This weekend Nick and I went out and purchased a baby stroller/car seat combo. Kinda neat, so we decided to strap Yellow Bear into it and try it out. (Yellow Bear was Nick's favorite stuffed animal as a kid.) We rolled it around the room a couple of times and Yellow Bear didn't complain, so I think we're going to deem the purchase a success.

With a little baby kicking nonstop inside my belly--(I really think she's testing it systematically for weaknesses, like a velociraptor)--I thought I'd do a little kicking of my own. This took place in the engineering building on campus. KAREN SMASH!

And afterwards . . . oh noes! What have I done!

Further updates:

Wanted is out on DVD now! Man, I loved that movie. It was just so brazenly beautifully over the top. Also, Zod is in it (you know, from Superman II?), and any movie featuring Zod is automatically Oscar-worthy.

And speaking of movies, we recently watched a movie called Machine Girl, which is essentially a Japanese grindhouse flick. Wow. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so hilarious and bizarre. Nothing about the violence is realistic (imagine, if you will, geyser-like blood spurts emanating from severed limbs), but it's still not for the faint of heart. Tarantino only wishes he could be this hardcore.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, I love hot chocolate again! More Chocolate-Cinnamon Delight, please.

Hey, remember when people used to make ambitious films? You go to the theater these days, and the best you can hope for is something approximating a coherent plot. Acting is a bonus. Special effects, sure. You never have the expectation of seeing interesting themes or ideas presented on the screen. Buttered movie popcorn helps mitigate the pain, but it can only go so far. It's just like that Smiths song says: "the [movies] they constantly play, they say nothing to me about my life." But every now and again, a director comes along who sweeps you off your feet and restores your faith in the medium of film. Enter Danny Boyle, master of the visual perspective, herald of the inexplicably gorgeous, and disciple of the human condition. He's the one who brought us the filthiest toilet in Scotland as the location of an ethereal swimming scene. He's the one who brought us an existential zombie movie. He's the one who made Hitchcock-style camera angles cool again. He's a revelation. He's a burning bush. He's a prophet from the creative ether, sent to save us all from the cinematic ennui that threatens to devour us.

Okay, so I'm getting carried away as usual. It's just so rare to find a director with such a unique aesthetic, who loves energetic plots and darker themes and yet isn't afraid to get a little cerebral from time to time (alright, very cerebral in some cases). I adore Danny Boyle, and I would watch anything he directed. Anything. Even a Ronco commercial or a Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week (I hear Meredith Baxter-Birney's a big fan as well). Some of his films may be flawed, it's true, but his style and point of view always make for an enjoyable experience.

Boyle's most recent film is Sunshine, and I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that I loved it. I've seen it twice already. Critics have said that the pacing is uneven, and I'm pretty sure they're right, but it seems to me that the film manages to transcend its own weaknesses (much like its characters do). Anyway, the premise is this. Our sun is dying ... way ahead of schedule. Like within the next 50 years. So the good people of Earth build a super-nifty space ship, christen it the Icarus, and send it off toward the sun, where the crew is expected to shoot off a massive nuclear bomb. The hope is that the resulting explosion will rekindle it, forming a new star within the old one. They're not sure it will work, but what the heck, right? Anything's better than just sittin' around waiting for the lights to go out. Unfortunately, the ship disappears before detonating its bomb. So those good old tenacious Earthlings try again, sending a replacement crew in a duplicate ship, which is of course known as the Icarus II. (Seriously ... how about naming the ship after someone who didn't die.) This is where the movie really begins.

Our current crop of strapping young astronauts includes such notables as Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Hiroyuki Sanada (there is evidently an attractiveness requirement for the space program of the future), and Chris Evans (hey, it's Johnny Storm!). At the heart of the movie, though, is the beautiful Cillian Murphy, who portrays Capa, the ship's resident physicist, and also acts as the film's narrator. His remarkable blue eyes are the lens through which we witness the voyage of the Icarus and the wonders it encounters. Incidentally, I've been a fan of Cillian Murphy ever since 28 Days Later (another Boyle film), where he played a bicycle courier who wakes from a coma to discover that London has been taken over by highly aggressive zombies. Since then he's played a number of eccentric roles, from the Scarecrow in Batman Begins to the cross-dressing "Kitten" in Breakfast on Pluto. I think he's great. All his performances have a quiet intensity to them, an odd mixture of openness and inscrutability. Not that he has to work terribly hard with eyes like that. (Shut up, I do NOT have a crush on him.) And speaking of eyes, Boyle uses a good deal of ocular imagery throughout the film. There are all these shots of the human eye in profile, seemingly parallel with the curvature of the sun. It's very cool.

As for the rest of the cast, they more than pull their weight. Rose Byrne does a great job of seeming both tough and vulnerable. Michelle Yeoh brings grace to the role of the ship's botanist, who cares for the ship's oxygen garden as if each and every plant was her own offspring. The greatest surprise to me, though, may have been Chris Evans as Mace. (The guy was in Not Another Teen Movie, for crying out loud.) At first you sort of dislike his character in Sunshine. He comes off as belligerent, cold, and bereft of sympathy. But as events progress, you come to realize that he is by far the most pragmatic member of the team, and therefore the one most likely to ensure their collective survival. He doesn't flinch when faced with difficult decisions, and although he seems to expect perfection from his crew mates, he is more than willing to hold himself to the same high standard.

So yeah. Where was I? When they are nearing their destination, the crew receives a seven-year-old distress signal from the Icarus I. Needless to say, the astronauts are at odds about how to deal with this new information. Should they deviate from their primary mission to check for survivors? I'm sure you can guess what the eventual decision is, although it's far from unanimous, and this becomes a later point of contention for a crew whose morale is already unraveling. Seriously, can you imagine spending years at a time in an enclosed space with the same seven people? Yikes. It'd be like a Sartre play on methamphetamines. But Boyle isn't afraid to delve into the whole spectrum of human behavior, including the petty squabbles and the predictable displays of selfishness. There is generosity and nobility, but there is also nihilism. There are messy choices to be made, many of which strain our sense of ethics. Skepticism exists alongside full-fledged spiritual obsession. The psych officer in particular, played by Cliff Curtis (remember him in Whale Rider?), comes to regard his close proximity to the sun as the ideal mystical experience. He spends hours upon hours in the viewing room, where the sun's brightness is dialed down just enough to prevent his retinas from burning. He describes feeling a sense of ecstasy in these moments, as if the light has become a part of him. As the film wears on, his skin begins to peel.

Whatever premise he generates, whatever genre he's operating within, Danny Boyle is first and foremost a sociologist. He has a complex view of humanity, to be sure--one that doesn't shy away from the darkest, most brutish impulses that exist within us--but ultimately his perspective is a generous one. He knows that human beings are difficult, and he embraces that. But he also knows that we're fighters, with a tremendous strength of will that can work miracles if applied in the right set of circumstances. This is a theme that is emphasized throughout Sunshine. His characters may be doomed (or they believe that they are), yet they never go quietly into that good night. That's why the ship was sent to restart the sun in the first place. That's why the crew soldiers on, committed to the mission, even after things get all wonky and scary. Even in their moments of terror, they are scintillant with their own humanity.

Of course, there are many mythological themes at work here. The most obvious is the story of Icarus himself, which everyone knows (he was the idiot with the wax wings). Boyle also refers us to the notion that humans cannot look upon the face of God (or Zeus) without being incinerated by the brightness. To further drive this home, there are lots of shots of human figures silhouetted against the giant sun. And since we're talking about cinematography, let me just reiterate that Boyle is a visual master. He gives so much attention to the composition of every scene--he's a lot like Kubrick in that way--and it's all driven by a keen sense of human psychology. Shots are beautifully framed even when they don't need to be. It's not an accident that he contrasts the dark, claustrophobic confines of the Icarus with the massive sun looming nearby. And some of the scenes that take place outside the ship are so beautiful you just may cry a little bit without even realizing it.

The visuals of course work in concert with the music. Remember the last few moments of Shallow Grave, when that Andy Williams song "Happy Heart" starts playing just as the camera pans down to the money beneath the floor? That was the moment of my conversion. And of course there was that raw, melancholy theme that kept surfacing throughout 28 Days Later, its elegaic insistence reminding us how fragile this construct called civilization really is. The music in Sunshine is used to even greater effect, if that's possible. It's simple and it's employed sparingly, but the way it builds during particular scenes ... I can't describe it, except to say that it left me feeling breathless and exhilarated and deeply moved.

There are things in Sunshine that will remind you of other sci-fi films. Definitely 2001: A Space Odyssey. Solaris, too (both versions). Event Horizon even sticks its creepy head in there toward the end. But the movie Boyle gives us here is entirely his own. I loved it, and I recommend it for anyone who enjoys thoughtful, genre-stretching cinema. No popcorn required.

Spider-Man 3--Ok, the critics have been pretty narrow-minded about this movie. Sure, it has some issues with evenness, but most of the specific criticisms that have been leveled against this movie are unfair and unfounded. First of all, the plot is complex, but not so convoluted that you can't follow it. Just set aside your expectations and go with the flow. Second, I don't think there are too many villains. Multiple bad guys is standard fare for comic books--if the superhero can't handle more than one villain at once, then maybe he doesn't really deserve to be a superhero. Third, there's a lot of time spent on the often-defunct friendship between Harry and Peter, and people seem to have a problem with that, as well as with the fact that most of the main characters cry at some point during the movie. Is it so terrible that Sam Raimi wants to depict genuine human relationships in all their complexity? There's still plenty of action, not to mention enough special effects to sink a battleship (that is, if special effects could, in fact, sink a battleship). I happen to think it does the audience a disservice to strip a film of its human element. If you want an example, just think of a bland, interchangeable Steven Seagal movie. Or better yet, think of the most recent Star Wars trilogy, then think about how hard you laughed at the "love scenes" between Anakin and Padme. Personally, I laughed pretty hard, because when the filmmaker doesn't care about the plausibility of his characters or their motivations, you just can't bring yourself to care about them either. And fifth, critics say that Spider-Man 3 is too ambitious. (Deep sigh.) Why shouldn't superhero movies be ambitious? Why shouldn't they strive for Wagnerian grandeur? If you want crappy vanilla superhero movies, just put on an endless loop of Daredevil and shut up.

Things I learned from this movie:

1. Being evil makes you dance really badly.
2. There is no easy way to fight a being made from sand.
3. Close proximity to science stuff will almost always turn you into a superhero/villain.
4. Bruce Campbell is awesome. But then we all knew that to begin with, didn't we?

Little Miss Sunshine--Twisted and hilarious. I always worry about movies that become wildly popular overnight, but the hype was justified with this one. The whole cast was wonderful, especially Steve Carell and Alan Arkin. I'm going to stop right there, because I'm pretty sure everyone in the universe has seen it by now. Smart and very funny.

Hot Fuzz--The guys who brought us Shaun of the Dead are back (yay!), and this time it's with a hilarious comedy about an overindustrious London cop who gets exiled to a sleepy country burb (his colleagues believe he's making them look bad). The town, of course, turns out to be a little less sleepy and a little more H.P. Lovecraft, although I won't spoil your fun and tell you what I mean by that. I will tell you that this movie is one big homage to American action films, especially the Lethal Weapon buddy film variety, and that its best quality is a magnificent silliness. It seems to be equally comfortable with intellectual humor and bodily function jokes. Plus, you get to see Timothy Dalton chewing up scenery as a diabolical grocery store owner.

Visitor Q--Don't watch this expecting the Broadway show with the puppets--it's not Avenue Q. And don't watch it if you are easily grossed out. In fact, if you're in my list of personal acquaintances, you probably shouldn't watch it at all. It's directed by Takashi Miike, the one who brought us the "kili kili kili" of Audition, and it's just as messed up as that film, if not more so. They call Miike the 'rabid dog of Japanese cinema,' and I can tell you why . . . it's because the man is a complete nutjob. He's wacko. Unlike Audition, though, Visitor Q is not a horror movie. (And unlike The Happiness of the Katakuris, it's not a musical.) This is what it is: vile, disturbing, and amoral enough to put you on a fast track to hell if you so much as giggle. Which you will. Because it's funny. Seriously though, if you're reading this, don't watch Visitor Q unless you can handle a film that delights in smashing every taboo our civilization has ever created.

Flyboys--Ah yes, Green Goblin Jr. is flying again! But this time it's as an American pilot in World War I France. Great special effects, beautifully choreographed dogfights, and a compelling plot. Not sure why this film was overlooked. History buffs will eat it up, and the ladies will eat it up because of James Franco. Also: Jean Reno!

This Film Is Not Yet Rated--Have you ever wondered how the Motion Picture Association of America determines its ratings? Filmmaker Kirby Dick did, and he set out to make a documentary about the process. Problem is, the MPAA kind of operates like a cabal. They refuse to tell him anything about their raters, their process, or their ratings criteria. Naturally, he hires a private investigator, and hilarity ensues! The film itself is rated NC-17, for some harmless sexual scenes (used as examples of the MPAA's inconsistency). It's funny and also eye-opening.

The Prestige--I'll say it again. Christian Bale is one of the greatest actors of our generation. I just love him. From his childhood role in Empire of the Sun to American Psycho and beyond, he has shown himself to be an artist of incredible skill and dedication to craft. He literally starved himself to play the lead in The Machinist, and so it seems appropriate that in The Prestige he plays yet another character who loses himself in a destructive obsession. He and Hugh Jackman portray competing magicians in England just after the turn of the century. It's right at that pivotal time when magic was done with science and science still looked like magic. The plot itself is laid out like a magician's trick, and it keeps you guessing until the end (I nearly swallowed my own tongue with surprise). Also, as you might guess, it's a pretty dark film. But very, very good. Oh yeah, and David Bowie appears as Nikola Tesla. What more could you ask?

My Super Ex-Girlfriend--Where to begin? I hated this movie. It's poorly plotted, poorly paced, sexist, and worst of all, not funny. Say it ain't so, Luke Wilson.

Monster House--Think Event Horizon, but for children. Seriously. This animated movie has a great cast of voice actors. The whole plot feels less like traditional wholesome children's fare and more like one of those bizarre, supernatural horror stories you hear at camp. (By the way, a big thank-you to that brat at Girl Scout camp who told me the creepy story about the three-fingered porcelain doll--I've never forgotten it.) Very entertaining.

Evil Dead: The Musical--I know, I know, this is a musical and not a movie. But I've been listening to it quite a bit lately and it's awesome! Check out the 50s teenage heartbreak song, "All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons." Classic.

Dystopian films and novels are not known for their subtlety. They tend to take one pet concept and hammer it home until your brain feels like it's hemorrhaging grape juice. (Technology BAD! Nuclear weapons BAD!) Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men is a different story altogether. Based on the novel by P.D. James, it's a dystopian story that is not so much interested in the causes of humanity's predicament as in the humans themselves. It's not a manifesto or a parchment containing Martin Luther's 95 Theses. It's not one big chorus of "You'll notice this was all caused by Items 1, 2, and 3 on your Dystopian Checklist." There are explanations as to why the world has come to this, but they aren't discussed at length in the film because they don't really matter. We know there was a massive flu epidemic in 2008. We know that sometime after that women began having miscarriages and then they were no longer conceiving at all. We know that the governments of the world began to collapse (due to despair about the world's future, one would assume), except for Britain. We know that Britain managed to retain control by extricating itself from the chaos of the world, which would only be possible because it is an island and inherently defensible. We know that by 2027--the time the movie is set--there are zillions of people trying to get into this last bastion of civilization, and we know that the British government takes all of them and imprisons them in refugee facilities that are really no more than concentration camps. We don't waste time rehashing how exactly this all came to pass, how personal rights and dignities were sacrificed, how it worsened degree by degree. We accept the premise because it's credible, because we all know this is how people (and governments) react when they feel threatened. The only detail that really matters in terms of the story is that there hasn't been a child born in eighteen years, and there is a profound deficit of hope.

I should add that in this disintegrating future world, there are animals everywhere. Cats, dogs, birds, goats, even deer--everywhere. Whatever happened to fertility, it happened only to humans.

The movie opens by telling us of the death of Baby Diego, the world's youngest person, who was stabbed to death by an enraged fan when refusing to sign an autograph. He was 18. Weary-looking people come in off the dirty London streets to watch the reports on flat-screen televisions. Some of them are crying, some don't even have the energy for that. This is a time when the human race is on its way to extinction. Suicide pills are distributed freely (under the product name Quietus, no less), and it's not uncommon for a bomb to explode in your coffee shop right after you leave. It's the bleakest of futures. Those who keep on living are doing so out of habit.

The movie chronicles the efforts of former anti-government activist Theo (Clive Owen) as he tries to transport a young refugee woman to the care of the Human Project, an ultra-secret group of scientists who study fertility. He's recruited for this task by his ex-lover Julian (Julianne Moore), who is the leader of a radical pro-immigrant organization called The Fishes. What's the reason for this mission? Well, it turns out that Kee (the awesome Clare-Hope Ashitey) is pregnant. Julian believes that the Human Project is the only place where Kee and her baby can be safe, where Kee's fertility can be studied by people who could use that knowledge to provide a future for the human race, and where the baby will not be used as a political pawn. Naturally, this proves to be a dangerous and difficult task. They have to steer clear of the authorities (the army is everywhere), and along the way find themselves at the mercy of a series of strangers, many of whom are not remotely trustworthy. This is an oft-underlined theme in the film, the idea that our very existence can hang on the actions our fellow human beings. It's easy to forget this as we sit at our separate desks and go home to our separate houses, but more often than not we truly have each other's lives in our hands. After all, a society is just a collection of agreed-upon behaviors, and it's a damn fragile thing. Generosity may flourish when things are going well, but as soon as people feel personally endangered, the niceties tend to go out the window.

Jasper Palmer, friend of Theo and former political cartoonist, is one of the few reliable people in the film. I've never been a huge fan of Michael Caine, but I adored him in this role. He's wonderful here: warm, clever, funny, unafraid of a good bodily function joke, and seemingly the last peaceful protester on the earth. Jasper may not have been an authentic first-generation hippie, but he definitely embodies that era's spirit of resistance and dissent. He lives in a remote forest area with his miniature ganja plantation and his wife, who is catatonic. Some newspaper clippings on the wall reveal that she used to be a photojournalist and that she was tortured, but nothing else about this is explained. What matters is that it happened and now she is how she is. Anyway, it's clear that Jasper still loves her. He talks to her and feeds her and is so tender with her that it practically breaks your heart. It's true--Michael Caine has finally won me over. The character he plays is not that of the archetypal hippie sage, who has transcended the follies of humankind and is in the film only to function as a sounding board for the protagonist. Nor is he some kind of blind Tiresias forecasting future events. He's purely human, both noble and flawed, and that's why his choice to resist oppression is meaningful. His very existence constitutes a kind of hope.

Children of Men has none of the rich, earthy tones and vibrant hues of Alfonso Cuaron's earlier works, like Y tu mama tambien. Everything is sort of washed out in appearance, as if the color drained out of the world right along with people's dreams. But the landscape of the film is fascinating, especially where it draws us to notice the intersection of futuristic-looking technology with flagrant decay. The bureaucratic offices contain sleek, partly holographic computers, but the buses and trains everyone rides around in are old and run-down. The cars have a science fiction-y shape to them, but they too appear to be falling apart. You get the feeling nothing new will ever be built. Early in the film, Theo (whose name, you'll recall, translates to God) seeks help from a wealthy cousin who has filled his house with priceless works of art. Michelangelo's David stands in the entryway, his lower left leg blown off. Picasso's Guernica is the backdrop for his dinner table (don't get me started--Guernica is the ideal metaphor for this movie's premise, and I don't want to get too geeky on you all by rambling on and on about it). And something else. While Theo is asking his cousin why he collects these artifacts when pretty soon no one will be around to appreciate them (his response is "I just don't think about it"), you can see through the window a parade-sized inflatable pig hovering over the city. It's an unexpected, surreal tribute to the album cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, and it conveys some of the strangeness of being part of a doomed race that has nevertheless managed to produce so many masterpieces. This idea alone could inspire a dissertation: What is the significance of art when its creators are dying out? And it might only be my imagination, but the balloon also seems to be invoking the spirit of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's dystopian novel about pigs who throw off the shackles of the unjust humans only to become cruel and callous and generally indistinguishable from their former captors. There's a lot of that sort of thing going on with this movie, and it's especially evident in the presence of the Fishes, who started out resisting and gradually evolved into full-on terrorist activities.

Let me briefly mention the use of music in this film. It's thoughtful and elegaic and not overdone. However, I could kill Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for writing "Ruby Tuesday," which makes me cry even when it's not juxtaposed over a scene like the one in the film. I could kill you as well, Alfonso. It wasn't fair to plug that into this movie where you did. Those of us with tender souls never had a chance.

I'm sure it's obvious by now, but Children of Men isn't a film you should bring your children to, even if you think they're not going to pay attention. To say that this film is disturbing is like saying that Jack the Ripper dabbled in crime. There's a whole lot of extremely troubling Holocaust-type stuff here, and also some stuff that could be straight out of the Abu Ghraib photo files. I won't lie to you; it's awful. But it's not gratuitous. It's just brief, brutal, and real.

I haven't talked about Clive Owen yet, but he's perfect in this role. He has a weary and weathered look about him, the classic noirish anti-hero, but he also exhibits an underlying integrity that he seems to wish he didn't have (he knows that life would be a thousand times easier without a conscience). His performance is understated and sincere, and his scenes with Julianne Moore are wonderful. They capture the complex nature of relationships, especially between two people who used to live together but haven't see one another for years. It's revealed that their relationship fell apart shortly after their baby died in the flu pandemic--their life together couldn't survive their grief--but you can see that they still have affection for each other. At times they even lapse into moments of playfulness. And then a seemingly innocent conversation will touch on wounds that have never quite healed, and tempers will ignite in the space of a moment. They are beautiful and broken and so very much like the rest of us. This is one of the things I love about this movie--the whole story is so bleak, bleak as hell in fact, but it's shot through with so much genuine humanity that you feel even more acutely what it means for our species to die out. We're leaving behind wars and evil and torture, but we're also losing marvelous things like Michelangelo and curry chicken and true love. There is a scene toward the end (SPOILER!) where Theo and Kee are stumbling out of a bombed out refugee building with the baby Kee had the night before. The only way out is through the soldiers, who have been pretty much killing every refugee on sight for the past three hours. It's clear that this may be the end of everything, the end of hope. They have no idea what will happen. But they walk out anyway because there is nothing else to do but keep going. Slowly, slowly, they walk down the stairs, bullets flying into the windows and explosions on every side, out of the building. The baby is crying and swaddled in a blanket, her tiny, fragile body a stark contrast to the devastation all around. Seeing this, the soldiers stop dead in their tracks. They don't move to stop them, they just stand and watch, the war at hand utterly forgotten for the moment. Some of them cross themselves. It's like a refashioned nativity scene, and it will take your breath away.

Children of Men shows us what a precarious thing it is to be alive, even in the best of circumstances. But for all its grimness, the film seems to believe we're worth saving. We just have to believe it ourselves. Highly recommended!

This past weekend was one of those glorious winter weekends where you end up doing virtually nothing and loving every minute of it. Nick and I planted ourselves in front of the television Friday night, all warm and cozy (the hot chocolate IV helped a lot), and just knitted until we couldn't knit anymore. It was beautiful. There was a parade of B-movies on the SciFi Channel, and we didn't change the station once the entire time, which was how we ended up seeing the Jeepers Creepers movies. (Pointless Aside: There is an episode of Loony Toons from 1939 with this same title. It features Porky Pig as a bumbling police officer who is called upon to investigate a haunted house. Funny stuff, but not the same premise at all.)

So anyway, I'd never had much interest in seeing either of the Jeepers Creepers films, but there they were and there WE were, and inertia got the better of us. So we watched them, and I'm sorry to say it, but Jeepers Creepers 2 was but a pale shadow of the original. You all know that I believe in the B-movie as an art form all its own, and these movies were on extreme opposite ends of the artistic spectrum. Let's pretend for a moment that the original was a Monet (quite a stretch, I know). This would mean that the sequel was somewhere in the quality range of that watercolor picture I made for my teacher in first grade. (Not only was it the crappiest unicorn you've ever seen, it also leaked all over Melissa's new white jacket when I was carrying it to the front. She was a snotty girl, but I still felt kind of bad about it.)

The original Jeepers Creepers aired first. As I said, I didn't expect much, but it actually turned out to be cool and dark and competently creepy. Here's a synopsis. A brother (played by the Macintosh guy from those Apple commercials) and sister are driving cross-country to see their parents over spring break, when an antediluvian truck comes up on them from behind and tries to run them off the road. When it succeeds, it sails on by them and they think they're safe. But a few miles later they pass this little residence partly hidden by trees, and they see the truck parked there. The driver is tossing bodies into a huge pipe in the ground. Once the driver takes off in his truck again, the brother and sister go investigate because Macintosh thinks maybe someone is still alive and in need of help. Clumsiness ensues, and he ends up tumbling down the pipe himself, where he gets to see firsthand what the driver of the truck was up to. There are bodies everywhere, all stitched together across the wall and ceiling. "Like a psycho Sistine Chapel," he says. But you don't really see it clearly. You don't see much of anything clearly in this movie, which is one of the reasons why it's cool. Rare glimpses of the creature and his handiwork are enough to amp up the suspense, and the camera never lingers on these gruesome sights long enough for us to get used to them. I wish I could say the same for the second movie, but I can't. Forget about all those lessons Hitchcock taught us, about how what you don't see is scarier than what you do. In the sequel, we practically get the full audition portfolio of the villain (who we learn is called The Creeper), complete with headshots. Here's The Creeper cavorting in a field of daisies. Here's The Creeper lounging seductively with a sheet wrapped around his waist. Here's The Creeper in a gabardine suit with a briefcase, looking all official and tycoonish. Look at his range! This boy can do any role you can throw at him. So yeah, basically we see far too much of him in the sequel, and he ceases to be scary in any way. He's more like that annoying neighbor who keeps dropping by and drinking all your beer.

But back to the synopsis. Every 23 years, The Creeper—who is a waxy humanoid monster with giant, bat-like wings—gets to come out and feed for 23 days, after which he has to go into hibernation for another 23 years. Sort of like Brigadoon. When he's out and about, he frightens people so that he can smell them to see if there's a part of their body he wants. (I don't exactly understand the mechanism for this, but it sounds like people give off some kind of 'scared' pheromone that The Creeper can detect.) When he's selected a person whose smell he likes, they become unwilling organ donors. In the first movie, The Creeper chooses one of the siblings (we aren't told which one) and then spends the whole movie chasing them. It's a simple premise, but an effective one.

So flash forward to the sequel. There's a rugged farmer fellow (Ray Wise, who will always be Leland Palmer to me) doing vaguely farm-y things out in a corn field. The camera reveals a dark scarecrow-looking figure in the field, and before long the figure comes to life and absconds with the farmer's younger son. The farmer chases them for awhile, and then the intruder zips up into the sky and disappears. Leland Palmer is pretty pissed about this, as it turns out. He starts making weapons and pounding on an anvil in a menacing way, and we're thinking this movie is going to be all about him getting revenge. Which would have been great.

But then we leap from the farmer family to a bus full of teenagers driving home in a school bus after a big football game, and we realize we're in for an entirely different kind of story. The first guy we meet is a brooding, sandy-haired jock who is complaining to his girlfriend that the coach, who is black, won't let him play because of the color of his skin. Yeah. Way to win over our sympathies right away. Anyway, several of the tires blow out, and when they get out to investigate they find a couple of elaborate throwing star thingies carved out of bone. But nobody's really concerned until the grown-ups start getting sucked up into the sky, and then they are very concerned indeed. The Creeper then hangs like a vampire at the back window of the bus and makes eye contact with some of the kids, who proceed to freak out about it. After awhile, a portion of the ceiling is peeled back like a sardine can, a kid is pulled out through the hole, and we realize that, for The Creeper, the school bus is nothing more than a buffet of brats.

At this point, I'm annoyed. I'm thinking to myself: seriously? This whole movie is going to consist of obnoxious football players/cheerleaders being yoinked out of the bus one by one? Yawn. Except it's supposed to be so much more than that, dude. Because now they're talking about how there are two classes of people, those who have been selected by The Creeper and those who haven't. Mr. White Supremacy decides that those who have been selected need to be removed from the bus so that those who haven't been selected won't be endangered more than necessary. Problem is, Mr. White Supremacy himself seems to have been selected and is in denial about it. It's pretty dumb. So they all argue some more about whether they should segregate the two classes of people and what that would mean for their humanity and stuff. Did I mention they're on a bus? A bus! Get it? Like with Rosa Parks and...ah, forget it. So what we have now is like the high school version of The Poseidon Adventure, people bickering and trying to save themselves at any cost, except that no one really cares if any of these sorry individuals live or die. (Psst. I have a secret to tell you, Mr. Salva. There's more to a horror film than a high body count. All you have to do is give us a couple of characters that we get to know just a little bit and can care about, then put them in a series of dangerous situations. Bam, instant suspense. It's not really that hard. You managed to do it with the first one...remember?)

So this moronic plot continues, and eventually the farmer guy appears and starts kicking some Creeper heinie, but by then no one cares. Most of us have already drunk our toxic Kool-Aid and/or shipped ourselves out to sea on an iceberg in order to avoid having to witness the rest of this travesty. But I've already revealed my secret. You already know I watched the whole thing, so there's no point being cute about it and pretending I switched to Masterpiece Theatre or something. And truth be told, I was actually kind of impressed by what they did with the ending. It's not anywhere as cool as the ending of the first one (which went to such a dark, wry place I could hardly believe it), and it's not even remotely enough to redeem this mess of a movie, but it's got some imagery that I really liked. Check this out: (SPOILER!) It's 23 years later, and the much-older farmer is sitting in a chair in his barn. The Creeper is pinned up on the wall, all Silence of the Lambs-like, and the farmer has a cobwebbed harpoon trained on it, ready to fire when it wakes up. It's cool. Of course, there are some logistical problems with this. Even more so than usual for a B-movie. Since The Creeper has gone back into hibernation, why not just cut him up and send his parts to the four corners of the earth? Maybe shoot some of the pieces into space or stick them in a nuclear reactor. Bury him in concrete. Turn him into a giant acrylic paperweight. Drop him in a volcano. Sell him to the military. Douse him in some liquid nitrogen and smash him to pieces (although this didn't work in Terminator 2 or that Jason Voorhees-in-space movie). Twenty-three years is a long time to come up with a better solution than the one we get in the movie. Still, I like the image of that grizzled old man with his rickety harpoon. I like it so much, in fact, I find myself hoping there's a clone of that guy sitting outside the film studio, waiting to shoot down this franchise if it tries to come to life again.

Superman! Superman Superman Superman! Needless to say, I awaited the opening of this film with tremendous excitement. I was so excited, in fact, that I went to see it at its very first showing, even though Nick was unable to see it with me. I saw it again two days later (Nick was with me this time). And a week after that, I saw it in 3D at an IMAX theatre. Truth be told, I could watch it a dozen more times--in a row even, with my eyelids pried open Clockwork Orange-style--and I'd never ever ever be tired of it. Up till now my personal record for number of times viewing a film in the theatre has been 7 (The Matrix). With Supes, I may actually surpass that record. Thanks to this film, you see, I have ascended to the apex of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I have now reached that sweet spot of self-actualization.

All hail Bryan Singer, the world's great benefactor! Okay, I may be getting carried away, but you get the idea. I loved this movie. It was everything I could have hoped for. It could have gone wrong in a thousand different ways, but somehow it didn't. Somehow it transcended the limitations of the form to become the greatest piece of visual art since the horsie thing stepped on the swoopy-head guy in Picasso's Guernica. Why is it I get all messianic talking about the Man of Steel? Maybe it's because everything about the myth is larger than life, and the language describing it has to be the same. Because true myths are not just stories, you know. They are visions of how we see ourselves as human beings--what we hope for, and what we wish to be.

The film begins with a brief explanation of where Superman has been for the past few years. It seems that five years back, scientists found the remains of Krypton, and Superman immediately took to the skies to see it for himself. Like many adopted children, he essentially went on a quest to find his birth parents, to find that place where he could truly belong and not be an outsider. Now he is back on Earth, burdened with the knowledge that he is the sole survivor of his race, and he has to cope with the way the world and his loved ones have carried on in his absence. These are lonely discoveries for the Man of Steel, and they contribute to the overall sense of melancholy that pervades the film.

But this is not some kind of emo Superman. This Superman is just as charismatic and funny as ever, and his feats and rescues are every bit as impressive as in years past. Maybe more so. And Brandon Routh does a fantastic job of portraying him. With that chiseled jaw and those piercing eyes, he looks as if he was born to play the part. He has the perfect sense of natural poise and, when he's in Kentform, the sense of natural poise trying to disguise itself. As Kent, his mannerisms and nervous tics are an homage to Chris Reeve's interpretation in the 70s films. It's both new and familiar.

Which brings me to another point.

The Superman tale is woven into the fabric of our culture, and that the story simultaneously exists in the past and the present. Superman does not inhabit one point in time; he encompasses an entire continuum. He's much bigger than a single movie, a single comic book, or a single television series. He lives and breathes in our collective subconscious. He is more than the sum of all his parts. Bryan Singer clearly understands this, which is why Superman Returns contains nods aplenty to the 70s movies, including archival footage and recordings of Marlon Brando's majestic Jor-El. Lois Lane still has issues with spelling ("how many f's are in catastrophic?"), and Clark Kent still says "swell." The opening credits were done in the same tubular blue lettering. In addition, much of the clothing and set design was created with a 40s style in mind, hearkening back to Superman's WWII-era origins. The result is really brilliant--it's both modern and timeless. It doesn't feel separate from its predecessors. It feels like an authentic sequel, the natural outgrowth of earlier efforts. And of course, the John Williams score ties it all together, instantly creating the mood, taking us to that happy Superman place in our hearts so that we embrace whatever follows with open arms. With the exception of Superman III & IV, that theme has never led us astray. I get chills whenever I hear it. And when I'm in a dark movie theatre, possibly with a pair of 3D glasses on my lap, that theme makes me positively ecstatic. There's just something about it. Maybe it's because everything we see today is so full of sarcasm and nuanced angst (and being an indie film fan, I do love that), but the Superman theme is just unabashedly majestic, so fearlessly huge in scope. And when combined with the camera's grandiose tour of space from the opening credits, with its supernovas and swoops past ruined planets, it's enough to transport you back to childhood and the kind of awe you had when you first looked up at the night sky and thought about how freaking immense the universe really is.

Anyway, the rest of the cast was great as well. Kate Bosworth made for a good Lois Lane. She's both confident and scattered, affectionate with her family and yet at times completely aloof. Bosworth's Lane is a little more girlie than Margot Kidder's, but she's believable and likable. And of course she retains that insatiable reporter's curiosity that has so often resulted in personal endangerment. It should be noted that all the film versions of Lois are pretty toned down when compared with her portrayal in the comics. The comic book Lois Lane is not just ambitious but outright aggressive, and pretty much fearless. She's kind of scary sometimes, even to me, and it doesn't surprise me that they softened her somewhat for the 70s movies. After all, this was waaaaayyyyy before the era of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and her generation of powerful yet sexy women.

The requisite villainess in this film is Parker Posey as Kitty Kowalski. Miss Tessmucker left some big ... er ... shoes to fill, but Posey does a great job of flouncing around in glammy outfits and being plenty entertaining on her own. She's simultaneously dumb in the expected way ("Like sea monkeys!"), and yet she can produce a bit of stinging sarcasm when the moment calls for it. ("Gee that's really something, Lex. It's freakin' Gone With the Wind.")

Now let's take a moment to talk about Lex Luthor. In fact, here's an impromptu poem about him:

Criminal extraordinaire
Connoisseur of phony hair
Thinks Clark Kent is super square,
Luthor Luthor Luthor!

Like it? I made that up just now.

WHICH ONE IS SCARIER?

(Caveat: The following paragraph may contain traces of SPOILERS. Those who are allergic to SPOILERS should not read on. I mean it. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, stop reading. Okay, well don't say you weren't warned.)

I think it goes without saying that Kevin Spacey was the sort of hardcore Lex Luthor that we just haven't seen in films to date. I loved Gene Hackman's version--I really did--but he always exuded more of a used-car-salesman vibe than one of actual menace. If anything, he was Herb Tarlek gone rogue. (Okay, that's a little unfair ... I suppose I can't hold Hackman accountable for the sartorial eccentricities of an entire decade.) But clothing aside, you never really believed that he would kill millions of people to further his empire. You never saw him physically assault anyone, much less stab them with a kryptonite shiv. Hackman just didn't give us the kind of formidable physical presence that Spacey does. Spacey's Luthor is not just insane, he's cold-blooded. Cutting Kitty's brakes for real when she was just going to pretend--cold-blooded. Threatening SuperKid with a glowing green tube--cold-blooded. Beating the crap out of Superman just because he can--cold-blooded. Spacey plays him like a modern-day Al Capone, flaunting his mischief with a sociopathic twinkle in his eye. It's funny, not long ago I watched an A&E special about the history of Superman, and I learned that it wasn't until the 80s that Lex Luthor made the switch from mad scientist to business magnate. And it makes sense, doesn't it? Within the context of modern life, there is no greater evil than a businessman. Businessmen are smart and ruthless. They're survivors (as we saw from the show of the same name). I think this was a very, very smart change to the lore, because Luthor's primary function is to be a foil to Superman. On some level, they have to be equals in order to balance out the story. Luthor has to be every bit as evil as Superman is good, and his machinations have to produce the kind of threat that is difficult to manage even for (maybe especially for) Superman. Bank robberies and crimus interruptus are one thing, but who can contend with the malevolence of corporate America? As Luthor observes during the film, Superman is great at swooping out of the sky and saving people, but he's not so hot on the details, like making your court date. This is a brave new world, in which red tape can be a sufficient weapon against a red cape.

(Notice: No SPOILERS beyond this point.)

There are several things in particular that impressed me about what Singer did with this film. For one, the physics of everything was rendered properly (at least to my admittedly untrained eye). When Superman lands the plane in the baseball field, he presses into the cone and a ripple goes through the fuselage, at which point he slowly lowers it from its nose-down position. This isn't the fakey one-handed Superman rescue we're all accustomed to seeing. The stuff that happens to the plane prior to this is also consistent with real-world physics (for example, the weightlessness of the passengers as the plane reaches its apex). Later on, a flare appears around his body as he re-enters the atmosphere. And toward the end of the film he goes rocketing through the windows of a skyscraper in order to catch a falling object. This makes perfect sense doesn't it? Superman would naturally choose the shortest path to his destination. But I don't think I've seen it on film before. Touches like this make the film feel more authentic, as if the action is taking place not in some slick movie world, but in our own.

(Ok, there are a few more SPOILERS in this next paragraph. So sue me.)

Another great thing was Singer's use of imagery and symbolism. This is much trickier than it looks. If executed properly, a conscious symbolism can really enrich the texture of a piece. If it's overwrought, we feel we're being bludgeoned by it, which is the way I sometimes feel when reading Toni Morrison (Ok, I get it! The corn is symbolic! Please stop, for the love of God!). For the most part, Singer succeeds in invoking a number of cultural elements without seeming heavy-handed. I mean, we all know that Superman is the quintessential American hero. He spends time all over the world, but everything about him represents American culture. Therefore, when Singer stages his comeback, it's natural that the backdrop would be a baseball field. Soccer and football may be comparatively more popular these days, but baseball carries with it a uniquely patriotic flavor that has not faded through the years, even in the face of decreasing ticket sales. The scene where the bullet crushes against his eye is also iconic. This is what Superman is all about for us. This is why he's a vessel for our collective hopes and dreams. Here you have the most vulnerable part of the body (at least for a PG-13 film), and a bullet can't so much as scratch the cornea. And just think of the part near the end where Superman falls to earth. Yeah, there's a crapload of Christ imagery there. That's really unavoidable with the Man of Steel, for obvious reasons (Jor-El so loved the world that he gave them his only begotten son...). But it's more than just that. It's positively Wagnerian. It's the twilight of a god. It's that little mark on a geologic timeline that signals the end of an era. This is why the scene is not just tragic--it's heartbreakingly beautiful.

Bravo, Bryan Singer. You rock my world.

Now to touch quickly on the romantic elements of the film. Most of Superman's emotional depth (and humanity, if you can call it that with an alien) has always been conveyed through his somewhat schizophrenic, on-again-off-again relationship with Lois Lane. Singer knows this is and smartly makes the most of it, giving us a complex situation in which Lois Lane has moved on with her life in Superman's absence. She has a live-in boyfriend and a son (oh snap!). Oh yeah, and she is fairly pissed at Superman for running off to Krypton without saying good-bye. It's a delicate situation for the film to navigate, and Singer treads a very fine line with it. It would have been so easy for Superman to come off as a homewrecker in this scenario, what with his occasional spying and his seductive aerial invitations. But it doesn't come off this way, and a lot of this is due to the performances of the actors involved, especially James Marsden, who plays the boyfriend. (Yes, he was Cyclops in the X-men movies, although it took me about thirty minutes to realize this because he wasn't wearing the visor.) He does an excellent job of not being all tearful and victimy. His character is attractive, successful, and imminently likable. At some point, of course, it becomes obvious to him that his girlfriend still has feelings for You-Know-Who (and vice-versa), but he carries this burden with an air of dignified melancholy. And the thing is, Lois clearly cares for him, too. It's a very grown-up scenario, one that is not at all black and white, and I appreciate that about it.

Ok, so to sum things up, Superman Returns is the greatest story ever told (apologies to Charlton Heston, of course)! The scope of the film was so much larger than I expected and contains some of the best action movie sequences in recent memory. One thing, though. What was with that blatant ripoff of 2001: A Space Odyssey? You know what I'm talking about, Bryan. The use of all those weirdly anharmonic voices when Superman was carrying that continent thing into space, just like in those monolith scenes. Call it homage if you will, but I'm onto you. Still, it's pretty effective at conveying a sense of eerie alien grandeur, I'll give you that, and anyway I'd rather movies err on the side of being too conceptually big than too small. I guess it's better to have Kubrick as an idol than the Farrelly brothers.

Four sticks of doom! See this film now--your immortal soul will thank you.

I see that ad for The Lake House, and all I can think about is that hideous chunky turtleneck Keanu Reeves is wearing. I want to look away, but I can't. I'm obsessed with it, so I just sit there and watch with the sort of grim fascination usually reserved for slasher films and presidential elections, and when at last the sweater appears—in all its hateful glory—I feel my blood run cold. That sweater is anathema to me. It's appalling, and I can't even say exactly why.

As a general rule, I don't wear these types of sweaters because they make me feel slightly suffocated, but it has never before bothered me when another person chose to wear one. So what, you may ask, is so terrible about this particular sweater? Well, I can tell you that part of it is my personal distate for men in turtlenecks. Something about a man in a turtleneck looks affected and unnatural to me. I mean, what are they going for? Casual WASPiness? Hoping to be scouted for a J. Crew modeling contract? I don't like it. And I think Nick had the right idea about Keanu's sweater situation when he said it was probably the result of the actor bringing a piece of clothing from home, believing it would be perfect for the character. But this was a mistake, and it was the mistake of Director Alejandro Agresti to permit it on the set.

Aside from issues of fashion, however, I really couldn't pinpoint my reasons for disliking the sweater. Maybe it's because the turtleneck looks like a living organism that is about to swallow Keanu's head. I don't know. I just know that looking at it fills me with quiet dread. It's like someone used the Necronomicon to open a portal to hell and this sweater is what came out of it.

If you still don't get what I'm saying, try reading Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" again and substitute the words "Keanu's sweater" for "the old man's eye." Then perhaps you'll understand that the sweater must be stopped, for its every fiber is infused with evil. A pox on this film for unleashing such horrors on the world.

Stay tuned: The Superman Returns review will be incoming soon. Men in capes = good. Men in turtlenecks = suffering beyond measure.

Let me begin by admitting to you that sometimes I exaggerate when it comes to my movie reviews. There, I said it. I know it's shocking, but it's much more fun to criticize movies than to praise them, and at times some of my righteous indignation is souped up a bit for effect. I'd like to assure you that this is not the case today. None of the following vitriol is in any way fabricated; this is one hundred percent pure disdain. The only reason I am dignifying this particular film with a blog mention is that I hope to prevent others from making the mistake I made. Do not see this film. If someone straps you to a chair in front of the screen and pries your eyelids open, force yourself to develop cataracts or something. Seriously. Because if you watch it, it will be the end of the pure childlike soul within you.

The story of my disillusionment began when Nick and I rented movies a few nights ago. We were feeling silly, and so we narrowed down the field to two selections, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Womb Raider: An Erotic Parody. I cannot express in words how much I wish we had opted for the campy soft-core, because watching the former made me feel like I would never be clean again. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was terrible. I really can't explain how terrible it was (although of course I'm going to try). To begin with, I was bored. I was so bored. A mind-numbing, chew-off-your-own-arm kind of bored. About an hour in, I had a wonderful hopeful moment in which I became convinced that the film was nearly over, followed by the crushing realization that that wasn't the case at all. To put it bluntly, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't tell a story. It just sort of vomits on itself.

Watching this film, I was reminded how much we take for granted that our modern storytellers understand the rudiments of filmmaking. As a general rule, I love bad movies, but even the goofiest Bruce Campbell vehicle has a million times more narrative structure and continuity than this. Hitchhiker's was uneven, choppy, and often nonsensical. The editing was terrible—it's as if a monkey got into the viewing room and had an epileptic fit with a pair of scissors. There were scathingly funny lines (straight from the book) that fell flat because of the timing, and scene transitions that came barrelling at you with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. I kept getting flashbacks to the last film that made me feel this way—Dungeons and Dragons (the only thing I liked about that film was the scene where Jeremy Irons is shrieking from the tower, defying the pitiless gods who refused to save him from this godawful role).

It's hard for me to say really what went wrong. I desperately wanted this movie to succeed. I even knew that they were going to change some things from the book, and I had made my peace with that. That's what happened with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, after all, and needless to say I was cool with the result because it captured Tolkien's spirit so well. But Hitchhiker's disappointed me from the first moment. And why, you may ask, was that? Well, I don't think the problem was the cast. Sam Rockwell was hysterical as Zaphod Beeblebrox...exactly as I imagined him. Mos Def was a decent Ford Prefect. Zooey Deschanel was an okay choice for Trillian (I have adored her in other films because of her caustic, slightly bored manner of delivery). And Martin Freeman was good as Arthur, that average, bumbling, yet passingly intelligent guy who is doomed to be a fish out of water for the rest of his life. Oh, and then there's Marvin, the manic-depressive robot. Marvin was voiced by the incomparable Alan Rickman, for whom I've harbored a passionate crush for lo these many years (ever since the first Die Hard...how broken is that?). The voice was great, but I didn't like the way this Marvin looked at all. I tried to be okay with it, I really did. But that weird roundness of his snowman body just didn't work for me. If there's one thing we know about robots, it's that they are built for efficiency, and there is nothing efficient about a cybernetic Wilford Brimley waddling around and taking up valuable real estate on a space ship.

Other things rankled me, too. The plot was altered dramatically to include a love story between Arthur and Trillian. Sigh. We all knew this was going to happen, because filmmakers don't trust women enough to believe we'd go see a movie without romantic overtones. I guess that's why I love the Alien series. Because of the romantic overtones. Same with Apocalypse Now. I watched that for the kissing parts. I'm a girl, you see, and I just won't be interested in your stupid little hitchhiker movie until you introduce some kind of ridiculous and improbable love story. Waa waaa waaa! Make the Arthur doll kiss the Trillian doll! Waa waaa waaa waa waaa!

Idiots.

So yes, I knew the Arthur-Trillian hook-up was coming, and I had determined to make the best of it. The presentation of the love story, however, proved to be uglier than I thought. We're supposed to believe that these two are soul mates because he was the only one at a costume party to realize she was dressed as Darwin. 'See, how he really gets her?' we ask ourselves rhetorically. 'Man, that dude certainly is in tune with that chick.' The thing is, the Arthur we know and love from the books didn't really 'get' any of the other characters, Trillian least of all. Their love story doesn't make sense here. I'll go a step further—it's nauseating. To the filmmaker's credit, however, at least he had the sense not to subject us to some terrifying soft-focus bedroom scene that later could have been repurposed by fundamentalists as proof of the existence of hell.

Some of the things they tried in the movie were really interesting. The claymation sequence, for example. The musical number at the first was daring, too, but it was also so precious and off-putting that I began to indulge in some unhealthy speculations about rat poison. I kept thinking that if Terry Gilliam had made this movie, this weirdness could have worked. But not here. Nothing works here, no matter how cool the concept. It's like some kind of crazy cinematic black hole that gobbles up everything thrown at it. You can throw cool actors at it, ingenious situations, and a whole spectrum of fantastic special effects. But it's still a black hole. It still sucks.

Admittedly, parts of it were not so bad when taken alone. I loved seeing how they rendered Magrathea, with its infinite factory floor on which planets are sculpted. I loved the way they presented Deep Thought and the two wise leaders who approached it. I even thought the Vogons worked pretty well. But the rest of it, especially the parts in which the original story was modified, did not work, and I can't envision an alternate universe in which they would. It's as if they said, 'let's take the Lew Wallace book, Ben-Hur. But instead of a Judean aristocrat who is wrongly enslaved, we'll have a cyborg kung-fu fighter with metal legs as big as tree trunks. And instead of chariot races, we'll have the guys racing around a tank of invisible sharks.' Okay, that would actually be kind of awesome. See what I mean? I can't even come up with a metaphorical situation that is as bad as this movie.

Another thing that really got to me was how they transformed the work of this wonderfully cynical British mind into something very sunny and American. First of all, only the actors portraying Arthur and Marvin are actually British; the rest speak in typical American voices. This is a problem. It should have been obvious to everyone that it would be a problem. The humor of Douglas Adams is quintessentially British, and the fact that people all over the world love his books doesn't mean that they can be removed from their cultural context with jokes intact. (This is why Americans sound like idiots when we repeat Monty Python routines.) There is a subtletly to his writing that just doesn't work when the characters are American. Second, the core philosophy of the books was sanitized and sprayed with a sickening potpourri scent. In this movie, everything (and everyone) turns out happy in the end, and Earth is restored to its former glory with its inhabitants intact. Um...what? The books all hinge on the idea that unthinkable things happen all the time, even things as unthinkable as our home planet being destroyed to make way for a bypass. To make it so the universe magically reverts back to what it was before the bad stuff happened is completely counter to Douglas Adams's own belief system. The only part I can think of where his original philosophy was evident in the film was the part where the missiles turn into a whale and a flower pot, and this is only because I don't think they understood the significance of the scene. You remember: the whale materializes in mid-air, falls through the stratosphere, and has about 30 seconds to come to terms with its existence before it smashes into the ground. It's so funny, and at the same time, so sad. You see, that was what the man's life philosophy was about. That was the source of his humor. He amused us by serving up the darkness and vicissitudes of the human condition with a wry smile. Remember, this is not a man who believed in any sort of heaven. He believed our existence on earth is all we have, as brief, confusing, and frought with heartbreaks as it is. Taking all that into consideration, there is nothing else to do but laugh. What an interesting movie it could have been if they had stayed faithful to that premise. But no, what we get instead is a movie promoting a shiny happy cultist's view of the world in which people always hug after arguments and puppy love conquers all. Yuck.

So finally the movie ended, and then a smug little blurb appeared on the screen: "For Douglas." As a writer, this caused me physical pain. I can just imagine if someone took one of my books and did something like this to it, and then at the end threw me some props because I guess I should be honored by how much they fracked up my story. I'm not exaggerating. What they did to Douglas Adams's beloved book was so perverse that everyone associated with it should be required to notify their community at once (they should also be encouraged to move if their homes are within three blocks of a school). Wherever Douglas is, I hope to god he didn't see this film. I hope he was out getting space donuts or something when this movie was in theaters. I hope the other dead people don't tell him, either, because he deserves better than to know that Hollywood repaid his amazing gift for storytelling with this travesty.

Warning: This blog entry is rife with movie spoilers.

I watched the movie Underworld over the weekend. Somehow I missed it while it was in the theaters, and now, of course, there is a sequel. Ordinarily, I wouldn't hesitate to plunk down money for a vampire film, but in this case there's source material to be absorbed and understood first. What if my negligence caused me to miss out on something critical in the film? Besides, there's something fundamentally blasphemous about watching a sequel before the original. It's disruptive to the natural order of things. As you will be aware, the movie industry pays close attention to market trends, so if sequels start outgrossing originals, then maybe we'll come to a time when a sequel is released to the theater before the original. This conundrum almost occurred with the spectacular success of Terminator 2, but was laid to rest again with the spectacular failures of both Matrix sequels. So anyway, this is why I decided to watch the original of Underworld before venturing to the theater and creating a rift in the space-time continuum. Because I care about the world, and because I don't want the natural flow of time getting all wonky and repeating itself. One Hitler was enough.

But enough about how benevolent I am. Here's the plot of the film.

Selene the Vampire is having a tough time. She lives in the Goth Barbie Dream House, but she spends many of her nights brooding, staring at somebody's tomb, and dodging the unwanted attentions of Kraven, the interim leader of the vampire mansion. (Gee, with the name Kraven, do you think it's possible that he'll display cowardly and self-serving behavior throughout the course of the film?) As for the unwanted attentions, Selene is a warrior and Kraven is a bureaucrat, so anyone could see that they're not very compatible. But the pesky Kraven just won't take no for an answer, pestering Selene with dinner invitations and generally making her immortal life miserable. You know how alpha-vampires can be. (With his shoulder-length black hair and pale complexion, Kraven badly wants to be Eric Draven. But he's just not that cool.)

Anyway, Selene has reason to suspect Kraven is in league with the werewolf leader, Lucian. This is bad, because the werewolves have been at war with the vampires for hundreds of years and any sort of secret pact between the races would be considered treason. Why are they at war? Well, Selene tells us that no one knows because "digging into the past is forbidden." Verboten! At any rate, Selene doesn't know what to do about Kraven, so she "awakens" Viktor, the previous vampire patriarch, who has been hibernating under an ornate manhole cover for a while. Viktor greets Selene affectionately and asks about how her life is going. But all at once he gets really cranky about being awakened ahead of schedule (it seems another patriarch was scheduled to be awakened before him), and he tells Selene that unless she can prove her allegations against Kraven, she'll be severely punished. "You will not be shown an ounce of lenience!" he hisses, implying that such a crime will carry a violent punishment. He's careful to point out, however, that he thinks of her as a daughter and would hate to see her hurt. Hold up there, Mr. Crazy Pants. Seems that someone has developed a multiple personality disorder while hibernating. I guess by this we're meant to understand that Viktor is a ruthless leader of the purest sort who will do whatever it takes to protect the species. Selene is annoyed by his threats, but she tells him it's cool. She'll find some damn proof.

You know, when I started watching this film, it occurred to be that the conflict between these immortal species boiled down to a battle between goths and metalheads. This is Bauhaus vs. Metallica all the way. The vampires sashay around looking pouty and decadent while the werewolves strip down naked and have street fights. See, the werewolves are tough. They're tenacious. But they also live in sewers, which led me to another funny thought. Namely, what if this turned out to be sort of a classist parable, in which the scrappy werewolf proletariat tried to wrest power from the vampire bourgeoisie? Well, oddly enough, this turned out to be pretty close to the truth. See, back when the war began, the werewolves were slaves of the vampires. The war started when Viktor, who was the reigning patriarch at the time, became incensed about his daughter's relationship with Lucian, one of the werewolf slaves. The thought of the "abomination" in her belly caused him to recoil in Lovecraftian horror, and he killed his own daughter in order to prevent the baby from being born. Lucian was seriously peeved about this, and the werewolves rose up and revolted. Bingo: instant war. Now in a microwaveable container.

But back to the story. In the course of her field research, Selene has run into a human surgeon guy named Michael. She notes that the werewolves are pursuing him and takes him hostage to figure out why he is so important to the enemy. At some point she is shot, and during the ensuing car ride she has a spirited discussion with her hostage about whether or not she should go to a hospital. She's like, dude, don't bug me. I'm the one with the gun. He's like, yeah, ok, but what about when you crash the car? You've lost a lot of blood. Then she's like, shyeah, whatever, that's not gonna happen, and promptly loses consciousness. The car flies off the bridge and Michael has to save his pretty vampire kidnapper from bleeding to death and/or drowning. It's one of those charming "how-we-met" stories that they'll bore other couples with for years to come. "You'll never guess how Selene and I met! Well, you see, she was holding a gun to my head...."

So they get away, and before long they discover that not only has Michael been bitten by one of the werewolves, he also has a special kind of blood that the werewolves want to get their hands on. Apparently, something about this guy's lineage means he could absorb both vampire and werewolf blood to become a new kind of species. A vampwolf! Or...I don't know...maybe a werepire. The important thing is that, according to some ancient legend, the resulting hybrid would enable the werewolves to conquer the vampires once and for all. Nasty stuff, indeed!

This is where the plot gets a little unfocused (or maybe I just wasn't able to focus on it). The revelations about the war's origins painted the werewolves as sympathetic figures, and it seemed to me that we were heading for some kind of revolution. But then it turned into a drama about whether Selene could protect Michael from both sides, and whether they could escape together to indulge in their forbidden love. Verboten! So the star-crossed lovers are on the run, with both the vampires and werewolves in hot pursuit. That is, after Selene has changed into appropriate battle attire. What's this? We're going to war? Hold on a sec while I shimmy into a leather catsuit. Ok, cool. Now we can go.

Toward the end, there's a not-quite-epic face-off between Viktor and Michael, who has transitioned from vapid human surgeon to vapid werewolf/vampire hybrid. See, Michael was dying, and Selene was forced to bite him so he'd have the strength to recover or something. Now he has lots of body hair, and something has gone horribly wrong with his rib cage. (Did I mention that the weird make-up makes him resemble someone from the cast of CATS?) Now that he's a super-hybrid he's supposed to be super-strong, but for some reason he's still getting his hindquarters handed to him by Viktor. Selene sighs to herself (why trust a human to do a vampire's job?), and intervenes on his behalf. She executes a comically exaggerated leap through the air over Viktor's head, then holds up her sword, which is dripping with his blood. And then, as you're trying to figure out whether she stabbed him or what, something very bad happens to him. I mean bad. As bad as that opening scene in Ghost Ship. Even the similar scene in Kill Bill was less disturbing, and that's saying a lot. But whatever. I'm sure the teenaged boys in the audience thought it was cool.

Overall, the film was entertaining, and it was as at least visually interesting, especially with regard to Selene's wardrobe (again, I'm sure the teenaged boys will agree). But plot and character? Um, yeah. Not so much. Selene doesn't have much of a personality, which on its own is forgivable because this is sort of the tradition for heroes of this genre. If you remember, Blade wasn't exactly loquacious, but he got away with it because other people in the film DID have entertaining personalities. Whistler anyone? In Underworld however, the love interest has nothing much going for him, either, except for his hippie hair and generic, cover-of-a-romance-novel looks. I'm sorry, SOMEONE needs to have a personality for this schtick to fly. I found myself enjoying the evil vampire overlord more and more, simply because he was doing and saying interesting things. The problem is, this particular narrative is supposed to be a supernatural Romeo & Juliet, in which we are meant to sympathize with the misunderstood lovers and root for them to get together. But it's kind of hard to do that when they go all Natural Born Killers on us, and destroy every living thing in the tri-state area with all the emotional involvement of a box of rocks. I mean, what if Lancelot and Guinevere had fire-bombed Camelot? What if Jack and Rose had found some tommy guns on the lower deck of the Titanic and pumped the other passengers full of lead before that iceberg ever slid into view? It'd be funny, sure, but would you still care about their happiness? I'm guessing not.

What if James Bond had been a cowboy instead of a spy?

Well, for starters, he would have a country twang. Every use of "Bond, James Bond" would be preceded by a hearty "Howdy, Ma'am." Rather than reporting to the good folks at MI-6, he'd be comparing notes with the head wrangler at the Lazy M Ranch. He would take his whiskey shaken not stirred. All of his cavorting and intrigue would take place on cattle drives and in saloons. It'd be fun.

Let's take a moment and look at how the Bond films might have been different if their protagonist had been a cowboy:

From Dodge City With Love

On His Marshal's Secret Posse

Goldfinger (Same title, except now it's about Sutter's Mill)

The Cattlehand Who Loved Me

License to Rope

GoldenEarp

Dr. Novocaine (About Doc Holliday, naturally. You knew who was a dentist, right?)

A View to a Necktie Social

Peacemaker

The Man with the Golden Boot

Tom Mix Never Dies

Octopussy the Kid

For Your Saddle Only

The Oklahoma Territory Is Not Enough

And so on. Of course, the dialogue would have to be modified to reflect the genre:

"Are ya waitin' fer me to talk?"

"No sirree, Mr. Bond, I'm waitin' fer ya to die."

Actually, the more I consider this the more I think there's something to it. Wouldn't it be fascinating to reinterpret all this spy vs. spy material through the lens of the Wild West? It's not as if there are so many substantive differences. They're both about stoic loners who engage in violent behavior for an honorable cause. They're both about men who change their women as often as their socks (more often, in the case of the cowboy). It'd be a pretty simple conversion, really. Got a nuclear weapon in the hands of a bunch of nihilistic political separatists? Substitute a bank robber with a pack of dynamite. Thrilling car chase through the French countryside? Make it a buffalo stampede, and you're gold.

Does anyone out there have the interest and temerity to bring this dream to life? Or maybe—just a thought here—I could generate interest in the highest levels of the industry. I'm envisioning an Indiana Jones-type feel to these, so perhaps I could persuade George Lucas to take on this project. You know, since he's all finished with the Star Wars films and everything. Wait, he is done with them, right? Anyway, I'm sure things are getting pretty quiet on the Skywalker Ranch, so maybe I'll head over there to pitch the idea. I have heard, however, that he sometimes shoots people on sight. So, Gentle Reader, if I end up dead in the next few months, you'll know George Lucas did it. Please don't let him get away with it (the way he got away with making Greedo shoot first). He's a smooth talker, that George Lucas. He'll swagger up to the witness chair in his uniform and terrify everyone with his bravado and his profanity. Don't let him pull rank on you, or tell you that if it weren't for him the entertainment industry would be a shambles. At some point he'll probably tell you that you can't handle the truth. But don't ease up. Press him until he screams in your face that he did the deed. I have faith in you, because deep down I know you're going to make one hell of a trial lawyer. Your father would have been proud.

Hmm. Maybe the movie should be about that.

—One stick of doom

The Deer Hunter was the feelgood movie of 1978.

Yes, and if you buy that one, you might just believe the advertising hype concerning The Fog, and how it's a breathtaking thriller that you simply must see. Such a claim is comical, because really, this is the sort of film you shouldn't watch unless you have been strapped to a theater chair—your eyelids pried open like Alex de Large—and the poison gas mechanism stored in your false tooth will not deploy.

In other words, it's pretty bad.

The first thing you should know is that this is a remake of a 1980 John Carpenter film. Mistake numero uno. What I'd like to know is, who thought it was a good idea to remake a John Carpenter film? I adore John Carpenter. I think he's got a great, morbid sense of humor and a skill for transforming even the campiest premise into something downright creepy. I mean sure, The Fog wasn't one of his best. It was no Halloween. It was no Escape from New York. It was not even as good as that movie he made where James Woods was a vampire slayer. But John Carpenter at his worst is still better than this new version of The Fog, which features nothing more scary than a levitating knife, some adhesive seaweed, and the possible end of Selma Blair's career.

Here's the thing. Every horror film has its own rules, its own system of logic. This is even more critical when it comes to the supernatural. If there is a reason for the ghosties to be mad, then their wrath must be visited upon their victims in a way that is consistent with that reason. Likewise, if the perpetrator is a sociopath, or the undead manifestation of a sociopath, you can get away with a wide swath of indiscriminate destruction. This isn't that difficult. The criminal just has to fit the crime. But nothing in The Fog makes any sense, even in terms of the rules it has itself constructed. It's like it was written by committee. Maybe it was the result of playing the "exquisite corpse" game, in which each person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, then folds that portion down so that it cannot be read by the next contributor. Or maybe it's the fact that the director, Rupert Wainwright, used to direct MC Hammer videos. It's hard to say.

Okay, here are some snapshots of the story. And yes, I'm including spoilers (although, if you do go see this film, I think you'll agree that it was a bit spoiled to begin with). The setting is a small island off the coast of Oregon. We learn from the start that the place was founded by four men in the 1870s, and that they have a lot of descendants running around. The primary characters are as follows. There's Nick Castle, a young, dark-haired young fisherman, played with confused intensity by Tom Welling (Superman from Smallville). There's Elizabeth, his mysterious blonde girlfriend who wears a Sergeant Pepper jacket and likes seaweed wraps. There's sultry-voiced Stevie (Selma Blair), Nick's other girlfriend, who plays records from a studio in the lighthouse and has a kid who makes cute, prescient statements like "it wants us." At the beginning, Nick and his token black friend, Spooner, are out in their fishing boat when their anchor disturbs ... well, I don't know exactly what it disturbs. Some kind of wreckage on the ocean floor. I really don't have any idea what it is. All I know is that it reminded me of that burlap bag Perseus used for carrying Medusa's head around. This is the first of many things that shouldn't have been funny, but were. Anyway, shortly after this event, weird things start to happen. A sudden fog rolls into town, and Tom Welling starts to brood. Girls in bikinis die. Elizabeth has flashback dreams of a 19th century boat burning, and corpses talk to her. All standard stuff. Basically, we learn that the four founding fathers did some very nasty things to a bunch of lepers a century ago, and the lepers are back for a little old-fashioned revenge.

Question #1: Why did the ghosts wait 130 years to exact their revenge? This whole business about "the sins of the fathers" could have been avoided if they had just taken out their anger on the guys who actually were responsible for their deaths. Why did they wait? Did it take them that long to get organized? Did they have to keep stopping so one guy could go to the bathroom? Did they maybe forget what had happened for awhile, until Superman's anchor reminded them and they got all pissed off again? I just don't get it. With all the resources the afterlife has to offer, it's hard for me to imagine that these guys couldn't have gotten their revenge in a more timely fashion.

Question #2: If their primary goal was to avenge themselves on the descendants of their betrayers, why all the other indiscriminate killing? In other words, why did the bikini girls have to die? I know, I know. Horror movies are all about puritanical morality, so I understand that it's their exposed flesh that dooms them. It's one of the classic horror imperatives (dating back to Hammurabi's Code, I believe). But it was never established that these girls bore any relation to the founding fathers, so their deaths are inconsistent with the stated goals of the ghosts.

Question #3: There's an alcoholic Irish Catholic priest, spouting revelatory scriptures and warning everyone to get the hell out of town. I want to know how they ever came up with a character so mind-bogglingly original. I mean, it's not like we've seen this same character type in countless horror films through the years. Oh wait....

Question #4: Can you really get away with cheating if one of your girlfriends turns out to be (possibly) a ghost? From the first, we learn that Nick Castle is a player. Early on, he and Spooner (who gets unfairly jostled around while on a boat with the bikini girls) have a conversation about whether Elizabeth knows about Stevie. This sets us up for a bit of interpersonal drama. But once all three are on screen together, not a one of them behaves as if anything is at all awkward or odd. There's no "what is she doing here?!" There's no "I can't believe you were doing this behind my back!" Nope. The women don't comment at all. When Nick shouts, "Get in the car—we have to go get Stevie!" Elizabeth obediently climbs into the car without a word, an expression, or, apparently, a solitary thought in her head. At this point, Nick gets to run around with both women hanging off his arm, helping them out of one desperately silly situation after another. Really, all three of them exude the kind of vacuousness usually reserved for brainwashed cultists. At least in Elizabeth's case, she has the alibi of being (possibly) a somewhat corporeal ghost to begin with. (You may think this sounds confusing, but until you've seen The Fog, you have no idea.)

I love bad movies. You all know this about me. But this film wasn't bad in a good way. It tried to be all serious and scary, and it only succeeded in being boring. Just stop for a moment to think about what I'm saying. This is from the woman who is terrified of malfunctioning music boxes. This is from the woman who quite literally lay awake all night after watching Ringu, paralyzed with fear that some straggly-haired moppet was crawling out of the television at that very moment. Put simply, I'm excitable. But even given my predisposition to be scared—my desire to be scared even—I felt not even the faintest frisson of concern for these stupid characters on their stupid island getting killed by stupid ghosts. Next time, ghosties, don't camouflage yourselves in low-hanging clouds of condensed water vapor. Just come right out in all your ghoulish glory and let us see you for what you are. We promise not to laugh at your outmoded clothing and Johnny Depp hair.

In short, I would advise you not to see this movie. You can get a better fog from a hangover, and the hangover would be more pleasant.

Saturday afternoon, Nick and I were feeling pretty bored. It was hot outside, and our usual industrious spirit (haha) had gone the way of the parachute pant. This is how we ended up anchored to the sofa for hours on end, watching John Carpenter's Body Bags on television.

We'd never heard of this movie, but how could we not give it a chance? After all, we're talking about John Carpenter, the man who brought us the Halloween films, Escape from L.A., Big Trouble in Little China, and—my personal favorite—They Live. This is a man with vision. True, it may be the sort of vision you'd have if you drank a bottle of Jagermeister and visited the Mutter Museum, but it's vision, nonetheless.

Body Bags is presented in a narrative format and features three horror vignettes. The first one includes Louis from Revenge of the Nerds (who is apparently the dad on Lizzie McGuire). The second one stars Mike Hammer (yes, I know that's not his real name). And the third one...well, the third one has Luke Skywalker. The narrator, a deathly pale coroner played by John Carpenter himself, introduces each segment with the kind of campy, comic enthusiasm that should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched Tales from the Crypt or any of those other late-night gems. Morbid puns abound.

The first segment was classic hitchhiker-brand horror stuff, depicting a young woman who runs the graveyard shift at a remote gas station. As she's showing up for work, she just happens to hear on her radio that there is a serial killer loose in the area. You don't say! Overall, this segment is so predictable you feel like you could almost quote the actors' lines along with them. But this familiarity got me thinking about why it is that certain horror devices work on our brains in the first place. After all, most horror films hash over the same-old storylines: haunted house, vampires/zombies, possessed dolls, teenagers out camping by the lake, etc. Every year, a deluge of horror films pours into the theaters fitting one of these existing formulas, and people flock to see them each time, even though they offer very little in the way of innovation or originality. You'd think people wouldn't be scared by this stuff anymore. But watching this tired old serial killer premise, I realized that these stories are using known techniques to grab at something primal in our brains. One of the most effective techniques a horror film can utilize is the creation of a safe place for the hero or heroine (in this case, it was the gas station booth), which is a fulcrum for the viewer's sensation of danger. It all seems rooted in the childlike need to have someplace that is protected, a home base that you can touch in order to be impervious to all harm. The brilliant thing about this is that by creating this one sanctuary where you believe with all your heart that no harm can come to the character, everything outside its perimeter seems that much more terrifying. We see the tiny gas station booth glowing like a beacon of safety in the midst of utter darkness—an architectural triumph of good over evil. And when our heroine is forced to leave her impenetrable fortress, as we know she will have to sooner or later, the viewer knows instinctively what's at stake. (I know it's weird that this is the kind of stuff I think about when watching horror films, but I can't seem to help it.)

The second segment of Body Bags was about Mike Hammer's thinning hair. This was by far the funniest segment of the three, and a good portion of it was spent just showing this character as he tries to camouflage his thinning locks using everything from comb-overs to spray-on hair. In desperation, he finally visits the office of a doctor who has been advertising a revolutionary method for permanently regrowing natural hair. (The doctor is the villain from Time Bandits, and in my experience, his presence in any film is shorthand for EVIL.) When Mike Hammer inquires about what is in the revolutionary new formula that will be applied to his follicles, he is told simply, "it's patented." Danger, Will Robinson! But Mike Hammer doesn't give this a second thought. He undergoes the procedure, and the next morning, he unwraps his bandages to find he has grown a mane of long, rock-star hair that reaches to his waist (the style he selected was called "the Stallion"). I won't give away what happens next, because you might want to see it for yourself. Haha, who am I kidding? None of you are ever going to watch this movie. So here's what happens. The new hair changes Mike Hammer's life, just as he hoped it would. But before long, it's growing abnormally quickly and sprouting from weird places, like his nose and inside his mouth. Also, the tips are twitching in an oddly lifelike way; when he trims his hair, he hears these weird little shrieks. Finally, he wakes one morning to discover hair growing all over his face, including on his forehead and under his eyes, and he storms into the doctor's office, demanding an explanation for what has happened. This is when Dr. Sinister calmly says to him, "you earthlings are so predictable." What, what, what?!!! That's right, there are a bunch of aliens on earth, and the only thing they can eat is human brains. They implanted these freaky parasitic worms onto Mike Hammer's head so as to harvest his gray matter more easily. The reason he had hairs coming out his nose, mouth, and forehead is that these little wormy parasites had already grown through his brain. Zoinks!

The third segment, set somewhere in the South, begins sort of like Major League and finishes up like Stir of Echoes. The easiest way to explain the gist of this section is to tell you about this weird, pulpy novel I read as a teenager. It was called "The Hand of Cain," and in the book, a murderer's hand was surgically implanted onto his brother's wrist. As you might expect, the brother found that his new hand made him want to kill people. This is almost exactly what happens in the movie, except that it's an eye and not a hand. At the first, successfull baseball player and family man Luke Skywalker gets in a car accident (whoah, just like real life!), and he loses an eye. After the transplant of his new eye (which is a generous donation from a man who was just executed for multiple murders), he starts seeing freaky things and digging in the backyard for hours at a time. Eventually, he decides killing people would be a rather good idea. Now, Luke and his wife are a religious pair, and I figured out pretty quickly that we were headed for a fantastic biblical tie-in with this whole eye thing. The movie did not disappoint in this respect. At the very end, Luke looks meaningfully at a pair of garden shears. The next moment, we see drops of blood spattering on the pages of an open Bible. The camera closes in on the page, revealing the passage: "if your eye offends thee, pluck it out." Didn't see that coming. HAHAHAHAHHA. Yep. Campy campy campy.

Well that's about it. John Carpenter's Body Bags is mild-schlock, Saturday afternoon horror fare. I'm not recommending it—I just wanted to tell you about it. If you want a film that's actually interesting, complex, and provocative, you should watch Melvin Goes to Dinner.

I'm one of the multitudes who have grown increasingly disenchanted with the Batman franchise. About the time Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone hit the set, I lost all hope for its redemption. But then the previews for Batman Begins came out and, in spite of myself, I was intrigued. So last week, on a dark and stormy night, Nick and I made our way to the theater and plunked down our eight and a half bucks. We were not disappointed. Forget the original Batman campfest. Forget the increasingly painful sequels. The new Batman is dark, like the graphic novels, and really, really good.

For one thing, I don't think Christian Bale has ever done a bad movie. (A possible exception is Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which looked to be no more than a vehicle for Nicholas Cage's crappy Italian accent: "Bella bambino, 2 o'clock!") But Bale is very picky about his scripts, and once he's selected one, he's obsessively committed to the role. (See my review of "The Machinist" for further detail on this.) The fact that he signed on for Batman Begins gave me tremendous cause for optimism. As I expected, he was great. We also have compelling performances from Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine (adding a spark of humor and depth to the character of Alfred), Liam Neeson, and Gary Oldman. Ms. Scientologist Katie Holmes also appears as the D.A.'s assistant who was friends with Bruce Wayne as a child and has grown into a convenient love interest. She comes off as a little too silly and idealistic here, but overall she's not a bad choice. I would have preferred someone a little more multi-faceted, but then again, if I had my way, Maggie Gyllenhaal would be playing every female lead until the end of time. So there. Oh, and I should also mention that the film is directed by Christopher Nolan, who brought us the freaky, mind-tripping Memento a few years back.

Typically, superhero origin movies are pretty unbalanced. That's the way I felt about the first X-Men film, which painstakingly chronicled the convergence of our favorite mutant heroes before spewing out an embarrassing "action" sequence in the last ten minutes. Other times you get the half-n-half problem, where Part I is childhood/adolescent drama and Part II is nailbiting action—like two different films were randomly spliced together. You would almost think it was impossible to develop a hero in a compelling way and still have time for a decent amount of excitement. But Batman Begins never once feels out of balance or rushed. It unfolds at its own pace, the shift from hero-genesis to action is seamless and, somehow, there is ample time for the face-off between protagonist and villain.

(DANGER: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS.)

And speaking of villains, Batman Begins features the Scarecrow, one of the second-tier villains who nevertheless creeped me out in a first-tier kind of way. Scarecrow's alter ego is asylum director Dr. Jonathan Crane, and the actor they picked to play him (Cillian Murphy) is perfect. Remember him from 28 Days Later? No, the zombie film, not that stupid rehab thing. Anyway, he has these weird blue eyes that look unbelievably sinister; they seem to radiate an eerie blue fog reminiscent of a post-spice Muad'Dib in David Lynch's Dune. Before I knew he was the villain, I remember thinking to myself, "Why in the world did they pick this guy for a throwaway role? His eyes are so creepy and distracting." Soon it became clear that this was the intent all along. As the director of the city asylum, he dons a burlap "Scarecrow" mask and experiments on his patients using an inhaled hallucinogenic that induces panic. This results in a phenomenon Nicks referred to as "insane-o-vision," in which we get to see freaky, surrealistic images that approximate what the victim is seeing while under the influence of the hallucinogen. These are some truly impressive effects, and—thankfully—they never get too campy.

Of course, the great thing about Batman as a hero is that he is just a regular guy, with no superpowers (unless being rich is a superpower). He does benefit from a lot of cool technology, though, and this film shows us exactly where he gets it. The body portion of the Batsuit is a piece of prototype armor developed for desert warfare but deemed too expensive for large-scale distribution. The Batmobile is an armored vehicle more like an aerodynamic tank than a car. But the most important accomplishment of the film is that we get to see who Bruce Wayne is as and was a person. We see him as a frightened child, a reckless and bitter adolescent, and a troubled young man who would rather rot in some Asian prison camp than face the painful truths about himself. The other movies only dared to show us Batman at a point of smug self-actualization, where a bloodless Keaton/Clooney/Kilmer could deliver witticism after witticism without even a sliver of vulnerability showing through. But it's almost like director Christopher Nolan decided to pretend these other films didn't exist, so determined was he to get to the core mythos of the Batman legend. And I think he did exactly that. In one scene, Bruce Wayne explains to Alfred about his planned transformation, saying that although a man can be defeated, cast aside, or trivialized, a symbol cannot. "As a symbol," he says, "I could be incorruptible." This is what it's all about, really. This is why the character has always resonated with people through the years—he's the flesh-n-blood everyman who takes on the gods, and is therefore a better vessel for our own dreams of greatness. This Batman learns to use theatricality to spread fear among the enemy and inspire hope among the good guys. And he chooses a symbol that is personally frightening to him because of a childhood incident and because, in a sense, it represents his sense of guilt concerning the death of his parents. This is pretty deep stuff for an action movie. For any movie, really.

(Sidenote: Bruce Wayne never specifies whether the bat he has in mind is of the fruit, vampire, or Northern Yellow variety. Sorry to disappoint the chiroptologists out there.)

Anyway, check out Batman Begins. You'll find yourself wondering what might have happened if this film had been made first. At the very least, we would have been spared Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. Talk about insane-o-vision.

It should come as no surprise to any of my readers that on my last visit to the video store, I picked up the two titles with the strangest cover art I could find. This is one of my favorite methods for movie selection, although sometimes I prefer to just close my eyes and grab something random from the cult section. But the cover art method is how I ended up watching A Tale of Two Sisters, a South Korean horror film, and Acne, a black and white film about teenagers who mutate because of the oil leakage in their drinking water. I could not have found a trippier couple of films.

Let's start with A Tale of Two Sisters, because this is the one I watched first. Directed by Kim Jee-woon, A Tale of Two Sisters is one of the most visually arresting films I've seen. Every shot is beautifully composed, but not a single one looks contrived. Watching it, you just believe you're peering into a universe of heightened aesthetics. It's got some of the vibrant colors of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but mostly the palette is much darker: rich browns, and the nebulous deep ochre of shadows. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.

Here's the story. Two sisters, Su-mi and Su-yeon (played by Im Soo-jung and Moon Geun-young, respectively) come with their widowed father to live with their wicked stepmother, who is an obsessive perfectionist with a frighteningly shrill voice. She fits the fairytale template so well that when things start going wrong, it doesn't occur to you to suspect anyone else. But pretty soon it becomes apparent that she can't be solely responsible for the malevolent vibe in the house. She begins seeing things, too, and she's every bit as terrified by these apparitions as the two girls. Things get weird and bloody in a hurry, and you're forced to question your own sense of what is really happening.

Now here's the funny part—I watched this movie without subtitles. Haha! Crazy huh? The thing is, our DVD player has been pretty moody lately, and we keep falling prey to its stubborn idiosyncrasies. On the night in question, the player was refusing to display subtitles. I went through the set-up menu at least 10 times, but no matter how many times I clicked on "give me English subtitles please," it did nothing. Nick gave it a shot, too, but even his technological Jedi mind tricks couldn't compel the player to do what were asking of it. In the end, I decided to just watch for a few minutes and then turn it off. It's a testament to the skill of the actors and the gothic, opium-dream look of the film that I continued to watch, even when I didn't know what the hell the characters were saying.

With most horror films—or, I should say, with most cheap-o American horror films—watching without understanding the dialog would not be a problem. They're so crammed full of visual cues that you'd have to be drunk, high, AND deceased not to understand what's going on. But A Tale of Two Sisters is one of those movies with a somewhat fractured narrative—with alternating versions of reality depending on whose perspective you are privy to—and I have a feeling that even with subtitles it would be tough to piece together. Oh, and did I mention that it's scary? Well, it is. There's a general creepiness imbuing the most mundane scenes, and during the scary scenes . . . well, let's just say it might be helpful to pick up a defibrillator on the way to the video store.

Next, we have the 2005 movie Acne, which was written, directed, and produced by indie film icon Rusty Nails. The film is like a 1950s B horror movie with a punk flair. It's funny, smart, and heavily symbolic, with a not-so-hidden message about the ruthlessness of certain commercial entitites. At the beginning, we are introduced to a teenaged brother and sister, Franny and Zooey (can you see where this is going already?), who become afflicted with a strange mutation in which the tops of their heads burst open like zits. The resulting condition looks sort of like a buzz cut, but instead of hair there is just an odd corona of upright skin. It's pretty vile, really, especially when they have to feed themselves, which they can only do by rubbing oily foods on the tops of their heads. Heh heh. Are you intrigued yet?

Anyway, this all turns out to be a conspiracy engineered by Mershey chocolate, oil companies, and the military, who deliberately introduced oil leakage into the water supply of a small town. The condition only affects teenagers because they have just the right amount of oil in their bodies, and so what we see is kids wandering the streets like zombies, lumbering into convenience stores and rubbing candy bars on their heads. They do have moments of clarity, but not many. Oh, and we learn that the military is standing by, waiting to wipe them out if they get out of hand. One scene shows an angry military commander grousing to himself about how nowadays you have to have a reason to kill and that he wishes he could bring the liberals "a G. Gordon Liddy sandwich." He then gets on the phone with the oil company rep, who tells him they need to re-introduce the contaminants into the town's water supply. When the commander hangs up, he mutters aloud: "man, those oil people have no souls." This bit of satire is so explicit it's pretty much inked across his forehead. But it's funny, so it works.

Throughout their trials and tribulations, Franny and Zooey engage in a number of comical, intellectual discussions about the world and their essential powerlessness in it. All of this culminates in what is possibly the greatest line spoken in recent cinematic history, "why couldn't we have been like Kerouac and Cassady, without the pusheads?" It's awesome.

FYI: The DVD also features several short films by Rusty Nails, including a hilarious one called "El Santiago." Get thee to a video store.

Rarely have I been so excited to see a film, then so disappointed to hear the reviews of it (both professional and anecdotal), then so delighted with the film itself. This is exactly the progression I experienced with Shaun of the Dead, and I have to say I'm baffled that people don't like this film. Sure, it's darker than I expected, but it's phenomenally funny, original, and just messed up enough to haunt you a bit—in a good way—mostly. Directed by Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead seems to be just as much about everyday trials and minutiae as it is about an epidemic of dead people who eat the living. It's like Monty Python combined with George Romero combined with The Office. (Incidentally, the film also features Lucy Davis, known to fans of The Office as receptionist Dawn Tinsley.)

The film opens with a montage of mundane city scenes, showing people standing in line, riding on the bus, and generally looking like zombies already. This sets the stage for our introduction to 29-year-old Shaun, who works as an assistant manager in an electronics store and is mercilessly ridiculed by his teenaged coworkers. He means well but just can't get his life together. He keeps forgetting to visit his mother, and his girlfriend Liz breaks up with him because he takes her to the same pub every night, even on their 3-year anniversary. Shaun needs something to jolt him out of his rut. And when you think about it, what better motivator could there be than a worldwide zombie apocalypse?

For a long time, Shaun's bumbling obliviousness prevents him from seeing what's going on around him. He passes familiar faces in the street but doesn't notice that they're zombies. He goes into the corner store for his morning beverage and doesn't notice the huge bloody handprint on the freezer case glass. It's 40 minutes into the film before Shaun and his slacker friend Ed finally realize that something has gone "a bit pearshaped" with the world. This doesn't occur until they see a zombie girl in their yard, and even then, they think she's just drunk. It's when she improbably survives being impaled on a drain spout that they get spooked, and by then there's a second zombie in the yard. So with a kind of confused resourcefulness that they display throughout the film, the two young men drag out a box of records and begin pelting the zombies with them, all the while having a hilarious discussion about which ones should be saved (hint: Dire Straits, Purple Rain, and Sade do not make the cut). Once they have dispatched the zombies, Shaun formulates a plan to rescue his mother and ex-girlfriend from their respective homes and take them back to his favorite pub. Their only conscious rationale for choosing the pub as a refuge is that it's familiar, it has heavy bolt doors, and Ed can smoke there. They have not thought it out any further, a problem that becomes immediately apparent once the group is assembled in the pub, eating peanuts in the dark. This is where things get weird. This is where we see a bizarre, choreographed fight scene (to the cheerful strains of Queen, no less) spliced with moments of intense pathos. This is where we hear a lot of impeccably articulated profanity. And this is where we get some lethal doses of classic British humor, humor that is so arid it makes the Sahara look like an ideal setting for hydroponics research.

One caveat: When the annoying, supercilious guy is dragged out into the street by a coterie of zombie raiders, you should probably close your eyes. Trust me on this: just keep 'em closed until the dude stops screaming. You'll sleep better at night.

Nick Frost as Shaun's friend Ed is hilarious. He's a beer-bonging, Playstation-doting, ambitionless sloth for whom properly timed bodily emanations are the ultimate art form. He's a buffoon, but he's ultra-likable. One of my favorite moments (and one that I think is representative of the film as a whole) occurs when the zombies are actively trying to break into the pub. Ed notices that their peevish flatmate Pete is among the ranks of the undead attackers, and he's so delighted that he can't help dragging Pete inside to show his best friend. "Hey Shaun!" he says with a laugh, his arm draped around the zombie's shoulders. "Look who it is!"

How can you not love a guy like this? How can you not love a movie like this?

The other day, I was in a taxi with an MGM executive who just happened to leave behind a piece of paper. Curious, I took a look at it and was astonished by what I read. For your edification, I have reprinted it verbatim.

Horror Movie Development Worksheet

A. Steal. Just rip off an idea from a rival movie company, and make enough minor changes that you can claim you thought of it first. For example, if their film is about man-eating alligators, make yours about man-eating crocodiles. Then when you are asked about it, you can look like a veritable zoologist. "They're totally different reptiles," you'll say. "While the alligator and crocodile have certain similarities, the crocodile can never fully close its mouth, so the teeth are always visible, a fact which lends itself much better to the horror genre. Compared with crocodiles, alligators look downright jovial."

B. Horror Movie Mad Libs

A group of sexually active teens pulls up at a ___________. They meet a mysterious __________, who warns them not to visit the nearby ____________. But the teens laugh it off and head straight for the ____________ anyway. It's old and creepy and they start to explore, breaking off by couples. One of their group, incidentally the only person without a date, is a practical joker, and the first couple thinks he is responsible when a ____________ bursts in with a _______________ in his hands. But it's no laughing matter they discover, as the intruder proceeds to _____________ them, so that when the next couple come in, they see ________________ hanging from a __________. The second couple arrives and runs into the basement, which is festooned with _________. They try to run out, but are neatly dispatched with a _______________. The third couple is smarter than the others. They devise a plan to trap the _________________, and the plan seems to work. The booby trap captures the _________, and just when you think they're going to get away, here comes a second _____________ (the mysterious ______________ from the first scene) with a _______________ as sharp as a ________________. They are _________________ in one slice.

C. Remake a horror classic. Points for irreverence will be awarded to those remaking Hitchcock. You think they liked Strangers on a Train before? Think how much they'll like it when it's starring Chris Kattan and Melissa Joan Hart.

D. Adapt a popular video game for the screen. Any game is fair game, as long as it involves vampires, zombies, or werewolves, and is anchored by a reasonably incomprehensible plot.

E. Think The Shining, but set in:

1. A spaceship
2. Congress
3. A battle cruiser
4. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
5. A dirigible
6. Burger King
7. Dave Mustaine's living room

F. Essay

In 500 words or less, describe the single scariest dream you've had. Now add a creepy child, a deformed killer with a catchy name, and a corporate cover-up. You've got a winner!

Nick got me the DVD of Blade: Trinity for my birthday because he knew how much I loved the original. So Saturday night, we sat down with some popcorn and Entenmann's donuts and settled in for some serious camp. Here's a not-so-quick rundown.

Wesley Snipes is great, as always. He's cool, unflinching, and he's given some new toys in this movie. There's a device that looks like a crossbow, but features some laser thing that is half as hot as the sun and can cut through vampire flesh like butter. Nothing's as cool as his signature swirly blade thing, but this new melee weapon comes pretty close. Jessica Biel plays Abigail Whistler, the original Whistler's daughter (still no mention of Whistler's mother). When Blade mentions that he thought Whistler's family was killed by vampires (which is what I thought, too), she says, no, she was born later, out of wedlock. She actually uses that term. Out of wedlock. Like anyone would ever describe themselves using the terminology of an 80-year-old televangelist. But whatever. Abigail is teamed up with Ryan Reynolds, as the grandly named Hannibal King, and they have created their own Gen X/Y vampire-slaying club. They begin working with Blade once the original Whistler...uh...becomes incapacitated.

I should tell you now that Reynolds was channeling Jason Lee when he did this film. I don't know how he did it, or how it's possible to channel someone who is still alive, but Reynolds did it. My theory is that they took an astral projection class together and that one day when they were practicing, Jason Lee got into Reynolds' body and decided to keep it for a while, just for kicks. Or maybe there was a fortune-telling vending machine thing responsible. I don't know. I just know that it happened, and that there's all this footage to prove it.

John Michael Higgins, who first crossed into my sphere of awareness with the Christopher Guest films, portrayed an evil 'familiar' who tries to publicly frame Blade as a murderous sociopath. (There is some evidence to support this.) There's also Natasha Lyonne, who portrays a blind scientist/computer geek/tasty entree. Normally a wonderful, vibrant actor, she seems awkward here and perpetually on the verge of laughter. It's like all our favorite indie film stars were at a party and decided between jello shots that it'd be fun to be in a really campy action movie. Unfortunately, the only one allowed to live up to her potential here was Parker Posey, as a fantastic vampiric Marlene Dietrich with stiletto shoes and a caustic smirk. You could just tell she was having the time of her life.

One of the many things we learn from Blade: Trinity is that vampires use Macs, and that vampire hunters listen to iPods while they're slaying (despite an obvious diminishment of external sensory input that I would think would be a disadvantage in combat). We learn that vampires are still obsessed with walking in the daylight, and that they have devised a method of feeding that will make the old-fashioned fang-to-neck technique obsolete. Twenty-first century vampires, it seems, are lazy, and can't be bothered to stop for a bite when the hunger takes them. They have things to do, you see. Unlike the libertine party kids of the first Blade, these are mostly thirty-something vampires with more adult ambitions and interests, like archaeology. And this is precisely how they discover the whereabouts of Drake (played by Dominic Purcell), the first vampire, who was born in Mesopotamia about 7,000 years ago. They uncover his hibernating body in the Syrian desert and try to persuade him to help them restore dignity to their people by killing their greatest enemy, Tom Jones. Just kidding. It's Blade, of course. At first the fanged progenitor is downright belligerent, chastising them all for making such a bloody mess of their legacy. There's a lot of "back in my day" speechifying—how the kids keep mucking up the garden, etc.—but in the end, the well-preserved Drake agrees to help them. (Incidentally, Dominic Purcell, who plays Drake, used to be on the show BeastMaster. Just thought I'd throw that in—I know you guys are fans.)

Oh, and vampire dogs. Did I mention there are vampire dogs? Not big dogs like Great Danes, either. We're talking Pekingese. Adorable little balls of fluff whose jaws suddenly unfold, insect-like, and try to devour whatever crosses their path. People have been trained by decades of cinema to be wary of the hulking, lathering, hounds-of-hell-type pooches, but no one expects little Princess to open wide and plant her incisors deep in your jugular. It's brilliant, and it ushers in some of my favorite Ryan-Reynolds-as-Jason-Lee moments.

Irrelevant Aside: I love the character Blade, but for my money, the real hero in this series has always been Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). Whistler ambles around on his gammy leg (without superstrength, or any of Blade's attributes, I might add), dies repeatedly, is resurrected for nefarious purposes, and somehow finds time to defang a throng of baddies. He's the true everyman, here. He's the Atticus Finch of Translyvania. He's the Gary Cooper of the underworld. He has the dignity of an aging monarch with the gravelly disposition of a trucker gone wild. He is the heart and soul of the series. And here's a fun fact: When original audiences watched a version of Blade II without Whistler in it, they started a riot and burned down the studio. Okay, that's a complete fabrication, but I could see such a thing happening. Whistler is just that cool.

One of the things I love about the movies is that they come alive with comic book-y ambience and visuals. With this last one, though, they couldn't seem to decide on the most appropriate tone. It's a cross between the silly battle banter of Spider-Man (more so in the comics than in the films) and the brooding gloom of dark, angst-ridden heroes like the Punisher and the Crow. You get a bit of whiplash switching between these two, and sometimes the switch occurs mid-scene.