This weekend sees a planetary alignment that even the ancient Mayans couldn't have predicted. First, their misinterpreted calendar becomes the "basis" for 2012, which will surely sweep the box office like a five-mile tsunami over the Himalayas. Second, the high priest of Hollywood schlock, Roger Corman, will be inducted into the Academy pantheon with his very own honorary Oscar. When he's formulating the outline for his putative TV follow-up, 2013, Roland Emmerich could do well to pay heed to this synchronicity -- and then send himself off to mine Corman's first take on the apocalypse, 1955's Day The World Ended.
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One of my favorite personal interview outtakes involves Rob Zombie casually mentioning, by way of illustrating his point that a good film crosses all boundaries, that he thinks Love Actually is a terrific movie. It's a testament to writer/director Richard Curtis's firm grasp on the romantic comedy genre (though Love was the first film he directed, he wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary) that he was able to pilot it across that particular boundary; after years working in television on series like Black Adder and Mr. Bean, Curtis carved out a niche that was well-rewarded but also well-respected. With Pirate Radio (released several months ago in the UK as The Boat That Rocked) he leaves the sure footing of boy-meets-girl, modern London for a boat docked off the coast of England in 1966. The true story of the ships that sat just outside of UK waters, broadcasting the rock and roll songs the BBC refused to play on a pirated signal, seems like an unstoppable premise, and yet Curtis's film feels strangely anchored in the port: lots of activity on board but no forward motion.
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There's something defiant in the charms of Fantastic Mr. Fox, a nose-thumbing mischief that underlies and yet is of a piece with the film's conspiratorial cheer; director Wes Anderson's terminal self-reflexivity here pushes right past the crisis point, accessing a kind of unlikely afterworld of self-self-reflexivity that elevates a pleasant lark into a wry work of art. When, after The Life Aquatic, critics began leveling charges of an increasingly rigid, constrained aesthetic, one that bound his characters up as marzipan players on a self-consciously confected stage, Anderson responded by building a sort of consecrated altar to everything they said was dragging him down, and in the process rediscovered what made his films so fresh and affecting in the first place.
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You know who would have hated Disney's A Christmas Carol? Walt Disney. Because what Disney knew -- and any animator worth his salt knows -- is that the language of animation is "the language of caricature," as he put it. Realer, in other words, isn't necessarily better, and detail, it follows, doesn't trump simplicity. As a surface display of cutting-edge technical wizardry, the endeavor succeeds. But at its core, this Carol is soulless.
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Based on Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button," the same way neon Velcro tear-away pants are "based on" button-fly jeans, The Box does little more than nick Matheson's premise on its way through director Richard Kelly's formidable looking glass. Matheson (now 83), who removed his name from the 1985 adaptation of his story for an episode of The Twilight Zone because they messed with his ending, may have to be sedated when he gets a load of Kelly's operatic, involuted head-scratcher. Both high-flown and packed with knowing kitsch, The Box is a genre pastiche and an allegorical hash that fails as often as it succeeds in articulating its one core, coherent point: we are as moral as our options.
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There were women in the screening I attended for Precious, Lee Daniels's erratic, commanding look at the life of an abused teenager living in 1987 Harlem, who could not keep their shit together. Occasional gasps and a steady baseline of sniffles gave way to outright weeping and then, at one critical juncture, a keening moan that did not let up until the credits rolled. My annoyance with the moaner (really to heavens, lady) mirrored that with a film that, in places, seems dead set on eliciting just such an overblown response, even at the risk of disrupting an otherwise assured, engrossing film. The only thing that will yank you out of a film faster than an apparent appendicitis attack in the row behind you is the kind of relentless emotional grubbing that incites it.
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In 2012 -- a definite Bad Movie We Love -- the Earth is being superheated by "mutant neutrinos" supposedly linked to a planetary alignment predicted by the Mayans. First, Gaia explodes in a fiery rain of molten B-movie cheese, and then a magnetic pole switcheroo causes a tectonic boogaloo that unleashes tsunamis big enough to inundate the Himalayas. It's the very best in schlock science and mysticism from Roland Emmerich, whose last picture, 10,000 B.C., had it that the mammoths built the pyramids. But while 2012 shamelessly appropriates sequences and tropes from just about every major disaster movie of the past, oh, forever, there are still a few crapocalypses too silly for even Emmerich to pilfer. Or maybe... just maybe... he's saving them for 2013?
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As we approach this week's first anniversary of Barack Obama's election as the 44th President of the United States, it's a time for remembering the past, contemplating the future and, of course, exploiting whatever random Obamaesque goodness we can find in between. Hence By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, an ostensibly all-access documentary culled from two years in the shadows of the Obama campaign (and premiering Tuesday on HBO). Produced by Edward Norton and directed by the rookie tandem of Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, it's got class and scope to spare. Now if only it could find its teeth.
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Looking for a new movie accompaniment to Halloween, I recently unearthed a $10 second-hand VHS of Godmonster Of Indian Flats. It's an ultra-obscurity, made in 1973 in Nevada, and putatively about a mutant killer sheep. I'd caught a clip about a year ago, and I thought if I liked the actual movie well enough I might sling a couple of old car-seat covers over me and be the Godmonster this Halloween. Easy -- and he's proven at freaking out the kids.
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So, here we are. Four months after his sudden death, the concert series that would have been about to begin its second leg in London takes the form of a different kind of spectacle. This Is It, a documentary assemblage culled from a cache of 80 hours of rehearsal footage, showcases the numbers that were planned for the concert, and is interspersed with limited behind-the-scenes footage of dance auditions, arrangement sessions, and the occasional pep-talk. As a concert documentary, it's quite limited and overlong; as what tour and film director Kenny Ortega described, in his live introduction before the simultaneous world premiere last night, as "a last sacred documentation of our leader and our friend" it is on the money, and a mixed bag at that. Whether you decide to see the film as a fan or out of the grim but human desire to watch a dead man dance, you will likely be surprised by how quickly your sorrow (or morbid curiosity) falls away and you are simply as Jackson would have you: entertained.
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Satan's back, y'all, but only sort of. Relatively dormant since his '70s horror heyday, in recent films like Antichrist and Jennifer's Body, Satan has been invoked, but not yet successfully resurrected as an organizing theme. Films like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen and The Sentinel elevated horror from its schlocky middle century, reinstating the respect it earned as one of cinema's earliest and most successful genres. And call me a cradle Catholic (all right, I'm a cradle Catholic), but I believe that had something to do with the fact that, in the right hands, there's nothing scarier than the devil. With the rise of the slasher, however, the more unrefined charms of the deranged serial killer took over, and that way torture porn lies. With The House of the Devil, director Ti West goes old school in the best possible way, and yet for all of the film's lovingly, effectively crafted suspense, old Beezlebub can't quite steal the show.
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Every scene in Amelia, Mira Nair's gooey biopic of record-setting female pilot Amelia Earhart, is glazed with a kind of Cheez Whiz glow. The actors, the airplanes, and the blue sky itself seem bathed in the stuff, an effect I imagine is supposed to signal "prestige picture" but just made me want to scrub down the screen. God knows I wish I could cleanse my mind of the sugar lumps of narration and treacle streams of dialogue, or at least cut them with some of the salt you know the actual Amelia Earhart, a dynamic if arguably foolhardy woman, had coming from her pores.
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The films of Lars von Trier, the brilliant, bellicose Danish director of The Idiots, Breaking the Waves and Dogville, aspires to the condition of exquisite, immersive poetry -- that is, to be felt, rather than questioned, analyzed, critiqued. His dark fables of human extremity -- sometimes uneven and grasping, often sustained and commanding -- intend to swallow, if not defy digestion. Which is why, when the first, trembling reports began filtering out of Cannes about Antichrist, the first thing I felt was envy. With von Trier's films especially I strive for an ascetically clean slate, and I wouldn't have that pure experience now -- I might never know my true reaction -- because von Trier had clearly made a film that would become unavoidable. And yet having seen the film, my envy was somewhat allayed: I can't be certain, but I suspect my reaction in France would have been the same one I had here -- an exasperated shrug.
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Yesterday, the debut glimpse of a New Moon werebeast brought much-welcome laughter to a world wearied by Glenn Beck likening progressives to slave owners and worries about which network will finally hire Richard Heene once the helium clears. But, horrific and half-finished though the leapin' lycanthrope was, we have to admit it's not the worst wolfman we've seen. Here, then, from the Bad Movies We Love archives, a brief history of furry freaks.
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Blaxploitation is the cinematic equivalent of blues -- American film's only indigenous genre, created by blacks for blacks and assimilated into white culture just as soon as it could figure out how to A) play it and B) sell it. Blaxploitation is barely middle-aged by comparison, however, having launched with a radioactive bang in 1970 by Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and having yielded a Cadillac trunk's worth of rangy classics during its virile '70s heyday. How fitting, then, that the genre perhaps finds itself in the prime of life today with the hilarious, high-spirited tribute Black Dynamite.
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