Shocktober Revisited: More Brains and Swallowed Souls

editor's note: this was originally posted in November of 2011.
 
 I finally caught up on some horror documentaries, specifically More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead and Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead 2. The former you might have heard of; the latter is more incentive to pick up Lionsgate's 25th Anniversary Edition of Sam Raimi's splatter classic.

 Dan O'Bannon fans will be elated and disappointed while watching More Brains - the film reunites most of the surviving cast and crew members (including the special effects artist fired halfway through the film), but until the very end, O'Bannon - who passed in 2009 - is absent from the oral history of Return of the Living Dead. There's a lot of talking about O'Bannon, often in conflicting narratives (he was too demanding, too aloof; he was easy to work with and open to suggestions), but only in the closing moments does the writer / director have a chance to speak to the film's cult status. In what was his final interview, O'Bannon is candid about the audience embrace of the film and its legacy, and makes a knowing comment about "if I die tomorrow" before the film goes to credits.

 The story of the making of Return of the Living Dead from John Russo (producer / writer of Night of the Living Dead)'s original pitch to the decision of Hemdale Films to hire Dan O'Bannon to write and direct the film as a horror comedy, from casting to premieres, is an affair filled with gossip, contradictory stories, and debates about whether Clu Gulager really threw a can at the director in a fit of rage. I'm tempted to share anecdotes from the cast, or to mention the ongoing bad blood between the production designer (William Stout) and first make-up effects (William Munns) over the inadequate zombie masks and "headless zombie" appliance. The memories are sometimes contentious, sometimes defensive, but always entertaining. More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead is well worth the time of fans of Return of the Living Dead.

---

 Meanwhile, I'd like to thank a video store in the mall that will go unnamed until later this week for erroneously placing two copies of the 25th Anniversary Blu-Ray of Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn the weekend before the disc is actually released (it comes out tomorrow). I've bemoaned the endless re-releasing of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films on DVD before, and we're seeing the first instance of "double-dipping" in high definition for the trilogy. As Anchor Bay closes (or whatever is going on with Anchor Bay) and their catalog is divvied up by Image Entertainment and Lionsgate, we're likely to see another release of The Evil Dead before long, and I find it hard to believe that Universal's underwhelming "Screwhead Edition" of Army of Darkness is the be-all-end-all of HD releases.

 But for now, let's look at the Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn 25th Anniversary double-dip. As a sucker for supplements, I must admit the list of extras seemed very promising - collections of featurette's about the casing, effects, conception, direction, and filming. When I put the disc in, I didn't realize that all of these individually listed extras were part of one 98 minute documentary, Swallowed Souls. It's reminiscent of segments of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and is broken into chapters complete with claymation vignettes to bridge them.

 Like More Brains, the primary element lacking in Swallowed Souls is the presence of Sam Raimi. It's not as though his presence isn't felt, because the "making of" footage shot by Greg Nicotero features young Sam Raimi in abundance, but he's noticeably absent from the proceedings. On the other hand, the doc features an abundance of newly shot interviews with Bruce Campbell, who speaks candidly about Evil Dead 2 and shares stories I don't think I've heard anywhere, including in If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Swallowed Souls also prominently features the rest of the leads of Evil Dead 2: Sarah Berry (Annie), Dan Hicks (Jake), Kassie Wesley (Bobbi Joe), Richard Dormeier (Ed) and Ted Raimi (Possessed Henrietta). Hearing their perspective on making the film is in and of itself a treat - many of them had no idea what they were in for.

 The entire makeup effects team, including Mark Shostrom (From Beyond, A Nightmare one Elm Street Part 2) and the first time in years that I've seen all three members of KNB (Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger) on camera talking about a project they worked on together*. Their camcorder footage, which documents the conception of Evil Dead 2's effects all the way through the film's production, are a treasure trove of unseen footage from Wadesboro, North Carolina in 1986. They gleefully exploit their creations and play around with camera tricks, mimicking Raimi's "evil force" camera shots.

 So here's where it gets tough - do you want to drop another $14 for Evil Dead 2 to see an admittedly great "making of" documentary? If you still have the Anchor Bay disc, you'll notice that The Gore the Merrier is still included, the commentary is still included, and I'm not sure that the picture is that much different. The price is fair so if you don't already have Evil Dead 2 on Blu-Ray this is a no-brainer, but wary double dippers are going to have to ask themselves if the making of justifies buying the film again. I will say that if it were released on its own, Swallowed Souls would be worth picking up in the same way as Halloween: 25 Years of Terror or His Name was Jason are. Evil Dead fans, prepare yourselves for the impending moral quandary. I don't regret it, but I also have the added bonus of picking the disc up early...


 * Since Kurtzman moved on to create his own production company, it's common just to see Nicotero and Berger appearing in "making of" documentaries that KNB did makeup effects for.

Retro Review: Jurassic Park III

 Jurassic Park III is the one that Steven Spielberg didn't direct, the one that has a dream sequence with a talking Velociraptor that says Alan Grant (Sam Neill)'s name on an airplane. I mean, that really ought to cover it, right? It's the one that's universally recognized as terrible and that director Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Rocketeer) somehow managed to bounce back from. William H. Macy and Tea Leoni are in it, somehow they talked Laura Dern into shooting a cameo but Jeff Goldblum said, "nah, there's a line and I'm not crossing it again." I guess that Cats and Dogs money was too good to pass up. But enough about Jeff Goldbum - people will debate until the end of time about whether The Lost World really sucks or just kind of sucks - Alan Grant is back you guys! I choose to believe that this is the work of Sutter Cane, but obviously I have no evidence to support that because Cane hasn't given me any.

 Anyway, so I saw Jurassic Park III in the theatre because that was back when I'd go see anything and maybe we didn't know it was going to suck. Or we hoped it wouldn't. Or maybe we did know and we went to see it anyway because, hell, we'd already seen Jeepers Creepers. It was a long time ago. We watched the terrible movie where the Raptors have quills because dinosaur research had continued to advance and now they're closer to birds than lizards to yeah, multi-colored quills. Some dumb kid with rich parents got lost on Isla The Other One from The Lost World (I would like to point out that in The Lost World you can also see this island chain includes Isla Muerte. I'd love to see the dinosaurs on that one) and Alan Grant has to find him. Even though he's never been to that Island. I guess Vince Vaughn isn't considered trustworthy enough to find a kid. Probably a good call.

 So we left the stupid movie and went to a friend of a friend's house, which is never my idea of a good time, especially when the friend who brought you there (and is driving) goes in one of the back rooms to get high and you're watching South Park with some dude who is half conscious and mostly paying attention to his turtle aquarium behind the couch. Good times. If that doesn't already sound sketchy enough to you guys, the people who lived in this apartment would later steal a bunch of stuff from some girl, get confronted about it, and decide to just leave it all on the runway of the airport for them to find. True story. But eventually my friend comes back out and he's going to drive me home which is what I wanted to do, and he grabs two beers "for the road." This is my only option of getting home and we're well before the days of cell phones here.

 Well, as luck would have it, while driving back there's a police checkpoint and he's already opened one of the beers to drink while on the road (in his defense, he's a very functional alcoholic) and can't turn around. So, uh, we're going to have to deal with this prickly situation. In his infinite (read: under 21) wisdom, he opens the other beer and proceeds to pour both of them onto the floorboard of the driver's side, hoping that they won't notice. Take a guess how that well that worked. We are both ordered to get out of the car and to submit to a breathalyzer, which is fine with me because I haven't been drinking and I'm not going to jail. On the other hand, they continue to ask him "Sir, have you been drinking?" and he answers "No."

 Taking the breathalyzer out: "Sir, are you sure you haven't been drinking?"

 Him: "I have not"

 Handing him the breathalyzer: "Are you certain that you were not drinking tonight?"

 Him: "No"

 He's blowing into the breathalyzer: "One last time, have you been drinking tonight?"

 BEEP!

 Him: "Well, maybe one beer."

 And they put him in handcuffs and take him off to jail. Me? I'm sober and without a ride home, so I get to walk with the officer back to his truck so she can take a look around and see if there's anything else they should know about. The entire cabin reeks of cheap beer and I'm getting a headache just standing there. She finds his back pack filled with issues of High Times and says "this is promising" and to this day I don't know how she didn't find his bowl or why she didn't check the ash tray, which is exactly where what he normally smoked was tucked away. I mean, you are a cop, right? Well, I'm not going to be too rude, because she very apologetically explained that I would have to take his truck home because they couldn't spare an officer to drive me to my parents house (that'll be important in a minute). She have me her badge number and name in case someone pulled me over and noticed the pungent odor of beer everywhere, and off I went.

 I was living with my parents, who were asleep, so I had to sneak into their room to get the cordless phone out. That way they wouldn't wake up when he called me from the drunk tank to come pick him up, as he did at about 2 in the morning. I took my car (much better idea) and navigated through downtown - which I didn't know very well - and found him outside of the jail, giving a homeless guy the last five dollars he had. Then he smoked a cigarette and I took him back to his truck, which he drove home without incident. He lost his license for a year and there was probation or something else and now he has a PhD and four masters and is an expert on bats. So I guess it worked out. One time we shared a motel room during a wedding and there was a bat outside. He brought it in, but because he was drunk, he dropped it and the bat went under the bed. He laughed and said "that's what you get when you party with me!" and then went to sleep.

 Where was I...?

Reflections on "Bad Movie Night" by Cap'n Howdy

 Bad Movie Night is coming up this weekend. For some of you that means you'll be at the Blogorium, inexplicably sharing in on the agony and the ecstasy of the best of the worst I can throw at you. For some, it will be a recap you take a look at later on, and think to yourself "wow, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through that." For the Cap'n, it's a fun, if admittedly unorthodox way to spend time with friends. It's also a good opportunity to clarify a few things, as I do from time to time. There's an inherent contradiction coming up, but I am vast and contain multitudes. Or I'm a walking contradiction. I can't remember. Anyway, let's discuss how Bad Movie Night fits into the evolving notion of the Blogorium and the Cap'n Howdy mission statement overall.

 Without fail, at some point during Bad Movie Night, someone is going to ask me if I'm going to see X or Y terrible movie, and I'm probably going to say "no". A friend recently asked if there was a review on the Blogorium for Tusk, and was confused / disappointed when I explained that I stopped watching the movie around the time that Johnny Depp showed up. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the point at which I realized that nothing Kevin Smith had in store for Tusk was worth investing any more time on. If you really want to know how I feel about post-SMODcast Kevin Smith as a director, there's a review for Red State out there that pretty much covers it. I'll add that it isn't particularly enthralling to hear his M.O. for making movies that aren't sequels is to get really high, record a podcast, and then turn whatever he comes up with into a movie. You know, like "Jaws with a moose." Nevertheless, I fully expect a question about how excited I am for Mallrats 2 (not at all).

 That said, it's totally fair to ask me that, especially at something called Bad Movie Night. Historically speaking, the get together-s hosted by the Cap'n have centered around horror movies or schlock, and primarily schlock. They're fun films to rally around, and are conducive to a party atmosphere. It's an informal crowd that comes to Blogorium events, and while you aren't expected to participate in any MST3k-like riffing on movies, I don't discourage making comments when something just doesn't make sense. The specious plot that bridges gratuitous nudity in Andy Sidaris films practically begs for some level of commentary. But I wouldn't do the same if I was at Nevermore (well, sometimes, but much more quietly). We do, on occasion, watch screwball comedies or more serious fare, and there's talk of branching into different "fest" directions, but let's stick with Bad Movie Night for now.

 Bad Movie Night was borrowed from a tradition my brother and his friends started more than a decade ago: during birthday celebrations, they'd each buy the birthday boy or girl the worst movie they could find, and everyone would have to sit through it. They would drink heavily and apparently it got quite loud. I'd never actually been to one, but the first Bad Movie Night was built loosely on that premise. Having had some experience with Horror Fest and Summer Fest, I thought I could program one that had some really entertaining stinkers, and we'd kick it off with a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage. Trust me, while highly entertaining, it falls squarely within the rubric of "bad movie". That was followed by The Giant Claw, Batman and Robin, Mac & Me, Troll 2, and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. A good time was had by all, and whenever possible, I've tried to keep it going.

 The Blogorium has existed in various forms over the years, but since I moved to this service, I've kept the "about" information over to the right basically the same. Sometimes, the phrase "Trash Savant" has come back to haunt me, because it implies that my movie watching palate is limited to sifting through lots of garbage to find the Least Worst Of. And I get it, because around the turn of the century / millennium / whatever, there was a point where the Cap'n and friends would go see anything. Like, literally, we'd just go see a movie to see a movie. How else do you explain watching The In Crowd, or Loser? Or the double feature of The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and The Replacements when I had an entire multiplex to choose from? Yes, I saw 8mm and Idle Hands and the first two Resident Evil movies. On the big screen. I don't know why. Well, I do: they were playing and we had already seen Payback or whatever else we really wanted to see. Sure, I also spent the summer of 99 watching Eyes Wide Shut and The Sixth Sense, even The Blair Witch Project and South Park (and, yes, The Phantom Menace), but for some reason only the bad movies stuck.

 It continued over the years, and yeah, I would organize group outings for Alien vs. Predator or The Matrix Reloaded, or Professor Murder and I would just go see, well, anything. Again, allow me to stress that yes, we only saw Paycheck because we were too late for Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. I don't remember why we went to see Godsend or The Butterfly Effect, or even Saw. A lot of that was a throwback to high school, I think, when we would regularly go to the discount theater to see things like The Big Hit or Suicide Kings, or The Big Lebowski. And also Godzilla, Lost in Space, Scream 2, and whatever else was playing. It was fun, and cheap, and bad movies are tremendously entertaining. The summer of 2008 had to be a record for "what's playing this week," because I saw The Dark Knight, The Happening, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. One of them was good.

 But, over time, they became a smaller part of my cinematic consumption. I know that a lot of friends from that era didn't necessarily keep up with that, which is why I'm still chided for not having watched Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. I'll probably still get grief for it, because I have no plans to watch it, and what I'll go out to the theater to see grows more and more limited. Most of the things I've seen on the big screen over the last year ended up on the Best of List. The last two movies I saw were Birdman and It Follows, both based on the great word of mouth I had been hearing from friends. Despite what people might assume, It Follows was the first movie I saw in theaters from 2015. These days, if a movie just looks bad (like, oh, Seventh Son), I'm less inclined to see it just to see it. The last time that happened was probably Movie 43, which was every bit as forgettable and terrible as you've probably heard. Lockout was the last time I really had fun with a terrible movie, which is why it's playing as a double feature with Lucy at Bad Movie Night this year.

 Herein lies the aforementioned contradiction, because I do still watch bad movies. Hell, I watched Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster last week, and Sorority House Massacre II the week before that. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, good movies. In the past you'd have reviews up for those, instead of It Follows and The Babadook. In fact, Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II are probably going to end up under the "Cranpire Movies" banner, which is what I tend to use when I want to talk about schlock. It's not that Cranpire will watch anything (even he has limits), but it's become a running joke between us that he'll sit through what I won't. Still, the two (technically three) Sorority House Massacre films are so disparate, even from each other, that I'd like to share their charms with you all. But I'm probably never going to watch Taken 3. And I doubt I'll ever finish Tusk.

 The funny thing about having had this blog for so long is that I'm frequently held responsible for reviews I wrote years ago. That's fair, I suppose, but I have tried to evolve as a writer and as a reviewer, so when I look back at a quarter review of something like Student Bodies and have to defend it when someone from the film takes exception to it, I cringe a little. Not because I didn't write it - I did, in the middle of a Fest - but because it's not really a review. It's a reaction to something that happened that I wrote quickly while people had a smoke break. It's a time capsule of a moment in the history of the Blogorium, but it's not how I would write it today. But you can't tell that to somebody who finds the review through a Google search - it's not an ongoing evolution of film criticism to them. It's a review, one that says the movie they like sucks.

 Or worse, it's The Mechanic review, which was a run of the mill Jason Statham movie, where I didn't feel one way or the other about it. In fact, by and large I gave up reviewing films headlined by Statham because they'd all be like The Mechanic - an overview of the plot, general comments about the action, he was good, the supporting cast was okay, the story was serviceable. Other than the Crank films, it's a pretty succinct reaction to most of his starring roles, and if I can't add anything to the conversation, I'll find something else to review. That doesn't stop people from reading The Mechanic review - which they do - and assuming that's currently how I feel about the movie. Honestly, four years later? I've forgotten almost everything about it. Even the "World Champion" ring, but it doesn't matter. Everything is contemporary on the internet.

 Which brings us back to Bad Movie Night and bad movies in general. As long as the Blogorium exists and posts can be found ala carte on search engines, people can and will safely assume that's all the Cap'n is about. And that's fair - I like the Dr. Re-Animator picture at the top of the page and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman background scroll bar. Perhaps someday they'll change, but hopefully it gives visitors an indicator that things aren't taken too seriously around here. Please don't think that I don't enjoy bad movies: one of the things that drove me crazy in film courses was an attitude of intellectual snobbery, of a dismissal of "low art" that wasn't to be bothered with. It wasn't rampant, but there is an attitude of "if it isn't a classic or a modern classic, it's not worth bothering my time with". I remember working with someone who sneered at the idea that Peter Jackson would adapt The Lovely Bones because it was "pop fiction" and that he was "above" that*. He should just stick to Tolkein, I guess. Look how well that worked out for The Hobbit.

 Over the years, I've tried harder to provide a balance of "high" and "low" art, and to be honest with you, I don't watch a lot of these neo B-Movies. If you read my Hobo with a Shotgun review, you'll notice that I didn't have a lot of fun with the movie. I hated Machete Kills. There wasn't enough about Wolf Cop to merit a review, to be honest, and I don't watch Syfy Channel Originals. It's not a matter of being dismissive of them, to jump back a paragraph - I don't particularly care one way or the other, and I'm not going to tell anyone not to watch them. I try to mention them as little as possible, so unless someone asks why a Sharknado movie isn't at Bad Movie Night or Summer Fest, you won't hear about it in the Blogorium. It's the same thought process behind the Transformers series: I haven't seen them, I'm not planning on it, so why devote time and energy into insulting them? There are literally thousands of blogs that do that. But if you want to know about The Beach Girls and the Monster, I've got you covered.

 Moving forward, the goal is to try to bring you reviews for films you maybe haven't heard about, old and new. If it's a major release, I might review it if there's something worth bringing up I haven't seen anywhere else. Otherwise, you probably won't see it until the Recap. In the meantime, I'd rather focus on movies like Under the Skin or Spider Baby (to name a couple from last year). They're very different movies for very different audiences, but I really enjoyed both of them, and you might too. I'm always open to suggestions, but it's been a long time since the Cap'n would go watch literally anything. By the same token, I'll pay money to see Samurai Cop with an audience, even though I own two copies of Samurai Cop. It was worth it to see their reaction. That was the same situation with Things at last year's Bad Movie Night - I suffered through it alone so I could see the faces I made on my friends. And by the way, they could have left, but no one did.
 

 This year's Bad Movie Night is a... shall we say, unique assemblage of "so bad, it's good"**: Continuing in our trend of "being afraid of women in the 1950s," there's Devil Girl from Mars, followed by High School Confidential, Disney's The Black Hole, Raw Force, the aforementioned Luc Besson double feature, and a special Trappening. Because you shouldn't always know what you're getting at a Bad Movie Night. A recap should follow some time next week, and then after that, it's back to whatever strikes the Cap'n as worth writing about. Maybe schlock, maybe not. We're on the cusp of blockbuster season, so maybe those will make it into the mix. I'm not sure. Above all else, my goal for the immediate future is to make Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium as unpredictable as possible, so as to keep you from settling in to "this is what to expect." Hell, I might even go back and re-review some of the older posts, just for kicks. Stay tuned, and if you're on your way to Bad Movie Night, prepare yourself...



 * I never saw The Lovely Bones, so I can't weigh in on whether it was any good or not, but it's a similar attitude to refusing to read a book that's been adapted into a film - like Trainspotting - because that "taints" the source material. And yes, that was another instance that came up with a similarly dismissive person.
** That's a big criteria for me - bad movies that are just bad are a waste of everybody's time.

Shocktober Revisited: The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project

Portions of these reviews originally appeared in 2011.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogorium Review: Jodorowsky's Dune

 If you haven't heard of Alejandro Jodorowsky, it's not going to surprise me one bit, and that's okay. Jodorowsky is best known for making El Topo and The Holy Mountain, two exercises in cinematic surrealism that aren't necessarily known for their accessibility. El Topo is considered by many to be the original "Midnight Movie," and includes extreme violence, bizarre imagery, Jodorowsky's son, Bristol, naked for much of the movie, and sporadic cruelty toward animals. It's a western. The Holy Mountain is... stranger than that, but arguably easier to stomach. I'm not saying that they aren't worth seeing, but it takes a particular type of adventurousness to want to watch them. If I had my druthers, I'd give The Holy Mountain the edge, but you might want to read a little bit about Jodorowsky before you dive in blindly.

 So this might explain why some of your friends went nuts with excitement when they heard Frank Pavich (N.Y.H.C.) was making a documentary called Jodorowsky's Dune. At least you maybe recognized the second word, even if the significance of the first didn't resonate. For fans of science fiction on the big screen, Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Dune is the great "what if?" of the genre. It's mentioned in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made (although it didn't make it into my review of the book, for some reason) and exists in a certain realm of "Hollywood Urban Legend": the great unmade epic that influenced every science fiction film made for the next four decades. And finally, we have it on film. The story is every bit as mad as Jodorowsky himself, and every bit as compelling as it sounded when you first heard about it. I have no idea if his conception of Dune could even be made, but I'd love to see it.

 Jodorowsky states that he wanted his Dune to feel like "being on LSD without actually taking LSD," and thanks to the exhaustive book he and producer Michel Seydoux prepared for every studio in Hollywood, it's clear from the concept art and storyboards that he meant it.  In 1974, after El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Seydoux offered Jodorowsky the opportunity to make "whatever he wanted," and the director decided he wanted to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd never read Dune, but friends of his had, and the idea excited him. Jodorowsky set about concocting a grand plan for the film, to push the boundaries of what was possible in cinema, and assembled his team of "warriors": artists, actors, and musicians he could find to make his dream a reality.

 Many, including the Cap'n, have wondered why it took so long for someone to make this film, but I suppose it's not worth complaining about too much. Even at 84, Jodorowsky remains energetic and sprightly, but many of the most tantalizing pieces of his puzzle have long since passed. Three major contributors to Jodorowsky's vision died not long before the documentary and the other very recently (thankfully, he's in the film and one of the others is featured in archival audio).  Jodorowsky sought out a team of artists to help him conceptualize the worlds of the book: Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Lifeforce), Jean "Moebius" Giraud (Tron, The Fifth Element), and science fiction cover designer Chris Foss traveled to Paris to create Arrakis, Giedi Prime, and the various spacecraft used in the film. Moebius also drew the storyboards that make up much of Jodorowsky's massive concept book in order to give a clear idea of how the director planned to make the impossible imagery a reality.

 With his ideas in place, Jodorowsky excitedly moves on to how he planned fill in the other pieces of the film in order to sell it to studios. For Duke Leto Atreides, he brought on board David Carradine, and for the Duke's son, Paul Atreides, Jodorowsky again turned to his son Bristol. For the corpulent Baron Harkonnen, Jodorowsky tracked down Orson Welles and convinced him to agree to the picture by promising to hire his favorite chef to serve him food (this is not a joke or some crack at Welles' weight - Jodorowsky tells the story himself). For Feyd-Rautha, he sought out and found Mick Jagger (in one of the story's many coincidental meetings, the only parts of the tale I found hard to believe) - in the actual Dune that David Lynch completed (more on that later), Sting plays the role, for those curious.

 Jodorowsky's great coup was convincing Salvador Dali to play the "Emperor of the Galaxy", a feat that required many "tests" by the great artists and a series of demands that seem like they would (and should) have crippled the film. Dali demanded his own helicopter, for a giraffe to appear onscreen with him, an elephant, and most troubling to Seydoux, to be "the greatest paid actor in Hollwood." Dali told Jodorowsky he wanted "$100,000 per minute," which the director assured Seydoux would be feasible if they only paid him for the amount of time on screen - about three minutes. To further assure Dali's cooperation, Jodorowsky cast the artist's muse, Amanda Lear, in the film, despite her warnings that Dali would "destroy the project."

 Whether he would have wrecked Dune or not, Dali did bring one major piece to the design of the film by introducing Jodorowsky to the art of H.R. Giger. Giger joined the film to design the world of the Harkonnens, and some of the concept work might look quite familiar to viewers of the film Prometheus (in particular, the pyramid). Among many of the shifts in adaptation, Jodorowsky mentions his ending for the film departs radically from the ending of the book (to give you some idea, the title of one of Herbert's sequels, Dune Messiah, is treated almost literally).

 With much of his dream cast in place, Jodorowsky and composer Christian Vander set about wooing bands to craft music for each of the planets featured in Dune. The only two mentioned in the documentary are Pink Floyd and Magma, and only the members of Magma appear on camera, but it seems like both were excited to make albums exclusively devoted to Arrakis and Giedi Prime (respectively). With a budget of 15 million and his pieces in place, Jodorowsky and Seydoux set off from Paris to Los Angeles to pitch the film. The end result, as many of you have guessed, is not a happy one for Alejandro Jodorowsky.

 The interesting thing that I found from Jodorowsky's Dune is that the studios were receptive to the books presented to them. They liked the concept, the execution, and found that the seemingly impossible requirements of visual effects had logical workarounds. The only sticking point was that they didn't want the man who put it all together: Alejandro Jodorowsky. There are a number of suggestions bandied about as to why they simply refused to make the picture with him as a director, but the end result is that his vision of Dune was never made because the studio system didn't trust the man who put all of this together to be able to make it a reality. The sense of heartbreak in Jodorowsky's voice, late in the film (he speaks in a combination of broken English and Spanish) is the hardest part. His frustration that they wouldn't even let him try to make Dune, and would instead let the rights lapse is palpable.

 Jodorowsky's Dune does touch on the aftermath, when the De Laurentiis Company bought the rights and David Lynch took over as the vision behind the film. Jodorowsky admits that he had no desire to see the film, and worse still, because he "admired David Lynch," he feared it might be even better than his vision. His sons convinced him to see Dune, ten years after he began work on his aborted project, and to his great relief, "it was awful!" Jodorowsky admits that this is "a human response, one that I am not proud of, but it was my response." He doesn't blame Lynch for the failure of the film, but rather the producers.

 The books remained with the studios, and the influence of his unrealized vision filtered into almost every science fiction film made after 1974. Many of the participants in the film not involved Dune's production - among them Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Drive), Richard Stanley (Hardware), producer Gary Kurtz (Star Wars), and online writers Drew McWeeny and Devin Faraci - point out direct influences on Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Masters of the Universe, and Contact. These are accompanied by storyboards and art which are hard to argue didn't come directly from the book, particularly Contact, in which Robert Zemeckis executes a reverse of Jodorowsky's planned opening: an unbroken, continuous shot through space which ends on Arrakis.

  More noticeable, particularly if you move past Star Wars, is the indispensable role Jodorowsky played (in absentia) in the creation of Alien. Following the collapse of Dune, O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles, dejected, and eventually wrote the screenplay for what became Alien with Ronald Shusett. When he met with Ridley Scott about the film, who did O'Bannon recommend to design the film? Chris Foss, Jean "Moebius" Giraud, and H.R. Giger, his fellow artists from Dune. It's also interesting, in a roundabout way, that Ridley Scott considered taking over the DeLaurentiis Dune after finishing Alien, but decided instead to adapt Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, leaving David Lynch - who had turned down Return of the Jedi - to step in. Jodorowsky's often unspoken influence on a generation of science fiction films finally gets its due, up on screens and not just in blogs and books.

 While it's clear that he can't bear the thought of trying again, Jodorowsky does express relief that most of the conceptual art found its way into the world through his collaboration with Moebius in graphic novels. Moreover, he hopes that after his death someone will take the book and create an animated film of his Dune. If the semi-animated versions of Foss' paintings (kind of like The Kid Stays in the Picture) are any indication, it would be a welcome substitute to look forward to.

 It is still hard to imagine that Alejandro Jodorowsky's mad plan could have translated to film, although I'd love to have seen his try. He only made three films after Dune's collapse - Tusk, Santa Sangre, and The Rainbow Thief (I've only seen Santa Sangre) - but being involved in Pavich's documentary led Jodorowsky and Seydoux to reconnect, and together they made The Dance of Reality last year. I hadn't heard of it until Jodorowsky's Dune, but it's described as a "metaphorical, poetical" autobiography, so I plan to seek it out in the near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend Jodorowsky's Dune, both to people who have been aware of the story and to people wondering what we were all so excited about. This review only really scratches the surface of what's covered in the film - I left out almost all of Jodorowsky's best stories - so don't worry that you'll already know everything going in. Just sit back and enjoy what might have been.

Blogorium Review: The Sacrament

 On the off chance you haven't heard about The Sacrament, it's the newest film from Ti West (The House of the Devil) - his first feature in the three years since The Innkeepers. If you've been keeping up with him, watching his features and contributions of V/H/S and The ABCs of Death, this is exciting news. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to temper it a bit for you, because The Sacrament might have been a tense thriller, but it isn't. Instead, it's fraught with bad decisions in the narrative structure, in adapting its source material, and most of all, its central conceit: the dreaded "found footage" subgenre.

 Patrick (Kentucker Audley, Ain't Them Bodies Saints) is a fashion photographer in New York who hasn't seen his sister in a long time. She had serious drug problems, and while cleaning up, she joined a religious community in rural Mississippi. While relaying the story to friends, Sam (AJ Bowen, The Signal), a reporter for an online news site, gets the idea to film their reunion for a story. Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz, Upstream Color) sent a letter explaining that they've left the country to create "heaven on Earth" without interference, so Patrick, Sam, and cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg, Drinking Buddies) land outside of their undisclosed location. After passing through a heavily guarded entrance, they find themselves in Eden Parish, a community that seems too good to be true, where everyone is happy and self sufficient, under the protective watch of Father (Gene Jones, Oz the Great and Powerful). But all is not what it seems in Eden Parish - Caroline is behaving... strangely, and Father has his own plans for the journalists.

 If you know anything about Jim Jones or the Jonestown Massacre*, not only does this synopsis sound very familiar, but I'm sorry to say that you already know exactly how The Sacrament is going to play out. Other than changing the names and moving the time period from the 1970s to the present, there's very little variation on the basic story of what happened to that religious sect, all the way down to their paranoia about the government and even the method by which the Massacre ends. There are hints that something else might be afoot earlier in the film, but those plot threads are abandoned quickly or given more mundane explanations (in particular what Caroline wants with Patrick). If you don't know anything about Jonestown, you might be a little less tuned in to where things are going (unless you watch the trailer, which gives everything away), but the disappointment that West didn't do anything interesting at all with the story is still going to dull the experience.

 West reunites with some of his fellow cast members from You're Next (he has a cameo in the film and SPOILER a pretty good death scene): Bowen, Seimetz, and Swanberg. Beyond the main characters, there isn't much in the way of Eden Parish's faithful that make much of an impression beyond basic "types": the nurse, the old lady, the teenage boys, the little girl who doesn't talk, the suspicious mother. They don't enhance the world West is building, but instead just serve a purpose in moving the story along to its inevitable conclusion. It's a shame, because one of the things I've really enjoyed about West's films are the characters, who you sympathize with and want to spend time around.

 Maybe it makes up for it that The Sacrament is not what we've come to know as a "Ti West" film, at least based on his last two (and generally, much enjoyed) efforts. The hand-held, shaky camerawork brings a sense of immediacy that's a stark contrast to the tracking shots and long takes he employed to such great effect in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It's an admirable step away from what he's known for, an extension of his segment in V/H/S (admittedly, one of my least favorite sections of that anthology), so in some sense it's commendable West is stepping outside of what he's known for in the horror genre. That said, "found footage" may not have been the best choice to branch out into.

 To West's credit, he finds a way to avoid most of the problems with "found footage" by appropriating Vice News (with their permission, I would gather), a media organization that goes into areas of conflict or otherwise "verboten" places to cover news stories that wouldn't be featured otherwise. Their handheld style works well within the "found footage" tropes, and it explains why someone would continue filming well past the point they should. But it's a double-edged sword, because The Sacrament isn't strictly "found footage" - early in the film, it's clear that the footage we're seeing has already been professionally edited with informational text overlaid on the image. While it may not be immediately apparent, you slowly realize that whatever happens to the protagonists, somebody made it out and cobbled this footage into a Vice "report," which robs the second half of the film of much of its tension.

 It also creates a massive plot hole later in the film, when Patrick loses his camera (that he's been shooting B-Roll on) and Father asks Caroline to continue filming ("this is important"). At this point, Jake has been separated from Sam and Patrick, so he has one camera and Caroline now has the other. And yet, as Father begins talking to the people of Eden Parish about their dire circumstances, West begins switching to a shot / reverse shot editing style that Caroline couldn't possibly be filming. Even if she somehow filmed all of Father's speech and then turned around and filmed the community long enough for Jake to later edit it together, it doesn't make sense that she would think to do that in the moment.

 Honestly, I began to wonder if The Sacrament had switched over from "found footage" to a traditional film, because there was no rational explanation for the editing in the last thirty minutes of the film, and that isn't even the biggest plot hole. By necessity, I'm going to have to go into SPOILER territory, but if you already know how the Jonestown Massacre turned out, it's not going to surprise you much. Jake finds Sam, still alive, in Father's cabin, and Patrick's camera is on a table, filming (for some reason). Sam is tied up and Father is blaming them for his decision to kill everybody with the poisoned Kool-Aid, and then Father kills himself. Jake unties Sam, and they leave - without picking up Patrick's camera. Half of the movie was filmed on Patrick's camera - footage we've already seen, and they just leave it there.

 Now, you could argue that they came back to Eden Parish and the camera wasn't somehow confiscated by local authorities or the FBI and that Jake and Sam managed to edit it back together, if not for the fact that the guard who saves them by shooting another guard promises he's going to "burn the whole thing down" once they've left. Since the office is already on fire after Caroline's self-immolation (Jake makes a point of filming the burning building), there's no reason not to take the guard at his word, and the final text on-screen indicates that "Sam and Jake are the only known survivors." So how, exactly, did we watch everything Patrick filmed from the interview with Father until the end of the movie?

 I don't want you to leave this review with an entirely sour taste in your mouth, and it is worth pointing out that West does generate some palpable tension in the middle of The Sacrament. It's largely due to the appearance of Gene Jones - the other half of No Country for Old Men's "friend-o" scene - as Father: he embodies the presence and charisma needed for a "cult leader," one you can feel immediately, and Sam's interview quickly turns into Father's critique of their presence. There's a sense of menace in that sequence that West excels at, and if he could have infused more of The Sacrament with that unease, it might have overcome some of the structural deficiencies. Bowen and Swanberg are pretty good in what are mostly reactive roles, and Seimetz does a good job at masking Caroline's intentions early in the film. It's just that most of it collapses as the story enters its third act.

 The Sacrament isn't my least favorite Ti West movie (that would still be Cabin Fever 2, which I doubt a "director's cut" could salvage), but it's the one I'm the least likely to revisit. That's a shame, because I had high hopes for it, and I'm still a big fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It should be interesting to see where he heads next, stylistically and from a narrative perspective, but as somebody who studied Jonestown extensively in college, The Sacrament just didn't work for me. I'm not sure that it will for other West fans, but you might give it a shot if no other new movie sounds appealing. Not much of a recommendation, I know, but it's the best I can give you for this one.



* I'm deliberately not linking to anything related to Jonestown on the off-chance you have no idea what that is and want to watch The Sacrament. I'm starting to think it's the only way this movie might be interesting, from a narrative perspective.

Cap'n Howdy Presents His Quasi-Annual Academy Award Speculation

 As anyone inclined to read a blog about movies already knows, this weekend brings the 86th Annual Academy Awards, the final award show of "Awards Season" that runs from last December until the beginning of March. It's possible the Razzies are also this weekend, but since they gave up nominating movies that were bad and just went for the low hanging fruit (did Adam Sandler or M. Night Shyamalan make a movie this year? Nominate them in every category!) I really haven't given that much credence. I can't remember when I started watching the Academy Awards, but it's been a fixture in my life as a cinephile (to give you some idea, I can still remember Jack Palance doing push-ups on stage and Billy Crystal in the Hannibal Lecter mask like it was yesterday).

With that said, I've never been very good at predicting the winners. As I often joke, I tend to defer to friend of the Blogorium Neil, because he has a much better track record, but as he's not around to write this, it falls to the Cap'n to give it a shot. With the exception of Nebraska, Captain Phillips, and Philomena, I've seen all of the Best Picture nominees, and a vast majority of the other nominated pictures (with the exception of Best Foreign Film and Best Documentary, which I'll be going with what friends have been telling me). In the spirit of the late Roger Ebert - who I imagine will have some form of tribute on Sunday - the structure will be who the Cap'n thinks should win and who will win. I'll try to give you some idea of why I think one nominee will win over another, but remember that a) the awards are voted on by people in the Academy, so who knows what their thought process is, and b) I'm not very good at this. Nevertheless, it should be fun to look at this next year, or even just next week.


 In order of how they're usually presented:

 Best Supporting Actress:

 Sally Hawkins - Blue Jasmine
 Jennifer Lawrence - American Hustle
 Lupita Nyong'o - 12 Years a Slave
 Julia Roberts - August: Osage County
 June Squibb - Nebraska

 Who Should Win: Lupita Nyong'o
 Who Will Win: Lupita Nyong'o

 Looking at the other nominees, there's no question in my mind that Lupita Nyong'o is taking home the statue for Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, and she deserves it. As much as I liked Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine, there's no comparison. I haven't seen Roberts or Squibb in their respective roles, and Jennifer Lawrence was too young for her part in American Hustle.

 Best Supporting Actor:

 Barkhad Abdi - Captain Phillips
 Bradley Cooper - American Hustle
 Michael Fassbender - 12 Years a Slave
 Jonah Hill - The Wolf of Wall Street
 Jared Leto - Dallas Buyers Club

 Who Should Win: Jared Leto
 Who Will Win: Jared Leto



 This is a little trickier to pick: although I'm convinced Leto should and will win, there's an off chance that American Hustle starts picking up steam (I'll get to the reasons why during Best Director and Best Picture) and Bradley Cooper sneaks in and takes it away as some weird penance for not winning last year. There is this strange sense of "making up for" awards that happen at the Oscars, which lead to oddball wins for movies, like Denzel Washington for Training Day or Martin Scorsese for The Departed (not that they aren't both very good movies / performances, but far from the best either has ever done). Still, Leto is fantastic in Dallas Buyers Club, although I don't know how that would impact the Leading Actor category. As another friend of mine pointed out, Jonah Hill might have been a little too broad, and Fassbender while great is too loathsome in 12 Years a Slave.

 Best Animated Film:

 The Croods
 Despicable Me 2
 Ernest & Celestine
 Frozen
 The Wind Rises

 Who Should Win: The Wind Rises
 Who Will Win: Frozen (?)

 I'm not sure here, to be honest with you; The Wind Rises is Hayao Miyazaki's final film and I can't imagine that wouldn't factor in the voters minds somehow, but all I hear about everywhere I can listen in on the public is Frozen. Since there's no Pixar entry this year, and that's the reliable vote (was Despicable Me 2 really that much better than Monsters University?), I guess Disney has an outside shot at this, but Studio Ghibli has my pick.

 Documentary (Feature):

 The Act of Killing
 Cutie and the Boxer
 Dirty Wars
 The Square
 20 Feet from Stardom

 Who Should Win: The Act of Killing
 Who Will Win: The Square (?)


 I'm not 100% sold on my "will win" pick - it could be 20 Feet from Stardom, although conventional wisdom is to go with the strangest title (Cutie and the Boxer). In truth, every single person I know who saw The Act of Killing says it's not only the best documentary they saw last year, but that it was the best movie they saw last year. Looking at the last few years, it's hard to say if a movie about unrepentant perpetrators of war atrocities is going to be the top vote getter, but it sounds like it should be. I'm looking forward to sitting down and watching The Act of Killing and seeing for myself.

 Writing (Adapted Screenplay):

 Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke - Before Midnight
 Billy Ray - Captain Phillips
 Steve Coogan, Jeff Pope - Philomena
 John Ridley - 12 Years a Slave
 Terence Winter - The Wolf of Wall Street

 Who Should Win: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
 Who Will Win: John Ridley

 Unless 12 Years a Slave totally gets blanked in every category, John Ridley will be taking home the Oscar for adapting Solomon Northrup's true story, and I'm okay with that. It's a harrowing experience, and a very well written screenplay that avoids being maudlin or playing for cheap emotional beats. That said, Before Midnight is built around conversations, usually between Delpy and Hawke, and is a masterwork of writing and capturing the ebb and flow of conversation. It's a little silly this lands in "adapted" because Jesse and Celine are recurring characters and therefore are "based" on something else, but despite my admiration for Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke's writing, the Academy's propensity for going "rogue" in writing is usually reserved for the next category.

 Writing (Original Screenplay):
Eric Warren Singer, David O. Russell - American Hustle
 Woody Allen - Blue Jasmine
 Craig Borten, Melissa Wallack - Dallas Buyers Club
 Spike Jonze - Her
 Bob Nelson - Nebraska

 Who Should Win: Spike Jonze
 Who Will Win: Craig Borten, Melissa Wallack


 Or David O. Russell and Eric Warren Singer, if American Hustle starts a-rolling. There's no chance for Woody Allen, and as much as I enjoyed Blue Jasmine we all know why that's not happening this year. I hesitate to even bring that up because I know how toxic the back and forth is and I don't want to weigh in without knowing all of the facts, and as it has nothing to do with Blue Jasmine's screenplay that's all I have to say about it. If Spike Jonze was going to win anything for Her (which he should but it's on the outside looking in for most nominations), it ought to be this but I somehow don't think it will be. That said, Borten and Wallack took what could have been an easy tear-jerker of a true story and gave us a more nuanced version, whether they took liberties with Ron Woodruff's story or not (speaking of which, how is something based on a true story an "original" screenplay?), so I'd say they have a good shot at it.

Best Actress in a Leading Role:
Amy Adams - American Hustle
Cate Blanchett - Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock - Gravity
Judi Dench - Philomena
Meryl Streep - August: Osage County

 Who Should Win: Amy Adams
 Who Will Win: Amy Adams


As much as Cate Blanchett owns every moment of Blue Jasmine, I think it's pretty clear that's a non-starter this year. Sandra Bullock was the odds-on favorite for Gravity when the film came out, but unfortunately that was too long ago (last summer is eons ago in Academy-time, which is why most of the nominees seem to be films released in November or December). Judi Dench and Meryl Streep are reliable favorites and you can never, ever count them out, but Amy Adams is THE reason to watch American Hustle. I'm dubious about all of the other acting nominations for that film, but unquestionably Adams is riveting from beginning to end and deserves to win.

Best Actor in a Leading Role:

Christian Bale - American Hustle
Bruce Dern - Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor - 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey - Dalls Buyers Club

 Who Should Win: Chiwetel Ejiofor
 Who Will Win: Matthew McConaughey

 Now, I could be wrong here, and Bruce Dern could be the spoiler because of a strange trend in Hollywood. What usually happens is that an older actor who has been under the radar for a while has a great performance and suddenly awards voters freak out and assumed that he's going to die soon and those nominations fly in (see Peter O'Toole in Venus, Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, or Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story). Now, to be fair, none of the actors I mentioned won, but everybody's talking about Bruce Dern like he's suddenly on death's door and how many more movies has he got blah blah blah. For what it's worth to you death clock counters, Peter O'Toole was nominated in 2006 and will be memorialized this year.

 For different reasons, I think there's no chance for Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale. DiCaprio, who did some of the most impressive work I've ever seen him do in The Wolf of Wall Street, has no shot because the stupid controversy surrounding the film "glorifying" Jordan Belfort, the sleazeball that DiCaprio is playing. In no way would you ever want to be Belfort after watching The Wolf of Wall Street, but DiCaprio makes him an undeniable presence you want to watch for three hours. The physical work in the quaaludes scene alone should be enough to justify his nomination.

 Christian Bale was all right in American Hustle. That's it. He wasn't any better or any worse than he is in any other movie, so I genuinely don't understand why he was nominated, and unless voters just decide to go crazy for American Hustle, I can't see him taking home the Oscar for gaining weight.

 I'm really tempted to go with Matthew McConaughey taking it from the amazing Ejiofor (who conveys a sense of dignity in the most dire of circumstances and is in almost every scene of 12 Years a Slave) just because voters seem to love a physical transformation. Also, McConaughey has been on a serious upswing over the last two or three years where he finally got tired of being Surfer, Dude and has been on a real tear reminding people he's more than Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. I think I preferred him in Mud, but this might be the year that voters decide to take him seriously. But secretly I hope Chiwetel Ejiofor wins, and deep down I think he might.

 Best Director:

 David O. Russell - American Hustle
 Alfonso Cuarón - Gravity
 Alexander Payne - Nebraska
 Steve McQueen - 12 Years a Slave
 Martin Scorsese - The Wolf of Wall Street

 Who Should Win: Steve McQueen
 Who Will Win: Alfonso Cuarón

 Since 1999, when Steven Spielberg won for Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love took Best Picture, it's no longer a guarantee that Best Director and Best Picture will go hand in hand, as they always seemed to. Ben Affleck wasn't even nominated last year, which boggles my mind if you're going to award Argo Best Picture, but I digress. What Best Director now means is anybody's guess, but last year's winner, Ang Lee for The Life of Pi, indicates that spectacle and technical achievement is now a mitigating factor. In that case, it's very hard to argue that what Alfonso Cuarón achieved in Gravity doesn't automatically qualify him to win, hands down. Regardless of how I feel about Gravity's story (and it's telling the screenplay isn't nominated), I can't argue that it's an astonishingly well made film, the work of a director who spent years doing something we hadn't seen before. So he's almost certainly going to win.

 Is that unfortunate? I guess: I prefer the understated, sober direction of McQueen in 12 Years a Slave, with his long takes and willingness to let a scene unfold without overt manipulation. It's hard to believe this is only his third feature film, and all of them are uniformly excellent. In my mind there's no reason he shouldn't be standing at the podium accepting the award for Best Director (as he has been at various ceremonies this season), but the Academy Award voters are weird like that.

Speaking of which: there's a teeny, tiny, outside chance that neither happens and that David O. Russell stops being a bridesmaid and finally wins (three nominations in four years, after all), even if it's not for his best direction. I'd hate to think he would win Best Director for a film that is so clearly a copy of Martin Scorsese's films, especially at the expense of Scorsese, who made a much better film that's not going to win anything, but there's certainly been a big push for Russell since The Fighter. It's weird, because I vastly prefer Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees to Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, but it could be that kind of year, which leads us to...

 Best Picture:

 American Hustle
 Captain Phillips
 Dallas Buyers Club
 Gravity
 Her
 Nebraska
 Philomena
 12 Years a Slave
 The Wolf of Wall Street

 Who Should Win: 12 Years a Slave
 Who Will Win: American Hustle

 Yep, I'm going with it. I don't think American Hustle was the best movie of 2013, and while Her is nominated it has no chance considering the paltry nominations. The Wolf of Wall Street is this year's Zero Dark Thirty, a great film overshadowed by a ridiculous "controversy" that will scare off voters regardless of the merits of the movie itself. Gravity has excellent direction and nice special effects but a story that strains credibility to the breaking point - it's a great ride, but not necessarily a great movie. I've heard nothing bad about Philomena, Nebraska, or Captain Phillips (in fact, quite the opposite), but they seem to be movies that are there to fill out the new "5-10 nominees" logic the Academy implemented a few years ago. Dallas Buyers Club is a fine movie but not one I see taking home the big award.

 All of the buzz, and rightfully so, has been with 12 Years a Slave, and it was my hands down pick to win Best Picture until I found out just how few people had seen it. I know that it's an incredibly difficult film to watch (I watched it) and that it's not a "feel good" movie and that it's "important." That's not to diminish the fact that yes, it IS important and it IS a part of American history we don't like to look at or talk about, but it saddens me that people just won't go see it because they don't want to deal with it. And I worry that this is going to trickle over to the voters in the Academy. It's true that the actors and critics and writers and directors who all voted for 12 Years a Slave in their respective guilds are also Academy voters, but for some reason they tend to go "safe" with the Oscars.

 Look, I really liked Argo, but it was the "safe" alternative to Zero Dark Thirty, which wasn't going to win anyway but they dealt with precarious points in American history that involved a level of obsession and a coordinated effort to come out victorious. Shakespeare in Love was the "safe" choice. The Artist was the "safe" choice, and so were The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire, to name a few from the last few years. Best Picture, increasingly, has been a bizarre alternate universe where movies you wouldn't necessarily consider the best picture of the year are nevertheless selected over other films.

 Putting aside the obvious argument that it isn't fair to put such varying types of films against each other, the reality is that often voters will go with a film they enjoyed over an "important" film. In fact, the "important" with quotes around it gets some sort of asinine backlash from people who want spectacle over serious. Think about the South Park episode that tore George Clooney and Hollywood a new one for being smug and suggesting that cinema should mean anything (and, by proxy, that they "mean" anything). That's a prevailing thought, even as it's easy to lampoon Hollywood for being too self-important.

 So yeah, could voters pick American Hustle over 12 Years a Slave? I can totally see it happening. Take the consistent presence of David O. Russell for the last few years, with a cast that was almost uniformly not doing their very best work (no offense, but Amy Adams is the alpha and the omega of that ensemble) who are all nominated, and a gamut of other categories, and you have the makings of a picture that could run the table. Why? Because it's a fun movie and lots of people liked it (although, increasingly, I talk to people who really didn't) and dammit, isn't that what's fun about Hollywood? Not depressing movies about the horrible things we did to other human beings and I know it's important but dammit I just want to see Bradley Cooper with a perm, you guys!

 Will it happen? I don't know. I'd like it not to, but you can never be sure. If there's one thing I've learned from years of unsuccessfully choosing winners, it's that I don't know what's going on in the minds of voters any more than I know how March Madness is going to end. I can pay attention to the prevailing trends of Awards Season and extrapolate from that, but that's about it. But it's fun to speculate in the meantime, to have wild theories and to spend unnecessary time and energy into rationalizing them. And besides, I haven't had a non-review post in a while, mostly because I didn't want to talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman or Harold Ramis, and I'm sure as hell not comfortable talking about Woody Allen right now. But the Academy Awards? Now that's something to talk about, at least until next week...