"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown is a perfect example of a Hollywood Factory project- a powerful producer commissions a screenplay written as a vehicle for a big star and then assigns a craftsman filmmaker to direct. On one level, this is collaborative work at its best, but as usual with Polanski, it's also a great work of personal art. The Polish auteur seems unable to shoot a film without dealing with its themes and ideas personally. So Chinatown, while boasting a brilliant screenplay by Robert Towne, is haunted by the director's trademark sense of paranoia and alienation.



I think that the two images above say almost everything about the film and expresses Polanski's very personal view on man's inability to control the chaotic universe around him. Not to mention that it's one of Jack Nicholson's greatest moments onscreen. The intensity of his desire to finally stand up and do the right thing, to try and make a difference in the first image followed by the shattered emptiness, the blank nothingness of the second image which follows the death of his lover Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and the secret victory of her vile father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

In an matter of seconds, Nicholson as private eye J.J. Gittes is shown how small his place in the world really is and how ineffectual his actions are in controlling the course of events even on a minor scale.

"Forget Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown has just been released in a special edition DVD. Click here to read my review of it for CinemaBlend.com.

S. DARKO review

by Brian Holcomb

Richard Kelly, the creator of the cult classic Donnie Darko has nothing to do with this Direct to DVD sequel. All I can say is "THANK GOD". I liked the original Donnie released back in 2001 quite a bit though perhaps not as much as some college freshmen who thought it was some kind of religious experience they had between tokes. But I did think that Richard Kelly discovered an interesting hook to make David Lynch styled movies for a larger pop audience by focusing on the subtext of teen angst. The film was a clever amalgamation of John Hughes, J.D. Salinger and Phillip K. Dick all wrapped up in an everyday surrealism very reminiscent of Lynch's work in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

Now, why Kelly couldn't just leave well enough alone is another mystery wrapped inside an enigma. He did the unfortunate thing of going back to his well received first film to create one of those horrific "Director's Cuts" that have plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD extra (Damn you Ridley Scott and your 9,000 versions of Blade Runner!). Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut released in 2004 was supposedly the film Kelly wanted to make all along. Going for a 2010: The Year We Make Contact approach rather than sticking with the glorious ambiguity of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kelly went ahead and tried to provide explanations for every damn thing in his movie. Replacing my own interesting possibilities of what might've happened to poor young Donnie with his own awful and very specific sci-fi mumbo jumbo about Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, and the Manipulated Dead. Bad enough on its own, it was just a precursor for the epic dystopian mumbo jumbo to come in his dead on arrival Southland Tales a few years later. Kelly's first film now seems to have been a accident of sorts, one of the few times where studio imposed cuts actually made the film better.

Unfortunately even though Richard Kelly isn't involved, S. Darko is the kind of film that limps right out of the gate since it really has no reason to exist in the first place. Donnie told a very self contained story and any attempt to come up with new ideas would seem to defy the mythology created in the original. In other words, this film should be as awful as expected. But while it isn't exactly good-it's a lot better than you might imagine, though that may seem like nothing but heresy to the converted.

You can read the rest of my review for CINEMABLEND.COM HERE

STAR TREK:THE REVIEW

STAR TREK
Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
Based on the TV Series created by Gene Roddenberry
Directed by J.J. Abrams
CAST: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Eric Bana, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, Leonard Nimoy, Bruce Greenwood, Winona Ryder, Clifton Collins, Jr., Ben Cross, Tyler Perry, Jennifer Morrison

by Brian Holcomb

Somehow pulling off the magic trick of appealing to the wider mass audience with one foot in Star WARS, this STAR TREK is at once as mythic as Lucas' Joseph Campbell inspired saga and as situationally gripping as any episode of the 60s TV series. There are two major storylines in this reboot, but director J.J. Abrams and writers Orci and Kurtzman are smart enough to just make it play as one. So, evil Romulan Nero (Eric Bana) doesn't do random things-when he kills a Starship captain-it's Kirk's father-when he destroys an entire planet-it is Spock's homeworld of Vulcan. This allows the narrative to focus on its more important story: the developing friendship of two very different beings, the hot blooded and very human James Tiberious Kirk and the mostly logical and half-human-half-Vulcan Spock . Unable to agree on the color of the sky, these two at least have a common enemy.

Kirk's story is of how THIS rebellious punk becomes THAT Starship Captain. It's Campbell's Hero's Journey once again and the biggest flaw could've been it's sheer unimaginability. Kirk has always seemed to be a self righteous space cowboy, a smirking two fisted George W. Bush knocking about the universe in his brash way and indulging in his preference for women of color-especially shades of green and blue-whenever possible.


Having walked onto TV screens fully formed, it seems impossible to imagine Kirk ever not being Kirk-that is, being a kid. But Abrams goes ahead and shows us some infant from General Casting and what appears to be another Culkin-bot as younger versions of Kirk. These aren't very convincing but this is where Abrams is getting better as a filmmaker. If you go fast enough, a good filmmaker can make you forget things like Indiana Jones being dragged underwater for miles lashed to a U-Boat. (See Raiders of the Lost Ark). As Hitchcock once said to a crew member looking for logic in the directionally illogical North By Northwest, "Don't be droll, dear boy."


Droll is the last thing Abrams ever wants to be and as a self sworn student of Movie Brats like Spielberg and Lucas he knows the power that mythic stories can hold over audiences. After Kirk gets into a barroom brawl with some Starfleet goons, he meets Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) who lectures him on making something of his life. Pike encourages him to join the Starfleet Academy and challenges him to do better than his father who once was Captain for 13 minutes and died saving the lives of 800 men and women including Kirk's mother and Kirk himself. This is a moment out of John Ford or Howard Hawks, a classic moment of mythic storytelling in which the young man, having refused the call to heroism his whole life, is made to confront his own destiny. Abrams follows this scene with one featuring Kirk riding his motorcycle alone into a field as the sun rises at dawn. A young man contemplating his future in much the same way as Luke Skywalker in that other Star film that Abrams obviously loves. Abrams knows well that if audiences can buy this moment, then they will go along willingly with this young man on his adventure which will also be their adventure as his choices reflect their own choices.

The most startling thing about this new TREK is how it avoids being incredibly AWFUL. If you think about it, there is no reason that this should ever be good or even great as it is. Trek has long entered the realm of parody and since the characters are so identified with the actors who played them, any attempt to step into those roles should seem like the worst of high school theater.


So, the real trick here is perhaps not pulled off by the writers or the director per se but by the cast. Somehow Chris Pine, the son of CHIPS actor Robert Pine and future winner of a Matt Damon look-a-like contest, is able to invoke the character of Kirk without EVER reminding you of the actor who made the role his own-William Shatner. There's not one iota of mimicry from Pine but at the same time you have no doubt that this man will become the Captain we know and love. Pine is good at looking smart when he behaves recklessly and maybe this is where his Damon-ness is most helpful. Jason Bourne operates as much from instinct as intellect and this is one of the strengths Pine brings to the role.

Zachary Quinto also makes the role of Spock his own and he has the uneviable task of having to actually share screen time with the real Spock-Leonard Nimoy. Quinto's Spock is still dealing with his emotions in a more raw way and the actor seems to channel as much of the classic Spock as the slightly unfamiliar one from the original pilot The Cage in which Spock was somewhat more emotional. Here Spock seems quite open to the shows of affection from Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and inclined to lose his temper when baited by Kirk.

The rest of the cast works extraordinarilly well in their respective roles, each taking a slightly different tactic in making the roles their own. Karl Urban steals many scenes with his near pitch perfect mimicry of DeForest Kelly's very particular voice and speech patterns. Along with Anton Yelchin's "V" challenged Chekhov, Bones is a character almost completely defined by the way he speaks-Urban's achievement is to do this without resorting to cariacature. Yelchin is primarily comic relief but the actor captures Chekhov's youth and is able to display his quirky intelligence in several scenes. One of the strengths of Orci and Kurtzman's script is the way they give each character a turn onscreen in the middle of the action to contribute something of their own. Sulu is known for his fencing so here he gets to best some Romulans with his saber and even save Kirk. Simon Pegg as Scotty is Simon Pegg with a Scottish accent but this is exactly right. He gets to beam his shipmates all over the place with the kind of professionalism James Doohan would approve of. Zoe Saldana is able to take the 60s Uhura and take away the issue of color. This Uhura is simply a valued member of the team, strong in her convictions but without losing her sensitivity to feelings, particularly those of Mr. Spock.


A note must be made of Bruce Greenwood's very strong performance as Captain Christopher Pike and of Eric Bana's choices as Nero. Greenwood's role may seem throwaway but it's of great importance to the story in actuality. Pike HAS to immediately evoke the honor and courage that that command requires. It is Pike whose prescence onscreen is the example set for Kirk and for us to understand what defines this duty and responsibility. Without an actor of quiet strength in this role, these ideas would merely be abstract instead of immediate.

Bana is a really good actor himself. Watch five seconds of Chopper followed by Munich and most would be instantly convinced. But his performance as Nero is perhaps too psychologically credible for a Star Trek film. The script doesn't help him here as Nero isn't given any more dimensions outside of his thirst for revenge. Bana gets the intensity just right but not the size. It's certainly good enough for the film and never hurts the storytelling but there is little of the Shakespearian quality needed for these Trek villains. Bana needed to keep the intensity but broaden the range of his performance a bit. Maybe this is where Shatner could've come in to participate. He could've easily coached Bana in how to get big without losing the plot.

Production wise, the film is damn near faultless. We've reached the zenith of special effects now where the painted and the photographed have lost their dividing lines. The sound mix is simply stunning. It's the work of Ben Burtt whose work on the Star Wars films defined the modern space epic. There are moments where the mix achieves poetry-as when Kirk and Sulu "spacedive" into the atmosphere of Planet Vulcan and the sound is cut off-leaving the dead silence of space and just the faint sound of breathing.

The sets and costumes are a wonderful evocation of the original '60s look but just tweaked enough to lose the camp value and become believable. Abrams then does something very smart with the excellent effects, sets and costumes-He ignores them. Never does the camera dwell on anything for its own good-every shot is there to further the story, nothing more. The result of this is a kind of space realism-we see things that look complex in the background and this helps us believe in the world of the story.

The biggest letdown is the score by the usually fantastic Michael Giacchino. There's nothing wrong with the scoring of the action pieces in the film, these are superbly done. What the film lacks is a strong and thrilling theme to get the film off to a big start when the STAR TREK title fills the screen. What we get is most underwhelming and remains underwhelming in other "big" moments in the film such as the reveal of the Starship Enterprise for the first time. It's a serviceable score but perhaps a bit too cerebral for its own good. What's missing is the guts of it. The big, powerful sound that Jerry Goldsmith used to bring to these films or James Horner's driving war themes in The Wrath of Khan. That said, there is great wit with which Alexander Courage's original theme is brought in at the end and Giacchino adapts it wonderfully with some very nice percussion.


Where Abrams still has a way to go to match his idols is in his staging. There is a lack of economy in some of his visual storytelling that would be effortless for Spielberg, for example. Where Spielberg can make a scene "sing" with a single tracking shot and downward tilt, Abrams still resorts to the scissors and breaks the action down into tiny pieces. A cut from one close-up to another close-up is a lot easier to shoot than to create more complex blocking with actor and camera and with the foreground and background. Still, this is only Abrams' second feature film not counting his work on the pilots of Alias and Lost. I'm sure he'll learn fast and soon his work will go where no man has gone before. Or something like that.

FRINGE: "Bad Dreams"

An Idiot Box Review by Brian Holcomb

So last night's episode "Bad Dreams" was the work of writer and debuting director Akiva Goldsman. This is the man behind the worst Batman script ever written, Batman and Robin. He also won an Academy Award for the worst script ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, A Beautiful Mind. So, one can say that expectations were quite low, lower in fact than those for many of the episodes of this still wet behind the ears series. But this turned out to be a pleasant surprise, probably the best episode yet.


Olivia ( Anna Torv) is having terrible nightmares in which she sees herself killing people. At least that's what she thinks she's doing when she dreams of pushing a young mother off a subway platform to be crushed by the incoming train. Of course, the dream has occurred in real life-in Grand Central Station in NYC-but the woman is seen on the security cam to just jump off the platform by herself, leaving her child in her stroller to witness the horrible event.

The Fringe team gets together to help Olivia solve her problem which turns out to be more complex than the usual "seeing through the eyes of the killer" trope expected. It turns out to be more of a "feeling what the killer is feeling" experience and is directly connected to the series' developing mytharc involving the US government's secret drug testing on children. Like much of Abrams' other work, the central concept may be derivative (in this case a twist on Cronenberg's Scanners) but the end product swallows up ideas at such a prodigious rate that it becomes less about what idea came from where than in how many of these ideas can be consumed in one sitting as one twist gives way to the next. Where Chris Carter cherry picked one classic horror-sci-fi movie idea at a time for each episode of The X-files, Fringe has no problem starting with a scene that looks to be an homage to Brian DePalma's homage to Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables and ending with a final act that's a much more effective version of M. Night Shyamalan's endless and lame The Happening.

It's a tightly crafted little story that weaves its "monster of the week" very well within its bigger serial story. We learn more about Olivia's past and the secret that Walter (John Noble) is holding from her. We get some more foreshadowing of a romance between Olivia and Peter (Joshua Jackson). As in all the episodes thus far, there's always some eruption of strangeness or quirkiness that suggests a madman hiding among the writing staff. This week we get a surprising moment of Torv kissing a female stripper while in a hypnotic trance and her "experiencing" the male killer's orgasm following intercourse. The show ends with an old videotape that Walter digs up featuring a young girl in what appears to be a cruel experiment. Offscreen a sinister and gravelly voiced scientist can be heard giving Walter instructions. I wonder who this could be...

THE DESCENT Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

Wow. This mediocre and very derivative British horror movie has finally beached itself onto our shores riding a massive tsunami sized wave of online hype and hope. It's really nothing more than your run of the mill "old dark house" plot, with a group of young women who get lost in some caves instead of a house or a spaceship or a summer camp or the outback and are picked off one by one by some creatures who look like relatives of Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings". These underground dwellers may have once been human but have since evolved to live and hunt in total darkness. And that's about it.

Technically well made, writer-director Neil Marshall has obviously kept his DVD player spinning for days studying all of the classics and simply taking wholesale everything he needed like a Vanilla Ice "Under Pressure". But the elements he's Frankensteined together do not cohere into anything resembling a good story, instead seeming like an anthology of classic horror riffs-a kind of "Horror Movies for Dummies" primer.

Which makes it all the more bizarre is that it's the horror film fans themselves that have hyped this movie up on the net.When false hype is fed by desperate hope the results are insane blurbs like, "The greatest horror film of the last 10 years" or "The best cave dwelling mutant horror movie since 'The Mole People'!". It only demonstrates how bad the horror genre has become, that fans will go into orgasmic exhaltations over almost any movie that will risk an R-rating in the US multiplex market.

The true horror lies in the fact that Marshall seems to have real talent as a film director and could actually make some authentic horror classics if given better source material. The material provided here is paper thin: After a tragic prologue lifted from the screenplay structures of "The Changeling" "Don't Look Now" and "Dead Calm", "The Descent" settles into it's main narrative of six young ladies who decide to reclaim a sense of youthful danger in their responsible adult lives by going on a caving expedition in the Appalachian mountains. However, one of them, the American, Juno, decides to lead them to an unmapped and far riskier cave without their knowledge to increase the danger and the excitement. This, of course, proves to be the classic "really bad idea" and a few intense arguments, suspenseful traps and cave-ins later, the horror begins-photographed in scenes so dark they look as though they could've been shot in your basement with the lights off.

There are several quite capably directed jump out of your seat moments, but these all appear quite cheap when you try and follow the logic of the storyline which soon fades into the darkness. A horror film meant to be a surreal fever dream is one thing;"Phantasm" and "Suspiria" never intend to make conventional sense and we're never annoyed. This movie, however, wants to be taken seriously on some level as a real narrative, with some effort to display a mini morality play as well between several of the characters. When the movie works, it ditches the tiresome character material and focuses on the "haunted house" styled shock machine. Marshall knows that these old movie tricks still work and does a quite reasonable job of playing with the whole "now you see me,now you don't" cinematic game. For a short while at least, you feel as though you are watching the genuine article: a new cult classic horror film. But this is soon swept away amid a series of shots and plot turns that appear to be an homage to classic horror cinema.

This "genuine article" turns out to be a Xerox of a Xerox even using a second generation dub of the Ennio Morricone soundtrack from John Carpenter's "The Thing". If we can agree for the moment that "homage" is actually French for "rip-off", that would seem to explain, finally, the appeal of this over-hyped flick to many tired fans. For what is more gratifying to a life long horror movie fan than to watch a movie which is a kind of 90 minute shout out to them. "Hey, man, that's the helicopter shot from 'The Shining'", "Bet you dudes pick up on the reference to 'Apocalypse Now'!", "...the arm is from 'Carrie'", "...or maybe it's the hand in 'Deliverance'","It's definitely the broken leg from 'Deliverance'", "Everything from 'Alien' and 'Aliens'?" We could go on, but why? Yes, Neil Marshall and I like alot of the same movies. I own all of those movies on DVD myself. I just don't feel the urge to do my Karaoke version of them for the fanboys. Especially if I possessed the technical skills of Marshall who perhaps one day will make the genuine article he so admires, creating new classic images and moments that others will feel inspired to copy- beginning the whole cycle anew.

KINETOFILM SCORE: 2.5/5

The ANTI-CHRIST is Coming!

Lars von Trier's Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo.

“I would like to invite you for a tiny glimpse behind the curtain, a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination: into the nature of my fears, into the nature of Antichrist.” LARS VON TRIER

Well, if that doesn't sound just like the opening of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace! Like Werner Herzog, It's ALWAYS hard to tell if Von Trier is kidding.



It's been awhile since we've heard from Von Trier and this film has certainly had its production troubles. But from the looks of it, it seems that Von Trier has crafted a film somewhat closer in style to his early works like The Element of Crime than the dogme and pseudo-dogme approach taken from The Kingdom onward. It also reminds me of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf in its mix of isolation, psychodrama, and surrealistic imagery.

But that remains to be seen...

This is the plot as offered in a press release from Zentropa: A couple lose their little son, and the wife subsequently suffers from terrible anxiety attacks. Her husband is a therapist, and in spite of warnings not to treat people with whom you have close relations, they begin to tackle her fears together, and in the place where her anxiety is strongest: Eden, a deserted cabin in the woods.

The tough therapeutic struggle develops into a battle of the sexes. Her fears inhabit them both, and even he is not exempt from experiencing the merciless evil of nature. Natural brutality takes over and his cool reason is rendered futile. The evil in her runs wild.

HARPER'S ISLAND TV Review

Harper's Island is a gimmick show in the grand but bargain-budget tradition of master showman William Castle and his reality-TV bastard stepchild Mark Burnett. It's best described as And Then There Were None Because I Know What You Did Last Summer When We Were Survivors, but that was probably too long a title to be marketable. The show has been promoted as a "Mystery Event," which is CBS's way of saying it's a miniseries with a conclusive ending—in 13 weeks, to be exact. This is a rarity amid the current vogue for never-ending serials with no hope of a satisfying resolution. For better or worse, Harper's Island will come to a close in the dog days of summer revealing the identity of its mystery killer and answering the age old question, "Who Will Survive"

Survivor was definitely the inspiration for this fictional show's central gimmick. Each week, at least one of the wedding party guests on the isolated titular island will be killed off and Jeff Probst will be on hand to put out their cigars. Not really. But the show's biggest flaw is that it's a gimmick show that doesn't effectively exploit its gimmicky nature. It would be one thing if the script made a real attempt at strong characterizations and a compelling mystery, but based on the sketchy first episode, Friday the 13th Part 3D was more complex and Fred Walton's April Fool's Day much wittier. Read the rest of this review at SLANT MAGAZINE

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

A Review by Brian Holcomb

For the first time since 1971's Diamonds Are Forever, a new Bond film begins pretty much where the last one left off: With the superspy going after the men who killed the woman he loved. This time, though, it's probably only about 5 minutes after the closing frames of Casino Royale which finds 007 (Daniel Craig) racing his Aston-Martin around the dangerous curves of a Monte Carlo mountain road while being pursued by 2,4 or 6 other reckless vehicles. I cannot actually be sure since the editing is so choppy in this Nouvelle Bourne Again style that pretty soon it looks as though we'll be seeing Craig drive the car right off the sprocket holes a'la Daffy Duck.

Marc Forster Is Going To Kick Your Ass

Out of his usual indie drama element, it's obvious that director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) wants to prove his action movie mettle by starting the show off with a bang and he definitely gets the heart racing. But he also begins to seriously tax the very persistence of vision which allows cinema to operate by editing the scene beyond all possible coherence. NOTE TO FUTURE BOND DIRECTORS (and Paul Greengrasshole): A flurry of abstract motion will NEVER equal the excitement of an action scene where the audience can see the geography and clearly understand the stakes facing the hero. An action film is only interesting when it engages the audience in the hero's problems. Look at Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and Bullitt for two examples of character driven action. We want to see STEVE get away with it. Not some random stuntman. Look at the classics of action cinema and you'll see that CONFUSION is never the desired result. But I guess it's just easier to set up 137 cameras to film the action from every conceivable angle and hope for the best in the cutting room. C'mon, only the lame refuse to PRE-VISUALIZE. Here ends the action film soapbox which needs to be opened every time someone makes an action film these days.


No matter-Bond gets away from his pursuers by editing himself subliminally between the frames and after an awfully dissonant Jack Black-Alicia Keys number, the film never looks back. Someone at the Broccoli 007 Factory (AKA Universal Imports, Inc.) must've gotten the notes from ADD sufferers that Casino Royale was lacking in the action department because this entry makes up for it by lathering on the set pieces without regard to any kind of storytelling. The problem is that this film has more plot than 10 Bonds put together and a script that was obviously written around action scenes that were shot before the script was done. They are all clumsily motivated and inserted into this collage editing project.

The plot has something or other to do with a US backed villain (Mathieu Amalric as Roman Polanski) who poses as a liberal environmentalist named Dominic GREENE of all things (this has to be the work of the very literal minded Paul Haggis) but who really plans on stealing the water supply of an entire nation in order to control it's financial "flow". It's like Chinatown in the Middle East and that may be why the whole thing plays as a big yawn. What works in an adult detective story is too much for the comic book world of James Bond no matter how much it wants to ape the Bourne films.

Any gains made by shaking up the Bond formula in the excellent Royale are quickly tossed aside as Quantum returns the series to it's bread and butter and even redesigns SPECTRE for the 21rst century. That, I completely understand. A Bond movie in the real world would take the absurd and make it outlandish. No one wants to watch Bond chase after Osama Bin Laden and switch off his dialysis machine with a bad one liner. On second thought, maybe that would be great? In any case, the new and improved SPECTRE is called QUANTUM and this is easily the best idea for the series as a whole since Bond will have to spend film after film working his way up the ladder to find the man behind the man as it were (I'm sure it'll end up being Woody Allen). This leads to the best sequence in the film, by the way, as Bond forces a series of QUANTUM members to out themselves while attending the opera in their establishment disguises. Forster ALMOSTS gets this scene right, before he trips over his own erect penis while masturbating for deeper meanings. (Forster is no John Boorman, that's for sure, and this isn't Point Blank even when it is...)

There's a lot of stuff that seems to come from the mouth of Paul Haggis here and there. Stuff about the CIA being a-holes dealing with other other a-holes abroad and breaking deals without any moral code. A world lifted form multiple viewings of Syriana and positioning Bond as an enemy of the United States and its corrupt business interests. But since this Bond seems to be beyond morality himself, this isn't exactly a strong theme. Putting a Chandler-esque hero WITH a strong sense of right and wrong among the denizens of the underworld IS a strong story and would allow for stronger thematic points to be made without resorting to editorializing dialogue.

Oh, there are some girls in it, by the way. We're back with the Bond Bimbo formula in which GIRL#1 sleeps with Bond and then ends up as a sacrificial lamb for Bond to get angry about. As though Bond isn't already PISSED OFF beyond repair in the beginning of this film. He gets even more PISSED when he finds the naive Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton) having been killed by someone who probably saw Goldfinger once.



GIRL#2 (Olga Kurylenko) is the REVENGE GIRL archetype. She's a mirror to Bond's desire for vengeance if you want to give the screenplay this kind of credit. Bond doesn't get to sleep with her and maybe that's why she survives.

There's a lot of action in this movie. Boat action, car action, gun action, bedroom action. But it's all been reduced to the level of porn in that the audience is given nothing human to engage with between the action. The audience I saw the film with began immediately to text and talk to their friends whenever the action let up and didn't stop until the action picked up again. Now, this could be seen as the phillistine youth showing their true colors. But I don't think so. I've seen many films in which audiences of similar ages were totally spellbound by a gripping story or situation. I think they saw through the film's BS and realized that this wasn't a complete movie but rather a series of DVD chapter stops. They were merely skipping the boring parts.

But you know, a lot of this griping is just silly, right? It's a Bond film and Bond films have their own scale. This one is definitely better than The Man with the Golden Gun but not nearly as good as Goldeneye to keep it within the gold scale. Daniel Craig is a great Bond. He is the best Bond since Sean Connery. (Actually, he may even be better than Connery but since he arrived late he will have to wait in line.) He's clearly come to chew gum and kick some ass and he's all out of gum (©John Carpenter ,1988). He looks tough in the fight scenes and cool as hell in a tux. Craig, alone, holds the movie together whenever it threatens to completely self-destruct. I just wish Forster let us see more of him.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

It has become somewhat fashionable to confuse nihilism with realism and to credit shallow filmmakers with depth merely because their themes are resoundingly negative. It's a cynical conceit which equates hope with naivete. Jonathan Demme has often been attacked as naive for the supposed la-la land of liberalness he depicts onscreen. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, Gays, Straights, Bush, Obama; everyone is invited to his Starship Enterprise with open arms. The truth lies less in Demme's perceived naivete than in the childish cynicism of his critics. It's cynical to believe that people can never see the humanity in others beyond their social or cultural differences. Demme has never made a film in which these differences were ignored, in fact, they are most often celebrated. Not since the great Jean Renoir has there been a filmmaker more inclined to allow everyone to "have their reasons." In Demme's cinematic world, there are no heroes, no villains, no simple right or wrong and there is nothing naive about that. Amidst the worst of human impulses and self destructiveness, Demme always portrays life as hopeful - not some Capra-esque nirvana of love and redemption but as a tough world full of complex choices and always with the unshakeable conviction that life does, indeed, go on. Even Hannibal Lector at the end of Demme's The Silence of the Lambs is allowed to have an old friend for dinner and the hope of a new life somewhere far from the grip of the FBI.

Rachel Getting Married, Demme's latest film, is like a digest for everything he has stood for as a filmmaker since 1974's women-in-prison classic Caged Heat. In truth, the film often seems less like an actual narrative than a kind of Demme art happening. His sweeping and very democratic visual style seems to have been fused with the ideas behind the Danish Dogme movement and the all inclusive collaborative cinematic murals of Robert Altman. The story is simplicity itself: On a weekend pass from a rehab facility, recovering addict Kym (Anne Hathaway) comes home to attend her sister Rachel's (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding and is very much aware that all eyes are on her from the instant she's picked up. Her father Paul (Bill Irwin) is way too overprotective, while her sister Rachel seems to want her to vanish, having picked her best friend Emma (Anisa George) over her as maid of honor. But neither of them is a match for her mother, Abby (Debra Winger) whose distance from her children is rivaled only by that of Mary-Tyler Moore in Ordinary People...

To read the rest of this review click HERE

SIX FILMS TO KEEP YOU AWAKE

A DVD Review by Brian Holcomb

Spain isn't exactly the first country to come to mind when discussing the classics of European horror. England probably comes first with Hammer Films and directors like Terence Fisher and Michael Reeves, followed very quickly by Italy with genre auteurs like Mario Bava, Ricardo Freda, and Dario Argento. Joining the English gothic and the Italian giallo, we could even add the "Krimi" to the list and toss Germany into the mix before Spain. After all, Germany was where the genre really began, in the 1920s with masterpieces like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari both providing inspiration for decades of American horror films. But this categorization doesn't account for Spain's own contributions to the genre, no less fascinating for not being more influential. Most of this is due to the fact that the Spanish horror genre is largely eclectic, resulting in no clearly defined waves like the giallo in Italy. From the dreamy loopiness and sometimes simply loopy films of cult favorite Jesus Franco to Paul Naschy's more classical tales of tragic werewolf Waldermar Daninsky, Spanish horror is defined by being ill defined and sometimes generically spliced.

From Amando De Ossorio's Blind Dead series and Jorge Grau'sThe Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue which were designed to cash in on the wave of Romero's Night of the Living Dead to Alejandro Amenabar's Tesis with it's slick American thriller style, Spanish horror filmmakers have often had an eye on the international market. Which brings us to the series of films under review here, six films by six distinctive filmmakers from Spain's past, present, and future of genre filmmaking. As Spain's answer to the American Masters of Horror series, Six Films to Keep You Awake is yet another attempt to sell a series of modestly budgeted genre films to the international market . Produced for Spanish TV, the series is an update of a classic '60s program also called "Films to Keep You Awake".

Taken as a whole, the series of films are a fascinating look at the state of contemporary Spanish horror. Individually, however, the films fall victim to much of the same problems as their Masters of Horror brethren in that the near feature length is both too long and too short to be effective dramatically. The best of the bunch is director Alex de la Iglesia's ( El Crimen Perfecto) The Baby's Room. If you rent or buy this DVD set-start with this one.

STANLEY KUBRICK'S XANADU

Last night the Sundance Channel ran the fascinating documentary by Jon Ronson, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes which was a fine, though far too brief, look at the many thousands of boxes Mr. K kept in storage at his home in England. These boxes contained vast amounts of material, all carefully catalogued and organized, pertaining to all facets of the man's career and life.

It's strange that this private man of whom so much gossip ranged regarding his lunacy and hermitage can be seen so nakedly through his calculated filing. The image one gets is not one of a man OBSESSED but of a man of great intellectual curiosity and method. An obsessed man would merely seem eccentric and quirky in his desire to control the world around him. Kubrick went round that bend and into something far closer to a scientist of the physical universe. This was a man who questioned everything from the font on a movie poster, to the size of his newspaper ads, to the kind of ink best used for writing and the construction of these archive boxes themselves. It appears Mr. K was frustrated with the way the tops of the boxes worked and was intent on finding a design that would allow the lids to sit securely but loose enough to slide off easily. It's most telling that the company constructing the boxes left a random note regarding the box construction that supposedly read, "Fussy customer".

Kubrick didn't think wanting things to work the right way to be fussy and this is the same attention to detail that went into all of his films and which makes them so very unique to this day. He believed that either you care or you don't, there's no in between. That kind of pride and dedication to one's work is something I must say I admire greatly.

I thought that Ronson made a fascinating film, particularly when he played detective and hunted down some of the people who sent Kubrick letters which the director filed as "crank" letters.

If you missed it, here it is:



Or you can find the entire thing on google video:
HERE

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE LOST TAPES

If you head over to MYSTERY MAN ON FILM you'll be in for a real treat. Well, that's kind of an understatement. This may be one of the true Holy Grails for those of us who are fascinated by the creative process. There's a link to a PDF available for download there, a 126 page transcript of the original story conferences for Raiders of the Lost Ark! From January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan spent 9 hours a day for 5 days hashing out the story and characters for their new film and it's all here. I have NO idea how this was allowed to escape and I sincerely doubt that the very controlling Lucas and Spielberg approve of it. But since it's available we now can observe the process with which each idea is suggested, tested, spun over and either developed or thrown away.

It's interesting to see how much of it is dominated by Lucas and how quickly he shifts his roles from Writer to Producer when he dictates that one of Spielberg's ideas is going to "cost another million dollars" and should be dropped. They are confused for a while as to what kind of heroine to put in the picture until Kasdan suggests that Indy had an affair with his mentor's daughter years ago and now she's grown up. They are way too excited to make her very underage and initially they want her to be as young as 10 or 12! But Lucas quickly becomes more conservative on this issue and says that they should make her 15, because at 16 or 17 it's no longer interesting. Lucas seems very concerned with keeping Indy cool but still a role model for children. I am sure he was thinking about his future deals with Kenner for the toys.

There is a constant discussion and argument over budget versus production value. Lots of talk about Hong Kong mogul Run Run Shaw and the use of stock footage. Spielberg seems to want crowds even if he has to steal the shots in Bombay. Lucas is more interested in making great stunts over the spectacle and thinks the money is best spent this way. It's interesting to see how Lucas, whose dime this was to be made on, is watching over the shop while Spielberg who had just come off a lot of bad press for budget overruns on the mega-bomb 1941 is more than happy to spend whatever necessary to make a great movie. I really think that the tug of war between these two, balanced by the story smarts of Kasdan really clicked, at least this one time.

It is fascinating to see how much Lucas seemed to understand the basics of storytelling at the time, basics which he seems to have lost today in the deserts of Tunisia. Here's a sample form the opening pages of the transcript which show just how much he seems to have understood about storytelling: (G=George Lucas, S=Steven Spielberg, L=Lawrence Kasdan)

G — We'll just talk general ideas, what the concept of
it was. Then I'll get down to going specifically through
the story. Then we will actually get to where we can
start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up
with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is
I figure a code, a general measuring stick perameter.
I can either come up with thirty scenes or sixty scenes
depending on which scale you, want to work on. A thirty
scene thing means that each scene is going to be around
four pages long. A sixty one means that every scene is
going to run twenty pages long. (?) It depends on, part
of it is the... (short gap in the tape) knock some of
these out, and this doesn't work out the way we thought
it would. You can move things around, but it generally
gives you an idea, assuming that what we really want at
the end of all this is a hundred and twenty page script,
or less. But that's where we really want to go. Then
we figure out vaguely what the pace of, how fast it's
going to move and how we're going to do it. I have a
tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff.
I found it easier and it does lay things out. Especially
a thing like this. The basic premise is that it's sort
of a serialesque kind of movie. Meaning that there are
certain things that have to continue to happen. It's
also basically an action piece, for the most part. We
want to keep things interspaced and at the same time
build it. As I build this up, you'll see it's done
vaguely by the numbers.

Generally, the concept is a serial idea. Done like the
Republic serials. As a thirties serial. Which is where
a lot of stuff comes from anyway. One of the main ideas
was to have, depending on whether it would be every ten
minutes or every twenty minutes, a sort of a cliffhanger
situation that we get our hero into. If it's every ten
minutes we do it twelve times. I think that may be a
little much. Six times is plenty.

S — And each cliffhanger is better than the one before.

G — That is the progression we have to do. It's hard
to come up with. The trouble with cliff hangers is, you
get somebody into something, you sort have to get them
out in a plausible way. A believable way, anyway.
That's another important concept of the movie — that it
be totally believable. It's a spaghetti western, only
it takes place in the thirties. Or it's James Bond and
it takes place in the thirties. Except James Bond tends
to get a little outrageous at times. We're going to take
the.unrealistic side of it off. and make it more like the
Clint Eastwood westerns.

G — The thing with this is, we want to make a very
believable character. We want him to be extremely good
at what he does, as is the Clint Eastwood character
or the James Bond character. James Bond and the man
with no name were very good at what they did. They
were very, fast with a gun. they were very slick, they
were very:professional. They were Supermen.

S — Like Mifune.

G — Yes, like Mifune. He's a real professional. He's
really good. And that is the key to the whole thing.
That's something you don't see that much anymore.

S — And one of the things that really helped Mifune in
all the Kurosawa movies is that he was always surrounded
by really inept characters, real silly buffoons, which
made him so much more majestic. If there are occasions
where he comes up against, not the arch-villian, but
the people around him shouldn't be the smartest...

G — Well, they shouldn't be buffoons. The one thing
we're going to do is make a very good period piece,
that is realistic and believable. A thirties movie in
the, even in the Sam Spade genre. Even in the Maltese
Falcon there were some pretty goofy characters, but
they were all pretty real in their own bizarre way.

S — Elijah Cook.

G-Elisha Cook might~not have"been-the brightest person"
in the world. In a way he was the buffoon of the piece,
but at the same time he was very dangerous and he was
very... They were strong characters. If we keep it
that mode of believability...

S — It's just like you don't put Lee Van Cleef as an
accomplice to... (garbled)

G — No, you put Eli Wallich.- Did you see "The Good, The
Bad And the Ugly"? The Eli Wallich character is a goofy
character, but at the same time he's very dangerous and
he's very funny and he's ... We can have that kind of
thing. The main thing is for him to be a super hero in
the best sense of the word, which is John Wayne, Clint
Eastwood, Sean Connery tradition of a man who we can all
look up to and say, "Now there's somebody who really
knows his job. He's really good at what he does and he's
a very dangerous person. But at the same time we're
putting him in the kind of Bogart mold, like "Treasure of
Sierra Madre" or ...

S — Or even the Clark Gable thing we talked about.

G — Yeah, the Clark Gable mold. The fact that he is slightly
scruffy. You don't know it until it happens.

Now, several aspects that we've discussed before: The image
of him which is the strongest image is the "Treasure Of
Sierra Madre" outfit, which is the khaki pants, he's
got the leather jacket, that sort of felt hat, and the
pistol and holster with a World War One sort of flap over
it. He's going into the jtingle carrying his gun. The
other thing we've added to him, which may be fun, is a
bull whip. That's really his trade mark. That's really
what he's good at. He has a pistol, and he's probably
very good at that, but at the same time he happens to be
very good with a bull whip. It's really more of a hobby
than anything else. Maybe he came from Montana, someplace,
and he... There are freaks who love bull whips. They just
do it all the time. It's a device that hasn't been used
in a long time.

S — You can knock somebody' s belt off and the guys pants
fall down.

Tellingly, Lucas doesn't seem to like this idea too much as it seems more broad than the rough and tumble adventure he has in mind(Which is exactly why I think RAIDERS stands tall above its more splatstickey sequels .) Flashforward to last summer and Crystal Skull is filled with this garbage (seemingly very much approved by the new Jar Jar mad Lucas), like Shia Lebouf swinging on vines a'la Tarzan following a horde of monkeys. Ugh.

"Pinteresque"

The great English playwright and Nobel prize winner Harold Pinter passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 78. Very few artists can claim to have had their very name become an adjective found in most standard dictionaries but Pinter is on that short list. Here is what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "Pinteresque":

"Of or relating to the plays of Harold Pinter; marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace."

Well, what does that tell us? It's basically like saying that "Hitchcockian" refers to the suspense and tension in the films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. If you haven't seen it yourself it doesn't mean much at all. Hitchcock's brand of black humored, sophisticated suspense is quite different from what might be expected.

Pinter was for many years a mystery to me. Absurdly, I first tried to read The Birthday Party when I was 12 years old. I wasn't THAT precocious-at least not about literature. Movies were my thing and at that time I making my way through the films of William Friedkin. Friedkin directed a film version of the play scripted by Pinter himself and starring Robert Shaw in 1968. It was a film I could not find at the time. So, when I found the play at the local library I dove into it to imagine what kind of tense and shocking thriller the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist could've made of it. What I discovered instead was a strange text full of specific words in strange combinations about some guy named Stanley who may or may not be on the run from some people who may or may not intend to harm him. Maybe. Nothing was certain the least of all the plot which at 12 years old is basically what seems to be the entire purpose of narrative fiction. I basically tossed the play aside as pointless and inexplicable. The only part I liked was a three page scene in which two strange men, Goldberg and McCann interrogate Stanley using a rythmic dialogue that reminded me of the famous "Who's on First?" sketch by Abbott & Costello. But again, it was words, words, in strange alternations with these...weird...PAUSES...

Years later I gave Pinter a second chance with something a little easier The Dumb Waiter which is like Quentin Tarantino's entire career in one act. I had just read Waiting for Godot and suddenly the whole thing clicked. I "got" what Pinter was all about, at least early Pinter which is what I prefer. He seemed to be combining in a wholly original, almost intuitive way the kind of absurdist theater of Becket and Ionesco with theoretically more realistic settings and a slangy language that sounded like snatches of overheard conversations edited to a cadence. The Dumb Waiter is like a gangster version of Godot with the two hitmen waiting forever for their orders to kill-neither understands their place in the universe any more than Vladimir or Estragon in Becket's play. But what Pinter adds to the mix is this veil of language- a veil so thick that no one can break through the games of wordplay, of question and non-answer, of pause before response.

This is the brilliance of Pinter's conversations-perfectly sculpted to dance around meaning, to create ambiguity as to what the REAL meaning might be. This goes beyond subtext, it's a kind of SUBconcious text. In Pinter's final screenplay, his reworking of Anthony Schaffer's much more straightforward thriller Sleuth, we get gems like the following quid pro quo between Michael Caine and his wife's new lover a struggling actor played by Jude Law:

Andrew: Why have I never heard of you?
Milo: You will before long.
Andrew: Really?
Milo: In Spades.
Andrew: That sounds threatening.
Milo: Does it?
Andrew: Doesn’t it?

So much of what makes Pinter unique can be found in that exchange of words-all in concealment of meaning. The two men are merely testing each other and it starts with words.The "air of menace" the OED refers to is there as well "in spades." But this is something that one needs to see performed in order to understand. Pinter was a stickler for his "...", "PAUSES", and "SILENCES" each with it's own meaning. When I finally saw The Birthday Party I saw how actors like Shaw and Patrick Magee could bring this menace between the lines alive. Watch this clipto see what I mean:



Pinter's influence is incalculable. David Mamet and Patrick Marber are clearly working in his shadow in the theater while Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson exhibit his use of quiet tension on the big screen. Along with Kafka, he has meant a great deal to me in my own writing and I continue to return to his work like a fountain of inspiration.

For more info check out my review of Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth HERE

Exorcist II: The Heretic Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

There's something to be said for directorial ambition. It's common to lay blame whenever a filmmaker overreaches instead of congratulating them for not doing the mundane, safe, and obvious. Some filmmakers make a habit of overreaching and John Boorman is near the top of a list that would include at the very least mad geniuses like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, and Terry Gilliam. Boorman is a man with lots of mad ideas swirling uncontrollably in his magpie mind. Sometimes these ideas come together in coherent ways and we get films like Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, Hope and Glory and The General. When they come together like a mixed stew we get films like Zardoz, Leo the Lost and, of course, Exorcist II: The Heretic.

I have to admit that I don't think there is a great divide between the two forms of madness.

This film is basically reviled by everyone. It's greeted with camp derision the moment it's brought up in conversation. Well, that's because it's completely and utterly batshit insane. Taken on its OWN terms, without expectation, the film is still pretty Godawful. However, it remains essential viewing for it's sheer ambition and reach which is amazing. No film could achieve it's goals and certainly not a sequel to a box office hit with an expectation set of its own.

Eschewing the procedural format of it's predecessor, Boorman places the follow-up square within a world of magic and fantasy-a world not so different from those depicted in Boorman's earlier Zardoz or later Excalibur. This is the premise on which the film starts and it is already a problem. The classical horror film (which Friedkin's The Exorcist still is despite its extremes) asks the audience to suspend their disbelief by having the supernatural invade what appears to be a fairly natural, acceptably normal world. The original film used realistic location photography, naturalistic and motivated lighting, and subdued performances in order to create an everyday mundanity. Defiantly, The Heretic begins on the wings of a demon and is set in a New York City as imagined by a blind and insane Chinese production designer.

A research facility made up of glass, mad scientist helmets ("The SYNCHRONIZER") which can link 2 separate brain waves, a constantly sweating Richard Burton acting up a storm, really cheap looking FX, James Earl Jones as Kokumo, Ned Beatty flying a helicopter, and dialogue that sounds like something was lost in translation from the original Swahili basically do everything possible to create disbelief rather than suspend it.

But the thing is, the film has so many more ideas than Friedkin's film it is a shame Boorman couldn't pull it off. He seems trapped between the literal and the metaphorical, between the realism of the original film which he has to respect on the one hand and the personal desire to make a film that exists on a whole different plane altogether. It seems that he and "creative associate" Rospo Pallenberg wanted to challenge the conventions of narrative cinema in which stories are told through plot and character and to take off into something much more visual and suggestive. A film told through symbolic imagery and associative ideas. This could've been amazing and would've brought back some of the magic of the silent film, particularly the early films of Fritz Lang. But note that I said "Silent Film". When The Heretic is driven by Boorman's imagery and Ennio Morricone's loud and incredible Disco hell score, the film begins to soar. It comes crashing down the moment Linda Blair says something abstract and inexplicable to Richard Burton, however, since this makes us instantly realize how absurd the film is. It may be that the best way to watch The Heretic is to shut off the soundtrack and play a CD of Goblin's Suspiria score as accompaniment.

KINETOFILM SCORE: 2/5

"AND THE NOMINEES ARE..."

These are the nominations for the 81rst annual Academy Awards. What started as a cookout in my backyard has blossomed into a major event. About every single nomination was totally predictable but I am glad that The Dark Knight was kept out of the major categories. Batgeeks around the world will weep. Too bad. Build a better Batman. I made some comments on this list, my choice in each category is in BOLD.

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Richard Jenkins - The Visitor
Frank Langella - Frost / Nixon(This is the" Joel Grey Effect")
Sean Penn - Milk(Been there, done that,gay Jeff Spicoli)
Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Rourke was once one of the best actors around-just watch his work in Diner, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Angel Heart or Year of the Dragon and you'll see what this guy could do. A Brando like combination of exterior toughness but with a very human vulnerability. His performance in The Wrestler is the biggest special effect of the year. There are moments which seem to completely transcend conventional acting and enter the realm of personal revelation in a way I don't know if I've seen since Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Josh Brolin - Milk
Robert Downey Jr. - Tropic Thunder
Phillip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt
Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight(*Will not be present)
Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road

I liked both of these performances equally. Michael Shannon is a good actor who was great in William Friedkin's Bug but he was not a character in Revolutionary Road so much as a bad literary device. Brolin along with James Franco stole Milk.

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie - Changeling
Melissa Leo - Frozen
Meryl Streep - Doubt
Kate Winslet - The Reader

Winslet hands down-she should win, and will win. Glad this was not for Revolutionary Road as that was really a subpar performance and film.

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Amy Adams - Doubt
Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis - Doubt
Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler

This is a hard category as all of these performances were excellent. Marisa Tomei was very efefctive at conveying a life full of emotional wounds in The Wrestler and Amy Adams was so wonderfully fragile in Doubt, a witness to the very personal war of wills between Hoffman and Streep. But I think Penelope was the best here. Very controlled and in command of herself in a way I haven't seen her achieve in the English language. Woody Allen helped a bit I think. Actually, I think this has been the key to his great success over the years: Woody writes dialogue that could almost play itself.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E

I have nothing to say about Animation.

DIRECTING
Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire
Stephen Daldry - The Reader
Clint Eastwood - Changeling
David Fincher - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard - Frost/Nixon

All of the nominees pale in comparison to Boyle's truly cinematic work. While the others made fine films they remain what Hitchcock once called "photographs of people talking" not cinema. Watch 10 seconds of Slumdog and you'll feel the electric charge that comes from a director who writes stories with his lens.

BEST PICTURE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost / Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Milk is a run of the mill TV movie and doesn't deserve to be here.

WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Doubt(play should be disqualified)
Frost/Nixon(play should be disqualified)
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

I still think it's funny how Hollywood just cannot stop from typecasting even their screenwriters. Eric Roth was hired to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" because he's the screenwriter of the very "Button" like Forrest Gump. In fact there is a great comparison video HERE of the major scenes from both films which illustrate the similarities.

WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)
Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk
Wall-E

MUSIC (SCORE)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Defiance
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E

A.R. Rahman's score is one of the key ingredients of Slumdog. But I'm actually disappointed not to see THE DARK KNIGHT here. That score was very subtle and clever and I think is one of the reasons why Heath Ledger's performance was so striking.

MUSIC (SONG)
"Down to Earth" - Wall-E (Peter Gabriel)
"Jai Ho" - Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman)
"O Saya" - Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman & Maya Arulpragasam)

Slumdog is driven by it's score and this song makes for a real crowd pleasing ending.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water

Man with Balls of Steel could be an alternate title for this film about a very unique madman.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Der Bader Meinhof Komplex
The Class
Departures
Revanche
Waltz with Bashir

ART DIRECTION
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Duchess
Revolutionary Road

The best part of the film. Amazing control of color and space. Partly authentic recreation of a time period, partly a nightmare catalog of '50s appliance hell.

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

COSTUME DESIGN
Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
Milk
Revolutionary Road

You're guess is as good as mine.

FILM EDITING
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost / Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

I know good editing is supposed to be invisible-I just don't agree with the literary restraint of that concept. Orson Welles is my man and his editing was loud, graphic, and very tactile! Slumdog features this approach throughout and it's graphic montages of Mumbai's light and dark are dynamic and thrilling.

MAKEUP
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army

SOUND EDITING
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted

I know I said I didn't have anything to say about Animation but Wall-E's sound editing and design was done by the great Ben Burtt and he should and will win.

SOUND MIXING
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted

Ditto.

VISUAL EFFECTS
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Iron Man
The Dark Knight

TAKEN

Directed by Pierre Morel
Written by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkely, Olivier Rabourdin, Holly Valance, Katie Cassidy

TAKEN is a by-the-numbers action flick from the action factory of Luc Besson and his partner in screenwriting crime Robert Mark Kamen. The thing is, most filmmakers have lost those numbers so this is actually a very welcome old fashioned B-flick. It's the kind of movie that was once commonplace in the days of Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner-a tough, no frills thriller that delivers EXACTLY what it promises and nothing more. Casting is everything in these films and Liam Neeson is both old enough and young enough to be convincing as an aging government agent with the two fisted skills and cat-like reflexes of Jason Bourne. Moreover, Neeson is damn likable which makes anyone who doesn't treat him respectfully in the film seem to deserve the bone crunching attack they receive. Even Famke Janssen, who plays Neeson's disapproving ex-wife, seems to deserve to be punched in the solar plexis for giving this cool dad a hard time. So what if he didn't have all the time in the world to spend with his little girl? The cats in the cradle Harry Chapin, daddy was busy keeping the world from blowing up. Give a guy some slack already!

If you've seen the trailer, you know the plot. If you haven't, it boils down to this: White slavery organization kidnaps a pair of naive teenage girls on their first trip to Europe not knowing that one of them (Maggie Grace) is the daughter of a retired James Bond who lets them know in no uncertain terms that if they don't let his daughter go, he will find them and when he does, he will kill them. Quite honestly, this set up is so full of clarity that there's no way anyone can watch the trailer and not think that they will at least catch some of this when it hits HBO. Besson and Kamen do not come up with anything new here but that's because they know no one has come to see an art flick. Director Pierre Morel shoots the action directly without any kind of post John Woo or Sam Peckinpah fussiness. Sure, the editing is fast but not as fast as it was in the frenetic Quantum of Solace-I could still figure out where the good guys and the bad guys were. These three men know how to play the genre game like old pros and deliver the hard edged action that their audience came to see. This is not a movie about moral dilemmas-it's about a father who will rip out your eyeballs if you don't give him his daughter back. Maybe Neeson's Bryan Mills will feel sorry later and confess his sins to a Priest or bartender but thank God it's not in this movie-the end credits roll without mercy. Enjoy this one with some popcorn and don't worry about the poor drug addicted girl Neeson leaves in a cheap hotel room on an IV drip. Besson and Kamen didn't.

MIRRORS

Cast: Keifer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck, Mary Beth Peil, Jason Flemying
Screenplay by Alexandre Aja & Gregory Levasseur
Produced by Alexandra Milchan, Marc Sternberg, Gregory Levasseur
Directed by Alexandre Aja

Ben Carson (Keifer Sutherland) is on extended leave from the NYPD after accidentally shooting a man. This tragedy has left him a broken man, a violent tempered alcoholic who has alienated everyone around him including his wife (Paula Patton) and children who have left him. He moves in with his sister (Amy Smart) and tries to put his life back together again by taking a job as night watchman in the old, rundown Mayflower Department Store. Ben very quickly learns that there is a terrible secret within the dark mirrors of the burned out building, secrets that seem to involve an old insane asylum that once stood in its place and a demonic force that kills all those it enchants. Ben soon discovers that only he can stop the evil force which seems bent on killing his wife and children as well.

In Dario Argento's Suspiria Udo Kier tells Jessica Harper that "bad luck isn't caused by broken mirrors, but by broken minds". Well after making the by-the-numbers and just plain silly Mirrors, director Alexandre Aja might think otherwise. He was on a lucky streak for the last few years, with the international success of his debut feature Haute Tension followed up by his American debut, the remake of Wes Craven's The HIlls Have Eyes. That film was the only one of the current spate '70s cult horror classic remakes to actually improve upon the original. But now it looks like it'll be at least 7 years before he'll be able to sweep up the pieces of this broken mirror.

There are many reasons why a film fails to work given the best intentions of its creators. Aja seems to have wanted to transcend the genre with a film that's partly a character study and, indeed, he and Sutherland work well to create a portrait of a man on the brink of a complete nervous breakdown. But these dramatics and long scenes of boring exposition do not sit well when weaved together with screeching demons and fiery deaths.

The most significant problem is the subgenre itself. Mirrors is a classical ghost story, a narrative tradition with many specific and familiar conventions. Subtlety is the driving force of these stories. A realistic setting and characters are slowly and very methodically invaded upon by events that may be supernatural. Often there is a mystery involving some dark secret in the past that must be solved and only in the very end are the angry spirits finally given their due and put to rest.

Currently it has been fashionable to rework this tradition within the commercially popular form of J-Horror. But this is a clash of cultures that does not work as well as it should. The problem is that the classical ghost story is logical as far as any story involving the possibly living dead could be. The ghost or ghosts are causing trouble for a reason. A reason it takes the hero 90 minutes and three acts to discover. However, in Asian horror the ghosts are far more malevolent and inexplicable. There is very little reason and the only logic is that of a nightmare.

Many of the greatest horror films play out on this level. Films as diverse as Carl Dreyer's Vampyr to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm and Dario Argento's aforementioned Suspiria do not tell so much as suggest the plots of their cryptic stories. By focusing their films on mood and atmosphere, they side step most of the silliness that comes from characters talking to each other about "vampires", "witches" and "demons". The horror is more abstract and therefore more personal. The nightmarish mood isn't dispelled every time the local professor is asked, "So, tell me, just what ARE werewolves?"

Aja is a filmmaker singularly unsuited to the classical ghost story. His brand of horror is driven by savage, torturous violence and in your face blood-letting in the great French tradition of Grand Guignol. Had he tossed out the needs of the classical ghost story and focused on creating a nightmare of the fantastique he may have created a film that could stand proud next to those by Dreyer, Coscarelli and Argento. He certainly had the visual imagination to pull it off-the design of the abandoned Mayflower hotel is hard to forget. As it is now, though, the film suffers from being pulled in too many contradictory directions.

Righteous Kill Review

Pacino. DeNiro. Armed and dangerous. In a cop drama. In NYC. Together. Written by the writer of Inside Man. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, the fact that it doesn't live up to expectations is not unexpected. Those are some lofty expectations. Both Don Corleones in the same movie? Scarface and Travis Bickle mixing it up as New York's finest? Any movie with those ingredients should be arrested for being too damn cool; for having more quotable lines than Goodfellas or Heat. But the trouble with Righteous Kill isn't just that it's mediocre. It's flat out bad. As in awful. Lame. Boring. What could've gone so wrong?

First, and foremost, this movie is somehow NOT directed by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, or Spike Lee. DeNiro initiated the project but I cannot imagine that the director of Fried Green Tomatoes and TV's The Starter Wife was at the top of his list. Jon Avnet is not a bad director in the way a Brett Ratner or Michael Bay might be, but in some ways he's worse, making films that are extraordinarily mundane and by the numbers. He seems to be a filmmaker comfortable with playing for a draw rather than risking losing to win. This one decision fuels the fire for everything else that helps burn the project down. Choosing a director like Avnet means that you have a filmmaker comfortable with making a routine film. For directors like Scorsese, Lee, or DePalma, a film might turn out awful in an absurd way but never a routine one. They would demand greatness all around them and attempt to make something memorable by pushing everyone's boundaries.

To read the rest of my review of the DVD at Cinemablend.com click HERE