Filmmaking is a tricky business.  There are roughly a thousand plates spinning at any given point, and it’s completely up to a small number of people to pull it all together into a coherent whole.  Sometimes they succeed and create great works of art, and other times they fail outright.  But what about the rest?  There are plenty of perfectly decent films that just don’t have what it takes to be considered among the all-time greats, there are mediocre films that aren’t worth expending any energy towards whatsoever, and then there’s this curious little slice of filmdom: films containing elements of genuine greatness that somehow can’t save the terrible movies in which they exist.  Such as…

Sliding Doors

The Film: Sliding Doors tells the story of Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) in two separate timelines, one in which she catches her boyfriend cheating on her, and one where she doesn’t, and the fallout from both.  It’s a movie that tries to break from the mold of your typical rom-com and try to examine the role small choices play in our lives.

The Greatness: That premise is undeniably brilliant.  The movie juggles the separate timelines well, finding organic ways to alter Gwyneth’s appearance so that the audience doesn’t spend the first few seconds of every scene trying to figure out what story we’re in, allowing them instead to focus on the unique story that’s unfolding; and the film resolves in a pleasant enough way that demonstrates the curious path destiny will take us all on.

Why I Hate It: The movie has no faith in its brilliant premise, or rather, it has no faith in its audience.  So rather than tell an emotionally complicated story about people with multiple layers, each character is painted in the broadest strokes imaginable.  So Karen is saintly to the point that actual saints would feel nervous about offending her, her boyfriend is a spineless, sniveling weasel, and the woman he’s sleeping with is the most hateful shrew this side of Baby Jane.  The one attempt the film makes at an emotional complication comes when Karen’s new love interest (John Hannah, playing an impossibly decent fellow, go figure) is implied to have been lying about his past, but the movie resolves this plotline as fast as it possibly can.  The result of all this is one of the most obnoxiously blunt movies you are ever likely to see, clever premise be damned.

The Haunting

The Film: One of the original haunted house stories told on celluloid, The Haunting stars Julie Harris as one of a handful of people contacted to research Hill House, a mansion with a mysterious, violience-ridden past.  The characters all display some skepticism at first, but gradually it is revealed that the strange occurences are anything but coincidence.

The Greatness: Look, I know I’m in the minority on this one.  The Haunting is considered a classic horror film, and not without reason.  There are several sequences that are legitimately terrifying, thanks largely to the marvelous sound design.  The film never reveals more than it has to, only letting us see what we absolutely need to, and it is with this that The Haunting creates a truly unsettling air…

Why I Hate It: … that is completely undone by the constant voice over from the protagonist.  The film lets us hear what’s going on inside Julie Harris’ mind as she slips further and further away from sanity, but by doing this, we are never allowed to process the terror being projected onscreen for ourselves.  The film is able to create lots of tension, but as soon as her ethereal voice over crops up, it all deflates, and delivers a death blow to this supposedly classic film.

The New World

The Film: Terrence Malick’s telling of the Pocahontas story follows Colin Farrel’s John Smith into the forests of Virginia on his quest to ingratiate himself with the Native Americans, and the settlers who fear them.  The film brings realism to a story we’ve all heard since childhood, and tries to get at what life was truly like for everyone in the early days of America.

The Greatness: Given that this is by the man who directed Days of Heaven and last year’s haunting The Tree of Life, you know it’s really saying something that The New World is Malick’s most absolutely gorgeous films.  The cinematography lends a majesty and grace to every piece of scenery Malick found himself in the mood to film on any particular day, leading to a final product that is breathtaking to behold.

Why I Hate It: Okay, this is kind of a cheat, because I don’t actually hate this film, but it is by far Malick’s most tedious and (unintentionally) incomprehensible films.  The dialogue mostly consists of offscreen whispers, making it near impossible to follow; Malick’s typically jumpy editing is in full force here, which should make the film more spastic, yet somehow slows it down even further; and the whole thing runs about a half-hour too long, and I’m not even referring to the Director’s Cut.

Shane

The Film: This Western tells the story of the eponymous gunslinger, played by Alan Ladd, who wants to leave his past behind him and make a life with a family of ranchers.  But as more and more seedy characters make their way into town, Shane finds himself forced with the decision of whether to do anything about it.  Accompanying him through most of this is the child of the ranchers, played by Brandon De Wilde.

The Greatness: Shane possesses something few other Westerns possess, and that is a sense of morality.  Sure, other films like High Noon or Rio Bravo will show people reluctant to fight, but that’s out of a sense of their own preservation.  Here, Shane is reluctant to get involved because he genuinely doesn’t want to be responsible for taking another human’s life, it’s an admirable trait that lends a thoughtfulness not often found within the genre.

Why I Hate It: Brandon freaking De Wilde.  I was able to tolerate the kid in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close because I knew in the back of my head that no matter how obnoxious he was, he doesn’t even touch Brandon De Wilde.  Towards the end when Shane (59-year-old spoiler alert) decides to intervene, Joey (De Wilde) sneaks out and follows him, and I genuinely hoped he would get caught in the crossfire, because A) it would fit in nicely with the morality I talked about earlier, and 2) I wanted his character to die.  Instead the film ends with a shot of his stupid face yelling for Shane to come back, and I was left with a desire to punch a child in the face, which is not something I’m comfortable with.

The Lovely Bones

The Film: An adaptation of the book by the same name, this is the story of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is murdered and who witnesses the investigation and her family’s reaction from Heaven.  Her father and sister are relentless in finding her killer, who, unbeknownst to them, has been right under their noses the entire time.  Her mother, meanwhile, is devastated and can no longer handle her domestic life and leaves for California.

The Greatness: As George Harvey, creepy neighbor and serial killer, Stanley Tucci is phenomenal.  He nails the quiet menace and is absolutely chilling when talking to people who don’t know that he’s the one they’re looking for.  His performance is the kind that you rarely see, crafting a character you want to see get what’s coming to him, yet one to whom you don’t particularly want to say goodbye…

Why I Hate It: … because he’s the only good part of the movie.  All the rest of the film is able to manage is average at best, atrocious at worst.  I won’t harp too much on the rest of the performances, most of whom fall in the mediocre range (Mark Wahlberg is the exception, he seems to be giving a companion performance to his role in The Happening), so instead I’ll focus on the biggest, most insulting issue with the movie: it is one of the absolute worst adaptations in the history of cinema.  It begs the question, did Peter Jackson actually read the book, or did he get a quick summary from one of his friends?  So many little things are changed in the story, every single one of them to the film’s detriment.

For instance, the mother’s journey to California, in the book she is gone for about ten years, making it a significant occurence in her family’s life, in the movie she’s gone for about a month, and as a result it doesn’t pack any of the devastation it’s supposed to.  In the book, they never definitively get George Harvey, they have circumstantial evidence and his questionable behavior.  In the movie, they absolutely nail him and he flees, losing all the ambiguity that makes the film so wonderfully frustrating.  In the book, Susie has a companion in Heaven named Holly, she is there because they are of similar ages with similar interests and they died roughly around the same time, period.  The book is content to let some things go, because it realizes that life and death are messy businesses and sometimes things just are the way they are.  But in the movie, it turns out that Holly got murdered by George Harvey, too, because Peter Jackson wasn’t content to let any detail go that didn’t have some significance on something else in the film.  I could go on, but I won’t, because I’ll just get angry.  Just know that the book is bursting with serene beauty (seriously, read it, it’s phenomenal), and the movie is able to nail precisely none of it.

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Thrilling car chases, underwater battles, exciting gadgets, sultry women, an over-the-top villain stroking a cat, sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads: absolutely none of that can be found anywhere in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the latest adaptation of a John le Carré spy novel.  Following in the footsteps of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (and, I assume, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: the miniseries), the film crafts a tense and gripping spy tale out of the mundanities of spy life.

The film follows the recently (and forcefully) retired George Smiley (Gary Oldman) as he is tasked with covertly rooting out a mole in the upper ranks of MI6.  As Smiley, Oldman gives a masterfully subtle performance, hardly letting any emotion disturb his steely exterior.  He just watches and takes everything in, confident in his ability to just straight up be better than everybody else.

Helping him in his quest is the owner of the most British name in all of history, Sherlock‘s Benedict Cumberbatch, who is used as Smiley’s pawn inside the Circus, and Tom Hardy as the rogue agent who has access to information potentially confirming the mole story.  Both give performances worthy of their respective statuses as burgeoning stars, Cumberbatch especially, who only gets one real scene all to himself, but nevertheless sells the absolute hell out of it.

The entire film basically stands as a treatise on the sheer pleasures of watching actors acting.  The cast is packed to the gills with talent, to the point that the film would be worth watching regardless of direction, editing, etc.  Fortunately the rest of the production was handled with as much care as the casting.  The direction from Tomas Alfredson (following up the brilliant Let The Right One In) is staggering, he uses long lenses and creative editing to provide us with an almost voyeuristic look at the bureaucracies of British Intelligence.

The timeline shifts without warning, the story juggles about a dozen different plotlines, and most of the communication is expressed through knowing glances and body language.  The whole thing winds up as sort of an anti-James Bond film, with any violence occurring in spurts and presented in a cold and straightforward manner, and while that may sound daunting or inaccessible, it isn’t.

What it is is brilliant.  But for as much brilliance lies in the spy tale, the real power of the film comes from the fleeting character moments, like Cumberbatch’s scene that I mentioned above, or Tom Hardy’s revelation that he wants a family, or the look that comes across Oldman’s face when he spots his wife in a passionate embrace with another man.  The mole hunt provides the intrigue, but it’s these vital moments that give this film its unflinching humanity.

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Young Adult, Jason Reitman’s newest film, is two things: a quirky, sad, funny movie, and a case study in the perils of uncontrolled nostalgia.  The film centers on Mavis Gary, played with zeal by Charlize Theron, a ghost writer on a once-popular, soon-to-be-cancelled series of young adult novels.  Fresh off a divorce and dealing with professional uncertainty (not to mention living in a state unbefitting the glamorous city girl she believes herself to be), she receives an e-mail from her high school squeeze, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), showing off him and his wife’s brand new baby girl.

Being in a tailspin already, Mavis does not take this well, but rather than shake it off like a grown up, she instead decides that she and (the happily-married) Buddy are meant to be together and packs up and heads off to her hometown (quietly, so as not to wake up her one night stand, who she leaves sleeping… in her bed).  From there comes a chain of increasingly uncomfortable events that see Mavis put even more emotional distance between her and a life she left long ago.

Along the way, she bonds with former classmate Matt (Patton Oswalt), a fellow arrestedly-developed 30-something (though for wildly different reasons), and it’s this relationship that forms the twisted, black heart of the film.  These unlikely kindred spirits don’t really help each other grow, but they do give each other someone with whom to be brutally honest about everything.  Matt is the only one with whom Mavis can be comfortable and the only one who can clearly see through the heavily manicured artifice she carefully applies every day.

It’s a brutal, yet tender relationship, one befitting the vulgar, emotional movie that encompasses it.  This is a film where the most comfortable and fun scene involves Theron and Oswalt bonding over their mutual hatred of a guy in a wheelchair.  It’s a strange balance that the film strikes, and it’s a wonder that it pulls it off with as much vigor as it does.  And most of the credit for that goes to Theron.

Her performance as Mavis is one of the most daring tightrope walks you will ever see from a mainstream actress.  She plays Mavis as an obviously broken, sad woman who you can’t help but feel for, but who is also an unapologetic, manipulating sociopath who doesn’t understand why the world doesn’t bend over backwards for her.  She’s brazen and horrible, sure, but she’s also so crushingly pathetic that your heart goes out.

Also in top form is Oswalt who continues his streak from Big Fan of using his well-established sarcastic geek persona as a mask for deep wells of vulnerability.  And credit is also due to Jason Reitman, who continues to grow as a filmmaker with each movie.  There is a shot late in the film showing all the knick-knacks and pop paraphernalia that Oswalt has in his bedroom that almost directly mirrors the establishing sequence of Ellen Page’s bedroom in Juno.  But whereas the shots in that film seemed to say, “This is exactly who this girl is, isn’t she awesome?”  These near-identical shots now say, “This is exactly who this guy is, isn’t that sad?”

It’s subtle, but it hits on a major theme of the film.  As I touched upon way back in the first paragraph, rampant nostalgia and the pitfalls of such are constantly on the fringes of Young Adult.  Whether it’s Oswalt’s figurines demonstrating just how pathetic his life is, or Mavis’ OCD-like obsession with her and Buddy’s song coming back to bite her once she realizes he has repurposed it for his wife, or simply the notion of a woman trying to reclaim her glory days when literally everybody has moved on to better things; the film goes out of its way to demonstrate that the past is something to look back on, not cling to.  Now if only our protagonist would learn that for herself.

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Horrible, stupid title aside, the latest (and hopefully last) installment in the Transformers franchise is leagues ahead of its predecessor.  It doesn’t quite match the simple thrills of the first one, but it didn’t awkwardly attempt to graft an unnecessary and overly complicated mythology onto the series, and should therefore be held in much higher regard than Revenge of the Fallen.

My main problem with the second film (aside from it being over-long and boring and a complete mess) was the wonky retconning that the whole “Optimus Prime is magic” thing turned out to be.  A friend of mine claims that this is my fault for not accepting the world of the movie, but I maintain that it was the producers wanting the dramatic tension of killing a main character and then just deus-ex-machina-ing their way out of it.

Fortunately, none of this came into play during Dark of the Moon (God, that is just awful).  Optimus Prime’s magic rejuvenation thing (I couldn’t care less what it’s actually called) still plays a part (by this point it’s canon, so I won’t complain), but the movie as a whole pretty much gets back to the “bad robots be bad, good robots be good, they gon’ fight” aspect that made the first one such good escapist fun.

The plot concerns Megatron and company’s attempt to steal old Autobot technology that would allow them to teleport their home world to Earth’s atmosphere so that they can begin to rebuild (I know that sounds complicated, but they don’t really go into details, to the film’s credit).  This obviously upsets the Autobots (given that it would, y’know, destroy everything they’ve come to call home) and so they head to the moon where the Autobot ship carrying the technology crashed after a failed escape attempt, and gather what they can find of it along with Sentinel Prime, the former Autobot leader and the creator of the technology in question.

Back on Earth, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is stumbling through life in an ostensibly hilarious slapsticky way.  He’s struggling to find a job, his car’s off saving the world without him, his parents are in town, and he’s worried about his love life, even though he should be thanking his lucky stars, what with having netted himself another ridiculously hot girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whitely) after it’s revealed that Megan Fox dumped him for one reason or another (my theory: she’s Megan Fox, he’s Shia LeBeouf).

It’s the typical hour of non-robot fights that have become curiously standard in these movies about robots fighting each other, but it’s fairly inoffensive this time out (no pot brownies are accidentally ingested), plus it leads to a superb John Malkovich supporting performance, and a pretty hilarious crack from Sam’s mom pertaining to his new car.

However, the movie does have problems.  At 157 minutes, it is still way too long for a summer blockbuster.  Also, there is an overabundance of comic relief, in that it seems half the characters function as such, making for unnecessary distractions at times when the movie really doesn’t need them (and while Alan Tudyk technically falls in this category, he gets a pass because he’s Alan Tudyk).

But for all the fundamental things wrong with the film, it’s still largely entertaining and (amazingly enough) watchable.  Michael Bay seems to have finally listened to his detractors, because there are several times when he holds on shots for several (!) seconds, making for a movie that isn’t a totally incoherent mess (what a concept).  Couple that with zero excessively grating performances and a plot that only seems complicated, but not in any ways that matter, and what we are left with is a movie about giant robots fighting that is actually fun.  Why was that ever an issue, again?

Oh yeah, and nobody gets humped by anything (kudos?).

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Uncanny.  That’s about the only word that can describe Steven Spielberg’s instincts when it comes to film-making.  Sure he’s stumbled here and there, but there’s something about his films that you can’t deny.  Spielberg films look the way movies should look.  They feel the way movies should feel.  They might scare the pants off you, bring you to tears, or crush you with a wave of nostalgia, but one thing’s for sure, you will remember that film.  Because Spielberg, despite possessing some of the best commercial instincts of anybody in Hollywood, makes films that aren’t quite like anybody else’s.

Well, until now, I guess.  With Super 8, J.J. Abrams does his best Spielberg impression (with the man’s blessing, of course [he serves as Executive Producer]), and for the most part it’s, yeah, uncanny.  The story concerns a group of Ohio adolescents with a penchant for making movies.  One night while filming at a train station, they are witness to the derailment of a train with some mysterious cargo, cargo that they may have inadvertently captured on film.  From there the military shows up and starts sweeping the town, the power goes out in patches, and pets and townspeople start to disappear.  Then things start to get weird.

The film is a throwback to Spielberg’s Amblin output, a period in film Abrams is clearly familiar with, as what he’s created is a stunning re-creation.  The cinematography does a lot of the work, lending a majestic air to every corner of late 70′s suburbia on display.  Shots of watertowers, chain-link fences, and mill-workers are filmed with a grace not seen often enough, and as a result, every frame winds up as a thing of beauty.

But for as much credit as is due to the cinematography, the real champions are the kids comprising the principle cast.  Possessing a natural and unforced chemistry, they lend the movie a lived-in quality that was imperative to the film’s success.  These kids aren’t bundles of quirks or balls of energy, they are kids and they act like it, and when they are ultimately confronted with danger, they react like kids would likely act.  In that, Abrams perfectly captures the spirit of a Spielberg film.

The movie is not without its problems, though.  Abrams, despite expertly crafting a sense of magic in the beginning, has trouble maintaining it, and as a result, the movie kind of falls apart in the third act.  Actually, it doesn’t fall apart, so much as change.  By the climax of the film, we have stepped away from Spielberg, and moved more towards Cloverfield.  But that’s only a mild disappointment, given the unchecked awesomeness of the first two acts.

So what we are left with is an astonishing film with some third act problems that are easy to ignore.  Because what we really have here is a bravura piece of film-making.  One that dared to pick up Spielberg’s mantle, and didn’t wind up a total catastophe.  A film that deals simultaneously with monsters and the difficulties of parenthood, and that treats both with necessary reverence.  A film that looks up with awe, while also trying to figure out exactly how things work down here.

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The Hangover was not a great movie.  Shut up, no it wasn’t.  It was a funny movie, that much is true, but as far as things like plot and character development are concerned, well, let’s put it this way: if you took everything from when the guys are on the roof to when they are driving back from Vegas, threw it away and replaced it with something completely different, you would be left with the exact same movie.  Which is fine.  As far as gag delivery systems go, The Hangover is tops.  But where do you go with a sequel?

Well (and this should come as no surprise), they decided to go the “same, but bigger” route.  So the movie we are left with hits a lot of the same beats.  Let’s see, bizarre facial mutilation for Ed Helms?  Check.  Small lifeform for Zack Galifianakis to tote around?  Check.  Montage of pictures detailing the forgotten night?  Check.  Sardonic, yet strangely earnest song by Stu?  Check.  Mike Tyson cameo?  Check.  Ken Jeong’s junk?  Check.

If that looks like a lot of sameness, you’re right.  The Hangover Part II is very similar to it’s predecessor, and the law of diminishing returns is very much in play here.  Whereas my face actually hurt when I left the theater after the first one, there was no danger of that happening this time around.  Don’t get me wrong, chuckles (and the occasional guffaw) were had, and quite frequently, but even the best joke stops being hilarious after you’ve heard it several times.

So what, then, about the bits not blatantly cribbed from the first film?  Well, there’s not a ton, but what is there is pretty damn funny.  Most of it heavy on the raunch, which actually works in the film’s favor, because the one truly new beat that the sequel hits is plenty hysterical and was virtually impossible to spoil in the trailers (if you’ve seen it, you probably know what I’m talking about).

Also there’s a monkey, and if you can’t mine humor out of a monkey (especially one as expressive as the one they found), well then you should just give up and move back into your parents’ basement and just stay there so we don’t have to deal with you anymore (too harsh?).  And of course, the chemistry between the three leads remains strong as ever, but where the humor was pretty evenly spread amongst them the first time, Galifianakis does pretty much all the heavy lifting in this outing (and Justin Bartha remains a non-entity).

But it is pretty funny, and that’s really all that matters (well, that and good box office numbers, which, check).  There’s no real important plot developments, but there weren’t in the first one either.  What we’re left with is a less successful, yet still worthy follow-up to one of the most impossibly funny movies to come out in recent memory.  It always had a tall hill to climb, and so you can’t really blame it for chickening out and taking the path already cleared by the first one, even if all the useful materials on that path had already been cleared out, leaving very little for the sequel to provide to the audience that they hadn’t already seen and… you know what, on second thought, skip this.  Go see Bridesmaids instead.

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I’m mildly ashamed to admit that, yes, prior to this past weekend, I had never seen Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise, the film that shook the Sundance Film Festival and helped shape the way independent cinema would look for the ensuing decades.  I say mildly, because my film geekdom didn’t really kick in until about two years ago, so even if I had seen it prior to that, I kind of doubt I would have enjoyed it much.

And I would be really ashamed if this were my first introduction to the works of Jarmusch, but I’ve already seen Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Broken Flowers.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that I hadn’t seen what is, if not his best, certainly one his most important films to date (at least in how it relates to his other works).

So I became set on making this film the next of his that I saw.  So much so, in fact, that I even denied myself chances to watch Down By Law and Night on Earth.  Eventually I got tired of waiting and bumped it up on my Netflix queue and finally took it in this past Sunday.  Straight away you can tell that this is quintessential Jarmusch.  Stark minimalism completely fills this film (which seems counter-intuitive, but shut up).  Filmed in merciless black and white and edited by laying whole scenes shot in one take end to end and eschewing transitions in favor of a few seconds of black between them, the entire movie works so very hard to further the theme set forth by the title.

The film concerns a man named Willie (John Lurie) who emigrated from Hungary years ago to fashion the perfect life for himself in America.  By his bombed out apartment and penchant for TV dinners it’s painfully evident that he hasn’t quite succeeded, but he perseveres.  When a call from his aunt informs him that his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), fresh off the plane from Budapest, will be staying with him for a few days before moving to Cleveland, it makes him nigh apoplectic at the thought of an old world influence on the life he’s managed to carve for himself.

But after spending some time together, a mutual affection grows between Willie and Eva, despite her ever-present tape player constantly set to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” that Willie claims to hate, perhaps because it reminds him of the spell America put on him that has since worn off.  But Eva is still fresh in this new world, so Willie’s spare apartment, New York’s barren streets, and the thought of living in Ohio are met with the wide-eyed optimism of a child going to Disneyland.

But a year later, when Willie and his best friend Eddie (Richard Edson) decide to get out of town for a few days, they head to Cleveland to find that the once bright-eyed Eva has been replaced by one that’s more appropriately world-weary.  It doesn’t help that Jarmusch films Cleveland as if it were some sort of snow-strewn, post-apocalyptic hellscape, but it adds a visual metaphor for the crushing despair that the midwest has brought upon Eva’s dreams.

So Willie, Eddie, and Eva decide to hit the road for Florida, and the promise of a new paradise, and with that marks the return of Mr. Hawkins, still to the chagrin of Willie, suggesting his hopes for a better life have been permanently dashed.  Once in Florida, Willie and Eddie head straight to the dog track to better their financial situation, leaving Eva in the hotel.  When the dogs fail, they change course and head to the horse races instead, again leaving Eva behind.

But Eva, tired of continuously being denied paradise, heads out on her own.  What she finds is less than she hoped for, the black and white cinematography adding a palpable ugliness to every lingering shot of all the strange corners of Florida Jarmusch could find.  So after a mix up involving her hat leads a mysterious man to give her a large payoff intended for someone else, Eva uses that as an excuse to once again head out in search of something better.

She heads to the airport with anywhere in Europe as the intended destination.  Unfortunately, the only thing available right then is a flight back to Budapest and the promise of continuing dissatisfaction.  Willie and Eddie show up at the airport to stop her, and are told that she got on the plane to Hungary.  Willie buys a ticket so that he can get on the plane to take her off it, but the plane takes off with Willie still on it.  As the film ends, Eddie is headed back to New York, Willie is returning to the place he shunned long ago, and Eva has headed back to the hotel.

Whether it’s to embrace her current paradise, or patiently wait for her next one, it isn’t revealed, but as Screamin’ Jay once again plays over the end credits, we can rest assured that a spell has once again been cast over the three of them, even if what they get is stranger than what they expected.

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“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.” 

That quote comes courtesy of Anton Ego, the infamously vitriolic food critic from Pixar’s Ratatouille.  Indeed, criticism of all forms usually accounts for little more than a guide, one factor among hundreds that will inevitably be forgotten once the bit of culture in question is consumed.  It’s a tremendously profound statement, and one all critics (professional and amateur) should probably keep in mind, if only to keep their cynicism in check.

But it’s not the point of Bad Movie Month.  So while I respect the notion of the artist being more important than the critic, for this month I will only be focusing on the first part of Ego’s statement.  Because it is fun to write, and quite frankly, it’s also easier.  And after Oscar season, I need that.  I need to rip into some easy targets with as much hate as I deem appropriate.  I need some slaughterin’ lambs, as it were.  And the first lamb up is a classic of sorts.  That beacon of black and white ineptitude, Edward D. Wood Jr.’s anti-masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space.

The film begins with Criswell making no attempt to hide the fact that he needs cue cards.  Reading an astonishingly poor-written statement (“These future events will happen to you in the future!”), he sets the tone for what is to follow: a film that, from stem to stern, practically drips with incompetence.  It is the story of space aliens who have come to Earth to destroy us by reanimating our dead to attack us.  Now admittedly, the idea of Alien-made zombies is pretty badass.  There is a really cool movie to be made from that idea, this one isn’t it, though.

Because while that plan sounds cool, it was Plan 9 for a reason.  There were apparently 8 plans that failed prior to that one.  And based on the progress they made in the film, there will probably be a Plan 10 (and 11, and 12, and…).  You see, while the aliens have the technology to reanimate corpses, they apparently can’t do more than one at a time, and the machine apparently needs time to recharge.  All told, over the course of the film, they create… wait for it… three zombies!  And that’s looked at as good progress!  So much so that the alien leaders decide to call back two of the three ships sent to carry out the plan.

Unsurprisingly, this is when the aliens’ plot goes to hell.  The American government is onto the aliens (USA! USA! USA!), because despite only creating zombies in one cemetery, they apparently felt the need to go sightseeing around the country.  Ed Wood probably just wanted to show off his amazing flying saucer special effects (complete with strings!).

So eventually, the Army Colonel assigned to investigate the goings-on at the cemetery arrives in town, and, with a group of locals in tow, finds the alien ship and heads aboard.  Prior to this point in the story, the film had been dragging.  After a wonderfully cheesy opening, the middle part was focused pretty squarely on exposition, shoddy exposition, acted shoddily.  But once the heroes confront the aliens, that’s when the film transcends stupid and becomes something more divine.  It becomes gloriously stupid!

Because the aliens aren’t just arbitrarily trying to kill us.  They’re preventing a Universe-sized tragedy in the making.  The aliens, being “eons of our Earth-years” ahead of us, know of a weapon of truly devastating force, and they know it’s only a matter of time before we develop the technology and use it ourselves, because we’re, like, totally stupid, and they’re so smart, you guys!  The weapon in question is a bomb that would, and I need you to sit down for this, BLOW UP SUNSHINE! 

The Solaranite Bomb is a bomb that would split the tiny particles that make up sunlight with a ferocious amount of energy (which is just stupid regardless, but doubly so, because light is made of waves, not particles), and since Earthlings are just violent brutes, we would use it willy-nilly, thereby destroying everything the sunlight touches, which is everything, everywhere.  Like I said, glorious.

The scene also hits upon the wondrous cheapness of the film as a whole.  In an ironic defense against the notion that we Earth natives are prone to violence, one of the locals punches one of the aliens in the face.  That sends him careening into an instrument panel perched atop the ricketiest table in the world.  Which seems curiously at odds with how turbulence-prone the ships were earlier shown to be.  But the best display of lazy set-dressing comes from the scene between the aliens and their leader, whose command room’s walls are just lined with curtains.  That’s it, just curtains.  All the way around.

A close second is either of the two scenes taking place in the alien-puncher’s driveway, in which we see a car, and behind the car we see… absolutely nothing.  Just blackness, not a fake tree, not a bush, not a fence, just nothing.  They had the car, and they decided that was enough.  It barely counts as a set, and that, apparently, was ok.  It’s an unintended metaphor for the film itself.

So what to make of it?  Well, there’s no way around it, Plan 9 is really bad.  It’s a bad movie.  But it’s the bad movie.  And that’s true for a reason.  Because you don’t watch it because it’s bad.  You watch it for just how bad it is.  Because every square inch of this film is terrible.  So much so that you start to wonder if maybe Wood didn’t know exactly what he was doing.  But he didn’t, I don’t think you could make a film this bad on purpose.  And that’s what’s great about it.  It’s so completely sincere.  If you tried to make a bad film, you wouldn’t get the police lieutenant gesturing wildly with his gun (with his finger on the trigger, no less), you wouldn’t get a Bela Lugosi body double who looks exactly nothing like Bela Lugosi, and you wouldn’t get dialogue that includes such doozies as “The light blinded me so bad, I couldn’t see anything at all!”

No, the ineptitude here is genuine.  And that’s what has endeared the film to so many people.  Sure, the enjoyment comes packaged with a thick coat of irony, but so what?  When a film comes complete with this much (unintended) hilarity, it doesn’t matter why people enjoy it, just that they do.  Even mockingly.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

In Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Natalie Portman plays a ballerina who, by all accounts, has achieved perfection.  She is unmatched for technique, she is more devoted than any other dancer at her company, and the Artistic Director (Vincent Cassel) has a crush on her.  The only problem?  After being cast as the lead in Swan Lake, she is being asked to transcend perfection, and that task proves damaging, both physically and mentally.

For the physical aspect, Aronofsky provides a disturbingly visceral attention to the abuse ballerinas have to endure for the sake of their craft.  He also masterfully uses sound to enhance every creak and groan of floorboards and bones, and by doing so he creates an unsettling air of dread that permeates the film and doesn’t subside until well after the credits have rolled.

As for the mental, Portman displays a shocking vulnerability as the dancer, Nina, struggling to find the key to transforming from the virginal purity of the White Swan to the unhinged darkness of the Black Swan.  A transformation she is completely unequipped for; still living with her mother who treats her like the 12-year-old girl she used to drive to dance class, still sleeping in a pink bedroom bedecked with stuffed animals, who is uncomfortable dealing with the advances of men, and who can’t even handle a night out without a psychologic episode.

Helping her with the transformation (although helping probably isn’t the right word) is fellow ballerina Mila Kunis.  Kunis brings a surprising darkness to the role of Portman’s real life Black Swan, making her presence felt in all corners of Nina’s world, even when she is not actually there. 

Filling out the supporting cast, Cassel gives an astonishing performance as the Artistic Director who uses sex and quiet vitriol to completely disassemble Natalie Portman into the psychotic mess she becomes solely for the benefit of his production.  And Barbara Hershey is phenomenal as the horrific stage mother who feels completely entitled to live vicariously through her daughter, and who responds with emotional outbursts when she is denied the opportunity to do so.

All these elements combine to form one of the most vividly upsetting and altogether astonishing films of the year.  Aronofsky skillfully balances sex and violence, abject horror and astounding beauty, the physical and the mental and uses all of it to provoke, confound, and mystify the audience.  In doing so, he has managed to transcend perfection in making a film that is more than a sum of it’s parts.  A film that makes for an unsettling experience, but one that is an absolute pleasure to behold.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

In 2003, the unthinkable happened to Aron Ralston.  While on a hiking trip in Utah he found himself with his arm pinned under a boulder.  Being a solitary individual, he wound up in this position without telling anyone where he was, thus leaving him only one possible option for escape.  127 Hours dramatizes that event while simultaneously bringing the horror of the situation into stark focus.

James Franco plays Aron with a swagger that could only be broken by a giant rock.  In the canyon he conveys the resourcefulness, the restlessness, and the helplessness that the real-life Ralston experienced, and so powerful is his performance that we, the audience, fully understand why he has to do what he did.  Franco’s performance is so magnetic, in fact, that it’s a shame the film around him couldn’t match it.  Don’t get me wrong, 127 Hours is not a bad film, it is actually quite good, but with such a strong presence at the center, the film’s faults become more obvious.

Chief among the problems is Danny Boyle’s direction.  Boyle has been accused in the past of favoring style over substance, especially when it came to Slumdog Millionaire (a sentiment I did not agree with, because I walked out of that movie with a giant grin on my face, and there’s something to be said for that), and in this case I am inclined to agree with that assessment.  While some visual style is required for a film like this (after all, it is one person sitting in the same spot for over an hour), Boyle too often goes overboard with hallucinations and dream sequences that threaten to take away from the enormously compelling story at hand.

Now granted, those hallucinations and dream sequences were real things that Ralston really dealt with during the five days that he was stuck, but Boyle gives them too many flourishes that at times make this harrowing film about survival look like a music video (and not a terribly good one).  Boyle is not completely out of his element here, though.  In the pre-boulder segments, Boyle expertly shows us the pure euphoria that Ralston is able to squeeze out of life, making his ultimate fate all the more tragic.  And he manages to convey the same cavernous landscape both as an exciting place full of adventure, and as a desolate hellscape after the boulder falls.

And I must congratulate him for not shying away from the key scene in the film.  If you’re not aware, yes, the film does include a graphic depiction of Ralston removing his right forearm with a pen-knife.  But the brilliant thing about the film is that by not leaving Aron, we absolutely comprehend why he has to go to such drastic lengths.  Yes, the scene is unflinching and brutal and horrifying, but all that completely melts away the second he steps away from the boulder.

But this is more than a movie about a guy getting stuck under a rock.  This is a film that celebrates life.  It’s about the joys of being surrounded by the ones you love and who love you in return.  It shows how being connected and being free don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  And how desperation and fear can drive people to do extraordinary things, even if those things aren’t all that nice to think about.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture