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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: October 2011

Review: “The Thing”

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

a. wilford brimley, alien, black christmas, E.T., eric heisserer, final destination 3, horror, howard hawks, jaws, john carpenter, kurt russell, mary elizabeth winstead, matthijs van heijningen, men at work, men in black, prequel, psychology, ronald d. moore, sigourney weaver, spielberg, starship troopers, the thing

“Take Me to Your Bleeder”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

WHAT ALIEN IN movie history has ever come in peace?  With the exception of E.T. and the space-oddities of “Men in Black,” how many little green men touch down with nothing but the best intentions?

The lethal leviathan at the gory core of “The Thing” is no exception to the rule.  Jeannette Catsoulis, a film critic at The New York Times, has already remarked on the creature’s resemblance to a “toothy, tentacled vagina,” which neatly sums up the film’s conflicted relationship with the gentler sex.  Not since the hideous “Starship Troopers” (1997) has the vagina dentata (that psychoanalytic trope of male horror) roared quite as ferociously as this gyno-gremlin.  It’s a shame that we see so much of the creature in the film’s latter half – have screenwriters Eric Heisserer and Ronald D. Moore learned nothing from Spielberg who intentionally left his man-eater half in the shadows to scare the bathing suits off us? – when the film’s most unnerving scene is also its least expensive:  every guy on base must subject himself to a dental exam and prove, since the alien spits out metals as it parasitically absorbs its victims, that he’s not the creature incognito by showing his fillings.  “What?” one member protests.  “So I’m the alien just because I floss?”  Open wide!

Perhaps the saving grace of this prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 “The Thing” (itself a remake of Howard Hawks’s “The Thing” of 1951, inspired by the John W. Campbell story “Who Goes There”) is that a strong female has been dropped down in the center of it all.   That’s scream queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead (“Final Destination 3,” “Black Christmas”) as paleontologist Kate Lloyd recruited to the lunar landscape of Antarctica where an unidentified object, lodged in the ice for 10,000 years, has been unearthed by a team of Norwegians.  Kate, who is cleverly listening to Men at Work’s “Who Can it Be Now?” when called to action, is later caught star-gazing by the only other woman in this remote base-camp.  “I’ll never look at them the same way again,” Kate tells her short-lived friend.  What the team exhumes looks like a tarantula the size of an Escalade encased in ice.  It’s hard to believe that this sophisticated team of “experts” has only a power drill to break that ice and reach the specimen.  Once that happens – and yes, the team’s only black member, in the grand horror film tradition, is the first to leave the party to grab a six-pack stashed behind the Alien Popsicle – all hell breaks loose.  Because the creature can replicate itself on a cellular level, the remainder of “The Thing” is Dr. Kate repeatedly putting out fires.

This doomed Norwegian team’s first (and fatal) encounter with the Third Kind is hinted at in Carpenter’s earlier version, which makes Dutch commercial director Matthijs van Heijningen’s version here something of a “prequel.”  When franchises such as this one can’t keep growing forward, they regress backwards.  Thus this “Thing” ends with a husky having escaped into the tundra and huskies, if you recall the original gross-out, get a raw deal in “The Thing” of ’82.  Apart from the gore, there was nothing really innovative about Carpenter’s version except A. Wilford Brimley (sans moustache) wielding an axe and shooting at a shaggy Kurt Russell.  Painfully derivative of the great “Alien” of 1979, Carpenter’s “The Thing” featured a no-thing that fixes itself on your face like a surgical mask, lodges in your abdomen only to explode in the worst form of indigestion known to man.  Just close your eyes at the film’s finale and think of its real inspiration: Sigourney Weaver, as the indomitable Ripley, walking the vertebrae-looking halls of the alien’s hideout, blowtorch in hand.  Now that’s a real gut-buster.

Review: “The Ides of March”

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

audacity of hope, barack obama, beau willimon, Caesar, chuck schumer, drama, evan rachel wood, farragut north, george clooney, grant heslov, hbo, hilary clinton, howard dean, jeffrey wright, karl rove, marisa tomei, mildred pierce, ohio, paul giamatti, philip seymour hoffman, politics, president, Rome, ryan gosling, The Ides of March

“Et Tu, Brute?”

Review: “The Ides of March”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

Back in 2006, when President Obama was still on the top of the world, he wrote in his bestseller The Audacity of Hope that an American politician may not “lie” per se, but “understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated.”  The fact that the system facilitates political prevarication, Obama asserted, remains a sufficient obstacle to making American politics cleaner and more transparent.  George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort, “The Ides of March,” could serve as another reality-check to Obama’s loftier aspirations.  In many ways, it’s not far off from Sarah Palin’s snide rejoinder: “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

Still, the truth is actually quite uncomplicated in “The Ides of March,” but it’s the cover-ups and team-switching to protect the lying politician at the center of it all that powers Clooney’s indictment of a corrupt and corrosive political arena.  The truth is simple because it’s sexual in nature: no spoilers here, but suffice it to say that when a fresh-faced intern named Molly Stearns (played by Evan Rachel Wood), strolls onto the scene, men in power quickly come unglued, or rather, unbuttoned.  As erotic napalm, Wood reprises the vixen role she played so expertly in HBO’s reboot of “Mildred Pierce,” but she’s more vulnerable here and ultimately, tragic.  The script smartly piles it on, too, inasmuch as Stearns is the DNC chair’s daughter and soon an important player in the Ohio state primary.  Thankfully, Clooney’s film also treats its viewer like a grown-up; when Morris’s top aid gets the axe, for example, all we see is actor Philip Seymour Hoffman step inside the governor’s Suburban, then, without dialogue, exit to a rainy alleyway.

Adapted from a Broadway play, entitled Farragut North (2008), by Clooney’s longtime collaborator Beau Willimon (and Grant Heslov), who worked on campaigns for Schumer, Dean, and Hilary Clinton, “The Ideas of March” has the realist pulse of an exposé based on firsthand experience.  Our man-on-the-ground is Stephen Myers (played Ryan Gosling, who has more or less commanded the screen since the summer), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Clooney’s Mike Morris (a governor and presidential contender with a few skeletons in his closet).

“The Ides of March” is ultimately a cynical and disillusioning film in which Marisa Tomei, as a jaded Beltway reporter, speaks to its central beliefs.  “He’s a nice guy,” she says of Morris, “They’re all nice guys.  He’ll let you down sooner or later.”  Tomei is just one of the film’s great supporting actors: in addition to a Karl Roveian Hoffman – can’t someone in the costume department help Hoffman tie a necktie so it reaches his belt-buckle? – there’s Paul Giamatti as the top aide to Morris’s opponent and Jeffrey Wright (briefly) as another influential senator.  Each has a secret agenda and if Stephen survives their machinations it’s because he’s cut from the same duplicitous cloth.  It’s a relief to find an unabashed anti-hero at the core of “The Ides of March”; love or hate him, at least Gosling’s Stephen will inspire some spirited discussion after the film.

Historically, the Ides of March refers not just to the Roman calendar but to the day Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the Senate floor.  We may no longer carry out our assassinations in the open-air, but as Clooney’s fine political drama suggests, we’re every bit as dead-set on power and revenge.

Review: “Dream House”

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

daniel craig, david louck, dream house, elias koteas, evil, freud, horror, james bond 007, jim sheridan, kubric, naomi watts, rachel weisz, stephen king, the shining, thriller, uncanny

“Burning Down the House”

Grade: F (SKIP IT)

For sale: three bedrooms, three full baths, garage, fully furnished, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer, storage.  House also includes poltergeists in the form of a murdered mother and her two dead daughters.  Any takers?

Only two: city-slickers Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and Will, a publisher with pectorals played by Daniel Craig (a.k.a. 007 du jour), who move from town to country with bloody results.  The primary problem with “Dream House,” which is set in a New England town called New Ashford with Craig as an aspiring novelist, is that there’s not a shred of newness or novelty in this film (directed by the otherwise bright Irish film director, Jim Sheridan, of “In the Name of the Father” and “My Left Foot”).  As an anguished Libby tells Will, “There is something wrong with this house.”

Wrong, indeed. The less than dreamy house at the center of this turkey is already something of a suburban legend by the time Libby and Will start unpacking boxes.  Horror-queen Naomi Watts plays Anne, Will’s mysterious neighbor who keeps her distance, and won’t say what happened inside the Ward home five years ago.  After Will catches a gaggle of Goths holding a creepy séance in his cellar, and the ever-menacing Elias Koteas (of “Shutter Island,” a superior film built on the same concept of parallel plots) peering through his windows, he complains that he has an “infestation of teenagers in the basement.”  That’s the least of his problems.  Much to his disbelief, he comes to suspect that he is the house’s former occupant, a wife-killer named Peter Ward, and that Libby and his daughters are mere visions.  After paying a visit to Greenhaven Psychiatric Institute, Will comes to wonder: am I Ward?  Am I a widower or a wack-job?

Chances are you won’t stick around to find out and for good reason.  Screenwriter David Louck stuffs his script with laughable lines like “I’m not writing a book, I’m living in a fantasy!” and “Get me the chloroform now!” And when Will and Libby realize that the iniquity inside their walls cannot be suppressed, we get this: “You can’t paint over evil!”

Any smart spectator of this claptrap would be hard-pressed to find something intelligent to say about it, but if forced to lay a cerebral layer of paint over “Dream House,” Freud’s conceptualization of the “The Uncanny” (1919) comes to mind.  To prove that the uncanny relates to what he calls “themes of the double in all its grades and developments,” Freud describes being lost in an Italian piazza: “I suddenly found myself in the same street again [where] my swift departure resulted only in my ending up in the very same place, through a different detour, for the third time.  But then I was overcome by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny […] the unintended return of the same.”   The uncanny isn’t so much déjà vu but the compulsion to repeat and return over and over again.

“Dream House” not only repeats the central conceit of the King/Kubric classic, “The Shining,” in which murdered girls leave an infectious trace behind – come play with us, Danny! – but it goes in circles like the toilet bowl in which it belongs.  When a great conflagration eventually erupts in the final reel, you won’t feel the heat since, by that point, “Dream House” has already collapsed like a house of cards.

Review: “50/50”

03 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

50/50, 500 days of summer, adam sandler, angelica huston, anna kendrick, blog, bromance, bryce dallas howard, cancer, chemo, cruella de vil, dexter, dramedy, funny people, humor, inception, jonathan levine, joseph gordon levitt, noga arikha, patrick swayze, seth rogan, the help

“Spinal Trap”

REVIEW: “50/50”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

CANCER AND COMEDY aren’t as incompatible as one might think.  For centuries doctors worked from the assumption that the human body was comprised of four humors: phlegm, yellow and black bile, and blood. What’s called the humoural model (from fluid, or humon, in Greek and humor in Latin) dominated from the fifth century BC, with the work of Hippocrates, to the early twentieth century, the vestiges of which are now understood in terms of moods and temperament.  “English-speakers still have to humor the whims of a temperamental colleague,” writes Noga Arikha, author of Passions and Tempers: A History of The Humours, or “face a Monday with ill-humor, and remain good-humored throughout the week.”

But what about facing a stage-four spinal tumor with a sense of humor?  That’s the challenge facing Adam and indeed the larger dramedy based on his existential ordeal called “50/50.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt [“(500) Days of Summer,” “Inception”] plays Adam, a radio producer in Seattle, in a script by Will Reiser who himself battled and beat spinal cancer.  Adam gets by, and high, with a little help from his friends, chiefly Kyle (a sly and slimmer Seth Rogan), his hospital-appointed therapist (Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air”) and smothery mother (an underused Angelica Huston).  When Adam informs her of his diagnosis over dinner, Huston shoots back: “I’m moving in.”

The film’s first frames feature Adam following all the rules: at 27, he exercises and patiently jogs in place at crosswalks while waiting for the light to change.  He’s smitten with girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who, as an abstract artist, fills his apartment with ugly canvases and worse, arrives an hour late at the hospital to pick him up.  Reprising her turn as Cruella de Vil in “The Help,” Howard tries her darndest to breathe life into a flat character in a film really about the bonds between men.

The emotional core of “50/50,” after all, lies in that fine bromance between Adam and Kyle.  Friends don’t let friends drive themselves to chemo.  And friends certainly don’t let friends shave their own heads, nor miss the opportunity to corral girls into sympathy sex.  “50/50!” exclaims Kyle, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds.  And lots of people beat cancer.  That guy from ‘Dexter’ and Patrick Swayze.”  “Swayze?” Adam retorts, “That guy is dead.”  “Really?” Kyle backtracks, “Well, don’t think about him.”

Rogan’s casualness as a comic actor makes him instantly likable, and citing “night-blindness” as a reason to share Adam’s cancer-pot, he also reprises a role already seen on screen: 2009’s “Funny People” in which there, too, he nurses a terminal Adam Sandler back to life and laughter.   Directed by Jonathan Levine, “50/50” has none of that inferior film’s acerbic nihilism.  Instead, and in large part because of Levitt’s tenderness – listen for his larynx-shattering howl on the eve of a crucial surgery – “50/50” keeps its head high in the face of despair.  There’s a term for that tactic, by the way; it’s called “gallows humor.”

Cancer Sucks so Blog for a Cure:

http://www.blogforacure.com/

My “Bromance” review (“Funny People,” “The Hangover,” and “I Love You, Man”) from the _GLR_:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/’Bromance’+Flix+and+the+State+of+Dudedom.-a0216644249

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