Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (High Expectations, Maybe Diminished Results)

 As has been pointed out to me a few times over the course of last year, I didn't review a number of movies that I had been open about looking forward to. In some instances, like Nymphomaniac, I never got around to watching them. When I do, we'll see what happens, review-wise. What happened with many of them was that I watched a movie I was really looking forward to, spent some time digesting it, and realized I just wasn't interested in writing about them. There are a few exceptions - and I will include links when we get to them - but by and large there wasn't much to add to the general consensus. That, or I really didn't want to rain on the parade of folks who really loved some of the films I'm about to cover.

 Bear in mind that it's not that I hated them, but rather that I wasn't blown away by any of them. A few were pleasant surprises, or technically impressive, but I've struggled with recommending any of them strongly. However, it didn't seem fair to recap 2014 and not mention a few of the most anticipated movies, particularly when two of them were nominated for Best Picture.

 On that note, let's start with Boyhood, which I'm not going to pretend isn't a very impressive achievement for Richard Linklater. That said, I think we all know the talking points about how long it took to shoot and the uncertainty about what direction (if any) the story was headed during that time. And yes, it's quite a feat to stick with it for that long, creating a mini-fiction version of the 7 Up series. Some of the transitions in time are quite clever, and it retains much of Linklater's signature "talking about stuff" dialogue that, when done right, is a fine variation on naturalism. When it's done wrong, well, then you have Waking Life. But Boyhood isn't about monologue-ing its way through Life, The Universe, and Everything - it's about the micro moments of growing up, avoiding the easy traps of movies about adolescence. And I give him a lot of credit for that. Linklater manages to keep the Philosophy 101 crap out of Ellar Coltrane's mouth until just before he gets to college.

 And that's about where I'm going to run out of nice things to say about Boyhood, because the movie didn't do a whole lot for the Cap'n. Maybe it was the choices of music at the beginning: a litany of "it's 2002!" that starts with Coldplay's "Yellow," continues with The Hives "Hate to Say I Told You So," and sneaks in Britney Spears before closing with Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun." I got it - it's 2002. Yup, got it. In Linklater's defense, the choices in music to indicate what year we're in becomes more subtle - it's almost easy to miss Gotye playing in the background at the bar in Austin - but to open the film, I found it off-putting. It actually sticks out more than the "campaigning for Obama" scene or the "what's wrong with the war in Iraq" bowling alley monologue from Ethan Hawke.

 When I watch a Richard Linklater movie, to be honest, I'm expecting a bit of aimlessness - there's less of it than you think in Dazed and Confused, but much of what he excels at is just spending time with people. It's exactly why the Before films work so well; even if they are scripted, it feels spontaneous. Boyhood has a lot of that, but at nearly three hours, I got the impression that he really wasn't sure how or when to end Mason (Coltrane)'s story. Maybe he enjoyed watching the young man that Coltrane grew into, but there are four or five points in the last forty five minutes of Boyhood that would have been more thematically appropriate than when the film does end. Is it in keeping with the "small moments?" Maybe, but considering that Boyhood just tapers off instead of making this ride feel like it was worth taking left me disinterested.

 It has been suggested that because I'm not a parent that I can't really "understand" Boyhood - or, at least, that was the implicit part of a conversation I had with a stranger who liked it more than I did because he saw his son growing up through the movie. While I understand his position, the counter-argument is that I shouldn't have to be able to directly relate with the film in order to enjoy it. I've never been an assistant hotel manager, or been to deep space, or been a hitman whose wife died, but I can relate to and enjoy films with those protagonists. I will say that Boyhood lacks a certain experiential quality to growing up that The Tree of Life has, at least for me. That may very well be an apples to oranges comparison, but there are small moments in The Tree of Life that stirred memories of being young in a way that Boyhood never did.

 Maybe that's not the point of Boyhood - maybe it's more of a "meta" project that condenses something like Michael Apted's "Up" series into a more manageable time frame. It is, in many ways, a spiritual successor to the Before films, which follow a relationship over the course of 18 years. That said, I think that Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight work better as films than Boyhood does. For every fine performance: Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are both great as Mason's biological parents, there's a wonky performance like Marco Perella as the stereotypically abusive, drunk stepfather. For a film that relishes in small moments, that lacks a real narrative arc, having Arquette marry her teacher, then leave him, become a teacher and then marry her student is less about poetic irony and more groan inducing. Sorry, that's just how I felt about it. I did enjoy Lorelei Linklater as Samantha, Mason's sister, who manages to make an impression despite never having much to do.

 The acclaim for Boyhood has, as far as I can tell, been part and parcel with the admittedly very impressive willingness of Richard Linklater to slowly make a movie for more than a decade. You do literally watch Coltrane grow up over the course of the film, and you watch everyone around him change, too. In that regard, yes, I find Boyhood to be admirable, but I don't know that I really liked it.

 While we're on the subject of "admirable," - and I suppose that will be most of this post - I never really warmed to Gone Girl, despite David Fincher's exhaustive attention to detail. I have a very hard time making the case that Gone Girl isn't a very well made film, or that structurally it's not successful, but like Boyhood, I was underwhelmed when it ended. I haven't read Gillian Flynn's novel, and I know she made some changes in the process of adaptation. If I understand correctly, the ending is a little more cynical, but the ending wasn't really my point of contention with Gone Girl.

 (By necessity, the following paragraphs are going to SPOIL the major twist of the book / film, so tread cautiously if you know nothing about the story)

 If I had to pinpoint the problem, it's actually more of the middle, when we know what's really going on, yet the film seems to lag, dragging the parallel arcs of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) out while he defends himself from a well orchestrated plan to assign guilt for her death and she makes mistake after mistake while in hiding. The beginning, when you don't know what's happening with any certainty, as Nick is still basically a blank slate and we're learning everything from Amy's diary entries / flashbacks, is riveting stuff. Our only real insight into Nick is through Amy, and it bleeds over (no pun intended) to the way we perceive him during the investigation into her disappearance.

 And then Gone Girl makes a hard right turn, revealing that we've been listening to an unreliable narrator who then tells us that everything we thought about Nick and Amy's relationship is designed to tighten the proverbial noose around his neck. But that's not the problem - actually, it's a great twist to introduce mid-movie, because now it's a question of whether the person we thought we couldn't trust and the person we thought we could are capable of meeting two very different agendas. So why, then, is the middle of Gone Girl so lethargic? I'm not certain that it's because Amy's story in hiding is much less interesting after she reveals her real plan, or that I just didn't buy that she could plan all of this and then allow hubris to drive her to desperation. What happens with Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris) serves only to show us what Amy is truly capable of when she feels she has no other option, but isn't it clear how far she'll go when we know that Nick really didn't kill her?

 The other problem, and one I still haven't been able to reconcile after watching the film again, is that we don't really know Nick. What we know about him is primarily from how Amy portrays him in her manufactured "diary," which means that even the "meet cute" and wooing parts could be total fictions. We know he was cheating on Amy with Andi (Emily Ratajkowski), and that his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) loves him, but doesn't necessarily trust him. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) has her doubts, but Officer James Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) is positive he's guilty. Celebrity lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) doesn't care - he likes the challenge and the media attention. But Nick? Well, we spend the lion's share of Gone Girl with him and I still don't have a reading on the character.

 Despite the obvious joke to be made, I don't blame that on Ben Affleck the actor. I think that he and Coon have some great scenes together, and that he does his best to give Nick a fighting chance when the deck is stacked against him. But I don't believe that the way the film ends is something he'd acquiesce to so easily, implied threat or no. It reminded me of the end of Proxy, which tells a similar tale of people desperate for attention. I also didn't like Proxy. And even if Gone Girl is a better made film, I'm still on the fence about whether that mean I should forgive its bloated running time in service of a great beginning, clever twist, and bleak ending. I do like that Fincher tells you almost immediately about Amy's relationship with her husband, just by showing you the board games in Margo and Nick's bar. Attention to detail runs rampant, Affleck's growing biceps aside (hello, Batman), but structurally, Gone Girl doesn't seem to sustain itself. So can I admire its construction without necessarily being crazy about it? I guess that's how it's going to be for the time being...

  The Cap'n wrote at length about Christopher Nolan's Interstellar a few months ago, and much of what I said still stands. Here's a piece of the review, as it transitioned from the positives of Nolan's scope to the failings of its emotional core:

 "If I'm being honest, I would have liked more of the exploring the other planets instead of the part of Interstellar that you don't necessarily get from the trailers: the back and forth between Coop (McConaughey) in space and his family on Earth. Instead of focusing on relativity and black holes, we have to keep jumping back home to see that Murph stills hasn't forgiven her father and now she's grown up and is Jessica Chastain. Murph is working with Professor Brand (Michael Caine0 on how to save everybody on Earth because they haven't heard from the ship in 23-ish years (2 years to Saturn plus another 21 thanks to a disastrous turn of events on the first world they land on). It's here that the Nolan brothers introduce the theme of Interstellar that isn't about exploration: that love may be a tangible concept that transcends dimensions and we just don't understand it yet. Oddly enough, the internet's least favorite person (Anne Hathaway) delivers the best monologue about it, but it leads Interstellar down a path I maybe could have done without. The space exploration was so much more interesting, and the Earth plot isn't."

 One of the other things I did between watching Interstellar the first and second times was to sit down with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which only exacerbates how foolish the climax of Nolan's film is compared with Kubrick's. Coop literally explains everything as it's happening in the "other" dimension, which seems even more ridiculous when compared to what happens to Dave (Keir Dullea) when he reaches "Jupiter and Beyond." I'm not saying that Interstellar needed to be as opaque as the end of 2001, or that Nolan was wrong to appeal to a wider audience, but when it's abundantly clear what sort of movie you're trying to emulate, you have to understand that fairly or not, you're going to be held to that standard. Interstellar's moment of cosmic transcendence is almost comical when held up against 2001.

 Still, I probably have a more favorable opinion of Interstellar than Boyhood or Gone Girl. Maybe it's the apologist in me, or maybe it's a subconscious reaction to the "Christopher Nolan is teh suxorz" kneejerk internet reception to his films. I don't find any of his films perfect, but I have enjoyed almost all of them, the lone exception being Insomnia, and only because I saw the original first. Even within Interstellar is the desire to reach for something greater, to bring a mass audience to something they don't see much in theatres anymore, and that's appreciated. It didn't necessarily work this time, and didn't connect with audiences (it clearly didn't connect with his peers, or whoever qualifies as "Academy Voters") but if this is what qualifies as a notable failure for Christopher Nolan, I can live with that. Would it be a bad idea to go back to something smaller, intimate? I don't even mean Memento; The Prestige is comparatively scaled back when put against Inception or The Dark Knight Rises. We'll see what Nolan has in store next time.

 "Next Time" seems to be an oft repeated phrase for Terry Gilliam fans like the Cap'n: every movie since 12 Monkeys has been pretty to very good, but falls somewhere short of the far he set so high with Brazil. And it's not just comparing everything to Brazil, because I think Time Bandits and The Fisher King are also among the most interesting work he's done, post-Python. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes the closest to his mad, glory days, but The Brothers Grimm, Tideland, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus all feel like there was a great movie in there somewhere, but it didn't quite make it to the finish line. Some from interference, one from an untimely death, and I'm not really sure what to make of Tideland. I always look forward to a new Gilliam film, and always hope that this time "they" - whoever "they" are - left him alone and we get a pure, undiluted experience.

 Which brings us to The Zero Theorem, the first of two movies on this list that I suspect you didn't even know came out in 2014. Like many Gilliam films, I heard about it the year before, waited patiently, and eventually it did have a (limited) release / VOD, and then mostly disappeared. That's not a value judgment on The Zero Theorem (we'll get to that), but what seems, increasingly, to be the case with how his work is going to disseminate from here on out (up next: another stab at The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which may or may not have benefitted from the decade of being abandoned). If you've seen any of the reviews for The Zero Theorem, you've probably noticed that it's been compared to Brazil, and not always favorably.

 The comparisons are not unfair: The Zero Theorem deals with a man very much in his own world, Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), who refers to himself as "we," or "us" works for Mancom in service of his own agenda. Qohen believes he's waiting for his "call" - in this case, a literal phone call to the apartment he's made out of an abandoned church. In the meantime, he tolerates Joby (David Thewlis), who can't quite seem to remember his name and is an exemplary representative of all "middle management." Speaking of which, Management (Matt Damon) has his eye on Qohen for a high level programming project, one which resembles a video game but is designed to solve mathematical problems. Management wants Qohen to help him solve the titular theorem, with or without the assistance of Joby, Management's son, Bob (Lucas Hedges), and Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), a woman he meets at a party that might have other hobbies. To keep Qohen on track, Mancom allows him to work from home, as long as he consults Dr. Shrink-Rom (Twilda Swinton), a program designed to monitor his mental state as he pursues the impossible task at hand.

 For the record, I've really just given you the set up of The Zero Theorem, a film stuffed to the gills with visual metaphors, which is always just one step away from collapsing entirely under its own weight. Once you get used to the barrage of information - Gilliam takes the concept of micro-news and runs wild with it - the film can be pleasantly entertaining, but it never feels cohesive. I never got a sense of what point Gilliam was really trying to make, but rather he was quite interested in dissecting the way that media and religion and business operate now. Some of the smaller gags, like "The Church of Batman the Redeemer," are quite funny, even if they add nothing substantive to the story. Of course, it's possible that the story itself isn't especially interesting, as we have little doubt of what Qohen will do by the end of the film. Also, once we're introduced to the virtual reality "fantasy" zone that Bainsley brings Qohen into, it's not hard to figure out where everything is going for the idiosyncratic, mostly misanthropic protagonist. Everyone seems game in the cast, and Gilliam's production design is, as always, a feast of details in every direction. But by the end, there's a sort of sensory overload coupled with, "oh, that's the point?" that just doesn't quite work. The Zero Theorem is an almost, but ultimately misses its mark, whatever it was aiming for.

 There is little doubt that The Zero Theorem is a Terry Gilliam film; his stamp as an auteur is unmistakable at this point. Such is true with Wes Anderson, whose distinct style draws praise and groans alike from audience, and who in 2014 doubled down on his cinematic "signature". When I reviewed The Grand Budapest Hotel earlier this year, I closed the write up by saying:

"I will openly admit to a giddy sensation during the beginning of The Grand Budapest Hotel, as I often have when seeing a Wes Anderson film for the first time. As the film went on, I alternated between admiration for the technical aspects of the Auteur and realizing that I was more impressed with the story than I actually enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, this is not a film that's a chore to watch, nor does it ever drag, but The Grand Budapest Hotel didn't grab me in the same way that some of Anderson's films do. I would be hard pressed to call this a "lesser" film in his catalog, but I can see why it might end up being another dividing line, as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was. I concede that, for the moment, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a (very entertaining) exercise in form over function. Is it possible that changes the next time I see it (and I will)? Quite possibly. The Cap'n is predisposed to follow Wes Anderson down the rabbit hole - less so his imitators - but it's hard to argue that this is not his most "Wes Anderson"-y film to date, for better or for worse."

 Technically speaking, framing your film for three different aspect ratios is an impressive achievement, but it still surprises me to see The Grand Budapest Hotel alongside the likes of Birdman or Boyhood in the Academy Award nominations. To reiterate: it's not a bad film, and I enjoyed watching it most of the time, but I would hardly put it at the top of any list of Anderson's films. The Grand Budapest Hotel is an exquisite trifle, which might be an oxymoron, but I have a hard time making the case that it is in any way exemplary of the best films of last year. While I do know quite a few people who love it, I also know several people who saw it, said "Oh, so this is just what he does now," and moved on. I don't suspect they - or I - will stop watching Wes Anderson films, or even looking forward to them, but my enthusiasm is slightly muted in a way it wasn't before I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 In the realms of enthusiasm, you will perhaps find the Cap'n no more anticipatory of one with the words "a David Cronenberg film." Despite the fact that he's been mostly in "adaptation" mode since eXistenZ, I haven't seen one from A History of Violence to Cosmopolis that wasn't worth sitting with, digesting, and having conversations about. Even when I didn't love one - as was the case with A Dangerous Method - it sparked conversation and made me want to write about the film. I'm in the minority who really enjoyed Cosmopolis, and have had a number of great discussions about its relative merits with people who truly hated it. So it must be telling that I spent most of 2014 sitting silently on Maps to the Stars. As far as I can tell, the screenplay by novelist Bruce Wagner isn't based on anything, but it has a certain "lived in" approach because of its subject matter.

 Many fans of Cronenberg have lamented his shift away from "body horror" in the last decade, although I'm not sure it's entirely accurate. Yes, we're long past the days of the New Flesh, but I think Cronenberg has moved from exaggerated, external forms of "body horror" and internalized it. One doesn't make a film about Freud and Jung without at least spending some time on the way the mind affects the body. That said, people miss the "gonzo" days of Cronenberg films, and Maps to the Stars isn't going to change that much. That said, there is a fair degree of body scarring, immolation, drowning imagery, and implied incest in his ode to Tinseltown. There's also something I can't recall ever having seen before in a Cronenberg film: ghosts. Maps to the Stars is weird, and that's what I've been telling friends since I watched it. Sometimes because there's not much else to it. It was described to me as "David Cronenberg's Arrested Development," which is probably not inaccurate, but don't go in expecting comedy.

 Cosmopolis alumni Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon appear in Maps to the Stars, albeit in smaller roles, one as a driver for Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) and the other as the apparition of actress Clarice Taggart, who haunts her daughter Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana is lobbying for the role of Clarice Taggart in a biopic, even though in Hollywood she's seen mostly as washed up. Covered head to toe, Agatha's presence in Hollywood is less clear - she arrives from Florida and explains to Jerome Fontana (Pattinson) that she struck up a friendship with a celebrity over Twitter (it's the only "playing themselves" cameo, and I wouldn't dare spoil it) and is here to work. Jerome has a screenplay - who doesn't? - and also works small parts on TV shows. Agatha likes him, but he's a bit superficial. Meanwhile, and seemingly unrelated, we have the Weiss family: New Age Guru to the stars Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), manager mother Christina Weiss (Olivia Williams), and child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird). Stafford hawks his inspirational books on TV and is also a Yoga instructor / Masseuse to Havana, while Christina tries to negotiate her son's latest sequel while assuring producers his drinking problem is long over with.

 How the three storylines converge becomes apparent fairly early on, especially once the aforementioned celebrity cameo hands off Agatha to Havana as a personal assistant and Stafford and Christina find out about her. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of moments of drug use and self doubt and threesomes with directors, interrupted by ghosts. Havana has her mother instilling doubt into her every move, and Benjie is inexplicably haunted by Cammy (Kiara Glasco), a girl he visited in the hospital for publicity. There are reasons for their hauntings, mostly tied to Cronenberg's dueling fire / water visual metaphors, although it's less important to how the film is than the very real threat that Agatha poses to the Weiss family. It takes most of Maps to the Stars to get around to why she's really in town, and her connection to Benjie and the vacant lot she frequents when not at work.

 By the end, plenty of cyclical imagery and thematic elements have come and gone, with a few accidental murders, and while I suppose it was worth watching, I'm not sure about much else. One must tread cautiously when using the word "weird," let alone "weird for David Cronenberg," but Maps to the Stars is definitely not like his usual output. I find myself on the fence about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, because while not as aggressively stylized as Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars does share its "go ahead, try to empathize with any of these people" ethos. Is the self-immolation of a major character supposed to be tragic or funny? The dodgy CGI doesn't help if it's meant to be the former. There's some semblance of comedy in Maps to the Stars, although it's rarely funny. Actually, tonally the film is all over the place, and not to its benefit. Perhaps I've avoided discussing Maps to the Stars because I'm not sure what to say about it. As a result, it's hard to recommend it to anyone other than die-hard Cronenberg fans, and what they make of it is anybody's guess.

 Coming up next, the Cap'n will reflect back on what turned out to be a very impressive year for science fiction, and then we'll move into the final stretch before the Best of 2014. Stay tuned...

Nevermore Film Festival Recap (Day Three)

 The final day of Nevermore for the Cap'n was a bit of a light one, by comparison to Saturday, but continued the trend of quality over quantity. While I only saw one feature (admittedly one I'd seen before) and one collection of shorts, the experience was consistently entertaining and served as a nice way to close out the fifteenth anniversary of the festival. As has been the case all weekend, the main draw, other than the films themselves, was the jubilant festival atmosphere. There really is something to be said for being at an event where people really want to be there, and not just showing up at the multiplex because it's something to do. Waiting in between screenings was an opportunity to soak in the decorations, take a look at posters new and old, and to trade notes with strangers about something you wanted to see but couldn't fit in.

 And there were more than a few - 2014 may have been the hardest to schedule in the three years I've been going to Nevermore. To give you some idea, here are the movies I wanted to see at the festival but didn't: Here Comes the Devil, Almost Human, Haunt, and Malignant. I'd already seen Last Days on Mars, Big Bad Wolves and The Human Race, so I was trying to catch movies I a) wanted to see with an audience (Grand Piano) or b) wouldn't be able to see on VOD or rental any time soon (The Shower). Since at least two of the movies I didn't see at Nevermore are on VOD (maybe more - I think The Visitant might be on there, too), I'll try to watch them in the next week or so and do a "supplementary Nevermore coverage" set of reviews, as were it not for the festival I wouldn't have known about them. As it was, I don't think I would have known about some of these movies at all had it not been for Nevermore, which is the other reason it's so much fun. But let's get to talking about the movies, and on the other side I'll share a few photos I remembered to snap over the weekend.

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 Grand Piano is a movie that I'm honestly surprised I hadn't heard about before Nevermore. It's a Hitchcockian thriller that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve, and is also being favorably likened to Brian DePalma, in part because it's easier (and maybe safer) to invoke DePalma than to draw comparisons to The Master of Suspense. That's fair (it sets a very high bar and is almost impossible to live up to when you put it up against Hitchcock), but director Eugenio Mira draws attention to his camera work and trick shots than DePalma ever has, and in many ways Grand Piano is a feature length version of the end of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It's a solid thriller with a very good cast that makes the most out of the three main characters being largely stationary for the duration of the film.

 Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) is a famed classical pianist, or, at least, he was - Selznick hasn't performed in public in five years. Following a botched performance of his mentor's composition, he withdrew from the public eye, just as his wife, Emma (Kerry Bishé)'s, star is on the rise. She's a famous actress, and uses some pull to get Tom back on stage to perform in Chicago for the first time. On top of that, Selznick will be performing on his mentor, the late Patrick Godureaux's custom Bösendorfer piano, flown in especially for the occasion. Most of the orchestra Tom's performing with is glad to see him, including conductor Reisinger (Don McManus), but someone in the audience is determined that Selznick have a perfect performance. If he doesn't, he's a dead man, and once the ground rules are in place, it's up to the pianist to figure out who is threatening his life, and why, without drawing attention while everybody is watching him.

 You can look at the poster and see that Elijah Wood isn't the only marquee name to draw in audiences: John Cusack is listed right afterwards, so it shouldn't be hard to figure out who the voice of the (mostly) unseen assailant is. At first I thought it might be a bad thing to know Cusack was in the film, since when you don't see him it's easy to work out his role in the film, but a friend of mine pointed out to me that it would be much more distracting not to know he was in the film and to suddenly hear his voice. Unlike Kiefer Sutherland in Phone Booth, it's impossible not to recognize Cusack's voice immediately, and it would pull you right out of the story at a critical point. As it is, using his name for marquee value when he's more of a audible presence than a physical one in the film is a necessary evil, but I do wonder why Grand Piano is still mostly an unknown film.

 The selling point of the film, beyond the always reliable Wood (people still content to think of him as Frodo tend to forget that he has quite a range beyond that) and a supporting cast you've seen in many other films, even if you don't recognize the names (Bishé was in Argo, for example) is Mira's direction. The camera is constantly moving, redirecting your focus and masking or revealing critical details at exactly the right moment. There's a split screen that doesn't initially look like one until one half of the screen zooms in on Selznick while the other side remains stationary, and seemingly impossible shots that swirl around the piano as Wood (or someone - Mira masks it very well) plays a series of very complicated pieces. Hitchock is famous for his use of "sound bridges," but Mira makes a great "visual bridge" by cutting to somepne playing a cello at the moment an act of violence occurs. I was impressed by the clever use of camerawork, but never distracted by it (as I sometimes am when watching DePalma).

 My fear is that the fact that Grand Piano is still something no one seems to know about will result in it being released on home video and being treated like a "DTV dump" to sit on shelves with any number of other movies with recognizable names that just aren't very good. Like, oh for example, The Frozen Ground, another movie with Cusack and Nicolas Cage you probably didn't know existed. It's not very good, and certainly nowhere near as interesting visually or structurally as Grand Piano. I don't feel like it would be fair for such a solid, consistently entertaining thriller to be thought of as "just another paycheck" for a few actors whose best days are behind them, which is often what the "DTV dump" implies. Wood was similarly great in the recent remake of Maniac, another movie that went largely unnoticed outside of hardcore horror fans when it drifted through a limited release last year. I'd hate to think that Grand Piano might not get a fair shot with audiences when I think many of them would enjoy it, and it's much better than a lot of so-called "thrillers" that do get wide release. But I'm glad I had the chance to see it again at Nevermore, and it benefits from multiple viewings, as the second time around you can see how much of the main narrative is set up in the first twenty minutes. Oh, and Alex Winter (Bill S. Preston, esquire) takes a break from his Excellent Adventures and Bogus Journeys to play a supporting role in the film, if that helps sway you.

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 After Grand Piano, we walked upstairs from Fletcher Hall to Cinema Two for They're Coming to Get You, Barbra!, the collection of U.S. shorts, which tends to be a highlight of every Nevermore. Generally speaking, it's difficult to see these short films outside of a festival atmosphere, even in a world where you can find nearly every short ever made online somewhere. Of the entries this year, I'd only seen one, and that was because it was an entry made for the forthcoming The ABCs of Death 2, where "M" is the letter up for voting this year.

 There was a bit of a wait outside of Cinema Two as a Q&A from the previous showing was running over, so after talking to a few other attendees and Jim, Nevermore's programmer, I caught up with some friends and had a brief chat with the cast and crew of The Shower who came all the way across the country with the film (seriously, if you can see it, do so. I'm looking forward to a release on DVD or Blu-Ray so I can show it to everybody I know, but in the meantime, keep an eye out to see if it's playing at a festival near you). Once Cinema Two finally opened up, it was time for my last screening of Nevermore, and it turned out to be one of the hardest ballots to choose a winner from.

 Like yesterday's shorts collection, I'll provide a brief synopsis and try to link to the trailer, site, or an IMDB page, because other than one entry, I couldn't find any of the full versions online.

 The Root of the Problem - starting things off on a high note is the story of a woman visiting the dentist in the 1950s(ish), only to discover her fears of dental work may not be unfounded. Are her dentist and his assistant really monsters, or is it just the gas causing her to see something horrible behind their pearly whites?

 Call Me Crazy - A mental institution may not seem like the best place to find love, but when a vampire who murdered her boyfriend meets a cannibal who ate his girlfriend, sparks fly. It starts a little awkwardly but quickly picks up steam and is both funny and rather gory in a way not dissimilar to yesterday's Mr. Bear.

 Out of One's Misery - A man mourns the loss of his family, only to be visited by a stranger that may or may not be real. The premise is a solid one, and it manages to be fitfully creepy, but there's a bit too much repetition of action in the story for me to really take to it.

Songs in the Key of Death - In the world where zombies roam the Earth, it's not always easy to make a living, but FJ Ackerman found a gold mine as a piano tuner with undead accompaniment. Presented as a news piece, ala 60 Minutes, Songs in the Key of Death is at times riotously funny and then flips to a truly gonzo finale that takes the insanity of the premise to a whole new level.

Rope-a-Dope - While not horror in the slightest sense of the word, Eric Jacobus' Rope-A-Dope is an amusing and action-packed variation on Groundhog Day where the Dope (Jacobus) runs afoul of a Martial Arts Mafia and wakes up on the same morning every time they knock him out. He has to learn to fight back, and the use of slapstick and action choreography and editing makes for a very impressive and funny short film.

Christmas Carvings - A locally made film starring one of the co-stars of Out of One's Misery, this short has a Tales from the Crypt-style twist but suffers a bit from pacing issues. A husband and wife celebrate the holidays in a unique fashion, but are they really alone?

Killer Kart - FSU Film School student James Feeney  makes what I ended up selecting as my favorite of a really strong set of contenders with this story of the closing crew at a grocery store trying to survive the shopping cart that "snapped." It combines the best elements of a slasher film with genuinely likable characters, some impressive gore, and one of the most improbable monsters you're likely to see this side of The Gingerdead Man. On top of that, it's really well made an a fun ride from beginning to end.

M is for Mime - I quite enjoyed this brief story of a disrespected mime who has his revenge on a snarky hipster, but realized quickly why The ABCs of Death keeps the credits for each short at the very end of the film - the credits are almost as long as the short itself, which left much of the audience feeling antsy. Don't take that as a slight against "M" is for Mime, because you'll enjoy the short itself, but it somewhat drained the momentum immediately following the end of the action.

Welcome to Dignity Pastures -  Speaking of really short shorts, I'm not sure what to make of this. Dignity Pastures is about a funeral home that caters to families of the undead, which is something we find out after the recently deceased comes back to life in the middle of a service. The funeral director is very quickly called to switch another service to a cremation, and before you know it, Welcome to Dignity Pastures is over. I suppose there's some merit to "get in, make your point, get out" but it felt like a better premise than the execution made it out to be.

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 Finally, here are some pictures I remembered to take (in my infinite wisdom) on Saturday night:

 

One of the many banners.

 Also known as "three I didn't see."

Forgive the glare: I tried hard to avoid it but it just wasn't happening.

 Well, gang, that about wraps it up for the 2014 Nevermore Film Festival coverage. I had a great time, made some excellent new discoveries, and am looking forward to seeing what's in store for 2015!

Retro Review: Con Air

 So tomorrow is the fifteenth anniversary of Con Air entering our lives. I assume that everybody felt the impact of Con Air the same way I did, but if you've forgotten the film (we can't all be 30 years old this year, Blade Runner), let's take a look back down memory lane...

 Con Air was a spin-off of the Jerry Bruckheimer / Michael Bay team up in the 90s that started with Bad Boys in 1995, kicked things up a notch with The Rock in 1996, and then reached its maximum peak with Armageddon, a movie that I'm not especially fond of. Con Air is tied more to the Bruckheimer side of things, as he would also produce Enemy of the State in 1998 before striking gold five years later with Disney and Pirates of the Caribbean. Wait.. where was I? Oh right, before getting tangled up with the people Jerry Bruckheimer was producing with at the Mouse, I was trying to make the point that there was a run of stylized action movies known for excessive "hero" shots, cartoonish plots, big explosions, and lots of actors you wouldn't expect to see yelling at each other. Oh, and the big soundtrack tie-in song: for Con Air, it was "How Do I Live" performed by Trisha Yearwood (after a version by Leeann Rimes was replaced).

 After being reborn as an "action" star in The Rock, Nicolas Cage plays Cameron Poe in Con Air, an Army Ranger coming home to see his wife Tricia (Monica Potter), who is pregnant with his baby. While celebrating his return at a local bar, Poe runs afoul of some one dimensional assholes who decide to assault him outside in the parking lot, and he doesn't really fight back until one of them pulls a knife, and in an act of self defense he kills the guy. Mind you, self defense. Nevertheless, his lawyer recommends he pleads guilty, the judge rejects that because Poe's skills make him a "deadly weapon" who is not subject to normal laws. Because Poe can respond with "lethal force," he is given a 7-10 year prison sentence instead of a reduced judgement. So yeah, it's important to understand this is the logic that sets up Con Air.

 Because it's only going to get crazier, when Poe gets out of prison he ends up flying back home on a plane with the worst of the worst, two of which - mastermind Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich) and Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames) - have planned an execute a jailbreak in mid-flight. They release the other prisoners and hold the guards hostage. Now in order to get home, Poe not only has to stop Cyrus and Diamond Dog, but also needs to find insulin for his cellmate Mike "Baby-O" O'Dell (Mykelti Williamson) in order to save his life.

 I'm not going to pretend that Con Air is a "good" movie by most conventional definitions. It includes an exaggerated version of Cage's H.I. McDunnough southern accent, what I sincerely hope was a wig, and includes a number of great (read: ridiculous) lines, few as memorable as "Why couldn't you just put the bunny back in the box?" But it isn't just Cage being Cage or Malkovich and Rhames chewing scenery that makes Con Air memorable. There's also the rest of the cast, an impressively loaded lineup in retrospect.

 So in addition to Sailor Ripley, Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, Bubba Gump, and Marcellus Wallace, Con Air also features Danny Trejo (Machete), M.C. Gainey (Lost), Colm Meaney (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Dave Chappelle (Half Baked), Nick Chindlund (The Chronicles of Riddick), Rachel Ticotin (Total Recall), and Steve Buscemi (Fargo) as Garland 'The Marietta Mangler' Greene, a Hannibal Lecter-esque serial killer that even Cyrus and Diamond Dog are nervous around. Oh, and John Cusack. How could I forget John Cusack, who plays U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin, the only person on the ground trying to help Poe bring down the plane safely, even as Meaney's Duncan Malloy is busting his balls and driving a car with a license plate that says this:

  Well, it is a very silly, bombastic action movie that they don't really make any more. In fact, I can't think of a modern action film to compare Con Air to, because it's more coherent than a Transformers movie and takes itself more seriously than something like Drive Angry, yet not as seriously as a Bourne movie, for example. It's not tongue in cheek, but things are so over the top at times that you have to sit back and laugh at the absurdity. There's a long setup involving whether or not Garland Greene is going to kill again, so during a brief period when the plane is landed, he ends up sitting down with a little girl. We all dread what should happen, but as the plane is flying off (to "Sweet Home Alabama" if I remember correctly), the little girl waves at the plane from the ground. Awww.

 Con Air was directed by Simon West, who went on to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The General's Daughter, and the remake of When a Stranger Calls. More recently, he made that kind-of remake of The Mechanic with Jason Statham that still gets the Blogorium traffic because nobody knows what the bodyguard's "World Championship" ring is for. In fact, I bet it's on the right side of the page right now under the frequently visited links. While I didn't care for Tomb Raider and didn't see the other two, I liked The Mechanic all right and enjoyed Con Air. Hell, I still enjoy Con Air, even if it is stupid as all get out. Hopefully he brings some of that absurdity to The Expendables 2 later this summer.

 One final sidenote: when I went to see Con Air in the theatre, I was 18 but the friend I went to see it with wasn't. I don't know if other states do this, but the one I live in takes the "under 17" part of the R rating to mean "including 17" so you can only see R-rated movies if you're 18 or accompanied by an adult. I don't remember how he got in - maybe he lied about forgetting his ID - but we did manage to see it.

Fifteen Minute Movies - Grosse Point Blank

 Well, eventually - I'm more than fifteen minutes into Grosse Pointe Blank, but I had to share the beginning of the tape with the rest of you. One of my forgotten joys about VHS was the random collection of trailers you'd find in front of the movie, and Miramax put together a doozy to proceed this one.

 In the order they played, this is what Bob and Harvey Weinstein think you might like if you rent / bought Grosse Pointe Blank:

 Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion
 Playing God
 Gone Fishin'
 The Sixth Man
 The Prophecy 2
 Chasing Amy

  No joke. The trailers don't make much sense, that placement really doesn't make sense, and to be honest with you, aside from the first movie I don't know that any of them are remotely similar to "John Cusack as hitman who takes a job the same weekend as his high school reunion." I greatly enjoy Grosse Pointe Blank, and have fun every time I watch the movie, but I never once considered any of the other films advertised in front of it as a good "double feature" option.

 For those of you who don't remember some of those titles, let's do a quick recap: Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion is the one with Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino as airhead valley girls who try to make a splash at their reunion. Playing God was David Duchovny's first major motion picture after The X-Files broke big (and before anybody knew what Kalifornia was), and also features Angelina Jolie. I've seen it and even I don't really recall specifics about the plot. Gone Fishin' is that movie with Joe Pesci and Danny Glover that everybody saw the ads for and didn't see. The Sixth Man? Kadeem Hardison and Marlon Wayans in a movie about the ghost of a basketball player who helps his team. The Prophecy 2 was the sequel to The Prophecy and is notable for having Jennifer Beals, Christopher Walken, and Glen Danzig.

 And then there's Chasing Amy. I think most of you know Kevin Smith's first "departure" from purely juvenile comedy and how people like to pretend that it's actually good, but I'm going to put all that aside. After all, it's not Armageddon's fault that it's the second least deserving Criterion title. The point of mentioning Chasing Amy (a movie that I have never once thought of when watching Grosse Pointe Blank) is the trailer, which is such a sanitized and toothless take on the film that they don't even show that the main character is a lesbian.



  Oh, and there's a spot for the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack. So how far did I make it into the movie after all that set up? Well, about as far a Martin Blank (Cusack) watching the Grocer (Dan Aykroyd) gun down a target and ruin his hit. The rest, as they say, was for another day...

From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Igor

The cruelest thing you can say about a movie is that it's inconsequential. There are a lot of ways to damn a film with faint praise, but the harshest one I can think of is to say that all of the effort behind the camera amounts to something that's neither really good or really bad: instead, it's of no consequence.

It takes a degree of passion to love or to hate a movie. Even to like or dislike something means the film had some impact on you. You remembered it enough to give it a pass or warn others to steer clear. I have a handful of those coming along later this week, but there are movies that just have no impact on you at all. The instantly forgettable films that litter the closet of your mind, gathering dust in the corner.

Sadly, Igor is such a film. That bums me out to say it because clearly the makers of the film had their heart in the right place. Igor is trying to be to classic horror stories what Kung Fu Panda is to chop sockey films: a gateway for kids. But where Panda succeeds, Igor merely lumbers along, faintly entertaining until it ends.

Part of the problem is that you can tell a story about Kung Fu and still be "kid friendly" while appealing to adults. Igor is trying to strike the balance between scaring children (something they love, by the way) and still playing it safe enough so that parents won't turn the movie off. And it plays it a little too safe. The fights in Kung Fu Panda have consequences for the characters. Igor may be the tamest movie to feature a suicidal rabbit and a brain in a jar, and that does it no favors in the long run.

On paper, the story sounds pretty good: in the country of Malaria, Mad Scientists spend all year working on evil creations and then show them off in front of the world as ransom ("Pay us or we'll unleash them on you"). You're either born a peasant, a scientist, or an Igor. Since Igors are the lowest class, they only exist to help the mad scientists and to be recycled into spare parts. One Igor (John Cusack) has dreams of his own, and when Dr. Glickenstein, his scientist, is accidentally killed, he gets the chance to make his own "evil" creation.

Since his earlier, secret, experiments, Scamper, an immortal rabbit with a death wish and Brian/Brain, a brain in a jar with a robot arm, don't need to hide anymore, they help. Of course, since Igor isn't all evil, his ability to create life from death backfires, and Eva is born. She's sweet, and that just won't do. In the background, the evil Dr. Schaudenfreude (Eddie Izzard) is looking to take over Malaria and wants to steal Eva to do it.

It's not hard to guess how this all plays out, along with some other background details about how Malaria came to be the home of Mad Scientists or what Eva's story arc will look like. The predicability isn't the problem though. Most kids movies aren't hard to work out, and Igor throws in some nice touches about the day to day workings of Malaria, like a brain washing facility. It's just that the movie only really does enough to skate by and nothing more.

Nobody in the cast is doing anything wrong either: John Cusack gives the title character that "everyman" he brings to all of his roles, and Steve Buscemi is fine as Scamper, the aforementioned bunny who can't die because he's immortal. The rest of the cast does so well that I honestly didn't recognize the voices of Sean Hayes, John Cleese, Jennifer Coolidge, Christian Slater, Arsenio Hall, Jay Leno, or Molly Shannon. In fact, I had no idea Molly Shannon was playing Eva until the credits rolled.

Have you noticed how much of this is just recap? I can't honestly thing of things that sway me one way or the other about Igor. The budget was clearly pretty low, since there are times where Dr. Schaudenfreude's face doesn't move at all, other than his mouth. I liked the tiny references to movies like Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Fly, but ultimately Igor is just inconsequential. I can't imagine ever wanting or needing to see it again and a mere 24 hours later I'm already forgetting the movie.

It's damning, but true: some movies amount to nothing. There's nothing particularly wrong with Igor, nor is there anything particularly right. Their hearts were in the right place, but the movie doesn't work. It's just "meh", and that bums me out. I could've done something more productive with my time, even if it was a movie I hated. Such a shame...


Thoughts from 2010: Another way to look at Igor is to compare it directly with Monsters vs. Aliens, which is the Science Fiction equivalent of the film. Both are relatively entertaining while you're watching them, but utterly forgettable hours later. It's not that they're doing anything wildly wrong, it's merely that the end result is so formulaic that they fail to be the genre deconstructions they set out to be.

Blogorium Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

Hey gang! Remember all that business about new reviews? Well, I hate to be a buzzkill, but moving got the better of me and I'm plum out of time. The good news? I'll be in New Mexico sometime Sunday, so a Trailer Sunday will be up then, and the Cap'n will get you that new Predators review up as soon as I'm settled.

But I did promise to finally give you some brief thoughts on Hot Tub Time Machine, which I saw waaaaaaayyy back in April, and here they are:

After much stewing and considering (and re-considering), I can't really say that I like Hot Tub Time Machine. I laughed in the theatre, and it has an amusingly vulgar charm, but there's no "there" there. It's a good "one time" movie with a great cast and one pretty clever running gag involving the always watchable Crispin Glover, but the problem is that it's a lousy time travel movie.

I know what you're about to say, which is "what did you expect from a movie called HOT TUB TIME MACHINE?" but the truth is that both sets of writers did try to make the movie more ambitious in its time travel story than just throw things together. The problem is that it still doesn't add up, even if you lower your expectations. For example - and this is a pretty glaring one - if Rob Corddry's character changes everything, he cannot also be the impetus for the four of them going to the ski lodge in the first place. Even if it splits off into an alternate future where our heroes magically replace better versions of themselves at the end, the fact that Crispin Glover's Chip knows who they are when they return to the present means they went back in the first place and all of that happened, so how did they go back?

Anyway, I've considered watching it again but I'm not sure that I'm terribly interested in doing so. Knowing where most of the good jokes are is likely to dull their impact, since things like the "soap on the mouth" gag works because you know as much as Craig Robinson does when he wakes up in the bathroom. I sense that I'd be less impressed with the film in another go-round, but maybe I should try. Time has not been kind to my opinion, so perhaps a second viewing is necessary.

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Okay folks, I'll see you on the other side of the country in a few days...

From the Vaults: Quick Review - Better off Dead

I glad I forgot to put this in last night's post, because it gives me some more space to ruminate on the twisted genius that is Better Off Dead.

Savage Steve Holland hasn't really done much else since Better Off Dead (well, a lot of tv, so like I said) but when you do it so well the first time around, why bother?

Better Off Dead is the kind of movie that arrived too early in the "80's Teen Movie" wave to be really effective in 1985, but watch it now and see just how badly movies like Not Another Teen Movie got it. Holland managed to make a movie that fits within the confines of the "underdog who comes out on top" but is simultaneously filled with elements too absurd to be accidental.

(future Cap'n needs to interject here and mention this poster. I mean, wow. That is a TERRIBLE poster for a movie this gleefully weird. It looks like someone took the Meatballs poster and decided to marry it with On Golden Pond*. I'm amazed anyone went to see this when Better off Dead was released.)

For example, two brothers who do nothing but drive around racing people. One speaks no english, and the other one learned how speak it from watching Howard Cosell's Wild World of Sports, and they both dress like Cosell. And they've installed a speaker on top of the car in order to give play by play during the races.

Or maybe the subplots tied into Lane Meyer (John Cusack)'s family: Mom's cooking "experiments" that may be more dangerous cooked than raw. Or his brother's proclivity for mail order junk that ends up working, like lasers, a home made rocket, or a "Pick Up Trashy Women" book that delivers.
Better Off Dead is the kind of movie that would introduce a Frankenstein homage just to have a claymation hamburger sing David Lee Roth. To treat a paper delivery boy like Jason Vorhees, or let Curtis "Booger" Armstrong snort jello in the cafeteria.

South Park spoofed the overlying plot of Better Off Dead a few years ago (the skiiing episode) but what they missed about why the movie works is that it knows how stupid the skiing story is, and Holland goes out of his way to pack non-sequiturs in places you'd never expect them. And, as a result, the movie is funny when it should be trite, clever when it should be obvious, and pays off running jokes in unexpected ways.

Had it come out at the tail end of the 80's, instead of the middle of the teen movie era, I think it could've been a real dagger in the heart of the "Brat Pack" era, instead of the cult hit it is. Of course, if everyone knew about Better Off Dead, I'd have to find something else to surprise people with.

Like Real Genius.

On the other side of Wednesday's Video Daily Double, the Cap'n will finally give you his thoughts on Hot Tub Time Machine, closing the circle of "John Cusack skiing movies."

*The trailer, which feels like it played on a loop at Carbonated Video, is only a little bit better, to be honest. Neither give the film its due.

The Week in Preview

Folks, there's just so many things to cover that the Cap'n isn't really sure where to start. Over the week ahead I should have reviews up for the following:

- The Informant

- The Wolfman (2010)

- Get Him to the Greek

- Breathless (part of French Film Friday)

- Micmacs (also a part of French Film Friday and the new Jean-Pierre Jeunet film)

- Iron Man 2 (which I've now seen twice)

- MGM: When the Lion Roars

- Murder By Decree (Sherlock Holmes takes on Jack the Ripper)

Plus if I can ever settle down and write it up, a review of Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Most Iconic Flops, a brief digression on Amazon's pre-order listings for Criterion titles that nobody is vouching for, and a lead in to next week's All Hamlet edition of the Blogorium (featuring a review a day for the Olivier, Gibson, Branagh, Hawke, and Tennant versions of the play). Plus I still never got around to my Hot Tub Time Machine review from nearly two months ago...

The problem is that I can't decide what to kick things off with. What do you want to read about first?

Horror Fest Day Two: 1408

I get it. Now that I've watched both cuts, I understand why people have a bad taste in their mouth for watching 1408, if not outright hatred.

1408 is a movie with a very simple premise: Guy investigates haunted hotel rooms, finds the ultimate haunted room, spends the night. Shit happens. For the purposes of this kind of movie, it's basically a one man show, and if you're looking for a guy who can go unhinged and still maintain credibility, you can't do much better than John Cusack.

Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a guy who had a promising future as a writer and then gave it up to pen trashy books about the degree of "haunted-ness" a place has on a five skull rating system (cute). After we see him debunk one and get some idea of his limited fame, it's on to the big kahuna: a postcard saying "don't stay in 1408", the infamous haunted room of the Dolphin Hotel in New York. Of course Mike is going to check it out, otherwise we don't have a movie, so off we go.

The movie would have you believe that Samuel L. Jackson is the co-lead in 1408, but don't be fooled, dear reader: depending on which cut you watch, his role is either a cameo or an extended cameo, and nothing more. Yes, you get Sam Jackson and John Cusack in a room together once (maybe twice), and Jackson's job as Gerald Olin is to keep Enslin from staying in 1408, which leads to this exchange:

"Enslin: Most hotels have switched to magnetics. An actual key. That's a nice touch, it's antiquey.

Olin: We have magnetic cards also, but electronics don't seem to work in 1408.
Hope you don't have a pacemaker.

Enslin: [into his tape recorder] General manager claims that the phantom in room interferes ...

Olin: I have *never* used the word "phantom."

Enslin: Oh, I'm sorry. Uh, spirit? Specter?

Olin: No, you misunderstand. Whatever's in 1408 is nothing like that.

Enslin: Then what is it?

Olin: It's an evil fucking room."

And evil it is; the build up once Enslin gets inside of 1408 is nothing short of awesome, because for the first little bit you can argue either way about whether the room is evil or that Olin is fucking with Mike, but when 1408 finally asserts itself, all hell breaks loose and the movie kicks into high gear, and stays that way for about an hour.

Then something happens. Something that just doesn't work with this kind of movie, and it's sustained way too long, and even I got impatient, wondering when they'd get this shit over with and get back to the REAL plot, which they eventually do. Depending on which version you watch, the movie is either a) slavaged, but not saved, or b) totally wasting your two hours.

I urge anyone interested in seeing 1408 to find the two disc version, because the Director's Cut on disc two is the only thing that's going to keep you from totally feeling gypped in the end. After I watched the ending that went to theatres, I was bitterly disappointed. It's a total cop out, and thematically just doesn't fit with the trip Enslin takes in the rest of the film. The director's cut is darker, but so much more appropriate, with a final image that makes sense considering everything else you've seen come before it. It's still not enough to totally wipe out the stumble two thirds of the way in, but at least it doesn't make everything nice and happy.

Up next:....? Maybe From Beyond. I haven't decided.

Tonight is probably going to be 3-D night, but failing that, we're going to watch 28 Weeks Later, Planet Terror, The Monster Squad, Night of the Comet, The Call of Cthulhu, and part of Death Proof, if not more stuff.

So move your dead bones on over here, you slackers!