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Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Link Dump Yet more links plumbed from the depths of the internets:
Posted by Mark on August 29, 2012 at 09:57 PM .:
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Sunday, August 26, 2012
Detention Director Joseph Kahn has only made two movies, but they're both impossible to categorize. Oh sure, Torque is clearly a Fast and Furious clone, but Kahn made it his own. It's a movie that "so bad it's good" doesn't even begin to describe. Back in the day, Nick Nunziata did as good a job as possible describing it: When I say that Torque is the most shamelessly synthetic and overstylized action flick ever made I mean it in the nicest way possible. This film makes cheese blush. It gives bullet time lead poisoning. From the first computer assisted race sequence to the climactic Chop-Kawasaki and Mach 48373 race through the city, Torque revels in excess in ways that would resurrect Don Simpson and eject him from his grave in slow motion as doves gather and carry him to the surface of Venus where he is pelted with little rocks shaped like Jerry Bruckheimer's night terrors. As the film unfolded I seriously found myself falling in love with its utter fakeness and bold arrogance. You know the kind of love I'm referring to. The love an inmate finds after cell blocks B and C ventilate his colon enough so that he forgets what it was like before the whistling sound began to waft from his drawers twenty-four hours a day. Before his ass had its own climate. Torque is that rough lover, the one who punches you in the eyes when he/she is happy and does spinning monkey kicks to your coccyx when he/she feels melancholy. This film has the Goodyear blimp testicles to recreate a quote from The Fast and the Furious (also produced by Neal Moritz, one of this film's many Summerian summoners) and then scoff at it.I can't say as though I truly enjoy Torque as much as its cult following suggests, but Kahn's latest film, Detention, is something I fell in love with right away. Within 5 minutes of Detention, I was on board. And, judging from the reviews (and even audience reactions), most other folks wouldn't be. But that's ok. This isn't a movie for everyone. It's a movie for the information-overloaded internet and texting generation (you could consider me on the outside of that, I think, but not so far outside that I can't appreciate what this movie is going for). Referential, manic, kinetic, goofy, this thing makes Scott Pilgrim look like an Ozu film. Smash cuts, whip pans, excessive cross-cutting, flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, on-screen text, and did I mention how referential this movie is? It's not a subtle movie. You could say that's a bad thing, but for me, it's rocketed past unsubtle and into some sort of transcendence. This is a movie that makes hyperbole seem inadequate. You could say that this is a movie that's trying to hard. It could feel like an exhausting experience, an endurance test, or maybe a seizure-inducing bomb. It seems like everything that I think is great about this movie could equally be considered a flaw by detractors. But while I can see why people would feel that way, I quite enjoyed it. The story, inasmuch as you could say it has a story, is about Riley Jones, a high-school "loser" who runs afoul of a slasher-inspired killer. Er, sorta. It's like a demented mixture of John Hughes and Donnie Darko and Freaky Friday and countless horror films. Kahn is riffing off of current horror movie trends, notably torture porn, but fusing it with references from the 80s and 90s. In fact, the 90s references seem to be about on par, if not more prevalent, than the 80s references. The movie is so fast paced that I suspect it will reward multiple viewings. It's packed with references, not only in the dialogue, but also in the visuals and conceptual design. For instance, there's a movie-within-a-movie slasher franchise called Cinderhella, and our main character, Riley, is walking around with one shoe for most of the movie. So while this film is ostensibly hitting you in the face with a sledgehammer (in the form of editing and writing), there are some subtle touches when it comes to stuff like this. The references are widely sourced; not just movies, but also music and fashion and probably stuff I didn't even come close to picking up on... If you get it, it's awesome, and if you don't, you might not like it. On the other hand, this is a movie made for the internet age. In interviews, Kahn suggests that he expects the audience to pick the movie apart and look up references on the internet. Indeed, I can see this movie gaining a big cult following who will go on to cultivate a wiki or something that would catalog all of the myriad references. Is this a good thing? I guess that depends on your perspective, but I'm glad someone is playing around with that sort of thing for this new generation. Referential art is certainly not a new thing, even excessively referential art. Kahn is pushing the boundaries of information processing. Consider how fast the on-screen text is displayed. which is clearly calibrated for a younger, texting-obsessed audience. Other folks might be tempted to tell this movie to get off their lawn, and that's ok too. I will admit, the movie is all over the place. That might trip it up some in the second and third acts, but it ultimately holds together well and I suspect that some of the seemingly goofy plot machinations that emerge later in the movie fit together tightly. For a movie featuring time travel, angry Canadians, alien bears from the planet Starclaw, and copious amounts of vomit, this is quite the feat. Again, I think repeated viewings might be necessary to break the code. This is bold, audacious, adventurous filmmaking at its best. Sure, it's totally bonkers, but it's got a manic energy that's hard not to like. A part of me, the part that tries to overanalyze and nitpick everything, doesn't really know what to make of it, but on a pure entertainment level, it's something that really appeals to me. I suspect you'll be hearing more about this movie when it comes to Kaedrin awards season... (Incidentally, I tried to take some screenshots from the BD, but it appears that BD's copy protection means I can't actually watch it on my PC, despite having a BD drive and "approved" player. Yet another instance of DRM making it hard on those of us who want to support filmmakers.) Posted by Mark on August 26, 2012 at 06:34 PM .:
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Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Tweets of Glory There's some great stuff on Twitter, but the tweets just keep coming, so there's a fair chance you've missed some funny stuff, even from the people you follow. Anywho, time is short tonight, so it's time for another installment of Tweets of Glory:
I have to admit, hatewatching The Newsroom has actually been pretty entertaining, but I'd much rather watch this proposed feline-themed show.
Yeah, so that one's a little out of date, but for the uninitiated, Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son.
(I love the internet)
Well, that happened. Stay tuned for some (hopefully) more fulfilling content on Sunday... Posted by Mark on August 22, 2012 at 09:54 PM .:
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Sunday, August 19, 2012
Final Girl Film Club: The Initiation It has been far too long since I've joined in on the Final Girl Film Club, so I'm rectifying that situation with this month's pick: The Initiation. It's not quite the cheesefest of some slashers, but on the other hand, it actually acquits itself reasonably well. Definitely a second tier effort, but well worth watching for fans of the sub-genre. Things get kicked off, as they often do in slashers, with a tragedy in the past. A young girl awakes in a room filled with decapitated dolls (this is brought up again later in the movie, though never really explained). She hears strange noises, so she goes to investigate. As she approaches her parents' room, she glimpses them knocking boots in the mirror. Naturally, she takes this opportunity to stab her father in the leg... at which point, some strange man bursts into the room. The father grabs a bottle of liquor and attacks, but he only succeeds in dousing the man in alcohol. Stunned, he falls backwards into the roaring fireplace, whereupon he immediately bursts into flames. All pretty standard slasher tragic history stuff here, but then the twist: It's all a dream! (This sort of cliched "twist" is a recurring theme in the movie.) It appears that this is a recurring nightmare for Kelly, a college freshman played by Daphne Zuniga. She's probably most famous for her work in Melrose Place, but to me, she will always be Princess Vespa. Here, she's pledging a (not at all creepy) sorority, and the head of the sorority informs her (and her sisters) of the typical 80s college movie prank they must carry out: they're to break into Kelly's family's mall and steal the security guard's uniform. Delightful. 
Checkov's Gardening Implement Meanwhile, Kelly's got the hots for her dream analysis professor Peter, who thinks he may be able to help her interpret her recurring nightmares. He takes her to "The Dream Factory", otherwise known as the basement, whereupon he hooks her up to all this fancy equipment, with the help of his wacky aid, Heidi. We immediately trust Peter because he's super intelligent, as demonstrated by his repeated references to Freud and Jung. Also: Science! Anywho, we find out a little more about Kelly and her dream as well as a childhood accident where she fell out of a treehouse, slipped into a coma, and then emerged weeks later with amnesia. As Heidi speculates, that ain't no nightmare man, it's a memory! Heidi will later perform quite the Scooby sleuthing on Kelly's past... 
Elsewhere, people are mysteriously dying, courtesy of the aforementioned gardening implements. This relatively short list of victims includes Kelly's father, who is beheaded on his way to see his mistress. In one of the film's more brilliant and retrained comedic touches, Kelly's mother notices that he forgot his glasses, and runs outside, only to find his car driving off (this is presumably the killer covering his tracks), and exclaims "Sometimes I think that man would forget his head if it wasn't attached!" This, again, is just after he was beheaded. Next up, we finally get to the aforementioned mall prank... but it appears that our killer has gotten there before our heroines. There's a lengthy sequence in which the porn mustachioed security guard who doesn't know how to button his uniform shirt and wears cowboy boots is stalked by the killer, eventually succumbing to yet another gardening implement. Not sure who this guy is, but he clearly thought this was his prestige moment and gives a full-throated scream as he dies. I believe he was nominated for an Academy Award that year, but didn't win. 
It's ultimately all good fun. There are a series of obvious twists and turns in the final minutes of the movie, again carrying forward the theme of cliched plot devices. This movie really does check off the slasher boxes pretty well. It's got everything. Past tragedy, suppressed memories, Freud, Jung, sanitariums, burn victims, evil twins, awkward revelations of child abuse, lots of T&A, obscure tools that are nonetheless common weapons in slasher movies (most notably the speargun), bad 80s music, faux-science, the list goes on and on. Pretty much every thing about this movie, every kill, every plot development, every character is derivative of other slashers... and yet, it works. It works pretty damn well, actually. That is the paradox of slasher movies, I guess. They're so formulaic and so derivative, and yet, so comforting in their sameness. It's like horror movie comfort food. Like putting on a warm sweater on a cold winter's night. As slashers go, I'd put this in the upper portion of the second tier. It's clearly not top tier stuff, but it gets the job done well, and there's a lot of nice little touches. This movie essentially represents a really nice appetizer for my upcoming 6 Weeks of Halloween horror movie marathon, which I now cannot wait for... Some more screens and commentary below the fold, though not a ton, as it's a pain to take screens off of Netflix's streaming. 
Death by Garden Tool 
Posted by Mark on August 19, 2012 at 08:05 PM .:
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Wednesday, August 15, 2012
BFI Greatest Films Meme Minor controversy in the film nerd world broke out recently when the once-a-decade BFI film poll unseated reigning champion Citizen Kane in favor of Hitchcock's most personal of films, Vertigo (Kane had held the top spot for 5 polls... 50 years is still a pretty impressive run though). Personally, Vertigo is a middle tier Hitchcock film (lesser Hitch?), as there are at least 5-10 other Hitchcock movies I'd put ahead of that one. But on the other hand, I'd probably opt to rewatch Vertigo over Citizen Kane (though I agree that both movies are pretty darn good!) In any case, all the cool kids are showing off their filmic bona fides by listing out which of the top 50 BFI movies they've seen. Sad to say, I've probably seen less than I should have, but here's what I've got (typical meme rules apply - bold the film if you've seen it): 1. Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 2. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941 3. Tokyo Story, Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 4. La Règle du jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939 5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, FW Murnau, 1927 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968 7. The Searchers, John Ford, 1956 8. Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929 9. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer, 1927 10. 8½, Federico Fellini, 1963 11. Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 12. L’Atalante, Jean Vigo, 1934 13. Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 14. Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 15. Late Spring, Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 16. Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson, 1966 17= Seven Samurai, Kurosawa Akira, 1954 17= Persona, Ingmar Bergman, 1966 19. Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 20. Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 21= L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 21= Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 21= The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 24= Ordet, Carl Dreyer, 1955 24= In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai, 2000 26= Rashomon, Kurosawa Akira, 1950 26= Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 28. Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, 2001 29= Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 29= Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985 31= The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 31= Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976 33. Bicycle Thieves, Vittoria De Sica, 1948 34. The General, Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 35= Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927 35= Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 35= Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975 35= Sátántangó, Béla Tarr, 1994 39= The 400 Blows, François Truffaut, 1959 39= La dolce vita, Federico Fellini, 1960 41. Journey to Italy, Roberto Rossellini, 1954 42= Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray, 1955 42= Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, 1959 42= Gertrud, Carl Dreyer, 1964 42= Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 42= Play Time, Jacques Tati, 1967 42= Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 48= The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 48= Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 50= City Lights, Charlie Chaplin, 1931 50= Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 50= La Jetée, Chris Marker, 1962 By my count, that's 20 out of 50, not a particularly impressive number, though nothing to be embarrassed about either. Still, there are a few on the list that I really should have seen by now (I'm looking at you, Metropolis! I'm coming for ya!) I think perhaps I'm also due for a French new wave marathon of sorts, as that's one area of film I'm not particularly familiar with... Posted by Mark on August 15, 2012 at 09:47 PM .:
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Sunday, August 12, 2012
On Nitpicking I watch a lot of movies and thus it follows that I also consume a fair amount of film criticism, mostly through the internets (reviews, forums, podcasts, etc...) One thing I've noticed recently in a few high-profile movies is that many reviews resort to long lists of nitpicking. I'm certainly not immune to this tendency - I tried to minimize my nitpicks in my Prometheus review, but if I were so inclined, I could probably generate a few thousand words picking the nits out of that movie. I really disliked that movie, but were the nitpicks the cause? Another movie I could probably nitpick to death is The Dark Knight Rises... and yet, I really enjoyed that movie. We could quibble about the quantity and magnitude of the nitpicks in both films, but a recent discussion with a friend on both movies made me start wondering about nitpicks again. It's something I've seen before, though I don't think I've ever really written about it in detail. The origin of the term comes from the process of removing the eggs of lice (aka nits) from the host's hair. Because the nits attach themselves to individual strands of hair, the process of removing them is tedious and slow. You could shave all the hair off and later, chemical methods of treating lice infestations became available. But the term nitpicking has lived on as a way describing the practice of meticulously examining a subject in search of subtle errors in detail. In the context of this post, we're talking about movies, but this gets applied to lots of other things. When it comes to movies and TV series, nitpicks can go either way. Some will claim that the existence of nitpicks are evidence that the show or movie is sloppy and poorly made. Others will claim that the nitpickers are missing the forest for the trees. Nitpickers just don't "get it" and are taking the fun out of everything. In fairness, there's probably an element of truth to both sides of that argument, but I think they're both missing the point of nitpicks, which is this: Nitpicks are almost always emblematic of a deeper problem with the story or characters. Oh sure, there are some people who can't turn their brains off and nitpick because they're just analytical by nature (one definition of engineer's disease), but even in those cases, I think there's something to be said for a deeper dislike than the nitpicks would seem to indicate. Nitpicks are the symptoms, not the disease. I didn't dislike Prometheus because, for example, their spaceship was in a constant state of thrust at the beginning of the movie or because there was no explanation for how the ship maintained gravity in space. But both of those things were immediately obvious to me, which tells me that I wasn't really immersed in the story that was being told. As the movie unfolds, a number of breathtakingly stupid plot developments were continually taking me out of the story. Perhaps if the movie wasn't so stupid, I may have overlooked those initial observations, but as the nitpicks mounted, it became harder and harder to overlook them. I don't go into a movie hoping that it will suck. There's a certain amount of goodwill that a movie has to wear away at in order to ruin immersion, and for whatever reason the quantity and magnitude of nitpicks with Prometheus wore out that goodwill pretty quickly. The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, didn't bother me nearly as much. In fact, as I mentioned in my review, most of the nitpicks I have with that movie came to light after the fact. It's what Hitchcock calls a "refrigerator" movie: something that makes sense while you're watching it, but falls apart under critical examination (while standing in front of the refrigerator later in the night). That being said, for lots of people, that wasn't enough. And that's perfectly understandable. In general, it seems that people are perhaps less objective than they'd like to think. One of the great things about art is that the pieces that move us usually aren't doing so solely on an intellectual level... and when it comes to emotion, words sometimes fail us. Take, for example, a comedy. The great thing about laughter is that you don't have to think about it, it just happens. Different people have different tastes, of course, and that's where subjectivity comes in. But for whatever reason, we don't like to admit that, so we try to rationalize our feelings about a given movie. And if we don't like that movie, such rationalizations may manifest in the form of nitpicks. None of this is absolute, of course. Most art works on both intellectual and emotional levels, and as you gain experience with a given medium or genre (or whatever), you will start to pick out patterns and tropes. One of the interesting things about this is that what gets labeled a "nitpick" can vary widely in scope. Nitpicks can range from trivial mistakes to serious continuity errors, but they all get lumped under the same category. As such, I think it can be difficult to discern what's a nitpick and what's the root cause of said nitpick. A few years ago, I was discussing John Scalzi's book Old Man's War in an online forum. I (and a number of other forum members) enjoyed the book greatly, but one person didn't. When asked why, she responded that it was disappointing that, during one scene earlier in the book, a doctor spent time explaining how some machines worked to his patient. This is a nitpick if I've ever seen one. What she said was true - it was somewhat unrealistic that these two characters would stop what they're doing to have a discussion about how certain technologies operated. But I was wrapped up in the story by that point, so I barely even noticed it. Even after it was pointed out, it didn't ruin the book for me. She was not invested in the story though, so that scene was jarring to her. After further discussion, it turns out that this was a specific manifestation of a larger issue she had with the book, which was that it lazily introduced concepts through awkward exposition or dialogue, and never followed through on any of it. I don't particularly agree with her on that, but I can see where she's coming from. I think the lesson here is that when people are nitpicking a movie to death, it's not necessarily the specific nitpicks that are so bothersome. Perhaps, in some cases, it's the combined weight of all the nitpicks that causes an issue, but I suspect that even in those cases, the nitpicks are merely the most obvious examples of a deeper problem. I think both critics and defenders would do well to recognize this sort of thing. It's fun to list out nitpicks or examples of something you don't like about a work of art, but that's not really what criticism is about. I don't mean to say that you can't or shouldn't do this sort of thing, just that it would be useful at some point to look back at that list and wonder what it was about the book or movie or whatever that inspired you to meticulously chronicle minor errors or whatever. This is probably easier said than done. I can't say as though I succeed at this all the time, but then, I'm just some dude wanking on the internets. Ultimately, all of this is somewhat superfluous, but it's something worth considering the next time you find yourself cataloging trivial errors in detail. Posted by Mark on August 12, 2012 at 06:38 PM .:
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Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Web browsers I have known, 1996-2012 Jason Kottke recently recapped all of the browsers he used as his default for the past 18 years. It sounded like fun, so I'm going to shamelessly steal the idea and list out my default browsers for the past 16 years (prior to 1996, I was stuck in the dark ages of dialup AOL - but once I went away to college and discovered the joys of T1/T3 connections, my browsing career started in earnest, so that's when I'm starting this list).
Posted by Mark on August 08, 2012 at 09:23 PM .:
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Sunday, August 05, 2012
Obscure Movie Corner I always hate it when I see a list of "Movies you've never seen before" or somesuch on the internets. It just seems so... presumptuous and conceited. Like all lists, sometimes they're good, sometimes they stink, usually they're somewhere in the middle. Well, recently a friend of mine asked me for some recommendations for movies he might not have seen (based on a discussion in meatspace about Christopher Nolan's first film, Following, a movie he had not seen). "Go deep," he says, so I did. This all happened on twitter though, and that 140 character limit is a bit chafing. Plus, it seems like an interesting topic for this here blog, which will also let me bloviate about these movies at length. I always enjoy highlighting the offbeat or obscure movies out there on my blog, and one thing you'll notice about some of the below recommendations is that a lot of them have shown up on the yearly Kaedrin Movie Awards or Top 10 lists (2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006) or elsewhere on the blog. But sometimes I think they get buried and again, I always like an opportunity to shine a light on obscure movies that folks don't talk about much... So here we go:
Posted by Mark on August 05, 2012 at 08:40 PM .:
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Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Link Dump I'm on vacation this week, so here we've got some links I slapped together on Sunday. Actually some good stuff here though.
Posted by Mark on August 01, 2012 at 10:44 AM .:
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