No Country for Old Men is about as close to perfect as you’re ever going to see in a movie. Not a single shot is unnecessary. The pacing is perfect; both for the movie overall, and for individual scenes that feel as if they were meticulously orchestrated down to a fraction of a second. Almost all of the performances are absolutely dead-on (the mother-in-law felt like she’d just come in off the set of “Mama’s Family”). The dialogue has a perfect rhythm and it perfectly conveys the character. There are no artificial moments; I’ve heard real people use exactly the same cadences and expressions as these characters. The plot stays completely true to the characters and the theme. The sound design is flawless. The suspense scenes are so perfectly executed, they act as a reminder that yes, movies can make you feel something. The movie has enough confidence to show exactly what it needs to, no more and no less. There are no cheap gimmicks, easy outs, or implausibly pat resolutions.

If any filmmaker other than the Coen Brothers had made this movie, it would probably be his masterpiece. The problem is that it was made by the Coen Brothers, so you have to unfairly compare it to their other movies.

And I ended up disappointed, because it just seems superfluous. They’ve made movies that convey all of the “meat” of No Country for Old Men, in a single scene. We already know they have an almost sadistic sense of how to make the perfect suspense scene; they proved that the second the newspaper hit the screen door in Blood Simple. We already know they can convey despair (Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), or blind rage (Miller’s Crossing), or coldly senseless violence (Fargo). This movie just felt to me as if it were made by extremely talented filmmakers who happened to be big fans of the Coens. Because ultimately, it’s missing its soul, that spark that separates very, very good work from genius.

Before I’d seen it, a friend described No Country for Old Men as “kind of like Fargo, but not funny.” That’s pretty accurate, except I’d take it even farther and call it the anti-Fargo.

They’re very similar movies. Both are about honest cops in a relatively simple and peaceful environment, being exposed to genuine senseless evil, all because of a basically ethical character who makes a single immoral decision. But where Fargo had moments of humor, No Country for Old Men is almost completely humorless. Where Fargo is ultimately uplifting, No Country for Old Men is relentlessly nihilistic.

One of the criticisms frequently made against the Coens is that they’re too arch, too concerned about the style of their movies to care about real characters. I’ve always thought the opposite: they genuinely love their characters, they like hearing them talk, they like seeing how they react to situations, and they like seeing them come out stronger in the end. (Except for Blood Simple, which is really just a bunch of suspense scenes taking advantage of the fact that all the characters are impossibly dense). I don’t get that sense from No Country for Old Men; they don’t hate the characters, they just really don’t care that much about them at all. I mean, they’re all going to die eventually, anyway, so why bother?

After the final monologue and the cut to black, I just felt kind of cheated. Definitely not because I was expecting a quick and easy resolution (spoiler: there’s not one), but because it just hung there, as if I were supposed to be impressed that it didn’t give me a quick and easy resolution. It struck me as sophomoric, in the literal sense: I felt like I’d just had to listen to two hours of a talented but pretentious college sophomore who’d just discovered Nietzsche.

And I just sat there in the dark, thinking, “Really? ‘Evil is everywhere, and life is random.’ After all this time, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” For a moment, I thought I saw my father in the distance carrying a horn filled with fire, but as it turns out it was just the usher telling us the movie was over and it was time to leave.

They’ve been warning us for years that the onslaught of digital distribution, torrents, iTunes, rental-by-mail services, and the new entertainment-in-pill-form (not available in some markets) was going to change everything. What they failed to warn us about were all the tragic implications of the entertainment glut.

Case in point: there are currently movies by Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers showing in theaters available for anyone to watch, but I have yet to see either. Instead, I watched The Omen: 666 the other night, just for the sake of getting my Netflix queue moving again. Other stuff I’ve watched since those movies have been released: the unforgivably abysmal Highlander: The Source on Sci-Fi; four episodes of the TV show “Ghost Hunters;” an episode of “Ace of Cakes” (that I’d already seen!); 300 again, only to see if the Blu-Ray made things better (it doesn’t); Superman II, to see if it’s as good as I remember it (it definitely isn’t); and Ratatouille to see the new short (awesome) and to see how long I could last until the objectivist undertones made me turn it off (about 20 minutes).

So I can’t really make the argument that I’m avoiding the theaters because there’s good stuff to watch at home. To be fair, though, it’s usually more exciting to read about movies on the internet than it is to actually watch them. The potential energy of the DOOM trailer could have powered a city, provided that city used engines running on perceived awesomeness. The reality couldn’t have sparked a penlight. So here’s more stuff on the internet about movies!

• There’s a new trailer for Cloverfield (previously just called “1-18-08″ or “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”) that’s not only renewed my interest, but has got me even more excited. The teaser was so indescribably cool that I’d put myself on a media blackout for the movie, afraid that finding out too much about it would pour cold water over everything. But it looks like the “filmed on home camcorder” gimmick is used throughout the entire thing, which is a brilliant idea: it’s a first-person monster movie! I’m predicting it’s the one really great scene from War of the Worlds (the flaming train), repeated over and over again. Or, it’s The Blair Witch Project with a big budget and CGI. But I still have a month and a half to be optimistic.
• Kevin Smith’s blog has a post about his crush on Seth Rogen and the casting for his movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno that would be so over-the-top gushing and self-effacing you’d think it was impossibly phony, if not for three things: 1) Kevin Smith’s turned self-effacing into an industry; 2) It’s nice to believe that at some level, it’s still possible for Hollywood to break down to just people working on stuff they’re fans of; and 3) Seriously, who doesn’t love Seth Rogen? He’s got pretty much the same aura as Kevin Smith himself, which is that whether his work is brilliant or not, you just can’t help rooting for the guy.
• For the record, The Omen: 666 wasn’t all that bad, considering. But that may be just because I think the original is one of the stupidest movies ever made. It’s basically two hours of dozens of people telling Gregory Peck his son is the Antichrist, and his being too dense to catch on (”Hmm, no, I’m still just not seeing it.”). At least the remake was slightly more plausible, in that Julia Stiles really did seem like she didn’t like the kid. And Liev Schreiber came across as more of just an uptight overprivileged white guy than a total idiot. So in short, the remake was inessential, but if you’re going to insist on making a remake of The Omen, they did about as good a job as you can possibly do.
• Rome isn’t a movie, but I feel obligated to mention it again since I was ragging on it earlier. Once you get a few hours into it, it’s really engrossing and very good. The production values were high enough to cancel it after two years, and they remain high throughout. But what really sells it is exactly the kind of thing you only get from episodic storytelling: a story that feels epic and ridiculously detailed, simply due to repetition and the ability to see a bunch of “smaller” scenes. You don’t see huge battles on this show, but you see how the battles affect the dozens of people the story follows. It also bugged me in the first few episodes how much of the stories seemed to be based on random chance or coincidence, but they had Caesar explicitly mention that in one episode, which makes it okay. In fact, that’s one of the themes of the series, how fate pulls Pullo and Vorenus into making a huge impact on Roman history. Plus: frequent nudity.
• The short film “Your Friend the Rat” that comes on the Ratatouille DVD is excellent. It feels like the Pixar guys got the chance to throw every possible style of animation and art style at the thing, and it’s just bursting with the feeling of a ton of absurdly creative people finally getting an outlet for their talent. It feels a lot like the classic Disney shorts of the 70s, and even a little like “Schoolhouse Rock,” in that it’s not afraid to bounce all over the place in different styles. I think that alone was worth the cost of the DVD.

So this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m in Georgia at my parents’ house without much to do. Am I going to see The Darjeeling Limited or No Country for Old Men or even Beowulf, or am I going to read the same RSS feeds and watch hours of the worst programming the Food network and Sci-Fi channel have to offer? (Note: if you’re the betting type, odds are strongly in favor of the second one.)

Astute readers will notice I haven’t been updating this weblog, and that’s because of a desperate attempt to get caught up with work. (That’s what happens when every time you get stuck writing, you run to the safety of The Orange Box and watching Japanese movies from the 80s about schoolgirl detectives). But it’s still my obligation to give a news update in the world of things that are interesting to me:

Joel Hodgson announced a new project called Cinematic Titanic, which sounds like a relaunch of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 concept. Details are there on the website, but in brief: it sounds similar to what the RiffTrax guys are doing with Film Crew Online, licensing a bad movie and putting out a DVD release with the commentary baked-in.

And considering that Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu are involved, it’s very likely that it’ll be more of a high-concept thing, with an overall storyline and more sketches in between the movie segments. (For RiffTrax and The Film Crew, they don’t try to hide the fact that all their energy goes into the gags during the movie, and the rest is just gravy).

Other good news is that Frank Coniff and Mary Jo Pehl are signed onto the project as well. And they’re planning to release the (first?) DVD before Christmas, and do a live show in San Francisco! But the live show is only open to ILM & Lucasfilm employees. Of all the times to quit working for Lucas, 7 years ago!

I’m sure this will just rub salt in the recently-healed partisan wounds that have divided our nation for so long, and we’ll soon go back to seeing lame “Who’s your favorite? Joel or Mike?” questions popping up all over the place. But for those of us who loved all of MST3k, it’s great news.

Also also: according to MST3Kinfo.com, the last remaining members of the MST3K gang have rebooted Best Brains, Inc. with a weekly animated series about Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy. No guesses here as to how that’s going to turn out, but it should be interesting.

Now that making fun of movies is turning into a growth industry, I’ve just got to get my work done so I can listen to the RiffTrax for Raiders of the Lost Ark in time for the new stuff.

On his Invincible Super-Blog, Chris Sims wrote a fine review of the 1987 Japanese movie Sukeban Deka that was enough to make me put it at the top of my Netflix queue, and for that I’m thankful.

Still, it’s hobbled by the old “aren’t those Japanese people wacky?” mentality that doesn’t really capture the sheer awesomeness of a movie like this. I mean, he hits on the old stand-bys of tentacle rape, bukkake, and goofy translations — frankly, it’s all just a little too easy and obvious.

An hour after reading that review, I was already hungry for a more detailed analysis of the movie, one that I could tell apart from all the other reviews (you see what I did there?!?) of wacky Japanese action fantasies based on a TV show based on a manga. So I’ve prepared the following photo essay to explain exactly why Sukeban Deka: The Movie is required viewing for anybody who likes things that are awesome:
Read the rest of this entry »

Or, Shallow and Not Particularly Novel Insights Gleaned from Watching Return to the Blue Lagoon on Satellite Just Now:

• It’s got Milla Jovovich in it! For some reason, I’d always thought The Fifth Element was her first movie.
• Even in her jailbait days, Milla Jovovich was shockingly beautiful.
• The “Brian Krause” in the movie is the blond, angel-looking dude from “Charmed.” He’s not Peter Krause, the perpetually-unshaven guy from “Six Feet Under.” So if you’re watching the movie just to see how they got a fairly average-looking, hairy guy who must’ve been in his mid 20s at the time to run around on a beach in a loincloth for an hour and a half and not look completely ridiculous, then you’re going to be disappointed.
• In the first five minutes of the movie, they show the tender young lovers of the first one face-down on a boat, dead. Then they wrap the bodies in canvas bags and throw them overboard. That is awesome.
• It makes the “Return” guys’ adventure a lot less impressive when their only struggle is moving into a two-story house built by uneducated teenagers.
• Milla’s reaction to her first period: initial horror, followed within seconds by… delight? Gas? Mischievousness? It’s difficult to read.
• Watching this movie made me vividly remember my own adolescence, growing up naked and unashamed on a South Pacific island.
• Actually, my own adolescence was spent growing up clothed and very much ashamed in the Bible Belt. And we would scan the channels desperately for movies like The Blue Lagoon and Losin’ It and Porky’s, anything, anything to get even the barest glimpse of the good stuff.
• We had a cable box with a dial on it, and I’d spend at least an hour every night trying to turn it to that sweet spot halfway between channels where you could see the barest glimpse of teh boobies on Cinemax.
• When we actually got HBO, and you could watch “The Hitchhiker” and see almost everything, it was a total disappointment.
• Puberty sucks.
• But not as much as it must have sucked having to be on a film crew making an entire movie dedicated just for the desperate and pubescent.
• Even on those terms, Return to the Blue Lagoon is a total cock-tease. They had a mom on the island, who explained sex to them! There’s like a total of 2 minutes of youthful abandon; the rest is sitting in a house that somebody else built, making goofy euphemisms about menstruation and masturbation, fishing, and comically misunderstanding how to put on Western clothes.
• And even if you’re supposed to be the son of two stupid people, stripping off your clothes and having the villain chase you into a shark-infested coral reef is the lamest ending ever.
• Holy crap, Milla Jovovich was only 15 years old when that movie was made! That’s just kind of gross, and now I feel bad.

I don’t know what got up the butts of the Rotten Tomatoes people, because I liked Resident Evil: Extinction an awful lot. It’s exactly what I was hoping to get out of a Resident Evil movie. There are a lot of reviews which dismissively compare it to a videogame, to which the obvious responses are: 1) No shit! It’s called Resident Evil; and 2) that might not be such a bad thing.

This one feels more like a videogame than any other movie based on a game that I’ve seen, and a lot of the stuff works for exactly the same reasons it works in games. There’s the save point at the beginning, a little dirt race sequence, lots of walking through nondescript interiors with guns drawn, and then walking through a dark cluttered medical lab surrounded by messages scrawled in blood and bodies impaled on spikes before the big final boss fight.

And for a movie about zombies, it seems a lot more like a Frankenstein’s monster creation stitched together from scenes and ideas out of other movies. There are the expected bits taken out of the first two Resident Evil movies, but they’re entitled, they picked the best parts, and it ends up feeling like closure to a series instead of just repeating the same old thing.

But as it goes on, it turns into a game of “Name that Movie” when you keep seeing set-ups that are eerily familiar. It hits on the obvious, of course — there’s a couple of scenes at a gas station that are straight out of Dawn of the Dead, then a couple of sequences lifted almost verbatim from Day of the Dead. Then there’s the sequence that’s like The Road Warrior, then The Birds, plus The Empire Strikes Back. And if you look real close, you get hints of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Akira, and kind of almost Enemy of the State. I’m sure that people who’d seen more cheesy action movies than I have would be able to spot more.

That all makes it sound completely unoriginal, and it mostly is. But I’ll take a movie that’s solid, exciting, entertaining, and unoriginal, over one that thinks too much of itself and fails.

One weird thing that kept bugging me: I couldn’t tell if they went in and airbrushed/photoshopped the lead actresses’ faces during close-up scenes. They all had this really weird much-too-smooth look to them, and it was distracting. I couldn’t tell if it was over-compensating desert make-up, or if they really did go back and edit the move in CG to make all the women look freakier.

I was genuinely disappointed to read online that this is the last in the series. Because the end of the movie sets up for a sequel that would be one of the most awesome action movies ever made. I was ready to just sit in the theater and wait for them to finish making the fourth movie.

In any case, I hope they can come up with another franchise for Milla Jovovich as good as the Resident Evil movies. Because she’s just fantastic in these, but keeps winding up in garbage that doesn’t take advantage of what she does best — which is playing a beautiful woman who doesn’t put any effort into or value on looking beautiful (unlike Ultraviolet), who has a handle on what’s happening (unlike The Fifth Element), and could totally kick your ass.

I don’t think I need to remind anybody about the significance of this weekend, but just in case: it’s the opening weekend of Resident Evil: Extinction.

I haven’t been reading or watching anything about the movie except for the trailer, because I don’t want no haters dragging me down. If I’d listened to the kind of people who go on about “bad” movies that “suck” “hard,” then I would’ve missed out on the laser-grid-slicing, zombie-dog-jumping, nipple-flashing, Michelle-Rodriguez-shooting magic of the first Resident Evil.

So what if that first movie could rightly be called “barely tolerable” by anybody watching it objectively, or that it seemed like it managed to be good purely by accident? This movie has even more hot women shooting guns and kicking zombie dudes in mid-air, which means I’m guaranteed to be there sitting right next to Front-Row Joe.

If I’m lucky, the shooting and kicking will be done to really loud thumping techno music. A guy can dream.

I remember when the intro clips they showed at movie theaters used to be cool. You’d be flying through space and there’s a Coke formation up ahead but all of a sudden popcorn starts exploding all around you and then they thank you for not smoking. Nowadays, the theater conglomerate that currently monopolizes Marin is called CineMark, and for some reason they’ve chosen to start every movie with a trip to the concession stand with a couple of furries. Their mascot, who has the vaguely dirty-sounding but I can’t explain why exactly name of “Joe Front Row” does a Busby Berkeley dance with a bunch of generic candy and his ballgown-wearing girlfriend. I’m convinced there’s some kind of subliminal messaging going on, because by the time the movie starts, I’m always overcome with the urge to buy some popcorn and screw a cat.

I’m 0 for 2 in my attempts to see a good, stupid summer movie over the past two weeks. Last weekend I got invited after work to go see Balls of Fury. Tonight, a sudden power outage at the office left me with no option but to see Shoot ‘Em Up.

If the ads for concessions weren’t confusing enough, the choice of trailers is almost as baffling. The trailers before Shoot ‘Em Up, a gun-heavy action comedy aimed at post-adolescent males, were: a Sean Penn movie about some guy in his 20’s discovering himself by becoming a hobo (sure, fine); Hitman (obviously); a horror movie about vampires in Alaska (I see where you’re going with this); a movie where Stiffler’s mom is played by Susan Sarandon (all right); and The Jane Austen Book Club (…the hell?)

Before Balls of Fury, there were ads for all the latest attempts at comedies, including The Comebacks. Anybody who thought that the double-whammy of White Chicks and Little Man finally put an end to the Wayans, not so fast: they opened Pandora’s box with Scary Movie, and we’re going to be feeling the after-effects for decades to come. You can see why Hollywood would be attracted to these parody movies, since they let you save the expense of hiring comedy writers. The Comebacks claims to be a parody of those schmaltzy Disney underdog sports movies, which sounds like a reasonably clever idea, except the trailer has a lot of footage where they’re parodying Dodgeball. Which was itself a parody of underdog sports movies. How much more can you scrape the bottom of the barrel and still be inside the barrel? Isn’t that a little like releasing a parody of a Leslie Nielsen movie?

So why have I been going on about the trailers, instead of talking about the movies themselves? Well, because there’s not much to say. I went into each having lowered my expectations as far as they could go while still looking forward to the movie, and they still managed to disappoint. Each time, I was hoping for a fun, stupid comedy, and each time they only managed one out of three.

Balls of Fury is the easier target, since it aims so low and misses. I’ve seen a lot of movies where all the good bits are in the trailer. This one is remarkable because they managed to take everything that was funny in the trailer, and then render it unfunny in the actual movie. I’ve read reviews that call it offensive, but it’s not. It’s just kind of lazy. It feels like they took a concept with a lot of potential (even the most soulless person has to admit that an Enter the Dragon / Bloodsport parody based around ping pong sounds like a can’t-fail idea), got together a bunch of funny people to make cameos, then started filming without realizing they’d neglected to write any funny material. It’s like they wrote the screenplay in Microsoft Word using “BLIND MAN WALKS INTO POLE” as a macro for “INSERT JOKE HERE”, then forgot to do a search-and-replace. “Oh well, Christopher Walken in a geisha wig will patch over the weak spots,” is all well and good, but the guy can only do so much.

Shoot ‘em Up is basically what you should expect from a movie called Shoot ‘em Up. Emphasis on should expect. I expected an over-the-top action comedy with actors chewing scenery and big, ridiculous shoot-out sequences — a movie every bit as ridiculous as John Woo’s Hong Kong movies, but which didn’t take itself at all seriously.

What I should have expected was a movie made by people who aren’t clever enough to come up with a better title than Shoot ‘em Up. It’s a deadpan riff on Hong Kong shoot-out movies with over-the-top action scenes, a Bugs Bunny or Roadrunner cartoon done in the style of Quentin Tarantino, but without Tarantino’s subtlety or nuanced dialogue.

That’s right, I said without the subtlety of Quentin Tarantino. I’m as stunned as anyone else; I always thought the appeal of Tarantino was the same as that of listening to a really imaginative, hyperactive 15-year-old who’d been raised on B-movies and TV shows describing the most boss fight scenes ever. It’s a hell of a lot of fun mostly because there’s just no sense of restraint or self-censoring.

Before seeing Shoot ‘em Up, I never fully appreciated what goes into Tarantino’s movies — it’s actually very risky to go as balls-out as he does, because when you get it wrong, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. I would’ve welcomed any of the interminable dialogue scenes in Death Proof if it meant I didn’t have to hear another unforgivably, suck-the-air-out-of-the-room unfunny attempt at a one-liner or the “ain’t BMW drivers annoying?” moments in Shoot ‘em Up. This movie feels like it was made by the type of guy who’s watching Kill Bill, and needs to lean over to his buddy and say, “Did you see that? She’s driving a car called the Pussy Wagon! Get it?”

The action scenes are decent, and there are a couple of genuinely clever* moments. Almost all of them are in the first 10 minutes, though. And the cast are good but all feel like they’re slumming. I’d think that Clive Owen was parodying his performances in Children of Men and those BMW ads, except that even that obvious a parody feels too subtle for this movie. The unintelligible Monica Bellucci seems wasted, and she was in The Matrix movies. It even seems like a low point for Paul Giamatti, and he was in that movie with the Nickelodeon stars where he gets dyed blue.

I think I’ve about given up on movies that are trying to be bad, because they’re so good at it.

* “Clever” in this context means (spoilers): killing a guy with a carrot, and delivering a baby by shooting through the umbilical cord.