Chuck Norris remembers Michael Jackson

When The Jackson 5 were young, I was a six-time undefeated world middleweight karate champion.

-Chuck Norris

Billy Mays is no longer here.

Movie Review: Away We Go (2009)

Away We Go is a movie about two people who are so nice and so passive that their nice passivity might come across as rude and condescending. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are unmarried, self-employed, and at least one of them did not finish college. They live in what amounts to a shack, complete with cardboard windows and fuses that blow at the flip of a switch. They drive a bad car. They are in their thirties. They are expecting a baby. They have no idea what they want to do with life.

Six months into the pregnancy, Burt and Verona have dinner at Burt's parents' house. The two live near Burt's parents as an apparent favor - the expenses they incur on their road trip (rental cars, gifts for friends, plane tickets) imply that Burt is doing just fine at his stay-at-home job - but they aren't exactly appreciative. After an awkward conversation about the baby (Burt's mom wants to know how black it'll be), Jerry (Jeff Daniels) and Gloria (Catherine O'Hera) drop their big news: They'll be moving to Antwerp, before the baby is born.

While that isn't a problem for Burt's parents, who are quick to remind the couple that they've been planning their trip for 15 years, it's certainly a problem for Burt and Verona: What are they going to do?

The short answer is that they won't live in their dilapidated shack, full of the sort of nick-nacks that belong to people who can do everything but can't decide to do just one. The long answer is the film, which is a trip across America, taken by plane, train, and automobile, with a stop in Montreal, which is an under-appreciated city.

Along the way, Burt and Verona meet up with relatives and old friends, normal people and eccentrics. They hope to learn from these people the kind of life they want to provide for their child. For the most part, they are unsuccessful, which is kind of the point.

The movie, a series of vignettes that smash-cut to title cards for the next city they plan on visiting, are either funny, sad, or a bit of both. In Phoenix, they meet with Lilly (Allison Janney), who was Verona's boss in Chicago, a city to which the couple will definitely not be returning. Lilly is an absolutely brutal drunk - it's the early afternoon, and she is hammered. She says awful things about her breasts, her 12-year-old daughter's weight and future sexuality, and her willingness to leave her husband (Jim Gaffigan). What she says is funny and sad. Her family is shellshocked, barely there. Burt and Verona are shocked and don't want to be there.

Their trip takes them from Phoenix to Tuscon to Madison to Montreal to Miami - there are no examples of the absolutely perfect family Burt and Verona wish to emulate. This is familiar ground for director Sam Mendes, whose Revolutionary Road was a powerful movie about the tension between two people who, on the surface, have a perfect relationship. By contrast, Away We Go is a much lighter movie, but it still carries a lot of weight. How many of us have inconsiderate family members, insufferable drunks, and whacked out losers in our lives? The friends with the near-perfect relationship? The sibling in need?

Burt and Verona are passive to a certain point, and they are truly, sincerely nice people - the kind of people your parents want you to be friends with. Maybe it seems strange that the movie's perfect couple is off looking for another couple to emulate, not realizing that most of the people they visit with envy them for being every bit the couple they aren't, even without tying the knot. If anything, it proves that Burt and Verona aren't rude and condescending people at all. If they were, why bother with living by Burt's parents in the first place?

In a lot of ways, this movie could have fallen flat on its face. The end of the film is predictable, even if the situations Burt and Verona observe are murky and uncertain. I felt that there was a need for that though - the protagonists are deserving of nice things; a bleak outlook would have been unnecessarily overwrought and without explanation.

It's the acting that propels just about everything. Krasinski shows that he has chops beyond staring into a camera, at Jenna Fischer, or reacting to what's going on around him in the Office. I'd much prefer to see him in movies than Rainn Wilson. The real surprise of the movie is Rudolph, who was always teetering on the brink of being a main player on Saturday Night Live, but just never seemed to take off. Her character is the emotional center of the movie, the mother who doesn't want to screw everything up, the girl whose parents died early in her life, the thirtysomething who wants to grow up.

The supporting cast is also stellar, but special credit goes to Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing a childhood friend of Burt's who grew up, changed her name to LN, and wound up indoctrinated in late-1960's hippie psychobabble. She hates strollers because they involve a constant pushing away of children, for example. The character is entirely weird, and I have a hard time believing that a university would employ such a woman (at least one co-worker seems to hate her), but Gyllenhall effectively skewers academia - its eccentricities and its potential ugliness. She has the best line in the movie, about why there are so many seahorses in her home.

Some smugness might creep in at the edges, but I didn't find fault with the characters. As a quirky road trip movie, Away We Go is aiming for Little Miss Sunshine, right down to the uplifting music playing in the background as the couple's boxy, awful little car drives out into the distance. The music doesn't change when the car does. It is all Alexi Murdoch on the soundtrack, doing his best to emulate Nick Drake, who kept taking me out of the picture. Little Miss Sunshine had its fair share of indie-folk darlings doing songs, but they really were in the background, lyrics cut for the theatrical flare of the music. Away We Go also felt much less organic than the standard bearer for this kind of movie. There are times when Burt and Verona seem like aliens being exposed to various facets of the human experience for the first time, likely because the script necessitates that the two be pure and naïve so they can run through a gamut of depressing, awkward American home-life scenarios. Maybe it works better with one scenario, one family, one destination, with all the character quirks and life situations in-between. Maybe Mendes, a Brit, doesn't understand the American myth of the open road. Maybe that myth is dying. I don't know, but it's still a game try.

I also don't know if I could call this a comedy - there are laughs to be had, but I have a feeling that they aren't the point. Mendes, working from a script by the talented husband/wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, delivers a somewhat hip slice-of-life/road trip film that examines the secrets lying just beneath the surface of most relationships. It is skeptical, but there's hope. Burt and Verona don't keep secrets. They seem to be doing fine.



Far Fucking Out

Michael Jackson

It was very likely that Michael Jackson was never going to be anything but tabloid fodder for the rest of his life. While he prepared for his curtain call - a 10 show engagement at London's O2 arena that, even with uncertain dates, sold $85 million worth of advance tickets - it was hard to imagine his reemergence as a performer without the headlines, the bizarre interviews, and the videos of his weird superfans espousing their opinions on Jackson's bizarre life.

A cursory glance at celebrity Twitter accounts and music websites reveals that Jackson died well before anybody knew how to classify him. The King of Pop was, maybe even for himself, a mystery. Do we focus on his music, which was great and influential, or do we focus on his personal life, which is full of scandal, even beyond alleged child molestation and plastic surgery disaster? It's a tough call, but I think his death has closed so many doors that his music remains one of the few that is open. Like him or hate him, everybody has some experience with his music.

The first music I happened to own was a cassette tape of the Jackson 5, a compilation that had "ABC" and "I Want You Back" on it. My sister and I played the hell out of that cassette, which is, I think, one of the reasons I got into Motown, then Stax, then Chess, and so on and so forth.

Those songs, as well as a few from Jackson's later career, are still great. When I washed dishes at a banquet hall, after hours of being forced to listen to line dance song after line dance song, "PYT" or "Billie Jean" would play, some white trash guy would try to do the moonwalk on the dance floor, and all would be right with the world. I imagine 20 years from now, those songs will still be playing, and everybody will still know them.

Which is why I think it's insane to be sad for Jackson's passing. The man reached his creative apex in the '80s. When Dangerous was beaten out on the charts by Nirvana's Nevermind, Jackson stopped being relevant...then the tabloid headlines started. By 2001, when Invincible came out, you'd be a liar if you said you were more interested in his music than his personal life. It's been 18 years since Jackson's music was relevant. To put that in perspective, Thriller came out 25 years ago.

So while Jackson's passing and the rumors surrounding it dominate the headlines for the next few weeks (just wait until autopsy results are released), I'll be doing my damnedest to ignore it all. I never much cared to begin with, but now that Jackson is dead, all rumors and speculation about what he did and didn't do are officially nothing more than rumors and speculation. All I'm left with is a cassette tape and the boom box my sister and I played it on. That's how I prefer it.

Best Picture Blow Out

There has been a considerable amount of chatter about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to expand the field of contenders for the main event award - Best Picture - from five nominees to ten. Some like it. Others don't. Some have contested that films like The Dark Knight and Wall-E would have made the cut, had the 81st Awards been contested under these new/old rules. Suggested outside shots: Iron Man and In Bruges.

Obviously, it doesn't make sense to speculate what the impact of this decision is until the nominees are announced, and hardly any films have been released that scream for attention. However, I have a few random observations.

1. This changes nothing, besides allowing a blockbuster and maybe a few controversial indie pics into the mix. The way things are set up right now, an animated movie and a foreign flick are still unlikely to be nominated.

2. Obviously, this is being done to add more drama to the Oscarcast. Last year's was pathetically predictable, as Slumdog Millionaire was dominating the world and could not be stopped. Slumdog vs. The Dark Knight would have been a much more interesting telecast/post-show debate. Theoretically, everybody's office Oscar pool is now a crapshoot. Will that raise ratings? The Academy sure hopes so.

3. The 10-contestant field was seen way back in 1932. It was whittled down to five in 1944. In my opinion, 1941 was the strongest of those years, where John Ford's How Green Was My Valley beat out Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, and Suspicion. The Academy would kill for a five film field as strong as that. Can you name the other five films up for the award that year? Probably not, but here's four that were snubbed: High Sierra, Dumbo, The Wolfman and The Lady Eve.

The long and short of this relative non-story is this: It changes absolutely nothing, and might even water down an already watered down award.

Hopefully, this is the only Oscar-related post until February, 2010.

Movie Review: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen would be a nihilistic masterpiece, if director Michael Bay knew what nihilism was. Here, he has every toy a boy could ever want in a sandbox larger than any director before him, and the end result is a movie that simply doesn't care about it's budget, run-time, plot, characters, or audience. It does, however, care about your money, which the franchise must generate in order to justify more expensive explosions, set pieces, and GM cars that are actually still made by the company (sorry, GMC TopKick pick-up and Hummer H3 - by the time the spotlight shone on you two, you were an anacronism) for the sequel, because it's going to take a hell of a lot of money to match the sound, fury, and nothingness on display here.

Transformers 2, if I can riff on an old critical cliché, plays like an explosion at the hack director factory, if that explosion cost $100 mil. to film. What would have had trouble reaching the finish line is pushed way farther than it can be stretched to 2 hours and 30 minutes of precious time that could be spent saving the whales, curing diseases, and watching more palatable movies, like The Spirit, which was directed by an amateur, sure, but one who was nevertheless able to determine if he was shooting a movie, a music video, or a commercial for, take your pick, cars, beach resorts, or the United States Army.

The movie focuses on Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) just long enough for the CGI to kick in to overdrive. Off he goes to college, having endured high school and an alien civil war. There are his parents, Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White), who are having a hard time letting go. And on the other side of town, working on supercharged cars to the tune of some terrible power ballad, is Sam's girlfriend, Mikaela (Megan Fox), who we will focus on for endless minutes, in slow motion, in soft focus, running, standing still, posing by a phone booth.

Princeton, usually such a nice school, is populated here by conspiracy theorists and mad bakers who sell Sam's mom a pot cookie that makes her go insane and gives her the strength to tackle strangers to the ground. I ate a pot cookie once and fell asleep before a Flaming Lip's concert. I think Transformers 2 might be exagerating the effect of the pot cookie, just a little bit. Sam, in the meantime, is ogled by one of the 50 hottest freshmen on campus and is put to work by his roommate, the chief Robots Live Among Us conspiracy theorist who is later drafted into the war against the Decepticons, proving generally to be whiny and useless.

It seems as though our hero has nothing to do with Transformers anymore, having dismissed Bumblebee (2010 Chevy Camaro) from his life so he can be free to run, jump, and transform with the rest of his friends, who are now under the employ of the U.S. Army. Transformers new and old first appear in Shanghai, where the U.S. Army somehow got permission from the Chinese to apprehend a Decepticon. Naturally, half of the city is destroyed. Naturally, an asshole from outside of the opperation is put in charge by the president (Obama is name dropped, lucky him) to halt the proceedings. Naturally, he is a nuisance and must be disposed of in a bloodless, embarrassing manner by servicemen who are willing to disobey direct orders from the president for the yuks, and so they can get back to the business of uselessly firing machine guns at big robots who are much more interested in punching other big robots. And of course, all of this serves to suck Sam back into the fold.

If any of the above makes sense, I'm sorry for grossly misrepresenting to coherency of this film. Granted a bigger than big budget, Michael Bay gives us a delirious, tweaked out smash-up of product placement, explosions, serious military meetings, Baywatch-esque shots of Megan Fox running in slow motion, explosions, images meant to invoke a sense of patriotism, painfully unfunny comedy, explosions, coming of age scenes, minstrel shows, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, famous scenes from other movies, and explosions. This takes up so much of the movie that we hardly know the names and motivations of any of the new robots, including The Fallen, who is so damn important that he's in the title.

Yes, minstrel shows. Perhaps the worst part of all was the baffling inclusion of new Autobots Mudflap and Skids (Chevy Volt concept car), two sidekicks so terrible they make Jar Jar Binks look like a sure bet for inclusion on the American Film Institute's next 100 Years...100 Heroes/Villains special. The pair are bumbling, idiotic clowns, which isn't bad in itself until you consider their voices, an approximation of street-wise, urban Brooklynese, the gold tooth one of them sports, and their inability to read. Michael Bay, much like George Lucas with Binks, claims that the pair were included for the kids. "I don't know if it's stereotypes," he said. "They are robots, by the way."

Yes, they are robots. Robots from the distant corners of the galaxy, in fact - called to Earth by Optimus Prime at the end of the first movie to defend humanity from the plethora of dumptrucks and kitchen appliances waiting to transform into killing machines with voices like mad Russian scientists. Most of the robots, with the exception of a bearded, British one, speak in generic, booming monotones. Their mannerisms are more boring aunt and uncle than blithering idiot. So why would Skid and Mudflaps come with stereotypes pre-installed? Bay says it's the voice actors, but they aren't the ones who drew a gold tooth on one and had a character ask them the lead-in question to their admission that they can't read. With that said, it could have been a case of runaway voice actor - Bay can't control his own impulses, so why should he control those of his performers?

A close runner-up for worst thing in this movie goes to the human acting on display. While Sam's parents are inexplicable and unnecessary, and while Sam has two modes (cowardice and screaming hero), it is John Turturro's reprisal of Agent Simmons that takes the cake, as he delivers Heroic Speeches and strips to his underwear with shameless abandon. "Remember what I did for my country," he tells Sam's roomate before trudging up a pyramid to note that he is directly underneath a particularly useless Decepticon's wrecking ball testicles, flopping around in the breeze.

This is an awful movie, maybe the worst film Michael Bay has yet to turn out. Considering Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, Bay had to dig deep to out do himself. There is not one single redeeming quality to this film, but people will see it, like it, defend it, and eventually buy it on DVD. There was clapping, cheering, and a smattering of high fives at the showing I went to. I felt alone and confused, unable to tell if it was a sarcastic reaction or not. I'm pretty sure that the guy who found it to be "the most patriotic movie since The Notebook" was just kidding, but maybe he couldn't think of a more patriotic thing than the power of love, and maybe watching a robot kick the American flag off of a bridge in Manhattan only to get his ass kicked by the Army and a bunch of American-made alien car monsters rifled just a tad harder into his red, white, and blue wheelhouse.

One of the worst movies of the decade.



The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain

When Great Reviews Happen to Awful Movies or: Why I'm Paying to See Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

No, I'm not talking about when Entertainment Weekly gives some inferior romantic comedy a B- and goes on about whatever tabloid-worthy relationship the shooting spawned. I'm talking about the kind of mindblowingly awesome diatribe from a respectable film critic that does the exact opposite of what the critic intends.

I had no intention of ever seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen in its opening week. The only reason I was subjected to the first movie, an exercise in bad actors staring unconvincingly at the air in which their CGI co-stars would appear in post-production, was due to a bus trip I took with a group of people who brought all of two DVDs: Transformers and High School Musical. (I was not spared from the later.)

I've done my best to avoid the sequel like the plague. I show up to most movies right before the film starts, missing most trailers. I don't watch much television, and as such have yet to see any teasers. I'm a Ford man, so I haven't stopped to admire the all-new 2010 Camaro, playing the role of Bumblebee. So, what gives?

A one star review by Roger Ebert has convinced me to see this movie in the format most befitting it's terrible nature: the fake IMAX available at the overpriced AMC Theater, which is right below a bar, where I'll be for four hours before the movie starts. I was suckered in by Ebert's first paragraph:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Save me the ticket price? You just guaranteed that I'll be plunking down my $15, thumbs be damned.

It isn't all Ebert's fault - I love going to see just plain awful movies. I can't help it, I've always been like this. During summer breaks in Michigan, my friend Matt and I would walk a mile to the Showcase Cinemas two or three times a week. We saw every tentpole movie, no matter how awful. We saw plenty of dumb action, dumb comedy, dumb, dumb, dumb. We didn't care. Movies were (somewhat) cheap back then, and it was easy to sneak in concessions. We saw maybe 25 films a summer, until the Showcase Cinemas dedicated themselves to Tyler Perry movies.

By then I had a car, and Matt had a job at the movie theater and didn't particularly care for putting down the money he earned sweeping up after slobs like me on movies he was paid to catch the endings of. So I started going to an absolutely massive theater in Canton with Neil, a friend from high school. Movies were more expensive, but between movies I saw with Neil and movies I saw by myself, I managed to take in close to 30 a summer, which is insane if you're not getting paid to do something like that.

We started with the spring movies that managed to straggle into their fifth of sixth week at the theater. The low-budget, poorly made horror films. The video game adaptations. The low ball comedy. Neil ate this stuff up. I made fun of it, as was the tradition at the talkative Showcase Cinemas in Dearborn, a tradition not always appreciated by the three or four other people in the room. We sometimes saw three movies a day, sometimes two and a Detroit Tiger's game, sometimes an actually entertaining movie. Mostly, we ran a contest in our heads - what movie could possibly be worse than The Fog? First Lady in the Water. Then The Happening. Then...

When we both stopped coming home in the summer, the game migrated to the winter, where The Fog ran into stiff competition from January fare like One Missed Call and The Unborn. When you look at Box Office Mojo and wonder how movies like that managed to gross even a paltry $20 mil., I am partly to blame. I know going in to most of these movies that whatever enjoyment I get from them will be from laughing at the movie. I am a snob. I am a cynic. I am a hypocrite. But I only caved on Transformers because I was stuck on a bus.

I know that Neil will be seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen thanks in small part to Michael Bay filming parts of the movie at Penn, presumably because Princeton, the school Penn is standing in for, isn't a photogenic enough collective of rectangular buildings. I'm seeing this movie as an endurance test, like The Spirit, Watchmen, The Love Guru, and Zombie Strippers! before tonight, Jimmy Fallon at Bonnaroo, and the John McCain/Sarah Palin superrally in 2008. If I ever meet the movie that makes me get up and walk away after paying $7.50 (or in this case, $15), I'll have met the movie that killed my great summer tradition, that brought me low, that humbled me.

But it's still Ebert's fault. He envisions Transformers 2 as Michael Bay losing out on a Faustian bargain, as though Bay had a soul to sell in exchange for the big time success that this movie is set to become. One star reviews are not supposed to be ringing endorsements for going out to the midnight premiere, but this one is. We are, after all, enthralled with accidents on the side of the road, plane crashes, train wrecks. Bad movies are, in a way, how I got around to finding this blog's purpose. They are my weakness. My kryptonite.

The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars.

That's exactly the kind of thing I laugh most at. Ebert doesn't know this, but anybody who has been to a movie with me, even once, knows it and either accepts it or wants to kill me where I sit. No movie is safe - not even documentary films at museums - from my enormous, booming laughter.

I do not expect Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen to turn out for the best, like my experience at Speed Racer, which I originally rated a The Dude Abides before realizing that I take this sort of stuff almost seriously. I don't expect that this post clearly explains why I'm paying to see Transformers 2 when Goodbye Solo is playing in my town, or even makes a lick of sense, but I know what I'm doing. If Roger Ebert sat through it, so can I.

Wait, what?

That is Che Guevara's granddaughter, nude except for a bandolier of carrots and a beret, striking a revolutionary pose for, of all things, PETA's new ad-campaign, featuring the slogan "Join the vegetarian revolution," which will target two key markets: South Americans longing to live in a Marxist state, and stoned college kids who skimmed through The Communist Manifesto, rented The Motorcycle Diaries, and bought a $15 dollar t-shirt with Che's face on it sometime around the last Rage Against the Machine concert.

Coupled with their response to Obama's killing a fly during an interview ("He isn't the Buddha," they said on their blog, promising to send Obama a fly catcher that is now among the most popular items on their web store), and the media's weird obsession with both that clip and PETA's "outrage," PETA is riding a wave of publicity unseen since the last time they trotted a naked Pamela Anderson out before the public in another bold attempt to convince red blooded 40-year-old middle-class men to stop buying their wives upscale fur coats.

On top of all that is peta2, which seeks to bring PETA to Gen Y via cuddly logos, cutesy shirts, People Magazine style "Sexiest Vegitarian" contests, and a member base that looks fresh from plundering Hot Topic's last accessories sale. Their summer reading list includes classics like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and, well, no other classics. However, they did get famous "comedian" Andy Dick to join them in protesting that really cool looking McDonalds in Chicago - the huge one, a block from the Hard Rock Cafe. If you listen really hard, you can almost hear them from across the street!



What is the moral of this particular post? With Che Guevara a whopping two degrees of separation from Andy Dick, every iconic image of the late Marxist revolutionary simultaneously lost its meaning.

Thanks a lot, PETA.

Do you know what "schmuck" means in Jewish?

No, I don't, but in Yiddish, it's a prejorative term for an idiot, a moron, a maroon, a loon, a quack, a screwball, an ass, a fool, a ninny, and the 15 people who gathered amongst 30-plus members of the press corps assigned to cover their awful little demonstration against David Letterman, who apparently said something bad about Sarah Palin's kid, the first time David Letterman has ever said anything bad about anybody in his entire career as a professional stand up comedian.



Choice screengrab aside, I like how these 15 people are out there, trying to grab their 15 minutes by the balls. Sure, they may only "watch Leno from time to time" and might "only watch FOX News," but with TEA parties behind us and the money from OBAMANATION bumper stickers already lining the pockets of some smart, fat-cat liberal, what's left for these few, these proud to do but demand Dave be fired because he told a joke in poor taste?

Obviously, to do so in a manner far worse than the way Letterman told his joke. It's probably not necessary to note the difference between Letterman riffing on Palin and some woman calling him a "verbal pedophile" while another calls his son a bastard and his wife a slut. It's funny, but alarming at the same time. I wonder if the woman in yellow knows what "איראָניע" means in English.

Movie Review: Drag Me To Hell (2009)

They say you should never go back.

For Sam Raimi, that should go double. Not only has Raimi moved very far along commercially since he was scrabbling around down the back of the sofa to finance the cult classic The Evil Dead, the rest of the world is still recovering from the massive practical joke he played on it in the form of the impressively dreadful Spider-Man 3 (2007).

So why return now? And why, specifically, to the horror genre he first made his name contributing to, when comparisons will immediately be made with what most people still consider to be the director's masterpiece? Is it simply a comfort zone, or does Raimi actually have something new to say that he couldn't with his previously meagre budgets?

Drag Me To Hell is a cautionary folk tale done with a modern twist. Children in stories who play with matches or sneak into the houses of bears do not experience happy endings. Likewise, Raimi ostensibly tells us in this film, if you work for a bank and refuse a loan to a mad old gypsy woman in order to beat your rival to a promotion, bad things are likely to happen to you. We could, then, look at Drag Me To Hell as a critique on our modernised, dog-eat-dog culture. Within this culture, of job promotions and loose Christianity and status anxiety, many things have been assimilated. Magic is not one of them; thus, the white middle-class characters, subconsciously recognising the mystics as old memetic entities battling against their own redundancy, instinctively shun spiritual healings and reluctantly admit their worth. Aged forces, both dark and light, represented by the elderly antagonist, permeate into this film at the expense of the modern consciousness, and it is the dilemma of the young couple to decide how much they allow in.

This all sounds pretty interesting. But is it anything that Raimi hasn't done before? To invoke the inevitable comparison, anyone who does expect an experience on the level of the Evil Dead might be disappointed. It's not that Drag Me To Hell is massively less funny than its predecessor, nor is it a great deal less frightening (though it is just about beaten in both categories). Certainly it is a worthy thematic successor in that the archetypal students like Ash have been replaced by career-orientated suburbanised twenty-somethings, not making their first forays but rather well on their way to establishing themselves in the adult world. The main issue I have with it is an aesthetic one: like many modern horror films, this suffers from being shot in high definition. Every bit of the budget is put up on screen or into the audio, which can make for quite an unpleasant experience. When someone is thumped in the face by the Lamia, the evil spirit who haunts the film, we are thumped very hard in the eardrums. The Evil Dead looked like hell and benefited from it; this looks very Hollywood and can merely make us physically uncomfortable. Visually it is bright and cheerful, but no more so than B&Q's wallpaper department and you end up wishing for some 8mm grit to work its way into the mix. It's also devoid entirely of any of the interesting shots or camerawork that added to Raimi's previous films.

In addition, it's predictable. As noted, this is unavoidable with a cautionary tale. However, the twist that brings about the inevitable dramatic conclusion is so obvious and uninspired you wonder whether the screenwriters spent more than five seconds coming up with it.

Was this a worthwhile venture? Yes. Just. It is very funny, and serves as another essay on the director's assertion that horror and slapstick follow the same basic principles. But it does not bode well for the intended 2011 remake of the film that made Raimi's career. Nor does it advance Raimi any further as a horror director: he still hovers below or around the likes of Craven rather than challenging Argento-level heavyweights. Weirdly enough, it's also not quite as funny as Spider-Man 3 can be when it's watched by a mind in the right frame. I recommend it for anyone wanting to see Raimi get "back on track" or for horror aficionados who agree that no self-respecting horror director can let the nice middle-class suburban couple get away with being nice middle-class suburban couples.

Really Tied the Room Together

Bonnaroo 2009

I won't be here for the next few days, due to the awesomeness that is Bonnaroo.

Thursday, June 11

Portugal, The Man.: 8:30-9:30


Friday, June 12

Trift Merritt: 12:45 - 1:15
The Dirty Projectors: 1:30 - 2:30
St. Vincent: 3:00 - 4:15
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: 4:45 - 6:00
Al Green: 6:00 - 7:30
Beastie Boys: 8:30 - 10:00
David Byrne: 10:00 - 10:45
Phoenix: 11:30 - 12:15
Public Enemy: 12:30 - 1:45
Girl Talk: 2:15 - 3:45

Saturday, June 13

Bon Iver: 3:30 - 4:45
Jenny Lewis: 5:00 - 6:15
Wilco: 6:15 - 8:00
Bruce Springsteen & the E. Street Band: 9:00 - 12:30
Nine Inch Nails: 1:00 - 3:00
MGMT: 3:00 - 3:45

Sunday, June 14

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: 1:30 - 2:30
Andrew Bird or Okervil River: 4:15 - 5:45
Neko Case: 6:45 - 8:15

And there'll probably be more. See you next week.

Movie Review: Observe and Report (2009)

In what was either a joke or a cloying admission of truth, Seth Rogen appeared on the Daily Show and speculated that the reason Observe and Report got made was because Legendary Pictures and Warner Brothers had a pile of money lying around from the Dark Knight: “You’ve got $500 million lying around, why not blow it on us?”

So they did, and the result is an unmarketable comedy with an unmarketable character released at an unfortunate time – two months after Paul Blart: Mall Cop - and boy did everybody want to draw a line between the two.

The line does not exist. In fact, if Paul Blart met Ronnie Barnhardt anywhere, even a well-lit seating area at the local mall, odds are that Blart would wind up face-down in a pool of his own blood. Observe and Report is not a sweet, well-intentioned comedy – it is angry, it is mean, and it does not care about your feelings. It is also one of the funniest movies of the year.

Mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) gets a big break when the mall comes under assault from a flasher – perhaps the nastiest looking one in film history at that. Ronnie hopes to break the case in order to reach two goals: Becoming a police officer and impressing Brandi (Anna Ferris), a make-up girl who looks like she’s been having too much of a good time for far too long.

Due to his incompetence and the incompetence of his underlings, Ronnie is unable to bring the pervert to justice. He flashes Brandi, which necessitates bringing in the authorities. Ronnie, absolutely committed to his goals, continues his investigation, getting in the way of Detective Harrison (Ray Liota), who stands a much better chance of solving the case.

From there, the plot nosedives into dark territory. If you noticed something a bit off about Ronnie, you’d be right. He’s bipolar, lives at home with his mom (Celia Weston), who the word “alcoholic” does no justice to. It becomes clear that Ronnie is something a bit more than bipolar – a maniacal person you’d find in a shed somewhere stroking the barrel of his gun. In fact, it is his psychological review that damns him in his quest to become a cop, which leads to his eventual break from reality.

Reality is relative though, as Ronnie is able to function in society despite a list of prejudices a mile long, a restraining order against him put out by another employee in the mall, and his take no prisoners method of enforcing the mall’s rules. There are several points in the movie where Ronnie would be arrested, or, at the very least, fired, but his eventual showdown with the cops doesn’t come until much later, and his boss is incredibly lenient despite crippling inefficiency and Ronnie’s psychosis.

Eventually, he succeeds in wooing Brandi, using a combination of alcohol and anti-depressants, both of which are Brandi’s suggestion. This results in Brandi lying nearly comatose in bed, vomit on her pillow, with Ronnie on top of her. It has been suggested that this scene is, essentially, date rape, but Ronnie doesn’t know that. In fact, he stops, which prompts Brandi to wake up and ask “Did I tell you to stop, motherfucker?”

This scene was a big controversy before it was revealed that nobody went out to see the film – did sweet, teddy bear like Seth Rogen just rape one of America’s comedy sweethearts? Why yes, he did, and yeah, that ugly act turns out to be pretty funny. As it turns out, the cliché is true: Comedy isn’t pretty, especially when it’s dark.

Observe and Report is so dark, it’s black. The end, a dreamlike fifteen minute stretch that is absolutely impossible in a world that claims to function on logic and reason, effectively skewers the entire proceedings. Ronnie does a lot of insane, downright illegal things, but he walks away the hero, and yeah, he gets the girl.

But wait – there’s a point to all of this. This is the story, however exaggerated, of an everyday American – a John Q. Public; a Joe the Plumber. It is hard not to watch Ronnie fire his guns at the shooting range and lament that he’s not allowed to carry on the job without thinking of the people who think it’s a good idea to let people carry guns on college campuses, on airplanes, and in national parks. Watching the characters in the film applaud Ronnie’s actions is symbolic of this country – we claim to abhor violence in proving a point but carry signs to Dr. George Tiller’s funeral that read “God Sent the Shooter.” Vigilante justice is illegal, but we cheer on Bernhard Goetz, who was going to be mugged, but just so happened to be carrying an unlicensed revolver. While the paradox isn’t uniquely American, it is uncomfortable, and it is rarely spoken about.

That the subject comes up in a black comedy from a major Hollywood studio is an incredible breath of fresh air. It’s a different kind of movie for nearly everybody involved, minus director Jody Hill, whose The Fist Foot Way was similarly dark-but-vaguely-sweet. Rogen, who splits time between being the voice of kids characters and playing the affable stoner, is dangerous. Ferris, who somehow built up a fair amount of buzz based on her work in the Scary Movie franchise, lives up to the hype as a woman who is as clueless as any other Ferris character, but with a nasty streak a mile wide. I’d go into detail about the other characters, but I do not want to spoil things – for once, the funniest bits do not hit the trailer, and are often the ones that leave you the most uncomfortable.



The Dude Abides

Movie Review: The Hangover (2009)

The Hangover seems to be one of those movies that opens in theaters with a mission to expose how stuffy and boring the tastes of your typical film critic runs. While the camp is not quite as bitterly divided as it was over the earlier (and decidedly more edgy) Observe and Report, The Hangover has, nevertheless, inspired some critics (around 30% or so) to observe that the movie either isn't as hardcore in its raunchiness as the trailer makes it out to be or is, at best, absolutely forgettable - the sort of movie that'll come out in a "WILD & UNRATED VIVA LAS VEGAS EDITION" DVD that will be a staple of most college kid's film collections but will amount to little more.

On the surface, I see where they're coming from. The Hangover features the familiar, misanthropic, stock character types that have been made popular (again) by movies like Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball, and Anchorman. Four friends - Doug (Justin Bartha), Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Stu (Ed Helms), and Phil (Bradley Cooper) - drive to Vegas in the cherriest of Mercedes Benz's to celebrate Doug's impending marriage. Phil is the jerk (a role Bradley Cooper seems to be made for), Stu the cuckolded boyfriend, Alan the lovable idiot, and Doug the responsible, loving husband-to-be.

Doug is the only character who isn't made out to be unlikable in some way shape or form, which seems to be the bread and butter of male-centric comedies these days. Phil, a school teacher, steals money from his students' field trip fund. Stu won't stand up for himself when his girlfriend browbeats him and is constantly in panic mode over one thing or another. Alan, for reasons that aren't made clear, is not allowed within 200 feet of a school. There's probably something wrong with Doug, but the guy has gone missing.

To further stick the poker in the eye of these stuffy critics, the soundtrack is compiled almost exclusively from your local Top 40 radio station, there are celebrity cameos a-plenty, and more pop culture references than Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith could shake four sticks at. If this is what comedy has become, and this does not sound like something you'd like to spend two hours staring at, you may want to bail.

However, after a bit of reflection, I think that the straight-laced among us are simply wrong about The Hangover. This isn't light, fluffy, unlikable, forgettable comedy along the lines of director Todd Phillip's previous work (Road Trip and Old School) - this is something along the lines of Caddyshack or Animal House, comedies that critics used to hate but now bring up whenever they bemoan things like Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Meet the Spartans.

The set-up is simplicity itself: The film starts with Phil calling Doug's soon-to-be wife, five hours before their wedding is supposed to start. They can't find Doug. Skip back to two days later, when things were much simpler. The four go to Vegas, where they book a rather lavish suite at the Caesar's Palace and drink shots of Jaegermeister on the roof, a panoramic view of Sin City laid out beneath them. What ensues afterward is a binge the likes of which only somebody as depraved and drug-addled as Hunter S. Thompson could imagine. While Thompson had the benefit of a journalist's training, a tape recorder, and a startling tolerance for the junk he constantly pumped into his system, Phil, Alan, and Stu have no such luck - they wake up too drunk to remember anything, which is unfortunate, as they quickly face a trashed room, a live chicken, a crying baby, a live tiger, and the fact that they stole a police car. Oh, and they lost Doug. Oh, and Stu lost a tooth and may have done something else he'll come to regret, besides putting the suite in his name.

Their objective is obvious: Find Doug. But to do so requires that they find clues to what exactly they did the night before, which means undoing the considerable amount of damage they did. At this point, the movie shifts from being a dizzying array of verbal humor to being a series of "What the fuck was that" moments. The pay off is the same, and no subject is taboo. Covered: Pedophilia, Julius Caesar, 9/11, the Holocaust, quickie Vegas weddings, belly button piercings, leaving children in cars, Asian penises, fatness, camera phones, stun guns, and Mike Tyson's favorite song.

While The Hangover doesn't quite reach the level of Caddyshack or Animal House, it is the same basic formula - a meaningless quest leads to a series of sketches that ultimately has nothing to do with the main quest. These movies have been a staple of comedy since their release, are often set in frat houses, and are often pale imitations, hampered by poor writing and lame casting. The Hangover is incredibly well written and has a cast that plays their roles perfectly. The ending may seem like a bit of a blow-off, but Doug is such a non-factor in all of this that it doesn't matter.

The Hangover is critic bait - TNT thrown into a barrel of fish. Yeah it's abrasive, combative, misanthropic, and rough around the edges, but that's the point, and there's a message in all of that: If you can't take a joke, fuck off to Land of the Lost. Hollywood needs more of this.



The Dude Abides

David Carradine

Movie Review: Up (2009)

I want to sit in on a Pixar pitch meeting, just to see how many people in the room think from the beginning that a premise like the one behind Up will end up being a great movie. I think a typical, rational person looks at the idea of an old man tying a bunch of balloons to his house so he can travel to South America as a minor entry in Pixar's mostly stellar line-up.

Lucky for us, Pixar doesn't believe in minor work.

Up, as I've mentioned, is about an old man (Carl, voiced by Ed Asner) who ties some balloons to his house so he can float to South Africa, specifically, to Paradise Falls, which he and his wife missed a flight to years before.

Before Carl sets off on his trip, we are given his motivation. As a kid, Carl was a big fan of Charles Muntz (Christopher Plumber), an explorer who finds an incredibly rare skeleton at Paradise Falls that is believed to be a hoax. Disgraced, Muntz declares that the world will never see him again...unless he catches a living specimen. Carl sees all of this play out on the big screen, via a newsreel.

On the way home from the theater, Carl hears noise coming from an abandoned house and decides to check it out. Inside, he meets Ellie (Elie Doctor), who, as fate would have it, becomes his wife. Then, in what might be the best ten minutes of animation this decade, Carl and Ellie grow old together and face the various realities of life. The segment plays out without dialog, instead choosing to use very strong, very human images to show the various heartbreaks and triumphs, large and small, that we all face.

But this is a movie about a man who flies his house.

And he does that, with the aid/hindrance of a young Wilderness Scout named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who is seeking out his last merit badge: Assisting the elderly. They make it to Paradise Falls, meet a talking dog, and have an adventure well beyond any you'd imagine the unlikely tag team of an old man and a young boy possible of having.

While I don't want to spoil what happens after the house lands in South America, it involves Big Subjects for a kids movie. Those big subjects include loss, as Carl talks to an absent Ellie and literally drags their dream house behind him as he and Joseph trek to the falls, loneliness, which both Carl and Joseph experience, and being let down by your heroes. There is lighter fare, and plenty of it - the talking dog device allows for some fun hypothesizing about dog psychology - but none of it is played for a cheap punchline.

Lurking somewhere out in Paradise Falls is Muntz, unseen since his last newsreel. After 70-something years in a jungle with only dogs and the rare poacher to keep him company, one wonders if there wasn't something slightly maniacal just beneath the surface of his superheroic adventures - a need to be praised. I imagine the reaction he'd get upon his return to society would crush him. Maybe he'd get a stub on Wikipedia and a listing on the page for centenarians - a societal shrug of the shoulders, a minimalization of his accomplishments - how many old newsreels do we have lying around, anyway?

If I had to guess at how old Carl is, I'd put him in his mid-70s, which may be generous considering the tennis ball muffled cane he walks with. That last sentence might be a bit ageist, and that may be what the movie is driving at by giving us a plot with an old protagonist, an older antagonist, and sidekicks who aren't supergeniuses who spring to the rescue. For every grandfather whose ever said "Do I have a story for you," only to be ignored in favor of the PSP, there are probably four or five really riveting stories about parachuting into some godawful machine gun nest in the thick of the jungle. Below that, there might be more stories - first jobs, first kisses, hilariously drunken episodes - that go untold until they've just simply faded away. Last year, Gran Torino featured a smaller story about youth/elder bonding and picked up considerable Oscar buzz, if only because Clint Eastwood, an old man, kicked a whole lot of ass. This movie is more accessible, and thus more important - who better to send this message to than kids?

The animation, as we've come to expect from most Pixar films, is excellent. Cartoonish though it may be, the animators are lavish with detail, from the curios on Carl's mantle, to the buttons on Russell's sash, all the way to the spray at the bottom of Paradise Falls, no shortcut is taken. I saw this movie in 2D, but the visuals still popped from the screen. I wonder how the colors compare once you throw on the glasses. I wonder if Carl's huge nose constantly juts from the screen.

Pete Doctor, the director of Up, has been an integral part of Pixar's success. Having been around since Pixar's short animation days in 1988, he has been on the writing team of Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Wall-E, which he left to devote more time to this. He was also the director of Monsters Inc., which, on the very surface level of things, seemed like such a simple project - a movie about the monsters in our closet. Maybe those pitch meetings start with a long discussion on what clichés they haven't brought to the big screen.

Since The Incredibles, I have been hoping for more of the mature mainstream animation, movies that don't treat children like insipid, sugar-addled idiots. After nose-diving with Cars, Pixar's last three films have been tremendous, if overwhelmed by the presence of Dreamworks, who seem to release three fast paced, poorly written, celebrity voiced catchphrase-a-thons to Pixar's one gem a year. While I don't see the trend changing (Dreamwork's upcoming slate is depressing), Pixar's ability to take a seemingly harebrained plot and turn in a winner is heartening. If Toy Story 3, The Bear and the Bow, and newt are as good as this, I'll forgive them Cars 2.



The Dude Abides