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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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - MEET THE PARENTS

Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It is a film that links elbows with the two-years-younger Texas Chainsaw Massacre to go skipping down a primrose path strewn with body parts and pooled intestines, as the two most viciously nihilistic movies of an entire generation, the two movies that most directly and punishingly place the national psychic trauma of the late years of the Vietnam War into cinematic language, in which violence is shown as a depravity that makes you feel worst about life and yourself for having watched it. In terms of the marketplace, it triggered an enormous wave of knock-offs, and it more or less invented the subgenre "watch as the plot stops so that something absurdly wretched can happen to basically decent people in stomach-churning explicit violence".

Nothing I could say could ever take away the seismic importance of Last House in the development of a newer, burlier, nastier mode of horror, and I wouldn't want to try. That said, alongside its absolute, quintessential status in the genre's history, the film has also generally accrued a reputation as a great horror classic, on top of its evolutionary importance. And that just baffles the ever-living hell out of me. As I watch The Last House on the Left, I don't merely see a film that fails to be as good as it ought to have been - for that, we had better look to its altogether superior 2009 remake - I see a film that's borderline incompetent in all the places that matter the most, constantly sabotaging itself and robbing all of the impact from the handful of scenes that are able to accrue some measure of power. It's amateur-hour indie junk, not to put too fine a point on it, and whatever it manages to achieve as a powerful indictment of the human capacity for hatred and violence is nothing next to its status as a long lost Keystone Kops feature cut together with the world's shittiest folk musical.

Like all of the most grueling exercises in grind house viciousness, The Last House on the Left started life as an Ingmar Bergman film. The film is an uncredited remake of 1960 Cannes competitor The Virgin Spring, in which a medieval Swedish Christian girl is raped and murdered in the woods, her parents accidentally meet her killers and then kill them, and to cut off the cycle of vengeance and violence, her father dedicates her resting place to God and prostrates himself, begging for forgiveness, while the family's pagan maid looks on in wonder. Transfer the setting to 1970s Connecticut, remove the spiritual overtones and burning need for expiation, and hit Sven Nykvist in the head with a baseball bat until he forgets how shoot a movie that doesn't look like somebody dried off their sweaty testicles with the camera negative, and voila! You have Craven's attempt to fuse exploitation and documentary in one intense package.

It's the day before Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Cassel) 17th birthday, and she's got a big night planned: she and her edgy friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) are going into New York City to see the band Bloodlust. It's a typical piece of adolescent overcompensation, trying as hard as she possibly can to shock her well-off bourgeois parents Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, appearing under the hilariously ultra-WASP name of "Gaylord St. James") and Estelle (Cynthia Carr), and they respond with exactly the ill-concealed dismay at their daughter's life choices that she was undoubtedly trying to kick up.

Already, by the film's three-minute mark, we've encountered two of the things that will primarily ruin The Last House on the Left: terrible filmmaking and terrible acting. The latter, at least, is explicable: the film was conceived by Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (who would, eight years later, drop another bomb on the horror landscape when he produced and directed Friday the 13th) as an actual hardcore sexploitation film, deciding only at the very start of shooting that it would be better for their artistic aspirations (which were "indict a culture of violence and rape", not "get main in raincoats to whack off to a rape scene") if they dropped that angle. But they'd already assembled a cast entirely out of pornography veterans. And even though pornography in the early '70s was at its all-time height of sophistication and cultural acceptance, it wasn't a Petri dish of high-end acting talent. That being said, just because we can rationalise on paper why everybody - literally, every individual in the film who speaks lines of dialogue - feels like they learned their line phonetically and has only had enough time to think of one strategy for physical acting (which leads to a lot of fixed snarling expressions, like somebody just had a big whiff of smelly garbage and is pissed about it), it doesn't lessen the deleterious effect that has on the film's second and third acts.

As for the terrible filmmaking, it speaks less to Craven & company's lack of talent, than the apparently undecided approach the film takes to itself. The director's chief intent was, supposedly, to present an supremely artless, unmediated vision of behavior, capturing actions without commenting or looking away, and in the individual shots he and cinematographer Victor Hurwitz put together, you can see that. But the editing, by Craven himself (assisted by future slasher director Steve Miner), is almost comically incompatible with any of that, feeling every bit what an ambitious newbie would make in '72 if he wanted to be "artsy". It feels like someone absorbed the technique of French New Wave editing without paying attention to the narrative and structural importance of that editing, which leaves it choppy and discontinuous to no effect whatsoever. So, the first scene: cross-cutting between the mailman (Ray Edwards) sorting through the Collingwoods' letters and Mari getting ready to shower (so much for indicting exploitative male sexuality), and every time he says "Mari Collingwood" (postmen read the address of every piece of mail out loud, you see), the film cuts to Mari's face. To make sure that we know who she is, and that it's her birthday, since while there were other, more organic ways of doing it, none of them were as easy. It's downright hilarious, or it would be, anyway, if we were watching a parody and not an ostensibly gut-wrenching exercise in agonising terror. The worst thing is, this kind of clumsy stitching together of disparate moments using awkward sound editing and is a fucking strategy in the movie. It shows up many fucking times. And while it's happening here, we're introduced to another of the film's great sins, the music by David Hess; it's soft, elevator-style noodling without a melody, sounding perfect for a 1972 douche advertisement, and not so much a 1972 genre film.

So anyway, Mari goads her parents, and her dog - she says "tits" in reference to her snug top with neckline that goes right to her chin, and Dad gets offended that she says "tits", and there is I swear to God an insert shot of the dog looking up with a cocked-head look of shock, like this is a '90s Disney family comedy. It is possible that Craven's goal was to lull us into a relaxed state, so that he could hammer us all the harder later on. If so, he failed: by this point - and we're still just a few minutes into it - I'm just peevish and irritable. Anyway, Phyllis and Mari leave for the city, cross-cutting merrily along the way, having long conversations about their boobs that sound exactly like a 32-year-old screenwriter's impression of what he wants to imagine nubile teenagers talk like. They hear a radio news report about some escaped murder-rapists at large, including a line of dialogue that should be enshrined in the bad exposition hall of fame: "The daring daylight escape of the two convicted murderers, dope pushers and rapists cost the lives of two prison guards, and surprisingly, the life of a German Shepherd". Surprisingly! We meet those killers pretty quickly: Krug Stillo (our beloved composer Hess, kicking a career that would consist almost entirely of shadings of this same character), "Weasel" Podowski (porn director Fred Lincoln), Krug's son Junior (Marc Sheffler, who looks much too close in age to Hess), and Krug's bisexual girlfriend Sadie (Jeremie Rain). They're reprehensible and animalistic (animal imagery is used fairly heavily in their early scenes, in fact), and the first time the movie even flirts with the idea of having some kind of sickening power, though the music and acting - Rain's in particular - do everything they can to deny that power.

In the city, the girls decided to hunt for pot before they go to the show, and they have the immense misfortune to hit up Junior Stillo on a subway platform. He takes them back to the gang's ratty apartment, and it's all downhill from the moment they realise that they've just been trapped: "Oh shit" says Phyllis with the irritable tones of a woman who has just discovered that her husband didn't do the dishes like he promised, and no the ones of somebody finding herself captured by a pack of almost literally slavering rape-happy ghouls.

The criminals bind their victims and toss them in a car trunk to drive into the country for their awful fun, which of course means it's time to break out the kazoos on the soundtrack, as Hess provides the worst of his many songs, "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)"; it's a jaunty ballad that earns having the word "baddies" in its title through bubbly jollity and wordplay, and whatever ironic contrast the filmmakers were going for between the knee-slapping fun of the music and the gut-roiling tension of two young women being driven to God knows where to have God knows what done to them is not landing at all. AT ALL.

What follows is the source of all the film's notoreity and most of its actual terror: Mari and Phyllis are released in the woods near Mari's house, and being just barely far enough from safety that it does them no good at all sharpens the sense of nihilism as the two girls are forced to degrade themselves. Phyllis makes a run for it and is caught and killed; Mari tries to trick Junior into letting her go, and for her cunning is raped before she's shot to death. It is serious, grisly stuff, and it needs to be treated with utmost intelligence and dignity. But the movie has already shat that bed. Leading into this harrowing sequence with the worst music cue in a film that is hellbent on showcasing Hess's poor musical judgment is enough to dispel any controlled mood that the film vitally needs at this juncture. And Cassel is unrelentingly terrible in her role that it's difficult to care about the vile things happening to the character: she's no more convincing at being scared and in pain than she was at talking about her boobs or acting casual with her parents. The dead-eyed blankness and lack of self that follows being raped - that's the thing she's good at.

As shot, this sequence at least tries to reach the savage documentary feel that Craven claims to have had in mind. The handheld camera is loose and raw enough to impart a level of queasy potency to anything it lands on, and there are points where the accumulation of dust and dirt on the gate gives the film the look of harried realism, where the filmmakers were too busy capturing footage to stop and make sure that it was pristine and polished. Later on, the same thing happens in a context where it adds nothing of value, so this is probably simple incompetent filmmaking, not an aesthetic choice. None of this is enough to actually elevate the movie: the editing and camera movement still do a lot to pull the film's punches, even beyond how badly the film bungles the lead-up to this sequence. To compare it to the other most controversial of all movie rapes, the six-years-later I Spit on Your Grave blasts it out of the water: it's longer, more detailed, and the victim is someone who has actually come across as a legitimate human being elsewhere in the film, and the resulting sequence is galling and wretched and openly painful, where The Last House on the Left can at best hope to be gross and upsetting.

While all of this has been going on, the Collingwoods have contacted the police, who've responded with a sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove), and they are the worst. Both at policework, and at being movie characters. They're comic relief of the biggest, loopiest, broadest sort, getting into all manner of slapstick scrapes and making bumbling asses of themselves. That's all I have to say about them, but they take up an enormous portion of the brief running time, and every single frame that includes them is a liability at least as great as Hess's addiction to the most inappropriate music cues in history.

Eventually, the killers find their way to the Collingwood home, little realising where they are, while John and Estelle little realise who their peculiar new guests are. At first. They all figure out the situation, but the killers add morbid stupidity to their list of crimes by not supposing they need to get the hell out as soon as they put 2 and 2 together. That gives Mari's parents a chance to spend the night rigging the house with booby traps, and then arranging a bloody revenge against the four human monsters under their roof. It's a better sequence by far than the rape, since Craven has a surer idea of how to use visuals in concert with content rather than trying to pull his punches; the film is a bit less explicitly bloody than one might think, though that surely has at least as much to do with budget as anything. The inherent dramatic strength of this segment of the narrative compared to the middle - it's the difference between horror as a concrete element that comes to your home and must be exorcised, versus horror as a sort of free-floating state of suffering - was picked up by the creators of the remake, who emphasise that plot and the Collingwoods' mental state far more than Craven & co. ever do (the remake also has much better actors, so it can afford more nuanced psychological study. Here, it mostly feels like a splashy Grand Guignol finale that traffics in bloodlust and a surprisingly robust strain of rightwing class resentment - the killers explicitly detest the Collingwoods for their wealth, and they have been depicted throughout as a parody of hippie culture, which adds a measure of counter-radicalism that's not at all rare in horror, but is a bit surprising from an indie movie in '72. Not that I suspect anybody thought this through that much; like the rest of the film, this is all slapdash and trivial. The aesthetic choices are clumsy as hell, with improperly balanced close-ups and blasted-out sound effects, on top of dirty lenses (an eyelash lazily sashays across a protracted take of Estelle and Weasel chatting, as she prepares to bit his penis off) and the usual cryptic editing - the Collingwoods find Mari after all of five seconds of searching in their backyard, as far as I can tell - and stilted porn actor performance. And then it ends with a freeze frame on the pensive, blood-soaked results of violence without having an iota of the Bergman film's curiosity about the moral cost of vengeance. And then "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)" plays fucking again, over cheery shots of the cast. Because that's a great way to wrap up your harrowing horror movie.

And from this font springs much of the rest of American horror: exploitative violence and basically entered English-language genre films here, Cunningham's career directly influenced the explosion of slasher movies, and you can draw a straight line from the last scene to the torture porn genre of the 2000s. So basically, all the shitty horror traces back to The Last House on the Left, and that's exactly as it should be: shit begets shit. There's nothing about this film that I'd care to defend as worth keeping

Body Count: 6, not counting the innocence of the American filmgoing public, nor my patience.

Nastiness Rating: 4/5, pretty damn Nasty. That's adding a point, honestly, for the notoriety of the film. There comes a point when even the most visceral rape scene starts to disintegrate from all those pulled punches. Still, there's a solid 7 minutes in the middle where the film really can make it seem like everything in the world is irredeemably awful.

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REVISTING THE OLD HAUNTS

At its best, the 2015 Poltergeist is a beat-for-beat (but only sometimes shot-for-shot) retread of the 1982 Poltergeist, with Jared Harris substituting for Zelda Rubinstein. And I love Jared Harris, and I'm never sad to see him in a movie, but Zelda Rubinstein was the best part of the original movie. So at its best, Poltergeist '15 is a conspicuously less-good version of a thing that exists in a perfectly fine iteration. At its worst, Poltergeist '15 is basically a disaster site.

I will say this in its defense: it manages to reverse the usual fatal sin of horror movies, particularly ones about ghosts and hauntings, particularly in the modern age. Virtually every such film is at its best when it's simmering along and freaking out the characters, and the minute it starts to explain things and bring in the experts to help exorcise the whatever it is that's causing mischief, everything goes right into the crapper. Poltergeist front-loads all of its worst material, and ends up being kind of interesting as it gets closer to the end, or right about the point that Harris and Jane Adams, in the role of a credulous parapsychology professor at the local university, take over protagonist duties.

That front-loading is dire, though. There's a rule so straightforward, longstanding, and obviously necessary that I'm always baffled when horror filmmakers forget to follow it: start by showing us what normal looks like, so we know what abnormal looks like. Phantasmagorical explosions of style and plotless terror on the European model can get away without laying that groundwork, but none of those words describe Poltergeist at all, which eagerly starts throwing demonic clowns and unseen people in the closet at its central family their very first night in their new haunted house, without even a single evening of vague unease to warm us up. It's not a good way to amp up the tension, it's a good way to blow out the tires on the movie before it's even out of the driveway, and the first half-hour of the film throws out so many creepy images with gothic shadows and a wailing score to tell us that it's time to be scared, it's numbing. It's like director Gil Kenan and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire threw the switch from "banal domesticity" to "gaping hellmouth" so hard that they broke it and couldn't switch it back.

Even setting that aside, the first act of the new Poltergeist is amazingly defective. The basic plot is about the same as last time, with the names changed and significantly more emphasis on economic misery: the recently laid-off Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) and his writer wife Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) have settled on a kind of dumpy suburban home as the new place for their family to live and economise as they regroup (Deficiency #1: every character reacts to this house like it's a tumble-down shack that only the most hellishly impoverished would dare to live in, when it's quite a trim, clean 2-story in a nice neighborhood, and if the constant implication that we're in the southwestern Chicago suburbs is meant to be taken seriously, it's certainly setting the grindingly poor Bowens back not less than a couple hundred thousand dollars). And so comes the fateful day when they move in the kids, surly teenager Kendra (Saxon Sharbino) and unbearably adorable moppets Griffin (Kyle Catlett), around 11, and Madison (Kennedi Clements), around five. It's seriously repellent how precious they are; but they have the merit of looking inordinately plausible as DeWitt's biological children.

And so, without further ado, the Bowens are swamped by an army of horrors, most of them plaguing the absurdly high-strung Griffin; eventually, the Whatever It Is in the house seduces Madison into entering her closet, whence she is warped into a hell dimension that, as we'll find out, exactly overlaps the Bowens' house, but only occasionally interacts with it. After which, things settle out into that beat-for-beat retread, and Adams and Harris come along, and it's almost possible to forget just how wretched everything has been so far. Other than Catlett, who's pretty terrific as a preteen neurotic living in the worst imaginable place for a child of his nervous sensibilities. Rockwell and DeWitt are generally terrible in their roles, persuasive as a married couple happy to be with each other as a bulwark against poverty, and nothing else - certainly it's difficult to believe in either of them as a parent, the foundation upon which the entire notion of Poltergeist stands. But it's not sporting to blame the actors for being unable or disinclined to do much with the half-formed characters and situations in Lindsay-Abaire's screenplay, which frequently resembles a skeleton for a script to be built up later more than a coherent movie in its own right. Like the way it treats the Bowens' financial difficulties, which is the central point of some scenes and totally forgotten in others. Or its utter failure to figure out what makes Kendra interesting and necessary as a character in any way.

Kenan's directorial debut came in the form of the motion-capture haunted house adventure Monster House in 2006, and it's easy to see that as an argument in favor of his qualifications for making a family-friendly scary movie (though the new Poltergeist is considerably less interested in being for kids and parents than the original), but none of his facility with genre mechanics shows up here. The first act is one-note and blandly assembled, typified by its pile-up of jump scares of escalating ridiculousness - a scary clown? No, a whole fucking box of scary clowns! No, a freaked-out squirrel jumping at the characters! No, a squirrel with blood red zombie eyes! - and its artless reimagining of moments from the original with absolutely none of its creativity, most prominently a scene that re-creates the wonderful moment in the the first film where the camera pans away from a kitchen only to find that a few moments later every object within it has been stacked into a complicated tower (in the remake, it's a house made out of comic books). Not only is the tone different - in the original it was more mysterious and wonderful than scary, but since the remake is humping "scary" as hard as it possibly can from the second scene, there's no room for that here - it's accomplished in a shock cut instead of a single camera movement, or even a simulated single camera movement. The result is something barely shocking, since Kenan telegraphs it too openly, and certainly not creepy.

It sticks the landing, at least, though not without some stupid touches (a Boschian hellscape of writhing CGI corpses is just silly), with Catlett, Harris and Adams all coming to the fore in the last third in ways that tweak the original enough to feel like the new thing has a worthwhile personality of its own. It's never, ever as good as the first movie, which I don't even personally love all that much, but it maneuvers through the formulaic requirements of a haunted house movie crisply enough.

Don't stay for the mid-credits scene, though; it's jokey awful nonsense, and the worst part of the entire movie with its insipid winking. And it immediately undoes all the hard work of the film's last hour in washing out the foul taste of the first 30 minutes.

4/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: JAMES FRANCO'S HOME MOVIES

To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it - and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie's achingly long 60 minutes - the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex in cinema, in art, and in real life. But around the five minute mark, the film shares its actual purpose, in the foggy phrasing of actor Val Lauren, the anchor of Franco's experiment:

"I don't personally like this project, personally. It doesn't, I don't, nothing artistic in it, right now. Maybe it's 'cause of my lack of understanding of what it is, doesn't respond to it. What I do respond to, and always have is his mission [points to Franco]. I like James's mission, I don't always understand it, but I like it. I like it. I like what he's doing, even when I don't understand it, and I'm into supporting it and being a part of it."

Let's summarise, to clean up the talky, inarticulate stumbling over language, which is itself a key part of Interior. Leather Bar.'s aesthetic: "this idea is dumb, confusing, and underthought, but if James Franco wants to do it, then let's go ahead and do it".

Interior. Leather Bar. is a categorically difficult little beastie, taking the form of a documentary but obviously scripted, and yet the thing it purports to document is actually being documented, though not depicted. Let me start over again. Interior. Leather Bar. finds Franco and Matthews deciding to re-imagine 40 minutes of gay sex supposedly cut from William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising (about five seconds of practical thought makes it pretty obvious that no such footage could imaginably have been shot, if for no other reason than the implausibility of Cruising having been conceived as a film that was two-fifths gay sex; it's not clear if Franco and Matthews, at any level of fictional or nonfictional remove, indulged in that five seconds). In the role of the character originally played by Al Pacino, they cast one of Franco's current favorite meat puppets in his weird art projects, Val Lauren. The film consists of Franco enthusiastically talking about how boldly his project is confronting reflexive heternormative values and representations, while Lauren wonders if it's a violation of ethics, taste, or his personal sexual comfort levels for him to watch as other people have sex in front of a camera.

The film doesn't try very hard to keep up the pretense that it has anything to do with Cruising, a dull potboiler whose latter-day recovery by a certain strain of queer theorists hasn't managed to address the fact that even if it has some interesting representations, it's still pretty crummy at basic thriller mechanics. From the evidence of how they frame (and frame, and frame) their arguments, their images, and their performances, it's entirely possible that neither Franco nor Matthews hasn't even seen Cruising. Instead, it is a platform to allow Franco, playing a modulated, scripted version of himself (Matthews is the film's credited writer), to launch into a series of painful exploratory discussions about what this whole experiment means in the grander scheme of society, and how daring he is for asking these intensely bold questions about what we are and are not comfortable with, and why. Questions that are mind-numbingly juvenile, and cannot possibly come across as new or probing to any of the very self-selecting audience for an experimental psuedo-documentary full of explicit man-on-man blowjobs.

Mostly, Interior. Leather Bar. is massively fascinated with and impressed by James Franco, self-challenging heterosexual visionary whose desire to break down the limitations of labeling and normalising things results in this film about filming the making of a film based on another film. It is possible, and indeed pleasurable, to imagine a version of this film as filtered through the mind of Christopher Guest, where the mingling of documentary and mockumentary would serve to poke fun at the rambling pretension of the actor/scholar/director/author who surrounds himself with people too cowed by his power over all of them (just several weeks after this film's debut at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Franco appeared as the lead in Disney's ungainly Oz the Great and Powerful, a fact observed here multiple times) to call him on his aimless verbal splattering, too directionless to work even as provocation. Even Lauren's film-long reiterations of his feeling that the film is a bad idea that makes no sense and makes him feel uncomfortable as an actor is constantly framed in terms of his admiration for Franco, and his conviction that it must be in the service of some greater social purpose, or it wouldn't be happening.

At times, almost exclusively in the second half (when the action moves to the film set, and away from Franco's head), there are flashes of the film that Interior. Leather Bar. could have been in the hands of someone with a stronger head for filmmaking, queer theory, or both, than this film evinces (Matthews is an award-winning director of documentary films about the gay male experience, so I am compelled to assume and hope that he's capable of more thoughtful filmmaking than the mish-mash on display here). The best sequence, by far, starts with the recreated footage of two men engaged in oral sex, with pulsing lights and music, cutting suddenly and harshly to the filmmakers shooting their act from multiple cameras, a stark and dare I say it, witty depiction of the distinctly anti-sexy ways in which onscreen sex is filmed, a matter of angles and lighting and choreography. It's a moment that feels like it actually has something to say, and keen insights into its subject matter; other moments like this are peppered in the last half-hour, though it is a chore to find them.

Having something to say, though, is not typically high on the film's agenda. Having something to ask is, but the film so joylessly over-enunciates all of its questions in bluntly literal ways that it leaves the viewer with nothing to engage with, no work to do ourselves. The film could just as easily function as a series of tweets, and even then, it would tend to reveal more about the author's lack of experience with social issues that have been debated well into the past, and on more interesting, sophisticated battlegrounds than Interior. Leather Bar.. Franco, or "Franco", at several points confesses that he's making this project mostly to see whatever happens: that approach can yield surprising, unmediated insights, but as this film proves, it's far likelier for it to end in frivolous tedium.

4/10

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ALL RAPT UP

The moment when you start to voice the old "I can't believe they left that part of of the book out of the movie! That was the best part!" complaint, and the movie about which you are complaining is Left Behind, that's when you discover that you need to take a nice long break from watching movies, and perhaps should go for more walks out in the woods. But they did leave the best part out, and I can't believe it. They also left out a huge amount of bad parts, mind you: surprisingly, the film is, in its entirety, about only a tiny segment of Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins's miserable 1996 novel about LaHaye's very particular, small-minded, punishing brand of Christianity. The movie dramatises literally only about the first 50 pages of the 450 novel, meaning that if it had somehow managed to become a success and kick of a new franchise adapting the entire 16-book series, the film producers were all set to commit to 48 motion pictures to make that happen. Talk about living in a Godless universe...

The point being, by the end of the first 50 pages, the novel Left Behind hasn't even introduced us to the villain yet, the vampiric Antichrist from Romania Nicolae Carpathia. And I mean, seriously, are you going to tell me that a movie in which Nicolas Cage fights a dime-store Dracula named Nicolae Carpathia isn't obviously preferable to literally any other movie where Nicolas Cage does anything? Of course you're not, it's not possible to hold such dimwitted belief. Unless, apparently, you are screenwriters/producers Paul Lalonde & John Patus, returning to help create this new film after having their fingers all over the original trilogy of direct-to-video adaptations starring Kirk Cameron. And let us not forget that LaHaye & Jenkins actually sued to stop that series of adaptations to continue ruining their carefully worked-out franchise of novels in which one half of a plot point occurred every 300 pages. For them to then turn around and let the same producers take another whack at the material seems a bit iffy. And maybe that explains why this new Left Behind resembles the book to hardly any degree, and resembles evangelical Christian propaganda even less. Which surprised me even more than the absence of Carpathia, given that evangelism is basically the only thing that the Left Behind books, movies, video games, and whatever other forms it has taken have ever been. Evangelism, mixed with smug reminders to the True Christians that they're better and purer than all the rest of us sinful schmucks.

None of that is to be found in this Left Behind, except around the very edges. Heck, the word "Rapture" is never even spoken to describe the event that occurs around the one-third mark, leaving every child and young teenager vanished off the face of the planet, along with all the adults who have come to believe the proper things about Jesus. Instead, it's a thriller - a very circumscribed, boring thriller that director Vic Armstrong hobbles with a very quiet, non-urgent tone throughout, about landing a plane under moderately adverse conditions. Recognising, to their credit, that "the passengers are freaked out, but mostly calmly remaining quiet, like the one remaining pilot asked them to do" isn't nearly enough to support an entire film, Lalonde & Patus eventually decide to bump up the stakes by throwing a second, pilotless plane at the first one, rupturing its fuel tanks in a mid-air collision and offering up something like a dramatic scenario for at least the final third of the 110-minute film. Mostly, though, the movie seems to believe that it can coast by on the mystery of what happened to all those people, which is obvious bullshit: we didn't pay money to see a movie called Left Behind because we don't know what it's about. Or what it's supposed to be about, anyway.

So the ingredients are these: Cage plays Rayford Steele, a pilot with a boring, preachy wife named Irene (Lea Thompson, looking thoroughly roughed-up by what amounts to little more than a cameo), is flying to London on his birthday, just to avoid being with his family, and also to flirt with the sexy flight attendant Hattie (Nicky Whelan). This breaks the heart of his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson, who looks like the person you get after asking the casting agent for Kristen Bell, and she laughs in your face), who was flying in from college to surprise him, and spotted him flirting with his Christ-denying whore. This sent her straight into the metaphorical-but-not-literal-because-sex-is-dirty arms of Cameron "Buck" Williams (Chad Michael Murray), heartthrob and internationally renowned investigative TV reporter. He happens to be flying on Rayford's flight, and proves to be an able right-hand man when the crisis hits. Meanwhile, Chloe returns home, dismissing her mother's loving nagging about religion just long enough to be at the mall with her little brother, who evaporates right as they're hugging, in a moment that would be touchingly shocking if it wasn't so damn goofy in execution: Thomson's expression is pricelessly fake, and the score by Jack Lenz (which is always a liability, though sometimes only a small one) is at its very worst during the Rapture, not sure if the tone is supposed to be "oh no, where is everyone, this is scary!" or "how wonderful all those people are in Heaven now", and so it decides to split the difference.

Of all the problems I expected to have with the movie, not one of them came true, and all of them were replaced by more boring alternatives: instead of bombastic, condescending preaching, it's a Christian audiences movies that's downright simpering in how shyly it mentions Christianity; instead of trying, feebly, to suggest a worldwide crisis that results in a charismatic businessman installing a one-world government, done on a budget too small to evoke even a tenth of the scale it needs, it sets up shop on a single airplane full of weirdly idiosyncratic characters and proceeds to march through an unironic version of Airplane!. Saddest of all, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is Nic Cage: instead of seeing him uncork and go apeshit in his anti-Antichrist histrionics, he's playing one of his boring and sedate check-cashing roles, all sober authority as an airline pilot who occasionally gets teary-eyed when he thinks about his family. That's what I can't forgive about this Left Behind: it's too limited in ambition or thematic overreach to be campy. Cage is half-asleep, Murray is devoured by his sexyindie beard, and only Thomson, chirpy and flirty in ways that feel wildly out of place in a movie of this stripe (she even says "shit"!), brings any kind of bad movie dementia to the proceedings. That Left Behind would be more infuriating than schlocky inept fun I was prepared for. That it would be infuriating mostly because of how drowsy and boring it is, I was not prepared for that at all, and thus I find myself in the curious place of being actually disappointed by a low-budget movie about the Rapture. Being a bad movie fan can really be horrible, sometimes.

2/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY PLUNDERING ITS ANIMATED CANON

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: with Maleficent, Disney updates a great cartoon from their Silver Age with a dubious live-action update that feels like it exists solely to facilitate a great movie star playing a redo of one of the best villains in animation, a role she was clearly born for. This is not the first time that this exact situation has happened.

When Disney decided to make a live-action version of its 1961 animated classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians - it obviously being the case that simply not remaking it was too ridiculous and perverse a notion to even contemplate - one of the things that happened was that John Hughes was hired to write and produce. This was undoubtedly because of the onetime teen movie impresario's hand in birthing Beethoven, first of the 1990s wacky pet comedies, and it turned out to be a definitive choice. For the ultimate version of 101 Dalmatians, released at Thanksgiving in 1996, is every inch a Hughes film. Not because the dalmatians sit around and talk about life as high schoolers and discover that there's more to them than just being a doggy jock, a doggy geek, a doggy princess, and so on, though that film would have been so much better that I weep to think of it. Rather, 101 Dalmatians feels like the culmination of Hughes in his "I don't care, give me fucking money" phase; it plays like a crude, clumsy welding of Beethoven (nonspeaking animals doing wacky things) and Home Alone (a protracted third act of alarmingly violent slapstick) stuffed into the narrative framework of the 35-year-old film, with considerable stretches of dialogue taken from the same source.

The results of that Frankensteinian tinkering with scattered body parts are not pretty, though we must pay the film this much respect: it gave the world Glenn Close playing iconic crazy woman villain Cruella De Vil, and that is something all fans of talented actresses uncorking it and having a bit of hammy, campy fun must acknowledge to be an ultimate good in the universe. Even if Close is a bit broader and therefore more fun in the much more deranged and therefore more interesting 2000 sequel 102 Dalmatians. We needed to go through this movie to get to that one, and so it still earns our thanks, however fatigued and sad those thanks might be.

In all ways, the film more closely resembles Disney's original film than the Dodie Smith book from which it claims descent. In London, there are two dogs, Pongo and Perdita, and they are respectively owned by an unemployed American video game designer named Roger (Jeff Daniels) and an English hold tight now, a video game designer? This is the way you sexify up the story of 101 Dalmatians for a 1990s audience, John Hughes? And boy, does the video game he's designing ever look unplayable - it's basically what you'd get if you asked, say, a team of Disney animators to whip up some "game footage" based on the character models from the animated Dalmatians, and don't particularly care if it resembles in any degree the kind of games that actually got played in 1996, or at any point before or after.

Perdita, then is owned by Anita (Joely Richardson), a fashion designer who works at House of De Vil, where she is a favorite of namesake, owner, and guru Cruella De Vil, who notices one day that Anita has been noodling around with a line based on irregular spots, inspired by her photo of Perdita. And this puts a bee in Cruella's bonnet that will not fly away. But it takes a while before she's able to do anything with this insight. First, Pongo and Perdita spot each other in a park, and then contrive to get Roger and Anita all mixed up and fallen in love; before you can say "quickie wedding" their houses are combined and Perdita is heavy with child. Children. 15 children, in fact, a robust litter of dalmatian pups that Cruella offers to buy on the very day of their birth. When Roger finds this all distasteful and suspicious, the fashion magnate opts for plan B: have a pair of idiot thieves, Jasper (Hugh Laurie) and Horace (Mark Williams), kidnap the puppies and take them into the country with 84 others, exactly the number Cruella requires to fashion for herself a dalmatian-skin outfit. The humans are distraught, but the dogs, communicating through an impressive network of barks, are able to track their family out of the city, where they and several other species of animal wreak their wide-rainging revenge on Cruella and her henchmen, including the angry mute furrier Mr. Skinner (John Shrapnel).

None of this is any damn good, though the film does itself no favors by ending on its worst material, the lengthy slapstick booby traps sequence in which the dogs, along with farm animals and a pair of teamwork-oriented raccoons, perpetrate all manner of indignities upon the human villains. The adult viewer cannot help their mind from wandering during all this, to ponder what possibly could have been going through the mind of five-time Academy Award nominee and three-time Tony winner Glenn Close as she read the descriptions in the screenplay of "Cruella drops into a barrel of molasses" and "Cruella slides backwards at high speed through a pool of pig shit", or what director Stephen Herek* might have said to her to get her prepared for the scene where a pig is catapulted onto her chest and she must feebly kick and scream for help.

That being said, Close is - by lots - the best thing happening in the entire movie. Recognising what kind of movie she was in and what kind of character she was playing, she turned of whatever filter actors have that makes them look for character truth or internal credibility, and went from 0 to psycho in one scene flat. It's a glorious thing to behold, when someone with Close's talents and authoritative presence just cuts loose and goes for it: there are manical giggles galore, and every line she speaks is in a relentlessly cheery scream, full of bizarre private amusement. There aren't many movie villains who take actual pleasure in being evil, for the sake of it; Close's Cruella belongs to that company, and while it's not nearly enough to elevate the movie itself, at least we get some one-of-a-kind live action cartooning to enjoy. Even without borrowing any affection the audience might have for the animated original, Close creates an iconic, comically menacing character that lingers in the memory long after the bland nonsense of the film has faded.

And boy, does it ever fade. 101 Dalmatians is utterly devoid of anything that has a personality at all, let alone anything genuinely appealing. Having made the (probably appropriate) choice not to have the animals speak, the film immediately hits the wall that both Disney's film and Smith's book take Pongo and Perdita as their protagonists, which now becomes virtually impossible. Not that stories with non-speaking animals as protagonists can never work, but when you hire John Hughes and Stephen Herek to make a family movie, you don't expect, don't want, and don't get Au hasard Balthazar. So the story no longer centers on the dogs; but it doesn't really center on anyone else - Cruella would be the obvious choice, but Disney wasn't interested in making movies about bad guys just yet. Roger and Anita are too bland - and Daniels's performance certainly isn't looking to counteract that impression - and that leaves basically nobody else. So the film descends into a free-floating collection of scenes that barely stitch together and have no particular visual flair: the costumes are the most interesting thing to look at in a movie that is content to have the actors stand in front of the camera delivering lines, while a mix of well-trained animals and animatronic critters (and sometimes, vengefully bad CGI ones) enact insipid jokey behaviors designed to appeal only to young and extremely unsophisticated children.

It's lowest-common-denominator kiddie filmmaking, basically, propped up by a weirdly committed and nasty-minded performance by the villain. Not the first time it ever happened, but it's especially irritating in this case: what Close is up to is so damn great that I'm almost bizarrely tempted to try and recommend the film, even though everything - everything - around her is at the most dire, shitty levels that 1990s family entertainment could manage to operate.

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ABORT, RETRY, FAIL

The 2014 remake of RoboCop (the word "reboot" is reserved only for remakes that start new franchises, and that doesn't seem to be a concern here) is a useless thing that tells a story which isn't very interesting in a way that is desperately tedious, but by God, it's so much better than RoboCop 3. I don't know if clearing that threshold counts as an achievement, but the film made it happen anyway, so kudos to screenwriter Joshua Zetumer and director José Padilha. The latter of whom has made it more less clear that the movie he has seen his name applied to and the movie he had desired to make do not overlap to an especially significant degree. And while we'll never know what vision Padilha had for the film before the studio execs slapped his hands away - maybe it involved an army of cyborg dachshunds flying around, or something, and would have been terrible - I'm inclined to think that he comes out on the right side of the deal, morally and artistically at least. It's hard to imagine a more anodyne, low-impact, aimless version of this film - hell, of this exact same script! - than the one we've been given.

A lot of that starts with Joel Kinnaman, a pretty anodyne, low-impact actor, in the lead role of Detroit police office Alex Murphy, who finds himself in the center of a horrible military-industrial complex PR stunt. I don't intend to flip back and forth between this film and the 1987 original too much, but it's certainly worth observing that in creating the role, Peter Weller played a pointedly robotic and inhuman version of the character with surprising, subtle flexibility and wit; in a revision that is vastly more sympathetic and emotional, Kinnman is stuck in a much more robotic, one-note performance. It's not a thing that torpedoes the movie - comparatively, RoboCop '14 has more characters doing more things to pull focus from Murphy - but God knows it doesn't help.

The story this time is that Detroit-based multinational tech company OmniCorp is desperate to expand the market for its military-application robots, and has been stymied in its efforts to introduce these machines as replacements for U.S. police officers by the Dreyfuss Act, a bill which prohibits the use of such machines domestically. Hunting for any sort of "in" with an aggressively anti-robot American populace, OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) strikes upon the idea of combining a robot and a man in one high-efficiency, but still relatable figure. The test subject is, of course, Murphy, who effectively dies in an car explosion set up by local drug kingpin Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow); Sellars is able to sweet-talk Murphy's wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) into signing off on hooking him into a machine designed by the guilt-ridden Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), who views it as a violation of professional morality that keeps snowballing until he eventually turns into a full-on Frankenstein.

There are multiple options for an A-plot in all of that, and the biggest problem by far with RoboCop's script is that no matter what we're watching at any given moment, it doesn't seem to be the most important thing. This is in part because out of all the angles that the filmmakers could have focused on, the lion's share of the plot is given to the part of the movie where Norton fine-tunes Murphy's link to the suit. It's probably necessary to focus more on this, given that the new film is so much more invested in Murphy's psychological state as a cyborg than the original trilogy ever thought about, but still, nobody could possibly thing that the R&D phase could conceivably be the most interesting part of any movie titled RoboCop, and it's leaden, deathly-dull, and not remotely as effective in exploring the man-machine link as it needs to be if it's going to land at all. In the end, it feels like 40 minutes of set-up just to get to the point that Norton confesses that he's programmed Murphy with only the illusion of free will, something that could have been established to much the same thematic and emotional effect with plenty of room left over for actual movie.

But then, RoboCop never really seems to know what it wants to be about. The opening ten minutes - by far the best part of the movie, and the only stretch where I genuinely thought it was going to be a worthy variation on the original - make a very, very, very clear point of comparing the battle robots with contemporary American drone warfare, complete with a cardboard right-wing ideologue newsman, Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) - I want so bad for his name to be a combination of Pat Robertson and Robert Novak, but I don't think the evidence is there for it - spitting fire and brimstone about military might. But until a desperate Hail Mary throw in the final scene, the film immediately forgets about this them in favor of various half-baked attempts to observe that corporations exist. All of the film's satiric notions exist at the level of a passionate and angry and mostly naïve teenager just getting into politics (Novak in particular isn't a remotely clever or funny or even appealingly cheap shot critique of Fox News talking heads - all it takes is making a cheapjack copy of Stephen Colbert, and even that appears to be beyond this movie), though I suppose it's admirable that RoboCop wants to say something about modern life, even though it so signally fails to.

What does tend to save it from being a complete waste of time is that Padilha does have a good eye for an image, and he and DP Lula Carvalho frame the action well (the opening scene, again, is a treat), and even create one truly memorable scene when Murphy discovers exactly how much of his organic self remains inside the RoboCop suit, a moment of melancholy PG-13 body horror that I expect to carry with me long after the rest of the film has rightfully been consigned to the garbage heap. There's not much else that recommends the film - it wastes a genuinely strong cast on stock characters played mostly without distinction (Keaton is a particular disappointment, spinning every moment in the flattest way possible), and it wastes surprisingly high-quality CGI on bland design concepts - but merely for including some sequences where the pace picks up and there's a real sense of style around the action, it manages to justify itself more than something like the Total Recall remake. Which is also not a very significant threshold to clear, but '80s remakes are a degraded genre, and you take what you can get.

5/10

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A BLOODY DISASTER

If the new Carrie teaches us anything, it's the importance of casting. I don't know if it's "officially" more of a new adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 debut novel, or more of a remake of the Brian De Palma-directed 1976 classic, but nobody could be stupid enough to suppose that people in the audience aren't going to be mentally making every comparison between that film and this that could possibly be made. And the first and most important point to compare is Carrie White herself: Sissy Spacek's performance is one of the legendary turns in horror cinema, as can be readily appreciated even by somebody like myself, no real fan of that movie. The role calls for a dysfunctionally awkward outsider whose awareness of human behavior and social code is provisional and hastily kludged together; Spacek, who in her youth possessed one of the oddest faces in cinema, slid right into that perfectly. It seemed genuinely probable that she was just as alienated as the script claimed, simply because of how apart Spacek could make herself seem just by projecting the right parts of her angular body. It is masterful, mesmerising stuff.

The new Carrie is played by Chloë Grace Moretz, and I can't think of a worse choice out of all the established actresses in the right age range. Everything that is burned into the character - uncertainty, ignorance, innocence, fear, the inability to fit in - is directly the opposite of everything that Moretz brings to any and every significant performance she's even over the last few years, and though she puts in an extreme effort to play the part like it's been written, it's just that - effort. Extreme effort. Moretz tries her absolute goddamn best to put Carrie over the way that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacas, dressing up the 1976 version by Lawrence D.Cohen, wrote her, and every bit of the acting process is plainly revealed on her face, which never looks like anything but a contorted death mask until the blood-spattered prom night finale, the one point were the film significantly deviates from earlier movie. And not to its benefit - if Spacek's Carrie exploded in an uncontained fit of rage and humiliation, Moretz's Carrie is making conscious, deliberate choices about who revenge herself on, and visibly enjoying it. Which alters the themes of the story to the point of uselessness.

At which point somebody might well trot out "but it's a different movie!" And the fact of the matter is: no, it's not. It's the same movie, hitting virtually all of the same beats, frequently using functionally identical camera set-ups. If there is any meaningful change to speak of, it's because the new Carrie assumes that it has a much less intelligent audience, one that cannot deal with shaded characterisations, and so requires every member of the cast to be predictable, from their first scene, as a Good person or a Mean person. And the film's prologue, in which Carrie's mother Margaret (a shockingly ineffective Julianne Moore) gives birth to her unwanted daughter, and nearly kills the infant in a fit of religious mania. As though we needed more proof than the story amply provides that Margaret is loony, and has a profoundly unhealthy relationship with her daughter.

That a remake of Carrie should turn out to be a pathetic retread of the same emotions, step-by-step, executed with far less skill and visceral punch is probably to be expected, I guess, though I wasn't really prepared for how entirely lifeless the new film would be at every step. That it is this pathetic and bland while being directed by Kimberly Peirce is confusing as hell. All along, it seemed easy to assume that Peirce, she who directed no less a study of gender roles and physical desire than Boys Don't Cry, was going to make some sort of arch-feminist Carrie, or a Carrie that found bolder ways to elaborate on the theme of pubescence and sexual awakening. Metaphorical sexual awakening is the freebie, with Carrie. So damn me if Peirce didn't end up making a film less involved in female sexuality than De Palma did; the shades and implied complexities involved in Carrie's feelings towards boys are left to one scene and basically one single shot, and that's it for sexualised themes. That and the famous menstruation opening scene, which I must give Peirce credit for: it's been handled with far more sympathy and openness than in the first film, where there was, however buried underneath style and the baroque action, a tendril of "ew, gross, periods!"

So no hardcore feminist reimagining; what, then, justifies this Carrie? The answer, I am certain is nothing. Other than a few intolerably obvious suggestions about how life in the iPhone Age changes the nature of bullying (Carrie's tampon hell is uploaded to YouTube - oh, and 2007 called, it wanted its plot point back), the story isn't upgraded to 2013 convincingly, the characters aren't likeable or interesting, there's not a single scary beat in the entire thing, and the prom scene has been turned into an indistinguishable clone of a battle scene from just about any superhero movie. It's one thing for the movie to be weaker than the '76 Carrie; this goes deeper than that. There is absolutely nothing of value in this movie; it makes boring and arbitrary things that legitimately worked in at least two separate mediums already (three if you're the weirdo who likes the Carrie stage musical). It's a film where the unabashed highlight is Judy Greer as a thoughtful and sympathetic gym teacher, and all the love in the world to Ms. Greer, whose presence has enlivened so many things, but you don't want her to do all the heavy lifting for your movie. Ever.

Everything here is surface-level and unengaged with the characters or emotions; and those surfaces are already pretty bland and hackish and sanitary. Medicore and useless, I had expected of this Carrie; grating, soul-deadening insipidity I had not, and this is about as insipid as modern horror is able to be.

2/10

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HO-HUM SILVER

Three things: first is that, despite what the aggregate of the reviews tell you, The Lone Ranger is entirely unlikely to give you cancer. It's not good, but it's not appreciably worse than plenty of big-budget tentpoles. Two is that $250 million dollars is impossible to justify for any motion picture, because while it's really obvious where director Gore Verbinski spent all that money - on a massive reconstruction of trains in the Western wilds to serve as the setting for an unfathomably expansive final setpiece that is, bar none, the best thing the movie has going for it - it's simply not any more involving or exciting than movies that cost half as much. Third is that the culture of making tentpole popcorn movies longer than they need to be really, badly needs to stop, because The Lone Ranger, at 149 minutes, tells exactly the kind of story (lawman avenges his dead brother, fights the evil railroad baron) that Westerns told ten or fifteen times a year back in the '40s and '50s, and they were able to tell totally engrossing, genuinely exciting films that felt complete and completely satisfying at just 80 or 85 minutes apiece. When we've hit the point that movies can be a full fucking hour shorter without losing anything of importance, and would be a hell of a lot more fun as a result - somewhere in all that footage, there's a 90 minute Lone Ranger that's my favorite popcorn movie of 2013 so far - then we have to acknowledge that something is deeply, even irreparably broken in the culture.

Sign of Trouble #1: the film's totally unnecessary framing narrative, which takes place a cheesy fair in 1933 (the year that the Lone Ranger as a character debuted on the radio), where a young boy wearing a homemade black domino mask (Mason Elston Cook) pokes his nose into a Wild West exhibit that's seen better days. Here, in a display marked "THE NOBLE SAVAGE In His Natural Habitat" (the first of many tepid attempts to Say Something about the treatment of Native Americans using a character noted for being a ludicrous caricature), he finds what looks to be a model of an old Indian, but is in fact an ancient Comanche who, in between his arcane mumblings, reveals himself to be named Tonto (Johnny Depp - the old-age makeup is unusually convincing). THE Tonto, the boy is delighted to learn, and Tonto tells him the story of the long-ago day that Tonto became the traveling companion to the legendary, one-and-only Lone Ranger, John Reid (Armie Hammer), back in 1869.

Bluntly, there's no reason at all for this framework narrative. It doesn't cast any kind of interesting perspective on the material. It doesn't add to the sense of mythic import enjoyed by the character in later days. It doesn't deepen Tonto at all (and Tonto, throughout the movie, could do with some deepening, I'll tell you what). It just... adds. There hasn't been such a spurious, but unavoidably present framework narrative, inserted for such unclear "but nobody told us not to" narrative or aesthetic motivations since, well, since John Carter, Disney's last adventure in spending a mountain of money to bring to the big screen an old-school pulp hero with not remotely the name recognition they'd been counting on, clarifying (like it needed it) that Disney needs to figure out what the hell is going on at the executive level, because Marvel movies aren't going to save the company's ass forever.

But anyway, the movie. Reid comes to Texas to visit his brother Dan (James Badge Dale), and practice law in the newly-forming civilised West, getting drafted into a posse to help take down the murderous Butch Cavendish (a nearly-unrecognisable William Fichtner, giving easily best performance in the film). The Reids and several other Texas Rangers are ambushed, with everybody but John dying, and he clinging to life only by the merest fraction of a thread, and that's where he's found by Tonto, who he'd already met during the very prison break that set Cavendish on the run. The two men join forces, reluctantly, to get revenge on Cavendish (Tonto has his own personal reasons to kill the man he believes to be a wendigo, a type of cannibal spirit that always puts me in mind of the unfairly underrated 1999 horror film Ravenous), and they eventually connect him to the company hastening to complete the Transcontinental Railroad, and particularly the smiling but menacing tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson). It takes, and I can't emphasise this enough, one minute less than two and a half hours to tell this unbelievably complex story.

A lot of that comes in the form of narrative spurs that exist for no obvious reason other than their own private amusement (and whole characters, like Helena Bonham Carter's ivory-legged brothel owner, who could be cut from the film without altering its storyline at all); most of it is simply because the film plods, scenes wander without motivation or a clear design, and the character development moments are hideously slow and redundant, to the point that they don't even end up establishing character, because the actual nugget of what's going on is lost among all the padding. Eventually, the film establishes the Tonto/Reid dynamic that should have been in place by the end of the first act, and indulges itself in an action setpiece that is, in truth, as good as anything the summer has born witness to: really impressive practical effects married, uncertainly, to CGI bits and pieces where practical effects would have been dumb, some very fun choreography of two trains on more-or-less parallel tracks, the use of a winningly bombastic orchestration of Rossini's overture to Guillaume Tell worked in with Hans Zimmer's score (which errs, throughout, on the side of anonymity; one feels almost that Zimmer was deliberately restraining himself until using the character's iconic theme as a big emotional release), and the presence of two things the film has desperately lacked till then: speed, and clear direction. It's too little, too late, even if it takes up almost a fifth of the total movie; but it's there, and the movie would be quite a bit more boring without it.

Should that problem have even come to pass? Verbinski and Depp, in their three Pirates of the Caribbean movies (of which only The Curse of the Black Pearl is "good", but all three are better than this) certainly found more interesting human elements along the way - Depp's Tonto is too sedate and one-note to even qualify as a decent retread of the increasingly deflated Jack Sparrow - and one would like to think that the director of Rango would have slightly more of an insight about how to treat pulp material with a bright energy. It is the case that the flickers of horror around the edges of The Lone Ranger (Cavendish's cannibalism, assorted dark, modestly spooky corners) are a bit more alive than the sullen action and dialogue scenes, even if "flickers of horror" feels somewhat contrary to the project to begin with, but that's all the more of the director's personality that shows up, and even at its worst, the leaden POTC: At World's End had a better understanding of why it's genre was meant to be entertaining. The Lone Ranger is mostly handsome, it sounds terrific, and when it wants to be exhilarating, it knows how to be; but the story is an epic disaster of bloat and confusion, and the characters simply aren't enough fun to hang out with to make up for that.

5/10

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