I've wanted to see the 2002 Sam Rockwell vehicle Confessions of a Dangerous Mind since about the time it came out, but never got around to it until now. If I were going to do a tweet-review of this, it would be "Way darker than I expected; don't watch it if you're in a misanthropic mood."
I wasn't really a nerd in school. I had to gain acceptance into their social stratum—I had to work up to nerddom (indeed, I never even played a tabletop RPG until college). This is largely because I moved from city to city and state to state so often that, statistically speaking, at any given point in my academic history I was probably the New Kid.
Table 1.1: School Social Strata ca. Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era
| Stratum Name (Descending Order) | Access to Sex, Liquor, or Non-Homemade Drugs | Trek Franchise Investment |
| JOCKS | Complete | None |
| JOCK AFFILIATES | Moderate to Extreme | None |
| JOCK WOULD-BES (& Vo-Tech Hicks, Where Applicable) | Low to High | None |
| ARTY COOL TYPES | Moderate to High | None to Low |
| NERDS | None to Low | Low to Extreme |
| NEW KIDS & UGLIER FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENTS | None | None to Extreme |
| UNTOUCHABLES | That's Pretty Funny | Let's Just Say, Probably Writes Letters to Counselor Troi |
(Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.) You will notice that the second and third columns above represent two major forms of escapism, for members of all strata, from the meat-grinder hellscape of their shared environment. You'll also notice that each of them is roughly inversely proportional to the other. That Star Trek was almost completely rejected by all but the lower strata is, I'm certain, a large part of Paramount's decision to not just reboot, not just reimagine, but thoroughly reinterpret the franchise with 2009's embarrassing film.
(Note: this review is as spoiler-free as I could make it. Which is to say, it hints at spoilers.)
Many indie horror films end up being more horror and less indie; they aspire, not to artistic profundity or hipster cred, but to scares, gore, and frequently, reliable genre tropes. Indie zombie movie Pontypool is largely the inverse of that.
I have mixed feelings about indie movies; even those I've liked, I've often found slightly irritating. And initially, I wasn't even going to do a full review for Pontypool because its ending bugged me so much. Upon further reflection, however, much of the first hour-plus was engaging and effective enough that I changed my mind. Its indie-ness is less overwhelming than it could have been, resulting in a watchable and quite different movie, which is a rare enough combination to merit attention by itself. It helps that, despite its miniscule budget, Pontypool is occasionally scary, and in a distinctive way.
Spend enough time in a nursing home or a psych ward, and there's a good chance you'll encounter some individuals exhibiting the same behavioral oddity that distinguishes Pontypool's zombies from others. Thus, despite its concept being even less plausible than that of more typical zombie narratives, its brand of scare works—and is likely to feel even more unsettling than most zombie movies to those of us who've seen people do this.
The story is self-evidently not meant to be taken at face value, as is the case with most science fiction. Let me explain. The Wild Blue Yonder has one actor—the always-adorable Brad Dourif—portraying an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. While standing in front of bleak terrestrial settings (like a seemingly abandoned town and a mobile home apparently hit by a tornado), Dourif explains—to the camera—how his people came to this planet, how the government launched a secret expedition into the far reaches of space in search of an alternative to Earth, and how this expedition discovered Dourif's homeworld. His exposition is overlaid with appropriately otherworldly footage from a space shuttle mission and from an Antarctic diving expedition, along with occasional snippets of interviews with astronomers.
There must be some cosmic significance to the fact that Netflix sent me The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) just in time for me to watch it late yesterday, around the time that the latest, and gobsmackingest, NSA revelations came to light. It's just as well that I wasn't aware of the latter until this morning, otherwise I would've been curled up and sobbing midway through the movie.
A fan of the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films will find Superman Returns to be a fun, affectionate follow-up. A fan of the other two Christopher Reeve Superman films does not, so far as I am aware, exist—so this will be the last mention of them.
One might think this film to have been a general failure, considering that this film came out only seven years before yet another reboot (Man of Steel, which I'll be waiting for home video to see). While it's pretty evident why Superman Returns failed to spawn a franchise, on its own merits, it's actually fairly competent. Some sequences are truly cool, the effects are weak only once or twice, and it lacked a lot of the sorts of cliches we've gotten so used to that we don't even complain about them anymore. (Well, it had one big one: a female lead too young to be believable as her character. When did Lois start working at the Daily Planet? When she was twelve?)
Based on a Stephen King novella, The Mist is a skillful and gripping monster/horror flick directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) that you should definitely see if you fall into any of the following categories:
…and especially if
I recently found myself in the mood for a "ninja movie," and while Shinobi: Heart Under Blade does have ninjas, and is a movie, it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Next time maybe I'll do more research.
Not that Heart Under Blade is bad or anything. But I'd hoped for more of a "ninjas doing badass shit to non-ninja mooks" kind of movie, rather than "ninja clan vs. ninja clan, but with lots of talking and romance-y moping, and also they're superhuman." That said, if you're in the mood for the latter, look no further.
The Netflix description nails it for once, describing this film as Romeo and Juliet meets the X-Men. The lead characters, Gennosuke and Oboro, are the star-crossed lovers (and yes, they use that phrase a couple of times, just in case the influence is unclear). They belong to rival ninja clans populated by a host of bizarre characters, including a Wolverine analogue with rapid healing, a male Mystique analogue, a poisonous Rogue analogue, and Sleeve Guy—whose power is telekinetic control over the fibers in his sleeves. (I'm not enough of a comic book nerd to know the relevant X-Man for Sleeve Guy.)
I like James Gunn, and I really like Slither, but The Specials? A total mess.
The loser cousin of Mystery Men, The Specials is a low-budget superhero comedy starring Thomas Hayden Church, Rob Lowe, Judy Greer, Jamie Kennedy, and the director himself (as one of the more self-deprecating heroes of the supergroup). They are among "The Specials," a B-list supergroup with so many members that the film has to spend half its running time just trying to distinguish them—and doing so via feaux-Whedonesque conversation and intermittent talking-head shots.
You know how, when an American comedian's act becomes successful enough, he gets a sitcom and sheds all of what made his act praiseworthy in exchange for becoming more widely accessible and family-friendly? Mr. Bean's Holiday can be seen as the English version of that phenomenon—watching it made me realize to my horror that, in some parallel universe, there's a Monty Python Land at Disney's Hollywood Studios.
A cute but never hilarious film, Mr. Bean's Holiday comes off as Rowan Atkinson using a Mr. Bean movie as an excuse to go to the south of France. To provide a semblance of plot, there's also a wiseacre kid who Bean has to reunite with his father after his own bumbling separates them. Later in the film there's even a love interest, which means all it's lacking is a dog or a monkey or something to complete the Family Movie Trifecta.
If you're a horror film buff, you should probably see the documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, but mainly because it's a fun historical review of American horror cinema, and not for any especially profound genre insights. You'll see clips from a few titles you might not be familiar with, and you'll enjoy the convention-panel-like ruminations of legends like John Carpenter and George Romero, discussing their work in the context of their personal lives and their perceptions of American history.
I've never owned a copy of Fangoria, but I enjoyed this documentary on the above basis. Where it lost me was in some of its attempted connections between American history and the trends in American horror films. When those connections seemed legitimate, it was largely because the films in question were so beat-you-over-the-head-with-something-rusty obvious about it—e.g. the '80s consumerism satire The Stuff, whose creator Larry Cohen is among those interviewed (not to mention the wonderfully endearing They Live). When those connections were more strained, you feel like you're watching the audiovisual version of an undergraduate film studies essay, and a fairly insightless one at that.
Every time I start one of these obviously-terrible titles on Netflix Instant, I battle with a sense of dread, asking myself "Am I about to waste an hour-plus of my life?" In the case of The Terminators, I'm happy to respond to myself, "Not entirely," mainly because they had the good sense to cast A Martinez.
For those of you who think that's a typo, A Martinez is his actual screen name. He's a well-known soap actor, and was on One Life to Live during the short cluster of years that my wife was following the show. His acting style has always been understated and detached in a kind of tough-guy fashion, and it's even more the case in The Terminators—yet not carrying the undercurrent of boredom you might expect from a real actor, like Martinez, reflecting on his presence in an Asylum movie. It's frankly a bizarre performance, but intentionally so, and I'm giving The Terminators a whole half-star just for the fact that his cop character turns out to be an android. It's a pretty well-handled reveal in a film of this calibre, and it's quite nice to see a real actor make a deliberate acting choice like that in the sort of movie where deliberate acting choices are infrequent.
The White Diamond is a continually intriguing and occasionally breathtaking documentary from Werner Herzog. This time Herzog turns his incisive eye on Graham Dorrington, a British aeronautical engineer trying to develop a small, highly maneuverable airship for studying the top of the jungle canopy (here's his website). But it turns out he's done this before, and with tragic consequences.
You can't help but wonder how Herzog finds these people and these situations. In this case I almost suspect his agent has standing orders to report to Herzog any and all eccentric-seeming types who're planning an ambitious project deep in the jungle. That, or Dorrington himself figured, "I'm an eccentric-seeming type who's planning an ambitious project deep in the jungle; maybe I ought to give Werner Herzog a call."
As Herzog documentaries go, Wheel of Time is fairly sedate and un-unsettling. I guess that's to be expected, considering the subject matter is Tibetan Buddhism.
The drama comes from Herzog's examination of some intense, and intensely foreign, faithful and their practices. He shows us preparations for a massive Buddhist event (called the Kalachakra initiation) at Mahabodhi in Bodh Gaya; a later, similar event in Graz, Austria; a massive pilgrimage at the holy Mount Kailash; an interview with a Tibetan former political prisoner; and his conversation with the Dalai Lama. Each segment of the film has its own remarkable moments, but to give examples would spoil much of what makes Wheel of Time intriguing.
