Horror spoofs are nothing new. You can go back to 1948 and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein if you want to laugh at monsters. But clever horror parodies are hard to find. Shaun of the Dead comes to mind. So does The Return of the Living Dead, a 1985 romp that takes aim at George Romero and his zombie movies, hitting the mark more often than not. Watch it for free by clicking here.
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Critic Roger Ebert describes the world on display in Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 as an immersive experience, and I can’t disagree with that assessment. But this is not the England filmgoers have grown accustomed to seeing. There are no by-the-rules Scotland Yard inspectors, no Sherlock Holmes, no Jane Tennison. There is nothing “feel good” in this crime drama, period.
Director Julian Jarrold, in this first installment of a televised trilogy based on novels by David Peace, has expertly crafted a noir that depicts 1970s Yorkshire (in northern England) as a place of unrelenting evil and despair. This hopeless atmosphere, punctuated by acts of violence, is the movie’s strength. But I also think it’s a weakness.
The protagonist of the film is young Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a hotshot reporter who is arrogant and mouthy, but also a bit naïve. When Eddie investigates a string of serial killings targeting young girls, he stumbles upon a web of corruption among city officials and businessmen. He also falls in love with the attractive mother of one of the murdered girls.
My problem with Red Riding: 1974 was my sense of detachment. The character of Eddie, as written, is no doubt realistic, but it’s difficult to empathize with him. The kid is a jerk, and no matter what horrors he uncovers, I don’t particularly care about his fate. His romance with the mysterious Paula (Rebecca Hall) is abrupt and uninvolving, and he seems to have no other social life. In a narrative this downbeat, and which offers no comic relief, it should be a requirement that viewers be given some character – any character – with whom they can relate.
What results is a film I admired, but didn’t much like. As Ebert observed, Red Riding: 1974 is a directorial triumph, a dark and bleak world successfully recreated. But this fairy tale was too grim for my taste. Grade: B-
Director: Julian Jarrold Cast: Andrew Garfield, David Morrissey, Sean Bean, Rebecca Hall, John Henshaw, Anthony Flanagan Release: 2009
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“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that [Piranha] is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops out of the turnip.” — James Cameron, creatively dropping clichés like “throw under the bus” and “last few drops out of the turnip.”
So let me get this straight: Re-releasing Avatar with just a few additional minutes of footage, and then charging full admission, is somehow not getting “the last few drops out of the turnip”?
*****
I was thumbing through Entertainment Weekly when I saw a picture from the TV series Sons of Anarchy. The picture was of star Katey Sagal and some kindly, grandmotherly actress. I recognized Sagal, but who was this elderly actress? I read the photo caption: Hal Holbrook.
*****
“It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.” — Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic .
My theory is that society is a pendulum and that now it’s swinging to the side of estrogen. When society declares some members the “winners” and some the “losers,” that means that — unlike what feminism would have us believe — not everybody wins. So, how to correct the imbalance? The same way that feminism encouraged fathers to support their daughters: Mothers will have to stand up for their sons.
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A Prophet is a tough film to criticize. It boasts a whopping 97 percent approval rating on rottentomatoes.com, so other critics are obviously impressed. It’s a serious crime drama that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
I thought the movie was compelling – but not riveting; good – but not particularly memorable. It’s always watchable, but never as sensational as Scarface, nor as epic as The Godfather, and it has fewer colorful characters than GoodFellas. Do I recommend it? Sure. Is it a “great” movie? I don’t think so.
A Prophet follows the career of prison inmate Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a young convict who gets recruited by Corsican crime boss Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and then offered protection from other inmates. This presents a problem for Malik, who is drawn toward the Arabic prisoners because of their shared ethnicity. As we watch Malik progress from the Corsicans’ gofer to polished criminal, we realize it’s just a matter of time before he and Luciani will clash.
All of this is well-acted and directed. But we learn nothing new about criminals or incarceration. Prison is hard on young men: check. Prisoners segregate themselves by racial or ethnic identity: check. Men who enter penitentiaries are not rehabilitated, but simply learn how to become better criminals: check.
Will you like this movie? Probably. Will you remember it a year from now? I’m not so sure about that. Grade: B
Director: Jacques Audiard Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen Release: 2009
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Time-travel movies are often problematic. If characters can zip forward or backward in space/time to alter events, why do they do so only at some junctures, and not others? And once you get into that whole “butterfly effect” business … it’s enough to drive a viewer bonkers.
Time After Time, a 1979 lark starring Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, also runs into these problems when plot complications cause it to lose steam, and credibility, in its final half hour. But until then the movie is a fanciful good time.
McDowell stars as H.G. Wells, and the famous philosopher/novelist has a problem: Jack the Ripper has stolen his time machine and transported himself from 1893 London to 1979 San Francisco. Wells, nineteenth-century romantic that he is, follows the infamous serial killer into the future and in the course of his pursuit falls in love with a quirky bank employee (Steenburgen).
There are two reasons this movie is so enjoyable: 1) McDowell’s amusing turn as Wells, a man completely out of his element in San Francisco as he navigates modern food (dining at “that Scottish place” – McDonald’s), escalators, movies, and an electric toothbrush; and 2) the cute – but never precious – romance between Wells and banker Amy. Steenburgen’s combination modern woman/ditzy brunette is a perfect foil for Wells, and you’ll find yourself pulling for these two.
I’m a sucker for H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and (sometimes) time-travel movies, so this is great entertainment for me. But don’t take my word for it. Here is a capsule review from someone called “moneygob,” commenting on Time After Time at YouTube: “This was a strange film. I started watching it at 3 p.m. one Sunday afternoon and the film finished at 1 p.m. the same day. Very realistic film!” What more can you ask for – a great movie and it takes no time to watch? Grade: B+
Director: Nicholas Meyer Cast: Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen, Charles Cioffi, Kent Williams, Patti D’Arbanville Release: 1979
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My eyelids were drooping, and my chin was resting on my chest, when suddenly someone barked, “You talentless little shit!”
I jerked fully awake, and swiveled round to see if anyone else was in the room. No, I was quite alone. The shout had come from the TV screen, where actor Christian McKay was chastising his young co-star, Zac Efron, on a city sidewalk. “I hope you enjoyed your Broadway career, junior, because it’s over,” McKay admonished Efron. I blinked. Was this some out-take from a “behind the scenes” confrontation during the film’s production? Could it be that McKay shared my disdain for Efron’s performance in the movie, and somehow the DVD people had allowed this candid moment into its “extras”?
Wrong again. The film, Me and Orson Welles, was still in progress. I was seeing Orson Welles, McKay’s character in the movie, berating an aspiring actor played by Efron. It was clearly an example of art imitating life.
It’s probably not fair to peg any one performance for the success or failure of a film, but in this case it’s tempting. Me and Orson Welles dramatizes the days leading up to Welles’s triumphant Broadway staging of Julius Caesar in 1937. But the movie makes the fatal error of focusing on the bland and humorless Efron, rather than McKay, who absolutely nails the bombastic genius Welles. Had the film been more like a superior movie with a similar plot – My Favorite Year, starring Peter O’Toole – it could have worked.
“Jesus that’s all we need, a dozen critics with wet asses,” Welles harrumphs at another point in the film. But the trouble with this movie is not critics with wet posteriors; it’s a young star who is still wet behind the ears. Grade: C+
Director: Richard Linklater Cast: Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Ben Chaplin, Zoe Kazan, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, James Tupper, Leo Bill, Imogen Poots Release: 2009
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Sure, it’s sentimental goo, schmaltzy and hokey and ridiculous on one level. But The Way We Were boasts a couple of classic scenes (including the ultimate bittersweet ending), and it does have Streisand and Redford in their movie-star primes. Plus, the title tune is a great song. Watch it for free by clicking here.
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by George Bernard Shaw
Here’s a classic example of how Hollywood routinely tacks on happy endings to film adaptations of plays and novels. Ignoramus that I am, I had no idea that the denouement of My Fair Lady, the Audrey Hepburn-Rex Harrison film version of Shaw’s play, had been so drastically altered from the original ending. Turns out that Shaw had Eliza marry Freddy in the end, and poor Higgins was left to his own devices. Shaw’s ending might not be particularly “happy,” but it’s dramatically (and realistically) sound.
What matters most in this play is Shaw’s language. All stage and screen versions of Pygmalion are successful because Shaw, with this witty dissection of class, social mobility, and gender roles, was a master of character and dialogue.
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Last House on the Left – groundbreaking movie, or a vile chunk of excrement? Depends on who you ask. Here are my random impressions after I watched the film and then the DVD commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and two of the film’s actors:
Oddly, Craven seems both proud and dismissive of his low-budget, career-defining movie. He says he never revisits his first film, yet implies that its horrific violence was somehow a commentary on the Vietnam War. Craven describes watching TV coverage of the war in 1972: “American cinema did not show violence as I was seeing it in this [televised] footage. It was ugly and it was sadistic, and there were sexual overtones … we were seeing, like, really shocking footage every night as we had our dinner.” I wish he’d elaborated on the “sexual overtones” part of that statement.
Craven then claims that House’s “basic premise” was lifted from the Ingmar Bergman classic, The Virgin Spring, adding that his film’s over-the-top violence sprang from his own religious upbringing in a strict, Baptist household. “It [making Last House] allowed me to be bad for the first time in my life … people would just be outraged and say, ‘Those naughty boys.’”
So, was Last House an anti-war statement, a rebellion against Craven’s puritanical parents … or simply a case of boys being “naughty”? This quote from Craven might provide a clue: “I think I wrote it more without thinking about it, than I did thinking about it.”
Porn actor-director Fred J. Lincoln, who plays the sadistic “Weasel” in the movie, isn’t nearly as ambiguous as Craven in his evaluation of the film’s legacy: “Sometimes I wish I could forget I was there,” says Lincoln, “because as I watched them edit I thought, my God, this thing is disgusting. No one is ever gonna look at this piece of shit … It sucks.” Lincoln adds, “Actually, I wish it would have been banned in the United States, to be honest with you … probably about 80 girls got raped after that movie came out. Not something to be proud of.”
And finally, there are the reminiscences of actor-musician David Hess, who is much happier with the film than Lincoln is, in particular a graphic rape scene featuring Hess and actress Sandra Peabody (Sandra Cassel): “Sandra was your archetype, upper-middle-class Protestant – repressed Protestant … how do you deal with that?
“I scared the living shit out of her, man. She really thought I might – I started to pull her pants down and grabbed her tits and everything … and I looked up at Wes at one point and I said, ‘Can I?’ and then she freaked.” Hess is clearly pleased as he recalls the infamous scene: “Pulling her pants off, right? And then drooling in her face, which I did intentionally. It just so, it humiliated her. There was all of a sudden this look. It would have been easy to fuck her, right there on the set. I mean, because she really gave in. She gave up and you could see this look of fatality in her face. That was real!” Peabody, wherever she is, was not interviewed for the DVD.
I’ll give Craven the final word: “Either I’m a very sick bastard or I showed something that people don’t like to be shown, which I suspect is what the actual truth is.”
Director: Wes Craven Cast: Sandra Cassel (Sandra Peabody), Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Fred J. Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler Release: 1972
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Trendy Expressions to Throw Under the Bus
iReporters — Just because you have a camera on your cell phone and you happened to be at Sea World when Shamu the Killer Whale gobbled up a trainer, that does not make you a journalist. You are a schmuck with a camera who happened to get lucky.
Optics — CNN, Fox News, NBC, CBS — all of the networks — have fallen in love with this irritating new way of saying “image,” “visuals,” or “photo ops,” all of which are perfectly good terms.
Throw Him or Her Under the Bus — I guess you’re no longer allowed to backstab or double-cross anyone.
Back in the Day — This stopped being cute way back in the day.
*****
Stephen King’s Bad Habits
What do the following books have in common? Christine, Misery, The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, The Dead Zone.
Now what do these books have in common? Cell, Duma Key, Under the Dome, Insomnia, From a Buick 8.
If you said the first batch of Stephen King novels became movies, and the second group did not, you are correct. If you said that the first six books were much, much better than the last five books, you would also be correct. But why is that?
King often writes about quitting his old drinking and drugging habits, and we are all very happy for his new life of sobriety, but you can’t tell me that dropping those vices hasn’t affected his writing — in a bad way. As far as I’m concerned, King wrote his last really good novel , Misery, in 1987. That was the year he quit drinking and drugging.
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