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March 23, 2007:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
by Michael Marano

You have no idea how much I hated 2003's pointless, empty, de-humanizing, idiotic, soulless, sissified remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I mean, I fuckin' HATED it. I could go off on the remake, but I think it would just piss me off to the point that I’d start shitting blood. I only mention my towering, righteous, molar-grinding hatred so you can get a sense of just how vision-above-Lourdes amazing it is that I tromped into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, prequel to that remake... AND REALLY LIKED IT?

What a shame The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning had to be part of a cheesball corporate media franchise. What a shame it wasn't released as just a tribute to 1970s slasher movies in the vein of The Devil's Rejects. This movie is written by people who truly understand the bleak, vicious nasty world view that made 1970s slasher movies like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas great. Screenwriters Sheldon Turner and David J. Schow take the implied Vietnam-era apocalypse of the original Chainsaw and make it overt. This is a bleak, unrelenting, soul-killing movie that feels like it could have been made in the months following the release of Easy Rider.

Director Jonathan Liebesman, a very good director previously saddled with bad movie projects, creates a grainy, grungy look that convinces you the movie was filmed in 1969 and the negative was stored under some guy's bed all this time. Liebesman, as you may recall (and might even possible care), directed the killer Tooth Fairy movie Darkness Falls, which is a painfully well-crafted film that tried valiantly to overcome the concrete-albatross-heavy shortcomings of its premise, to say nothing of the shortcomings of its granny's-nightgown-on-a-broomstick monster.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning got bashed by a few critics for its sadism, which I don't think is fair. Is there brutality in this movie? Yep! It’s a movie about... y'know... a guy with a chainsaw, after all. But it's a brutality with meaning and purpose, not staged and arbitrary gamesmanship like in the Saw movies. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a damned fine horror movie. Just pretend that giraffe-blowing, candyass 2003 remake never happened.

February 9, 2007:

The Messengers
by Michael Marano

There's an old trope in science fiction called "the idiot plot". That refers to a plot in which nothing can happen without characters acting like idiots. Think, if you will, of the cheerleader who goes up into the attic of the sorority house after hearing strange sounds up there, even though she knows there's a killer on the loose. The new movie The Messengers, directed by Hong Kong's dynamic duo the Pang Brothers and written by Todd Farmer and Mark Wheaton, doesn't just have an idiot plot. It has an idiot premise. How does it have an idiot premise?

Let's see. Dylan McDermott is in bad financial straits. So he buys a sunflower farm in North Dakota, because small family farms are such stable investments, these days. He and wifey Penelope Ann Miller's daughter (Panic Room's Kristen Stewart) has a substance abuse problem and has had her license revoked. So they move her from Chicago into the heart of teeth-rotting crystal meth country, where there's no public transportation. Their toddler son had an accident and doesn't speak anymore. So they wisely move him as far as they can from the University of Chicago Medical School Speech Pathology Labs.

This is not to say that there are no idiot plot moments in The Messengers, such as when our heroes hire a big scary ZZ Top-lookin' cracker with a shotgun (My Big, Fat Greek Wedding's John Corbett) as a farm hand as soon as they meet him, and proceed to leave their pretty teen daughter alone with the guy. The ghosts are idiots, too, as all they do is insert themselves into the plot with no rhyme or reason just to move things forward. Are the ghosts warning our heroes? Are they out for revenge? Why are they invisible only when the plot necessitates it?

Why bother? If you got pangs for some good stuff from the Pangs, rent the Eye movies. The Messengers has all the marks... make that ritual scarification... of a movie made by studio committee. The Pangs are great at making quiet, slow scares. In their Hong Kong films, the Pangs never rely on flash cuts or crashing music. Think of their notoriously slow and agonizing "ghost in the elevator scenes" in the first two Eye movies. The Messengers is full of both flash cuts and crashed music, and I can just hear in the back of my head some studio boss looking at the dailies going, "Hey! How are the kids to know that the rotting, necrotic pissed-off phantom with the milk-white eyes in the corner is supposed to be scary? Better crash in some music and use a quick cut, just to make sure they know!"

And if you can't see the twist that comes in the third act, you've never seen a movie before in your life.

OK, I'm done talking about this movie. Life's too damned short.

January 7, 2007:

Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men
by Michael Marano

When I stumbled, and I do mean stumbled, out of the press screening of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, my fellow critics and I all looked at each other and kind of blurted out: "How the hell did Cuaron get backing for that?" As I write this, it's a few days following that press screening and a few weeks before the movie opens, and I'm deeply thankful that somebody was profoundly stupid enough to fork over his or her cash and finance Children of Men. It seems Paris-Hilton-winning-the-Nobel-Prize impossible that this movie will make a profit (it having cost something like $75 million smackers). Yeah... a profoundly depressing, dystopian, politically enraged, racially charged, post-colonialist science fiction movie. Yep! That'll have ticket buyers lined up around the block, don'tcha think? I hope I'm wrong, and the movie is a hit. Because Children of Men is such a deeply human exploration of science fictional themes, it almost restores my faith in the genre.

I haven't read the P.D. James novel on which Cuaron's movie is based, but friends who have tell me that Cuaron and his screenwriters have so significantly changed the novel, that the film almost stands as a separate creation. And as a separate creation, Children of Men is a significant addition to the SF genre. Not just in film. But the whole genre, including its written form.

The movie stars Clive Owen as Theodore Faron, the kind of guy for whom "Weltschmerz" is something to which one could be urged via a nice and pithy Hallmark card. Maybe one with Garfield. He lives in a world in which no child has been born in 18 years. In SF circles, that's a great hook, a great "What if?" upon which to build a world and a narrative. But "What if?" can lead to cop outs, the indulgence of speculation that becomes not an act of world-building, but just denial of this world. Children of Men isn't speculative--it's syllogistic. It's rooted in this world. Children of Men forsakes "What if?" for "If/then". The smoldering dystopia that Faron inhabits, in terms of technology, social structure, emotional states, generational identities, political landscape, religious outlook, even the goddam coffee stands, are all extrapolations of this world, this reality, this today.

I'm not going to go into the plot of Children of Men, because the plot is amazingly simple. It was only after I thought about the plot while formulating this review that I realized how amazingly simple it is. I think this is because emotionally, the movie is incredibly complex. How do you film cultural despair and desperation? And how do you make that matter-of-fact? Politically, the movie is devastatingly complex, a cauldron of issues ranging from worldwide immigration rights to fanaticism to the birth pangs of incipient fascism is Europe. And technically, this is one of the most complex films ever made, with action set pieces on the scale of the climax of The Wild Bunch done in single takes.

Children of Men is a breakthrough film, and I think it's going to affect the course of the SF genre over the next few years. (But, for the record, I'm lousy at predictions, having stated on hundreds of radio stations across North America that Friends wouldn't last 13 episodes and that there was no way that Titanic would turn a profit.) Yeah, it has two horrible plot points that nearly sink the movie in which characters under rather dumb circumstances overhear exactly what they need to hear at exactly the right time to move the plot forward. But I can forgive those lapses. This expression of hopelessness offers SF and filmmaking quite a bit of hope.

January 7, 2007:

Herzog's My Best Fiend
by Michael Marano

So, how'd you like to sit down and have a heart to heart with your own Id? I don't mean have a confrontation with it, like Walter Pidgeon did in Forbidden Planet. What's the point of being a genius like Morbius, if you don't have an Id to inspire you? When Morbius said "I renounce you! I give you up!" he was renouncing his own drive and ambition to fathom the genius of the Krell. I mean, what would it be like to really sit down and try to fathom your own Id.

Would it be funny, d'ya think? Sort of like meeting your own inner Bluto from Animal House? Would it be kind of sad? Like seeing your inner young Bruce Wayne crying over his dead parents in Crime Alley? Scary? Like Norman Orsborne deciding it's a good idea to become the Green Goblin? If you had the chance to hang with your Hyde, would you have a balls to the walls pud-whackin' good time? Or would you go all wussy, like "the Good Kirk" did comforting and helping "the Evil Kirk" created by that pesky transporter glitch in "The Enemy Within"? Or would you enable your Id, like that sea captain did in Conrad's "The Secret Sharer?"

Or, would you and your Id do all of the above and make five brilliant movies hailed as classics of world cinema?

Actually, make that six.

Director (and nut bag) Werner Herzog's documentary My Best Fiend is an homage to the late actor (and nut bag) Klaus Kinski, with whom Herzog worked on such deliciously demented flicks as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu: The Vampyre, and Fitzcarraldo. It's also an introspective examination of Herzog himself as a person; an attempt to fathom Kinski as an artist; a posthumous dialogue between Herzog and his part-time collaborator and full-time doppleganger and Herzog's finally getting the last freakin' word in on Kinski once and for all. Their love/hate relationship is folklore for movie buffs around the world. There was this time during the filming of Aguirre in the steaming jungles of Peru, y'see, when Kinski was about to walk off the set and Herzog supposedly went into his tent and got a...

Nah... you're not gonna get that story from me. But suffice to say that Werner and Klaus had their share of good times, rewarding artistic achievements, and mutual death threats.

My Best Fiend is a movie about a ghost, of course. Kinski haunts the movie. In the opening scene, Herzog returns to the Munich apartment he and his mother had shared with Kinski. There, he tells to the place's current well-fed and bourgeois tenants the story of Kinski locking himself in the bathroom to indulge in a forty-eight hour screaming tantrum during which he put Keith Moon to shame and smashed everything to the point that "all the pieces could be sifted through a tennis racquet." Herzog forces Kinski into the present. Like the characters in his own movies, Herzog undertakes a journey of discovery (to the music of Popol Vuh, and against sublime backgrounds) as he retraces his steps through Peru and other locations around the world where he made movies with Kinski. As he had done with Kinski in life, he directs Kinski's memory and stages a narrative by way of clips, outtakes, and behind the scenes anecdotes (think That's Entertainment for psychopaths). Herzog's movie is as much about himself as it is about Kinski. In that sense, it's a film about two ghosts... those of Kinski and the person Herzog had been while working with him. My Best Fiend seems to be Herzog saying his final good-bye to them both.

Herzog once said about Kinski, "I had to domesticate the wild beast." As any ranch hand will tell you, doing that can change you as much as the beast. My Best Fiend might be his attempt to domesticate the part of himself that Kinski had made wild.

Check it out... it's pretty brilliant. And check out any of the movies that Herzog and Kinski made together. By watching Unca Werner deal with his inner and outer beasts, you can appreciate his recent masterwork about the interaction of man and beast,Grizzly Man, all the more.

August 1, 2006:

Gibson's Passionately Bad The Passion of the Christ
by Michael Marano

Wow. Mel Gibson has really made a botch of things, huh? Getting loaded after saying Jesus saved him from a life of excess, getting busted, and allegedly spewing forth a string of anti-Semitic remarks to the arresting officers. Remember a few years ago, when much was made of his father Hutton Gibson's remarks about the World Trade Center being destroyed by remote-control airplanes, the Holocaust never happening, and global Jewish conspiracies? Gibson's allegedly crying out to the cops "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!" makes it seem that the apple has not fallen far from the tree. It's important to remember that daddy Gibson did not write, direct, or produce The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ. Mel, as far as can be inferred from his movie in and of itself, does not have the sins of his father visited upon him. Mel's sins are uniquely his own.

Is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic in the way Hutton Gibson's remarks are? No freakin' way. Is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic in the way that Mel's alleged post-bust comments are? Nope! Is it a loving work of Supersessionism (the belief that Christianity eclipses Judaism)? Yep! The film begins with a quote from Isaiah about a certain somebody who's gonna get wounded for our rebellions and crushed because of our guilt (according to the wording of my New Jerusalem Bible; I don't remember the wording of the translation used at the start of the film). The end of the film revels in Irwin Allen-like excess in its depiction of the trashing of a certain structure. The extent to which Supersessionism is, or might be, anti-Semitic in and of itself I leave for you to decide. As Mel himself, sober at the time, told Diane Sawyer, "To be anti-Semitic is un-Christian, and I'm not." I just felt that it should be brought up, as nobody seems to have done so yet. I mentioned Mel Gibson's set of sins, didn't I? Is Supersessionism a sin? I'll leave that up to you, too. But I will state that Mel Gibson has made a really, really bad movie.

The Passion of the Christ is crummy, no matter what its ideological subtexts, and no matter the beliefs of its audience. It's overdone. It's melodramatic. It over-relies on slow-motion shots for a forced and cheap sense of the poetic. Gibson bludgeons us with stylistic excess to the point where he drowns out his subject matter. Let me give you a prime example. There's a scene in which Mary (Maia Morgenstern) runs to the side of Jesus (James Caviezel) after He has stumbled on his way to Golgotha. Now, any scene in which any mother runs to the side her son who's being tortured to death should rip your heart out. In Gibson's ten-thumbed hands, the scene moves like a pebble dropped in honey, and is inter-cut with a slo-mo flashback featuring a younger Mary running to catch a toddler Jesus who has stumbled. What should have presaged The Pieta becomes a syrupy groaner. That this scene and flashback dovetail with another flashback in which a buffed-out Jesus makes a table that would look more at home in an Ikea catalogue than the Middle East of two millennia ago doesn't help much, either.

Gibson sabotages himself repeatedly. In amidst the noise and confusion of The Passion is a genuinely moving moment in which Jesus promises a certain somebody access to Heaven. Gibson punctuates this moment with the arrival of a crow that would be more at home in a Brandon Lee movie, or maybe in Argento's Terror at the Opera. There's a really nice and touching exchange between Jesus and the Apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane. But it's followed by a scene in which Jesus is arrested which so relies on flashy cutting and an embarrassment of Wachowski-esque trickery, you expect Carrie-Anne Moss to fly up, hang in the air, and kick a few Sanhedrin in the teeth. The stylization of The Passion of the Christ is so overblown that it undermines the "authenticity" and "accuracy" of Gibson's decision to film the movie in Aramaic and Latin.

And speaking of "authenticity" and "accuracy", much has been made in the press about the bloody detail Gibson has gone into depicting the last few hours of Jesus' life. On this count too, Gibson is his own worst enemy. Slow motion. Special effects. Spraying blood. Make-up created by Greg Cannom (Oscar winner for Bram Stoker's Dracula). All are overused by Gibson to the point that the suffering of Jesus (or anybody who has been whipped or tortured) becomes numbing. The suffering of Jesus, in the context of this, Gibson's filmic profession of faith, is mitigated by his over-the-top directorial indulgences. You could make the argument that the same would apply to any representation of Jesus being martyred, but there is a crucial (no pun intended) difference: a Passion Play is participatory, requiring a level of involvement from the audience that Gibson's Passion does not. Gibson's camera does not participate. It is a voyeuristic gaze.

It's not my place to list my ideological gripes with Gibson's take on the Gospels; I got more than a few. But it is important to remember that controversy about religious movies is as regular as clockwork. Life of Brian. Hail Mary. Mohammed, Messenger of God. Last Temptation of Christ. A publicist I once worked with got death threats for taking on Kevin Smith's Dogma. My sisters walked in on a group of nuns crying hysterically in the ladies' room of a theater showing Jesus Christ Superstar. The Passion of the Christ is not unique, save for its remarkable badness.

July 31, 2006:

Semi-likeable Ladykillers: The Coen Brothers Dilute Their Own Best Assets
by Michael Marano

What a month for poor Buena Vista/Disney Queen Bee Nina Jacobson. Not only is she painted as a villain for squashing delicate butterfly of M. Night Shyamalan's brilliant, shining creativity in the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, she got fired from Disney the week the book and Shyamalan's Lame-Ass in the Water were released to a flurry of press... and then got the news she was shit-canned from her boss Dick Cook while she phoned him from the hospital where her partner had just given birth to their second child! Jeeze! Talk about life passages, huh?

Because my heart goes out to Nina (and how freakn' rare is that, a critic sympathizing with a studio head?), I thought I'd take a look back at one of her pet projects, a project which demonstrates that Nina during her tenure at Disney had no problem shepherding the vision of auteurs, even when said vision wasn't so hot. Having seen Lame-Ass in the Water, and having read some of the totally justified misgivings Nina had about the script, I feel the need to bolster her side of the story... sort of a therapeutic way to recover from the M.NightMare I suffered while asphyxiating in the muck of Shyamalan's Narf-Barf-fest.

If I hadn't known going in that Nina's production of The Ladykillers, the flick the Coen Brothers made after the triumph of their Nina-shepherded O Brother, was a remake of the 1955 classic starring Alec Guinness, it would have taken me a while to recognize it as a remake, assuming that I missed the opening credits. It would also have taken me a while to recognize 2004's The Ladykillers as a Coen Brothers movie. There's an energy to the Coen Brothers' work, even in their deadpan stuff like Fargo and The Man Who Wasn't There; it's the same kind of under-the-skin energy someone has while sitting still after drinking too much coffee. The Ladykillers came out all energy and no stillness. Even the shots and set-ups that establish the sleepiness of the Mississippi town in which the movie is set, complete with comedian George Wallace as the town sheriff snoring at his desk, aren't really still or deadpan. The movie has the flavor of broad comedy even before anything happens, which is not necessarily a detriment. But the humor of The Ladykillers (both in its 1955 and 2004 incarnations) turns on the coziness of an old lady's house as contrasted with the nasty doings of a gang of crooks. The lack of stillness and the broad flavor of the scenes that are supposed to be cozy make the movie feel diluted. And wow, that is a detriment.

The Ladykillers isn't a total dud. Not by a long shot. The stuff that is funny is very funny, and when the movie works, it works in a way that looks effortless. But for the most part, the movie tries too damned hard, to the point that the ancient "dignified-portrait-over-the mantelpiece-that-changes-expression-as-things-get-crazy" gag is used. That dead horse was flogged way back in Young Frankenstein. Tom Hanks as the sweet-talking philologist/criminal mastermind Professor Dorr borders on the hammy; he's straining to be hilarious, and the movie takes for granted that he is hilarious. What's amazing is that Hanks' performance as Professor Dorr, which comes across like the Colonel Sanders of some evil parallel Star Trek universe, works best in scenes that are not supposed to be funny.

I won't give away too much plot, as the movie works in a Thomas-Crown-y way as you watch the central heist unfold. A band of crooks, led by Hanks, uses the house of a nice old lady as a staging area to rip off a riverboat casino. Things go wrong, as they usually do in heist movies, and some serious gallows humor comes into play. Each crook--Marlon Wayans as Hip-Hop playah Gawain, J.K. Simmons as old crunchy '60s washout Garth, Tzi Ma as a Vietnamese guy known only as The General, and Ryan Hurst as a walking Coke machine named Lump--is given a backstory... which has a downside, in that as the whacky events unfold, we don't discover anything new about the characters.

There are nuggets of gold in the movie. One scene in which Hanks and the aforementioned old lady house-owner chat by a fire has surprising depth, and it's a goddam shame that Irma P. Hall as the widow Marva Munson never got an Oscar nod based on her work in this scene alone. Hall is amazing. In moments of broad physical humor, and in quiet and sweet moments, she seems in complete control of her character. Throughout The Ladykillers, Hall maintains just the right balance of strength, innocence, and all around lovability. The always great Diane Delano has a brilliant role as Simmons' main squeeze, Mountain Girl. And just as O Brother, Where Art Thou? used "Old Timey" roots music as a kind of Greek chorus throughout, so does The Ladykillers use some mighty fine vintage Gospel.

But ultimately, The Ladykillers is too long by half an hour to maintain its laughs. The movie really only picks up at midpoint, and then the final acts, with their comedic payoffs, feel rushed.

Maybe the shortcomings of The Ladykillers are due to the fact that it is a remake done by auteurs. The Coens' gift has been to assemble, almost in a post-modern way, different elements from different films in a manner that's always engaging and smart, but that never feels smarmy. Think of how Blood Simple managed to quote a million film noirs without being insufferably clever pastiche. The Ladykillers is an OK film. But since the arc and the premise of the film are that of the 1955 original, this may have hobbled the Coens' trademark deliriousness. (OK, you could argue that the same applies to O Brother with regard to Homer, but you get my point.)

The shortcomings of The Lady Killers are those of the Coen brothers, who undermine their own auteur vision by relying too much on the distinctly British, Ealing Studios comedy style that so defined the original Ladykillers. But these mistakes were Coens' to make. Nina let them make those goofs, indulging their vision, something she wasn't willing to do for Shaymalan, so faulty was his vision that it couldn't be saved from drowning in its own solipsism. Shyamalan may have heard voices. But the failures of The Ladykillers, and the rope she was willing to give the Coens in making those mistakes, proves that Nina heard sense. Godspeed, Nina. The rough times will pass. When the smoke clears from Lame-Ass in the Water, everyone will know that you were right.

Now as for that fucking shit-wipe remake of Dark Water you greenlit....

May 23, 2006:

THE FORGOTTEN....
by Michael Marano

"Oh, Gawd... not THAT music!"

You know the music I'm talking about. I'll try, with my ignorance of notation, to describe this film score cliché that gets me wincing in anticipation of banality. It's a tinkly music. With strings as a bed. Usually with a piano making a sad single low note followed, one melancholy heartbeat later, by a single, slightly higher note. Think of the music heard at the start of Lifetime movies, as the camera caresses the expensively cozy and lovely living rooms belonging to our beautiful and strong crusading housewife/supermom/activist protagonists. Think of the music played whenever Granny dies in a family drama, and the camera pans over Granny's doily-draped couches and the black and white pictures of the movie's principals awkwardly Photoshopped and airbrushed to create an instant family history that viewers can swallow in a single gulp. The earliest example of this kind of music I can think of was in Jaws, when Lorraine Gary looks upon hubby Roy Scheider bonding with their kid by making faces at him at the dinner table ("Give your old man a kiss"). It's the music that communicates the fragility of homey security as seen through a woman's eyes.

Such is the Pavlovian opening theme music, by Jack Horner, of Joseph Ruben's The Forgotten. Thanks to that music, I knew exactly what the set-up of the flick would establish. Lead Julianne Moore must have a gorgeous place to live. Check--huge palace in NYC's DUMBO neighborhood (that's "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass", for you tragically un-trendy). She must have lots of gorgeous stuff, and a successful hubby, so that the audience will relate to her through the coveting of her cash and stuff. Check--Anthony Edwards plays her lawyer hubby, and Moore's world looks like a vortex of goodies from catalogues you find in the waiting rooms of dentists who only do cosmetic work. She must have a dream job. Check--she edits children's books, one of those jobs that sounds really interesting and fun to people who have never had to copy-edit on a deadline. As you probably know from the previews for The Forgotten, the flick concerns Ms. Moore's quest to solve the mystery of her missing son, whom everyone around her insists has never existed. Neat premise.

For a movie reviewer, a neat premise, let alone when coupled with good execution, can seem like a shining nugget of gold in a pan of river sludge. The Forgotten has brilliant execution. Director Joseph Ruben is a fine craftsman, as anyone who's seen his The Stepfather, The Good Son, Sleeping with the Enemy, or Dreamscape, can tell you. The performances are great... and with Moore, Edwards, Alfre Woodard and Gary Sinese in the cast, we'd expect no less. But The Forgotten, which is gorgeously shot, edited and paced, is rather like what you'd expect The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Plan 9 to be like. The failure of The Forgotten is due to the buttons it's designed to push, the buttons defined partly by James Horner's opening score and the context of Moore's Lifetime supermom existence. The Forgotten is about intrusion upon our safe and tidy homes and our minds. The mind, the heart, and the home are collapsed in The Forgotten, sorta like how the mind, personal morals and the home were collapsed in Straw Dogs (I know this sounds whacked, but think of Dustin Hoffman's speeches about not allowing violence in his home before the bloodbath that ends Dogs). The Forgotten is about home invasion, and the invasion of a woman's sense of self as a mother, just like Straw Dogs is about Hoffman's sense of manhood being invaded. Now, if your movie is about invasion, if you're dealing with a home being invaded by a malignant force (and think of how brilliantly Ruben executed this notion in The Stepfather), you'd better have some ass-kicking invaders. The invaders of The Forgotten are ludicrous, so obvious as to be comical. The movie is backed into a corner by is idiot premise, like a kid caught telling a big fat fib, and all it can do is tell more outrageously unbelievable fibs to weasel its way out. The Forgotten degenerates into a series of special-effects shots that whoosh! troublesome characters (whose continued presence would require greater narrative cogency than the film can muster) off-screen and out of the story in a manner reminiscent of how The Bridgekeeper who didn't know the different air speed velocities of the African and European swallow was whooshed! out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

A number of critics have said that The Forgotten is best forgotten. I have no desire to do so. It's such an interesting failure of story defeated by its own premise, such an interesting example of a film becoming its own lampoon, I'll be watching it for years to come.

Whoosh!

April 10, 2006:

GI Joe, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Terror of the Terror of the Sublime
by Michael Marano

GI Joe is unto "Danger!" as Girl with a Pearl Earring is unto "Genius!" When I was a kid, ads for GI Joe toys in comic books and the scenarios plashed on the packaging of GI Joe products would depict Joe in a chopper or hang-glider; the captions would read: "You can help GI Joe fly high over… Danger!" This was when Vietnam throbbed in the national mindset like a cracked molar. Did I want to face "Danger!" in the same way that boys just ten years older than my eight years were facing "Danger!" in rice paddies? No. But GI Joe was a fun, packaged, commodified bit of plastic that would let me vicariously own "Danger!" as a plaything. "Danger!" after all, is scary. Girl with a Pearl Earring, the film by Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask director Peter Webber, based upon the novel by Tracy Chevalier (a book I've been unable to finish), which is in turn based upon the painting of the same name by 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer is a packaged, commodified bit of celluloid that lets the audience vicariously own "Genius!" as a plaything. "You can help Johannes Vermeer get in touch with his… Genius!" But only in a diluted form. "Genius!" after all, is scary.

Lemme mention what's good about Girl, which is very good, and may make the flick worth seeing, despite its colossal and aesthetically irresponsible shortcomings. Current "it" girl and red carpet boob-gropee Scarlett Johansson as Griet, the titular girl who, as a servant Vermeer's house, becomes the subject of his most famous portrait, is pretty darned marvelous. Her movements, the look in her eye, the tilt of her head, not only make her seem fragile, but also make her entire world seem fragile. Yes, her existence in the Vermeer household entails grunt work. But Johansson, even in drudgery, seems like a thing of glass in a world of glass. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra's work is brilliant; he captures the tones and textures of 17th century Dutch painting in a way you'd only think possible on canvas, though Webber overplays this asset when his camera lingers on recreations of objects and scenes that appear in Vermeer paintings: "Hey! Lookit me!" Webber seems to say, "I made a tableau! Can we put it on the 'fridge, Ma?" To his further credit, Serra really did make Unbreakable a thing of knee-weakening beauty, in a few shots.

Girl is, ultimately, Lifetime Channel-flavored melodrama about genius that fails because it is terrified of genius. This does not bode well for the Thomas Harris-scripted Young Hannibal, as Hannibal the Myth is all about genius, isn't it? Trying to fathom genius takes guts and insight that Webber does not have. For contrast, take a look at Peter Watkins' biopic Edvard Munch, which forces you to grasp the mindset of the guy who painted The Scream the way somebody might force a dislocated shoulder back into its socket: it hurts like hell, but ultimately, it's good for you. Genius and its associated terror imply an act of surrender on the part of the person exposed to genius that is a kind of obliteration. There's the famous passage in Stendhal's diaries (Argento fans, take note), in which he describes a mini-breakdown he had on September 26, 1811, standing before Volerrano's painting of the Four Sibyls at the Church of Santa Croce: "At each detail you make out, your soul becomes more enraptured. You're on your way to tears." Proust got this, when he wrote about the death of the writer Bergotte (his fictional stand-in for Anatole France), who was so moved by the beauty of a painting that he dropped dead. The painter whose sundering genius gave Bergotte an apoplectic stroke? Uhhhmmmm… that'd be… Vermeer.

Rilke wrote that Cezanne's canvases seemingly have the ability to change the shape of rooms in which they are hung. I've stood before Vermeer's work. Vermeer's canvases change the sound of a room. They radiate silence. The painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring, is beautiful because we don't need to know the story of the girl. Vermeer captured her. His genius shows us the girl's soul. To slap a narrative over the painting is to fill the silence the painting itself generates with noise. The slapping on of a narrative is an unwillingness to surrender to Vermeer's genius, as intrusive as some yuppie shit-wipe yakking on a cell-phone in a gallery where a Vermeer is hung. It's the inversion of what Stendhal and Bergotte experienced. They faced the danger of genius. The film, Girl with a Pearl Earring, mitigates and distances one from the danger of genius just as surely as a plastic GI Joe toy mitigates and distances one from real danger. It's a chicken-hearted work that demands none of the surrender that Watkins' Edvard Munch demanded.

Girl, the film, doesn't surrender to genius; it tries to own it as a vicarious, anecdotal thrill. The plot is a turgid string of clichés, complete with a lecherous patron of Vermeer who comes across as a Dutch avatar of Mighty Mouse's Oil Can Harry, a plump "Nurse-From-Romeo-and-Juliet" stand-in, a bitchy Mrs. Vermeer, a bratty Vermeer daughter, and a handsome butcher boy out to court Griet, played by the terminally creepy Cillian Murphy of Red Eye and Batman Begins fame. Ben and Me, the kids' book about the mouse who helped Ben Franklin invent bifocals, was a more interesting and respectful meditation on the work of a genius.

You may well ask, "OK, Mike… aside from Webber's directing Young Hannibal what does this have to do with Horror?"

Plenty, Padawan. Because Horror and the kind of beauty that genius reveals have got a lot in common. As Doug Winter has said, "Horror is an emotion," and the emotion of profound Horror has much the same heart-stopping impact as the emotion felt in the face of profound beauty. Horror and the beauty revealed by genius like Vermeer's are manifestations of the sublime. Edmund Burke wrote in A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) about how a sublimely painful or frightening idea or image nukes rational activity. The sublime is scary, and the scary is sublime; they kick our rational legs from under us. We walk around with the cow-brained certainty that two plus two equals four; but the sublime taps us on the shoulder and says, "Who says the Universe gives a shit how you count, dickweed?" Kant took the ball and ran with it in his Critique of Judgment (1790), in which he wrote about how the sublime is infinite; when the mind tries to grasp the infinite, there is a pleasurable thrill in the failure of the attempt. These ideas percolated through the Graveyard School of poetry, the Gothic novel, and the Romantic Movement. Without these ideas, Poe, Baudelaire and Hawthorne wouldn't have had much to go on, and if it weren't for them, where the Hell would we be?

Girl with a Pearl Earring and the Oprah-endorsed phenomenon that the book represents are part of a larger trend: an avoidance of terror. An unwillingness to surrender to awe without the buffering of kitsch. The Da Vinci Code (which I also couldn't finish, and which will soon assault movie screens in the form of celluloid crafted by Ron Howard) is a work that commodifies and tames the genius of Da Vinci into a McGuffin for a plot that in turn commodifies and tames the scary, sublime notions of the history of the Early Church; Manichaeism and Gnosticism is bullshitted into something palatable for Starbucks slurping bourgeois pig-dogs. (I've said it before and I'll say it again--I claim my bourgeois birthright to kick the bourgeoisie in the teeth. Just call me "Little Punk Fauntleroy.") Walk around your local Barnes Ignoble. You'll see dump trucks of books that invoke works of the sublime, but that are too chickenshit to really engage the sublime. The Dante Society may nominally be about how dangerous is the sublimity of Dante, but in packaging that sublimity in the form of a cheese-ball mystery for croissant munchers, it limits Dante. The infinite sublimity of The Divine Comedy is squished into the finite. Something digestible for a milk-livered target audience who think reading and seeing movies that use High Culture as plot contrivances lets them participate in High Culture, just as GI Joe clutched in grubby little hands let kids think on some level that they were confronting "Danger!"

Again, our old Cezanne-loving pal Rilke wrote: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us." It might just be this "disdain" that's the real issue. Annihilating beauty, the sublime, is the domain of the Horror writer and the Horror filmmaker. The best Horror is scary because it is beautiful, and as such, it's sublime. Therein lies its power to annihilate. The Exorcist is beautiful. Lovecraft's work, in its own fucked up way, is beautiful. Barker's best work, on page and screen, is beautiful. Giger's paintings are beautiful. The target audience for Girl with a Pearl Earring and other such fare are disdainful of that which is so presumptuously disdainful of them. And I think that this broad cultural fear of aesthetic danger is a big fucking danger for us who as readers, writers and filmgoers want to confront beauty and the sublime, and so experience the sense of danger that the best Horror provokes. It's a market-based tyranny of kitsch, and I don't think even a hero with Kung-Fu Grip could bring it down.

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February 24, 2006:

Sadly Broken: M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable
by Michael Marano

Well, still bruised from The Village, I'm dreading the fact that there's a new Shyamalan movie on the way, Lady in the Water. Ever since The Sixth Sense, old M. Night hasn't been doing so good. Everyone I know is grumbling about how bad the new flick is gonna suck. I'm trying not to prejudice myself about the new flick. It seems to be totally different in tone from all of M. Night's other work, and I hope he realizes the potential he showed with his first foray into horror. But all I can think of, faced with the looming advent of Lady in the Water, is how much I loved the first forty minutes of Shyamalan's Unbreakable. Head-over-feet loved 'em.

Too bad Unbreakable is 107 minutes long. How could I have known back then that Shyamalan could so horribly, horribly fumble a second supernaturally-themed team-up with Bruce Willis? I was rooting for Shyamalan. I'd been so looking forward to Unbreakable, that when I sat down and took notes during those first forty minutes, I was truly, truly happy. "Hot damn!" I thought. "No Sophomore slump for Shyamalan! The guy is gonna carry this movie to end zone without breaking a sweat."

Let me remind you guys about what was good about Unbreakable, which was very, very good. Shyamalan beautifully pulls off the same intimate voyeurism he managed to create in The Sixth Sense. He has a real knack for lulling an audience into believing they're honestly watching events transpire in other people's lives. Signs, without the idiocy of alien invaders allergic to water invading a planet that's seventy-five percent water, would have been a pretty brilliant family drama. The first two scenes of Unbreakable, in a department store changing-room and on a passenger train, are just exquisite. Shyamalan's camera peeks into the drama. After all, The Sixth Sense worked because we felt like we were watching people's lives fall apart as would some house guest sitting forgotten in a corner. That was why Shyamalan could spring that ending on us, right? We felt like we were in on a bunch of secrets, so how could that big, BIG secret have been hidden from us?

I'm gonna spill a few beans. If you feel like not reading the rest of this paragraph so that no plot points are spoiled, that's cool by me. Anyway... Unbreakable deals with comic books on a thematic level. Now, I love comic books, and I'm okay with that. But if you're dealing with a comic book-ish notion of reality, you have to sell the audience on the idea. The tone of Unbreakable is like that of The Sixth Sense; it's brooding and creepy. But it also forces people who've never read comic books to think about them the way the most devoted fanboy would. Look at how Shyamalan had sold us on his notion of ghosts. There were very strict rules as to how his ghosts acted, and he taught us those rules over the entire first half of The Sixth Sense before he really unleashed them. Imagine if he had just shoved those ghosts into The Sixth Sense without such a careful set-up. The movie would have been like that ghastly Haunting remake, which I still love to bash at every opportunity. (Like now. The Haunting sucked, by the way.) Shyamalan fucked up Unbreakable because the rules of comic books are set in stone. There are certain things that have to happen, just as in classic tragedy there must be hubris and a fall. Shyamalan tried to supercede comic book rules with his movie making rules.

And Shyamalan's rules aren't up to the task, because he doesn't make his premise convincing, and Unbreakable degenerates into a sad joke. The end result is sort of like, say, trying to sell ALIEN without a spaceship. Sigourney Weaver rounding a corner to get to an escape pod and being confronted by eight feet of drooling bio-mechanoid horror is scary. Sigourney Weaver rounding a corner to get to a Seven-Eleven and being confronted by eight feet of drooling bio-mechanoid horror with no adequate explanation as to how it got there is laughable. And that's what Unbreakable ultimately is--laughable. Shyamalan went for The Watchmen, and delivered Richie Rich.

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February 6, 2006:

The Assassin's Hour: Murder by Numbers
by Michael Marano

Everyone loves Sandra Bullock. I love her to pieces. But I've never really liked any movie she's made, except for Speed, and Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. The second she's on screen, you're in that "Hey-it's-Sandra-Bullock-gosh-I-really-like-her-she-reminds-me-of-the-girl-I-had-a-crush-on-Junior-year-and-I-wonder-whatever-happened-to-her?" mindset. Would you have been able to tolerate Miss Congeniality or Miss Congeniality 2 if they'd starred anyone else? How about The Net? Or A Time to Kill? Would you give this column a glance if it weren't about a Sandra Bullock movie? (Yeah, right... you give a damn about my opinions. Your eye fell on this column 'cuz you caught a glimpse of Sandra Bullock's name among my words of wisdom. Why don't you make a few phone calls and find out what happened to that girl you had a crush on Junior year? Maybe romance will blossom. Then things'll be just like in a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock! Remember that one she made about the guy in a coma?)

Current cable TV staple Murder by Numbers has Sandra Bullock in it. Ergo, half its battle is won. It's a riff on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which two brilliant boys committed a murder as a Nietzschean experiment to prove they could get away with it. Leopold and Loeb movies are almost a genre unto themselves... their arrogant shadows fall upon classics like Richard Fleischer's Compulsion, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, not-so-classics like Tom Kalin's Swoon, and about a million episodes of various Quinn Martin productions (IN COLOR!). I think there's something like five episodes of The Streets of San Francisco alone that riff on Leopold and Loeb. The mythic status of the Leopold and Loeb story should have won the other half of Murder's battle.

Yet Murder By Numbers is just an okay movie, when in fact it coulda-shoulda been great. In this post-Columbine world, we need a Leopold and Loeb riff that'd be in keeping with the spate of "fucked-up-suburban-kids" movies that have been coming out: L.I.E., Bully, Ginger Snaps, Donnie Darko, Gummo, etc. Murder By Numbers admirably tilts at that windmill. What sabotages Murder By Numbers are the boring conventions of the "tough-gal-fighting-sexism-in-the-system" sub-genre, which, between TBS, Wifetime, We, and Oxygen, means that Murder By Numbers has an infinite life ahead of it, and I BET someday it spawns a sequel due to its long and sturdy, secondary market, Bullock-y legs, just like Miss Congeniality.

The motifs of this "tough gal" sub-genre are rigid and stylized as Japanese Bunraku puppet theater. And like Bunraku, the audience is expected to politely not see the puppeteers on stage manipulating things. But unlike Bunraku, there's no finesse to Murder's manipulation. You can set your "movie watch" to the appearance of the clichés. "We're ten minutes in. Time for the doughnut-chomping patrolmen to make a crack about Sandra not being feminine." Ding! "Twenty minutes in. Time for the revelation she had a bad sexual experience with one of the mean, sexist cops." Ding! "Forty minutes in! Time for her to do something brave without calling for back-up, like any academy cadet would." Ding! "One hour in! Time for her to lecture her superiors on the moral duties of their job." Ding! "One hour and one minute in! Time for the line, 'You're off the case!'" Ding! "Okay, now. Cue those tears of frustration on my mark... three... two... one! There they go! Watch those tears of frustration a-fallin' like spring rain! Gosh... I like Sandra Bullock. Even when she cries with frustration. She reminds me of someone. Hmmmmm. Clarice Starling? Nah. Waitaminute! That girl in Chemistry class, back in Junior year...."

Which is not to say Murder by Numbers is a one-person show. Ryan Gosling (from Young Hercules) and Michael Pitt (from Hedwig and Larry Clark's Bully) are both pretty tremendous as the creepy kids. They add levels of rattiness heretofore undreamed of in any Leopold and Loeb movie. Writer Tony Gayton and director Barbet Schroeder riff on their thrill-killers via the dysfunctional relationship of symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. No fooling. I don't know if this stunt works, but it's a nice try (Pitt reads from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and is made-up to look like Rimbaud). The actors use the Verlaine/Rimbaud angle in a pleasingly abrasive way, which is way more than can be said for the abilities of most actors twice their age.

I can't flat-out recommend Murder by Numbers for any non-chick, non-insomniacs. If you are a chick or an insomniac, there are enough glimmers of real thrills and suspense to make it worth your time when it shows up on cable. However... if you're a fan of the "tough gal" movie, get to the DVD store now.

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February 3, 2006:

Welcome to MediaDrome Online
by Michael Marano

I've made a number of jokes, in print, and on the air, about being a bitter, old punk rocker going through his mid-life crisis. It's weird being a 41-year-old punk, and it was really weird the other day to crack a gummy, gooey eyelid, blearily look in the mirror to shave and see my dad staring back at me. But for the most part, I'm having a good time during my mid-life crisis. I'm kinda proud of myself for not getting hair plugs and a little red sportscar. Those Richard Ford knock-offs that crowd the shelves of the local Barnes Ignobles don't speak to me. I dunno. Novels about guys my age feeling sorry for themselves and finding true love and redemption in the arms of girls half their age are as dull and uninteresting to me as chick books about women in Manhattan with great jobs finding the "perfect" man who'll make their lives complete.

So, it was with receding hairlines, sprouting back hair and prostate exams in mind that something whacked my frontal lobes the other day, as I was walking out of a Roman Polanski double feature at my neighborhood revival theater. By golly, it's 2006. This is the year that Rosemary's Baby would be turning forty. True, the movie, ROSEMARY'S BABY was made in '68. But it's set in '66. It never occurred to me before that little Andy the AntiChrist is a Gen X-er, just like me.

And if you look around you, it kind of makes sense. I mean, churches are still standing. Yeah, attendance is down, and there are some very naughty priests in the papers. But we never really saw the "GOD IS DEAD!" conflagration promised during the last few moments of Polanski's film. The pope is still around. Things have been shaken up in Mia Farrow's life over the past few years, but she's still standing. (Note to Woody... Soon-Yi, at 36, is looking a little used up and haggard, if you know what I mean. It might be time to swap her out for Scarlett Johansson, now that she's old enough to drink.) We've slouched way past the Millennium, and no firey destruction has rained from the sky.

Of course Rosemary's baby is a Gen X-er. He hasn't nearly lived up to his potential.

So, what do you think is up with Rosemary's kid, these days? He's probably living in Berkeley, or maybe Seattle. He was in a band, for a while, but it really didn't go anywhere. I can picture him now, funky cat's eyes illuminated by the glow of a second-hand TV tuned to The Simpsons, just come home from his shitty temp job in a cubicle that makes the part-time retail job in a video store he used to have seem like fucking paradise, because back then, he could at least fantasize about being Roger Avary or Quentin Tarantino. Maybe he clicks the remote to VH-1's I Love the '80s, worrying someone will detect that pirate cable box duct taped to the set, and thinks back to when he still had possibilities before him. He'd like to squeeze his nascent gut into his black jeans and maybe check out Goth night at a local club, but he's just too fucking tired. I bet he majored in the liberal arts, and didn't finish his BA.

Poor Rosemary's Baby. He must be a real disappointment to his dad.

Later...

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For the past fifteen years, Michael Marano's work has appeared on the Public Radio Satellite Network program Movie Magazine International, syndicated in more than 111 markets in the US and Canada. Two of his radio plays have been broadcast over the Pacifica and Western Public Radio systems. His commentary on pop culture has appeared on the BBC, and in print venues such as The Boston Phoenix, The Independent Weekly, The Weekly Dig, Science Fiction Universe, Sci Fi: The Official Magazine of the Sci Fi Channel, and Paste Magazine. He has served as a consultant selecting short stories for inclusion in textbook anthologies, and his work has been taught in Writing and Journalism classes on both the high school and college level. His short fiction has been published in several high-profile anthologies, including the Lambda-winning Queer Fear series, and has been selected for inclusion in annual "Best Of" anthologies and Honorable Mention lists. Dawn Song,, his first novel, was a Library Journal "Word of Mouth" special selection and received the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards. He taught Writing at the State University of New York College at Buffalo for several years. He is currently under contract to produce a chapter for a forthcoming instructional guide to be published by Writer's Digest Books. Since 2001, Marano's unique voice as a bitter old punk rocker media critic in the form of his MediaDrome column has been a wildly popular staple of Cemetery Dance magazine, North America's leading horror publication. After five years, Marano's opinions and rants will now spill over from print into Cemetery Dance Publications' web incarnation as well.