Cynical Cinema

Guillermo Del Toro has made some of the best films of recent years.  Dark, brooding, beautifully filmed movies like Blade II, Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth.  And he must have an eye for other great directores, because as a producer he has achieved a great succes with The Orphanage.  Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, The Orphanage is not really a horror movie, although it was marketed as such.  There are definitely some creepy scenes and scary moments, but it’s the atmosphere that tells the story as much as the scares and the characters themselves.  Belen Rueda plays the main character, Laura, a woman who returns to the orphanage where she was raised in order to build it up again, and take in some more kids.  She lives there with her husband and her own son, seven-year-old Simon.  But when Simon begins to talk to a series of imaginary friends, and soon goes missing, Laura tears her life apart to find him, and that means unearthing some long-dormant secrets and spirits in the orphanage.

The movie may be reminiscent of several others.  Hallowe’en, Poltergeist, Final Destination, any number of Peter Pan movies, and Del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone.  But it’s the Peter Pan theme that holds the key to The Orphanage.  Suppose the Peter Pan story was, instead of being a kids’ tale, the work of some deviously evil murderous freak show?  I know, I know, I’m describing the Neverland Ranch.  But Michael Jackson aside, only Bayona has managed to make the Peter Pan story this creepy.  Rueda, as Laura, undergoes a transformation that is part obsession and part a growing belief in the spirits that surround her in the house, and it is a remarkable acting performance.  There are red herrings, but not too many.  There are many characters that come in and out of the movie with varying degrees of effectiveness.  The best is the old lady who gets dispatched in a fairly memorable and gory fashion.

 The Orphanage is a good, creepy, evocative flim, with terrific camera work and a genuinely gothic sense of foreboding.  The direction is first-rate, the acting is for the most part excellent, and the film is very much worth watching.  A few quibbles prevent it from being a truly great movie, like the pacing and the length, which I think is a little unnecessary.  But all in all, a quality movie experience.  Oh, but it has subtitles.  So it isn’t for those who hate to read.

Diane Lane is reason enough to watch just about any movie.  Not only is she a remarkable cougar and gorgeous, she is also a very fine actress who, like most other actresses of her calibre and stature, is forced to take lousy roles from time to time.  There are a few actors who have almost never done truly bad movies.  Tom Hanks springs to mind.  DeNiro, until about eight years ago.  But that is because high-calibre male actors can pick and choose their roles.  High-calibre actresses must take what comes along, even if that is Aeon Flux.  And Untraceable is on a par with that pile of junk.  Lane plays a cop who works at the cyber-crimes department, tracking down internet predators and so forth.  All of a sudden a guy shows up on the net, killing people online based on the number of hits his website receives.  The more hits it gets - the faster the man or woman he’s captured dies.  These deaths are all done with a series of creepy but unnecessarily complicated devices that display his flair for morbid showmanship while simultaneously commenting on society’s depravity. 

 Which is a fairly interesting premise.  The more people watch, the faster the guy dies, and of course more and more people will watch, because society and people are so horrible.  But the big problem with Untraceable is the bizarre disconnect between the cyber crimes unit of the police and the killer.  In fact, the killer ends up targetting that particular police department, for what appears to be…no reason at all!  Why would this guy, who wants to make a point about the evils of society’s depravity, and targets people who profit from that depravity (I hope I’m not giving too much away here - this movie scuks anyway), go after these cops?  Aren’t they the only ones who exist to take down the very people he’s raging against?  Aren’t they, in many ways, on the same side? 

So the only reason he might do so is that the people who made this movie thought it would be more exciting to put the stars in the precarious positions.  Like when CSI does one of those episodes where a member of their team is held prisoner somewhere, or targeted by a kidnapper or something.  And that’s what Untraceable is.  A long, poorly thought-out episode of CSI masquerading as an action movie with an attempt at a message.

One of the fine listeners of Cynical Cinema has started a campaign to get it back on the air!  Because internet petitions are so passe, and there are so many of them hitting your email every day, the only way to do these things now is…a facebook group!  Thanks to Mike Donnelly, who left the link in a message on the Strange Wilderness post.  Here’s a link, if you feel like signing up!  (I figured to  put it in a post like this, make it easier to find.)

  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28374608016

National Treasure 2:  Book of Secrets:  If you liked the first one, you are likely a poor judge of quality in movies.  And if you are a poor judge of quality in movies, then perhaps you will like this sequel as well.  Look for Nicholas Cage to continue sucking.

Strange Wilderness (2/10):  All of Adam Sandler’s friends get together, yet again, to make yet another movie based on a script written by seven-year-olds.  Poop and fart jokes, and animals attacking people.  Garbage.

The Air I Breathe:  Forest Whitaker,  Kevin Bacon, Emile Hirsch and Andy Garcia are cool.  Sarah Michelle Gellar and Brendan Fraser are not.  Which means that based on the cast, there are 2/3rds of a reason to watch.

Diary of the Dead (7/10):  For all the zombie fanatics who couldn’t get enough of the Romero movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead…noticing a theme here?)  This one stands up with the rest.

The Walker:  Cool cast including Ned Beatty, Lauren Bacall, Woody Harrelson, Willem Dafoe, and Kristen Scott Thomas.  Political thriller, could be very good.

Penn and Teller:  Bullshit!  Season Five (7/10):  A fairly decent TV show that takes on some of the most cherished myths in the world with the humour and insight of Penn and Teller, who are famous magicians.

National Lampoon presents:  Cattle Call:  Another franchise that can seemingly churn out movies at will, just like Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company.  I guess anyone could make forty movies a year if you didn’t care whether any of them were good.

Exes and Ohs Complete First Season (5/10):  Lesbian sit-com starring lots of hot chicks.  Yeah…but it sounds a lot better than it is.  Smacks of Canadian, and pushes no envelopes.

Who’s Your Monkey:  Over the course of a single night, four childhood friends kill a drug dealer, rescue animals, dispose of a dead body and discover the unbreakable bonds of friendship. This film is a hilarious, irreverent, heartfelt comedy full of laughs, surprises and a lot of monkey business!  And…it stars Newman from Seinfeld.  Whee.

Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Season Four (4/10):  Not only did this show exist, it apparently had at least four seasons!  What is your major malfunction, Private Pyle?!

Grindstone Road:  The inimitable Fairuza Balk stars in a movie where she is either haunted by ghosts, or she is losing her mind!  Uh-oh!

Short Circuit:  That 1986 movie, with the cute little robot that does cute little stuff with cute little Steve Gutenberg.  Finally released onto DVD!  After SUCH a long wait!

Darkest Hour
Sight
Vexille
Hannah Takes The Stairs
They Wait

And now, some dots I can’t seem to get rid of.

Paramount Home Entertainment releases Strange Wilderness on May 20th. It’s yet another movie featuring Adam Sandler’s buddies, from his Happy Madison production company. This group seems to be able to churn out thirty movies a year, of varying quality from below-average to insanely putrid. Strange Wilderness is somewhere in the middle. It’s dreadful. It’s the story of a bunch of Adam Sandler’s friends who attempt to revive their flagging TV wilderness show (Strange Wilderness) by tracking down and finding and filming Bigfoot. Which ends up being a series of animal attacks, idiotic jokes, stoner jokes, and more animal attacks. See, there’s this turkey, and it attacked a guy while he was peeing, so it’s on his junk. And it’s stuck there. And it’s a special turkey, so they can’t just chop it’s head off and kill it. So they have to massage it’s neck, and there’s this hot nurse who has to do it, which means she’s really massaging…oh, come on.

The cast is fairly good, because it is full of some quality comic actors. Justin Long, Steve Zahn, and the always-funny Jonah Hill, who has some decent moments. But the script is so thin that there is no reason for anything to actually happen. It’s just a series of toilet humour jokes and painful gags that grows tiresome right away. Shark attacks are played for humour, with incredibly poor results, the one hot girl is constantly pursued by a bunch of horny drunken idiots, with the intended effect of creating comedy. Once again, with poor results. And the final bigfoot gag is so badly done, obvious and, amazingly for this movie, underplayed that it negates the entire premise of the film. Strange Wilderness is neither strange, nor does it involve good wilderness. It’s just stupid, and is best ignored altogether. Which is why I didn’t write a longer review.

The premise behind Diary of the Dead seems like old hat. In fact, it seems unbearably lame, the Frankenstein-monster piecing together of all the modern successful horror movies, thrown into a pot and stirred and spit out in six hours. However, the director is very intriguing. George A. Romero is one of the all-time great directors not just in horror, but in cinema. And with Diary of the Dead, he returns to his uber-successful roots, the zombie flick. Romero is the genius behind such zombie classics as the one that started it all, Night Of The Living Dead, and the one that many would suggest perfected the genre, Dawn of the Dead. (The original, not the poorly-thought-out crazy-kinetic 2005 sequel.) So the question with Diary of the Dead was this: Which Romero was going to show up? The one who made many of the most classic and original zombie movies of all time, or the one who jumped on the fast-moving zombie bandwagon and laid the turd that was that recent Land of the Dead?

Diary of the Dead is shot like Blair Witch, and Cloverfield. First-person, hand-held camera narrative, where the guy with the camera keeps it on because either “it’s the only thing keeping me sane in all this chaos”, or “if this turns out to be something big I want to record it for posterity”. Which is always a lame explanation for continuing to film during a monster attack or a scary time in the woods, but in the end, they’re the only explanations that work. The first good news - Romero has reverted to the slow-moving zombies of yore. The second good news, in fact, great news - Romero retains his sense of social commentary and political bent throughout this movie. This is something he has never lost, and it exists as much in the tone of his movies as it does in the actual story and dialogue. In this case, the entire construct of the film is a commentary on the media itself. The set-up tells us that this is the story the mainstream news media will not tell you, that this film is the only way to find out what really happened.

And what really happened is awesome! The dead are genuinely creepy, the scares are real, and the dialogue is terrific. It’s that classic Romero dialogue, that borders on the cheesy in making it’s point, but it works nearly every time. The voiceovers are suitably amateurish, and the best speeches about the nature of violence and war and the capabilities of individual men to confront their worst fears come from the film professor who accompanies the protagonists. The one, key line that is repeated more than once, refers to a gun. Three different characters hand it off to someone else saying “here, take this. It’s too easy to use.” There is some great black humour, suitable only for the zombie movie genre, like the bit with the deaf Amish guy who blows up some zombies with dynamite.

After a while, however, the voiceover narration from the girl who (obviously) has survived the zombie massacre becomes pretty tiresome, since it all seems so obvious and cliched. And there are a few scenes that are nothing new, in fact they are so familiar it’s almost insulting in the middle of a movie like this one. Like the one where a girl gets attacked by her own zombified family member and doesn’t know what to do, and the scenes where the military who show up to save the day might be too good to be true…but all in all, it works. Diary of the Dead is a quality film from a quality director who hasn’t lost a step. It’s impossible to make another Night Of The Living Dead. Once Romero made that one, he changed the zombie game for everyone, including himself. And he can’t make another Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead either. So he makes a Diary of the Dead and adds to his already considerable legacy. Diary of the Dead comes out Tuesday May 20th from Alliance Films.

Michael Moore had a short-lived TV show called The Awful Truth a while back, that presented a series of left-leaning half-hour episodes where he used humour and publicity stunts to educate people about some of the world’s ugly truths. Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Is pretty well the antithesis of The Awful Truth. Basically the same thing, only with a heavier focus on humour, more mean-spiritedness, a LOT more profanity, WAY more naked boobs, and it’s slightly right-leaning. The basic premise of the show is that famed magicians Penn Jillette (who has two names) and Teller (who has one) try to uncover the myths and well, the BS behind some of society’s most treasured beliefs. God, I’m trying to type this while re-watching the episode about women’s breasts. It’s called Breast Hysteria and it’s really distracting.

Anyway, Michael Moore’s show was hit-and-miss, because it’s fairly difficult to really hit the mark on social causes in a half hour. And this is similar. It is very hit-and-miss. Like the episode on Wal-Mart. Penn and Teller take on the people who made the movie Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and others who protest against Wal-Mart. Their position on Wal-Mart is that it’s good, not evil, and that people who protest against it are stupid jackasses. But that’s about all they have. They take on some of the ideas people have about Wal-Mart, but they don’t really provide much information to tell them they’re wrong, or to present the other side. They just say they don’t care. Like, Wal-Mart drives small stores out of business in little towns. The movie made the point that if Wal-Mart is prevented from opening in that town, they will open just outside that town, taking the business anyway and denying the town the business, and thereby forcing towns to either accept Wal-Mart or suffer the consequences. Penn and Teller ignore the second part, and just say “who cares? It’s capitalism - just let Wal-Mart into your town!” OK, it’s a good reason to yell and be angry, but it isn’t exactly informative.

Which is about all they do. They take issues or beliefs that people have, hear from both sides, pick a side, and rage against the other side. Which sometimes works. There are quite a few good episodes. The one about the conspiracy behind the weight-loss industry, and how it’s such a massive multi-billion dollar industry that it becomes in their best interests to keep people fat so they can buy into weight-loss programs and diets. And the one about anger management is great too. The BS behind court-ordered anger management, and some particularly hilarious “treatments” for peoples’ anger. And, of course, the breast episode, which I am still watching. So please forgive any spelling mistakes.

Of course, as in many episodes, there are many, many naked boobs. But it’s also very well done, as the guys take on societal stereotypes about breasts and the women who have them. Idiotic ideas about the blasphemy of public breast-feeding, the stupid double standard that says it’s OK for men to go topless and not OK for women, and lots of other stuff. Really - how come men’s nipples are a body part that just happen to be on their chests, whereas women’s are strictly sexual organs that shouldn’t be seen by anybody? It is a pretty silly double standard, when one really thinks about it. And Penn and Teller don’t stop there - they take on the breast cancer lobby in a bit that makes a lot of sense. If lung cancer kills more than twice as many women every year as does breast cancer, how come there are way more movements to reduce breast cancer? In the end, it is because breasts, even in the world of charity and disease fighting, are sexualized. Which means that fighting breast cancer is sexier than fighting lung cancer. And despite the gigantic amount of effort that is made to raise money to fight breast cancer, more of it goes into raising more awareness of the problem than goes into fighting it or finding a cure. In fact, there is no organized effort in the States to find a cause or a cure for breast cancer.

I keep calling them Penn and Teller. But, of course, it’s really just Penn. Teller is the one who doesn’t talk. So Penn narrates and stars in every episode, and Teller just shows up to stand next to the naked models. I wonder what his paycheque is for this? The breast episode is over, so I am able to concentrate better, and this is what I’m thinking. Now it’s a gross episode about colon cleansing, detoxing, and the parasites that supposedly live in your body. There’s a vole necropsy going on, and it’s gross. I want to watch something else now. OK, I’m going back to the breast episode. Penn and Teller: Bullshit! The Complete Fifth Season comes out on DVD today, May 20th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.

Exes and Ohs is another lesbian TV series, like The L Word, running on Showcase here in Canada and on Logo in the States. It’s a standard couples and young-people-looking-for-love TV show, except that it’s all about lesbians and not straight people. It’s well-written, well-acted, and has some good characters. But it doesn’t really delve too deeply into the actual world of gay women. The world of lesbians is treated the same way the straight world is treated on regular TV. Like, if you think a woman is hot, just ask her out! OK, great, but what if she’s straight? This is the kind of thing I’d like to see explored a little more. The world of Exes and Ohs is so insular that it becomes irritating. I want to see the way these women interact and co-exist with the world around them. They hang out at lesbian parties, lesbian bowling nights, lesbian bars. So all we see are other lesbians. We don’t see any bigotry or homophobia or, really, any straight people at all.

Which makes Exes and Ohs sort of like Friends, the whitest show in the history of television, where nothing existed outside their own little circle of six people, and guest stars appeared only in order to give the main characters something to crack jokes about. And Friends got really tired, really fast. In fact, I would go so far as to say Friends sucked. Exes and Ohs is a little better, in that it has solid writing and that Canadian feel that actually works, like in Rent-A-Goalie. It stars Michelle Paradise, who also directs. She plays a character that is clearly close to herself, a documentary filmmaker. She’s the neurotic one in the bunch, the Ross-from-Friends of the lesbian world. Marnie Alton is the Joey-from-Friends character, the dirty one who sleeps with all kinds of women all the time. Heather Matarazzo plays a weirdo wannabe musician.

The best comedy in the series comes from the only two who are a consistent couple, Kris and Chris, played by Megan Cavanagh and Angela Featherstone. (Angela Featherstone, by the way, for all you nerds out there, was the girl Bruce Campbell kissed in S-Mart at the end of Army of Darkness.) They are quite funny, as basically childish and innocent idiots who have this cute and funny yet fairly stupid relationship. Like…if Phoebe and Joey got together on Friends…OK. I really have to stop thinking about Friends and more about lesbians. There are not too many TV shows like this starring all-male casts. That, I firmly believe, is because gay-man shows have only one audience - gay men. Lesbian shows have a chance at two audiences. Lesbians and straight men. Because straight men are likely to watch at least once, in the hope that they will see some hot women making out with one another. And this review wouldn’t be complete, for those guys, without at least a small discussion on that subject.

Yes, there are sex scenes. And yes, they are almost always sex scenes involving hot women. In TV world, no matter how realistic a show attempts to be, attractive people get most of the roles. And so, unlike the real world, 90 percent of the lesbians here are hot. Which, while it is unlike the real world, it is very much like the TV world. Most of these hot babes, however, seem to be there mostly as guest stars. Like Seinfeld. Only lesbian Seinfeld. And, like Seinfeld, not all of the main characters are attractive. Which is nice. Like, watching The L Word is interesting for a while, but then it seems so unrealistic where everyone is supermodel hot, that it becomes irritating. At least in something like Sex And The City, they cast Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role. And, as Peter Griffin once said, she looks like a foot.

There are a few scenes in later episodes in Season One that break the mold a little, like when the dirty chick confronts her parents about their uncomfortable attitude toward homosexuality, and when Kris and Chris start looking for a father to inseminate one of them. But really, it’s a show that is too insular to be really compelling, and too obvious to be ground-breaking. It needs to take ON the issues, rather than just middling along as a fairly decent, well-written show. It’s nice to see shows like this getting made, and getting air time, and Exes And Ohs is not a bad program. But it would sure be nice if it (metaphorically speaking, no pun intended) grew some balls. The first season comes out on DVD on Tuesday the 20th.

I just picked up a show I never know existed. Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., season 4. It came out May 13th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Oh, I’ve heard of Gomer Pyle. The Andy Griffith Show and all that. And I knew he was played by Jim Nabors, and I knew he was goofy and as dumb as a bag of hair. I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup of 1960s TV characters, if he stood beside Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett and Chester from Gunsmoke. Gomer Pyle is an American institution, just like Jerry Lee Lewis is a French one. But somehow the existence of the show completely eluded me. And I should have known – I always thought, in Full Metal Jacket, that R. Lee Ermey was referring to the Andy Griffith character when he calls Vincent D’Onofrio “Private Pyle”. But now I know better - He’s referring to this, actual “Private Pyle”. Which makes that bathroom scene all the creepier.

Especially now that I watched Season 4 of Gomer Pyle. I couldn’t help but think about Vincent D’Onofrio and that maniac smile that spreads over his face while he sits on the floor of the bathroom. Seven-six-two millimetre. Full. Metal. Jacket. And so every time I see even a shadow cross the permanently-happy, blissfully stupid face of Gomer Pyle in this series, I expect the next thing he’ll do will be to bust into the weapons depot, load up a Rambo rifle, and go on a killing spree. (Which, as I understand it, is the alternate ending to Episode 91, “A Visit From Aunt Bee”. Or, at least, the director’s cut.) There are very few killing sprees in Gomer Pyle, USMC. And I wasn’t counting, but I think there are more laughs than murders. I think. I believe the final score is 1-0. One laugh, zero kills.

Not that I expect a military-themed show to have actual soldiers doing actual fighting. Remember Major Dad? No, neither do I. But I DO expect a “comedy” to make me laugh. And I have rarely seen a comedy that feels more dated than Gomer Pyle. The premise here is that a garage station attendant of sub-par intelligence has left Mayberry to enlist in the Marine corps. While there, he has to deal with his angry, yelling, order-barking platoon sergeant, but because he’s a “knucklehead”, he can’t do anything right ever. Which makes the sergeant yell more. And that makes Pyle screw up more. And hilarity, one would suppose, would ensue. But somehow, it just doesn’t. There is something just so painfully sit-com-ish about Gomer Pyle USMC. And perhaps in it’s day, it felt new, but there are few shows on DVD today that feel as dated as this. And that includes the A-Team.

The 4400 was a series with a lot of promise.  It was out there, on TV, but it has now been cancelled.  So the only way you’ll get to see it is on DVD, and Season 4, the final season, has just been released, May 6th, by Paramount Home Entertainment.  I say it had a lot of promise, because it really was a neat idea.  Over the past however many decades, thousands of people have mysteriously vanished.  No one was able to connect these disappearances until 4400 of them are returned to Earth at the same time, obviously having been abducted by aliens.  Each of these 4400 people has a unique ability of some kind, an ability no other human has.  Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition and so forth.  But they have no recollection of their disappearance, they are disoriented and the government gets involved.

The government agency is called the National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) - not exactly a great title for such an organization, is it?  But they are the ones who keep an eye on these 4400 people.  And at the end of Season One, apparently we learned that the 4400 people were NOT abducted by aliens, but in fact by human beings from the future.  And then they were sent back to Earth to help us all avoid some kind of calamity which was to come.  But…that calamity never occurred, because the show was cancelled.  It was run on the USA network, and produced by CBS Paramount Network Television.  The reason for it’s cancellation, apparently, was twofold - the writer’s strike, and budgetary problems.  Well, threefold.  There were also “lower than expected ratings”.  Fans of this show have launched a campaign aimed at the SciFi/USA network to get it back on the air, but it doesn’t look likely.

 And the reason for that is twofold.  One, this show just came at the wrong time.  And two, it just isn’t that good.  This is basically a cross between The X-Files and Lost.  The X-Files has run it’s course, and well…there already is a “Lost”.  And after two seasons, I gave up on Lost completely.  I just couldn’t be bothered to watch each episode and work my brain around it.  You had to watch every single episode of that show to know what was going on, and yet one episode did not necessarily follow the previous one.  So it wasn’t satisfying from one show to the next.  And with the 4400, this concept was taken to an extreme.  The end was never, in any way, in sight.  In season 4, the clues come toward the end of the season, but the rest of the episodes stand almost alone.  The NTAC chases down various members of the 4400, or people influenced by them, and then the episode ends.  And it seems as though you don’t really need to watch one to understand the others.

So each episode feels like a low-budget episode of the X-Files.  Or like an episode of that old show, The Outer Limits.  With some kind of greater purpose, maybe.  And it just wasn’t good enough to get a big enough audience to keep going.  I can understand why there IS a cult following here.  Once viewers had immersed themselves in this show, they would of course be desperate to find out how it ends.  But I don’t see that there would be much profit to bring it back just for those eleven people.  In fact, until this week, I had no idea this program had ever existed.  Now that I do, I will likely forget all about it in a week.