Shocktober Revisited: The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project

Portions of these reviews originally appeared in 2011.

 In some ways, it's hard for the Cap'n to believe that The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project have been out there for fifteen years. They don't feel that old, which is not to say they don't feel dated in different ways - both are distinctly products of the turn of the millennium - but it doesn't seem like it's been that long. Maybe the Cap'n is just getting older, which is funny, considering that I saw them when I was in college and technically speaking I'm not that old. Old enough that I can't have Horror Fests into the wee hours of the morning anymore, but y'know, comparatively speaking, not that old. Movies from 1999 just don't feel like it was that long ago, but someone born the year The Sixth Sense came out is getting their learner's permit now.

 Here's a look back at what it was like in those halcyon days of pre-Y2k, when people thought The Phantom Menace might not be terrible and that M. Night Shyamalan had promise. Oh, who am I kidding? At least we weren't tired to death of "found footage," although my friends were very concerned that the "scary bonus footage" on the Blair Witch Project soundtrack was three people bickering in the woods. If we only knew...

(For good measure, I'll throw in the now fourteen year old Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, because nobody's going to be talking about it's fifteenth anniversary next year.)

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editor's note: if, for some reason, you actually don't know anything about The Sixth Sense, this is absolutely the wrong review for you. However, if you found this review by Google-ing "Sixth Sense Spoiler," you're going to get it. Consider that your warning.

Long before people hated (or had forgotten about) M. Night Shyamalan, he was the "hot new up-and-comer" with his debut film* The Sixth Sense. If you were somehow drunk for the entirety of the summer of 1999, it's possible that you didn't hear about this suspenseful ghost story with a wicked twist**, and have somehow never seen or heard of the movie where Haley Joel Osment (remember him?) "sees dead people."

 Specifically Bruce Willis (SPOILER), who plays a child psychologist killed in the opening scene by one of his former patients (Donnie Wahlberg). Of course, he doesn't know that until the end of the film, even if eagle-eyed viewers can see that Dr. Malcolm Crowe never physically interacts with anyone during the film and nobody talks to him other than Cole Sear, the kid who sees ghosts. The ghosts, by the way, are spooky and sometimes quite gory (like the accidental gunshot victim kid), but aren't actually dangerous to Cole. Most of them are sad or lonely or need to pass something on. This doesn't stop Shyamalan from milking every ghostly encounter for the maximum creepy factor, but you have to remember that I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who's already seen the film.

 When The Sixth Sense came out, all we really knew about the movie was the "ghost" angle, and that there was a twist. The ghosts are played for scares, and it's quite effective, in the same way that The Haunting (not the one that came out in 1999) or The Others are. It's a clever move not to make the ghosts actually menacing, until you watch the movie again, and then it's just a lot of building tension to mess with the audience in order to pull a switcheroo. The same problem exists with the twist, because a) if you know there's a twist, chances are you're looking for it (I was), and b) the best twists make you want to watch the movie again. If you figure out the twist early (say, when Crowe is "having dinner" with his wife at a restaurant), then there is no rediscovery in watching the film again - you did it the first time. All of the color coding is easy to figure out and The Sixth Sense becomes an elaborate game of "follow the rules" twist filmmaking.

 Maybe I'm being meaner than I ought to be, because I bought the Shyamalan promise - that he was a spiritual successor to Steven Spielberg - through Unbreakable, a movie I also used to really like (and probably still enjoy more than The Sixth Sense) but it all fell apart during Signs. I gave up after he started lifting narrative beats wholesale, and have only seen one of his films sense - The Happening. Most of you know that The Happening is a colossal failure in almost every respect, and is hilarious because of it; I either subjected you to the film or you've heard about it from me. In the interest of fairness, The Sixth Sense is still highly regarded by just about everywhere in the critical community, and people still seem to love the movie. Don't take that old Grumpy Gus Cap'n Howdy to speak for the consensus opinion here.

 After Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender, Shyamalan is pretty much a joke - audiences reported laughter when his name appeared on trailers for Devil - and even his die-hard fans have given up making excuses for the lousy writing, awkward editing, bad performances, and the pompous, thin-skinned auteur / actor himself (Lady in the Water features Shyamalan as a writer who is destined to "change the world," while the least likable character is a film critic). Nobody knows what he's doing next, and I'd go so far as to say they don't care, either.

 The reason I really wanted to bring up The Sixth Sense, which was for 1999 a highlight of an already packed summer of great movies (and The Phantom Menace) was because I have, as usual, a story related to events surrounding the film. The air conditioning was out in the auditorium we saw the film in, so the staff propped a door facing the back of the theatre open, and crickets got in. We knew this because the whole audience could hear them chirping. A colleague of mine (Professor Murder) eventually got up from his seat, crawled under the screen, and we heard "THUMP THUMP THUMP" and the chirping stopped. The packed auditorium gave him an ovation, and he cut the back of his head on a curtain staple. Forgive me if I look back at that night and consider this moment to be the highlight of seeing The Sixth Sense.



* Which was not actually his debut film - he made this and this beforehand, and he wrote Stuart Little. Seriously.
** My own fake poster quote, but here's what the New York Observer's Andrew Sarris wrote at the time: "An effectively understated and moodily engrossing ghost film with a surprisingly satisfying jolt at the end."

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At this point, it's almost been so long since The Blair Witch Project came out that people have by and large forgotten all about the film. Considering that we're still feeling the impact of "found footage" movies, including no less than three that I can name released in the U.S. this year (The Troll Hunter, [REC]2, and the upcoming Apollo 18). That's not including [REC], Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, The Last Exorcism, Cloverfield, The Zombie Diaries and The Poughkeepsie Tapes. These are, in one form or another, the offspring of The Blair Witch's Projects success; a low-budget horror film passed along like an urban legend until it was time to explode in the mainstream. It captured the zeitgeist at a time when horror was winding down from self-referential Scream knockoffs, and scared the hell out of a lot of people.

 And then there was that second film. Yeah, I don't blame you for not remembering Book of Shadows.

 Back to the success story - The Blair Witch Project was a movie I'd hear about long before I saw it. In 1999, the internet was agog about this "found footage" of three film students making a documentary in Burkittsville, Maryland about the "Blair Witch" legend. Something went horribly wrong and they were never heard from again. In fact, I bet you remember the tagline:

 In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary...A year later their footage was found.

  Very few people knew who Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were, and since The Blair Witch Project ended without credits, there was good reason to perpetuate the myth that this WAS "found footage" and not a horror movie designed to make you think it was real. By the time it opened wide in the U.S. (in the summer of 1999), internet savvy geeks already knew it wasn't (online critics love to be the people who have the "scoop" that shows the seams of an illusion), but there were plenty of "John and Jane Moviegoer"'s who didn't know. I was taking some summer classes at N.C. State, and there was a guy in one of the poetry classes that I overheard talking about having a bootlegged copy of the film. A clerk at Schoolkids Music claimed it had already been in "secret" screenings in Raleigh when I purchased the soundtrack (containing footage from the film as part of a CD-ROM feature). I always seemed to be one step behind The Blair Witch Project.

 And then it opened at The Rialto, and the next part is not going to endear the Cap'n to theatre owners. I can only say that it's something I did once and never again, and not something I would do again. Some friends were in town to see The Blair Witch Project with the Cap'n and friends, and the midnight showing was SOLD OUT. But we needed to see that showing of the film, so while standing in front of the vacant box office, we noticed that instead of using special tickets, The Rialto (at the time) had the kind of tickets one could purchase at, say, an Office Max. So we maybe kind of bought a roll of tickets from Office Max, tore five off, and got in line early. And it worked. It was a shitty thing to do, but it's the kind of thing you'll do at twenty to see the movie everyone wants to see. Our ruse wasn't a total success, as before the film started the manager came out to say that he knew some people got in when they weren't supposed to, and we shrunk in our seats a little. The moral of the story is don't do this, kids - you'll feel shitty about it twelve years later.

 The movie? Well, if you were old enough to see it in 1999, then you already know what The Blair Witch Project is like. It's a nice setup, a whole lot of pointless bickering, some carnival tricks to rattle you, and a baffling ending that's really only effective with an audience willing to be scared shitless already. The reason that nobody remembers The Blair Witch Project is that when people know it's a film and are watching it at home with no suspension of disbelief or desire to really let the adrenaline take over, the film is a total bore. There's virtually no rewatchability to The Blair Witch Project, and other films have taken the crude elements and refined them with less believable but more effective narratives and gimmickry. The success of Paranormal Activity is in large part a reflection of how much it borrowed from The Blair Witch Project in publicity and execution (appropriately ten years later, following an excessive cycle of gory horror films often lumped together under the moniker "torture porn").

 By the time that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 came out, nobody was that interested in the film anymore. The curtain had been lifted, the actors done the publicity rounds, and the directors moved on to make... well, not much for seven years. They didn't even want to make Book of Shadows, and instead acted as executive producers for new director Joe Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker best known for the Paradise Lost films about the West Memphis Three. Book of Shadows was Berlinger's first (and, as far as I can tell, last) narrative feature, which he co-wrote with Dick Beebe (the House on Haunted Hill remake). It attempted to look at the Blair Witch phenomenon, but quickly devolved into a terrible movie about possession, murder, and surveillance footage wrapped up in a pale Rashomon "multiple perspective story" mold.

 It took quite a while for me to muster up any memories about Book of Shadows, which should give you some idea how forgettable the film is. Until I looked it up, I'd completely forgotten that it involved two different "Blair Witch" tours in Burkittsville or that one ended up butchered and everyone else went to a house with excessive closed circuit cameras. I vaguely remembered people being picked off and someone being accused of being the witch, as well as stock stereotypes of Wiccans, Goth Chicks, hippies (?), and mentally unstable characters.

 Looking at the film from a distance, it's kind of funny how many people I recognize for roles they took after Book of Shadows: Jeffrey Donovan is now better known for being the lead on Burn Notice, Kim Director worked with Spike Lee before and after the film, and Erica Leerhsen played virtually the same role in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Only Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner haven't done anything I noticed since 2000. Oh, and there's that Kurt Loder guy; wasn't he in Get Him to the Greek or something?

 While it should come as no surprise to people that I saw a movie with Cranpire where he fell asleep, I can't honestly fault him for nodding off during a late showing of Book of Shadows. There's nothing in the movie worth staying awake for, and I think he got more out of the nap than I did the movie. The only other fun tidbit is that when the DVD came out, Artisan was desperate for a gimmick, so they tried a variation on the "flipper" disc: on one side, the movie; the other had the soundtrack. The problem was that the disc was often too heavy for CD players and when it wasn't, the film portion scratched easily, meaning you could never sell the damned thing when you got bored of having it around. And yet, I suspect if you go anywhere with used DVDs, you'll find a copy of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in the "three for $1" bin. It's still not worth it.

"G" is for A Good Day to Die Hard

 Somewhere in the bowels of 20th Century Fox, the dank recesses where mid-level executives and producers are relegated, a day came along like any other. But this day would be different, as it would be a good day. Wallowing in its own filth, one enterprising young junior executive wondered aloud "why not make another Die Hard film?" and instead of climb across the table and gouge his eyes out with a pen (the customary Hollywood form of saying "why would we do a stupid thing like that?"), the other mouth breathing trolls agreed. It had been a long time since Live Free or Die Hard for, after all, six years in Hollywood time is an eternity (nearly half the requisite period to wait to remake a Spider-Man film), so they scrawled out their horrible idea with fecal matter and shuttled it up to the dungeon where regular producers dwell.

 Preparations were made: a dump truck was loaded with money and driven to Bruce Willis' mansion, on the off chance the the one-two punch of Moonrise Kingdom and Looper had fooled him into thinking he was "above" slumming around as John McClane, but they needn't have worried. Of course he'll say yes, on the provision he's allowed to appear as disinterested as possible in the film. But they needed a screenplay, and more importantly they needed a director with no vision of his own, so there was no chance of straying from focus group tested notes about what a Die Hard audience would like*.

 Fortunately, the writer of X-Men Origins: Wolverine literally had nothing better to do. Better still, the director of Max Payne, The Omen remake, Behind Enemy Lines, and Flight of the Phoenix the remake (what do they all have in common other than being unremarkable at best? They were all made at 20th Century Fox!) was schedule to be released back into the wild, having fulfilled his period of indentured servitude to the studio, but someone has slashed the tires to his 1983 Gremlin**. He would need money to pay for new tires, and Die Hard movies always make money!

But where to set this latest Die Hard, and what to call it? Well, one of the unpaid interns had a mock-up poster with the tagline "Yipee-ki-yay, Mother Russia" that was originally designed to mock Live Free or Die Hard's PG-13 rating, so let's demote him to janitor and set the movie in Moscow! And Chernobyl, because as far as audiences are concerned, it's all the same place.

 They could bring back Mary Elizabeth Winstead to play Lucy McClane, but in the interest of not paying much for another returning cast member (except for a contractually mandated "one scene on camera and one scene in voice-over / phone call"), let's just hire some interchangeable twenty-something guy, slap an American accent on him, and hope that audiences remember McClane has a son, too (it's in the picture in Die Hard! It counts! Continuity!).

 And so we have John McClane and John McClane, Jr. - one is still a cop and the other has been a CIA operative since some time between Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard - and because they are also estranged, somehow nobody doing Jr.'s background check ever contacted the supercop who killed both Gruber brothers, Colonel Stuart, General Ramon Esperanza***, and cyber terrorist Thomas Gabriel. Never even called to check that reference. Never occurred to them.

 Anyway. since all that matters are the "'splosions," McClane has to go to Moscow because his son has been arrested. How can he help? Why was his son in Moscow? Why does McClane keep saying "I'm on vacation!" when that's not why he's there at all? What does the bad guy want? Which one is the bad guy? Who cares? It's a DIE HARD movie, assholes! It's rated R this time!!!

 I could complain about the incomprehensible editing in the car chase at the beginning or the myriad lapses in logic in the plot, but it's beside the point. 20th Century Fox as a corporate entity and the gaggle of suits and money men behind the decision to make a fifth Die Hard film didn't care about the plot of the movie. They didn't even care that it was a movie, because to them A Good Day to Die Hard is a product, a calculated effort designed to maximize grosses in theaters and home video.

 There's a trickle down effect to this lack of giving a shit, because when the powers that be clearly don't care what the movie is so much as it's done under budget and in time for release and the star of the film mumbles his way through the script with the bare minimum required of his presence, then the rest of the crew starts messing around. Foley artists are emboldened to use comical punching sound effects that would be right at home in a cartoon. The props department selects a comically oversized machine gun for Bruce Willis to pick up off of the floor of a CIA "safe house". The result of their collective disinterest makes A Good Day to Die Hard not only seem lazy, but comically inept to boot.

 Somewhere along the line, I suspect at least one of the basement dwelling junior executives (who will remain as such until he slays and consumes a middle executive) thought it would be a good idea to fool audiences into thinking that Live Free or Die Hard wasn't as bad as they remembered it being, and that was partially in mind while "making" A Good Day to Die Hard. That John McClane ceased to be the everyman from the first two films and somehow swapped places with Willis' superhero from Unbreakable was irrelevant to the crew and the star.

 But, as we all know, 20th Century Fox didn't need divining warlocks or the deal that fell apart at the last second - one that would turn every screening of the film into something resembling the movie Demons - to ensure the success of a film scraping double digits in critical reviews. Nope, bad word of mouth still brought in audiences for the opening weekend, and eventually it'll recoup its budget and make way for Die Hard 6. It's what the masses want, even if they don't think they do. They recognize the name, and until Willis no longer has the clout to prevent an inevitable remake, Fox will keep up with the law of diminishing returns. I'm sure that Bonnie Bedelia is at home right now, unplugging her phone in anticipation of the McClane "reunion" that nobody's asking for. I mean, it's not like Samuel L. Jackson, Reginald VelJohnson, or the guy who played Argyle are going to turn it down...

 It's hard NOT to be cynical about this, because when something this patently manufactured just to get asses in seats (not to enjoy the film, but just to show up) does, in fact, succeed, then why bother trying to make a good Die Hard movie? Cash in on the name, make the last one look better by comparison, and release a reasonably priced box set later in the year with all five movies, knowing full and well that people will pay for two movies they'll never watch again. You don't even need to be a troll living in the bowels of 20th Century Fox to know that'll work.

 * The focus group indicated that they would like a movie that wasn't anything like Die Hard, but if it had they same name they wouldn't forget what they were going to see, so this would be fine.
** I know what you're thinking, but it turned out this was simply a fortuitous coincidence for all involved parties.
*** Played by Django's Franco Nero - see what I did there? Tenuous connection!

Cap'n Howdy Presents: The 14 Best Films I saw in 2012 (Part Two)

 I believe when we left off, the Cap'n was lamenting that of the first seven "Best Of 2012" movies that I only had existing reviews for two of them (The Avengers and Cosmopolis) whereas the second half of the list includes only one movie I haven't already reviewed. How silly of me not to, you know, split up the writing duties between the two pieces, but as it turns out I have plenty to add about the films that made this list.

 If the theme of Part One was "surprises" - and, looking back it it, it clearly was movies I didn't expect to be blown away by - Part Two is comprised of films that I had a strong inclination I would enjoy, but that surpassed even that. It's also become clear that more than a few of these films are ones that people I know (and whose opinions I often respect) REALLY hate. One in particular looks to be a repeat of one of my top picks from last year, and we'll address that accordingly. To save some time, I'm going to let the links to the original reviews do most of the heavy lifting this time and focus my energy on additional reflections now that I've had some time to digest these films and to study reactions from around cinephilia.

 The difficult bit is figuring out where to start, so maybe I should get the most controversial choice out of the way first:


 Looper - To be honest with you, I was expecting The Master or Cosmopolis to be the movie I had the most disagreements about this year. Even Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained seem to have a healthy debate surrounding them, but I'm continually surprised by the immediate and negative reaction I get for suggesting Looper was one of my favorite movies of 2012. It's akin to my inclusion of Drive in last year's list, when I discovered that many good friends really and truly hate that film, often for the very reasons I enjoyed it.

 I get the impression that people don't like Looper because the time travel logic is nonsensical, or that the resolution of the story leaves audiences feeling like they wasted their time, or that (in the words of an acquaintance of mine) the film felt like someone was shooting "a first draft."

 Needless to say, I don't agree, but this is a much more hotly contested movie than I had any idea after seeing it. Whether you left the film feeling ripped off or wanting to see it again immediately, I guess it's better to feel strongly about it than to feel nothing, but for my money Looper was worth revisiting. I think that Rian Johnson sets up a world with its own rules about time travel, sticks to them and tinkers with themes set up in the film in clever ways. He also leaves a few elements ambiguous (I find it amusing that in his downloadable commentary, Johnson is fascinated by the "Kid Blue is Abe" theory but doesn't say one way or the other). I've given Prometheus grief for intentional ambiguity, but since Looper is a self-contained story that is pretty clearly about closing Joe's "loop," the story elements not specifically addressed don't fall under the "kick the can down the road" sequel-izing that Prometheus and Tron Legacy are guilty of.

 You'll notice that in my original review I posited a theory that can't possibly be right. One commenter suggested another theory, so I checked to see if that held any water.

This is the comment:

 I saw this posted on another blog about Looper and watched the movie again and realized yup this person has got it right: ( I was a bit uncomfortable with the thought of Joe sleeping with his mother but turns out he didn't at all)

"I'm going to throw everyone for a "loop" no pun intended. If anyone paid attention, Young Joe slept with a hooker whom had a daughter named: SARAH. "Sarah" was the girl looking after Cid. Considering the hooker knew what Young Joe did, and that Old Joe went after the hookers daughter(Note long hair of the kid the hooker carrys to the room, it's blonde.) as one of the three targets this leads you to one conclusion. The hookers daughter is the Sarah watching the young Rainmaker. She herself looped back to change him from a young age, remember Cid stated that, "Sarah's a liar, she's not my mother. My mother was killed." and Sarah stated she was trying to raise him properly. Boom, now you know how Sarah know's what Looper's are.

I caught it the first round. If I hadn't heard the hooker state her daughter's name was Sarah, I would of never of caught it." 

 Unfortunately, none of this is true. I literally just finished watching every scene that Piper Perabo's Susie is in the film, and she never once says her daughter's name. The child is also not blonde, but brunette (which helps the argument because Emily Blunt / Sarah's hair has brown roots). Rian Johnson is actually pretty tricky in avoiding Susie's daughter's name, even in the deleted scenes, but when you look at the age matches Old Joe finds, two of them are visible:

 The cagey bit is leaving the bottom one off (and the edit happens right before the bottom picture gets close), but since Cid is one of the possible choices and the other possibility was the boy that Old Joe kills, I think we're meant to believe that Megan Richardson is Susie's daughter (even though the address doesn't match). So that doesn't help my theory or the reposted comment theory, but I guess if you hate Looper for "not making any sense," then this is only going to bolster your case.

 Fair enough. I'm not going to try to argue with you about whether every plot point makes perfect sense or not, or in failing to do so that it means the film is terrible (and I've heard that a lot). I still think that Johnson sets up the universe well, raises the stakes in a compelling way, and tells an interesting story that leaves you asking questions. Are the answers to those questions in Looper? Well, I've seen it several times now, with and without the commentary/ies, and I find there's something new to discover every successive time. For me, that's successful, but I get that for others, the film collapses under its own logic. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.


 Moonrise Kindgom - While I will continue to debate with myself what my favorite Wes Anderson film is, I'm settling down comfortably with saying that Moonrise Kingdom is his best made so far. For a film that's set in the period that Anderson fetishizes unabashedly in all of his other movie (the mid-1960s), Moonrise Kingdom manages not do feel bogged down by its period trappings. I don't mean to diminish Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic, et al, but Moonrise Kingdom's cast of characters feels less like a motley collection of "let's see what these types would be like together" and more like an ensemble that fit together in the story. In particular, I like the way the adults are continually flummoxed about how they're supposed to handle Sam and Suzy's determination to stay together, in particular Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) and Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). I don't think I mentioned it in the old review, but the scenes with them talking to Sam's foster parents and Social Services (Tilda Swinton) over the phone made me laugh as hard as anything in the film.


 Argo - Ben Affleck made a Zero Dark Thirty that doesn't seem to bother the people bothered by Zero Dark Thirty. Does that make sense? I don't wish to diminish his truly engrossing, exceedingly well made retelling of a declassified true story by implying that because it doesn't address torture that the film is somehow "less than" another movie that retells something more recent. Not at all. Argo is Ben Affleck firing on all cylinders, and while I enjoyed Gone Baby Gone and really enjoyed The Town, that didn't prepare me for how accomplished his third directorial feature is.

 The parallels to Zero Dark Thirty are inevitable - both deal with CIA Operatives who, in real life, tenaciously pursued their goal and succeeded when nobody believed they could. One was made with the cooperation of the individuals involved and the other wasn't (if you don't already know which is which, go check - you might be surprised). Both manage to keep the audience engaged in the narrative, to give them a laugh or two, but to then turn that switch and be genuinely suspenseful even when we know what happened. Zero Dark Thirty is harder to watch, but don't take that to mean I'm suggesting that Argo's palatability (probably not an actual word) means it should regarded with kid gloves. I've seen it twice, and it holds up both times. Hopefully we can get over this "Ben Affleck who stars in crappy movies" stigma and begin to enjoy his second life as a director of high quality films. We know what he can do, and I look forward to seeing him top himself after setting the bar this high.

  The Master - If Cosmopolis is a hard movie to like, then The Master is its mercurial cousin. Paul Thomas Anderson continues to push his films further away from the concept of conventional narrative and towards specific types of character studies, of dichotomies. Since Punch-Drunk Love, he's edged away from the "three act" structure of conventional cinema and instead hones in on two specific archetypes, pits them against each other, and plays out the result in front of us. The films don't so much end as they drift off, and even more so than There Will Be Blood, The Master is less about the lives of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as it is the specific intersection of their paths for a period of time lasting no longer than two or three years. We learn as much about Freddie as we're ever going to before he meets Lancaster, and what little we know about "the Master" comes from the way that other people react to him.

 I can understand the frustration from audiences (and working at a theatre where The Master was playing, I saw it first hand), but I don't believe the point of the film was to tell a story about these two men - any more than the film is a meditation or expose on Scientology - so much as it was to throw the embodiments of two essentially divergent philosophies together and allow them to coexist for as long as humanly possible. Or perhaps you'd like to think of The Master as the Id and the Ego clashing, as the Super Ego strains to separate them, all the while acknowledging a futility in fighting their codependent addiction. In the end, they both get what they want, and unlike most Hollywood films that turns out not to be each other. Eventually I hope to be able to talk to more people who have seen The Master, as so far it's been a limited sample size.

 Skyfall - It took MGM going bankrupt to settle the Daniel Craig as James Bond run of 007 films. Like another movie on this list, the down time helped, rather than hindered, the end result, because for all of the promise of Casino Royale and all that Quantum of Solace failed to build on, Skyfall at last figured out how to bring Bond full circle. Yes, it borrows a bit liberally from The Dark Knight in its villain's story structure (I'm sorry, but it's hard to watch the interrogation scene and not see Javier Bardem giving his best take on the Joker), but where it stumbles in some places it excels in others. Yes, Silva sometimes resembles a certain Clown Prince of Crime in his philosophy and execution, but his reasoning for it is more sound in the Bond universe, and his maternal fixation to M (Judi Dench) elevates some of the "copycat" mechanics of the plot.

 But besides all of that, Skyfall is a cracking good James Bond film that feels like it's a James Bond film. Gone are many of the Bourne-inspired aspects of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and in its place are clear action sequences, clever quips, and nods to the earliest of 007 films that serve a purpose beyond just referencing the series. Skyfall ends in a comfortable nook that should have James Bond fans very excited for what's to come, because it's the promise of what we've been looking forward to married to the series that brought us here in the first place. The revelation of who a certain character is caught me completely off-guard because of how well Sam Mendes, John Logan, Robert Wade and Neal Purvis built their arc (I'm being cagey just in case you haven't seen it and want to) in the story. Needless to say that we end Skyfall in a very familiar location with a fitfully intriguing dynamic moving forward.

 It's fair to mention that there isn't a "Bond Girl" in Skyfall, not in the conventional sense or really in any way that you'd define the character type. There are characters that would seem to fit into those roles, but without spoiling too much, neither of them actually where you think they'll be. Instead, Skyfall focuses more on Bond's relationship with M, with Silva's relationship to M, and briefly where Bond himself came from (all the while debunking the long-standing theory that "James Bond" is a code name assigned to 007 agents). On the other hand, I can't gripe too much with a movie that brings back Q and the Ashton Martin and has refreshingly clever things to do with both of them.


  Django Unchained - I don't know that I have a lot more to add to my review of Django Unchained. It is, bar none, the most fun I've had watching a Quentin Tarantino film, and that includes the giddy experience of watching Pulp Fiction when I was far too young and that first audience reaction to Kill Bill Part One. It still makes me chuckle that Tarantino brazenly gets away with using a Jim Croce song and it's totally appropriate for the montage he includes it in. That, even more than the Rick Ross or the James Brown / Tupac Shakur mashup, made me laugh out loud in the theatre. If you want to read something silly, Google Armond White's critique of Tarantino (and more specifically, of Samuel L. Jackson), "Still Not a Brother." It's hilarious in the way that almost everything Armond White writes is, and if you haven't heard of the intentionally contrarian reviewer before, it's as good a place as any to learn what he's all about.

  The Cabin in the Woods - I was watching Serenity the other night, and when I finished it made sense to watch some of the extras again. In particular, I wanted to watch them for the conception of Joss Whedon in 2005, when he was still mostly known as the guy who made Buffy and Angel and Firefly. He had a small legion of devoted fans (of which the Cap'n counts himself, to a degree) that helped turn the cancelled Firefly into Serenity, which didn't set the world on fire (at first, anyway - today it has a solid fan base I run across frequently). Whedon made Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse, and then 2012 happened.

 Now he's the proven box-office commodity / smash hit director slash writer of The Avengers, a movie that really shouldn't have worked and even then shouldn't have worked as well as it does. The world is his oyster, but it's funny to think that because MGM went bankrupt, the Whedon-scripted / Drew Goddard-directed meta-horror film The Cabin in the Woods went from coming out to relative anonymity in 2009 (when it was made) to being a preamble of sorts to the blockbuster to come. And honestly, if I really had to choose between the two, I'd give the edge to The Cabin in the Woods.

 I've mentioned it before, and because horror films are something of a specialty for the Cap'n, I come back to it a lot, but The Cabin in the Woods doesn't necessarily deconstruct or redefine horror films in the way that I think some people believe it does. That fact, counter-intuitively perhaps, actually helps the film more than it hurts it. Scream was a deconstruction of slasher films while also being a slasher film. The Cabin in the Woods slaps the structure of "Scooby Doo" on top of the concept of horror archetypes - trust me, you'll have a hard time finding a horror film that corresponds closely to the "rules" of Cabin, especially The Evil Dead - and then uses that pretext to explore what audiences expect in scary movies.

  The Cabin in the Woods is clever as a meta text not because of how it deconstructs the genre, but in exploring why the genre persists when people firmly believe that it's the bottom of the barrel in "entertainment." Whedon and Goddard throw in a few specific references (a Pinhead stand-in complete with puzzle box) but by and large focus on the broader purpose of horror, and of audiences who don't get what they want. Look at it this way, complaining about the way the movie ends is really making their point.

  Had The Cabin in the Woods been released in 2009 or 2010, I'm not sure how people would have responded to it. That was still in the height or remakes and Saw-mania, and I think that unlike some movies that sit on a shelf for a few years, Cabin benefited from being able to wait until a lull in horror trends. The impact was that much stronger last April, because not knowing what I was in for made all the difference that first time.

 And yes, to be fair, it was following Lockout, the worst movie I saw in 2012, but I've seen The Cabin in the Woods three times since that fateful weekend, and I tell you with confidence that it still delivers the goods and rewards multiple viewings. So, sorry Avengers, but in the battle of Whedon projects, you come in second this year... 



 * I'll include the link down here, although I generally disagree with everything in this review and don't necessarily see the connections he tries to make with other films listed.

Blogorium Review: Looper

 I'm not even sure I should be allowed to review Rian Johnson's Looper without having seen it a second time. I mean, the moment the credits rolled I regretted going to see the 10pm showing and not the one before so that I could slink down low, bide my time, and then watch the movie again immediately.  Like Primer, another time travel film that the writer / director took the time to "get it right," by the time you see the last image in Looper, it's hard not to want to start the movie over and watch it to find things you didn't know to look for. I don't normally have the strong desire to see something a second time so quickly, so hopefully this gives you some idea of how strongly I'm recommending Looper.

 Why get that out of the way in the first paragraph? Well, if you are on the fence about Looper, just know you should go see it now. I'd love to write a spoiler free review, or to try to give you a Cabin in the Woods-esque "the less you know, the better" review, but if I do that then describing Looper is nothing more than a plot synopsis of the first quarter of the film, and you can find that anywhere. So stop reading this review right now, go see Looper, and the Cap'n will be waiting when you get back.

  In the mean time, if you really need a plot synopsis: Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a "looper," an assassin hired to kill people sent from the future (2074-ish) to the past (2044-ish) by criminal organizations. As he explains in the opening narration, "time travel hasn't been invented yet, but one day it will be. It is immediately outlawed and only used by the most powerful criminal organizations." The crime syndicates use time travel to dispose of people - they send them back in time, a looper kills them and disposes of the body. No evidence of a murder because the person didn't technically exist, no crime in the future, it's all clean for the crooks.

 Joe isn't exactly a good guy - he uses drugs and liaisons with stripper / prostitute (Piper Perabo), drives his fancy car around the city, nearly running down the destitute masses that make up this near future. His fellow loopers are all "closing their loops," the moment when they kill themselves from the future, receive a significant payoff and are free to enjoy the next thirty years of their lives, but a mistake on the part of Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) raises the ire of their boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). Abe is from the future and stays in the past to make sure that loops are closed and that everything goes smoothly, so when Seth fails to kill his older self, a serious problem arises.

 It's just not quite as serious as when Joe's future self (Bruce Willis) comes back with a plan of his own...

 Reading any further goes into spoiler territory. I've recapped everything you learn from the trailers, minus the significance of Emily Blunt's character Sara. I'll deal with that below the break, so if you haven't seen Looper yet, I highly recommend you do so. Cap'n Howdy is very patient.

 SPOILER ALERT ETC FOR PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T READING CAREFULLY

 So you're back? Good. Did you like it? I'm guessing that if you bothered to come back to continue reading this that you did, because if you had "a lot of problems" with it then I'm not sure I'll be able to change your mind. But I guess we'll see, right?

 The reason I'm putting everything that happens after Young Joe makes it to Sara's farm is because the second half of Looper (or, basically, the "Cid / Rainmaker" part of the film) is where the movie goes from just being a really well made time travel film and transitions into "wow" territory. Rian Johnson introduces all sorts of concepts about the inevitability of changing the past (whether it's actually possible or not) and the ramifications of making those changes by mostly avoiding paradoxes. I say "almost" because I'm still on the fence about the way that Young Joe closes his loop and ultimately prevents the Rainmaker from ever being, but we'll get to that later. First, I want to throw out one (probably erroneous) reading of the last scene in the film.

 Like Shane Carruth did with Primer*, Johnson constructs Looper in such a way that no detail, however minor, is insignificant. From the seemingly incidental "TK" mutation that 10% of the population has in the future to the range of a looper's blunderbuss compared to a pistol, there's nothing mentioned in the film that doesn't resonate somewhere later in the picture. Johnson's screenplay is one of a series of loops, all of which close in on themselves somewhere to one degree or the other.

 So then what are we to make of the scene where Young Joe is visiting Suzie (Perabo) after Seth dies? In the scene, Joe mentions that one of the few things he remembers about his mother is the way she ran her fingers through his hair, one that Suzie tries to replicate. It's exactly the same way that Sara runs her fingers through Joe's hair after he shoots himself with the blunderbuss, preventing Old Joe from killing Sara and, in effect, creating the Rainmaker (the 12 Monkeys "inevitability of fate" narrative trick, appropriate considering Bruce Willis' role in both films).

 I can't quite rationalize in my mind that Sara is the mother that Joe doesn't remember or, to go beyond that, there's a possibility that Cid grows up to be Joe, although there are some details in the film that might loosely support it. For one thing, she does seem to behave differently towards Joe after he sacrifices himself, although one could argue she knew who he was all along. Let's look at a couple of concepts in the film that led me to this theory:

 If Young Joe kills himself to prevent Old Joe from ever being, is he closing that loop, or is he closing another loop?

 1) It's established that when a loop is closed, the Looper receives a large sum of money and has thirty years to do whatever they choose. So when Joe dies, Sara discovers the car full of money, and Young Joe is roughly thirty years older than Cid.

 2) The final images in the film cut back and forth from Sara with Young Joe to Sara putting Cid in bed, and there's a visual bridge made between the two that seems to go beyond the fact that he prevented the Rainmaker from ever being. That Johnson cuts from Sara running her fingers through Joe's hair to Cid lying in bed with a bandage over his face (I really want to look to see if Levitt or Willis has a scar on their cheek) seems to me to be more important than just "time can be changed for the better."

 3) When Young Joe meets Old Joe in the cafe, Old Joe explains that his memories get fuzzy when he's in the past. He can only remember things that happened to Young Joe as they happen, and he struggles to remember his wife from the future's face. This might explain why Young Joe can't remember much about his mother - it's possible that at some point between the end of the film and when he's older that Cid / Joe is sent back in time and that his memory is a construct designed to prevent him from knowing Sara when he meets her.

 But I can't get past the fact that means Joe slept with his own mother, or the fact that Cid has advanced "TK" abilities and Joe doesn't, so how could Cid grow up to be Joe? One could make an even crazier argument that Joe pulls a Futurama "Roswell That Ends Well" and that he's his own father, so Sara gives birth to Young Joe, sends him back in time, and "sells" him to criminals so that Abe finds him and hires him to be a looper, but that's pushing it, even for me.

 Still, there's something about those final images, about the way Sara holds Joe and the intercutting between Joe and Cid that seems like more than just a poignant way of closing the proverbial "loop" on the film. There's something deliberate about echoing the detail about Joe's mother going on at the end of Looper, and I'm really going to need to watch it again to see what else is happening in the various loops introduced during the film.

 Any theories are welcome, because I'm sure that mine is a pretty out there one, and while there's some information to support it I can't convince myself it's enough. Not with one viewing, anyway. But damn is that a well constructed film.

 Oh? The paradox? Well, while Looper is careful to avoid getting bogged down in (as Old Joe calls it) "Time Travel shit," one could argue that if Young Joe prevents Old Joe from ever being, there's no reason he would even be at Sara's farm in the first place, so she and Cid wouldn't know who he was or what he was doing in the first place because they never meet. Looper does introduce the concept that the future can be affected by changing the present while still allowing people in the present to remember things that change (also the "memories of possibilities" speech by Old Joe) but you could argue that Young Joe killing himself undoes the necessity for Young Joe to ever be there in the first place, which is a paradox.

 Anyway, go see the damn movie. See it again. I plan to. I didn't even mention the technical details or the relationship between Abe and Kid Blue (Noah Segan) or the visual style or the fantastic way Johnson demonstrates how Young Joe becomes Old Joe and why Willis comes back in the first place. I could probably write about Looper all day if I wanted to.


 * It's worth noting that while he appears in the credits under "special thanks," Carruth served as the "Time Travel" adviser for Looper.

Blogorium Review: The Expendables 2

 Around this time two years ago, the Cap'n was way out west and The Expendables was in theatrical release. There was a bit of a kerfuffle on the internet* because The Expendables opened against Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Scott Pilgrim lost. I may have had a thing or two to say about that, because they selectively chose to denigrate The Expendables even though Scott Pilgrim also came in behind Eat Pray Love, Inception, and The Other Guys as well. But The Expendables weathered the storm, even with some shaky hand-held action chicanery and over-earnest monologue-ing from Mickey Rourke.

 It was a throwback to action movies that managed to upset action movie (no pun intended) die-hards for its adherence to new action movie techniques (see: hand-held camerawork during fight scenes) and also upset the kind of people who pretend to be action movie fans but actually just assume that it means every "action" movie is exactly like Commando or YouTube compilations of Steven Seagal kicking people through windows. I saw both kinds of reactions, and both camps seemed to say "boo hoo, it didn't meet my expectations so it sucks." And okay, it wasn't the movie it could have been, but to expect The Expendables to be the last twenty minutes of Rambo for two hours is absurd.

 To expect any action movie to consistently be as ridiculous as Commando is asking too much. People tend to forget that Commando has a few (not many, but a few) scenes where Arnold isn't punning or brutally murdering people. Predator has a LOT of those moments, and so does Die Hard and First Blood. Even Bloodsport has a story, threadbare though it may be. I know, you're shocked, but it's more than a 90 minute string of explosions and arterial spray, and other than maybe Bloodsport, I think you'd consider those to be some of the best films the action genre has to offer.

 But anyway, so we got past The Expendables and the people who didn't automatically feel "disappointed" it were pleasantly entertained, even if it wasn't great. And now, without the burden of political careers or Scott Pilgrims, there's a sequel. So how was The Expendables 2?

 Basically, it's exactly what it needs to be. Not a whole lot more, and certainly with things that improve on the first film but also some changes that I wouldn't really call "improvements." Still, overall I have to say that it delivers on the action, has a few good laughs (and a lot of chuckles / groaners) and is going to provide the "popcorn entertainment" quota for late summer action. It doesn't feel bloated like a Battleship or unnecessarily convoluted like a Bourne Legacy, and for the most part West and the cast get things right about where they need to be.

 This time, since they killed off "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Eric Roberts, there was a need for new villains, so Stallone and director Simon West (Con Air, The Mechanic) brought in Scott Adkins (Undisputed II, The Bourne Ultimatum) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD, Universal Soldier) to give Barney Ross and his crew some real trouble.

  The first thing The Expendables 2 does better than The Expendables is streamline the plot: instead of some kind of rogue-CIA agent funding a military coup / dictatorship in a fictional South American country that our team are vaguely invested in, Van Damme's Villane / Villain (it depends on what site you check) makes good on the promise implied by the name "expendables" by kicking Barney (Stallone)'s knife into the chest of a team member. (SPOILER ALERT) To be fair, it's kind of a cheat because a) it's the new "Expendable" Billy (Liam Hemsworth), the sniper who announces two scenes earlier that he wants to leave the team to be with his girlfriend, and b) because Liam Hemsworth is mostly in the movie so they could use his last name in the trailer to trick you into thinking it was his older brother Chris, prompting guys to say "Oh shit! Thor is in The Expendables 2" when in reality it's just the dude from The Hunger Games. In fairness, he does blow a guy's head off with his sniper rifle and holds his own for a while.

 Anyway, Villane and his crew the Sangs (who have goat tattoos on their necks for a reason Van Damme sort-of explains) steal the layout of a Russian mine where weapons grade plutonium is stored from our heroes, so the movie becomes a combination of "stop them from selling the plutonium" and "get revenge on this asshole" that invests the audience in the story. I'd be lying if I said we get to know more about the individual members on the Expendables - Jet Li leaves after the first action sequence, providing a waffling "maybe I'll be back, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll start a new life." and then parachuting out of the plane.

 Randy Couture and Terry Crews don't get much more to do than they did in the first one, Jason Statham only gets two scenes to really show off (one in a church and the other fighting Adkins at the end), but I guess it's nice that Dolph Lundgren has a few defining character quirks introduced this time around. Stallone (who co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Wenk) incorporates some of Lundgren's actual life into Gunner's character by making him a former chemical engineer (and Fulbright Scholar) who worked at a nightclub "to impress a girl" (all true, although I'm not sure if he was working at the club to impress a girl or because he was a 3rd degree black belt.) It makes up for the notable absence of Mickey Rourke, even if that means we're spared another monologue about the value of human life.

 Most of the focus in the film is on Stallone or the new / returning characters. In addition to Hemsworth's Billy, when Jet Li takes off before the title screen, Church (Bruce Willis) tells Barney that Maggie (Nan Yu from Speed Racer and Lundgren's Diamond Dogs) is going to join them on the mission to retrieve that map Villane steals. Maggie can hold her own, and is in a lot of ways more interesting than most of the guys on the team. She also gives Stallone the opportunity to be funnier because Barney Ross is so uncomfortable around women that he just can't understand why she keeps flirting with him. Van Damme is also good to see, although if you've seen Universal Soldier: Regeneration or JCVD, you know he's more than capable of putting his weathered face to use as an imposing adversary. He's a bad guy out for the money, but the Sangs have a code built around respect, so he's very particular about how he deals with the Expendables.

 Oh, and then there's the other driving force of the film, which provides for some of the best (and also worst) adjustments between the last movie and this one: Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris. Of the three, only Willis really seems to be playing a character, as Norris and Schwarzenegger are basically playing their personas. Case in point: Chuck Norris, introduced after killing an entire Sang team and blowing up a tank, walks into frame to the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (?), is identified (repeatedly) as a "Lone Wolf," and proceeds to provide a "Chuck Norris Fact" in the span of three minutes.

 And look, it's kind of funny at first, until he leaves shortly thereafter and it's clear that when (and if) he shows up again that's all he's going to be used for. He's a walking reference to the fact that people mythologized Chuck Norris. But then we get to Arnold, reprising his cameo from the last film as Trench, who is a walking "one-liner": he says "I'm back" or "I'll be back" repeatedly, and when Chuck Norris walks up next to him, I kid you not Schwarzenegger says "Who is next? Rambo?" It's like Arnold wrote all of his dialogue for the film and delivers it in the worst possible way (seriously, when he has things to say relevant to the plot, the delivery is much better).

 Oh, and then there's this exchange between Church and Trent:

 Trent: I'm almost out. Stay here - I'll be back.
 Church: No, you've been back enough. I'LL BE BACK.
 Trent: Yippie-ky-yay.

  The walking, talking reference to your more famous movies is a little groan-worthy, but it is mostly contained near the end, where Statham was a pretty good knife fight with the largely unused Adkins (seriously, check out some of his movies), Stallone has a better fight with Van Damme (even if they re-use footage of one of JCVD's high kicks right after he did it the first time), and I have to say that I laughed at Arnold and Bruce in the Smart Car and Chuck Norris' use of an airport scanner. That said, it's not exactly the direction I was hoping to see these movie go in. We're seeing them because we know who these action stars are, not because we want to be reminded of their "greatest hits." That just reinforces the assumption that The Expendables as a series is a glorified YouTube compilation of action tropes.

 But overall it's a fun time at the movies. I really enjoyed Van Damme and Statham's "I now pronounce you man and knife" and Dolph Lundgren being a part of the team (and failing miserably to impress Maggie) and let's be honest here: there's something cool about seeing Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger standing side by side and shooting at Jean-Claude Van Damme and assorted goons. I still wish that Randy Couture and Terry Crews had more time to shine, but I guess the third movie is an inevitability, so there's always next time, right?

 Oh, one final note: so Simon West made Con Air (which I liked) and The Mechanic (which was a serviceable but not great Jason Statham vehicle) and also a few other things I didn't see or didn't like (The General's Daughter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider respectively), so I didn't really know what to expect here. The Mechanic was competently shot but the action scenes were few and far between, so it was hard to say what we'd get here. I'm happy to say it's mostly an improvement over the impossible to watch fight scenes in The Expendables (I'm looking at you, Lundgren / Li fight), so that's an improvement over Stallone. The pre-title sequence was good and easy to follow other than awkward framing in the Jet Li "knives vs frying pan" scene. Still, I don't think the series has quite found a director that can convey the action in a way that does it justice. So that's something to think about for next time, if you ask me. And by that I don't mean the movie leaves itself blatantly open-ended - it has a beginning, middle, and an end, but it's clear there can (and more than likely will) be more Expendables adventures. I mean, the producer has to make good on promising Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, and Clint Eastwood for part 3**!


 So yeah, if you didn't like the last one I'm sure you'll find lots of things not to like about The Expendables 2. And to be fair, it's not like they knocked it out of the park. It's more like a "ground rule double" of action films, which is probably less than what you expected with this kind of lineup but it's getting them in place for a grand slam. I hope, anyway.


 * Interesting tidbit: Auto-Correct didn't even blink when I typed the word "kerfuffle" even though I'm positive I've never used that term before on the Blogorium and I'm honestly surprised to think that it might qualify as an actual word with a working definition.
** Two of the four names will be in that movie, and I bet you can guess which ones.

Blogorium Review: Moonrise Kingdom

 There's a moment in the first half of Moonrise Kingdom that elicited an audible gasp from most of the audience. It's the kind of scene that should, for all intents and purposes, ruin the movie for a lot of viewers, and it's impressive that Wes Anderson is able to pull everyone back in with a wry response. When Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) answers Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) question with a typically Andersonian response, "who's to say?" the tension broke and Moonrise Kingdom continued along its course. A lesser filmmaker wouldn't be able to save the moment, and yes, I'm deliberately staying vague because it isn't an essential plot point but it does break an unspoken cardinal rule of filmmaking.

 A quote famously attributed to W.C. Fields* goes thusly "never work with dogs, or children" when making movies. Wes Anderson breaks both of those rules to great success, although the adults in Moonrise Kingdom are no slouches either. At its core, the film is about Sam and Suzy conspiring to run away from unhappy situations: Sam is an orphan with a history of acting out and Suzy is a "troubled" child in the eyes of her parents, Laura (Frances McDormand) and Walt (Billy Murray). Through correspondence, Sam and Suzy decide to escape and follow the old Chicktaw Nature Trail to find a private hideaway. Unfortunately, the Bishop family, along with Khaki Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) and police Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) are on their trail, along with the rest of the Khaki Scouts and their dog Snoopy.

 This was roughly what I knew about Moonrise Kingdom going in (minus Sam and Suzy's reasons for running away) along with what appeared to be the most Andersonian opportunity the auteur had to indulge in his fetishistic set design. Wes Anderson has always demonstrated an affinity for the mid-1960s, in music, art direction, and color palette, so setting Moonrise Kingdom on an isolated island in New England just before a hurricane hits. Oh, and it's 1965. If it was possible to go beyond Fantastic Mr. Fox, where Anderson literally had control over every element of production, Moonrise Kingdom would be that film.

 I don't suppose I need to warn people who don't like Wes Anderson films that Moonrise Kingdom isn't going to change your mind, but it's a good enough opening for the fourth paragraph of a review as any. Anderson fans have a tendency to fixate on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums as "high water marks" (with good reason), but tend to disagree about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, working with Roman Coppola again on the screenplay, finds a tone similar to Rushmore and Tenenbaums, but from a different perspective. Sam and Suzy are 12, even younger than Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman does have a small role as "Cousin Ben"), and rather than behaving like adults, the two bond over their feelings of alienation from everybody else. Sam leaves Scout Master Ward a letter of resignation from the Khaki Scouts but relies heavily on the hiking and camping skills he picked up at Camp Ivanhoe. Suzy leaves a note to her brother explaining that she will return his record player "in ten days" with new batteries. Their plan is naive, they just barely know each other, but the kindred spirits are determined to be together.

 Scout Master Ward and Chief Sharp find themselves in a situation they honestly aren't sure how to deal with, one that grows increasingly more complicated when Sam's foster family refuses him and Social Services (Tilda Swinton) gets involved. The Bishops are both lawyers who reject the notion that their daughter is culpable in Sam's plan, or that she would attack one of the Khaki scouts in order to escape a showdown (I will say nothing more than it involves a pair of left-handed scissors). Part of the fun of Moonrise Kingdom are its twists and turns; beyond what you learn in the trailer, there's a lot going on between the adults, between the other children (particularly the scouts), and how the Narrator (Bob Balaban) figures into the narrative. Also, a mostly unmentioned cameo from Harvey Keitel Khaki Commander Pierce, who runs Camp Lebanon on an island across the way.

 If you felt detached from the characters in The Darjeeling Limited or had trouble connecting to Team Zissou or Mr. Fox, you'll have no such trouble with Moonrise Kingdom. First timers Gilman and Hayward are excellent as Sam and Suzy, two prepubescent kids who don't quite know how to be grown up but want something better. Willis, Murray, McDormand, Norton, and Swinton all make impressions as they try to make sense of the situation, and while Murray is typically in high form working with Anderon, the others fit like a glove in his "universe," particularly Norton as a sweet-natured math teacher who wants to do right by his scouts.

 There's something about setting Moonrise Kingdom in 1965 that might lead you to expect Anderson is indulging in all of his favorite stylistic moments, but the soundtrack leans heavily on Hank Williams and the film feels loose and unencumbered in its mid-section. Once we move past the impeccably organized Bishop home and move outdoors, Anderson's camera is liberated along with Sam and Suzy, and Moonrise Kingdom benefits from this relaxed approach. Later in the film, he returns to stop motion animation (watch the bridge crossing late in the film) and some clever special effects (the lightning field sequence), but overall Moonrise Kingdom feels more attached to its characters, however flawed, and it's a fine experience at the end. (Oh, make sure to stay through the credits to hear a musical bridge to the opening credits. It's worth it.)


 * I could find no evidence that it isn't a Fields quote but at the same time couldn't pinpoint exactly when he said it.

Retro Review: The Fifth Element

 When I re-purposed "From the Vaults" into Retro Reviews, one of the first films I mentioned as an example of how relationships with films change was The Fifth Element I never got around to explaining the first experience I had with the movie, so let's fix that today.

 The Fifth Element came out in May of 1997, a period when I was regularly attending films, both good and bad - McHale's Navy being the nadir of that era. At the time, though, I might have argued vigorously that The Fifth Element was every bit as bad of a film. That's right - when we saw it the first time at Waverly Place, the consensus was that it sucked. I didn't get the over-exagerrated colors, design, costumes, and performances. And that was BEFORE Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod appeared. We derided the Luke Perry cameo at the beginning, guffawed at "Tiny" Lister, Jr. as the President of Earth, and couldn't get over Gary Oldman's hairstyle.

 More to the point, we weren't paying attention - I remember loudly complaining that the plot didn't make any sense, that it was too busy, and that the resolution that the "fifth element" was "love" was laughable. It seemed like a French take on Captain Planet or some crap like that. We walked out laughing about how horrible The Fifth Element was, how stupid it was we went to see it, and how much more excited we were about The Lost World or Face/Off. We'd just seen the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions in theatres; what was this garbage all about?

 And that's how I remembered The Fifth Element for another year or so. I don't think I watched it again on video when it came out, and it probably wasn't until I found myself confused but fascinated with the much derided Alien Resurrection that I thought about giving a French director working on American studio films another go. I may have watched Jeunet's The City of Lost Children in the interim as well, and almost certainly had seen (and loved) Luc Besson's The Professional on video. So I gave The Fifth Element another chance.

 I loved it. I had no idea why I ever claimed the film was "confusing" or "stupid," and can only point to youthful ignorance for blowing the film off. It's a goofy, cluttered, and yes, simplified to radical degree, but it's all by design. Besson is having fun with the "fish out of water" trope, in an over-cluttered world that kept building up threatened by evil. The hero is a beleaguered taxi driver just hoping to get points off of his license. The only thing that can save the universe has taken the form of Milla Jovovich, and she literally falls into his taxi. Then two monks try to steal her, police and villains chase her, and an evil mastermind almost chokes to death on a cherry. Again, we haven't even made it to Ruby Rhod.

 There are very few films that I can so vividly remember pulling a complete 180 on than The Fifth Element. From totally dismissing the film to embracing it and showing it to friends in college, I struggle to think of another such radical turnaround in two viewings. It just goes to show that when you see a film in your life can make all the difference. Sometimes you just aren't ready for it, but when you are the difference is night and day.