AFTERTHOUGHTS (55)
55.1 THAT’S THE SPIRIT! 2008
Juno took home three awards at Saturday night’s Independent Spirit Awards, winning for Best Feature, Best Female Lead (Ellen Page), and Best First Screenplay (Diablo Cody).
And while that’s certainly good news, the win that really got me jazzed was that Once took Best Foreign Film. Brilliant!
For a complete list of the winners, go here.

55.2 SOUND OFF 2008
Meanwhile, at the 55th Golden Reel Awards (also held last Saturday night), Juan Antonio Bayona‘s El Orfanato (The Orphanage) won Best Sound Editing in Feature Film: Foreign, Lost won Best Sound Editing in Television: Short Form – Sound Effects and Foley, for the episode “Left Behind,” and Superman: Doomsday won Best Sound Editing: Direct to Video (actually a tie with Return to House on Haunted Hill).
Michael Bay was also honoured with the 2008 MPSE Filmmaker’s Award. (Whatever you may think of his films, they do sound good, don’t they?)
For a complete list of the winners, go here.

Congratulations to all the nominees and winners at this year’s Independent Spirit and Golden Reel Awards.

Parting shot: Reviews of Juno, Once, and Superman: Doomsday can be found in the Archive, along with episodic recaps/reactions to Lost.

(OS’s and Lost Season 4 ad courtesy of impawards.com; Superman: Doomsday DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (50)
THE BEST OF THE VES 2008

And while Sunday night meant the BAFTAs for British film geeks (see Afterthoughts (49) in the Archive), over in La-La Land, American film geeks looked to the Kodak Theatre, where the 6th Annual VES Awards took place.
This year, the Visual Effects Society favoured Michael Bay’s Transformers with four awards, including the big one, Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture.
Beyond Transformers though, the win that really made me go “Woot!” was…

Battlestar Galactica: Razor:
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special (Mike Gibson, Gary Hutzel, Sean Jackson, Pierre Drolet)

But, just for the record…

Transformers:
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture (Scott Farrar, Shari Hanson, Russell Earl, Scott Benza)
Best Single Visual Effect of the Year [Desert Highway Sequence] (Scott Farrar, Shari Hanson, Shawn Kelly, Michael Jamieson)
Outstanding Models or Miniatures in a Motion Picture (Dave Fogler, Ron Woodall, Alex Jaeger, Brian Gernand)
Outstanding Compositing in a Motion Picture (Pat Tubach, Beth D’Amato, Todd Varizi, Mike Conte)

Additionally, the award for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Broadcast Program or Commercial went to Nicklas Andersson, Mike Mellor, Sylvain Marc, and Florent DeLa Taille, for the Fatlip shots in Chemical Brothers – Salmon Dance.
Not exactly sure what that is, but hey, it’s the Chemical Brothers…

Steven Spielberg was also honoured with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award, for “the contribution that his vast body of work, as both a director and producer, has made to the art and science of visual effects.”

On the downside though, I’d just like to say it’s such a sad thing that not only did Zodiac get no love from the Oscars this year, but VES passed it over too.
Zodiac was up for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture and Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture (for Washington and Cherry), but lost out to Ratatouille and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (for The Maelstrom) respectively.
It’s pissy since David Fincher’s use of visual effects in Zodiac is so seamless, it’s practically invisible. I guess VES gave him an invisible award too…
Don’t worry, Mr. Fincher, the Iguana luvs ya…

For a downloadable PDF of the complete nominee list, go here, and to see a complete list of the winners, go here.

Parting shot: Reviews of Razor, Transformers, and Zodiac can be found in the Archive.

(Battlestar Galactica: Razor DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Transformers OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; and Zodiac OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (30)
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

At best, I have vague recollections of the Jay Anson novel (creepy) and the 1979 film adaptation (not so creepy) starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder, so the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror is going to be judged pretty much on its own merits, as it should be, without comparisons to either of its previous incarnations.
Produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes (who also produced the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher), and helmed by first-time feature director Andrew Douglas (whose previous film was the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus), this version sees Ryan Reynolds (Blade: Trinity, Van Wilder: Party Liaison) and Melissa George (Mulholland Drive, TV’s Alias, and the upcoming 30 Days of Night) as George and Kathy Lutz, the beleaguered couple allegedly driven out of their home by demonic entities a mere four weeks after moving into their new Long Island residence.

Like the Platinum Dunes remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror is clearly of that slick (and slickly-edited) breed of Hollywood horror movie that isn’t necessarily horrifying. The script (by Scott Kosar, who also retooled the Massacre script) doesn’t really help either, giving us no real sense of character deterioration on George’s part. One minute he’s fine and they’ve just moved in, then he sees the ghost of a little girl, and the next day, he’s doing a Jack Nicholson in The Shining, all dark and moody and borderline psychopathic.
To be perfectly fair, Reynolds does a creditable job of channeling his dark side, effectively erasing his hokey comedic TV sitcom self, but the problem is, he’s like a light switch: outside the house, he’s fine; in the house, he’s definitely not. We get no sense of any sort of encroachment on George’s personality, say, as he drives up to the house. All we have is Good George, and Bad George. The script shows no finesse when it comes to this aspect of the story.
The sense of the house as an entity onto itself, the true brooding monster of the piece, influencing and tainting those within, is also decidedly absent. There is no sense of the house as the source of the evil, of the house as a separate, sinister character. It’s just there, for the quick and the dead to run around in.

And though the young cast members, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett, and Chloe Grace Moretz, as Billy, Michael, and Chelsea Lutz, respectively, are capable young actors, none submit any breakthrough performances, and character actor Philip Baker Hall (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Gus Van Sant’s colour remake of Psycho, and TV’s Millennium) is seen too little of, as Father Callaway, who does a bad job of blessing the haunted house and is chased off by a horde of flies for his troubles.
As a result, the film becomes a series of scares (some passably effective, some not) that not only doesn’t cohere properly, it also doesn’t seem to build up towards the film’s climax. We jump from Day 1 to Day 15 to Day 28 (or at least, that’s what it feels like).

Strangely, the scenes that seem to work the best are those that don’t involve scares per se, but those that have Bad George terrorizing his stepchildren, actions that tread the thin line between discipline and abuse. These scenes are scary in an entirely different way than flitting ghosts or bleeding walls.

Sadly though, when all is said and done, The Amityville Horror doesn’t really add up to a whole lot, and is yet another black mark on the score card of Platinum Dunes’ horror film remakes.
Even worse, Bay and company have more remakes in the pike: Near Dark (which originally had Heroes’ flying Petrelli, Adrian Pasdar, and an Aliens contingent consisting of Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein) and The Birds.
You’d think that Bay would steer clear of Hitchcock, but the man apparently has titanium balls and an ego the size of Texas…

(The Amityville Horror OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a review originally entitled “Another 28 Days Later.”)

TRANSFORMERS
(Review)

It’s curiously apt that Transformers is produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay, as it feels like nothing so much as an attempt at a classic Popcorn Spielberg film, pumped up on adrenaline and testosterone.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf, recently seen in Disturbia and soon to be seen in Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods) is an American teen-ager seriously crushing on Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox, from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and TV’s Hope & Faith), a girl who doesn’t even know he exists. He’s got a bling-wearing Chihuahua called “Mojo,” who happens to be popping pain pills at the moment for a leg injury. He’s also busy selling some of his explorer grandfather’s stuff on eBay for his car fund.
But after he wrangles an A- from his History professor (one of his father’s conditions for getting Sam a car), he ends up taking an Internet-savvy alien robot home.
And though there are a couple of other plot threads that run through the first two-thirds of the film, the grand coming-of-age tale of a boy and his first car is the core of Bay’s Transformers, and it’s an effective and affecting hook that manages to hold all of the film’s other elements together, though just barely.

Considerable stretches of Transformers succeed admirably in the popcorn entertainment department; this film can move when it wants to. When Bay pulls out his standard bag of tricks (yes, lots of things go bang and boom here), aided as he is by impressive CGI courtesy of ILM and Digital Domain, you really do believe a vehicle can turn into a robot and piss on a man. Oh, and cause massive amounts of property damage too.
But it’s perhaps in the number of plot threads—survivors from a Decepticon attack on a US military base in Qatar; the efforts of the Pentagon to deal with the threat; the actions hacker Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor, soon to be seen in the English-language remake of Shutter) takes to decipher a signal used by the enemy—that the ride gets a tad wonky.
The film’s pacing is never quite as sharp as it should be, its rhythm mostly erratic, ultimately making it feel it really is as long as its running time indicates, always a no-no with movies that run over two hours.
Characters drop on and off the narrative’s radar like a Decepticon on buggered stealth mode, and some of the comedic aspects—particularly some of the Transformer hi-jinx, a borderline loony character played by John Turturro, and a hacker played by Anthony Anderson—though certainly not as blatantly off-key as those found in Spider-Man 3 (see review in Archive May 2007), still do manage to grate at certain points of the film.
And some of the dialogue, particularly from Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who gave voice to Prime in the cartoon; he’s also been Eeyore, the Red Skull, Captain Crabnasty from—heh—My Little Pony and Friends, and Glitterbot from—double heh—Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer) tends to be clunky and awkward.

Clearly, the film could have done with some judicious editing and quite possibly, the deletion of a character here and there.
I have a feeling though that many will choose to overlook these problems in the film since the action set pieces do their work like gangbusters. And LeBeouf goes a long way in giving the audience a relatable protagonist, in making us care, not just about him, but about his car/guardian/friend too.
Yes, for a bunch of pixels that speaks in snatches of songs and sound bytes, Bumblebee is surprisingly an endearing fictional construct. Certainly not on the level of a Gizmo or an E.T., mind you, but affecting nevertheless.

Contrary to what its iconic theme song claims, there really isn’t much more than meets the eye with Transformers.
It’s a Michael Bay film. It’s got money shots aplenty, handsful of underwritten characters, and it’s got loads of stuff that blow up real good. It’s fun, manipulative, and ultimately disposable popcorn entertainment. (Allowing your brain cells to chill out during the 144-minute running time is advisable.)
What is surprising though, is that the Popcorn Movie King throne vacated by Spielberg and assaulted by would-be usurpers like Roland Emmerich, Stephen Sommers, and most recently, Gore Verbinski, could very well be snatched up by Bay, of all people.
He’s taken his patented action formula and applied it to the PG-13 family friendly film franchise template, and produced a flawed, yet crowd-pleasing hybrid, with the resultant boffo box office that all studio heads just love.
Watch carefully, kiddies, we’re watching Bay transform before our very eyes.

(Transformers OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

reVIEW (5)
THE ISLAND

With Michael Bay’s Transformers looming on the very near horizon, I thought it might be good to resurrect this review of his previous science fiction effort, The Island. (The review was formerly known under its published name of “Tomorrow, With A Bang.")

I’ve only watched one previous Michael Bay film, Armageddon, and I found it by turns borderline cheesy and painfully laughable; none of his other films seemed interesting enough to me to make the effort for.
Then Bay decided to do The Island, and for once, I found myself actually looking forward to a Michael Bay movie. With its science fiction angle, The Island seemed to have the potential to be the first Bay film with any actual substance. And Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson aren’t exactly lightweight thespians, either.
So, was my excitement justified?
Well, to weigh in on the matter, The Island’s a good movie. Go out and watch it.
Now, if you’re here for the dissection…

The Island is the tale of Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Johansson), apparent survivors of some global “contamination” that has forced them to live in an isolated facility, their every action monitored, under the vigilant eye of Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean). The only break in the monotony of their daily routine is the lottery, which chooses one lucky individual every week to be sent to “The Island,” purportedly the last pathogen-free spot on the planet, a paradise for the blessed few.
Of course, if you’re a fan of these kinds of SF films (or, if you’ve seen the film’s trailer), you’ll know that all is not what it seems. There is a dark secret to the facility and Dr. Merrick, a secret that will be uncovered by the unusually curious Lincoln, a secret that will cause him to go on the run, Jordan in tow, in an attempt to expose the truth of this seemingly perfect (though perhaps a trifle boring) society.

I’ve always been a big fan of futuristic dystopias, from the literary (George Orwell’s 1984, William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy) to the cinematic (Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, and Michael Radford’s adaptation of 1984), and the vision presented in The Island is an interesting one. The rigorous control, from social (close proximity between members of the opposite sex is prohibited), to dietary (chemical imbalances are monitored by urine-analyzing toilets, and rectified by a careful selection of solid and liquid intake), to mental (reading material is screened, and reading lessons are apparently limited to “Dick and Jane” primers), is frighteningly claustrophobic in this future-by-Adidas society.
And it is, of course, this society that Lincoln and Jordan must flee from when the horrible truth is revealed. It is also at this point in the film when the fact that The Island is a Michael Bay film becomes readily apparent.

There was a point in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall when the film permanently left Philip K. Dick land and firmly entrenched itself in Arnie land. But, whereas Recall’s pivot point crippled the film beyond any hope of healing, The Island’s actually makes it a fun and agreeable thrill ride.
Bay’s bag of tricks—the adrenaline-pounding pacing, the car chases, the big explosions—is deployed to applaudable effect. This is Hollywood SF, surely, but it’s Hollywood SF that actually moves, that doesn’t get bogged down by its own hype or a spew of pretentious philo-babble.
The premise and SF scenario is just enough to make The Island more than a mere Michael Bay thrill ride (which it essentially is), while the themes—the objectification of the human being, man as the ultimate disposable product—though certainly not explored in any significant depth, are nevertheless present, also adding precious spikes of flavor to the mix.

Sadly, the performances by McGregor, Johansson, and Bean aren’t their strongest, as if they also know, instinctively, that all is in ultimate service to the Michael Bay-orchestrated action. Also, Steve Buscemi (like Michael Clarke Duncan, reunited with his Armageddon director), as McCord, Lincoln’s friend and confidante, has sadly limited screen time.
Shortcomings aside though, as I said earlier, The Island’s a good movie, a Hollywood SF actioneer that has just enough brains to make it an agreeable way to pass two hours and seven minutes of time.
Which is more than can be said for a lot of other movies being made these days.

Parting shot: For a mind-blowing approach to practically the same idea, check out the “An Orison of Sonmi-451” sections of David Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel, Cloud Atlas.

(The Island OS's courtesy of impawards.com.)

ON THE LOT
Film Premiere 2

The rules for this batch of short films: write, shoot, and edit a short film with a running time of not more than 3 minutes, in 5 days.
Now, for some reason, the show decides that they’ll be pitting five of the remaining 15 directors against each other, and the one whose film scores the lowest numbers of votes from the audience, goes home next week. I’m curious to know though how the five directors were determined, or was it all totally random (which somehow, I don’t think is the case, ‘cause if it were random, they could’ve just pulled names out of a hat right then and there).

Anyway, with a field of five, I’m choosing to forego my usual alphabetical rundown of the short films that comprised my middle pack (neither my favorites nor my un-favorites) and cruise through the five films, going from my favorite to my un-favorite.
So without further ado…

MY FAVORITE: Adam Stein’s “Dough: The Musical”
An inspired and delightful tale of a baker searching for a woman to wed, and a girl searching for a job to pay the rent.
Not only does Stein display his songwriting skills (always good to wear a lot of hats in Hollywood), but he’s got some interesting wordplay with the title going, to reflect how two people looking for two entirely different things can come together and discover mutual satisfaction.
This one’s funny and heartfelt, and if I have one complaint, it’s that the actors’ lipsynching skills aren’t completely convincing. (I’m a lipsynching stickler, sue me.)

Sam Friedlander’s “Broken Pipe Dreams”
Ingenious short about a man with a toilet bowl trauma (see it to believe it) losing an engagement ring to the porcelain god.
After getting me solidly in his camp with one of my favorites last week (“Replication Theory”), Friedlander has fun with Mission: Impossible and moves the audience with the apparent death of a fish. I can safely say I’ve never spent any previous 3 minutes of my life quite like this.

Shalini Kantayya’s “Laughing Out Loud: A Comic Journey”
The life of a gay Hindu stand-up comic, just before he has his first big show.
This one was the only short film of the batch that tended more towards the dramatic than the comedic, though it does play like a confessional camera piece, and the final advice, “Be yourself” is sort of really Hallmark-y and trite. (Carrie Fisher said it a lot more nicely and without the snarky tone.)
Of the five, this was also the one that looked most like a music video/advertisement, thus gaining guest judge Michael Bay’s vote.
It was moving though…

Trever James’ “Teri”
Another funny blind date short, this one is passably entertaining, till we get to the end.
While Kantayya’s effort had an ending we’d pretty much seen before, “Teri” has sort of a non-ending, as all Ben’s nightmares about his blind date evaporate into the aether when the nice-looking, normal Teri shows up at his door.

MY UN-FAVORITE: Hilary Graham’s “The First Time I Met The Finkelsteins”
Once again, Graham ends up an un-favorite with this “first dinner with potential in-laws” concoction. Just as real-life dinners of this sort can turn out, this one’s a disaster.
The end result is just coarse and unappealingly vulgar. Of course, that’s because the Finkelsteins are coarse and unappealingly vulgar, but then again, this is from the woman who gave us “Bus #1” (where a woman just really urgently needs to pee), so you gotta wonder, why is she still here when Phil Hawkins was sent home last week?

I learned two things from this episode: that having Friedlander and Stein on my lookout list was so on the money, and that Michael Bay talks like he’s a director who’s far more talented and gifted than his films actually indicate.
Who knows, maybe he is, but dude, lighten up. You were only on the show to promote Transformers anyway, right?

Parting shot: Due to its less than stellar ratings, On The Lot has been pared down to one episode a week.

(Contestant image courtesy of thelot.com; Michael Bay image courtesy of movies.yahoo.com.)

THE HITCHER

(Review)

Having never seen the original, I can come at this with a clean slate. And on that clean slate, I write…

Horror movies being the home away from home for today’s teen TV show stars, One Tree Hill’s Sophia Bush (who also appeared in the lame horror-video-game-come-to-life film, Stay Alive) finds herself terrorized by Boromir himself, Sean Bean, in Dave Meyers’ remake of The Hitcher.
Along with her boyfriend, Jim (Zachary Knighton), Bush’s Grace is hounded by a deranged psychopath the couple crosses paths with on a drive through the deserts of New Mexico.

Grace’s penchant for long bathroom breaks (conveniently established within minutes of the film’s opening) becomes the unlikely reason for all the terror these college kids are about to endure.
Sadly though, once the terror begins there isn’t much tension to keep the audience captivated, and, as if to pour salt on that already gaping wound, Bean is totally wasted in this production. Normally, he’s able to bring a palpable presence to the characters he plays, regardless of screen time. In The Hitcher though, despite playing the title role, Bean does not register at all; there isn’t really much for him to do except run around and make Grace and Jim’s lives a living hell.

Not even Nine Inch Nails (whose music plays during Bean’s most improbable stunt in the entire film) can save this dud. It’s the kind of movie where the characters can actually have a shower together while a maniac incessantly stalks them.

It’s also one of those bizarrely feminist horror films where the men are ultimately impotent when the chips are down, and the heroine does a last-second Ripley (or a Sarah Connor, take your pick of sci-fi pin up girl) and kicks stalker a$$ with knife or chainsaw or gun (or whatever weapon is readily available). However, beyond her baby’s bladder, we don’t know much more about Grace as an individual for us to fully appreciate the change she undergoes. For all the audience knows, she was a closet Ramboette to begin with.

After directing Eddie Griffin in Foolish, Dave Meyers made a name for himself in the music video world, and his work should be familiar to most of today’s youth through his clips for Britney Spears (“Lucky”), Missy Elliott (“Get Ur Freak On”), and Creed (“My Sacrifice” and “With Arms Wide Open”), to name a few. Now Meyers becomes the latest in a long line of music video directors making the difficult transition to the big screen.

But directing a 3 and a half minute video is one thing. Helming a feature film on the other hand, is a whole different ball game in an entirely different league, a ball game Meyers doesn’t seem to know how to play very well. (Having never seen Foolish, I can’t really say whether the feature film has always been his Waterloo.)

There is nothing here that actually gets the audience involved and invested in the action onscreen. It’s just an hour and a half of Bush and Knighton running (and driving) around New Mexico while being chased by Bean (and the cops!).
And while The Hitcher manages to evade the gore-soaked territory of films like Wolf Creek and Haute Tension, it doesn’t replace the lack of grue with any excitement either. (Despite a needless plot flip, Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension is actually an excellent example of a film with both the gore of an in-your-face, grindhouse horror flick, and the taut, razor-edged suspense of an A-grade thriller.)

The Hitcher (like the recent Turistas, which is sort of like Hostel without the gore or the excitement) is yet another bland entry in the annals of modern horror cinema.

One important thing to note in this sad and sorry mess is that The Hitcher is the latest of Platinum Dunes’ remakes which doesn’t hit the mark at all. Dunes—which has director Michael Bay as its backbone—has been responsible for the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and its prequel, as well as the remake of The Amityville Horror.

Now, it’s forgivable when a remake isn’t quite as good as the original, when said original is a classic, as is the case with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But even when there’s a lot of room for improvement, as with The Amityville Horror, Bay and company still manage to bungle it somehow. The Hitcher is just another nail in this particular coffin.

It’s sad though that there are still more remakes slated to emerge from Platinum Dunes’ gates, including one of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (blasphemy, I tell you!).

But, despite all of my issues with it, to be perfectly fair to Bush, Bay, Meyers, and company, I did learn something from The Hitcher: if you’re driving down a lonely desert road, and have the urge to help a stranger in distress, DON’T.

Oh, and one more thing: learn to control your bladder.

(The Hitcher OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

(Originally posted 021007)