Day 80: Annie Hall

"Look, there's God coming out of the men's room."

First things first, Annie Hall isn't Woody Allen's best film. That would be The Purple Rose of Cairo. It's also not my favorite of his films. That would be Love and Death. So what is it then? Everyone's always going on about it and how great it is. It won four Oscars, it's always mentioned on those lists of the greatest films ever made. It must have something going for it.

It does. It has a ton going for it, not least of which is that it's easily Allen's most accessible film. It's the perfect gateway into his filmography for newcomers. I started with Sleeper, but I like Allen's more eccentric side, so that was a perfect gateway for me. But for your average person, Annie Hall is the best way to introduce someone to the world of Woody. The other issue is that it is also his most referenced, most quoted and most aped film. It is ridiculous how much this film is copied from in modern love stories. The only film that I would even venture to say is a worthy successor to Annie Hall is High Fidelity.

Allen plays Alvy Singer, one of his many thinly disguised versions of himself that serve as the protagonist in virtually all of his films (though he found his true muse in Mia Farrow in the 80s and let her take over protagonist duties on most of his films in that period). When the film begins, Alvy's relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton, in her well-deserved Oscar winning role) has just ended.

The film then uses a non-linear structure to jump around in time, although once it settles in around the twenty minute mark, it tells the rest of the story pretty much in order. Alvy & Annie are the perfect example of opposites attracting, and their relationship is doomed pretty much from minute one, and not just because we already know it's doomed. You can sense it. These two are not right for one another, but we root for them to end up together to fulfill that hopeless romantic desire that maybe even two people who are such polar opposites can work it out in the end.

Alvy's best friend is Rob (Tony Roberts) though they call one another Max for some unexplained reason (it's like the point I made about Harold & Maude, I wonder how many critics would deride such a choice in a modern romantic comedy). Rob is constantly trying to get Alvy to move to California, but just as Woody Allen would never leave New York, so too Alvy never would. I can't say much about the plot, it's pretty razor thin, but that's not a criticism. I don't think a film needs a strong, event heavy plot to work. One of the reasons Annie Hall works so well is that it doesn't rely on a point a to point b structure that can bog down and sink most romantic comedies. And I also don't call this a romantic comedy in a derogatory way. That term has really come to have a lot of repugnance associated with it, particularly in the last decade, but this is the true definition of a romantic comedy, in that it's a funny movie about love.

Allen is the true heir apparent to Groucho Marx, his quick-witted one liners never stop coming throughout the entire film, and while some of them are horribly dated (Ben Shahn paintings anyone), most of them still land with the acerbic wit that made them funny to audiences thirty five years ago. The thing that Woody Allen does better than anyone else though is write fantastic female characters, and he gifted Diane Keaton with a star-making role. He has written and directed more Oscar winning female performances than any other director (five by my count), and while I'm sure it was a great role on the page, Keaton turns Annie into a true free spirit who still has that impressionable streak that she can't shake from her Midwestern upbringing. I'm actually happy for her at the end, because I think she would've been miserable had she and Alvy stayed together. She's definitely younger than him (11 years in real life) and wants to get more out of life than he does, so it's definitely the best possible outcome for her.

Fox just released Annie Hall on blu-ray and it's a great transfer. The only version available before this was the MGM one from the late 90s that was fake anamorphic (they admitted to taking full screen versions of some films and adding black bars to them to give them the appearance of widescreen). This is a substantial upgrade and I wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of the film and the technology. I still have most of the movie memorized as I watched it endlessly in high school, but it's always fun to revisit a film you haven't seen in a while. And if you know someone who has never seen a Woody Allen film, or claims they've never seen one that they liked, watch this with them. They'll thank you for it.

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Day 79: I'm Still Here

"Is this human shit? Did someone human shit on me?"

Joaquin Phoenix is an undeniably talented actor. Roundabout November 2008, rumors began swirling that he was retiring from acting to pursue a career in hip hop. The stories that followed on the internet and on tv were often hysterically funny: He fell off the stage during his rap debut, he suffered a meltdown on David Letterman's show, he got into a fist fight with a fan at another show. This was genuinely funny stuff, the kind of thing that makes for great performance art. The issue, however, is that while he was doing this, his brother-in-law Casey Affleck was filming it all for posterityand the joke is actually on anyone who thought it was a joke. I know that both Phoenix and Affleck have come out and said the whole thing was a hoax, but watching this film makes you feel like it was anything but. I think they're trying to make the best of a bad situation.

The film is the kind of self-indulgent, navel gazing nonsense that Hollywood stars are derided for in the media. I have a really difficult time liking Phoenix because, well, he's a dick. The encounters he has with various friends and celebrities reek of sadly staged attempts at garnering empathy for Phoenix through the derision of the people around him, and it just makes the whole affair that much more ridiculous as a result. For example, a visit from Ben Stiller to persuade Phoenix to take a part in the film Greenberg ends in disaster. Later in the film we see Stiller mocking Phoenix at The Academy Awards, as Phoenix watches at home with a mixture of hurt and sadness. Then in the end credits, Ben Stiller gets a big, stand-alone special thanks credit. So what exactly are we supposed to glean from all this?

The film is full of this kind of nonsense, where Phoenix bitches and moans about the lack of honesty and truth in entertainment, but is so full of shit that it's hard to know exactly who the joke is on. For some background, Phoenix takes part in a staged reading of a play in honor of Paul Newman's passing. He takes this opportunity to announce his retirement from acting and that he'll be springboarding into a hip hop career. His attempts to get a notable producer for his record fail, until he is able to secure a meeting with P. Diddy. Well, his pubicist is able to secure a meeting, but Phoenix is more interested in getting high, fucking prostitutes and acting like an imbecile to actually go and meet with Diddy.

Okay, so this is where I'll get up on a soapbox for a moment. Phoenix's older brother, River, very famously overdosed on drugs some twenty years ago, so why on earth am I watching his younger brother fucking around with drugs? And who knows if the whole thing is staged, it could be for all I know, but it's sort of a hollow joke when it involves drugs and this particular family. Okay, rant over.
So anyway, he finally ends up meeting with Diddy and getting him to sort of agree to produce the album if his stuff is good. So is it good? Look, I'm no hip hop expert or aficianado, but it sounded like garbage to me. It was rank amateurishness at best and pretentious bullshit at worst. Diddy later calls him out on this after listening to his demo, asking him if he wants to get into hip hop because he thinks it's funny to walk around and act like a black dude.

Phoenix takes virtually every opportunity he can to deride his friend and assistant Antony. In one particularly awful outburst after his disastrous appearance on Letterman, he tells Antony that he doesn't want him around anymore, and in the middle of the night, Antony takes a shit on him. It's a fitting gesture from a friend who's devoted any sort of time to being around this lunatic.

As the film draws to a close, it becomes obvious to Phoenix and everyone around him that this whole endeavor has been a failure. He travels to Panama to see his father (played by Affleck's father for some inexplicable reason. Why list that in the credits at all?) Phoenix wades out into some water by a waterfall he was filmed at as a kid (don't worry, they replay the footage from the beginning of the movie, just in case you weren't paying attention, and at this point, I wouldn't blame you if you weren't). The last five and a half minutes of the film are just a shot of Phoenix, from behind, walking in the water as this sad piano music plays.

What the fuck? As I said before, who exactly is the joke on here? Is there even a joke? At least in Exit Through the Gift Shop, that was a legitimate question that the film has nothing but fun with. Here, the whole thing is devoid of fun that I can't even begin to fathom what anyone involved was thinking. If there's a statement to be made about the falseness of fame, it's certainly lost in the whirlpool of self-indulgence and drug use on display here. This isn't a film so much as it is an endurance test. It was so devoid of fun, that by the time we see his appearance on Letterman, I was so happy to see someone calling this bonehead out on his bullshit.

There's no reason I can think of to recommend that anyone see this film. Let it be a private, unfunny inside joke between Affleck and Phoenix and let it die with them. I used to respect Phoenix. From here on out, I'll be approaching everything he does with an air of caution, lest I end up being another sap that fell for his joke that's on no one in particular.

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Day 78: Season of the Witch

"I serve the church no more."

That makes two of us holmes. Man alive, Nicolas Cage has a real knack for ending up in garbage. It seems like for every Drive Angry, which is a knowingly bad movie, he ends up in at least three outright bad movies. There's a definite streak that runs through his films, and it's undeniable that he balances his work in halfway decent films with work, no less committed mind you, in some downright bullshit. Season of the Witch falls firmly into the second camp, as it has the elements in place to be a good movie, but it's so full of nonsense, particularly the last twenty minutes, that it's hard to see anything good in it by the time it's over.

Cage and Ron Perlman (one of my absolute favorite character actors) play Behmen & Felson, two knigts templar who swore a vow to fight for the Catholic Church in the Crusades. They have lots of witty banter to set them up as friends and badasses, the kind of half-hearted attempt at backstory that George Lucas tried to squeeze into Revenge of the Sith, so people will know they're friends without having to show it. They fight in many battles, but at one particular battle, they storm a castle and find that they've been led to slaughter innocent women and children. Well, Nic Cage is many things, but he's not a kid killer, so he and Felson abandon their duties and flee the war.

They stumble upon a village that has been decimated by the plague, and they are arrested as deserters. They're given an offer by the dying Cardinal (Christopher Lee, in grotesque plague makeup) to accompany a priest (Stephen Campbell Moore, looking like Tobey Maguire in that fake trailer from the beginning of Tropic Thunder) and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen, looking like Sting) to a monastery to deliver a young woman (Claire Foy) suspected of being a witch to the monks there, who can perform an ancient ritual to reverse the plague that has been brought on them. They are also joined by an altar boy (Robert Sheehan, looking like a cross between Shia LaBeouf & James Franco) who's handy with a sword, and a thief (Stephen Graham) who will act as their guide.

Along the way, they have to cross a treacherous bridge, cross through a forest that will drive them mad and is also full of wolves (as if the madness wasn't enough), and they lose the knight that looks like Sting and the thief. When they arrive at the monastery, they find that all the monks are dead from the plague and low-rent Tobey Maguire will have to perform the anti-witch ritual himself. They are then alerted to the fact that the girl is not a witch, but she is possessed by a demon, who takes the form of a typical winged demon and flies off into the church to destroy the ancient manuscripts that deal with exorcism. Short of Henry Winkler showing up and water-skiing over the demon, I don't know how much harder this film could have jumped the shark. It's one thing to make a movie about the unfair persecution of young girls by the church, it's another thing entirely to turn that all on its head in favor of becoming another god-damned exorcism movie.

The film is a jumbled mess. It seems like it's going to be a screed against the church, but then it turns out that the priest was a good guy all along and the devil is really waging a war against humanity, and the film eventually has no idea what message it was trying to get across. It's fine if you just want to make a mindless action movie, but don't set up pins you don't intend to knock over by the third act. Does Behman regain his faith? Who fucking knows, the film forgets all about that in favor of having him battle cgi demons.

I felt sort of hornswoggled because I thought, okay, this will be like Nic Cage, with his ridiculous hairstyle that starts almost at the crest of his head, in some anti-church propaganda dressed up as a medieval action movie. That kind of thing I can get behind, but the film just sort of tosses all of its thoughts on religion right out the window when the demon shows up. It felt kind of like Don't Say a Word, that movie that spent an hour and twenty minutes as a taught, psychological thriller, and then decided to have mild-mannered therapist Michael Douglas turn into John McClane in the last fifteen minutes. Make up your mind people. Don't start a movie in one genre and try to end it in another.

I guess there's some fun to be had here, Ron Perlman is always a blast to watch and Nic Cage does some really committed acting here, for no good reason. I like Nic Cage so much better when I'm not sure how self-aware he is, and he seems entirely too self-aware here for me to enjoy the film. The rest of the cast is populated with some pretty lousy actors who serve no purpose but to remind you of better actors. The direction by Dominic Sena is uninspired at best, and downright clumsy at worst, and the script by someone named Bragi F. Schut is a mess of convoluted gobbledygook and awful, modern sounding dialogue for a film set in the 14th Century.

There are much better worse Nic Cage movies you should be watching Trespass or Wicker Man, so don't waste your time unless you're a completist like myself. And even then, lower your expectations. You'll still fnd yourself wistful for a Nic Cage movie where you're just not sure if he knows how bad the movie around him is. I think he had a pretty good idea about this one, and that ruins half the fun.

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Day 77: Take Shelter

"There is a storm coming like nothing you've seen! And not one of you is prepared for it!"

Michael Shannon is an actor of unusual intensity. There was a time in Hollywood when intense actors were much more commonplace, but that has faded over time, and most of those actors have gone on to softer, less intense roles (Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Ed Harris, Edward Norton, & John Malkovich are five examples of this). I would place Shannon firmly in this camp. He's an actor that can make even the smallest, most subtle gesture carry the weight of a thousand words, and everything he does is endlessly watchable, regardless of how good the film around him is. His performances in Bug, Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, are intense, focused, and brilliant.

Writer/Director Jeff Nichols worked with Shannon on 2007's Shotgun Stories, which I have not seen, and they have reunited for 2011's Take Shelter. Shannon plays Curtis, a construction worker living in a small town in Ohio who begins having nightmares about approaching storms. His dreams range from a strange, yellowish brown rain, to people trying to break into his house and abduct his daughter, to his own dog attacking him.

Not wanting to worry his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their hearing-impaired daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), he doesn't share his anxieties with his family or friends. He goes to a doctor to get some anti-anxiety pills or something that will help him sleep without the nightmares, and his sleep improves after taking those. However, his visions are now beginning to seep into his waking hours, and he begins having visions while at work. His anxiety about all of these visions is fueled mainly by the fact that his mother (Kathy Baker, who has one small, but great scene) was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in her mid-30s, which is where Curtis currently finds himself. Are the visions real, or is he losing his mind?

He begins building out the storm shelter in his backyard, seemingly in an attempt to give into the visions and not admit to himself that he may be going crazy. His biggest issue beyond these visions is that he is keeping everything secret from his wife and friends, and as his obsession with building the shelter increases, their concern for him does too, and threatens to unravel everything in his life.
Now, to say anymore about the film would be to ruin it. If you haven't seen the film yet, and I recommend you do, I would stop reading now, and return after you've seen it, as I find it impossible to talk about the film without ruining the surprises.

Okay, so here's what worked for me and what didn't. One of the things that really worked for me was the decision, whether it was by the costumer or the director, is the fact that Curtis is always dressed nicely in his visions, and differently from how he dresses in real life. His clothes in real life are in earth tones and usually unkempt, but whenever he's in a vision, his clothes are nice, neat, and usually dark colors. It's a really nice, instant visual cue to let you know whether you're watching a dream or not. It's an incredibly effective tool, and a wonderful example of what great costuming can do, even in a small, modern, independent film.

Here's my biggest issue though. The fact that the film doesn't end when he makes the decision to leave the shelter. He takes his family down there, thinking that the storm has come. They stay down there the whole night, and his wife tries to convince him that there is no storm and he needs to let them out. He tries to give her the keys, but she tells him that he has to do it himself. I didn't need her to vocalize this, I understood what she was trying to do, and thought it was a bit of a cheat to have her verbalize that. The ten minutes or so leading up to him opening the shelter are super intense. It's the best scene in the film, and the intensity is almost unbearable.

Anyway, the fact that the film continues after they leave the shelter makes you immediately know that there's going to be a storm at the end. It seemed anti-climactic after the intensity of the scene in the shelter to have the film continue. You now know exactly what's going to happen, so it ruins its impact when it does happen.

Shannon is remarkable in the film, definitely one of the best performances of last year. The scene at the Lions Club dinner when he flips the table and begins screaming at everyone, then withdraws and breaks down when he sees the look of terror on his daughter's face is amazing. It's the kind of big, showy, scenery chomping scene that actors love, and the fact that he can have that explosion and bring it down so quietly and effectively at the end is incredible. Jessica Chastain is also very good, and was in so many films last year that she went from unknown to overexposed all in the same six month period. She's definitely an actress worth watching though and is a great match for Shannon's intensity.

Take Shelter is a very good film that could have been a great film had it ended about six minutes before it did. It's very much the same feeling I had about The Hurt Locker. I don't know, maybe the ending worked really well for some people, and I could see it working for some, but it really disappointed me, if for no other reason than, once the film continues, you know exactly how it's going to end, and it was so mysterious up until that point.

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Day 76: Hobo with a Shotgun

"When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat... with razor blades!"

In 2007, Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez unleashed a bold, experimental vanity project on the world with Grindhouse, an homage to the low-budget, violent exploitation films they grew up watching. It could have been a great film, but with two directors notorious for refusing to cut anything from their films, the film became a bloated mess with a handful of good moments (mainly the fake trailers) and a whole lot of nonsense. Three years later, Rodriguez turned one of his fake trailers, Machete, into a feature length film that was a complete and utter nonsensical waste of time. The film wanted to have it both ways, it wanted to be a fun, violent throwback to the old grindhouse pics, but also it tried to be a deadly serious screed, not-so-hidden agenda about immigration. The film is pure garbage as a result, leaving me with little hope for anything Rodriguez does in the future (which I'm told includes turning Machete into a trilogy. Sigh.)

When Grindhouse was released, there was a contest for amateur filmmakers to create their own fake grindhouse trailers, and the winner would be shown as part of special screenings of the film. The winner was a Candian kid by the name of Jason Eisener who created a trailer for a film called Hobo with a Shotgun. Like the much more expensive trailers produced by big name filmmakers for Grindhouse, Eisener's film was a masterpiece in miniature, but would it actually be able to sustain for a full ninety minutes? When Eisener signed a deal to turn his trailer into a feature, we got the answer to that question, which is a resounding yes.

What makes Hobo with a Shotgun succeed where Rodriguez failed miserably, is that the film has a genuine air of danger and borderline carelessness to it. It's a true low-budget affair with big aspirations instead of a big-budget film with low aspirations. Films like this can only be made on the cheap, and any attempt to do otherwise is immediately fighting an uphill battle. The biggest and best asset the film has going for it is Rutger Hauer as the title character. Hauer is an actor who can play go-for-broke without a shred of vanity, and his presence elevates the film immediately.

Hauer's hobo arrives by boxcar in Hope Town (which has been changed on the sign to Scum Town) and finds himself in the middle of a town run by a ruthless gangster named The Drake (Brian Downey) and his two sons Slick (Gregory Smith) & Ivan (Nick Bateman). The hobo gazes longingly at a $50 lawn mower in the pawn shop window, dreaming of starting his own lawn care business. Not the type to roll over and let a bunch of punks push him around, the hobo fights back when Slick tries to rape a prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth). When the hobo brings Slick to the police station, he finds out that everyone in town is on The Drake's payroll, and they cut the hobo up and leave him for dead. Abby takes him in, grateful for his help earlier, and the two lonely outsiders find comfort in one another's dreams of bigger and better things.

The hobo is finally able to scrounge up the fifty bucks to get his dream underway, but when he goes to the pawn shop to buy the mower, some punks in ski masks show up to rob and terrorize the people in the shop. The hobo takes a quick glance at the wall, seeing a shotgun with a price tag of fifty bucks. Seeing his true destiny taking shape, the hobo grabs the shotgun, and begins a spree of vigilantism that sends the people in power reeling and gives the outcasts of society hope that things can change.

There has been a common misconception about this film that it was made by inept filmmakers, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Eisener is an incredibly skilled filmmaker, and as I mentioned in my review of House of the Devil, it takes talent to make a film so seamlessly steeped in the tropes of the films it's paying homage to, that it feels like it could have been made at the height of that genre's heyday. This is one such film. It could very easily have been made in the mid to late 70s, as it uses makeup and effects techniques that have been around since then, and it doesn't rely on a bunch of bullshit cgi and after-effects to make the film look like it didn't cost anything to make.

The script is phenomenal, full of gloriously ridiculous quotes and monologues that very blithely walk a tightrope between dumb and knowingly dumb. It takes a ton of talent to make a film this good, and the people who don't appreciate this film, don't understand what these filmmakers were going for. It's a delirious excessive blood orgy, but it's fun, never trying to make anyone take it seriously for a second, and the scenes where it does attempt to be serious end up being more ridiculous as a result. The serious moments should be the dumbest, and this film nails that. Rutger Hauer gives the performance of his career, committing so wholly to the film and the character, that he makes you genuinely afraid that he may have lost his mind in real life. It's a great performance from a great and underrated and underused actor, and hopefully it will encourage other directors to use him more.

Hobo with a Shotgun is not a movie for everyone, but if you love films like Black Dynamite, and were similarly disappointed with Grindhouse and Machete, then this is the film for you. I can't recommend it highly enough!

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Day 75: Chronicle (2012)

"This is just... this is what I'm doing now, I'm filming everything."

So, I've officially seen the first great film of 2012. It sounds funny to say it, but Chronicle might be the most realistic portrayal of what it's like to be a teenager in America since Welcome to the Dollhouse. This is the kind of film that gets virtually everything right, and that's a rare commodity when dealing with characters in high school. Films set in high school try, and fail, to achieve this kind of verisimilitude through easily labeling people as the nerd, the jock, the outcast, etc. when in actuality people are really shades of grey and aren't so easily pigeonholed.

It's also strange to find this kind of truth in what is more or less a science fiction film. I don't know how else to categorize it, but that seems like the most fair genre assignment. The film is about three teenagers, starting with Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a bit of an outcast who has a terminally ill mother and a drunk and abusive father. He begins documenting his life for reasons that are never fully explained. Is it because he's afraid of his father's outbursts and wants to catch him on film? Is it because he has no way of connecting to people, so he creates a barrier between himself and the people around him? Is it because the film requires it of him in order to exist? It's more than likely a combination of the three, but most other films in the "found footage" genre that has exploded lately have built this premise on far more wobbly ground (I'm looking at you Cloverfield).

Andrew's only real friend is his cousin Matt (Alex Russell), the perfect example of a guy everyone went to high school, the guy who's not super popular, but not an outcast, and spends all of his free time reading various philosophers in an attempt to shape his worldview. If you didn't go to high school with a guy like this, you were that guy. The two cousins attend a rave (they still have those?) one night and Matt discovers a giant hole in the ground just down a hill from the party, along with one of the most popular kids in school, Steve (Michael B. Jordan). They ask Andrew to come film the hole in the ground, and when the three go down into the hole to explore, they come across a mysterious quartz-looking entity that is radiating light and noise.

The film suddenly cuts to three weeks later, and the three have now formed a friendship based around their mutual discovery of telekinetic abilities that came from their encounter with whatever was in that hole. I have to stop and say how much I loved how organic the friendship between the three builds. It's a true stroke of realism that one of the most popular kids in school just becomes friends with these guys because he's a genuinely nice person. There's none of that, "you're too cool to be our friend" or "why are you guys so weird" dialogue that would easily sink a film like this. Their friendship develops and I don't only buy it, it likely sold me on the film as a whole.

Matt develops a theory that their telekinetic abilities are like a muscle that needs to be worked to develop fully, yet can also tear with too much pressure put on it. That's the only real stab at rationalizing these abilities that anyone makes, and the film is much better as a result. If it had gotten bogged down in analytical conversations, it would have sunk the whole film. Instead, these are teenagers, running around and fucking with people through their new found superpowers, and it's what makes the film so thoroughly believable. This is what kids with telekinesis would do, and while I am surprised by the lack of undressing of girls they do, I'm more surprised with how much the film actually wants to invest in the reality of a fairly unlikely scenario.

I am an unabashed admirer of The Blair Witch Project, and I haven't seen anything that has approached that film's realism until Chronicle. It's the first film that has taken the time to make you care about the characters and how they react to the predicament, as opposed to the other way around, which seems to be the stock in trade for most found footage films in the interim. The turn of events that happens in the last twenty minutes or so of the film will likely lose a lot of people, but I feel it's a very natural progression, and I bought it 100%. I'm curious to talk to someone who felt otherwise, because I could very easily see someone becoming infuriated by the third act of this film.

The three main actors are all genuinely good. DeHaan resembles a gawkier Leonardo DiCaprio, and plays an abused social outcast very well, with tons of empathy. Jordan is fantastic, the kind of young actor who brings a ton of magnetism to an otherwise underwritten role, and you can genuinely see why he would be the most popular kid in school. Russell has the hardest part to play, and he does a pretty great job of playing someone who's endless readings of various philosophers would inform his decision making in light of being given superpowers.

This is a film that I cannot recommend highly enough. It's awesome, in the truest sense of the word. It makes you contemplate what you would have done if you had gotten powers at that age, and you'll find yourself marveling at how much these kids are just like you, as much as you may think they aren't. It's the kind of film you can just get lost in and have a great time doing so, and I recommend you do that sooner rather than later. This is the kind of film that deserves to make tons of money at the box office, and I truly look forward to what not only these young actors do next, but also what director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of John) do next. They've all got talent to spare, and I hope someone can tap into it this well again.

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Day 74: Labyrinth

"It's so stimulating being your hat."

The term visionary is bandied about entirely too much in this day and age. The following people have been labeled visionaries in advertisements for their films: Zack Snyder, Patrick Lussier, Robert Rodriguez, David Fincher, Marcus Nispel. The only one of that crew I could make an argument for is Fincher. In fact, there have really and truly only been a handful of visionaries in the history of film, and Jim Henson was undeniably one of them. The world suffered a major loss when he passed away in 1990 as he created more original and timeless entertainments than most people could have hoped to create in several lifetimes.

One of his most original creations is 1986's Labyrinth, a musical fantasy that is unlike anything seen before or since. It's funny how all the cgi in the world has yet to create anything on a par with Henson's puppets and sets. A fifteen year-old Jennifer Connelly plays Sarah, a girl stuck babysitting her half-brother Toby when her parents go out for what seems like the umpteenth time this month. Unable to stop Toby from crying, she makes a wish that Jareth, The Goblin King would take him away from her. Her wish comes true when Jareth (David Bowie) appears in the boy's room and tells her that if she ever wants to see him again, she must make her way through a labyrinth to his palace.

The simplicity of the set-up and story is what makes the film work so well. Rather than spending time setting up the rules of the world, we're thrown right into Sarah's world that is filled with crosses between fantasy and reality, and makes embracing the world of the film that much easier as a result. Ostensibly this is a children's film, but Henson was always savvy enough to keep his plots simple enough for children to follow, but never pander to them, or treat them like simpletons the way many directors do when approaching family entertainment.

Let's talk for a minute about David Bowie. I am one of the biggest David Bowie fans in the world, and I've always loved his ability to play things so gloriously over-the-top, that the joke actually reverts to being on the audience rather than on him. He deliriously goes for broke here, and it works every time he's on screen. His costumes are fantastic, and add a level of extravagance that's seemingly fit for Liberace.

While we're on the subject of his costumes, let's talk about his... um... codpiece. It's nowhere near as ridiculous as I seem to remember with the exception of two costumes he wears. The red & grey number he wears mid-film to go talk to Hoggle & his white outfit he wears in his final scene. Those two outfits definitely reach excessive heights of massiveness in the crotchal region, but I had come under the impression over time that it was grotesquely large in every scene, and it's not. It's an instant point of recognition for fans, however, and is one of those things where the legend is better than the facts.

Jennifer Connelly is actually pretty good too. In the early going, she's whiny and annoying, but as the film goes on, she becomes more subtle and her final confrontation with Jareth is actually really good. Again, it was a case of me seeming to remember her as being more cartoonish than she actually is. The sets, costumes, and creatures are all fantastic. It's a real world, fully fleshed out and realized, and it makes the film more timeless as a result. There are very few films from the 80s that were able to achieve a timelessness (Sarah's love of denim aside) and this is undeniably one of them.

The one place that Henson borrows from, to amazing effect, is the film version of The Wizard of Oz. The items in Sarah's room become the things infused in her fantasy world. We see a picture of an actor from a show she saw on her mirror, and that actor plays Jareth in her fantasy. She has the famous MC Escher "Relativity" picture on her wall that will become the setting of her final confrontation with The Goblin King. The characters that become a part of her crew parallel the ones Dorothy meets in Oz, not directly, but enough to see its influence.

Lots of Henson's best muppeteers were involved in the film, Kevin Clash (Elmo), Dave Goelz (Gonzo), Steve Whitmire (Wembley Fraggle, and now Kermit & Ernie), & of course, Frank Oz, which only adds to the quality of the craft on display. While I feel that this film isn't quite as good as The Dark Crystal, it's definitely better to watch with your younger children, and they'll thank you for not haunting their dreams with the scary visions on display in that film. But Labyrinth is a fantastic film that stands the test of time, and if it has been a while since you've seen it, I recommend you watch it again. It's just as good as you remember it to be, and that's something you can't say about a lot of films from your childhood.

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Day 73: Winnebago Man

"The mini-Winnie, part of American tradition, and today, on the cutting edge of design and function in a classy motor home... you believe any of that shit?"

Jack Rebney is part of a new breed of superstars. It's a broad, varied and distinctive group of people who have gained celebrity as part of that ubiquitous part of modern life known as the internets. All of the various internets have given rise to the most fleeting form of celebrity yet, the "viral video" star. These videos typically feature someone doing something embarrassing, knowingly or unknowingly, on video, and the video is then uploaded and shared on sites like you tube and passed from person to person through e-mail or facebook. The videos are enjoyed, derided, and forgotten about as soon as the next one comes along.

The interesting thing about Jack Rebney's video, however, is that it actually preceded the internet boom by about a decade. It first made the rounds via VHS tape, being duplicated and passed from person to person the old fashioned way. Ben Steinbauer is one of those people who has had one of these video tapes of Jack since the early 90s, and he has decided to document his experience trying to track down the guy in the video. So, what is this video? It's outtakes from a Winnebago industrial video, edited together in a torrent of anger and obscenities, featuring Jack Rebney, forgetting his lines and losing his temper with everyone around him, including himself. You can watch the entire video here, it's only seven and a half minutes, and is well worth your time...

So Jack gained some notoriety in the pre-internet age as the video was passed around, and once the internet came along, and sharing of the video became as simple as clicking copy, paste and send, his celebrity sort of exploded. But Steinbauer wants to know what became of the guy in the video. Is he still alive? Is he still angry? What are his thoughts on his pseudo-celebrity? Finding himself unable to track down any trace of Jack, Steinbauer hires a private investigator who turns up nothing but a series of PO Boxes which Ben then sends letters to in hopes of finding the man behind his cherished video. Improbably, he receives a response and begins his journey to find out what Jack Rebney is up to these days.

The answer is surprising, as he finds a man living in seclusion in the mountains of Northern California, who is calm to the point of zen, and seems to be at peace with the world and himself, harboring no ill will towards anyone who has used this video against him over the ensuing decades. Several days after leaving Jack's new home, Ben receives a phone call letting him know that he'd been had. Jack decided it was going to be easier for him to live out his remaining years in seclusion if he presented an image to the world of a man at peace, when in actuality, he's as ornery and fiery as ever, and has decided he wants to set the record straight and let people know how fucked up the world they're living in truly is. So Ben returns to California to find out who the real Jack Rebney is, and maybe get some answers to his still lingering questions.

I wasn't sure what to make of Winnebago Man. I thought that I knew what kind of movie it was going to be before I watched it, and while it was similar to my expectations, it sort of transcended them a bit. The film is very similar to another documentary, Best Worst Movie, about the lives of the people from the 80s cult classic Troll 2. Both films have a similar agenda, trying to humanize the people behind embarrassing pop culture, while ultimately using their humanness to condemn the people who are amused by their failures. I don't think Steinbauer has as much contempt for the audience, as he is one of the people who has enjoyed the video for years, whereas Best Worst Movie was directed by one of the stars of Troll 2 and definitely has an agenda of condemnation in mind.

Jack Rebney does a pretty good job of making you despise and pity him simultaneously. He has no interest in redeeming people's opinion of him, but has enough universal flaws to make you see yourself in him, both in his old videos and now, as an angry old man at the end of his life. Steinbauer's love of Jack is evident in his persistence to get him to open up, and I feel that this is very close in spirit to American Movie, another documentary I love, in that the filmmaker and the subject seem to share a subversive, winking conspiracy that no one who watches the film will ever truly know what the real people behind the film are like. This film also shares that film's minor triumphant conclusion, where the subject gets to bathe in true adoration from a crowd of supporters (and some rubberneckers who have their opinions changed when faced the man behind the story).

Ultimately, Winnebago Man is a very loving tribute to the misfit that lives in all of us, that most of us are able to hide from the world, but sometimes escapes and becomes shared with a world who would sooner deride it than see themselves in it. It's a much better film than it has any right to be, and I would recommend you see it should you get the chance... you believe any of that shit?

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Day 72: The Sitter

"Maybe use a bazooka next time instead of a sledgehammer. What are you El DeBarge?"

Director David Gordon Green has one of the more puzzling resumes in Hollywood. His feature debut George Washington is a leisurely paced meditation on small town Southern life. His next film All the Real Girls was a quirky love story featuring the best performance anyone's ever gotten out of Zooey Deschanel. With his next film, Undertow, people were dubbing him the heir apparent to Terrence Malick, a Southern director interested as much in languid pacing and nature as much as he was in characterization and storytelling. He made one more small film, Snow Angels, before taking his first, big, director-for-hire gig on 2008's Pineapple Express. That film is notable for featuring what I think are the best action sequences ever put in a comedy, because they felt real, they felt like a bunch of dudes who had no idea how to fight, fighting. He's also directed several episodes of the acclaimed HBO series Eastbound and Down which is written by and stars his friend Danny McBride.

Earlier this year he made one of the worst movies I've ever seen, Your Highness, gathering lots of people he'd worked with before (Deschanel, McBride & James Franco) and thoroughly wasting tons of time and money on a garbage stoner rehash of the 80s sword & sorcerer flicks. It's awful, don't waste your time or money. I know he's been friends with McBride for a long time, but it doesn't mean he has to indulge his every whim, particularly one so expensive and meaningless. I had little hope for The Sitter, not because I feel he's gone so far in the direction of just making stoner comedies, but because it felt like a movie I'd already seen before, and also because I'm not the biggest fan of Jonah Hill.

The Sitter defied my expectations, and I'm honestly willing to say that I kind of loved it. A lot of what makes it work is the fact that it plays directly into your expectations and gives you a damn enjoyable ride. Hill plays Noah, a college drop-out who lives at home with his mom, and has no direction in his life. His mom gets a chance to go out with some friends, but will have to cancel as her friends don't have a babysitter. Seeing this as an opportunity to help his mom get out and meet people, Noah agrees to babysit for the three children. There's Slater (Max Records from Where the Wild Things Are) a basket case trying to bury his feelings in medication, Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) their adopted son from El Salvador who's a bit of a pyromaniac, and, my favorite, Blithe (Landry Bender), an eight year old obsessed with celebutantes and wearing tons of makeup. When Marisa (Ari Graynor), a girl that Noah is sort of, kind of dating, calls him and promises him sex if he brings her some cocaine, he ushers the kids into their parents' mini-van and heads into New York City for a night of adventure.

The Adventures in Babysitting parallels are obvious, and I suppose that the fact that Noah's reasons for bringing the kids into the city are nowhere near as noble as the ones that forced Elisabeth Shue to do the same in that film, puts The Sitter at a dangerous disadvantage. We don't trust that Noah is a good enough guy to do the right thing in the end, so it does add an element of suspense to the entire film, but as the film goes on, and he begins to soften to the kids and sees himself in all three of them, it gives the film a major leg up on Adventures in Babysitting. There's a journey for all of the characters rather than just pure survival, and while I'm not about to say I like this film better or it's a superior film, it's certainly more nuanced than I was willing to give it credit for.

Above and beyond everything else that works, the main thing that this film has going for it is Sam Rockwell. I am an unabashed admirer of his, and I am of the opinion that he is the best actor working in film today. He's always the most interesting person on screen, in this or any other film he does, and he does some stellar work here. The first time I realized how awesome Sam Rockwell is was about forty-five minutes into Galaxy Quest when I said, "that's the guy from Green Mile." I've been a fan ever since. He's beyond brilliant in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he's fantastic in Assassination of Jesse James & Moon, and will forever reside in my mind as the definitive version of Zaphod from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. To quote my friend Jason Bone, I'm not fit to touch the hem of his garment.

Here he plays a gay (I think) drug dealer named Karl who lives in some sort of bodybuilding warehouse where Noah has to go to buy the cocaine. There's oiled up muscle men everywhere, some cutting coke, some doing demolition to expand the space, some doing choreography, and some just getting their pump on. It's a phenomenal set-piece that left me wanting more, which is always the best possible feeling to get after a scene like that. His main men are Julio played by JB Smoove (Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Garv (Sean Patrick Doyle), his roller-skating flunky, on whom he pulls a Spider from Goodfellas in one of the funniest scenes in the film. To say there's too little Sam Rockwell in this film is an understatement, but he's of that school of character actors that always leaves you wanting more. That being said, I would happily pay my hard-earned money to watch an entire film with Rockwell and Smoove in it, they are fantastic together.

The film will likely have a dubious place in history as being the last movie to feature a fat Jonah Hill (as long as he doesn't backslide) and I think it's unfair to pin this film with such a legacy. It's a surprisingly good and touching film that stretches the bounds of believability at almost every juncture, but never loses sight of the fact that, at its core, the film is about a kid who was abandoned by his father and learned to cope with it, and now seeing a group of kids facing a similar predicament, genuinely wants them to know that they'll end up just fine. Maybe that's just what I took away from the movie, but I think that's certainly what the filmmakers were going for, and it works better than it has any right to.

It's safe to say that you can determine whether or not you'll like the film based on the trailer. If the trailer makes you laugh, the film will make you laugh, and if not, it won't. But give it a chance, I was really ready to dislike it, and I thought it was pretty great. There's nothing better than being surprised, or seeing a film that manages to be good in spite of what you think it will end up being, and The Sitter is one such film. I was laughing out loud frequently, especially at Sam Rockwell (who says the quote that opened my review), but I also laughed at Jonah Hill's Morrissey joke which no one else in the theater laughed at. There's tons of 80s pop culture references that will fly over the heads of today's teenagers, but they're there, and they're hysterical. At the very least, give The Sitter a rent. You likely won't regret it.

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Day 71: Death of a President

"He said to me, Mike, the President is on the line. I thought it was some kind of sick joke, and he said, no, Mike, President Cheney."

If those last two words don't scare the ever-loving shit out of you, I don't know what would. Is that enough of a premise to sustain a 90 minute film? Well, hang on, that's not entirely fair... The 2006 film Death of a President is presented as a documentary from the future that details the assassination of President George W. Bush on a trip to Chicago in October of 2007. I'm sure there are plenty of people in this country and certainly this world that hate George W. Bush more than me, but I am of the humble opinion that his administration is the absolute worst thing that has happened to this country in the last century. 9/11 & Pearl Harbor & all the attacks on this country are one thing, but this man spent eight years dismantling freedom in this country and installing policies that helped the rich get richer and crippled the middle class and especially the poor.

Personal feelings aside though, how would I have reacted had he been assassinated as this fictional documentary posits? I think my first reaction would have been relief to be rid of the douchebag, but then a creeping dread would set in when I would realize who was taking over for him. I'm a true liberal, in every sense of the word, but the people that made this faux-documentary are the worst kinds of liberals. They're the ones who seek to use the same fear tactics that conservatives thrive on against them. I feel you can't fight fire with fire, and anyone seeking to do that has their message diminished. I have no doubt that what this film presents is certainly a possibility of what would have happened in the aftermath of an event such as the assassination of a President, but I don't know how probable it is. The film however treats it like not just the logical outcome of such an event, but the only possible conclusion.

Utilizing talking head interviews, file footage & news casts, the film strives for verisimilitude, but the overacting of many of the talking heads sinks the film almost immediately. Bush arrives in Chicago to give a speech about creating jobs that's really a stern warning to North Korea to stop its "nucular" ambitions (sorry, couldn't resist). I admire the way the film uses actual footage of Bush to give the film an air of immediacy, but as I said earlier, it's the interviews with the people who were there that really makes the film fall apart.

Bush heads out to greet his supporters, and is hit twice in the chest before being shoved into his limo and rushed to Northwestern Hospital in downtown Chicago. Despite their best efforts, the doctors aren't able to save him, and he dies on the operating table. The feds investigate every possible lead, rounding up potential suspects like a militant anti-Bush protestor who broke the protest line and hid in a building across the street, and a former soldier who was spotted in the area immediately after the assassination. Their focus narrows however to a Syrian man named Jamal Abu Zikri, and as his past comes to light, he seems not only the most likely suspect, but certainly the most convenient.

It's one thing to be heavy-handed, it's another to draw these conclusions and present them the way they do. Because the suspect is Syrian, Cheney wants to find out if there's a link to the Syrian government, and if there was a conspiracy by them to have Bush assassinated. Cheney and Congress (which would have been Democrat controlled at this point in history) pass a new version of The Patriot Act giving virtually unlimited power and resources to the FBI to round up, interrogate and deport whomever they saw fit. I have no doubt that Cheney is the kind of man who would cream in his jeans over the possibility of being granted and, in turn, granting this kind of power, but there's no way both houses would have rolled over to his whims. But I digress, the film has an agenda, and needs conveniences like this to sell it, so I guess we'll just go with it.

As I said earlier, the talking heads are atrocious. The worst are the head of the Secret Service at the time who turns into a blubbery mess anytime he begins recounting the events, and a young man who was apprehended as a suspect because his name was Samir Masri. This kid makes William Shatner seem like a model of restraint. He's only in the film for about five minutes, but he is so unbearable, he almost single-handedly turned me off to the whole thing. James Urbaniak, the actor who played R. Crumb in American Splendor, turn up playing a forensic investigator, and he's probably the best of the bunch, but the rest are just awful.

When it becomes clear, even after his conviction, that Zikri is more than likely not the assassin, he just has the most convenient and easy story to sell to the world, the film's scheme becomes insufferable. Writer/Director Gabriel Range has tried to have it both ways. By making a film about a the assassination of a President as massively unpopular as Bush was at this point in time, he's trying to say that it would still be a tragedy, and the country would unite behind such an event. At the same time, he's also attacking the people in this country who would happily accept a more intrusive and expansive government giving us an easy solution we can all get behind. It's not just an affront towards the Neo-Con movement that dominated the first half of the last decade, it's an all-out assault on the average person in this country, who would willingly roll-over and accept such base, partisan bullshit.

That's where the film really pissed me off. It depicts the people of this country as bloodthirsty, stupid and compliant, and while I think that does accurately describe a portion of the population, this country is smarter than this filmmaker gives it credit for, and this is why the average liberal is such an easy target for the zealots on the right. They're so easy to depict as snobs and elitists who thumb their nose at society. This film does nothing to help diminish that image, and worst of all, it's not even entertaining. Get one of those two right, and at least there's a reason to exist. Without either of those to things, this becomes as unessential a film as can be.

Avoid it at all costs.

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