Popcorn Kernels: That'll Do, Pig

In which we review the movies in the Babe duology, which the blogger was forced to watch by the maniac he's dating, but found to be quite a treat.

Babe

Year: 1995

Director: Chris Noonan

Cast: James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Christine Cavanaugh

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A young pig is taken to a bucolic farm, where he longs to be a sheepdog instead of just a fancy dinner.

I don't usually respond to movies with animal protagonists, but I do respond to movies with effects brought to life by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, so I guess I was as neutral as Switzerland coming into Babe, which I'm certain I saw as a young child but remembered literally nothing about. And let me tell you what, I loved it. 

Babe is not only an adaptation of a children's novel, it is a storybook come to blissful, bucolic life. The farm set feels stagebound in a way that doesn't limit belief but rather creates a homey, insulated fairy tale atmosphere, and yet the world of the film spins an unlimited amount of potential from its glorious creature designs. This might just be the best work the Henson company has ever done, delicately switching between excellent trained animal actors and lifelike animatronics to create the impression of talking animals in a way that still holds up even two decades later.

The only effects liability is the sheep (which, incidentally, were the only creatures designed by a different company), who have a rather stiff range of expression and dead glassy eyes when it comes down to it, but other than that Babe is quite frankly a technical masterwork. There's something to be said about the fact that in the 23 years separating then and now, no Racing Stripes or Beverly Hills Chihuahua or Marmaduke has come even close to achieving the look and feel of these lifelike animals. To create something like this requires a great deal of craftsmanship, skill, and love, and that's something that the incredibly patient producer George Miller has proven himself to have in spades.

But a technically perfect children's film is nothing without heart, and Babe has enough of that for a whole pod of blue whales. Pure, blissful, painful heart bursts from every pore of this film, starting and ending with its two core performances. Christine Cavanaugh is irresistibly tender and innocent as Babe, a pig who doesn't know enough about the world not to believe he can do anything. And James Cromwell has a brilliant interiority to his outwardly hardened farmer character, letting the pig crack his gruff, masculine exterior in a variety of brilliantly small, subtle ways.

The screenplay is also tight as all get out, letting Babe wander through a variety of domestic, picaresque adventures that establish the world of the farm and the personalities of the animals within it, before slowly introducing the naïve pig to the harsh risks and realities of what it means to be a farm animal. Terror, death, and isolation form a constant presence over the film, but it doesn't shy away from darkness, allowing the sweetness to seem even more pure and scrumptious. It never gets pushed into saccharine, cheesy territory exactly because of that dash of reality taking the edge off.

In short, Babe is one of the best kids' films ever made. It's a beautiful combination of everything that makes it both a perfect motion picture (technical prowess and storytelling spirit) and a perfect storybook tale (heart with a dash of edgy reality). It's impossible not to be invested in Babe's journey, however big or small the plot developments are. If you have a child, this should be the only movie they watch until they're old enough to start seeing Scream movies.

Rating: 10/10

Babe: Pig in the City

Year: 1998

Director: George Miller

Cast: Magda Szubanski, Elizabeth Daily, Mickey Rooney 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

Babe leaves the farm in an attempt to raise money to save it, and ends up getting stuck in The City with a gaggle of assorted outcast animals.

When I told my mother I was going to watch Babe: Pig in the City, she said, "oh, the bad one?" Mind you, she'd never seen the film, but let's just say that that it doesn't enjoy the most sterling reputation in the world at large. And it's not hard to imagine why. It takes the sweet, gentle bliss of the original Babe and runs it through a meat grinder. While it's pretty interesting and unique on its own merits, those merits are not that of a Babe movie, or really that of a movie intended for minors to any degree.

It's not fair to say that this tonal shift is George Miller's fault, considering that he shepherded the original film into the world as producer, but this one is very George Miller. His Mad Max sensibilities burst through every pore of Pig in the City, and while those instincts are as sharp as ever, they're just not... cute. Take, for instance, one of the most disgusting characters to ever grace the silver screen: Mickey Rooney's mute clown Uncle Fugly, who is the scariest character the man has ever played, and this is a guy who starred in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5.

I don't normally post photos in mini-reviews, but look at this sh*t.

And that's not the only place where the man indulges in his more bizarre, manic instincts. I'm talking exuberant slapstick involving elaborate pulley systems, multiple disgusting side characters with pig noses, and a general daredevil attitude with the fragile psyches of the children that are supposedly in the  film's core audience. I think it says a lot that you could read this film as a prequel to either Hotel for Dogs or The Godfather.

That's not to say this is a bad thing. It's just not what people were asking for, and that's fair. But approaching this film as an adult, there's a lot to appreciate here. First of all, there's a wide variety of subtextual material to plumb. I won't go into great detail, but Pig in the City offers perspectives on gentrification, homelessness, and class disparity all sprinkled with ample Holocaust and slavery imagery. I've never seen a kids' movie with so much grim reality on its mind, even as it tells a simplistic fable within that framework.

Unfortunately, none of this carries the emotional heft of the original Babe, which faces the reality of being an animal on a farm in a simple, clear, and thus brutally precise way. It flings its ideas this way and that, and they only coalesce into something satisfyingly probing in the character of the orangutan Thelonius, a great ape whose only wish is to maintain his dignity in an increasingly cruel, unforgiving world.

But one thing that's unequivocally great is the design of the titular city itself and its inhabitants. Although Babe spends most of his time in a single hotel, every time he visits the broader environment of The City, it's a breathtaking amalgam of the greatest urban landscapes this wide world has to offer. It quite blatantly refuses to take place in any single city, lumping together landmarks and visual signifiers from a dozen different famous metropolises.

There we go with another picture, and if the fact that I can't resist including these doesn't prove Pig in the City has something stunning and visual to offer, I don't know what will.

This production design is perhaps the only thing that consistently maintains the dreamy storybook quality of the original film, and it's glorious, from the Venice canals that border Babe's hotel to the angular roads that drift across its downtown area to the Day-Glo muscle beach at its outskirts. And the costuming of the characters that inhabit this world is glorious, ranging from Medieval powdered faces with Cindy Lou Who hair to leather punks on roller blades to this angular work of art who runs the hotel.

She's like an Ellen Greene character made her way into the Capital from The Hunger Games, and oh boy there I go with the pictures again.

It's a boisterous good time visually speaking, and the animal actors are just as top notch this time around. Unfortunately, it's still just not as good as Babe, but really there aren't many things that are. Changing the actress playing Babe robs the character of some of its all-important heart, and the movie is a little too obsessed with effects setpieces and big, broad humor to focus on well-rounded characters. It's still fun, but it feels like a well-made trifle rather than a work of genius. But if that's the biggest complaint I can make about it, we're still in pretty good hands.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1470

Popcorn Kernels: Movies I Missed (On Purpose)

In which we release mini-reviews of two fairly recent comedy films that managed to pass me by until now.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Year: 2008

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In order to make enough money to pay their rent, two slacker friends decide to produce and star in a porn film, but how will this affect their relationship?

Pretty much any movie starring Seth Rogen between 2007 and 2010 was created explicitly to cater to the greasy, speckly daydreamers of the world who wanted to believe the busty blonde down the hall would find the lovable oaf buried deep beneath the Cheeto dust-crusted exterior. It’s the kind of nerd-fulfillment fantasy Judd Apatow has been trafficking in since day one, and the only person I can think of who is more suited to bring that icky feeling to life is Kevin Smith. …Enter Kevin Smith.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about Elizabeth Banks falling for Seth Rogen and while both are admirable performers, the spark isn’t even there on paper. I’m not even talking about their disparate physical attractiveness. Zack could be played by Hugh Grant and Miri’s interest in him would still be deeply questionable. It’s all in the writing, which is skeevy and sweaty in a deeply disconcerting manner despite the supposed sex positivity of the script. 

The film crows over the female form like a cackling magpie, exempting men altogether from its bone-chilling leer. This is a movie strewn with completely naked women that treats its one full frontal male scene like it’s something shocking and disgusting. Male perspectives in sex films are just the worst, aren’t they? Despite Banks’ attempt at creating a shaded, multi-dimensional human being, Miri is merely a prize to be won: a fun fair sack of flesh, blood, and mammary glands. 

And Zack and Miri treats its minor characters even worse, if you can believe it. Craig Robinson is forced to contort into every stereotype in the book, and some that have been scribbled in the margins (whipped sitcom husband, wise best friend, irrationally angry black man), and the rest of the porno cast are given no introduction, with personalities ranging from one-note (Jason Mewes’ clueless sex fiend) to topless window dressing to “no seriously, who are you?” Then they’re sent floundering through a fundamentally broken story with a distended first act that swallows half the run time, a bungled time jump that kills the momentum at a climatic juncture, and a central relationship that vomits out manufactured filler drama in an unending stream. There are such deep cracks in the narrative here that James Cameron wants to make a documentary exploring them.

Is it funny? I suppose. Justin Long has an excellent extended cameo as a gravel-throated gay porn star, and there are jokes throughout that work when they’re not being extravagantly racist, sickeningly misogynistic, or they completely miscalculate the film’s capacity for scatological humor. Zack and Miri aims to shock, and it succeeds, but hardly in the way it intends to. Its sex is too tame to be titillating, and it can’t sustain such a deeply disjointed story on a pocketful of dick jokes. I say Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a tremendously lazy film, and the Windows Movie Maker credits that grace its front and back end seem to agree with me. I’d love to see this material handled by another director, but unfortunately Zack and Miri – and especially Kevin Smith – just don’t turn it on.

Rating: 4/10

Vacation

Year: 2015

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold decides to take his family on a road trip to Wally World in an attempt to smooth over their problems.

Now, here’s a movie I never thought I’d see, let alone like. A belated straggler from the 2000’s remake boom (seriously, other than Ghostbusters, who’s making remakes anymore? Remakes are so passé, sequels are what’s In this season), updating material that nobody has given a passing thought to in over a decade, Vacation seemed like the most obnoxious kind of family comedy. And to be honest, it doesn’t really try to be anything different. All the scatological gags, picked-clean sexual references, and oddly violent slapstick that you might expect are front and center, but Vacation prevails in spite of that.

I blame the cast. Ed Helms has always been a reliable comic presence, even if he doesn’t stand out in a sea of funny 40-something white guys. And he’s surrounded by a bevy of delightful professionals, first and foremost Christina Applegate. I’ve never paid much attention to Applegate beyond her cameo appearance on Friends, but she’s utterly brilliant here, wrapping up the classic Apatowian pent-up manboy archetype within the guise of a tired suburban mom. And then we have, packed in like sardines, Leslie Mann, Charlie Day, Caitlin Olsen, Michael Peña, Keegan-Michael Key, and f**king Chris Hemsworth, who Ghostbusters has taught us is a bona fide force of nature.

This cast elevates the mostly generic material, making it funny enough that when the script hits its patches of actual genius, they don’t seem out of place. The family car is a bubbling fount of hilarity with its endless absurdities and M.C. Escher-esque design, the young brothers are a wonderfully mismatched pairing, and there is a spot of psychosexual terror that cold-cocks your funny bone. It’s not highbrow, to be certain, but there are actual laughs here - laughs that Vacation comes by honestly, and that is a remarkable achievement.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 953

Popcorn Kernels: Two-Stop Shop

In which I share mini-reviews of two comedies I watched over the course of a weekend with Sergio. He fell asleep during both of them, but I was only upset about it once. The other time I was jealous that he managed to escape.

Marci X

Year: 2003

Director: Richard Benjamin

Cast: Lisa Kudrow, Damon Wayans, Richard Benjamin

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A Jewish-American heiress struggling to protect her father’s reputation attempts to bond with an out-of-control rapper who is tanking his music label.

I love Lisa Kudrow. I think she is an underappreciated comic genius whose work on Friends was just the beginning of a career that included the farcical heights of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and the caustic, improbably hilarious The Comeback. But there’s a thing that happens when the peak of your fame was in the 90’s. Somehow, some way, the fates will conspire to dump you into a project like Marci X, a film that makes Soul Man look like a carefully thought-out racial tract.

The film is such a gargantuan miscalculation that it overflows the “offensive” reservoir almost immediately, spilling over everything until it pools around the “adorably quaint” drain. This might be a more effective defense if it had come out 43 years ago instead of 13, but it’s a perfect time capsule of Hollywood’s most embarrassing proclivities: Lisa Kudrow raps in the movie, you guys, and it is tremendous. If you approach this movie as a huge slice of camp rather than a film attempting to reflect any sort of truth about any ethnic or minority culture, it becomes a little easier to swallow. You’re still ingesting a whittled-down turd, but at least you’re not choking on it.

The real troubling thing is that I had so much fun watching Marci X. It’s a truly ludicrous movie, and its ability to completely ignore every last stricture of logic and decency makes for a madcap hullaballoo of completely unpredictable, off-the-rails filmmaking. It helps that pretty much everyone in the cast is genuinely talented. Damon Wayans might not be operating at the top of his game, retreating into half-assed, breathy line deliveries like a turtle hiding in his shell, but look at the comedy cavalry that’s assembled: Kudrow, 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski, a very young Matthew Morrison, Christine Baranski, Richard Benjamin (who also directed)… No, it’s no Ghostbusters line-up, but they’re charming performers who convert a surprising amount of material into genuinely fun humor. 

Marci X is probably at its best when lampooning one-percenter socialite culture, not only because these moments are free of the lingering shame residue that comes any time the film even glances in the direction of hip-hop, but because it’s intentionally, satirically, successfully amusing. These upper class bubbleheads parade around disabled children at charity balls, assume they understand minority plights even better than the minorities do, and generally attempt to solve all the world’s problems without realizing that they are one of them. It might be low-hanging fruit, but they pluck it with vim and vigor.

Of course, in the third act the plot loses its goddamn mind and spirals blindly down a hundred narrative dead-ends before just sort of giving up and plastering over its missing ending with another ill-advised rap sequence. It’s a steaming bowl of nonsense, but the music (co-written by Marc Shaiman of Hairspray and Smash) is an apt stylistic parody of the worst of late 90’s pop (the flick may have premiered in 2003, but it was made in 2000 – I wonder what could possibly have held them up?), the fundamental misunderstanding of the rap scene is pitifully endearing, and the secret abundance of genuinely good jokes hiding in the wings make it a must-see masterpiece of Hollywood crap.

Rating: 7/10

Clerks

Year: 1994

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two clerks at a convenience store and a video store bond over the course of an extremely long shift.

Indie flicks were such a Thing in 1994. Pulp Fiction immediately became the biggest movie in the galaxy and Clerks toddled along to prove that anyone could make a movie. Literally anyone. Kevin Smith was a convenience store clerk from Ass Nowhere, New Jersey, and he made himself a megahit using a cheap camera on his off-hours. It’s a truly inspirational story, and it wouldn’t have worked if Smith wasn’t an incredibly savvy creative mind, but damn if Clerks isn’t a slog.

Fans of cheap movies are used to forgiving such films their many technical flaws, but Clerks isn’t even a movie. It’s a staged reading of a screenplay. The screenplay is admirably sharp, to be sure, restaging Dante’s Inferno as a miserable day shift and casually tossing off some incredibly tight comic vignettes as it putters along. But there’s literally nothing else to Clerks. The camera is either hibernating on its tripod or whipping back and forth between its subjects like a rabid squirrel. The black and white cinematography is not a choice but a necessity, and it makes a drab, uncomplicated set look even less interesting. Which I guess emphasizes the theme of the narrative, but that’s certainly not on purpose.

With the script front and center and nothing waiting in the wings to prop it up, every tumble it makes violently topples the film. And let me remind you, this is the first script Smith ever produced. It’s inherently composed of stumbles. The dialogue tends to be both overwritten and underperformed, women are treated like interchangeable hogs on a spit, and certain chapters (oh yeah, the film is divided into nine segments with different titles) just dump a bucket of words on your head, hoping there’s a joke in there. And I’m sorry to say it, but Jay and Silent Bob are not commanding presences at this juncture in their lives.

There’s some genuinely funny stuff in Clerks (my favorite being an anti-smoking advocate inciting an in-store riot), but when it lulls as most comedies tend to do, there isn’t a white of redeeming quality to lean on. It’s a treacherous slog to get to the good stuff, and the good stuff is too laconic to really boost your energy and recharge your interest. It’s a clever debut film, but it wears its amateur status on its sleeve, which it then tears off and drapes over its entire face.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1078

Popcorn Kernels: Funny Girls

In which we dole out mini-reviews to two female-led comedies, released 30 years apart. Let’s see how things have changed, shall we?

Valley Girl

Year: 1983

Director: Martha Coolidge

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A girl from the Valley falls for an LA dude with a bitchin’ bod, but her friends think he’s, like, totally grody. Will she choose him or get back with her old beau, Tommy?

I feel like such a traitor to the cause. Like, every cause. As a staunch feminist and an 80’s movie advocate, I’m always delighted when I find out that a classic high school movie was actually directed by a woman. But Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemeont High failed to wow me, and now Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl has suffered a similar fate. Obviously, this has everything to do with the state of second-tier 80’s teen flicks and not women in the director’s chair, but I can’t help feeling like a heretic.

At least with Valley Girl, I can see why it became such a zeitgeisty hit, and it’s not just Phoebe Cates misplacing her bikini top. Simultaneously canonizing a parade of 80’s megahits, including Modern English’s evergreen “Melt with You” and calling into existence an entire lexicon of slang like an omnipotent pop culture deity, Valley Girl struck teen culture during a pivotal transition period. As a cultural artifact, it’s pristine, but as an actual piece of film narrative, it’s a major bummer.

Copping the classical “forbidden love” story arc so hard that our couple literally makes out in front of a movie theater marquee advertising Romeo and Juliet, Valley Girl assumes that the drama is baked in automatically and doesn’t actually bother to create its own meaningful conflict. It’s hard to care about a relationship that has lasted the course of a montage, but it’s even harder to believe that Julie’s decision is challenging in any way, because Tommy is such a collar-popping Cobra Kai asshole that it’s literally impossible to imagine that anyone would even give him the time of day without smacking that smug grin off his greasy face.

Plus, Nicolas Cage is obscenely attractive at 19 years old. He might be giving a performance bizarrely reminiscent of David Schwimmer, but he’s got the goods, and that’s something I never thought I’d say about the star of the National Treasure franchise. This extremely superficial narrative (which expends a lot of energy trying to emphasize how “different” this white dude from 20 miles away is) can’t even pick up on that, which is immensely frustrating.

The film’s emphasis on vérité conversational scenes that meander through halfheartedly improvised dialogue while straining to grab guerilla snatches of downtown LA betray its low budget, as does its lack of proper nighttime lighting. Far be it from me to punish a movie for being cheap, but it doesn’t cost money to punch up the script a little more. A whole lot of nothing happens in Valley Girl, and it takes forever to do it. 

I admire its veracity as an on-the-ground examination of the totally arbitrary class warfare of teen culture, but Deborah Foreman is a deeply uninteresting lead (her second biggest credit is the forgotten 1986 slasher April Fool’s Day, in which she’s also the least interesting presence), the story is lazy, and just like Ridgemont High, the film is packed with side characters and subplots that we spend an arbitrary amount of time with before they vanish. At least we’ll always have Nic Cage’s eyebrows.

Rating: 5/10

I Give It a Year

Year: 2013

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Rose Byrne, Rafe Spall, Anna Faris

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A newlywed couple struggles to make it through their first year of marriage, both presented with temptations in the form of romantic partners far better suited for them.

I Give it a Year is a curious beast. A small British alterna-rom-com nestled in the underbrush of the Netflix catalogue, you’d think you know exactly what you’re getting. And that’s what you get: A Spartan narrative with few twists and turns, a half-cynical but still heteronormative-monogamous takedown of love and marriage, and a revolving door of broad comedy stock characters. So why did I find it so f**king delightful?

Well, ingredient number one is Rose Byrne, a vastly underrated comedy actress who I would follow to the ends of the Earth. Hell, I would watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop in Space if she was in it. She has an uncanny ability to take an extremely sour character, sharpen her to a deadly steel point of hilarity, and swoop in with her natural charisma to tie you down and force you to care for her anyway. She handles all the film’s copious negativity with charm and grace, keeping the tone light and airy.

That’s not to say the rest of the cast don’t pull their weight. I mean, Anna Faris is in this movie. Her character is probably the most flat on paper, but she grabs her nebbish role by the horns to craft a lived-in character with more dimensions than scenes. And in the wings are the male leads; Rafe Spall to play cavalry with dunderheaded charm and physical comedy, and Simon Baker to project handsomeness and overconfidence all over the place like a fire hose.

Surround this cast with a battalion of British character actors, and you’ve got yourself an unforgettable movie. I Give it a Year is simple, sleek, unadorned, and pretty hilarious. It’s no classical masterpiece of the form, but it’s a ridiculously fun time that I would recommend to anybody who fancies themselves edgy and cynical, but is still a soggy romantic at heart.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 961

Popcorn Kernels: Fangs For The Memories

Everyone, please welcome back our dear friend Scream 101! The podcast has risen from the grave for a second season, and this September we’re all about vampires. Please enjoy a set of mini-reviews about the first two flicks in the lineup.

Dracula (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1931

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

C’mon.

I do my best to approach classic horror with the respect it deserves, bringing as much context as possible to understand why people might have been scared of it back in the day, even if it doesn’t phase modern audiences. I get how Psycho shocked a post-Code audience and respect its tense thriller mechanics. I understand Halloween’s game-changing, stylish approach even if it doesn’t particularly spook me. And every time I watched The Exorcist… OK, The Exorcist is still terrifying. I’m just saying, I’m not speaking as a live Tweeting, torture porn-bred millennial when I say that the massively important, influential-even-to-this-day 1931 Universal smash hit Dracula is a pretty awful movie.

Please keep in mind that I don’t hate all Universal horror. Bride of Frankenstein is a doggone triumph. It’s just that Dracula is cut off at the knees twice over by its source material. While Dracula works well as an epistolary novel, its meandering, country-hopping plot is not the stuff of great cinema. And then our Dracula goes one step further by actually adapting its script from a stage play based on the novel, confining that addled narrative into one suffocating location.

The pacing chokes on its own blood as a handful of characters shout at one another, circling back to the same points over and over again. And far be it from me to knock an iconic performance, but Bela Lugosi is no Karloff. His slow-as-molasses line deliveries are just exhausting. The word “boring” is bandied about a lot when it comes to movies released more than a decade before our time, but Dracula truly earns that description. 

There are exactly three things that are genuinely good about Dracula, and they are what prevent it from teetering over a precipice of despair and tedium. First is Dwight Frye, our Renfield. Frye just goes for it, bringing an immutable energy to the role that sends him careening up into the rafters, but appropriately sells the character’s stylized insanity. The second stems off from that over-the-top quasi-expressionism: the production design of settings that aren’t the main mansion. Dracula’s castle is an excellent chiaroscuro nightmare, and the staircase in his London hideout is a deliciously overwrought jagged cliff.

The third and final element is one scene, a bedtime conversation between Mina and Lucy that thrums with naturalistic chemistry, providing a tiny breath of fresh air between all the hammy tagines. But a couple gasps do not a full lung make. I’d rather be buried six feet under than spend an eternity with Dracula, and that’s exactly what this 80 minute expanse of celluloid felt like.

Rating: 3/10

Let the Right One In (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2008

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young Swedish boy falls in love with the girl who moves in next door, only to discover that she’s a vampire.

I love the book Let the Right One In, as it’s one of the few works of modern literature that has turned my stomach as I was reading it. That might explain why I’m so chilly toward its film adaptation, which defangs most of its more questionable content in favor of a languorous arthouse vibe. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Let the Right One In is a great arthouse horror movie, but I’m well aware of what it could have been, which is supremely frustrating.

But it’s only fair, I suppose, to focus on what it is. Which is beautiful. Like many a Scandinavian film, Let the Right One In uses sprawling fields of snow as giant canvasses of negative space onto which it paints its frame. Given that vampire films tend to predominately feature blood, this aesthetic is especially suited for the subgenre, juxtaposing lurid reds against the pure white snowfall. This is especially especially meaningful when you consider that both our monster and our twisted protagonist falling for her are children, the traditional innocents.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in Let the Right One In, though you might not suspect that from its sedate pacing. It truly succeeds in combining thoughtful, thematic imagery with intensely visceral horror, sometimes even in the same frame. Certain moments are achieved so elegantly that they could be framed and put in a gallery, even though they depict, say, a woman being engulfed in flame or a man burning off his own face with acid. … Maybe I’m being too harsh when I judge this movie for not being hardcore enough.

And let’s not discount the film’s love story, which is believably clumsy, childish, sweet, and dark. The two child actors are superb, especially Lina Leandersson, whose Eli has the eyes of someone who has seen a million lifetimes come and go.

Hell, Let the Right One In is terrific. I don’t love it, because I sometimes have trouble penetrating its icy exterior, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t sing its praises and recommend it to fans looking for more intellectual horror fare.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 926

Q2 Review Purge

Howdy, folks! You may have noticed that Popcorn Culture hasn’t updated in over a week. I’m very sorry for that, but I also have a very good reason. I’ve been in a midsummer frenzy, packing up my apartment, job hunting, prepping season 2 of Scream 101 (big announcements are on their way), And I just spent all of last weekend working on the set of All the Creatures Were Stirring, the feature film debut of my friend Rebekah McKendry, which I’m absolutely thrilled about. And then this weekend was my birthday and volunteering for Blumhouse at the ScareLA haunted house convention. All of these things, you may notice, are not formally considered “writing this blog.”

Popcorn Culture isn’t going anywhere, but in this scheduling melee, I’ve decided to once more unclog my backlog by releasing atypically brief reviews of films I’ve watched in previous weeks (and months, ugh that I haven’t had time to give my full attention to. It was either that or call a plumber. Let’s get started!

Pinocchio

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A lonely woodcarver builds a marionette named Pinocchio that he wishes was his son. His wish is granted, breathing life into the puppet, but Pinocchio must prove his integrity before he becomes a Real Boy.

I know, I know. I should never have made that grand statement that I’d be marathoning every movie in the Disney canon. That was an incredibly foolish thing to so, given my track record for successfully completing marathons. But I did get a step or two further down the trail from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio is a massive improvement on Snow White’s sometimes spotty animation, the beautiful backgrounds and consistent character designs holding up much better under modern scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t quite there. This is a film filled with incident, but there’s not really any rhyme or reason to its plot. Pinocchio is launched through a series of visually compelling and frequently terrifying vignettes with absolutely no connective tissue. The film completely forgets the bit about his nose rowing when he lies after one scene, and Monstro devours Gepetto entirely offscreen. When you need to have other characters explain to one another what’s happening in the plot, you know there’s some deep structural damage there.

But in a nascent medium like feature animation, story is only half the battle. Pinocchio’s ridiculously advanced sense of camera mechanics and framing in a hand-drawn medium is at the height of the craft, so Pinocchio’s a must-see for artists of all kinds. Like they haven’t already seen it. Plus, it’s weirdly obsessed with butts, so there’s that.

Rating: 6/10

Fantasia

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Corey Burton 

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A series of short form animation pieces set to classical music.

Talk about not having a plot! Fantasia takes Pinocchio’s slack script and completely demolishes it, replacing it with a flurry of pure visual mayhem. A mind-bending blend of animation live action, and symphonic music, Fantasia was like nothing that had ever been seen before or since, perhaps Walt Disney’s greatest artistic triumph. I, of course, am a heathen, so I’m bored silly by it.

I’m not well equipped to handle non-narrative film or non-lyrical music, though I do recognize that this is an excellent example of both. It’s a glorious burst of pure animation imagination, informing the look and feel of dozens of Disney features in the years to come with its vibrant colors, fantastical animal designs, and graceful sense of motion. The mythological sequences are a little too twee to hold my attention, though once again Disney doesn’t stray from full tilt horror, depicting ghastly creations like the Chernabog in “Night on Bald Mountain” or the surprisingly tense flood sequence facing poor Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

I definitely forgot there were dinosaur fights in Fantasia, so that part was cool, but by far my favorite segment is an early piece using abstract color and line work to depict the emotional movements of a composition. It’s a gloriously compelling segment that is the closest anyone has ever come to a visual depiction of sound. And then there’s fairies and hippos and crap for like two hours. Like any anthology, which is undoubtedly what this is, the sum is much less than certain parts of its whole.

Rating: 6/10

Not Another Teen Movie

Year: 2001

Director: Joel Gallen

Cast: Chyler Leigh, Jaime Pressly, Chris Evans 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In a parody of 80’s and 90’s high school rom-coms, a popular jock is dared to make the indie rebel girl into prom queen material and falls in love with her along the way.

Remember the massive run of “____ Movie” parody flicks made up of pop culture offal and shattered dreams that ran in bulk from the early to mid-2000’s? Yeah, I try to forget about them too. But now we live in a world where those movies have been diverted from theaters and are pumped directly into Netflix (Tooken, anyone?), so we can look back on America’s unhealthy obsession with some degree of clarity and moral high ground. Let’s just pretend we didn’t give A Haunted House enough money to earn a sequel.

This is a low bar here, but among the Scary Movies and Date Movies and Meet the Spartanses, one movie actually stands out as being not quire so terrible as all that: Not Another Teen Movie. Perhaps it’s due to the presence of latent superstar Chris Evans, who brings a delightful blend of steely overconfidence and goofy charisma to the role. Perhaps it’s the soundtrack, which cherry picks the most instantly likeable 80’s hits from Brennan’s Bin of Beloved Pop Classics. Or perhaps it’s because the film actually has a damns sense of focus, parodying the teen movie genre as a coherent whole rather than winging off in random directions in pursuit of hot topics and trends from the millisecond it was released.

The obvious pitfalls are still present (whole scenes are lifted from other movies almost untouched, ands some of the humor is just too random to make heads or tails of) but Not Another Teen Movie is striving to be an actual parody, using elements of its genre, and it’s intermittently successful. That makes it infinitely better than even its closest competition. The fact that there are a few laugh-out-loud jokes that don’t cop from other movies and a handful of trenchant, actually analytical observations on the genre means that this movie is the Citizen Kane of its cycle. Even if it sports a totally random, ill-conceived musical number and a deeply boring football scene. Although, to be fair, pretty much every high school movie has a boring football scene, so they got that right too.

Rating: 6/10

Mean Girls

Year: 2004

Director: Mark Waters

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A new girl at school is coerced into infiltrating the evil popular clique to take them down, but she unwittingly becomes one herself.

Reviewing Mean Girls is a challenging undertaking as a millennial. The film is such a zeitgeisty hit that it barely reads as a movie anymore. It’s just a carousel of Tumblr gifs, Twitter bios, and whispered quotes in the back of classrooms. But it has gotten that way for a reason. It’s a damn good movie. Well, it’s a damn good comedy.

The script is witty and sharp, with a plot loose enough to allow the characters to flourish yet still keep track of the throughline. The punchlines show off that then-undiscovered Tina Fey pop, and the characters watch Friday the 13th Part 2 on Halloween, so they clearly have their heads screwed on straight. With a gratuitously fantastic ensemble and a Lindsay Lohan in her prime to give voice to the sharp screenplay, Mean Girls can’t help but be a winner.

The actual filmmaking is totally cardboard and anonymous, but who the hell cares? Mean Girls is the last great teen movie (well, Easy A gives it a run for its money, but still), and its clever premise is both a generation-defining clash of the high school classes and a sweetly powerful movie about the damage teen girls can cause to one another and why.

Rating: 9/10

The Last Five Years

Year: 2014

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Tamara Mintz 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A relationship is shown out of order in a series of musical numbers depicting its inception, triumphs, pitfalls, and eventual destruction.

Sometimes a movie is all about performances. It’s a good thing, too, because without Jeremy Jordan and out-of-left-field musical prodigy Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years would crumple like a bouncy castle in a power outage. The movie is essentially (500) Days of Summer cross-pollinated with an opera, and though its tone management is ferociously askew (Kendrick is saddled with an Adele album’s worth of ballads, with Jordan receiving all the poppy, high energy stuff), it’s a small-scale love story that lives and dies on the actors’ ability to apply human emotion to a battery of arbitrary musical numbers, which they do with aplomb.

There are some intensely memorable longform musical sequences at play here, but The Last Five Years is crippled by a devastating problem: It’s pointless. The out-of-order gimmick is but a lark, and we leave this couple having gained no particular insight into why their story is worth telling. The only reason it’s not told in chronological order is that no musical could have been so mismanaged as to backload so many weepers. This is a vehicle for two delightful young performers, not a necessary entry into the cinematic canon of doomed relationships.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1684

Popcorn Kernels: Sequel-Itis

In which we write mini reviews of films that explore the dichotomy of movie sequels. Both follow flicks released in 2000. One’s a bigger, better improvement and the other is a no good, scum-sucking disappointment that let its nascent franchise wither on the vine.

X2: X-Men United

Year: 2003

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry 

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The X-Men and Magneto’s team of evil mutants must join forces to combat a bigger evil: a crazed colonel hellbent on destroying all mutantkind.

If you remember, Bryan Singer’s 2000 film X-Men was a slight but politically aware superhero movie that was fun but no masterpiece. What makes his followup X2 the pinnacle of the series is that it removes the slightness, but as close as it gets, it’s still no masterpiece. Beefing up the already sprawling number of X-Men with the teleporting Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming, rocking flawless blue makeup), the gender-bent Wolverine Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu of Friday the 3th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan – got skeletons in your closet? Let me remove those for you.) and expanded roles for teen polar opposites Pyro (Aaron Stanford) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore, wistful sigh), the cast is even more cumbersome but the political context is even more charged, coming in the wake of September 11th, 2001.

In X2, America is on the verge of Civil War as humans have become increasingly more aware (and afraid) of the mutants living among them. X2 puts all its cards on the table in the opening scene, in which Nightcrawler attempts to assassinate the president to promote Mutant rights. Not only is it a stunning action sequence on the bleeding edge of film technology at the time, it’s a heady parallel to both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. The embers of political subtext (namely, gay rights) in X-Men have become a blazing inferno in the edgy paranoid grip of a post-9/11 society.

X2 maintains this social statement from frame one, though its intelligence flags at certain points. It’s astonishing that a film that contains a visual metaphor so complex as the scene where Professor X freezes all the humans at a museum right next to the exhibit depicting motionless Cro-Magnon figurines (indicating that humans are no longer the next big thing in evolution) could also be so wickedly unconvinced of its audience’s IQ that it needs Mystique to flash her eyes yellow in a place where she could easily be compromised just so we can know that it’s her in that dude’s body. But hey, this is Hollywood. Why should they have faith in us? We keep paying to see Transformers movies.

X2’s problem isn’t the occasional pandering, but rather the fact that its eyes are bigger than its screenplay. So many characters are crammed into these 2 hours that major players routinely vanish for half hours a time, and the movie heavily relies on X-Men to provide character backstories. Jean Grey and Cyclops get barely anything to do, Rogue has so little reason to be there that she’s literally tossed out of a plane, and Nightcrawler is shuffled to the back after we learn his tragic backstory, only to be called off the bench when the movie needs some deus ex machina, stat. The only new character given any real depth is its villain, Brian Cox’s Col. William Stryker.

But aside from that, X2 is even more fun and action-packed than the first. The fight sequences show a surer hand behind the camera, and the characters’ powers (especially Iceman) are far more integrated into both their fight choreography and their daily lives (Rogue blowing out ice cold breath after kissing Iceman is a playful, sexy detail that X1 could never have dreamed of). Plus returning arch-nemesis Ian McKellen is clearly having a ball here. His Magneto is alternately sassy, sardonic, and pure evil. He’s a joy to watch, and when McKellen is having a great time, you’re guaranteed one as well.

Rating: 8/10

American Psycho II: All-American Girl

Year: 2002

Director: Morgan J. Freeman

Cast: Mila Kunis, William Shatner, Geraint Wyn Davies 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Rachel Newman (geddit?) murders her competitors for a sought-after TA position that will help her get into Quantico.

Could there be a more pointless sequel than American Psycho II? Well, Psycho II, I guess, but by all accounts that one’s actually OK. Let me rephrase that: Could there be a more pointless American Psycho sequel than American Psycho II: All-American Girl? Where the original was a cutting satire of yuppie consumerism and the pointless conformity of Wall Street, the sequel is about a quippy college student mowing down hardbodies so she can work for William Shatner. It might have been more at home in the 90’s alongside the likes of post-Freddy killers like the leprechaun, but it certainly has no place in 2002, poised at the very cutting edge of the torture porn zeitgeist. It’s an unnecessary, silly, and shallow slasher in a way that American Psycho is patently not.

Lucky for me, I have made a life out of enjoying silly and shallow slasher outcasts. Although American Psycho II still isn’t very good when you cut down to the core of it, it’s like Legally Blonde gone berserk, and I have room for that in my black, twisted heart. The novelty of seeing a wet-behind-the-ears Mila Kunis gnaw on a role that she has less than no grip on (her deep psychoses is mostly represented by a bunch of squinting) opposite an earth-shatteringly Shatnerian performance (ol’ Billy hisses every line like a syphilitic snake and It. Is. Sublime.) is certainly enough to power me through the duller parts, which this movie boasts in abundance.

The bloated second act is a repetitive slog of bloodless murder, apathetic alt-rock, and anemic puns livened up only by Robin Dunne as Brian, an entitled rich kid who’s hyperbolically venal and has the ill-advised hots for Mila Kunis. And he’s barely in it. This overly long portion of the film is a damn shame because, without it, American Psycho II would be a bad sequel magnum opus.

The opening act, which features a recast Patrick Bateman (Michael Kremko) being murdered by a little girl (yeah, sure) while Mila Kunis narrates, describing how she thinks they wrote a book about him (ha, ha), is a poppy, exciting chunk of early 2000’s schlock. Mila Kunis prowls the quad in a leather jacket and faces off against a lonely career counselor who has named her cat Ricky Martin. It’s a monster of pure innocence, cluelessly racking up scenes of hideously outdated trends and endearingly dim dialogue (Do you want to catch a bite to eat, maybe some dinner?”).

Then there’s the finale, which majestically unspools for a solid half hour after the plot has already ended, layering twist upon nonsensical twist atop a preternaturally straightforward story like an out-of-control soft serve machine. This is the act where we meet Rachel Newman’s mother, a blithering, incessantly complaining old hag ripped straight from the sweat-soaked pages of The Room (she even has a non sequitur line about breast cancer. What a time to be alive.) The interplay between this banshee and her crusty, leering husband is the stuff of f**king legend, a bad movie gold mine of biblical proportions.

I love so much about this movie’s bookending sequences that I feel bad rating it so poorly, but that middle third is so staunchly unimpressive that it drags its many glittering gems into the muck like a safe tossed into the Boston Harbor.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1272
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
American Psycho II: All-American Girl (Freeman, 2002)

Popcorn Culture: Banderas de Manos

Man, Sergio and I are just plowing through the filmography of Pedro Almodóvar Here are two mini-reviews of flicks starring a psychotic Antonio Banderas. Check it out.

The Law of Desire (La Ley del Deseo)

Year: 1987

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas 

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A promiscuous gay film director brings home the wrong fan: A jealous, psycho who will stop at nothing to make sure he’s his ONLY lover.

Pedro Almodóvar is a genius. A colorful, frenetic, dazzling presence behind the camera. An overwhelming personality that radiates love and fun even if you’re not enjoying a particular movie all that much. The way Almodóvar crosses and transcends genre boundaries, it was inevitable that I would stumble across one that doesn’t hit my sweet spot, though that doesn’t mean it’s not a work of art. The film in question is Law of Desire, which grafts the director’s loopy, nebulous storytelling style onto a thriller framework. It can’t be argued that the result isn’t visually spectacular, but the presence of such a tautly defined genre casts the director’s storytelling idiosyncrasies under a harsh spotlight.

To be fair, everything I love about Almodóvar is here in spades: His surreal interstitials (like a gorgeous shot of cocaine falling over a movie script like snow), his effortlessly kinky sexual deviancy, and most of all his intricately woven thread of unshakeable humor. The comedy is not so prevalent as Volver or Mujeres (the latter of which is an out-and-out farce), but it’s no less electric. Humor is mostly relegated to supporting players Carmen Maura (an Almodóvar stalwart from Day 1) and Manuela Velasco (star of my beloved [REC], who is very young in this film but no less talented) leaving Banderas and top-biller Eusebio Poncela to make do with a heap of straight drama (and by that I certainly don’t mean “heterosexual”) that doesn’t mesh as well with the cozy, silly aesthetic as it could have.

There are still some tremendously solid components to this part of the film, notably the subtext about a filmmaker who wants to direct his own life but finds out that life has different plans. But this is largely derailed by a goody third act amnesia plot point that’s perhaps even more frivolous than the similar moment in The Muppets Take Manhattan (yeah, that movie got dark).

It’s an undeniable achievement in filmmaking (remembering the driving scene that matches a car with the lead’s flaring emotions still sends a chill down my spine,), but the story is just to weak to hold up the weight of Almodóvar’s visual prowess. The film crumples in upon itself in the third act, but let’s remember that a disappointment within the context of this director’s filmography would be the magnum opus of most anybody else.

Rating: 6/10

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Átame)

Year: 1989

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Loles León

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A newly released mental patient kidnaps his favorite movie star and ties her up in her apartment to make a case for why she should marry him.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is essentially a bold-faced challenge to anybody who thought that Law of Desire was too kinky. It might boast the shallowest, most straightforward narrative I’ve seen in one of his films, but that doesn’t stop it from being a sexually dynamic, uproariously silly, sublimely weird erotic thriller. It suffers from the los of Carmen Maura (the up-for-anything actress who stopped working with Almodóvar for 18 years after a tough experience on the set of his previous film, Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios), but what female lead Victoria Abril lacks in personality, she makes up for in wounded vulnerability.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is an intriguing evolution from Law of Desire, upgrading the sympathy for its villain along with the depth and complexity of Antonio Banderas’ performance. While the story may not have as many twists and turns, it shows a heretofore unseen focus on developing one particular character, showcasing Banderas as the true movie star he is. The really interesting thing about the cut-and-dry plot keeping the villain in the spotlight is that the film is unmistakably an entry in the horror genre. You don’t just hire The Thing composer Ennio Morricone by accident.

Of course, Almodóvar can’t keep his finger on any one genre for more than about 20 seconds, but the horror influence is certainly felt. So far, every single movie of his that I’ve seen has either been explicitly about cinema or features a character who works in the film industry, but this is his first to center almost entirely over the production of a B-horror film. Again, this is certainly no coincidence. His passion for the subject bleeds around the edges of the frame, and these scenes on the movie set number among his most effortlessly funny material.

I can’t stress enough that the story itself is a touch weaker than it could have been, but I’ll be damned if h doesn’t pull out the stops everywhere else. The foreshadowing in the script is dense and satisfying, and a recurring shot from the film-within-the-film is a woefully perfect cinematic image (a body swinging on a rope that resembles the pendulum of a grandfather clock). Plus, his characters, even the ones that only appear in a single scene, are given startling emotional depth. They’re like stepping into a puddle only to realize that your foot has plunged into a pothole.

Almodóvar just loves people, even the crazy ones. Especially the crazy ones. As wacky, kinky, and violent as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! gets, it remains a warm-hearted tribute to the best in humanity, it’s also a fearless depiction of sexual deviancy with an extended, iconic (for those who know about this kind of thing) lovemaking sequence that’s erotic because it’s not erotic. It’s perhaps the most real, human sexual act hat’s ever been committed to celluloid. It reflects his European sensibilities in a perfect, divisive (NC-17, anyone?) manifesto. Sex is messed up, gross, fumbling, and beautiful. And it certainly doesn’t have to be a big deal.

This scene(and in fact this entire movie) basically defines the entirety of Almodóvar’s sexy, lighthearted, fearless filmography. So, yeah. Don’t write it off just because the A-plot is a wee bit thin.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1075