and now back to your regularly scheduled portman

All apologies for the downtime around here: I've been waiting on a fresh adapter for the laptop - no juicey, no bloggy. So while I reset the blog - reviews for Bruno, Los Bastardos, and others are in the pipeline - here's a loverly picture of Natalie Portman, who will probably not be at the Sonic Youth show tonight, nor any screenings of Tokyo Sonata or that new Atom Egoyan that's opening up this week.


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There - now you don't need to see Zack Snyder's
wretched Watchmen adaptation. And you're welcome.

U.S. and region 1 releases>>
- Coraline (I can't see footage or stills from this stop-motion fantasy directed by Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas collaborator without seeing a girl who broke my heart a couple of years ago. Am I sad, or what?)
- Global Metal (a fun-lovin' look at metal worldwide, if that's how you think people should live their lives)
- The Great Buck Howard (John Malkovich as a goofball, aging stage magician and hypnotist who finds fame again with one apparently amazing performance)
- Made in U.S.A (Criterion Collection directed by Jean-Luc Godard)
- 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her (Criterion Collection directed by Jean-Luc Godard)
- The Watchmen (right-wing scumbag Zack Snyder's stunted interpretation of Alan Moore's comic series)

Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- All's Right With the World (Taiwanese version, all region) (well-received doc on living in poverty in the shadow China's "unique" brand of capitalism at work HK)
- Battle Creek Brawl (HK version, all region) (one of young Jackie Chan's first forays in America and action-drama)
- The Bunker (UK PAL) (Anthony Hopkins is Hitler! Susan Blakely is Eva Braun!)
- Bunsinshaba (Korean version, region 3) (teen bullies suffer the curse of Bunsinshaba!)
- The Evil Twin (Korea version, region 3) (South Korean period-piece-horror from 2007)
- The King and the Clown (Korea version, region 3) (2005's highly popular, gender-bending, "taboo-breaking" comedy-drama set in the regin of King Yeon-San)
- She's On Duty (Korean version, region 3) (a "21 Jump Street"-style comedy by way of So-Ko, set in an all-girls school...and that means schoolgirl unis!)
- World of Silence (Korea version, region 3) (South Korean serial killer-thriller from '07)

Region 1 Blu-Ray>>
- Coraline
- Midnight Express (featuring an early, Oscar-winning script from Oliver Stone)
- The Watchmen


Field Guide to Invertebrates in Film: Tremors

Tremors (1990)
Critter: An enormous and hideous underground worm called a graboid,or more formally Caederus mexicana. A frighteningly complete life history is available here.
Size: 30 feet in length
Modus Operandi: An eyeless, underground predator that senses prey vibrations on the surface, attacks by grabbing prey and gorily consuming them
How the Menace Emerges: A lovely mystery
End Goal: Dinner
Ah, finally a decent invertebrate flick. It’s been so long since I’ve reviewed a movie that wasn’t awful that I hardly know what to say. Tremors does right what so many critter flicks get wrong. It’s fun, smart, funny, action-packed, quick-paced, made for adults and loaded with likeable practical effects. It would be overdoing it to say that Tremors is a masterwork, but it is without a doubt, a solid piece of critter filmmaking. It isn’t exactly original, and a lot of its charm comes from the utilization of time-tested techniques, but it seems to land in that well-crafted category of B-flicks* that hits all of the necessary points to come off as a fine piece of craftmanship. There are far too many folks on the internet that are obsessed with this fine film for me to add anything to the mix, but if you have a spare 96 minutes one Saturday afternoon, it won’t be a waste of time.
* I’ve read that Tremors had a budget of about 11 million, which in my book makes it more of an A flick. Still, in 1990 Arachnophobia had a budget three times as large.

Nit-picking Science: One of the nicest things about Tremors is that, aside from a bit of healthy speculation, the scientific explanations are left almost entirely out of this tale. It might make this section of the guide a little dull, but it does wonders for a monster action flick. Even so, the makers of the Latin name for the critter picked a good one. If I’m not mistaken, the genus designation Caederus is derived from caedes or caedo, both words having to do with killing, slaughter, carnage, etc. Yay!


and the ass saw the angel: whatever works, revanche, and moon

Three of the last four Woody Allen films - an excellent Match Point (2005), featuring Scarlett Johansson's best performance to date, along with more middling Cassandra's Dream (2007), and a mostly minor Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) - have all been pictures from bleaksville: sure, we all hope for and chase after love, but in the end that's all so much superstructure to base factors like class or nationality from which we can never achieve escape velocity; ho to the hum, yo. His latest, Whatever Works, is conceived as an apology of sorts for all the director's current doom and gloom obsessions, so the Woodman gets points for trying, anyway. But Whatever Works is still an absolute train wreck, lacking any sort of the requisite energy to make the madcap comedy this so badly wants to be go and move. People's exhibit 'A' is Woody's choice of Larry David for his stand-in this go around. David's overall persona is twitchy and neurotic, sure, but there's a little street there, too, and not all the CGI in the world could make me believe that that Larry David doesn't like a good roll in the hay, or that he would pick through Allen's closet for weird old man shorts, and the Woody-speak sounds utterly ridiculous falling out of David's mouth to boot. Anywho, just to be sure you know where Woody's coming from, he has David end the film with a painfully earnest monologue, and I have to believe that he actually believes all the things his woefully miscast star says about happiness, togetherness, and our ever-so-short time on earth. However, I don't think we needed his avatar to literally turn to us and plead to take love where and whenver we can find it because it's here today gone tomorrow: I know for a fact that Woody Allen believes in heaven, or a place like it - maybe a film set where all the directors, even if they're nebbish, bespectacled and slight, they always have a cast of actresses on tap who're statuesque, raspy voiced and curvy, or otherwise blonde.

There is no such heavy-handedness in Gotz Spielman's Revanche, a 2008 nominee for the best foreign film Oscar, which, somewhat like Whatever Works, also proceeds from the idea we dupe ourselves into believing in the control we have over our lives. Rather than face the audience and tell us, Spielman does what filmmakers are supposed to do and shows us: the cinematic themes and motifs are all there - a not-so-good guy, his "angel" (really, we don't get a name until at least thirty minutes in), his gun, his plan, a trigger-happy cop, the cop's wife, and a house in the country. If it sounds like you know where all this is going, you don't, not the way you think. And because of this richness, and despite being Spielman being a filmmaker who chooses to show us rather than tell, Revanche also feels like something quite literary.

Duncan Jones' Moon is probably the most disappointing movie of the summer, a flick that appeared to promise to warm up some of the sci-fi tropes mined by Kubrick, Tarkovsky (and of late Soderbergh) - or as J.G. Ballard mused, that space, by its very spacey nature, even some space on a moon a few million miles away, is not at all like here, constituting a different reality altogether. Instead, Jones never bothers to scrutinize either the good ideas he introduces into Moon's story or the ones laying in wait, but dispenses with them almost as quickly as they pop up, choosing to hold us by the scruff of the neck and march us, one step two step fast as you can, to the movie's blah blah ending. But nevermind all that: bad scifi flicks are inevitable, a sad fact of our lives, like white trash neighbors who move in right next to you and stay up all hours like every night of the week, no matter how many times you call the cops, no matter how many times you call the building manager, they stay up all night drinking shitty beer and SINGING EAGLES SONGS VERY VERY LOUD ALL NIGHT DRINKING THEIR BEER. No. The issue is Moon's star, Sam Rockwell, so memorable in A Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy (2005). That's the issue - will someone please give Sam Rockwell a project worthy of that talent? Pretty please?

david lynch thursday!


get yr release on

Look deep, deep into the blood-red eyes of the Tuesday releases elf...

U.S. and region 1 releases>>
- Door into Silence (words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm)
- For All Mankind (Criterion Collection directed by Al Reinert)
- Grey Gardens (2009) (a non-musical adaptation of the musical adaptation of the Maysles' doc with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore)
- Journey to the Moon: 40th Anniversary (holy fucking shit, man walks on the fucking moon)
- Rec (enjoyable Spanish horror romp - with a supercute lead, hoo-boy- was the inspiration for the U.S. Quarantine)
- 12 (12 Angry Men by way of the Russian invasion of Chechnya)

Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- British Intelligence (UK PAL region 2) (Brit WWII-spy thriller featuring Boris Karloff as a menacing butler)
- Double Agent (Taiwanese version, region 3) (Korean spies-n-lies flick)
- The First 7th Night (HK all region) (a modern-day HK ghost story starring Gordon Lam and Michelle Ye)
- Shinjuku Incident (HK VCD) (this HK gangster flick opened the 33rd Hong Kong Film Festival; stars Jackie Chan, in a rare dramatic role)
- Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (UK PAL region 2) (medieval period piece featuring martial arts great Sammo Hung and Andy Lau, Maggie Q, and Vanessa Wu)

Region 1 Blu-Ray releases:
- For All Mankind (Criterion Collection directed by Al Reinert)
- M*A*S*H (Blu-Ray versions are painless; it brings on many changes)
- Towering Inferno


Field Guide to Invertebrates in Film: They Crawl

They Crawl (2001)
Critter: Genetically engineered cockroaches that completely resemble the cinematic Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, let’s call them Gromphadorhina portentosa var. conspiritatus
Size: Singly, about 2 inches long, en masse as big as a mac truck
Modus Operandi: Burrow and eat
How the Menace Emerges: The government is surprised when two physics geeks decipher and solve their blueprints for deadly surveillance bugs… or are they?
End Goal: Who cares!

I should retract all of the nasty things I have said about such gems as Mesa of the Lost Women and The Horrors of Spider Island. I hadn’t seen one of these new fangled bug flicks in a while, and I had forgotten how much worse things could be in this new age of CGI. They Crawl is one of the lowest forms of invertebrate film I’ve run across: a budget and nothing to show for it. Its better than B-grade production value only guarantees that it won’t even hit the campy-charm sweet spot. This mediocre movie is essentially an unending TV police procedural with glaring plot holes, a red herring cult, sub par TV soap opera stars, horrible CGI and inane dialogue parading as edgy. Do two characters have nothing better to say at the moments of their separate, impending demises than “Fuck you!” with eyes squinted in their best Clint Eastwood impersonations or did the scriptwriter just like that one enough to use it twice? It’s odd that with a visual effects guy in the director’s seat that not even the special effects are worth a peek. The handful of poor cockroaches that wasted their valuable time on this film are quickly tossed aside to make room for their ineffectual and utterly un-insect-like CGI replacements. Uggggh.

Nit-picking Science: Hey, encryption-boy! You have vastly overestimated the mass of insects on the planet! Although I am unaware of a decent estimate, 90% of Earth’s biomass is unlikely to consist of insects. Sure, ants and termites might make up about a third of forest biomass, but what about bacteria, protozoa and plants? And you, Mr. Coroner. Frequencies can't electrocute people. Stick to bodies and leave the physics up to the professionals.


get yr release on

Putting a dirty towel over your head doesn't make it near dark.

Region 1 U.S. releases>>
- Beau Geste (1939) (dir. William Wellman)
- The Beloved Rogue (1926) (starring John Barrymore)
- Coco Chanel (starring Shirely MacLaine)
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988 anime on the firebombing of Kobe, Japan)
- Knowing (what a dumb title)
- Le Jupon Rouge (talky Holocaust survivor flick with GLBTQI-appeal)
- Mr. Rock N’ Roll: The Alan Freed Story
- Near Dark (reissue) ('87's super-fantastic southern-fried vamp flick featuring Aliens cast members Jeanette Goldstein, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton; Hurt Locker helmer Kathryn Bigelow's first flick)
- One Missed Call 3 (wait - there was a second one?)
- Sherlock Holmes (1922)
- The Tempest (1928)
- Unborn (hotties versus demons, with Gary Oldman and Carla Guigino)

Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- Bronson (PAL UK region 2) (Brit prison bio-pic getting lots of fanboy buzz)
- Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts (PAL UK region 2)
- GP506 (Japan region 2) (supernatural box-office hit taking place in the South Korean-North Korean DMZ)
- Kung-Fu Girl (HK all region) (1973) (stars former Shaw Brothers' actress Chang Pei Pei, Corey Yuen and Jackie Chan)
- Lola Montes (PAL UK region 2) (Max Ophuls' wonderful bio-flick gets a DVD remaster; stars Peter Ustinov and Martine Carol)
- Meatball Machine (PAL UK region 2) (super-gory Japanese cyberpunk)
- Shadows in the Palace (Korea region 3) (period-piece-murder-mystery)
- The Show Must Go On (Japan region 2) (highly-praised Japanese gangster melodrama)***
- Three Monkeys (PAL UK region 2) (the best film of the year, thus far)

Region 1 Blu-Ray releases>>
- Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
- Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire
- Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix
- Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
- Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone

*** - Pike Bishop informs me that this is actually a Korean highly-praised gangster melodrama, tho this particular release is for the Japanese market. Thanx Pikey!

Field guide to Invertebrates in Film: The Horrors of Spider Island

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
Critter: The dreaded tropical five-fingered monkey spider and its mutant creation, Gary
Size: About Chihuahua-sized, man-sized
Modus Operandi: One bite from this critter will either kill you or turn you into a hairy faced, toothy thing that likes to run around shirtless
How the Menace Emerges: Our crew of dancing gals encounters this undescribed spider species after they are stranded on deserted island
End Goal: Hard to say, neither critter seems to eat

Hmmmm. Let’s see, what if a plane wrecked in the middle of the ocean with 8 buxom dancing girls and you were the only guy? You might enjoy the strip-joint sax soundtrack, but watch out, you’re on an island with an oddly buck-toothed spider sporting monkey paws, and soon you’ll become a were-spider-monkey more interested in strangling than making out. That’s the German sexploitation wonder that is The Horrors of Spider Island (a.k.a. A Corpse Hangs in the Web or It’s Hot in Paradise). Here, the sexploitation comes first, catfights, cattiness and skinny-dipping all trump horror, critters and critter attacks. When we finally get some monster action, there’s only about 10 minutes of film left. Once we discover that the barely mutated spider-monkey-were-man is afraid of flares, and barely remembers his lost human self, poof: we’ve reached the sorriest of all endings.
When I viewed Mesa of Lost Women, I had to add a drop my rating scale a notch (to zero) to hold such a wretched film. Still, with its leering dwarves, it had more charm than this piece of schlock. Even for a cheap sexploitation film, The Horrors of Spider Island sets a new low. Granted, the version I’ve seen had been burned from a video transfer, trimmed to remove the nudie bits and terribly dubbed, but I still doubt that a crisp, restored version of this would help one whit.
Nit-picking Science: Science? What science?


puts you there where things are hollow: anvil! the story of anvil and jcvd

Even if he has no intention whatsoever to explore or exploit it, Anvil! The Story of Anvil director and band fanboy Sacha Gervasi still can't avoid capturing on film the very real and very strange tension between reality and stage life that exists for original bandmates Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner: we get Kudlow and Reiner are best buddies - always were and always will be - and we get that the pair and their bandmates seem to be genuine, decent people who're dearly loved by their families, friends, and their few remaining devoted hometown fans. We get that the pair are still talented musicians, effervescent onstage even after twenty-plus years. And we get that even talent and effervescense means little to the corporate-dominated music culture, one that nevertheless acknowledges Kudlow and Reiner's hard work and Anvil's legacy. In this respect, Gervasi's love letter to his heavy-metal youth (he worked as a roadie for the group in the mid-1980s) and to his music idols is an unqualified success: we get all these things, and we're rooting for Lips and Reiner the moment we see Anvil's frontman whip out a fat, flesh-colored vibrator in archival concert footage to the final, wistful scenes of his flick.

What we don't get, and what we should, is more about that tension. I went in thinking they were one-hit wonders, but the revelation that Anvil has been hard at work making albums since the early 80s - thirteen of them - is glossed over with an aside that they had bad management, bad label representation, and that's why they never made it big. Really? That's all it was? Lips and Reiner repeatedly state throughout the film that they accept that what's past is past, that they're happy with the impact they've had among current metal acts, or some variation of this; yet, the pair continue to scrape and claw for success, and it's clear that it's not just any kind of success they want, but the sort of fame and money their metal brethren enjoy. I know a lot of people have been throwing around This is Spinal Tap (1984) as well as (the wantonly voyeuristic and cruel) American Movie (1999) comparisons, but I think a more apt film to hold up alongside Anvil! The Story of Anvil for contrast would be The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years (1988). In so many ways, Steve Kudlow and Robb Reiner appear to be grounded in lives among loving people the way the bands and musicians (the ones which survived success, anyway) featured in the latter film probably never will, and maybe, just maybe, some of that has to do with their lack of "success" (at what point do you think somebody like, say, Bret Michaels stopped being a real person? The first million? The second? Five?). While it's hard to blame them, and hard not to root for them, Lips and Robbo are still starstruck after all these years, and it looks like Gervasi cares too much to lift the curtain on the contradictions permeating their heavy metal fantasies.

The economy of fame is the theme for Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD, an A-grade arty action vehicle for C-grade action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The Muscles From Brussels is essentially playing a variation of himself, here - broke, divorced (again and again), his weathered face a document testifying to the years of excess and addiction since he broke as a high kicking hero back in the late 1980s. Mabrouk and his screenwriter Frederic Benduis designed JCVD almost as a gauntlet of embarassment and low blows for Van Damme to act his way through; remarkably, the film's titular subject accedes in practically every way, pulling off a charismatic, nuanced and unselfconscious performance. Indeed, from the exhausting opening master shot the forty-plus actor huffs and puffs his way through to the surreal, rambling, tear-laden apology for a life of indulgence and family neglect midway into the film to the smack on the head with he gives himself in the movie's last shot, you might be inclined to say that Van Damme saw JCVD as penance. He's often so good in JCVD you hope and wonder if you're seeing a real person up there on the screen, but if not, it's definitely a real actor.

david lynch thursday!