Cinema Hype

Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we have it: the first misspelled anti-(I think)-Nazi comedy? bloodbath of 2009 (though, of course, surely not the last). Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds stars the reliably excellent Brad Pitt, surrounded by a line-up of semi-unknowns and Cloris Leachman, going undercover in WWII France to defeat the Germans. Whether or not the Germans, as a political force, will actually be defeated seems dubious, though obviously many individual Germans are bound to eat it. From the trailer, it’s not exactly Valkyrie and it definitely isn’t Defiance; minus these kinds of inappropriate comparisons, what’s a wary critic to do?

There’s really only one right answer here: Make a pro/con list, as follows:

Reasons to See Inglourious Basterds

- Brad Pitt having a good time
- Brad Pitt doing his best impersonation of Jon Stewart doing his best impersonation of George W. Bush
- Brad Pitt saying “Nat-sies” a lot
- B.J. Novak doing…whatever it is he’s doing here
- Attempts at simulating a Coen brothers movie without involving the actual Coen brothers

Reasons To See Bambi Instead
- Exceeding amounts of gratuitous violence
- ANOTHER Nat-sie movie
- Attempts at simulating a Coen brothers movie without involving the actual Coen brothers

And the biggest con of all: “You haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.”

To which I say: There are so many myriad things in this world that I don’t need to see through Quentin Tarantino’s eyes, I don’t even know where to begin the list. Why start with World War II?

Case closed….maybe.

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, Inglorious Bastards, Brad Pitt, BJ Novak, B.J. Novak, Coen brothers

Sometimes, when you’re trying to make a tough decision, they say it helps to make a pro/con list (and by “they” I mean “Rory Gilmore,” but don’t knock it ’til you try it). You know, you put all the good things on one side and all the not-so-good things on the other side, and see which side is longer. The gurus at Wordpress haven’t yet come up with a column function, but I’d like to experiment with the pro/con game as it pertains to an upcoming movie: The Soloist.

So let’s see, shall we?

Pro: Robert Downey Jr. as Los Angeles journalist Steve Lopez, he of the personal angst and ultimately uplifting story. You know how I feel about the RDJ; still. If anybody can bring something new to this archetype (see below), it’s him.

Con: We’ve seen this movie before. Seemingly okay person stumbles upon definitely less-okay person; less-okay person displays astonishing gifts in music/sports/academics/underwater basket-weaving; seemingly okay person attempts to help less-okay person and ends up changed for the better. The End.

Pro: We’ve seen it before, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Pro: Joe Wright directing. I love what Wright does with a camera; his eye for image and motion and his tendency to include little visual jokes make him one of my all-time favorite directors. America and the present day are each new territory for Wright, filmwise; how he makes L.A. onscreen is anybody’s guess.

Con: Susannah Grant. Grant is a seasoned screenwriter—in other words, the person I perhaps should not criticize, as she has my job—who consistently writes movies I almost like: Catch and Release, Ever After, In Her Shoes, and so on (I grant exceptions for Erin Brockovich). If she can keep things moving and find the originality in The Soloist, things might work out between the two of us after all. If not…well, there you go.

I think that’s a tentative win for the pros. I’ll keep you posted.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I pretend I might like movies like The Happening? Is it some kind of peer-pressure thing? All the cool kids are white-knuckled and squinch-eyed in the theater, so I should be, too? Clearly, anything beyond Bambi on the creep scale is not to be endured. I know this about myself. Did I really think I was going to make it to the theater for whatever it is M. Night Shyamalan has up his sleeve?

They had me at the white-faced, bloody-nosed zombie. Now, I like a good creepy moment as much as the next girl (as long, of course, as the next girl doesn’t really like creepy moments). The people falling from the sky? Call me callous, but I think that’s a pretty awesome shot. But that zombie/alien colonist/James Carville freaks me out. As soon as the extended trailer hit my TV, the debate was over. Nothing but kittens and rainbows and unicorns for me, okay? I live in a Lisa Frank world. I’ve accepted that.

Apparently, everybody else agrees, or perhaps they’d just rather watch a green monster stomp all over the U.S. Army. The Happening came in third at the box office this weekend (trailing The Incredible Hulk by $24 million and the second weekend of Kung Fu Panda by $4 million, which doesn’t bode well for the alien zombie folks and their marketability). A $30 million first weekend isn’t terrible—plenty of movies you may have seen this year have opened to cooler audience responses—but it’s not enough to make Shyamalan’s film, which was a hard sell anyway due to the box-office failures of his previous two movies, a legitimate threat to the Hulk. Would The Happening have been a box-office winner in, say, April? I’d tell you, but then I’d be sleeping with the lights on for a week.

The Happening, The Incredible Hulk, M. Night Shyamalan, box office, box office totals, Kung Fu Panda, horror movies

When I was a little girl, my dad once said to me—in line for either the water slides or some unknown roller coaster; I’m don’t remember which, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my idea—”Hey, sometimes it’s fun to be scared.” Even at the time, I was pretty sure he was either wrong or lying. And that, ladies and gentlemen, boils down the basics of why this blog pretends that horror movies don’t exist. I don’t like to be startled; I don’t want to sleep with all the lights on. I don’t want to be a grown woman who’s just waiting for some Child of the Corn to come wandering into her bedroom as she sleeps. Alone.

Which makes me uncertain about The Happening. I like the poster, with all the abandoned cars; I keep telling myself that maybe it’s just a suspense thing. I like suspense. And I sometimes dig M. Night Shyamalan. After all, The Sixth Sense is my usual rule of thumb for scariness, the approximate ceiling of what I’m willing to subject myself to. So, you know, maybe fair game, right?

It’s true that I’ve skipped his last couple of projects, but that was a function of their being bad, not scary; I did see Signs and survive. But The Happening, as the ad campaign associated with it loves to remind us, is rated R, a first for the Shyamalan universe. And that makes me nervous—they don’t rate suspense movies R for nothing. So I guess that’s the question: does The Happening move Shyamalan from suspense and the supernatural into full-fledged horror territory? And how many minutes of the movie would it take me to figure that out?

Readers, I’m depending on you to let me know: CH-friendly, or no?

The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense, Signs

“Hello. I am Sweeney Todd. FEAR ME! I am the demon barber of Fleet Street! You will make an appointment six months in advance, only to be postponed for another month by my scatterbrained assistant. Your bangs will grow long. Long, I tell you! Past the cute sweepy stage and on to the “I’m hiding behind my hair because there’s a zit on my forehead” phase! I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE.

Make no mistake, ye who enter here. When you finally arrive, the glass coffee table will be a mess of car magazines and hair books from 1977, and yet I will allow you to sit and fester until you MUST page through them or slump to the ground, defeated. The Farrah Fawcett Feathered Fluff will not be denied! OH, NO IT WILL NOT. I will escort you to my “station”–the one with the mysterious trap door behind it, but never mind–where I will inform you that you have hideous “mushroom head” and surely should have made an appointment earlier on. I will examine your split ends and tell you that you really ought to go for some Jessica Alba hair, because it would just be so fetching. Meanwhile, I will know that your face is far too long for Jessica Alba hair, and that you will look like a horse for the next six weeks. Take THAT, injustice! I will cut your layers too short, give you a fe-mullet, and convince you that “heavier in the back will really work for you.” When I’m finished, I will blow-dry your hair into hay and then work a styling “creme” made from giraffe’s milk and gelatin through it, leaving it dangling in front of your face like a dead rodent. All in the name of beauty! This is what the world has made of me. Look in the mirror of your shame, fools, and know that you cannot go back. YOUR HAIR WILL BE MINE! MINE!”

For more, see here.

A conversation with myself regarding the new Iron Man trailer:

“Ooh, something new from Marvel. You know, I’m really pleased that they’ve taken to making their own movies. If you want something done right, and all that.�

“Yes, I know. So….this is….?�

“I dunno. But oh, look, Robert Downey, Jr.! You love Robert Downey, Jr.!�

“You know me so well.�

“…because, yes, he is/was a drug addict, but he’s such a good actor, and he seems like he’s always trying to get it together. And, you know, Heart and Souls, which is so underrated, and Only You, and then he was Larry on Ally McBeal–“

“I miss that show.�

“–well, of course. And then there’s Good Night and Good Luck and Wonder Boys and Zodiac, and you know you love the way he delivers his lines. He’s so…sardonic, you know? And oh, look, he’s doing it now!â€?

“This actually looks really good. I love wry, dry comic-book movies. Especially when they get all political.�

“Wait, what’s happening here? He…gets captured and now he has a suit? Oh, now, I think we all know that the “suit” superheroes aren’t as cool as the “I have powers from within so ha ha ha” superheroes. I mean, look at Batman. He’s good, and all, but really he just has a nice tool belt.”

“This trailer is kind of going downhill. Don’t leave us, Robert Downey, Jr.! Or we might have to pick just one of your names!”

“Well, May 2008. Looks like we have plenty of time to decide.”

“Yeah.”

Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.

Upon finally seeing the full trailer for Anne Hathaway’s new movie, Becoming Jane, I’ve been able to pinpoint the source of my violently mixed feelings about it.

I think that, considering the misty, swoony nature of it, I might actually really like it…if I can convince myself that it’s not a movie about Jane Austen. I firmly believe that Jane herself would be horrified by the tone and the totally unsupported “Hey look Jane Austen had a secret love affair!” claim (by which, frankly, I’m pretty horrified, myself). But if I can pretend that the Jane we’re talking about is, like, Jane Smith, or some other non-identifiable Jane, we might be okay.

On the other hand, I kind of only want to see it because…well…it’s about Jane Austen, and I have no sales resistance to things that are either Austenian or claim to be tangentially Austenian (hence the recent trip to the lame Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, even though I already knew it was going to be bad. No sales resistance, I’m telling you). How can I not?

What to do, what to do? Talk amongst yourselves.

Becoming Jane, Jane Austen, Anne Hathaway

I haven’t been to the theater in over three weeks. In the life of a movie blogger, that’s a long time–there’s only so much to write about, movie-wise, without actual trips to the movies. Part of the problem has been a lack of material–I recently checked the listings for a sixteen-screen multiplex near my house and found exactly one movie I could maybe have been talked into seeing (Blades of Glory). So, review-wise, there was The Host, and then there was…nothing. Now, I did miss Spider-Man 3, which is a little embarrassing after all the Cinema Hype-ing I did. I was supposed to see it opening night, but I was sick, and then the moment had passed, and word of mouth isn’t exactly inspiring me to spend $10 and nearly three hours on it.

So I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m looking forward. Forward to summer, to blockbusters and less-than-blockbusters, to having decent choices. Currently, I’m trying to track down a showing of Waitress and then waiting for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (for which I will need to find an appropriate acronym, since I will not be typing the entire thing out every time; mark my words). There will be movies, soon. There will be more movies than a reasonable person can see, and I know that. I’m just trying to pace myself, here.

Waitress, Spider-Man 3, The Host, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, movies

A few things about The Host (Gwoemul). First of all (because I know you want to know): It’s not scary. If you can handle, say, Jurassic Park, The Host is small potatoes, cowering-in-terror-wise. Second of all: Not so much of a “monster movie” as a “family dramedy with incidental slimy creature.” Third of all: They really don’t like the ‘mericans so much, do they? (I can’t imagine why not…)

As a complete unit, The Host is either multi-textured or inconsistent, depending on your point of view. Director Bong Joon-ho tells a good story–a classic “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” story–in a way that isn’t so much concerned with consistency of tone as it is with the capturing of moments. He’s a director who seems to care about what’s best scene by scene, which makes for polished scenes that don’t fit together in the traditional way. Instead, he mixes elements of comedy, family drama, action-adventure, and political satire to get his particular brand of storytelling. It’s an unusual recipe, and it works with varying success. Much of the film is beautifully shot, particularly the very beginning and the very end–the climax is especially artistic, all swirly and foggy and surprisingly quiet (it’s essentially a family moment)–but it’s so much more highbrow than the rest of the movie that it may as well be from a different piece of work.

Furthermore, the term “monster movie” is misleading, or maybe incomplete. Maybe it’s just that this monster movie is what more monster movies should be, and what many American monster movies of recent years have failed to grasp–that it’s the people that count. The creature is an impressive bit of CGI–an overgrown people-eating tadpole rampaging through Seoul–but if all goes well, he(?) is just a set-up, a force for change in the lives of characters. The Host carries this off well, focusing on the Parks, an ordinary Korean family struggling with the kinds of ordinary troubles that all families seem to have. When the monster runs off with Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko), the daughter/granddaughter/niece, the story becomes about the Parks in relationship to one another more than it becomes about their relationship to the monster. In fact, the monster is literally out of sight during most of the climax scene, which works because it’s true to what the movie is doing–using a monster to tell a story about people. In that way, The Host is unlike many of the monster movies made in recent years (I’m thinking the forgettable Godzilla remake), because long stretches of the movie are monster-free, but it’s also very much like the Platonic monster movie, because it gets what it has to do.

If The Host is about family relationships, it’s also about the relationship of a nation to its own government and to the government of an occupying nation. Bong portrays anybody with political power as the enemy–the South Korean government is inept, and the Americans simply don’t care what kind of havoc they cause. The entire story begins when an American military scientist orders his Korean assistant to dump hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the Han river (resulting in an extremely well-preserved monster egg?). The scene is inspired by actual events that occurred on an American military base in 2000, causing public outcry and anti-American sentiment among many Koreans. If The Host is unusually character-based, its political stance is right in line with generations of sci-fi and monster films: eventually, the blame lies with both governments, and the movie adopts a classic monster-movie moral: monsters are dangerous, but people bring real destruction.

movie reviews, The Host, Bong Joon-ho, Gwoemul, Korean cinema

I’ve decided to do it. The Host. Tonight. It’s about me and a giant Korean sea monster (and…a theater full of people, but never mind them).

Which brings us to the difference between monster movies and horror flicks–what makes a monster movie not a horror film? Is it the non-human status of the killer? I’m pretty sure some of Stephen King’s best-known villains aren’t human (Cujo), and they’re pretty horrific. Is it a lack of premeditation? Because some of the monsters out there seem pretty self-aware (”Land shark!“). I don’t think it’s a cinematography issue, because although there are certainly camera tricks associated with the horror genre, there’s nothing more monster-movie than a good old-fashioned “stalking” shot.

Having thought about this, I think the most likely answer is the human vs. non-human issue, even taking into account the non-human horror films out there. A person (someone who is essentially like us) leaving a wake of death and destruction is scarier–more psychologically disturbing–than a “creature,” something rare and unfamiliar. Even a human character without a solid motivation to kill is more frightening than a monster: monsters wreak havoc because it’s somehow in their nature, or perhaps for some practical reason (food, defense), but a person who kills without a motive is just plain hard to read. You could be next!

Further thoughts on The Host to follow.

Readers, I need help. (And yes, I “need help”–ha ha, right?–but that’s not what I mean. Focus for a minute here. Eyes on me.)

My question is: will The Host scar me, disdainer of all things horror, for life? I’ve been invited to see it this week. I know practically nothing about it, except that it’s a “monster” movie (which apparently is different from a horror movie) and that it was the highest-grossing film in South Korean history. According to Wikipedia, it has “elements of comedy and drama films.” All this sounds great, but what I really want to know is whether every sudden noise will send me running for cover afterwards. Will I wake up in the night, screaming for my mother (in Korean)?

Readers? Tell me what you think.

The Host, Korean film, horror, monster movies