One Minutes Review: Sorority Row (1.5 out of 5)

Sorority Row is a real howler. In the third act, after it is believed that one of their sorority sister's who was killed in the midst of a nasty prank has come back from the dead to pick the remaining girls off one by one, the house's head mistress (Carrie Fischer) shows up unexpectedly with a shotgun to find the house in ruins after it is terrorized by the cloaked murdered. One of the girls accidentally lets it slip that they were responsible for the death of their missing sister. Instead of being baffled, shocked, taken aback, disgusted, anything that a normal person would do when faced with such information, the mistress racks the barrel and declares that whoever he/she/it is, it's about to get two to the face. Then, when but a few survivors remain and the killer's identity is revealed, one of the still living girls bashes the killer over the head with an inanimate object and runs away before checking if they are dead not once, but twice in the span of minutes. Shouldn't every horror movie character know by now that unless you physically see to the death of a demented killer, giving them a good whack or two usually doesn't solve much?

It's been quote some time since a film was as heedless careless with it's audience's intelligence as Sorority Row is. Not that horror movies haven't been dumb or anything, but ever since Hollywood started remaking every Japanese horror movie in sight or got all involved with movies about torture, they've been relatively straightforward, ugly and humourless. How rare it is to see one so lazily phoned in. Finally we get another horror film that no one asked for, that had no chance of being seen by anyone but horror fans and that couldn't care less that it's about as stupid as anything out there. It's nice to see that, in these economic times, Hollywood still has it in itself to throw money away for ol' times sake.

That's it. The girls are stupid and not overly attractive. They are also vain, shallow and unlikable. Think of Sex and the City as a slasher movie. And they also go through all the old standbys of running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door. Oh ya and when they go back to the mine shaft that the dumped the murdered girl's body down they find the dude there who actually was the one who killed her because, of course, he's probably been waiting there all year since for the moment when they would return. That makes sense.

Filmic Measures-The Documentary Rule

When Gene Siskel said that a movie needed to be better than having lunch with its stars he, in a way, unconsciously, if not changed film criticism, than changed the way films are consumed. Although the statement was, I assume, meant merely as a means to have a quotable critical means for which to evaluate movies, the buried implications are worth unearthing. To think about films this way is to uncover their relationship to the world or art, society, etc, for a film, in order to succeed, must always be better than something else. Is there another art that bears such a burden? Theatre is comparable to other theatre, music is judged based on it's worth next to other music and the success of the writer depends on their ability to convey meaningful thoughts through words.

But film is at once art, culture, politics, philosophy, psychology, engineering, anthropology, history, sociology, what have you. And although all art is, in some way, influenced by these things, does any but film ever truly embody them? For most arts have something that keep art separated, for lack of better phrasing, from politics. The play has the luxury of unfolding in real time in front of a crowd in which, if one desired, could be reached out and touched, but it is, aesthetically speaking, built upon the suspension of disbelief. The writer is not so much responsible for the events they depict as they are their interpretation of such events, which are only as real as the writer's negotiation of them. The writer has poetry on their side. But, because of this disconnection, theater must only be better than other theatre, the novel only better than other novels, etc.

But film, despite the "lie" of editing as Godard would have it, is captured with sound, movement, colour. It's a literal embodiment of whatever has been placed before the camera, no matter how artificial it's construction may have been. Film must not only be art, politics, philosophy, etc., it must be better than art, politics, philosophy, etc.

That's why we're always judging film based not only reality, believability, aesthetic invention and so on, but also the depth of it's thoughts, it's moral centre, it's ability to speak something, anything, be it the banal or the humorous. To paraphrase what Ossie Davis once said: art is a form of power; it has the ability to move us and make us move. Is there, looking back on history, a more powerful art form, in this sense, than film?

That's why we create these sayings, these filmic measures because, as Siskel pointed to us, all film must be better than something else. So here's one: A film must be better than a documentary made on the same subject. The difference between fiction and documentary is simple: documentary is fact, fiction is being there (note-I am using fact in an abstract way, not in a literal way as if to suggest that documentaries are not subjective). A fiction film should take you to the heart of it's subject, take you along for its journey, let you understand its hero and their cause, morals, beliefs, whatever it is that makes the experience as personal and intimate as possible. A documentary on the other hand should be, as it's name suggests, a document of something; a chronicling of a belief, a movement, a moment in time. Fiction is built from emotions. Documentary is, in one way or another, built from thesis'.

That's why a fiction film needs to be better. It needs to, in a sense be more real, because it needs to immerse the viewer. Documentaries impact knowledge and feelings. Fiction does this too, but also takes you for a ride. Take a real example: Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is based on the story of Dieter Dengler, the subject of Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Although Little Dieter is a special and informative documentary, Rescue Dawn shows us what Little Dieter can only leave in the crevices of our imagination. It makes the story more real by putting us alongside Dengler in that moment.

Some films are so boring and so dramatically uninspired that to see a documentary on the same subject would be so much more enlightening, entertaining, informative, whatever. The September Issue must certainly be of more worth than either Sex and the City movie, no? That's because the documentary tells us something about high class, sophistication, fashion, and so on, where the film simply uses that world in order to fulfill it's own superficial fantasies and fairy tales. You see the difference?

Other Filmic Measures: The Chocolate Bar Movie, Where's The Airship Movies

Sex and the City (3 out of 5)

Sex and the City 2 opens today. I'll be seeing it next week because that's part of what having a girlfriend is all about. So I figured, what better way to prep than revist my review of the first one.



A film like Sex and the City the Movie really unearths the true arbitrary nature of the star rating system. What does appointing a film with a star value really mean after all, when the true point of criticism seems, not to be so much in evaluation, but of sharing ideas and experiences from one film fan to the next? It certainly doesn’t tell us a film’s worth amongst other films (Sweeney Todd and the Godfather share the same five stars, but equals they are not). And if the stars convey a sense of the writer’s experience with an individual film, then why not just let the review speak for itself? A good review after all, will uproot those differences in greatness between films like Sweeney Todd and the Godfather.

So I bounced the concept around in my head of eliminating the stars altogether for Sex in the City, because really, what kind of critical angel can I approach it from? Prior to writing this I skimmed Rotten Tomatoes to see what the general critical approach seemed to be. I of course, like many, could resort to general film criticism. I could say that the film is too long (which it is), isn’t very genuinely witty (which it isn’t), and doesn’t use the film form in order to expand the original television concept to appeal to a wider audience (which it doesn’t). But I won’t do that, because a good critic will just be honest with themselves and admit up front whether or not they embody the film’s ideal audience and proceed from there. What good would film criticism do anyway for a work that’s iconic status stretches far beyond the simple realms of the film world? “Oh man.” I said to the person I was attending the theater with, “This thing is two and a half hours long.” “Good.” She replied, “The more the better.” Struck out before even getting up to the plate.

So, here it is: I never watched one solitary second of Sex and the City when it was on the air, and probably won’t now that I’ve witnessed it on film. So what do I do? I can’t even begin to validate the film’s success in its faithfulness to the original show and playing movie critic for a film whose audience I was clearly not meant to be a part of seems silly for me and dishonest for you. So you see my predicament with rating the darn thing. In my position, appointing a star value to this work seems about as redundant as, well, writing about how redundant it seems.

There are two things every 20-something moving to New York City is looking for, tells the writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker): labels and love (which could have easily doubled for the film’s own title). Needless to say, Carrie isn’t a very good writer, but a lack of talent seems like small criticism in a world where The Devil Wears Prada flies off the shelves.
Carrie, having spent her years in New York, is now 40 and writing about being in love with the man of her dreams Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and their future plans. Supporting her along the way are her four best friends: Charlotte (Kirstin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and of course, crowd favorite Samantha (Kim Cattrall).

For those not initiated with the show, they will find that these four women each inhabit broad social types and their emotional reach does not seem to delve much deeper than that. Carrie is the emotional one who thinks (as her opening voice over suggests) with her heart and her cheque book. The first thing Carrie checks when looking for the new apartment: the closest space. Miranda (the most level-headed and interesting of the four) is the headstrong one, a driven career woman, so caught up in her work that she risks sexually alienating her husband. Charlotte is the bright and bubbly one; the girl who everyone loved but no one took seriously in high school, who wound up with the best husband and family anyway. She’s mostly comic relief and has an unfortunate scene put upon her in which she accidently drinks water in Mexico and has an attack that wouldn’t be below a Wayans Brothers comedy. Finally there is Samantha, who women love, I assume, because, even at fifty, she is sexually liberated and vulgar, kissing and telling whoever will listen. No wonder Sex and the City was such a hit on TV; these girls occupy the perfect high class/high fashion female fairytale.

The plot however, at two and a half hours (that’s five episodes worth of material), feels painfully episodic as each sequence seems to announce itself as a requisite Sex and the City moment instead of emerging from a greater overarching narrative: okay, here’s the fashion show; Okay, here’s the unveiling of the new closet; Okay, here’s the homosexual male banter; Okay, here’s the fabulous wedding dress, and so on. Of course, none of this seems to add up to any more than it is: another moment, another new idea for next week’s episode. At half an hour increments, I assume that Sex and the City could sustain itself. At two and half, it lacks the continuity and coherence to pack any emotional punch, despite one great sequence that, in spite of it all, seeps under the skin. It’s a montage of New Years Eve, set to the subtle splendor of Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis’ Auld Lang Syne

So now I’ve come to the end, and done my best to fulfill my job as the critic. I’ve described to the best of my abilities, the movie that I saw and the experience I had of it. I’ve tried to explain it in such a way that, if it sounds like it will appeal to you, you’ll see it even though it didn’t much appeal to me. I’ve thus given some thought to the matter and finally decided that the film deserves a three star rating: neither here nor there. As a whole the film doesn’t work: to those uninitiated, it will feel like visiting a stranger’s family reunion, with not much incentive to care about anyone there or the actions they take, and I firmly believe that a film of any nature should strive to be self-sufficient; to not require that the audience bring any prior knowledge into the experience. However, for better or worse, as both a love and a label for many, I’m sure that Sex and the City the Movie is just about perfect.