Revisiting Donnie Darko

The first time I saw Donnie Darko was when it first came out on VHS. A couple of DVD's were around at that time but the technology was just emerging and certainly too expensive for my family to invest in at that point, which was fine was me and I am generally not well receptive to change. I had no idea what the movie was at the time other than that I had seen a preview for it on some other VHS' I had recently rented and thought it looked alright. That of course was the sweet summer between grade 10 and 11 when I would watch anything that had a cool enough video box regardless of whether it was released theatrically or straight-to-video. I had already gotten into writing reviews at this time and had made the decision that one day I would be a professional critic (I think my original review still exists on IMDB somewhere, spelling mistakes and all).

What played before me, at the time, I considered an act of absolute brilliance. Of course, back then, when you're young and think you know something about something, Donnie Darko was just the thing I needed to floor my mind. Here I was, 16 or somewhere there around, working the film out over and over in my head, connecting the dots, making huge, brilliant discoveries about life and love and fear and death. I thought I had seen a masterpiece.

Soon after I got a DVD player and slowly started collecting them (up until that point owning a movie had seemed a strange concept to me because they were expensive and you could just rent it whenever you needed to see it). Donnie Darko was one of my first purchases. I intended to watch it over and over and over again in my lifetime.

I just watched Donnie Darko for the second time tonight, Saturday February 27, 2010. I watched it because I want to sell off some DVDs and thought it might be one of them. Over the span on those years I've grown. I now hold a major in Film Studies, I've had reviews published and presented at a prestigious film conference, I've even gotten an e mail from Roger Ebert complimenting my writing, and, most importantly, I've watched some of the greatest films ever made.

Needless to say I don't feel the same about Donnie Darko. One of us apparently hasn't aged well. I can admire the craft of it's making, the professionalism of it's performances, but now I've learned that ideas are not what makes a film great or not, it's how it goes about presenting them (Roger Ebert once said, "It's not what a film is about that makes it good or not. It's how it's about it."), and an over-emphasis on film style doesn't impress me nearly as much as it once did.

In reality, Donnie Darko is one of those stepping stone pictures. Like Fight Club, The Boondock Saints or The Usual Suspects, to name a few, young people discover them and latch on to them because they are like nothing they have ever seen before. Every independent thinking, individualistic teenager wants to have something that they can hold above everyone else; something that speaks to them in volumes that their brainless colleagues could never comprehend, until they grow up, see more movies, better movies and finally realize that those films are no more than empty-headed and empty-hearted excursions into style, with shallow philosophies that serve only themselves, not the stories.

That was Donnie Darko to me. I'm glad I got out of that stage. Some people never do. I think Kevin Smith said it best on one of his Evening With... DVDs when he made that comment that not even writer/director Richard Kelly knows what Donnie Darko is about. The comment was in jest but that basically sums it up. Kelly has no overarching approach to this material. He has no one specific thing he is trying to say, so he says them all and hopes maybe one or two stick.

I know, I know there's all this contradictory imagery that shows the duality of the human psyche, and I get that, but so what? Does that automatically make the movie good? What does it have to do with time travel? By the time the movie rolls around into it's third act and starts looping back upon time and upon itself and we are treated to a conclusion that is more ironic than anything, you finally see what Kelly's point was: to try to hold this thing together for just under 2 hours. That he does it is commendable. But it still doesn't make the movie a success.

To put imagery in a movie and assume it speaks for itself isn't enough. The golden rule of style is that form must equal function. You cannot separate the story from the style. As Godard once said, they create each other. That's the mistake Donnie Darko makes: it doesn't provide an adequate story to back up it's symbolism. I can see why a lot of kids would connect with Donnie Darko. He's a depressed, dissatisfied youth, wandering through life just trying to find something meaningful. I obviously connected with that once upon a time myself. Now though, his journey just seems in vein because Kelly doesn't allow him to find that meaning. At the end, Darko isn't a kid on the verge of grand epiphany, he's just some character in some minor, hip indie flick that goes through the motions of being some character in some minor, hip indie flick, and that's about it really.

P.S.- It's also strange, all these years later, to see that Seth Rogen actually had a small part in this film (that's him in the back row). The part is so small I don't even think his character is ever given a name, but it was his first film role after starring in Judd Apatow's cult TV show Freaks and Geeks

Update- I found that original Donnie Darko review on IMDB and, despite how embarrassingly amateur and nonsensical it is (I clearly have no idea what I am talking about), have decided to post it in all of it's original, unedited glory:

What would happen if M. Night Shyamalan had let sam Ramai direct The Sixth Sense? You would probably get something like Donnie Darko. This film is so psycholigically complex I don't even know where to begin. The film is simply brilliant in that it has so many different issues weaven together to create on huge ball of irony, that one finds blinking may take your eyes off the screen for much to long. From the very beginning you get the feeling that this film has more to it than meets the eye. At first glance one may write it off as a modern day attempt at Poltergiest. After veiwing the trailer you may even want to consider it a brainless slasher movie but nothing could be further from the truth.

What we have here is the tale of a teenager who's name is Donnie Darko. But Donnie isn't your average teen, see he finds himself drawn at night to a myseterious force named Frank. Frank is a bunny who teels Donnie that in 28 days , on Halloween, the world will end. We also have Donnie's girlfreidn who had to move away because her step-father stabbed her mom in the chest four times and seems to be living a life of torment and personal angst all fueled by fear. Fear is a hard topic in the movie, infact I would say that that one world "fear" us the basis for everything to come.

We also have Jim Cunningham, a motivational speaker that teaches that fear and love are the two strongest emotions that a human has and learn to live your life in the love spectrum of life and avoid the fear. Then we have Grandma Death, an old lady who may just be the most important piece of this huge puzzel. She stands in the middle of the road all day, occasionlly walking to her mailbox to always be greeted by nothing inside. One day after Donnie's father almost runs her over she wispers in his ear "Everyone dies alone." Donnie later finds out that in the past she was a teacher and wrote a book on time travel (but to understand that without giving away the plot you must see the film).

This comment comes up at Donnie's therepy and along with stories of Frank the bunny his shrink believes that Donnie is afraid to connect with reality due to a great fear of what may come from it. It pains me to say this but the climax of the matches, if not surpasses that of The Sixth Sense as everything finally starts to make sense. This will not only leave you wide-eyed, it will probably take your breathe away as well. The acting is all top notch including as cast of Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swazey and the gripping Jake Gyllenhaal as Donnie in his most mature role yet.

The love/fear topic is present throughout the entire film and you can look for hidden signs of this scattered all over the film. One example of this is the billing of Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ as a double feature at the theater. The film is horrifying and edgy without becoming cliched or unoriginal, making it not on;t the best, if you will, horror movie I've seen since The Sixth Sense, it is hands down the best movie of the year so far.

Word on the Street

Last Friday I stole an idea from Mad Hatter where, instead of writing something original on Friday I just posted links to other people's interesting stuff. But then I didn't do it just quite right and Hatter scolded me for linking to too much news and not enough original blog posts. So this week I thought I'd give it another go and include more blogs this time.

Everyone is blogging about the Oscars. So much so that I've stopped reading all the full posts and just skim the ones that have some degree of appeal. Regardless, Nathaniel R at The Film Experience seems to be providing the most frequent coverage.

Speaking of The Film Experience, Robert has sparked a comments debate about whether or not Christopher Nolan's Memento is a masterpiece or not. (I weigh in on that debate somewhere in there).

The Mad Hatter gives his own tribute to Roger Ebert after the Esquire profile on Ebert earlier this week. To reply to something in his comments section: a large majority of the Siskel and Ebert back issues can be found on the At The Movies website. Be warned though, once you start watching one, you're going to want to watch them all.

Tom Clift puts in his two cents regarding the new Nightmare on Elm Street reboot trailer.

Kid in the Front Row started his own Facebook fan page.

Andrew at Encore's World of Film and TV continued counting down his favourite performances of the decade. Can't say I agree with his number 13 choice, but hey, he's still got 12 more to name.

Everyone is doing podcasts. Here I am, the new kid on the block, who is so technologically incompetent that I can barely even get pictures on my site properly and everyone is putting these things on theirs. Consider me jealous. Piper of Lazy Eye Apocalypse is doing one about the Oscars, Mad Hatter did one where he named his top five Martin Scorsese's movies, among other things, and Big Mike did his first one about the Oscars as well over at Big Mike's Movie Blog.

One more Oscar post from Sebastian from Detailed Criticisms who is none too pleased that Zac Efron and Taylor Lautner are going to be presenters.

/Film is saying that Michael Bay will start shooting big action sequences for Tranformers 3 in Chicago and Moscow. It is still to be revealed where the other 10 minutes of the film will be shot. (Sorry, I couldn't help it).

There's pictures of Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis from John Landis' Buck and Hare. I've read it. It's funny and also not funny, but in a good way.

To anyone else, if you thought you wrote something great and I missed it, drop me a line or scold me in the comments section and maybe I'll catch you the next time around. It was nothing personal. Really.

Valentine's Day (2.5 out of 5)

Jean-Luc Godard once said that the best way to criticise a film is to make another one. Consider Valentine’s Day anti-criticism. If Love Actually was like a greatest hits collection of all the warmest, funniest, wittiest, most tender moments in romantic comedy than Valentine’s Day is the collection of the boring radio singles you can’t endure anymore that seem to already be on every other album you own. It’s the pathetic record label cash grab: there’s nothing new, there’s nothing inspired, and there’s no other reason to buy it unless the thought of throwing money away to hear the same old songs for the hundred and one millionth time is compelling to you.

Valentine’s Day is thus a bloated collection of big stars enacting cheesy scenes from bad movies you’ve already seen countless times over. They’re the same songs, all in one convenient place, in a different order. When you think about it in those terms, that basically sums up the aesthetic ark of director Gary Marshall’s career: to disguise mediocre fluff as grand entertainment with the help of big stars.

That’s essentially the approach to Valentine’s Day, which takes place over the course of a 24 hour period on February 14, and features not a single scene without, if not a big star, than a recognizable face. Some of them fall in love, some out, some with other people than they should, and some with other people that they shouldn’t, and the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round. Most of them, the adults anyway, will end up making a pit stop at an I Hate Valentine’s Day party before racing off into the arms of true love after all. That’s the difference between Britain’s romantic comedy and America’s: the British approach romance with a polite detachment, as if they must remember to bow to love before letting it in for dinner. American films are more bitter, cynical and shallow; as if love is something to be dealt with before a grand revelation that leads straight to the cheesy, improbable happy endings.

Maybe I should describe the actors. Florist Ashton Kutcher (surprisingly likable) proposes to his girlfriend Jessica Alba, using a line dear ol’ dad taught him (“If you find a girl who seems too good for you, propose.”). He’s best friends with elementary school teacher Jennifer Garner who is with doctor boyfriend Patrick Dempsey, who may still have a wife in San Francisco. Kutcher and Garner have the sweetest relationship as the two dolts who everyone else but they realizes are meant for each other. Working for Kutcher is George Lopez, doing his obligatory gee-wiz I’m an immigrant shtick. Then there’s Topher Grace (who should rightfully be a star by now) going out with Anne Hatheway who, in the most unfortunate instance of a great actress forced to do embarrassing things, moonlights as a phone sex girl while also holding a job as a secretary for Queen Latifa. Julia Roberts is on a plane with Bradley Cooper. Emma Roberts plans to lose her virginity in a sequence not nearly as awkward and sweet as the same kind of one she played in the underrated Lymelife, while her shallow, moronic friend Taylor Swift, shows off her muscle-bound boyfriend Taylor Lautner, whose talent seems to evaporate in the presence of a shirt. Jamie Fox is a newsman, Jessica Biel is an agent, and Shirley MacLaine is a wife with a secret.

The stories are so many and cut in such a way that there is hardly enough time to grow to care about a single one of them. Dempsey, for example, disappears for so long that by the time he swings around for a second appearance it feels like we’re already on to next week’s episode and need a refresher. Because the film is thus too busy to create a full story for the viewer to actually care about, what it ultimately offers is a mere reminder of all the much better films, romantic or otherwise, that all of these actors have starred in before. Garner in Juno, Kutcher in The Guardian, Latifa in Last Holiday, Cooper in the Hangover, Grace in Mona Lisa Smile, MacLaine in Terms of Endearment, Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married, Roberts in Notting Hill, Biel and Alba in…well nothing really. I guess their careers have jumped the shark. That’s a term that refers to the moment when you know something will, forever after, be downhill from there. It’s named after an episode of Happy Days, a show that Gary Marshall created. Go figure.

A couple weeks ago I happened to watch Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman, a great romantic melodrama with Richard Gere and Debra Winger. There was a great film that cast big stars as strong characters that are forced to encounter serious obstacles on their way to finding love and deciding whether or not they were worth overcoming in the long run. They were real people with real problems. Conversely, Valentine’s Day is a film that typecasts big stars into movie-type roles as people who deal with relationships that feel as though they were dreamed up in the office of some under ambitious screenwriter who needed a convenient way to connect her long, boring, uninspired story together. Unlike An Officer and a Gentle, who’s melodrama feels not like a film but an event, this one feels like someone has pushed autopilot, just on a grander scale.

The Celebrity Connection: Eliza Dushku

I've done this twice now, where I've found photographic evidence that leads me to believe that certain celebrities are just other celebrities is disguise. First it was Michael Bay, then it was Lady Gaga and now it's happened again. So I've decided to give this a name. I'm calling it the Celebrity Connection, as you may have been able to decipher from the title of this post. I feel that it is my duty to unmask the truth behind the identities of all celebrities, one by one, especially on days when there is nothing better to write about.

This brings me to the matter at hand. Eliza Dushku (Bring it On, Wrong Turn,) has another movie that no one will care about going direct-to-DVD. She should team up with Mischa Barton for her next movie. There's no point after all, of deriving two movies their chances of theatrical distribution. The movie is called Open Graves and IMDB tells me that it is about a bunch of surfers who discover a game that kills someone every time it is played. That kind of sounds halfway like the plot of Richard Kelly's The Box except, ya know, stupider. So anyway, I see a picture of Dushku from the movie and it hit me:

Could Eliza Dushku be Brandon Lee in disguise? You Decide.

Treadmills Are Dangerous!

I went to see Valentine's Day today with my girlfriend (review coming soon) and there was a scene with Jessica Biel on a treadmill, which got my thinking about this video that someone sent me the other day. It's certainly funnier than anything in Valentine's Day.



Good thing he took his bling off first.

Oh, The Irony

Here's a funny bit of random news. /Film is reporting that heath officials are confiscating 3D glasses at theaters because they are considered to be unhygienic when not cleaned properly. I wonder what affect this discovery will have on Tinto Brass and his and his 3D Italian porn movie. Check out the full story here.

Alice in Wonderland Controversy Still Going Strong

I think this whole story revolving around Tim Burton's Alice and Wonderland being given a truncated theatrical release in order to get it onto DVD quicker is fascinating, which means I'll post about it every time there is some new revelation which thickens the plot. Consider the plot thickened.

Hollywood Reporter is saying today that that Odeon in the U.K., who are responsible for over 100 theaters have boycotted Alice in Wonderland and will not be playing it in the U.K., Ireland and Italy (it will however play in Spain, Germany, Austria and Portugal, where it is scheduled for the regular 18 week run).

The reason for the boycott is because Odeon is saying that it has put considerable time and money into upgrading its facilities to accommodate 3D films and will therefore give precedence to those that plan on staying for a full run, probably because it is assumed that they will generate more revenue for the theaters.

Poor Alice in Wonderland. Even if the movie is no good, here it is sandwiched between it's distributor who is basically saying "It will make more money on home video so let's get it there as quick as possible," and the exhibitor saying, "We don't need it, we have more important films to show." All this because it was chosen to be the guinea pig in a strange and, what is looking to be, unsuccessful experiment.

Personally, I say good for the theaters. As someone who values the theatrical experience above all else, the idea that studios want to get movies through the exhibition process and straight into consumer hands as fast as possible is disturbing. Back when DVD sales started rising and box office receipts started dwindling, some pundits started saying that exhibition had simply become a preview for the DVD. Disney is bringing this statement one step closer to reality with this move.

I remember the controversy over Steven Soderberg's Bubble some years back which was released to theater, DVD and on-demand all within the span on several weeks. Theaters cried it would be the death of them and they may have been on to something had Bubble not been a small film that applied only to a specific niche market. However, Alice in Wonderland is supposed to be a big tentpole picture. It has a big name director, big stars, and comes from a classic story. To think that a movie like this will find more business on DVD than in theaters implies a sad fate for exhibition. Instead of cutting the theatrical run, why doesn't Disney roll out Alice in the classic mode: open it in select cities, see what the reaction is and then decide how long to play it for? Or else, let it play in 3D for the full 18 weeks while taking it off regular screens after 12 weeks and prepping the DVD. That way it can still play, theaters aren't sore about spending money to play 3D movies for shortened periods and the DVD can be in people's hands in a shorter time, while in the meantime those who still want to see it in 3D can.

The reaction from Odeon though also brings to light another fear I've had in recent years: there's just too many movies being made. George Lucas once said that multiplexes were great ideas because it would offer people the opportunity to see smaller films in big theaters alongside the big event pictures. Although I appreciate his optimism, and in some cases he has been right, in most cases the opposite has happened. Studios are scrambling to make more movies to ensure that every screen is filled with their product. Instead of one or two quality products from each studio, we now get mass amounts of prepackaged garbage every week. prepackaged garbage has always been part of the movie going reality, but there's more of it now than ever as studios try to make as much money with as many films in as short a time as possible. That a theater feels it doesn't need a big film like Alice in Wonderland in order to do good business means that studios, by mass producing movies, are, year after year, lowering the value of their own product, even the blockbusters.

This is unfortunate because it means that it's now easier than ever for good films to get lost in the shuffle. That seemed to have happened to Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant film with Nicholas Cage, which garnered excellent reviews but did next to no business. That's just one example.

So I'm glad the to hear that theaters are taking a stand and telling the studios that if they don't want to play ball, they'll play with someone else. What is unfortunate is that all of this comes at the expense of a film that might be good or bad, I don't know, but deserves just as fair a shot at success as any other. Could Alice in Wonderland fall victim to all this silly deal making? It'll be interesting to see whether studios or exhibitors will be making the next move.

To read my other posts on this matter click here and here.

Sick

I'm sick. I've got a fever, which makes even standing up seem like a chore. So that's it for today. I'm going to see Valentine's Day (blame the girlfriend) tomorrow so there should be a review of that soon, health pending.

Celebrities Behaving Badly

It's true that history repeats itself. There are a few things we can always count on in this world: every ten years independent film becomes chic, every year there will be a new Woody Allen movie, the Toronto Maple Leafs will not even come close to winning the Stanley Cup and Sean Penn will be in trouble for kicking the ass of some kid with a camera. See the video here at TZM.com.

Costumes Do Not Equal Acting

Nathaniel R over at The Film Experience has inspired me. This morning I came across his post in which he yearned for the days when Johnny Depp actually played characters that resembled humans. This was in reference to his upcoming performance in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Of course I agree with him that Depp, although enjoyable when he goes into full-on costume mode, but, at this point in his career, by taking on these roles on after the other, risks repeating himself in an effort to, I would guess, not repeat himself.

Then I was watching Steven Spielberg's Hook in which Dustin Hoffman plays Captain Hook under the guise of excessive make-up: ironically the performance predates Jack Sparrow by about 12 years. Although I was not surprised to discover just how bad Hook was (it's considered minor Spielberg and justifiably so), I was surprised by how bad Hoffman was.

Then I got to thinking: it seems that stars gravitate towards these roles in an effort to cut lose, do something wild, have fun, and escape themselves by having their persona's devoured by their costumes. Johnny Depp is so solemn and strange in real life that it's no wonder he tends to work with fimmakers like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam: they let him cut lose and play by his own rules.

However, costumes don't equal acting and sometimes stars seem to forget that. There's a thin line between imitation and performance when it comes to actors being cloaked in disguises to the point where they cease to be recognizable. See, a costume also invites an actor to be lazy. In the case of Hoffman, who is a great actor no doubt and managed to create a brilliant character under a disguise in Tootsie, he spends too much time acting with his fake teeth and his hook, making sure we see how horrible they are at all times, showing how vile a villain he is. However, outside of the hook and the teeth, which always seem to be playing against Hoffman within the frame, there isn't much of a character there and Hoffman approaches playing him like a high school drama student playing dress-up. The whole performance announces itself as performance: "Look at me," Hoffman seems to be saying, "I'm acting." Depp did the same thing as Willy Wonka in Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

One actress who comes to mind who knows who to act outside of make-up, not under it, is Emma Thompson. Look her in Nanny McPhee, not a great movie to be sure, but Thompson does exactly what it takes to bring a costume to life: she builds the character from the ground up. The make-up can speak for itself; it's Thompson who let's us know just what Nanny McPhee as a character is really about.

The examples go on and on of great character actors who seem to be perfect for zany roles (usually as villains) who are overcome by their costumes. Look at Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's Batman (there seems to be a pattern developing here, no?). The Joker is one of the most iconic villains in all of comic book history, but Nicholson does virtually nothing with the character except smirk his way to a huge paycheck. Even when Nicholson is all dolled up in the infamous face paint, he can't escape himself as a persona and the character falls to the wayside.

Heath Ledger on the other hand completely disappears inside the same character in The Dark Knight and in doing so, provides one of the most memorable villains in all of film history. Ledger, like Thompson, builds the character from the inside out. We aren't seeing Heath Ledger acting evil, we are seeing a truly evil villain who, despite being a fictional character, is believable as an individual because he embodies truly human concepts of good and evil within society. Not only is Ledger deviously entertaining, he also manages to embody the character's ideas and philosophies. That's the sign of an actor giving a character everything they've got.

On the other hand, when watching Hoffman in Hook or Depp in Charlie or Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever, or any other innumerable instances of this happening, the joy of acting is sucked out of the performances as we are made physically award of an actor playing dress-up. There's no joy in that. Acting is the art of assessing a character and providing them with exactly what they need. It's about making choices and committing to them to the fullest extent. Performances like the ones mentioned don't make choices, they don't get to know the characters, they don't strive for anything but second rate imitation. That's unfortunate as there are few things more unfortunate than seeing a great actor phoning it in in a role that only they seem destined to play.

The Original Gangsta Rappers

I have nothing to say about this other than that I think it is funnier than any words can describe. Enjoy.

It's the End of the Week

The great thing about still being a student is three day weekends. It's probably no surprise that I don't put much effort into weekend posts unless something big drops. There are some interesting things going on in the news that require a mention but not really a full post and since Mad Hatter and Encore Andrew (check them out for sure!) did posts today about other people's posts well, I've never come across a good idea I didn't want to adopt myself as well. So here goes:

/Film U.K. is reporting that the Alice in Wonderland controversy is starting already as three of the U.K.'s biggest theater chains are trying to boycott the film due to the truncated release window in order to get the film to DVD sooner. I've already done two posts on this issue so I won't repeat the story word for word but do read about it here. Also check out my past posts here and here.

/Film U.K. is also saying that Owen Wilson is trying to get his acting cred back after phoning it in with stuff like You, Me and Dupree, The Wedding Crashers and Drillbit Taylor (I liked Marley & Me, sue me). Not only does he have the upcoming Farrelly Bros. movie Hall Pass in the works (I've read it. It's funny), but he's also attached to James L. Brooks' next movie (although he hasn't made a truly great one since Broadcast News) and the new Woody Allen movie. That certainly offsets his involvement with Marmaduke and the next Meet the Parents movie. Now if only Vince Vaugh would follow suit.

Deadline Hollywood is saying that the trailer for the next Twilight film Eclipse will be debuting in front of Robert Pattinson's upcoming movie Remember Me, the trailer for which I happened to see before New Moon (clever, eh?). The trailer didn't really inspire me to want to see the movie. What else is curious is that Jenny "daughter or Sidney" Lumet's name has been taken off the IMDB page for the movie after she did work on the script. Although the Eclipse trailer may get the film a bigger audience than it would otherwise find, Little Ashes (remember that one?) didn't exactly prove that Pattinson had the star clout to open an original movie on his own.

I guess it was inevitable. Wes Craven begins work on Scream 4 in May. In other news surrounding sequels no one really wants, I just finished reading the third Riddick film. All I can say of it is: maybe Vin Diesel's return to XXX will be better.

Now I've seen just about everything. Once again, /Film U.K. has posted a trailer for an animated Bollywood film. The film is apparently a remake of a popular live-action Bollywood film and is the most expensive animated feature ever made in India. Check out the trailer below. Is it just me or is it kind of weird seeing animals talking and singing in Indian?

James Cameron

James Cameron is a great filmmaker, but he still kind of annoys me. I liked him better back in the 90s where he was proceeded by a reputation as being some sadistic, perfectionist tyrant on set of his movies and wasn't afraid to rip the people around him new ones. I can admire that. I like people who have a vision that is so determined and singular that they aren't afraid to call out the people around them who are hindering them on their journey to creating something great.

However, now that it seems Cameron has cooled down with age (or maybe it's because he got rid of the facial hair), he's still kind of pompous in that goofy Canadian way and tends to come off as the guy who says stupid things in public before thinking them out fully (announcing he needs to pee while accepting best director at the Golden Globes, like come on).

I say this because today Deadline Hollywood has posted four different videos of Cameron (three from MTV and one with Charlie Rose). In the first one, with Rose, his ego is on full display as he says he hopes Avatar wins best picture but he wants Kathryn Bigelow to win best director for The Hurt Locker, not because she deserves it, but because he doesn't need another best director award. I don't know if he is being sincere, is saying this because he knows the Director's Guild award usually determines the Oscar winner and that one went to Bigelow, or if he's just saying, "Ya, our film is the best of the year, but give my poor little ex-wife an honour because she's not as big a star as me."

Then Cameron is asked about any advice he'd give to Marc Webb for directing Spider-Man in 3D which gets Cameron talking about the rebooted Batman movies, which he liked so much better than the first four which he couldn't stomach. Of course, nice guy that he is, says he doesn't want to "throw anyone under the bus" immediately after calling out Tim Burton on being responsible for the first Batman movies. Sorry Jim, I think the Burton Batman movies sucked too, but once you call someone out, you can't take it back. I hope Burton catches this and responds like he did with the whole debate about how he stole the end of Planet of the Apes from Kevin Smith's Chasing Dogma comic book.

Then Cameron talks about how he is done with the Terminator series and has no comment on the plans for a fifth and sixth movie in the series other than he's glad someone else can make some money off it like he did, right before getting into information on an Avatar sequel. This whole Avatar sequel talk bothers me because it seems opinions on it change by the week. First Cameron says that it will probably be a long time before a sequel because he won't make one until he knows he has a great script. Then Rupert Murdoch came out saying that he wants another Avatar movie as soon as possible. Now here Cameron is saying he's been thinking about new projects and Avatar is definitely a strong possibility.

Personally, I could live without another Avatar film. It was a complete, self-sufficient story and I feel to continue it would simply be like the second and third Matrix films. They were good, but at the same time they felt like unneeded continuations of a singular film that still stands on its own without them and apart from them. Also, unlike Cameron's Terminator 2 which was the big sequel to a minor film, Avatar 2 would need to be the ultra-major sequel to a major film. Expectations would probably kill it on arrival.

The John Hughes Tribute

Deadline Hollywood got a scoop today that there is a separate John Hughes tribute being planned for this year's Oscars apart from the usual name and picture as part of a collage thing that the Oscars usually do.

This is all fine and dandy and touching and all that stuff because, as I wrote last week when I posted about Hughes, his films had an enormous impact and his death came suddenly and without warning. However, despite his impact, I'm not so sure Hughes was good enough a filmmaker to deserve his own separate tribute, especially when Robert Altman, Heath Ledger or Eric Rohmer, just to use random examples, only got the in memoriam treatment come Oscar time.

I understand that some of the Oscar writers and producers and both hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin worked with Hughes before, but I don't know, this whole thing reeks of desperation: finding any means necessary to up Oscar ratings.

It also sets a strange precedent for the future of Oscar telecasts by opening up the question: at what point is someone special enough to deserve their own separate tribute after death and just who decides who meets the criteria?

Indian Fight Scenes

I don't really watch mainstream Indian movies, but a friend of mine brought this video to my attention while we were meeting to discuss a Labour Relations midterm. It's a fight scene from some Indian movie. I'll let the video say the rest.



I thought that maybe this was a joke in the Dolemite vein, you know, it's bad but it knows it. Apparently not, as I came across these videos as well.



And



The examples of this are infinite.

Suddenly Transformers:Revenge of the Fallen doesn't look quite so incompetent.

Laughing into the Darkness: The Forms and Functions of the Black Comedy

I've been promising this for at least two weeks when I wrote about my joy over IFC picking up Todd Solondz's newest film Love During Wartime. This is an essay that I wrote a couple years ago and presented at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, as part of the Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference. Hope you enjoy it.

Some of the most brutal, cynical, pessimistic and emotionally devastating films ever made have been comedies. One may find it hard to concur with such a statement knowing how comedies have found themselves functioning within the film industry of yesterday and today. Almost entirely forgotten come awards season, the most popular comedies are mostly light and fluffy entertainment vehicles dumped into multiplexes during the summer season in order to draw teenagers with nothing better to do. That may be a stereotype, but with shallow, juvenile offerings such as Little Man, Scary Movie 4, You, Me & Dupree, and Beerfest, the film industry would be hard pressed to argue its case otherwise.

Enter the black comedy, an unrelenting genre that exists at the crossroads somewhere between humor and tragedy, in a vacuum of confusion and indifference, balancing itself on a sliding slope of irony. Alas, black comedy is a mish-mash of the senses providing viewers one thing and then ripping that out from under them to reveal another. The black comedy is as emotionally penetrating as the best of dramas and yet as funny as any straight comedy. Thus, black comedy poses a distinct question of morality: Is it okay to laugh or should we be crying? How do we feel about laughing at masochism, misogyny, or pedophilia? Are these viable subjects for comedy or should such subject matter be left to serious films?

Three such films raise these very questions. They are Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men (1997), and Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998). All three address the function, or in most cases dysfunction, of sex, the alienation of being an outsider in a society that has no use for you, and that funny way in which uncomfortable situations tend to leapfrog back and forth between hilarity and brutality at the blink of an eye.

I was raped once…. He came in through there on the fire escape. He held a knife to my throat and said if I made a move, he'd cut my tongue out. He tied me to the bed... he took his time... six hours. Actually it was a boyfriend of mine. To tell you the truth, I slept through most of it. So... there you are.- Marcy, After Hours

Marcy’s comment functions not a lot unlike the structure of After Hours itself. Where Marcy’s anecdote begins in horror and descends into banality, After Hours begins in banality and descends into chaos. And like Marcy’s speech, After Hours explores the cruelty of sex. It is a film in which its main character Paul Hackett sees sex as an opportunity to escape the boring routine of his life as a word processor, but in order to attain any he must venture into a strange section of New York City called SoHo, a world completely foreign to him. SoHo is a place that Ben Nyce, in his book Scorsese Up Close: A Study of the Films describes as, “A world where others accept deviant behavior with cool detachment” (88).

It is Paul’s naivety from which Scorsese derives both his comedy and drama as it stands in sharp contrast with this sexually deviant world where Paul quickly realizes that he is disgusted by the behaviors permeating the underbelly of SoHo and wishes simply to escape back home to his banal existence. What is most shocking about the film is that we as an audience exist on Paul’s side of the sexual coin: the straight man in a crooked world. This is how After Hours derives its blackness. By the time it is over and we have shared Paul’s grueling journey into the darkest realms of sexuality, we are drained. We, like Paul, just want to go home.

Maybe most disturbing and hilarious is After Hours’ outlook on the disgusting nature of sex. It is rare in any of Scorsese’s work for one to see sex as being synonymous with pleasure, but After Hours is particularly brutal in its depiction of the underside of the sexual conscious. We see this in one particularly funny scene in which Paul suspects that Marcy’s roommate Kiki has been robbed by a group of burglars. She drops him her apartment keys from her window which overlooks the streets below. He runs upstairs to find her tied up. He is impressed by the professionalism of the knots that bind her hands behind her back. A man cloaked in leather enters the room. Turns out Kiki was not burgled, but was simply engaged in a little friendly S&M. Again Scorsese has allowed the banal to descend into the obscure and the joke is on us, the innocent naïf.

However, for as many jokes as the film makes about Paul, the sad sack of an outsider trying to escape this world of sexually deviant women, it is also unsettling in its treatment of said women. As Ben Nyce points out, “More disturbing and damaging is the films portrayal of women. As agents of Paul’s disorientation, Marcy, Julie, Gail and June are uniformly hurtful” (91). Even more to the point is the fact that Paul approaches all of these women as if they can provide him a portal of escape. Yet all of the women, mirroring the films perfect comic structure, appear normal upon introduction but descend into beings who only desire to entrap Paul, both literally and metaphorically. What the black comedy givith with one hand he takith away with the other.

And yet, despite this bleak content, there is something strangely funny about Paul’s Kakfaesque journey through the streets of SoHo. Because he is so innocent, so naive, so out of place in this strange world, we must laugh at the absurdity of his situation. Take the pathetic line the timid Paul uses in order to escape Marcy after becoming disgusted by the idea of sex, as he projects all of his sexual insecurities upon her once the possibility arises that she could be horribly burned enters into the scenario. He asks her to show him one of the bagel and cream cheese paper weights that Kiki makes, “As we sit here chatting,” he says, “There are important papers flying rampant around my apartment because I don’t have anything to hold them down with” (Minion, 1985). Not only does Paul not know how to deal with Marcy as a sex object, but once it arises that her sex is undesirable to him, he doesn’t know how to handle that either. He is, after all, a long way from his home as a word processor.

Or yet another perfect scene which balances sexual obscurity with hilarity in which Marcy explains that her husband was so fascinated by the Wizard of Oz that he only called her Dorothy in bed. Once again, sex is a hotbed for obscurity and deviancy instead of pleasure. Sex is not escape in After Hours, it is entrapment.

After Hours, at its comic center, operates as a juggling act, constantly presenting us with one thing and then ripping the rug out to show us something else more disturbing and perverse. This is, the very essence of what makes it a black comedy.

This process may not be clearer than in a final scene in which Paul meets a lonely lady at a bar; the most seemingly normal he has met all night. They have a sweet moment on the dance floor in which genuine emotion seems to circulate back and forth between them, she hides Paul in her apartment from an angry mob that wants him dead, and we think that he has finally found someone who can truly help him. She then, in order to hide him, makes him into a paper machete statue, thus making him her own private prisoner. What the film makes us question in these moments is in the true tradition of black comedy: do we laugh at the absurdity of Paul’s situation or do we feel bad that he has been forced to realize the irony that sex is just as entrapping as his 9-to-5 desk job? Are we disgusted by the film’s inherent misogyny or amused by its audacious sexual deviance? The film, like all great black comedies, does not answer these questions, and nicely paves the way for true unrelenting filmmakers like Neil Labute and Todd Solondz.

Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race, it doesn't matter in the end. Inside they're all the same meat and gristle and hatred just simmering.- Chad, In The Company of Men

If After Hours is a film about how devious women entrap men, In the Company of Men is a film that takes revenge with gleeful abandon. Written and directed by Neil Labute, In the Company of Men is a savage look at misogyny within the corporate world. The film tackles serious issues with cold detachment, and if it is a comedy, our laughter stems from a disbelief in just how brutal it is willing to be. It thus employs humor for two purposes: first as a coping mechanism and second, in order to sideswipe us by not allowing us to realize the true extent of main character Chad’s cruelty.

Neil Labute seems to make films about a specific kind of individual. His characters come from a place of position, they are the elite. Labute deals with people of status, be they corporate players, university professors or art students. Because of this, Labute easily projects his anger upon these people. He brings to the surface their shallowness, their greed, their hollow existences, their lack of a moral center; attacking them simply by showing us who they truly are. The comedy of Neil Labute seems to stem from a deep disgust and disdain for his main characters.

In this, the true spirit of black comedy, there is an inherent sadness that lurks underneath the scenes of humor. Labute sees Chad as a product of his own environment, a man who has been socialized into crushing everyone in the way of his path to the top of the corporate ladder. He and his friend Howard are constantly framed by office doors and windows, the camera never moving; they are trapped within the confines of their own corporate world with little room to move. If there is humor in any of this it is in the fact that one man could be so evil and yet so outside of caricature. We laugh at Chad out of fear; a fear that a man like him could actually exist among us.

Chad is thus a corporate slime ball whose plan is for him and the meek Howard to make an innocent deaf girl fall in love with both of them and then ditch her when she least expects. In a scene of utter cruelty, Chad describes with complete exaggeration to his co-workers how the mute girl Christine sounds when she talks. He laughs emotionlessly while comparing her to a dolphin, as she struggles to form words, spit gathering at the sides of her mouth. And yet the scene is funny; funny to think that any human being could be so cruel and unsympathetic; Chad is such a monster that we don’t know how to deal with his extreme behavior other than to assume he must be putting us on. The laugh therefore seems to erupt from a place of confusion; not because we are enjoying ourselves, but as a way of dealing with the underlying sadness of the scene; convincing ourselves that no one could possibly be so cruel by nature.

As stated prior, the second way in which Labute uses humor is to sideswipe the viewer. Just like After Hours, In the Company of Men makes us think we are inside a comic universe only to pull the rug out from under us. Alas, Chad, in an act that uncovers the true unrestricted nature of his cruelty, not only destroys Christine but also Howard in the process, without care or concern. If In the Company of Men is so emotionally affecting, it is because the film steps outside of comic expectation and serves the audience with a cruel backhand to the face during the unexpected climatic moment.

Suzanne Fields states that “What makes the movie especially horrible is that the man who hatches the scheme and seduces the girl gets away without punishment. There’s no justice, poetic or otherwise, for his cruelty” (1998). By doing this, Labute has turned the black comedy upside down. In After Hours the comic tone, as critic Roger Ebert states, lets us know that “We’re not supposed to take it seriously” (1985). However Labute’s approach is more cynical, more real. Fields, explaining Labute’s purpose, says that, “He wants an audience to be deprived of the satisfaction of a moral resolution to make them-and us- experience the depths of moral callousness running amok in our society” (1998). In other words, Labute makes us believe that we have stepped into the comic world which is not to be taken seriously, a satire of the shallowness of corporate players, and then shows us that the situation is all too real by ripping the satire out from under us, leaving only shallowness, and showing that life is cold and cruel and that it is possible for evil to continue to exist without punishment. That Chad rises in status and position among his corporate cronies after his little stunt may be Labute’s cruelest joke of them all.


I want kids that love me as much as I hated my mother- Diane, Happiness

Todd Solondz is one of the most fascinating makers of black comedy. He is, in my opinion, the most unrelenting filmmaker working today because he is willing to bring modern taboos to the surface; dealing with them by having the courage to admit that they exist. His subject matter has ranged from childhood neglect, to rape, to pedophilia, to abortion, and yet, unlike Labute, who seems to have little but contempt for the inhabitants of his films and the society that created them, there is a strange, morbid sweetness lurking within the Solondz universe. He may be just as, if not more dark and relentless in his comedy than Labute, but he also sympathizes with the outsiders of his world.

A true auteur in the sense that his films are mirrors that reflect the state of mind of their maker: to understand Solondz’s films is to understand Solondz himself. In an interview with writer Sigrid Nunez from The Believer magazine Solondz says that,

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It’s in real life that people are over the top. And if I have a certain view of how people behave in this regard, it’s because I’ve been a target for a certain kind of comment all my life. Perfect strangers have always felt free to say things to me in the street, or shout things from passing cars (2005).

Alas, seeing that he is an outsider himself, we begin to understand why Solondz is attracted to the people who inhabit his films. Happiness is comprised of a suburban pedophile who rapes his son’s friends, a sex addict who combs the phone book looking for random women to make lewd phone calls to, a novelist who wishes she had been raped as a child so that her new novel could be more authentic, and a woman who has killed her doorman and placed his remains in plastic baggies in her freezer.

This is dark material, and even though Solondz doesn’t sympathize with the actions of the pedophile or the sex addict, he sympathizes with the individuals as human beings, which is what makes them funny. These are the people who live next door, who appear normal on the surface, the “quiet ones” as the neighbors always say; and although Solondz doesn’t go so far as to make excuses for the behavior of his characters, he does attempt to show that they are in fact normal, or at least in the sense that they too are human beings. There is something ever so sweet about a perfect scene in which Allen the sex addict and the woman across the hall who has recently murdered their doorman find each other and go to bed together, only to lie on top of the sheets, facing away from each other. Solondz is a master of allowing his characters exactly what they would want.

However, it is in the tradition of black comedy that the comedy works at the surface while darker subtexts hide underneath, and this is no expectation for Solondz with Happiness. Although he my align himself with the outsiders who he portrays in his films, there is still the inescapable reality that pedophilia is a serious crime and mental disorder, and for every scene of hilarity there is a moment of absolute bleakness such as the one in which Billy confronts his father about his pedophilia, resulting in a perfectly written scene which is also one of the most uncomfortable and heartbreaking ever to be put on film.

Herein lies the trick to Solondz’s brilliance. He leads us by the hand into situations that we don’t want to be in and then abandons us there, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret how we feel about a given situation. We laugh at a character’s actions and then analyze our own sincerity; do we feel right about ourselves having laughed about rape, pedophilia or abortion? Therefore, Todd Solondz is probably the master of the black comedy (a term he himself hates).

Where Scorsese amplifies his comedy into a state of nightmarish weirdness which could only exist in a world of its own, or at least New York, and Labute only provides us with the option of sharing his distain for his characters, Solondz is a fence sitter. He follows the rules of the black comedy, viewing sex as a function for displeasure, seeing the world from an outsider’s perspective, and making us question how we feel about what we have seen, but he also offers no easy answers or conclusions.

Instead he presents the audience with only indifference, seeing the pedophile, sex addict, and murderer as both people who perform horrible actions and also have a human side, forcing us to look inside of ourselves and assess how we feel about the characters and their behavior based on our own moral judgments. In a sense, although all three directors discussed have either played within the realm of black comedy (Scorsese) or built a career out of it (Labute), it is Solondz, with his complete indifference, pulls the rug out from under us himself, which, despite the hilarity of his films, makes us wonder if he is even operating within the genre of comedy, black or otherwise, at all. No wonder he hates the term.

The Best Valentine's Day Movies

Happy Valentine's Day. I promised to do this yesterday but things just didn't work out that way so you're getting it today. Basically I'm just going to list what I think the best movies to watch with a significant other on this day are. There won't be much justification because, ya know, it's Valentine's Day and I got things to be doing other than blogging. So check out the list, go out and rent a couple and enjoy the one you love, and if you don't agree with my choices, put it in the comments section and we'll duke it out later. And if you don't have a significant other, well, watch Audition or American Psycho or something.

Okay, so here goes (in alphabetical order):

• 9 1/2 Weeks- After the kids have been put to bed of course


• American Pie- I've just always found something terribly sweet about this movie


• An Autumn Tale- Eric Rohmer's most romantic


• Annie Hall- Duh!


• Before Sunrise/Before Sunset- So intelligent, so beautiful


• Bridges of Madison County- Clint Eastwood can do just about anything


• Casablanca- Another duh!


• Catch and Release- This little gem slipped under the radar which is unfortunate because it is sweeter and more knowing about love and loss than almost all of Hollywood's romantic comedies


• Conversations With Other Women- A film that does split screen well


• The Cooler- Another underrated one. William H. Macy shines as always


• Dopamine- Love as science. A small Sundance treasure


• Fever Pitch- Nick Hornby meets the Farrelly Brothers, which means both sweet and hilarious


• Flirting With Disaster- Totally offbeat and hilarious in that David O. Russell way


• Hairspray- Because there's got to be a musical


• High Fidelity- Nick Hornby again


• Love, Ludlow- Another Sundance treasure


• Manhattan- See Annie Hall


• Moonstruck- One of the best romantic comedies ever made


• The Notebook- What can I say, it's infectious


• Officer and a Gentleman- Richard Gere and Debra Winger are a perfect match


• The Princess Bride- Fun for the whole family


• Say Anything- Cameron Crowe at his best


• Yes- So poetic. So erotic

Alright so I'm sure I've left many of your favourites out. Feel free to share them. And have a happy Valentine's Day

What strikes me is that almost all of these videos have that scene on the ice from Serendipity, which is maybe the only good scene in a truely awful movie.

Shorter Theatrical Runs at Warners Too

A couple days ago I posted about how Disney is trying out some experimental ways in which to release their films, the first of which will be to truncate the theatrical run of Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, which would mean taking the movie out of theaters roughly a month early in order to get it onto DVD and ondemand even faster. The question that plagued my mind about this is whether or not such a maneuver signals the beginning of the end for seeing movies theatrically, or is it just a nice roundabout way of saying that Alice in Wonderland is no good?

Now Hollywood Reporter is saying that Warner Bros. is also going to adopt the shortened theatrical run method too. Here's the scoop: Warner's is planning on doing the same thing to their fall movie Guardians of Ga'hoole (Zac Snyder's new animated film). The plan is to chop about a month off the initial run in order to have the product prepped for DVD and Blu-ray for Christmas. Similarly Disney is saying the reason for shortening Alice's run is so that it can be out on home video for summer.

What's also been revealed is that that studios have assured exhibitors that they will sweeten the deal by offering concessions on movies with shortened runs.

The studios have also promised that it will only do this to two movies a year: one in the spring and one in the fall. Of course, the exhibitors need to agree to take these movies out of theaters a month earlier than usual but really, what choice do they have? If they don't play ball with the studios, the studios won't schedule big movies for May and September, ultimately hurting theaters than to just let the movies go early.

Something about these developments fascinates me. What does it imply about the future of exhibition; the future of distribution; the future of home video; the future of the film industry in general? Will two movies a year do anything to help out stuggling studios, especially when they are movies that will probably make big money no matter how fast they get to DVD? I guess all we can do is wait and see whether or not all the majors will adopt this system or whether or not it will reveal itself as a failed transgression and be quickly forgotten.

Eli Roth Again

Sometimes when filmmakers become great they use all of their power in order help build up new and exciting artists in order to give them the shot they need and deserve. Unfortunately though, sometimes the wrong people get famous and end up helping nothing.

Take Eli Roth for example, who I clearly expressed by dislike for the other day. So today Hollywood Insider is saying that Lionsgate (who have worked with Roth on both Hostel movies) has picked up a film from a newcomer that Roth produced: call it paying it forward after Quentin Tarantino basically handed Roth a career by putting his name on Hostel.

The movie in question is called The Last Exorcism and it's about a priest who has his faith tested when he comes into contact with a young girl possessed by the devil who he needs to exorcise.

Funny, that plot sounds kind of like a little masterpiece from more than a few years back that you might have heard of. I think it was called The Exorcist or something like that? Maybe next time Eli.

One Last Word

Yesterday, just for fun, I posted the trailer to Insane Clown Posse's direct-to-video western flick Big Money Rustlas and added about how it boggles my mind that anyone could take a band like ICP seriously. My friends, look at what I mean:




Sigh

John Hughes

I just finished watching Don't you Forget About Me a documentary about a group of Canadian filmmakers who head for Chicago in order to snag a rare interview from iconic but reclusive filmmaker John Hughes who more or less disappeared from filmmaking in the late 90s and wasn't heard from again until his unexpected death last year.

The documentary itself isn't a great one; it really has no background on Hughes as a person or a filmmaker, it only focuses on his 80s teen comedy work neglecting his best film Planes, Trains and Automobiles or his later, lesser quality screenwriting efforts under a pseudonym, and of course, ends in anti-climax as Hughes does not accept to be interviewed.

However, one thing about the film struck me. The weight of the material comes from a combination of interviews with some of his actors (though Molly Ringwald is understandably absent), some other filmmakers who he inspired (Kevin Smith, Jason Reitman), critic and fellow Chicagonians Roger Ebert and Richard Reoper and a bunch of high school kinds in an effort to show that contemporary teenage comedies are vapid and shallow and don't reflect what it is really like to be a teenager. "I've never had sex with a pie," one kid says. "But I've defiantly skipped class before."

Smith, Reitman and Howard Deutch (who directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful) along with all the kids interviewed throw the term realism around a lot in relation to Hughes' work. They say that Hughes was so influential because you could go to his movies on a Friday night and see yourself projected up on that screen. Some people claim they knew and were friends kids like the ones in Hughes' movies, and no one has ever gotten that formula quite right again.

I'll agree with the second point: no one indeed has ever gotten it quite right again (although I think there is may be more truth to some of the more tender moments in American Pie than the kid in question is letting on). Indeed, teenage comedies over the years have become shallow, juvenile, gross and stupid and do not reflect what it is truly like to be a teenager in the midst of growing up. There aren't movies about kids just hanging out anymore, having fun, wandering aimlessly, trying to find themselves when they can muster up the energy to do so, and so on. That was Hughes at his best within those teen films. A lot of people in the documentary say things like The Breakfast Club could never have been made today or people like Molly Ringwald could never be stars: it was too talky, too boring and she was too average, too ordinary; he persona didn't come with enough baggage to be flaunted in public. They are probably right.

All that is fine and dandy and, most of all, true. But I wonder just how much closer John Hughes actually got to reality than any other filmmaker ever does. My high school experience never mimicked anything like what is depicted in those films and this brings me to my reservations about using the word reality in regards to film.

Simply put, realism in movies doesn't exist. Critics talk about it all the time. Andre Bazin constantly touted realism in film and dismissed anything that came with even the slightest hint of artificiality (Jim Emerson posted a good article on this topic over at Scanners earlier today).

However, the realism that Andre Bazin and other critics talk about is not the realism of the everyday. It is cinematic realism. It's about finding something realistic within the context of a given film. Is the story plausible? Do the characters act in the ways we believe they would act in such a situation? I didn't believe a moment of The Dark Knight as creating a plausible, realistic world, but the film creates the aura that these people would genuinely exist in such a world and act in the exact manner in which they were acting up until the point when Batman and The Joker become real people. That's cinematic realism.

This brings me to a question that was posed to me in a grade 11 Media Studies class and I just found an answer to a few years ago. The question was whether art imitates life or life imitates art. It seems like one of those impossible questions with no right answer like what came first, the chicken or the egg? But then it becomes clear. The answer is that it's a two way street: each are a reflection of the other. In other words, we'd like to think we talk and act like they do in the movies and the movies would like to think they talk and act like we do in real life.

There's no doubt that, in those teen films, John Hughes was channelling people and places from his life and his youth, using something real as the template to cast his film against. However, are the films realistic in any sort of every day sense? I don't think so. Yet, the reason they are so affecting and people connect with them, enabling them to continue to live on these 20 years later, is because they offered an ideal portrait of what we wished out lives were like. To be as unique and innocent as Molly Ringwald, to be as hopelessly in love as Ducky, to be as rebellious...and so on.

John Hughes' method was then to create characters that represented types. They weren't typical teen characters: they were amalgamations of every kind of teenage archetype there was, and then put them into situations in which any teenager could possibly be confronted with: love, heartbreak, detention, an irate teacher, etc. However these things represented the ideals: the love was sweeter and more innocent than real life might be, the heartbreak more searing, the friendships more long lasting, whatever you will. These kids were the people we wanted to be, the friendships we wanted to have, the lives we wanted to lead.

John Hughes' films didn't so much create a portrait of reality because, let's face it, if the movies really presented accurate visions of reality we would never go to them. We go to them to see things as better than they are, funnier, more exciting, more tragic, more anything other than what we know in the day to day. John Hughes just so happened to present those things within a world that didn't feel as if it was completely unattainable; that it just existed outside the grasp of human possibility. That's what Hughes did at his best. That's what made him special. That's true cinematic realism.

Speaking of Dee Snider...

The other day I made a post in which I pondered whether or not Michael Bay was actually just Michael Bolton in disguise. Writing about Dee Snider and his Strangeland sequel made me think of another celebrity who may simply be played by another celebrity in disguise. Check it out:

Could Lady Gaga actually be Dee Snider is disguise?

Sequels to Movies That No One Cared About the First Time Around

I was pretty lucky. I had parents who let me watch just about anything no questions asked. So, it was in around grade 7 or 8, when I first saw Dee Snider's Strangeland for the first time. I saw it for no better reason than that the cover art with the girl with her mouth sewn shut intrigued me and I was just getting into Twisted Sister at the time, Dee Snider of course being the singer of that band. Of course at that impressionable age I loved the movie, bought the DVD, thought Snider was a great villain, wasn't bothered by the horrible acting, plot holes or extreme violence. I saw that movie at least 7 or 8 times.

Dee Snider, who also wrote and produced Strangeland, has been on the down low lately but apparently today Metal Sucks is reporting that we can expect a Strangeland sequel sometime soon. The film will be called Strangeland: Discipline (spooky right?) and will basically be a rehash of the first film as the evil Captain Howdy (who I guess didn't die after all at the end of the first film) will be back to wreak havoc on the victims of the first film one again. Dee Snider promises that, noting what didn't work about the first film, he will use this new one as a vehicle to right the wrongs of the original. Whatever. Just listen to We're Not Gonna Take it by Twisted Sister instead because it sure is catchy.




Another band I used to listen to in my final days of elementary school was, and I'm ashamed to admit this now, Insane Clown Posse. They were that group of white guys from Detroit who dressed up as clowns and rapped about being part of some dark carnival or something dumb like that. At that age I found them silly and amusing because they swore a lot and rapped about insignificant things, until I got to high school and met a guy who worshipped the ground they walked on, which made me realize just how stupid and untalented they really are.

Anyway, back in the day, ICP made a direct-to-video gangster movie called Big Money Hustlas. I haven't seen it. I don't want to see it either. But now, ICP are in front of the camera once more for a new direct-to-video western entitled Big Money Rustlas (clever, eh?). I won't see this one either but I encourage you to watch the trailer which is amusing in just how stupid these guys actually are. That people take this or their music seriously boggles my mind.

Speaking of bad movies, the guy who directed the original Leprechaun who's name I'm too lazy to look up, made another movie called Triloquist. It's about a family of killers and their evil, talking ventriloquist dummy. It's bad. Beyond bad actually. I don't know if it's intentionally horrible or the filmmakers were just incompetent, but oh boy. It's actually so bad that I can't think of many movies more amusing. I keep it around on DVD just for the right time when I will need a guaranteed laugh. Check out the trailer. You'll be happy you did.

Something`s Fishy in Wonderland

New Tim Burton films don`t excite me. He`s done some good work but, to be honest, I don`t think the man is a very good filmmaker. He`s an excellent decorator but a second rate storyteller, which means his films always end up feeling like hollow exercises in special effects and set design while the emotional crux of the stories take the back seat.

His approach to macabre subject matter doesn`t much interest me either. I get that he is making films about outsiders cast away from society, but his satiric vision of the everyday life which he juxtaposes his characters against is, in and of itself, so over-the-top that he`s not so much making a statement as making a misguided spectacle.

It should be no surprise then that, whether it`s good or not, I`m not really excited about Burton`s upcoming live-action-with-animation take of Alice in Wonderland which is set for release on March 5th in both 2D and 3D formats.

What does interest me though is that Hollywood Reporter is saying that Disney is planning on taking an experimental approach to releasing the movie. Apparently Disney has been toying with different ideas on how to release movies and now it is time to put one into practice. So the idea is that Disney is approaching exhibitors about shortening Alice`s run from roughly 16 weeks in first run theaters to around 13 or under. The reason for this is because Disney feels the film will be a big hit on DVD and ondemand services, so the quicker they can get it there the better.

What`s unclear at this moment is, if studio`s plan on adopting this method of distribution, how they plan on compensating theaters for shortening the runs of big films like Alice in Wonderland in order to push them onto DVD quicker. For theaters, shortened runs means less actual return from the studio on the film`s actual business and less physical traffic through the theater as people may be encouraged to simply wait for the DVD, which translates into less traffic through the theater`s concession stands, the place where most of an operation`s profits are derived.

Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that truncated runs could be a way to maximize the Disney`s bottom line, but I don`t quite buy it. Is this simply a sign that Disney has lost faith in Burton`s project and doesn`t believe it will perform. I can`t imagine the studio pulling something like this with one of their big projects like a Pixar or Pirates of the Caribbean film. Or is this one last desperate attempt by studios in hard times to keep people going out to the movies before everything except tentpole pictures and arthouse fare go more or less straight to video and ondemand.

It will be interesting to see how Burton, who began his career as an animator at Disney, will respond to his movie being the lab rat in such an experiment.