hair, steps into a leadership role with a .357 Magnum; an elderly woman overdoses on painkillers (Aisle 7); and the butcher turns to barbarism with his various cutlery (Deli Department).
Much of the plot is spent with David Drayton (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane), who comes to the store with his young son when the mist rolls in. Drayton is the typical horror-film hero, the guy you can depend on to make wise decisions and play offense and defense with skill. His weapon of choice: flaming mop of death (mop, Aisle 10; lighter fluid, Aisle 9) His cool, calm character is countered by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a religious zealot who has such a fervent hold on God’s gospel that she would worship a Glade plug-in (Aisle 3) if it were written in the Old Testament. Mrs. Carmody is apparently a member of a satellite branch of the Westboro Baptist Church: her love for God is reduced to hating all that he has created.
Half expecting the dreaded mist to be a psychological dilemma — a mind-controlling mist that produces decibel-crushing hallucinations maybe — I was delighted to see that there are real monsters lurking in the billowing whiteness outside the store’s doors. They begin as tentacles, then giant scorpion-like mosquitoes, then full-blown pterodactyls. They eventually evolve at a steadfast rate: tiny gnats into tarantulas into cat-sized creepers into horse-sized spiders into elephant-sized crabs into brontosaurus-sized beasts right out of Middle Earth. They came from somewhere, the movie hints, but it’s pointless to describe it here — impalement is impalement whether they come from Saturn or the Boy Scouts of America. They’re from Sweden if you need to know.
The Mist is often times very humorous, very much like Slither, last year’s gory laugh factory of a horror film. Mist isn’t as silly as that movie, but it is never 100 percent serious until the final closing moments, which will shock you like only Stephen King knows how. Its real appeal is the way it fuses tremendous monster frights with the situational dilemma of being in a confined space with a person so loony that Acme should name an anvil after her. That’s Mrs. Carmody, who will have your blood boiling so hot that you’ll melt yourself through the chair and have to watch the remainder from the floor.
I greatly admired the pacing and structure of The Mist. And I’m usually hard on horror films. This is the best one since last year’s The Descent, which was awash in shadow and blackness. The Mist is bathed in white and that fiendish, overcast mist. The whiteness, the religious subtext, the devilish ending … all totaled up, this is an unconventional film from a man who has become all too conventional recently. Thanks for trying something new out, Stephen.
Perfect humans have not yet been animated. Several films have come close, and Beowulf is the new leader, but there is still much work to do. Humans, as simple as our movements seem, are too elegant and unique for a computer to animate perfectly. If the motions aren’t synchronized with absolute precision then what are supposed to be totally believable pixilated humans come off as cartoonish as Bugs Bunny jumping into Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. Beowulf has many sequences that support the illusion that yes, indeed, those digital humans could pass convincingly for real humans and 80 percent of the general public wouldn’t know it in a blind test, say a series of TV commercials. Beowulf’s characters look that good. But — you had to know there was a “but” coming — there are many sequences that break the illusion entirely and remind us that we’re watching a digital world. The spread is about so: half the movie feels like a live-action movie, half feels animated. Considering all of it is animated, that’s pretty good. 
More than ever, and this is a testament to the skill of the animators, I’m frustrated with the “acting” of the characters and not so much the way they move or look. No matter how real a digital creation looks, it should be held to the same standards as real-human actors. The characters of Beowulf spend long passages gazing into the eyes of women, or into the oblivion pondering their fates. And as good as they look, they seem to be making acting mistakes. They also seem vacant, as lifeless as the computer monitors they were created upon. I should stop. Here I am halfway through a review and all I’ve talked about is the animation. It’s warranted, though. This is a technical film, and people are more likely to discuss how creepy-real the characters are before they discuss the plot. 
Beowulf is, of course, based on the 10th Century poem describing the life and adventures of the warrior Beowulf. I have never read the original poem so when I Googled its plot, I was not surprised to find that this Beowulf veers into its own translation of the codex. But I guess that’s beside the point since most of those who will be seeing the film this weekend will be going not to see Norse literature but to take a gander at Angelina Jolie’s naked front, which resembles one of Auric Goldfinger’s victims if they had lived. Yes, Jolie is in Beowulf. And yes, she gets mighty naked. Remember, that’s not Jolie, but a stack of pixels. And for the ladies, or the gay audience still swooning from 300, there is a male character who not only sheds his armor and medieval underpants (undoubtedly made of chain mail) but also grapples naked with a monster, which had to be awkward for the monster — “Cleave my skull but get that out of my ear, please.” 
Jolie plays one heck of a mother — Mommy Dearest in Viking format — who orchestrates a variety of sons against the warrior Beowulf, who is played by Ray Winstone, although he does not look like Ray Winstone even as other characters look like their voice actors. Beowulf has been summoned by a king to rid his land of a monster named Grendel (Crispin Glover!!!), a hideously disfigured giant who finds anything above a whisper as agonizing as his dentistry. Beowulf, the good soldier that he is, slays Grendel and draws the wrath of Grendel’s mother (Jolie). I intentionally neglected to warn of a spoiler alert for the above paragraph because that part of the text hasn’t changed in a millennia. For the rest of this graph, though, spoiler alert — feel free to skip down. Beowulf makes a pact with Grendel’s mother and retains the throne in the land as long as he produces an offspring to replace Grendel. So what happens when a slithery apparition with the body of the female half of Brangelina mates with the most ultimate warrior? A fire-breathing dragon — smoking hot, but in a bad way. 
For those of you rejoining the text, we were discussing a dragon, which appears in the film’s climactic fight sequence. Beowulf, now in his 50s and as grey as Steve Martin at 21, embarks on a dragon-slaying mission worthy of any of the Lord of the Rings movies. The dragon’s scaly appearance and movements are fantastic, as are those of the monster Grendel, who looks as though he had an Old Testament’s worth of leprosy injected into his twisted form. I’ve already spoken at length on animation, but it warrants a return. Some things aren’t animated well: the second appearance (post-nudity) by Jolie’s bad mommy, horse and riders, and many of the fighters in the first Grendel attack. But there are moments in Beowulf where faces (bearded ones especially) are as real as yours and mine. It’s so real, it’s kind of creepy. (Although not as creepy as director Robert Zemeckis’ last animated movie, The Polar Express.) Creepy is the way many people thought of certain characters in the last human-replicating animated movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Beowulf has learned from that film and gone a few steps farther to its success. 
But how real is too real? Scientists and robot engineers have long theorized that a mechanical robot that is too human will weird people out, so they have gone to extra lengths to make their mechanical creations appear more robotic than necessary, as if giant lugnuts and exposed wires somehow make an intelligent robot less threatening to mankind’s fragile ego. I think we’re on the edge of that same kind of thinking here with animated movies. How far should animation go? While the animators work that out, go and enjoy Beowulf and marvel at how far we’ve come from Steamboat Willie. 
143 words on 3 dimensions and 13 ratings If you have the chance to see the movie in 3-D, do so. That extra dimension of picture really does enhance the dazzling animation. And like Meet the Robinsons before it, Beowulf’s 3-D is not so much popping from the screen — although blood, spears, swords and fire occasionally do breach the screen — but the 3-D effect opens the back of the screen to give depth and distance to its scenes. It feels like watching a live performance on a stage, where the screen is the edge of the stage and the actors can exist in foreground and background. 
As for the PG-13 rating, what was the MPAA thinking? Nude characters, monsters, sexual innuendo, deaths, decapitations, impalements … Beowulf is a bucketful of gibs away from being an iMac’d version of Braveheart. But no F words, kiddies, so come watch the digital blood spray.***Elements of this review ran originally in the West Valley View.***
Fred Claus is not likely to end the writer’s strike. And if the writers don’t distance themselves from it, audiences might start picketing the writers during their picketing. Even Santa has become involved: coal for you, Dan Fogelman and Jessie Nelson, Fred’s naughty writers.
The concept of Fred Claus is much funnier than the actual film Fred Claus. In it, Santa Claus has a reject brother who almost destroys Christmas. Possibilities on that subject are limitless.
Indeed, the film grasps for better material. In one scene, Fred Claus, played by the motor-mouthed Vince Vaughn, goes to Siblings Anonymous to purge the jealousy and resentment he has for his bro, Ol’ St. Nick. He sits next to a Baldwin, the nutty religious one; Roger Clinton, brother to the former president; and Frank Stallone, who says his life was peachy until Rocky came out. Later, there’s a sequence where Christmas is almost outsourced. To where, though? India? Child sweatshops in Bangladesh? Chinese lead factories? The movie never explains, but the idea was hilarious.
The previous paragraph is all the praise Fred Claus is going to get from me. It’s a sad, sad, sad movie, an even sadder statement on the holiday season, which is reduced to gift-giving and elves doing kung-fu. Oh, and Santa having a snowball fight in a North Pole village set that could have been stolen from the It’s a Small World attraction at Disneyland. And if you’ve ever been on that ride, you know it was made with Popsicle sticks and dollar-store tinsel.
The film begins in something like the 17th Century when a rather large, round baby is born to a rather large, round woman (Kathy Bates). The baby is Nicholas, who will grow up, achieve sainthood and become Father Christmas. Fred — yes, apparently there were Freds in 1654 Holland — is immediately jealous because, after all, how do you upstage a saint? As it turns out though, Santa’s a jerk: he gives away personalized gifts, chops down trees and makes young Fred feel like a real chump. By the time the 21st Century rolls around, Fred’s pretty bitter.
The rest of the plot involves Santa (Paul Giamatti) bailing Fred out of jail and bringing him up to the North Pole to do menial toy tasks in preparation for the holiday season. Santa trusts his bro too much and gives him the job of declaring children naughty or nice, a job that requires sitting behind stacks of “Dear Santa” letters with a rubber stamp. Is Santa dense? Don’t give the big idiot important tasks, unless the plot is too dumb to know better. Fred Claus contains just such a plot.
The brotherly bonding is interrupted by an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) sent in to watch Santa run Christmas. An unseen executive board, we learn, has demoted the Tooth Fairy, canned the Easter Bunny and has sights set on the Jolly Ol’ Elf, who overspends their already tight budget. With the efficiency expert, Fred’s complacent girlfriend (Rachel Weisz), a horny elf and his leggy crush (Elizabeth Banks), all the baggage of the Claus Family and a miscellaneous tangent with an orphan, Fred Claus has enough plots and characters for five or six mediocre Christmas movies. The fact that they’re all crammed into this one is remarkable in its own special way.
Most bad movies crumble slowly. This one implodes almost immediately and begins sucking life into its void for the remainder. Most of it is shock and awe, Christmas on hyperdrive: A mob of Salvation Army Santas attack Fred, small people use kung-fu to protect the North Pole, a dance sequence interrupts toy making, and an entire scene written around the line, “Don’t bring a snowmobile to a snowball fight.” If your children liked the Tim Allen Santa Clause movies, then this movie will talk down to them in all the right ways.
This movie does something very creepy, too. Rather than shrinking human-sized actors down to elf-sized characters, or just using small people, the movie cuts and pastes normal-sized heads onto tiny child-like bodies. The digital effect is never convincing, in fact it’s unsettling and disturbing.
Above everything, though, Fred is just not funny. Vaughn, who’s already become a parody of his better performances, talks too much and about nothing of great importance. Most of the movie is two characters staring at each other waiting for laughs that never come. Giamatti, who will win an Oscar one day soon for something amazing, is too fat and cartoonish for Santa. His fingers, which must be makeup props, are as round sausages and have liver spots — overall, he’s a rather ugly St. Nick. And Rachel Weisz, who didn’t do a third Mummy movie because she wanted to pursue “serious acting,” seems to look into the abyss that is Fred Claus and longs for a corpse wrapped in toilet paper.
Fred is clearly trying to capitalize on the quirky comedy Elf, which is a treasure of a holiday picture. Instead it comes off worse than any film from a growing list of terrible Christmas movies that includes Christmas With the Kranks, Surviving Christmas, Deck the Halls, Jingle All the Way and the Santa Clause series, the last of which featured a robot Santa imposter. Elf was innocent, intelligent, charming and sincere in its goofiness. Fred Claus can’t even copy a tenth of its tenderness right.
And it never does capture the true spirit of Christmas, which is where Elf soared. Fred and Santa’s ultimate goal is to get gifts to children. A noble endeavor, but Christmas isn’t just gifts. What about peace, love, charity? Even more un-Christmas-like though: It gives a small cameo to rapper Ludacris, who has made an entire career out the same words that Santa uses — “ho ho ho.”
That’s definitely not the spirit of Christmas and Don Imus would completely agree.
***This review originally appeared in the West Valley View.***
In the past 36 hours I’ve seen 10 movies. It's like running a marathon of film. As sad as that may sound it may not even be a record for me, although I can proudly proclaim I’ve never sat through the 312-minute TV version of Fanny & Alexander or the 15-hour snooze-o-rama Berlin Alexanderplatz. See I have Sundays and Mondays off. I started late into the night Sunday and just kept going and going and going. Duracell, I’m expecting a check. 
