Movies
Excellent: Movies this great are rare, so don't miss it.
Good: At least worth the price of admission.
Okay: See it if you have nothing better to do.
Bad: If you absolutely have to see it, wait for the DVD.
No stars: Frickin' terrible; give us our two hours back,
you director from hell.
I ❤ Huckabees
(✩✩✩)
Perhaps it was Jason Schwartzman as Albert, an environmentalist whose coalition for preserving nature is teaming up with megastore Huckabee in order to save a marsh. It could have been the pairing of Dustin
R, 105 minutes, Liberty Hall I Huckabees is inexplicable. Directed by David O. Russell, director of Three Kings, it leaves the viewer pretty much at a loss for words. It has little to no plot. It is self-important. It is in love with its own cleverness about the state of the world. It is definitely going to require a second viewing to be sure what was really going on. And yet I found myself enjoying it nevertheless.
Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as Bernard and Vivian, the Existential Detectives Albert hires in order to sort out his meaning in the world. It probably was Jude Law as Brad, the charming but crafty corporate fodder in the Huckabeees chain who is Albert's nemesis. It could have been Mark Wahlberg as Tommy, a firefighter who is suffering his
own existential crises in his crusade against the use of petroleum as the root of all evil. Or it could have been Naomi Watts as Dawn, the voice of Huckabees and Brad's girlfriend, who in learning about all these existential matters begins to wonder what it all means. And then there was Isabelle Huppert as Catherine, a nihilist who questions Bernard and Vivian's theories about everything being connected as she tries to convert and seduce Albert and Tommy along the way.
If all this seems off-kilter, that's because it is. The film is a frenzied assault on any deep thought you've ever had about the world. It does so with a loud, messy onslaught of words exchanged so fast I'm sure I
missed something. Russell has certainly created something new and refreshingly different (the fantasy scenes, complete with
a machete-wielding Albert, come to mind), and although you will find yourself laughing and pondering your own existence, you will still be wondering what the hell is going on.
— Lindsey Ramsey
The Grudge (★★★)
PG-13, 96 minutes, South Wind 12
The rare horror movie that defies expectation, The Grudge is a surprisingly exceptional exercise in cinematic scare tactics. Judging by the rowdy Friday night crowd I saw the movie with, who left the theater giddy with fright, Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar's return to the big screen is going to be a huge smash.
Gellar stars as an American foreign exchange student attending a university in Japan. After a few brief introductory scenes, the film breaks from its main character and veers into bizarre territory that catches the viewer off balance. The first half of The Grudge has no exposition, no character development and basically no point-of-view. We're introduced to one American expatriate after another, each of whom enters a haunted house and is greeted by the spectral vision of a wounded little boy
and a terrifying girl who has the ability to hover off the ground. This extended opening makes effective use of traditional horror
effects like cobwebs, creaking doors and shadow play, but there's even more going on here.
Like The Ring, The Grudge was adapted from a series of fllms from
"J-horror," a new Japanese film movement that has reinvigorated Eastern filmmaking. The director of the original Grudge movies, which (for those who dare) are now available on DVD, also directed this Hollywood remake. Takashi Shimizu's filmmaking style is pure J-horror, which favors scaring the shit out of you over telling a comprehensible story. He uses images familiar from The Ring (interactive video tape, omnipresent children) to suffuse the movie with anticipatory fear. Shimizu is a
master at knowing exactly where to put the camera so that the frame is filled with suspense. Few movies have made interior
architecture so foreboding - we dread the house in The Grudge as much as we do Regan's bedroom in The Exorcist.
Shimizu is also a witty conceptual prankster.
He's taken the conceit of characters wandering off alone to their doom and made a whole movie out of it. In one dazzling sequence, a woman escapes a creepy skyrise only to end up at an even creepier one on the other side of town. Horror crops up in moments that are traditionally designed to give the audience a breather. There's no escape.
The Grudge reduces you to a child cowering in a carnival spook house. It is, hands down, its the year's the scariest movie .
Stephen Shupe
Shaun of the Dead (☆☆☆1/2)
R, 99 minutes, South Wind 12
Flesh-eating zombies and apathetic Londoners blend seamlessly in a casually apocalyptic metropolis in this hilarious Brit horror-comedy. Shaun (Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Edgar Wright) is an aimless twentysomething professional working a dead-end job and losing his ready-for-commitment girlfriend (a tart Kate
Ashfield). Worse, his roommate (a scene-stealing Nick Frost) is a lazy, unemployable mooch tempting Shaun to play video games during the day and drink at the pub at night. His troubles multiply when zombies start trudging up the neighborhood streets and driveways, and of course, it's up to Shaun to save the day.
Wright's cleverly executed direction nails the satirical aspirations of his screenplay, which
argues that zombies already exist in the soulless day-to-day monotony of modern capitalism. The film piles on the gore in the last 20 minutes and it's ultimately not for the squeamish. But Pegg's physical comedy is disarming, lending a breezy streak to the nightmarish proceedings. Look for Shaun of the Dead to become a socially relevant cult classic in the tradition of Donnie Darko.
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Jayplay 10.28.04
Stephen Shupe