There Will Be Blood

After five long years in the wilderness, P.T. Anderson graces the world with a new film There Will Be Blood. Shrouded in secrecy yet epic in scope, I was rather dubious about the whole enterprise. Punch-Drunk Love seduced many that I trust, yet it washed over me without making an impression; perhaps a second viewing is in order. After the epic emotional devastation and bone- china fragile hope of Magnolia, it felt like the worst kind of comedown. Even an arty Adam Sandler movie is still an Adam Sandler movie. Was Paul slipping? Had he become Dirk Diggler, or worse yet, Brock Landers?

Then this trailer hits.



Daniel Day Lewis. Sinclair Lewis. Oil.

Some have suggested this will be Paul's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. To me, it felt like his Once Upon a Time in the West, both surreal and hyper-real, with the additional emotional richness and wonderful performances that P.T.A. brings to the table. In short, this trailer feels like the aperitif to a great cinematic feast.

No Country For Old Men

Arriving with a bang from the south of France, the trailer for the New Coen Brothers thriller, No Country For Old Men, has hit the web. The Coens have competed at Cannes seven times, and won six prizes, including the Palm d'ore for Barton Fink. Unfortunately, despite the incredible buzz, No Country failed to garner any palm fronds for the Bros.



As for the film itself, it simply looks fantastic, a return to the lean-and-mean southwest noir of Blood Simple by way of Sam Peckenpah in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia mode. Joel and Ethan adapted their screenplay from Cormac McCarthy's book of the same title. Enjoying a late career renaissance as of late, McCarthy's latest, "The Road," received glowing reviews, a National Book Award nomination, and a meteoric publicity boost by the literary king maker herself, Oprah Whinfrey, care of a rare interview by the reclusive author. Let's hope that the studio lets more of McCarthy's story wind up on screen this time that Billy Bob Thronton's much maligned All the Pretty Horses.

Of Semoitics and Steve-O

Originally Posted September 25th, 2006

So, over the weekend we checked out the great cinematic colossus that sits astride the great pillars of the domestic box office, the most anticipated sequel since Godfather Part II about guys who pierce their butt cheeks together, Jackass Number Two.

Now there are two camps on the subject of Jackass. If you are male and under 30, you will probably think this is the funniest thing since Cameron Diaz wound up styling her hair with Ben Stiller's spunk. If you are over 30, or female, you might not. Despite this deep critical divide, Jackass Number Two has racked up some of the best reviews of the year (61% fresh) besting overstuffed literary adaptations, (Black Dahlia, 32% Rotten and All the King's Men, 11% Rotten) feel-good football pictures (Gridiron Gang, 41% Rotten) and uplifting war epics (Flyboys, 28% Rotten). It's the best reviewed film of the year featuring a man unwittingly gluing his friends' pubic hair to his face in order to impersonate an Arab terrorist.

Admittedly, a film where Steve-O gives himself a beer enema might not have been what the Lumiere Brothers had in mind when they invented the cinema, but I'll be damned if its not fucking funny. Wait, the Lumieres did make a film where a gardener gets a comedic blast of water in the face, so maybe they did.

The formula is completely unchanged from the show and film that proceeded it: a bunch of drunk skate punks led by the grinning Johnny Knoxville perform dangerous, disastrously stupid stunts involving sharks, vomiting, fart masks, kicks to the balls, blindfolded rodeos, eating cow pies, and manually masturbating horses connected by simple dissolves and kept afloat by a pounding punk soundtrack kicked off by the Minutemen's jaunty Ommpa Loompa theme, "Corona." They hang around without shirts, tanned and (mostly) toned, bearing their tattoos, cradling beers, often curled up in the fetal position clutching the latest body part that they've inflicted searing pain upon. These guys are seriously comfortable with their sexuality, as they are constantly nude around one another. The two Jackass films contain more male full-frontal nudity than every non-porno film in the entire history of the cinema. Lottsa cocks in this one. And yet, despite how gay this all sounds, dude, it's totally not gay, I swear. Just like professional wrestling, the crucible of sadomasochistic violence burns away the obviousness gayness.

Perhaps it's my own need to find the intellectual underpinnings in even the feeblest of works of art, but while taking in the carnage, I drifted, thinking about what it all means.

Looking at the film from a pure genre history POV, we can place the Jackass boys in the context of reality pranksters like Allan Funt and DIY gross-out auteur like John Waters. In fact, Waters has a cameo dressed as a magician directing a hugely obese woman to smother a naked, grinning Wee Man. Add a dash of the S&M comedy of the Three Stooges, the exploitation documentary feel of Mondo Cane. Imagine if Moe really did rip out Larry's hair for real, shaved his ass and glued the hair back on while shoving Divine out of the way to hungrily scoop up that infamous dog turd wile Funt directed in some third world setting. That's what we're dealing with here.

I wonder if the Jackasses are emblematic of some lost youth movement, a bunch of suburban twentysomethings who have no job prospects, no demonstrable skills, who feel the need for personal expression, a need with no outlet except through self destruction. They uses their bodies as canvasses, their brushes the detritus of our consumer culture, crashing shopping carts into impossibly manicured shrubberies at high speeds.

As Ryan Dunn says in the movie when asked why the Jackasses performed a destructive stunt, "It was funny." Considering my throat was horse with laughter afterwards, it was.

Are You Ready For Freddy?

Originally Posted November 16th, 2006

I recently had the pleasure of watching Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street in a theater, something I never had the chance to do first run. After years of watching the murky Media VHS, it was a revelation to see Freddy's antics on the big screen, with a freshly struck print digitally projected, natch. Despite some derisive laughter from some kids who were scarcely blastocysts when the film was first released, it was a fantastic screening.

Growing up, the only type of films that were strictly verboten were horror films. Despite living in a small town in southern Mississippi, I had access to a handful of excellent mom-and-pop video stores. My mother was a cinophile and we frequently came home with stacks of tapes. (From a Curtis Mathes store! Man, that makes me feel old.) Yet, scary movies were off limits, dismissed as the worst kind of corrupting trash. Occasionally, mitigating circumstances would intervene, such as the presence of an Oscar winning actor or some genre hybrid, like Aliens. So no Poltergeist. No Friday the 13th. No Silent Night, Deadly Night. (Skipping the last one turned out to be a good idea, as it turns out.)

Nightmare was the proverbial fork in the road for me. Sliding into early adolescence, renting Nightmare was a big deal. After months and years of "no" I worked my way up to a reluctant "fine." I remember my parents having a hushed conversation in the next room about my youthful transgression as the tape unspooled in our clunky VCR. Despite some grumblings to the contrary, the floodgates were open. I was enthralled. It was the subversive manifesto for my young life and Freddy was its author, carving up banal suburbia one perfectly manicured lawn at a time. Its heroine possessed rare pluck, trying to stay alive despite every adult's stubborn refusal to listen to her. It was violent and inventive and has one of the greatest "high concept" premises in the cinema.

Soon after, I was "five-for-fiving" my way through the horror sections. To my parents, I was wasting my time, but what I was doing was forming a lifelong obsession with films. I was busy falling in love with everything about the cinema, with horror movies as my singular obsession. They were rebellious and dark. Low budget and perverse. Off Hollywood products of the underground. Unlike so many gore fanatics, I quickly branched out, developing interests in other genres, but I would always circle back to my first genre crush.

In the forward to his excellent, long-out-of-print genre survey "Nightmare Movies," Kim Newman frames his critical point-of-view through the prism of his age. His adolescent horrors were from Hammer and Universal. Despite his admiration for some of them, he distanced himself from the then-recent crop of slasher movies, stating that "when Freddy says, 'You are all my children now,' he's not referring to me."

That's right, Kim. He was talking to me.