POSEIDON – wolfgang peterson – 2.5 / 10

Fifteen minutes into Posiedon the boat gets flipped upside down. Then, over the course of the next hour and twenty minutes, every character in the film has their personalities turned upside down. I don’t know whom to credit (or blame as the case may be) for this development, director Wolfgang Peterson or screenwriter Mark Protosevich, but either way this plot-by-numbers is just no way to make a movie. I guess somebody thought it would be incredibly interesting and exciting if what happens to the boat is a metaphor for what happens to the characters. And that’s not actually unreasonable. The problem only arises because the film is little more than an exercise in seeing how many things the filmmakers can turn upside down.

Let’s count the ways. The loner hero (Josh Lucas, their character names are completely irrelevant) will, by the end of the film, be in love and wanting to start a family. The old gay man ready to die (Richard Dreyfuss) will discover a wonderful desire to live life to the fullest. A young woman (Emmy Rossum) who had written off her father as an ineffectual and distant dictator will finally realize just how much he really does love her. And then we have Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon playing Johnny Drama) who, before very long, discovers that he’s pretty damn unlucky.

See, the problem here is not so much that these people have had their lives turned upside down by the capsizing of the boat (that seems reasonable and somewhat logical) but rather that each character only has one trait. And reversing that one trait over the course of one hundred minutes is simply far too shallow (forgive me the pun) a character progression. Especially considering that anyone who’s ever seen a movie before in their lives would be able to figure out that the loner would fall in love or that the spiteful daughter would realize how much her father loves or that the idiotic Lucky Larry would prove to be unlucky. I’m not asking for Shakespeare but come on.

The only people that could possibly enjoy watching this film are those that really really like watching computer-generated fire. More so even than water, Poseidon is filled to bursting with scenes about or involving fire. It’s got flash fires, slow-burning fires, big fires, small fires, columns of fire, water on fire and even super-heated air that “burns your lungs like rice paper.” And most of this fire looks pretty damn cool. But then, of course, the silly humans that are trying to evade the fire have to do their thing and pretty soon you’ve got people diving headfirst (headfirst!) into a pool of burning oil and water or some such nonsense.

There are worse films (X-Men III, The Da Vinci Code, etc.) out there at the moment but hardly any that are this joyless. Blowing shit up and people holding their breath as they swim through flooded corridors whose length is unknown should be a lot more campy fun than this. It just looks like everyone involved was doing it for the paycheck.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK – steven spielberg – 8.6 / 10

Although it’s been rechristened Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the cover of the DVD, it’ll always be simply Raiders of the Lost Ark to me. I’ve seen this film almost ten times by now but every time I return to it I’m surprised by how good it is. Maybe that’s because of the less than stellar position Spielberg has in my estimation but then I suppose that would still be more my fault than his.

And to be sure it is easy to hate on this film. Because so much of what made it so intoxicating back in 1981 has been imitated and copied so many times since then that it’s easy to forget how unique the picture really was. The most duplicated element of the film must surely be the overall tone, more specifically the hero’s wry sense of humor in the face of life-threatening danger. This flippant manner, basically invented by Harrison Ford in Star Wars and perfected here, provided the template for the eighties action hero. Following in Indiana’s footsteps audiences were soon to be treated to John McClane, Cobra Cobretti, John Rambo, etc. on down to Vin Diesel’s XXX. And mostly because of these lesser imitators, this ironic detachment from the danger the hero faces has come to represent everything that was wrong with the action film in the eighties and nineties. But that’s not the fault of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you as a modern viewer can see past all that extratextual weight, you’ll be treated to a rare cinematic treat,

The most noteworthy plot element in this film is just how often (and consistently) Indiana Jones fails. In the opening sequence Indiana swipes a sacred idol from some South American jungle only to have it swiped by the evil Beloq. Once the plot proper begins, Indiana is responsible for the destruction of Marianne’s bar, loses her to the bad guys in Cairo, finds and loses the Ark in the desert and on a boat. Even at the climax of the film, Indiana fails. His ultimate victory comes when he is tied up to pole. It’s hardly the resounding victory you’d expect.

Although all the failures that have lead us to this final moment were fun and everything, this last “failure” does strike the wrong note. Maybe it's the modern perspective from which I'm writing about this film but the fact that the hero's triumph comes from doing absolutely nothing is pretty anticlimactic. In fact, it's really the only sour note in the whole film. Unfortunately it happens to come at the very end of the movie and thus can leave you thinking it wasn't as good as it really was. Maybe that's the reason I'm surprised by how good this film is every time I put it on.

UNITED 93 - paul greengrass - 7.5 / 10

No matter the faux-documentary style or the real-time plot progression or the use of nonprofessional and unknown actors so as not to break the illusion, United 93 failed to really affect me. But that certainly wasn't for lack of trying. Director Paul Greengrass and Co. pull out all the stops on this one but by the time the fifteenth passenger is calling home to say good-bye I was starting to wonder what the Capitol might have looked like had the passengers failed to seize control of the plane and it had made it to Washington. Does that mean I'm a cynical bastard too inured to the mass mediated horrors that humans inflict on each other? Maybe. Does it mean that I've watched films with one eye on the action and one on how it was done for so long that I'm incapable of having a real emotional response to a film? God, I hope not. Actually, no, I know that isn't true. There are films, some of them nonfiction but an equal number of them are fiction, in which the moments of violence and horror have really hit home, have knocked that part of my brain thinking about how it was done completely out of my conscious thoughts (the two examples that jump most immediately to mind are the death of John Rooney in Road to Perdition and the Arab man's suicide in Cache). So even after all this time and all those films, the medium still has the power to bowl me over. But even with the loaded images from September 11, 2001, United 93 failed to do that. Why?

I suspect the answer is twofold. Firstly, Greengrass tries so damn hard to get me to emote that I almost don't want to just to spite him. This is especially true in the film's last act which, maybe not incidentally, is also the only part of the film that is almost entirely conjecture on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, during the first half of the film, right up until the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I was a bit caught up in it all. But after that the film never leaves the doomed plane and its passengers who make those seventeen phone calls to loved ones wherein the passengers say tearful goodbyes (which is initially compelling but soon turns into a game of seeing how long it takes the person in question to say they love whoever's on the other end of the phone) and people start to pray (both the passengers and the terrorists). I could maybe forgive the many many goodbyes but this whole, "we're all human beings" nonsense is exactly the type of shit conservatives have every right to hate liberals for. Yes, we're all human beings with our own unique hopes and fears and dreams and even gods. This is so head-slappingly obvious that to have it pointed out moments before what is this generation's most powerful shared experience is unnecessary, annoying and, most devastatingly for the film in question, distracting. They lost me right there. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so wondering what the conversations must have been like when the filmmakers were trying to decide how exactly to end the film. I bet they were spirited and possibly more interesting than the stuff that ended up on the screen (although the fact that the outcome is know in advance might have something to do with my distraction here).

But back to the point above. The second reason this film failed to really connect with me emotionally is because of the way in which it was shot. At this early stage in our recovery from 9/11, I'm not sure there was any other way to make this film than in the pseudo-documentary style that Greengrass employs. Anything stylized or art-directed would probably (maybe rightfully) be derided as too glossy for an event that still touches a raw nerve for a great number of people. Plus, the faux cinema verite style goes a long way towards allowing the average viewer to completely believe in the events on the screen. I say "average viewer" but I'm really just guessing. It didn't have that effect on me so I'm making that assumption based on reviews I've seen in the papers and magazines.

As far as I'm concerned, the fake documentary style of this film made me very aware that I was watching a film, more so even than were I watching a very artificial looking big budget version of the same events. The art of film has, over the last century, developed a grammar and language uniquely its own that, when properly deployed, becomes basically invisible, absorbing the viewer into the action on the screen. Documentaries, by their very nature, cannot employ all the tools (angles, lighting, etc.) that fiction filmmakers can and thus are less able to so absorb the viewer. Why then would a filmmaker attempting to be as "realistic" and as "truthful to the events" as possible want to give up more than half the available filmmaking tools? It's like Greengrass is trying so hard to make it seem real that he's overcompensating and thus it feels fake. On-screen violence, to my eyes, is only shocking and horrible when it is abundantly (and horribly) clear exactly what is going on. When the action on-screen is obscured by shaking cameras and whooshing zooms, that says, "Movie!" to me. It doesnt say, "this is a real thing that we just happened to catch on film." No style can say that. But at least when the terrible acts are shown clearly there's no place to hide. Even though the viewers know they are seeing a prosthetic or a computer generated effect, their eyes deceive them for a moment. And in that moment of deception lies the true horror (for me anyway, I know this is all subjective).

I knew going in that I wasn't going to get that in United 93. And if Greengrass had employed that method I think the critical establishment would have bolted from rather than embraced this film. I think this film will be a cathartic and momentous experience for a lot of Americans. I think, in some ways, this film will make the events of September 11, 2001, more real for people who spent that whole morning glued to their televisions but had nothing to personally connect them to the events they were witnessing. Because the real images we have from that day are so grainy and poorly photographed (so un-movie like) it might take a fictionalized version to really bring it home. And if that's what happens and it can be cathartic for people, then I guess that's something. For me, watching television that morning, I kept thinking not that this was like a movie (which was something I later heard that many people thought) but that this was less affecting than a movie. Even though it was undoubtedly really happening, because it was shot so poorly and because the news anchors were so unprepared that they lacked the ability to convey the import of this event, I kept thinking that I should feel something, anything much stronger than I was. And, I kept thinking, if this were a big budget Hollywood film, they'd have shot it in such a way as to facilitate my outpouring of emotion. But these grainy shaky images were preventing that.

The same exact thing was happening when I was watching United 93. I couldn't react to it as emotionally as I think I (maybe) should have because of the way it was shot. So, in that respect, Greengrass and Co. have made a film that reflects my experience of that day pretty damn accurately. And if that's true for me, it's probably true for most other Americans. And as such I guess we could have done a lot worse for Hollywood's first crack at depicting our greatest national calamity in fifty years.

PALINDROMES - todd solondz - 2.1 / 10

That old curmudgeon Todd Solondz (he of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse infamy) is back and more "twisted" than ever. Palindromes finds him swapping the actress who plays the lead every ten minutes or so (from Jennifer Jason Leigh to a morbidly obese black woman, etc.), a conceit which seems primarily designed to make the viewer wonder what the point of it is. And while you're wondering what the point of it is, you really don't have much time to think about anything beyond the superficial elements of the film. So let's get to that question first.

Maybe the reason for switching the lead (and particularly because the actresses are so distinctly different) is to say that the idea of identity is constantly mutable and changing. For each encounter a person has they also have a unique identity. That is, you are a different person from day to day depending on who you're with and how you want to be perceived. Maybe that's what Solondz is getting at. But that's a pretty trite point to make and hardly one worth devoting an entire film to.

So maybe the reason for the lead swapping is to point out the way people shape their perceptions of each other around how they want to see the person. Or maybe Solondz does it because he wants to distance the viewer from the events of the film, make them constantly aware that they are watching a film and thereby force them to analyze what they are seeing more than they might normally do. Or maybe he does it because he wants to flaunt normal film convention. Or maybe he does it because he's just a cantankerous bastard who wants to mess with people. Or maybe, and this might be the direction I'm leaning, he wants to be inscrutable. He wants people to puzzle over his film and by extension him, but never really get to the heart of what the film (and the filmmaker) is about.

Maybe the reason is one of those. Maybe it's none. And maybe it's some combination. But in the end it doesn't really matter because the film is just plain boring. So boring that, for most of the time I was watching it, I was thinking about things completely unrelated to the on-screen action. For instance, when Aviva is stowed away in a truck on the interstate, I was wondering how the hell Solondz had the money to spend on a helicopter shot. Or maybe he used stock footage. But that would mean that he had to acquire the stock footage first and then dress the truck to match the stock footage. And who would bother to do that just for a few inconsequential shots of a moving truck? And besides, aren't there at least fifteen better ways to spend a few thousand dollars when making an independent film?

Guess I went kinda off the track there but that's the sort of reaction watching this film engenders. There's just not enough on the screen to hold your interest so you fill in the gaps with all sorts of ancillary nonsense. I mean, I guess you could try to wrap your mind around all the targets at which Solondz takes aim (from anti-abortion crazies to the need for gun control to the general stupidity of organized religion to our continued inability to deal with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the need to dispose of aborted fetuses in a more seemly manner) but there's so many potshots aimed at so many classic liberal targets that it's barely worth the wasted effort. It's art, I guess, but art is easy. Being entertaining is hard and on that score Solondz fails pretty spectacularly.

BOOGEYMAN – stephen t. kay – 2.9 / 10

There seem to be two types of horror films made these days: gross-out, gore-filled torture fests or middlebrow, completely predictable supernatural thrillers. Boogeyman is, as you might infer from the title, part of the latter group. And as such, it’s basically just more stupid mainstream studio bullshit PG-13 horror. This is the same film as about ten other films of recent vintage (Amityville Horror or Hide and Seek, say) and as such I guess it’s not better or worse. But really, these paint-by-number horror films are just annoying. First you have the initial scare. Then comes the introduction of our hero and his life (or love interest or non-horror related problem). Then you have some sort of rising action that ratchets up the tension through some random but foreboding event (here the accidental killing of a crow, which, fyi, couldn’t really have been a crow since killing crows are illegal in the United States). Tthen the hero confronts and attempts to deal with the thing he’s been avoiding, etc.

The initial scare is provided by the hero’s father’s abduction by some unseen closet monster. This is neither unexpected nor scary and mostly just made me wonder if it wouldn’t have been more interesting to see what happens to the father once he’s sucked into that closet as opposed to watching the emotionally stunted son come to terms with his abandonment.

And anyway, what is the film saying when this guy who, if he were a real person would basically be a lunatic for being afraid of the dark as a thirty-year-old is proved to be right to be afraid? Are we supposed to be afraid of the dark? Are we supposed to think that all mentally ill people are really just seeing the world the way it really is and we are the ones who are crazy? I don’t think it’s trying to say either of those things but that seems to be the only logical conclusion.

THE SQUID & THE WHALE - noah baumbach - 4.0 / 10

Basically just a Wes Anderson movie made with seriousness instead of humor, The Squid & the Whale is almost a complete failure on every level. The people in this horrifically titled film are just terrible (and not completely convincingly realistic) examples of humanity. Basically the entire first hour of the film is a collection of these hideous people doing deeply embarrassing things. And not just embarrassing but lifetime-of-psychotherapy-required mortifying. Things like pretending you wrote Pink Floyd's "Hey You" or making your son's girlfriend pay for her own dinner or masturbating in public or not letting your twelve year-old son beat you at ping-pong. Not only does almost nobody in the world lack the basic social grace to do any of these things, the idea that I might want to sit down and watch them do it for an hour and a half is absolutely stupid.

FORTY SHADES OF BLUE - ira sachs - 4.9 / 10

Forty Shades of Blue is one of those films that cineastes love to champion. It's all about the ineffable pain of being alive. And it communicates this by meandering around for a couple of hours while a few depressed and misunderstood characters collide with each other and screw things up. As far as that goes, this is a pretty good film. It does all that stuff better than most films of its kind.

The problem, however, is the same with this film as with all the others that are just like it (Junebug, We Don't Live Here Anymore, Keane, Broken Flowers, etc.): it's just not very interesting. And yes, you can make the argument that these films are far more indicative of what life is like for an average person than something like Reservoir Dogs. And they are. But that still doesn't make them interesting, sorry. In short, this is the type of movie that you don't need to pause to take a bathroom break. You might miss someone being sad or looking sadly at something beautiful but so what? There are ten more of those moments, dragged out equally long, up ahead.

I am not a plot supremacist. It doesn't all have to be about the What of the thing. But if you ask me, the What should at least be marginally interesting. I could relate what the What of Forty Shades of Blue is but why bother? It doesn't actually have anything to do with the point of the film. Some people might find that beautiful. I just find it boring. I'm bored because I know five minutes in that someone, a hopelessly trapped and depressed someone, will make a bad decision (in this case to sleep with her boyfriend's son but it could just as easily have been to sleep with a best friend or to quit a job or to beat up someone, whatever). Then, rather than deal with this situation and its attendant causes, the person will retreat, not talk about the problem and get pissed. Maybe this anger will come out in inappropriate ways (hateful public speeches, tirades against the kids, whatever) and then the film will end with nothing much having been resolved.

Well, congratulations, that sure does reflect the way a lot of people live their lives. But those people suck. And it's their inability to take control and communicate that makes them suck. I hate these people in real life. And I hate them in films. So again, congratulations, you've effectively rendered some fictional people I find as infuriating as real people. Bully for you.

WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE – john curran – 5.0 / 10

And here we have yet another indie drama about the unbearable weight of being alive that bores the shit out of people. Aren’t the lives of these people so complicated and tragic? Aren’t all our lives? Isn’t it so damned hard to live a good life and forge meaningful connections with the opposite sex? Maybe the answers to all these questions are “yes.” But I don’t think so. And honestly, even if I did, I don’t think it would interest me to see that reflected on the screen. Why does “adult drama” mean boring people doing half stupid things that I’m almost embarrassed to witness? How does that deepen my understanding of the human condition? I just don’t know what people see in these films.

Well, okay, I think I know what people see. They see what they believe to be their understanding of the world reflected in the film. I guess they can identify with these people (God help them). I don’t, personally. And maybe that’s why I have contempt for these sorts of films. Or maybe it’s because every problem a person in a film like this has could be solved by effective communication. Either way, they never get me.

That’s not to say that there isn’t the occasional moment or two that works for me. In fact, in this film, almost all of it seems to work on the level that the characters and their interactions seem believable (I’m sure there are people who behave exactly this way somewhere out there). The moment in which Mark Ruffalo’s Jack tells his mistress Edith (Naomi Watts) that their spouses are having an affair and the pain-filled sex that follows hits the perfect emotional note. The look on Watts’s face as the scene ends is particularly powerful. That being said, I’ve never had sex like that and, although I’m sure it happens, I really don’t know how well what I’m seeing reflects the reality of that situation. Basically, the film convinced me that this is what it would be like but I really don’t know.

But, for as many moments that work wonderfully, there are just as many moments that are painful and annoying. And mostly, at the end of the film, I’m left with the impression that the level of commitment of everyone involved in this project could have been put to much better use.

MUNICH - steven spielberg - 6.7 / 10

There's a moment or three in Steven Spielberg's latest film that recalls the greatness of his earlier pictures and reminds why he's the unquestioned master of the visual medium. Unfortunately, as wonderful as those moments are, they only account for fifteen or so minutes of the film's bloated three hour running time. Most of that time is padded with yet another bombing of a nondescript European house or yet another meal in which the characters discuss nothing much so that the audience may see just how different what they are doing has made these men. It's those scenes, the ones of look-at-me self-importance, that really grate. Perhaps it's that this film was rushed into production and rushed again to release so that it would qualify for the Oscars. Whatever the reason, the magic is just not in those scenes.

But it is there in the extended opening that depicts the capture and murder of the nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Told mostly through shots of televisions, reporters and people watching TV around the world, this sequence says more about the way that we perceive the world in the modern age than most films that are expressly about the subject. It's just really impressive filmmaking.

The magic's also there in a scene in which Avner's group of Jews, basically terrorists without a home state at this point in the film, share a safe house with the Palestinian terrorists they are hunting. The idea (discussed by the two groups) that these people could co-exist were it not for the mere fact that the Jews have a place on Earth to call theirs and the Palestinians do not is certainly an interesting one (and not one shared by either of the two sides in their public rhetoric). It's the only scene that really gets at the motivations behind the commitment these people have to a way of life that turns them into animals and makes them look, to the rest of the world, like savages.

Later in the scene Avner, (the Jew, duh) asks Ali (the Arab) why they are so committed to the destruction of Israel. Ali's answers are simultaneously frightening, completely illogical and totally rational. In the scene's best moment, he asks Avner how long it took the Jews to get a homeland. Avner doesn't answer but the unspoken threat here is that the Palestinians might be willing to wait ten thousand years, too.

The old Spielberg magic's also there in the ending of the film (something rare indeed to be saying about a Spielberg film) when Avner and his handler talk about what they've really accomplished with this little war of theirs. They wonder, since every terrorist they kill seems to spawn five new ones in his place, what the net effect of the whole thing was. And as they wander and talk about this in the shadow of Manhattan's skyscrapers, we get a glimpse of the Twin Towers. And finally the characters part, neither feeling too assured by the other, as the camera pans up on those now gone landmarks. It's as loaded and interesting (and, yes, even depressing) an ending as Spielberg has come up with in years and it's the only thing from this film that might really stick with me. Interesting that with this and War of the Worlds, Speilberg, that benchmark of middlebrow conservatism, is really the first mainstream artist to tackle the thorny issue of 9/11 with some amount of grace.

Of course, the film isn't without Spielberg's trademark squeamishness about sex and family issues. In the film's worst scene, Avner, after meeting a beautiful and willing woman in a bar, decides at the last minute to be faithful to his wife. On the way out of the bar, he bumps into a friend. He tells the friend to beware of the woman but sure enough, later that night, unable to sleep, Avner visits his friend, smells the woman's perfume and finds the friend murdered in his bed. The implication being that unfaithfulness gets you killed. Talk about your Hebrew School reactionary impulse towards sex. It's almost as if, when Spielberg isn't paying attention, the most wonderful things leap forth from his mind but when he's trying to make a point, all he can really say is the most reactionary and simple sort of moralistic nonsense. That's a shame really because he could be our greatest artist. Instead he's just one our most interesting.

FREDDY VS. JASON - ronnie yu - 8.5 / 10

For fans of either seminal eighties horror film franchise (Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm St.) and especially for fans of both, the meeting of the minds that is Freddy vs. Jason is as good as could possibly be hoped. From the opening company logo (New Line's) that's been converted to red to more closely resemble the company's original logo that opened the first Nightmare of Elm St. to the hint of Jason's theme that accompanies it, the filmmakers get all the small details exactly right. Maybe most impressively, they came up with a believable story that would bring both maniac killers together and allow them to fight on each others respective home turf (Freddy's being dreams, Jason's, of course, being Crystal Lake). I'm just astounded that they were able to squeeze so many seminal moments of eighties horror into one film without the film devolving into parody (like A Nightmare on Elm St. 5) or a complete bloodbath (like Friday the 13th, Part 5).

Of course, this comes from a fan of both series who has recently watched all the films that preceded this one. If a viewer came into this film with only the vague ideas of Freddy and Jason that they've gotten from Halloween masks and occasional references in other media, I'm not sure how successful the film would be for them. It's impossible to imagine myself as one of them but it's safe to assume that, when Jason enters the house to kill his first victim and the victim's girlfriend is in the shower, people not familiar with the series wouldn't get the joke and would, rather, think of this scene as clichéd and old hat. I, on the other hand, loved the reference to the classic Friday the 13th shower scenes of old. And the fact that the girl in question is never really imperiled in this shower is part of the joke.

Some of the picture's best moments, the ones that are most loaded with subtext, are the murders themselves. For instance, the murder that accompanies that shower scene is of a man in bed and is filmed in such a way as to unmistakably reference the sex act. But since it's Jason doing the killing (Jason kills most of the men in the picture. Freddy takes care of the women) and his killings of men are usually decapitations (read: castrations), indeed, his later killings of men in this film are decapitations, what to make of the fact that this first murder is by repeated penetration (read: rape)? And then, later in the film, a girl is trapped asleep in Freddy's nightmare world as a drunk guy is poised to rape her in the real world. The drunk guy is about to save her from death by raping her. But then Jason comes along and stabs both of them. So, while Freddy is metaphorically raping her mind, the drunk guy is literally raping her and Jason is symbolically raping them both with his knife. That's some pretty heady stuff from a slasher flick.

This brings up the question of what role exactly Jason is playing in the film. Is he the hero of the piece? The kids eventually unleash him against Freddy in the hopes that he will save them (since Jason on the loose would only really be a problem for Crystal Lake and hence not such a threat for them since they live in Springwood). Does this make him the hero or some sort of failed romance (since he kills the girl he's ostensibly saving)? Perhaps he's some kind of heroic ambition run amok and perverted to evil by the lack of a mother figure to direct that ambition in the proper direction. Ever fearful of the sex act, Jason's been unable to overcome his trepidation and partake in the act in the rightful way. Instead he has his rapes of steel as a substitute. In the same way, his heroism is slanted and skewed. It can be harnessed by others but never truly takes the right form.

There's an awful lot going on under the surface of this film, too much even to get to it all on the first viewing. There's the part where the girl wants a nose job and then later has her nose hacked off by Freddy. There's the valiant (for a change) geek character who is actually respected and listened to and even has a somewhat heroic death. (Is this a sop to the geek fan base of the picture or does it say something about what is most valued in today's society?) There's the father, used by Freddy to murder his own wife, who comes after his daughter in exactly the same way as he went after the mother. Basically there's a ton of stuff in this film. And it's been put there by people who, for once, treat this genre with the seriousness normally accorded ancient myth. This film shows that such treatment is not only warranted but also quite fruitful. This is the film that points out just how far from mere titillation the slasher flick can be. It's a great film and nothing could have done the two franchises prouder.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 8: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN - rob hedden - 2.9 / 10

Jason Voorhees is the star of these movies. That is an undisputed fact as he is the only character to remain consistent throughout the series and is the only one for which the audience has any real interest. However, up until this seventh sequel, Jason had never had anything like star treatment. Here, for the first time, the viewer can catch a glimpse of how Jason goes about stalking his victims and why he chooses one course of action over another. You can see how he behaves after a murder (never shown before) and you can almost see how his addled child's mind thinks.

And that's all well and good for people who care about such things, but it makes for one crappy movie that couldn't scare a small child who is new to the series. If the viewer knows exactly where Jason is all the time and what exactly he's planning on doing, there's just no way to be frightened by what's going on here. Somewhere along the line someone, and I'm thinking it was the editor, figured this out, so during the later killing scenes Jason just appears out of nowhere constantly (created, probably, by jettisoning minutes of footage that show how he got to these new spots). This tactic doesn't work either because it simply makes the audience wonder how in the hell Jason could have climbed thirty rungs of a ladder in two seconds (even with his newly acquired superpowers) or how he could know the exact layout of a New York City sewer having never been away for Crystal Lake before.

But this is all moot. The real dilemma here is the time problem. The Girl Who Lives in this film is eighteen years old. As a small child of eight or nine, she was pushed in the lake by her uncle who was attempting to teach her to swim. While struggling to stay afloat, she met Jason who had been submerged there by his campmates. So, nine or ten years ago Jason was a little boy. That makes him about the same age as the kids in this film (never mind the whole, sunk at the bottom of the lake and still living thing). However, he is an adult when Tommy Jarvis, as a boy of about eleven, "kills" him in Part 4. Then, later, Tommy Jarvis returns to Crystal Lake as adult (in Part 6) and has another run-in with Jason, putting Jason's age at least over thirty. And if you really want to do the math, Part 2, in which the adult Jason first appears, was made in 1981 and Part 8 was made in 1989, so Jason has to be at least six or seven years older than the Girl Who Lives.

I know all this is beside the point with this sort of film but I couldn't help being distracted by it. Here you have one of the most interesting film franchises around with one of the richest subtexts and apparently monkeys are at the controls. There's not much about this film that could have been conceived by an intelligent, creative person. Too bad we'll never get to see what a person like that would have done with the franchise. Instead were stuck with a vision of New York that posits the ridiculous notion that the sewers are pumped full of toxic sludge every night (how our beloved killer meets his ignominious end). A sad way for someone so interesting to go out. Oh well, I suppose I haven't seen that Jason in space movie yet so I might have greater disappointment in my future.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PT. 7: THE NEW BLOOD – john carl beuchler – 4.5 / 10

So apparently nobody bothered to get Jason’s body out of the lake after Part 6. Great idea. I’m sure nothing bad could possibly happen from leaving the most vicious mass murderer of all time chained to a rock and floating a foot or two from the surface of Crystal Lake (oh and by the way, it’s called Crystal Lake again). And how is it that the filmmakers choose to have Jason brought back from the (half) dead? Telekinesis, of course.

Okay, so the setup is hokey and makes pretty much no sense, it is an interesting choice on a subtextual level. Telekinesis, a power that typically only manifests itself in young women (at least the young women of Brian DePalma films anyway) seems to have some connection to sexual awakening. And since Jason is a sexually stunted man who murders people in what basically amounts to rape (repeatedly penetrating women with pointed objects), it’s quite appropriate that he is brought back by a force that draws its power from burgeoning sexuality. Unfortunately, as depicted in this film, telekinesis is simultaneously pretty lame and pretty ineffectual.

But that’s not really the problem with the film. No, the real problem is the plot and the fact that there is an attempt at one. People come to Camp Crystal Lake to try and get laid and be cool, Jason kills them all except for one, the end. That’s the plot of a Friday the 13th. But no, this film has to add some mother-daughter issues and a sleazy psychiatrist who is trying to profit from his charge’s gift on top of the trying to get laid and look cool stuff. There’s just too much going on. And I don’t know if it’s fact that the filmmakers are trying to do too much that lead them to make the other characters (aside from the Girl Who Lives and her boyfriend) such tools, but man did I want to see some of these people die.

Although, come to think of it, wanting desperately to see people killed does put the viewer in a very strange place. While not exactly identifying with the killer, it makes the scary scenes far less so, if you don’t care about the survival of the victim. I don’t know, all this Friday the 13th has sort of inured me to the scary scenes in these films. Not because they are repetitive (although they are to some extent) but because no one ever survives (except, of course, the Girl Who Lives). If Jason comes after you, you die. It’s just a question of when and how horribly. So it seems a little silly to be concerned for someone’s safety if you know they ain’t gonna make it. Which, in terms of Part 7, means that when you see Jason going after one of these hateful people (they make fun of the telekinetic girl for going to a shrink, for chrissake) you can enjoy the entire sequence just as you did back in the beginning of the series. Yes, you enjoy the scene in an entirely different way, but it is enjoyment nonetheless. It’s injecting life back into the scary moments of the film and that’s something that seemed all but impossible after the last two sequels.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PT. 4: THE FINAL CHAPTER – joseph zito – 7.0 / 10

Aside from Halloween, this film may be the quintessential eighties horror flick. It has all the elements: great sex scenes, tension filled murders that are sometimes unexpected and sometimes horrifying, it’s loaded with subtext and, since the kid who ends up killing Jason in the end, seems to be headed for a career as a special effects maestro, it’s even a little bit meta. The only thing that grates about the film is the terrible music that for some reason continues to be used. Nothing about Part 1 has been carried over to the sequels (the killer’s different, the people being killed are different, etc.) except for the terrible theme. Harry Manfredini, the creator of that terrible theme, is also the only crew-member that has remained throughout the series. Whether this is because they are just recycling the music from the first film for all of the sequels I do not know. Whatever the reason, I just can’t understand why anyone would choose to keep using this terrible music

Also, a minor concern I suppose, but when did Jason get superpowers? In the previous two films (he wasn’t in the first one), he’s just a regular fucked up psycho but here he suddenly has the power to throw people through walls and bust down doors with this hands. Although his previous incarnations were a little stronger than your average human, his exploits were still more believable than the shotgun blast to the chest induced flight across the room of most action films. Now, however, and without explanation, he has powers. I suppose he needed to have superpowers to survive the axe to the head that ended the third film, however, I think an explanation as to the origin of these powers is needed or, barring that, it would be nice for someone to at least comment on the fact that he seems to have superpowers.

Still and all, this is a very good, maybe the best, entry in the series. It’s got a lot to chew on after the killings are done. The one that’s still working its way around in my brain is what’s going on the final scene where Tommy, after crippling Jason, sees his hand twitch and so proceeds to beat his head until it’s turned to liquid. On seeing the next film, I suppose one might think that it was meant to leave the door open for Tommy to become the new Jason. But from the production values and the subtitle, I really think this was intended to be the last Friday the 13th. So would they really plant the seed for a sequel in what was supposed to be the last film in the series? I doubt it. So what’s going on there? Why does Tommy only really beat on Jason after the heat of the moment has passed? I guess it says something about the nature and power of violence and the addictive rush it can give the person committing it. I think it also might say something about the nature of people in these movies in general. Nobody seems to be in this film for any other purpose than to kill or be killed. And since Tommy isn’t going to be the latter he must embrace the former, there’s no middle ground in Friday the 13th.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME – j. lee thompson – 6.7 / 10

This cheapie Canadian tax shelter flick is pretty much a perfect example of an 80’s slasher flick. It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination but it has a lot more going for it than most of the cheapie horror films that piggybacked on the success of Friday the 13th.

Viewed at this late date (the film was made in 1981), Happy Birthday to Me looks like an instruction manual for the many slasher films that would follow in the next two decades. The film is set at a prestigious boarding school (as later films like Urban Legend and Cry Wolf would be). It centers around the most popular kids in school as they drink and carouse and get picked off one by one (as in I Know What You Did Last Summer or Graduation Day). Its protagonist has a horrible event in her past that she’s trying to outrun but that has implications for the murders currently being committed (just like Scream and The Fog and Boogeyman and Jeeper Creepers). And finally, the end is one twist after another as more and more information is revealed (just like any self-respecting horror flick ever made).

Since the slasher genre doesn’t get much attention in film history textbooks and in college classrooms, I don’t have quite as good a handle on the history of the genre as I do on, say, the detective film or the western. So I don’t know if Happy Birthday to Me was a big deal when it came out and therefore can’t say for certain that this film was hugely influential. But judging by the films of its ilk that have come after it, either Happy Birthday to Me was the prototype for a great many films or else it just happened to touch on all the things the genre would eventually embrace. Either way, it’s a remarkable achievement for a film whose only real reason for being made was to give some doctor or lawyer a tax write off.

HOSTEL - eli roth - 4.1 / 10

As far as I can tell, the point of this film is to see how much you, the viewer, can stomach. There's nothing in its artfully disturbed head besides a desire to maim and torture. So much so that during the film's climactic escape from the house of horrors there are numerous scenes of horrible violence for no apparent reason (two men get their heads bashed in by hungry looking children, a Japanese woman throws herself in front of a train). These moments do not advance the plot and are not necessary from any sort of story perspective. (Notice that I've left out the final murder in a Prague bathroom which is somewhat justifiable.) They are bloodletting for the sake of bloodletting.

So the question becomes, what the hell is the point of this sadism and why are people interested in watching it? These days the vogue in horror / thrillers is to set the action in medieval looking dungeons with years of blood and grim soaked into the artfully photographed cracks in the floor. Various tools of torture (all artfully rusted and squeaking of course) are strewn about the room. And there's always some sort of half human hunchback waiting in the wings to clean up the mess when the sadist torturers have completed their work. I guess the thinking is that we are no longer scared of death itself, that what we really fear is a gruesome and prolonged death. And so these films (Saw, Wolf Creek, etc.) give us the bloody torture before the eventual murder. There's nothing wrong with that approach in and of itself (except perhaps for what it says about a society hungry to eat up this sort of uber violence) but what is often lost, as it is in this film, is any pretense of scaring the audience. There's no build-up of tension and no question of what's going to happen. It's just a waiting game for scenes of torture.

There's also the issue of the gross misuse of music in Hostel. Throughout the beginning of the film, in which there's nothing much horrible happening, the music is used to give a sense of foreboding when none would otherwise exist. I suppose that's somewhat necessary because of the complete lack of anything interesting happening but the way in which it's overused is just grating. There's no need to have a huge build with violins screeching away as the train pulls into the station. It's distracting and annoying and completely unjustified.

SUPERMAN - richard donner - 3.0 / 10

The special effects are lame and the story's completely lacking in any sort of logic or believability (turning the Earth backwards to reverse time? Really?) so I can't for the life of me understand why this film is so revered. Let's start with the opening scenes set on Krypton concerning Jor-El (Superman's father) and his run-ins with the Council. He first sentences some bad guys (the sequel's villains) to some sort of alternate dimension as punishment for some non-specific crimes. Why this is in the film is never made clear as it plays no part in the rest of the plot and does nothing to define the character of the people later involved in the film proper. Then Jor-El tells the Council that the planet is doomed. They don't believe him, of course, and instruct him not to leave the planet. Why he listens to them is never adequately explained and really what could they have done to him if he decided to leave when the planet was exploding? Then, of course, there's the fact that both Jor-El and his wife know what kind of life Kal-El (Superman) would have on Earth (i.e. that he would be a god among men). How do they know this? And more importantly, how does their knowing this impact the story in the least? In short, why bother having them know this?

Okay, so dissecting the specific illogicalities of the film is sort of a zero sum game as you're left with really no film whatsoever if you take away everything that doesn't make sense. But seriously, turning the Earth backwards, what the fuck? I guess the concept of trying to make superhero films set in the recognizably real world is something of a recent development but this is really pushing it. Especially when you take into account all the ways in which Metropolis is shown to be New York (multiple Twin Towers shots, the Statue of Liberty, etc.). It just isn't very consistent, is what I'm trying to say and even if the film is planning on being cheesy and silly it still needs some consistency. The fact that the sequels only got worse really says something about how far down the bottom is for these superhero flicks.

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE - wes craven - 7.8 / 10

New Nightmare is certainly the best film in the Nightmare on Elm St. cycle. It is also one of the most inventive horror films around and provides the series with a fittingly conclusive ending. The film is set in our (i.e. the real) world where the actors Robert Englund (who played Freddy) and Heather Langenkamp (who played the original Girl Who Lives in the first film) play themselves regrouping to create one final Nightmare on Elm St. But Freddy Krueger invades the real world and starts wreaking havoc.

It seems that, since he's been driven out of his various nightmare realms, he's left with only ours to torment. It's a brilliant idea and the execution is almost as intoxicating as the concept. There's some stuff about Wes's nightmares spawning the films; that he creates them from his dreams; that he is simply a conduit for them rather than the creator of a story. Thus Freddy becomes a sort of spectral ghost relying on the tales in which he is the star to sustain him. Now that the series of films is drawing to a close, he needs to invade our world in order to stay relevant and to continue to exist. He's a story that's fighting to continue being told so that he does not slip into irrelevance and the realm of forgotten bogeymen and childhood nightmares. It's a wonderful concept for a horror film and more importantly it's a fitting conclusion to a cycle of films that, despite the terribleness of most of them, has become ingrained in the consciousness of the American public. Rather than allowing the series to peter out and fade into obsolescence (as these things so often do) Craven revitalized it at the moment of its conclusion. Fitting and wonderful.

KING KONG - peter jackson - 8.7 / 10

Although the film is a touch on the long side, there's enough jaw-dropping action crammed into its three-hour running time to satisfy all but the most demanding action junkies. I say a bit on the long side but it's really only in a few specific moments that some judicious editing would have made the film better (and even those elisions would only amount to a few minutes). For instance, as Ann and Kong watch the sun rise over the New York skyline, it takes Ann so long to figure out what the ape is trying to indicate that I started to worry that she was dim because she should have figured it out a full minute earlier.

But that minor grievance aside, I can't say enough about how spectacular the action sequences in the film are. One on top of the other (especially the scenes on Skull Island) and each one more spectacular than the last, there's never been anything like it in the modern computer-generated-character age. Kong's fight with the T-Rexes for instance takes them from the top of a mountain, down a crevasse and finally through the jungle with Ann balanced in between the entire time. This sequence (as well as the one in New York City and the Brontosaurus chase on Skull Island ) is like a complete film unto itself. It has separate acts and rising and falling action. It also has a distinct plot aside from just having cool shit happen. I just can't get over them.

Add to all this the fact that Jackson and company (Naomi Watts deserves a lot of the credit here) have created a real and deep emotional connection between Kong and Ann and you have one tremendous film. It's tremendous on an old school level. It works the way a John Wayne / John Ford picture works. And its also tremendous on an I-can't-believe-they-did-this level. It's a filmgoing experience unlike anything I've ever had, being completely enraptured with the film itself and simultaneously dazzled by the level of filmmaking prowess on display.

Interestingly, I think it's just that sort of enjoyment on two levels that has led to the less than stellar box office thus far despite unanimous critical acclaim. Critics and people involved with filmmaking can easily appreciate the film on both those levels but the average moviegoer is oblivious to that second level. And, that being the case, they just think it's too long and not interesting enough when Kong isn't kicking ass. I guess, then, that I feel sorry for those people because the film I'm watching is pretty damn good.

SYRIANA - stephen gaghan - 5.7 / 10

There's just way too much going on in this movie; it's trying to do more than any film, even a ten-hour miniseries, would be able to do. It's not a bad film per se, but because of the amount of stuff writer-director Stephen Gaghan is trying to cram into the film, there's just no room for little things like character development and plot clarity. The real shame of it is that a lot of the stuff that pushed those essential elements aside is beside the main point of the film. For instance, why make room for Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) and his wife's marital troubles? For that matter, why does Gaghan bother having Woodman's oldest son killed in a freak accident? It wastes a lot of screen time and doesn't add anything at all to the oil discussion.

There's also the matter of the overwrought names. The surnames of the two CEOs of the oil companies are Pope and Killen. There's also Bennet Holiday, a lawyer, and the aforementioned Bryan Woodman, an oil analyst. The names and subject matter cry out that this is a capital "I" important film and must be taken seriously. The problem (besides trying to discuss a very complex issue from all sides in less than three hours) is that the film isn't any fun and lacks any real forward momentum.

As the film slipped past the two-hour mark, I started to wonder what would signal the end. There hadn't, as yet, been any sort of coherent plot whose conclusion would lend the film some sort of climax, so I had no idea what was going to happen to signal the end of this "story." It turns out, unfortunately, that some late in the game violence and a tacked on emotional moment serve as the climax to this opus. But these are both cheap and out of left field and, until this climax came, I had quite forgotten that the people involved were even in the film at all.

That being said, you do have to give Gaghan and his team (especially George Clooney who packed on thirty extra pounds for no reason for his role as Bob Baer) credit for trying to make a popular film that has something to say about our modern world. And I suppose some of the credit for that goes to Mark Cuban (who put up the money to make it), which is pretty much just bananas.

THE ICE HARVEST - harold ramis - 3.0 / 10

The only thing interesting about this run of the mill "thriller" with a stupid and predictable "twist" ending is the filmmakers' recognition that having the protagonist possess a working cell phone would eliminate the entire plot. So they have him break it very early on. That way he has to go to all these places rather than just call up the people he's going to see. I guess that's acceptable but it seems kinda cheap.

And besides, it turns the whole film into a cautionary tale about the bad things that can happen if you lose your cell phone. Which brings up the point that most movies more than ten years old have plots that would have been dramatically simplified if the protagonist had the use of a wireless phone. (As a side note, it makes me wonder if the book this film is based on was published before cell phones became so commonplace.) That getting the cell phone out of the equation thing has become very very popular over the last few years. And I, for one, am looking forward to the day when cell phones are incorporated into the plot in an effective way rather than done away with in increasingly silly ways.

DAYS OF HEAVEN - terrence malick - 5.0 / 10

The same lame ass voiceover and directionless storytelling that mar Malick's later work (The New World, Thin Red Line) is also present here. I suppose the predictably tragic nature of the story is supposed to lend it some gravitas, to make it allegorical for the impossible plight of the nation's poor during this period of American history. And maybe it does. But it's still a slow and boring film with a simultaneously cute and pretentious narrator who is speaking words that can't possibly be her own (and are therefore the words of the writer-director).

I don't mind a filmmaker taking a philosophical stance and having a point of view, that's the job of an artist after all. But Malick seems to be cloaking himself in aimlessness as if to say, "You can't pin this on me, this is how it was. And if you blame me for being aimless and pointless then you're also condemning the people of that time period and who are you to do that, you bourgeois prick." So I say, fuck Malick and his lovable pretensions. And fuck all the art school cineastes who would say that I just don't "get" Malick. His films are fucking boring. And I don't want to spend long hours in the dark studying something that's just plain boring. Any idiot can be pretentious but it's very hard to be entertaining. If you can be both you're a genius. But there aren't many of those. So if you have to be one or the other, I recommend the latter only because then you won't have pseudo-intellectuals following you around with their tongues hanging out. Oh, and you'll probably earn a hell of a lot more money that way, too.

DERAILED - mikael håfström - 1.5 / 10

Derailed offers one bewildering movie-going experience. You don't cast Jennifer Aniston (who's just plain not going to be a movie star) in a role unless you want the audience to have sympathy for her, even if you are casting her against type. She's America's other sweetheart (after Julia Roberts of course). But in Derailed she plays a double-crossing, cheating wife who is only ever an impediment to our hero (Clive Owen's Charles Schine). But she sure does seem nice. And further, her interactions with Charles, although they're later revealed to be an act, are sweet and playful and the stuff of which movie romances are made. These encounters are in sharp contrast to the stilted, pained interactions between Charles and his wife. So the audience is put in the very strange position of rooting for the relationship between the philandering husband and his mistress to be the one that prevails.

But then there's the big reveal that exposes the mistress (Aniston) as a con woman. And now the audience is completely lost with no relationship to root for (Aniston's character dies early and uselessly). The wife and sick child of our hero are annoying and having him and them return to normalcy isn't nearly interesting enough. And so, we're put in the position of wishing that somehow Charles and Aniston's Lucinda could have made it work. That's a very strange position to be put in and it's more than a little bewildering.

Also bewildering is the film's portrayal of black people. There are three in the film. One is an ex-con mailroom employee. One is a gun for hire. And the third is a policeman. (And for added fun, two of the three are played by rappers) So the good guy (Charles) has his black guy who can die in a dramatic way. And the bad guy has his black guy who Charles can kill to prove he means business. And then there's the black detective who can figure it out in the end and, although he has the power to do something to stop it, merely add a wink-wink nod of approval to our vigilante hero. How this paternalistic portrayal of black people (and foreigners and women) didn't ring any bells somewhere along the line should be shocking and offensive. Instead it's met with a shrug. This is the way it is in mainstream Hollywood, I guess.

JARHEAD - sam mendes - 7.9 / 10

It's understandable why a looser and more casual film would appeal to Sam Mendes at this point in his career. His previous two films, American Beauty and Road to Perdition are two of the most carefully photographed films in recent memory made with the help of the best cinematographer who ever lived (Conrad Hall). But since Road to Perdition, Hall has passed away and left some people, me among them, wondering just how many of those perfectly composed shots were the work of Mendes and how many were the work of Hall. Additionally, such rigorously well-composed films take a lot of creative willpower to make. With these two factors in mind, is it any surprise that Mendes would make a looser and less careful film than his previous two?

And indeed he has. Jarhead is loose and fast with a constantly bobbing and weaving camera (courtesy new DP Roger Deakins, not a bad substitute). The problem with that, however, is that handheld camerawork and loose staging go a long way towards defeating analysis of a film. You can't look to any one shot in this film and say that it sums up the movie (or even the scene) because you can't say for sure whether everything in that frame was put there on purpose. You can't say for certain whether the sun glinting off the water bottle was done on purpose or if it was just a happy accident created by the fact that Deakins has the camera on his shoulder and can swoop down for that perfect shot whenever and wherever he sees it.

So Mendes has done an end run around the question of whether or not he can make another terrifically composed film without Conrad Hall. And on first viewing, that frustrated me to the point of nearly disliking the film. On second viewing, however, I began to look at the other areas in which Mendes creates subtextual and extratextual meaning in this film. There's not nearly as much of it in Jarhead as there is in American Beauty or Road to Perdition but it's there and it's worth discussing.

Foremost among these is the soldiers' use of (anti-) war films as violence porn. The marines in the film learn of their deployment to the Middle East during a screening of Apocalypse Now, a legendarily anti-war film that they're treating like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with cheering and pantomiming of the on-screen action. It's a clever subversion of the idea that a film about war can ever truly be anti-war. And it's also a lot like how you'd imagine these men would respond to a viewing of a pornographic film. Indeed, with women largely absent from their lives and pornography (obviously) not allowed in the barracks, these men more or less substitute blood lust for sexual lust. And later, when the troops gather to watch The Deer Hunter only to find that it has been taped over with real porn, Mendes makes this point abundantly clear. It's the best, most resonant moment in the film and it says the most about the situation these men are in.

The main problem with the film, however, is, to carry the violence as porn metaphor one step further, that this particular war is all foreplay and no climax. Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the only member of his elite scout sniper unit to even see an enemy combatant, never fires his rifle. And while this only deepens the meaning and value of that particular metaphor (and indeed makes it the point of the whole piece) it isn't terribly compelling filmmaking. The audience, like the soldiers, have been craving the pink mist, the bloodletting, the violence of war. And denying us (and them) that violence aborts any sort of catharsis.

Certainly not all films have to be cathartic but this particular case of cinematic blue balls leaves the audience craving some sort of release. And if they can't have it through bloodshed, they need to get it in some other way. I think Mendes realized this and thus he tries to imbue the film with some sort of catharsis in the few short scenes after the soldiers return home from the desert. In these scenes, the characters, now quite different than we've seen them before, attend the funeral of one of their own. But this desperate grab for an emotional payoff is so far removed for the rah-rah marine life and feels so tacked on that the only real emotion engendered in the audience is apathy. It's too little, too late.

I can't help but think that if this film weren't based on a book some studio executive would have mandated that we see some bloodshed. And, although the filmmakers might have resisted, had that bloodshed made the final cut I think the film would have been the better for it.

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES - rob zombie - 3.7 / 10

I love The Devil's Rejects (the sequel to House of 1000 Corpses). That's just a fun, smart, sick film. But this, the one that came before and launched the sequel I so enjoy, is just lame. I kept waiting for it to get good but the longer I waited the more annoying the film got and the more annoyed I became. Every new wrinkle and twist of the plot is completely predictable and totally boring. The film is basically a group of freaks killing a group of normal people. They don't torture them very much and don't really seem to be having too much fun with the killings so I guess I'm wondering what the point of the whole thing is. In the second film, the twisted family of killers fully embraces their work and exploits their victims in horrible (but pleasant for viewing and analysis) ways. In this film, as often as not, they'll just shoot someone in the head without so much as a hello.

That being the case, my mind started to wander (never a good sign in a horror film) to thoughts of logic and common sense. Usually a horror film exerts enough grip on your fear receptors that you don't have time to consider the why's and wherefore's of the whole mess (which, if you were to actually do while watching most horror films would rob you of any pleasure. It's not that House of 1000 Corpses is unique in this department, it's just that I focused on it more than I'm normally inclined to.). Chief among the ridiculous implausibilities is the fact that the family kills people wantonly, whoever they may be and however they may have stumbled across their path (be they high school cheerleaders or law enforcement officers). The problem here is that this family could not do this for very long without people figuring out that something is amiss down by that crazy looking house.

Which leads me to the second major common sense lapse: the house. It's a fucking nut house. And while that might be scary and all, any sane person looking at that house would know some fucked up shit be goin' on in there. The fact that they've been committing murders left and right for years coupled with the fact that they've been doing it in this ridiculous house makes it impossible to believe that they could have gotten away with it for so long.

Finally, the most annoying logical lapse is the dozens of mutant creatures that live in the web of subterranean tunnels that snake all over the Firefly property. Who are all these people? How did they come to be this way? How has not one of them ever been noticed by a person who's just passing by? Why does the family even keep them around? And how did they get the technology to meld flesh with machine? That last question especially irks me because it comes out of nowhere and is never addressed but for god's sake they've built a Terminator down in that dungeon. I guess by the time you've gotten to this part of the film it's basically over and if you've gone with it this far I guess you can go with it a little more. What the hell?

However, what really turned me off the whole film in the first place was not the illogical nature of the plot (that came later when I got bored) but rather the silly interstitials of, alternately, Sheri Moon dancing half-naked, the brother looking crazy, or some half glimpsed negative image. These interludes are not scary so much as they are disorienting and annoying (not to mention pointless). That wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that, it seems to me anyway, the best violence is done in these little interstitials. You go to see a film called House of 1000 Corpses, you expect some serious grue, full-on and in your face. You don't expect it to be hidden in sepia-tinged, negative printed, shaken camera interstitials that come out of nowhere and return to the ether without making any real impression. That's just not good business sense. But I guess somebody liked it. And I'm glad because that meant Zombie got to make the sequel. And since I really liked the sequel, I guess I can't complain too much.

SAW II - darren lynn bousman - 4.5 / 10

Gotta love the concept: a killer gives people a choice, give in and die or struggle and live. That's a setup for a tremendous film. Unfortunately neither this film nor the one that preceded it is that film. I can get behind the logical inconsistencies and not get too bothered. I can even accept the very strange and uncharacteristic behavior of certain characters (assuming they're under pressure and might do the plot-convenient thing at a random moment). And, since I knew what I was getting into when I bought a ticket to see this film, I can accept the fact that there has to be a twist ending.

But with such a rich premise and basically nothing but places to go, I cannot accept that this is the story they chose to tell. It's just stupid. They have a bigger budget, access to actual actors (as opposed to using the screenwriter as the second lead in the first film) and they have the audience expecting that the killer will get away. You don't have that combination very often. And this garbage is the result? For shame.

I guess most of my ire here is over the basic set-up of the story. Five (or six or seven) people are locked up in a house and gradually exposed to a lethal toxin while the hero cop interrogates the killer and watches the proceedings on television monitors. It's like one of those bullshit romantic comedies wherein the entire world order is disturbed just so some schmuck can learn a lesson (Bruce Almighty, etc.). This whole elaborate set-up is just so Donnie Wahlberg's detective can play the game. Thus, I spent the whole film wondering why the hell Jigsaw didn't just kidnap him and make him play. Why go through the trouble of getting caught by the police and setting up this elaborate game and then having to rely on the detective doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment? Everything has to go exactly perfect for the killer (and it does) in order to pull this thing off. And that's just too much exposure for a guy who would surely know better. If he didn't, he would've been caught long before now.

The other major problem with the film is the twist ending. It's not bad, per se, it's just obvious from about five minutes in. Once Jigsaw says the object of the game is to sit and listen for two hours, the rest of the film is almost moot. There's a fun scare here or there but it's mostly just a way to pass the time until the detective is unable to wait out the two hours and does something stupid that plays right into Jigsaw's hands. Although the specifics of how this happens are interesting and not entirely predictable, the final plot development is greeted with a shrug. Still, there's great promise in this premise and I'd love to see somebody with a brain get in there and do something interesting with it.