Blogorium Review: Ride, Rise, Roar

 Approaching my review for Ride, Rise, Roar, a documentary / performance film for David Byrne, I find myself constantly trying to avoid comparing the film to Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. On one level, it just isn't fair to Ride Rise Roar to be held to that kind of standard; if you've never seen Stop Making Sense, it is arguably one of the best concert films ever made. Demme's shot composition, camerawork, and editing not only complement the music, but elevate it.

 I'm trying to give Ride Rise Roar the benefit of the doubt and treat David Hillman Curtis' film as something not trying to be like Stop Making Sense, even if the comparisons come easily and frequently.

The film begins with an interpretation of "Once in a Lifetime" that is baffling on two levels: 1) it seems as though Byrne is trying to keep himself interested in a song he's no doubt sung to death, but the choice he makes (to pose the lyrics as a series of flat, disinterested questions) is immediately off-putting. This is compounded by 2) the presence of interpretive dancers, who seem to be doing whatever they feel like without any connection to the music. Since Byrne doesn't seem to be very interested in "Once in a Lifetime," I can't honestly say one part is more distracting than the other, but it's an odd way to start a movie, and not "good" odd.


Fortunately, the interview footage that follows provides some context: while wrapping up mixing on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Byrne's collaboration with Brian Eno, the singer / songwriter accepted a series of tour dates. In order to keep things fresh, Byrne reached out to a number of choreographers (Annie-B Parson, Sonya Robbins, Layla Childs, and Noémie Lafrance) to create a free flowing, interpretive combination of modern dance and pop music. He also requested they find non-professionals (?) and prohibited them from learning any particular routine, instead preferring they find the "right" movements as the song progressed. By mimicking each other, they would create a complementary visual element to the music.

 And that might work, if the staging weren't so claustrophobic: Byrne is playing in front of a full band with back-up singers perhaps five feet behind him. His dancers don't have much room, and on top of that, he chose to narrow down the number to three (Lily Baldwin, Natalie Kuhn, and Stephen Reker), which further underwhelms whatever it was he had in mind. When Byrne is engaged with the dances, there's a sort of symmetry, but more often than not the staging is two on one side and one on the other with Byrne in the middle. It may just be the way that Curtis shoots the performance, but the end result is often flat and disengaged, which seems to be the opposite of what David Byrne had in mind. It's not until the dancers bring the back-up singers into the choreography of "I Zimbra" that the film has any sense of life.

Ride, Rise, Roar also settles quickly into a repetitive motion of performance - interview (black and white) - performance (color), sometimes interspersing the live show with rehearsal footage (also black and white) but otherwise sticks with what works. I hate to even bring this up, but the way Curtis covers the live performance, it's often unclear that there IS an audience, especially early in the film. If I hadn't eventually seen the heads of  the crowd, I was inclined to believe that parts the film were simply stage rehearsal being passed off as "concert documentary." There's no sense of performance, which once again brings me back to Stop Making Sense. There's a kinetic energy to that footage, something lacking in Ride, Rise, Roar, despite the animated vocal delivery from Byrne, that just doesn't make sense.

 I'm almost positive that someone with a better background in dance would find Ride, Rise, Roar more interesting than I did. It pains me to say that, as a huge fan of David Byrne (both with the Heads and also solo), but the film struggles to stay interesting as it slogs along. There's a discussion of how Byrne and Eno worked together on the album that should be more engaging than it is. It's also fair to mention that the dancers will also arbitrarily disappear during the show without the explanations typically lavished elsewhere during interviews.

On an intellectual level, I know it isn't fair, but watching Ride, Rise, Roar and not making mental comparisons to Stop Making Sense is going to be difficult for anyone interested in watching this film. It only compounds Ride, Rise, Roar's existing problems in that not only are you watching a movie that isn't very engaging, but it reminds you of the film about roughly the same subject that is exactly the opposite experience. Even in attempting to disassociate one from the other, I found myself bored during Ride, Rise, Roar, and that's the biggest shame of it all.

Blogorium *ahem* Review: The Hangover Part II

I fully admit that I'm borrowing this concept verbatim from Outlaw Vern's review of The Stepfather remake, but for there were a few people who heard me say "The Hangover Part II is the same movie" and thought that was a good thing. I guess it could be if you want to pay $10 to see something you can get from Redbox for a dollar, plus popcorn and all the other accouterments, but to prove my point, here's my original review of The Hangover, amended to reflect the same movie The Hangover Part II.

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The Hangover The Hangover Part II won't cure diseases, or bolster world peace. It's not likely to make many "top" lists, when "serious" and the "meaningful" films are to be had, but so what? The Hangover The Hangover Part II is a comedy that sets out to entertain, offend, and periodically shock you. And that it does very pretty well, in addition to being quite slightly less funny.

Forgive me if the Cap'n is late to the party. It is a well known fact that as much as I'd like to get out and see films during their actual release, I rarely do. To remedy this, I do attempt whenever possible to watch them on the fancy tv with the fancy picture and sound hookups. This part is mostly irrelevant as I obviously saw the movie yesterday and everything the follows is pretty much accurate. I even leave my phone on for that "authentic" movie theatre atmosphere. Normally speaking, it makes up for not seeing it with others in a darkened auditorium*, but I do feel I cheated myself out by not seeing The Hangover The Hangover Part II with others.


  If anyone at this point doesn't already know the plot of The Hangover The Hangover Part II, I will detail it in brief: this time, Doug (Justin Bartha) Stu (Ed Helms) is getting married, but before he does so his friends are taking flying with him to Vegas Bangkok for a blow out reserved bachelor party (that actually happens in an IHOP in the U.S.). The friends in question are school teacher Phil (Bradley Cooper), dentist Stu (Ed Helms) Doug (Justin Bartha) and soon-to-be brother-in-law invited against Stu's wishes Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Rather than seeing the bachelor party, the audience is introduced to the aftermath, as the very hung over and completely confused Stu, Phil, and Alan try to retrace their party trajectory. See, they lost Doug Teddy, Stu's soon-to-be-brother-in-law, and Teddy's dad already hates Stu who is getting married very soon.

Along the way, they run into escort / stripper Jade (Heather Graham) Kimmy (Yasmin Lee), who Stu married at some point had sex with / is a transsexual, a very not quite as naked  Chow (Ken Jeong), another Doug (Mike Epps) a tattoo artist (Nick Cassavetes), and Mike Tyson. What any of these people may have to do with a stolen police car a missing finger, a tiger drug dealing monkey, a baby Buddhist Monks, and roofies is up for you to figure out. Also, Stu seems to be missing a tooth have Mike Tyson's tattoo on his face. These, and other debaucheries come to light over the 108(ish) minute unR-rated Theatrical cut of The Hangover.

Early reviews indicated that the film was lacking on consistent laughs almost exactly the same movie, to the degree that the cast keeps saying things like "I can't believe we did this AGAIN!" - a point I disagree with - but compensated for very big gags jokes about trannies and boners strategically placed throughout the film. While most of the reveals as to how or why such strange things happened during the bachelor party are the source of the biggest laughs, I'm going to side with a more consistent mostly the same comic approach to the film, largely from character moments. Director Todd Phillips (Old School) hit the jackpot with the combination of Cooper, Helms, and Galifianakis. You could not put three more different people together, but they have a chemistry that sells the rampant absurdity of the story.


Cooper manages to make Phil, a complete asshole who starts the film stealing money from field trip funds a prescription pad from Stu's office, a reasonably likable dude by the end of the film. Ed Helms begins The Hangover as a henpecked loser dominated by Melissa (Rachael Harris) pretty much the same milquetoast dude as in the last film, and grows out of that "type" in a believable way to embrace his "dark side" for reasons that aren't really believable. You can actually buy his final scene with Heather Graham the guy who plays his fiance's Dad as something nothing that could happen between those characters.

Galifianakis runs away with the movie, partially because Alan is a walking non sequitur transformed into a total sociopath. Half of what Alan says doesn't make sense, and the way he makes connections or expresses whatever dementia going on inside that brain carries the humor past big joke set pieces. I was personally fond of the way that the film addresses some of his off hand comments but not others (like why he's not allowed near schools or Chuck E Cheeses). There's also a ridiculous payoff for a Rain Man joke earlier in the film that works because Galifianakis sells it so well. Well okay, Alan is actually more obnoxious at the beginning of the film which doesn't help things.

In the interest of keeping this review short, I won't mention all of the great supporting parts from Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Riggle, Matt Walsh, Paul Giamatti, Bryan Callen, Mike Epps, and particularly I guess Mike Tyson, who has a much better scene than just that is like the Phil Collins moment in the trailer, except this time he sings "One Night in Bangkok" at Stu's wedding. I'm not at all surprised that a sequel is in the works inevitable for The Hangover The Hangover Part II, because the combination of Cooper, Helms, Galifianakis (and, to a lesser extent without spoiling anything Bartha**), is too good to pass up revisiting the line for the midnight show was ridiculous when I was leaving Bridesmaids and people are going to pay a ton of money for something they already saw. I wouldn't mind seeing didn't see more of Heather Graham in a this sequel, as her character is criminally underused in the film, aside from a third-act con game in the casino she either asked for more money or was busy or something.

There is one complaint I must register with The Hangover The Hangover Part II, and it is a matter of personal disagreement. The Dan Band, who Phillips also used in Old School, show up near the very end of the film, and are featured in such a way that it nearly derailed my enjoyment of the entire film. I just don't like that group, and having them singing a lounge version of 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" isn't going to change that. the fact that it's really just The Hangover all over again, except in Bangkok. You can figure out almost immediately where Teddy is and everything else that happens is clearly misdirection.Why? Because you ALREADY SAW THIS MOVIE! Otherwise, The soundtrack the music alternates between bachelor party appropriate and inspired (like the use of Danzig's "Thirteen Black Hell" to open the film play over the opening credits).

If you're like the Cap'n and somehow slow to pick up on the universally positive buzz generally "meh" buzz that nevertheless has people turning out for The Hangover The Hangover Part II, now's as good a time as any to catch yourself up. I doubt you'll regret it, unless you offend easily or really like babies monkeys that smoke cigarettes.



* Please don't fail to note that I've been sharing excerpts of a paper I wrote extolling the virtues of seeing films theatrically. The irony is not lost on me, I assure you.
** It was not until writing this that I checked IMDB to figure out why Justin Bartha looked so familiar. Turns out he was the "nerdy" character in National Treasure. His part in The Hangover The Hangover Part II is enough of a departure that I never made the connection.

Blogorium Book Review: The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made

The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies NEVER Made

by David Hughes

2001, A Capella Books

Reviewed by the Cap'n

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David Hughes chronicles a number of high profile Science Fiction (and to be honest, Comic Book and television) properties that failed to materialize despite considerable efforts on the part of artists, writers, designers, directors, and producers. Oh, and H.R. Giger, who appears in almost every chapter as a key figure in pre-production for The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies NEVER Made. What works is that Hughes does a very good job of putting together the stories from as many sources as possible, but the book suffers from a handful of problems, the largest of which is that the bold claim in the title is frequently undermined by the reality that many of these films WERE made.

I'm going to try very hard not to beat up on straw men here, because it's really not fair to hold a book from 2001 accountable for suggesting a number of movies would not be made that were subsequently produced and released. And believe me, I'm really having a hard time not calling out Ain't It Zoul's Harry Knowles for saying "It's a melancholy examination of that which will never come to pass..." (242) in the Afterword, because he of all people should know that in Hollywood all films are in a constant state of flux until the last penny is squeezed out of "Unrated Director's Cut" DVDs and Blu-Rays. But instead of criticizing the book for periodically unfortunate timing, I'll stick with some amusing ironies:

Had Hughes waited, let's say four years, several of the films listed under a "NEVER" moniker would at least be in active production, and quite a few of them would be already be out. For example, there are breakdowns of Spider-Man, Terminator 3, Aliens vs Predator, Superman Returns (nee Lives), I Am Legend, Watchmen, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Thunderbirds, and the unlikelihood that James Cameron would ever make Avatar.

What you're noticing (and what struck me) is that all of these came out not long after the book was published. While not Science Fiction, it's entirely possible that had Freddy vs. Jason found its way into the book, that also would have been a "never" going to happen movie, and yet it sits on many a shelf. But getting back to the proximity of release, I was continually reminded in the middle chapters of just how close Hughes coverage of the films was from the final version; usually no more than a script draft or directorial swap. The suggestion that a Will Smith version of I Am Legend is brought up in its chapter, although the focus is on the Ridley Scott take that didn't come to pass.

To be fair, Hughes has updated the book for a 2008 version, which I have not seen, but the point remains that "Never" unfortunately became "yeah, I saw that" for a lot of you.

What I will grant you is that none of the films were made as described in Hughes book; The I Am Legend film with Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger did never did materialize, and probably won't since the Will Smith one did. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of debate. Like Science Fiction in general, what's outdated about the book becomes a game of speculative "what if"s.

However, not all of the book covers films that did eventually happen. The early chapters, devoted to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, The Tourist, and two stillborn David Lynch projects (Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble) do thoroughly cover films that have not and may not ever appear. Other chapters deal with unrealized visions of Star Trek and Alien sequels, plus various takes on Dune.

I was also quite fond of the chapter on how Steven Spielberg's Night Skies idea split off and became E.T. and Poltergeist, or the strange saga of how Supernova came to be, but was the most interested in a blow-by-blow account of how The Island of Dr. Moreau became the disaster it is*. For that, I certainly felt like the book was worth reading. (I had no idea that Richard Stanley, director of Hardware and Dust Devil, was initially directing the film and subsequently fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer)

Not all of the stories are new to the book; in fact, I'd venture to guess that since Hughes lifts most of the quotes from other magazines, books, or newspapers that there's only a bit of original research, but his ability to collect it all in one volume is quite valuable. I was troubled by minor but consistent typos throughout the text, particularly when it's a case of misspelling someone's name when the correct spelling is less than half the page up.

My only other quibble was that the chapter on The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy tries very hard to replicate Douglas Adams' style, and it doesn't really work. I had hoped it would only last a paragraph of two, but it appears sporadically throughout the chapter and is more annoying than clever. I get why Hughes tried to do it (I myself have attempted to co-opt Adams' style once or twice), but even in 2001 it had been done to death.

Overall, I'd have to say I give The Greatest Sci-Fi Films NEVER Made a "check it out" recommendation. If you happen to find it used somewhere (or the 2008 edition, which no doubt addresses many of the drawbacks), I will admit that at no point was I particularly bored. The caveat is that I spread out reading the chapters over visits to the bathroom, and I find it works quite well broken up into smaller portions. I'm not sure that sitting down and reading the book beginning to end would be the same experience.

"Never" might have been too strong of a word, but as a collection of collapsed productions and good ideas that never took off, it's definitely worth looking into.



* The film is famous for being one of the few movies a regular Blogorium reader ever walked out of.

Robots and Plants, Oh My!

Things have not progressed well in finding our mystery science-fiction film. I tried to search the "plot" section of IMDB, to no avail. I've pored through a dozen or so sci-fi related websites that claim to list "every movie with robots ever!", to find nothing. I even plugged the following sentence into Google:

"low budget space movie with robot that turns astronauts into space zombies"

Alas, the Cap'n found nothing. No trace of this movie anywhere. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and did not have documentation (photos by Major Tom, to give belated credit where it's due) one could reasonably convince me that no such film ever existed. But it does. I know it does, and it's alternately comforting and baffling that it's so hard to identify a movie in the age of information.

But seriously, how could you not want to find out the movie responsible for these images?



Please help. I'd love to share the video, but it's so hard to follow the movie without our inane commentary, but if it comes to that, I will put that up if it helps you identify the film.

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My brain and throat are unpleasant, so it's just about time for the best "From the Vault" you could ever hope for...

See, last year I promised not to mention M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on the Blogorium for a year, and that year is up. For those of you who are intimately familiar with my coverage of The Happening, I hope you enjoyed the sabbatical.

For those of you who aren't aware of my unique relationship to Night's first "R" rated film, I happily re-present the first of two reviews for The Happening. Tomorrow I'll post the second review. One of them is the absolute truth, and the other is a total lie. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.

Blogorium Review: The Happening

There's a common expression on the interweb for a person who posts a positive review of a movie almost everyone else is panning: PLANT!

Typically, this is to imply that the person who gives the thumbs up to something universally reviled is actually an employee of the studio releasing the movie; hence, their review is "planted" on sites like CHUD or Aint It Cool in order to swing the negative trend.

It's particularly fitting that I'm likely to be hit with "plant!" for what I'm about to write, considering that the menace of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening may or may not also be leafy and green. Moreover, I do not work for or know anyone at 20th Century Fox, and while it's going to be an uphill battle convincing you, I really feel like The Happening is the victim of "piling on".

As you probably noticed in the last few days, I was in no way interested in seeing The Happening: as a person who was not a fan of Signs and didn't bother seeing Lady in the Water or The Village, I had pretty much given up on M. Night and was buying into the sea of negative press his new movie was getting. Could an R rating actually make the difference for a guy who had apparently lost all sense of storytelling?

Well, I don't know about the R rating, but The Happening is waaaaaaayyyyy better than you've been hearing. I might go so far as to say it was amazing, but then you'd think I was drinking the Kool Aid or something. The catch is that this movie is being advertised as this sort of Hitchcockian thriller, ala The Birds or something like that, and The Happening isn't that at all.

Going in to this The Happening, you should probably have movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the brain, because that's what Night is doing here. The Happening is a hyper-stylized film, and it seems like most of the reviews are missing that. Yes, everyone stands around like a deer in the headlights and delivers lines like they weren't just in the scene preceding this one, but it's uniformly corny. It's not like one person is acting like people normally do in this movie; everyone is acting like they're out of a 1950s "Red Scare" science fiction film. You might also want to consider Soylent Green.

I can honestly say I sat riveted through the whole film, as did Daniel and Leckie. Even though there's no M. Night "twist", he finds ways to keep the menace creepy and (largely) unseen. The plant angle is pretty much where the film goes, but they keep other possibilities floating around so that you have options to follow. I also dug little moments and, no pun intended, signs like the one that reads "You Deserve This" on a real estate billboard.

The mass suicides are effective mostly because Night drops you right in on them. The world is pretty much exactly like the one we recognize, and right off the bat crazy shit starts happening. It would be like if Steven Spielberg cut the awkward opening off of War of the Worlds and just got to business wiping out people. The R rating may be less for the stuff you've seen in the trailer and more about the two brutal shotgun killings (of kids, no less) and the "lion" scene.

Well, I know you aren't going to believe me, because everyone else is hating on the film. That's fair: if they want to beat up on Shyamalan because that's the path of least resistance, so be it. I'll stand up proudly and recommend all of you see it and judge for yourselves. It's the only way you'll know for sure. Feel free to ask for more information. I promise you I did see it and I could not turn away.

The Best You Can is Good Enough

I hope we all learned something from our Twitter experience last night. I learned that while it's a cute exercise, ultimately The constraints were more frustrating than creatively fulfilling. If the spaces count as "characters", then I really feel bad for people who are trying to do anything substantive in their accounts. I'll stick with whatever it is I'm doing here, thank you very much.

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As some of you may have noticed, I wasn't very careful in setting the parameters of the poll, so technically speaking, you still have a little over twelve hours to vote. I'm not going to sway the vote by telling you what's winning, so feel free to point me in one direction or the other. Provided I actually have time, I'll watch the winner tomorrow night and give it a proper write-up for Monday.

"But Cap'n," you exclaim, "didn't you say you'd be reviewing it tonight?"

Why yes, faithful audience, I did. Unfortunately, life got in the way and something non-movie related took precedence, ergo I allowed my foolish extension of voting time to stand. As it was non-movie related, I'm not going to bother you with the details. Besides, I have something much more amusing to talk about...

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As previously discussed in the Blogorium, Criterion is losing a bunch of titles to Lionsgate, who are subsequently releasing a handful of them as "StudioCanal Collection" titles. Being that the Cap'n is nothing if not a diligent pursuant of information, I went to the trouble of tracking down two of the first three releases (Contempt and The Ladykillers; I left Ran on the shelf because it's been getting universally poor marks for BD image quality) and was amused to discover the following paragraph atop the back cover:

"The StudioCanal Collection brings together the very best of cinema, with a series of acclaimed and influential films on Blu-ray with superior picture and sound quality and other unique special features. Discover or rediscover the great classics, contemporary works or adaptation from literature masterpieces. Cinema will never look the same."

What struck me almost immediately is how that blurb sounds suspiciously like a bloated version of this:

"The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of classic and important contemporary films, presents..."

It is fair to point out that Criterion never had a Spine Number for The Ladykillers, and in fact never released any iteration of the film, but they did have Contempt and Ran, and most of the supplements for those films appear on the StudioCanal Blu-Rays. I haven't seen any list of upcoming StudioCanal BD's, but I wouldn't be shocked to find they synched up nicely with the list of films going Out of Print from Criterion.

Perhaps I'd be a bit more forgiving if it weren't so apparent that these Blu-Rays are redressing of Criterion supplements (and at Criterion prices, by the way - the two I picked up on Amazon were exactly the same price as Revanche, Lola Montes, and Hunger). If they continue pushing beyond merely releasing HD versions of Spine Numbers, then I'll be behind StudioCanal a bit more. The artwork and discs for Contempt and The Ladykillers do look nice, in the interest of fairness.

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Finally - because there has to be a "finally" - I would also like to solicit advice from Spine Number aficionados (and foreign film buffs) as to what Criterion BD to pop in after I get around to watching the winner. Nary an unkind word has been spoken about their three latest releases, or Paris, Texas for that matter, so give me your two cents, gang.

Please Don't Tell Me the Spaces Count as "characters"

I'm going to try a little experiment tonight. As you are no doubt aware, I am no fan of Twitter. The damned thing drives me nuts with its "140" character limitations. Ack.

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See? That's 140 characters. And then I had to stop, having said nothing whatsoever of substance. I've already blown through 2/3's of the length of this section. So sad.

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Two utterly pointless demonstrations of why Twitter serves no purpose. In an attempt to disprove myself, I will try to give you four brief reviews of 140 or less.

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The Private Life of King Henry VIII - Charles Laughton is in top form as VIII and while the film plays fast and loose with history, wry humor and Korda's direction prevail.

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A Countess from Hong Kong - Charlie Chaplin's worst bar none. Anachronistic, even for 1967, and painfully unfunny. Brando has seldom been more out of place; Loren is ok.

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Borat - I never finished watching the movie. I'm not really sure why not, but I keep getting bored about twenty minutes in. 101 No offense to Sacha Baron Cohen: Ali G still good.

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Malevolence - This movie mostly reminds me of better horror movies, but its saving grace (if you can call it that) is the stupid "beeeeooorrowr" noise. Just skip it.

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Okay, that was taxing and obnoxious. I felt challenged in all the wrong ways, so I'll stick to writing like a human being from here on out. Twittering ain't for the Cap'n.

Edu-ma-brain-drain

The Cap'n would like to apologize for the sudden lack of Blogorium Reviews. If this week is any indication, there won't be much time to watch entire movies outside of Monday afternoons. I've seen pieces of movies, digested in bite-sized portions: the first thirty minutes of Moon, twenty minutes of Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey's The Girlfriend Experience Commentary, the opening of Che. (Did you know that Weeds' Demián Bichir plays Fidel Castro? I missed that somehow...)

I know that much - if any at all - of the appeal of this blog is the promise of new material six days a week, with trailers on Sunday, so I'm really going to try to keep that up. It's going to be very hard though. Whenever possible, I try to keep this blog strictly about film and occasionally television, so I'm going to limit this school update to just tonight. I had what sounded like a reasonable number of classes with a heavy, if oddly split up, work load. And then I went and did a stupid thing, which was to add an extra class. A class I don't need, because I already took it.

The course material was too interesting to pass up. Yes, I'd been in Senior Seminar last year, and slogged through it, but this year was about religion and gender. Three books are on the agenda: The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Omnigender, and Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. I wanted to just sit in and read the books, but the ruling came down from high that in order to get the Senior Seminar experience again, I'd have to take the class as an independent study. And do all of the work, again. Facilitate in-class and online discussions, deliver two oral presentations and three written critiques. Again.

Okay, so that's a pain, but worth the price of admission for source material like that. I did not ask to take over the Religious Studies Club. I said I'd help, but I'm not looking to organize field trips, guest lecturers, and help put the next generation of club leadership in place. That's not my bag, kids. I get worn out organizing Horror Fest. I didn't mind having people over every Thursday night to shoot the breeze and wax religiosophically, but responsibility... mrm.

I don't feel quite as horrible because I manage to cram in far more reviews over the holidays than I'd anticipated, and even got the recaps done before 2010 hit. That's good. I still have a half dozen or so movies that need seeing, and I'd really like to catch The Road before it leaves theatres. I just don't know when that's going to happen. Aside from the Coen Brothers class and next week's triple feature, I don't know when I'll be able to provide you with the kind of regular exposure to new movies that dominated most of December and January.

But I'm going to try. It's a tricky thing, walking away from a project I've been adhering to for the last six years. I apologize in advance if the recaps and reaction to news dominates entries. I'll make a concerted effort to get more "Four Reasons" and "Five Movies" out, and there's a chance you'll see a dry run of a Coen brothers paper I'm mulling over. However, it could get bumpy for a little bit, so bear with the Cap'n.

Blogorium Review: The Ladykillers (2004) reconsidered.

I must admit to being slightly puzzled while re-watching the Coen Brothers remake of The Ladykillers. It's been several years since I late viewed the film (possibly the first time in its entirety since the theatrical release), and while I can't reverse my opinion that it's my least favorite Coen Brothers movie, it's not on account of The Ladykillers being an awful movie. It's not even necessarily a bad movie.

The Ladykillers is, however, a mess; it is a jumbled concoction of good ideas, bad execution, and outright baffling decisions.

For example, I like much of the camerawork early in the film. In fact, the camera movement is one of the strengths of The Ladykillers. The Brothers Coen set up visual motifs quickly, and it's not hard to see where the film is going in the first fifteen minutes, whether or not you've seen the original.

Both versions are about a group of criminals setting up their operation in the home of an kindly old lady. When the inevitable tension arises, disposing of the old woman becomes much more difficult than they imagined. In the original version, Alec Guinness played the role of Professor Marcus, the leader of hooligans disguised as musicians. In the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks takes over as Professor G.H. Dorr, PHD.

But Hanks isn't really the problem in The Ladykillers. Despite that fact that he chews scenery as thought it were covered in honey, Tom Hanks fits very well into the Coen Brothers universe. Like George Clooney and Nicolas Cage before him, Hanks isn't afraid to get silly. There's an underplayed hint of menace about Dorr early in the film that never really plays out, but this is more on the side of the auteur writer/directors than the star.

In fact, much of what doesn't work in The Ladykillers rests on the shoulders of Joel and Ethan Coen. The film can be maddeningly schizophrenic with its tone and characters, particularly the rest of Dorr's crew. J.K. Simmons finds himself working out of a tough spot early in the film after his character is introduced killing a dog (much to the chagrin of commercial-within-a-movie director Greg Grunberg and ASPCA Rep. Bruce Campbell). That none of his subsequent character work or the Mountain Girl subplot never registers is in part because of the awkward first impression. Oh, the Irritable Bowel Syndrome introduced later doesn't help either.

Believe me, I understand that The Ladykillers is trying to juxtapose the world of the sacred and the world of the profane, and while the Coens get the sacred spot on, the profane is wildly inconsistent, giving the movie an almost anachronistic tone. Scenes that are merely between Hanks and Hall are great, but when Marlon Wayans is dragged in playing a far too out of place "lost soul", the slapstick wears thin quickly.

Part of it is that The Ladykillers feels like a remake that tries too hard to keep the spirit (and the black comedy) of the original but that isn't a "period" film. It makes sense, considering that O Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn't There are "period" films, and while Intolerable Cruelty is set in 2003, it feels like a screwball comedy in tone. The Ladykillers does not find that balance so easily. It often feels like an uncomfortable mishmash of the 1950s and 2004.

This is not to say there aren't small touches I still enjoy. Irma P. Hall is uniformly excellent as Marva Munson, and I love her obsession with the one "hippity hop" song she can identify, A Tribe Called Quest's "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo". Had the film tried less to incorporate "modern" influences and simply focused on Munson and Dorr, it might be more palatable. Other little things amuse me, like the way Lump (Ryan Hurst) calls the Professor "coach", or Munson's cat constantly staring at the criminals with anthropomorphized disdain. And the recurring portrait of Munson's late husband, Othar, is chuckle inducing in its mere presence.

At the same time, I can't say that it holds up any better than it did five years ago, and I can't see myself rushing to see it again (although I suspect it will make a cursory appearance in the Coen auteur class next spring), but it's not bad. Just very curiously put together, and not in ways I think are defensible. Thoughts, anyone?

To tell the truth...

I don't even know what to talk about after Boss and Teenage Mother. After a one-two punch like that, there's nothing I could watch, no development I could raise angst for. So the Cap'n spent most of the day doing homework and finishing season three of Dexter.

Season four starts tomorrow, but I won't be watching it. As stupid as this sounds for a movie fanatic to say, I'm getting rid of cable. And the DVR, and the stored movies and "record all", and the On Demand. I weighed the pros and cons of having it, and it boils down to a simple fact: I already don't have enough time to watch the hundreds of movies at the apartment. I have three Netflix movies that I haven't watched since I lived three houses away. I spend most of my time reading and writing for school, and when I did watch the fancy digital cable, it was a distraction.

The DVR was nice, I guess, but it became another method of piling on. I had another pile of movies and tv shows eating up space that I wasn't going to get to any time soon. Other than Lost, Doctor Who, and Weeds, I don't keep up with shows. I'm horrible about that, and the same goes with movies. How did I really expect to add more tv to the plate? By the time I get around to Bored to Death or Curb Your Enthusiasm, they'll be out on dvd. It just doesn't make sense right now to have cable with any amenities. So I cut it off.

I can still keep up with tv shows, but now at a less break-neck pace. Now I can finish watching The Office and Dollhouse, start Fringe, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, True Blood, Pushing Daisies, and The Mighty Boosh, but at my own pace. Not worrying so much about when the next episode airs. Not hurrying to catch up before the season premiere. By the time I'm done with those, the new season of Dexter will be in stores.

The other big perk is no more idle channel surfing. From here on out, if I turn the tv on, it's with a specific purpose. I'll be watching something I want to watch, that I made time to watch, and that I can write about. So you get more content and less excuses.

For a while there, I thought it would be worth keeping just for all the movies available. The truth was that with so many options, nothing ends up being what I'd watch. There were at least 30 channels devoted to nothing but movies, and I watched maybe four movies in the two months I had service. The math just doesn't work. Does it mean I'll miss being able to watch Schindler's List and Clean, Shaven in HD? Maybe. Was it the right thing to do for now? Definitely.

So far, the only thing I miss is not having a clock in the living room.

3-D's Nuts!

I wasn't alive in the 1950s and 60s, but the Cap'n is slowly understanding why the 3-D fad died off the first time around. And we haven't had our eyeballs sodomized by Avatar yet!

Like the remake, if the zombified corpse called Hollywood sniffs anything that turns brains to dollars, it fixates and overproduces... wait. Bad metaphor. The desperation is right, the zombie part ties to the desperation... hmmm. Okay, I've got it.

Let's say that Morgan Spurlock decided not to eat ANYTHING for thirty days. Then, on day thirty-one, presuming he hadn't died from malnutrition, he returned to find the only place open in a one thousand mile radius was McDonalds. So he ate it, and had what passes for sustenance, and decided he really liked McDonalds.

Now, McDonald's takes this small sign of appreciation as an indicator that everyone will want AS MUCH McDonald's ALL OF THE TIME, so they start opening more and more fast food joints, cramming the market with their shitty yet affordable food. Perhaps in the short term people love it more, yes, but eventually everyone, including Mr. Spurlock, gets sick of it.

Right now, Hollywood is McDonalds AND Morgan Spurlock. They're desperate for anything that people will like, so they've been throwing just about anything they could find to see what stuck. Right now, the apparent answer is Remakes and Just About Anything in 3-D.

Accordingly, if you look at announcements for movies coming out in the next year, the somewhat limited 3-D market of even two-to-three years ago is about to be flooded. The Three Musketeers, Iron Man 2, Piranha, Drive Angry, Avatar, Halloween 3, Saw VII, Astroboy, A Christmas Carol, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Alice in Wonderland, Shrek 4, Toy Story 3, The Hole, The Gate, Frankenweenie, Tin Tin...

Yeesh! And I doubt this is even close to the number of movies being fast-tracked for 3-D. This is not including the rumored re-releases of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Toy Story 1 and 2, and George Lucas' Star Wars Trilogy in three dimensions. Oh yes, they're going back and making those 3-D now too, so we'll enjoy them more.

We've come a long way from Robert Rodriguez releasing Spy Kids 3-D and Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and I'm already a little 3-D'd out. We had two of them at Summer Fest and I'm not even sure I'd want to do one for Horror Fest again this year or any time soon.

The argument against my complaint is that "Demand is high for 3-D now, so if we don't capitalize then people will simply lose interest", leaving Hollywood grasping at straws and continuing to simply make movies we've seen before and not bother changing the title. I get that. On the other hand, flooding the market may temporarily satiate demand and maintain interest, but before too long it becomes passe, the flavor of the month that everyone is into and six months later is being mocked soundly on VH1's "I Love the _____'s."

I'm no marketing genius (believe that; if I were more people would read the blogorium) but there is such a thing as cultivating interest and maintaining it without giving too much too soon. That is possible. Admittedly, it runs the risk of not working (take, for example, wildly successful campaigns for terrible movies like Godzilla and The Phantom Menace), but you can carefully dole out something in a way that brings people back and wanting more. Just because My Bloody Valentine and The Final Destination do well in 3-D doesn't mean EVERY horror movie needs to be in 3-D as soon as possible. Ones that really take advantage or benefit from the process, maybe.

The point I'm trying to make is that even when someone does very well exploiting a gimmick, like a William Castle for example, it's not merely the presence of the gimmick itself that sustains audience interest. I've never seen House on Haunted Hill in "Emergo", but the movie still works aside from the gimmick. Maybe the flying skeleton really did make the difference, but it doesn't rely on the trick to work. If you want to keep 3-D fresh, consider very carefully just how much of the movies being fast-tracked would benefit from the process, of it it's just a cheap gimmick.

Because cheap gimmicks die the faster death. The Creature from the Black Lagoon and House of Wax endure, with or without the glasses.

Finally, the worlds of packing and movie anecdotes can collide!

Shamefully, I don't look at my VHS collection that much anymore. Aside from a brief return to taping movies on TCM and the occasional Horror Fest cameo, the VHS function on my DVD/VHS machine doesn't get much use. The tapes have been sitting in the remains of an entertainment center-cum-bookshelf, and I just don't give much thought to them.

The reason this is a shame is because without those tapes I wouldn't have the foundation of cinematic geekery the Cap'n draws upon. Packing up those tapes today reminded me that not only did I tape a significant amount of X-Files, MST3K, and The Twilight Zone, but I also learned to appreciate film history in the best possible way: trial and error.

While I can't advocate film piracy or copying tapes or any of that jazz, in my younger, dumber, days, I would copy the shit out of some movies from Carbonated Video. Unlike many video stores, they didn't put scrambling signals into their tapes, so you could straight up copy a movie if you had two vcrs. I should feel worse about this than I do, but the honest truth is that I rented so many movies from that store and gave them so much business that it must have offset the copies.

It's not like I copied stuff and then didn't rent anything else. I would - quite literally - rent three or four movies at a time, make copies of them, and then rent four more. If it was summer, I did this all the time. I burned through their "twenty rentals for twenty bucks" or whatever it was in two to three weeks. In that time, I had lots of exposure to movies I would never have rented otherwise, and the tapes reflect it. Some of the tapes are embarassingly bad; others are just amusing.

For some reason, I rarely went by "theme"; I'd just rent four movies that looked interesting, get a six (and later, eight) hour SLP tape, and put them together. It's how you end up with tapes that have the following combination:

The Postman
Spice World
The Lost Boys
The Untouchables

So the upside is that I have The Lost Boys and The Untouchables. Unfortunately, they're the second half of a craptacular 8 hour tape. Admittedly, it's not as bad as the tape where I had to fast forward through The Island of Dr. Moreau and Shock Treatment to get to Edward Scissorhands, but what I love is that I rented indiscriminately. I don't rent like that anymore, so that willingness to try out just about anything and keep it on tape makes me chuckle. I'd end up with random stuff like Beavis and Butthead Do America, Ghostbusters, Animal House and Die Hard on one tape. Three comedies and... Die Hard. Beats me.

Those years taught me what I did and didn't like, what I gravitated towards, and helped lay the foundation for what I looked towards when I got older. Looking back at the tapes is like looking at other juvenalia: you can see where you were heading, warts and all.

I had originally considered giving these tapes away on the Free Shelf at work, but I think there's some value in having keeping my "sequel" tape of Halloween II, Dawn of the Dead, and From Dusk Til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (or whatever it's called. the tape is in a box now). If I'm willing to embrace the dead format of HD-DVD, I can keep giving those tapes a shot. They teach me a lot about where I've been and where I'm going in film studies.

Minor Life Lessons with Cap'n Howdy

The, uh, vote is in. Major Tom* successfully campaigned for La Haine and won because, well, nobody else bothered voting. This tells the Cap'n two things:

1. I'll be watching La Haine sometime soon.

2. That whole "vote for what the Cap'n watches next" will not be back next week.

That's cool. It's better to know early when an experiment isn't working and course correct than take forever only to suffer months of crushing futility**, so I'll scale back the "reader interaction" for now. Nevertheless, look for a write up of La Haine next week, hopefully better than the Star Trek one from Monday.

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Onto other business: Mr. Cranpire, I checked up and Ghost House Underground is, in fact, part of the craptacular Ghost House productions Sam Raimi is responsible for. This does not help his case, I'm afraid.

Also, every time I think about After Dark Bore-or Fest, I grow slightly frustrated. The After Dark Horrorfest started the same Halloween I launched Horror Fest here, and while I selfishly think my fest is better, more people know about 8 Films to Yawn For.

For that reason (and many others), I won't show any of their films; not even Frontier(s) which never technically played at an After Dark. They also put out The Butterfly Effect 3, Crazy Eights, Dark Ride, Penny Dreadful, Wicked Little Things, and (theatrically anyway) Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror. If you count Frontier(s), they're still doing better than Ghost House and Ghost House Underground.

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I haven't finished watching anything in the past few days. Honestly, I spend most of my day doing homework and most of the evening at work. When I get home I do more homework (never take summer classes, gang), and write the blogorium. I did manage to watch pieces of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Star Trek: The Boring Picture all on fancy schmancy discs. They all looked pretty nice, even if the T2 disc is so overcomplicated that it won't actually start the movie when you press "Play _____ Version"***.

Actually, the T2 disc is kind of creepy. It pretends to be linking your "disc" with Skynet, including an on-screen readout of where you live, what kind of internet connection you have, the provider, and a map showing where you're watching the Blu Ray from. Any time you ask it to do things, "Skynet" spends a little time downloading crap to help it "function" better. Sure, most of its just Java-related stuff for the picture-in-picture modes, but dammit that's creepy. Because, you know, I WANT Skynet (and we all know it really exists) to know I'm watching a movie about how it fails to kill John Connor. That's going to earn me brownie points during the inevitable robot invasion.

To be fair, I'd rather be wasted in the Robot Holocaust called Judgment Day than to wake up in The Matrix after it happens. You guys did know that's what happens, right? John Connor fails and the Terminators hook humans up to The Matrix to grow their Skynet Empire. Surely you've heard this already.

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Oh, Star Trek? Well, Wrath of Khan looks very good and The Boring Picture is, as ever, pretty boring. Unless you have a huge boner for long, uninterrupted model shots of Klingon ships and the Enterprise or V'Ger (SPOILER: it's the Voyager 6 space probe. What a twist!). For some reason, HD makes the Klingon makeup look really bad, like something from the BBC Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm glad they improved it in time for Christopher Lloyd (SPOILER: He's a Klingon in The Search for Spock! Baron Von Trapp and Evil from Time Bandits are also Klingons but in a later movie. So was Shakespeare. What a twist!).

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Finally, while I could always be very wrong when it comes to Werner Herzog (the trailer for Rescue Dawn looked like the most generic "inspirational prisoner of war" movie, after all), the trailer of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - and that's actually the title - looked baaaaaaad. Like, Wicker Man crossed with Bangkok Dangerous BAD. I was going to share it with you, but the user who posted it on Youtube wisely removed the clip.

If it helps give you some idea what you missed, here are some things Nicolas Cage uttered in the trailer:

"You don't have a lucky crack pipe?"

"What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?"

"Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing."

I can't remember whether it's supposed to be a remake or a sequel to Abel Ferrara (The Driller Killer)'s Bad Lieutenant, but I'm suddenly regretting that mandate that (like Harvey Keitel), Nicolas Cage unleash the schlong for his version.

Oh, who am I kidding? The only thing I think when I see this trailer is "well, they made a Basic Instinct 2 and look how well that worked out."

*EDIT* Just kidding. Look what I found



Trailers speak louder than blogs, and this trailer sounds like it's saying "Crap Sandwich."

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Class dismissed.



* Major Tom is, I believe, left his vote the same day during his comment about locating Terrorvision.
** Yes, I'm sorta kinda talking about the Blogorium in general...
*** You have the choice of the theatrical cut (which I prefer), the Director's Cut that James Cameron prefers, or the super-mega-everything back in cut with all of the deleted stuff including the T-1000 killing John Connor's dog and "glitching" after freezing and re-constituting.