Monster House & The Crimson Rivers

Monster House: I'm torn here. Again, I think my disappointment with Monster House is a result of my high expectations. I'd read such good things about it that I was expecting something on par with The Incredibles. What I got was a lot better than Polar Express (the first animated movie to use "performance capture"), a little better than the middle of the pack (i.e., Over the Hedge, Robots, Shark Tale, Madagascar), but nowhere near as good as The Iron Giant. I guess I should just stick with Brad Bird movies. (Which reminds me Ratatouille is coming out in June.)

Where Monster House succeeds is in capturing the poignancy of early adolescence, when you're leaving childhood behind but not quite a young adult. My big knock against it, though, is that a) the house itself is not scary and b) the explanation behind the house's animation, so to speak, is kind of lame. Also, Bones, voiced by Jason Lee, is supposed to be dating D.J.'s teenage babysitter, but he's drawn like a 40 year old hippie burnout. Weird and distracting.

(But how much scarier is the French poster (above) than the dull American version?)

If Netflix had half stars, I'd tack on a fraction. As it is: 3 stars.



The Crimson Rivers: A serial killer thriller directed by Mathieu Kassovitz; he played Amelie's boyfriend and the toymaker in Munich. Pros: Visually imaginative and a good excuse to watch Jean Reno for an hour and forty six minutes. Lots of helicopter shots of sweeping French alpine scenery. Cons: The first hour is awkwardly structured, you follow two separate investigators around wondering when, if ever, their storylines will intersect. Jean Reno has an unresolved, or at least unimportant, fear of dogs. And in the end, the twist is a cop out.

Also, and this is probably more important than I'm giving it credit for, but the subtitles (it's in French) weren't synced correctly with the dialogue on the copy I watched, and I really struggled to stay in the moment.

In this case I'd take my half a star back if I could. 3 stars.

Late February Round-Up

From worst to best:

Blade Trinity: I like a vampire movie as much as the next guy. Probably even more, given this is the first of two I've seen in the past couple weeks. But this one stinks. The effects look like they were made on a TV budget. Ryan Reynolds makes the most of the incessant Van Helsing-meets-Van Wilder cracks written for him, but he just wears you down. Alright already, you're the wise guy. Shut up. And I think Wesley Snipes believes he really is Blade. Too silly plus too serious equals one too many Blade movies. 2 stars.



Nanny McPhee: This one's not bad, just slight. And predictable. It would be fun to watch with a kid, but doesn't really stand on it's own. I liked the art direction, though. Each character's color palette is fun, but nothing you haven't seen before. It's nice to see Emma Thompson again, and when the warts and all disappear you remember, wow, she's beautiful. But overall a forgettable diversion. 3 stars.


Near Dark: Vampire picture #2. Now we're getting somewhere. This brood of vampires is imagined as a gritty little band of bloodsucking, daylight-fearing, wise-cracking hobos. There's the craggy, grizzled leader who calls the shots. You've got a little boy vampire, whose age and urges are out of sync with his appearance. And a smart-assed Hudson-like character who... Hey!, wait a minute, that IS Hudson. In fact, this movie's crawling with Aliens alumni. Which makes the dopey love story and the cheesy Tangerine Dream score forgivable. I especially like that the vampires don't "poof," explode when the sun hits them. They roast. 3 stars.

Edmond: Come for the stilted Mamet-isms that chafe and challenge and sound like nothing anyone's ever actually said. Stay for the parade of panty-clad young actresses. For Mamet fans only. 4 stars.


Half Nelson: Ryan Gosling gives a performance so natural that combined with the shakey-cam you sometimes think you're watching a documentary. It's not easy to do what he's doing here. It's not even easy to describe what he's doing here. It just feels real. And, wow, Shareeka Epps is right there with him. Amazing. 4 stars.


Children of Men: I went into this movie with HIGH EXPECTATIONS (stay tuned, I will come back to this) and this movie met them. Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, the rest. All very real performances. The future is fully imagined. And it's grim. The scary parts are truly scary. The refugee camp makes you glad you didn't live in 40's Poland. Or today's Palestine. I haven't rocked in my seat trying to jump start the car in the movie in a while: "go, go, go."

Go. 5 stars.

Also, if you enjoy post-apocalyptic horror, read Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road. I didn't sleep right for a week. It haunts me.

Pulp Fact!

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Achievement in Directing
Achievement in Film Editing
Adapted Screenplay

Best Picture? In 10 years Letters from Iwo Jima might stand up as the better movie, certainly the more "important" one. But I'll see your Dances With Wolves and raise you a Goodfellas. And Scorsese (The Aviator) and Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby) probably both should have lost to Alexander Payne's Sideways in 2005, but comedies don't win and, hey, we're all caught up now, right?

So long as Babel didn't win the social engineering award, I'm good.

Oscar Grouchy

This being a movie blog, I suppose I have to submit an Oscar post. But I don't have to like it. I can't put my finger on why I'm so "meh" about them this year. I suppose my apathy is partly due to the feeling that the biggest categories' winners seem preordained:

Best Actress: Helen Mirren
Best Actor: Forest Whitaker
Best Director: Martin Scorcese

Yawn. Thanks for draining out all the suspense Golden Globes. And there seem to be so many factors in play other than the plain question of which actor/picture/whatever was best. Scorcese's owed one. We don't want Eastwood to have too many. Conflict diamonds are bad, mmkay?

Maybe that's it more than anything. Many of these movies feel like "homework movies," the kind of movies that are good for me, that I'm supposed to like. When more and more I'm learning that the movies I love are unmitigated pulpy genre spook-em-ups. Some of my favorite movies last year include The Descent (Yeah, yeah, 2005. Sue me.), Slither, Miami Vice and Casino Royale. That the paint-by-numbers race relations Power Point presentation that is Crash won best picture last year still burns me. I know Brokeback Mountain was the favorite, and I wouldn't have begrudged it (gay or not, they were cowboys), but I would have chosen Munich. But then we wouldn't want Spielberg to have too many Oscars, and so it goes.

I guess what I'm saying is that as long as The Queen (snore) or Babel (doubleclick to advance slide, ding!) don't win I'll be cool with the Academy. But chances are I'll be asleep. Or watching Layer Cake on DVD.

By the way, Best Documentary Feature, where's Awesome: I F**kin' Shot That!?

To San Jose, or not to San Jose?

A question for you, faithful reader. You live in Long Island City, Queens. Your usual Netflix distribution center, i.e., the return address on most of your mailers, is in Flushing, Queens. You receive a Netflick from a d.c. in San Jose, CA.

Do you a) dutifully return your Netflick to the San Jose address drawing out the return phase of the flick-cycle, taking you out of the game for 2-4 days, or b) piggyback the San Jose disc in a Flushing envelope?

Seems easy enough, so let's increase the level of difficulty. The only reason Netflix mailed from California is that the first TWO times they mailed from Flushing this particular title arrived cracked.

What would you do?

The Puffy Chair

I'm making this quick because it's Valentine's Day and mine will be home any minute. I'm not sure how this movie ended up on my queue, but that's not strange. I often sit with Premiere or Time Out New York or Highlights open in my lap and just add movies blindly. What's strange is that it ended up at my house at all. I obsessively groom my queue, until the surprises have floated back above position 50 where they will ever bob. So, I popped it in with No Expectations. (I will return to this theme in the future.) I was mesmerized.

This is a small, emotionally true movie. It's small in the sense that its' locus of action and cast is very tight. A quick little road trip, 3 folks in a van. The truth stems from its being "written" and played in the same way that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and Christopher Guests' movies are: the creator produces a story outline and then the cast improvises the details to get themselves from points A to B to C. I don't think this method of arriving at the final product is the only way to fly, but it provides a wealth of real, intimate moments between the characters that would be very hard to script and just toss off.

This movie is a great exploration of what's meaningful between people and what keeps couples together. 5 stars.

An American Werewolf in London

How is it that I had never seen this movie? I guess because in 1981 it was rated R and I wasn't. But Dad took me to see The Thing just a year later. And I remember Werewolf playing on Showtime over at my nemesis, John's house. In this life it's all about timing, I guess.

If you liked Shaun of The Dead, you'll like this funny-scary movie too. A young Griffin Dunne plays the throwaway banter between two college-age buddies just right. Jenny Agutter, as nurse Alex Price, is a natural. Her performance is so strong, David Naughton appears to fumble when he switches gears from screwball to serious. But his screwball has enough movement to get you swinging.

The Academy created the Best Makeup category specifically to acknowledge Rick Baker's work, which still looks dynamite. Well, most of it. The transformation is great, but the closeups look a bit like a drugstore Halloween costume. And the animatronic werewolf at the foot of the escalator might as well have a giant hand behind it, pushing*, "rrraaar." But the effect is kind of like seeing Bruce full-on for the first time. He looks hokey, but he's eating Quint alive, dammit.

And as you're closing in on the ending, you wonder if John Landis is going to stick to the bargain or wiggle out at the last minute. John, Landis not my nemesis, keeps his word. 4 stars.

*One of the making-of featurettes reveals that the quadripedal werewolf effect was created by laying out the (not animatronic) werewolf performer on a board with wheels and pushing him, wheelbarrow style, into the shot. Rrrraaar, indeed.