Film

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.

When will cinema stop being obsessed by sex? Sex scenes these days are so predictably present, and so predictable, they may as well start slotting in audience toilet breaks – just to keep it real. Do filmmakers still collectively think we have no clue what happens when naked people rub up against each other? On-screen relationships were much more interesting when actors had to keep one foot on the bedroom floor.
Humpday is a film obsessed by sex like a toddler is obsessed with presenting what they've done in their potty. To its credit, Humpday came out of the Sundance Film Festival, and hardly any DV-made, Sundance films actually make it to theatres. Film critics tend to believe people will see Transformers despite the reviews, but a small, independent film can be helped greatly by a good quote for the posters. Sad to say no such quote will be provided in these prudish paragraphs.

District 9 is much more than a sci-fi thriller. It's an engaging mockumentary infused with black humor, a scathing satire on 24-hour news, commentary on xenophobia, corporate greed and apartheid, and it's all wrapped up in a full-blown action movie.
So much work went into this movie that it's hard to believe it was made for only $30 million. At least 10 minutes of credits are given to post production special effects teams and yet the beauty of D-9 is that its high-tech soul comes across as low-tech believability.
The plot is a straightforward Stranger in a Strange Land. An alien spacecraft is marooned over Johannesburg, South Africa. After the starving aliens are rescued, a shantytown of corrugated metal shacks is constructed to house them, and over the next 28 years their population expands to 1.8 million. Segregation and cultural differences lead to increasing prejudice and violence between humans and aliens. The Predator-like creatures with spiny torsos and protruding mandibles are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” and treated as an underclass.

Julie & Julia is split in half to tell the true stories of the chef and author of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Julia Child, and aspiring writer Julie Powell, who wrote a popular blog about cooking all the recipes in that book over one year. But the problem is – only Child's half proves worthwhile. The portion of the film following Julia Child through her first French food experience and her life in Paris is colorful and energetic, given buoyancy by Meryl Streep's pitch-perfect performance and some beautiful backdrops. The half of the film detailing the period of Julie Powell's life in which she began chronicling her duck boning and sauce-stirring adventures is uninspiring and weighed down by a whiny, obnoxious characterization of the New York blogger that Amy Adams limps through lifelessly.
Meryl Streep does a very loveable, joyous turn as the eccentric chef that many remember most well from her 1970s and 1980s television series Julie Child & Company and Dinner At Julia's. With brilliant comic timing, she makes even her most over-the-top moments endearing. It's so good a performance that some of Streep's best lines are those muttered at the edge of scenes, suggesting when the cameras stopped rolling she just carried on in character. In all honesty, Child had the sort of personality that could have been a disaster when magnified on the big screen – shrill, grating – but Streep brings an undercurrent of genuine emotion to her wild gesticulations. Julia's marriage to Paul Child, played by Stanley Tucci, is convincing, with his adoring love for her helping along our own fondness.

A wise woman once told me that the older she got the more she tried to see the good in things rather than the easier route of criticizing everything. I have thought of that comment virtually every day since she said those words, but never more than while watching GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
The problem for me with this movie is not that it brings to life the Hasbro action figures first introduced in 1964 – that's kind of cool – but it does so with none of the freshness or originality of other similar efforts like Sin City or the humor and self-deprecation of the Superman franchise, or the passion of Iron Man. The creators bumbled a golden opportunity here to laugh at the effort itself, you know, the tongue-in-cheek stuff. There is nothing interesting about this effort and no humor to buoy the comic book dialogue. See the good.

The frequently used term “nail-biting” has never been more appropriate than to describe The Hurt Locker. Focused on a bomb squad assigned to dismantle IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Baghdad circa 2004, the gritty realism and sheer tension of this movie sucks you in, hooks you and keeps you dangling the entire time.
Based on the true experiences of journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with such a unit (Explosive Ordinance Disposal or EOD), Hurt Locker is not an Iraq war statement but rather an in-depth character study of addiction to risk and danger. It's also a classic study of men in combat and under stress that could have taken place anywhere, detailing strong characters thrown together in the harshest of times, forced to deal with each other's psychotic idiosyncrasies and insecurities.

Here we have proof that no matter how cool a movie looks, how dazzling the photography, how mesmerizing the score, how nail biting the suspense, there is no masking a stupid story. The Collector is one of those movies, and here's why…
Arkin (Josh Stewart) has problems. His wife owes a vague yet sufficiently large amount of cash to loan sharks, and his handyman job doesn't pay enough to help. It does get him into homes, however, and being an ex-con in cahoots with a robbery ring, he decides to steal a huge gem from the house he's been casing. All looks well and good, but as soon as he breaks into the home he finds that someone has beaten him to it. A masked creep has been torturing the family, and has booby trapped the house to the hilt. The burglar is faced with the moral dilemma of stealing, fleeing or saving the family. Escape is not going to be fun.