Film

note: Our film critic, Morgan P. Salvo, spent the weekend taking in the movies of the BendFilm Festival, where he's long been a volunteer. Here's a list of the flicks that caught his eye and also may have caught your eye, too, if you made it out to BendFilm.
NARRATIVES:
Cold Storage (Directed by Tony Ellwood) This was by far my favorite, although in a semi-packed house I was one of only four people who applauded. A very warped and disturbing movie, it features the same hillbilly perspective of Norman Bates' Psycho world. This gory, graphic and darkly comic flick will make you think twice about taking that trip through the mountains.

The first five minutes of Zombieland depict some of the best chewing, spewing and gore-guzzling zombies ever seen on film amidst side-splitting comedy. Unfortunately, what follows does not live up to the film's early promise. It's as if the grand finale starts the show.
This is not a Zombie movie to rival Shaun of the Dead. Mostly, it's a poorly directed love story with interspersed moments of humor. Zombies serve only as comedic background for a feeble and redundant story of love and angst. Too many “touchy-feely” moments interfere with the sort of guts splattering and zombie killing scenes that make for zombie film gold.

Michael Moore loves America, but America does not always love Michael Moore. After the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, public opinion of the liberal filmmaker took a downturn. Republicans have good reason to hate him, but the attitude of Democrats is baffling. They claim to dislike his oversimplification, his manipulation of emotions and facts and his bombastic personality. Conservatives have long used these methods to influence the public with great success – all Moore does is play them at their own highly effective game.
Moore, in a way, has been a liberal in Republican's clothing for the last decade – he looks like a Republican and he sounds like a Republican. He takes radical ideas, mixes them up using the conservative's recipe, and makes them easy to swallow. Capitalism: A Love Story contains some very radical ideas. Moore argues that capitalism is evil, that the US is run like a corporation and that big business holds more power than politicians. He started making the film before the crash, and although the recession has produced a few more doubters of the American Dream you don't have to look far to see that the ideal is still alive.

There is nothing in The September Issue that could be described with the normal documentary vocabulary. Director RJ Cutler does not probe, investigate, expose or provide much insight into the world of Vogue. What we get instead is an entertaining effort in rebranding.
The fashion industry has taken the blame in recent years for a variety of social ills – credit card debt, anorexia, teenage pregnancy, drug addiction and more. Fashion magazines and the thin models contained within are now the go-to scapegoat for low self-esteem and its ever-expanding list of consequences. When the recession hit, fingers were jabbed more fiercely and the key players fell out of favor alongside celebrities, or anyone else living luxuriously. This film pointedly includes a money shot of a model trussed up in a corset happily biting into a huge cream pastry. We don't, however, see if she swallows.

The concept of Surrogates might sound good, after all it's based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldel. Unfortunately, at the hands of the gang behind Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, it misfires, turning into a slow-paced, bland fiasco. This Disney fairy tale/sci-fi thriller plays out like an episode of Law and Order: Special Surrogates Unit – it's a glorified TV show without any redeeming qualities.
The opening provides background history through news footage: the crime rate is down dramatically now that everyone is living through robotic surrogate bodies. People seem to function with regular jobs and have non-stop fun with no apparent risk to their own bodies (beyond atrophy). Users at home operate sexy, physically perfect mechanical versions of themselves as they grow weak, feeble and unhealthy from dentist-chair-like recliners. That is until some craggy faced “meat bag” on a motorcycle yanks out a death ray and ices some surrogates, mysteriously killing their real users at home. This brings in surrogate FBI agents Greer and Peters (Bruce Willis, Rhada Mitchell) and a whole bunch of convoluted plot twists and turns. Apparently, things in a super-fake world just aren't as they seem. Agent Greer, forced to go solo, discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomenon. Abandoning his surrogate, he risks his life to unravel the mystery uncomfortably interacting with a city full of pretty mannequins.

Expectations are understandably high for The Informant! since Warner Brothers has spent a fortune placing pop-up ads and television spots virtually everywhere. It has been extraordinarily difficult over the last month to avoid the nerdy image of Matt Damon in the title role of Mark Whitacre.
But the finished product stands up to the scrutiny. I'd read it's like A Beautiful Mind meets The Insider. And that's not bad, of course. Director Steven Soderbergh's prodigious and excellent body of work cuts him plenty of slack. Michael Clayton, Syriana, and Oceans 11 and 13 alone would command our respect, but he's also responsible for Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

The first line of Jennifer's Body is, “Hell is a teenage girl.” Let me rephrase: “Hell is enduring a teenage girl/demonic possession movie written by Diablo Cody.”
The film features the same producers as Juno, but brings into the fold director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and it seems this group is slapping themselves on the back for how clever they think they are. Suffocating from Cody's overly wordy and relentlessly self-conscious narrative, this flick is an exercise in extreme futility. It's OK if one character talks like a wiseacre (as in Juno) but when every character has essentially the same smart-aleck voice, it rings untrue and loses its punch. Real people do not talk this way… ever.

With a slew of horror movies saturating the market lately the genre is getting overworked. Initially, Sorority Row follows almost all the '70s drive-in rules but then morphs into cheesy wisecrack one liners, a trait started in the late '80s when horror flicks took a turn for the worse with tongue-in-cheek horror clichés.
With an opening zoom into a house party replete with naughty dancers wearing butt-exposing jammies bouncing on a trampoline, you know you're in for a treat of some sort. This re-make of the House on Sorority Row more resembles I Know What You Did Last Summer even though it claims to be based on a screenplay called Seven Sisters.

Charlyne Yi is the kind of girl you'd like to be friends with, meet for dinner on the weekend and hear her observations on LA life. She is not, however, the kind of girl to follow around with a camera. Nor, despite my affection, would this reviewer turn up on her doorstep one day and stalk her for several months with said camera in the hope that such a tactic might secure that regular weekend meet-up and a lifelong friendship. But Paper Heart does just that; it's a tireless stalker of a movie.

The recent cloudy, windy afternoons and crisp cold evenings have awakened the sleeping bear of desire. The ski and board shops on Century Drive are restocked with the year's new gear and dumping their old inventory in Labor Day sales.