That thing scared the bejesus out of me, and it was painted by Jesse Peper.
(Hat tip: the amazing horror-art site Monster Brains, which you should be visiting regularly already.)
Burning down the House
Well, I suppose we could have seen this coming. It’s a massively long movie, meaning most theatres I checked could fit in no more than four screenings a day even for the people who’d want to sit for a three-plus-hour movie, and that’s a comparatively rare breed these days. And it’s not like they’re gonna put it on multiple screens to offset that–this isn’t The Return of the King we’re talking about here. Even as a horror film, it’s kind of been marketed to a niche within a niche. All the horror buffs I know were stoked as hell about it, but based on the ad campaign, would the hoi polloi even know if it’s supposed to be scary? Hell, is it supposed to be scary?
That being said, it’s inspired some hella fun posts around the horror and film blogospheres, my favorite being the bitchin’ Horror Roundtable for last week, which asked participants to name their ideal grindhouse programming line-ups. I kinda cheated…
Quote of the day
To tire of The Sopranos is to tire of life.
–Timothy Noah, “The Sopranos: Final season, Week 1,” Slate
Amen!
For more Sopranos reading, I’ll simply point you to the blogs of Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, who collectively offer the most insightful and comprehensive coverage of the show on the web. Read their reviews, follow their links to other sites, do it all.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy
An unusual bit of breaking news at the day job: Wizard reports that Batman Begins and Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer will be penning a “Green Arrow vs. DC Comics supervillains in prison” film called Super Max. Hey, stranger things have happened…
:(
It’s an interesting day from a psychological perspective, as my depression that every one of my traditional movie-going companions will have seen Grindhouse already by the time I get a chance to go duels with my anxiety that I won’t make it through the Sopranos season premiere (let alone the finale) spoiler-free. Agita!
Even further Grindhouse
Holy smokes, I’m blogging a lot about this movie that I haven’t yet seen and probably won’t this whole weekend, aren’t I?
My beloved Wizard talks to Marley Shelton, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Poitier, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rose McGowan, and Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez. Add that to yesterday’s Q&As with Naveen Andrews and Rosario Dawson, and that’s some wall-to-wall shit right there.
Here’s one juicy exchange with QT and RR, debunking a big bit of horror blogosphere CW:
WIZARD: Did you guys have a problem with the ratings board?
RODRIGUEZ: No.
TARANTINO: No, not at all. That is a complete rumor. [The MPAA] hadn
Grindhouse Tut-Tut Watch
I’d been looking forward to Slate.com film critic Dana Stevens’s review of Tarantino & Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, assuming it’d be just as humorless, myopic and all but parodically p.c. as her reviews of every other genre movie ever. Imagine my disappointment when her take on the flick didn’t even register on the joyless-scoldometer. She actually kind of liked it!
But don’t worry. In an essay straight from the log of Captain Obvious, Stevens’s Slate-mate Grady Hendrix is bringing killjoy back, telling us all that grindhouse movies weren’t actually very good. (No, really?) While he’s at it he attacks Tarantino for being a closet bourgeois (an oldie but goodie) and works in a factual error about Mariah Carey’s movie career to boot.
Have fun, suckers!
Further Grindhouse
The day job’s on the beat: Wizard interviews stars Rosario Dawson and Naveen Andrews. I like Andrews more and more with each interview of his I read:
Well, Quentin [Tarantino] and Robert are beloved in England. I remember after
I have to admit
Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving trailer from Grindhouse is pretty agoddamnedmazing.
It’s so gleefully, joyously violent and sleazy and exploitative and poorly made that I’ve been in awe ever since I saw first saw it. Maybe it’s that announcer voice: “WHITE MEAT. DARK MEAT. ALL WILL BE CARVED.” It’s enough to make me reconsider my (ill-informed, but no less passionate for that) anti-Roth stance. And (the ostensible goal, of course) it’s also overcome my From Dusk Till Dawn-diminished expectations of Grindhouse.
In related news, Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson are sexy and Rolling Stone is awful.
(Via Cinematical.)
Seen at the mall
A 300 poster for sale in Hot Topic, featuring a picture of Queen Gorgo and the words “YOU WILL NOT ENJOY THIS!” So the line used during both her rape and the murder, by her, of her rapist, is an advertising slogan. Go figure!
Pic of the day
–from “Quint spends his final day on the set of STEPHEN KING’S THE MIST watching spiders run amuck!!”, Ain’t It Cool News.
So far, so good.
Thoughts on The Host
There were two things I really enjoyed about my viewing of the Korean monster movie The Host on Saturday at the Landmark Sunshine on East Houston Street:
1) That magnificent shot toward the beginning of the film, just after the monster has leapt out of the river, where he slowly rampages his way from the background of the shot to the foreground as our oblivious protagonist stares off the left of the screen. This is a shot that’s been in my head for years and years as the coolest possible rampaging-monster shot possible, and seeing it was an absolute joy, even if it’s a publish-or-perish situation for yours truly.
2) Lou Reed was there too. He looked shorter and older and more fashionable and wealthier than I imagined him, but mostly it was cool that Lou likes to go to monster movies on a Saturday afternoon.
And that was about it.
The Host suffers from a vast, er, host of problems that interfere with its supposed effectiveness as a top-drawer monster movie. For starters, there’s the monster itself, which is goofy-looking and not scary at all to behold. The visual effects used to bring it to life are excellent, and held up well to director Joon-ho Bong’s decision to keep the thing well lit and in our face rather than hiding in the water or the shadows. But that doesn’t compensate for a design that’s silly rather than scary and calls for the creature to move in ways that make no physical sense given its size and primary method of movement. (Why would a giant river monster flip around bridges like a trapeze artist, anyway?)
Then there’s the fact that the film, to me at least, was quite frankly boring. Its profligate use of slow motion made even 300‘s look judicious, and nearly every shot and sequence involving the put-upon dysfunctional family at the film’s heart lasted twice as long as it needed to. Thematically the film was very similar to the parental trauma of last year’s Great Monster-Movie Hope, The Descent. Unlike Neil Marshall, Bong seemed to believe that showy bloat would better convey this than no-frills relentlessness, a mistake that sinks the film.
Interestingly, the tonal inconsistency didn’t bother me–to a point. One of my all-time favorite movie-watching experiences was viewing Arthur Penn’s all-over-the-map Little Big Man while cataclysmically stoned, so I’m open to radical shifts in mood and even genre within the confines of one film. (I am a big fan of Kill Bill, after all.) It helped that for the most part, the funny stuff here–Gang-du’s Kafka/Brazil-esque attempts to get someone, anyone to listen to him; that hilarious shot where he breaks out of that medical trailer and shocks a parking-lot full of American soldiers away from their barbeques–was actually pretty funny. But where it did bother me–indeed, where it pretty much lost me for the rest of the movie–was when it played the ostentatious grief of the family over the death (“death”) of their little girl for laughs. Killing a child, especially one with whom we’ve spent time and for whom grown to share an affinity, is extremely dangerous ground for any movie; this goes double for horror, a genre that essentially presupposes that the audience, on some level at least, enjoys watching people get killed, and therefore has its work cut out for it if it’s going to depict the killing of a child, the least enjoyable killing possible. At first I was impressed by just how raw and unfiltered that scene in the crisis center was getting with its sobbing, screaming, inconsolable, mind-shattering grief–so imagine my dismay and disgust as it devolved into slapstick. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the death of a little girl is funny. And unkilling her later in the film doesn’t get you off the hook–especially if you’re going to re-kill her during the climax and want that to be the emotional lynchpin of the film.
I’ve written about enough movies I don’t like to realize that I tend to give them the business for plot holes and logical flaws to which, were they to appear in a movie I did like, I wouldn’t give a second thought. There were plenty of them here–the fact that the monster was able to grow to enormous size without ever having appeared at the surface and devoured countless human beings before this particular day; the fact that the filmmakers couldn’t seem to decide what, if any, effects “Agent Yellow” actually had on anything other than the monster; Gang-du’s ability to recover from some sort of trepanation and escape from a heavily guarded military installation filled with armed soldiers who honestly believed him to be the carrier of a deadly contagion–but none of them, obviously, were deal-breakers in and of themselves. The bizarrely bad fire effects at during the climax might have been deal-breakers considering the pivotal moments they mar, but again, I could probably look the other way if the rest of the movie demanded it. But its distasteful mockery of grief, lugubrious pacing, and fundamentally unfrightening creature left me in less than a charitable mood. Indeed, if it weren’t for mainstream critics’ erroneous belief that adding some melodramatic pathos and unsubtle (though funny) political allegory to a genre picture makes it A Great Film, I very much doubt whether we’d even be talking about it. As it stands, I’ll remember it as kind of like a Jaws remake that replaced Robert Shaw with tedium.
I hope Lou liked it, though.
“Andy! You GOONIE!!!”
Here’s cool news I helped break in the latest issue of Wizard, now on the website: Goonies director Richard Donner and his one-time-assistant, current-comics-big-shot Geoff Johns will be creating a sequel, Goonies: The Search for Sloth, as a comics miniseries. Booby traps!
gonna smash myself to pieces i don’t know what else to do
This week’s Horror Roundtable asks its participants to name undiscovered horror classics that deserve wider release. My suggestions bridges two of my all-time favorite things…
As always
If you’d like to know what I thought of this week’s issues of Daredevil, Green Lantern, Guy Ritchie’s The Gamekeeper, Action Comics, Batman, Superman Confidential, and Ultimate Spider-Man, then Thusrday Morning Quarterback is the place for you!
Insert “All Along the Watchtower” quote here
Behold! my massive interview with Battlestar Galactica co-executive producer and writer of the Season Three finale, Mark Verheiden, over at Wizard. It was a struggle to pull out a sample quote that isn’t loaded with spoilers, but I think this does the trick:
I was wondering if you went into it sighing, wondering how you
Desert Island Director
Over at Wizard, my pal Kiel Phegley has conducted a massive, informative, surprisingly candid interview with Jack Bender, executive producer and lead director of Lost.
With so much emphasis on the plotlines and characters and mysteries and other writerly aspects of the show, the fact that it’s the best-looking network television program since Twin Peaks almost always gets overlooked, and pretty much no one on the show has more of a role in that visual look than Bender. Sample quote:
So what we did is that we saved all the camera moves and all the moving shots and handheld and longer lenses and all of that stuff for the island story, and we made the flashbacks closer angles, wider lenses so that all of the background would be in focus.
I never even noticed that, for crying out loud.
Quote of the day, real world version
Passengers who resisted the smugglers were stabbed or beaten with wooden and steel clubs, then thrown overboard where some were attacked by sharks, the agency said it learned from survivors.
“Several recovered bodies showed signs of severe mutilation,” UNHCR said.
Quote of the day
“Battlestar Galactica” is a bit like “Lost” in that it’s what’s called a highly serialized drama, with a long continuing plotline. If someone misses a few episodes, they may stop watching entirely, thinking they’ll never be able to catch up. At the same time, once you get past the first season, new viewers can be put off by how much they don’t know about what’s going on. So you can lose the viewers you already have much more easily than you can acquire new ones, and both shows have suffered dips in their ratings. Yet this also seems to be one of the most fertile and exciting formats in the medium. How do you deal with those challenges?
I don’t. It’s a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It’s certainly not something they’re in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We’ve done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they’re almost never very successful for our particular series. They’re not what the audience tunes in for. But the network’s legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It’s hard to bring new people on board. There’s the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don’t know what to say. This is the kind of show I like to do, and we’re just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, we can persuade people to buy the DVDs and catch up at home and keep watching the show, but the show is what it is.
The availability of DVD sets seems to have made it more possible to do this kind of series.
I think it has. It’s really changed the landscape. People are much more comfortable getting on to shows like this because they can pick up a boxed set and catch up.
–Ronald D. Moore, quoted in “The Man Behind ‘Battlestar Galactica,'” Laura Miller, Salon
I latched right on to this portion of the interview because it confirmed something I postulated two years ago:
I wonder if new technologies like TiVo and DVDs aren’t also playing a major role in how narrative fiction is developing on the tube, insofar as they’re making complex series economically feasible in ways they didn’t used to be. Back in 1990, a show like Twin Peaks could make a huge splash, but if it demanded too much week-in week-out attention from its viewership, network pressure to make the show accessible (in Peaks’s case by revealing whodunit) would quickly kill what was special in the show, if not kill the show outright. Nowadays viewers, and more importantly executives and producers, know that it’s easy enough to “catch up” by hitting a few buttons on your DVR or renting the first season through Netflix. Perhaps we can expect the complexity of televised fiction, even on the benighted networks, to expand accordingly.