a sense of joy and then a panic

sci-fi weekend horror movie round-up! 

MINOTAUR - Set in ancient Greece, chronicling the mythic struggles of fragile little Athenian "virgins" who have been sacrificed to the bull-man (who is really, really, gross, with his rotten flesh and dripping blood and exposed gums and shit... I mean, he makes orcs look well-scrubbed) except Theseus the wonderboy dies in this version.  I'm not spoiling anything because no one should ever see this atrocious movie. 
Fun Fact:  Theseus is here nicknamed Theo!
Grade: F - NOT RECOMMENDED

BEYOND LOCH NESS - Somehow Nessie the tortured sea-serpent has moved to a North American lake and is breeding children that look like velociraptors made out of rubber chickens.  That's all I have to say.
Fun Fact: Leo from Charmed plays the scientist/hunter/hat-wearing-hero!
Grade: F - NOT RECOMMENDED

BENEATH STILL WATERS - One of those "evil spirits come out of yonder body of water in droves to terrorize townspeople", and in this one the cliche was the idiot town mayor who, as in Jaws, insists that the "celebration" he's planning for the town must go on, despite people being eaten by the perpetually murky water containing dried-up zombie-ghosts who, despite looking like bags of bones, can drown even the most drunken Spanish groundskeeper. 
Fun Fact:  This cosmopolitan movie had a British reporter, Spanish policemen (and police tape!), lots of "Spanish"-speaking blondes, and a Danish-looking scuba guy!
Grade:  D - NOT RECOMMENDED

UNREST - Set in a morgue and using "real bodies" (a fact this movie is very proud of), this "independent" doozy is about a med student and her boytoy who realize that there's a cursed cadaver in the vaults who brings woe to all who messes with it.  Except it's not really the body that's pissed off... it's the Aztec god that the body, in life, pissed off, by uncovering 50,000 skeletons of his human sacrifices.  I don't know.  Lots of blood and decomposition and gratuitous nudity (of both living, pretty bodies and un-living, un-pretty bodies).  Pretty cheapy, although at least it wasn't annoying.
Fun Fact:  Has more geographical and historical inaccuracies than any movie I have ever seen (such as, the Aztecs were never in Brazil)!
Grade: C - NOT RECOMMENDED

GHOSTDANCERS - Yeah, um, glad I didn't see this at TriBeCa (although still regretting that I saw Hatchet instead).  A group of dumbass yuppies dance on three graves "in the psycho section of the cemetery" because the undertaker leaves a letter on their friend's grave telling them to, and are thus plagued with hauntings.  They get help from the worst paranormal investigators ever (and follow the standard cliche of stupid, selfish paranormal investigators who just make things worse blah blah blah).  What killed it was the ghosts.  They start out ok, especially when they're invisible poltergeists... but once you see them, it turns into, well... live-action Scooby-Doo.  By the end there's what my mom called the "super ghost", a gigantic translucent skull head the size of a tank, chasing the survivors.  I mean, this didn't scare me, and before you ask, it was not near funny or campy enough to be a parody.
Fun Fact:  The older brother from Prison Break plays the main character!
Grade: F - NOT RECOMMENDED

BENEATH - Hooray for a director who can edit at least as well as most AMV-makers and acting that isn't completely trash.  While hardly a good movie, at least this had a solid plot (that held my mother's attention as well as frightening her).  And other sci-fi movies, learn from this one: do not show your monsters.  learn the art of subtlety.  Two sisters are in a car wreck.  Older sister is terribly burned (yeah, if burning and burn victims scares you, this movie may be difficult) and later dies.  Younger sister has lots of nightmares, psychological problems, clairvoyancy, etc.  She's been sent to numerous rehab centers but returns to her older sister's home to stay with her brother-in-law's family in a Rockies mining town (this movie gets an A+ in scenery), still convinced as ever that her older sister was buried alive.  Was she?  Is her vengeful spirit the "dark thing" that her creepy daughter thinks lurks in the red-velvet mansion, killing off the nasty brother-in-law's relations?  Or does younger sister just need more counseling?  Dun dun dun! 
Fun Fact:  The main actress is constantly wearing black lacy off-the-shoulder funeral dresses!
Grade: B - RECOMMENDED.

By the way, Lindsey, here's the trailer for the American remake of The Eye.  Jessica Alba's in it.  You'll probably recognize every scene.

I have to go to a wedding reception now.

So, mixed feelings about I Am Legend.  There were some nice ideas.  The post-human New York was nice; I see "zombies" have now established (romantic?) relationships, a hierarchy, and trap-learning capacities.  But this was Hollywood does 28 Days Later, and Boyle's version is better.  From the poor lovable German shepherd to the God-fearing Red Cross woman, this was trademark Hollywood with rubber-stamped emotion.  Not even getting into the problems with the cinematography (if your zombies look like Diablo monsters when you see them in good light... first, fire your special effects company, and second, never show them) and plot (save for the almost cute development of zombie boyfriends/girlfriends - and not of the absolutely hilarious Return of the Living Dead 3 variety)...

Will Smith's a good actor.  But this had the philosophical depth of Men in Black, without the funny bits.  Only Hollywood can make a movie about the last man on Earth and have the extent of his mental development be: 1. I have no hope!  Life sucks!  to  2. omg God still loves me.

My poor mother brought up a good point though: what happened to the internet?  We post-apocalyptics are obsessed with the HAM radio and repeated broadcast signals crossing oceans, but that was a Cold War-inspired trend.  Maybe we need an update?

edit:  The Signal's getting a wide release in February just in time for Valentine's, and the trailer does justice!  Everybody see it for some superior post-apocalyptica.  Peace.

Heima was mindblowing.  Premise: after completing their world tour, Sigur Rós returns to Iceland to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in various small towns in the countryside, under mountains, protesting dams to build aluminum factories, in abandoned fish factories, in coastal towns shrouded in mist, in nursing homes, with marching bands.  It was advertised a week before its showing in a one-page article in Ground Zero - and by advertised I mean spoken of, because it was a free one-time showing (to correlate with their free unannounced concerts in Iceland) at our independent movie theater.  If you weren't looking for it you wouldn't have noticed.  I had heard of it, and I saw the article and screamed. 

My mother and I went.  We were late because dinner at the new colonial-era Thai restaurant took a while (to Lindsey: food was good, called the Blue Orchid, we should go) and we had to tiptoe over a few blocks of black ice to get to the theater.  I had no idea how many people would show up - I was envisioning maybe five homeless drugged out college students.  But it was packed.  Packed as in we sat on the floor ten feet from the screen.  When they performed "Popplagið" in Reykjavik in the climactic ending I could feel the vibrating bass.  That may be my favorite song of theirs. 

Sigur Rós is a secret cult - the only one you know is in it is yourself, and you never know who else is a worshipper.  And they in turn worship the planet so much, if you learn anything from Heima it's that they worship the planet.  Theirs is my kind of paganism. 

The band thinks that their Earth is being lost, replaced with industry.  But I think Iceland is the future, not the past.  Iceland is the world without us.  As Explosions in the Sky says, the Earth is not a cold, dead place - it's got lasting properties, and after we eliminate ourselves, in our anthropophagy without any particular ritual (is cannibalism, looping back on oneself, the culmination of evolution?  Evangelion would agree), the world will revert to Icelandism.  I am sure of it.

***

Judging by the Golden Globes nominations, I'm going to have a very angry Oscar party in February.  Atonement?  What?  The movie that A. O. Scott described as "an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be"?  Where "even the most impressive sequences have an empty, arty virtuosity... the impression left by a long, complicated battlefield tracking shot is pretty much “Wow, that’s quite a tracking shot,” when it should be “My God, what a horrible experience that must have been"?  It sounds like Children of Men meets The English Patient.  Brilliant. 

Not.

***

Our Journal Star reviewer criticized I Am Legend for becoming standard zombie fare - by having crazy killer zombies vs. a survivor.  As my mother said, that's like criticizing samurai movies as regurgitated for including fight scenes.

***

John the Revelator - Depeche Mode: Constantine.

hush, I love this movie. yes, despite Keanu Reeves. he's actually not that bad in it. plus Rachel Weisz + Djimon Hounsou = the hot.

(thanks to lindsey for introducing me to the song)

Like all other reviews I've read, the only thing I can say is this:

JESUS CHRIST GO SEE THIS MOVIE. 

Also: I've never read the book, but I could feel the McCarthy seeping out.  You can hear it in the dialogue, in the silence of the landscape, in the breathing and the taps of the murderous oxygen tank, you can see it and you can feel it.  McCarthy's prose has been described as "cinematic" and the Coen Brothers were faithful to it. 

The plot is unimportant to whether or not you should see the movie.  Even if you have no interest in the subject matter and have never read McCarthy (like my mother), you will still be amazed at the cinematography and the finesse of everyone involved.  Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones were all brilliant.  So were Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean (Trainspotting) and Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells.

Pete Hammond of Maxim calls it "a superior, bone-chilling ode to the New West".  This is a film about an evolving, decaying American pastoral.  The American dream is over.  Not even treasure-hunting is possible, because there is no treasure, and don't even suggest climbing the ladder by your merit and hard work.  Little dogs, at the beck and call of their masters, will die for the gun.  Only outlaw cats survive.  It's the Wild West without the sunset, without the possibility of a new frontier, without the fairytale (so refreshing after all the romantic fantasy bullshit that's being propagated to us lately: Stardust, Enchanted).  There's sheriffs and there's robbers, like in the Old West, but now there's a new breed of highwayman: the Hunter, a monster of modernity (those who've seen the Criminal Minds episode "Open Season" or the Crime Investigation Australia episode "The Kimberley Killer" will be familiar with the type). 

Paul Virilio in Strategy of Deception, italics his, bold mine: "The 'deportees' in the 'camps' of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, 'savages' or even 'new barbarians'.  In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously almost unknown level of deprivation and human misery.  They are waste-products of a military-industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals of the knowledge and sill accumulated over generations and millennia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to the exactions of kapos of a new kind... a ruined planet, where there will soon be nothing left to take... With the appearance of new forms of bio-political conditioning, in which the other will no longer be considered an alter ego, nor even as a potential enemy (with whom reconciliation is always possible), but as the ultimate quarry.  Nietzsche had, in his day, predicted the imminent arrival of this new misanthropy - an anthropophagy which would have no particular ritual, as he put it." 

"Call it, friend-o," says Anton Chigurh, the Hunter of No Country for Old Men to a suspicious, pudgy gas station clerk who wants to know what he stands to win by saying either "heads" or "tails" to Chigurh's coin toss.  Everything, of course.  He stands to win his life.  He calls correctly and survives.  When Chigurh tosses the coin again at the end and tells Carla Jean to call it, saying it's the best he can do for her survival, she refuses.  "The coin ain't got no say," she says, "It's just you." 

An anthropophagy which would have no particular ritual.  Yet this is the stuff Cormac McCarthy meditates upon. 

Just see it.  It's going on my top ten list, and it deserves an Oscar or five. 

maybe it's because her name sounds like manolo blahniks, the most oft-quoted high-price shoes in chick lit novels modeled after Sex and the City, or maybe it's telling that she can't write grammatically coherent sentences, but manohla dargis is kind of dumb. 

"American cinema is in the grip of a kind of moribund academicism, which helps explain why a fastidiously polished film like “No Country for Old Men” can receive such gushing praise from critics. “Southland Tales” isn’t as smooth and tightly tuned as “No Country,” a film I admire with few reservations. Even so, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like Mr. Kelly reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience’s comfort zones, than follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art-direct yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure and mine."

I haven't seen either movie.  But this reminds me of this last summer's English class, when my liking of the short stories we were reading reached an apex in the 1930s, remained alright in the 1940s and 1950s, and then went downhill very fast.  I don't think that what I dislike is experimental, because I actually have a pretty strong stomach for things that get labeled "modern" - modern art, modern dance.  I dislike the stuff that is seen as "the future is now", the cool stuff.  Richard Kelly is nothing if not cool.  Ask any self-labeling "self-aware" high school student.  Well, not that they'd recognize his name, but I bet they'd recognize Donnie Darko.  Is that an experimental movie?  No.  Is that an academic movie?  No.  Is that a genre movie?  No.  What is it then?  Something similar to Garden State.  Produced by a "promising young director" (nobody ever mentions Khrjanovsky, but that's okay...) who is "attuned to the youth and times of today".  Oh, bullshit.  Richard Kelly was a perfect boy, perfect in the sense that he was not only popular (Phi Delta Theta) but intelligent (scholarship to USC), a fan of Kurt Vonnegut (no surprise there) and Holes (once again...).  The well-educated pretty-fly-for-a-white-guy, master of the "indie counter-culture" scene.  The "product of his generation".  Boy, I hate artists like that.  Omigod, he really is Zach Braff, who famously makes movies for every decade he lives.  In their universe they are the center of gravity, these happy little white American boys who really (really) don't bother looking beyond their own earwax and navel fuzz when they create movies that are supposed to define their "generation", whose idea of profound social commentary is criticizing psychiatrists and self-help talk shows.  At least Richard Kelly doesn't act in his own movies and pair himself up with beautiful actresses. 

Because the thing is, Donnie Darko did not push my comfort zone (unless you count introducing a demonic life-size bunny) anywhere.  It could have.  It could have redeemed itself.  But then it decided to fall back into the realm of utter predictability, become a suburban fairytale (that's really all it is) and I ended up wondering what the hell my peers were so excited about.  Jake Gyllenhaal?  Yeah, that had to be it.  Don't tell them that, though.  They'll just tell you "you don't get it yet... watch it a couple more times, then you'll see."  Hold your breath.

If preferring Cormac McCarthy to Kurt Vonnegut makes me a snob, then I'm a snob.  I think that really, I'm just uncool.  I've never been cool and I'm alright with that.  A couple other movies that I think I was supposed to like were Election and Pleasantville.  Yeah, they didn't work either.  But then, I've never been able to identify with my peer group.  Who knows, maybe I'm just "unstuck in time". 

survey stolen from kim. 

1. 13 places that I would like to visit or visit again:  Indonesia (4) - Jakarta, Bali, Jogjakarta, Danau Toba; Thailand - Bangkok; North Korea; Singapore; China - Beijing; Japan - Tokyo; Greece; Costa Rica; Morocco; United States - Alaska.

2. 13 things I hope to do in the next 12 years:  graduate college; graduate graduate school; go to Indonesia; be published; see those 71 movies on my to-do list; have a vacation with my mother; have a good, healthy relationship; cook gyoza on my own; see Radiohead live; get a real job with a real salary; drive to Las Vegas; finish Ilium; read the complete works of Cormac McCarthy. 

3. 13 things I want to tell my children:  study hard; be honest with yourself; read the news; remember you are a global citizen; remember you will always have home to come back to; but travel; be loyal to your friends; but keep your principles; take care of yourself and eat well; judge not lest you be judged; be critical of everything the media tells you; listen to me; but make your own choices.

4. 13 excellent movies that you should see:  Apocalypse Now, Akira, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, 4 (Chetyre), Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, Contact, Kairo, The Fog of War, Magnolia, Bowling for Columbine, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, The Corporation. 

5. 12 excellent quotes:  "Life finds a way" - Ian Malcolm (Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park); "I'm not a cynic.  I get up everyday hoping to find an honest man" - Jack McCoy (Law & Order); "Others again, from the edge of the leaf, look over the precipice calmly and bravely and say: 'I like it!' " - Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba the Greek; "There is poetry in defeat.  And probably better poetry" - Jean-Luc Godard: Notre Musique; "We write with our desire, and I have never stopped desiring" - Roland Barthes; "Do not feel safe.  The poet remembers" - Csezlaw Milosz; "That is SO consumerist!" - my mother; "What today remains of our capacity to reinvent the world?" - Adbusters; "What's important is that we've lived on this Earth, and we're bound to it" - Abbas Kiarostami; "We train young men to drop fire on people.  But we won't let them write 'fuck' because it's obscene!" - Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now; "They could be alive somewhere, the man said.  It's possible" - Cormac McCarthy: The Road; "Are you a fighter fish queen, or are you zombie food?" - Undead.

6. 12 musicians/bands you should check out:  Collective Soul, Arcana, TV on the Radio, Rammstein, VAST, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Microphones (now called Mt. Eerie), Moby, The Knife, Tricky, Deftones, Lords of Acid. 

7. 12 favourite fictional characters:  Ellen Ripley (Alien); Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park); John Yossarian (Catch-22); Captain Kurtz (Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now); Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs); Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs); Bruce Wayne (Batman); Nicholas Angel (Hot Fuzz); Aragorn (Lord of the Rings); The Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland); Kaneda (Akira); Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter).

8. 22 songs you should listen to/download:  "Modern Love (David Bowie cover)" - Last Town Chorus; "Personal Jesus" - Johnny Cash; "La Folklore Americain" - Sheila; "Postcards from Italy" - Beirut; "All Cats are Grey" - the Cure; "Kings of the Wild Frontier" - Adam & the Ants; "Los Angeles" - Sugarcult; "Renegades of Funk" - Rage Against the Machine; "Love Train" - the Legendary Tiger Man; "Is That What Everybody Wants?" - Chris Martinez (Solaris OST); "Voodoo Child" - Jimmy Hendrix; "What is Fight Club" - the Dust Brothers; "Maybe Tomorrow" - Stereophonics; "Get Along (feat. Pace Won)" - Morcheeba; "Woke Up This Morning" - A3; "Jennifer's Body" - Hole; "James River Blues" - Old Crow Medicine Show; "Be Quiet and Drive (Deftones cover)" - Radiohead; "Speed" - Atari Teenage Riot; "Hands Away" - Interpol; "Laura's Theme" - Silent Hill OST; "Waiting So Long" - Berserk OST.

9. 22 CDs you should listen to/buy:  The Joshua Tree - U2; Amnesiac - Radiohead; Charango - Morcheeba; Jesus Christ Superstar; Neon Bible - the Arcade Fire; From the Choirgirl Hotel - Tori Amos; Mezzanine - Massive Attack; X&Y - Coldplay; Lateralus - Tool; Post - Bjork; Singles 1986-1998 - Depeche Mode; Garbage - Garbage; Confessions on a Dance Floor - Madonna; Thirteenth Step - A Perfect Circle; Von - Sigur Ros; How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb - U2; Hail to the Thief - Radiohead; Takk... - Sigur Ros; Kid A - Radiohead; Absolution - Muse; Songs for Liquid Days - Phillip Glass.

10. 22 things I'm often doing:  refreshing my livejournal friends page; checking my email; watching YouTube; writing; reading NY Times reviews; watching television; eating snacks; walking up and down Swanston Street; changing tracks on my iPod; grocery shopping; studying; taking quizzes; complaining and/or whining; stalking livejournals of people I don't know; making playlists; boiling water; daydreaming about AC; planning internships or graduate schools or classes; daydreaming about food I don't buy; imagining my works on screen; using the bathroom; changing clothes.

11. 22 hearables:  sizzling food; music; mourning doves; my cat meowing; traffic; church bells; waves crashing; gamelan orchestras; horseshoes on asphalt; pianos close-up; talking; football games on the radio; crickets; firecrackers; rain; subways; heaters; microwaves; breezes in palm trees; the doppler effect; vinyl scratches; doorbells.

12. 22 touchables:  cashmere; silk; wool; wood; marble; concrete; asphalt; cotton; goose down; paper; swimming pool water; dough; hard-boiled eggs; living fur; living skin; feathers; glass; moist cooked rice; tuna and salmon sashimi; wood beads; ball-point pens; handles.

13. 12 beliefs:  music is important; buildings suppress spirit; class matters; everything is alive; everyone is worth as much as anyone else; technology correlates with war; artists are mad; there is no clash of civilizations; history is crucial to identity; states have identities; norms can be changed; culture is not static.

I think there's a serious error here.  The guy is supposed to be a vampire.  Why does he have a reflection?  And furthermore, why is America producing lots of crappy supernatural shows?  Oh, I know, Moonlight is supposed to be decent, but last time I heard that, it was about Torchwood, and that show fails to meet the standard of "decent" by a lot of ground.

Oh yeah, in case it's not obvious, I'm in love with this site Twitch - movies, television etc. that are weird, fantastical, paranormal, extraterrestrial, splattering, epic, what have you (with a clear and welcome leaning away from Hollywood).  I first found it when I was searching for reviews for Seven Swords, and then I found it again when Cyberpunk Review had a link up to it.  If it's any indication they are willing to see movies if Simon Pegg is in them, or if its official description is "Yosuke, a school student, comes across Eri, a beautiful girl in a school uniform. Every night, Eri is fighting an immortal giant with a big chainsaw" (Negative Happy, Chainsaw Edge).  They're my kind of people (and probably yours too). 

Kanye West does Akira. Or does Akira "do" Kanye West.