Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part One: The Less Worse, I Guess)

 It's fair to say that you might see the first few movies on this list and say "really, _____ made it on your 'Worst' list, but that didn't?" That's fair, I suppose; I could hide behind the veil of "subjectivity" and argue that this is my list, not yours, but the name of the blog isn't "General Cranpire's Den of Filmduggery" (note to Cranpire - that's a great title and you should use it, post-haste), so that should be obvious who the opinions belong to. Spoiler Alert: The Highest Bidder! But yes, okay, it's under a weird criteria that I determined where to stop the "worst of" without including one of last year's Liam Neeson movies (not the one where he fights vampires, I assume strictly from the title). That's how I roll, kids.


 So it makes sense to just get Non-Stop out of the way, and by that I mean mostly just link to my review from earlier this year. It was short enough to sandwich in with Bye Bye Birdie and Die, Monster Die!, so while I didn't hate it, clearly the movie didn't make much of an impression, review-wise: but, looking back at it, it's way longer than needs to be in a recap. This section of the review does seem to sum things up pretty well:

"It's almost ridiculous enough to recommend in and of itself, but the fact that the first half or so is also a decent game of "cat and mouse" works in its favor. In the "Liam Neeson, man of action" genre, it falls somewhere between Taken and Taken 2 - neither as enjoyable stupid as the former, nor as inane and redundant as the second [...] If you're inclined to enjoy movies like this, or saw the poster and said "I'll rent that," you're better off watching Non-Stop than, say, Drive Hard. If you're more predisposed towards, say, Neeson in The Grey, this is not going to be your cup of tea, but if you liked Flightplan... well, um, you liked Flightplan. Congratulations?"

 Fading Gigolo is a movie I'm guessing most of you didn't see, because it came out not long after last year's "is Woody Allen a pedophile or not" row that was everywhere between the Golden Globes and the Oscars but was pretty much gone by the time Magic in the Moonlight came out (a movie I'll be discussing in another part of the recap). At this point I'm going to stop talking about that, because I learned what a bad idea it is to mention the words "Woody Allen" or "Roman Polanski" and "controversy" on the internet. But yes, Woody Allen is in Fading Gigolo. He did not direct it - John Turturro did, along with writing and starring as the titular character, Fioravante. He's a florist, and his friend Murray (Allen) just lost his bookstore and needs money. Fioravante agrees to become an escort with Murray as his manager, in the service of eventually fulfilling the fantasy of Murray's dermatologist (Sharon Stone) and her friend (Sofia Vergara) to have a three-way.

 That's probably enough of a movie right there, but Turturro also includes an entirely separate plot about an Orthodox Jewish woman named Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) who Fioravante falls in love with, much to the chagrin of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a community police officer. At some point, a council of Rabbis get involved, and it plays out like a bizarro version of being confronted by the mob, complete with Murray needing his lawyer (Bob Balaban) to save him from charges of being a pimp. It's a mostly harmless and sometimes amusing movie, even sweet sometimes, but not something that stuck with me for very long afterward. There's a better movie with John Turturro that will be showing up later in the recaps, so stay tuned for that.

 While we're on the subject of "better movies," I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.

 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 Speaking of ambivalent, here's a good time to mention Bad Words, a movie people seemed to like a lot more than I did. While it's true that I liked Horrible Bosses 2 less than Bad Words, Jason Bateman is jerk instead of beleaguered everyman was not novelty enough to win me over what is essentially a one-note joke. If Bateman hadn't directed the film and the star was, oh, let's say Billy Bob Thornton, I somehow doubt anyone would even be talking about this, another film in the "bad" series of comedies. (For the record, that review is probably NSFW, just based on the first sentence).

  The best thing I can say about Automata is that it's a better version of I, Robot than I, Robot is. Actually, there are a lot of things to like about the film, which is not-so loosely based on I, Robot, but for some reason the film as a whole is underwhelming. There's little doubt in my mind that the film is trying to skirt by under the radar without people noticing the similarities to Alex Proyas', kinda loud, kinda dumb Big Willie Style / Shia LeBouf CGI action fest, including scaling back to rules of robotics from three to two (and changing one of them to suit the narrative - that robots can't self repair). It's a visual feast, for what I have to imagine was not a large budget (director and co-writer Gabe Ibáñez shot the film in Bulgaria).

 Stop me if you've heard this before: in the future, there's been a catastrophic global weather shift, which caused most of Earth to be irradiated. People live in cramped cities, with some living in zeppelin-like housing units. Robots help humanity, although they've so permeated the culture that they're considered just as useless as any of the other trash (shades of Elysium, if you remember that movie from, you know, last year). Cop Sean Wallace (Dylan McDermott) finds one repairing itself, and blows it away, causing the ROC Robotics Corporation to send insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) to investigate. What he finds could change the ROC corporation forever, as well as endanger his boss, Robert Bold (Robert Forster) and his wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and their unborn son.

 And what does he discover (SPOILER???): that the robots are evolving, some past the point where they require humans at all. But they just want to be free, man. This doesn't sound familiar or anything, so I'm not going to belabor the comparisons to I, Robot any more. You get it. It's a more visually stylish, more sober approach to the story, after Jacq is rescued by the robots (one voiced by Melanie Griffith, who is also another character in the film, and one voice by Javier Bardem, although I didn't realize that until I saw his name in the credits). The ending is kind of predictable, but it feels like there's more at stake than in I, Robot, and that violent ends can and will come to any character.

 So why didn't I like it more? That is an excellent question, and I'm not convinced I can give you a good answer. Despite the fact that it does almost everything I, Robot does, but better, in part by giving is a Neill Blomkamp sheen or grime and decay over everything, there's something strangely inert about Automata. I can't quite put my finger on it, but instead of being invested, I found myself distanced, at times bored. It wasn't that you can see where the movie is going a mile away - that can be said of Horns, too, which is at least partly a fun ride - but that despite all of the effort into making the film look great, Ibáñez never quite makes the humans interesting. Banderas certainly gives it his all, but neither he nor the robots are all that gripping as characters. It's a very nice film to look at, and has a lot of things I would recommend about it, but I hesitate to recommend it over any of the better science fiction films released in 2014. And there were a lot, as you'll see when we get near the top of my list.

 There's a degree to which I enjoyed Batman: Assault on Arkham, one of the better DC Animated films that I've seen in a while. Despite the misleading title (this is, make no mistake, a Suicide Squad movie that Batman pops up in periodically), it's fast paced, sporadically funny, surprisingly violent, and pushes the PG-13 as far as they can with animated sideboob. Being that it's a Suicide Squad story - one tied to the Arkham games, and specifically Origins - the death toll is quite high, including many of the main characters. Unless you're a massive DC fan, you probably won't know many more characters beyond Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Maybe Captain Boomerang, and if you didn't, yes, that's a real thing. It has the odd distinction of having Kevin Conroy as Batman but not Mark Hamill as the Joker (although Troy Baker does a fine job) - also odd because Conroy isn't the voice of Batman in Arkham Origins, which ends with the setup for this movie. It's short, and I'm struggling to remember much more than a few offhand references to The Dark Knight and using the layout of the asylum you'll immediately recognize from the first game. So, uh, recommended?

 On that decisive note, we'll leave it here for now, but there's more. Next time, I'll move a little farther up the list, to mixed-positives that you might want to check out (with some caveats), although I have the feeling that one of them might be more contentious than anything included in this section. Until then...

Shocktober Review: High Tension

  So, High Tension has been out for eleven years, and looking back, I never reviewed the film. There's probably something tucked way back there in the old days of the long lost Blogorium (or buried in a Word file) that amounts to a paragraph, and I'm almost positive I can tell you what it says:

 "Great 2/3rds of a movie, really violent, well made, but damn if it doesn't fall apart at the 'twist*'."

 That was, for two or three years, the way I felt about Alexandre Aja's second film**: it was an extremely well made film, one that lived up to its title all the way until the "greenhouse" scene, and then completely collapsed in logic as it lurched towards an ending. And I'm not alone in thinking that. It seems to be the universal response to High Tension for people who've only seen the film once. When I saw High Tension the second time (and subsequent viewings), it's more apparent that Aja and co-writer Grégory Levasseur had more carefully planned out what seemed arbitrary the initial viewing: there are hints, and details in the background that explain where the antagonist found weapons to kill with, and aside from one important element that was (wisely) deleted from the finished film, most of the seemingly arbitrary decisions are actually on screen.

 Of course, to discuss that further means SPOILING High Tension for anybody who hasn't seen it, and I don't want this review to become a "look here and then look here and then here" tutorial. I'd rather people who saw it, liked it, but felt the ending didn't make any sense to go back and watch it again. You know how the story plays out, and what happens the second or third or fourth time is that you can focus on the details of what Aja is and isn't showing you. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll be watching this again very soon to answer one lingering problem I have with the film which specifically leads to the "greenhouse," but I'll save that until after the SPOILER warning. For everyone else, watch High Tension, enjoy High Tension, and don't immediately give up on the film when the "twist" happens. You'll want to; I know, many of us did, but it's not as out of left field as it seems. Just very well disguised. SPOILERS to follow...

 So the second time I saw High Tension, one of the first things I noticed was the shotgun above the mantle above Alexia (Maïwenn)'s parents' fireplace. At that point, I realized that the killer / Marie (Cécile De France) wasn't magically finding murder implements or pulling them out of her magic truck - she noticed them around the house when she arrived. Yes, most of the movie - particularly after the bedroom scene that instigates her murder fantasy - is from Marie's perspective, but Aja is careful to plant most of the seeds in camera so that even though we think the killer is "Le Tueur" (Philippe Nahon), it's mostly plausible that she could be "seeing this" in a dissociative identity delusion. How did Marie manage to move the armoire and push it fast enough to remove Alexia's father (Andrei Finti)'s head on the bannister? Probably the same way she was able to slice off Alexia's mother (Oana Pellea)'s hand - Marie is a lot stronger than we think she is.

 There are certainly logic lapses, and I'm not trying to give Aja and Levasseur a complete "pass" for them - I don't know what happens to the car that Marie wrecks outside of the greenhouse when she's chasing the truck from the gas station. The last time I saw the film, I was positive you could still see the wreckage before she chases Alexia into the woods. Aja cut a scene where Marie and Alexia drive past the truck that "Le Tueur" uses, in part because he thought it was too obvious to give that information away too early. While I can't argue with that, it does open the plot hole of "where did Marie get that truck?" It also makes the introductory scene of "Le Tueur" seem like it's something the audience is seeing objectively and not - as it is ultimately revealed - to be Marie's invention of a villain she can conquer to win over Alexia's affection.

 The subtext of Marie's rescue fantasy has been the subject of debate about whether High Tension is homophobic or not. Marie is clearly uncomfortable telling Alexia that she's in love with her and depending on how you read "Le Tueur" (the killer), he's either an expression of repressed homosexuality lashing out at a hetero-normative world, a manifestation of her self-loathing about how she feels, or a straw man she invents to fulfill a "damsel in distress" fantasy. Arguably, it could be all three, but there's not much arguing that because he doesn't appear until after she self pleasures that the idea of "sex" and "death" are linked in Marie's mind. How the two are linked is less apparent, given the book-ending chapters and that most (but not all) of her victims are men.

 Her idealization of "Le Tueur" is that of a disgusting, obese, middle-aged man, slovenly kempt and prone to using severed heads to pleasure himself (in fact, it's how we're introduced to him). He "collects" women, seeing them only as sexual objects to toy with and eventual kill. My initial reading of her manifestation of masculinity was along the lines of the "homophobic" reading. After seeing the film the first time, one written and directed by men, it felt like having him be how Marie sees herself (which, technically speaking, is what she's doing by imagining she isn't murdering and kidnapping) was indicative some self-loathing, of projecting her lesbian attraction to Alexia as monstrous, as purely destructive.

 With time, and subsequent viewings, particularly in light of understanding that the "twist" wasn't just thrown in to the film, I'm more inclined to go with the bookends of the film and read Marie's fantasy (i.e. the film) as her attempt to win over Alexia in a jumble of fractured logic. If she really doesn't believe that she is "Le Tueur," and that she's "saving" her, then one could argue this is not self loathing but a rejection of hetero-normative relationships by someone who truly can't distinguish between reality and her imagination. It's certainly how the film begins and ends - that Marie genuinely has no idea what she's done - so I'm more inclined to put the "homophobic" argument aside, at least a little bit. When the reading of High Tension is that "a woman loves her best friend, snaps, kills her family and any stranger who impedes her, and believes she's doing it so they can be together," I can't totally ignore that interpretation.

 That said, whether you choose to read anything into High Tension / Haute Tension / Switchblade Romance, it's hard not to appreciate what Aja accomplishes with the film. It's a genuinely suspenseful ride, with some truly disturbing moments of violence. The use of Muse's song "Newborn" still gives me chills - it's so well matched to the editing and the specific point in the film it's used. I can't think of the song without also thinking of High Tension. However you choose to read the "twist" - positively, negatively, or not at all - as a horror film, High Tension delivers for almost all of its running time. For some, all of its running time, but I'll concede that it can be very confusing the first time. Give it a second chance, and I think you'll be surprised. I was.




* Here's exactly what I wrote in a piece about the "Splat Pack": 

I really like High Tension, and while I've heard the pyschoanalysis, I don't buy the twist. Not at all. Too many elements of the movie are abandoned in favor of the twist, and I hold it akin to Frailty, a movie that lacks the suspense and build of Tension, but still has a rotten third act "twist" that undermines the first two acts. That being said, High Tension works for a long time and builds on itself well enough that I can pretend to agree with the psychoanalysis. 

 ** In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't seen Furia, but I didn't want to write "debut" when that's not accurate.

Horror Fest 6 Day One: Piranha (2010)

 Alexandre Aja promised boobs and gore early on when discussing his remake of Piranha, and he delivered. There's a certain pleasure derived from seeing a movie with someone who hasn't seen it before, and Piranha is so shameless in its false tension and pure exploitation punctuated with extreme gore that you can't help but laugh. It's the kind of movie that you know immediately what's going to happen, but instead of being disappointed that it does, it delights you by being more depraved in its execution.

 This is a film, after all, that includes a nude underwater ballet sequence AND a Grand Guignol bloodbath set piece where a wet t-shirt contest turns into an unmitigated blood bath. Where Jerry O'Connell's quasi-Joe Frances gets his johnson chopped off, swallowed, and spit back out at the camera. Where Richard Dreyfus cameos as Quint from Jaws and is killed by piranha. Where Christopher Lloyd provides exposition. A film with no less than four porn stars in the cast. If you're expecting more than what you get in Piranha, your expectations are astronomic.

 I find that the film loses none of its charm or watchability on repeat viewings - it was just as enjoyable tonight as it was six months ago as it was when I saw it in 3-D in the theatre. It's nice to know that a filmmaker can toy with you without insulting your intelligence, and entertain and exploit at the same time.

 Okay kiddos, it's time for bed. Nap'n Howdy isn't the young buck he used to be, and bed means more these days than it did during Horror Fest 1. I'll be back tomorrow with more reviews!

Democracy is back.... and so is HORROR FEST

 Well gang, I've been sitting on this announcement for the last week or so, but now that things have opened up in such a way that I feel comfortable in declaring there will be a Horror Fest at the end of Shocktober. But not just any Horror Fest:

 HORROR FEST 666

 Coming October 28th-30th, 2011

 Now here's where the Democracy in Action kicks in:

 See that note on the right side? 80s Slasher Night? The Cap'n has a backlog of 80s slasher flicks from this summer that he wants to showcase - many of which have simply been forgotten in the sands of time. I have so many, in fact, that I don't even know what to show.

 So here's what I'm going to do - Starting tonight, I'll set a poll up every week from now until October 21st listing five different slasher titles. Choose one title that strikes your fancy, and the finalists with the most votes will play on Sunday night. I haven't had time to watch all of them, so I don't have preferences here. All of them look cheese-tastic and I'm sure they'll all be tons of fun.

 I'll have more details in the weeks to come, but I wanted folks to know that while Summer Fest was a bust this year, Horror Fest will be back and better than ever just in time for Halloween!!!

2010 Year End Recap, Part Three

An important note from the Cap'n: While every review available is included as a link, the placement of the film on these "year end" lists may not appear to reflect the review. As time passes, I have the opportunity to reconsider films, revisit initial reactions, and every now and then, change the way I feel about movies.

Finally, we come to day three, my favorite films of 2010. This comes with the caveat that I have not yet seen Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, a film that seems evenly split between ridiculously enthusiastic reactions and equally dismissive pans. Does that mean I should put the list on hold for Black Swan? Well, no, and here's why: I have a list of movies - a fine list, might I add - of films released in 2009 that I didn't see until 2010. They always, without fail, end up in what I call the "Lost in the Shuffle" list*. They have individual reviews, but I do not revise year end recaps to insert them into the conversation. With one exception, this list is comprised of films I saw in 2010 and reflects the year 2010.

These are, for me, the best films I saw in 2010. That may not make them the "best films" of the year, and I can assure you many of them won't be mentioned come "Awards Season," but they entertained, challenged, and confounded me long after the first viewing. As usual, links to the reviews will be provided, along with an asterisk (*) for films that had festival showings prior to 2010 but were not widely available until last year.

I hesitated putting these in an "order," but what the hell. You should see all of them, but since there are fifteen films, I'll put them from "favorite" to "very favorite" just to spark discussion. From the best to the best of the best:

15. Double Take* - The more I think about Double Take, the more I'm willing to overlook the artificiality of Grimonprez's "recreation" of the Hitchcock double meeting, not only because he announces the artifice by introducing the audience to the physical and vocal "doubles" early in the film, but because it's beside the point. This film, experimental in its storytelling, its premise, and its juxtaposition, does stick with viewers after the initial confusion wears off. A film that can do that belongs with the best of the year.

14. I’m Still Here - A film that would be higher on the list, were it not for an even more ballsy attempt at blending reality and fiction that doesn't show its hand. All the same, whether you view Joaquin Phoenix's downfall into misery and drug addiction as a "document" of true events or a film that rides the fine line between real and fantasy, it succeeds in making viewers uncomfortable, yet unable to turn away.

13. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus* - We may never be able to see what Terry Gilliam originally planned for audiences in 2009, but the end result - finished after the death of Heath Ledger - is nevertheless a valiant and visually fertile attempt to pick up the pieces and tell the same story. There's so much to recommend in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - the battle of wits between Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits, the execution of the inside of the Imaginarium, the ability of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell to stand in as Tony - that I'm willing to overlook the scattershot manner the film tells its story. Gilliam, even when compromised, is always worth a look, and this is a step above The Brothers Grimm and Tideland by a long shot.

12. Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy - This documentary sets the bar for covering a series of films, and I sincerely doubt anyone will ever top it. As somebody who watched His Name was Jason, Halloween: 25 Years of Terror, and any other so-called "comprehensive" doc covering horror films, Never Sleep Again blew me away. At four hours, anything you could possibly want to know about the Nightmare on Elm Street series is covered, and that's not including the extra disc of content that covers EVEN MORE stories never before told. Even without Johnny Depp, Patricia Arquette, and Frank Darabont, Never Sleep Again is so comprehensive, so addictive, and so frank about the making of this series that even casual Freddy fans will be able to keep it on for the duration. I guarantee this is the one film on this list least seen, and with as many horror addicts as there are that visit the Blogorium, I want to change that.

11. Piranha 3-D - A shameless explosion of gore, gratudity, mayhem, and B-movie acting, from the director of High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes. You won't come out of this film feeling smarter, or even with a greater critical acumen, but as 3-D exploitation goes, you're going to have to search long and hard to to better than Piranha 3-D.

10. Get Him to the Greek - In almost every way superior to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, of which this film is a spin-off. Get Him to the Greek never forgets that it has to be a rock and roll comedy, and as the wild rocker lifestyle of Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) spins out of control, so too does the film... but never to the point that it loses its heart, the bewildered but surprisingly balanced Aaron Green (Jonah Hill). More to the point, writer / director Nicholas Stoller never forgets that a comedy is supposed to be funny, and Get Him to the Greek is in abundance.

9. Shutter Island - The hate for Shutter Island astounds me, but it's there. People bag on Scorsese for making The Departed, and now are deriding his decision to embrace a technicolor laden exercise in pulp film-making. The twist is apparently the final straw, but I'm going to be honest with you: despite having guessed the twist before watching the movie, I was nevertheless riveted as the story unfolded. I don't understand why people hate the film, either as an exercise in homage or as a spiritual sequel to Cape Fear that nobody knew they needed. Give it a shot - either it will work for you or it won't.

8. The American - Since my initial review, I've seen a series of write-ups that insist Anton Corbijn is commenting on American foreign policy with this film. You could make the argument that yes, the concept of "I make the weapons but I don't use them and I get very defensive when you use them on me" is a direct criticism of the United States military complex. Fair enough, I suppose. Either way, The American can be appreciated as a excellently told story with fine performances, or as a critique masked as cinema.

7. Waking Sleeping Beauty - I don't really want to add too much more to the review. Waking Sleeping Beauty is exactly the documentary the Walt Disney company needed right no; its honesty is refreshing, its story is too amazing to be real, and its execution is refreshing in a world of "talking head" true stories.

6. MacGruber - I haven't laughed at a film this hard all year. Period. If you're still avoiding the MacGruber because it "looks stupid," or because somebody told you it probably sucked, rent it and find out for yourself. Then, after you buy it, show it to everybody you know that didn't see it.

5. Inception - I'm terrified to watch Inception again. So much of the film relies on allowing Inception to unfold in front of you, knowing nothing of what's to come, that any familiarity with the twists and turns could tumble the whole house of cards. That said, Christopher Nolan made a wildly ambitious film with ideas that stick around after the film is over, not to mention some set-pieces I've never seen before. It's technically impressive, well-acted, with an understandable "heist" narrative that kept audiences from feeling lost, but never holds your hand after setting up the rules. I'm not going to pretend its wholly original - nor will I play into the many "Inception stole from" arguments - and I really hope that this film is more The Prestige than Memento, where multiple viewings hold up.

4. Exit Through the Gift Shop - Did Banksy create Thierry Guetta? Does Mr. Brainwash really exist? How much of Exit Through the Gift Shop is designed and how much is document? I have no idea, and I don't care. The discussions that this film generates will be fascinating once more of you see it, but regardless of that, it doesn't matter unless Exit Through the Gift Shop can't hold up on its own, and it does.

3. True Grit - There have been reasoned, well argued points about my reaction to the potential racism in True Grit in the comments of my review, but I'm still not convinced that the individual instances don't point to a larger comment. That being said, I'm not saying Joel and Ethan Coen are engaging in racism so much as their ironic detachment in comedy is raising a point about systemic racism (at least in post-Civil War Arkansas). What I can't deny is that True Grit is an extremely well made film, a very entertaining movie that pushes violence beyond the PG-13 rating, and a film that, despite its history as a novel and very well known prior adaptation, manages to stand on its own in the Coen brothers body of work.

2. Best Worst Movie* - Best Worst Movie has been traveling from festival to festival since 2009, but had I seen it then, it would have been on my top films of 2009 list. As it was, I caught a screening of Best Worst Movie in New Mexico shortly before its DVD debut (the way almost everyone else saw the film) in 2010, so here it is. It's not necessary to have seen Troll 2 before you watch Best Worst Movie; if you see it on its own, chances are you'll seek out Troll 2 afterward. This is a fantastic "personal essay" film (my working moniker for documentaries where the filmmaker is central to the narrative) covers the cultural phenomenon of the "best worst movie" through the eyes of Troll 2's cast, crew, and fans, but particularly dentist George Hardy, who was in the film and moved on with life. Hilarious, disturbing, touching, and embarrassing, Best Worst Movie is easily my favorite documentary in a year of excellent non-fiction films.

1. The Social Network - Broadly speaking, the only thing I fear about seeing The Social Network again is a faint concern that Aaron Sorkin's dialogue might be "too" perfect: the scathing comebacks, the one-liners, the returning phrases throughout the film - I fear an off-chance it feels too clever for its own good. But even so, I can't wait to pick up The Social Network next week. I have no misgivings in recommending this film to anyone, and especially to people who think it's just "the Facebook movie." Trust me, it's not. The Social Network wasn't a movie made because it was temporally appropriate; it's a fully realized character study that covers events we lived through and weren't necessarily paying attention to. David Fincher's assured hand as a director marries with Sorkin's dialogue, and the cast - from Jesse Eisenberg to Andrew Garfield to Armie Hammer to Rooney Mara to Justin Timberlake - are pitch perfect. Does it have small faults? Yes, it does. Do they keep me from considering The Social Network from being my favorite film of 2010? Not even a little.




* For the 2009-10 list, that would include The Road, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Big Fan, A Serious Man, Black Dynamite, The House of the Devil, The Informant!, and the unfortunate An Education and I Sell the Dead.

Blogorium Double Feature Review: Piranha and Piranha 3-D

Designed to be a Jaws-ripoff, Piranha has the benefit of fond memories on the part(s) of kids who saw it on TV during the 1980s. It doesn't hurt that producer Roger Corman, screenwriter John Sayles, and director Joe Dante are held in high esteem among geek culture, so 1978's Piranha tends to get a "pass" without much need for revisitation. After watching the film again yesterday (for the first time in years), I'm afraid that the Cap'n is going to have to be the Grumpy Gus that ruins that nostalgic glow.

The story is reasonably simple: after two teenagers (Roger Richman and Janie Squire) go missing, "skip tracer" Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent to find them along a mountain stream. She enlists the help of hermit Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) and unwittingly sets loose a pack of genetically modified piranha from a disused military base. Warned by Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) of the danger these piranha pose to the summer camp and water park downstream, Maggie, Paul, and Hoak travel in a homemade raft in a race against time to stop the piranha.

They're blocked in their efforts by the military - including Colonel Waxman (Bruce Gordon) and fish expert Dr. Mengers (Barbara Steele) - local police, and overbearing camp director Dumont (Paul Bartel), as well as the impending opening of the Aquarena, a water park on the other side of the dam. The piranha are moving all over the place, and seem to always be right ahead (or behind) our heroes, who take a while to get where they're going (reasons why are not limited to being arrested, being held in a military camp, being stuck on the raft, and driving through town in stolen vehicles).

It isn't that Piranha is awful by any means; it's just that for a movie about killer piranha, there's surprisingly little killing, and between the (mostly off-screen) kills, there are long stretches where people wander around, or where the audience is continually introduced to new characters (this happens at least six times in the last thirty minutes).

Mind you, the characters are mostly worth keeping up with, it's just that the ones introduced near the end (particularly Dick Miller's Buck Gardner) don't actually do much but stand around during the chaos. I could understand if Miller's sleazy businessman (who insists on opening the Aquarena water park despite warnings of impending piranha attacks) got more comeuppance than wandering around, dazed, after the massacre, but that doesn't happen.

Considering the three main names behind the camera (Dante, Sayles, and Corman) one would expect Piranha to be a) funnier, b) more subversive, or c) more titillating than it is. There's a handful of exposed breasts, two or three good gore shots, and the occasional shot at authority, but more often than not there's a lot of chatter and very little piranha action. Almost all of the kills take place underwater, so the audience is left with shots of blood bubbling up from below the surface, punctuated with a stop-motion or puppet piranha every now and then.

There are weird touches, like an air-breathing fish with legs that sneaks around Hoak's lab for no reason (while the camera continually cuts away to the stop motion creature, it serves no purpose in the narrative), or an animated shot of a piranha opening its eye when the teenagers dangle their fingers in a military test pool (the best place to go skinny dipping!).

On the whole, though, Piranha is a bit of a patience test when one considers that it comes from the producer of Death Race 2000, Humanoids from the Deep, Rock N Roll High School, and Galaxy of Terror. It has enough going for it not to be terrible, but Piranha is certainly slower than your expect (or remember) it being. There's a lot of waiting for something to happen and not enough happening to in Piranha, which keeps it from being better than it could be. While it's watchable, even if purely for nostalgic reasons, you might want to consider checking it out yourself before inviting over the gang.

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Piranha 3-D, on the other hand, wastes no time on giving the audience what it came for: nudity and gore, at first alternating but eventually combining them. If the Aquarena in Piranha was the set piece for carnage, the Wet T-Shit contest elevates it to grand guignol levels: gallons of blood, missing limbs, porn stars cut in half, faces ripped off by boat engines, an Eli Roth head explosion, and more than one back torn open (an image lifted directly from the original).

Sensing that audiences wouldn't have the patience for long sequences of chatter, punctuated with the occasional suggested piranha death, Alexandre Aja packs the 89 minute running time of Piranha 3-D with the cgi devils, chomping, stalking, and tormenting an exponentially larger crowd of college students. And of course, this time they deserve it; compare to the Aquarena, Lake Victoria (joke no doubt intended) may as well be Sodom, and the ancient piranha a wrath visited upon Spring Break co-eds.

The truth is that Piranha 3-D falls somewhere between the realm of Skinemax and USA Up All Night and doesn't aspire to do much more. Oh sure, there's the proverbial "bone"s thrown to horror theorists: a strong female protagonist (Elisabeth Shue), semi-defined character types (more on this in a second), and a not-even-implied castration of Joe Francis-esque Derrick Jones (Jerry O'Connell). While it's not my favorite castration related joke in a horror movie (that still belongs to Black Sheep), the Cap'n can say with certainty that he's never had a 3-D severed member spit in his direction before Piranha 3-D.

Speaking of which, the post-conversion 3-D is put to reasonably good use. The abundant nudity and gore gets the lion's share of "third dimension"-ing, but there are also a handful of very nice underwater perspective shots that benefit from a better sense of depth. Most people will point you in the direction of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan-esque all nude underwater sequence featuring Kelly Brook and Riley Steele, but that should give you a very good idea who the target audience for Piranha 3-D is: thirteen year old boys. Unfortunately, I have no idea how they're supposed to sneak into the movie without 3-D glasses.

While the film delivers on the gratudity and gore, there's not much in the way of character development. Most members of the cast don't even have time to be "types", since the film is in such a hurry to get to the piranha gone amok action. Richard Dreyfuss barely registers in a cameo before he's fishmeat, and Christopher Lloyd has two scenes to make an impression (which, admittedly, he does). There's a lot of talking and not much character development, which some might argue is the point in a movie like Piranha 3-D, but if that's the case, why even suggest that Danni (Kelly Brook) might be competition for Kelly (Jessica Szohr) in winning Jake (Steven McQueen)'s affections? Danni actually turns out to be one of the more decent characters in Derrick Jones' entourage, so when she (is this even a SPOILER) dies late into the picture, it's slightly more surprising than it should be. Adam Scott, Ving Rhames, and Elisabeth Shue do a lot of reacting and riding around, and there are at least two more deputies that simply show up during the Wet T-Shirt massacre.

I sense that lots of Piranha 3-D is sitting in storage somewhere, waiting for an UNRATED release on home video. Not that the film feels like it's holding back, but there are clearly scenes in the trailer that aren't in the movie as it was released. Unless I missed something, Paul Scheer's character disappears completely from the movie without explanation, and Ving Rhames' death left a lot to be desired. It seems like the mantra (probably from Aja) was to keep it short so it doesn't wear out its welcome like the original Piranha did.

To that end, Piranha 3-D is exactly what it sets out to be: dumb fun. It won't change the world or make you feel better about yourself (unless you're a teenage boy watching Piranha 3-D on home video) but it's not even trying to be high art. I hate the term "critic proof", but a movie like Piranha 3-D isn't something you're going to win people over to seeing or scare them away from. Either they were on board from the get-go or it's a lost cause. Those inclined to enjoy its dumb pleasures will have a field day with the last minute, "holy shit that's the end of the movie?" sequel tease, which may or may not ever come. As it stands, it's a great way to close out Piranha 3-D, which has the good sense not to stop once it gets rolling, a mistake Piranha made more than once.