Before The Host, they ran a promo for Grindhouse. It’s easily the best movie trailer I’ve seen in decades:

I’ve never been this excited to see a movie that I’m probably going to miss half of because my I’ll have to keep my eyes closed. It’s easy to get taken in by cool trailer, dull movie syndrome, but word on the street is that the theatrical release has fake trailers in between the two “features.” I’m sold.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing about The Host. I’ve been deliberately avoiding details about it, to keep from spoiling any potential surprises, so all I could ascertain was that it’s a South Korean movie about a giant river monster attacking a family.

And that I needed to see it. From the near-unanimous praise on Rotten Tomatoes, to breathless reviews like this one, it was described as a rapturous, life-changing experience.

So maybe my expectations were too high. The first twenty or thirty minutes are most definitely excellent. I’m not spoiling anything by saying there’s a monster attack at the beginning, and it’s just great movie-making. The CG effects are good but not exceptional; what’s exceptional is the way they’re used — pacing, staging, dialogue, everything is just dead-on, and you’re never given a chance to believe that what you’re seeing isn’t real.

After the attack, it goes into horror/comedy mode, with the family interactions and incompetent government officials and some of the best “black slapstick” I’ve seen since Cape Fear.

And then… it starts wandering. You’ll frequently see reviews that say it isn’t a traditional monster horror movie, and while that’s correct, it implies a genre mash-up that just isn’t there. The movie doesn’t dip into the big bag o’ cliches; the plot keeps going off on tangents you don’t quite expect. But you quickly discover that there’s a distinction between “surprising” and just “unexpected.” Stuff keeps happening, but it’s not the oh my God he’s been dead all along! level of surprise as much as well, would you look at that, he ordered corned beef instead of ham and cheese.

There’s a consistent theme throughout most of the movie, that of the struggle between an unsympathetic, monolithic, and incompetent government against a barely sympathetic, incompetent, but heartwarming family. But although it’s a recurring theme, it never breaks through into full-fledged satire. It just remains an idea — the value of the individual versus that of society. A nice enough theme, but nothing groundbreaking, and there’s not much new added.

So in the end, it’s a reasonably well-made slice-of-life movie of the type that’s kept Sundance festivals going for decades. But with an amazing opening sequence that hints at so much more potential than the rest of the movie can deliver. It should definitely get points for being neither a stock, by-the-numbers horror movie; or a bland and predictable indie comedy/drama. But I just didn’t think it was cohesive or powerful enough to hold my interest.

It’s a little weird that I’ve been so engrossed in the Final Destination movies lately. I’m not a big fan of horror movies in general, because I don’t usually have the constitution for them. And the movies, frankly, just aren’t that good.

I was initially interested by the TV tie-ins. Ali Larter from “Heroes” is in the first two movies; and two elements of the series: the hit-by-a-bus scene from the first, and the overall concept that once you’re marked for death, you can’t escape, are being “borrowed” by “Lost.”

More than that, I’m just fascinated by how the whole thing works as a franchise. It’s easy to have a dismal view of Commercial Entertainment Product, and the typical laments about art versus product, insipid marketing tie-ins and focus-testing and sequels, and how Hollywood (and big business in general) ruins everything. The Final Destination movies leave me feeling kind of optimistic — I’d point to the third movie as proof that there’s still plenty of room for art and talent in the process.

I’m obliged to point out that warm, fuzzy, pro-Corporate Media Congolmerate feelings aside, Final Destination 3 is not a great movie; in fact, it teeters precariously on the precipice of “good enough”. I don’t want to get carried away here; we’re still definitely in “it’s better to aim low and hit than aim high and miss” territory.

But it takes the basic template of Final Destination 2, a truly awful movie, and shows what’s possible when you put some talent behind it. It’s got the big action sequence at the beginning, a callback to explain the plot of the first movie, then a series of increasingly complicated death sequences interspersed with scenes of your tedious and unlikeable heroes trying to figure out how to save themselves. I’m impressed that the filmmakers didn’t just completely ignore the second movie, but recognized what worked in it and took only the parts they needed — the basic formula (less “X-Files” episode, more teen horror blockbuster), and the increased gore level the kids go crazy for.

The trick, of course, is that unlike the second movie, they took the formula and did it right. The cinematography is way better than a movie like this needs to be. The opening sequence is genuinely creepy. I’ve read some reviews complaining about the CGI in the roller coaster sequence, but I thought it worked well; everything looked hyper-real and unsettling. And throughout the movie, there are interesting shots and set-ups that just have the feel of a bunch of people who know what they’re doing.

Of course, the roller coaster sequence is completely ludicrous — they actually have one of the characters go on about how a coaster is nothing but physics in action, and then still show the coaster stopping at the top of a loop (like in Chris Elliot’s “Get a Life” series). But whether intentional or not, it’s goofy, and funny, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The events are ridiculous; the non-action scenes are talky, plodding, and pretty dull; and the characters are tedious and unrelatable.

Which all works, because the movie’s all about the suspense, and again, with the pacing and editing, there are signs all over that the filmmakers know what they’re doing. The characters exist only to get killed, so they’re just relatable enough to distinguish them from a crowd scene. The talking scenes are slow and dull on purpose, to give the audience enough time to calm down after the last death scene. And the ridiculous nature of the deaths keeps you on edge, because although you know that someone’s going to die, you spend agonizing minutes watching, trying to figure out exactly how it’s going to happen.

The sequence in the hardware store, in particular, sets the “murder weapon” up in the very first shot. And then shows you about ten minutes of red herrings, tedious plot development, and fake-outs while you wait for the end to come. That’s how suspense scenes should be done. And again, the way they filmed this scene, and in fact every other scene in the movie, repeats the idea that every single thing around you is dangerous and potentially lethal.

My biggest problem with the first movie, after listening to the commentary, was the frustration that the filmmakers seemed so close to understanding what their movie was about, and then dropped the ball trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. Final Destination 3 addresses all of that; it feels as if everybody involved is on the same page.

In the first movie, the commentary points out that they used “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver for death scenes, to show a contrast between what you hear and what you’re seeing. Get it? That’s irony! The third movie uses basically the same gimmick, but does it 1000 times more effectively and less clumsily. “Love Rollercoaster” plays during the first death; a little obvious, but still a great choice. Even better is the recurring theme, “Turn Around, Look at Me” by the Lettermen. (The version linked is by The Vogues, which is less creepy than the earlier one, but still the same idea). It suddenly starts playing on the radio whenever Death approaches, and it’s a perfect choice.

And in keeping with the “Hooray for Corporate Entertainment!” theme of this post, there’s the “Choose Their Fate” feature of the DVD release. Before the death scenes, you’re given a choice as to what the characters will do, and then can see how it plays out in the movie. I’ll go ahead and ruin the surprise: it doesn’t make a bit of difference. You get a few extra seconds of footage in a slightly altered scene, and can only really “save” one victim. (The DVD even makes a joke to that effect, asking you, “Was he worth saving?”)

So it’s yet another sign of crass marketing ruining the artistic process, right? I say no! It’s a perfect example of how to exploit the system. According to the extra features and commentary on the first movie, it was plagued by focus-testing, alternate scenes, and the need to re-shoot the entire ending. By the third, they took advantage of the DVD feature to try out all their alternates. For example, the option at the end of the movie changes nothing, but lets you see the original, dull ending, before preview audiences demanded a new ending.

Another case just shows two versions of the exact same death (inside a football workout room), but edited and paced differently; a shorter version was requested by the studio to mimic the hit-by-a-bus scene in the first movie, but the longer, superior version made it into the final movie. The marketing types get a bullet point for the DVD case and the PR surrounding the movie; the filmmakers get to try alternate takes and save the best stuff for the theatrical release. Everybody’s a winner.

So whether or not it’s a Modern Day Classic of Cinema (hint: it’s not), I’m still impressed by it. In videogames, TV, movies, and every commercial entertainment medium, we hear over and over again about how big corporations ruin everything, marketing/publishing/the studio is The Enemy, and art can’t survive under the pressing weight of cold, soulless commerce. Final Destination 2 still sucks all kinds of ways, don’t get me wrong. But the third one shows what can happen when you take a less antagonistic attitude towards the business end — talent can still shine through, and you can end up with something that might not be art, but is a hell of a lot of fun.

I rented Onibaba (Demon Woman) because a website recommended it to fans of Yokai Monsters and Kwaidan, two movies about Japanese ghosts and monsters. Plus, it’s got a big demon on the cover!

The truth is that, except for the last twenty minutes or so, it’s not about obakemono at all, and it isn’t what I expected. But it’s one hell of a movie.

It’s unlike any other Japanese movie I’ve seen, contemporary or otherwise. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s what would happen if you had a Japanese New Wave director take sets and costumes from a samurai movie and make an interpretation of a Tennessee Williams play. With maybe some John Steinbeck and William Faulkner thrown in.

The story is set near Kyoto during the warring states period, and it deals with a woman and her daughter-in-law living in poverty because of the war. The war has ravaged the land and made farming impossible, so they’re forced to murder dying samurai from the battlefields, loot the armor and weapons from the corpses, and sell them for food. Things become even more complicated when a neighboring farmer returns from the war and attempts to take the place of the daughter-in-law’s dead husband.

Onibaba is very much a 60s movie; despite its setting, it’s aggressively modern in its style, editing, music, characterization, and subject matter. There are all kinds of film tricks which come across as tedious and pretentious in other movies, but work perfectly here. Long shots of nothing but flowing grass perfectly convey the idea that civilization has been squeezed out and overtaken by wild nature. Jump-cuts and super-imposed shots give everything a surreal feeling and perfectly capture scenes of people overtaken by passion.

The characters are portrayed as being genuinely destitute and desperate — hairy, filthy, and generally nasty. There’s a lot of breasts and ass to be seen, and even though it’s sexual, it’s not erotic. That’s because they’re living in the most primitive conditions, and also because one third of the breasts belong to an old woman, and most of the ass is that of a dirty, hairy, male war deserter. It was still nice to see a movie showing characters not as “movie-peasants,” carefully arranged to have just the right amount of muck about them, but in true squalor.

Some of my favorite scenes are the ones in which the daughter-in-law runs across the fields at night to meet her lover. Kaneto Shindo filmed the scenes in silence except for the sound of cooing pigeons; in the movie, you can’t quite identify the noise, but get the subliminal impression of surreal urgency and passion. In an interview with the director included on the disc, he points out that he used pigeons because they’re “known for their fecundity,” which adds another layer of meaning to an already effective gimmick.

What impressed me the most is how well the film* conveyed its message, even to those not receptive for it. After watching the interview with Shindo, I realized that I’m a lot more of a prude than he is. Still, I got the message of the film completely, on an almost instinctual level, and I was surprised to hear him describe the process — everything he claims he tried to do with the movie, worked. It’s more like a film you understand than a film you watch.

The movie is about sex. Or more precisely, it’s about people as animals as opposed to products of society. The characters are living in a state of nature at the beginning of the story. Our protagonists are quickly established as murderers, but they’re not the villains. They’re only doing what needs to be done to survive. The war is described several times as a general’s war, a product of the cities — it’s causing the terrible conditions for the peasants, but giving them no benefit. So in the movie’s logic, the protagonists’ actions are justified.

It’s not until the horny newcomer arrives on the scene that the conflict starts. Suddenly, the concerns are societal concerns — jealousy, fear of abandonment, repression, guilt. And it’s only after the mother feels threatened (and unsatisfied in her own lust) that she begins to talk about sin and religion. Not as a means of finding the truth, but as a means of repression and control.

I’ve read some online reviews that describe the movie as showing what happens when people are reduced to their primitive state, but I think that’s just a shade on the simplistic side. It shows societal constructs as just that — man-made constructs, separate from what’s needed for our existence. In Onibaba, the murder of invaders and sex outside of marriage aren’t sinful; the only true sins are jealousy, repression, guilt, and the lust for power and control. I believe a better message to take from the movie is that we’re never completely removed from our “primitive” state, and we should never lose sight of the distinction between what we want and what we need.

* After a year of film school, I resolved never to use the word “film” or “cinema” to describe movies — my token battle against pretension. I’m making an exception in this case, because everything Shindo attempts to do, works, and it works almost like poetry.

Update: One other thing I wanted to mention: I’ve read a few reviews online that translates the title Onibaba as “The Hole,” but that’s incorrect. (It means “Devil Woman” or “Demon Woman” or just “hag”). But the hole, the first thing introduced in the movie and a symbol revisited almost as frequently as the flowing grass, is an important character. In the story, it’s where the two women toss the bodies of their victims. In the movie, it gives an ever-present sense of danger and dread, and also of course represents hell. But hell in a very practical sense — not just a place of punishment for sinners, but the place where everything that’s no longer needed is cast away.

I’ve got to admit I was biased against 300 from the start, because I don’t like Frank Miller. I don’t like his art, and his writing only works for me when he sticks to one or two of his strong areas.

And I can never tell where he’s coming from — he always strikes me as being completely humorless and devoid of self-awareness. Everything of his I’ve ever read has been locked in adolescent male comic book-reader fantasy mode, without ever maturing past the “fuck yeah!” moments. I’ve got no problem with bone-crushing awesomeness for its own sake, but when you’re in your late 40s and still making stuff that doesn’t seem to serve any higher purpose than making 14-year-old boys say “RADICAL!” then it just smells like arrested development.

But for all I know, he totally gets it, and there’s a level of depth there that’s just way, way too subtle for me to pick up on. I loved the SinCity movie, even though I hated the comic books, because of the visuals and because it seemed to hit exactly the right tone: it was purposefully, gleefully brutal and over-the-top pulp.

300, though, is your standard, straightforward ancient war movie. Lots of guys slapping each other on the back, talking about honor, making speeches about freedom, then commence with the stabbin’. There’s not a lot of new material covered in the speeches, so the movie makes sure to repeat each one at least twice. King Leonidas shouts out “For Sparta!” and variants so often, at times I thought I was watching a high school football movie.

The Spartans themselves are portrayed as a kind of cross between neo-conservatives, smug libertarians, and Klingons. Even though they’re ancient Greeks, they make a point of mentioning that it’s those pansy-ass Athenians who are into the buggery. The Spartans are all about reason, not anything fruity like Gods or philosophy, and everybody in the government is corrupt, easily bought, and slow to act. And of course, the only honorable death is a warrior’s death. Unless I mis-heard it, at one point a character actually says, “Freedom isn’t free.” The whole message of the movie is basically the lyrics to a Hank Williams Jr. song; I kept hoping that Leonidas would confront Xerxes and shout, “This is no rag; it is a flag!”

Now, that’s not to say the movie’s completely without irony. Most obvious is that it’s easily the gayest war movie I’ve ever seen. Leonidas makes a dismissive comment about the “boy-lovers” in Athens, then spends the rest of the movie with the rest of his buff pals wearing nothing but capes and leather briefs, their hairless chests on display like well-buttered dinner rolls. Nothing exactly wrong with that; I’m just sayin’.

And for a movie so gung-ho hell-yeah this is a MAN’s war, dammit!, it’s overwhelmingly pretty. Astoundingly so, in places. Every shot is perfectly composed; I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie where I so frequently and consistently said “wow” when seeing a new visual. Not even Sky Captain had as many “wow” moments. Now granted, a lot of it had the feel of a Skittles commercial. And the bit with the Oracle, while interesting, reminded me a little too much of a Calvin Klein ad. But more often, I was reminded of Jacques-Louis David, in particular the shots that seemed straight out of Oath of the Horatii. For imagery alone, it’s genuinely stunning.

As for the action scenes, I was underwhelmed. The first couple of battles are great, but it all quickly gets monotonous. The problem is that nobody does anything particularly clever, so it’s just wave after wave of disposable Persians getting stabbed by a bunch of indistinguishable Spartan guys. They do all they can with film speed changes and Matrix-style spin-cam tricks to make it seem like something different is going on, but the fact remains that you’re watching two hours of a bunch of dudes defending a canyon.

And Leonidas’ little maneuver at the end was just plain dumb. I guess it was supposed to be deeply poetic or something, but just didn’t make sense, didn’t work in terms of story, and showed nothing other than that Leonidas can’t aim for shit.

Now, I’m always bitching about how moviemakers have gotten too preoccupied with being hip and post-modern that they crank out shallow, irony-laden nonsense. So what’s wrong with an earnest, straightforward action war movie with some great visuals? Does the touchy-feely San Francisco anti-war liberal only complain when the movie doesn’t agree 100% with his politics?

Well, there’s some of that, I’m sure, but I think I would’ve enjoyed the movie more if it just hadn’t been so shallow and juvenile. How cool would it have been if it actually had something to say to measure up with how great it looks?

Seems like every time I make an effort to meet Hollywood halfway, they slap me down. Last night I watched Final Destination 2, and it used up all my good will towards idiotic consumer entertainment product.

In this case, Flight 180 Part 2: The Pile-Up is a better title. Partly because they mention Flight 180 even more than the first movie did, but mostly because you watch the thing and can’t help thinking about piles. In both the flaming, irritated hemorrhoid sense, and the big pile of crap and cliches sense.

I have to admit I’m impressed, but only because they somehow managed to cram every single thing that’s bad about sequels into one movie. They completely abandon any notion of subtlety. Even worse, they spend so much time beating you over the head with the “rules” of the movie, only to abandon them towards the end. (Apparently two people can get killed simultaneously, out of order, as long as one of them is a star from the first movie who really, really wants to get out of this franchise).

The only thing I can say in the movie’s defense is that there are two pretty effective death scenes — indirect death by airbag, and garroting by flying barbed-wire fence. But even that they screwed up, by putting them back-to-back with absolutely no sense of pacing. Earlier, they make an attempt to emulate the Rube Goldberg-style death from the first movie, but blunder it on several counts: it happens too early in the movie to be satisfyingly tense or surprising. And since they’ve already done it, the overly-complicated set-up later in the movie, with gas leaks and PVP pipes and cigarettes and airbags, loses any sense of tension. Plus, any tension in the scene is lost because you can’t stop thinking, “Who the hell comes home from buying a computer, then immediately takes his shirt off and starts frying up fish sticks?”

You can’t even enjoy it as a stupid horror movie, because it’s so aggressively stupid, it drains all the horror out of it.

I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes goings-on of this franchise. But I have to wonder if the reason Morgan & Wong came back for the third movie is because they saw this one and realized, “maybe ours didn’t suck as bad as we’d thought.”

I watched Final Destination a while back, and I enjoyed it just fine. It’s perfect for all your young-people-getting-killed-in-gruesome-ways needs.

I suspect that this is one of those cases where waiting for the DVD is hundreds of times better than seeing it when it first came out. For one thing, the opening works as well now as it did on release, if not even better. If you follow pop culture at all, you have to at least heard of Final Destination, and you probably heard the premise, as well. (A premonition warns people off a doomed plane flight; Death comes back to take the ones who were predestined to die.) Knowing the premise added a separate level of tension to the beginning of the movie, since it wasn’t playing out as I’d expected it to. I must’ve spent the first 30 minutes saying to myself, “But I thought the… but wait… no!”

Even better than that, though, are the commentary and other special features. I found out some stuff I hadn’t known going in — it was originally intended as a pitch for “The X-Files,” and coincidentally ended up being produced/directed/written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, writers and producers for that series as well as “Millenium” and “Space: Above and Beyond.” But what’s most memorable is Morgan’s sad-sack, defeatist commentary throughout.

Now, I’m not a fan of kicking a guy when he’s down, and it’s just not cool to make fun of a guy for acknowledging he’s made something lousy. But I’m making an exception for two reasons: first, because I don’t think it’s lousy. It’s really an above-average horror movie. The death scenes are increasingly clever and surprising, and paced well in the script. It’s better than Scream at the post-modern self-referential thing, because it’s not as clumsy and obvious. The characters don’t just talk about the gimmick; the gimmick is baked into the plot. The characters know they’re marked for death, they even figure out the order in which they’ll be killed, and the killer isn’t some predictable serial killer, but the unseen hand of death itself. It’s a lot more clever than anything wallowing in late-’90s irony.

And the second reason I’m making an exception is because Morgan’s commentary is so hilariously over the top in its disappointment. Almost immediately after introducing himself, he starts in ragging on the movie. If you use chapter-skip, you can’t go more than few seconds at each track without hearing him make a comment to the effect that the scene didn’t work like they wanted, or it was a rip-off of something else, or that it wasn’t what they originally intended, and they could’ve done it better.

It continues to the deleted scenes, alternate ending, and a couple of documentaries. One of the documentaries is about New Line’s focus tests for the movie, and how the ending was changed as a result. It was clearly done to appease somebody, as New Line representatives keep making very tactful comments about how it’s necessary to protect an investment, and to let audiences be the judge, and how when you’re making movies with multi-million dollar budgets, art must be carefully balanced against commerce.

There are a couple of segments with Morgan, and he describes the original title and ending, what they saw during focus tests, and how they came up with the new ending. A typical quote: “Steven Spielberg doesn’t have to do focus tests. But we’re not Steven Spielberg.” If I’d been editing the documentary, I wouldn’t have been able to resist superimposing Glen Morgan’s head with Eeyore’s.

So yet another Hollywood movie gets dumbed down for the sake of the lowest common denominator in the audience, right? Not quite. Providing all the alternate and deleted scenes on the disc shows that the changes were universally for the better. Much, much better.

The original title was Flight 180. Apparently film execs thought that it sounded too much like Airport 77 and such, so they chose the title Final Destination. Not only is that an infinitely better title, it worked a lot better with sequels than Flight 180 Part 3: The Roller Coaster would have.

And the original ending, that was full of intelligence and hope and a beautiful artistic statement on what it means to be alive? Suuuuuuuucccccckkked. It’s not just that it’s a dull, overly drawn-out, and out of place ending for a suspense thriller; it’s that it’s hard to believe it was made by the same people who did the rest of the film.

Everything in the first 45 minutes of the movie has the mark of a group of people who know exactly what movie they’re making, and why it’s cool. The original ending seems like a desperate attempt to bring meaning to a movie that doesn’t need to “mean” anything. It’s not a case of dumbing down a piece of art in order to give the people what they want; it’s a case of being true to the rest of the work of art and not trying to turn it into something it’s not.

It’s a well-made franchise movie, with an undercurrent of intelligence and comedy, that makes you jump and laugh in all the right places. And it’s disappointing that they didn’t realize that there’s value in that, and that it doesn’t need to be anything more. I still haven’t seen Final Destination 3 yet; apparently Morgan & Wong weren’t burned by the first one so much that they wouldn’t come back for a sequel. I’m looking forward to seeing it and finding out if they still “get it.”

And one more thing: after the episode of “Lost” called “Not in Portland,” I read a bunch of stuff on the internet saying that the show had ripped off Final Destination. At the time, I thought that was just typical internet wankery — the same as saying George Lucas “ripped off” The Hidden Fortress, when the movies have next to nothing in common. Now that I’ve seen Final Destination, though, I think the internet definitely has a point. The scenes are eerily similar, although the movie has a much-appreciated splash of blood on the passers-by. I’m not feeling charitable enough to say that “Lost” was making an homage.