Exclusive Interview: Jon Russell Cring and Anna Shields Discuss Indie Film Projects

by Brett Parker

Anna Shields was a last minute replacement for the lead role in Jon Russell Cring’s R.I.D., the first installment in his skin-crawling anthology of delirious terror, Creeping Crawling.  Cring really lucked out with this acting discovery, for Shields proves to be the sexually vibrant cherry atop Cring’s sundae of demented and unsettling horror treats.  Instead of relying on gotcha scares and generic familiarities, Cring pushes to build a feverish nightmare fueled by slow-burn disturbances.  Within every step of this crazed fun house, Shields rides each creepy wave with an alarming colorfulness.  With her classical blonde looks, Shields elevates the material with a bubbly alertness and animated resourcefulness thats like watching Jean Harlow trapped on Shutter Island.

What this beautiful star and her horror-flick helmer probably didn’t anticipate was that this collaboration would not only produce a fruitful actor-director relationship, but also a filmmaking team that reflects each other’s passionate drive and creativity.  For as Cring was working to complete the rest of his Creeping Crawling trilogy (with Grubbery and Bugger making up the second and third installments, respectively), Shields presented him with a script for Little Bi Peep, a heartfelt and modern peek at a young woman who lives her life as a bisexual.  Cring not only loved the script, but encouraged Shields to produce and co-direct her very own starring vehicle by any means necessary.  Cring cheerfully showed her the ropes of mounting one’s very first film production all while trying to get his own horror anthology across the finish line.

Linked by the hardships of making a low budget feature and the creative zest in bringing cinematic visions to life, I decided to sit down with Cring and Shields on a recent summer afternoon to discuss both of their film projects.  By focusing on their thematically-different yet equally-inspired productions, the duo was able to highlight the stresses of pre-production, the process of fundraising, and the reasons why any average joe with passion can make their very own movie:

You two worked together on the first installment in the Creeping Crawling trilogy, R.I.D.  How did the actor-director relationship work out between you two?  What did you learn from that specific process?

JON: I found Anna basically because she was recommended to me by my friend James Pentaudi.  I was looking for somebody because someone else had fallen through on the role due to medical reasons.  I needed someone and I didn’t want to cancel my shoot.  I had only two days to go and James said “you have to come meet this girl, Anna Shields.”  When I met her, I knew she had something about her.  She’s kind of has an old Hollywood thing, because she’s beautiful, funny, sexy, yet not afraid to be super self-deprecating and it was a great combination.  When people meet Anna, they tend to surface her.  They think “this is all she is,” but she has a lot of layers underneath her.  I felt like the character in R.I.D. was exactly the same way, for Dori Dixon was a woman who put up a normal front to be like everyone else, yet underneath her there was all this darkness that was bubbling up from the bottom, so I felt Anna was a great choice for that.

ANNA: Meeting Jon, I just felt there was this cool, calm understanding between us, like, from day one.  There was some sort of connection.  I remember right off the bat, right after we read the script together, I compared it to some movie and you agreed and there was this basis off of that and I think it was just a big comfortability factor....

JON: We’re best friends, basically!  Anna and I didn’t know we were best friends until we actually met each other!

ANNA: [laughs] Exactly!  Yeah, so there was this initial connection and it worked great on set, and I think we made something great out of it!

JON: Anna is doing a Hollywood film right now, she has another movie coming up...I mean, some people just have “it!”  They have star quality, they are the kind of people that, if the stars align, you’ll see them on the cover of magazines.  

What do you look for in an actor as a director?

JON: I look for a combination of a seriousness about the material and a levity about themselves.

Anna, what do you look for in a director?

ANNA: Someone who has everything planned out for a movie and is just able to get that across to an actor who also probably has the same ideas but doesn’t really come to that idea right off the bat.

JON: It’s all about being easy to work with.  I always ask Anna about past film experiences, “did your director actually direct?”  And most of the time she says....

ANNA: No! [laughs] 

JON: It’s like the idea of the director has been lost.  What exactly does a director do?  Really all I’m concerned about is performance, performance, performance, and trying to get the actor to surprise me.

ANNA: And an actor just wants someone who can translate clearly to the actor what they need to be doing.   

R.I.D. was completed last year and screened at a premiere in Albany, NY.  What did you guys think of the finished product and how people reacted to it?

ANNA: My first time seeing it on the big screen was the first time I saw it, actually.  I was completely blown away, in a positive way.  In the short interval that we shot it, I was amazed by how good it looked and everything.  It looked exactly how I thought it should look after the first time I read the script.

JON: I was shocked by how tiny Anna’s underwear was!

ANNA: [laughs] I was shocked too!

After R.I.D. was complete, you guys went off to follow your own independent film projects to bring your own unique visions to life.  Jon, I understand that the entire Creeping Crawling trilogy is now officially in the can.  Were there any new challenges you faced while filming the other two that you didn’t experience the first time around?  Are there any mistakes you made on the first film that you went to great lengths to prevent from happening with the other two?

JON: One of the big issues I had on the first film was that it was underpopulated.  Because of a freak snow storm we had on October 26th, we had to change scenes in which we would’ve had a lot of our extras.  Thats one thing about independent film, it can’t look like a porn!  You can’t just shoot it against, like, a black wall and say “that’s a movie!”  Movies are populated, they have a lot of people in them.  That was a big issue on R.I.D. and we wanted to fix that.  So we made sure we went to some great locations on Grubbery and Bugger and we made sure that the films were a lot more populated.  

I’m extremely excited about getting Raine Brown, a horror movie icon who’s all over Fangoria.  She was incredible, she came with a lot of ideas and opinions about how she wanted her character to be and it was really fun working with her.  So Bugger became a very funny story then Grubbery turned out to be a very dark story.  You never really know how something is going to turn out to be until you finish shooting it.  In October, we’ll be doing a run of the films and introducing the world to them!  They will see things in Creeping Crawling that I guarantee they have never seen on film before!  So that’s always exciting for me, to push the limits, surprise people, maybe gross them out, and reveal the human experience.

Will we be seeing more girls in their underwear?

JON: I won’t really get into that, just to say that maybe you’ll be seeing more girls OUT of their underwear!

Anna, right now you are working on your first writing-directing endeavor on film with Little Bi Peep, which is the story of a young woman and her lifestyle as a bisexual.  You are currently funding this project through Indiegogo.  What is the funding process like for a project with a decidedly sexual subject matter?

ANNA: I’ve never done anything on the business side of films before and there’s so many tricks to marketing things a certain way and so we had to find a hook that maybe I hadn’t initially thought of when I wrote it, so we’ve sort of been trying to adapt the movie to that.  But yeah, we’ve been funding through Indiegogo, which has gone pretty well, and we’ve just been trying to get the word out there.  Like any kind of connection you have, you just kind of push this project like “hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while, but here’s this project I’ve been working on...” [laughs] So you try to see what connections your connections have and it turns into this tree of marketing.  We’ve also been talking to a couple of people who could possibly help produce, so its just been this giant web of inter-marketing!

JON: We call it a LGBT, but when she wrote it, that wasn’t what it was initially about.  Anna wrote it as a character piece about her experiences and the experiences of other people that she knows and the LGBT market just seemed obvious for this particular story.  So thats kind of the direction where we’re taking it, but we also want to do something almost like Juno or Ghost World with that kind of look and feel.

CHASING AMY springs to my mind, for that’s a well-known film that dealt with bisexuality.

JON: Yeah, well you know Chasing Amy is very much a straight man writing a story about being gay.  That’s cool, but its a completely different mindset than someone who’s actually in the light.

ANNA: And that’s exactly what I was trying to write about!  It wasn’t just about an LGBT stance, but also a young person’s stance in general.  You know, sexual encounters within the current times of a younger generation.  So it was about me nailing that down, as opposed to someone in their 60s trying to nail it down! 

JON: And its like what you said in the campaign that I found very interesting: “in relationships, you start with sex.”

ANNA: Right, so then what are relationships after sex?

JON: Cause nowadays, its not unusual for someone to have slept with someone by the third date!

Both of you guys have gone through the process of funding a film and trying to put complicated pre-production plans together.  Do you feel these are tasks that any artistic person with passion can pull off, or do you need to be a lawyer or accountant to get this all together?

JON: Any artistic person can!  You have to have the experience of making all the lists, writing down all the names, and doing all the organization.  You have to have that experience to know that it can be done.  Everything has to be demystified!  It has to stop being about inspiration after a certain point and it has to start being about “okay, this is what we need to do to get this done!”

ANNA: Right!  Because so many filmmakers today write their own scripts, buy their own camera, they just do it.  They’re not sitting around trying to rely on big-time producers to get things done.

Anna, what’s it like starting out as a first-time filmmaker?  Are there more frustrations than pleasures?  What kind of things would you warn other aspiring filmmakers about?

ANNA: It can be frustrating, but I think its all going to pay off.  I think I would tell people to never lose any connection they ever made because you’re probably going to need to count on it again!  I think its all about getting out there and talking and just knocking out that self-deprecating way you look at yourself and assume that everyone wants to hear what you’re talking about.  That’s a giant thing that I’m trying to learn.  

JON: Anna is an asshole in training, while I am a professional asshole! [laughs]  I would say Anna is a minor league asshole and I’m trying to get her into the majors!

ANNA: [laughs] Right!  Just trying to vocalize inner-sarcastic thoughts right now!

That brings up an important question: do you have to be an asshole to get a film project done?

JON: Well I think one definition of an asshole is someone who knows what they want to do and believes that they can do it.  I don’t think “niceness” has anything to do with it.  I’m the nicest person in the world, but I also am somebody who believes that they have a voice and believes that other people have a voice that should be heard.

ANNA: And I think either way wins you points, because if you are an asshole, you can go and voice your thoughts to the greatest extent you can or if you’re nice about it, people can be into that, too.

JON: Yeah, absolutely.  I am never mean to anybody, I don’t believe its necessary or important.  But I also don’t let myself be stomped out like a fire.  I am going to burn!  If you’re a pile of embers and you’re mad at me because I’m a fire, thats your problem!  But I’m not gonna bring my fire down just to make you feel better about yourself!  

So when all is said and done, what are your ultimate hopes for the future of your projects?  In a year from now, where would you like to see yourselves artistically and professionally?

JON: After Creeping Crawling, I have a short film that I’m working on called Carnival.  As far as whats happening with Creeping Crawling, I’m definitely going to seek distribution on that.  And, I’m just trying to make bigger and better films.  I want to get more people involved and have more energy behind projects.  I love what Roger Corman did, you know?  There’s a whole generation of filmmakers who wouldn’t be making movies if it weren’t for Roger Corman and his process of encouraging people.  You know, Anna sent me this script and had written something that wasn’t her.  Its like she was trying to make a commercial movie.  And I said to her, “this is SHIT!”

ANNA: [laughs] I think you compared it to Abduction with Taylor Lautner!

JON: Exactly!  It was a terrible script!  It had a plot, but it was terrible!  So I said to you, “write yourself, write what you know.”  And literally, two days later she sent me this incredible script!  She knew exactly what she wanted to write about!  There’s a whole generation of people who need that opportunity for someone to say “look, if you write something awesome, I want to totally get behind that!”

ANNA: I want to see my project in the festivals.  I think this is a big festival piece and that’s kind of what we’re aiming it for.  I also want people from the LGBT community to see it, cause there’s not too many LGBT movies around, so it’d be a reassurance if everyone comes and find that its a good one!

JON: I think Little Bi Peep is going to appeal to everyone because its a movie about sex.  I like sexy movies, I like movies that aren’t afraid to play with that idea of how intimacy and sex relate to each other.

ANNA: But its also about relationships, and the way people misjudge relationships whether they’re just about sex, which a lot of them are, or whether there is something more to them, including the lies people tell each other within them.

JON: Hopefully, someday we won’t even have to say that “this is an LGBT film.”  It will feel like its just another movie.  I mean, no one ever goes, “hey, this is just a firefighter movie!  It’s for firefighters, so we’re marketing it just for firefighters!”  It’s sound just as stupid to say such a thing about a LGBT film, but thats where were at right now in this country, and hopefully we can get past that “firefighter” phase.

You think we’re still in such a “firefighter” phase?  You don’t think people have become more accepting of such subject matter?

ANNA: I think a little more, but I think we’re still in it as well.  Just look at The L Word, its literally named after “lesbian!”  You know?  Its marketed specifically for that.  I think we’re getting more and more into an age where thats more acceptable, but to just throw it into a movie as a minor thing isn’t exactly marketable.

For more information on Little Bi Peep, check out http://www.indiegogo.com/littlebipeepmovie and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2262078/

For more information on Creeping Crawling, check out http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234035/

To read Jon Russell Cring's previous interview with The Cinephile New York, check out http://thecinephilenewyork.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-interview-filmmaker-jon.html

Not the 'Lincoln' You Remember From History Class

by Brett Parker

I’ve heard all the snickers, groans, and bickering over the prospect of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, for the general consensus over the past few weeks appears to be that the film simultaneously represents creative bankruptcy in Hollywood, an abomination of our national history, and cinematic cheese jumping the shark.  To be honest, I’m more irked by the people who complain about the film’s premise than the actual film’s existence itself.  Where’s our sense of humor?  Anyone bringing an ounce of seriousness to this enterprise is forgetting that most Hollywood thrill-rides are built on magnificent ridiculousness, and they should at least admire the cheerful way this historical mash-up is reveling in its own insanity.  As far as the Steampunk genre goes, the film finds a very entertaining vibe from its historical resources.  If Sherlock Holmes can dish out Kung-Fu and Edgar Allen Poe can get his Silence of the Lambs on, then I’m all for our Honest Abe chopping off vampire heads with an axe.  

We first witness the young Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) as a man haunted by the death of his mother, Nancy (Robin McLeavy).  Years earlier as a child, Lincoln witnessed an evil vampire named Jack Barts (Marton Csokas) sucking her blood dry to repay a debt owed by his father, Thomas (Joseph Mawie).  As an adult, Lincoln wants to seek revenge, but has no idea what he’s up against.  By chance, he meets a mysterious gentleman named Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper) who is quite the expert on hunting and killing vampires.  He agrees to train Lincoln in the art of vampire combat if he vows to destroy more vampires beyond the one that killed his mother.  Lincoln agrees, and after bouts of training, he becomes an axe-twirling warrior who expertly disposes of an alarming number of evil bloodsuckers.  

All of this hunting leads Lincoln to discover than an ancient vampire named Adam (Rufus Sewell) is plotting to take over America through his forces in the southern U.S.  Vampires favor slavery, for it provides them with countless warm bodies to feed on without anyone really noticing, and they hope to expand that enterprise all over the country.  Lincoln realizes he must take his anti-vampire stance to a whole new level.  He rises up through the ranks of government to become President of the United States, taking a firm anti-slavery stance to fend off his ghoulish foes.  Realizing their opposing strength, he oversees the Civil War to make sure the south is defeated and slavery is abolished.  With the assistance of his childhood friend and right-hand-man, Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie), Lincoln carries out his epic war against the vampire nation, all while keeping it a secret from his beloved wife, Mary (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

Producer Tim Burton had the right idea when he compared this flick to the blaxploitation mashup Blacula, for the basic idea is to marry together two incongruent but very entertaining genres of cinema and see what bizarro fun can be generated from the result.  As a fusion of historical epics and action horror, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t half-bad.  It doesn’t feel like the easiest marriage of opposite ideals, but its never boring and it presents the logic of its atmosphere with a surprisingly clarity.  Part of me wonders if this film would’ve been better had it been built on broad humor in the style of Mel Brooks or The Naked Gun films.  It takes itself pretty seriously in a hyperbolic action-thriller way, and perhaps we missed out on a great deal of laughs in the process.  Yet the more I think about it, a silly comedy version probably wouldn’t have been all too funny, and the hard-boiled tough guy treats we’re actually given does a good job at making this deranged cartoon premise exciting.  

Perhaps its an advantage that foreigner Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) is in the director’s chair here.  An American director probably would’ve been slightly more timid about tinkering with his own heritage, putting a leash on action indulgences and being more meticulous about historical accuracy syncing up with supernatural ideas.  Yet the Kazakhstan-born Bekmambetov clearly has no qualms about pushing one of our greatest national heroes into feverish lunacy, and he cheerfully places our 16th president in his comfort zone of grandiose action overkill.  Bekmambetov’s Wanted was one of the most over-the-top action movies I’ve ever seen: a sleek, kinetic ballet of slam-bang scenes that could never, ever occur in a realistic universe (hell, it strained plausibility in a movie universe, if you know what I mean).  Oddly, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is also founded on such impossible action.  While the sequences here are clunkier than Wanted, they’re still a hell of a sight to see in a historical fantasy.  A vampire chase across a stampede of horses and Lincoln dishing out beheadings in a southern mansion pumps up our adrenaline until the film’s climax sneaks over into Lethal Weapon territory with a flame-inducing brawl on a fateful train ride.  

With this film and Wanted, Bekmambetov is clearly in love with the idea of a sincere young simpleton finding liberation and purpose after morphing into a gritty tough guy.  Since that represents the basic fantasy of male moviegoers who turn up religiously to action pictures, having it literalized on the screen can add excitement to any frivolous thrill ride.  What’s surprising here is not only how it fits and enhances the crazy concept so well, but how it also deepens our appreciation of Lincoln’s legacy, as opposed to the opposite effect.  Credit for that must largely be given to the superb Benjamin Walker, who pulls off the main schizophrenic balancing act with a heroically straight-face.  It’s a testament to his skill that we can see him playing either a true-blue sincere version of Lincoln (especially if Daniel Day-Lewis had to back out of Spielberg’s upcoming biopic about the president) or a sketch-comedy concoction of the man.  That he can reconcile both of those aspects into a a package of open-faced alertness and remarkable leading man poise is nothing to sneeze at.  Ironically, this isn’t even the first time he’s played a deliriously-skewered portrayal of an American President, for he starred in the Broadway hit, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  Bringing level-headed magnetism to demented pop manifestations is the mark of a good actor, and I’m excited to see what Walker brings to us in the future.

I like to think that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t complete nonsense, but actually has thoughts to spare about our current business of American myth-making.  Whats telling about our current times is that people seem to care more about superhero mythologies than they do about American history.  Most schoolchildren probably couldn’t name all the U.S. Presidents, but they could recite the names of The Avengers--along with their secret identities--almost as a reflex action.  It makes sense, then, that this modern-day movie about Abraham Lincoln is essentially a superhero film, in which a damaged soul turns to a life of righteous ass-kicking to squash evil and protect all that is good in this world.  The tipoff comes when we realize that the scene first showing Lincoln with his iconic dark suit, beard, and stovetop hat holds the same cinematic allure of seeing Batman in his costume for the first time.  Re-imagining Lincoln’s legacy in the mold of a superhero tale shrewdly allows lesser minds to reflect on his heroic deeds and his importance as a man in American history.  

Another effect this strange premise achieves is that it plays out good old-fashioned American conspiracy theorizing to its absolute breaking point.  Entire books and television specials have been devoted to secret conspiracies hidden throughout history that make The Da Vinci Code look like a John Hughes movie.  Most people find it ridiculous to imagine Lincoln as a vampire slayer, yet an alarming number of right-wingers have no trouble buying that President Obama is a secret Communist overlord plotting to destroy democracy.  By taking the ultimate absurd conspiracy theory and mapping it out with halfway-seriousness, we are able to hint at the mountains of implausibility and murkiness that arises when an actual conspiracy is visualized.  I’m not saying all conspiracies are mirthless, but I imagine most paranoid grumblings would look as silly as the vampire plot expanded out here.

To the people that think this film will skewer Lincoln’s legacy and make people more stupid about history, I must clarify that this movie fueled a curiosity in me to do extensive research about the real-life Lincoln and seek out the actual facts about one of our finest leaders.  So don’t let anyone ever tell you that trash serves no purpose.  Either way, you have to realize that this is all in good summer movie fun.  As Inglorious Basterds cheerfully pointed out, if we go to the movies for a history lesson, we’re usually getting a skewered version of actual events.  Hell, I bet even Spielberg’s upcoming “serious” biopic about Lincoln will probably sentimentalize the actual truth.  As with most Hollywood pop, the important thing is to understand the whole-hearted difference between real life and make-believe, and here its wise to know what this great man actually achieved as this flick wickedly suggests otherwise.  Once you’ve done that, feel free to put your brain on autopilot and enjoy some sweet vampire beheadings!

The 'Boy' Who Won't Grow Up

by Brett Parker

That’s My Boy is the latest low-brow and cheerfully delirious Adam Sandler yuk fest that comes to us packed with a hard-R rating, a rare occurrence in the junior-high-school-class-clown universe Sandler himself has institutionalized into our culture.  Since Sandler’s exuberantly callow comedies speak directly to the slobbish 12-year-olds in all of us, they never truly needed raw adult content to garner appeal (after all, he’d be preventing a great deal of his teenage audience from buying tickets).  Yet after the weakness of his most recent comedies, particularly the undeniable stink of Jack and Jill, Sandler probably felt an urgent need to return to the gut-busting irreverence of his earlier pictures with hedge-betting assistance from anything-goes raunchiness.  Whether you see this move as calculation or desperation, the film itself is actually pretty damn funny.  It’s rude, crude, foul-mouthed, immature, trashy, sloppy, boneheaded, and offends all kinds of tastes...and I loved every minute of it!

The film opens in 1984, where we see a 12-year-old trouble maker named Donny (Justin Weaver) serving detention for his older hottie teacher, Miss McGarricle (Eva Amurri Martino).  Donny lets it known to her that he has a crush on her and is shocked to discover that she wants him just as bad.  Pretty soon, to his utter surprise, Donny is having sex with his dream teacher on the regular.  Its not soon before their secret relationship is discovered though, along with the revelation that Miss McGarricle is pregnant with Donny’s child.  McGarricle is sent off to women’s prison while Donny is ordered to take custody of his child when he himself turns 18.  Yet Donny’s trysts with a much older teacher turns him into a national sensation and he becomes the unlikeliest celebrity this side of Kim Kardashian.  Needless to say, Donny’s strange celebrity status prevents him from maturity and being a proper father.

Cut to 2012.  The older Donny (Adam Sandler) is revealed to be a slobbish 80s relic whose been coasting on his celebrity name to put off getting an actual job for years.  His  laziness proves to do him in, however, when its revealed that he owes the IRS over $40, 000.  It’s also discovered around this time that Donny’s long estranged son, Todd (Andy Samberg), is now a successful businessman whose about to marry a woman from a rich family (Leighton Meester).

Donny secretly hatches a sneaky plan to use his successful son to help him obtain the money.  This plan involved Donny crashing his son’s wedding preparation week on Cape Cod.  When he shows up, Todd is furious to see him, but is forced to introduce him to the in-laws as his “best friend.”  Donny tries to reconcile with his boy, but the uptight Todd is still resentful of his lowlife father, one who allowed obesity and a New Kids on the Block tattoo to plague him in his youth.  Running low on options, Donny figures the best thing to do is to liven up Todd’s richie surroundings.  What ensues is a week filled with drinking, brawling, strippers, wild sex, shootings, and a whole lot of bodily fluids.  Amidst this chaos, it appears there might be a chance that Todd can loosen up after all and perhaps, miraculously, get along with his father.

Sandler’s buffoonish universe is a world of comedy I’ve always bought into.  The hidden complication within every Sandler comedy is how an outcast goofball can stay true to his ideals in a confusing, contradictive grown-up world.  Of course the grown-up worlds depicted in his films are usually hostile and demented environments which make him look more sane by contrast.  Yet audiences don’t seem to mind these hyperrealities, for our everyday plights can seem just as magnificently ridiculous in our own eyes.  Plus, the hilarious and sentimental ways Sandler’s heroes usually deal with an uncertain world help provide us with a certain amount of inspiration.  In a way, perhaps the idea of a Sandler hero, along with the growing trends of romantic leading everymen and deeply humanized superheroes, have contributed to this current generation’s favoring of unapologetic, scruffy individuality over rigorously traditional societal archetypes.  

Lately, his films have lost a certain comic zest and have settled into an uninspired laxness.  These comedies were never meant to be taken seriously, but their growing complacency with their own frivolousness have allowed a mind-numbing lameness to infect the material.  As some of my friends have pointed out, its as if all the cheesy films his movie star character made in Funny People were now being produced for real.  Thankfully, an R-rating has brought some of that old juice back into Sandler’s world, as That’s My Boy delivers the jolly chaos that made us treasure his films in the first place.

On the surface, That’s My Boy plays like a dirtier version of Mr. Deeds, with Sandler once again demonstrating that old comic ideal that uninhibited everyman hedonism is the perfect antidote to stuffy upper-class emptiness.  Perhaps on a deeper level, however, Sandler is putting his old-school self out there to show the next generation how scrappy hilarity should be done.  Maybe its no coincidence that his character is a fading jokester determined to show his apparent heir how to loosen the hell up and enjoy the perks of running wild.  This theory is helped by the fact that his son is played by Andy Samberg, a comic talent bred by the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live.  Samberg is a likeable comic talent, but I have my reservations about what SNL thinks its good for these days.  The current crop of comedians on the legendary NBC show are good with ideas, but have little clue how to bring big laughs to life.  Perhaps a lesson in Sandler’s gleeful lunacy would benefit that whole crew as well as most comedians of today.  

Since most of the supporting characters in Sandler’s nuthouse universe are seen as outsized weirdos, it beautifully allows talented actors a chance to cut loose and get down with the weirdness.  The snarling fink role thats a staple in these comedies is this time filled by Milo Ventimiglia as Todd’s future brother-in-law.  Ventimiglia audaciously pokes fun at modern day soldiers all while concealing hilariously outrageous secrets.  James Caan brings a stunningly quiet conviction to the role of a brawling priest and the result is even more hilarious than if the role were played more over-the-top.  Vanilla Ice turns up as himself, and while his real life washed-up-ness can get tiresome at times, he’s thankfully just here to party and he certainly livens things up.  Rex Ryan’s hilarious cameo as Donny’s lawyer shows that he can nail the film’s biggest acting challenge, for the real life coach of the New York Jets is convincing as a New England Patriots fan.  And if the gorgeous Eva Amurri Martino has even half the acting chops of her mother, Susan Surandon (who turns up here in a logical appearance), then she’ll be a real pleasure to behold in future movies.

With a wild bachelor party that involves excessive urination and gunfire and one of the funniest masturbation scenes I’ve ever seen, Sandler has jumped back into the thick of his guy’s-guy humor, and I consider that a comic blessing.  At a time when snarky randomness and toothless improv is running wild, perhaps Sandler’s messy manchild rambunctiousness is just what the comic doctor ordered.  I recall that Happy Gilmore is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.  It’s one of the few films that I could watch at random over the past decade and lose-my-breath from laughing every single time.  It had a furious silliness and mad-dog preposterousness that didn’t let up for one single second.  R-rated Sandler ventures may alienate some of his core audience, but if they can conjure up even half the laughs of that earlier powerhouse comedy, then I say more power to the dude.

The Vapid Awe of 'Prometheus'

by Brett Parker

You really have to hand it to Ridley Scott here, for the old pro figured out how to sell a pointless Hollywood remake to an audience usually weary of such an enterprise.  With Prometheus, he has basically rehashed his old Alien premise into a sleek new exterior using old science and space philosophies to distract us from the basic genre servings at hand.  Gussying up an old car and turning it into a shiny new Rolls Royce is a tricky thing to pull off in Hollywood, usually because we tend to notice that the engine under the hood has some rust and wear.  A lot of secrecy surrounded the production of this film, and Scott was clearly hoping that all the talk of whether or not Prometheus was or wasn’t a direct prequel to Alien would distract from the fact that the real surprise with this new film is that it can’t come close to being as pulse-pounding or as horrifying as Alien to save its life.  

The film follows the crew of an epic spaceship named Prometheus as it journeys far into space towards the moon of an alien planet.  A duo of scientists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered a star map found in the drawings of ancient and unconnected civilizations that may or may not be an invitation from humankind’s “makers” or “engineers” to find out the truth about their beginnings.  Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce), the wealthy tycoon of a vast corporation, is also interested in finding out the answers to such mysteries and funds an elaborate space expedition to follow this map and see if anything is at the other end.  With a team full of scientists under the command of Captain Janek (Idris Elba) and the watchful eye of Weyland’s representative, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the crew heads to a rocky and desert-like alien land to see if anything profound is lurking beneath the surface.

What they stumble across is a seemingly-ancient pyramid hidden below the moon’s surface which suggests traces of an alien civilization.  What is especially curious about the pyramid is how one of its monuments resembles a giant humanoid head and how gooey liquids found within hold traces of human DNA.  But as the scientists go about their research, it becomes quickly clear that hostile forces begin stalking them in this strange new world.  Alien lifeforms begin infecting certain crew members and viciously attacking others.  Chaos quickly erupts aboard the ship and the scientists frantically realize that in order to survive, they must hurry to find answers from the alien civilization they’ve been studying.  But as they get closer to discovering the truth, things turn out to be bleaker than they expected.

What’s most frustrating about Prometheus is that it presents us with deep questions about creation and existence but has no idea what they’re good for.  The script isn’t terribly provocative with its ideas and doesn’t challenge traditional boundaries of science fiction.  Scott was perhaps relying on ambiguity, and maybe perhaps his trademark cynicism, to hide the fact that he doesn’t really hold any interesting answers to these big questions.  The film sustains suspense with the prospect of the characters “meeting their Makers,” but once we finally get up close and personal with our Makers, they have nothing to say and possess the deranged hostility of a werewolf.  Their grand scheme for mankind is only hinted at by the characters, and it not only seems ridiculously excessive but owes more to sci-fi dopiness then to deep philosophical musings.  The deep revelation here, so far as I can tell, is that Prometheus himself would’ve bitterly regretted his decision to give mankind fire and would’ve passionately kicked our asses out of spite.

What’s befuddling to me is that a film that proclaims to be a new-age Alien, made by the very filmmaker who made Alien in the first place, is absolutely nowhere near as scary as the earlier film.  What’s stranger is that it doesn’t even appear to try.  Alien is routinely featured on lists of the Scariest Movies Ever Made and is indeed a master-class in nail-biting suspense, jolting scares, and ominous dread.  Even if Scott copped to copying the beats and rhythms of Alien’s horror bit by bit, it would still hold a lot more entertainment value than what we’re given, especially for unsuspecting audiences that haven’t seen the original.  But Scott is clearly kidding himself that the script’s vapid philosophical musings are too important to succumb to the genre’s thrills.  The moments that are considered “scares” by default are clumsy, simple-minded, and surprisingly flatfooted.  

Even the lesser Alien sequels were keenly aware that creature-feature ickiness was half this enterprise’s meal ticket.  If nothing else, ticket buyers could expect some delicious alien gross-outs to deliver some grins.  Prometheus is considerably light in that area as well.  Considering how the original film’s moneyshot scene of a baby alien bursting through a guys’ stomach was just the tip of the iceberg, you do feel considerably short-changed here.  While the Makers themselves have an alluringly-pale humanoid look, the hostile aliens look like creature-design hand-me-downs that support Tim Burton’s theory of how movie monsters today are too complicated-looking.  These alien baddies come in small spurts and aren’t nearly as viciously terrifying as the treasured space jockeys from the original Alien.  

If there’s one supreme moment that does rekindle some of that old Alien magic, its one in which Elizabeth must race against the clock to remove an alien fetus trapped inside her body.  The graphically-surgical way in which Elizabeth cuts into herself and the gooey monstrosity she yanks out from her insides in the only moment that is able to combine the original film’s blend of intensified suspense and stomach-turning nausea.  The scene also highlights Rapace’s expert combination of vulnerability and resilience she displayed so wonderfully in Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  If she is indeed representing a new-age Sigourney Weaver, then she makes for a damn fine candidate.

Of course Rapace’s magnetism is the tip-off to the true interest with Prometheus: the endlessly-fascinating inner-motives of the layered characters and the expert way their handled by the marvelous cast.  The best character, and the best reason to see this film, is David, a cold and calculating human-like android played with creative precision by the dynamite Michael Fassbender.  An expertly-advanced robot with undercurrents of shady motives, Fassbender delivers this soulfully-challenged mannequin as a mix of both Hal 9000 and Lawrence of Arabia.  It says something that his daily routine of maintaining the spaceship while his human counterparts sleep in hibernation is more interesting than any alien attack in this movie.  Guy Pearce effectively brings a level-headed clarity to the magnificent egotism of the trillionare who funded this epic space mission, although part of you wonders why Scott didn’t find an older actor to play the part, considering his eventual nature.  Charlize Theron holds a sinister beauty as the corporate overseer of the mission, although its worth noting that her recent efforts to portray cold-hearted nasties (with this film and Snow White and The Huntsman) holds nothing on the one she dished out in Young Adult.  And Idris Elba, that great masculine smoothie, is allowed some irreverent fun as the ship’s captain.  Whether he’s trading sexual quips with Theron or showing concealed concern around Rapace, Elba shows us he could play Han Solo in his sleep.

Whatever success Prometheus does, in fact, achieve is due mostly to Ridley Scott’s expert evocation of grand, detailed environments.  As with Gladiator and Blade Runner, Prometheus is an epic world of grand sights, but with a lived-in quality that brings a startling realism to an excessive world.  The vastly minute details of the spaceship wonderfully convinces you that its a fully-functional ship while the pyramid ship from the Makers evokes a convincing ancient quality about it.  The film’s various hologram displays have a graphic beauty about them, none more powerful than in the scene where David is able to visualize the Makers’ mapping systems in the hull of their ship.  Yet Scott isn’t just a remarkable window decorator but is unique in the way he conveys how human values buried in worlds of dread, cynical motives, and imminent hostility have ways of jolting to the surface.  He tries to bring sincerity to those themes here, but the film’s lack of strong ideological footing undermines his trademark ideals.

Scott doesn’t falter when it comes to alluring character bits and the grand beauty of vast  atmospheres, and those features here feel damn well strong enough to give Prometheus a recommendation.  It’s just a shame that the film has very little to say about its bigger ideas, although you certainly admire that such big ideas were even evoked in the first place.  So whether or not this film is indeed a prequel or reworking or whatever of Alien, it doesn’t come close to touching that far superior film (even the ending’s gratuitous and obvious link between the two films makes you groan more than smile).  But it does have its visual beauty, and its perhaps the kind of sci-fi eye candy you could enjoy more if you were to watch it on mute.  

'The Avengers' Bring the Action

by Brett Parker

What is first and foremost impressive about The Avengers movie is the very sight of so many single, popular Marvel superheroes gathered up into one giant flick.  Sure, a movie like X-Men also contains a collective group of heroes within the same picture, but those characters were already part of the same property, you see.  To bring all the Avengers together in the same film, Marvel had to pull off a symphony of legal wrangling, rights clearance, star scheduling, plot interweavings, and comic synergy.  The pay-off of seeing these all-stars under the same roof is truly spellbinding.  There’s a scene towards the end where the camera swoops down in a single-take to find Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow pounding on alien baddies invading New York City, and the 12-year-old inside me was thrilled out of his mind!

Of course, for most fanboys, the icing on the cake is the fact that these heroes have all been rounded up under the watchful eye of beloved pop maestro Joss Whedon.  For those that don’t know, Whedon is the poetically fun creator of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly who forever altered the cultural landscape with the grand fusions of humor and heart he brings to his mythic worlds.  Whedon can’t help but let big laughs and stunning humanity fly from his characters as they go about dealing with comic book situations.  If you’re not familiar with Whedon’s work and wonder why him directing this franchise is such a big deal, look no further than Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the micro-budget musical web miniseries Whedon created that starred Neil Patrick Harris as a lovelorn supervillian.  That little internet ditty astonishingly packed more poignancy and heartache than its more big-budget commercial counterparts.  If Whedon could pull off such a feat on such a small budget, imagine what he could do with unlimited resources!

Whedon’s pop musings can be so profound and transcendent that my ultimate hope for The Avengers was for the producers to get the hell out of Whedon’s way and let him work his untampered magic on these classical characters.  But I ended up feeling a tad disappointed, for the final result certainly doesn’t feel that way.  It feels like Whedon was summoned to look after plot tidying between big-budget action pieces.  If this is, in fact, Whedon in free reign mode, then its mildly surprising to see him get so caught up in a dizzying plot that would make even a 10-year-old ask for more substance.  Of course, all of this is done in an highly entertaining fashion.  When it comes to eye-popping, heart-rushing superhero shows, you can’t say that Whedon doesn’t deliver the goods, but forgive me for believing that the man is capable of delivering so much more than whats here.

The film opens with the Fallen Norse God Loki (Tom Hiddleston) penetrating our world through an inter-dimensional portal.  The cast-off Asgardian has found his way to Earth through the magic of a cosmic cube and he holds plans to wreak havoc.  Earth and its humans are beloved by his half-brother, Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Norse God of thunder, and Loki plans on enslaving the human race out of enraged spite towards his brother.  Loki has assembled an army of monstrous warriors from another galaxy to aid him in his quest to enslave Earth, and he makes it quite clear that no mercy will be spared.

Fearing that the planet is in serious doom, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division) decides to assemble a team of superheroes to do battle with Loki.  Fury calls upon Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey, JR.), the billionaire inventor protected by a suit of armor, Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans), a recently frozen 1940s soldier, Dr. Bruce Banner a.k.a. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), a scientist trying to keep a green inner-beast under wraps, Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a Russian warrior, Clint Barton a.k.a. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an expert archer, and Thor to assemble into one giant team to protect Earth.  The problem, however, is that these larger-than-life heroes hold gigantic egos that makes it impossible for them to play well with others.  Yet if Loki has any chance of being defeated, than these conflicted heroes will have to overcome their issues and flock together as a team.  Can this mythic group put aside their issues and do what needs to be done to save the planet?  Or will they end up killing each other instead?

The film is at its very best when it regards the brief colorful character bits within the heroes’ interactions.  Whether its Stark and Rogers bickering about what it takes to be a hero, Thor and Hulk getting territorial with their testosterone, or Stark convincing Banner to get in touch with his angry side, it says something that these insights are far more fascinating than any explosion this film has to offer.  Thats why you wish more than anything that Whedon ditched the logistics of the epic comic plot and let the character riffs take over completely.  It’d be far more interesting to see where the heroes’ unpredictable depths took the plot as opposed to the grand developments of Loki’s evil plan.  

Still, its hard to deny that Whedon doesn’t excite the living hell out of us with epic action scenes that pull out all the stops.  Hulk going ballistic on the S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities and Thor free-falling to Earth in a sealed-off pod aptly wets our appetites as we find our way to the grand finale in New York City.  As Loki unleashes his army of inter-galactic nasties  on the Big Apple, Whedon treats us to a comic book Black Hawk Down on crack.  The finale puts The Avengers in the mother-of-all-battles as they turn New York into a playground of smackdown, and you’d have to be a corpse not to be entertained by the sight of this team collectively dishing out their fighting skills.  One of the perks of this sequence is that we get to see what makes each hero so unique in their own rights.  Captain America finally gets to dust off his celebrated leadership skills, Hulk proves that he can smash like no other (especially when tossing around Loki), and Iron Man beautifully shows that he can answer the call of the most important sacrifices in spite of himself.

The ultra-talented cast has institutionalized their superhero personas so superbly that you honestly wish the film delved more into their character developments.  Downey here  finds even more touching variations on Stark’s shiftings from a sardonic goofball to a true hero who can do what is necessary for his fellow man.  Evans can wonderfully convey the earnestness of his square leader, but you wish the script deal more with his man-out-of-time dilemma.  Hemsworth continues to nicely develop Thor’s old world personality, although you wish his arrogance was given more room to breathe.  Johansson brings a no-nonsense fusion of sexiness and smarts to the table, doing Whedon’s heroic-female ideal great justice.  Renner puts his overqualified skill-set to good use by compelling us with an archer hero who holds no real superpowers.  Ruffalo proves to be quite superb in his first outing as Hulk, beautifully articulating a shell-shocked sheepishness that will prove to be more memorable than Norton and Bana’s variations on the role.  And Hiddleston, he of the Peter O’Toole mold, brings great theatrics to Loki, making you feel every ounce of his bitterness and festering heartbreak.

If you, like me, have come to truly grow a heart for these Marvel outcasts and get off on watching superheroes blow up things real good, than you’ll find that The Avengers will bring you more bang for your buck than the usual Hollywood Blockbuster.  Yet if you’re looking for the Citizen Kane of superhero flicks, you won’t find it here, not by a longshot.  The Dirty Dozen of superhero flicks is more what you’re getting.  There’s no major surprises to be found, nor is anything outside of the team’s assembly terribly groundbreaking for the genre.  Yet the film plays up the character’s myths competently and finds their juice in a symphony of delicious pop action.  And if its any testament to The Avengers’ appeal, the post-credits scenes really got me fired up for a sequel.  These hidden scenes prove that: 1) The Avengers quietly dining together can be more exciting than most superheroes in action, 2) the next villain, as my Uncle Phil put it, is gonna be “a real son-of-a-bitch.”

'Titanic': 15 Years Later

by Brett Parker

It feels pretty safe to say that living in America during the late 90s was a time of breezy complacency.  We had cleaned house in the Gulf War and the economy was booming thanks to the rise of the Dot-Com era.  The tragedy of 9/11 was still years away from happening and any notions of such unspeakable horrors materializing for real were arrogantly dismissed by the average citizen as paranoia.  It was this very paranoia, and perhaps jitters over the end of the millennium, that lead to a prominent rise in the Hollywood disaster film around this time.  For a great while, we had tornadoes, volcanoes, asteroids, and aliens blowing up the White House real good at the multiplex to shake up our comfortable states and work up our anxieties over what a freakish tragedy would actually feel like.  Since real life catastrophe was still a distance away from happening, none of these disaster shows were weighed down by haunted significance.  This allowed a certain innocence to be prominent in their membrane, the tell-tale sign being that most of these dances of destruction had happy endings.  Our city is in ruins, but we can rebuild, damnit!

Of course, the most successful disaster film during this time, and of all time, turned out to be James Cameron’s Titanic, the romantic epic that painstakingly details the doomed ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the ocean in April 1912.  Cameron’s re-staging of dignified richies and hopeful working-class stiffs being ushered to death’s door under the same swoop perfectly articulated the mid-90s phobia of a sustainable, structured way of life being uprooted and dented beyond all repair.  The irresistible kick here is the gallant way in which most of the passengers met their deadly fate (historically speaking, this is one of the real life allures of the well-discussed tragedy).  Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the more wealthier passengers, went down with the ship while delivering the film’s best line (allegedly spoken in real life): “We are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down as gentlemen.  But, we would like a brandy!”  

Perhaps one of the reasons for the movie’s success is the idea of the individual triumphing in the face of catastrophic circumstances.  As the film follows the star-crossed romance of poor-little-rich girl Rose (Kate Winslet) and happy-go-lucky poor boy Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), we find ourselves witnessing a love story of plucky resiliency.  It is this liberation between the couple that allows them to dodge various hazards from the ship’s sinking and in the end, Rose has come out of the tragedy a strong-willed woman, one who apparently weathered the storms of the 20th century with astonishing success.  If the idea of our independence allowing us to overcome mayhem and come out the other side a stronger person is indeed an infectious American fantasy, then its one that Titanic holds in aces.

Very few people would deny that Titanic didn’t come out all aces when it was released in theaters back in December of 1997.  Titanic-Mania gripped the nation with an iron hold and took pop culture hostage for an astonishingly prolonged period of time.  Not only did the film rack up 11 Academy Award wins but also went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, a title that would later be claimed by Cameron’s own Avatar.  Yet while Avatar was certainly a phenomenon, it didn’t soak into the national membrane as intoxicatingly as Titanic did.  For all its grosses, Avatar didn’t have people constantly sprouting its lines of dialogue or making Billboard hits out of the film’s score (James Horner’s “Southampton” got significant radio play and the soundtrack album itself went on to become the highest-selling primarily orchestral soundtrack ever), two things that were certainly the case with Titanic.  The movie was that rare pop event that could cater to a wide swath of tastes while retaining a sense of dignity.  Young boys and adult males alike were primarily marveled by the state-of-the-art evocation of the ship’s sinking, a painfully-detailed visualization of one of the world’s largest ships splitting into two and plunging to the bottom of the ocean.  Of course, what made Titanic unique was that it was an adventurous disaster spectacle that women got more out of than men ever could.  The film has one of the most appealing wish-fulfillment romances ever produced by a Hollywood film, one in which a dreamy hunk liberates a trapped woman towards her true independent, feminist self.  And since the hunk doing the liberating was a young Leonardo DiCaprio in full mega-wattage star mode, it helped make a classical romances’ ascension towards the ultimate feminist ideal damn near irresistible.  American women were drunk on Titanic, and they were shelling out big bucks to keep tasting that hooch.  

Like most drunken binges, however, the sobering-up period tends to make one awful resentful of the thing that got them drunk in the first place.  When all the talk of grosses, Oscars, Leo, icebergs, and romance began to calm down, a considerable backlash occurred amongst a considerable amount of moviegoers.  After being suffocated by “king of the world” jokes and hearing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” one time too many, people just snapped.  The film incongruently became a target board for pop of the broadest tastes.  To admit that Titanic is one of your favorite movies had unfairly become the equivalent of saying that you prefer Britney Spears over Bob Dylan or The Clash.  Some people came down with a serious case of cinematic diabetes from the love story’s sweetness.  Some people never forgave Cameron for his sneaky leftist agenda, giving the jolly blokes in steerage the more sympathetic slant over the stuffy caricatures up in first class.  I think on an elemental level, some people rejected the idea of a horrific disaster being sold as a pop event.  Somehow, a tragedy in which over a thousand people died had become Star Wars for women.

With his eagerness to prove that 3-D is to modern cinema what sound was to the silent era, Cameron has re-released Titanic around the tragedy’s 100th anniversary with an extra dimension added for our viewing pleasure (i.e. extra dollars).  The announcement of the film’s re-release struck me with the realization that I hadn’t watched the mega-hit from start-to-finish since high school.  In my younger years, I was spellbound by the ship’s profound sinking and struck with the revelation that “sketching Kate Winslet” urgently belonged on my bucket list.  But these were opinions first formed at the age of 13, a time when I thought The Mask was the Greatest Movie Ever Made and that Citizen Kane suffered the great disadvantage of not having Jim Carrey as its lead.  I’ve grown up a lot since then (hopefully), learning much more about cinema and developing a far superior intellect than that junior high-schooler who put Space Jam in the same category as Lawrence of Arabia.  Considering how I once felt about the spectacle, and all the skepticism hurled at it since then, I was very curious to see what my adult self made of the flick.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer beauty of the visuals.  Art Director Peter Lamont and Set Decorator Michael Ford went to painstaking lengths to accurately recreate the interior of the ship, yet its the evocation of the vessel at sea, amazingly re-created by Cameron’s visual effects team at Digital Domain, that is most striking upon revisitation.  The mid-90s saw a period in which traditional special effects were rapidly giving in to advancements in computer-generated technology.  Movies like Cameron’s own Terminator 2 and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park were impressively making leaps in visuals while old-fashioned effects were keeping up where they could.  To watch Titanic is to watch a film that bridges the gap between those two sensibilities, for the ship is obviously a computer creation, but its texture certainly evokes cinematic techniques of yesteryear.  The ship and its surroundings have a “painted-on” quality that evokes the beauty of brush strokes, making a lot of the scenes give off the vibe of a moving painting.  This feeling proves especially sublime in the famous scene where Jack and Rose share their first kiss at the front of the ship.  With a hyperbolic vanilla sky and a sweeping view of the sunset-tinged ship, the scene transcends real life and resembles a timeless work of art.  Since the film is told in flashback from an elderly Rose’s point-of-view (wonderfully played by Gloria Stuart) and she’s an admitted lover of art (she collects “cheap” Monet works that go down with the ship), these colorful visuals don’t diminish the ship’s realism but superbly finds the beauty amidst an unfortunate ordeal.

Another big thing I noticed about the film was its surprising innocence.  The central love story wears a big, old fashioned heart on its sleeve so unapologetically that its rather disarming in its dewey-eyed sincerity.  There’s probably an inherent dopiness at work here, but people forget that Cameron is harking back to a classical tradition of cinema in which dopiness could be vibrant.  Most sweeping romantic epics have to rely on heightened elemental emotions to accommodate its grand nature, leaving little room for subtlety of heart.  Not to mention that a film with such a massive budget needed a broad range of appealing emotions to snag a grand audience.  With a budget that soared over $200 million (a record at the time), you weren’t exactly getting Downtown Abbey on a boat (that TV show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, did, in fact, end up making for a Titanic miniseries for television).  I’ll admit, falling head-over-heels for someone you’ve only known for two days on a boat is something of a stretch, but Cameron’s lefty masterstroke is making Jack’s working class zest for life an ideal that would make even the corpse of a rich woman go gaga.  And since Jack is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his ultra-movie star mode, its terribly hard to feel like any of this is a bad idea.  

Of course if the two two leads didn’t have the star magnetism and expert lyricism they hold in aces, the movie wouldn’t have been nearly as alluring as it is.  What first grabs you about the young Kate Winslet is her unique beauty.  In an industry where skinny blondes thrive (Gwenyth Paltrow was up to play Rose at one point), Winslet was striking in her full red hair and porcelain skin.  Even at a young age, she had expert nuance in teleporting a woman’s inner-vulnerability and awakening independence.  Of course, her lead co-star became famous for reminding us that expert nuance can translate to matinee idol dynamite.  It is jokingly believed that Titanic was such a massive success because pre-teen girls would pay to see it over and over and over (and over) just to see Leo do his thing.  There’s certainly truth to that and its not hard to believe, for DiCaprio as as romantic screen idol was the real thing and then some.  Even in his youth, he could teleport charm and charisma with the effortless ease of Roger Maris cranking out home runs.  Before he would move on to playing riled-up outsiders and wily eccentrics in his grown-up years, the young DiCaprio packed golden-Americana looks and a commanding calm that teleported a more exuberant and resourceful Robert Redford.  Together with Winslet, these two talents proved that old school romantic melodrama handled with expert thespian skill can equal electric moviegoing.  And since the film shattered box office records, you wonder why studio heads don’t pick up more on this golden ideal.

Once you get past the sparkle of the leads, you also notice that the supporting cast is just as dramatically compelling.  This time around, I found myself impressed with the men in charge of the ship as they go from glowing confidence to crushing defeat.  Victor Garber is especially heartbreaking as Thomas Andrews, the naval architect of the ship who overflows with pride in his creation until that fateful collision with an iceberg shatters his sprits, leading him to go down with his labor of love.  One performance I was curious to revisit was Billy Zane’s as Rose’s slimy rich fiance, Cal Hockley.  Film history does not remember Zane’s performance too kindly, for Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly cited it as “one of the worst performances in one of the best movies.”  For having been summoned to play nothing more or less than a snarling upper-class nasty, I found Zane to be rather superb.  With his handsome, silent-screen star looks and his prestigious thespian demeanor, Zane was pretty much born to play old world, melodramatic finks.  In a less confused world, Zane could play Orson Welles-style villains until the cows come home.  

Even by today’s standards, the epic sinking of the ship that marks the film’s third act is still a stunner.  Too many disaster films tire us with their clunky stagings and quick-cut editing, holding no bigger interest then to hurry along to a cheap special effects money shot.  What’s impressive about Cameron’s work here is his sense of patience and pacing, as he slowly allows the viewer to feel the claustrophobic dread of impending doom and the deadly architectural domino effects that caused a ship’s massive destruction.  The special effects team flooded their lavish set to create a painfully accurate depiction of a ship’s sinking just damn near short of sinking an actual ship for real.  Yet this fantastical sinking isn’t hocked to us in an Irwin Allen-popcorn kind of way, for Cameron paints a poignant poetry in the heartbreaking ways different passengers faced their own demises.  Images of an elderly couple cuddling in bed while ocean waters fill their room and Captain Smith (Bernard Hill) going down with the ship are deeply unsettling.  Perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the sight of the ship’s band playing “Nearer My God To Thee” as the chaos of the sinking flourishes all around them.  I’ve never actually cried any of the times in my life I watched  Titanic, but upon this recent viewing, I found myself letting tears flow as this band played their final serenade.  

Since there are those that pick apart Titanic’s flaws, there’s one big one I’d like to address.  The film’s final scene depicts Rose’s spirit being whisked away to the Titanic’s main ball room, which has been resurrected into a haven where all of the disaster’s victims have gathered.  Of course, waiting atop the room’s stair case is Jack, who pulls Rose in for a kiss that leads everyone to applause.  The popular theory is that the elderly Rose died in her sleep and her soul was whisked away to a “Titanic heaven” where she can happily live on in the afterlife with Jack.  Ok, let’s assume point blank that an afterlife exists.  And lets remind ourselves that after the tragedy at sea, Rose went on to America to get married and start her own family (as evidenced by he presence of her granddaughter, Lizzy, played by Cameron’s real-life spouse, Suzy Amis).  So if Rose indeed went off to “Titanic heaven,” then that means she abandoned her (presumably) deceased husband at another place in the after life to shack up with a guy she once romanced for only 2 days when she was younger.  Sorry to be the grouch here, but Rose’s better half pacing frantically in front of the pearly gates, constantly looking at his watch and complaining to St. Nick about his wife not showing up, doesn’t sit well with me.  It makes way more sense to understand that the film’s final scene is a dream sequence.  

In the end, however, I have little patience for the skeptics, cynics, and killjoys who berate this film.  After all these years, I still find the film to be marvelous.  I couldn’t help but be seduced by the film’s purity, romanticism, danger, and yes, music (that Celine Dion song may have been overplayed in real life to the point of lunacy, but that shouldn’t diminish James Horner’s masterful score, with its celtic flavorings and piercing emotion)!  By the film’s closing, Rose was able to find a hope and closure amidst the heartbreak of disaster and thats certainly the astounding achievement Cameron accomplishes here.  If finding resiliency and optimism among crushing calamity ranks amongst the best of humanist values, then that makes Titanic a masterpiece of humanism.  

A 'House' Not Worth Buying

by Brett Parker

I’m about to give away the ending to Silent House. I always try to avoid big spoilers, but I’d like to use my review to point out something that kind of bugs me. So if you’re curious to see this film and don’t want a yahoo like me ruining that experience for you, turn back now! Anyways, here it goes: screenwriters, lets put the brakes on employing that tiresome “twist” ending where “the entire movie took place inside the protagonist’s head, who’s revealed to be psychotic. That means everything that transpired before the ending was a delusion that never actually happened.” Not only is such a development sneakily contrived and very hard-to-pull-off, but its not even terribly original these days, seeing as how Martin Scorsese pretty much retired the prize with Shutter Island. Not to mention, tacking on such an ending is an insult to the memory of Donald Kaufman.

Things started so promisingly here, too. As the film opens, we see a young lady named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) standing by a lake in front of her family’s summer home. She is spending the day with her father, John (Adam Trese) and Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) as they all help to clean up the house and sell it. The house is boarded up on the inside and makes everything seem dark and ominous from within. Pretty soon, Peter storms out after an argument with John, leaving Sarah and her father left to clean the house themselves.

While Sarah works to clean things up on the downstairs level of the house, she hears a loud noise upstairs and discovers that someone (or something) has apparently knocked John violently unconscious. Pretty soon, Sarah realizes she’s not alone in the house and that obscure bodies are moving throughout the shadows, trying to find her and potentially harm her. With the front and back doors of the house locked up tightly and the window boards casting the entire house in blinding darkness, Sarah must duck in closets and use whatever light sources she can to try and break out of the house, find safety for her Dad, and discover who (or what) is wreaking havoc on the house.

Directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (the team behind Open Water) trick the camera and the editing into appearing as if the entire film is a one-take realtime sequence. While it may not be exactly that (the film secretly edits together a string of long, uninterrupted stretches), the final effect is still impressive. One advantage of this technique is how it allows us to discover each jolting scare as Sarah does, making her terror of what cannot be seen our own. While this film doesn’t employ the gambit of a found-footage flick, it certainly looks like one with the shaky camera that constantly peaks over Sarah’s shoulder, making us feel exactly what its like to be standing there and experiencing horrific events. One perk of this increasingly popular style of filmmaking is the way it brings an immediate intimacy to generic film matters. Indeed, if Silent House were made with classical editing and camera techniques, it would probably be revealed to be the tired and preposterous genre flick it truly is. It’d probably turn out to be more coherent in its plot, though.

We should consider ourselves lucky that we have Elizabeth Olsen to guide us through these scary waters. With this and her last film, the endlessly-creepy Martha Marcy May Marlene, Olsen has pretty much cornered the market on playing frazzled and mortified young victims. She has an inherent gift for teleporting genuine emotions of utter fear and panic in a way that puts most scream queens to shame. Indeed, she hits all the bases of this haunted house experience with a startling rawness that the film is absolutely undeserving of. I was especially impressed by the way she quietly freaks out under a table while hiding from an unseen threat. Going the emotional distance and then some for generic trifle is the mark of a good actress. Nathan Fillion once said that he could cry his eyes out at the drop of a hat. I wonder if Olson could turn on her urgent terror face with the same speed. That’d be especially fun at parties or something.

So the tension and scares are pretty consistent as the film rolls along, but then the ending shows up and its explanation of events (or lack thereof, rather) proves to be vague and underwhelming. So the film tries to explain how most of what we just saw was one big delusion, but why everything was a big delusion is what I have a problem with. The film expects us to pay attention to early background details that, for the life of us, we didn’t terribly notice in the first place. Call me old fashioned, but a good twist ending usually relies on an intelligible exposition, which is exactly what I feel this film is lacking. The film wants to be a clever meditation on traumatic sexual repressions but it all feels like too much of a horror gimmick to me. For what its worth, at one point I thought the unseen threat would turn out to be psychotic squatters hiding out in the summer home (a suspicion I picked up from a shot of a bed in a basement and a throwaway line from Uncle Peter) and that, to me, would’ve made the movie ten times better. Not only would it be a shrewd commentary on privilege anxieties amidst these tough economical times, but it’d probably give The Strangers a run for its money.

Elizabeth Olsen as a horror heroine and a real-time “one take” fluidity sounds like such a recipe for surefire horror success that its rather dumbfounding that Silent House takes such damaging stumbles in its last act. But alas, this flick is another disheartening example of how a bad ending can ruin an entire movie. However, the ending left me with one deep thought: one day, I’d like to see a real life psychologist write a horror script where the entire movie takes place inside the hero’s mind. It’d be interesting to see what all those other scary films with that gimmick were missing.