[CinemaRatty] tag: citizens

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:34:00 +0000

"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear... The Lone Ranger rides again!"

Oh, if only that were so...

I'm a huge fan of The Lone Ranger. Let me put that fact on the table first.

When I was a little boy living in New Jersey, a local TV station (WPIX, I think...) ran an afternoon block of heroic programming. First The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958), then Batman (1966-1969) and then, finally...The Lone Ranger (1949-1957), This went on every weekday for a long time...and boy...I was in kiddie heaven. I remember some days begging my Mother to take me home from Brookdale Park so I could get home in time to see these programs!

Anyway, Clayton Moore portrayed the heroic Lone Ranger in the 1950s series (along with John Hart, for two years), and I admired the Lone Ranger as a child (and now, as a man) because of his moral creed. He didn't drink or smoke. Not only did he speak beautifully (never indulging in slang or jargon), but he believed that "all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world." Most importantly, the Lone Ranger never shot to kill.

Despite my love for the 1950s Lone Ranger TV series (and I even owned a complete set of Gabriel's 1973 10-inch Lone Ranger figures...), I would have certainly welcomed, by 1981, a modern take on the classic material; just as I had welcomed with open arms the updated Superman: The Movie (1978). But with The Legend of The Lone Ranger (1981), a notorious box office bomb, something went wrong. Badly wrong.

I watched The Legend of the Lone Ranger again last week, for the first time in years, and was shocked anew at just how bad this film is. In fact, I was unpleasantly reminded of Tarzan: The Ape Man another 1981 film which failed to do justice to an iconic hero. At least Tarzan: The Ape Man has Bo Derek starring (and disrobing...) in it, and boasts a high-degree of camp value. The Legend of the Lone Ranger is just...plodding.

Actually, The Legend of the Lone Ranger fails on three distinct fronts. But before I get to each particular failure, a brief re-cap is in order: The Legend of the Lone Ranger tells the story of the "man behind the mask" (as per the ballad of the Lone Ranger, ickily performed by Merle Haggard).

In the Old West (Texas, 1854), young John Reid sees his parents brutally murdered by bandits and is taken in by friendly Indians to live as one of the natives. Reid's "blood brother" is Tonto, and at this early age, Reid decides irrevocably to follow "the trail of justice." Soon, however, he is removed from his Indian life by his older brother, Dan, a ranger who sends John back East to become an attorney.

Several years later, a grown John (Klinton Spilsbury) returns to the wild west hoping to make it a terrain where justice prevails, but in local "Del Rio," (a town in trouble, Merle Haggard tells us...) he finds that much of the territory is already in thrall to the power-hungry, megalomaniacal Butch Cavendish (Christopher Lloyd), a warlord who seeks to kidnap President Ulysses S. Grant (Jason Robards). Before long, John, his brother Dan and a team of rangers are led into a Cavendish trap by a traitor in the ranger ranks and -- after a brutal gun fight -- left for dead.

Only John survives the massacre. He is nursed back to health by a now-adult Tonto (who happened by the crime scene at just the right moment...) and soon launches his quest for justice. But first, John must "dig a grave for John Reid" and become The Lone Ranger; a masked man who rides a white steed named Silver, and who uses silver bullets in combat.

The Legend of the Lone Ranger's first and most egregious failing is that it doesn't seem to know its audience (which, if you ask me, would include generations of "grown up" boys and girls who loved the TV show). By this, I mean that Legend of the Lone Ranger is the ugliest, gauziest, dustiest-looking western since Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980).

It's not just that the movie is unpleasant to watch...it's actually unpleasant to look at. You can hardly make out faces, the film is so gritty and soiled-looking. I would argue that this is precisely the wrong visual for any Lone Ranger production. We should be inspired by the beauty of the West, by those gorgeous wide open skies and natural landscapes; just as the Lone Ranger is himself inspired by the promise of America. I mean, I know dark things happen in the Lone Ranger's origin, but no one in their right mind would live in a Wild West that looked like this, forever inside its own whirling Dust Bowl.

Secondly, this is a film that, in the first few minutes, depicts innocent Mrs. Reid (John's mother) dragged behind a horse by bandits, and then shot and killed at point-blank range. Later, the film doesn't cut away when two bandits are executed by Cavendish at point blank range and we see the bloody impact wounds blossom on their chests. I'm no prude, but the Lone Ranger in the past was a franchise that didn't exploit graphic violence. The Lone Ranger himself never killed his enemies; and furthermore lived by a code of justice that he applied to all: criminals and honest citizens alike. It's a mistake, I submit, given the history of the franchise, to revel in bloody demises like those depicted here. It seems antithetical to what the Lone Ranger is all about.

I'd also state that The Legend of the Lone Ranger doesn't know its audience because it makes several basic mistakes in franchise information and background. For instance, this film transforms heroic John Reid into a rookie attorney (!) not an experienced ranger, when he is involved in the massacre. It also establishes that he is a terrible shot, one whose skill is miraculously improved only when Tonto gives him silver bullets. In most incarnations of the Lone Ranger, Reid is a talented marksman and ranger before the events that change his life. Frankly, that origin makes more sense. Silver bullets aren't magic in and of themselves (though I guess they can kill werewolves...). I just don't see how silver bullets make a person's aim more true, even if, according to Tonto, "silver is pure."

The Legend of the Lone Ranger's second, and perhaps most catastrophic failing is that it is dull beyond all conventional forms of measurement. This is an action movie that moves at a snail's pace. It takes thirty-eight looong minutes just to get to the ranger massacre in the gully. It takes to forty-eight minutes to introduce Silver. Key scenes are notably and irrevocably dull. For instance, the moment when Reid tames Silver is extended relentlessly by slow motion photography (think of Tarzan's wrestling match with a boa in Tarzan the Ape Man), and becomes almost laughable in its duration. I'm a long-time admirer of composer John Barry, but his lugubrious, ponderous score only contributes to the sense that this movie is a dead weight around your shoulders...never ending, ugly, and with nothing of significance occurring. And remember, I dig the Lone Ranger!

"Thrilling days of yesteryear?" You won't find them here...

The film's final flaw is simple: basic incompetence. Through the entire film, Klinton Salisbury's voice is badly dubbed by James Keach, and you can tell. Worse, in key moments, (particularly the horse whispering moment), it is obvious that Silver is played by at least two very, very different horses. You know a movie is in trouble when you have the time to notice that the lead horse is being stunt-doubled...

The Lone Ranger is being remade again today with Johnny Depp as Tonto, and I think it's fair to say that any new film will be a helluva lot better than the sleepy, dusty Legend of the Lone Ranger. The only time this movie comes to life is when that inspiring William Tell Overture is dragged out of mothballs.

What a disappointment. The children of 1981 deserved better.

'City of Ember' web reviews

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:40:28 +0000

Younger audiences will likely have a good time watching "City of Ember" this weekend, Gil Kenan's family adventure about two teenagers who race against time to help the citizens of Ember escape before the city’s powerful generator breaks down and all the lights go out forever. Saoirse Ronan, Tim Robbins and Bill Murray star. Let's see what online critics have to say about the flick:

• Cinematical's Jette Kernion: "Caroline Thompson's script gives us strong main characters and entertaining supporting characters, but is a little light on story."

• Brian Orndorf at Collider: "'City of Ember' is a sci-fi fantasy film with forbidding apocalyptic overtones, extravagant set design, and an edge that mixes high-flying questing with significant ecological worry."

Civilization

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:02:53 +0000

I like civilization. I'm a big fan of having a large crowd of people committed to my safety and protection, since I'm generally against large hordes of barbarians raping my wife and pillaging my home theater system.

But I do think that civilization encourages a weird kind of myopia. Because the civilization and culture around you does a lot of the heavy lifting, you forget all the effort put into creating your world and come to believe that people just naturally are that way. And that causes you to make some stupid goddamned mistakes.

The best example is, of course, the Middle East. We were so steeped in a civilization based on democracy that we thought that hey, democracy works for us - so all we have to do is invade somewhere else, drop a little democracy on 'em, and WHAM! Peace and prosperity in our time. Large swathes of our culture actually believed that left to their own devices, people would naturally vote in an orderly, respectful manner and patiently wait for their next turn at the ballot box when they lost.

Truth is, democracy's not a natural state of mankind, but rather an agreement that we've all made with each other. In America, we have an ingrained understanding with each other that you get regular shots at the prize, and that your opponent will gracefully step down if defeated. If someone said, "No, I'm still in power!" and tried to stage a coup with military resources, we'd go batshit on him - everyone, from the press to the little guy in the yard, would be so infuriated that it'd probably never last. Large portions of the military would most likely go, "Whoah, that's too far."

The reason people don't try it is because as a civilization, we've all quietly gotten together and agreed that, hey! Takeovers? Bad. You gotta wait your turn.

That's not the natural way of mankind, though. There are plenty of other areas where a guy gets into power, first thing he does is starts shooting the competition so they never get a shot again. And if the vote goes against him, who cares? Ignore the results! Declare a state of emergency and stay in power!

Democracy all hinges on the idea that "We wait our turn patiently for power." Take that away, and democracy goes awry, sometimes causing more strife than it solves, and certainly not acting as a magical fix-up. But we were so steeped in democratic ideals that we thought that people just naturally waited patiently. Why? Because everyone we knew had that ideal, and we had come to believe that it must be something inherent in us rather than years of social conditioning.

Likewise, a lot of people I grew up with in rich-and-peaceful Connecticut were hippie types who believed that humanity was inherently kind to each other, and that it was only The Man who made us ugly. I looked around at other areas, where people ripped each other off on a regular basis and dictators thrived and murders were sometimes sanctioned - and I looked at the bloody times of history. And I went, "Well, that's clearly not a natural kindness, or we'd have peace all over the world instead of just in Connecticut."

But they'd grown up in a place where everyone was rich enough to be nice to each other, and so that was how everyone must act. Right?

And though I speak as though I have a clue, truth is that I don't know what the natural state of humanity is. 99% of the people I know in real life have been raised on American stories by American parents, shown American TV and raised in American structures, taught American lessons by American teachers. Most of what I know about "humanity" is actually what I know about "Americans."

I can look around the world and see the way other people interact, and take some obvious lessons from them, but I'm sure I have some hidden opinions on "how people work" that utterly fail when I move to another culture. And that's because any civilization, when done well enough to protect its citizens the way it's designed to, encourages that kind of blindness where you come to believe that "That can't happen, because people just don't do that sort of thing."

But they do. Somewhere else. You just don't see it.

MOVIE OPENINGS - October 10

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:32:46 +0000

QUARANTINE

Director: John Erick Dowdle
Stars: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Columbus Short
Studio: Screen Gems

The Plot: What happened to the people who were locked inside an apartment building by a CDC-issued quarantine? The only evidence left after the quarantine has been lifted is a videotape shot by a TV reporter (Carpenter) and her cameraman (Harris) who were investigating the initial 911 call …

BODY OF LIES

Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Plot: In Jordan, an ex-journalist (DiCaprio) working to locate an Al Qaeda leader for the CIA faces pressure from an agent (Crowe) for whom failure is not an option.

ROCKNROLLA

Director: Guy Ritchie
Stars: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Idris Elba
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Plot: In London, a real-estate scam puts millions of pounds up for grabs, naturally attraction the attention of some of the city’s scrappiest tough guys (Butler, Elba) its more established underworld players (Wilkinson), and others — all of whom are looking to get rich quick.

CITY OF EMBER

Director: Gil Kenan
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Toby Jones, Bill Murray
Studio: Fox-Walden

The Plot: For generations, the underground City of Ember has been the only light in an otherwise dark world. But when the city’s generator begins to fail, teenagers Lina (Ronan) and Doon (Treadaway) desperately race to help their fellow citizens escape before the lights go out permanently. To do so, they will have to search Ember high and low for clues that will unlock the ancient mystery of their city’s origins.

HAPPY GO LUCKY

Director: Mike Leigh
Stars: Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin
Studio: Miramax Films

The Plot: A look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy (Hawkins), a cheery, colorful, North London schoolteacher whose optimism tends to exasperate those around her.

Creative Coalition launches YouVote

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:56:23 +0000

Even more inspiring than the voter registration video we posted yesterday, the Creative Coalition encourages us to vote with a quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCcLzu3jz1M

“For too long the entertainment community has been accused of being either indifferent to important issues or lending their voices only to certain pet causes. This video demonstrates that Hollywood understands voting is not about liberal or conservative, it’s about participating in the democratic process and being a proud American.” — Sue Kramer, director of the “YouVote” video.

1951: Interstellar Overture

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:43:35 +0000

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

92 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

A transcript of The Past Through Tomorrow Show

Airdate: Sunday, October 7, 1951

This is T.O. Morrow. Today we're going to discuss atomic warfare, the exploration of outer space, flying saucers, and a new science fiction (SF) feature film titled The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). We're going to examine these things as free thinking citizens, perhaps as cinephiles, but not as armchair jesters or water-cooler wiseacres.

Not long after World War II reached an earth-shattering conclusion with the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan four seemingly disparate issues somehow unexpectedly intertwined in American minds. First came the dawning sense that this once largely isolationist country had been thrust by victory to an unprecedented position of power, influence, and responsibility in the world. Yet optimism over this new reality was tempered by the realization that our former ally the Soviet Union also assumed a new dominant position of power. And the result, as we are all well aware, ladies and gentlemen, is that the world is tensely divided between two ideologically opposed areas of influence, one based on democratic principles and the other on communism.

Secondly, some more than others are convinced that science offers a means to relieve our global tensions by shifting our attention and energies to the exploration of outer space, the new and final frontier. After all, ours is a pioneering tradition, they say, and atomic powered rockets could theoretically become the covered wagons of a new space age. Other opinions hold that if we blaze a path to the stars we would likely only extended our earthbound conflicts into the heavens. And there are those who fear pioneering into outer space on the grounds that it will risk contact with unknown, possibly hostile extraterrestrial forces.

A look of anxious fear touches the faces of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public when they sight a flying saucer in the skies over Washington D.C. in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And speaking of extraterrestrial forces: Ever since a gentleman named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a number of disc shaped aircraft in the skies near Mount Rainier, Washington in June 1947 there has been a rash of similar sightings of "flying saucers" around the country. Accompanying this phenomenon is no small amount of speculation about the nature of these sightings. Some suggest that these flying saucers are quite real and represent secret advanced military aircraft, either ours or, more alarmingly, those belonging to some other power. Others have theorized that these craft carry extraterrestrial visitors intent on contacting us. Then there are those who call the whole thing a hoax. Still others have tried to explain this phenomenon as some form of mass hysteria. Whatever the truth, my friends, this flying saucer business remains a matter of public concern.

Finally, and most serious of all, is the pressing issue of what to do with the discovery of atomic energy and the awesome devastating power of atomic weapons. Many wish to embrace all of the potential good that might result from further study into atomic energy. Yet others suggest that it represents an area into which science has already wandered too far. There are claims that, like Dr. Frankenstein, we have unleashed something terrible upon the world and now have a responsibility to control our creation. Many simply wish to turn away from the whole matter and destroy these weapons before they destroy us all.

Though relatively few of us have been directly involved in making decisions about these far-reaching and curiously intertwined issues almost all of us have found ourselves associated with them through newspapers, radio, magazines, television, and motion pictures. Yes, even motion pictures, that otherworldly arena of escapism, magic, and make believe, has involved us in these all-too mundane matters. And that is where we are going to turn our attention to now, to a picture Twentieth Century-Fox released a few weeks ago called The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Director Robert Wise uses a silhouette shot to build mystery and suspicion around the arrival of a stranger (actually it's the extraterrestrial visitor Klaatu in disguise) to a Washington D.C. boardinghouse in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

If you haven't seen the picture yet I urge you to do so because it is informed by all of the complex issues mentioned here today, and many more. Yes, it is a science fiction feature but director Robert Wise avoids the kind of gimmicky juvenilia we've come to expect from such things as Captain Video (1951) or the old Flash Gordon series. Advanced technology, a requirement of any good science fiction picture, is on display here--a flying saucer capable of interstellar travel, an indestructible robot armed with a disintegration ray, a reanimation machine. These mysterious technologies play integral roles in the narrative, but Wise tends to focus on natural tendencies in human nature, such as a distrust of the unfamiliar and the quick turn to violence as a means of resolving conflicts, to move his story along. If anywhere, the greatest feeling of otherworldly-ness results from Bernard Herrmann's spine-tingling score in which he makes great use of an obscure electronic instrument called a theremin.

Stylistically, Wise constructs his picture with the kind of semi-documentary realism that makes suspense and crime pictures so thrilling to watch. He's not above using a dash of the classic horror film style when it suits his purposes either. Though the film is concerned with complex issues, Wise avoids the trap of producing a message picture--wordy, polemical, problematic from a technical standpoint, and, frankly, sometimes quite boring to sit through. Wise, and producers Darryl Zanuck and Julian Blaustein, should be commended for translating the aforementioned big ideas to the screen while remembering that most of us go to the movie theater to be entertained. They must have sensed that only the fantastic, eerie, and technology-based science fiction genre could encompass such heavy ideas and still move our senses through dynamic twists and turns like an amusement park roller-coaster.

Klaatu is shot in the back while running toward us in this thrilling image from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Now, allow me to review what happens in the feature in a few broad strokes. The picture begins when Klaatu (Michael Rennie), an extraterrestrial diplomat on a mission for a federation of planets, arrives in Washington D.C. in a flying saucer. Klaatu's attempts to contact mankind are frustrated by all-too human xenophobia. His initial interstellar overture of friendship is misconstrued and he is shot and wounded. His request to speak before an assembly of all world leaders is denied because mutual distrust makes such a thing impossible to stage. Soon, Klaatu goes undercover and becomes a fugitive hunted by the military. He befriends a war widow (Patricia Neal), her young son (Billy Gray), and a Einstein-like famous scientist (Sam Jaffe) who agree to help him convene an group of international "great minds." Now military forces catch up with him and he's shot and killed. Gort, his indestructible robot guardian, revives Klaatu long enough for him to present his message to the assembled scientists. In truth, it is an ultimatum: if earthlings extend their warlike ways into outer space they will be annihilated. The suggested alternative is to give up all aggression and irrevocably place the planet under the total authority of a race of robots like Gort. At the first sign of violence these robots will destroy the aggressors. With that said, Klaatu and Gort reenter their spacecraft and return to the stars.

Based on early indications, The Day the Earth Stood Still is drawing audiences and making money, something Hollywood desperately needs since being divested of their theater chains by a ruling of the Supreme Court, coming under investigation from the House Un-American Activities Committee, and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in admissions to the growing popularity of television and other leisure activities. It isn't unreasonable to predict that the success of this picture, along with the recent successes of George Pal's Technicolor science fiction adventure Destination Moon (1950) and the science fiction/horror hybrid The Thing from Another World (1951), will trigger a science fiction picture boom in the coming months. Certainly there's enough inspirational SF material available in John W. Campbell's popular Astonishing Stories magazine to craft any number of screenplays. But, if science fiction should turn out to be the only genre in which filmmakers can make entertaining films that also discuss the serious matters of our times then let's hope that the film moguls will insist on producing intelligent, high-quality features like The Day the Earth Stood Still and avoid the temptation to produce a series of cheap, low quality bug-eyed monster movies simply to cash in on a fad.

Now let's take a moment to reflect on Klaatu's frightening ultimatum: give up our aggressive ways if we intend to explore outer space or face utter annihilation. You may have recognized that some of my fellow commentators have stated that this film espouses pacifism. Perhaps they have the picture confused with a prophetic movie of the early 1930's titled Men Must Fight (1933). That film predicted a second world war six years before the actual fact, and reminded audiences that the only real way to achieve pacifism is if we all refuse to fight. The Day the Earth Stood Still, on the other hand, makes the case that peace can only be achieved if assurance of total annihilation is the only alternative. The pacifism theorists overlook that, backed by the threat of deadly force, Klaatu demands a compulsory and irrevocable loss of liberty and self-determination. Make of that what you will, my friends, but such ideas are nowhere to be found in the definition of pacifism in this commentator's dictionary.

Regardless of how we categorize Klaatu's solution to war, his words are likely to become a source of discussion among commentators, critics, and movie fans. In these discussions let us remember that in reality his ideas do not represent a more advanced extraterrestrial form of wisdom nor a kind of thinking unknown to our own policy-makers. In fact, a group of very real scientists proposed a similar answer to the atomic crisis only a few years ago. Yes, Klaatu's otherworldly logic mirrors one side of a very earthbound debate. Let's take a moment for a brief recap:

Here comes the robot monster Gort...jagged shadows and Patricia Neal's wide eyed look of fear and off-kilter, half-supine body language recall the look and feel of 1940s low-budget horror pictures.

In 1946, a group of scientists hoped to simplify the incredibly complex issues surrounding the advent of atomic energy and the possibility of atomic war in a film strip titled How to Live With the Atom. Perhaps you saw it in your local school or at a public meeting, or read a condensed version that ran on page 81 of the New York Times on June 9, 1946. In the film strip, produced by the National Committee on Atomic Information and the Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists, these learned folk presented their argument in clear, simple language: "We must get together to tie the atom down. Atomic energy must be taken out of our own hands and those of other countries and brought under world control." These scientists wanted to "save the world from the Atom bomb" by joining the combined might of all nations on Earth to enforce world-wide control because "without force to make the signing nations keep their word, someone will just whip out a bomb and use it." In truth, I don't know if the scientists' plan is workable. What I do know is that, just like the distrusting politicians in Mr. Wise's science fiction film, our world leaders have not all gathered together and solved the issue yet. For now, our own policy-makers and those of the Soviet Union have only agreed to disagree over these matters and we appear to be settling into a frigid stalemate, what some have termed a cold war.

Speak softly and carry a big Gort: Backed up by deadly advanced technology, Klaatu delivers his ultimatum to the assembled scientists of Earth.

The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn't allow the group of international thinkers a chance to debate Klaatu's ultimatum before the end of the picture. However, that doesn't mean that we viewers should remain mute on the subject. Let us consider if the policy proposed by our own scientists but unheeded by officials in 1946 isn't preferable to current conditions which only seem to have us all feeling uneasy, to say the least. Will we heed Klaatu's warning and find the will to suspend aggression? Is his solution workable? Shall some future generation revisit these concerns or can we find the strength to rise to the challenge and solve them now? I frankly admit that I don't know the answer, my friends. But I do know that the outcome is ultimately up to you. I can say this: given the unthinkable implications of the recent reports of development of an even deadlier doomsday weapon, the hydrogen bomb, and the complexity of the politics involved in all of this business, it is little wonder that the producers of The Day the Earth Stood Still looked to the heavens for answers.

Well, that's all for Sunday, October 7, 1951.

Until next time, o' friends, remember: keep one eye on the skies!

Johns Response To Alan Oranges Douchebag Article Blog Is A Four Letter Word

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:09:16 +0000

In the 5+ years of doing The Movie Blog I have taken great pride in the fact that even while some other people have launched attacks on me (I’m talking about ATTACKS, not just criticism over certain issues), I have never once personally attacked or engaged in any sort of “shit slinging” contest with another movie website writer… because I really do believe in the old saying “The only thing that happens when 2 people start slinging shit at each other, is that everyone ends up smelling like shit”, and so I never do it.

However, last night I read an “article” that was so asinine, so inane, so witless and dare I say, so ignorant, that I have to throw my 5+ year streak of not going after another movie website writer out the window and call him on the imbecilic piece of gutter shit that he has shown himself to be.

The sad thing is that I COULD have agreed with him in some ways had he not exposed himself for the moronic simpleton that he clearly is.

So what am I talking about?

An “article” went up on the movie news website “MovieWeb” (a site I actually enjoy and respect for the most part as a great source of movie related news) entitled “BLOG IS A FOUR LETTER WORD” written by writer B. Alan Orange. The basic concept if the piece was that blogs and bloggers (specifically movie blogs and movie bloggers) are uneducated, unpaid, living in their mother’s basement second class web citizens that are so debase that he personally feels offended whenever someone refers to him as a blogger. He illustrated his point by likening it unto being referred to as a “nigger”. Yes, that’s what he said.

Now, before I go onto the work of eviscerating this boy, I do want to lay the groundwork and context for my thoughts and give some disclaimers:

DISCLAIMER #1 - THERE ARE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MOVIE NEWS SITES AND MOVIE BLOGS
I whole heartedly agree with B. Alan Orange when it comes to acknowledging that there is a difference between a news site and a blog. Perhaps his next great revelation will be that wet and dry are two different things. Movie News sites do the work of JOURNALISM. Researching, finding, chasing and breaking stories. They are wonderful online resources who specialize in that aspect of what they do. Blogs on the other hand are more grassroots. We are fans. We concentrate more on the sharing of thoughts, opinions and experiences when it comes to the movies and movie news. I am a fellow fan with all the readers that come to The Movie Blog just having a conversation about our mutual passion. I do not try to be, nor do I want to be a “news reporter”. The two (movie news sites and movie blogs) are two very opposite yet complementary sides to the online film community. Both serving distinct yet valuable purposes for the readers.

DISCLAIMER #2 - BLOGGERS ARE NOT JOURNALISTS
There are some bloggers out there who fancy themselves as journalists. These are friends of mine who I whole heartedly disagree with. There is a difference between blogging and journalism. Just because you get invited to press junkets (that I personally never ever ever go to) and have a readership and conduct some interviews DOES NOT MAKE YOU A JOURNALIST. Blogging is a different task, but no less valuable. The ironic thing is that by pretending to be journalists, some bloggers actually devalue what blogging is, and that’s a shame. On this point (that bloggers are not journalists), B. Alan Orange and I can agree.

DISCLAIMER #3 - SOME BLOGGERS ABUSE DIGG
I had this discussion with some of my fellow blogger friends several times. It is WRONG for one website (blog or otherwise) to take a news story from another site, and then use DIGG.COM or another social networking link sharing service to promote their post about the story instead of pointing all Digg traffic to the source of the story. I feel very strongly about this and I will acknowledge to my movie news website friends that this is a problem in the Movie Blogging world that needs to stop and be addressed. If MOVIE NEWS SITE A breaks a story, then it is WRONG for MOVIE BLOG SITE B to try to get Diggs pointed at their own post, and essentially steal traffic that deserves to be pointed to MOVIE NEWS SITE A. We in the movie blogging community need to clean this part of our practice up and on this point I will agree with B. Alan Orange.

But therein ends my diplomacy. This is where I can stretch as far as I can go to try to acknowledge any sort of validity to this mental midget’s “article”. Now let me address B. Alan Orange directly. Are you reading this boy? I’d like to call out your insipid piece on the following points:

1) Making personal insults and attacks on Alex Billington of Firstshowing.
So is this what “journalism” is you pasty skinned ass wipe? Publicly making personal insults and remarks about another movie website writer? Saying things like: “Especially when you see some of these people. If you hung out with doughboy extraordinaire Alex B., or just saw a picture of him, you’d be screaming, “I don’t give a fuck if this guy likes the movie. Look at him. I’m not going to listen to him. And his lispy pudge of a face.”” is that “journalism” you ignorant fuck? Is that how true movie website writers communicate? Look, I’ve had problems with Alex too from time to time, none of us are perfect, but to publicly make personal comments about someone like that is the pathetic pussy act of a pathetic pussy man. Thus, if you follow my logic, you boy, are a pathetic pussy.

2) Classifying All Bloggers As Living In Their Mother’s Basements
You directly said in your “article”: “And then there are the “bloggers” who run their sweat-powered opinion industries from their parent’s basement”. Really? Is that so? Well, I don’t know if you know this boy, but I happen to be a blogger. I run a little site called “The Movie Blog” (go figure). I have two places, one in Canada and one sweet little place here in Hollywood on Sunset. I’d invite you over sometime to smell up my place with your ignorance, but frankly you’re probably too stupid to follow your GSP giving you directions… then I’d just feel guilty when they announce sending out search parties trying to find the poor lost dumb fuck.

3) Classifying All Bloggers As Being Unemployed And Making No Money
Just when I think you’re a stupid as a human being can possibly be, you come out and say something like this: “Being a “blogger” means you don’t get paid. It means being on the same evolutionary back porch step as a fetch happy dog.” Yeah, ok. Here’s the thing boy, I’m willing to put my paycheck up against yours any day you feel like getting humiliated because a lowly little ignorant, evolutionary back parch blogger makes more money than you. Time and place son… time and place.

4) Classifying All Bloggers As Uneducated
I’ll just go along the same lines here as your last “point”. Anytime, any place that you’d like to bring whatever pieces of paper you’ve earned from various educational institutions (no, you don’t get to count your finger painting certificate from scouts) to compare against my pieces of paper, I’m all open to it. What’s the problem boy? I’m just a lowly little uneducated blogger right? RIGHT?

5) Classifying Bloggers As Unintelligent Second Class Web Citizens
Your caricatures of what bloggers are and are not would amuse me if they weren’t so asinine. Here’s the thing Gump, I am, in every way, shape and form your better. If you’d ever like to put that little theory to the test, let’s book a room, get two podiums and a small audience and we’ll have a little debate on this topic where I can expose your 4th grade intellect and have you crying yourself to sleep while trying to saw a plastic butter knife through your wrists because I’ve convinced you your life really is just that meaningless. All because you realized a mere pathetic little BLOGGER proved himself your better. And hell, I’m not even close to being the smartest blogger out there… you’d get eaten alive in these wastelands boy.

Next time you have a beef with someone specifically or blogs in general, do what INTELLIGENT movie news sites like JoBlo, IESB, ComingSoon or CHUD do… or do what intelligent members of your own site, MovieWeb (like Paul) do. Engage in some discussion. Send emails. Talk to us dirty unwashed bloggers. Maybe it’ll be frustrating, maybe it’ll be productive, maybe you’ll teach something, maybe you’ll learn something, but at least at the end of the day you won’t expose the bare ass of your idiocy for the whole world to see you ignorant jack ass fuck.

Have a nice day dick.

We Put The "Cannes" In "Canada"!

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:44:00 +0000

The Edmonton International Film Festival finished up today. EIFF may not rank anywhere among the world's most important film festivals (and even within Canada, it's not all that significant) — in its effort to sell itself as a "populist" film festival, the schedule tends to get clogged up with a whole lot of third-rate Project Greenlight-style filler — but I did get to see a few interesting titles, some of which will no doubt be coming to Edmonton in the next few weeks and others that will probably never surface here again.

Here are my quick thoughts on eight of the films I caught at EIFF 2008.

AUDIENCE OF ONE

Richard Gazowsky, the well-fed pastor of Voice of Pentecost Church, has a vision: he wants to make the greatest movie of all time, a sci-fi version of the Biblical story of Joseph (entitled Gravity: Shadow of Joseph) that he describes as “Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments.” He has zero filmmaking experience and, indeed, never even saw a movie until he was 40, but God spoke to him, he says, which is more than George Lucas or Cecil B. DeMille can say for themselves.

With his wife and daughter heading up the costume and props department and a German bank providing the budget (could this be the same one that gives Uwe Boll all his money?), Gazowsky and his parishioners head off to Italy for a disastrous five-day shoot, followed by an even more unproductive sojourn at a studio back home in San Francisco. And somewhere along the way, Gazowsky stops looking less like an amusingly deluded dreamer and more like an insane menace. Michael Jacobs’ documentary will have you shaking your head in dismay, and then picking your jaw off the floor in amazement as Gazowsky tells his followers about his new plan to film 47 movies a year, open 27 resorts around the world, and colonize outer space.

RATING: 3.5/5

GOMORRAH

This Italian crime drama, based on a hugely popular nonfiction book about the inner workings of the violent Camorra crime syndicate in Naples, came to Edmonton on a wave of rapturous reviews from Cannes, calling it a new genre classic: The Godfather as directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni. I’d heard it described as being in the vein of The Wire: a crime film whose true subject wasn’t any particular hero or even group of characters, but the vast, complicated, deeply corrupt social system of which crime is an inevitable byproduct. But I don’t think I was prepared for how anti-sensationalist this film is, how free of “colourful” criminal characters or “cinematic” explosions of violence. (The closest director Matteo Garrone comes to a stylish setpiece is the opening scene, in which various mobsters are assassinated in the unnatural blue light of a tanning parlour.)

The film was almost too diffuse and low-key for me — it took me a while to sit up and realize that Garrone wasn’t going to spoon-feed me any explanations as to how the five main plot threads fit together, and that I was going to have to figure it out on my own. I wouldn’t have minded a little more Wire-style humour, either. Honestly, Gomorrah didn’t fully engross me, but now that I know where it’s coming from, I suspect I’d find a second viewing much more rewarding.

RATING: 3.5/5

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

When 12-year-old Oskar asks Eli, the little girl who’s moved into the apartment next door, how old she is, she replies, “12... more or less.”

Eli, as it slowly becomes clear, is a vampire, and as this involving, low-key horror film from Sweden (based on a popular novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist) unfolds, Eli finds herself torn between her desire for companionship and the animalistic hunger for blood that rages in her veins. Lina Leandersson, who plays Eli, strikes just the right note in her performance—she has a childlike awkwardness to her bearing, but there’s something very old and alien and hungry behind her eyes. She’s not “cute”—she’s got lank, dark hair and a broad nose, and when she feeds on a victim, she doesn’t bother to wipe the blood off her chin.

Director Tomas Alfredson makes excellent use of the Swedish setting and the contrast between the snowy ground and the black nighttime sky, where the only sound is the crunching of snow underfoot. There isn’t a lot of gore on display here or a lot of special effects, but when Alfredson uses them, he uses them well, especially in the final bloodbath, which he films in a single shot, underwater in a swimming pool.

RATING: 4/5

MAN ON WIRE

August 7 ought to be some kind of national holiday. Or if not a holiday, then some annual way of remembering the anniversary of one of the boldest, most beautiful feats of physical daring of the 20th century. August 7, you see, was the day in 1974 when French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, with the aid of a small crew of ragtag assistants and true believers, sneaked into the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York, made contact with confederates on top of the north tower, strung a wire across the 140-foot void between the two structures... and then walked out onto it. He spent 45 minutes out there before surrendering to police.

James Marsh’s spellbinding documentary climaxes with Petit’s walk, and my God, but you’ve never seen anything so moving in your life as the sight of this man balancing so high in the sky, concentrating so hard on the task at hand as to reach practically a state of grace. But Marsh devotes an equal amount of time to the six years of planning that went into “le coup”—and he’s smart enough to let the still-youthful Petit, a born raconteur, handle most of the storytelling. Absolutely magical.

RATING: 5/5

MOMMA’S MAN

The shabby New York loft apartment of Flo and Ken Jacobs — piled to the ceiling with old books, records, film projectors, glasswear, mirrors, artwork, and box after box of childhood bric-à-brac — is a place you could get lost in, and that’s just what thirtysomething Mikey (Matt Boren) hopes to do. Even with his wife and infant daughter waiting for him back home in California, Mikey contrives a series of excuses to extend his stay in his parents’ loft indefinitely — at first he tells his wife that the airline has screwed up his flight, but he soon stops calling her altogether, burrowing into his makeshift bedroom cocoon, reading old comic books and digging out the lyrics to songs he wrote when he was 15.

Momma’s Man has much the same premise as this summer’s arrested-development comedy Step Brothers, but while Momma’s Man contains plenty of comedy (as when Mikey visits an old buddy, a bodybuilder with an irrational fondness for The Indigo Girls), its characters are never “merely” comic, the central situation plumbed for its full melancholy poignancy. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs casts his real-life parents Flo and Ken as Mikey’s parents, and they’re both fantastic — especially Flo, whose watery eyes are overflowing with deep concern for her son’s state of mind, but who can never think of any way to express that concern except to continually ask him if he’d like some cereal, or may a nice cup of coffee.

RATING: 4/5

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

I really started to worry about Jonathan Demme with The Truth About Charlie — after the solemn trio of The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and Beloved, here he was, working so hard to recreate the anything-goes breeziness of his earlier comedies like Something Wild and Citizens Band, and none of it was working. Not even Demme, it seems, could convince the world that Thandie Newton was a star.

Convincing us that Anne Hathaway is a heavyweight dramatic actress seems like an equally difficult task, but Demme pulls it off in Rachel Getting Married, his absolutely splendid new drama about a young woman who goes from rehab straight to her sister’s wedding, where her presence puts an unbearable amount of pressure on an already fraught situation.

There’s a lot of pain in this film, but an equal amount of joy: Demme includes several long, long, apparently plot-free sequences showing musicians practising, minor characters giving speeches at the rehearsal dinner, people dancing at the reception, and not since the days of Robert Altman has a movie teemed with this sense of life spilling outside the edges of the frame. Hathaway is excellent, but for me, an even bigger revelation is Bill Irwin, who I’d always (unfairly) dismissed as that Robin Williams crony in the oversized suit, but who is just miraculous here as their anxious father. Every glimpse Demme gives us of his face gave me a thrill — even when the expression he's wearing is heartbreakingly sad.

RATING: 5/5

[REC]

The title stands for “RECORD,” as in the button on a video camera, and this Spanish chiller belongs with movies like The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead and Cloverfield to that new microgenre that some have dubbed “POV horror” — horror movies that purport to consist of “found footage” shot by one of the characters as some creepy event unfolds.

Here, the footage is the work of a cameraman for a fluffy local TV program that’s spending the night at a firehouse. It’s a boring night, until the engine is called to handle an incident at an apartment building — the site, it turns out, of an outbreak of some kind of 28 Days Later zombie disease that turns anyone infected with it into a bloodthirsty monster. Desperate to contain the disease, the authorities seal the firemen in with the cameraman and the young female host of the show, and they keep the film rolling even as the residents all gradually fall victim to the plague.

There’s nothing to [REC] other than scares — there are no climactic character reversals, no allegorical underpinnings to the story, no metaphors being worked out — but it’s a very well-made, swiftly paced scare machine, with a shock near the end that literally made me scream out loud. It was cheap, but I screamed. I don’t know if I’ll be as rattled by Quarantine, the American remake that comes out this week — I’m just surprised that the producers of Quarantine have put what is apparently the final shot of the film into the trailer, which would make this the worst case of trailer spoilery I’m aware of.

RATING: 3.5/5

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO

The premise — two longtime platonic friends and wage slaves (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) decide to get out from under their mountain of unpaid utility bills by making a low-budget porno movie — sounds like it would be a topic close to writer/director Kevin Smith’s heart. A slightly tubby nerd who finds his true calling making likably amateurish, sexually obsessed movies with his friends? Why, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is practically autobiographical!

Or at least it would be, if Smith’s script didn’t get bogged down in the predictable twists and turns in the relationship between Rogen and Banks... a relationship whose backstory, frankly, doesn’t really even make sense. (Seriously? These two highly compatible, hard-drinking, frequently horny roommates never did it in all the years they’ve known each other?) But little in Zack and Miri makes sense — not the timeline of the two heroes’ money troubles, not Craig Robinson and Jeff Anderson’s incoherently written character, and not the wild oscillations between goopy romance, raunchy dialogue, and grossout visual gags, including a scene where Anderson gets a faceful of... well, I’d hate to spoil it. (The tone of Zack and Miri is schizophrenic even by post-Apatow standards.)

Still, snowbound Pittsburgh is a nicely unglamourous choice of setting, and Justin Long has an amusing cameo as a disconcertingly deep-voiced gay porn star.

RATING: 2.5/5

Bakterion / Panic / I Vivi invidieranno i morti

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:57:00 +0000

The most memorable thing about Bakterion / Panic is surely the name of David Warbeck's special agent: Captain Kirk.

Otherwise it's pretty much your standard MIC experiment goes wrong leading to a monster running amok 50s sci-fi stuff, brought up to its 1970s date by the distinctly cynical treatment given the selfsame authorities, who are concerned more for covering their own backs over the location of a bacteriological warfare lab in the middle of a city than the welfare of its citizens.

The putative location is Newtown, England, resulting in some awkward non-integration of stock footage of iconic London buses and location shooting with clearly Spanish locations and extras elsewhere and the concomitant displacement / generalisation of any political point compared to the more specifically grounded likes of The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II and The Crazies.

Admittedly, however, any such point is also decidedly secondary insofar as we're still very much in the realm of individualising conflict, with Kirk the representative of a more benevolent face of authority who takes up the cause of the people of Newport and saves them from themselves, the monster and the excesses of his masters, all whilst finding time to establish the classic heterosexual romantic outcome with Janet Agren's research scientist in that don't-worry-she's-also-a-woman-as-well manner.

The monster

Those scenes which don't feature the good and bad guys emphasise the scientist turned monster stalking and slaying, each being announced by the introduction of two or three stock types who we know are there solely for the purpose of being slaughtered.

There is one exception. This is the priest who saves his choirboys at the cost of his own life, who get an establishing scene before they are attacked – a scene which one suspects must have played differently to Catholic Spanish and Italian audiences than an Anglican one.

Having said all this, it's also worth noting that if the IMDB can be believed the film wasn't released in Italy and Spain until late December 1982 and March 1983 respectively. The possibility of political factors playing a part here are, however, countered by the likelihood that the film sat on the shelf because of its overall poor quality. If so, its belated release might then be speculatively attributed to some combination of the relative prominence of Nightmare City – whose end "the nightmare becomes reality" coda is recalled by the "this could already have happened" one here – Zombie Creeping Flesh and other monster-cum-disaster movies in the early 1980s along with the higher profiles enjoyed by its stars at this time.

With the direction throughout characterised by a perfunctory quality – the one sign of imagination seems more accidental than anything else, as the monster's attack on a crowded cinema sees everything go black in a reductio ad absurdum of the old don't show the monster trope – Panic is a film which strongly suggests the success of the only other Ricci film I can remember seeing, the 1971 giallo Cross Current, was down more to Flavio Mogherini's production design and its impressive ensemble cast.

Don't have nightmares, do sleep well...

With no Mogherini on board, more weight is placed on the performers here. Warbeck and Agren are game, but don't quite seem as comfortable in their roles – or the co-production way of working – as they would given a few more years experience. Franco Ressel, something of a regular in Ricci's films, again proves to the manner born as the sleazy scientist in charge of the biological warfare programme, while Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue's Jose Lifante is very welcome as the Newtown police sergeant out of his depth – even if his presence also reminds one of another, far superior, English set, Italian-Spanish made science gone bad horror movie of the period.

Blindness Review

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:35:00 +0000

Mark Ruffalo plays an ophthalmologist who is the first doctor to notice a fast-spreading epidemic of blindness. It’s not long before the doc himself becomes afflicted by the infliction and his wife (Julianne Moore) (for conspicuous allegorical purposes, no one is given a proper name in the movie) feigns blindness to follow her husband into a ratty, abandoned hospital that quarantines those affected. No explanation for a cure or cause of the outbreak is offered as the hospital’s ward quickly becomes overcrowded with blinded, common citizens. With no one to maintain order, it’s not long before things devolve into a Lord of the Flies-esque bedlam.