Kennelco Film Diary

(2005) dir. Rob Zombie
viewed: 05/28/06

I’d been curious about Rob Zombie’s gore films even though they had gotten mixed reviews because some of the comments about them suggested a sense that they strove to attain some visceral quality of 1970’s horror films, something more edgy than other current horror fare. I didn’t realize that The Devil’s Rejects was a sequel to Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003) or I probably would have watched that one first. I don’t know how watching this film would have been altered by that experience. I just note it.

There’s a lot of extraneous nudity. The violence itself is less graphic than other films I have seen lately. Ultimately, though, it’s a film where the crazed psychopathic killers/rapists/torturers are the explicit anti-heroes despite their brutatlity. There is an interesting twist when they are tortured by the cop that is seeking revenge for the murder of his brother. The cop is played as the bad guy largely, though it’s a bit of a blurry line. The viewer is meant to enjoy the band of killers called “The Devil’s Rejects”, a family of fightin’, feudin’, and feisty Ed Geins, mostly gruesome and filthy in their appearance, but perhaps idealized as well. It’s a family unit, so there is probably some social commentary there.

Baby Firefly, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, wife of director Rob Zombie, is a weird contrast to the pure trailer park creepy that the mother, father, and brothers are. She’s straight out of Playboy, blonde and cute like a girl-next-door. She’s the oddball, which one could liken to the character of Marilyn on TV’s The Munsters. Maybe that is part of how she is figured. Everyone else is gross, pretty much, though her brother Otis could be considered somewhat of a representation of the director, since he looks somewhat like him.

Ultimately, I am not sure what to make of it. It wasn’t utterly innovative or clever. The dialogue was often criminally bad. It’s hard to see what Zombie is making of his killers. They enact moments of torture and violence that are unprovoked and cruel. Are we meant to like them? Why are we meant to pity them when they go through the same things? It’s clear from the ending that they are being posed heroically, maybe like Bonnie and Clyde, or something poetic and idealized. It’s not a-morality in a rational sense, but maybe in a confused and contradictory way. Maybe if I’d seen the first film, I’d have a better sense of it. I don’t know.

(2005) dir. Mike Mills
viewed: 05/27/06

Tepid indie fare. A coming of age story about a teenager who sucks his thumb. There are some good performances by Tilda Swinton and Vince Vaughn and others. And a typically strange and representational performance by Keanu Reeves as an orthodontist. There are moments of true quality but it’s mostly low-key and not overly substantial, I would say.

There is an interesting analysis of Ritalin as a treatment for the main character. And some of his journey is interesting. I think that the portrayal of his parents is one highlight. The best sequence is when he gets his Debate Team teacher to buy him and a bunch of girls beer in a hotel room and they have a pillow fight. I don’t mean this for voyeuristic reasons, mind you. This film is not bad, but not amazing either.

(2003) dir. Judy Irving
viewed: 05/25/06

This film played in San Francisco for some time and intrigued me. I have always found the flock of wild parrots in the city as one of the city’s amusing characteristics. I’ve seen them flying many times and heard their distinctive jabbering. I didn’t really know how one could make a feature-length film on the subject, but quickly after the movie starts, one realizes that this film is really about Mark Bittner, this semi-loser/classic San Fransiscan, and his relationship with the animals.

Bittner is this guy who is jobless and lived in a little place right by the birds free of rent for several years. He cared for the birds, fed them, named them, studied them. There are interesting aspects of parrot biology offered up, but ultimately this isn’t a nature documentary. It’s really about Bittner. He’s sort of an urban, less insane version of Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), although he is not pecked to death in the end of the film.

The film has a sappy ending that sort of makes sense, with the long-haired Bittner (who says that he was growing his hair until he got a girlfriend) cutting off his locks, moving out of Telegraph Hill, and hooking up with Judy Irving, the director who poses herself lightly into the film (until this point). Sorry for the spoiler. I know that you’re upset.

(1945) dir. Robert Wise
viewed: 05/24/06

This film appears as a companion on the DVD for I Walked with a Zombie (1943), part of the Val Lewton collection. Directed by Robert Wise, director of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Sound of Music (1965) among many others, it is like other Lewton films, a cut above the period’s genre films while remaining pretty low budget.

Based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, it is a mostly “realistic” horror film about grave-robbing and the cultivation of the science of anatomy but ultimately murder as well. It features a prime performance by Boris Karloff and a sad and diminshed role for Bela Lugosi.

Again, I was struck with how this film and I Walked with a Zombie both prefigure some of the better work of Roger Corman in the 1960’s with Vincent Price, who also goes back to 19th Century gothic horror to cull for subject matter for their films. It’s a tight film, dark and creepy, but also interesting historically regarding the development of science. It’s good stuff. I mean it.

(2002) dir. George Lucas
viewed: 05/22/05

Ah,…Star Wars.

As a general rule, I won’t watch anything in an “edited-for-television” mode. But with Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) just released and my impending trip to the theater to see it, I was thinking that it would be good to revisit the 2nd …or is it 5th chapter of this saga, because the last and only time I had seen it was in the theater on its initial release and disappointment.

When Fox broadcast this, I realized the opportunity to save myself the trouble of renting the DVD and could watch it in its most plebian format. Then I would feel prepared to head out to the cinema to catch the final installment.

I grew up with this stuff, like many a person of the era. I saw the first film in the theater in 1977, a mere 28 years ago. I was agog over it from the age of 8-14 or so. And I still have a soft spot for it. But significantly, I am not part of this modern zealot phenomenon whose fanatacism is far more proliferated and often even more insane than the cult of Star Trek. Is it all about Science Fiction culture?

Anyways, my first viewing of Attack of the Clones was in the theater and was disappointing. While I thought it was an improvement on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), it was still a huge letdown. Was Lucas really so bad at so many aspects of making a film?

The love story is awful, painfully awful. The cringe-inducing dialogue and the amazingly over-the-top cliche’s of soft-lit romantic backdrops to the lovers’ conversations are truly things for the ages. Interestingly, it seemed as if they cut some of it for the telecast.

Still, the film is more fun than the first, and I am not just talking about when Natalie Portman’s shirt gets ripped to reveal her midriff. Though that still does crack me up like nobody’s business.

It’s amazing how many plot points that I had forgotten in the years since I had seen it. Who was making the clones, why they were making the clones, all about the death of Anakin’s mother, etc., etc. So re-viewing it helped for going to see the new film. And for some reason, I felt less harshly critical of it. Maybe I’m just softening up after all these years.

(2005) dir. Rian Johnson
viewed: 05/23/06 at the Embarcadero Theater, SF, CA

It’s been a long time since there was a movie that I was hearing a lot of word of mouth buzz that I hadn’t read much about beforehand. But lots of people have been talking about Brick and most have been recommending it. So much so that I actually got out to see it.

The film is generally described as “Film Noir in high school”. This is moderately accurate. The narrative is set in a Southern California high school and the kids talk in this weird vernacular that seems a pastiche of old slang and maybe made up slang. It’s meant to have that tough sound of hard boiled communication, I believe. The whole high school thing is fine as a setting, but really the film is more interested in the story, which could have easily been set outside of high school. The whole high school thing feels strange, not trying for realism per se, but some strange fictional world that simply doesn’t really exist. This is reflected in the odd dialogue.

While the world of the film doesn’t feel like realism, one of the more interesting aspects of the film to me is the settings in which the film was shot. It’s this bland, faceless suburbia, with California hills and back alleys of a town. It’s a generic place but at the same time very specific. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Though there are some moments of curious humor, the film largely seems to be fairly serious. The living room lamp in the SUV was a nice touch. The houses are decorated with strange pictures on the wall.

Lukas Haas struck me as quite good in this film. He’s developed into a very handsome guy, and he brings a subtlety to the character of The Pin that stands out among the other characters.

Overall, the buzz about this film seems a little overheated, though it’s different, unusual, and has some true character to it.

(2006) dir. Tim Johnson, Karey Kirkpatrick
viewed: 05/20/06 at the Loews Metreon Theatres, SF, CA

Not groundbreaking by a long shot, but a mostly well-made feature animation, Over the Hedge, the latest digital animation to hit the big screens, is alright. Adapted from a comic strip that used to run in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back and presumably still runs in some, it features some big star voice talent and finely detailed animation, showing the money spent to render it. And it features some genuinely funny bits.

My son, Felix, particularly liked the squirrel, voiced by Steve Carell, who is pretty much the definition of “manic” and really has the funniest lines and tropes.

I mean, this is what it is, a well-made, nicely designed animation, certainly not up to the Pixar standards and certainly doing nothing of note to diverge from narrative and character standards that exist. It’s nothing overly original. There is a moderate amount of consumer culture criticism and the whole story is about animals in nature being encroached by suburbia. The only thing that could have given this critique any teeth would be if all the cute little characters ended up dying or being relocated.

(1943) dir. Jacques Tourneur
viewed: 05/21/06

I had seen I Walked with a Zombie when I was living in England 11 years ago and the film had made a great impression on me. I have long been a fan of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur’s collaborations and really think that this film is pretty darn amazing.

These zombies are not the blood-thirsty killing machines of the 1960’s and beyond, but the more Voodoo-inspired walking dead that embody the term “zombie” (meaning catatonic more or less) more than the ones that want to eat people’s flesh.

It’s a gothic tale in a true sense of the genre. I’ve read that it is a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre which is further insistance that that novel hits my summer reading list. Atmospherically shot, with shadows of Venetian blinds and jungle leaves, it’s a dark nightmare of a dream, with visions of fear and death.

The most striking images are those of Darby Jones, the dead-eyed African zombie, who lurches around like a spectre. The shot by the tree with the hanging goat is iconic, often cited in texts. It’s really of something from a lost time. The attitude towards racism is mixed, somewhat well-intentioned, but using fear of the unknown of Voodoo as outré, there is a malignity in this, probably not entirely out of step with the Hollywood, even the B-movie Hollywood, of its era. Still, there are more African-Americans in this film than in many. But I must say, after reading a few short stories that focused on African or Carribean Voodoo and religion as a site of horror and tittilation, I would say that this comes from a small subgenre of horror that makes it interesting, too.

The film is beautiful, particularly in its poetic ending. One other thing that struck me about it is that Val Lewton and Co. were true pre-cursors of Roger Corman in creating low-budget horror films that transcend genre and elevate into great art.

(2005) dir. Karyn Kusama
viewed: 05/20/06

The first 15 minutes of this film promised something along the lines of perhaps the greatest, most embarrassingly bad science fiction in a decade. The hilarious costuming, pretentious anti-government, dystopian narrative so derivative it makes one wince, it’s all just totally hysterical. Just the way that Charlize Theron stands, with her legs apart is somehow ridiculous. It’s meant to be slick and stylish. It’s a cartoon of great proportions.

Of course, it was adapted from a cartoon, which ran on MTV in the 1990’s. The animated version contained a much less clear narrative, with the main character not uttering hardly any dialogue. Narrative wasn’t explicated, so I never really could figure out what was happening (I never watched it regularly and for some reason it feels like I watched the same episode maybe nine times). I kind of liked that aspect of it.

The film’s badness ebbs, unfortunately, and it settles into a pretty standard, though bad, sci-fi/action flick. It never begins to be good, with the exception of the early moments of being “so bad, it’s good”. It’s a shame, really. This had great potential for badness.

(2005) dir. Greg McLean
viewed: 05/19/06

Of all the edgy horror/splatter flicks that have been buzzing around like High Tension (2003) and Hostel (2005), Wolf Creek is probably the best (best still doesn’t necessarily signify “great”, mind you). It’s nothing incredibly original. I mean, it’s “young people meet a serial killer in an isolated spot and gore and violence ensue.” That’s the story, and though it claims to be based on real events, it’s only loosely true.

It has some narrative surprises, but nothing incredible which I won’t detail it for spoiler reasons. The film is shot in Western Australia, which is stark and beautiful, a significant part of the character and appeal of this film. The setting is secluded and lonely, like parts of America used to seem. The film seems particularly interested in its Australian-ness, with a villain who seems to be a Randy Quaid-esque Australian hick, probably a grotesque caricature, maybe not the film’s strength. It is interesting that he is a person, who has significant dialogue, not just some voiceless, personality-deprived murderer. Still, it’s a simplified thing in a lot of ways. Uber-killers usually are.