My review of The Reel Stuff, an anthology of horror and speculative tales turned into Hollywood films edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. In addition to the reading (in most cases, rereading) I had to do for the review, I watched many films: hence, the crazed kudos for Candyman posted at some ungodly hour not long ago.
Johnny Mnemonic had the consolation of some unintentionally hilarious moments and Screamers was a hoot, complete with a distinguished Canadian actor licking a knife and scowling, “It’s never sharp enough.”
But the worst film of the bunch was Enemy Mine. I hadn’t seen the film in almost two decades, but time had not been kind. Its failure, however, had less to do with its sweeping production value (even with the visible matte lines) and more to do with its almost total bastardization of Barry Longyear’s Hugo and Award-winning novella. Aside from changing the book’s ending to include a literal mine (did they really think the audiences were that dumb?), screenwriter Edward Khmara and director Wolfgang Petersen placed less emphasis on Davidge’s unexpected role as surrogate father, introduced over-the-top meteor showers, and otherwise muted the novella’s themes of war and camaraderie. There is even a terrible moment in which Pepsi product placement gets Dennis Quaid excited.
Longyear’s novella was collected in a handsome book put out by White Wolf called The Enemy Papers, which also featured two other stories, “The Last Enemy” and “The Tomorrow Testament,” set in the same universe. But this went out of print. Thankfully, the book is also available through Back in Print. Longyear also has a website and an interesting history.
Bakshi: Well, Andrew Belling on Wizards did an absolutely brilliant job. Let’s talk about Wizards. Wizards is very low-budget. One million two. Okay. I’m not going to fall back on my records, because it’s not that kind of movie. I need a score. But I need a score that I love. And I don’t remember how I got to Belling. I’d been to New York with a lot of other guys. But Belling came with a little synthesizer. One little machine which was a very big deal. We didn’t have any orchestra. We had synthesizers. All that music was done with Belling in the room. And he said the right things and he did the right things. And he came back and he played me a piece of music that was beautiful. I think Belling did an incredible job in that song he wrote. And the battle scenes. And the emotion. Belling nailed it. He did it himself and everything. It was all done without an orchestra. It was good.
Being a journalist, I’m invisible. I’m the barista or bartender of the media system. I’m considered too dimwitted to pay attention to the dismal and terrible things that actors and filmmakers sometimes say. The expectation is that I won’t write about it. The idea here is that I can’t inquire, lest this prevent future interview opportunities from surfacing upon my shoals. I truly don’t care who I talk with, so long as there’s a fun and somewhat enlightening conversation. But this modest goal is incompatible with what is expected. I’m expected to offer softball questions along the lines of “Where do you get your ideas?” or “What’s next?” But I can’t. Just can’t. Don’t have it in me to dumb things down. This simply isn’t what journalists do. I feel compelled to present a film person with a goofy or thoughtful inquiry into his craft. Perhaps it’s naivete. But it worked back in the day for Mike Wallace. But if I do inquire, and I’m just about to, it’s considered “inappropriate.” No explanation or specific solecism given. 
Some New York junket veterans — like a man named Brad Balfour who I have run into at press screenings and interviews and who has eyed my audio equipment not so out of bonhomie or curiosity, but with the hope of discerning some way that he can use me* — boast about having ten minutes with Samuel L. Jackson. I heard Balfour shrieking at the top of his lungs about a Jackson chat at a screening a few months ago. He had bagged Jackson. But what kind of sustained inquiry can you have in ten minutes? 
Actors are, on the whole, very friendly. They are, after all, people. But there are some who have chips on their shoulders the size of Montana. And it is these prima donnas who tarnish the profession. I began my conversation with Bose — easily the best actor in Before the Rains and, as it turned out, the smartest guy at the table — and Ehle, given a relatively thankless role as the wife to Roache’s adulterer. Things started off okay, with Bose claiming to be Ehle and “very sexy.” But when Roache, the film’s leading man, arrived, flashing his pearly whites, I was expected to break off my conversation with Bose to acknowledge his presence. (You can hear this awkward pause in the podcast. I’m presenting the audio file below unedited. I leave others to make up their minds over whether I went over the line with my questions or whether the actors I talked with were incapable of working without a script.) The problem was that I was in the middle of a query with Bose on how Sivan had placed his character at the top of a cliff, and I was curious to know how landscape and position affected his performance. And I thought it very rude to break off this conversation in media res. When Bose was finished with his answer, I then introduced Roache. Roache was getting fidgety, presumably because he was not the center of attention. 
This colorful sentiment is, to say the least, a disingenuous generalization. For Morris’s documentary (and the accompanying book written by Philip Gourevitch) would seem to suggest that one cannot approach an important subject like Abu Ghraib without a sense of outrage. That no matter how rational one is in investigating the events behind this nightmarish aperçu into America’s dark underbelly, journalist, filmmaker, and audience member alike must shout to the high ethical heavens. But is it really an act of conformity — class-driven, no less — to be appalled by what is revealed in the photographs? Is it conformist to speculate upon why Sabrina Harman offered a thumbs-up signal or whether or not Lynndie England was coerced by Charles Graner into holding a dog leash? 
Others will likely perceive this film to be mostly about the visuals atop the visuals, the analysis atop the analysis, the meta within the meta. But the real “standard operating procedure” explored in this film isn’t so much the pedestrian issue of how war caused the lines of basic human decency to become fuzzy, but the manner in which a great filmmaker has partially abandoned his subtleties to get Americans hopping mad. The faults lie not in the filmmakers and not, as White suggests, the critics. They’re doing their best to continue the dialogue, but their efforts have increasingly fallen upon deaf ears. For Abu Ghraib does not entertain. And neither does moral outrage. 
Two movies opening today have me concerned about the way that contemporary cinema is avoiding authenticity in an age of wartime. If we accept the idea that a movie is, in some sense, an entertainment, then should not the entertainment at least be authentic in some sense? I think of films like My Man Godfrey, The Lady Eve, and It Happened One Night, all outstanding examples of the screwball comedy. I don’t think it’s an accident that the screwball comedy emerged from the residue of the Great Depression and continued on roughly until America became involved in the war. My Man Godfrey offers a wonderful performance by William Powell as the besotted man taken up by Carole Lombard in a scavenger hunt. What Lombard doesn’t realize is that Powell, the ostensible freeloader, is quite loaded. And Lombard’s assumptions about socioeconomic status mirror the class mobility that was very much a reality in 1936. The Lady Eve, written and directed by the great Preston Sturges, likewise plays with issues of class and very much concerns itself with a milquetoast (Henry Fonda), who must find a way to embrace the realities of fortune hunter Barbara Stanwyck. I’ve always thought that Fonda, to some degree, reflected how America was concerning itself with events unfolding in Europe. After all, much of the action takes place on an ocean liner. And Fonda’s diffident spirit seemed to reflect America’s unwillingness to get involved with events across the pond. Then there’s 1934’s It Happened One Night, in which how one survives becomes a running comic theme, as in 
But I felt as if this film’s energy didn’t so much originate from its human moments, as it did its rampant concern for chasing nostalgia. This is evident through the film’s showy performances that are less designed with characterization and more designed with approximating screwball comedy conventions. (It doesn’t help that the great character actress Shirley Henderson, reduced here to robotic snaps of the head and her lovely voice reduced to two shrill notes, is more or less wasted as an embittered socialite.) The film relies too much on obvious gags, such as the “boy” upstairs who must be woken up, who is not some unruly tot, but actually one of Adams’s lovers. (Witness too how this setup is based around a contrived and entirely predictable irony, in which the characters are not allowed a whit of spontaneity.) It relies very much on coincidental run-ins. There are forced double entendres, such as Ms. Adams’s “There’s something so sensual about fur next to the skin,” which she manages to make work. But more attention has been devoted to sweeping pans of parties and the crazed curve of Adams’s hat. In short, the technical outweighs the human. Which likewise involves keeping Adams’s nudity constantly covered by towels and other obstructions for the obligatory PG-13 rating. (For those who detect the whiff of prurience with this allegation, I am, like any red-blooded man smitten by a striking actress, understandably curious. But I register this charge because I am disheartened by films that wish to suggest that a woman would, in the company of another woman, constantly hold up her towel in a convenient and preordained way. We are no longer in the days when husbands and wives were depicted in double beds. This is particularly ridiculous because Adams’ character wrestles three lovers throughout the film and is by no means modest in her temperament.)
The Bank Job is slightly better, in part because Jason Statham is a charismatic if two-note lead and Roger Donaldson is a good enough craftsman to get some kind of performance out of the rather uninteresting Saffron Burrows, even when she beams, “I’m in a spot of bother,” to remind us heavy-handedly that we are, after all, in London. Statham, at the mercy of loan sharks, gets a lead on a bank and sets out to rob this bank in an effort to secure himself and his family for life. What makes this film work, before it drifts disappointingly into standard heist movie territory, is the intriguing way that Statham and his crew make mistakes. They haven’t committed a robbery before and they jackhammer underneath a restaurant to get to the loot, not thinking that their quite audible work is going to get them some attention. There’s a lookout man outside, but they’re all communicating through walkie-talkies on an open frequency. (This audio is intercepted by a ham radio enthusiast.) These thieves don’t know what they’re doing and, when they remain naive and clueless, this film is often gripping. And this works because these moments are human, dripping with some relative authenticity. 
If you don’t know who Bill Plympton is, you’re missing out on one of the most unique independent animators now working in America. Plympton emerged into national consciousness when many of his shorts begin appearing on MTV’s Liquid TV during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This came concomitantly with success on the film festival circuit — in particular, with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. But, ironically, his work has found greater appreciation outside of the States. In his own country, he’s considered more of a cult item. Which is too bad. Because if this were a just universe, Plympton would be considered a national treasure.
I guess that character, who was originated in “Your Face,” was inspired a little bit by Bud Abbott on Abbott & Costello. The pencil-thin moustache guy with the suit, the slicked back hair. Kind of a sleazy salesman type guy. And that film was such a big success, such a big hit, that I continue that character on through “The Wise Man” and through “Push Comes to Shove,” and a bunch of my feature films — The Tune and Mutant Aliens and I Married a Strange Person. So those films use that character a lot. And I’ve found that he’s a very good character for laughs.
Plympton: A thin guy and a stockier guy. I guess that was inspired by the old Laurel & Hardy gag where they would take an egg and squash it on his head and put the hat back on. It was very dry humor. Very deadpan humor. And then that would escalate. And it escalated into, I don’t know, getting hit by a board or something like that. Well, I wanted to take that escalation and exaggerate it even more. So it becomes so violent and so surreally violent, that it’s just preposterous. And that was my initial inspiration for the film. So Alfred Hitchcock wouldn’t be someone I would say. It was more like Laurel and Hardy. Although even then, Oliver Hardy is more of a caricature than I would want to use. I brought him down as to more of a normal person than Oliver Hardy.
Let us be clear on this. I saw all five Best Picture nominees. And while I liked the other four, it is an outrage that so many thinking people have been duped by Juno. Ellen Page’s snarky one-note performance, originating from the same creative morass that spawned such execrable “wonders” as Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and Wes Anderson’s films after The Royal Tenenbaums, is considered multilayered and superlative. Nobody has had the balls to call out Reitman for relying so heavily upon great character actors like Rainn Wilson and Allison Janney to disguise his creative deficiencies. Juno was nothing more than an extended episode of Arrested Development — a dreadful film in which such filmmaking tactics as six consecutive cuts of a van driving in front of a suburban house are considered “clever” and in which Michael Cera has been encouraged to abdicate his talent in favor of being typecast as the nice guy (and he will most certainly be typecast, if he takes another one of these damnable roles).
This is a pity, because Diary of the Dead is a gutsy and energetic film that believes in its audience more than Land of the Dead ever did. Romero made something of a mistake going to the big studios. He’s always been a more instinctive and playful filmmaker when working the indie turf. Land‘s blunt gas nozzle through the windshield has been replaced by more intriguing symbolism, such as a deaf Amish farmer now giddily grenading the dead and an overturned American flag hanging from a dormitory wall. 
Told from the perspective of college filmmakers who see the (again unexplained) rising of the dead as an opportunity to record “a part of history,” Diary is a claustrophobic assault on media culture. “I just want to record it,” chants Jason Creed like a creed. He’s the director of the film-within-the-film, The Death of Death. And while his fellow students are initially uncomfortable, they become distressingly accustomed to having cameras in their faces. Some may decry the “amateur” acting, but when Romero has his actors mug for the camera, it’s symptomatic of a disease more pervasive than the zombies. At one point, just before entering an abandoned house, Creed tells his cadre to stop so that he can get a good wide angle shot. The voice of reason (so dissolute that he clings to a first edition of Dickens and seems, like Abigail’s Party‘s Laurence, more taken with the cover) is an alcoholic professor named Maxwell, named perhaps after the mathematician who proved that light was an electromagnetic wave and who thus made cinema and DV possible. Maxwell’s weapon of choice is not a gun, but a bow and arrow, which suggests that Romero’s affinity for chivalry — seen most prominently in his underrated film Knightriders — still holds. 
Adam Swica’s cinematography favors crisp and steely digital blues. The visuals remain cold and rampant even when a camera is shoved in the face of a young woman trying to remain calm after driving over a number of zombies. “How do you feel?” asks Creed, unable to discern the tangible trauma.
I can certainly agree with Ebert that video games are, for the most part, showcases for the latest gaming engines, primarily designed so that the individual will drop hundreds of dollars for a next-generation console system or a needlessly expensive video card that will be outdated in a few years (only to be replaced by yet another). We are now in the nickelodeon days, although, as the Wii demonstrates, the game controllers are getting more interesting. But this multi-billion dollar industry is less concerned with the human experience than it should be. It has come close with 
Replace “motion pictures” with “video games” and you essentially have what’s 
Whatever the circumstances, The Mist may very well be one of the most quietly subversive movies of the year. 
I was also impressed by the attention to the mist monster ecosystem. Large and beautiful insects affix themselves to the supermarket window, attracted to the glass the way that moths flock to light, only to be snapped up ruthlessly by gargantuan winged beasts. Nothing here is quite what we expect, which is saying a good deal in light of the fact that the story is essentially a familiar one.