I am cute, but generally confused.  The origin of this confusion can be found in the name of my breed, which was derived from the original tachskreiger, literally ‘badger warrior’.  I am designed to hunt badgers.  If I have a quizzical expression on my face, 

it’s because I’m wondering: Where are the badgers?  or Why aren’t there more badgers around?  

In the absence of badgers, I generally bark at everything, assuming, naturally enough, that they might be badgers.  I have barked at fish, bunnies, and even a video of myself on the TV.  I have also barked at a Slipskull Chimera, which is an alien race of creatures that do not exist.  It’s only fair, since this is while my daddy is playing Resistance 2, and he screams at them too.  

Unable to come to a decision, my daddy made the mistake of letting me choose the film that he saw a few weeks ago.  He did this by carving cheese in the shape of a symbolic representation of a film, and letting me choose by whichever piece of cheese I ate first.  His friend Nathan carved this one in the shape of an international bank: 

and daddy carved one in the shape of hockey mask for Friday the 13th

Cheese is a difficult medium.  At least that was their excuse.  

Incidentally, they also made one in the shape of a shopping bag for Confessions of a Shopoholic, but found out that it wasn’t playing at the right time, whatever ‘time’ is, so we had a do-over with just The International and Friday the 13th.

You may be wondering why I chose The International,

Something to chew

Banks are in business to make money.  In the logical world, a bank will charge 1% on credit cards and make billions.  In The International, a bank will instead trade arms to African nations at extremely high risk and almost no profit.  They’re evil, it seems.  And you’re confused by The International’s choice to do the latter, then you know what it’s like to be me.  

In the real world, products are made by a variety of companies.  If, for example, you met someone who didn’t want to trade guns with you, you could, say, go to one of the billion other people who sell guns.  In The International, what you’re going to do is kill said guy.  But not just kill him.  You’re going hire one assassin to miss the target, and another assassin to hit the target, and make it look like the first guy did it, then bribe the police to kill the first guy and make it look like a political assassination, instead of, say, just having the first guy shoot him making any conspiracy impossible to prove.  It makes me confused just to talk about it, and I’m a dachshund. 

Aha, thought Daddy.  These preposterous set-ups and improbable motivations serve the plot of the movie.  I’m not confused; it’s just bad filmmaking.  But then it was finally revealed why I choose The International.  During the only fun bit - a shoot-out in the Guggenheim, during which 1) a lot of art was destroyed, and 2) my daddy, or Nathan, depending on whose story you believe, was heard to utter “So that’s what art is for” - our hero is trying to rescue the only man who can tell him: who is behind this conspiracy.  

After much gunfire, and the pleasurable destruction of that overrated modernist piece of trash (according to me, a tiny and adorable dachshund, not Scott, who would never say such a thing), the man dies.  So our hero goes down the street and asks the other guy, who tells him, thus rendering the preceding sequence entirely pointless.  There is no plot to serve.  The confusion, as it is for a dachshund, is in service of nothing.  Evil, it turns out, isn’t so much evil, as it is totally unmotivated and inexplicable.  

Where are the badgers indeed.

Wanting an award you detest is bad enough, but entertaining the notion of a best anything is just plain odd.  Even if we could agree to that an Aristotelian material cause of beauty could lead to a formal cause of truth, Hume correctly points out that matters of fact, standing in opposition to relations of ideas, makes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just fucking impossible to sit through.  

But let’s say you’re Immanuel Kant, and you can somehow justify the ‘best’ moniker.  Where this really falls apart is the technical awards.  Carter Burwell, the composer of the soundtracks for Fargo, Gods and Monsters, and The Hudsucker Proxy, and the main reason that the Coen brothers’ films have any emotional component whatsoever, has never, that’s correct, never been nominated.  I can live with the fact that Howard Shore was ignored The Fly and Naked Lunch, but for Silence of the Lambs, which swept in every other category?  Not even nominated.  Darius Khondji’s cinematography for Se7en?  Not even nominated.  Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes for The Fifth Element, designed down to the last extra?  Not even nominated.

These last two baffling omissions are clues to what ‘best’ in this case means.  Cinematography and Costume Award inevitably go to films set in the past,  because this is what Grandma and Grandpa like.  The awards, as you are no doubt aware, are in this case in determined by vote (and we all know how well that whole democracy thing turned out), specifically AMPAS members, who tend to be, well, old.  Got a fanatical adherence to the 1943 Sears catalog?  That statuette is practically sitting in your bathroom with guests surreptitiously closing the door, wondering if they have time to see exactly how big around it really is. 

This demographic is all perfectly fine and good, but in addition to this, Grandma and Grandpa are going to pick the movies that ‘mean something’ over ones they actually like.   While it’s a given that this is a group that will chose Driving Miss Daisy way before their going to pick Lethal Weapon 2, or American Beauty over the The Matrix, it’s furthermore the kind of democracy that chooses  How Green Was My Valley (blech) over Citizen Kane or The Life of Emile Zola over any movie ever made before or since. 

Add to this the fact that membership in AMPAS is usually a sign of considerable wealth, and you get not so much ‘best’ as very specific awards for very specific things.  The aforementioned Benjamin Button would be up for, say, Best Representation That A Very Recent Realization Through Haze of Mini-Mansion Knick-Knacks That There’s A Possibility That I May Die At Some Point Means That I Have Achieved Depth.  The odds-on winner Slumdog Millionaire would correctly be in the Best Visual Fetishization Of Poverty To Serve The Dual Purpose Of Experiencing Guilt Over Exploiting India, And Expatiating Said Guilt Through The Story Of One Person Not Being Poor For Five Seconds And Making It All Better For Everyone Forever.  In A Musical Or Comedy.  

And, along these lines, I will be giving my awards for the year 2008 in such a specific manner.  2008 wasn’t a watershed year to be sure, and it had the specific disadvantage that all the good films were at the beginning of the year.  Grandma and Grandpa may like dwelling on the past, but they don’t remember that far back.  To wit:

Best Use of Future Plu-Perfect: Reprise, which came out here in the early part of the year, was a Norwegian film about two things that should not be interesting: authors, and coming of age.  It’s a tribute to the energy of the cast and the filmmakers that it’s just a lot of fun to watch.  It captures, exactly and deliberately, the feeling being young and having no idea what’s coming next, as it narrates in great detail what ‘would be’, leaving it a mystery as to what did or did not happen.  It’s to the film’s credit that you don’t want to know.  You didn’t see it, and you should.

Best Reason To Actually Pay Actors A Lot Of Money.  The Dark Knight was pretty good, certainly better than anything nominated for best picture this year (excepting the only film that would have won in a different time, Frost/Nixon).  Not the greatest film ever made, or even in the top ten of the year, but better than Iron Man, worse than Tropic Thunder.  Nevertheless these three films succeed, and I’m going to break with breaking with tradition and agree with AMPAS:  Robert Downey Jr. and Heath Ledger, as with Johnny Depp in the Pirates movies, and anything good by Tim Burton, are the reason, the only reasons these movies work.  Heath Ledger seems to be in way more of The Dark Knight than he actually is, and the film drags without him (think of the ‘action’ sequences, where the big finale is the batcycle turning around - oooh, a U-turn!)  Robert Downey Jr., playing a black man impersonating a chinese guy, and pulling it off.  The supporting actor (in this case literally)…it’s a category I would just prefer to leave to posterity.  Please, don’t decide this award.

Not Even Nominated: What if you were to put an indefatigably positive person in depressingly real circumstances?  Take that a step further: what if you were to put that same person in a Mike Leigh film?  With Happy-Go-Lucky, Mr. Leigh does what all filmmakers do when they make their best work: he makes a film he shouldn’t have.  Leigh, who’s been making the same slice-of-real-London movie for the last 30 years, accidently gets in right by creating a character (with bafflingly snubbed actress Sally Hawkins) he has no business creating.  I can’t explain the origins, but like Frost/Nixon, it’s a film where you only want to talk about what it means, rather than how it was made.  At the end, you wouldn’t say: uhh, nice work, Mike.  I…um…I really liked the light placement in the bedroom scene, but would want to know how one, how you, can live in the real, and sometimes deeply ugly, world and find a way to stand up.  A film that is both genuinely inspirational, and curious about how to inspire. 

Best Cinematic Experience: I had not heard from my friend Dante in quite a while, when I received the following email:  ‘See Speed Racer.  I think it may be the greatest film ever made.  I’ve seen it six times.  Make sure you see it in Imax.’   That was all.  I took him at his word, and he was correct.  Don’t get me wrong.  I can see why people don’t like it.  It may even be a bad movie, with wooden and convenient characters and a nonsensical plot.  But there is nothing, nothing, even remotely like it visually in the last ten years.  The amount, complexity and speed of the images is totally unprecedented.  It’s not so much a movie as it is an experiment designed to test a hypothesis: can people die from watching a movie?  It’s like being attacked by bunnies while having a heart attack on acid.  After being what can only be called assaulted, we walked in the neon mess of Universal City and thought - this is a beige place.  If you’ve ever been to Citywalk, you’ll understand.   

Best Narrative: Wall•E.  As I’ve tried to explain to my friends who steadfastly refuse to see it, Wall•E, besides being just plain astonishing, makes the political aspirations of Idiocracy look like Fox News.  It’s as much pure cinema as Speed Racer, a film with no dialog for the first half, but with a brisk and specific plot and a one-sided character whose simple doggedness connects to you in a way that ‘complex’ characters fail.  It’s the best movie Pixar has ever made, working on every level and then some.  All these things make it sound like a chore to watch, and the fact that the movie is anything but is an achievement in itself.  It’s out on DVD, Nathan, Bob, Adrienne and Jason.  See it!

I'm just messing with you. I'm taking advantage of HBO's counterprogramming Flight of the Conchords tonight.

Now I’m not going to watch tonight, partly out of protest, partly out of lack of invitations to any Oscars parties, and partly out of the fact that seeing the rerun of Law Order: Criminal Intent with Elizabeth Berkeley, one that I’ve just seen for the seventh time, is going be more interesting an eighth time than sitting through people sitting around and looking forward.  I will acknowledge, however, that it doesn’t matter what I do because the Oscars have already won.  The real purpose of awards shows can be found in the ‘list’ shows on any given night of the E! Channel.  Whether it’s The 20 Homeliest Child Stars, or 50 Best Bikini Model Makeovers, awards shows are about creating the ‘no way’ response.  They’re designed to make you protest, like you would if you ever found out that someone, somewhere in the world, once bought a Dave Matthews record.  It’s supposed to make you anxious, and it does.  The only thing that could free you from the cycle of despair would be, I don’t know, some external validation.  

Maybe an award of some kind…

But only a few months ago, I was in England, which usually offers the odd opportunity to see movies that will either never come out here (Keeping Mum), should never come out here (Factotum), or, my favorite, movies that are coming out a few months later.  There’s nothing more satisfying than coming back to America and seeing trailers for a film you’ve already seen.  It’s the closest to time travel I’m ever going to get, and next time I’m going to tell future Scott not to get that oxblood turtleneck.  It’s just not a good color for you. 

I was still stuck back in September, I had already made the mistake of seeing the unfortunate RocknRolla.  The effect was largely educational.  I learned two things: misplaced self-confidence is not the same thing as wit, and thankfully for Guy Ritchie, who started out about a tenth as talented as Quentin Tarantino, is now his equal.  Thankfully, because at least he didn’t have as far to fall.  On the other hand, they have Ben and Jerry’s in their theaters.  And sweet and salty popcorn.  How disappointed could I be?

Actually, it was pretty terrible.

Arriving in Lewes a few days later, I was unsatisfied.  I had seen plenty of churches and gardens and ruins and coastlines, but where was my mediocre film that I travelled 8000 miles to see, and which I could see back home in identical circumstances a few months later?  Fortunately, I soon spotted a headline: Fatboy Invasion Fears:

Look out!

No, under that one: an ad for Taken, which I knew had not come out in America yet.  It was an unpretentiously violent remake of Not Without My Daughter! (emphasis added), starring an Irishmen in Paris beating up Albanians.  How cosmopolitan!  

Unfortunately for me, when I bought an all-day pass for the rail south of London, the ticket didn’t seem to realize that it either wasn’t all-day, or the definition of south, and the machine that lets you out of the station promptly ate it.  You wouldn’t understand, it seemed to say.  It’s a Southwest Rail thing.  

I made do with an excellent West Indian meal (in Lewes, can you believe it?), and went home the next day.  Thank God Virgin Airlines had a fresh supply of Jumper, which I regret not seeing in the theater.  It’s still goes in the book; I save the ticket stub from the airline ticket.  Otherwise, how would I remember where I saw Undercover Blues?

I had to wait an agonizing four months, and I was desperate.  Could I really wait even one second longer?  I found the earliest showing and made an entire day of it.  It was at the AMC Woodland Hills 16, where I had enjoyed the truly insane Kangaroo Jack (another January release), which I felt was a good omen.  There was much planning and coordinating of errands, getting boxes at Office Depot at 10:05, finding the perfect parking place at the nearby Westfield Woodland Hills at 10:12 (not be confused with Woodland Hill Westfield), to get the chocolate for the showing at 10:22, and so on.

I arrived at the theater and the line was huge.  Fortunately, I am not afraid of machines; in fact, I prefer them to human beings.  The list, incidentally, in order of preference, would be dogs, food, dogfood, simulations of human beings, machines, machines that talk, human beings, and at the bottom, that extremely weird Wescom ATM that has a video of a creepy lady with giant $20 bills which she ‘puts’ into the slot where you get your money and then walks away with a smug expression on her face, and last, and worst, the committee that approved that extremely weird Wescom ATM that has a video of a creepy lady with giant $20 bills which she ‘puts’ into the slot where you get your money and then walks away with a smug expression on her face.  

In any case, there’s generally a credit card ticketer in front of every theater, which will save you about ten minutes of time, time which you would apparently prefer spending in a line of other like minded people.  For some reason, human beings like to be as inefficient as possible.  It’s why we invented cars: to have traffic jams.  

In any case, thank goodness it was a machine, because I only had to wait a minute to discover that the 10:30 am, that’s right am, was sold out.  I was disappointed, until I quickly realized that I would now have two opportunities to eat chocolate in a day without really noticing that I was doing it.  

Now I had to strategize.  Surely a sold out show at 10:30 meant the only place that I could get in was the Regency Agoura Hills 8.  So I went home, consoled myself with an almond praliné, and went out again for a ridiculously late 12:30 showing, this time consoling myself with a nice single origin truffle.  

The film begins and there’s a lot of chatting, which was disappointing after having seen My Bloody Valentine 3D, but at some point, the daughter gets kidnapped and Liam Neeson, giving his best Darkman impression, gets ready to kick some Eastern European ass.  Then, suddenly, the film goes experimental on my ass.  The sound gets all Lynchian, and things jump about.  It’s a comment on the sad state of American filmmaking that it took me 10 seconds to realize that it wasn’t a technique to cover up a lack of story or character, but that reel four was on backwards.  

Having actually worked in a movie theater, I was the first to get up and inform the management.  I was also the first to leave; movies these days, despite what Fight Club will tell you, run on giant platters.  They splice the whole thing together and it runs through the projector, platter to platter, so that at the end of the film, you don’t even have to rewind it.  The simplicity of the system means that you can pay projectionists $6.00 an hour, and furthermore, that you get the kind of projectionist that might, say, splice in reel four backwards.

Leaving the poor saps in theater behind, no doubt saying to their respective spouses, “Don’t worry, Chelsea/Brandon, I’m sure they’ll just press the ‘fix film’ button (it’s next to the ‘fix the environment’ and ‘fix the economy’ buttons people are always forgetting to push) and we’ll be on our way again.” (see above, p. 453, King, hatred of humans re: their enjoyment of waiting in line to be frustrated).  Driving home I realized that the universe’s efforts to prevent me from seeing Taken must mean it, or at least the last 60 minutes of it, would the greatest, or worst, movie of all time.  

Either way.

Not wanting to sit through all the talkie-talkie bits again, I arrived the next day, exactly forty minutes late (adding the ten minutes for trailer time), badged my way in with the ticket from the previous day,

Two-Time Use

It was okay.

I guess.

I learned one thing.  Everyone knows if you have either Xander Berkeley or Leland Orser in a movie, he will ‘turn out’ to be the bad guy that he couldn’t possibly be.  What everyone may not know is that if they are both in the same movie, they cancel each other out, and they both ‘turn out’ to be the good guys.

The effect was largely educational.  

Then, worst of all, you have to see the movie.  I know that it’s my job to fall on your cinematic grenades, and two weeks ago, I saw Defiance land in the foxhole, and without regard for my psychological well-being, I leapt.  Since then, I haven’t written a word, since it’s just one of those films you don’t want to bother with.  In fact, I will never write another word about movies ever again for the rest of my life.  

In my defense, it was a Nazi film, and I had previously vowed to complete the 2008 Nazi septilogy (The Spirit, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Unborn, Valkyrie, The Reader, Defiance and Good) when I found out this morning that Good has come and gone after two weeks, having grossed a whopping $53,000.  No way to complete it, and I’m not a little happy about it.  You may not know this, but World War II, Nazis, genocides, it’s a little depressing.  I think I’ll get back to seeing every video game movies ever made. And so I did.

9:35!

Secondly in my defense, it was a 9:35a showing.  9:35!  You feel like you’re going to be arrested just by being there.  Even the mall isn’t open yet.  When you walk out of the theater, you have the whole day ahead of you.  Unless you see Defiance, but at least then, you have the whole evening. 

Not in my defense, I hate you for making me see it.  

Not really.  

No, really.  I do.

Defiance isn’t so much bad as it is evil.  And since I’m getting very close to the realm of this being homework, for you and me, I will be brief.  Even the most non-descript film will have some element of a moral story; Monsters, Inc., is about the effects of forgetting what your job actually does, not what it is, Die Hard: why you shouldn’t trust anyone with an accent, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the inadvisability of making Paul Blart: Mall Cop.  The problem is, that writing about morality is dull.  Too bad.  You’ve made me see Defiance, and now I’m going to punish you.

The story of rebellion in impossible circumstances is not only an interesting one, but an important one.  When faced with certain death, pretty much everyone caves.  I won’t bore you with the details, or depress you with them; if you want to know more, look it up.  From Carthage to Turkey to the Ostland to Rwanda, even when you know to a certainty, without a doubt, then you’re going to die in the next second, you are not going to do anything about it.  Deal with it.

The interesting bit about this depressing notion is that this is the exact opposite of how movies depict our nature.  We fight back.  We’re heroes.  This division between real life and how movies depict it why Defiance is just a shitty film.  What’s more, I can prove it.

Because, and this is the dull part (sorry, one of them) people, once and a while, in real life, do fight back.  The Bielski brothers did, just as Sobibor, a concentration camp, had a full-on rebellion.  The real life stories are not only inspirational, but really cool.  In the case of Sobibor, the plan involved killing SS commanders on a tight timetable.  The first commander had an appointment with the camp’s shoemaker at 1205, they killed him and waited for the next one at 1210.  If not for the famous German punctuality, one of the commanders would have been early or late, seen the bodies being stuffed into their various hiding places, and the plan would have failed.  They were perfectly on time, and it worked.  True story.  No, really, it’s a true story.

The films about both these events botch them in exactly the same way.   In the case of Sobibor (the documentary), the filmmaker has the truly offensive (and you should know by now how hard it is to offend me) gall to ask one of the actual survivors if it ever bothered him to kill another human being.  The man simply looked baffled, and the filmmaker asked again.  I was far too shocked to remember the details of the answers; there aren’t going to be a lot of times when murder is okay - Sobibor and the occupation of Belorussia are going to be two of them.  I can only say this: you’re going to talk about the immorality of murder…now?  Where were you when they were pitching Collateral Damage?

This is an equally confusing question to a befuddled Edward Zwick, who seems to be saying Murder Is Wrong Unless It’s In A Rousing And Astonishingly Improbable Battle Sequence At The End.  It’s like the exact opposite of A Clockwork Orange, where Kubrick deliberately stylized Alex’s violence when he was committing and depicted it graphically when it was done to him.  When Tuvia Bielski kills the police captain who was responsible for his parents death, it’s graphic and depressing, making the case that an actual hero is a worse person than Alex and his three droogs.  Totally not dobby, dude.

Fair enough; violence is horrible.  I’d go as far to say that it’s unnecessary pretty much all of the time.  I’d go even farther to say that the one group of people who possess the ability to do it (sociopaths) shouldn’t have the ability, and the group that can’t fight back (everyone else), should have it.  This would be a good topic for a film.  Someone should make it.  I bet there’s even some stories in real life that might fit this exact thesis.    

I’ll let you know if I find any.  

Actually, he did have a pretty nice doggy.

And I was just as disappointed to discover that My Bloody Valentine 3D is now receiving its appropriate critical acclaim.  Certainly the filmmakers deserve it, but bad movies belong to me!  Especially when they’re great.  And My Bloody Valentine 3D is that.  So I will push past my superficial nature, and tell you why.

Let me give you an example: I hate the dolly reverse zoom.  Hate it.  This is when you put the camera on a dolly and push it forward while you’re pulling the zoom backward.  The object of focus stays about the same size, but the world around him distorts.  It was done, correctly, in Vertigo, as Jimmy Stewart peers down the bell tower and the camera conveys absolutely what vertigo feels like.  It has since been used (and the worst offender is Steven Spielberg) to convey such non-sequiters as “I see a dinosaur!”, or “I found my keys!”.  It’s a camera technique that should only have been used twice.  Once by Hitchcock, and once in 3D.  In 3D, it’s genius. 

It's even good in upper 11, the dreaded digital theater.

This film does everything you could possibly do in 3D.  It places people behind chain link fences; it puts a heart drawn in blood on a piece of glass and frames the town sheriff with it; a fist punches a mirror; Kevin Tighe very slowly sweeps a shotgun across the front of the camera.  And so on.   My friend Adrienne said it can’t have done everything you can do in 3D.  She’s right.  But it does absolutely do everything you can do with a pickaxe in 3D.

Everything.

It is a testament to the film, and my willpower, that I’m not going to tell you what those things are.  You need to see it.  In 3D.

It furthermore has boobies.  Remember boobies?  They used to be everywhere.  Now you can rip people in half in a PG-13 film (another dig at Spielberg, who could get the MPAA to let him torture puppies onscreen and fight about whether it should be PG or PG 13), but God forbid we get what any kid could have gotten on Cinemax 20 years past, and on the internet 10.  

I would have preferred more variety to the boobies, but to My Bloody Valentine 3D’s credit, it makes up in length what it lacks in breadth.  And no that’s not what I meant; the film features a protracted and full frontal nude scene involving a scorned woman chasing her lover to the parking lot of a motel in the buff with a gun, and then running from the erstwhile killer.  In heels.  

As the scene begins, our heroine is naked, and she’s in a hurry; do I pick up the gun, or a single stitch of clothing?  Let’s take a moment to praise that moment; the moment when our heroine, and the filmmakers, decide to just go for it.  Because what the critics will miss (and this how I can maintain my sense of cool, by seeing what others don’t.  Take that, self-generated sense of inadequacy!), is what My Bloody Valentine 3D does with narrative.  It’s a unexpectedly well structured film.  

When Speed came out, I was blown away, not because it’s a great movie, even though it is, but because it was the first time that they didn’t waste time with my most hated of film tropes: exposition.  Characters don’t sit around and talk about how their mother died, or didn’t die, or introduce themselves to the audience.  The film starts with action, and, after a very brief scene of the cops talking in bar, continues with action until the end.

This, I thought, correctly, is brilliant.  This is how all films will be from now on.  I was tragically mistaken.  The talky talky remains; to this day, you have to wade through the exposition to get to the good stuff.  And, as my final dig against Spielberg (in this post at least; two great films [1941 and Minority Report] and countless overrated ones do not an auteur make.  Okay that’s my last dig…The Terminal…okay, okay, I’ll stop), I recently saw Jurassic Park II on the television box, and its an astonishingly bad, and strangely mean-spirited film.  And, as expected, the first hour is talk, talk, talk.  I don’t care what characters say; I don’t care who they are, or what made them; I care what they do.  Get to it.

And get to it My Bloody Valentine 3D does.  This is a film in a hurry.  The film begins with a very brief newspaper headline montage of a mining accident.  It’s not a bad story, beginning heroic, where we discover that one miner survived, and turning nasty quickly, when we discover how: by  killing the others to conserve oxygen.  With the aforementioned axe.  

In any other movie, this would be a twenty minute scene.  In this film, two minutes, and it’s not even a scene; it’s just the title sequence.  The movie begins when our villain, Harry Warden, wakes up after a year in a coma, and starts to talk about his childhood and how it affects who he is. As a person.

I’m just messing with you.  He just starts killing.  Everybody in the hospital. 

Cut to the abandoned mine full of partying teenagers.  Here, I thought, we go with the exposition.  But after a very brief introductory scene, a character pops out and goes, “Boo!  I’m Harry Warden!”, and immediately proceeds to get an ax through the back of his head from the real Harry Warden, the eyeball impaled on the tip.  In 3D (did I mention they do everything than you can do with a pickaxe in 3D?  They do everything than you can do with a pickaxe in 3D).

I admit to being a little confused at this point.  Don’t they have to talk about ‘who they are and why they do stuff’ more?  For the first few seconds I thought, oh, it’s a dream, it’s not the beginning of the movie.  Movies start twenty to thirty minutes in, something happens, people talk for another twenty or thirty minutes, and something else happens and we all acquiesce and call it the ending. No, I thought, this has to be a dream, and in a minute, they’re going to get back to the talking.  But as the killing rampage began, with many bits and pieces coming towards and past the camera, I knew it wasn’t a dream; we’re five minutes in and the movie has started…twice.

Is My Bloody Valentine 3D that great?  Probably.  It doesn’t hurt, as we all know, when your expectations are low.  And while the film is not perfect, all other filmmakers on the planet (with the possible exception of Alfonso Cuarón) have a lot to learn from director Patrick Lussier and writers Todd Farmer and Zane Smith.  Characters don’t reveal characters; story does.  I know it’s hard to think of a good solid plot, with lots of things happening, but your audience is waiting. 

Get to it.

It’s hard not to think of those superhero movies, where The Penguin and Lex Luthor and Bizarro Gallager sit in a room and talk, and talk, and talk and are mysteriously unable to kill their foe.  The point is this: Hitler as Batman would be a great movie.  Besides being incredibly offensive (already a good start), it’s actually a relevant idea.  What was it about Hitler that you couldn’t just shoot the guy?  It gets into the whole notion of how he rose to, and kept his power, and furthermore gets into something the film skirts around: where were these guys when he was doing well?  It is that he was a fascist that they had a problem with, or that he just turned out not to be very good at it?

But Valkyrie is its own movie, and judging it on its own merits, it is a success.  We know how the story ends (Batman gets away), but Singer, et. al. do manage to keep the tension up for quite a bit of the film, as they detail the various personalities and motives, mistakes and successes behind each step of the failed plan.  This is no mean feat, to be keep someone like me interested when I know the outcome, and kudos.  In a Post-tomatometer era, we forget that a movie isn’t so much a 60%, as it is a series of scenes that we like and don’t like, and there’s a lot of 100% in this movie.  

Auditorium 8, to your right, not the most impressive.

And you can see what attracted the filmmakers to the story.  It’s a fascinating tale of incompetence, pride, and missed opportunities.  But, as it often the case, the filmmakers have forgotten the weight of history, something which you run into whenever you make a movie about, well, history.  A movie about the plot to kill Hitler is going to have Hitler in it.  And that’s going to cause all kinds of problems.  I thought immediately of the last season of Deadwood, where David Milch introduced George Hearst into the environs of the show, and though he didn’t know it, he was stuck.  Milch had created these intense, vital, and absolutely ruthless characters, who now had to kowtow to Hearst, not because they would have, but because that’s what actually happened.  He betrayed the characters and the show, because history made him.

There are many great stories in the plot to kill Hitler.  There’s the story of  outrageous incompetence, as each of the players makes mistakes that are both believable and sad.  It’s a story that would funny, hysterical actually, but if it’s Hitler you’re trying to kill, the weight of the Holocaust precludes a comedy, at least these days.  I don’t know why it was okay to make comedies with Hitler in it as recently as twenty years ago (The Producers, To Be or Not To Be, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [Hitler signs his notebook - come on - you could never do that today, ironically because the same filmmaker directed Schindler's List four years later]) a time when many more people were alive who actually were there, but I do know that making a movie about why you can’t make a funny movie about Hitler would be a good movie.  If the censors let you keep Hitler in it.

And you have the story, the tragedy, of the plotters’ failure.  Which would be tragic, if this wasn’t a movie.  But it is a movie, and so when people behave stupidly, when they behave like the Scarecrow and Doc Oc (‘nuff said), it’s hard to feel sorry for them.  It’s not tragedy when making mistakes leads to a bad outcome; it’s just inevitable.  In this case, history is imprisoned by the rules of film.  If you act stupid, and your plan doesn’t work, we’re not going to feel sorry for you, no matter how cute your wife is.

Nazis in films have both an advantage, and a disadvantage.  They make great cannon fodder, being one of three groups you can kill without feeling guilty (as a screenwriter, one can never forget the ZRN trinity: Zombies, Robots, and Nazis.  And, if you’re English, people with red hair.  No, I don’t understand the last one either).  But Nazis, unlike their machine and undead counterparts, carry a lot of cultural guilt.  Furthermore, at a certain point, they’re going to wear out their emotional resonance as a symbol of true evil.  In a time when I’ve seen 4 movies in a row with Nazis in it, and I’ve still got three to go, we have reached that point.  World War II, and Nazi Germany, are full of human stories, but when we put them in the past, it lets us off the hook a little bit.  We are free to say: I’m not Hitler; I’m Tom Cruise.  I would do the right thing…six years after the fact.

So tell me a funny story about a madcap group of neer-do-wells who just can’t seem to get it together to kill someone.  Or the tragedy of good intentions undone by fate (not buffoonery).  Or the comic and tragic one of a group of people who go along with evil as long as evil is doing well.  Make as many movies about Hitler as you want.  Just don’t put any Nazis in them.

It works the other way as well.  When I saw One Missed Call at the beginning of 2008, it was a desperate attempt to erase the memory of the baffingly overpraised There Will Be Blood.  It succeeded, since, while I remember almost nothing about One Missed Call, including the title, and constantly confuse it with the virtually identical Pulse, I do remember it was better than There Will Be Blood.  To the best of my recollection: cute girl, cell phones, and better than There Will Be Blood.  Which was 2008 in a nutshell.  

What does it mean that the rating is bigger than the film title?

And now the oracles turn to The Unborn, which predicts a year of cute girls (two years in a row!), mysterious guest star appearances (Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, Carla Gugino and Jane Alexander all appear as bit parts; it’s very disconcerting), some admittedly great scenes surrounded by a totally nonsensical and convenient plot, and the resurrection of a deserving star of yesteryear.  No, not Mickey Rourke: Spuds Mackenzie, who makes his own brief appearance.  What his agent will do about the fact that his head is now upside down, I couldn’t say. 

It’s going to be a great year.

The Unborn enters the arena with a lot going against it.  It is not going to be a critical darling, which is a shame really, since it delivers a lot more than most films of its ilk.  Howard Hawks said that it didn’t matter what kind of movie you made as long as you have 2 or 3 great scenes.  And to be fair, The Unborn has those scenes.  It opens rather well, with the creepy boy losing a glove (I can’t remember: did they have bright blue gloves in Auschwitz?), and then turning into dog with a boy mask, which is just plain cool, and then the mask into a fetus in a jar that proceeds to open its eyes and go ‘boo’.  At that point, you’ve got a good 30 minutes before you need to see a glory hole with the words, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

And no, I’m not kidding.  The film really has its moments; it is, after all, from the man who gave us vampires snorting dried blood in Blade 2.  And the glory hole provides the chance for something new to say out loud in a horror movie.  We’ve heard, “Don’t go in there!”, and “Don’t hang out under the cat really to pounce on you from the top of the refrigerator!” (hard to get out in one breath), and even, and this is true “Don’t go under the stairs!” heard very plainly, in front of witnesses, during The People Under the Stairs.  And now we have the much more original: “Don’t look in the glory hole!”  Our heroine ignores our shouted pleas, as is her duty, and even though in this case it’s only a million gooey potato bugs that come flying out, it’s just good advice: in a movie, or in life, don’t look in the glory hole.

Which leads us to our second disadvantage: this is a PG-13 horror movie, which normally I detest, since the point of horror movies isn’t to scare people, but to do really bizarre things to the human body and make me go eww.   But Goyer, and the MPAA, didn’t seem to know this, or care, and so while no one can say ‘fuck’ (a popular word for actors while improving, as is apparently ‘look’ and ‘listen’), they can have, say, glory holes.  Goyer pushes this rating as far as he can go, especially with Miss Yustman, who walks around in underwear that would make the editors of Maxim blush, finally culminating with a brief shot of her grabbing said underwear off the floor as she gets out of her post-coital bed.  It’s very naughty; you can almost feel them being pulled on.  As with the casting of Gary Oldman as the exorcising rabbi,

No, I didn't take this myself; it's what the studio thought would best represent the film.

2009 is going to have a tough time topping that.

It is thirdly, about Nazis (to which I say 1) enough with the Nazis already, and 2) having seen two Nazi movies in a row, I’m accept that I’m doomed to see The Reader, Good, Valkyrie, Defiance, and The Strange Case of Benjamin Button [you’re telling me that he travels through the 20th Century and doesn’t bump into Hitler?]. And when I discover that Bride Wars is about Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway’s dilemma that they both want the Reichstadt for their weddings - on the same day - I won’t be surprised).  

To The Unborn’s credit, it goes to a place that no one has, perhaps one that was inevitable.  And while the ubiquitous evil child in question is a victim of Josef Mengele’s experiments, it is, nevertheless, the first time that a child victim of the holocaust is baddie in a horror film.  Which leads to a rather unfortunate choice of words, which I wrote down just to be sure: “It has fallen upon you to finish was begun in Auschwitz.”  I would have been offended by that, only I had just seen the title for the New York Post review of the aforementioned The Reader: 

“Death Camp for Cutie.”

Look it up.

To recap: good gags, cute girls, and a strangely casual tastelessness about the holocaust.  But all this, even the tastelessness about the holocaust, comes at a price: a plot that takes nonsensical to new heights.  I don’t remember much, but there’s this dybbuk who sometimes inhabits bodies, and sometimes doesn’t.  It’s all powerful, unless you yell at it really loud.  And even though it seems to have no problem entering everyone else’s body, thus ensuring its entry into the human world and armageddon, it’s willing to forgo this to inhabit Odette Yustman (which it could have done at any time, but I guess didn’t feel like it), presumably waiting for the chance of a possessed shower or two.

Fair enough.  

So we will pay a price in 2009, a price of random events disguised as plot.  We only hope there are enough potato bugs living in fried eggs to make up for it.  And upon exiting the Santa Monica 7, we came upon this portentous standee (and let’s hope that’s the only time you ever hear the phrase ‘portentous standee’):

Somewhere in the world, there's a young girl with two very special pieces of cardboard.

Does this mean that we will see the beheading of a Jonas Brother, and the partial beheading of another Jonas Brother?  In 3D?

Signs point to yes. 

But how to choose from the plethora?   I this time was faced with Benjamin Button (three hours long), Marley & Me (it takes 13 years for a family to love their doggie, and then it dies), and Valkyrie (The tagline of ‘Many saw evil.  They dared to stop it’ having been changed from the much longer: ‘They went along with evil for ten years or so, and then, for their own selfish reasons, decided to make a half-hearted and incompetent attempt to stop it, only to fail and then die’.  The shorter version fits better on a poster).   

I went with the Nazi one.  The Spirit.

I should have known by the asterisk.

And if you’re surprised to discover that Frank Miller’s at once baffling and dull adaption of The Spirit has Nazis in it, I was too.  Going to see a film is always a bit like Christmas, which may be why I don’t celebrate the holiday - I get to celebrate the excitement (and then the subsequent elation or crushing disappointment) twice a week.  And if seeing movies obsessively is a form of paganism, burn me at the stake.  Or at the very least, assimilate one of my holidays and call it your own.  Why not start with Christmas?

In any case, this is the thrill of seeing a movie: you really have no idea what you’re going to get when you pull back the wrapping.   The Spirit had received a 10% on the tomatometer, which was a good sign that I might be getting a Tango and Cash for Christmas.  Tango and Cash, one of my favorite Christmas miracles, was not a critic’s darling; it was nevertheless inappropriately and unconsciously homoerotic, surreal, and stupefying.  Sylvester Stallone? Wearing glasses?

It was not boring.  

And the augers were good for The Spirit.  Yes, on Christmas, the Godiva store was closed, but I found a Lindt crème brûlée bar at the 7-11 on Santa Monica and Overland (no, not that 7-11, the other one.  And for those of you from out of town who don’t get that bit, there are two 7-11s on the same block in that section of LA.  Sometimes, you just can’t be bothered to turn left).  The candy, which didn’t taste the slightest bit like crème brûlée, was nevertheless delicious, and I intend to have it again.

As I entered the theatre, there was additional good omens: a crazy unwashed lady four seats to my right, and a guy saying ‘Wow’ at the trailer for the misguided Friday the 13th remake (from the man who brought you The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Tobe Hooper’s back?  No, from the man who brought you The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.  Even I’m getting confused at this point).  I couldn’t lose - if the movie was bad, crazy and crazy jr. would at least give me some distraction.  

Sadly, they were silent as the producers getting this week’s grosses.  They were no doubt expecting a narrative film, with a story, a theme and maybe characters doing something.  I myself am not that fussy.  Sure, I’ve gone on and on about narrative films, but if not making any kind of sense is your bag, that’s cool, man.  When I realized, right at the beginning, that I was watching the climatic fight scene, you know, at the beginning, I was hopeful that at least I might be getting a jaw-dropping baffle-fest for Christmas.  And I really could use one of those, as my National Lampoon: Gold Diggers was getting a little threadbare.

And as the film progressed, I should have liked it.  All the pieces are there.   Scenes set inexplicably underwater.  A protracted and unexplained scene where Samuel Jackson dresses as a Nazi, straps our hero to a dentist chair, and, instead killing him, dissolves a kitten.  Like a soap opera, it’s a film where nothing, really, genuinely nothing happens on screen, but the very little that does happen is talked about endlessly.  Unlike a soap opera, there are no aliens, twins, or kidnappings; nothing strange or even very interesting happens. But they do talk about it, in front of vertical blinds…in black and white!

As Frost/Nixon was to Doubt, so My Name is Bruce is to The Spirit  I don’t mind the lack of wit.  I loved My Name is Bruce for the reason that I don’t like The Spirit: when I say it lacks wit, I imagine a sheepish Bruce Campbell hearing me say that and saying, “Hey…”.  Bruce Campbell is cool, and shouldn’t be.  Frank Miller is supposed to be cool, and isn’t.

Nazis, kittens being dissolved in acid for some reason, Greek mythology, Scarlett Johansson; they’re about as hip as the Converse hi-tops (remember Converse hi-tops?) that the Spirit wears, and Frank Miller foregrounds extensively, as if to say: A Suit?  With Sneakers?  What would Nancy Reagan think?  Unlike My Name is Bruce, during which I said “This is the greatest movie I have ever seen in my entire life” at least four times, The Spirit, during which I was silent, is a film that is so desperate to be memorable, that all you can remember is desperation. 

If you’re going to make a bad film, be cool.  But know that cool is a tricky thing.  Everyone knows if you try to be cool, that’s not cool.  Not trying to be cool is, but not if you’re doing it to be cool.  I try to be cool, but I do it so desperately that it winds up being cool.  If you were cool, you’d know what I was talking about.  And now you are!

You deserved better, Lindt Crème Brûlée bar.

That man was me.  

This may be difficult to believe, but I was at that preview screening, and anyone who knows me will tell you those exact words have tumbled from my mouth more than once (though I was slightly misquoted.  The exact phrasing is, “This is the Greatest Film.  I Have Ever Seen.  In My Entire Life”  Happy to set the record straight).  That being said, my friends are lying if they tell you that I say it about every movie I see.  That being said, it is a phrase I will use at least four or five times a year.  It is a statement reserved for the truly remarkable and wonderful, not the good.  And to be clear, I mean it each time I say it.  My Name Is Bruce is not a good movie.  It may even be terrible.  But that doesn’t stop it from being the greatest movie I have ever seen in my entire life.

Let me explain.  

To be honest I wasn’t expecting much, and almost didn’t go, since in order to see it (at least with Bruce Campbell in person, and what’s the point of going if you don’t see Bruce Campbell in person), I had to go to an evening show, which I detest.  There’s people (yuck), it costs more, and it’s very inconvenient for dog feeding times.  I compromised on the 5:10p, and made the right call by buying tickets in advance.  Not only was I guaranteed a seat, my natural sense of cheapness meant that even though it meant doing something (also yuck), I was going to go to collect the tickets that I had already paid for.

The Ticket I had already paid for.

It was a small crowd, not sold out, but a good crowd.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie with a bunch of people who are really looking forward to that particular movie.  Not because some critic said so (and critics wrongly warned us away), or because there’s that guy in it who did that thing once (although technically speaking, Bruce Campbell is that guy), but because they were fans.  I knew I was in for a treat after rather pedestrian trailer about teens having sex and killing each other went over very badly.  That is, until the title card, which got a really big laugh.  Donkey Punch.

And then, My Name Is Bruce began, and I was instantly transported to another world.  It’s a world that you probably aren’t familiar with, but one which My Name Is Bruce recalls and mimics with great fondness.  It is the world of the low-budget early 80s movie, where it is perfectly acceptable to put the characters in a rigid line, facing the camera, like they’re standing under a proscenium arch.  A world where the cuts are always on the lines of dialog, so if a character says something, there’s an eight frame pause, cut to  the other character, who then says something, and so on.

It is also a world filled with jokes that only work if you’ve seen a thirty year old horror movie and the attendant Campbell ouevre.  It’s not dissimilar from watching a corporate video in a conference room and saying, ‘There’s Sally from accounting!  Remember that time she wore that red top with a slightly different red skirt?  And now she’s doing it again!’.  

The best one of these jokes comes early on.  As one character makes fun of another for loving Bruce Campbell too much, our hero defends the man who made The Man with the Screaming Brain (a real film), and Cave Alien (not a real film), and his friend responds tentatively, “I liked Bubba-Ho-Tep”, to which our hero exasperatedly replies, “Everybody likes Bubba-Ho-Tep!”

It’s a good joke, and it got a big laugh from the only audience who would get it.  Bubba-Ho-Tep, if you don’t know, stars Bruce Campbell as an elderly Elvis stuck in a nursing home with a black JFK fighting mummies.  I know, I know, it’s sounds awesome.  But it’s just okay.  It wavers between genre movie, and parody, and some kind of meditation on old age, and just winds up being wanky.  And I was about to find out why My Name Is Bruce worked, and Bubba-Ho-Tep didn’t. 

See, I had just finished watching the film, which was silly, and had a lot of dumb jokes in it, and I just didn’t understand: why was I smiling from ear to ear?  I almost left, because usually Q&As make me depressed, and I didn’t want to ruin the high.  But I was also afraid to leave, in case Mr. Campbell saw me go, which would have been awkward.  At least for me.  In any case, it was my duty as a reporter that kept me in my seat, and thank God for imaginary jobs.  

Bruce Campbell, the ultimate gentleman and entertainer did not disappoint, and in fact provided the answer to the question I was seeking.  As he related tale after tale of horses (not donkeys) that he was told to punch, and mailmen who are now confused as to where to deliver the mail (to save money, they built the small town western set of My Name Is Bruce on Bruce Campbell’s actual property - it’s true dedication), he mentioned that Evil Dead was having its 30th anniversary, and someone asked if he would rather be back there, looking forward, or now looking back.

There was a hush in the audience, as the tone had suddenly got serious.  But Mr. Campbell was up to the task, and told how he was happily surprised to be there, 30 years ago, sitting in a theater in Detroit, seeing something that he had made, in the same mall where he saw Poseidon Adventure.  It was never going to get better than that.

And that’s the answer to why I liked My Name is Bruce so much.  It’s just happy to be a movie.  It was enough for the people involved to tell some dumb jokes and film them.  Bruce is happy grabbing the love interest’s ass and looking sheepish, the sheriff is happy singing a song about a bean curd loving homicidal ghost, Ted Raimi is happy doing whatever it is that Ted Raimi does, and the dog is happy drinking whisky from the bowl.  You feel like no one cares if the audience gets it, in a good way.  They’re happy for the chance to do stupid bits, and it shows. 

Kane put it best when he said, “It might be fun to run a newspaper.”  It’s obvious that Orson Welles was talking about himself, having been widely quoted as calling the RKO Studios the biggest toy box a boy could have.   It might be fun to make a crazy movie; it’s certainly fun to watch.  This sense of fun is something Welles never really captured again.  Before Citizen Kane, he didn’t have to worry if he was going to make Citizen Kane.

With all the Sundance’s and awards and attention to ‘what film is’, and directors being the new rock star and all (like a rock star, but you don’t even have to learn to play an instrument - in fact, you don’t have to know anything at all), no one makes movies anymore; they have agendas, and movies are the result.  It’s the reason I didn’t like Bubba-Ho-Tep; it wants so much to be something else.  The sense of wonder at just getting something up on the screen is something we’ve lost without even noticing, so cheers to you Mr. Campbell, for the reminder.  I haven’t seen this kind of ‘let’s make a movie’ joy since John Waters, or Jean-Luc Godard or Truffaut.  I won’t argue to put Mr. Campbell in this pantheon; I’ll leave that to Jean-Luc Godard. 

No thank you, Ma'am, I've got my own glasses.

In any case, I’ve been forcing myself to write huge essays on going to the movies, but sometimes, it’s just not necessary.  I’ll save that for My Name Is Bruce.  In fact, I’ve already gone on too long.  Maybe it’s the 3D talking, but I really liked Bolt.  I didn’t feel pandered to, or bored, and it’s about a doggie who loves his owner, and I cried three distinct times.  I like well-made movies (and truth be told, the visuals are pretty nice) that are positive.  I just do.  And I’d rather have a Bolt than 100 No Country For Old Men’s, or 8 quadrillion There Will Be Blood’s.  That’s a lot of potential blood.  

And so I conclude this session thusly: doggie, doggie, doggie!

Doggie.

That is all.

The images of Beowulf and Journey of the Center of the Earth have passed through these babies. How could they go wrong?