Film

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.

The writing/directing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, responsible for the pair of Crank films, deliver an epic cartoon with a messy-mix of politics, corporate greed, mind control, internet porn, gore, bloody violence and wacky ideas. Forcing us to swallow a huge pill, Gamer oddly enough seems to work.Beginning with a title reading, “some years from this exact moment,” the Gamer's overstuffed plot begins to unfold, telling the story of a world where “Gamers” can now control interactive death row inmates that serve as real-life avatars. Anonymous users fight it out on rubble-strewn battlefields in a virtual reality game. The convicts battle each other in the biggest globally viewed TV game show of all time called “Slayers.” If one con makes it through 30 battles, he is supposedly released. So far no one's been that fortunate.Another game option is a neon-colored world called “Society” wherein actors in lavish, scantily clad getups wander around, commanded by Internet slouches. Here's where the desperate can whore themselves out to virtual deviants who want a taste of anything they choose, like, as you probably guessed, sexual acts. Yes, it's porn.

Once upon a time, if you saw a short film, you saw the work of someone who wanted to make a short film. Nowadays, that ain't necessarily so.
In 2006, Shane Acker's 10-minute computer-animated 9 was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar – but by that point, Tim Burton was already working with Acker to develop it into a feature. It became the latest in a line of “calling card” shorts: works created by inexperienced filmmakers hoping to get a full-length movie out of their efforts. In just such a way, Jared Hess's short Peluca became Napoleon Dynamite; Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Gowanus, Brooklyn became Half Nelson. Sometimes, the raw material was there for something bigger and richer. Sometimes, it's not. In its expanded form, 9 remains a dazzlingly innovative vision that showcases Acker's skill as a director. But in trying to develop the mythology behind his story, Acker loses sight of its appealing mystery.
The title refers to the number scrawled on the back of a rag doll (Elijah Wood) who wakes up with no knowledge of the world. Wandering through a crumbling, corpse-strewn city, he soon spots a similar figure marked as 2 (Martin Landau), and learns that a mechanized predator stalks the streets. But how did these sewn-together bits of burlap achieve sentience? What happened to all the humans? What is the significance of a strange dome-shaped artifact 9 carries from the place of his birth?

Halloween 2 is so seriously and extremely brutal that it takes violence for violence's sake to a whole new disturbing level. Director Rob Zombie's track record started with homage/tribute to slasher/horror movies of the late '70s and early '80s, making House of 100 Corpses and The Devils Rejects and both have their moments of pure genius. With these two under his belt he ventured out into remake land. His Halloween was fairly reverent to the original with added Zombie-isms and more hyperkinetic violence. Now, as he finds his “voice,” it's becoming more incomprehensible to fathom his vision. Pushing psychedelic visuals aside, he abandons creativity for one big grisly CACHUNK after another.

We need to stop living in the past. People complain how the youth of today knows nothing of history, when in fact they know far too much. Everything they do, create and think is compared unfavorably to what came before. Maybe we could forget the influences of The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Kerouac, wipe the slate, and start again. Like overbearing older siblings, the titans of the past set everything new in claustrophobic shadows. Will any band ever be as vital as The Beatles? You'd think not from the constant noise of nostalgia. (See this month's cover of Rolling Stone.)
It sounds fascistic – but perhaps we could put a ban on talking about culture prior to this millennium? Particularly that period that inspires such obsession – the '60s. We've all internalized, by osmosis, the major movements of the era. They've been cartooned over the years, the truths of the time reduced to cultural shorthand. Tie-dye t-shirts, LSD, camper vans, peace, sexual revolution – it all means both too much and nothing at all. It could be argued that the last 40 years have been shaped, politically and socially, by waves of '60s glorification and/or backlash, rather than by the decades' actual events.

After all the rampant previews clogging up my TV, Quentin Tarantino's newest epic Inglourious Basterds arrived with a $37.6 million box office debut. This movie is way better than I expected. Even with all its messed up parts and incongruous plot-holes there is some redeeming beauty. Basterds is a cinephile's dream with obvious references to all movies great and small. Although clearly influenced by The Dirty Dozen, any Spaghetti Western and Pekinpah's Cross of Iron, Tarantino seems heavily anchored in his director chair rather than lifting from other movies (including his own). Still he adds super hero writing and chapters as a signature style but the cohesiveness enables three remarkable stories to intertwine.