It took two years for “Paranormal Activity” to reach a wide audience, and in that time, the film attracted a fantastic amount of hype online. Filmed in a week in 2006 with a budget of only a few thousand dollars, first-time director Oren Peli’s film bounced around from festival to festival and studio to studio before it finally earned a limited release, and—thanks to sufficient internet buzz—a wide release. It’s been tagged as “the scariest movie ever,” and while that particular hype is a bit exaggerated, it is an extremely unsettling, captivating movie, full of old-school thrills and genuine spookiness.
October 3, 2009
Zombieland
When it comes to shaking up the status quo and establishing new ground rules by which to live, there’s nothing more motivating than an apocalypse. And there’s no better apocalypse than a zombie apocalypse, an end-of-the-world scenario that started out as a favorite genre among horror fans and then shambled into the realm of big-budget mainstream movies earlier this decade.
No matter what our foibles and flaws, zombies bring out the best and the worst in the still-living, and a few days stuck in a world populated by gore-caked ghouls hungry for flesh is a self-improvement tool that puts Oprah, Dr. Phil and the rest to shame. Zombies are gross, deadly and grim reminders of our base instincts, but damn it all if they don’t help us become better people (or, for those who fail to heed the zombie’s lesson, become lunch).
Any self-improvement movement must have a guide-book, and that’s partially the function that “Zombieland” fills. When it comes to living with (and dispatching) the undead, there are plenty of rules to abide, and as the “Zombieland” cast demonstrates, ignoring those rules most often leads to serious peril. As the movie opens, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a college student/shut-in, goes over the ground rules: keep yourself in shape, go the extra mile when killing zombies, and always wear your seatbelt. And—this is a big one—don’t get too attached to anyone, since, in Zombieland, they might very well end up trying to snack on you later.
September 29, 2009
The Informant!
From the exclamation point appended to the title to the standoffish based-on-a-true-story title card at the film’s start (it ends with “So there.”), “The Informant!” all but challenges you to believe it. Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film is, after all, based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, a former high-ranking executive at agri-business giant Archer Daniels Midland who, in the early 1990s, blew the whistle on the company’s price-fixing scheme. That much is true, despite the sort of “nyah-nyah” declaration at the outset.
But the line between fact and fiction quickly becomes unrecognizable. “The Informant!” at first appears to be part white-collar crime drama, part character study, in the vein of Michael Mann’s “The Insider.” But as the film unfolds and Whitacre shifts from the executive who cried wolf to whistleblower par excellence and finally into something else entirely, “The Informant!” seems more in line with “Burn After Reading,” the Coen Brothers’ black comedy from last fall about bumbling idiots caught up in the very deadly world of espionage. While “Burn” had the benefit of being fictional, “The Informant!” carries with it a grain or two of truth, and this makes the movie all the more engaging–and slightly frustrating. Keep reading →
August 26, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
In Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” a chronicle of an alternate history of World War II in which the Axis won the war and Germany and Japan conquered America, there’s a great moment in which the characters glimpse, very briefly, another world (that is to say, our world) in which the Nazis actually lost. Quentin Tarantino has a similar scene in “Inglourious Basterds,” his own fractured fairy tale version of WWII. The coolly malevolent SS Col. Hans Landa (played with careful, manicured aplomb by Christoph Waltz) tells his longtime adversary, Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt) of how the hand of fate can reach out and change history utterly. Landa knows history is about to change, but not in the way, he seems to sense, it’s meant to.
In this case, though, the hand belongs not to fate but Tarantino, who’s created a singular movie that’s part revenge-fantasy, part comic book and an all-around unabashed love letter to the cinema. It’s a bold and brightly colored movie, bloody and utterly shameless and supremely confident in every move it makes. “Basterds” is a homage to WWII mission flicks like “The Dirty Dozen” and Italian director Enzo Castellari’s similarly titled 1978 “Inglorious Bastards,” but its closest cousin is this summer’s “Drag Me To Hell,” another quirky piece of old-school filmmaking that makes its own rules and revels in the pure fun of going to the movies.
June 28, 2009
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most American movie ever. To be more specific, it’s an expensively, maybe even carefully, constructed meta-prank about America, pop-culture and other topics best left un-addressed by giant talking robots. “Revenge” can only be a goof. It must be—that it would make a boat load of money was a given, and with that goal out of the way, director Michael Bay, stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and the rest of people responsible for this travesty must have had some other endgame in mind. Laughing with and at everything that is great and stupid about modern life in America seems as reasonable an explanation as anything presented in the movie, though that’s damning with faint praise indeed.
June 28, 2009
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
The subway is the fastest way to get around New York City, a fact that’s noted more than a few times in Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” a bland retread of the 1974 heist flick of the same name. The subway system is the city’s circulatory system and so long as the trains keep running, the city remains alive. Messing with something so important by, say, hijacking a subway car full of people would typically invite a sense of urgency, but everyone in “Pelham,” from the city employees tasked with saving the day down to the hijackers themselves, move along as though it’s no big thing. It’s a fine attitude to have when dealing with a crisis, maybe, but it’s the kiss of death for what should be a taut summer thriller.
May 31, 2009
Drag Me To Hell
“Drag Me To Hell” may just be the movie Sam Raimi has been waiting his whole career to make. Raimi is one of those directors who has vision to spare, with an off-kilter visual aesthetic and an expert understanding of how terror and comedy so often overlap. But he’s always been forced to make concessions, whether due to budget limitations, studio pressure or both. That’s why, as awesome as “The Evil Dead” is (and make no mistake, it is really awesome), it still feels like a rough draft when compared to “Evil Dead II,” and why other Raimi classics like “Darkman” and “Army of Darkness” are almost-but-not-quite exactly what the director initially had in mind.
May 17, 2009
Angels & Demons
After almost a decade of conservative Christianity dominating America’s social and political landscape, it feels like the never-ending debate between science and religion finally is entering a cooling-off period. But just like its protagonist, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, “Angels & Demons” rushes in just as the party is wrapping up, ready to breathlessly opine on the tenacity of faith and the power of science. Except, of course, “Angels & Demons” is a summer thriller, and so these central ideas that ignite the plot have about the same weight as a crossword puzzle where all the across clues are about the Pope and all the down clues are about particle physics. After that, all that’s left is for “Angels & Demons” to be thrilling, which it accomplishes just well enough to be entertaining.
May 5, 2009
Next stop, severed fingers: Shuttle
I’ve been on a few airport shuttle rides in my time, and most were miserable. But none were as taxing as the ride in Edward Anderson’s Shuttle. My review is up over at Cinema Suicide, so go check it out.
