* Surely, you've all been listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, right? Two Santa Monica film guys bust each other up and talk Lovecraft, story by story, in an engaging and often illuminating fashion. Plus, their narrative and incidental instincts are knife-keen, as befits film guys. If you haven't made a habit of listening, may I recommend the perfect jumping-on place? As those who know me may have suspected by now, it's the one featuring me as a guest: Episode 18, on the prose poems "Nyarlathotep" and "The Crawling Chaos." They've promised to have me back on, and I am eager to return. Plus, they regularly cite Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales during their show (though not during this episode), and they gave me a very nice plug for Cthulhu 101. So listen up!

* In other, non-meta-plug news, mollpeartree and I watched The Ruins tonight, part of my "flood the Netflix zone" plan to make sure there were plenty of horror movie options for Halloween. It's a pretty terrific horror movie, which (like many great horror movies) makes the characters wreak at least as much horror on themselves as the horrors do. Like Lovecraft, it values verisimilitude (even moreso, given the aforementioned character-driven realism), and presents a horror of the Outside come up from Below. But interestingly, the swarthy natives who live Where Horror Dwells are the ones staunchly committed to fighting it; it's the white Americans (and German) who are decadent enough to let the Outside come In.¹ Add a nice eco-noia monster-thing and some excellent sound design and atmospherics (I'd like to see the same production team try and tackle "The Willows," come to think of it) and you got yourself a fine 21st-century weird tale.

1] There's elements of that formula in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," of course -- the Pacific Islanders slaughtered the Deep Ones, while white Obed Marsh married them -- and in "Haunter of the Dark," in which the non-WASP Italians and Poles keep the Haunter at bay while white-bread Robert Blake communes with it. But these stand out as exceptions, and "Shadow" is plenty racially fraught, for all that.

Although those wacky sunspot minima are giving us May in July (with the occasional side trip to April) weather-wise, my film schedule has briefly resembled October, or "Film Fest Plus Halloween Month," as I like to call it.

Two Fridays ago was Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), which may have been one of the most gloriously crazy domestic noirs ever filmed. Edward G. Robinson is a shlub who falls for a smokin' hot Joan Bennett. She and her madcap thug boyfriend Dan Duryea ("I'll go with ya, honey. I wouldn't want ya ta get run over by a street-car.") mulct Robinson for cash, and then exploit his painting hobby for more. Like a true noir, everything in society is suspect: marriage, banks, love, art, the police, and journalism. Here, though, Lang (or the source play) takes the extra magical step -- almost to the fifth act turn, you almost believe that Robinson can win. But like I said, noir. And I haven't even alluded to the most jaw-dropping fourth-act reveal ever. "The coal barge unloaded on a banana boat headed for Honduras ..." There's a whole other post in here about noir as black comedy -- so much of it is built on anti-social love, contrasted with the social love of the Aristotelian/Shakespearean comedy. Talking of Shakespeare, though, Scarlet Street makes Troilus and Cressida look like Emma.

The next day we reconvened for a rare showing of Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965). I so very desperately want this to come out on a legal American DVD -- just watching it once was immensely frustrating, as there was so much going on in every shot as Welles and Shakespeare fought it out for global dominion. It would be nice if the DVD digitally cleaned up the sound, too -- the print we saw was more than a little muddy. I have to put myself on the other side from the Falstaffolators, as far as the drama goes, but Welles (for excellent, if obvious, reasons) makes Falstaff the center of his filmic Henriad. (Although Harold Bloom chooses an interesting, even noble, approach when he engages in a Falstaffian rant in defense of Falstaff in The Invention of the Human, I am not convinced.) All that said, while Welles is (of course) tremendous (heh) in the part of Falstaff, the real fireworks are in the emotional bullfight between Keith Baxter's Hal and John Gielgud's Henry IV. The Battle of Shrewsbury, meanwhile, may be the best battle scene ever filmed; it's absolutely the best one on a per-extra basis. Welles' choice to frame virtually the whole movie as a flashback from the grim, depressing Henry IV, Part Two is just one of the genius touches that re-lights things in entirely unexpected ways, no matter how well you know your Henrys.

Last Friday, meanwhile, was the silent masterpiece that was Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926). (We saw the restored German version, not the one Murnau recut for the American market.) Although much praise is rightfully given to the set design and set-piece productions -- Mephistopheles wrapping the city in his wings and sending forth the plague is still scary today -- the acting was absolutely stellar. There were whole stretches where I forgot the film was silent. We saw the film on the Big Screen at the Portage Theater, where it accompanied a smallish exhibit of prints of German silent film posters, and some art by Dave McKean, who introduced the movie. Among the McKean pieces, a tribute to Dr. Caligari, and one to Faust -- and one that we thought was based on Val Lewton's The Bodysnatcher but turns out to be based on the German silent that Lewton was homaging.

Which led us into Saturday, which was a bunch of Dave McKean shorts and Mirrormask (Dave McKean, 2005), a film that I quite frankly thought superior to Pan's Labyrinth. McKean's visual imagination is at least the equal of Del Toro's, and his fantasy film, unlike Pan, does not carry the message that fantasy is oppressive. To be sure, it's quite reactionary ("obey your parents and stay in your place"), but so are all proper fairy tales. There were parts that were a little bit groaningly obvious -- having one's parents show up in Neverland surely can be put back on the shelf or at the very least restricted to J.M. Barrie for the next fifty years or so -- but the sheer invention on display more than made up for it. And in Gaiman and McKean's defense, they explained it. I'm not sure I liked it as well as the original Labyrinth, of which it is something of a redress, but I'd probably have to watch them both again to be sure. But who has the time?

It's been a busy fortnight here at the Ambipartisan Manse. We've had visits from the delightful schlafmanko, my Mom, the Un-Maker, and the Best Plumber in the World. We've had frustratingly fewer visits from the Muse, as it's been catch-as-catch-can on the writing time around here. All of which takes its toll on LJ posting.

I am not insensible of the pain this causes you good people.

So here are the titles of the posts I would have posted over the last fortnight or so, if this June weren't shaping up to be so very much like my average May -- namely, horribly busy and over-committed.

Actually, Paramount Marketing Division, That Pretty Much Was My Father's Star Trek.

Today, I Am Canadian (Letting people who care know that I'm on Facebook. So far, I'm still resisting Twitter.)

Tori Spelling's Cthulhu Actually Kind of Horrific, But Not In The Way You'd Think

Watch Alien Raiders Now Or The Kid Gets It

With Up, Pixar Demonstrates An Uncanny Ability To Blend Tone While Maintaining A Powerful Thematic And Narrative ... Squirrel!

Almost entirely on the basis of cassielsander's surprisingly strong recommendation, I talked luagha and N. into seeing Push yesterday.

You may remember Push as the movie whose preview made you go: "I saw that movie already, and it was called Jumper, and it sprang for Samuel L. Jackson instead of Djimon Hounsou, and it still sucked." Well, this is what we in the rhetoric business call "poisoning the well."

It turns out that cassielsander was absolutely correct to call it "nifty" and yes, even "thoughtful." (Indeed, it tiptoes into Philip K. Dick turf once or twice.) Director Paul McGuigan uses Hong Kong terrifically well; it's almost harder in some ways to set a movie in a city so thoroughly filmed as Hong Kong (or LA or New York), and while he doesn't tread a lot of new ground, he dances the old trod both sprightly and stately in its measure. (He also takes some deliberate risks with the pacing, which pay off handsomely.) Chris Evans can, as I had previously discovered to my interest, actually act if he wants to or if the director is holding a particularly shiny treat in his eye line, and Dakota Fanning deserves credit for showing up for work and thereby risking her indie cred on a movie about fightin' psychics in Hong Kong. The villains are also good, although as villains, have less to work with -- that said, Hounsou does "imperturbable badass" pretty well, especially when he does get perturbed.

There is only the very bare minimum of "as you know, Bob" dialogue, which combined with a commendable "show, don't tell" mentality and liberal use of psychic slang makes the movie seem very complex and convoluted while merely being capable and intelligent. Think of Rounders, with psionics instead of poker, or of an old-school HK version of Scanners, and you'll have the vibe here. All that, plus three really good psionic combat scenes -- including one against the mookiest army of mooks to ever be flung through a window in Hong Kong -- makes Push a movie that in no way deserves the obloquy that the reviewers, the box-office, and the studio (which dumped it in February, after all) are dealing out.

* With the Oscar nominations providing their annual Tribute to Back-Patting Timidity, I suppose it's up to me to run down the Ten Best Films I Saw In 2008. Oscars aside, this year may not be as much of a washout as it appears at first blush -- it's just that 2007 was a fricking epochal year for good film. (That said, 2008 was the year that Doug Liman and Baz Luhrman both demonstrated that "Thou too ... or rather, they two ... art mortal." If I were Zack Snyder, I'd be keeping my fingers crossed.)

For example, my Ten Best Films of 2008 That I Saw In 2008 are: Let The Right One In, Timecrimes, The Dark Knight, WALL•E, Iron Man, Mamma Mia!, My Winnipeg, Burn After Reading, The Strangers, and Sukiyaki Western Django, and only the last is even an A-. My Next Ten are pretty good ones, too although they get down into the Bs pretty fast: Cloverfield, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, In Bruges, Hamlet 2, The Earl, Gomorrah, Quantum of Solace, Chronicles of Narnia 2: Prince Caspian, Incredible Hulk, and Race, a giddy Bollywood noir-action-romance. With line dancing.

The Ten Best Films of 2008 I Haven't Yet Seen are all pretty great-sounding, too: Antarctica, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Redbelt, Kung Fu Panda, Baghead, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and Mother of Tears. Look at that list -- Herzog, Eastwood, Aronofsky, Boyle, Mamet, Argento. One or two of them might even take the #3 spot on my Top Ten list once all is seen and done. And that list doesn't have room for either Mongol conqueror epic (Mongol or Jodhaa Akbar), or Robert Downey Jr.'s other great 2008 performance (Tropic Thunder), so it's incomplete as it stands, too.

* Would you rather listen to me rattle on about something I know more about than film? How about Cthulhu? He's the centerpiece of a really good interview with me done by Rich Rogers for Canon Puncture, and it's available here.

* Sadly, no, I haven't yet managed to see Tori Spelling's tribute to "Shadow Over Innsmouth," Cthulhu, although I've heard from a number of people (in tones of appropriately Lovecraftian shock and denial) that it's not as godawful as you might think. Once I do, I'll report back here.

Y'know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's a pattern behind all this.

Tim Burton's Penguin is a wannabe gothic theatrical impresario with torturous daddy issues.

Bryan Singer's Magneto is an artistic genius with (perhaps justified) persecution paranoia, who continually tries to build something lasting out of discards.

Brad Bird's Syndrome is a self-made genius who desperately wants to be accepted as an equal by his iconic peers.

Marvel Studios' Obadiah Stane is a malevolent corporate pirate who steals intellectual property with abandon.

Frank Miller's The Octopus is a power-worshipping psycho who turns Denny Colt into a monstrous revenant freak.

The interesting thing is how much of Miller's movie still worked, despite all the gratuitous damage and misunderstanding. Filming virtually the entire movie with no blue in the palette (except for the Lorelei Rox scenes -- a reinvention by Miller that I actually kind of approved of) makes no kind of sense, especially given that the Spirit wears a blue suit. But it works. (The other place they put blue? Gabriel Macht's eyes, which look brown in the publicity photos. The color-enhanced Macht, by the way, is a terrific visual match for the Spirit. It's like they sent an Eisner sketch to casting directors.) Miller's cityscape isn't Eisner's at all, but (again) it still works. Even giving the Spirit a sort of quasi-parkour (more Daredevil, really) doesn't jar too terribly badly. And some of it, Miller still gets right -- the fight scene at the beginning, while honkingly wrong for the film, is true to Eisner's original cartoonish fight choreography. The "Wildwood Cemetery" establishing shot is something that we could count on Miller not getting wrong, although (like the fight) it's misplaced in the film itself. Blending P'Gell and Sand Saref into one character is understandable, though only barely forgivable.

As an Eva Mendes delivery system, though -- top notch. A+. I feel like someone complaining the syringe they're shooting up with is the wrong color.

But it is the wrong color, and it's not just the absence of blue. Dolan is wrong (too confrontational). Ellen is wrong (too spineless). The Octopus is wrong, wrong, wrong (too flamboyant, wrong m.o., actually visible), and I could have lived the rest of my life happy without seeing Samuel L. Jackson in blackface. (Silken Floss, surprisingly, is pretty much right, although Scarlett Johansson apparently read her part off the storyboards in looping.) Sand Saref, as discussed above, is half-right for Sand, half-right for P'Gell. Officer Morgenstern is just horribly, horribly, horribly wrong, even though she doesn't appear (to my knowledge) in the original comic.

The fantasy is the wrong kind of fantasy; the violence (mostly) the wrong kind of violence. The jokes mostly don't work and almost always suffer from rotten framing, timing, and presentation. And the whole conceit is wrong. I'm sick of movies about ironically questioning the thing the movie's about. If you're going to pose a movie as an ironic commentary on comic-book conventions, don't film it in comic-book storyboards, don't have first-person narration (which Eisner's Spirit didn't, of course -- that's all Sin City), don't give your hero superpowers he doesn't have in the original material, absolutely don't have Samuel L. Jackson mugging for the cameras pulling cartoon guns out of his hat like the Judge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and don't be vastly flatter and less human than the seven-page comic insert you're indicting for its alleged two-dimensionality. If you're going to ironically question the Spirit, do it like Eisner did in his own comic, with that beautiful old New York Jewish sense of the ridiculous. I am a bigger Frank Miller fan than most people these days, but he has no sense of the ridiculous.

It seems like an awful waste of an LJ post just to point you good people to an interview with me on technoir's podcast, The Basics of the Game, but not a lot else is going on.

Snow covers my city, the New Capital of the World, as is good and right, but it makes getting out and doing things inconvenient. And cold. Which is good for GURPS Horror 4E, at which I'm plugging along. Next up: re-read all of GURPS Powers to see what else dr_kromm has done that I don't need to. I did have the pretty great brain wave of doing up Powers for all the various Fears from the monster section. That should be good.

In response to ratmmjess' challenge of a few weeks ago, I've started re-reading the Smiley novels, which is also good ground-work for the ongoing vampire espionage thriller game. I read them eons ago, and I'd forgotten just how good a writer LeCarre was back in the day, so that's been fun. It's also instilled in me a burning desire to read Declare for the dozenth time, but maybe I'll read that godawful brick by Robert Littell, or my Alan Furst book instead. Once I can get out and do some last-minute shopping, I'll see if there's more Alan Furst lying around used.

No movies to speak of; TiVoed and watched the Will Smith I Am Legend, which is another red-hot brick Akiva Goldsman will be carrying in Hell. You will likely hear my anguished response to The Spirit once I see it in a week or so, although I can bet it will be a threnody on the theme: "Frank Miller has no sense of humor. Will Eisner's The Spirit is good-humored. Discuss." Hopefully, I will be able to ignore Will Eisner at least as much as Frank Miller looks to have done, which may make the movie enjoyable. Cross fingers.

I made French onion soup last night, along with roast potatoes (in olive oil, with kosher salt, pepper, and herbes de Provence) and Craig Claiborne's recommended mushroom accompaniment to venison steaks, which his_regard brought over, along with a bottle of very upscale Chianti. I swapped a glug of that for the dry white that Claiborne recommended, and on Claiborne's suggestion used beef gravy in a jar (!) instead of sauce espagnole, which I didn't make as I don't happen to have five pounds of veal bones lying around. The mushrooms came out better than fine, so there. I swapped about three recipes around for the French onion soup to approach a non-psychotic version, so if you care: ( The Final Version? )

Tonight, I may use up the rest of the baguette on ham-and-Brie sandwiches, or I may make chili, or I may make venison goulash with the leftover steak. More importantly, right about 11:30, Darlene Love sings "Christmas Baby Please Come Home" on Letterman, and it's officially Christmas. Have a merry one, everybody.

With Quantum of Solace, the remaking of James Bond into someone else is complete. James Bond began as, and even down to the last Brosnan film, remained, a servant of the British Empire. He fought Communists, capitalists, and anarchists -- all threats to the aristocratic, reactionary order that Ian Fleming identified with. He was a courtier, with aristocratic tastes and a vicious, aristocratic temperament. (In You Only Live Twice, he even becomes a samurai to all intents and purposes.) For the Brosnan cycle, the producers were just going through the motions, trying to care about Fleming's character, or change it. But Bond was too tough for them: in GoldenEye, for example, Dame Judi M accurately calls him "a dinosaur" (but learns that he is indispensable as he is), we see (yet another) attempt to humanize him end with his aloof coldness reaffirmed, he defeats Communists, and capitalists, and anarchists.

But now, for good or for ill, they've finally killed James Bond and replaced him with another person. He has some of James Bond's powers -- wheelman, seducer, dirty fighter, crack shot, uncanny luck -- but none of Bond's identity. In the two recent films, we even formalize that -- last year's Casino Royale is "Bond before Bond," and in Quantum of Solace, Bond is ceremonially killed (on paper and plastic) by MI6 ("Cancel all his cards; put a hold on his passports -- all of them." "There's a detain and terminate order out on you.") Bond never introduces himself as "Bond, James Bond." Our new Bond is not a servant of Empire, but Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, with a touch of Vindice -- motivated by personal hates and private codes, the one clean man in a dirty world. (With M as the "decent cop" figurehead for order.) He fights his own government, and the CIA, and business-government moguls, and resource robber barons: in a word, Chinatown. (It's even a water-theft story!) He barely cares about his newest Bond girl's body -- he's more interested in her life story. (This is decent of him, but it's hardly James Bond.) Giving Bond a personal quest may make for one or two interesting movies, but as the narrative for a continuing series, it's doomed to fail compared to the well-crafted and (more importantly) hermetically self-contained Bourne trilogy.¹

Now, don't get me wrong. I'd much rather watch Bond be turned into Philip Marlowe than have Bond turned into a complete moral nullity like George Smiley. (A protagonist, perhaps, but no hero.) But for better and for worse, Bond was the only James Bond we still had. Now, the species (or at least its charismatic megafauna, as we say in eco-speak) is extinct, killed by a ruthless band of corporate pirates mouthing pieties about "renewal" and "ecology." Someone should make a movie of it.

[1] Bourne, for those scoring at home, is Frankenstein's Monster -- doesn't know his own power, educates himself, comes to hate his creator and pursues him across Europe, bride killed, discovers his true self, flees across water -- with a touch of Orestes.

"The old masters -- by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
-- Orson Welles, on which directors he most admired

A few years ago at GenCon SoCal, I was asked by someone (ptevis? macklinr?) to provide a basic "Westerns 101" list; the Westerns you needed to have seen in order to have done the reading. After the show, I wrote it up in an email, as the tenor of our conversation may have left us prone to ethylated amnesia on this, and other, topics. Ever since, I've had to go back and fish through my emails if I wanted to reference that question, so here it is, for my convenience and the edification of the interested, in the permanent glory that is an LJ post.

The Four Gospels:

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

The Two Commentaries:

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks' 1959 response to High Noon)
Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood's 1992 response to Shane)

The Two Heresies:

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

The Epistle From The Virtuous Pagan Samurai:

The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)

The Weird, Hallucinatory Apocalypse:

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1967)

Note: This is not the Ten Best Westerns of All Time, although there is a good deal of overlap. This is a primer on the Western as art and myth. Advanced students will likely scoff good-naturedly or nitpick assiduously, as advanced students will when seeing an introductory curriculum in any subject.

So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post-apocalyptic, 1970s-era Western, and Harajuku.

The movie concerns the war of the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, but the characters often refer to it as the War of the Roses, and the head of the Heike clan even renames himself "Henry". It's set in "Nevada," the subtitles explain, as they show the Japanese lettering on the wind-eroded Western sign over the town. The Reds and Whites have two giant Japanese tea-houses as headquarters, in the middle of a Western town straight outta Don Siegel.

The movie itself sets you up; almost the first line of dialogue after the credits (there's an extended tribute to the sound-stage Western tradition at the beginning, starring Quentin Tarantino) is something like "Best not get any ideas about playing Yojimbo on us, man." A sloppy, freewheeling remake of Yojimbo (out of Fistful of Dollars) immediately ensues, with occasional thefts from (or nods to) Corbucci's original Django among other movies.

But is it actually any good? This is the question posed by really great mashups like this that are, nonetheless, magpie nests or Frankenstein art: for example, the Venture Brothers. Even the crummiest spaghetti-Western knockoff, or cheesiest pop song, or lamest piece of French Academy historical painting, is saying something. Are mashups saying anything, or are they just commenting "I like Sergio Leone and samurai," or "Hey, 'Genie in a Bottle' has the same beat as a Strokes song." And where is the line -- is Kill Bill a mashup, or a reinterpretation? Is Grindhouse a mashup, or a tribute, or just cynical exploitation? And who's to say that cynical exploitation can't be art -- someone out there was moved by Monkees songs, after all, and I can attest to the saving power of the Sex Pistols. On a slightly more elevated note, does anyone really think that Shakespeare cared as much about The Merry Wives of Windsor, a ground-out Falstaff sequel to order, as he did about Henry IV, Part Two, in which Falstaff achieves uttermost heights of drama? Is there a difference between Falstaff and Django? I don't know. I know that I believe that Art comes from somewhere, and can come out in the oddest places. But I think we need (at least) two different kinds of awesome, to differentiate Django from "Django," and Jonny Quest from Venture Brothers, even though (or especially because) Venture Brothers is way more awesome than Jonny Quest.

So I see by the Internet that Natalie Portman's film company Handsome Charlie is supposedly producing a remake of Dario Argento's bizarre horror masterpiece Suspiria. More intriguingly, Natalie has been tipped as the star of said remake, which has brought a denial from her publicist: "Natalie has signed nothing and confirmed nothing regarding a role in any Suspiria remake, as she has already played her part in retroactively wrecking wonderful genre films made in 1977." [Quote may contain additives and cereal fillers.]

So this is probably a crazy-making rumor of the "Priyanka Chopra is being cast as Wonder Woman" sort that exists solely to bedevil my life while fueling my Improved Alternate-Historical Netflix. Although The Dark Knight comes very close to being my (or, as it turned out, Mark Millar's, in the best writing he's ever done) "Orson Welles' The Bat-Man," so never say never, I guess.

But anyhow, and more intriguingly still, indie darling David Gordon Green, who wrote and directed the extraordinary film George Washington, is honest and for true attached to the Suspiria remake as director. When first I heard the news, I was hard-pressed to think of any movie less like the wildly melodramatic, color-drenched, Symbolist gorefest Suspiria than the careful, muted, pointillist character piece George Washington. But both films deliberately privilege incident over plot, and mood over beat; both nonetheless build compelling story from seemingly broken narratives. Green has acknowledged the influence of Terence Malick, who may be something of the missing link here; I had a splendid 15 minutes or so on my walk home from Philly's Best yesterday reconsidering Malick's Badlands as a Midwestern giallo.

Well, I saw it today and it's just as good as you've heard; possibly better than that, even. The greatest actor of their generation, forcing an emotional impact straight through all the artifice and melodrama that go (perhaps rightfully) with the role. The explosion of passion and emotion seen both as power and as terror. The deft repetition of the three-characters story element, and (in a way) of the love triangle motif; the simultaneous rescue and celebration of source material too often relegated to marginal demographics or worse yet associated purely with camp. The classic, even Shakespearean, architecture of the plot arc.

What else? The music, of course; the timeless set design; the gorgeous location; the grace notes for hard-core fans; the costumes at once believable and iconic.

Are there flaws? Sure; the choreography isn't up to the Asian best-of-breed work, and the director doesn't always know how to shoot that choreography reliably, depending more on establishing shots and (justifiably) on solid acting and character development work instead.

Oh, and Pierce Brosnan really can't sing.

* I'm off to BookExpo in L.A. tomorrow, so ironically my recent posting drought will likely be broken on the road, with plenty of gloating to boot, if Thoth smiles upon me.

* In the meantime, I should note that drivingblind has tossed me the keys to the Impala and set me loose on Archer Avenue at midnight: I'm signed on to write the "Occult Chicago" chapter of the upcoming Dresden Files RPG from Evil Hat.

* Real quick housekeeping question: What would the general sentiment around here be if I started posting teasers for my "Suppressed Transmission" columns when they hit Pyramid? Would it be, "Thanks, Ken, I'm interested to learn what you're writing somewhere else behind a subscription wall" or "Even more gratuitous self-promotion? Pinch me, I must be dreaming!"

* One of the greatest cartoonists -- one of the greatest surrealists -- of the century, Bill Elder, died two weeks ago. He and Wally Wood were the Marlowe and Shakespeare of comic satire, truer heirs to Hogarth and Gillray and Nast than virtually any overtly political cartoonist of the last fifty years. And Elder could work in any style, such that his parodies were often better drawn and composed than the originals. R.I.P.

* I didn't blog about it, because I figured everybody already knew it, and because I've been crazy busy this month, but Iron Man was freaking awesome -- I'd call it the third best of the recent crop of superhero movies, after The Incredibles and X2. Robert Downey, Jr., is the best actor ever to play a superhero, and Jon Favreau is a writer's director, so the story was in good hands. Every nickel of that $180 million bought a dime's worth of fun. And oh, the rich, gravy-like irony of Marvel making a movie about IP rights -- tell me I'm not the only one of you who heard Evil Jeff Bridges ask "Just because you invent something, you think it belongs to you?" and responded not-so-silently with "Yeah, who do you think you are? Jack Kirby?"

* I've been reading a bunch of H. Beam Piper, and a crazy book recommended to me by dspitzle, and more stuff about the Gothic, but at least two of those deserve their own entries. Which will come after BookExpo, honest.

Saw Indiana Jones and the Voyage to the Land of the Jungle of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of Terrifying Monster Town today, and I am gratified to report that I pegged the expectations game exactly.

I'd read enough of the ambivalent reviews to come in just slightly lowballing what turned out to be a fine, if not unblemished, installment of the series, somewhat below Last Crusade but well above Temple of Doom. (Or at least above my memory of Temple -- I haven't watched that movie past the bailout point since I saw it in the theater. Perhaps I am being unjust.) The biggest surprise was a dual one: that LeBeef actually contributed something, and that his part was not written solely to make me miss Short Round. The whole Indy-Marion-Mutt dynamic actually worked, and (thanks in no small part to Karen Allen) was more fun to watch than the last round of somewhat exhausting chase sequences.

I shall not belabor the movie's flaws, save to aver that the McCarthyism that has Indy's Dean so Broadbent out of shape a) was a spent force by 1957 in our history, but b) turns out, on the merits, to be completely justified, given the number of Soviet agents running amuck in America in the movie's history.

And its virtues? Soviet Psychic Warfare Machinery! Crystal Freakin' Skulls! Army Ants! Evil Commie Bastards! Ray Winstone! Quotes From Milton! Swordfightin' Cate Freakin' Blanchett! And last but not least, Indy outs himself as a Republican!

Last night, gnosticpi and I hit the last night of the premiere run of Jim Sikora's film The Earl, at the Siskel Center. Think Intacto crossed with The Hitcher, restricted entirely to one scene -- total unity of theme, place, action, and character. It's Aristotle with crowbar-fights.

It's based on Brett Neveu's late-night play of a couple years ago, and it retains the staginess of its ancestry, not least since Neveu adapted the script. This is not a down-check; it's like watching a Mamet film.

And not just in the staginess -- the focus on arbitrary gamesmanship, the physical and emotional cruelty, and the hyper-masculine atmosphere are all Mametesque. (Mametian? Mametish?) The story is about three brothers who meet in an abandoned warehouse to play a ritualized game of physical violence -- the repeated jargon ("Ten acknowledged!" spoken in a triumphant, sneering tone) and rules-lawyering ("You can't call a hold unless a person or animal is actually approaching!" "There's no way you're at H now. I think that was a short count.") was especially true to life, and darkly comical, to us gamers.

The soundtrack was pretty great, too, and for an immensely low-budget film (shot on VHS of all things) the rest of the technical stuff was more than adequate.

The only flaw, such as it was, was that the structure of the film was as brutally simple as the dialogue was oblique. The brothers play their game, the Earl shows up and reverses the dynamic, the end. The film would have benefited from at least one, or ideally two, twists, to play up the gamesmanship of the story, rather than merely the gamesmanship of the setting. Now, this may have been Neveu's point -- that all games end when the powerful refuse to play -- but I think he could have kept (or even reinforced) that theme while still feeding us a little narrative twisty-juice.

All of which said, well worth seeing if it comes to a festival near you. I'd call it a B+ movie with little hesitation, and if you grade on the curve for the budget and such, well, then the movie has definitely taken its ten.

Lord, Lord, Lord was it gorgeous outside in Chicago today. gnosticpi, kaynorr and I celebrated the glorious spring afternoon by sitting in a dark room for two hours, watching A Colt Is My Passport at the Siskel Center.

The film, which I hadn't heard of either until last night, is a kind of pseudo-New Wave gangster flick, directed in 1967 by Takashi Nomura for the Nikkatsu studio, starring Jo Shishido as the puffy-cheeked hitman with a code of honor. (It's not really New Wave, because it doesn't deconstruct its plot or genre, nor do its characters violate their norms in order to validate themselves. Plus it was ignored by critics.) It's the kind of straightforward "Killer B" genre film that in its own way is as predictable and as surprising as Greek tragedy. In addition to its own not-inconsiderable virtues as a movie, it's also a neat grayscale window onto 1960s Tokyo-Yokohama -- Nomura clearly and evocatively limns the docks, the rich gangsters' villas, the offices, and the roads.

It's also fascinating to decode all the films that go into it, many of which are themselves explicitly recursive exercises in Japanoiserie, from Le Samourai to A Fistful of Dollars. (Nomura's film even has a whistling spaghetti-western theme song!) And of course, the films that come out of it, such as (possibly) Don Siegel's equally interesting 1973 crime thriller Charley Varrick (another great movie with an antihero who's just plain smarter than everyone else) and (almost certainly) Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, which (in addition to being yet another case of Japanoiserie) borrows great chunks of the plot and some of the specific bits.

All especially intriguing, given that this movie was considered a cheap throwaway from a second-rate studio. We apparently got to see the only existing 35mm print of the film, and no subtitled version exists. (We got supertitles projected onto the screen, translated by the Japan-American Society of Chicago or some such.) Apparently there's some sort of traveling series of these "Nikkatsu Akushon" films going around the country, and it's the Siskel Center's turn; if they come to your neck of the woods, it's well worth your two hours and your nine bucks, no matter how nice it is outside.

The twenty or so minutes of Jumper that were under the mostly sole control of Doug Liman -- the fight scenes and chase scenes -- are pretty darn good. The rest, not so much; it would be indefensible charity to give the movie anything better than a D+.

A detailed breakdown should be unnecessary, but: Rachel Bilson is certainly easy on the eyes, but like her namesake Rachel (Weisz), she apparently doesn't bother to, you know, act if there's no script. Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell aren't even given parts, so much as portraying bumpers off of which the impenetrable steel pinball that is Hayden Christensen (as terrible as ever!) thuddingly rebounds with only a very occasional "ka-pwing." Diane Lane is wasted with an almost breathtaking profligacy.

Unlike some reviewers, I actually approved of the movie's general churlish refusal to explain anything -- the film is built around disorienting, breakneck experience, after all -- especially since when Tobor the Script-writing Robot did occasionally attempt exposition, he made things worse and dumber. Far better to just see the weird machines and strange extensible Taser-nets and random knifings in the jungle and anonymous mook assassins. Most important, though, the morality of the film is repugnant where it is not merely despicable, and its stupid, brutish protagonist is concomitantly unleavened with any sort of human decency, fellow-feeling, or even charm.¹ Which is certainly a realistic outcome for an adolescent who discovers a superpower that lets him escape the consequences of his actions, but I didn't go see Jumper for the psychological realism.

I went to see it because Doug Liman had, up to now, made only really, really good movies. Consider that string well and truly broken.

The chicken vindaloo at India House, however, was really, really good, balancing the vinegar and the spices on a knife's edge. So between that and those 20 minutes of fights and chases I mentioned above, the evening wasn't entirely wasted.

[1] In this sense, Hayden Christensen is a triumph of casting -- but you can see him play a smug, pouting twerp in Shattered Glass, a vastly superior film, if that's all you want.

So kaynorr and I saw Cloverfield on Saturday. I give it an A- or maybe a B+. It's not as good a monster movie as The Host, and it's not as good a "fantastic verite" as Blair Witch Project, but since both of those movies were of epochal quality, the comparison is perhaps unfair.

(I don't suffer from shaky-cam motion sickness, but the movie gave kaynorr a nasty case of vertigo; so be warned if you are of delicate lights.)

In general, I thought the movie succeeded best where it stayed truest to its vision, the "ant's eye view" of an unbelievable, even unknowable event. Every time it diverged from that, it threw me out of the immersion. Perhaps if I'd gone into it looking for structure and top-down coherence, I might paradoxically have been better able able to stay in the film. Or perhaps if my buddy Matt Colville's impassioned review of it hadn't led me to oversell it to myself; a little more initial cynicism on my part might have served the strategic purpose by crumbling a half-hour in, leaving me defenseless. But that's all by the wayside.

I would argue that for all the obvious parallels both explicit and inexplicit, this isn't a movie about terrorism, at least not in the sense that Gojira is a movie about atomic weapons, or that Alien is a movie about corporations' inhumanity, or that The Host is a movie about the United States. I think it was intended to be about a purer, more primal fear than that, namely the one all three of the other examples also draw upon: Cloverfield is about powerlessness. This shows up in lots of different places, from the obvious to the inobvious, which I will avoid exampling so as not to spoil anything. But again, it's best where it sticks most closely to that vision, which is why (I think) the oft-criticized failure of the viewpoint characters to "act like gamers" and KEEP CROWBAR and GET SHOES works dramatically.

And there's one really, really bravura old-school shocker in there that just works on all cylinders. Yeah, A-minus.

On Sunday, along with bunj, gnosticpi, and bigstokes80 I caught the Doc matinee of The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, and bunj and I stayed for the second matinee, King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Two excellent movies, A+ and A.

What is perhaps most interesting about both of them is the light each sheds on its chosen form. Jesse James is a formally experimental Western in which James is both the outlaw and the gunslinger, creating Bob Ford to kill himself and rid the West of his own barbarity. (Needless to say, this is a myth. So is the whole movie, a glorious myth complete with sacred king killing. The legends and the printing and the glavin.)

In King of Kong, meanwhile, the story presented is so trite, so cliche, so obvious (should it need repeating, none of these are necessarily drawbacks), that like all great documentaries it calls into question the whole epistemology of narrative -- is the truth really that fictional? Do we perceive the True Fiction behind reality, or do we pattern-match Reality until recognizable fictions emerge? And if the latter, why is it always the same damn fiction?

Jesse James should also get huge thumbs up for the sound mixing and sound design -- neglected for some odd reason by the Oscars, which here's hoping get cancelled, or at least drown everyone involved in their own scabby flop-sweat.

Which leads ineluctably to the Top Ten 2007 Films I Saw:

No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Shoot 'Em Up, American Gangster, The King Of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Die Hard 4: Live Free Or Die Hard, Sunshine, and 300.

The Next Best Ten:

The Bourne Ultimatum, Grindhouse, Paris je t'aime, The Mist, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, 28 Weeks Later, Alpha Dog, Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

Despite the real drop-off right around number 14-15, the startlingly high quality of 2007 as a film year can perhaps be judged by the Pirates of the Caribbean slip. Though not appreciably worse than the second installment, Pirates 3 is only the 21st-best 2007 film I saw in 2007, where Pirates 2 made it up to 14th-best in last year's list.

Or you can judge 2007's cinematic puissance by the Ten Best 2007 Films I Haven't Managed To See Yet: Persepolis, Rescue Dawn, The Darjeeling Limited, Michael Clayton, I'm Not There, Helvetica, My Kid Could Paint That, Juno, Ratatouille, and Lust, Caution, which gets the tenth spot mostly because it's easier to punctuate clearly there. (That's why I left the comma out of Paris, je t'aime, at thirteenth place above.) I strongly suspect that a lot of those will belong in my top ten when all is said and done.

On its own recognizance, I'm going to issue National Treasure 2: Book of Silly Buggers a B-minus, even though the Masonic stuff was totally played down, and even though the ending just honest to God makes no earthly sense whatsoever.

The villain (an Ed Harris who seems occasionally struck by crippling shame of the "wasn't I up for an Oscar once?" sort that transiently hampers his sketchy characterization) is descended from Albert Pike, but the movie doesn't tell the viewer who he is -- it's essentially an Easter Egg for those of us who know and love him as one of the great usual suspects in old-school American conspiracy theory.¹ And Harvey Keitel throws nary a Masonic high-sign throughout. But there's a shout-out to Calvin Coolidge, Awesome Secret Carpentry, a hilarious scene in which Nicolas Cage argues assassination theory with a ten-year-old boy, and Helen Mirren. Its basic skill in inventing plausible new conspiracy theories (harder than it looks) should not be underestimated -- the "President's Book" is estimably established.

And for fans of the first movie, there's three pell-mell caper sequences, instinctive melodramatic patriotism, even more bits where the characters call shenanigans on their own dialogue, Diane Kruger doing her uncanny increasingly-easy-on-the-eyes bit, and Nicolas Cage further encrazifying his "History Channel Tourette's Syndrome" idiot-savant character.

What this movie is, is a Jerry Bruckheimer class in making cinematic sausage. It doesn't bear close examination at all, but it surely ain't terrible, and it fries up good and greasy, which is just what you want on a cold winter's day.

[1] Alleged Luciferian Satanist, Illuminati stooge, treasonous agent of the British Royal Family, Knight of the Golden Circle, Founding Klansman, and prime impetus behind the Scottish Rite Masons in America -- the list goes on and on. And if Gen'ral Pike objects to being dragged into all this foolishness, he shouldn't have been writing anti-Catholic conspiracy theory when he was alive. Live by the innuendo, die by the innuendo, Confederate jackass.