REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world's most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of history's other rap biopics - because they're pretty much all dreadful - let's take a peek at something of a freer, more impressionistic pseudobiopic of its subject and lead actor.

History is littered with movies in which popular music stars attempt to show off their acting chops, often playing a variation on themselves, and the results are disastrous. The list of films that are A) impressive as cinema, and B) demonstrate that their stars have anything resembling screen presence or acting talent is a brief one: 1964's A Hard Day's Night, with Richard Lester directing the Beatles to heights that defy the project's obvious "let's cash in on the teenybopper!" impulses.

That said, A Hard Day's Night is so fucking good that it has encouraged generations of filmmakers and pop stars to try again, almost always to no damn good effect at all. So this much credit must absolutely go to 2002's 8 Mile, starring Marshall "Eminem" Mathers as an impressionistic gloss on himself in the mid-'90s: it's a pretty strong movie. Director Curtis Hanson leads a terrific below-the-line team including the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editors Craig Kitson and Jay Rabinowitz, and costume designer Mark Bridges, in the creation of a striking vision of urban decrepitude embracing and nurturing its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the director fills out the margins with wonderful performances by Mekhi Phifer, Brittany Murphy, Michael Shannon, and Anthony Mackie in a virtually nonexistent role that still benefits enormously from his extraordinary ability to control the camera with his scowling face.

So that handles A), though this is not a Lester-esque explosion of inventive style (on the contrary, the film subscribes to a stock-issue "let's film urban poverty" aesthetic, it just happens to execute that aesthetic tremendously well). It does not, however, do well by B). Eminem doesn't embarrass himself in the way that Britney Spears did in the repellent Crossroads earlier in 2002, or Mariah Carey did in the insipid Glitter the year prior. He's perfectly unexceptional, with a fairly limited palette of facial expressions that leave the impression that his character doesn't feel feelings; he looks uncannily like Elijah Wood much of the time, and that's all it took me to long helplessly a re-casting in which Eminem could be taken out of the movie that only exists because he is in it (also, "how much better this would be with Elijah Wood in the lead role!" is a pretty awful place to be in).

Eminem's alter ego in the script written by Scott Silver is Jimmy Smith Jr, an automobile factory worker in Detroit whose life is in that singular state of perpetual collapse that only true poverty can create. As the film begins, he has just moved back in with his mother Stephanie (Kim Basinger), whom he resentfully tolerates, his kid sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield) who is unique among living human beings in having the ability to make him feel joy and love, and his mom's abusive wretch of a boyfriend, Greg (Shannon). When he's not slacking off at his job or skulking around his house with undisguised disgust, he pursues his great calling, freestyle rap; he has immense talent but no confidence at all, and at a rap battle emceed by his best friend Future (Phifer), performing as "B-Rabbit", he chokes completely, humiliating himself in front of virtually everyone whose opinion he cares about, and earning the disdain of Papa Doc (Mackie), who lambastes Jimmy as nothing but white trash trying ineffectually to muscle into the African-American territory of rap.

The film is not, in truth, very plot-heavy; there's a bit of back and forth involving Jimmy and Papa Doc's rap gang, the Leaders of the Free World (I'm looking for some kind of irony with Papa Doc's name, and I can't figure out if it's actually there), and the danger in which it puts Jimmy and his friends; there's a B-plot in which Jimmy's relationship to a young woman he meets accidentally one day, Alex (Murphy), helps to drive him to stop being such a resentful lump and take some ownership of his actions. But this is mostly a hang-out movie, of a particularly bleak stripe: the bulk of the film is scenes of Jimmy simply inhabiting his world and bumping against the people in it, with his character arc slowly coalescing as we observe the minute shifts in his behavior from moment to moment, rather than big dramatic shifts that come as the result of melodramatic incidents. The film doesn't even end melodramatically: the film eschews the rags-to-riches arc of Eminem's own life in favor of ending with the triumph of Jimmy being ready to seriously grapple with his life and nascent music career, rather than having actually become a success anywhere but in the tiny world he has always inhabited.

It's a refreshing way to build a story that is ghoulishly overfamiliar in nearly all its particulars, and it leaves 8 Mile feeling like it has earned its emotional claims on the audience, rather than just blindly insisting that we should be moved because of the poor. Parts of it are undernourished, beyond a doubt: the most troubling is the film's decision to steadfastly not think about race beyond Papa Doc's mockery of Jimmy for his whiteness (though it's not the most absurd "let's pretend that nobody is having conversations about Eminem's place in politics and culture" moment: that would be when he stops the film cold to explain why it's not okay to make fun of people for being gay), and while Murphy is utterly incandescent in the role of Alex, bringing a fire to the cold grey movie that emphasises better than anything else just what the absolute, burning desire to get the hell out of there looks like, there's no denying that the romantic subplot is the one that the film has by far the least desire to do anything with.

The biggest case of undernourishment, though, is Jimmy himself, owing mostly to Eminem's fine but basic performance, and the central relationship with his loved, hated mother, owing to Basinger's. The common complaint against her when the film was brand new was that she was too beautiful for the role of a broke drunk, and that's true; but it's also true of Murphy, and she didn't have a problem overcoming it. Basinger, though, simply retrenches to shticky performances of grinding poverty, with director Hanson failing to draw out the same once-in-a-lifetime brilliance that made her so shockingly potent in their previous collaboration, L.A. Confidential. "Shit. We're be-ing evicted. God damn it" she intones at one moment of crisis, and the effect is not "woman who is too far gone into the bottle to have human responses", which might have saved it; it's "didn't think through the right emotional tone for this most important scene". Her onscreen son, meanwhile, has a confrontation with his possibly-pregnant ex-girlfriend (Taryn Manning), and he stares and speaks at her like a Scandinavian tourist dropped into the heart of Detroit with only a tourist's dictionary to get by, so perhaps wildly unacceptable line readings are genetic within the film or something.

There's an absolute upper limit to how good the film can be when its two most important roles are filled by its two most disappointing actors, but 8 Mile comes remarkably close to that ceiling. Its depiction of urban squalor is right on-point without being so realistically hellish that it no longer makes sense to locate an unresolved Horatio Alger fable there; Prieto shoots it with moody, almost horror movie shafts of light and shadow that make it all look interesting without glamorising it, and the frequently impressionistic editing - which starts right from the bravura opening sequence, which muddies the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music as Jimmy practices his rapping, while the editors keep flashing from point to point around him - keeps our attention on the physical environment as an object and a force, not just the backdrop for the characters.

The film's depiction of urban Michigan is stellar, visually; it could, of course, be a bit more rigorous sociologically, but given what the film easily could have been, I am inclined to be excited for any little victories. Ultimately, the takeaway is that all this is a touch too easy and a touch shallow, which is far, far better than I'd have ever expected from it: a narcissistic autobiography of a non-actor is one of the most surefire no-win situations in cinema, and that Hanson, his crew, and most of his cast were able to haul this into something that's at least somwhat admirable is a huge triumph.

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THE WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL

A second review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The 1936 propaganda film Tell Your Children, known far better under its re-release title Reefer Madness, is almost too easy to take cheap shots at. It's the most infamous of the peculiarly robust cycle of anti-drug films in the '30s, and its exaggerated horror at all of the nightmarish things that happen to people who smoke marijuana cigarettes - they become cannibals, they sell their babies, they have premarital sex - is so hysterical and divorced from reality that the end result is among the ripest camp films in history. It's also deeply cynical, playing the trick that was also peculiarly robust in those days, of looking up with a martyred, aggrieved face at the Right-Thinking People to simper about how it's an important public service announcement that simply must go beyond the pale in depicting the wretchedness of the ruined lives it takes as its topic. And heck, if that means showcasing sex and violence and in some cases nudity (not this one) to levels that were 100% not okay by the standards of the day, well that's what had to happen in favor of telling the truth. And of course you had to market it as an extreme showcase for sex and violence - the audience might get too freaked otherwise. But it's certainly not a crass exploitation film, no sir. Come on, don't you want to stop the spread of the demon weed?

On top of which, it's pretty shabbily made, so the film has enjoyed a reputation for decades as one the most overwrought, hilariously awful movies out there (I don't have the data to back this up, but it's always been my sense that it was in fact the first movie to be widely appreciated on a "so bad it's good" basis). All of which brings me back to my point: this movie is much, much too easy a target. And yet, when writers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney took dead aim at the film with their 1998 play Reefer Madness: The Musical, they managed to make those cheap jokes land with flair and energy, enough to make their tossed-off gag of a show into a huge hit that eventually went to New York where its off-Broadway run in 1991 was another hit, and paved the way for a movie adaptation. Revised by Murphy and Studney, sharing director Andy Fickman with the original two productions, and featuring several of the established stage performers in the cast, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical debuted on Showtime in April, 2005, capturing the latest version of the show (with a new song) for all posterity, and nailing down a terrific cast to do it with.

It's compulsively charming, making a good argument for the spry appeal of the stage show (which I have not seen) but also putting in enough irreducibly cinematic touches that doesn't come across as a filmed play. It has some jarring problems, and I'll get to those in due course, but mainly, it's a breezy lark: the leering, heavy-handed parody is lightened significantly by the sugary confection of the songs, which come by often: 16 numbers in the 101 minutes that the film runs without credits. It is, all things considered, a pretty close remake of Tell Your Children: a traveling lecturer (Alan Cumming arrives in a small Everytown in the U.S. of A., where he invites parents and teachers to watch the film's bringing along to demonstrate how wicked dope fiends could become, no matter how innocent where were to start. With frequent cutaways to show the audience's repulsed responses, or the bafflement of one less-than-concerned adult who's certain that the lecturer is trying to put one on ever everybody, this movie-in-the-movie is the great majority of Reefer Madness: The Musical Movie, and it's basically the same dread tale as the movie-in-the-movie in '36.

Somewhere in another Everytown (in '36, it was the same one as the city where the frame narrative takes place), there lives a swell kid named Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell), fresh-faced and 16, and just about ready to ask his best girl Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) to wear his class ring. The trouble starts when they and all the other kids head to the five and dime to dance swing and drink soda fountain drinks made by the bubbly Miss Poppy (Neve Campbell, Christian's sister; though of course she's a hell of a lot more of a name than he is). This is already a touch sinful, we are assured, but Jimmy's so clean-cut and square that he doesn't even know how to swing. Along comes local dope pusher Jack Stone (Steven Weber) to seduce the boy with promises of dancing lessons; what Jack actually has in mind, once he gets Jimmy back to his wretched flophouse, where he lives in sin with Mae Coleman (Ana Gasteyer), and the crazed junkies Sally DeBains (Amy Spanger) and Ralph Wiley (John Kassir) are always hanging around being wretches is to force the boy to smoke a joint. And thus having hooked the boy with the most addictive and dangerous of all illicit drugs, Jack can sit back and gloat as his new customer ruins his life and, increasingly, the lives of all around him.

There are two general problems with the film. Three, perhaps, if we count the lame direction, in which Fickman simply props up the camera and points it at stuff, recording the action with the same clabberhanded grace that he'd later show off in timeless classics like You Again and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Thank God for Mary Ann Kellogg's choreography, is what I'm saying, because that's just about the only time that the onscreen action is meaningfully interesting to look at. But this is a broad parody of a shitty quickie from the '30s, and even as I doubt it's intentional, the argument is easy to make that the primitive visual style works to the film's advantage. So let's not count it, and go back to just the two problems.

One of these is that that film is simply too damn proud of itself; for every moment that's a lacerating dart of satiric wisdom about panic-mongering and ultra-reactionary impulses, there's another that plays like a loudmouthed drunk screaming at you in what he thinks is a conspiratorial tone: isn't it fucking wonderful how much more sophisticated we are than 1930s conservatives? And more often than not, this boastful self-satisfaction is accompanied by Cumming's unusually off-key mugging for the back rows in TV-scale close-ups. That's all the film's prerogative, of course, and I agree with the greater points it's making, but that much sardonic winking starts to suck the wit out of the jokes.

The other problem, which actually bothers me more, is that the material is a stewpot of anachronisms: most of the time, it hits the '30s pretty closely, particularly with the music. The nauseatingly cute romantic duet "Romeo and Juliet", Mary's earnest prayer of double entendres "Lonely Pew", and the rousing folksy showstopper "Tell 'Em the Truth" are all 100% on-point, and most of the other numbers are close enough to fake the odd bar or harmony that's not quite right. Some of the time, though, it seems like the filmmakers were only gunning to get something that fits the general 1933-1959 window: oftener in Maya Mani's costume designs than anything else, but the dialogue is ribboned with lines whose particular anti-Communist rhetoric certainly feels more like the post-WWII Red Scare than the more muted wariness of the Soviet Union in America in the '30s. And while nearly all of the humor in the film comes in the form of exaggeration of the "gee whiz!" ethos and inadvertent filthiness, a few incidental moments are jarringly modern in their sarcasm and irony.

Both of these problems, I would point out, are matters of individual moments that are a little clamorous and off-putting; they stand out only because the film in general is such giddy fun. The songs are maddeningly catchy, with line after line of showy wordplay; it's not one of the great masterworks of musical theater or anything like that, but it's intoxicating as a collection of well worked-out verbal and musical gags. And it's all delivered with unyielding commitment by a terrific cast: everybody is playing a pretty broad concept, but they're all doing it without hesitation or shame. Much of the film is wild absurdity, more and more as it goes on, and the tether to some kind of character reality that the actors provide keeps it funny and not just ludicrous.

Deliberate camp is a hard game to play well, and Reefer Madness makes it look easy: no, it's not consistent, but it's never more than a couple of minutes from some inspired piece of snarky idiocy that brings it back up, and at the very least, Bell and Gasteyer don't put a single foot wrong at any point. It's energetic, it mixes silliness and meanness well, and it threads the impossible needle of being deliberately bad in a way that's appealing and funny instead of just shrill. Nothing can top the manic ineptitude of the original, of course, but this succeeds in being distinctive enough that its strengths are its own without any reflected glory from a legendary forebear.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - PARTY MONSTER

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-'60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself as a filmmaker in the 1960s, who was the first of those producers off the post, releasing The Horror of Party Beach (which he also directed) in June of 1964, about ten months after American International's smash hit Beach Party first made the film a possibility. And how grateful we all are that Tenney shouldered his way up to the bar before anybody else could. It's easy to imagine a beach party horror movie made with bland competence, generic junk food that's a bit dopey and mostly forgettable, like dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of other horror movies in the '50s and '60s that aren't bad, certainly aren't good, basically aren't anything at all.

Thankfully, The Horror of Party Beach isn't any kind of forgettable generic anything: it's one of the great fun-bad movies of the 1960s B-movie circuit, high octane camp that's so ridiculous in so many ways that it's impossible to suppose that Tenney and screenwriter Richard L. Hilliard weren't at least slightly doing it on purpose. You don't cram that many unbelievably awful gags into a movie's opening 15 minutes if you don't want your first impression to be one of unrelenting corniness and fearless stupidity. For that matter, you probably don't lead off with the film's opening credits either, with all their stilted, hip flashes of car racing edited together with uncommon messiness and incoherence, while the soundtrack bellows out with singularly inauthentic surf rock.

It could also just be unbridled incompetence, mind you, an impression much sealed by the material that comes in after those credits are done. The driver of that racing car is teen-ish adult Hank Green (John Scott), who has in tow his girlfriend Tina (Marilyn Clarke), and the second the film properly starts up, they launch into a conversation that's a concentrated blast of badly-written exposition ("I know about your experiments in that laboratory!" is a line, and it ends up meaning absolutely nothing like you suppose it might) and deeply uncomfortable close-ups that appear to be trying to zoom all the way into Clarke's pores. Anyway, the film's inanities start hard and fast, and they don't let up. Not even five minutes from the start - that's five minutes including the credits, mind you - we've already seen the local radioactive waste dumping crew tipping big metal barrels into the ocean, and we've seen that toxic goo start to congeal over a skeleton in a shipwreck, forming into the film's monster with what I confess to be impressive effects work for a low-budget joint, though the comically severe "you should be terrified right now" music makes it rather more funny than even a little bit creepy. Nor do the superimposed fish help.

The first sequence is something like a codex of beach movie tropes as they had already congealed into existence, intercut with Tina's murder by the newly-created sea monster. So we get lots of alarmingly bad surf rock played with anxious determination by local band the Del-Aires, lots of alarmingly bad dancing as the extras Tenney tossed together gyrate randomly and with no obvious organic connection to each other or the music, and lots of ancient, wheezy jokes, presented as insert shots of people we'll never see again. At one point, the camera stares, hungrily, at a girl's bikini'd ass for several seconds before crash zooming out to a pair of filthy boys doing the staring. One turns to the other and says, with unfounded alarm, "That reminds me, did I bring my hot dog buns? That kind of wheezy joke. Hank and the local biker gang get into a fight over Tina, who retaliates by going swimming alone, where she gets assaulted by a suit that plainly didn't come cheap, but looks regrettably goofy, with giant Muppet eyes and a mouth that's all full of... like... feelers, I guess? It looks like a bunch of cigars stuffed into a novelty Gill Man dispenser. And despite the profound inadequacy of the monster and the appalling effects - the stuntman rubs chocolate syrup on Clarke's abdomen, and that's enough for the "violent attack" - Tenney stages this with extreme gravity and menace, all long-ish shots of Clarke flailing and screaming while the music goes hard. The tonal shift between the wacky beach shenanigans and the grisly killing could almost be brilliant, if it was handled with even the smallest measure of artistry.

The most amazing thing about this extended beach party opening is how much it has almost nothing to do with the remainder of the film. Hank comes back, and the monster comes back of course, but the great majority of the remaining movie essentially starts from scratch, with Hank's mentor Dr. Gavin (Allen Laurel) trying to figure out what the creature is so it can be stopped, while his daughter Elaine (Alice Lyon) balances her desire to make out with Hank and her sense of abashment that he's only on the market because his girlfiend was just horribly murdered. That's making it sound rather more clean and streamlined than is the case: in fact, the screenplay of The Horror of Party Beach is a deeply inelegant affair, a series of disconnected anecdotes roughly shaped into a plot-like substance. Some moments, like an extended sequence of three women lazily trying to escape this murderous hellhole for the safety of New York City, don't even have the decency to involve the characters or settings established anywhere else in the film.

Tenney charges through this aimless material, with its nonsensical technobabble (Gavin declares that they can use carbon-14 dating to determine the genetic makeup of the monster at one point, in one of the most overtly wrong things I have ever encountered in a movie that wasn't making a joke of it), casual racism (Gavin's made Eulabelle, played by Eulabelle Moore, is a cringing black maid of a sort already years behind the curve in '64, going on and on about voodoo), logic gaps, and colossal tonal shifts, and makes a movie that is, if never remotely satisfying as drama, at least frantic enough in its pacing to only rarely be boring. He's terrible at the nuts and bolts of directing: the performances are variable down to the level of individual line readings that end someplace different than they started, while there are obvious flubbed takes left in the finished film. And where any clever B-movie director would work hard to keep monsters that looked this stupid as a background threat, hanging around in shadows and fragmentary quick cuts, Tenney puts it - them, in fact, a detail the script doesn't explain - front and center, with even the most moody, atmospheric shots lit such that no matter how dark and threatening the backgrounds get, the monsters themselves are bright and wholly visible.

This is in keeping with the overall feeling of The Horror of Party Beach, which is that's some kind of ersatz object, barely a movie at all. It was shot on the beaches of Connecticut, but everything about it borrows from the vocabulary of Los Angeles-based beach movies, the original sin from which it never recovers: it explains the overcompensation of the opening sequence, the shrillness of the music, and the general uncertainty that crowds out every actor and plot beat. Movies of this sort were cranked out in the L.A. metropolitan area on a weekly basis, and the people there knew how to do them; Connecticut had no native presence of cheap-ass indie productions, and a constant feeling of "are we doing this right? Is this how we do this?" coats everything: the production, certainly its approximation of surfing culture.

I say all of that like it's a bad thing, but of course it is the film's chief strength. Lousy B-movies are thick on the ground, and rarely were they thicker than the 1960s; The Horror of Party Beach is weird enough and vividly incompetent enough to feel genuinely special and - I will not say "unpredictable", since every last thing about it has been taken from the nuclear monster handbook. It has an unconventional feeling, though, one that's not to its credit as a beach comedy or a horror movie, but is manna to the lover of weird, colorfully dysfunctional bad movies.

Body Count: 7, along with the entirety of a slumber party numbering "over 20", plus apparently dozens or hundreds of bodies during the monsters' reign of terror - the film is alarmingly bad at chronology among its other sins, and we have only the alarmist newspaper headlines to go on here.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY THEME PARKS AT THE MOVIES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Disney's latest effort in brand-mining, Tomorrowland, takes the name (if nothing else) from one of the most famous attractions at Disney's various theme parks. Journey with me back to the beginning of this particular game.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.

-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The Country Bears goes wrong fast, and it goes wrong hard. The film's opening scene is a concert in 1991, the final one given by the titular group before their inglorious retirement, and every last thing about it conspires to be as hideous in combination as remotely possible - the lighting is perfectly designed to accentuate everything that looks horrible about the main characters. For the main characters are people in extraordinarily complex bear costumes with state-of-the-art puppetry faces. And the first time we see them, they look like there was no room left in Hell, and so it began to vomit forth the dead.

Setting aside the ursine abominations inhabiting all the main roles - though we cannot help but return to them later - The Country Bears is a disgusting moral failure of a different sort. This is, depending on the exact set of definitions you want to use,* the very first movie released by the Walt Disney Company as a tie-in promotion to one of its theme park attractions. This was back in 2002, when the company's film division was starting to lose its way again after roaring back to life in the early 1990s, and any terrible idea that could plausibly be defended as a branding exercise could make it through the gates. 50 weeks and two movies later, this misbegotten experiment would finally result in a critical and commercial success, with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; but before that happened Disney had to embarrass itself a couple of times (The Haunted Mansion was the second effort; I haven't seen it, but the rumor is that it's the worst of the trio).

Really, though, calling The Country Bears an embarrassment is being nice (and also a shameful waste of a pun: it's a veritable embearassment!!!!!). This a stare into the black void of corporate shamelessness and inartistic savagery, a movie whose technologically audacious and unforgivably off-putting animatronic bears are merely the most visible example of the movie's overriding lack of anything beautiful or interesting. The story the producers settled on - Mark Perez is the credited writer and Peter Hastings directed (an animation story artist making his solitary theatrical film), but it hardly seems fair to blame them for getting their names slathered on what's unambiguously a company affair first and foremost - is as musty as it gets, trading on the sadly too-common belief that if you're making a movie for kids, you can get away with any number of clichés, since your pre-teen target audience hasn't encountered them yet. Herein, Beary Barrington (voiced by Haley Joel Osment, sung by Elizabeth Daily, physically performed by Misty Rosas and Alice Dinnean - this is going to turn into an all-parenthetical review if I keep up like this, so let's just acknowledge that the bears were all played by puppeteers working their asses off), a tween bear adopted by humans, has started to feel the pain of being different, goaded by his dick adopted brother Dex (Eli Marienthal). So he runs away to make a pilgrimage to Country Bear Hall, the home of his beloved Country Bears before they disbanded eleven years ago. I allowed myself to assume from the dates that it might turn out that one of the Bears would prove to have fathered Beary, because I somehow managed to expect that this would at least invest itself in some fancier dumb clichés.

Country Bear Hall is, alas, about to be torn down by the over-enthusiastic (human) developer Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken, in the role that exemplifies the "can't say no to a paying job" aspect of his career). But Beary has a great idea: if the Bears get back together for a benefit concert, surely the hall's owner and the band's manager, Henry Dixon Taylor (Kevin Michael Richardson) could raise the $20,000 to save the historic site. So the two of them go on a road trip to recruit the divided bears: brothers Ted and Fred Bedderhead (Diedrich Bader and Brad Garrett), Zeb Zoober (Stephen Root), Tennessee O'Neal (Toby Huss), and Trixie St. Claire (Candy Ford). Given that all of them are suffering som kind of enormous dysfunction and bad blood lies between many of them individually, this proves to be most difficult task. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't prove insurmountable, because this is a Disney picture.

The absurdly insipid, pedestrian storytelling could never have resulted in a movie worth keeping, though it's honestly the strongest thing about The Country Bears; hoary, trite stereotypes at least have the benefit of being road-tested. Even without leaving the writing, the characters are a much bigger liability, being as they are a collection of cheap redneck jokes weirdly sanitised for the sake of the kids who make up the sole audience that can be honestly supposed to enjoy this. The actors are totally helpless to combat this problem, owing in no small part to the tripartite acting (voice, body, face). Frequently throughout, and especially in the critical case of Beary, there's no obvious relationship between the physical performance and the line readings, and it makes the characters feel like emotionless monsters, even without accounting for the terrifying design and execution of the bear suits. They do not provide any illusion that they're connected to the story at all, simply floating through the world without interacting with it except arrhythmically, in the fashion of an alien being clumsily mimicking human behavior.

But let's go ahead and account for the bear costumes, anyway. They are marvels, produced by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and clearly serving to show off that company's best and brightest doing some of the most complex work imaginable. The bears have incredibly precise, flexible, nuanced faces; it's always possible to tell exactly what they're thinking just from a still image. But even so, they are pure, high octane nightmare fuel, the spiritual heirs to the four-year-old talking and walking snowman that the Creature Shop built for Jack Frost. The bears aren't quite as viscerally unacceptable as that character - bears, after all, exist in the world, and even at their most grotesquely malformed, none of them have any feature as individually upsetting as Jack Frost's arms. But dear God, I do not like to look at them. Their heads are all weirdly big for their bodies, and they look not quite like bears, even less than the original audio-animatronic creatures in the Disney attraction. Incidentally, I won't have a better moment to compare the movie to the show; as a Disney parks lifer, The Country Bears strikes me as a most generic and soulless attempt to spin off the Country Bear Jamboree (it's not clear at all from the script, but I think we're meant to understand the movie as a kind of sequel to the show; though it is a sequel from an alternate universe). The big problem is the music: the show has a soundtrack made up of goofy bluegrass music on the '50s model, the movie is larded up with that godawful country rock that started to become popular in the late 1990s, taking the folksy heart out of the whole genre of music. Another problem is ineptness: giving fan favorite Big Al (James Gammon) a slot in the film, and denying him his fan-favorite song? Shoddy multi-platform synergy, that. And for Christ's sake, not including the talking mounted game heads in any capacity is just proving that you didn't wanted to make a movie from this material in the first place.

I had not finished my low-grade freakout over the bear designs, though; hadn't even gotten to the worst part. Which is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their tremendously detailed, realistic mouths, with their incredibly specific teeth and almost tangibly damp tongues. And somehow, Hastings always seems to make them the centerpoint of every close-up. David Cronenberg couldn't have put more unsettling organic terrors into a movie if his life depended on it.

The film was a disaster at the box office, proving that sometimes we do live in a just universe. I feel sorry for the Creature Shop folks, honestly: the bears are miraculous machines, ugly or not. But they had the misfortune to show up in a badly-written and cloddishly-directed exercise in corporate intra-marketing. This is a commercial, and it's a remarkably bad one; and with Beary proving to be such an awful protagonist, alienating in every way, it's even worse as an inspirational tale of believing in your dreams and sticking by family, in various more or less figurative senses of that word. I would say that, if there were justice, this would have brutally murdered Disney's attempt to make movies out of theme park rides, but then, the first Pirates is at least worth the indignity of The Country Bears. And, indeed, the first Pirates - hell, all four Pirateses - seems that much more precious in light of how utterly craven and artistically uninspired its peculiar subgenre can so depressingly prove to be.

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THE PITCH IS BACK

Being "disappointed" in Pitch Perfect 2 would require having meaningfully elevated expectations for it, and hopefully not too many people would make that mistake. Cinema history is littered with comedy sequels that fail in exactly the way this one does: re-create the same plot beats and thematic arc, only do everything bigger, more expensive, and less funny. There are few enough exceptions that the course of wisdom is to just assume that you're heading for a piece of absolute crap, or a mildly amusing but horrifically lazy retread at best, and when you are graced by the sudden arrival of an Addams Family Values or A Shot in the Dark, clutch it to your breast like an innocent child. What I am disappointed in, then, is not the movie itself.

But I am definitely willing to concede that I'm very disappointed in Elizabeth Banks's directorial debut, which Pitch Perfect 2 happens to be: after years of counting on Banks to be a reliable stabilising presence in wonderful comedies, mediocre comedies, and downright shitty comedies, I was more than a little eager to see her apply the knowledge she picked up over the years into working on the backside of the camera. And that didn't happen; there are lots of reasons that Pitch Perfect 2 isn't very great, but the directing is absolutely one of them, with the tone going far more sour far more often than in the first Pitch Perfect and the visuals flatlining in exactly the place you'd want them to thrive, the musical numbers. Which are inventively staged by choreographer Aakomon "A.J." Jones, but shot hectically and cut to ribbons by Banks and editor Craig Alpert, and that's just no fun at all.

In her defense, Banks didn't have all that much to work with. The script, written like the original by Kay Cannon, is a pristine example of sequelitis, going to extreme (and frankly, unnecessary) lengths to set the characters back to the start in a lot of ways, while raising the stakes enormously but unconvincingly, and ramping up everything that worked last time from modest and thus charming all the way to screaming and tedious. Three years after winning the national college a capella championships, the Barden Bellas are America's premiere a capella group, having completed a three-peat of their victory, and thus must be punished back down to freakish misfits. This is accomplished in the first of the film's weirdly regressive jokes, for a movie that is so fucking anxious to show off its liberal message bonafides: at a concert for no less than President Stockfootage Obama, the self-named Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), sardonic Australian and beloved breakout character from the last movie, suffers a wardrobe mishap that leaves her genitalia on lingering display for all of America to gawk at with intense furor and ragehorror, because the vaginas of fat people are the holes to Lovecraftian hell dimensions.

The Bellas are kicked out of the a capella ssociation with only one chance to redeem themselves: if - if! - they can become the first American team to win the world championship of a capella. And they throw themselves into the task of doing so, though de facto leader Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) is far more interested in her new internship under a great music producer (Keegan-Michael Key) than making new and radically challenging arrangements for the group to prove itself. It's no more and no less predictable in its assemble of stock items than Pitch Perfect was, and the difference comes down entirely to performance and tone. Pitch Perfect ignored its wanton overfamiliarity in favor of focusing on the warm, specific characters played by Kendrick, Wilson, and others like Brittany Snow (who comes back as a graduation-averse four-time senior), Anna Camp (who cameos), and Ester Dean (who returns in a role that isn't as mired in lazy stereotypes as before, though it feels like she's also in the movie less). Pitch Perfect 2 lets its characters be far too snappish, and the basic pleasure of watching characters be friends with each other is forced and inauthentic in most of its occurrences. There are just enough flashes of the congenial spirit of the first movie for the sequel to be, generally, speaking, satisfactory; for example, a long scene around a campfire where the movie digs in with a "wow, we're all going to graduate soon and this will all end" vibe that the movie keeps glancing at without committing to.

But these likable grace notes are only intermittent in a film that loses the originals two best weapons, with much-degraded performances from a palpably checked-out Kendrick and Wilson shading perpetually into mean brutality instead of fleet-footed sarcasm. And then there's the usual "do it again but bigger and stupider" problem, which finds the last movie's riff-off turned into a huge underground a capella death match overseen by a rich eccentric played by David Cross as a collection of mincing effeminate stereotypes that were stale by the end of the 1980s (this scene does have, by far, the film's best joke in the form of the most unexpected celebrity cameos in an age), and the dirty-minded humor cranked into outright foulness that's so wearying as to lose any ability to trigger even a slight giggle. The morally reprehensible color commentators played by John Michael Higgins and Banks herself (she proves, like many actors before her, incapable of directing herself; she keeps stumbling into a reprise of her Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games and its sequels) are even more of a film-stopping liability than before, jamming the breaks to grimly push through riffs with rather too much cruelty to be even ironically funny.

Even when the film plumbs new territory, it's of limited value. The movie's new villains, an archly Germanic a capella group led by the statuesque Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and Pieter Krämer (Flula Borg), are amusingly severe at first (all of Kendrick's best work comes in her scenes with them), though it eventually becomes clear that the movie's sole idea for them is "boy, Germans are assholes!", the first volley in what will eventually become a whole litany of national parodies in the last act that makes Epcot Center look like a painfully realist docudrama (one previously unseen Bella, played by Chrissie Fit, is nothing but a delivery system for obnoxious and tired "boy, what about illegal immigrants? And those Central American death squads!" jokes). The new hero, Emily Junk, is a generic striver played by Hailee Steinfeld without any color or charm, and the film's open insistence in its writing and framing that she's set to be the franchise anchor going forward is nothing but a threat. Particularly if her character continues to write such joylessly anonymous pop songs as the one that turns into a major film-long plot point, and we're meant to find enthralling in some way or another.

It would be overstating to call Pitch Perfect 2 "bad". Mostly, it is profoundly lazy, slackly plotted - after three years of national prominence at a school where a capella culture is a Big Fucking Deal, there's only one Bella who isn't a senior, and the script calls repeated attention to this fact - and tonally off; not contrary to being funny so much as it doesn't have the flair and timing to be more than thinly amusing. There's never more than ten minutes that go by without a scene that works well on a character level, and Key proves to be an infectious scene-stealer, wandering in from a spikier, much smarter movie and bringing all its stinging wit and laser-focused pacing with him. The filmmakers didn't not care. But they didn''t care enough, and their movie is the most boring kind of retread, one with all the jokes muted and the performances robbed of vitality and the characters put through glaringly simplistic paces.

5/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE POWER OF A CAPELLA

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Pitch Perfect 2 is the sequel to one of the most beautiful and rare creatures in this heavily market-researched days, an honest-to-God word of mouth hit. Which makes it the perfect excuse for me to finally catch up with said hit.

The question of how Pitch Perfect managed to become a generational touchstone is one I really shouldn't try to answer, not being a member of the generation in question, but let's spitball anyway. Personally, I think it's the film's universality, at least among the audience sector it has largely succeed in seducing. Not the romantic comedy elements, which are frankly unpersuasive, and not the evergreen girl-power overtones and the celebration of female friendships, which are absolutely persuasive and even elegant. I am referring strictly to the film's subject matter: I'd be willing to believe that there's not a single human being who attended a four-year university in the United States at any point in the 21st Century who didn't attend an a capella concert, or know somebody involved in the a capella scene, or at least know how to avoid the a capella culture on campus like a deadly plague.

And this is the world that Pitch Perfect leaps into, feet first, and with a perfect balance of praise and mockery that is certainly its most distinctive strength and its calling card. This is a movie for everybody who admires the showmanship and dedication of a capella performers, and who considers it one of the highlights of their own life that they are or were part of that same tradition. It's also a movie for everybody who finds a capella tacky and ridiculous, and looks down upon the singers as social misfits clinging to their in-group because nobody else will have them. Impressively, it's not merely both of these things at the same time; it's sometimes both of these things in the span of an individual gag that can be interpreted as either lovingly self-aware or wickedly sarcastic, depending on how generous the viewer is, or how generous they want to credit the filmmakers with being.

It's a pretty remarkable piece of alchemy that gives Pitch Perfect a vivid personality even when it's flopping about at its most miserable and derivative. Honestly, even the teen target audience of the film must be experienced enough to recognise a largely uninterrupted parade of stock tropes when it struts and frets its way across the stage. And particularly when the film curiously inserts an entire scene that finds the main character, Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick), curtly dismissing the entire medium of motion pictures as being derivative and maddeningly predictable, either as a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging its own scene-for-scene predictability, or hypocritically trying to forestall the audience's criticism of the same.

Still, familiarity is appealing in its way, and as I've already suggested, Pitch Perfect is a movie that's insistent on being as familiar as possible. So it doesn't really matter that only the most innocent will fail to get way out in front of the story of freshman Beca, arriving at Barden University four months after a disastrous case of projectile vomiting ended the championship run of the all-female Barden Bellas a capella group. Trying to avoid her overly-present father (John Benjamin Hickey), a professor at the university, Beca - who seriously needs to think about changing the spelling of her fucking name, because I've gotten it wrong every time I've typed it out so far - ends up crossing paths with Chloe (Brittany Snow) and Aubrey (Anna Camp), the current leaders of the Bellas, trying to whip up enthusiasm among the incoming class. This doesn't appeal much to Beca, even with her naturally clean and tuneful alto voice, but her father manages to push into agreeing to join any club, and the Bellas are as good as any. And thus does Beca, with her passion for producing mash-ups and tweaking sound, run smack into Aubrey's fascistic devotion to the corny traditions of a capella past. Surely there will be no chance for the radical Beca to prove the superiority of her forward-looking attitude, especially not one that involves a competitive championship berth against their archrivals.

Meanwhile, the cute boy Beca works with at the school radio station, Jesse (Skylar Astin), joins those same archrivals, the Treblemakers, the only population of boys at Barden that the Bella members are specific forbidden by club rules from dating. And Beca's rather tetchy disinterest in Jesse would seem to mean that's not a problem at all, and given how acutely the film deflates when it shifts its focus from the dynamics running in all directions between the Bellas, over to its lukewarm romantic plot with its generically meaty looking male lead, it would be better not just for her singing career but for Pitch Perfect itself if she'd just stop speaking to him. But then we'd be out a B-plot.

The film imagines, and I think that a substantial portion of its fanbase agrees, that the star of the show is the music, presented in a copious quantity of performance numbers, choreographed by Aakomon Jones and framed by director Jason Moore with a slick efficiency that undoubtedly resembles a high-end a capella stage performance of the sort that really would win all the a capella awards, but doesn't really stand out in the annals of musical cinema. The singing performances are generally strong-to-great; this was the film where Kendrick redefined herself as a specialist in musicals, and while the demands of this role and these songs don't meaningfully compare to those she essayed in The Last Five Years or Into the Woods, it's very difficult to imagine her landing those movies without the unimpeachable work she showcased her as a singing actress clearing the path. Still, it's hard not to wish for some more energetic staging to go along with the impressive singing; I can't vouch that watching the numbers provides much that simply listening to the soundtrack wouldn't.

No indeed, the real strength of Pitch Perfect lies in its characters, an outlandishly appealing lot even when they're a collection of awkward stereotypes - Aubrey the shrill neurotic control freak; when we alight on Cynthia-Rose the butch African-American lesbian (Ester Dean) and Lilly the inaudible shy and quiet Asian-American (Hana Mae Lee), we've arrived at a place that filmmakers as self-conscious about their progressive representations as Moore and screenwriter Kay Cannon probably should have noticed long before it got to post-production. The actors make it work, though, and so does the film's unflagging generosity, loving its protagonists even when it gets why they're ridiculous. All this culminates in the immediate break-out character Fat Amy, a breezily self-confident Tasmanian immigrant played with unflappable authority by Rebel Wilson in her break-out role. It's the kind of comic performance that you can tell even without having to be told involved a lot of improvisation and spontaneity, providing just enough sharpness at acute angles to the rest of the film that Wilson provides exactly the counterbalance to the overdetermined plotting that the film needs. But this is an ensemble affair; it takes the combined efforts of every Bella, no matter how small the role, to create the film's winning sense of acceptance and community.

It's winning enough that I can even overlook the degree to which, in truth, huge swatches of Pitch Perfect are pretty lousy comedy. It's certainly never fresh: the jokes are almost as easy to predict as the plot beats. John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks, a pair of cast-iron comic troupers who can't help but be fun to watch, are stranded as a pair of despicable color commentators hurling passive-aggressive insults at the Bellas, a steal from Best in Show that would be obvious even without Higgins right there reminding us that the earlier film exists; they get laughs out of many of their lines (how could they not, those two?), but the film would certainly be stronger without them. There's a whole elaborate vomiting sequence late in the movie that includes several jokes which would feel indecently crass in a genuine gross-out movie, let alone a sweet-natured character comedy. And so on, and so forth.

Still, there's a lanky, casual attitude going on that makes certain the film is good-humored even when it doesn't have particularly good humor, if you'll forgive an awful turn of phrase. Pitch Perfect manages to be both acerbic and friendly in a way that gives it bite without giving it too much edge - it's a very pleasurable movie, even if those pleasures are on the simple side. And even if they're frequently secondhand. I'm not quite convinced that it comes by its admiring cult fairly, but it's hard to complain when a feel-good movie actually ends up feeling genuinely good, or is so unfussy about celebrating the kinds of friendships that don't show up in movies nearly as often as they should.

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TAKE A BIIIIIIITE!!!!!

A review requested by Robert K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I'm greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There's a deep connection between this film and my own period of sickness back in 2005. It was at that year's B-Fest in Evanston, IL that I first saw The Apple, where it stood out for especially personal reasons - of course, it pretty obviously stood out for everybody in that auditorium. But I knew that I was going to get a call on that Saturday from my oncologist, telling me whether my cancer had metastasised or not. I was barely able to focus on the parade of bad movies in front of me; only The Apple was so manic and stupefyingly incomprehensible that I was truly distracted from my health worries. As I started receiving chemotherapy the next month, I had a portable DVD player to while away the five-hour days stuck in a room, tethered to machines; the "get well soon" present I request from my parents was a copy of The Apple, and it became the first movie I watched during treatment.* Many years later, I've seen The Apple more times than is decent, and I always hear just the slightest echo of those bleak days, in its clamorous musical numbers. It is and will always be my cancer movie.

It's also so toxic in its badness that I wouldn't be surprised at all to know that watching it causes brain tumors. So that's the other reason it's a good fit for this fundraiser.

The 1980 film takes place in the far-flung world of 1994, where a record label impresario named Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) plans to use a hybrid pop-disco sound to establish a musical dictatorship over at least North America, if not the whole world. At which point I should confess that a plot recap of The Apple is doomed to failure: it is simply not possible to express using the clumsy, limited matrix of English to communicate how fucked up this movie is. No, not even when the Devil wants to use disco to take over the world in 1994. Oh, right, because I skipped over that bit: Boogalow is symbolically equated with Satan, right up until he turns out to actually be the actual Satan. So let's skip back to the 1994 Worldvision Song Contest, which is like the Eurovision Song Contest only trashier. Here, Boogalow and his lackey Shake (Ray Shell) sit in the show's control room and gleefully cackle with triumph as Boogalow's top act, the duo Pandi (Grace Kennedy) and Dandi (Alan Love) hit record-setting levels on the biometric scanners they're all using to test audience response to the duo's new single, "BIM". Which stands for "Boogalow International Music", and will eventually be, more or less, the name of the future one-world government. Which makes it even more threatening when the singers lead the crowd in the chant "Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way!" As if it wasn't already threatening enough when they start off by reciting that in the world of BIM, "There ain't no good / There ain't no bad / There ain't no happiness / There ain't no tears". And you have to hand it to George S. Clinton, adapting the lyrics from Iris Recht's Hebrew originals (Iris and husband Coby, who composes all the music had originally planned a Hebrew-language stage musical before meeting the film's producers... but we'll get to the producers): it takes some truly, relentlessly appalling songwriting when you can legitimately declare that "There ain't no sad" would have been a much better line than the one they went with.

Pandi and Dandi are followed by Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), a folk duo from Moose Jaw. They immediately launch into a syrupy love ballad that manages to sound even worse than "BIM", but somehow, this tribute to the most essential of human emotions - BIM, we find, has been hellbent on eradicating love songs - gets the audience so worked up that there biometrics go all the way up to 151. Whereas Pandi and Dandi topped out at 150. I mean, they're a whole 1 better!!! Boogalow knows a threat when he sees one, so he immediately invites Alphie and Bibi to BIM headquarters the following day to sign a contract. Alphie is far more untrusting than his partner and girlfriend, and when the contract is presented to him, he has a vision of thunder and storms. It gets even worse when Boogalow and his crew try to force Alphie to sign - from out of nowhere, he suddenly finds himself inside a smoke-filled cavern, with Boogalow suddenly dressed in long black cloak with a tiny gold horn on his left temple, and the rest of BIM's hangers-on dressed (or undressed) as trolls, snakes, zombies, and all number of hell denizens. And an oiled-up Dandi urges Alphie and Bibi, dressed in the chaste fig leaves of Adam and Eve, to taste the BIM apple, and seal their fate. Bibi doesn't see this vision, and signs herself over to Boogalow the Devil, but Alphie flees, and spends the next period of time hiding out and trying to avoid BIM's takeover of all society, identifying the BIM faithful with the metallic triangular stickers all citizens are required to show - the mark of BIM.

You guys, I think The Apple might be a religious allegory.

The film was made by producers Menahem Golan (who also wrote and directed) and Yoram Globus, Israeli cousins and masterminds behind Cannon Films. Now, this was early in Cannon's existence, so it's probably not fair to be as baffled by its place in the company as we must be: for Golan and Globus were the most savagely, mercilessly market-driven filmmakers of the 1980s. And The Apple is not remotely market-driven. It's a disco musical made at the ass end of the disco era whose message is that disco is the literal devil's music; it is a stunningly incoherent spiritual odyssey that ends with God showing up in a gilded Rolls Royce to Rapture up all the hippies who'd been able to hide out from BIM. It's a work of futurism that attempts to show a modestly dystopian world by throwing some banners up around concrete hyper-modern West German buildings and putting fins on cars. It has some of the most shitty original songs in the history of movie musicals. It feels for all the world like a mad auteur's highly personal vision gone wildly far off the rails, not like an attempt by two savvy producers to make a popular disco cash-in. But that's absolutely what it was, the last of 1980's three Hail Mary attempts to keep disco alive long enough for one more hit movie, following Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu. All three tanked and all three are awful, though The Apple is surely the most thoroughly demented and incompetent, and I am quite inclined to suggest that it's by far the most entertaining for those reasons. But not the kind of entertaining that Golan and Globus would have preferred.

No indeed, this is the entertainment that comes of pure unbridled madness. It's easy enough to latch onto the songs, and talk with baffled amazement about the inane lyrics which don't rhyme, don't scan, and don't make even the slightest narrative sense. Like, to name a conspicuous example, the film's most notorious line, "It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire", upon which a vampire (Francesca Poston) does indeed pop up and then just stand there, doing the gaping mouth "vampire snarl" face for, like, 15 seconds. It's not worth going through all of the dizzyingly horrible lines - the review is long enough already. Anyway, the deficiencies of the songwriting has nothing on the savage insanity of Golan's staging of the songs, all of them drifting headlong into big group numbers with virtually identical choreography, and inexplicable choices like the one where the bad guys ride on exercise bikes while Boogalow talks about how great it is to be a manipulative creep, right in front of of the woman he's manipulating, or the one with all the clowns and then the people twirling batons with streamers on the ends. Or the number I have fondly referred to, since 2005, as the Quaalude Tango (the actual name is "Made for Me", and it's a romantic ballad song by a date rapist), which in addition to its comatose dancers features the most deadeningly literal editing, crisply bouncing around precisely on the beats of the music and always showing us exactly what the lyrics are referring. Though painful lyrical literalism is pretty much found in every moment of every song. I mean, there's that vampire moment.

But focusing entirely on the songs, however tempting and easy to do, means missing out on much of the joy The Apple has in supply. It could be totally absent any songs at all, and be no meaningfully better, though it would be a hell of a lot shorter, and that could only help. But the godawful production design and erratic acting - Sheybal is the only person who comes even close to giving a functional performance; even Miriam Margolyes, who I generally love, is out-of-control terrible as oy gevalt, the most outrageous kind of Jewish landlady - and dogged commitment to its opportunistically New Agey message of how everybody but the hippies is in the grip of pure evil, and the totally incomprehensible closing moments with the gaudiest deus ex machina on record, all of this would make The Apple a transcendent bad movie experience even without the unclear satire of the "America loves drugs" song "Speed", the unacceptability of a song that tries to set the words "Life is nothing but show business in 1994" to music, or the outlandishly smutty double-entendres in a song whose subtlest couch is that it's title is "Coming".

Put it all together, and it's a completely unadulterated bundle of the worst of cinema all spun up into one ball of madness. It cannot be described, and it can barely be experienced; I assume that this is what a bad acid trip feels like, right down to the chintzy rendition of Hell. With all the sincerity I can muster, this is one of my very favorite bad movies, and not even with the "I kind of think I like it unironically" relationship I have with Xanadu. The Apple is utter, irredeemable trash, and it is a privilege to be part of the same species that could cook up something so totally imaginative and divorced from anything resembling rules, logic, good taste, or basic decency.

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MILES TO GO BEFORE WE SLEEP

A review requested by Arlo Banta, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

If you are like me at all, the notion of Cartoon Network making its first-ever miniseries probably budged you not at all, and knowing that this miniseries was greeted with almost exclusively enthusiastic reviews only made it worse. For critics and audiences have something they look for out of Cartoon Network stuff, and they find it, God bless 'em - but it is not and has really never been what I look for. So if you are like me, you sat out Over the Garden Wall during its premiere week in November, 2014, and that was a tremendous mistake. It's not perfect, mostly because it's still buried in the Cartoon Network house style - series creator Patrick McHale, and a great deal of the writing and design staff, logged plenty of hours with Adventure Time - which I can't help but feel isn't the perfect fit for what's going on here. But for an imperfect thing, it's extraordinarily special, and goes straight onto the pile of things I'm angry weren't around yet when I was a child, because it must be truly wonderful to be able to encounter this from that perspective, rather than trying to fake one's way into it.

The story is broken into ten episodes of eleven minutes each, bound in pairs for the purposes of television scheduling. And it is certainly episodic, far more than it seems explicitly serial. Almost half of the episodes could be dropped entirely without leaving any meaningful gaps in the story; yet it's also impossible to think of it working as well without all of them in place (and, for that matter, impossible to think of this as really just a 110-minute story divided into chunks; it takes great care to use the episode breaks as a way to let the viewer recalibrate and push the narrative ahead so that it's always perpetually starting in medias res). What those seemingly random misadventures in the middle actual do is to give the whole story the feeling of Pilgrim's Progress, in which each disconnected episode serves to change the characters in small but cumulative ways that leave them able to leave the story very differently than they began it. And the series knows this, explicitly dropping the word "pilgrim" at one point. It also draws from The Divine Comedy, giving its pilgrims a guide named Beatrice, because once you've started in with the classical religious literature references in your TV kids' cartoon, you might as well just keep doubling down on it.

The pilgrims are Wirt (Elijah Wood) and Gregory (Collin Dean), half-brothers who find themselves, at the start of the first episode "The Old Grist Mill", confused as to where they are, how they got there, and how to get home. Teenage Wirt does, at least. Little Gregory is living in a sort of constant present tense, totally unconcerned with anything in the dark woods or with his brother's nervousness, and mostly interested in giving a name to the frog he's carrying around. Also, Wirt is dressed like a garden gnome and Gregory has a teapot on his head, facts which seem to bother none of the equally inexplicable characters they meet during their journey. The first of these, and the ones who come back the most, are a talking bluebird, the aforementioned Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), so there's some Der Ring des Nibelungen in there on top of the rest of it, and an old woodsman (Christopher Lloyd), who skulks around in the most menacing sort of way and acts exactly the way you'd expect someone to right before he buries an axe in your head, and yet her turns out to be almost unfailingly helpful, pointing out that the boys need to be constantly aware of the Beast that haunts those woods.

The show ultimately reveals its backstory, near the end, and it's perfectly timed; by that point, we've gotten used to the steady rhythm of the show (each episode follows the structure of "Wirt and Gregory find themselves in some new mad place, and by their actions better the lives of the inhabitants, without advancing their trip home by a noticeable amount"), and have seen enough of the changes in the boys that being sent back to square one with both of them is a bit of a shock, and it helps to clarify the show's overarching themes. Which I'd be reluctant to discuss too much for fear of spoiling things - though as befits something targeting children, it's really not hard for a particularly genre-savvy adult to guess the basic shape of the show fairly early on. Let's just say that neither the Pilgrim's Progress nor Divine Comedy references are at all incidental, and the show's overall message is a surprisingly moralistic one: in order to move towards the goal, one must make a reckoning of the kind of person that one has been, and take steps to be better.

For as surprisingly sophisticated as the series is - it trusts its audience to be willing to think hard about life and themselves more than any other piece of American children's entertainment from the 21st Century that I can immediately call to mind - it has enough immediate pleasures that it's already proven to be singularly engaging and compelling long before the thematic shape starts to become clear. There's mood and atmosphere to spare here: it is set in timeless autumn, and everything about the color palette, lighting, and even the stories emphasises this. The second episode, "Hard Times at the Huskin' Bee", is an especially beautiful evocation of a harvest festival atmosphere, and like most of the other episodes, it has the shape of a ghost story to be shared over a campfire as the air grows cold. The seventh episode, "The Ringing of the Bell", includes an image that even managed to freak me out, wizened old horror buff that I am, not least because of the slow, inexorable way it builds to its big scare, and then suddenly ramps forward at the last second to hit harder when it arrives.

But then, the whole show exists in a discordant world of fable and horror, taking things that are normal and common and warping them through the medium of animation and the writers' offbeat comic sensibilities (it's also one of the best blends of comedy and horror I've seen in a long while, allowing that the kiddie-postmodern Cartoon Network sense of humor is not really the same as my own) to make them strange and oddly threatening even at their kindest. Like the never-homicidal but always terrifying woodsman, or the sweet Beatrice, brilliantly voiced by a best-in-show Lynskey as sunshine and optimism, even when she makes it clear that she honestly kind of hates both of the boys. It's an ethereal show, that's what it is, one that feels like bedtime stories and weird dreams made up of snatches of urban legends. Further pulling it out of time, the whole series is driven extensively by music: both flat-out musical numbers, but more often its deeply insinuating and atmospheric score, composed by a group called the Blasting Company. It's a mixture of folk music, pre-WWII pop, and a kind of Victorian-feeling dance music; a polyglot that at any rate feels like it could have been assembled, in exactly its present form, at any point from the 1930s onwards. It adds immeasurably to the sense of timelessness and placelessness of the show - it might, indeed, be the case that the music is the most important single element of the series, more than the backgrounds and color and their peerless evocation of autumn, more than the colorful voice acting, more than the light but never unserious dialogue. It's remarkable to listen to, elegiac and romantic and funny all at the same time.

And I have put off talking about the animation, because I loved Over the Garden Wall, but I loved that the least. It's certainly an intentional show, in terms of its design: there's a pronounced affection for the Fleischer cartoons of the '30s, which I'd ordinarily love, and in the one big '30s showcase sequence, a dream that occurs in the eighth episode, it works perfectly. But the broad, round cartooning seems a little too, I don't quite know, too frivolous? It resembles Adventure Time by feeling somewhat like the sketches an especially talented grade school student might make, given life, and that's an admirable aesthetic mindset in many of their projects. But given how much of Over the Garden Wall is cemented in folk art, having the big eyes and internet-comic goofiness of the characters strikes me as a little off. It's surely the case that the non-human characters, and the most overtly grotesque and otherworldly of the humans, look more appropriate than the leads, or the "normal" people they stumble across through their adventures. Gregory, in particular, looks too much like a doodle; I won't deny that it takes skill to animate someone like that and give him a real, obvious personality, but I simply don't like looking at him. It is, of course, a taste issue. But we all have our own tastes, and no matter how much is going right with a thing, that's an insurmountable obstacle.

Still, everything else goes right with Over the Garden Wall, so I don't want to harp on it. The world and the stories told in are so compelling that the rather generic protagonists are only a little liability; and I am powerless to resist anything that does such a great job of communicating the damp cool and colorful weariness of autumn through purely visual means. This is one of the most entrancing works of animation I've seen in a long time, even if the animation is, itself, nothing terribly special, and if nothing else, it's already permanently secured itself a spot in my annual Halloween week viewing schedule.

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DOWN ONCE MORE TO THE DUNGEON OF MY BLACK DESPAIR

A second review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Like just about anyone born after 1970 who loves musical theater, I had my Phantom of the Opera phase. I'm not sure when or how it ended, exactly, but it was well before December, 2004, when at long last The Phantom of the Opera The Movie bombasted its way into theaters, 18 years after the musical had premiered. And yet I still found myself sitting there opening weekend, duty-bound to see if there was anything in the sprawling concoction heaved up by Joel Schumacher, a filmmaker uniquely devoid of a sense of proportion or fear of being thought tacky, that could make me believe again in the transporting power of the music of the night.

There was not then. There still isn't.

Yet it's not enough to say "The Phantom of the Opera ('04) sucks because The Phantom of the Opera ('86) sucks, and Andrew Lloyd Webber is a farty toot-head". Love or hate the source material, the fact remains that The Phantom of the Opera is nowhere near the movie it could have been, committing one unforced error after another on its way to becoming one of the damned sloppiest major musicals of contemporary times. The cynic might say that the filmmakers knew they had an enormous pre-sold fanbase, and simply didn't need to care about doing a good job; but I legitimately don't want to be that cynical. Schumacher had been invested in this project for years before it was completed - I can't imagine that he just didn't give a shit about the material.

That material, of course, is one of the most popular stage musicals in the history of the medium, adapted from Gaston Leroux's 1910 romantic horror novel, which had been translated into Lord knows how many movies by the time Schumacher's version came along. The basic story is as familiar as it gets: young opera singer-in-training Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) is able to pinch hit on the night of a grand gala at the Paris Opera (the fictional Opéra Populaire in the musical), when the stormy prima donna Carlotta (Minnie Driver) decides to pitch a hissy fit, and wins an enormous success. What nobody knows is that she has been receiving lessons from an unseen tutor, her "Angel of Music". What even Christine doesn't know is that this is actually a disfigured man living in the catacombs and sewers beneath the opera house, whose inhabitans refer to him in nervous whispers as the Phantom of the Opera (Gerard Butler). When she connects with childhood friend and current patron of the Opéra, Raoul, Victomte de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), she pushes the shadowy Phantom into a jealous rage, and while he plots to have her firmly entrenched as the company's new leading soprano, he also works to fully possess the young woman whom he already has in an enraptured haze.

Every version of Phantom is basically a melodrama; in the case of the legendary 1925 Universal production, it's melodramatic horror, while the musical, with score by Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, and book by Webber and Stilgoe, is a melodramatic romantic triangle that juts out into horror here and there. The movie goes a little bit more in for thrills and chills than the stage version did, owing largely to some new orchestrations that live threateningly in the baseline, but the core is still swoony romance, and that's probably why the film committed one of the two absolutely crushing sins that would have turned it into a failure no matter how great everything else was - and in this Phantom of the Opera, there is nothing whatsoever that deserves to be called "great", except for maybe the costumes designed by Alexandra Byrne. We'll get to the other one in a moment, but let's pause for a moment to contemplate good ol' Gerard Butler, the pretty boy Phantom cast with an eye towards making the disfigured murderer a sex symbol who could compete with the handsome young Wilson (whose subsequent career of shifty, pathetic emblems of self-loathing masculinity makes it incredibly hard to take him seriously here, but that's not the fault of the movie or his performance) and Wilson's ludicrous shoulder-length wig.

Permit me to be blunt, dear reader, in stating directly that Butler's casting doesn't work on any level whatsoever. Madonna's lead performance in Evita, the last film made from a Webber show, wasn't necessarily any better, but at least she makes sense from a metanarrative and marketing perspective. Butler is just wrong. He's too attractive to be remotely plausible as the scarred, angry outcast - and the make-up design is quite ashamed to cover him up with more than a bad rash and a bit of modest scar tissue around the lips, compounding the problem.

"So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face"

Nor was he nearly enough of a noteworthy heartthrob in 2004 to make up for it by re-making the role into a star vehicle. He's also not tremendously good as an actor, find one emotion per scene and clinging to it like a life raft, resulting in a far plainer Phantom than the material deserves; instead of a tragic Byronic antihero, the character is just a mopey creep.

But the worst of it, and it's not even a close race, is in his singing. It is mind-blowingly bad - it competes only with Pierce Brosnan's cow-giving-birth performance of "S.O.S." in Mamma Mia! for the title of worst vocal performance in a musical in the 2000s. Butler has to bark and bray his way through the musical's signature ballad, "The Music of the Night", leaping for notes that he can only hit through momentum, not through good pitch, and turning the song into an uncomfortable straining ruin. There are certain points - the first time he sings the line "The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind" in "The Phantom of the Opera" is the clearest example - where he drops his AmerBritish accent and lets the Scots flow through him. He sounds, throughout, to be in dreadful pain. And that, infinitely more than his incongruous appearance, is what causes him to jam the brakes on the film and throw the audience out through the windshield.

That is one of the film's primary sins. The other one - the worse one, I'd say, given that I've thought about it constantly in the decade since I saw the film last - is that the sound mixing is the fucking worst. I have seen movies from 1929, where the microphones were hidden in potted plants, that didn't have such brutal shifts in the texture of the soundtrack. Of course, any musical where the songs are prerecorded and the actors lip-sync on set (generally not all that well, in this film) is going to show the seams between the two, but in Phantom of the Opera, it feels like they're singing on a different continent from the action depicted onscreen. Thankfully, it's mostly sung-through, so there's not that much spoken dialogue - though quite a lot more than in the show - but when it arrives it is dramatic and horrible, particularly during the lovers' secret banter in "Masquerade", where a sweet moment is turned into an earache. Or there's the grisly experience of "Stranger Than You Dreamt It", in which Butler sounds like he was delivering all his lines on the back of a truck speeding through a windstorm.

Mind you, just because Butler and the sound mixing are so utterly, unrelievedly vile that I have to separate them out, that doesn't mean that Phantom of the Opera has much of anything to recommend it. It's easier to praise the performances on a moment-by-moment level than any of them across the board: only Wilson is generally solid throughout, along with Miranda Richardson as the curt ballet mistress with A Dark Secret, but her role is too tiny to make a film-saving impact (she's also the only character in this Parisian-set story to speak with a French accent, because Miranda Richardson says "fuck you, I'm doing it"). Rossum's best moments are sublime, playing Christine as the guileless child that most films and stage productions tend to age up into her mid-20s, radiating an innocence that shades deeper into sorrow and fear as the film proceeds; but there are enough rocky patches in her performance that it's not flawless, and while it's a pity her career evaporated until TV saved it in 2011, this is hardly the kind of grand coming out as a leading lady the 18-year-old probably hoped for. She looks sleepy and distracted during the soaring love duet "All I Ask of You"; her singing is never better than satisfactory, and she has an enormous problem with the semi-parodic opera aria "Think of Me". Incidentally, nothing about The Phantom of the Opera indicates that Webber or Hart had even a micron of knowledge about actual opera. Driver goes way broad, and her Italian comic villain is the next best thing to a hate crime; it's also impossible to take her seriously as an actually talented, popular, and world-class diva, a reality that the entire rest of the plot springs from.

The staging is generally indifferent, save for a few scattered shots that prove Schumacher had seen Moulin Rouge! sometime in the three years since its release, and the utterly tacky lift at the start of the garish, over-lit "The Phantom of the Opera" sequence that proves he'd also seen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and inaccurately assumed that he had earned the right to lick that film's taint, let alone pilfer one of its most famous images. Some moments - a series of high-angle tracking shots during "Prima Donna" the dreamy incoherence that precedes that ghastly Cocteau homage - are clever and lovely; and the way he stages the framing scenes from years in the future as a flickering silent film (albeit with sound) is well-done if not effective. Some parts - the baffling destruction of the fourth wall in "Masquerade" and the anachronistic choreography that pops up in the same number - are irritating and lousy. The vast majority of it, though, is just there, doing nothing in particular but plopping the action onscreen in a way that's a bit brighter, more glittery, and tackier than the stage version.

I don't know if it's the worst Phantom of the Opera that I can imagine - it has no space aliens or dubstep remixes of the songs - but it's surely the worst that could have been made under Webber's personal supervision. What isn't sleepy and tediously literal is messy and inept, shots slamming together rather than cutting neatly, the sets looking garish and flat, the performances drifting aimlessly and in no real relationship to each other. It feels like even an enthusiastically mediocre and hackish adaptation should have been better than this; this is an actively terrible motion picture that every reason to be bland and perfunctory. That's takes some kind of skill, I suppose, but it's not really something you'd want to brag about.

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