Bangkok’s horror-wunderkind Pang Brothers (Danny and Oxide) come to the U.S. to serve up… well, a wretchedly formulaic Old Dark House ghost story that doesn’t have an original bone in it’s body (or even an original ghost in it’s cellar, really.)

Best-described as an “only the crappy parts” mash-up of “Amityville Horror” and every Asian horror movie since “The Ring,” here we have another tale of a city family (strong-Mom, patch-o-bad-luck-Dad, angry-teen-Daughter and a mute toddler) moving into a run-down old house in the country. Small town, everyone-knows-everyone, but no one knows what happened to the prior occupants of the house… other than they vanished mysteriously (the audience sees them, apparently, murdered in the opening prologue) and now the local kids think the place is haunted.

I. Wonder. What. Will. Happen.

Sure enough, the place is practically slathered in ectoplasm. Spooky noises abound, the electricity is funny and the furniture likes to break itself into pieces only to magically re-form once the adults come home. There’s something grimy and waterlogged-looking in the cellar, plus the requisite spider-walking little kid a’la “The Grudge” and a female wraith that manifests in water stains, and… well, it’s a little unclear, actually, how many spooks actually seem to be drifting about, and also exactly what they actually can and cannot do. At times it seems they need their new human housemates to open doors and solve mysteries for them, other times they are able to move around at will, they go from hostile to benign… oh, and they apparently have backup from a full murder of crows seemingly in a constant hover-pattern over the property.

There isn’t a plot twist you won’t guess, a mystery you won’t instantly solve, a scare that isn’t telegraphed from a hundred miles away. You’ll have it all figured out after a half hour, and then you’ll be mad because you’ve deduced what a crummy movie you’re about to suffer through the remainder of.

Danny, Oxide… what the HELL happened to you guys? I mean, I heard they re-shot the ending parts, fine… but how do you explain the 70+ minutes before that?

FINAL RATING: 1/10

So… I write this blog based in Boston, which you may have heard had kind of an “issue” yesterday, as the entire security infrastructure of the city was nearly crippled as a result of, well.. an invasion by perennial “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” bad guys The Mooninites, basically.

Short version: A “guerilla marketing campaign” to help promote the cartoon and it’s upcoming feature film was launched sometime back involving hanging up “Lite Brite”-style renderings of the video-game-like Mooninite characters in various places around various cities. Since whoever designed the things made the (bad) decision to “power” them via a strip of batteries and protruding wires, someone here in town thought one was a bomb, called it in, sightings poured in and everyone freaked out. Bomb squad, the two indie-marketing guys arrested, the whole shebang.

First thing: Yes, Boston now looks profoundly stupid, and we deserve to. People will be teasing Mayor Tom Menino about this for years. “No, Mayor Menino, New York is NOT being attacked by giant monsters… that’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.” However…

Second thing: Whoever designed the things and put the battires and wires on the outside and didn’t even consider that someone might find it alarming-looking: MORON.

Bottom line: Both parties need to resolve this FAST before they look any sillier. Boston: Try to get back the tax money you spent, take Turner’s apology, slap the two kids who put them up on the wrist, don’t do anything stupid like asking them to cancel the show. Turner Broadcasting: Promise not to do it again, give Boston the money, apologize, don’t do anything stupid like canceling the show.

What’s interesting to me is how plainly this shows the “niche” nature of entertainment right now, generationally and otherwise. Think about it: If the cartoon character depicted was something pre-Internet universally-known like, say, Bugs Bunny… this never would’ve happened. Someone among the first-responders would’ve said “Hey, it’s Bugs Bunny. Somebody call Warner Bros and ask if this is some kind of commercial.” Warners would’ve said “yes, it’s a commercial,” situation defused, no panic, no problem. But now? Yes, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” has been on for five years and is a HUGE cultural hallmark for it’s target audience… but if you’re not IN it’s target audience of college-age-and-under YouTube devotees you’ve probably never heard of it, nor would you recognize a Mooninite if you saw one. All that would’ve needed to happen was for ONE person in the group of Boston first-responders to have recognized the icon as a TV cartoon character and this whole mess could’ve been avoided.

YAAAAAAYYYYYYY!

It’s not a leak or (as near as anyone can tell) an illegal-posting. It’s a direct-to-Google-Video release of Corey Yuen’s tongue-in-cheek movie version of “Dead or Alive,” the video game based chick-fight action/comedy I’ve been impatiently chasing after for at least a year now. And my birthday isn’t even for another few weeks!

Beautiful women kicking the crap out of eachother with wire-fu and samurai swords while dressed up like anime/cosplay fetish dolls. Thank you ma’am, may I have another?

Get it here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6983938994236570211&q=Dead+or+Alive+duration%3Along&hl=en

Who knows how long this stays up, and I can’t figure a way to “save” it or anything and so far have only had the chance to watch about a 3rd of it… but I’d say this is probably semi-official, a novel attempt at building buzz for something that was pretty much trading on presumed B-movie silliness to begin with. In any case, so far it’s exactly the kind of silly/sexy fun I wanted from it. Well done.

The first thing one needs to process about Joe Carnahan’s “Smokin’ Aces” is that it’s not as good as Carnahan’s last movie, “Narc,” but that that’s okay because most movies aren’t as good as “Narc.” The second thing is that, yes, “Smokin’ Aces” is 100% a Guy Ritchie angry-toughguy-all-about-the-‘tude crime shoot `em up, only with sloshy London Grime swapped for sun-burned Vegas Kitsch (despite technically taking place mostly in Lake Tahoe)… but that there’s also really nothing wrong with that.

For a change, here’s a movie thats being 100% honest about it’s intent and reason for being. It’s trailers say: “Look at me! I’m an angry, superviolent, pissed-off-at-the-world-little-boy-except-I’m-nearing-3o faux-macho crime movie! You want outlandish hitmen? ‘cool’ leading men with personality-identifying facial hair? Female characters who’re either hookers, fetishized-lesbians or fetishized-lesbian hookers? Buckets o’ blood? Deliberately-labyrinthine “Usual Suspects”-esque pretzel-plotting? Memorization-ready Mafia “tuff-talk” dialogue? Come and get it!!” It’s a slickly-made B-movie, it’s pure genre, it’s exploitation, it’s a big brawny bear-hug to the subcultures of movie-geekdom that worship at the altar of “Boondock Saints” and “True Romance,” yes… and it’s glorious in how comfortably and unashamedly it occupies it’s own skin like some aged-yet-contented professional roadie occupying a vintage “Kiss Army” tank-top.

The film is made, at least as at the skeleton, of simple elements: A collection of unique, outrageous characters – all of whom are heavily-armed, a reason for them to start emptying ammunition at one-another, and a location for them to do so. In a nutshell: Vegas lounge-fixture and wannabe mobster Buddy “Aces” Israel is holed-up in a Lake Tahoe penthouse, binging on booze, drugs and hookers before turning State’s Evidence with, we’re told, enough connections and secrets to bring down what’s left of The Mob. Two FBI agents (Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds) are on the way to collect him, a sleazy bail bondsman (Ben Affleck) and his crew are looking to get there first for a whole other reason, and so are several different contingents of contract-killers hot for the million dollar bounty the mob apparently has on Israel’s head.

Alongside the tuff-talk and random comic-dialogue digressions, the arrangement of hired-gun characters make up the bulk of “why the movie was made.” It almost seems as though Carnahan is attempting a “Kill Bill”-style collection of disparate genre fixture: The pair of witty, bantering female stealth-snipers (one played by an action-debuting Alicia Keyes, and lemme say “holy shit!” for the record) come off like side-characters from “Sin City.” A Latin American super-suave minimalist seems to have migrated from the world of “007.” The neo-nazi Tremor Brothers show up costumed for a “Mad Max” knockoff and employ chainsaws, road-flares and axes in their arsenal. A no-nonsense master of latext-makeup disguise reminded me so much of perennial Spider-Man adversary The Chameleon that I had to keep reminding myself not to call him that. (The vampire, the ninjas and the trained razor-wielding gorilla, presumably, got stuck at the bus station.)

Basically, all of these people converge on Israel’s hotel and eventually open-fire on one another for the duration of the 2nd and 3rd acts. Some live, some die, loyalties shift, secrets are revealed, twists reveal more twists, and eventual it all makes a certain kind of sense in a maximum-plot/minimum-story sort of way. Appraisal isn’t really complicated in these cases: You either enjoy the spectacle of good actors having fun speaking craftier-than-necessary dialogue while blasting the shit out of eachother, having drug-induced breakdowns or dragging the post-“Swingers” ironic-Rat-Pack-appreciation schtick around the track for another lap.. or you don’t. This time out, I dug it once again.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

So… Now that the happy dancing over “Dreamgirls” not having a shot as Best Picture is done, let’s get on with it:

BEST PICTURE:
The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen.

I still haven’t seen it (soon enough) but just about everyone I know who HAS is kinda surprised “The Queen” got in there. The pervailing buzz seems to be “performance peice, really good BBC movie, not BP material.” Dunno, didn’t see yet, doesn’t matter, not gonna win.

I may have to start a new review policy for “Babel.” From now on, when I’m reeeeaaaally generous to a flawed but well-meaning movie and it goes on to be hugely overrated come awards season, I’m gonna start knocking off points. This is getting ridiculous. Oh, and SHAME on the Academy for snubbing “United 93.” The gossip will be that it couldn’t get a nod because too many members were too afraid to watch it. If so, the word for them is COWARD.

Having now seen “Letters From Iwo Jima,” I can no longer be surprised that it’s there. It’s the best WWII movie since “Saving Private Ryan.” It even raises the profile, imo, of “Flags of Our Fathers” both by association and by the genuine “whoa” of seeing the way the two stories intersect. Clint Eastwood: Best living actor-director. Period.

My gut says that “Departed” and “Little Miss Sunshine” are the frontrunners. Both are atypical as Oscar fair: A violent crime flick and an R-rated family comedy. I’d be more fond of a “Departed” win, largely because Scorsese deserves it at this point but also because I think it’s the overall better and more deserving film.

BEST ACTOR:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gosling, Forest Whitaker, Peter O’Toole, Will Smith

Wow. Great list this time around. All great actors, all solid turns, all largely worthy. It’s Whitaker’s to lose, but Peter O’Toole’s resigned not-long-for-this-worldness on the talk show circuit may tip it in his favor.

BEST ACTRESS:
Penelope Cruz, Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, Dame Judi Dench, Kate Winslet

Yeah, Helen Mirren will win. Long time coming, etc, etc. Cruz is mainly lucky she got a second chance at being taken seriously by U.S. audiences after her first few “hot new thing” duds threatend to render her the female Yahoo Serious. Winslet would be a worthy upset, but as “Little Children” hasn’t been seen by, well, ANYONE she will sadly have to be content with the honor of starring in one of the only Oscar nominated performances destined to provide “Mr. Skin” with a literal pile of usable clips. Thank the gods for her.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Jackie Earle Haley, Mark Whalberg, Djimon Honsou, Eddie Murphy, Alan Arkin

Money says Murphy, gut says Arkin. THRILLED to see the appreciation for Jackie Earle Haley, who between “Little Children” and “All The Kings Men” had an amazing comeback from child star oblivion… in two movies NOBODY got to see. Hopefully, this means more work.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Adriana Barraza, Abigail Breslin, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Hudson, Rinko Kikuchi

TWO from “Babel?” Eh… Barraza gave a good performance, at least, and Kikuchi gave a GREAT one, contributing to the problem that I keep forgetting that her deaf-mute Japanese teenager was the not-even-really-that-related third bit from “Babel” and not a seperate, exponentially better movie of it’s own. Breslin, the little girl from “Little Miss Sunshine,” will not win but WILL be the most often-photographed celebrity in the entire audience.

Does it make me a bad person that I want Jennifer Hudson to NOT win this… not because of her performance, which was decent in an otherwise shitty movie… but because her win would lend retroactive credibility to the national shame known as “American Idol?” If so, well… tough. I have what I consider to be a rational position on “Idol”: namely, every person involved in it’s inception and continued existance should be sitting in a windowless cell in Guantanamo Bay have jumper-cable clamps affixed to their reproductive organs by Keifer Sutherland.

BEST DIRECTOR:
Clint Eastwood, Paul Greengrass, Stephen Frears, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Martin Scorsese

Gotta hand it to AMPAS, in a year where THE story in directing was the “three amigos” of spanish origin, they picked for a BD nod the one who’s movie wasn’t that good. This is a tough one, here’s my read: If Martin Scorsese wins this, it means “Departed” will NOT get picture and this is his consolation/”sorry to ignore you for the last few decades” prize. One way or another, I see another weird “split” year.

The sticking-out one is Greengrass for “United 93.” By Academy rules, “everyone” only votes for picture while the other categories are voted on by folks with the same jobs, explaining how U93 could be in for Director but not Picture. With no one else from it nominated, it could be that theres STRONG sentiment in there for it so the prize could be his.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, The Queen, Letters From Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth

Wow, “Pan’s?” Pleasant surprise. “Sunshine,” I believe, has it in the bag for this one.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Borat, Children of Men, Departed, Little Children, Notes On a Scandal

Okay, let’s get this out of the damn way: “Borat” is nominated here because it is technically “based on” the Ali G sketches. Still kinda hazy logic if you ask me, but on the other hand.. “Borat” is an Academy Award nominee!!!!!!! Oh, and “Departed” will probably win.

More categories next post.

Best Motion Picture Drama: “Babel”!

Wow.

What boldness. What bravery. What sheer perceptive grandeur this choice represents.

For two long, the world has ignored the Great Social Problem of people-not-aware-that-firing-a-loaded-rifle-at-a-moving-bus-will-often-have-ill-effects. In a moviegoing year where big, flashy distractions like “acting,” “direction,” “vision” or “subtlety” were all the rage… the distinguised Hollywood Foriegn Press Association chose to go out on a limb and throw their top honors to the ONLY film that had the gumption to tackle people-not-aware-that-firing-a-loaded-rifle-at-a-moving-bus-will-often-have-ill-effects with the maturity and awareness it deserves… the ONLY film with the conviction and the guts to take the risky boxoffice gamble of bludgeoning it’s audience into submission with the powerful tool of trite, obvious messageering.

Yeegh.

The Golden Globes having been hemorraging what limited credibility they ever had for about the last five years or so… and B.S. like this is the reason why. “Babel” isn’t a “bad” movie, at least not compared to the majority of films this year. I recall giving it an (incredibly generous) 7/10 awhile back, in fact. But “Best” anything?? Not even close. Not even in a year where it isn’t nominated against “The Departed” or “Little Children.”

Well done, HFPA. You’ve managed to instantly turn a respectable if frequently-irritating little “message movie” into an instant tie with “Dreamgirls” for the most overrated films of the year.

Today is the day that 49 of 50 American states set aside in memory of one of the men most deserving of the term American Hero. On that note, I want to share a brief clip with all of you who may or may not have seen it yet.

I’m not a devoted fan of Aaron McGruder’s animated series “The Boondocks,” nor the often preachy comic strip (also from McGruder) which inspired it. Let me say at least that I think the series is a tremendous improvement over the strip, as the necessities of a narrative force the characters to be rendered as three-dimensional and human as opposed to mere souding-boxes for McGruder’s political editorializing. Though consistently uneven, it has moments of genuine heart and power that are more effecting than almost anything being attempted on live-action TV.

I can also say, with total self-assuredness, that the series “peaked” in it’s first season; offering an “MLK Weekend” episode so solid, funny and utterly moving that I can’t fathom another installment of the series ever equalling it: It was not only the best I can ever imagine that “The Boondocks” will ever be, it was instantly one of the finest episodes of anything I’ve ever seen on television, period.

(Just for the sake of context, “The Boondocks” is about a pair of black grade-schoolers, one a politically-minded rebel, the other a ‘gangsta’-culture devotee, who move with their grandfather to an upscale suburb.)

The episode, titled “Return of The King,” imagines an alternate timeline where Martin Luther King was not killed by the assassin’s bullet, but merely fell into a 40-year coma. King awakes in 2001, and is at first celebrated… until his pronouncements of peace and nonviolence fall on deaf ears in a post-9/11 America. Soon his realization of how little progress has been made, in his view, since the Civil Rights heyday, coupled with he sorry state of black pop-culture, drives King to depression. Left largely unsaid, save for some subtly-seething facial expressions, is the animated King’s alarm at his people’s casual tossing-around of “The N-Word.” Until the finale…

…At the episode’s climax, lead character Huey teams with King in a last-ditch effort to get Black America back on track by forming a new political party. But when their innaugural event degenerates into a BET/Source Awards-style debacle, Dr. King has had enough, and decides to let his people know what he thinks of what they’ve done with the world he left them:

I’m not nuts about a lot of what McGruder mouths off about, in his comic or otherwise, but this one I’ll give him without reservation: Setting out to write dialogue for a resurrected MLK is ballsy to begin with; having him voice anger and dissapointment you can easily see him actually feeling as opposed to empty platitudes is damn near fearless. Mr. McGruder, take a bow.

It should be understood, before embarking to see Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” that the film isn’t so much a “fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War” but rather a story of the Spanish Civil War in which the fantastical imaginings (or maybe more?) of a young girl form one of the main plotlines. Even moreso than in del Toro’s more definitively-supernatural “The Devil’s Backbone,” the film offers scenes of fairytale creatures and fantasy realms as welcome-intrusions into a main story which, while compelling, would be almost unbearably bleak without them.

The girl in question is Ofelia (Ivana Baquero,) who travels with her recently-widowed and uncomfortably-pregnant mother to the secluded mill/military outpost which is currently home to the mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez.) A decorated member of the Fascist army of Franco’s Spain, Vidal is a meticulous psychopath who’s managed to parlay his inhuman tendencies into a position of great regard; “his” mill borders a forest occupied by the Rebels he is aiming to slowly and painfully gring into submission. Like most villians of his ilk, the Captain is also (poorly) working through some serious “daddy” issues, and wastes no time in making life suitably hellish for Ofelia – he’s really only interested in her mother, or more precisely the innevitability of her giving him a son.

Left to her own devices, Ofelia escapes – maybe literally – into her books of fairytales, and has soon made contact with Pan, a half-man/half-goat “faun” inhabiting the decaying stone maze behind the mill. According to Pan, she is the reincarnated spirit of a long-lost Underworld Princess, and must complete a series of tests to gain re-entry to her kingdom. These “tests,” and the strange realms they take Ofelia to, effectively comprise the “margins” of the film; while the “main” arc of the film focuses dually on some profoundly suspenseful wartime cloak-and-dagger business as rebels, soldiers and spies vie for control of the area and an unnervingly-intimate character study of the mad Captain Vidal himself.

And make no mistake, while the fantasy sequences provide memorable set peices of Ofelia confronting monsters like a giant toad and a ghastly creation I can only accurately describe as “The Jazz Hands Monster,” del Toro and his narrative are centered on the very human monster driving it’s events. Vidal is easily the “best” movie bad guy of the year, played by Lopez as so brazenly wicked that at times it feels as though the Labyrinth and it’s mythical denizens exist mainly to justify him… as though a human character this demonic could only seem plausible in a world where frog monsters and fauns seem to be roaming about.

Much more cannot really be said of the plot, as it becomes both complicated and secret-packed fairly quickly, but it can be said in summation that the film is a masterpeice and very likely del Toro’s best film to date. A great deal will be argued over as it’s release continues, much of it dealing with the somewhat unanswerable question of what is actually going on in the film and which (if any) single genre it actually belongs in, but what I don’t believe can be disputed is that del Toro is the best matchmaker of childlike fantasy with grownup bleakness since Terry Gilliam; not exactly trivial praise.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

WARNING: BIGGEST SPOILER OF THE ENTIRE MOVIE IN FIRST LINE OF REVIEW!

It’s about a crocodile, okay?

Sorry, but there’s no way to get to a critique of “Primeval” without giving that away. Dropped unceremoniously into the middle of the January movie doldrums and then rocketed to release a scant month after it’s trailers started popping up, “Primeval’s” handlers concocted one of the more amusing advertising ploys of recent: A return to the sideshow-barker style of half-cleverly/half-deceptively promoting B-movies.

In this case, the ads have been teasing an Africa-set “true story” of “Gustave… the world’s most-prolific serial-killer!,” while only vaugely alluding to the fact that “Gustave” is, in fact, a giant crocodile that supposedly terrorized an African marshland toward the tail end of the Rwandan genoicide. Given the moved-up release date, it’s entirely possible that a good deal of people who turn out for “Primeval” won’t initially realize they’re getting an old-fashioned creature-feature, a prospect which is (expectedly) more fun to contemplate than the film actually is to watch.

Best-described (pardon my morbidity) as “Hotel Rwanda” meets “Anaconda,” the nominal story concerns a newsman (Dominic Purcell, aka “that guy from “Prison Break”) and his cameraman (Orlando Jones, aka “the most criminally underused character-actor in America) who get shipped down to war-torn Burundi to help an animal issues journalist (Brooke Langton) cover the attempt by an Aussie animal trapper (Gideon Emery in what now feels like a really, really mis-timed ribbing of Steve Irwin) to caputre Gustave, who when eventually seen is about the size of two SUVs. Jurgen Prochnow is also on hand, since no self-respecting monster movie can go trudging off into the wilderness without a celebrate character actor hamming it up in the Jon Voigt role.

There’s really nothing going on thats as much fun as the initial “oh, it’s a crocodile? Nifty!” probably is (I knew beforehand) but despite the ease-of-creation now afforded by CGI we just don’t get enough old-school monster movies in theatres these days… so it’s almost enough to reccomend “Primeval” just on the basis of it being the only entry in the genre fans can get right now. It’s also at least got the nominal interest provided by it’s African setting, and the matter-of-factness with which it weaves the factual humanitarian tragedy of the region into the “something in the water” forumla.

Raised, but left largely unexplored, is the intriquing notion of “Gustave” as a living consequence of the genocide around him, implying that the constant supply of freshly-dead corpses choking the country’s waterways is cheifly responsible for turning the creature into a maneater and a giant. A better and possibly great genre film could be made from that notion, but “Primeval” is content to stay right about where it is: A decently-mounted B-movie with a clever marketing hook. You can do a lot worse, I promise you. After all, “Dreamgirls” is still playing…

FINAL RATING: 6/10