The Black Dahlia

I’ve been to Disneyworld on a handful of occasions in my life. When I was there I always loved the Haunted Mansion. I think I liked it as a kid because it was “scary lite.” I liked how it was scary was like without actually being scary. It was safe scary. Surface scary. Beneath the dark veneer it was all safe and bright. It’s a schtick that Disney has down pat. Managing to take something and give you the general idea behind it while making it completely removed from everything that makes “it”, well, it.

The Black Dahlia was like a Disney version of noir. It looked nice and shiny on the surface but lacked any of the depth and danger that makes noir, well, noir.

I’ll get this out of the way. I consider James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” to be one of the ten best books ever written. It was an incredible characterization of obsession and paranoia. And I can’t begin to tell you how it pains me to see such incredible source material squandered on such a miscast, poorly written, badly directed piece of crap as this movie.

The movie is very badly miscast. Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichart simply does not work. Bucky is supposed to be a man obsessed with finding the Dahlia’s killer so that he can save his partner from going off the deep end and avoid being tempted by his partners girlfriend. Hartnett chooses to play this incredibly comples character with all the subtlety and panache of a block of wood. It pains me to hate on something like this, but it really truly deserves it.

I won’t go on about how the script manages to be bereft of everything that made the book so moving and emotional or how a movie about “the black Dahlia” barely makes any mention of her for the first 40 minutes. It’ll just have to suffice to say that it was all I could to not pick up my Gameboy and play Zelda until the movie was over.

3/10

Jet Li’s Fearless

A martial art film is a unique bird in the world of movies. They have to walk a fine line between the demands of action fans and the demands of the general movie goer. Some, like the Matrix, have done this with great aplomb. Others don’t worry about things like story, directing, or acting, and simply pile on the kicks and explosions. Nothing really wrong with either approach, but, I think most people would prefer an action movie to have some Punky Power to it. They would rather have some emotional weight and resonance along with their adrenaline. It’s a tough balancing act but when it’s done right it’ll give you some incredible cinema

Fearless walks that line between action and emotion with incredible deftness. The result is an incredibly moving and thrilling movie.

Fearless is based loosely on the life Huo Yuanjia. A Wushu master who lived during the time of western imperialism in china. Huo is raised by a father who fights for money and notoriety but forbids Huo from following in his footsteps. Flash forward to Huo as a grown man and he’s become what his father didn’t want. A braggart fighter who only wants notoriety and fame. The path that Huo travels through the rest of the film forces him to see the outcome of his selfishness and he is given a chance to redeem himself. He sees how the west has started to demoralize his countrymen. The leaders of the Japanese, French, German and American stage a fight where Huo will fight the best fighter of each country for the honor of china.

Where Fearless succeeds is in showing us the complete transformation of Huo from a talented fighter with a chip on his shoulder into a compassionate and gentle man more concerned with the fate of his country than his own legacy. And truthfully, some credit must be given to Jet Li for his great acting in this one. It may seem a bit of an oxymoron. Jet lit and acting. But he really does do a phenomenal job.

Any discussion of the action itself is almost superflous. It’s Jet Li. The fights are very very good and they’re never over the top for the sake of being showy. They always serve the story and help you to understand the characters and their motivation.

In the end I guess what there is to say is that Fearless was truly a great action movie and a great movie in general.

9/10

Jackass: Number Two

I try to start these reviews with a catchy opening paragraph. I try to create some kind of analogy to help people understand exactly what type of movie we’re dealing with. That’s not gonna work with this one. It’s because everyone knows what Jackass is all about by now. So any review of this may as well be a review of the first movie or of the T.V. series as a whole. I guess the best tact to take with this is by seeing if it stacks up to rest of the Jackass “ovewah.” And I’m happy to say yes. Yes it does. Not only is it just as good the other stuff, it’s quite a bit better in certain places.

Number Two has all the standards we’ve come to expect. Bodily evacuations. Self-violence. Pranks on unsuspecting people. It’s got everything we’ve seen from these guys before, only better. The classic Pontius bit where he dresses up like the devil and screams about keeping god out of California get’s a great update. The old people make-up gets taken to some awesome extremes. Even the played out bit with Preston chasing Wee-Man while they’re both in their underwear get’s a face-lift. It’s not just old stuff either. There’s some incredible new stuff in here.  I don’t want to ruin it for you. Suffice to say that the boys have had to step up their game creatively and they certainly went above and beyond what was expected of them

There’s a certain attraction people have to seeing things done that shouldn’t be done. A morbid fascination. We love to see people put themselves in danger. Whether for our entertainment or not. And it’s hard, very very hard, to look away when you see someone strap themselves to a real live rocket that’s going to be fired across a lake. If you’ve ever seen anything by these guys before and been at all interested then go see Number Two. You’re guaranteed to see at least one thing that will leave your jaw hanging and face cramped from laughing.

9/10

The Protector

Late at night, on certain subscription cable channels, they show soft-core porn. I’ll admit it. I watch it. You probably do to. It’s okay. You can say so. What always trips me up about this stuff though is the way they insist on showing 10-20 minutes of “story” between the good stuff. I’ve always wondered if they think we care. Surely they’re smarter than that. It’s almost like their nodding saying “Look we know what you want and we’re gonna give it to you. But we gotta dress it up and pretend that’s not the only reason you’re watching or else we may as well just be a porn channel”. Hey man, whatever you gotta do. It’s cool with me. Just so long as when the good stuff finally rolls around, It was worth the wait.

The Protector is like a soft core porn. It insists on making you wait through boring and nonsensical story before giving you what you want. But when it finally gets to the good stuff it was DEFINITELY worth the wait

The movie is about a young Thai man who owns a couple of elephants. One day he and his father go to a festival to see about giving one of the older ones to a king. Somewhere along the way the young mans father is shot and the elephants kidnapped. There was more to the story than that but to be honest it isn’t really that important. If you’re laying down money to see this movie there’s only one real reason you chose to. And that’s because you want to see some mind-blowing action. I’m very happy to say that The Protector delivers in spades.
There are stunts in this movie that will leave you smiling. Struggling to comprehend what you have just seen. It takes a few seconds to let it sink in that yes, it actually happened. A human being actually just did what you just saw. For real. No wires. No lame cgi trickery. Just straight up mind blowing athleticism. Seeing this sort of thing happen for real is one of the biggest adrenaline rushes any action fan could hope for. There is something so thrilling about seeing one guy do things that ought to be beyond the realm of human capability and it instills a sense of real wonder and astonishment. Of course this all due to the incredible work of the film’s star, Tony Jaa.  Get used to that name. It’s a name that all action fans are going to be intimately acquainted with over the next few years. With his first major American release under his belt and his star on the rise it’s only a matter of time before we see him filming in English with huge budgets and a token black sidekick.

I could try to describe some of the things that you’re going to see in this one, Like going from a standing jump to a full black-flip and kicking out a streetlight 7 feet above him ALL IN ONE MOVE Or the incredible scene where he fights his way up 8 flights of stairs for like 5 minutes ALL IN ONE TAKE, but it wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t convey the astonishment you feel at seeing this stuff actually happen.

The Protector is not for everyone. You gotta be a real action junkie to get hyped on this stuff. But if you are, and you can sit patiently through the all window dressing they tacked on to make this a “movie”, then you are in for one HELL of a treat.

7/10

Brick

Crime noir is a genre that is very near and dear to my heart. I love the way that great noir paints the world in shades of grey. As though good never existed. As though we’ve ever only had varying degrees of evil and nothing more. I love the way the hero of a good noir story is often the only moral person in the whole affair. The way they’re beaten and broken after a complicated past. And usually, it’s the hero alone against the world. Fighting for a principle, a moral, or an ideal that everyone else has given up on. It seems melodramatic I know. But when it works, when it’s from the heart, it works on such a gut level that it resonates. Powerfully
Brick is great classic crime noir.

Brick is set in modern day southern California. It tells the story of Brendan, a loner who eats his lunch at the back of the school by the dumpsters. One day he gets a note in his locker from his ex-girlfriend asking him to call her. He does and finds out shes in trouble. Very serious trouble. But before she can tell him anything else she gets cut off. Thus begins Brendan’s quest to find the truth at all costs.

What carries Brick and makes it such an astounding film is it’s ability to take such classic noir concepts and place them so seamlessly into a modern world. Never does the film feel like a cheap attempt to play on adolescent problems. It never crosses that threshold into melodrama that films dealing with teenagers very often can. This is due in large part to some incredible performances from it’s young cast. Joseph Gordon Levitt, whom you may remember as the kid on Third Rock From the Sun, manages to make Brendan and his obsession with his ex-girlfriend believable. He never crosses that line into selfish brooding that could have very easily been the role’s downfall. The film has so many great performances, in fact, that to comment on and list them all would make this review novel length.

In the end, what makes Brick so great is that it manages to hit all the right buttons while being completely detached from everything we’ve come to associate with crime noir. There are no trench-coat wearing detectives. No nightclub running bad-guys wielding tommyguns. You’ll not see any black and white footage here. What you’re gonna get is a very heartfelt story about a high school student trying to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend. A story about one kid against the rest of the world, fighting for a moral, a truth, and an idea that everyone else has given up on.

9/10

Pulse

I’m sure we’ve all seen the work of some impressionist painters before. Impressionists weren’t concerned with getting the details right. They wanted to make sure you understood the whole scene. That you got the emotion of the painting, the heart of it, rather than the brain. Take Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ for example. We’ve all seen it. Try to pick out any real details in the painting. You can’t. But those details aren’t really needed are they? In fact, if they were there they’d ruin the painting wouldn’t they? We don’t need those details to give us the feeling of looking at the stars on a clear evening. Let’s pretend for a second that Van Gogh, instead of sticking to peaceful scenes, had attempted to paint pictures that disturbed you. Pictures that made you paranoid and uneasy and frightened.

Pulse would be THAT impressionist painting. It’s missing alot of details but the cumulative effect is a masterwork of paranoia and loneliness.
I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way. If you can’t stand a story that doesn’t tie up neatly, stay away. If you want blood and gore, stay away. If you’re sick to death of the “let’s cast whoever’s hot on the WB and MTV” thing, stay away. If, on the other hand, you can tolerate something that’s a little slow and takes it’s time to gradually, almost imperceptibly, bring on the creeps, this is for you. And I’ll be the first to admit, that the premise is very stupid.

The premise is that a couple of computer hackers have found unknown radio frequencies and strangely enough, people are talking on them. Turns out those people are dead and now that someone has discovered them they can come on down to where you and I live. There’s more to it than that, but, the movie doesn’t attempt a really detailed explanation so I won’t attempt to understand the details. Neither should you. Just know that these ghosts are everwhere where there’s a radio or phone signal. And if you’re in one of those areas you are fair game.

Once you get past the premise being very bad, the effect is very unsettling because there are essetntially no safe areas. And as the movie progress and more and more people start dying, the movie achieves a feeling of very intense paranoia. The ghosts can’t be seen until they are right near you. They can’t be heard at all if they don’t want to be. And since signals can go through walls there is no where to hide. They only hope for escape is to grab a car and head for the mountains. Which is what the last remaining survivors of humanity have to do.

Sometimes horror works not because it’s scary, but rather, because it gets under the skin and makes you paranoid. It presents a scene where you are asked to explore a very dark and disturbing idea. Pulse presents a picture which attempts to convey paranoia and loneliness. It does this very effectively, even if it leaves out a couple of big details along the way.

8/10

Beerfest

I don’t drink very often. When I do though I prefer to drink good beer. Usually something imported. I won’t get into specifics because there is no accounting for tast as far as beer is concerned. Also, We don’t need a “my microbrew could beat up your microbrew” argument. Suffice to say that in the world of beer there are levels of goodness and we can almost all agree that on those levels, a Bud Light is near the bottom. But Bud Light serves a purpose too. Let’s face it, when you’re drinking just to get hammered you aren’t gonna spend the money for good beer. You’re gonna go cheap and easy. You’re gonna get a case of whatever’s on sale and go for it. Sure it doesn’t taste all that great, but with enough of it in you’re not gonna care.

Beerfest was like a six-pack of cheap beer. No taste. Just enough alcohol to get ya feelin’ good.

It’s hard not to appreciate this movie for what it set out to be. Nothing more than a bunch of dumb and crude humor. An approach the Broken Lizard guys have been taking for years, and in this one they mosly succeed. The set-up is that two brothers have to go to germany to scatter their dead grandfathers ashes. Once there they end up seeing a secret beer drinking competition called Beerfest. They end up being humiliated by the Germans and vow revenge. Once they return to America they assemble the ultimate drinking team and start training.

It’s in these training sessions that the movie starts to hit it’s stride. Almost every drinking game I’ve ever heard of and a few I haven’t gets made fun of and all of the typical “oh my god I was so wasted” stories you’ve ever heard get shown. Now, I’m not saying that you need to have some humiliating drinking experiences to enjoy the humor, but it will definitely help. The movie as a whole does rely on picking at your own experiences with alcohol to get some laughs at of you and if you don’t have many of them you won’t be able to laugh along with the movie. There is plenty of plain ol’ stupidity to go around for the rest of us though. At one point a character falls in a vat of beer and can’t swim to the top so he attempts to drink all the beer out of the vat. Dumb? Yes. Hilarious? Yes.

Beerfest is not a nice imported beer that you drink to savor the complicated the flavor. It’s a cheap domestic that you chug to get a good buzz and enjoy your evening.

8/10

Little Miss Sunshine

I have this aunt named Betty. Betty is kind of an odd duck. She likes to talk a lot and, more often than not, it’s about something you don’t really care about. She’s not crazy or anything by any stretch of the word. She’s just kind of odd. She likes to put on lots and lots of make-up but she doesn’t really put it on properly. Her eyelashes are always caked with mascara. Her lipstick is generally also on her teeth in addition to her lips. Most of my family avoids her. I do to. But I also feel kind of sad for her. She’s kind of old and lonely see, and I get the feeling that she just wants a friend. But she’s so socially awkward that being friends with her would be like teaching a bear to wipe his ass. Difficult, to say the least. So consequently we all try to avoid prolonged conversations with her. I’m sure you know at least one person or family member like this. You probably take the same tact with them that we take with Aunt Betty. Avoid a drawn out conversation with them at all costs.

Little Miss Sunshine is about what happens when you take a family of Aunt Bettys and force them to communicate.

You’ve got a foul-mouthed heroin snorting grandfather. A dad that’s trying to pitch a self-help program to publishers. A son who’s taken a vow of silence until he accomplishes his goal of getting into the Air Force. A gay uncle who’s just attempted suicide. A homely young daughter who wants to win beauty pageants. And a distracted mom trying to keep them all together. Each one of them has their own worldview that is a source of irritation with everyone else in the family. They don’t talk much anymore. Then an opportunity for the daughter to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant, 800 miles away, forces them all into an old VW bus to drive her there. It’s here in the unairconditioned confines of the bus that the family finally starts to really communicate, even if it’s only out of sheer boredom. Along the trip each member has either a breakdown or an epiphany which snaps them out of their malaise and makes them realize how much they truly love their family.

The danger with putting this much quirkiness into a movie is that it can feel forced. And it’s only thanks to an incredible cast that the movie never crosses into cheap sentimentality. Alan Arkin and Steve Carrell are especially good in the two roles that could have ended up being annoying but thanks to their great interpretation of the characters make the grandfather and the uncle especially endearing. The movie as a whole, in fact, is very charming despite the fact that it is itself, an Aunt Betty. It has all the typical “independent film” tricks. Quirky music. Well known actors proving their depth. And last but certainly not least, titles all done in a minimalist font. Oh yeah, dig it man. Dig it.

Still, Little Miss Sunshine is a rare gem in that it manages to get its somewhat heavy handed message across in a lighthearted and charming way. Even if it sometimes gets its lipstick on its teeth, you’ll forgive it and make friends pretty quick.

8/10

Monster House 3D

My mom tells me that when my older brother was real little he used to love being picked up and launched in the air by my dad. The sight of it used to scare the hell out of her. My dad would grab him by his little arms and he would let his legs buckle. Then my dad would hurl him into the air with all of his strength. Sometimes getting five or six feet above my dad’s head. My fiancé likes to tell a story about how she would sometimes climb up on top of the monkey bars near her house and walk on them. Her mom to this day doesn’t know that she used to do that. She’d probably crap herself if she knew how close my fiancé came to snapping her 6 year old neck on occasion. I bear a scar on the right hand inside of my mouth where as an infant I was learning to crawl and I crawled right over to and electrical outlet and bit the hell out of it. I don’t know why as kids we’re given such curiosity about the world that makes us want to go explore it, but, we also have such innocence and naïveté that could get us killed by doing so.  It’s even more astounding that in those instances where adults weren’t there to protect us from our own stupidity that we didn’t get impaled or crushed or god knows what else. But, also, in those instances were some of the most incredible times you could have as a kid.

Monster house is all of those near death experiences you had as a kid. Only this time you can just enjoy them and not worry about dying.

The movie tells the story about a group of three kids who try to kill the haunted house that sits across from them. The crotchety old man who lives there has been harassing them for stepping on his lawn for years. If any of their toys or balls land on the lawn he takes them and keeps them. The house doesn’t pull any punches either. It doesn’t just want to annoy or scare these little guys, it wants to literally kill them. But the kids figure out a plan to slay the giant shingled bitch anyhow and set out to leave it in ruin.

This movie really does convey such an amazing sense of danger and excitement. But it tempers that danger and excitement with a great feeling of wonder and adventure. It makes sure that the danger never becomes terrifying, only exciting. Which is a hard line to walk. The movie pulls this off while maintaining a great classic feeling.  Like E.T., The Goonies, or Adventures in Babysitting, the movie has all the hallmarks of a great kids adventure. Not the watered down edutainment that passes for kids entertainment these days.

The other really cool part of this movie is that it’s not being shown in digital 3D at certain theaters. If you have the chance to watch the movie like this I highly recommend it. The movie never goes for the cheap “things flying out of the screen at you gag”. Instead it uses the 3d in very cool and subtle ways. When a kid has to run across the yard to try and retrieve his ball before the house eats it the movie uses the depth perception that 3d offers to show how his initial 10 yard dash is turned into what seems like miles by the house. Very cool and a very great way to show these artistic possibilities of 3d beyond mere novelty.

9/10

World Trade Center

It’s amazing how exactly I can remember details about what I was doing on September 11th. The one thing I can recall with the most clarity, however, isn’t a particular event, it’s a recurring theme. I remember all of the confusion about what was happening. When the North Tower was hit, nobody had a clue what had happened. Some news sources said it was a small prop plane, others said it was a large commuter plane. Some were already calling it a terrorist attack and others were calling it an accident. Then the second tower got hit and everyone got on the same page. Definite terrorist attack. Then the pentagon was hit and the confusion started again. Some said missles. Others said plane. Others said explosion. Then flight 93 went down in the field in Pennsylvania. Then the south tower collapsed. Then the north tower. Boom Boom Boom. Then World Trade Center 7 collapsed. Reports started coming out about fires breaking out uncontrolled all over Washington D.C. Then someone on CNN reported that the CDC in Atlanta had been hit. Lots of different people on the news just started reporting whatever unsubstantiated rumors came into them. And I recall, very clearly, how frustrating it was to not be able to know exactly what the hell was going on.

World Trade Center brought back to me the most painful parts of that day. And you should really see it only if you think you’re ready to go through that again.
For me it was the confusion. For others it will be the way it came out of nowhere. A still larger majority are going to get waylayed by the endless walls of missing posters. The way the dust and smoke made everyone look like ghosts. Everyone, no matter how hard hearted, is going to get suckerpunched in some way by how accurately World Trade Center conveys the emotions of that day.

The movie follows two Port Authority police officers (William Jimeno and John McLoughlin) as they get up and go to work in the early morning hours of September 11th. They get their showers and drive into Manhattan from New Jersey. They go through their normal routine as they get handed their daily duties. They go out and start patrolling their normal routes. Officer Jimeno rousts his favorite bum from Jackie Gleason’s statue. It’s in these early scenes that the movie does an amazing job of reminding you how no was prepared for what was about to happen. How even when it does happen no-one expects what happens next or what happens after that. No-one was capable of comprehending just how bad things were going to get.

When the north tower is hit all of the Port Authority officers are recalled to the station to prepare for rescue attempts. It’s truly depressing to see these men prepare for their rescue attempt. Not only because we know that they aren’t going to make it, but because their plan would never have succeeded anyway. It’s so disheartening to see these men put their blind faith in their Sergeant (Mcloughlin) because he came up with the plan for evacuations after the ‘93 attacks. And even though he truly did know more about the buildings than almost anyone else save the architects, it would never have been enough. It’s very disturbing to see how the best and most capable men we had, the ones who were the MOST prepared, were basically slaughtered.

I could go on like this for page after page but I think you get the idea. This is not a lite afternoon at the movies and it requires a heavy emotional investment out of you. I still don’t know if I’m glad I sat through it or not. Because even though we’ve had time to let our wounds heal, those wounds were very deep and very sore when they were created. Alot of people have just now got them bandaged up. It’s up to you to decide if you’re ready to tear all of those injuries open again.

9/10