Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Return of Dawn of the Dead

I want to watch the new Dawn of the Dead again, which says something about my movie-watching habits. I watch Paris, Texas once, and I think I know everything about it. With Dawn of the Dead, I feel as if I have only scratched the surface, so I need to watch it again. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but sometimes pop culture holds some hidden gems, and this one is definitely pop culture: special effects, terrible acting, and all-around silliness. I'm not sure if it holds any hidden gems, but, boy, is it fun.

In case you don't know (or more appropriately, live with a spouse that doesn’t let you watch horror films), Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) is a remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Like many people I know, my spouse doesn’t let me watch horror movies (I have to watch them after she goes to bed), and my libraries don’t have the original version, so I haven’t seen Romero’s original in many years. From what I remember, though, it was very different from this remake, in ways that make it sometimes less interesting.

Snyder’s version has some great points. In fact, I think it’s one of the better horror films to come out recently. It begins with some scenes that continually caught me off guard, even though we all know what is eventually going to happen. It open as a nurse sees some bizarre stuff in her night shift, but nothing is so remarkable that it makes much of an impression on her. One memorable part occurs as the nurse is leaving: she sees some paramedics bring in a badly wounded guy on a gurney, and as she walks out of the hospital, she sees the ambulance there with two legs sticking out of the back. She gets startled and goes over to it, thinking that something has happened to the driver, which is the same thing we are thinking, but it’s just the paramedic resting. And that’s genius, yes it is. That’s the way horror movies are supposed to work. Snyder knows that we know what is going to happen—the world is going to be taken over by zombies—so he has to make the lead-in play on that knowledge. I kept expecting a zombie to appear everywhere during the first fifteen minutes, whether at her car window, in the morgue, in the ambulance, or on her doorstep. And the movie knows this! So it keeps messing with me, teasing me, letting me into this person’s normal life, until it all goes to hell in a way I wasn't expecting.

And to hell it goes pretty quickly. We don’t just see one zombie here—no way, there are immediately hundreds of them everywhere, killing everything, and they cause all kinds of chaos. With zombies running everything, there is of course no power, no water, no TV, no nothing. Eventually, this group of survivors is left with nothing, which would have made this an appropriate remake for 1999-2000. The zombies here are not the caricatures of old, either. Sure, some of them are funny looking, but they’re fast, too, more like in 28 Days Later (2003) than in Night of the Living Dead (1968). When they see people they want to eat, they immediately go after them en masse.

So Snyder’s version is smart, but really only a technical or plot level. That’s where this one fails the original. If I remember it correctly, the original had more about consumerism. Here, it seems to be a coincidence that the survivors hold up in a shopping mall, whereas in the original it was a comment on our consumer society. We get one comment from Ving Rhames’s character that the zombies go to the mall perhaps out of habit or instinct, but this idea is never developed. Yeah, it’s a good hideout, but the story never reaches anything beyond the plot level, or even nearing the level of allegory. The way the people attempt to escape to a create a new life could be allegorical, but the movie doens't explore this idea--it's ripe for it, but it doesn't let us go there. Zombies are not a metaphor here, not like in previous zombie films (fear of nuclear holocaust, fear of technology, rage); they’re just zombies, and you have to get away from them or they will eat you.

Which makes for a decent horror film, but I don’t think it moves much beyond that. That movement beyond is what I generally appreciate about horror movies, and this one just doesn't deliver it. Still, it’s a fun ride.

Grade for Dawn of the Dead: 6

Friday, November 11, 2005

I didn’t know there was a Paris, Texas

I’ll be honest here. Wim Wenders is one of those directors I have always heard about and never seen. Nope, I have never seen Wings of Desire (1987) or Until the End of the World (1991). The guy has around thirty movies to his directing credit, and I have never seen a one of them. I was interested, sure, but his movies always sounded like they would be boring, and I tend to veer away from those really intelligent movies.

Then my wife starts looking for movies about Texas—we live in Houston, after all—and she stumbles across this film called Paris, Texas (1984) that she has never heard of. So of course she requests it from the library, along with View from the Top (2003) and The Trouble with Angels. I figured they were all of the same caliber—terrible, that is.

As it starts, I see that it’s directed by Wim Wenders, and now I’m intrigued, because I’m supposed to know this guy, being a film lover and all.

Paris, Texas chronicles the story of Harry Dean Stanton’s character, and the film opens with a shot of him wandering through the West Texas desert wearing a ragged suit. He manages to make it to an apparently empty bar in the middle of the desert. He’s parched, so he goes to the refrigerator but finds only beer, so he grabs a cube of ice, begins to suck on it, and then collapses. There was some guy sitting there all along, and the film cuts with the guy murmuring, “What the hell?”

It’s quite beautiful, actually. I think it’s one of the best scenes in the entire film, and that’s saying a lot, for there are a lot of good scenes here. We don’t know anything about the guy, and my biggest complaint is about how it finally reveals the back-story. This same scene is also really interesting and compelling, however. It’s a bit pretentious and long-winded, but the works in a remarkable way.

So I’m having trouble saying anything coherent about Paris, Texas, and think this has to do with both the meandering plot and the way I will be forced to give everything away simply through the process of describing it. Let me not do this by giving you several reasons to see this movie:
· Parts of it take place in Houston.
· It was made three years before Blue Velvet (1987), and it traces a lot of same ground, except in Texas, which makes it more interesting.
· It will make you appreciate what you have—families are fragile and precious, after all. If there’s one thing that this movie does well, it’s showing us how all of our positions are relative and how those things shift so easily.
· It’s named after a place that you never actually see, except in a photograph—now that’s interesting.

Harry Dean Stanton is an Everyman who wants to make everything right after he screwed everything up. It’s sad, yes, but it’s interesting to see this child-like character attempt to make up for his own childishness. Watching him grow throughout the movie isn’t as interesting as it could have been, but Paris, Texas still does it pretty well.

So the bottom line is that when I have to deal with an intelligent movie, I’m without words. I think my strength is drawing out pop culture drivel. And with that in mind, I will review the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) next time. Now there’s a movie with some undiscovered layers! When it comes to Paris, Texas, it seems like it’s all rather obvious. It’s too smart to draw anything out because Wenders meant for all of it to be there anyway. Which sounds as if I’m saying that these other films don’t know what they’re doing, which isn’t quite the case.

Maybe I will explain all of that later…

As a sidenote, I think I am going to start watching movies about Texas and especially about Houston. I would love to get recommendations from readers—the two or three of you who keep coming back….

Grade for Paris, Texas: 8

Thursday, November 10, 2005

It Sure Ain’t the Top

For a while there, I was stuck on trying to figure out whether movies were conservative or liberal, and my aggregate response should have been obvious: we’re talking about Hollywood, not the New Republic, so of course films tend to be conservative. Yet I have been determined to find a conservative film. I know they exist, in early films at least, but I just want to know if there are any conservative filmmakers out there.

I think I may have found one. His name is Bruno Barreto and he’s Brazilian. I know none of you have heard of him, which probably has something to do with the fact that his average rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 49%. Yeah, pretty much his film seem to suck, and View from the Top (2003) is no different.

Yep, I actually watched this piece of crap. I could blame my wife—she’s the one who picked it—but I still sat through it. It’s not as bad as Bridget Jones 2, but it never made me laugh and a few scenes made me cringe. I know I tend to say this a lot, but what made Gwyneth Paltrow make this movie? She’s an Oscar-winning actress for crying out loud! Why, Gwyneth, why?

But let’s not go on about how bad this movie is, or why Paltrow decided to star in a film with Christina Applegate. Let’s move on to how this film is conservative.

The plot is typical, although the setting isn’t. A country girl—Paltrow—wants to break away from her small-town heritage and make something of her life. Her destiny seems to be to marry someone who will more than likely beat her, and to work at Big Lots for the rest of her life, so she decides to go for the glamorous job of stewardess. She gets a job at a small company and eventually proves herself and moves onto a big company. She finally makes it! But there’s a catch. In order to strike it big-time (which means flying international from New York to Paris), she has to leave her boyfriend, who is sticking around Cleveland. Well, guess what?

--I’m going to spoil the movie now, but I don’t feel bad because I don’t want any of you to actually watch this piece of drivel.—

She does it! She leaves her boyfriend behind and becomes a super-successful stewardess! Yep, she makes all feminists proud and decides that she doesn’t need a man to be happy! She strikes one for team Steinam!

She isn’t happy, of course, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she has broken away from our patriarchal strictures and made something of herself that is independent of man.

But then she goes back to him! She leaves it all behind and decides that being with him is much more important than her job. In the final scene, she goes crawling back, and he says (the words are not exact quotes here), “So you’ll stay here in Cleveland?” Yep. “And you’ll be happy?” Yep. She gives it all up, because the women should stay where their men are. That’s right. Women have to give it all up for the men they love.

At this point, I was really happy. Here was the conservative film I had been waiting for. Never mind that not even Mike Myers could make this movie funny. Never mind that Paltrow sports a rural accent and what seems to be a mullet through most of the movie. Here was my conservative film!

But then there was one more scene, which came on briefly as the closing music started. It showed an airplane flying, and a somewhat familiar voice was speaking to the passengers. Then it shows us Paltrow in the pilot seat! Yep, she’s now flying internationally from Cleveland as the pilot!

Damn, I thought. Foiled again.

As somewhat of a sidenote, the movie equates mullets and Southern accents with unsophisticatedness. By the end of film, Paltrow has lost her accent. Not uncoincidentally, she has also become a pilot.

Anyway, the movie turns out to be less conservative than I thought. Even thought the pilot scene seems to be an afterthought, it lessens the conservatism without particularly ruining it. Paltrow still stayed with her boyfriend, after all. She had to give it all up and start anew because that’s what a good girl does for her man. Sure, she takes over the traditional male role as pilot, but it was staying with her man that forced her to have to do that. And how many years did she have to rot in Cleveland to get there?

Overall, this film stinks, and I don’t want any of you to watch it.
Take my word for it, please.

By the way, I will be reviewing a Wim Wenders film next. So all of you who have been waiting to see me tackle something more intellectual, this will be your chance…

Grade for View from the Top: 1

Friday, November 04, 2005

More Woebegone Films from Kevin Smith

I can’t tell what Kevin Smith is doing. I mean, why would someone who obviously has oodles of talent make schlock like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? It could have been good, though. After all, it chronicles the two Quick Stop hangouts that have been ubiquitous since Clerks, who, incidentally, made some of the funniest scenes in that early film. I’m sure they will even be a major part of Smith’s new one, The Passion of the Clerks, which is set to come out this year.

Basically, the Bluntman and Chronic strip has been sold to Miramax, and Jay and Silent Bob have to stop it. Why? Because people are using this newfangled thing called the In-ter-net to comment on how stupid the characters are. So they have to travel from New Jersey (bold move, Smith!) to Hollywood, falling in love and causing mischief along the way. It’s a plot as preposterous as Bluntman and Chronic itself. In fact, it all seems to be a ruse to show Hollywood that it “had it coming,” as the tagline suggests, because there are intermittent spurts of movie parody that verge on becoming no different from Scary Movie or any other parody of film. These spots are probably the weakest in the film, too, offering absolutely nothing new.

The whole thing makes me question why Kevin Smith made this piece of drivel. The only redeeming feature is the charisma of Kevin Smith himself, aka Silent Bob. His little quirks are quite endearing, and he reminds me more and more of one of my friends who recently moved to Austin. Just some of Smith’s gestures make him charming, smart, and humourous, too. These really are funny guys, but a bunch of profanity does not make for a good movie. Yes, I think the number of times the f-word is used is ridiculous. Come on, Smith, South Park did it first, so there’s no use in trying to outdo the amount of profanity you can fit into 90 minutes. At the end, one of the characters says that Hollywood turned Bluntman and Chronic into one big gay joke, and heck, that’s all this movie is, too!

Which screams self-referentiality! Jay and Silent Bob makes the most references to itself as a movie than any other film I have seen. It doesn’t do it subtly, either. In case you don’t catch some of the references, characters actually look at the camera to remind you that you’re watching them in a movie. It’s not like The Simpsons, where a character makes a statement, “There’s never anything good on Fox,” and then they move on. Here, they make that kind of statement, pause, and glare at the camera, before moving on to say whatever it is they’re getting at (which is generally nothing, by the way). But even the plot appears self-referential, too. People talk about how dumb Jay and Silent Bob are? No, when would people ever do that? Should I expect these two guys to show up at my door and kick my ass, like they do in the movie?

If this film references itself so many times, does that mean that Kevin Smith made the film he meant to make? I sure hope not. Yes, there are really funny parts, but they’re also very stupid. It’s as if Kevin Smith wanted to make his own Dumb and Dumberer. I hear that he made the movie on $20 million, which means that all of the famous actors basically volunteered to be in the movie. Are they happy with the product? Was Kevin Smith happy with the product?

After watching Clerks for the first time (see one of my previous blogs), I was ready to give Kevin Smith his due. But now, I’m not so sure. And Jersey Girl is sitting on my counter just waiting to go in the machine…

Grade for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: 4

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Feel the Rays

Yes, Jamie Foxx was wonderful portraying Ray Charles, and he probably deserved the Oscar for it. Foxx was able to somehow embody Ray Charles; at various moments, I thought I was actually watching Ray Charles on screen, not watching Foxx’s portrayal of him. It was quite weird and amazing at the same time.

Besides Foxx’s great acting, however, Ray didn’t have much to offer. And it made me think about why I didn’t like it. In the same way that Runaway Jury made me question why I don’t like crime/jury dramas, Ray made me realize that I generally don’t like biopics. I always thought it was partially because I don’t like the way they age characters in movies, and I still can’t stand that. Watch A Beautiful Mind, and you will see what I mean. The aged Russell Crowe just looks silly, and nevermind great young actors trying to act old. It never works. But Ray didn’t really age through the movie. They gave him a little bit of gray hair at the end, but they didn’t overdo it. I guess that’s due partly to the fact that the main action of the film ends by 1970. So I can’t really blame my dislike of the film on the “aging.”

I think it’s just something about the biopic that doesn’t make for a great movie. They’re always flawed. Of course I’m speaking generally here, that the movies are bad, when really, a lot of respectable people love these films, so maybe I’m just talking about my own personal taste. But, to my own personal taste, these films are well, never all that great.

People are fascinating, yes, and the hour long biography on A&E can be quite engrossing. But a movie is a different animal. We need one central plot that can be wrapped up in two hours or so, and people’s lives can’t generally be reduced to that. Ray did a better job than most, I admit. It managed to tie everything together with his flashbacks. I was glad it didn’t just start with him as a kid because the flashbacks helped us see how the past fit into his present. But consider all of the plots here: the death of Ray’s brother, his marriage to what seemed like an angel, his old manager, his new manager, drugs, rehab, and the list goes on. Too many plots? Maybe not, because the film did a good job of making everything tie into Ray’s brother’s death.

But too many things were left unfinished. What about his marriage? Did it become a real marriage? Or what about his son? What happened to him? Did ever become a real father? What about his new manager? Was he actually stealing from him? What about any of the other characters we were introduced to throughout the film? If they’re not with Ray, they’re simply offscreen, forgotten, dismissed. But what about his mistresses? Did he continue to have them? Did he adopt his other son?

Yes, I’m being hard on it, I know. Overall, it’s a decent film, and it was enjoyable to watch. The drug and rehab scenes were way too overdone and seemed to be taken directly from Requiem for a Dream, but the movie was beautiful otherwise. So this film has flaws, but it’s still worth watching. Is it best picture quality? No, so I’m glad it didn’t win. But it’s still good.

Grade for Ray: 6