Popcorn Kernels: Stuff 'N Things

I watched some things and wrote down what I thought about them. Here you go.

Arachnophobia

Year: 1990
Director: Frank Marshall
Cast: Jeff Daniels, Julian Sands, John Goodman
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

A big city doctor moves his family to a sleepy rural town and struggles to make ends meet. It doesn’t help that a venomous spider infestation has descended upon the town and is killing all his patients.

90’s horror gets a bad rap. Sure, the dried-out slasher genre was puking out flicks like Leprechaun or The Ice Cream Man until Scream course-corrected everything, but as loathe as I am to admit it, the slasher genre isn’t the only thing going on in horror. That period saw the urban gothic masterpiece Candyman, the surreal thriller Jacob’s Ladder, and Peter Jackson’s cult gore classic Dead Alive. And then there’s a little 1990 film called Arachnophobia with its foot in two worlds.

The 80’s are represented by the ambassadorship of actors Julian Sands (of Warlock) and Harley Jane Kozak (of The House on Sorority Row, and I’m pleased to announce that I officially earned my horror nerd card when I squealed upon seeing her name in the opening credits), but the 90’s are revving up with a more Amblin-esque adventure-horror roller coaster vibe. There’s not a lot of gore (though some of the spider bite effects are memorably grotesque), but that 80’s staple is traded for some impressive puppetry, animatronics, and spider wrangling used to render a tangible, more-or-less wholly realistic menace. Mind you, Arachnophobia doesn’t necessarily seek to scare, but rather provide adrenaline spikes in a safe, fun environment. It’s  a creepy crawly campfire story.

Of course, the plot itself is as formulaic as an algebra test. There’s the requisite interesting drama (small town conservatives vs. an open-minded doctor with a stroke of bad luck) that is dropped entirely for a third act monsterpalooza, the supposed expert who immediately kicks the bucket, and a character arc so obvious it could be seen from space. However, none of that matters because the film is just so damn fun it’s hard to care about anything else.

Arachnophobia is a jack-in-the-box of thrills and spills, milking every last ounce of spine-tingle out of humanity’s collective disgust for spiders. It might seem like an easy job to make somebody afraid of an eight-legged monstrosity leaping out at them, but there’s more to it than that. The scares in Arachnophobia are impeccably crafted, playful tricks and treats. There are a lot of close calls, unnoticed crawling horrors, and the like. That’s enough to make you want to hug a can of Raid, but the scene where a spider descends on two little girls singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” while a knocked-over doll’s eyes slowly open is an out and out masterpiece moment of horror filmmaking. This movie isn’t creepy by accident.

Incidentally, it’s also not funny by accident. There’s quite a bit of strong comic relief here that helps ingratiate you with the film’s small town vibe. The biggest risk the film takes is including John Goodman as a pseudo-autistic, drawling exterminator, but his performance is so sharply timed (and his screen time so discreetly limited), that it unequivocally works. So there you have it. Arachnophobia is sunny. Arachnophobia is scary. It might be a little overfamiliar, but who really cares?

Rating: 8/10

Volver

Year: 200
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas
Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute
MPAA Rating: R

A young mom strains to handle the pressures of work, family, illness, gossip, incest, murder, and her mother returning from the grave. You know, the usual.

Pedro Almodóvar is an international film icon, but I’ve never seen a single one of his films before Volver. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. I think we’ve established this by now. But even Volver, which is about as late-period Almodóvar as it gets, still brims with the energy, color, and life that his work is known for, making me all the more excited to revisit his earlier films. He share with George Miller the ability to still make films with the artistic and creative energy of a young man.

What’s really striking about Volver is how effortlessly it blends some surreally dark subject matter with its exploration of colorful life as it characters examine their pasts and analyze their futures. It’s an intensely optimistic film that doesn’t flinch from acknowledging life’s trials and tribulation. Consider Penélope Cruz’s Raimunda. In any other film, this single mom struggling to make ends meet would be a beatific saint (*cough cough Chocolat*), but she’s more Erin Brockovich than anything. Volver allows her to have human flaws: She’s a selfish, short-sighted, fiery woman who needs to learn and grow just as much as any of the other characters.

What Volver lacks in a strictly structured plot it makes up for in supremely well-realized human characters and a dazzling fantasy esthetic. Penélope Cruz is obviously a heavy hitter here (she won an Oscar while speaking a foreign language, for crying out loud), imbuing Raimunda with a sharp wit and maintaining a sympathetic character despite her obvious flaws and incomprehensible beauty. But the rest of the ensemble is equally committed to the film’s zany tone, especially Lola Dueñas as Soledad, Raimunda’s frumpy little sister. Her charming, almost nuclear awkwardness powers the film’s sentimentality and humor, and her line readings are always skin-crawlingly perfect.

These performances work in conjunction with the films stylized, boldly colorful universe to create a sugar-coated treat. Almodóvar’s confident filmmaking floods the frame with bold reds and the film’s warmth extends deep into your own soul. The delicate imagery is both whip-smart and just plain beautiful and the humor transcends the language barrier. What more could you want from the guy?

Rating: 9/10

Brooklyn

Year: 2015
Director: John Crowley
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson
Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the 1950’s, a young Irish immigrant is torn between building a new life (and love) in New York City and missing her family and friends back home.

Brooklyn is less a movie than it is a Norman Rockwell painting of 1950’s New York done up in dreamy pastels, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s an uncannily pleasant motion picture: a darling comedy that knows it’s a low stakes trifle and thrives in that knowledge.

Without the burden of high-strung drama and Oscar reel theatrics, Brooklyn gives itself plenty of room to breathe. Every character in the ensemble is given their moment in the sun, and while not a one of them is particularly complex to any degree (save Ronan’s Eílis), they are fleshed-out, lived-in roles from the romantic leads (one boy to represent scrappy, forward-looking America, the other to represent the ginger Hell of sticking with what’s familiar all the way own to the bit parts, like Eílis’s coworkers and her fellow lodgers.

Brooklyn’s truest strength is the rigorous detail put into its exquisite costume design, sense of location, and color palette, but the glue that holds it all together is the chemistry between Saoirse Ronan and Emory Cohen. Ronan’s entire career has basically been long-winded proof that she can lead a film, but Cohen’s charismatic young swain Tony is an admirable standout for two reasons.

First, he takes a painfully static, goo goo-eyed, John Corbett in My Big Fat Greek Wedding character and turns him into an adorable, intensely compelling figure with just a twitch of his eyebrow. He says he based his performance on a cute little puppy dog, and this might just be the single finest acting choice in the history of cinema.

Second, I really hate Emory Cohen. Every time he appeared on Smash, I would joke that he was on tranquilizers. He landed my Worst Actor of 2013 slot for his role in The Place Beyond the Pines. And yet he managed to obliterate years of professional disdain in one fell swoop. I’m actually excited to see his next film, which - if you know me well - is about as shocking as Scrooge McDuck donating his swimming pool of gold coins to charity.

So yes, Brooklyn earns my esteem. Hard. It’s not a challenging motion picture, but since when does every movie need to be so edgy? It’s a silly, somewhat emotional good time, like a good piece of saltwater taffy.

Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1408

Popcorn Kernels: I'm A Classic Man

In which a weekend of classic film viewing is deconstructed with a set of mini reviews.

Rashômon

Year: 1950

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The murder of a samurai is depicted through the wildly varied perspectives of four witnesses.

I was very excited to watch Rashômon. As a film school graduate, I’m always happy to fill in the gaps of my classic cinema education, and this was an egregious one. Before Rashômon, I had ever seen a film by celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Now that I have seen one… Either I made the wrong choice or I’m just not a fan of Kurosawa.

Now, I understand what Rashômon is doing. It’s a parable on the truth, and how we all experience reality from different perspectives that we may ever be able to synthesize into one coherent fact. As I digested the film, I began to develop an appreciation for how this idea was presented (in the trial during which the 3 perspectives on the story were told, we never see the judge The witnesses speak directly to the camera because we, the audience, are meant to be the ultimate judge). It is and will always be an interesting message, but that doesn’t mean it’s an interesting film.

It can’t help its profoundly boxy aspect ratio, but its capacity to be cinematic is severely stunted, warding off the delicate imagery that Kurosawa is reportedly known for. It also can’t help the tenets and morals of feudal Japan, the time period in which this story takes place. However, the systematic sexism with which the film treats its sole female character is deplorable, and the fact the she is either punished for being raped or submits wholeheartedly to her attacker makes me want to scrub my skin with steel wool.

I understand that, as a modern critic, these complaints lack the context of Japanese culture and film technology in 1950 and as such are somewhat invalid. But you know what isn’t invalid? Rashômon is kind of a snoozefest. We’re treated to a stroll through the woods that lasts what feels like a half hour, and the endlessly repeated stories might differ wildly in the details, but the follow the same, plodding, over-formal structure, endlessly repeating it into oblivion.

Again, I recognize the qualities that helped make Rashômon a respected classic. Some of the stylized imagery is dazzling (a half-destroyed temple and the clawed hands of a murdered man stand out particularly) and a scene of a medium channeling the victim’s spirit to get is testimony is certainly disconcerting. I also love Toshiro Mifune’s acting choice to five his criminal a tic of rubbing his neck to imply that he is flea-bitten and mangy. However, the presentation is stultifying, constantly shifting back and forth between three superfluous layers of storytelling and constantly recycling itself, unspooling more and more officious narrative rigidity as it goes along.

Rating: 6/10

The Constant Gardener

Year: 2005

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A timid diplomat uncovers a vast conspiracy that links the British government to illegal African drug testing while investigating his wife’s murder.

Good thing it’s chic to disapprove of Oscar nominations now, because otherwise I think this blog might get me lynched. Let’s throw more kindling on that rage fire, shall we? The Constant Gardener, sitting pretty at four nominations and one win, is a monumentally obnoxious motion picture. It doesn’t reflect well on film critics to toss around dismissive, subjective words like “pretentious,” but The Constant Gardener is a film that strains very hard to impress its audience with visual acrobatics rather than actually compelling content.

It’s an arid, emotionally vacant film that underplays each and every beat of an interesting if not action-packed storyline in favor of a wholly disingenuous third world misery porn scenario. Every single aching moment of this didactic white guilt extravaganza grinds your face into its Important Message, liberally slathering the frame with overexposed whites to remind you that this is Art. It’s so insecure that it feels the need to restate its themes in a mortifyingly on-the-nose wrap-up speech, actively defying its misguided impulse to tell its story in non-chronological order, filling in details only on a need to know basis.

Of course, by this point the film is already hopelessly muddled. I’d say The Constant Gardener loses track of its own storyline about once every twenty minutes, requiring it to send us through another kaleidoscopic barrage of weak metaphors before it gets back on tis feet. But enough complaining. There are enough annoying arthouse films out there to fill an encyclopedia, and this is hardly the worst of them.

There are several points where The Constant Gardener does actually succeed. It manages to pull the rug out from under you several times during Fiennes’ investigation, although it never manages to convince you these characters are worth caring about. And during the third act, there are some excellent visual representations of all-consuming paranoia, especially during a scene with a motorcycle in Germany. The Constant Gardener might be a haphazard affair, yet it does have at least a dollop of verve. But it’s not the sharp political thriller it thinks it is. It’s a self-consciously artsy film that strives for aesthetic greatness but mostly just ends up cutting off Ralph Fiennes at the hairline.

Rating: 5/10

Year: 2007

Director: Sean McNamara

Cast: Skyler Shaye, Janel Parrish, Logan Browning

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The Bratz must maintain their friendship despite a clique-obsessed class president’s attempts to separate them.

What makes any movie a masterpiece can vary wildly across cultures, mindsets, and time periods. Critics hated The Shining when it came out, but now it’s hailed as a classic film. Ditto Citizen Kane. Ditto John Carpenter’s The Thing. No film is set in stone. So, keeping that in mind, please allow me to submit Bratz: The Movie as a bona fide masterpiece of world cinema. A stakes-lite wish-fulfillment teen movie based on a popular line of skanky dolls, Bratz might not be an obvious candidate for this title, but let me assure you. In terms of pure, unintentionally comedic, hyper-earnest, mind-boggling insanity, no movie even comes close to Bratz. The film is a glittering absurdist prank against art that challenges everything we know about the craft of cinema.

You don’t watch Bratz. You experience it. It’s a pastiche of high school movies that tosses every established tenet of narrative filmmaking out the window, so there is literally no way to predict what may be coming around the corner. This makes Bratz a careening adventure through a vision of human life as interpreted by an outsider. I don’t know whether the film was made by Martians or just people who had never interacted with teens, Hispanics, principals, cheerleaders, nerds, or girls before, but it presents a fascinating, demented way to view the world.

This is a universe where Hispanic households have mariachi bands practicing in their living room. Where high school bears prison-like signs reading “OBEY,” “SUBMIT,” and “NO LITTERING.” Where that same high school has a principal who 1) receives a grotesquely enormous salary, and 2) is played by Jon Voight. I could go on and on, and in fact my notes on this movie last a good five pages, but I’ll be brief.

Bratz is obviously not a good movie. The four Bratz are defined only by their race, and the de facto protagonist – Hispanic Brat Yasmin – is by far the weakest performer. Also, Bratz strains to convince us she can sing despite clear evidence to the contrary. But the movie shifts gears as often as its soundtrack (which contains, by my count, 29 distinct songs, from sub-Simple Plan moperock to straight-up opera, and that’s a rate of one song at least every four minutes), lending the film a whirlwind pace to the effect that you never spend too much down time with the Bratz. It’s difficult to hate them, because they’re always sprinting on to the next cotton candy coated activity, whether it be an alarmingly violent food fight or a rundown of school cliques that includes – mysteriously – “disco dorks” and a set of mimes.

At every turn, Bratz so eagerly defies logic with random cutaways, inscrutable production design choices, and over-the-top teen mayhem that it overrides the system, something that only the very best bad movies can do. I’m forced by my formula to assign a numerical score to this film, but I urge you to ignore it and seek out Bratz, even if you must go to the ends of the Earth to find a copy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1467

Popcorn Kernels: La Vie En Rage

In this set of mini reviews, we explore the modern incarnation of the zombie genre that pumped adrenaline into a decade of horror.

28 Days Later (For our podcast episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2002

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A bicycle courier wakes up from a coma, only to discover that London is completely deserted, devastated by a Rage Virus that turns humans into ravenous, bloodthirsty monsters.

Zombies as we know them have been around since Night of the Living Dead in 1968. They’ve been devouring humanity on the regular since that fateful day, but our current zombie boom (spearheaded by the ratings juggernaut The Walking Dead) can be traced back to one vicious epicenter: 28 Days Later. This massively influential flick changed the landscape of 2000’s filmmaking in an astonishing myriad of ways, introducing the world to Cillian Murphy, proving that theatrical films can be successful even when shot on digital video, and ushering in the slightly smaller but nerve-jangling subgenre of “fast zombie” movies that eventually spawned my favorite film, [REC].

We owe a lot to 28 Days Later, but the fervor it spawned shot off in a totally different direction, so it still stands alone as an idiosyncratic littler indie without too many copycats dragging it down. That’s something very unique, but then again 28 Days Later is a particularly special movie. With a budget approximately the allure of the Avengers 2 snack table, it crafts an elegantly simple, paralyzingly terrifying premise, which is a testament to the fact that it was shot by an actual film director (Danny Boyle would later helm Slumdog Millionaire and Steve Jobs, but even before 28 Days Later he had Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary) rather than an amateur thinking they can strike gold with a cheapo shocker.

Danny Boyle crafts his scares with great patience, allowing his audience time to breathe, giving the scope of the devastation time to sink in before he pounces, plunging his characters into hot water without a moment’s warning. In his world, you are never safe, and this structure invokes a constant paranoia, even (perhaps especially) during the film’s surprisingly frequent comic relief interludes. The fact that 28 Days Later’s fear is so fiercely politicized (included among the angry grab bag of subtext is an indictment of animal testing, blind activism, sexual aggression, human pettiness, and the military industrial complex – no wonder this flick is nearly two hours long) just makes its undercurrent of rage – the source of every danger in this film – that much more potent.

There’s just one thing that bothers me about 28 Days Later… The film is powerful ugly. It was shot on digital video, which opened up all sorts of avenues for easily obtaining iconic images, especially in the scenes taking place on deserted city streets. This is all fine and dandy, but the unfortunate side effect of the format is that everything looks like a 90’s grunge music video, all overblown colors and Vaseline-smeared lenses. A lot of the handheld, vérité aesthetic is intentional, but when compounded with the low quality camera (which is usually something I never mind much), it’s an immensely frustrating visual schema. However, I suppose that being brutalized by the aesthetic pitches you even further into the film’s deranged terror. Well played, 28 Days Later.

Rating: 8/10

28 Weeks Later

Year: 2007

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Virus-devastated England is being rebuilt by the American military, but when the rage virus outbreak begins once more, a defected doctor and sniper must protect two children who potentially hold the key to finding a cure.

28 Weeks Later is the Aliens to 28 Days Later’s Alien. Where the original was a methodical, chilling nightmare, the sequel gnaws the cap off a syringe of pure adrenaline and jams it right the hell into your eyes. And just like with Aliens, it’s a Sisyphean task to even attempt to decide which film is better, because they’re both great in almost totally opposite ways.

While there’s still an angry political element to the film, rotating the vices of the military system front and center, 28 Weeks Later is more of a rapid-fire family drama about a Bad Dad hall of famer who abandons his wife to the rage zombies, destroying his family from the inside out, and then pretty literally destroying them from the outside when he becomes the next Patient Zero. The last vestige of humanity within him converts his guilt into pure rage, sending him after his own children like a bloodhound. As if you couldn’t extrapolate from that, this is a remarkably dangerous movie, a wicked, brutal extravaganza of blood and pain.

This is elegantly reflected in a seemingly innocuous Act One scene where a group of snipers spy on the citizens of the safe zone through their scopes. They may be laughing and joking about what they see, but the message is disturbingly clear: Every single living person is in the crosshairs of 28 Weeks Later. Violence is coming and it has no mercy. This atmosphere makes it a spectacularly effective action-horror film, if not a universally palatable one.

The one area where 28 Weeks Later is a marked improvement on the original is its aesthetic, which isn’t so bodaciously ugly. The quick-cutting handheld aesthetic is resurrected for the zombie scenes, but when it has a confident, appealing aesthetic to juxtapose against, it makes it so much more effective. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo crafts his film impeccably, making moments like the stunning visual metaphor in the aforementioned sniper scene possible, and capturing the forlorn emptiness of London with a keen attention to detail that grinds the dreary mood into every fold and crevasse of your mind.

It helps that 28 Weeks Later had a significantly higher budget and more developed CGI technology to fill in the cracks, but a well-shot movie is a well-shot movie. Let’s not blame the dollar bills. Now to even things out, let’s broach 28 Weeks Later’s biggest flaw. The film spends much more time world building than its predecessor, allowing us to explore a zombie-free London for quite some time, all this occurring after a significantly long opening scene (a terrifying affair, to be certain, but one that also eats up a good chunk of the run time). As much as I appreciate both these sequences, 28 Weeks Later is already a full ten minutes shorter than Days, so when the main plot finally kicks in, it’s a rather truncated affair that feels like it ends before it can even begin.

It’s not often that you’ll hear me begging for a longer movie, but it’s not often that a horror sequel assembles a stellar cast (including future stars Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Imogen Poots, and even Idris Elba) for a bloodthirsty, challenging, incredibly sharp horror affair. 28 Weeks Later earned those extra ten minutes, but even dismayingly abrupt as it is, it’s an indelible film and an eternal beacon to the cause of proving that sequels can be genuinely terrific.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1198

There’s No Such Thing As Safe Sex With A Werewolf

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There’s a reason Wes Craven took a six year break from feature filmmaking after 2005. Two of his films came out that year. One was the excellent airborne thriller Red Eye. The other was Cursed, a Kevin Williamson-penned werewolf thriller. On paper, it’s a match made in Heaven. The duo had previously collaborated on the massively successful Scream trilogy, which reinvented the slasher genre. Why not do the same thing with Craven’s first foray into werewolf mythology?

There was just one little thing in the way… The Weinstein Company. What should have been a nice and easy teenybopper shoot grotesquely stretched into a two and a half year nightmare of reshooting, rewriting, recasting, and general meddlesome nonsense that twisted the film into a wholly unrecognizable form. It started off as a normal movie, but ended up a misshapen monster.

I suppose the real werewolf is the movie itself.

In Cursed, Ellie Myers (Christina Ricci) is a late night talk show producer who takes care of her high school-aged brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg, already Social Networking it up) after their parents died. She is dating Jake (Joshua Jackson), a lothario who is opening a horror-themed club (because Kevin Williamson), and who has been pulling away as of late, much to her chagrin. After Ellie and Jimmy get into a car accident, they witness a young woman (Shannon Elizabeth) being mauled by a giant wolf, and both of them get scratched in the process.

Over the next two days, during the full moon, they begin to exhibit increasingly wolfish tendencies. Ellie is freaked out by her sudden aggression and attraction to blood, but Jimmy has a great time Teen Wolfing it up with his heightened sexual charisma a (AKA flat-ironed hair. This was 2005, after all) and newfound athletic prowess. But a werewolf keeps attacking people around town. Is it one of them? The original wolf that cursed them? Or somebody else entirely?

You know how it is in Hollywood. Every waiter you get is either an aspiring actor or a werewolf.

Although it’s almost impossible to discern a film in the finished product of Cursed, there is a 100-minute block of images and sound in front of us, so let’s talk about it.

The two year delay didn’t help much, but even in 2003 Cursed would have felt way too 90’s. Kevin Williamson’s particular brand of postmodern winking worked in 1996, but sarcasm’s lease hath all too short a date. Cursed is chock full of weird rock band cameos (go Bowling for Soup!), movie references, and too-polished teenspeak, stuff which was getting unfashionable by the time the millennium rolled around, but in the post-Saw period was downright humiliating.

And I hate to say it, but the script just isn’t very good. Obviously, it has been cobbled together from about 19 different drafts, which would explain the jumbled structure, the jerry-rigged romance between Ricci and Jackson, and the two finales in a row that proudly contradict each other. But the script is putrid all the way down to the dialogue, and there just ain’t no excuse for that.

Most of the teen scenes are preoccupied with exuberant homophobia, culminating in this mid-wrestling match gem: “You know the best thing about being a fairy? Getting to fly,” which is deeply offensive on both a personal and a syntactical level. Cursed is packed with this kind of anemic quippage (my personal favorite being “You’re playing games with us… Well, play this!”), finally exhausting Williamson’s seemingly endless reserves of arch wit. It’s telling that he too would retreat from motion pictures for over half a decade following Cursed’s release.

It seems like this film really was… cursed.

Pretty much everything in Cursed is underwhelming, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a central problem within the infinite vicious cycle of blame. The actors are subpar (especially the bland Ricci and Portia de Rossi, who is hideously miscast as an ominous fortune teller) because their characters were crumbling beneath them as the script was cannibalized by the writer, who was working with a harried director, who was being squashed under the pressure of producers, who didn’t like the script, and on and on and on. It’s an unsolvable Sphinx riddle. At this point, it would have been better if it hadn’t gotten a release at all.

All that being true, it must be said that while nothing in Cursed could really be called good, it’s not quite so rotten as I’m making it sound. Sure, it’s a wretched, hybridized monstrosity, but during the bulk of its run time it’s merely mediocre rather than actively terrible. Craven manages to milk some suspense out of several sequences, especially in the initial wolf attack, which features a jump scare that is the single most effective scene in the film. His stalk sequences see him pulling a lot of old tricks out of his toolbag (scraping claws a la Freddy Krueger, things subtly going wrong in an increasingly dream logic manner), but there’s a reason they were put in there in the first place: They work.

Cursed also features a terrific entry in the Craven/Williamson canon of loony killer reveals when the werewolf turns out to be [SPOILERS Judy Greer], who gives the best performance in the film once outed as a psychopath, final proving that there was something comedic lodged in the script that could actually click when a performer got a crack at it. This scene also provides the second best moment of the film, some werewolf body shaming that is deliciously over-the-top and lampoons the Hollywood lifestyle at a level the movie had been feebly attempting to reach for an hour and change.

The only thing that never ever works in Cursed is the werewolf itself, which feels like a pretty big oversight. While the original effects were provided by FX genius Rick Baker, who pulled off An American Werewolf in London without anything remotely resembling the technology of 2003. Yet for some unfathomable reason he was yanked from the project and replaced by KNB, whose work would be plastered over with crappy CGI. To be fair, the computer work here is a smidge better than a lot of recent lazy CGI (here’s lookin’ at you, The Hobbit), but the werewolf looks far too much like Bobo the Bear to be menacing.

Seriously, they could be brothers.

With that, let’s leave Cursed to rot in peace. It’s a pitiful creation that doesn’t deserve all the stellar people who worked on it. It’s not the worst film of Craven’s filmography, but it’s the one where his creativity and humanity are least apparent, which is far more damning than simply being crappy.

TL;DR: Cursed is an endlessly fiddled-with film that wouldn’t have been good in its original form.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1150

Riches Get Stiches

Year: 2016

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Melissa McCarthy is the most important force in modern cinema. OK, maybe that was a wee bit of “this review needs a hook” exaggeration, but she’s certainly in the Top 10. As a cultural figure, she is proving that a woman can lead and, more importantly, succeed in a vulgar film comedy. This might seem like a trivial thing to attach so much importance to, but it’s far from it. She’s opening up a dialogue about women in cinema, sexual agency, and body image, and the best thing is that she’s a genuinely  funny performer. 2015’s Spy may have been the first film to truly get her as a lead, but her continued success speaks volumes.

Of course, every major cinematic icon has their follies. Marlon Brando had The Island of Dr. Moreau. Al Pacino was in Gigli. Robert De Niro perpetrated Dirty Grandpa upon the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a reason this discussion is cropping up at the beginning of a review for The Boss. I would scarcely say that the film is as egregious a misstep as the cinematic bile that is Dirty Grandpa, but – you know what? Let’s pick this up in a second. Time to hit the plot.

Let’s crack this puppy open and drink that sweet, sweet story nectar.

In The Boss, Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy) is a grotesquely wealthy woman who doesn’t respect her hardworking assistant Claire (Kristen Bell). Her life gets a bit of the old switcheroo when her ex-lover/business rival Reynault (Peter Dinklage) exposes her for insider trading, sending her to jail and stripping her assets. She is reluctantly taken in by Claire and her daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson), but on a visit to Rachel’s to Totally Not Girl Scouts meeting she gets an idea. With Claire’s help she creates Darnell’s Darlings, a troupe of young women who sell brownies. And thus begins the epic journey of a rich lady gettin’ rich again.

But will she be rich with money or… (drumroll) friendship?

The thing about The Boss is that it’s not terrible, especially not to the degree that critics have been implying. It’s merely generic, which can be just as damning. Here, your average Melissa McCarthy profanity is grafted onto the most sundry family comedy plot imaginable the point that it’s pretty much for no one. It’s too vulgar for the kids who can sit through this kind of plot on the regular and it’s too toothless and predictable for the over 17 crowd. Take out all the F-bombs and sex jokes and you’ve got yourself a Hilary Duff vehicle.

However, I do respect The Boss for being the second McCarthy film in a row that doesn’t mock her weight of integrate it into her character. In fact, she’s playing a highly successful and fashionable woman, which is light years ahead of her previous filmography. Although Michelle Darnell has a predilection for turtlenecks so awful they provide strong evidence for the necessity of capitol punishment, she is a character worthy of Melissa McCarthy, though she’s not in a film that can really support her.

If Ghostbusters doesn’t prove to be the best McCarthy film this year, something will have gone terribly wrong.

For what it is, The Boss is totally fine. While the plot plods along the path everybody knew it would set on from the first frame, the comedy – always a subjective affair – does a decent job of keeping audiences occupied. We get a bit of the old fish out of water gambit, mocking the cluelessness of the rich (Occupy Hollywood!), and some classic “let’s dump the hot blonde in a chunky sweater and call her unattractive!” The best material comes from Tyler Labine, the James Corden-esque love interest for Kristen Bell who brings a much-needed dose of warm, earnest comedy in a register that is actually a little unexpected. For once.

The only comedic element that well and truly rankles is the physical comedy, which follows the recent trend of upsettingly punishing slapstick. Good physical comedy, like The Three Stooges, works well because it exists in a heightened cartoon reality here the characters aren’t actually in physical danger. The Boss is not a prime example of good physical comedy. A little girl fight scene almost gets there, because the filmmakers knew they needed to tiptoe around that one, but Ms. Darnell is run through the wringer, slammed into walls and down concrete stairs with deadly force, the sound design doubling down on sickening thuds and crunches. They’re more like UFC fights than gags, which totally undermines any potential laughs whatsoever.

So much of The Boss is a swing and a miss (an aborted Kathy Bates cameo literally has her abruptly exiting a scene on a galloping horse, there’s a full rap performance, and the climax is a hypercolor nightmare of violent nonsense), but the same genericness that keeps it from being truly great likewise prevents it from totally sucking. It’s a buffer of blandness.

While I should pan The Boss for a woeful misrepresentation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a gory movie, cutting between two scenes 45 minutes apart like I wouldn’t f**king notice, there’s enough good here to earn a qualified positive score. Labine is excellent and hopefully this film allows him to reach a wider audience, Ella Anderson is one of the better child actors in recent memory, and the easy emotional beats are far from taxing. If you’re looking for an unstressful time at the movies, you’ve come to the right place. Otherwise, maybe don’t bother with this one.

TL;DR: The Boss is a defanged Melissa McCarthy vehicle that doesn’t really have a place with any audience.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 977

Census Bloodbath: Oy, Oy, Oy

Year: 1981

Director: Terry Bourke

Cast: Chard Hayward, Louise Howitt, Deborah Coulls

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If Australian filmmaking is kind of like the eager younger brother of Hollywood, full of loony ideas but without the same level of means to achieve them (not that that stopped The Road Warrior from blowing every film ever made right out of the water), Australian horror is Hollywood’s deranged cousin who pins cats to his dartboard. I love me some Aussie shockers, from the modern classic The Babadook to the underrated backwoods satire 100 Bloody Acres, and the country’s contributions to the slasher genre re particularly interesting.

So far we’ve visited the psychosexual vista of the stagebound slasher Nightmares, the rural charms of the sci-fi tinged Strange Behavior, and the superb roadside thriller machinations of Road Games, so I was certainly excited to see what the idiosyncratically titled Lady Stay Dead had to offer. As it turns out, Australian slashers in the early 80’s also had some grindhouse grime to shake off before they got to the good stuff. However, Lady Stay Dead may be a milquetoast bucket of sleaze, but there’s still something interesting lurking in the background.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

In Lady Stay Dead, Gordon Mason (Chard Hayward) is a man with such vice they named him twice. He’s the handyman for successful singer/actress Marie Coleby (Deborah Coulls). She’s a stuck-up diva who treats him like dirt, but that doesn’t stop his sick obsession that eventually leads him to rape and murder her. His day gets even worse when Marie’s sister Jenny Nolan (Louise Howitt) arrives for a weekend visit at the starlet’s beachside villa. After an unsuccessful attempt to hide his crimes, he traps Jenny inside the house, preparing for another square meal of murder.

Part of a mentally imbalanced breakfast.

Before I say anything remotely nice about the film (and any nice comments will certainly be remote), I want to make it clear that this is a rape-murder slasher, the most abhorrent incarnation of the subgenre. There’s only one rape scene, but it’s pretty discomfiting, although the real brutality lies in its extravagantly poor staging. Luckily, the awful, blunt editing and dubious composition of the scene tempers the blow of its violent misogyny, but this is not a movie you want to go into unprepared.

The greatest triumph of Lady Stay Dead is that it can never keep track of its genre for more than like twenty minutes, so before long it shifts away from gruesome grindhouse to a psychological thriller, then home invasion, then – for some reason – wacky police action thriller.

Lead actor Chad Hayward handles these abrupt transitions with the deftness of a concrete butterfly. Although he fitfully improves as the film goes on and adopts a less gritty tone that’s more open to his wanly camp stylings, he already tanked his performance around the five minute mark when he first opened his mouth, so it’s not like he could have gotten any worse. When we’re forced to spend alone time with him, which occurs most often in the first act, Lady Stay Dead is nothing but a monotonous smear underscored by bleating Lifetime romantic thriller music.

Talk about making a good first impression, am I right?

However, once the home invasion element kicks in, Lady Stay Dead has a secret weapon up its sleeve. It’s more of a butter knife than a machete, but it’s a weapon nonetheless. Jenny Nolan, who has been singularly unprepossessing up to this point, suddenly morphs into a frustratingly awesome Final Girl extraordinaire. Much like Jennifer Holmes in The Demon before her, she gives a survival effort so stupendous, it’s actively infuriating because now you have a reason to consider rewatching this dreadful movie. She just goes to town on Mason, wailing on him with a metal rod she rips out of the fireplace, scalding him with boiling water, and even dragging his own rake into his chest in a bloody tug of war.

Her Xena phase doesn’t last long, because – this being one o’ them violence against women pictures – we can’t have anything like empowerment sneaking up on us. But before she turns into a blubbering pile of hormones and hands the reins to a male cop who can wield his penis to save the day, she puts up a hell of a fight. This genuinely enjoyable fifteen minutes then folds into a bonkers finale that delights in its own ineptitude, which is equally enthralling in its lunatic ambition I shall avoid spoiling the manifold splendors of this sequence, because its unexpectedness is the only thing that makes it worthwhile, but let’s just say “Keystone Cops meets Scarface” isn’t a wholly inaccurate description.

Honestly, a good 45 minutes of Lady Stay Dead is passable to excellent trash entertainment, but it’s impossible to overcome that initial slump. Especially when that slump is such a dozy, vulgar mess in which the scariest moment is a smash cut to a kettle whistling.

Lady Stay Dead strains to capture the fading echoes of Halloween’s success, forcing its killer into endless visual quotations of the iconic Michael Myers, but no dice. I’m sorry, but “whistling dude” doesn’t carry the same impact and weight as “faceless scion of pure evil.” The film is fun enough to bear but haggard enough that you’re ashamed of liking anything in it. It’s a match made in Hell, which is pretty much where Lady Stay Dead belongs. Let it stay dead, because there’s no need to dig this one up for your next movie night.

Killer: Gordon Mason (Chard Hayward)

Final Girl: Jenny Nolan (Louise Howitt)

Best Kill: After Officer Clyde’s partner is shot in the back but miraculously survives, a Molotov cocktail accidentally rolls down the lawn toward him, lighting him on fire.

Sign of the Times: When Gordon drowns Marie, like 60 pounds of costume jewelry sink to the bottom of the fish tank.

Scariest Moment: The trash bag holding Marie’s body splits open of its own accord.

Weirdest Moment: The same Molotov cocktail that kills the cop also sets a boat on fire, sending off sparks that are very clearly colored fireworks.

Champion Dialogue: Drown, ya animal! Drown!”

Body Count: 6

1. Marie Coleby is drowned in a fish tank.
2. Cilla the Dog is shot.
3. Billy is struck in the head offscreen.
4. Cop is shot in the back, then set aflame.
5. Officer Clyde is killed offscreen.
6. Gordon Mason is hit with a motorcycle, then shot.

TL;DR: Lady Stay Dead is a bland, dull, greasy slasher that is redeemed only by an insane third act.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1109

Men In Tights

Year: 2016

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams

Run Time: 2 hours 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

F**k Christopher Nolan, am I right? The man is pretty much solely responsible for the current whiplash dichotomy in superhero movies today. It’s either the peppy smirking of the Marvel empire or the dour bleakness of DC, and that’s entirely the result of the success of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. And while I admit the first two are good films, the gritty superhero genre already folded up its own ass with the uniquely baffling Dark Knight Rises. Yet they keep on pumping this crap out.

The thing is, when a Marvel movie is bad, at least it still has a sense of fun (it’s no coincidence that Marvel’s biggest recent failure, the Fox-produced abortion Fantastic Four, is also the darkest film in their slate). There’s a bit of that comic booky cotton candy flavor that at least makes it bearable. Unfortunately, “fun” is a four-letter word when we’re in Zack Snyder’s wheelhouse, even when presenting a team-up that has been caramelizing in comic book fans’ fevered imaginations for half a century: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

The court case of the century.

In BvS, Batman (Ben Affleck) is the vigilante alter ego of Bruce Wayne, a wealthy playboy whose company was turned to rubble during the highly destructive Zod battle at the end of Man of Steel. He has since vowed revenge on the caped crusader what wrought this devastation. Batman lives in Gotham, a crime-riddled city located just across the river from the bustling Metropolis, in a lunatic bit of comic book world-building that has no place in this relentlessly serious film.

Metropolis is the home of Superman (Henry Cavill), who works as a reporter for the Daily Planet as his alter ego Clark Kent. His elaborate disguise, a pair of glasses, is even more ridiculous considering that even wearing a suit and a nerdy tie, Cavill looks like a WWE wrestler crammed into a tube sock. Anyway, Superman has a distaste for batman because he’s been running around f**king branding people like he’s Immortan Joe. I think that’s fair.

Anyway, when Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane (Amy Adams) – who sucks at everything she tries to do, constantly tripping into life-threatening situations – gets a hard-hitting interview with a Middle Eastern crime boss (her first and only question: “Are you a terrorist?” Now that’s journalism!), things go south and Superman saves her. For some reason totally obscured by a poorly edited action sequence, Superman is blamed for several deaths and called to trial by Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) as the public begins to doubt their trust in this literal superman who could crush their skulls without breaking a sweat if he wants to.

This crisis is being whipped into a frenzy by wealthy magnate Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who is the screenwriter’s mouthpiece for approximately a quarter of a billion twitchy monologues about the stunted themes the film tries to force on us about power and man’s goodness or whatever. Also Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) shows up to toss in some Justice League promo, but she has fewer than twenty lines and exists solely to be hit by things, only to swing her hair in sexy slomo as the dust clears to reveal that she’s indestructible.

Go feminism!

Oh man, where the hell do I begin? I suppose we should start with the obvious controversy: Ben Affleck as Batman. The masses were certainly upset by this decision, but I have no beef with the man. He turns in a solid world-weary performance, and he’s about as impossibly, gay porn buff as Cavill so at least our heroes match.

The real problem is that the actual character of Batman is spectacularly ill-defined. Other than a needless repetition of his “dead parents” backstory, this Batman is nothing but a haphazard collection of iconography the film assumes we already know (Alfred, batmobile, Bat signal, etc.). But this ain’t a continuation of Christian Bale’s character. This is an entirely new personality that we are given no face time with because this is through and through just a Superman sequel. But Affleck? No, he’s not even a blip on the radar of the tremendously bad things this movie provides in spades.

While we’re on the topic of casting, let’s talk Lex Luthor. Jesse Eisenberg is not Lex Luthor. And I don’t mean that in the “oh, he’s not bald, oh he’s too young” wailing tone of the hopelessly obsessed comic canon advocates. I mean he’s the single worst casting choice made by a major motion picture studio in perhaps a dozen years. And I actually like Jesse Eisenberg. But his work here is a plumb embarrassing retread of his Mark Zuckerberg persona (The Social Network weighs heavily on Luthor’s characterization in this universe) performed via a weak Robin Williams impersonation, rapidly shifting from silly voice to silly voice in a palsied, irritating frenzy, sometimes just kind of yipping like a Chihuahua for no reason. It’s bad, you guys.

He makes Kylo Ren look like genius casting.

It’s not like any of the cast is up to any truly great work (Cavill contents himself with strangled teeth-gnashing, Adams is profoundly boring – though she’s given zilch to do, and a random extra gives a portentous line reading with all the misplaced emphasis of a second grader attempting to read Shakespeare aloud), but Eisenberg sinks every scene like a cement brick. It doesn’t exactly help that the film hangs on his every word like it’s the divine gospel.

Actually, that’s a problem inherent to the entire film, and to Zack Snyder’s career if you think about it. Whether Batman is decrypting a hard drive or Lois is checking into a hotel, the film treats it like The Single Most Important Thing That Has Ever Happened. My problems with this are twofold. 1) They ignore the actual most important scene (Superman cooking breakfast shirtless), and 2) if everything is important, nothing is important. Junkie XL’s percussive score worked for Mad Max: Fury Road because every frame of that movie is the most exciting thing ever filmed. But here it just drives home how unimpressive nearly everything you’re watching actually is.

And boy is this film just a pile of unimpressive nonsense. When it’s not overexplaining itself like you’re 8 years old (“I need Kryptonite. I’ve got to get back to Gotham. Because that’s where the Kryptonite is.”), it’s launching into an inscrutable barrage of gobbledygook that is either forced promo for Justice League films three years down the line or one of a million useless dream sequences that endlessly repeat the film’s puerile themes. 

And the action scenes for which the film was ostensibly created are too-dark jumbles of half-hearted punching with absolutely no juice. Plus, you know how people complain about Hollywood movies being all explosions and no plot? Well, if you took every explosion from one of those movies and crammed them together, you would have a single frame of Batman v Superman, which at certain points seems to take place in a whirling firestorm. You sometimes can’t even see the action through the smokescreen of orange and yellow flames.

Let’s take a moment to relax and realize that the substandard action makes sense when you remember that the movie is actually just gay porn.

I suppose the biggest flaw of Batman v Superman is that it’s at odds with itself, attempting to be both a superhero battle film and a hoo-rah teamup Justice League prequel. The reason there’s almost zero motivation to their fight is that they have less than half a movie before they have to be BFFs, [SPOILERS which would explain Batman’s on-a-dime turnaround during the patently ridiculous scene where he discovers that Superman also has a mom named Martha. That’s even more embarrassing to write down than it was to watch.]

This weakens the already thin characterizations, leaving us with nothing but a bombastic sludge of dreary overexertion, filled with deeply unthreatening villains, a preponderance of sloooooow ominous zooms, and a rich undercurrent of misogyny that may or may not especially hate Asian women for no discernible reason.

Oh, and because this is leading to an Avengers-style team movie, we have a handful of attempts at quips and winking barbs that either fall flat from the get-go (like the syntactically spurious “Firm grip. You should not pick a fight with this person.”) or were so clearly retrofitted to be in the trailer that they reek of flop sweat (the famous “Is she with you?” “I thought she was with you!” exchange re: Wonder Woman actively defies pre-established plot mechanics).

But I suppose I should say something nice about the film before I get the hell out of here. The opening credits are pretty. Well, not the actual font, which is punishingly bland, but the sequence that they play over has some interesting visuals. And a couple images that deify Superman actually deserve the film’s pretentions of grandeur. But the single best thing about the film was that it definitely didn’t feel 2 ½ hours long, so I must have enjoyed it on some level. Right?

There’s a scene in Batman v Superman where a woman discovers a jar of piss on her desk, which causes her to babble incoherently. I couldn’t think of a more perfect analogy for this review. Don’t see Batman v Superman if you can help it. Don’t let my sacrifice go to waste.

TL;DR: Batman v Superman isn’t the worst superhero flick ever made, but that doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1608
Reviews In This Series
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016)
Suicide Squad (Ayer, 2016)