Blogcritics Author: Steve Carlson

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

DVD Review: Arang and The Ghost

Steve Carlson — Wed, 8 Aug 2007 19:27:58 EDT

Is there any genre in modern horror cinema that is simultaneously more abundant and more depressingly rigid in its narrative constructs than the Asian ghost story? The spooky genre of Ringu-inspired films are to the beginning of the 21st century what the first-wave slasher flick was to the '80s -- an omnipresent, easily copiable template with which any minimally ambitious automaton with a camera and a crew can provide character names and let the cliches fill in the rest. Presumably, this means that a few years from now we'll start seeing entertainingly tongue-in-cheek deconstructions of the genre a la Scream or Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon; until that time, though, we're stuck with endless variations on a theme, of which Ahn Sang-hoon's Arang and Kim Tae-kyung's The Ghost are but two recent Korean examples to receive a U.S. video release from Asian-film specialists Tartan Video.Arang at least shows some initial promise. After an opening sequence featuring the typical expendable uniformed schoolgirl (who gets to deliver the priceless line, "It'd be better to see a ghost than a pervert"), the plot kicks in. It's the typical story of a group of people, linked by an incident in their past, dying mysterious deaths at the hands of a ghost with broken fingernails and long black hair. What sets Ahn's film apart initially is that it's framed as a police procedural -- rather than the research into the history and motivation of the vengeful spirit being done by one of its prospective victims, it's being done by two detectives. So-young (Song Yoon-ah) and her new partner Hyung-gi (Lee Dong-wook) are initially called to the scene of a death thinking it to be just another murder case; when investigations into a couple of other subsequent deaths reveal a cryptic e-mail delivered to the victims moments before their deaths, the two realize that, to solve this case, they must also tackle a case from many years prior.While the genre mash-up is an admirable idea, Ringu and its progeny already serve as procedurals by proxy, as the template demands an effort by the protagonist to figure out the nature of the haunting and how to stop it (if, indeed, it can be stopped). Despite his enthusiasm for the CSI-style goings-on that comprise much of the narrative, Ahn's tweak can only be considered cosmetic; beyond this minor change, Arang falls pretty quickly into the accepted plot progression often found in these narratives.Given this progression, I give Ahn and the other three screenwriters credit for tossing in little touches, such as the traumatic event in So-young's past that eventually aligns her sympathies with the ghost or the unexpected third-act homage to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, that show them at least trying to make something even a little different than could be expected. This extends to their clumsy-but-sincere attempt at subtext; the corpses all show signs of having been killed by poison gases that forced their way out their stomachs and up through their mouths, thus drawing a concrete parallel to the guilt they hide within that proves to be their undoing. Nevertheless, the familiarity of the material overwhelms the small steps of progress made by Ahn's attempts to play with the framework holding said material. Slapping a rejiggered package on an old product doesn't make it a new product, and Arang unfortunately too often feels like a greatest-hits compilation that has had a new track added to it to make it more attractive.If Arang suffers from its familiarity, The Ghost collapses under the weight of its accumulated cliches. Even the English title screams out a warning -- it might as well have been titled Generic Asian Ghost Story #427. It too involves someone, this time a young woman with amnesia (Kim Ha-nuel), trying to discover why people are dying in eerie ways and whether there's anything she can do about it; however, it lacks even the low-grade energy of Arang, settling instead for a bland professionalism that suggests everyone on set, from writer/director Kim down to the key grip, was a mere hired gun aware that they were crafting product and nothing more.The Ghost, in fact, so slavishly adheres to the standard tropes laid out by the genre trailblazers (jet black hair, copious water imagery, spirits with an unquenchable desire for revenge as a result of a past grievance) that it almost seems a parody of itself, a la the sly first half of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call. Certainly satirical intent would explain the occasional moment of inexplicability, such as one character, apropos of nothing, advising another not to drink on an empty stomach or a coroner judging a man drowning in a darkroom to be a "natural death." Considering that Kim lets the film run for a good thirty-five minutes before telling us the names of the lead characters, though, these bits seem more symptomatic of the kind of slack filmmaking that occurs when nobody really cares how the final product turns out. It's indicative of the type of quality one gets from Kim's film that, despite the current home-video craze for just about anything that has a raven-haired ghost and subtitles, it took a full three years for it to make it to America. Neither The Ghost nor Arang are anything special, but at least Ahn's film shows signs of effort. Both films, though, demonstrate that this genre is weary unto death from repetition. It's time to put Sadako and her ilk to rest for a while.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: Black Christmas

Steve Carlson — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:59:11 EDT

2006 was not a good year for the filmmaking team of James Wong and Glen Morgan. First there was the Wong-directed Final Destination 3. As a return to the franchise that made the pair's theatrical bones, the film qualified as a modest financial success, but was trumped in its opening weekend by the inexplicably popular Steve Martin redux of The Pink Panther, and garnered few fans. At least FD3 had those fans, though. Morgan's re-imagining of the 1974 slasher classic Black Christmas wasn't even allowed that small victory. Smuggled out on Christmas Day by Dimension Films to no acclaim and no business, Morgan's film was allowed to die as quickly and ignobly as his previous film, the underrated remake of Willard. I wish I could report that the burial of Black Christmas was as undeserved as that of Willard, but this is one of the rare cases in which I have to agree with Dimension - this is pretty awful.Yet, it isn't nearly as awful as the excitable horror community would have it believed, either. That it's essentially stealing the name of history's first slasher film for a needed whiff of cachet is disheartening, especially since there's little in common besides the plot (which has long since drifted into the halls of cliché) and a couple signature images (the bag over the head, the peeking eyeball). A re-title might have given it a fairer shake in a bad-remake-saturated genre; of course, such a cosmetic marketing change wouldn't have actually made the film any good, but it might have at least allowed space for its meager assets to be noticed.The perverse sense of black humor that runs through this remake is its chief positive aspect. This Black Christmas isn't so much a horror film as it is a bizarre and bilious comedy in a slasher costume. The tale of a group of housebound girls (sorority members here, as they were in Bob Clark's original) menaced by a psychotic and mysterious stalker, picked off one by one until only the Final Girl (here named Kelli and played by Katie Cassidy) remains, is old hat at this juncture, so Morgan adds sick-minded curlicues and offbeat flourishes in an effort to lengthen attention spans. My favorite joke comes early on, with a shot of a man who thinks he's Jesus in an asylum being told "Happy birthday," but the script's mining of cannibalism (flesh cookies!) and incest, among other things, for gross-out giggles speaks to a demented sensibility worth indulging.This sensibility extends to the film's death scenes as well. Those watching Black Christmas solely for gore will find little in which to be disappointed, especially in regards to the unrated cut on the newly-available DVD. The red red krovvy flows like a river after a spring thaw; vicious stabbings are the order of the day, but there's also decapitation, dismemberment, impaling, an unexpected brain avulsion, and enough eyeball violence to make Lucio Fulci wet himself. Say what you will, but Morgan's Black Christmas is everything we've been told a late-wave slasher ought to be - mean, nasty, callous and willing to cheerfully dispatch anyone in horrifying ways. It's in the getting, though, that one realizes how pitiful and unsatisfying the "ideal" slasher film is. The flavor-of-the-week actresses who essay the unfortunate sorority sisters (including Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) are given no distinct personality traits by Morgan's script with which to set themselves apart from their compatriots. This is, on some level, out of necessity, as nearly all of these girls are going to die and emotional investment presumably would be a waste of running time. Thus, the film becomes a pure expression of the term "meat movie" - these women are merely walking sacks of meat, fonts for bad dialogue whose purpose is to be ogled and then destroyed. If the majority of the cast is then filled out by sacrificial zeros, the scales are rebalanced by giving way too much characterization to rampaging maniac Billy. A good third of the film is spent explaining his back-story when a five-minute campfire story would do just as well. Billy's horrendous upbringing, detailed as thoroughly as it is, puts the viewer in the odd situation of being pushed to sympathize with a character that is clearly not intended to be sympathized with. Morgan's decision to follow this is puzzling - we don't need to care about our slasher characters beyond caring about how well they can swing implements of death. While I can appreciate the perversity of a film which explains its psycho and leaves its protagonists blank, such a gambit destroys any sense of proportion or pacing. Especially since said back-story is parceled out in increments throughout the film's first forty-five minutes.Given the deficiencies in characterization and storytelling, all we have to go on is the gore and the humor, and the latter goes south halfway through when it curdles into flouncing desperation. (Ooh, a deadly ice-skate! A randomly fatal icicle! How, um, not clever at all.) There's also a god-awful dénouement set in a hospital that couldn't scream "re-shoot" louder if it had a bullhorn attached to it. The 2006 Black Christmas is ultimately empty-calorie entertainment, a cinematic blood-filled Twinkie. Like a Twinkie, no amount of justification for its consumption can stop the empty feeling afterwards. This isn't a film to watch - it's a film to lose in a brain fog.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: Bloody Reunion

Steve Carlson — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:02:31 EDT

There is, it seems, an impulse within recent South Korean filmmaking to revitalize moribund disreputable genres. First, The Host flips the monster movie on its head, and now Im Dae-Woong's To Sir with Love arrives stateside, complete with a new title (Bloody Reunion), to shame the way the direct-to-video revolution has gotten crassly lazy with slasher films. Do we, as proud Americans, need to tell South Korea to keep their paws off our genres? Or have we enough strength of character to accept their superior efforts and enjoy them? Considering the entertainment value that would be sacrificed, the latter option seems the best course of action, since Bloody Reunion offers a nasty sort of pleasure long since abandoned by lowest-common-denominator films like Tamara or The Butcher (to name two of 2006's least impressive American genre attempts). Until it loses its way in its final minutes, it's an unapologetically brutal and camp-free example of hyperbolic slash-happy sickness.The story, as ever, is the umpteenth variation on a theme. A group of young adults convene on a beach home occupied by their ailing former elementary-school teacher Ms. Park (Oh Mi-hee) for a nostalgic celebration of their past glories before Ms. Park passes. As it turns out though, Ms. Park wasn't the nicest or most tactful of educators; consequently, all the attending parties have psychic (and in a couple cases, like former aspiring baseball player Dal-bong [Park Hyo-jun], genuine physical) scars as a result of her less-than-ideal tutelage. They've all shown up with big metaphorical axes to grind, so it's inevitable that someone would push that into the realm of the literal. It's a good forty-five minutes before the sharp objects come out, though, and it's to Im's credit that Bloody Reunion holds our attention even before the grue commences. The former students are all pretty messed-up, and though their grievances seem relatively petty, they are genuine; their actions and words may not deem them likeable, but they all at least stay within the realm of the sympathetic. The cast is rough around the edges but generally convincing at putting this across. Especially interesting is Sun-hee (Lee Ji-hyun), the requisite ugly-duckling-to-swan; what is generally a bitchy diva type in domestic product is given a more measured portrayal here, helped along immensely by Lee's eerily calm self-possession and omnipresent black sunglasses.Furthermore, Im's careful meting-out of the nature of Ms. Park's cruelties keeps the film engaging while the buildup to violence takes place. Themes of personal responsibility run through the first half of the film, with Ms. Park's failings as a responsible educator tantamount among these; there's also some hints of class resentment in that the majority of the gathered complain about their shoddy treatment at the hands of Ms. Park stemming from their lower financial status. But all this, honestly, is window dressing, briefly touched upon then buried; when the dam finally bursts, Bloody Reunion reveals its foremost concern to be merely how savage it can become.And savage it is - the violent scenes cooked up by Im and writer Park Se-yeol are grisly and vicious enough to make even the most sanguine old-school slasher pale in comparison. The killer's modus operandi favors school-related implements of destruction, and while that might sound gimmicky (images of Cutting Class come to mind), the mean-eyed gusto with which the murder setpieces are staged obviates any sort of eye-rolling. A ferocious amount of blood is shed during the second half of Im's film, enough to satiate even the most jaded gorehound, with the highlight being a wild bit where a woman's eyelids are stapled open. If nothing else, Im knows what will goose his audience will keep them entertained.With all that goes relatively right, it's a shame then to report that the ending blows the film to hell. There's a twist in the tail of Park Se-yeol's script, and it's the kind of thing that would work well as a shock shot finale followed by a cut to the credits (much like it did in the well-known '90s film which seems to have heavily inspired the twist here); unfortunately, the film keeps going for fifteen interminable minutes after the revelation. This then leads into one of those baffling closing shots (see also: Masayuki Ochiai's Infection) that probably seems more profound in theory than in action. Much like High Tension, another mostly-exemplary neo-slasher that detonated itself with a silly attempt at getting too clever, Bloody Reunion is not a good movie overall. It is, however, a pretty satisfying slasher movie. And that's all that it needed to be.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: The Host

Steve Carlson — Thu, 8 Mar 2007 20:18:52 EST

If there's one film that will plant South Korean cinema into the mind of the American public, The Host is it. Bong Joon-ho's lively feature provides all the thrills and sensation of the average American summer spectacle, except that it does so while still remaining a good movie. It's got heart, hilarity, triumph and tragedy as it gives us a fractured family that finally sets aside their differences and unites towards a common goal. It's also got a giant mutant fish-monster that tries to eat everything in its path.Still with me? That's the kind of film that The Host is - able to shift tones on a moment's notice (often within the same scene), Bong uses all his formidable talents to bring respect to a disreputable genre. And thanks to his sure hand, somehow it all comes together.The genesis of this giant mutant fish-monster comes in the year 2000 prologue, when an American government official, over the objections of his Korean subordinate, orders the disposal of several hundred bottles of formaldehyde (they were dusty). Flash forward to the present, when the monster crawls out of the Han River one fine summer day and wreaks a whole ton of havoc. This is a spellbinding sequence - the first glimmer of the rampage comes when layabout snack-booth merchant Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) casually turns to his left and sees the beast running full bore at him, trampling or swallowing everyone in between, and the rest of the sequence has that same disbelieving, half-glimpsed quality about it. Most effective is the first tail whip, which would be played as a major shock-cut in Hollywood but here is viewed from a distance, which makes it somehow both more horrifying and weirdly funny. The attack is all the more impressive for coming not fifteen minutes into a two-hour film; in lieu of arduous story setup, Bong quickly introduces the members of the Park family and jumps straight into the action, leaving the rest to be filled in on the fly as the remainder of the film proceeds. A significant portion of the family is elsewhere at the time -- Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na) is on television attempting to win a gold medal in archery, while Nam-il (Park Hae-il) we learn of only in Gang-du's conversation with his daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung) about his showing up at parent-teacher day in place of the shiftless, borderline-narcoleptic Gang-du. Among other things, Bong demonstrates with The Host that he's adept at the art of storytelling shorthand. In this early scene alone, he gives us quick sketches of five characters without feeling expository or leaving the snack shack run by Gang-du's father Hie-bong (Byoen Hie-bong), while simultaneously emphasizing the spatial separateness that is reflected by the family's emotional divisions. Both of these gulfs are closed in short order by a horrific event, and that's when the meat of The Host arrives on the scene.It's a hell of an event, too: During the opening monster mash, Gang-du loses sight of where he's going, stumbles and accidentally lets go of Hyun-seo's hand. Just as he realizes his error, he turns to see Hyun-seo being swept up and carried away by the monster's tail. Initially thinking her dead, the family is crushed. One night, though, Gang-du gets a call; the reception is full of static and the voice on the other end is difficult to hear, but it's definitely Hyun-seo. Before her cell phone dies, she manages to get across that she's alive in a sewer somewhere. The family then resolves to band together and save her... but first, they have to get out of quarantine. See, Gang-du got monster blood on him, and the monster might be carrying a new virus, so...As you can see, there's a lot going on in The Host. I haven't even touched upon the political dimensions present within the progression of the plot -- it was, after all, the order of an American soldier that caused the mutation in the first place, and as the crisis spins out further, there's talk of direct intervention. Bong isn't just indulging in America-bashing, though; the Korean government is consistently displayed as corrupt, inefficient, and incompetent (example: the scene where Gang-du and Hie-bong talk their way through a guard post using quick words, a stolen van, and a bucketful of change). The further along things go, the less willing anyone in charge is to admit mistakes, which leads to some unforeseen narrative complications. By the climactic showdown, the Park family appears to be the only hope for humanity - where the institutions fail, the family will persevere.Lest I lose sight of my target, though, I might as well confess that this is all thematic gravy and the foremost intent of The Host is to entertain. Bong succeeds in this aim grandly. He throws so many balls in the air that it seems inevitable that some will fall, and while a couple subplots go unresolved, on the whole Bong keeps an admirable balance. He's also not afraid to puncture the creeping seriousness of the situation with absurd comedy, such as the mourning scene degenerating into a thrashing slugfest between Nam-il and Gang-du or the hazmat-suited soldier who, in the middle of Hie-bong's vow of vengeance against the beast that assumedly killed his granddaughter and apropos of nothing, slips and falls.The action scenes are also well-handled. While nothing quite tops the jaw-dropping frisson of the monster's introductory romp, Bong moves the film along at a crisp pace and keeps the tension at a rolling boil. Whether it's Nam-il giving an impromptu demonstration of his escape artist skills, Nam-joo attempting to get off an arrow at the monster before it runs her over, or Hyen-seo struggling to sneak out of the monster's lair without attracting attention, The Host keeps the excitement coming.It's the finale, with its confrontation between an exhausted monster and a determined Park family, that drives home the true measure of Bong's achievement. The mutant fish is a means, not an end. While it's lots of fun to watch a big ugly something chow down, there needs to be something else down the line if a work of art is going to be more than a forgettable diversion. By not losing sight of the humanity of the situation, The Host succeeds in ways most genre efforts wouldn't think to consider.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Steve Carlson — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:13:52 EST

These days, it seems that everyone has a story to tell; some stories are just more worth telling than others. Dito Montiel's story falls under the latter rubric. Montiel told his story in the 2003 book A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, and three years later he turned that book into a movie. I'm not normally much for the mythology of the self so favored by many neophyte filmmakers, but Montiel's forthrightness and keen sense of observation, coupled with some interesting directorial choices, gives Saints a leg up on the average indie memoir. Saints tells its spiky coming-of-age story on two temporal tracks. The first dominant thread is set in the early '80s, as young Dito (Shia LaBeouf) navigates the wilds of his Queens neighborhood and finds himself with an increasing yearning to break free and see something beyond what he already knows, much to the consternation of his father Monty (Chazz Palminteri); the second involves the current-day Montiel (Robert Downey Jr.) returning home to convince Monty to seek medical care and maybe attempt to patch up their tattered relationship in the process. It's fairly familiar stuff - true story or not, there's a lot of Mean Streets in this film's DNA, especially in the parts involving Dito's loose cannon friend Antonio (Channing Tatum). The strength of a good story, though, is often more in the telling than the content, and that holds fast for Montiel's tale.Downey Jr. says at the film's outset, "I want to remember who these people are and what they meant to me - what they mean to me," and it's the second part of that phrase that makes Saints stick. A good deal of "...and we were never the same after that summer" films ascribe utmost importance to the narrow window of time covered in their flashback narratives; Montiel, on the other hand, is smart enough to acknowledge that time marches on and things keep changing even after what would be considered the great formative experience. The present-day segments aren't quite as compelling as the flashback segments, but they do present the idea that coming of age doesn't necessarily make you wiser or better - sometimes it just makes you older. Dito's burnout friend Nerf says about the neighborhood, "Things don't get better around here." Even as Montiel acknowledges that, he also pushes through that the best we can do is struggle to reconcile ourselves with our past; once we've done that, we can then try to force things to become a little bit better.The past in question provides the meat on the bones of Saints, and it's quite the juicy package. For a first-timer, Montiel's directorial gifts are considerable. Some of his touches seem familiar - a little Spike Lee here with a characters-speaking-to-the-camera interlude, a little French New Wave there with the conscious desyncopation of dialogue and editing. What's important is that he's taken his influences and assembled them into a package that feels fresh by welding everything together with a solid sense of earnestness and street-level realism.Montiel structures the film as an impressionistic memory piece, all overlapping dialogue and funky jump cuts (i.e. the scene where Dito meets Mike [Martin Compston] on the subway), which is generally an obfuscatory tactic, but Montiel doesn't go that route. Early on, young Dito tells neighborhood girl/eventual girlfriend Laurie (the fetching Melonie Diaz), "I really wanna fuck you," and it's this honesty without concern for glamour or sympathy that allows Montiel to escape the trap of avoidance, thus making his tale all the more compelling.It also helps that Montiel's packing an incredible cast. LaBeouf proves he's ready to transcend his Disney origins in essaying the young Dito, and he's ably supported by Diaz (the best thing to come out of Raising Victor Vargas) and Tatum, the latter offering a finely conflicted portrait of the kind of mercurial asshole that dominates teen-male social groups, hiding his wounds and insecurities behind braggadacio and physical intimidation. The youthful cast is clearly having a blast with the gloriously juvenile reams of aimless profanity so favored by rebellious teens, as they sell it like it was improvised on the spot.In the present day, Downey tamps down his natural motormouth mania to turn in a portrayal of a guy who has spent years trying to understand his past without fixing the damage done; in particular, he gets a great scene with Rosario Dawson, who shows up in a vivid cameo as the grown-up Laurie. The center of the film, though, is Palminteri as Monty the patriarch. Rather than the monstrous or ineffectual fathers that float through so many Sundance-approved flicks, Monty is a genial, warm, and affectionate dad who's also willing to play a surrogate for Antonio. His love for his son comes through just as genuine as his fear of losing him does, which makes his bitterness in the modern-day plot all the more caustic.A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints eventually hinges on Dito making peace with the legacies left him by both Monty and Antonio - learning how to recognize his saints, if you will. These people still mean something to him, and Montiel wants us to see that so maybe they can mean something to us as well.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: Rude Boy

Steve Carlson — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:37:07 EST

Rude Boy is both a film about The Clash and a film about everything but The Clash. Half concert film, half narrative documentary and all frustrating, Rude Boy is an odd and unsuccessful centaur work. This isn't to say it's uninteresting, but rather that the points of interest aren't enough to sustain a feature film. This much seems apparent from the structure of the film. Ostensibly a freeform look at the life and world of Ray (Ray Gange), a disaffected lad who drifts into a roadie gig with The Clash, Rude Boy alternates scenes from Ray's life with concert and studio footage of The Clash. The performance scenes are electrifying, capturing as they do a band coming into their own and nearing the peak of their creative powers (it was filmed in 1978 and released in 1979; London Calling would follow a year later). The scenes with Ray are... well... not so electrifying. The non-musical scenes, interesting at first, quickly descend into drudgery when it becomes clear that they lead nowhere except into the slack-jawed, drunken mind of Ray. What should be a crackling performance document keeps being tripped up by the makeshift narrative, and the constant interruption of the film's flow renders it a bit dull.To be fair, there's a level on which this is intentional. The overarching intent of directors Jack Hazan and David Mingay points toward a desire to simultaneously understand and demythologize the punk rock lifestyle. The former part comes off well, especially in the film's early sections. Hazan and Mingay do a smashing job of depicting the crumbling and divided England of the late '70s. The England seen here is a drab and depressing place, a land of drunks and demonstrations, of seedy sex shops and bored bobbies. In other words, it's the kind of environment that breeds extreme points of view, whether the radical-right National Front movement or the far-left politics of bands like The Clash. It's also the kind of environment that leads to disaffection, anger, and disengagement with society - all symptoms of the burgeoning punk movement.So that's all well and good, but it's the second aspect of Hazan and Mingay's approach that dampens Rude Boy. Ray is a crude, shiftless lout given to unintelligible muttering (when indeed he bothers to speak at all) and near-constant inebriation; the guys in the band, when not gigging or recording, don't do much besides kill time and wait for the next gig or studio session. It's a film of banality and boredom punctuated by brief moments of energy; its portraits of aimless youths and road-weary musicians feel truthful enough, but the cumulative effect is enervating. While there's a good deal of great footage here (the scene where Joe Strummer tracks vocals for a song that would eventually become "All the Young Punks" is amazing), Rude Boy shares a bit too much common ground with the rarely-seen Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues - both succeed in the dubious accomplishment of deglamorizing the scene they depict so thoroughly that they become a chore to watch.About the DVD: Looking at the extras, it becomes obvious that those involved with the disc's production too felt that Rude Boy was more valuable as a concert film than a proper piece of narrative cinema. The most interesting feature on the DVD is the "Just Play The Clash" option. This gives you the opportunity to skip over the character stuff and go straight to the incendiary live footage of The Clash. There's also a Clash photo gallery, two extra live bits that weren't used in the film (one of them a version of "White Riot," for those who have issues with the Jimmy-Pursey-guest-starring rendition that shows up midfilm) and BBC performances of "Clash City Rockers" and "Tommy Gun." For people who want to learn something of the film total, there are included interviews with Hazan, Mingay, Gange, and former Clash road manager Johnny Green. Lastly, there's a few more deleted scenes that have nothing to do with music and a vintage trailer. The video quality is decent, given the age and DIY nature of the film; the sound, on the other hand, is expectedly spectacular.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Music Review: Youth Group - Casino Twilight Dogs

Steve Carlson — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:24:20 EST

Rock music comes in so many varieties these days. The word 'rock,' for many people, automatically conjures visions of hedonism, of sex and drugs and violence, and won't somebody think of the children? But there's more in the spectrum than that - rock, as evidenced time and again, can be quite mellow. If mellow's your thing, you could do worse than to take a listen or two to Casino Twilight Dogs, the third album (and second American release) from Australian rock band Youth Group. I know they come O.C.-approved (Their cover of Alphaville's "Forever Young," included here, became a #1 single in Australia based on its appearance during an episode of that late, unmissed show.), but don't hold that against them - they're good, honest.Youth Group's metier, at first blush, is lush mid-tempo rock with pop inflections (a genre on which I'm not usually keen); so goes the first half of Casino Twilight Dogs. Wayne Connolly's production is crisp (check the surprising crack of the drum line on "Under the Underpass") and the hooks are clear and clean. It's pleasant without being bland, catchy without being inane - in short, the kind of music that seemingly exists just to get stuck in your head; in particular, I've found myself at work humming the chorus to opening track "On a String" more than once. It's nice, but it's been done.The album's second half, though, is what gives Casino Twilight Dogs its kick. The moment the album really started to hum for me was midway through "Daisychains," when what had been a mild, slightly downcast ballad unexpectedly opens up into something far more grandiose. It's a sign that they aspire to more interesting things, and it can't help but color what's come before and what follows in a different shade. The highlight is the quietly apocalyptic "The Destruction of Laurel Canyon," which carries with it a whiff of The Pernice Brothers in its dark jangle.If there's a weak point to Youth Group, it's in their lyrics. The lyrics on this album are of a literary bent, which is all well and good. But for every sharply sardonic turn of phrase ("Did you find what you were looking for? Oh, I just don't care anymore / It's a free world, go out and be an artist," from "Sorry") or evocative image ("The gutters become torrents and run down the graceful streets / Like a revolutionary force stamping its foamy feet," from "The Destruction of Laurel Canyon"), there's a line that comes off as clunky or overthought. Oddly enough, the clumsiest line pops up in "Daisychains," a song I otherwise dig: "I'm more General Haig than Napoleon Bonaparte."Still, it's better to overreach than resort to the same pop-rock lyrical cliches that currently swamp modern radio. (Lord knows we don't need more deep thinkers like Nickelback or Staind.) A little overbaked wordplay is understandable as symptomatic of Youth Group's ambition. In retrospect, it seems obvious why the producers of The O.C. would want to use Youth Group - Casino Twilight Dogs fairly screams "mood music." It's smart, sweet mellow rock. Give it time and it'll grow on you.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

The Best Films of 2006 (Version One)

Steve Carlson — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:29:29 EST

"Seen any good movies lately?"It's a sign of 2006's artistic timbre that this was probably the most flummoxing question I heard all year. Inevitably, the answer was either, "No, not really," or, "Well, such-and-such was decent, I guess..." Even when I did see a film that impressed me, I'd often have to qualify it somehow. I still get funny looks when I tell people my favorite film of the year. That's the kind of year it's been - not necessarily terrible, just plum weird. Thus, my picks for the year's finest cinematic achievements are a mixed bag: a couple expected choices, a couple obscure ones and at least two that seem to invite a response of "You're kidding, right?" So it goes.(And yes, this is version one. I'm still catching up -- I haven't yet seen, for instance, A Scanner Darkly, Old Joy, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal or either of the films Clint Eastwood put out this year -- so, as always, I won't feel completely satisfied with this until mid-March. But people just think you're off your nut if you wait that long.)The Best:10) Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro) and Tideland (Terry Gilliam)Unlike, say, Kenneth Turan, I'm not generally the type to shoehorn two films into one slot and call it kosher. I can't deny, though, that Pan's Labyrinth and Tideland are kindred spirits. Both are dark little fairy tales (heavily indebted to tropes identified with the Grimm Brothers) wherein little girls escape/deny adverse living conditions by receding into an imaginitively-rendered fantasy world, and both have singular lead performances from their youthful charges. Del Toro's film is one of the best reviewed of the year; Gilliam's is one of the worst. Go figure - I think they're equally excellent. Labyrinth, a gorgeous and gruesome Gothic phantasmagoria, allows its heroine to live on a separate track from the rest of the world around her until reality cruelly crashes in on the fantasy; the heroine (and, by extension, director) of the eye-poppingly mordant Tideland doesn't allow that such a separation exists, deciding instead to shape reality in her head. Which, in the end, is more frightening?9) Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer)I continue to suspect that Tykwer is only as good as the sum of his influences on any given project, but he's at least chosen some fine influences here. Through careful editing and expressive cinematography, he manages to convey a reasonable impression of scent, that least cinematic of senses, while also staying fairly faithful to the tone of Patrick Süskind's novel (which I'm currently reading). He saves his most impressive material for last, though; in rendering Süskind's grandly insane climax, Tykwer gets closer to the rude, earthy mastery of late-era Pier Paolo Pasolini than anyone since Pasolini himself.8) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles)The political significance of Borat has been overstated; the effectiveness of its humor has not. Jesus Christ, this film's funny. Despite the real-world sheen, the film boils down to Sacha Baron Cohen understanding and exploiting to the hilt one of the oldest and truest maxims in the comedy game: Humor is most effective when it comes from within a character as opposed to merely happening to a character. The joke's on us, the joke's on Borat, the joke's on everyone. Is nice!7) Down in the Valley (David Jacobson)It's all make believe, isn't it? Set in Los Angeles, where urbania conquered the desert sprawl of the West, Jacobson's undervalued drama centers on the relationship between a teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and an impossibly polite older man (Edward Norton) who fancies himself a modern-day cowboy. She wants to believe that he's come to save her from her tumultuous home life, and he desperately needs to believe that she needs saving. What then starts as a tentative and sensitive look at an oddball May-December romance takes a hard left halfway through and mutates into a dark treatise on mythmaking and modern life.6) Bubble (Steven Soderbergh)The last time Soderbergh walked away from Hollywood, he unleashed the hilarious absurdist comedy Schizopolis; this time around, he's returned with a starker and quieter but no less off-the-wall film. It's neorealistic yet anti-naturalistic -- accomplished amateur performances in service to a tightly controlled and designed directorial style, with every shot set up just so and every cut placed for maximum impact. Some would argue that this makes the film arid; I argue that the aridity is the point. (It's set in a freakin' doll factory, for Pete's sake.) We all live in our own little bubbles, and the smallest disturbance can rupture that. The closing credits, on a second viewing, struck me as the most disturbing thing in any movie from 2006.5) The Departed (Martin Scorsese)"I'm gonna go have a smoke right now. You want a smoke? You don't smoke, do ya, right? What are ya, one of those fitness freaks, huh? Go fuck yourself."4) A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)Even before Altman died, I knew this was his last will and testament, the sight of an old man making peace with his mortality. That it manages to be so without becoming depressing - indeed, while remaining a gently boisterous marvel of knockabout entertainment - is what makes it truly special. Plus, any movie that makes Lindsay Lohan look talented deserves as much recognition as it can get.3) Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón)Alternately droll and terrifying, this darkly dystopic vision of the near future does its job as efficiently as possible. (No time for tears, gotta keep moving forward.) It's both exciting and understated (Clive Owen's trauma over his dead child is briefly touched upon rather than turned into a clumsy emotional fulcrum), and there's a wealth of tiny details that show someone was thinking every step of the way. Cuarón utilizes handheld cinematography and long takes to give the impression of striding along with the characters and being in their situation, which makes for a chaotic and harrowing experience; yet, in its own tough and unsentimental way, Children of Men shows that hope can still glint in even the darkest times. (Also, I don't care what anyone says - that last cut is perfect.)2) Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke)A magnificent little gem of a movie dedicated to the fine art of hanging out and doing nothing. Eimbcke knows that, much of the time, major change can gradually evolve until one day, with no fanfare, everything's different. Thus, his film becomes a bittersweet paean to the ephemerality of today. You only go around once, so enjoy it. 1) Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine)The most impressive aspect of this unexpected artistic triumph is the Rorschach reactions it causes. It's malleable enough to be just about anything - it's the ferocious vanishing point of sadistic neo-slapstick; it's a radical queer document on the secret life of male bonding and a joke on its (presumed) fratboy audience; it's a gloriously juvenile ode to the sheer physicality that unites us in commonality (we all hurt when struck and bleed when pierced); it's Johnny Knoxville and company entering into the world of performance art; it's bleeding, screaming raw art-punk terror; it's jes' plain hilarious. You know what? Fuck art, let's dance.The Worst: For the last few months, I've been on the horns of a dilemma. Is the worst film I saw from 2006 Park Chan-wook's morally rotten Lady Vengeance, as bald and hateful a one-sided valentine to the righteousness of mob justice as I've ever seen? Or is it the agonizing Date Movie, a film so mistrustful of its audience's ability to understand simple pop culture references that all its jokes are theoretical? Ultimately, I think the latter is the worse film - I subscribe to the belief that trying to say something, no matter how off the mark, is better than trying to say nothing - but I wouldn't shed a tear if both films disappeared tomorrow.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Movie Review: Sheitan

Steve Carlson — Fri, 5 Jan 2007 10:25:47 EST

Actors who play big and steal scenes with regularity are often tagged as 'forces of nature.' Though evocative, this well-worn term seems inadequate to describe what Vincent Cassel pulls off in the French horror film Sheitan, new on DVD from Tartan Films. Outfitted with massive yellow dental appliances, his Gallic good looks hidden beneath a goony farmer's mustache and a singularly unruly mop of hair, Cassel can only be described as a walking cataclysm. His performance doesn't so much chew the scenery as devastate it, laying waste to everything and everyone within reach and leaving behind smoking piles of wood and shattered windows aplenty. It's a fascinating, hilarious and wholly ego-free performance from a major world actor, and it goes a long way towards propping up what is otherwise a wobbly slow burn of a supernatural shocker.Cassel doesn't enter into Sheitan until the start of the second act, by which point director Kim Chapiron has generated a low-grade anticipatory air via careful application of visual style and a fine sense for the manic and the lurid. It's a pretty typical spam-in-a-cabin setup, with five friends — steely-eyed player Ladj (Ladj Ly), sweet-natured bartendress Yasmine (Leïla Bekhti), smooth-operating horndog Thai (Nicholas Le Phat Tan) smoldering temptress Eve (Roxanne Mesquida) and awkward, socially desperate would-be thug Bart (Olivier Bartélémy) — going up to the isolated farmhouse where one of them (Eve) lives. Chapiron takes the time to set each of these oafs up as semi-sympathetic, their delinquency (a bar fight, a gas-n-go) depicted as mere youthful foolishness; yet, he doesn't actually sympathize with them (the opening title card reads, "Lord, don't forgive them, for they know what they do"). Splitting the balance between clever and obnoxious — there's a wonderful near-throwaway bit involving a scarf — Chapiron manages the difficult balance of making us want to see these characters die horribly... but maybe not just yet.Then, Cassel's grinning visage turns up in the guise of oddball caretaker Joseph, and from there on the other characters might as well not have names. The introduction of Joseph amplifies both the film's energy and its weirdness; whether he's squirting goat milk straight from an udder into Eve's mouth or trying, in his twitchy grunting way, to hook up Bart with his hysterically oversexed niece Jeanne (Julie-Marie Parmentier), Cassel's live-wire antics are something to savor. As Sheitan stretches closer to its climax, gathering suggestions of Satanism and swinging group sex along the way, the whole endeavor takes on the shameless energy of a good, sick barroom joke. It's not unlike the anecdote Bart relates about a prospective hookup's poor genital hygiene.It is unfortunate, then, that Chapiron's script (co-written with his father Christian) also has the ramshackle construction of such a joke. While there's a killer punchline regarding Joseph's mysterious, hugely pregnant wife Mary, it's precisely that point at which the narrative structure begins to collapse — it's such a show-stopping topper that it negates any other surprises Chapiron might have holstered. The third act is both superfluous and not informative enough. For example, it's obvious that Joseph is in league with the Devil (and Eve's name wasn't just chosen for its palindromic perfection, either), so there's a certain level on which all there is to do is wait for the inevitable (which, when it arrives, is lifted from Jeepers Creepers). But in attempting to jazz things up, Chapiron muddies the clarity of the through-line. The dream sequence is well-played, but what is the impulse to dredge up forgotten characters (i.e. Jeanne) solely for the purpose of forgetting them again? And, indeed, what are we to make of the slapdash Christian iconography and the explicit earmarking of two characters as Muslim? (I think it depends on whether the Joseph-and-Mary symbolism is a perverse joke or a willful misunderstanding.) Kim's got a lot of ideas, which is good, but he's attempted to jam them all into a ninety-minute horror film, which isn't so good. Not even a bellowing, red-eyed Cassel crashing headlong through a window as though it were paper can keep the wrap-up from feeling like a surfeit of wasted opportunity.Still, Sheitan has a lot going for it. It's got moxie, a kinetically trashy spirit and a brazen willingness to offend. It's got a flashy visual style from Chapiron. And most importantly, it's got madman Vincent Cassel going as full-bore nutzoid as a well-respected actor ever has. I'm not sure Sheitan is a good film, but I wouldn't dissuade you from giving it a look. I might give it another look myself.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

Music Review: East West Blast Test - Popular Music for Unpopular People

Steve Carlson — Thu, 4 Jan 2007 07:59:00 EST

Hey kids! You know that group The Postal Service? Of course you do... they had a couple songs that got used on The O.C., didn't they? That O.C. is some kind of show. When they killed that chick on that last season-finale -- you know, the one who weighs about twelve pounds and was prettier when she was 13 -- I nearly lost it. Man, I was so devastated. I wonder what they'll do for an encore. Maybe Evil Eyebrow Man will sing some more. That would be so awesome. So yeah, you know The Postal Service. It's that long-distance thing between some mellow-techno-pop dude and that guy who sings in The Cars That Ate Paris or something like that. Anyway, while you were bopping around in your underwear and singing to your teddy bear about great heights and snoozing districts, did you ever wonder what this band might be if they changed their sound a bit? If instead of twee indie electropop, they decided to get really noisy? And, most importantly, if they stopped sucking? Wonder no more, my dear friends - East West Blast Test and their album Popular Music for Unpopular People can answer that for you!Note that I said 'noisy' and not 'loud.' Popular Music has its share of paint-stripping, ear-bleeding tracks, as you'd expect from a group with the credentials of this one - Chris Dodge has logged time in bands like Spazz and No Use For a Name, while Dave Witte has done work for Burnt by the Sun, Discordance Axis, Phantomsmasher and pretty much anyone who'd let him bash his kit for a while. (The guy even toured with Agoraphobic Nosebleed, thrashing out drumbeats that were created by - and should be able to be recreated solely by - a drum machine.) The album begins as the credits on these names would suggest; "Kind of Black & Blue" is a ferocious, galloping slice of speed metal that sprints by in a blur of violent volume. Then "The Last Drop" pulls out the xylophones.Yeah, the xylophones. They pop up a lot on Popular Music. The liner notes claim that "Dave Witte plays Trick drums; Chris Dodge plays whatever is within arm's reach," and the music bears out that idea of what-the-hell-let's-try-THIS invention. So alongside grind freakouts like "Corkmaster" and "Long in the Tooth," there's the tribal chant of "Passport to Papua." Or the Zappaesque jazz-noise-here noodlings of "Fathership Invasion," complete with meows. Or the closing track "Welcome to Geelong (Now Go Home)," a three-and-a-half-minute epic festooned with didgeridoos and wailing ululations.Even a good portion of the expected land speed ear-damagers contain unexpected angles or wrinkles, like the referee's whistle that, apropos of nothing, pops up right in the middle of "Fabulous Slurry." Dodge and Witte keep Popular Music moving at a neck-snapping pace, but they also leech out any sense of oppressiveness or self-importance. The album sounds like what it is - two extraordinarily talented and creative guys messing around and creating anything-goes music; as such, there's an unmistakable sense of fun even within the most blistering bits contained herein. East West Blast Test are assuredly serving up eclectic extremity, but they're garnishing it with a smile and a raised eyebrow. I'll take them over that other USPS-inspired project any day, even if I have no idea what in hey "In the Multi-Purpose Room" is supposed to be.

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.