Marketing THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Remake

When I heard David Fincher was going to be making an American version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, I didn't know what to think.  Here is a well respected and critically acclaimed director known for a wide range of work, and he is looking to return to the doom and gloom of his directorial heyday.  Fair enough.  The novels certainly fit into his element, which has always lain somewhere between grunge and gloss.  But why a remake/reimagining/whatever you want to call it?  I'm still not 100% sure as to why this is happening exactly, other than the assumed (and sadly verifiable) "fact" that American audiences will not watch a movie with subtitles.

In any case, it's here, and it's time to come to terms with it.  Before I go on, please watch the trailer before I go on and on and on about it:

Banning the Human Centipede

In a decision that is truly mind blowing in this day and age, Tom Six's sequel to HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FIRST SEQUENCE (Subtitled FULL SEQUENCE) has been banned by the BBFC, Britain's film censor board.  As reported in various sources, though I first read about it in The Guardian, the reasoning behind the decision is based entirely on the certification that the film breaches the BBFC's Classification Guidelines, and poses "a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers."


For those of you who have not yet been scarred by what in the film poses such a risk to viewers of the movie, a little taste of the plot:  A man becomes increasingly obsessed with the first film and starts to act out sexual perversions and recreate the centipede by abducting and surgically altering captors of his own.  Two scenes in particular, involving masturbation with sandpaper while watching the film and a rape scene involving barbed wire and the girl bringing up the rear of the man's creation, are singled out by the board in its justification for the classification, which makes any activity having to do with the film (including possession, distribution, and viewing - much like drugs) illegal.


But as pointed out by a favorite film blog of mine based in Britain, Little White Lies, this essentially tells us nothing about what these fears may be.  Clearly the fears of the board are realized within the film itself, but what of the real world prospects of copy cat amateur surgeons?  The first film has been out for nearly two years and I've yet to read a single report of anyone moved to such lengths by a perverse little diversion.  It also bears to recognize, as again pointed out by LWL, that the board has banned films for similar reasons before, including THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which created an absurd situation that saw one of the defining horror movies of all time, as well as one of the less sanguinary of the last thirty years by comparison, banned in the UK until 1999.


That ban did nothing to stop people from seeing the movie, though, and this one will likely do nothing to stop THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FULL SEQUENCE either.  In an era when anything and everything can simply be downloaded via torrent or sold internationally, there's no stopping someone from seeing something if they want to.  It's just absurd to do it with something as fluid and accessible as cinema, no matter how lacking in artistic merit it may be.  And if we start banning things based on that criteria, I say we start with movies starring Rob Schneider.


And then there's the situation brought on by the announcement of the ban itself.  As evidenced by the growing interest in A SEBIAN FILM, a nasty little number from last year's festival circuit which still fails to have U.S. distribution, all the attention about how horrific and immoral it is has only given it free publicity and increased the likelihood that more people will actually see the movie at this point.  Not to mention the fact that adults are allowed to make decisions about what they would like to watch or read because they are adults, hence the very need for a classification system at all.  Tell us what's in the movie, and then let us watch it if we want to.  I know I, for one, can't wait to decide whether or not to watch Tom Six's follow-up to THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE.  That's because I'm an adult, and not a child to be coddled and told what is appropriate.  All that aside, though, there's more seriously fucked up material written in literature these days anyway, but I guess that's okay because the luddites out there who want us to be on the lookout for perversion don't read anything anyway.

4 Performances - Johnny Depp

This weekend we wered treated to the fourth film in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise, ON STRANGER TIDES.  In honor of that film's release (which could honestly have one of these columns written about any number of actors in it), and its star attraction Johnny Depp, I want to discuss four of my favorite performances from the prolific, idiosyncratic and extremely talented actor.  I'm also going to forego discussing his terrific (and career changing) turn in Jim Jarmusch's minimalist masterpiece, DEAD MAN because I want to write about that a bit in-depth in the near future.

1)  Sam, BENNY AND JOON (Jeremiah S. Chechick, 1993)

One of Depp's earliest attention-grabbing performances was as Sam, an eccentric man who has apparently modeled himself off Buster Keaton, opposite a terrific Mary Stuart Masterson as Joon, an emotionally distant woman who opens up to be herself in the presence of Sam.  Funny, sweet and just enough oddball to herald the career to come, BENNY AND JOON is remarkable character work by a burgeoning star.

2) George Jung, BLOW (Ted Demme, 2001)

BLOW is one of only two pictures that have ever made me cry in the theater (I don't mind telling you the other is Tim Burton's BIG FISH).  A wholly engaging crime drama as well as character study, BLOW follows George Jung, a big time cocaine dealer who, at one time, was responsible for roughly 70% of the imported coke in the U.S.  Tracking his rise and fall, the film utilizes the considerable acting chops of Depp and Ray Liotta, who plays his father, who gets all the best lines.  Directed by the late Ted Demme (nephew of Jonathan), BLOW is electrifying in its use of rock music, the production design and gorgeous, coked-out set pieces that rival the best of De Palma and Scorsese for 70s/80s period gangster drama.

3) Ichabod Crane, SLEEPY HOLLOW (Tim Burton, 1999) / Inspector Frederick Abberline,  FROM HELL (The Hughes Brothers, 2001)

I often conflate these two characters, though I don't rightly know why.  Perhaps its because Depp plays the same character very similarly, though adding or subtracting a bit of aloofness from his performances (respectively).  His Ichabod Crane is a man of science on the hunt for the Headless Horseman, and who is nearly driven mad by the ordeal.

Ditto Inspector Abberline, who is searching for a similar boogeyman in the shadows of London with Jack the Ripper on the prowl and the city gripped with fear.  While neither role is a huge departure from Depp's usual repertoire of weirdos and malcontents, it's refreshing to see him take on characters that are at least grounded in the real world, and who partake in normal movie star activities like solving murders and being hunted by ghouls in the night.

4) John Dillinger, PUBLIC ENEMIES (Michael Mann, 2009)

While the film itself has some problems - chiefly its on-again off-again commitment to a watchable image during its action sequences - Depp's portrayal of John Dillinger, America's favorite antihero, is spot-on perfection.  Dapper, clean and charming, Depp here proves that he can really be an everyman, just as long as that everyman has charisma and is terribly handsome.  In this regard it's a better role for him than other forays into similar territory, like 2004's SECRET WINDOW or last year's THE TOURIST, which gets my vote for best film everyone hated for no good reason in 2010.  It also doesn't hurt that he plays against type by being the flat-out bad guy, and that he gets to go head-to-head with fellow pop-thesp Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the Federal agent given the assignment of taking Dillinger down.

Essential Listening 01 - "Where The Wild Roses Grow"

note: I originally wrote the following article for the website SceneSC.com for an (at the time) ongoing column in which I would discuss songs and artists I loved and spotlight the intermingling of music and imagery.  The column never really came to fruition, so I'll be reproducing the unused articles here so they may see the light of day.

I think my Facebook friends are already tired of me going on and on (and on and on) about just how good this song and video are, and about the perfection of the duet by Cave and Minogue, from subject matter to its final execution, but dammit, I just can’t get enough.  This song is something like a religious experience - best experienced by yourself and then shared with others continuously throughout the rest of your life.

In the mid-90s, Cave came up with the idea of doing a full album of murder ballads, which had been a staple on every Bad Seeds album since From Her To Eternity in 1983.  Originally conceived as a joke - a sort of over-the-top “obvious” record, meant to be taken ironically - the resulting release is nonetheless a treasure trove of material.  In addition to this haunting and oddly romantic song, there’s also the rambunctious barnburner “The Curse of Millhaven” and the devastating, violent and explicit reinterpretation of the essential murder ballad, “Stagger Lee”.  But I digress.

“Where the Wild Roses Grow” is the song that makes the album, linking all of the songs together with Cave’s usual semi-crooner persona from this era in his career, the romantic who only sees heartbreak and loss around every corner.  Telling the story of a courtship that ends with the man killing his beloved by the riverside after determining she was too beautiful to ever grow old (and also from the point of view of the confused spirit of the deceased, Elisa Day), the song treads some truly disturbing ground, mostly because it’s such a damned gorgeous composition.

As a fan of both Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, the sheer logic of them recording together has never quite made sense (I could do a whole other bit on Kylie album “Fever”, but that’s another beast altogether).  But apparently, they had a thing for one another.  There’s a rather amazing little short edited together over on YouTube that tells the story of this pairing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFezNxypDK4), and it’s fascinating just to hear the pair of them discuss the song and its legacy.  I highly recommend it.  

But back to the task at hand.  Cave and Minogue’s vocal delivery, surely some of the most amazing to exist in all pop music, is perfection; lightning in a bottle.  It’s awful and beautiful and romantic and ugly in only the way a Nick Cave song can be.  That this album of songs about ugliness, greed, lust and, yes, murder is a prelude to the heartbreaking and tender follow-up The Boatman’s Call is evident in this very song.

And then there’s the video, which is based on painter John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia”, depicting the scene in Hamlet when Ophelia drowns herself in a river.  In the video, of course, Cave is constantly kneeling over his deceased love while she lay in the spot where the wild roses grow.  Visually, it’s all soft-focus photography on the gorgeous Minogue, and harsh shadow for the murdering Cave.  It sends shivers down my spine constantly.

Masculinity Under a Microscope - Writ Large, preliminary thoughts on VALHALLA RISING

I recently - and finally - caught Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn's breathtaking new film, VALHALLA RISING, via Video-on-Demand service.  Following the pagan warrior One Eye as he accompanies a band of crusaders in their journey to the Holy Land, the film plays out like an odd mixture of brooding uber-masculine Viking epic, with the pacing of a Terrence Malick venture and a dash of 70s Herzog/Kinski madness.  In scope, beauty, and pure brutality, I can't say I've ever seen anything truly like it.  It's not any one thing, but a mixture of things, and a pure, unadulterated work of imagery and poetry.  VALHALLA RISING is definitely not for everyone, but then again, few films are.

The film begins with a sequence depicting One Eye's enslavement to Scottish pagans and the constant hand-to-hand fights he competes in for their sporting pleasure.  After being introduced briefly to this situation, and the leaders of the clans discussing the coming Christians marauding the land and massacring the pagan tribes if they don't convert, One Eye escapes in a bloody rage, murdering the party that is to transport him to his new owners and heading off on his own, with the young Are - who fed him in captivity - in tow.  It's not long before they come upon the Christians, freshly off a massacre, and still sitting in the area where they killed another clan of heathens.

Instead of either side attacking the other, and thinking they could use a great warrior like One Eye on their side, the Christians invite One Eye to join them in the Crusades as they take back the Holy Land and fight for riches and the Lord.  Soon they are journeying across the ocean, and it's at this point the film becomes an increasingly spartan filmmaking exercise; the dialogue all but ceases to exist for long stretches, and the imagery really takes over even more than it had already.

One Eye also has some sort of ability to see events in his future, tinted a bright, bloody red, which makes you wonder if that's how he sees the world - through that blood-red hue.  He also carries a bit of a mystical quality about him in that he seems to be able to speak through Are, who constantly answers questions asked of One Eye and makes remarks on behalf of him.  This plays out to much stranger effect in the last half hour of the film, when the fates of the party and the events that lead to them play out.

The crew finds land after drifting for days in a fog that seems to have descended upon them for fateful purposes, but it's not Jerusalem, and is filled with lush greenery.  Once their party is attacked, two things become apparant: they are in fact in the New World, and are under threat from "primitives" and their pagan companion has brought them to Hell for suffering and death.

The contrast between One Eye and the Christians' reactions to their ultimate location is interesting to consider: One Eye is a warrior, a non-convert, and for him, death can only lead to his place in Valhalla, and some sort of Hell isn't really an option as long as he fought the best he could and died while fighting.  But the Christians think they've been corrupted by the pagan, this viking One Eye, and they blame their plight on him, descending into madness, sodomy, murder and, ultimately, their own deaths.

VALHALLA RISING is enigmatic, ethereal and difficult - having seen it twice now I'm still processing most of my thoughts on it.  It's completely unlike any other viking epic I've ever seen, and the cinematography is some of the most gorgeous I've ever encountered.  During the film's final two acts, slow-motion photography is employed to an extreme, giving the impression of characters walking through sludge to get to their destination.  The movements, the expressions on their faces - they're all highlighted in various forms of suffering, coping and acceptance.  The essence of VALHALLA RISING is in these final scenes: masculinity, under a microscope, on a large scale.  What it says to you - that's the interpretive part.

The Life Of The Mind

All of this INCEPTION talk has been enlightening and refreshing, and not just in a Facebook status update "that movie blew my mind" sort of way.  I'm still a bit on the fence about it, personally, and though I do have some small problems with it, I tend to fall much more squarely on the side of having liked it.  The story of a dream heist is too good for me to pass up, given my interests in crime dramas and my own concerns with the nature of memories and how they shape our lives and those of other people.  Despite whether or not I like the film or not, the discussion surrounding it justifies its existence on some level, even if you, like many others, find talking about the movie more fun and enlightening than actually watching the film itself.

Of course, as a natural outgrowth of all of this, I've gone back again and again to thinking about dreams and reality and the nature of cinema altogether.  As many blogger, commentators, and others have pointed out, a movie is not entirely unlike a dream, in that you enter a fantasy world, usually via a surrogate's experience, and exist within the imagination of the filmmaker for the time you're watching the movie.  It's a point the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg have made over and over again in their films.  Below is a brief discussion a few of my favorite films concerned with reality, dreams, perception and memory.  (Oddly enough, BARTON FINK doesn't make it in here.  I just liked using that reference as a title.)

TOTAL RECALL (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
Arnold Schwarzenneger plays Quaid, a regular guy who dreams of taking a trip to Mars - where he may or may not have been before.  In order to get there, he opts for an implant in his brain that will give him the memories of his amazing, romantic, spy-themed vacation.  During the course of the procedure, something goes wrong, and he awakens suddenly with very concrete memories of a huge conspiracy that has gone down, and has been covered up by having his brain wiped.  All of the pieces begin to fall into place, and before long, we're transported to Mars for real (maybe), and Quaid begins to lay waste to his enemies as he unravels their dirty deeds one by one and helps the "mutants" of the colony reclaim their humanity and rights.  Adapted fairly loosely from a Phillip K. Dick story, TOTAL RECALL has aged remarkably well, mostly thanks to pulp-auteur Paul Verhoeven, who infused the story with enough stunning visuals and ridiculous adventure (and that camp humor that anchors all of his films) to make the film stay fresh through repeat viewings.  The movie is fairly non-commital as to which parts of it are fantasy and which are reality - the potential is there for several different interpretations - and that's one of its many charms.  The dreams in TOTAL RECALL are also structured pretty literally, if they're dreams at all, and though they're fantastic images, there's nothing really hallucinatory about them as they're all based in some sort of physical reality that is easily interpreted as only being slightly outside the realm of possibility.  In other words, the dreams are normal science-fiction worlds.  Verhoeven is less interested in the perceptions of reality, though, than he is in examining the effects of memory on these perceptions (a common trait among all the best dream films.)

MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, 2001)
In one of the great fractured mind performances ever put on film, Naomi Watts plays Betty / Diane - a mash-up of two personalities, real and imagined - an aspiring actress freshly arrived to Hollywood to live out her dream of becoming a star.  Lynch is not a director to shy away from surreal imagery and unexplainable and disturbing themes.  His films are maybe best described as being the aesthetic kin to fever dreams, most definitely in the cases of ERASERHEAD and LOST HIGHWAY.  To this day I am still freaked out by the oddly creepy homeless man behind the dumpster of Winkies, a typical diner, and the build-up that leads to his reveal.  That sequence begins with a discussion of dreams, and a fear of a particular nightmare becoming reality, in which Dan (played by Patrick Fischler, who is well-known to television fans from his stints on LOST, MAD MEN and dozens of guest spots on other shows) finds a monster behind the dumpster that kills him.  I won't give away what does happen, but there is indeed a monster to be found, and its relevance in the reality of Watts' character later in the film is as puzzling and mystical as it is profound and, in some ways, moving.

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (Wes Craven, 1994)
The NIGHTMARE films have always had a firm grasp on the wild and weird world of dream and nightmare imagery, even as they had varying degrees of success at making those worlds interesting, fresh and scary for the intended audience.  In NEW NIGHTMARE, original director and series creator Wes Craven returns for the first time in a decade to the characters and the world he forged in the seriously creepy and remarkably dark A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.  Heather Langenkamp returns as herself as Nancy in a story that sees the child-murderer and, at this point, demonic Freddy Krueger attempting to break through from the celluloid world of dreams into the real world by attacking his oldest nemesis Nancy, who is, of course, Heather.  If all of this seems too convoluted to worry about, don't worry, it's not, though describing it to someone could induce headaches in all parties involved.  This is one of the most fun meta-excursions into films about films about dreams and all that jazz.  Robert Englund has some of his best lines as the character, and the 'reality'-based make-up for Krueger is truly frightening.  I wish they had just followed this film up (with Craven behind the scenes) instead of rebooting it into a soul-less, humor-less excursion into boredom and wasting a solid performance by Jackie Earle Haley as the new face of the franchise.

SHERLOCK JR. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
The portion of this film in which Keaton, playing a projectionist in a movie theater, falls asleep while showing a film and dream himself into the movies themselves is inarguably one of the most famous movie sequences ever, silent or sound era.  Never lacking in imagination, Keaton's dream world flashes from the film he is screening to a crowded city street, to the mountain ranges of the West, and then to the African plains as he is surrounded by Lions.  This may be one of the first such instances drawing the parallel between the nature of dreams and the nature of film itself, though it's certainly not the only silent-era film to do so.  There are more amazing evocations of dreams in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, and Carl Th. Dreyer's early sound film VAMPYR, which features proto-Lynchian imagery and disjointed editing techniques to specifically and subtly cause an uneasiness in the viewer.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME's Disquieting Charms

Casey Affleck's portrayal of Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford in Michael Winterbottom's THE KILLER INSIDE ME is probably the single most amazing performance I've seen this year.  It's a total embodiment of a horrible character that's as memorable, disturbing and thought-provoking as Daniel Day-Lewis was in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, but more subtle and unassuming.  Lou Ford, much like Robert Ford, is the perfect role for the younger Affleck, and it continues a string of amazing performances in low-key, provocative dramas since his appearance in brother Ben's masterful GONE BABY GONE.  His performance is the center of this film, with all of its menace and traditional noir overtones radiating outward from the essence of the unnameable evil that surely exists in Lou.

The film is without a doubt one of the creepiest and most disturbing movies to come out this year, which is surprising considering the unusually high number of creep-fests unleashed on audiences in the past few months  (SPLICE, THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE).  But creepiness aside, I find myself constantly returning to it as a purely unforgettable viewing experience.  I can't shake it - it's under my skin, and it's going to stay there.  Everything about it is pitch-perfect.

Adapted from what is probably the rowdiest novel I've ever read (the passage where Lou describes beating his girlfriend's face as being like hitting a pumpkin is the most graphic thing I may read in my lifetime), Jim Thompson's blacker-than-black noir THE KILLER INSIDE ME, this is a film that, quite literally, pulls no punches on its audience.  From the opening, which is full of gorgeous retro-styled freeze-frames and features the haunting use of Little Willie John's version of "Fever," it's obvious that Winterbottom has crafted an altogether different sort of film than what we're used to seeing for an American audience.

The film has been attacked for its ultraviolent murders (see my previous write-up: "Strange Bedfellows"), which are brutally realistic, but they work to great, sickening effect, but which mostly feature the women Lou Ford ostensibly has feelings for on some level.  Affleck brings a quite menace to these scenes, and his innocent, boyish features may contain the key behind some of the critiques lobbed at the film.  After all, how can someone so nice, even as purposefully nice (and in some moments of pitch-black humor, extremely biting) as Lou is.  In some ways, the "nice guy" persona is played off much like in the television show DEXTER, which also concerns a cold-blooded killer that is intent on keeping people off his tracks, but Lou isn't really likable, so this may not be an entirely apt analogy.

For me, the scene that most singularly makes the film is right as Lou delivers the final blow to Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), a prostitute who is probably the only person Lou actually cares about in the film (though the killer inside him definitely does not).  After punching her repeatedly in the face, at which point bone is visible through her gored and broken skin, he tells her not to worry, "it'll all be over soon," and then he delivers a few more crushing blows as she falls over onto the floor, being beaten to near-death before the arrival of Elmer Conway, his second (and main) target in the planned double-murder that sets the film in motion.  Still, after having her skull pounded like so much flattened steak, it's the fact that, in both book and film, Joyce still has that compassionate, loving look in her eyes.  Only moments beforehand she had been planning to run away with Lou after stealing a load of cash from Elmer's father, but even as her dream is slowly fading from her reality, along with her life, she just can't believe that Lou is doing this to her.  It's an absolutely chilling point to make: no one believes Lou capable of such things, even those he is doing them to.

But back to Affleck, who really makes this scene tick.  He's cold, calculating, and goes about the savage beating in a very methodical way.  Lou's detached from what he's doing at this point, and it's only when he sees Joyce's eyes that he offers solace in the only form he can: assurance that he's going to end the pain soon.  That brief exchange allows Lou to break through the killer, and I think it's probably the only time in the entire film (and the book) that he realizes that he actually does care about this woman on some level.  And then he kills her.  Brutal stuff.  That, in essence, is THE KILLER INSIDE ME:  Haunting, unflinching, and ultimately unforgettable.

It's difficult to say why this film got under my skin.  Maybe it's my deep love for the Noir genre, and for Jim Thompson's creation.  This is by far the best and truest adaptation of his work, even counting Stephen Frears' THE GRIFTERS.  I can't stop thinking about Affleck.  I can't stop thinking of his first, second and third murders (his gut-punch and head-kicking of his respectable girlfriend/fiancee Amy Stanton is just as brutal as that of Joyce).  I can't stop thinking of how he seems just like a nice guy, but with a seriously dark urge that he is helpless against.  I don't mean that the killer part of him is entirely separated from his conscious, just that it makes up the majority of a completely subdued personality that he doesn't let out in public.  Logically, he knows he probably shouldn't kill people - after all, why would you cover it up or care about how you're perceived - but that doesn't stop his own logic that people have to die.  "No one has it coming," he tells the teenage boy in his jail cell right before killing him, "That's why nobody can see it coming."  In the case of Lou Ford, that is 100% correct.

Strange Bedfellows: A Double Feature of the Grotesque

I love when films come along that are deemed immoral or have claims made against them that they glamorize violence and really serve no purpose.  This just reinforces the reasons for these films to exist: to push boundaries, make people uncomfortable with what they're seeing, and to provoke thoughts about what exactly are the roles that violence (in all its forms) play in our day to day lives.  While this may be evident in the discourse a film like THE KILLER INSIDE ME is having with the moral assumptions within every day society, being set in reality, and completely subjective in its point-of-view of a seemingly normal man who does unspeakably horrible things, it is also useful to understand that violence and its role in society has long been the territory of the horror film, and that Tom Six's THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, for all its over-the-top shock value, is a perfect example of what power the visual realization of horrific circumstance on film can have on an audience, and how important it is that such images exist to provoke and disgust.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME, director Michael Winterbottom's dark noir adaptation of the pitch-black novel by Jim Thompson is the stronger of the two films in question, but with the pedigree behind it, that's not terribly surprising.  We're given small-town Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (another absolutely spell-binding performance by Casey Affleck), who appears normal, and even knows and explains to the audience how he's appearing normal, to everyone around him, but who nonetheless has the impulses of a psychopath, and who isn't afraid to act on them when need be.  As Lou descends into an ever-growing spiral of sexual assault and murder, mostly in order to preserve his innocent status, the film forces the audience to experience his acts in the most visceral manner: explicitly, visually, and unflinchingly.

Winterbottom has never been a director to shy away from utilizing the medium's advantage of being able to give physical life to something that otherwise could only be imagined.  From the literal visions of Tony Wilson in 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, to the explicit sexual relationship catalogued in 9 SONGS, and the very visual representation of adapting an unadaptable work (more successful than even ADAPTATION) in TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY, he is consistently one of the most confrontational directors for an audience to enter into a discourse with, specifically designing his films to provoke and push the viewer into places they may not be comfortable in, but which nonetheless serve to make them think about what they're watching.

The scenes in THE KILLER INSIDE ME that leave everyone so disgusted and puzzled as to just what the film is supposed to be telling us are the scenes in which Lou Cobb brutally murders his lovers, who he may or may not actually have any feelings for, but whom he nonetheless must kill in order to satisfy his need for personal survival.  The first murder in particular, of the prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba), who Lou seems to regret his actions toward the most after they are complete (though he analytically decides there was really no other option), is exceptionally disturbing.  As part of a plot to get personal vengeance while also making a little money, he repeatedly beats Joyce in the face, her skin eventually giving way and exposing some of the bone underneath.  While this is definitely brutal enough, what I think most people find most repulsive is the desire for Joyce to kiss her lover and attacker one final time, and the fact that he does it.  The fact that all of this happens just after they've had sex so he could say goodbye to her only compounds this disgust.

But what does it all mean?  I think that, aside from attempting to tell us about society at large, these scenes are meant to get us thinking about how we process violence on a personal level.  What is more disturbing: to see this woman brutally murdered by the man she loves, and who apparently loves her on some level alien to those of us without a psychological disorder, and that she continues to love him despite his faults and the fact that she is very well on her way to death, or that we can watch countless action films where hundreds of people die and not feel anything at all about whatever brutal ways they meet their end?  I think both are equally disturbing, and neither is more condemnable than the other.  In fact, I think that both serve very visceral purposes for the viewer: thrills that are meant to provide some sort of release, whether it's one of disgust, or one of some sort of vindication.  Maybe both at the same time, and in varying levels.

Before getting into THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, I'd like to address something that has been said of both films: that they are in some way misogynistic fantasies.  I don't know that this is necessarily an incorrect assessment of the films in some way, though I feel it oversimplifies and disregards a whole lot of other things the films are interested in or seek to provide some sort of insight into.  To simply say that a film is demeaning to women completely disregards the fact that sometimes the demeaning portrayals of certain acts toward female characters may come with the intent (and I think very easily noticeable) to deliberately make the audience feel disgust at the ways in which these characters are treated.  Why are women treated this way on film?  What advantage would a filmmaker have to simply make a film that absolutely does not care in any way about its female characters?  Is it the responsibility of the filmmaker to curb the possible or supposed interpretations of how "cool" some behavior may or may not be to the audience?  To the latter, I think absolutely not.  To the rest, I think these are things that must be considered at all times.

People lobbing accusations of completely pointless existence at THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE seem to be missing a bit of the point: the film is much more interesting if read as a companion piece to a film implicitly interested in showing violence to its audience like THE KILLER INSIDE ME (or HOSTEL, or A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, or anything else).  Rather than dwelling on the fact that the victims are women, which is important, and which I want to discuss a bit more shortly, assume for a moment that you are shown the actual "violent" scenes of THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE.  Well, for one, they're completely antiseptic medical scenes, and in most cases you can find more graphic representations of surgical procedures on any number of television hospital dramas.  Aside from a few incisions, the most violent scenes involve gunplay and a couple of instances of physical altercations during escape attempts. This is actually pretty standard fare for any number of films.  Second, four of the six victims in the film are male: two abductees, same as the women, and two police officers in the climax.  That the women get the worst treatment, in that they form the second and third portions of the centipede, is kind of a hollow argument, in that it's all pretty horrible, no matter where you are in the warped creation.

In any case, I think that the key to what THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is about is in the pivotal performance of Dieter Laser as Dr. Heiter, a stock mad-scientist with a diseased mind character.  Laser's interpretation is chilling, in that Heiter enjoys what he's doing more than anyone logically could, and is obsessed not with killing people, but in furthering the field of biomedical surgery.  It's a concept that is interesting in its implications, given not only that Heiter is of course German (and the ties to actual biological questions infamous Nazi doctor Mengele posed and attempted to answer), but that we are, as a society, constantly attempting to find ways to prolong and save lives by forcing our bodies to accept foreign biological elements (i.e. - another person's body parts) into our own ailing frames.  Arguably Tom Six's twisted little horror film is more interested in bio-ethics than in creating any sense of horror at all, though it definitely succeeds on that level as well.

The key to understanding these films (and any others like them), I feel, lay in attempting to understand ourselves within the context of what we're watching.  And while you can certainly find them to be murky, problematic, or in some cases completely non-existent, it's at least a more worthwhile exercise to think about why we are shown what we are shown than to simply dismiss it as something that shouldn't be shown to begin with, for any reason whatsoever.  There may very well be no moral compass at work within a film like THE KILLER INSIDE ME, and certainly there is less of one to be found in THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, but that doesn't discount what they may tell us about our own sense of morality, or the world we inhabit, and who we inhabit it with.

In Dreams: Thoughts On and Discussions of INCEPTION

I saw INCEPTION, Christopher Nolan's mostly brilliant new film, on opening night this past week, and was thoroughly entertained.  I think he may be popular cinema's most consistently interesting auteur of what I like to call the "Thinking Man's Blockbuster."  And while I may not be a fan of every single choice Nolan makes, I find all of them interesting, especially his missteps and what they may tell us about his films more than what actually works in them do, and the discussions they lead to in the online world.  (Though you shouldn't really be surprised if you frequently read my blog, I feel it's actually necessary to point out that there are really big spoilers below, and on most of the links I'll provide, so if you have some fear of such things, please make note of this now).

For instance, there's some hullabaloo currently happening in the film blogging network that has sparked some serious and refreshing debate.  The argument centers mainly on two things:  first, that INCEPTION's "dreams" don't actually operate in the strange, illogical way that real dreams do, and second, that there's no emotional connection to any of the characters (or emotional logic to the supposed revelations they have) during the course of the "mechanical" plot (see Jim Emerson's thought-provoking discussion for an overview and to join the fray, especially comments by long-time contributors to the discussion Matt Zoller-Seitz and Christopher Long for the most interesting threads of debate).

What strikes me most about the discussion are the comparisons being lobbed about to other dream movies, amid the denial of total fans that the movie isn't "about" dreams at all.  This is a point I agree with, and mostly feel that if anything, the entire movie and all of its mechanics are a McGuffin for working through Cobb's (Leonardo DiCaprio) hang-ups about his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard).  Arguably, everything we see in the film is a construct of Cobb's imagination, a perpetual dream state that he either got lost in during his own experimenting, or by choice over the guilt of what he may or may not have done to his wife.  The flip side is that there's actually a layer of reality in all of this, which I don't ascribe to, and which I'll get into in more detail later on.  What is fascinating to me is that a lot of the criticisms of Nolan is that he is too literal in his dream-world.

As many have pointed out, the dreams within INCEPTION aren't really dreams at all, but literal constructs of an architect, who is out to deliberately fool the subject's subconscious into not realizing it's under attack and having a normal dream state.  Well, given this, why would dreams appear to the audience of the film appear to be anything other than that?  There's absolutely nothing in the film to suggest that the dreamer is privy at any time to the knowledge that they're dreaming, and who knows what his dreams are like while he's wandering around inside of them?  Aside from the "Mr. Charles" episode, which actually does play out a bit like a surrealist dream state of lucid and conscious dreaming (I'm thinking of the sudden appearance of rain outside the hotel as water starts hitting the faces of the dreamers in the above level as the van is under attack), appropriating incidents from the previous reality into the current dream state.  Think of this like every time you awake with a jolt from your leg falling off the couch, or have to go to the restroom after waking up from a dream in which you were about to, etc.  I think this sort of interplay between "real" dreams and constructed dreams works fairly well within the rules set up by Cobb and Ariadne (Ellen Page) at the beginning of the film.  Why some of these rules are disregarded by the end of the film is exactly why I think the entire film is a dream state of Cobb's making.

The biggest thing that stems from the ending and its implications:  not only does the top continue spinning, but there's absolutely no reason it should fall.  Upon going back over the film in my mind, I've discovered this really is the only outcome, and the biggest clue is the top, Mal's totem, itself.  In an early scene, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is explaining the concept of a totem to Ariadne, and says that it should be a personal object that grounds its holder to reality, and which only the holder should know the specifics of, in order to avoid being unable to distinguish the dream from reality, and potentially becoming stranded in their subconscious.  So where is Cobb's totem?  We only ever see him with Mal's top, which at the point it becomes handled by him, has been compromised.  This can only mean one thing, really:  Cobb is trapped in a dream state just like he fears Mal was (and really, does this mean that maybe Mal actually left the dream world for real and the idea that spread in his mind was that dreaming was reality?)  Or, was Mal even real at all?  Is Cobb simply dreaming a better existence than what he may have had outside in "the real world"?  I don't know that I can answer any of those questions, but they're certainly interesting things to ponder.

Going back to my original thoughts about the dream mechanics and how literal they are, the utter disregard shown by Cobb at all times for these rules, from constructing dreams of his wife from his memories to the risks he takes by delving into Limbo on, apparently, at least two levels in order to save Saito (Ken Watanabe), also shows that the film's reality is also a construction of Cobb's: if he's dreaming, then the rules can change from moment to moment whenever its necessary to progress the lie he's telling himself, no matter what the lie may or may not be or mean to him personally or the audience watching the movie.  While this may be sloppy storytelling mechanics, I think it definitely makes a case for the dreamworlds within INCEPTION to be a bit more dream-like and transient than they may appear at first glance, even with the presence of an architect that builds them into labyrinthine constructs meant to trap the dreamer and keep them from discovering the truth that they are, in fact, dreaming.

I don't want to seem like I'm lavishing too much praise on the film, though.  I do think that there are some extremely imaginative sequences, including all of the shifting- and zero-gravity stuff with Arthur toward the end of the films and the concept of actually creating stable dream states (which is what most of the critics seem to have problems with, acceptably so, I'll point out - not everyone has the same interests).  But, as with all of Nolan's films (including both Bat-flicks, despite my assumed "fanboy" status), I have some problems of pacing and the existence of far too much exposition in dialogue form rather than simply utilizing film to do what it does best: show us what we need to know.  I also think that its similar psychological territory to that certain earlier-this-very-year DiCaprio thriller, SHUTTER ISLAND, is too much to ignore.  They would certainly make very interesting viewing partners, even if one were only interested in dissecting strengths and weaknesses between the two.

What all of this means to the current discourse, I can't say just yet.  I know that I'm genuinely interested in the back-and-forth this particular film is providing for us all, and I'm looking forward to being able to discuss the similar (and dissimilar) parts of INCEPTION and any number of "dream"-related films that have already been brought up in context: TOTAL RECALL, eXistenZ and any number of Cronenberg films, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, etc, etc, etc.  In parting, I'll leave you with this thought: is a film that sparks so much debate and academic/professional interest really that bad of a film to begin with?


*****
For further discussion and context, check out my friend Julia Rhodes' very positive review of the film over at California Literary Review, where she shares some similar but slightly different thoughts and responses to mine, as well as Jim Emerson's previous essay on Nolan's film THE PRESTIGE, again on his ::scanners:: blog.

IRON MAN 2: Exactly As It Should Be

Reading all of the online articles posted about it, you'd think this Summer blockbuster season was populated by a bunch of really awful films being released on a very well-informed and comparably underwhelmed movie-going public.  I don't think it's nearly as dramatic as all that.  Sure, there have been tons of really bad flicks, buy what month goes by in theatrical releases when that isn't true?  What really bothers me, though, is that aside from the actually pretty bad and disappointing movies, there is one really big one that everyone is describing as a huge letdown:  IRON MAN 2.  I don't get it.

IRON MAN 2 is exactly the film it should be, especially when taking the first film into consideration along with the rules of the sequel.  We had a largely-uknown hero get his due from the audience, in a light, much more character-centric take on the superhero genre, that featured some really amazing special effects, and a charismatic star turn from Robert Downey, Jr.  The sequel is bigger, has more action and more special effects, features more quips and one-liners from its star, further establishes and expands the mythos and world of the Marvel films, and is a really fun ride, even if it does do a bit of wandering.  But these are all things that seem to cause problems for people.  A major complaint is that it has too much going on.  I disagree.  I think that, for its aims, it may actually do too little.

This time out, Stark is being attacked by a vengeance-obsessed Russian (Whiplash/Mickey Rourke, who I'll get to a bit later), an arms-dealer competitor hungry for the Iron Man tech (Justin Hammer/Sam Rockwell), the government and, by extension, the military, and his own body, which is being slowly poisoned by the very technology that's keeping him alive.  On top of all of this, though, this second film is also the set-up for the next two years of Marvel releases, teasing Captain America and Thor with weapon cameos, nods direct and indirect to S.H.I.E.L.D., and most of all, setting up Tony Stark as an integral part of this universe.  That's a lot of stuff to cram into a two and a half hour run time, and Favreau does a pretty good job of getting it done, especially considering the fact that it's fun and engaging.

The whole film plays a bit loose, and if it seems to only get its story going about forty minutes in, well, it should.  Stark is a loose character, always a bit flighty, and I really enjoy the fact that, unlike most big superhero flicks, it doesn't always feel like he has some sense of duty.  He's got an ego the size of Texas, easily, and he thinks he can get away with anything.  Some of the best parts of the movie have nothing to do with anything other than Tony being Tony: genius savant, ladies' man, egoist.  Just the sight of him eating a hangover donut in the Iron Man suit after an out-of-control party and showdown with his best friend, or his perfect interplay with Pepper Potts, or his completely devastating and quite funny showdown in a Senate hearing is enough to keep me coming back for more.  This allows the film some much-needed room to breathe, which is what a lot of these pictures lack.

I also felt much more acclimated to this style during the second time I watched IRON MAN 2.  It flows a lot better than I thought it did, and even the final battle doesn't seem like as much of a let-down in how brief it is.  I think I initially suffered from what a lot of people who saw it did: high expectations.  The difference is that now I've seen that it in fact met all of my expectations, and perhaps even surpassed them.  It's not a disappointment in any case.

As for the film doing too little with certain things, it just feels a bit too small.  Whiplash is an interesting character, but we get too little time with him.  I wanted more of his bloodlust.  It's also a shame that he doesn't end up with ties to some of the super-villains that I know are coming up in the future films (AVENGERS and, hopefully, IRON MAN 3).  I also think that there could have been some more time spent on S.H.I.E.L.D.  We're introduced to Black Widow, but what's her role in the organization?  She has some really great scenes, but the character is held back too much.  Nick Fury's two scenes are played mostly for comic effect and to set up the next films, but he's still a mystery.  But, maybe I'm alone here.  I did, after all, think that Peter Jackson's KING KONG could have used an extra ten minutes or so.

In any case, I think IRON MAN 2 is perfectly fine as a sequel.  It's not a well-oiled machine, but it has to be understood within the context that Marvel isn't attempting a single franchise here.  If the focus were only on Stark/Iron Man, the film would probably have been greatly streamlined.  The film, however, doesn't have any particularly deep flaws aside from a bump here or there.  As a Summer blockbuster, it's exemplary.  It's exactly what it should be, if not what I expected the first time around.

"I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are": THE RUNAWAYS

I may be going out on a limb when I say this, but THE RUNAWAYS, Floria Sigismondi's adaptation of the book NEON ANGEL by Cherie Currie (with obvious input from other sources as well), which details the rise and fall of the all-girl rock group, is an hour and forty-five minutes of exhilarating storytelling experimentation within a genre that has become all too stale in recent years.  What some may see as lacking in forms of context, I think is invigorating.  There are things that Sigismondi all but ignores in the film, mainly in the way she handles the exact level of fame the group achieves, that leave an enigmatic and half-baked feeling, but gets a whole hell of a lot more bang for her buck in terms of character and feel.  This is a film as preoccupied with the aesthetics of storytelling as it is with actually telling the story of five young girls who grew to be one of the most important rock acts of all time.

Kristen Stewart is Joan Jett, and Dakota Fanning is Currie.  Both are unbelievably good, with Fanning carrying a lot of the film's emotional weight, and performing a fairly provocative role at the same age as her real-life counterpart when the group started.  The relationship between the two girls is explored in reasonable depth, but plenty is left floating out in the ether, too, which I rather appreciated.  It left me thinking about them a whole lot after the film was over, and how amazing it was that this band happened at all given its totally disparate band members.  As the film (and the book) make pretty clear, a lot of that had to do with producer Kim Fowley, who coaches the girls on how to think with their cocks, exploit male physical attraction, and defend themselves against stage debris, all while helping them write songs and create an on-stage presence.  The Runaways as an all-girl rock band may have been Jett's idea, but there is no doubt that they were Fowley's baby.

There's an amazing sequence mid-way through the film where Jett and Currie hook up while on tour.  It's not really anything explicit, but all of the eroticism and drug-fuelled desire of it really makes it stand out. The scene's all reds and blacks and flesh, and the constant throbbing of Iggy Pop.  It's one of the closest approximations to the feel of passionate sex I think I've ever seen, and all while basically showing a lot of close-ups of arms and one very quick and smoky kiss between the two girls.  And, better yet, the fact that it is two girls isn't played up at all - it's all completely natural and un-attention grabbing, which may be why it really hasn't been mentioned much by the press.  What I like here is the expressionism of the scene.  It's all about mood and not about act.  And it works.

And that's not the only time the film plays around with things.  Rather intentionally or unintentionally, the only time there's a taste of how big the group has actually gotten is its foray into Japan, where Curry dons her famous leggings and corset, and even that is basically relegated to a performance of "Cherry Bomb" and a scene in the dressing room when a group of screaming fans breaks through the glass door and chases the girls down.

Otherwise, the film focuses on drug use, battling egos (especially Curry's of mythological proportions), and girls raising hell.  It's not perfect, but I like this approach to detailing the rise and fall of such a misunderstood and important band in the history of rock music as The Runaways really and truly are.  By the time the fall part of it all comes around, it's not quite as big a shock because you've already witnessed the girls at each others' throats for the last half hour, and the battle between Cherie's loyalty to her work and to her family at home, and it all flows logically and never becomes completely routine.

The performances in the film are all pretty great, but I was particularly impressed with the two leads.  Stewart and Fanning are pretty great as Jett and Curry, and have an energy that buoys the film throughout.  Fanning has really come into her own as an actress, and she does some great work here, adding real psychological depth to a character that could have easily been treated like a cartoon.  As for Stewart, I've known since PANIC ROOM that she had the ability to seriously act in her somewhere, but all of her post-stardom work (even in ADVENTURELAND, which I like quite a bit) seems to consist of the same boredom infused lip biting that makes up so much of the character of Bella in TWILIGHT.  Apparently all it takes to make her act is to put her in something she actually gives a toss about.

A quick word about Michael Shannon, too, the fabulous actor who really wowed me back in 2006 in William Friedkin's BUG.  His portrayal of Kim Fowley is spot-on, flawless really, and backed up 100% by interview footage of the real Fowley and Joan Jett at the time.  But it transcends mere impersonation, and he really comes into his own with the character of Kim - someone who is flamboyant, racy and really couldn't give a shit.  He is fantastic.  Michael Shannon is one to keep your eyes on.

I don't think I've really done this film justice here.  I really loved it.  Is it perfect?  No, it's not, but I'll take imperfect and interesting any day over glossy perfection that just bores me to tears.  Seriously, in my honest opinion, THE RUNAWAYS is worth seeing just for that Stewart/Fanning sequence with Iggy Pop.  That's pure cinema, and you can't say that about many other biopics out there.

Of Fleshy Blobs and Bio-Ethics: SPLICE (2010)

Thankfully, there's Canada.

Without their particular brand of crazy, I don't know where the sci-fi/horror genre would be.  Sure, there are the French, but that's another thing altogether.  No, the Canadians have had this market cornered for decades now, with David Cronenberg's body horror oeuvre being most prominent, and now we have SPLICE, directed by CUBE mastermind Vincenzo Natali.

SPLICE follows superstar geneticists Elsa and Clive (a terrific Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody), who are also a happy couple, and their attempts to splice a new creature together and track down an enzyme that is a gateway for all kinds of cures.  So, we have Fred and Ginger, two slug-like organisms who are apparently far more complex creatures, who bond ("imprint") with one another, and who are extremely successful at producing the protein that the pharmaceutical company is looking for.

After this success, Elsa and Clive want to move on to human splicing - the next logical step - but are told no by their big-pharma employers, who want them to shut down their operation and attempt to synthesize the protein now, so they can start making some money off of their years of research.  And of course, Elsa and Clive ignore all of this ad create the thing anyway, "just to know that they can."  Things are never as simple as they seem in these movies, and inevitably, they decide to put off destroying their creation, and stuff eventually goes very, very wrong.

And then the film becomes absolutely, thrillingly insane.  I mean it: crazy.

After the initial shocks of the experiment - the premature birth, the rapid development of the creature, their fear of its potentially deadly abilities - Clive and Elsa decide to keep it, especially once Elsa becomes attached to it, and gives it a name, Dren, which is significant ("nerd" backwards) in that it stems from a discovery she makes while bonding with "her."

The decision to assign a gender to Dren is a significant one, because it fuels a lot of the most intriguing questions the film raises.  It also makes complete sense, given the fact that during one of the most amazing sequences, while dancing with Dren, Clive notices Elsa's features in her, leading to the realization that the human DNA spliced into her was not some random donor, but was in fact her own way of having a child (a subject brought up by Clive, but which disinterested Elsa, perhaps as not being "enough" for her).  This realization is where the film completely changes into something profoundly interesting, with Dren developing self-awareness, drawing conclusions about relationships, and, of course, typical adolescent urges.

The resulting final hour of the film is packed with questions and ideas about bio-ethics, relationship dynamics, greed, species and gender identities, sexual ethics and so much more it's mind-boggling.  I was so breathless by the time I left the theater that I felt like I had just run a marathon (the way I feel after watching Cronenberg's films, too).

Now, I'm not going to spoil much of anything for you, but I will give this piece of information:  the relationship between Dren and Clive sets all of this in motion, and it's one of those oddly erotic moments that you're quite simply unsure of at the time.  The model and sometimes actress Delphine Chaneac was no doubt chosen to play the oddly attractive Dren (from the waste up, at least) because the creature is supposed to have some sort of sex appeal.  The film thrives on our identification with this thing as a humanoid.  It totally works, too, because throughout the narrative, the film consistently plays with who the audience identifies with based on their relationship and reactions toward Dren.

The six or seven college kids behind me hated it.  They weren't kids, just immature adults.  SPLICE is not a movie for someone who is just looking for a big dumb horror flick (which is acceptable, too), and it certainly is not anything like what you would expect.  It is, however, excellent, and then you even get the traditional final reel freak-out horrorshow to top it all of.  It's nothing short of brilliant, and easily one of the best films I've seen this year.

George A. Romero's SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD

It seems that with each new installment of his "Dead" films, Romero further solidifies his reputation as the king of so-called "serious" zombie cinema.  He is more focused than ever on his life's work and his humanist message.  His films have always had a political bent to them, but he seems more conscious of this than ever with his previous film DIARY OF THE DEAD and his new epic, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD.  The main difference is that he's lost a bit of his cynicism regarding the human race - there's a streak of actual hope in his recent efforts, and his focus (particularly since DAY OF THE DEAD) on the possibility that the undead might have their old memories lurking underneath all that decaying flesh and insatiable hunger has really lent itself to the morality at play in the whole "should we kill them or wait to find a cure" conundrum that sits at the heart of all standalone zombie films (as if no one had ever seen a zombie movie before).  In this regard, he's become a storyteller of great empathy, somewhat akin to a latter-day, splatter-centric and less technically masterful Kurosawa, who sees the potential in humanity through all its ugliness.

I've been following and writing about Romero's series for quite some time now, and I'm sorry to say it, but this film is most certainly the beginning of the end.  SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is Romero's sixth zombie film, and again the odds are on the dead overrunning the living.  SURVIVAL marks two major departures for the director, as well as the series:  it's essentially a take on the Western (a showdown between two feuding families on an island over what to do with the dead forms the central conflict of the piece), and it features a character from another film in the series, Sarge Crocket, the National Guardsman who hijacks the protagonists' RV in DIARY.

This really opens up the universe of the series, and fulfills the hopes (somewhat) of late film-theorist Robin Wood, who wrote of DIARY that he hopes to see characters from that film populate later films, though he was speaking mostly in the context of the militant blacks who had taken over the town and supplied the kids with a lot of the stuff that got ripped off by the National Guard.  I agree, that would be one of the more interesting sets of people to make a zombie movie about, especially in Romero's super-charged politically relevant mythology.

The plot is pretty basic - in an Earp/McLaury scenario, the island two families of Irish immigrants live on isn't big enough for the both of them, so one has to go.  Forced off the island, Patrick O'Flynn takes to ripping off people for passage via boat to the island, which is apparently unknown to anyone who doesn't live in the area.  Sarge and the crew he ends up with encounter O'Flynn while trying to flee the mainland, and end up bringing him back to the island.  The morality play picks up and goes from there, ultimately ending in a bloodbath, but one that has some real ramifications for where the series goes in the future (Romero has said he only wants to do one more, but we'll see if that's adhered to, or not), particularly in regard to the undead's apparent ability to remember their family members, though this ends with tragic consequences.

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD has been heralded as a let-down by both non-fans and admirers of Romero, but really it's not the bore-fest it's been purported to be.  Like most Romero films, there's a healthy layer of cheese that covers everything, from the over-the-top kills and the self-important dialogue (a way of interpreting other "end of the world" films' overwrought mental masturbation, in my opinion, and often bad on purpose), but none of this should be a surprise to anyone who's followed the director's films since CREEPSHOW.

He's a pulp-infused storyteller, more akin to a schlocky EC comic than anything cerebral and "intellectually engaging" on traditional levels.  Part of the pleasure of watching SURVIVAL is seeing how Romero blends and synthesizes genre, undermines his own supposed legacy, and continues building upon both at the same time.  It may well be the weakest of the "Dead" series, but when you're discussing any horror movie in the same breath as NIGHT, DAWN or the under-appreciated DAY OF THE DEAD, that's not exactly saying anything revolutionary in thought.  Compared to the original three films, almost all horror films are completely inferior, and not just those featuring the beloved lumbering undead.

Edit - 5/28/10 3:10 PM:
Check out this interview with Romero that's really quite interesting.

5 Performances - Val Kilmer

Whether he's taking on real-world icons, or crafting wholly original characters, when he's on his game, Val Kilmer is a talent to be reckoned with.  He's been in Westerns, thrillers, crime-dramas, and even comedies (thought I love it, REAL GENIUS only gets this mention), and has played everyone from gunslingers to fallen porn stars.  And then there's my love for him as Madmartigan in Willow, but that's another article altogether.  Val's in theaters currently as arch-villain Dieter von Cunth (insert joke, right?) in SNL sketch-cum-feature-length movie MACGRUBER, which I have yet to see, so in honor of his return to the big screen, here's some of the more memorable slices of his career, and, since I like him so much, and because I make the rules, he gets five performances instead of my customary four.

Jim Morrison, THE DOORS
I think Kilmer's under-appreciated in this film, and that may be largely due to the more salacious details surrounding its reception.  Some feel it's too schlocky, while fans of The Doors find the film overall to be a bit too slanted to Ray Manzarek's version of things and therefore factually inaccurate.  But that doesn't take anything away from the performance Val gives us as Jim Morrison, the poet/provocateur behind one of rock's enduring iconic bands.  Maybe it's because of his amazing physical resemblance to the real Morrison, or maybe it's just that he's so damned good in making a sympathetic figure out of a man who was by all accounts a bit off-putting.  Morrison had issues with his audiences, constantly clashed with indecency enforcers and there were a lot of mind-altering drugs in use - the brilliant Indian in the desert sequence where all the members of the band are tripping balls was hilariously parodied in WAYNE'S WORLD 2.  Stone's film may be imperfect, but Kilmer's spot-on.

Gay Perry, KISS KISS BANG BANG
Shane Black's brilliant buddy action-comedy/noir/Hollywood tale was actually the rebirth of both the careers of Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer (who's gone on to have tons of work since, most of it very good and overlooked), though for some reason Downey's the one everyone paid attention to.  Still, Kilmer's turn as the gay P.I. hired to show Downey's actor-impersonating criminal, Harry Lockhart, the ropes in the trade to prep him for a role is where the real money's out.  His constant state of incredulity at Lockhart's behavior is hysterical by itself, and really drives a lot of the best reaction moments from Downey.  This is a great movie and has two of my favorite actors at the top of their games.

Doc Holliday, TOMBSTONE
This is probably his most popular and impersonated performance, but Kilmer's Southern-gent take on the iconic, tubercular sidekick and friend to Wyatt Earp still remains top-notch interpretive acting work.  At once comical and deadly, Doc Holliday is a thrilling character in George P. Cosmatos's blockbuster, action-centric take on the story of the Earps and the legendary status they achieved in the town of Tombstone.  With amazing delivery on some of the best trash-talking dialogue in screen history, like "I'm your huckleberry" and "You're a daisy if you do" when taunting Johnny Ringo (a great Michael Biehn) about his threat to kill him in a gunfight, Kilmer's performance goes into instant legendary territory.  Is there a person alive who doesn't at least like Doc Holliday in this movie?

Scott, SPARTAN
In David Mamet's 2004 masterpiece (one of several, it should be noted), Kilmer plays Army Ranger Scott (maybe, though he's more black-ops off-the-radar than that, and even hints that he may not be a Ranger after all), who's given the task of tracking down the kidnapped daughter of the President.  The film's filled to the brim with the traditionally Mametian double- and triple-crosses, enough twists and turns to effectively fill an album full of '60s car crash tunes, and an ensemble cast that's to die for (Ed O'Neil, William H. Macy, Derek Luke, and Kristen Bell).  This was the first major film role that Kilmer had had in quite some time, and it undoubtedly led to him getting further prominent work.  As Scott, he's all quiet and troubled subtlety - a man searching for the truth in a sea of corruption that Mamet has a field day with.  The scenes between him and the Secret Service agent who was assigned to protect the daughter are especially moving, and Kilmer conveys the exact mood that overcomes Scott and compels him to complete his mission, swimming through all the muck and bullshit and beaurocracy to find the missing girl.

Chris Shiherlis, HEAT
As part of Neil McCauley's heist crew, Chris Shiherlis is a man of principle who is truly in love with his wife, Charlene, but who faces marital problems due to a gambling addiction that continues to fuel his dependence on the criminal life.  With long blonde hair, Kilmer portrays Shiherlis as a no-nonsense professional, and at the end of the film when forced to leave his wife behind so he can go on the run and attempt to get free of the ever-tightening noose of the police, it's devastating.  "For me the sun rises and sets with her," he says in the film, and it's especially evident in his face as he realizes that he has to go, and that she can't come with him.  HEAT is every bit the modern crime epic that it's said to be, though I think some people actually underrate it just a bit.  Kilmer's just one of many great performances, and it's arguably the last truly great film Michael Mann made.