Blake Snyder, 1957 - 2009

My job has kept me too busy lately to keep up with blog writing or blog reading, in part because all these celebrities keep dying on my watch. But I was dismayed, while going through my Google Reader backlogs, to learn that Blake Snyder had passed away suddenly on August 4th.

Snyder is best remembered by moviegoers as the writer for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Blank Check, but remembered even more fondly by the writing community for his screenwriting bible Save the Cat! But don't let the word "screenwriting" fool you - Cat is a brilliant blueprint for any writer, from novelist to playwright to, yes, screenwriter. With great humor and verve, Snyder lays out the basics of shaping a great story in a clear and refreshing way I have yet to see in any other writing how-to book. In fact, I'm generally against writing how-to books, but this one is absolutely essential. His passing touches me more than any of the others in the Summer of Death.

In an eerie coincidence, I purchased the sequel to Save the Cat! on the day he died. I was in Union Square's Barnes and Noble, killing time between an article interview and work, and spotted it on a table full of screenwriting books. I was surprised, I hadn't even realized he'd written a sequel. I picked it up, hoping it would cure me of my nasty writing procrastination streak. Now I'll appreciate it as among the last words of a gifted teacher and storyteller who truly loved movies and wanted to share that passion.

He'll be missed, but at least his words of wisdom will live on in his books and his stellar blog.

Buffy Lives! Maybe.

Like any other television fan, I'm known to get a little cranky when my favorite show gets cancelled too soon. But some shows have healthy runs that come to their natural ending points, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of them. Other shows get dragged on past their prime, to their detriment. See also: Scrubs (now coming back for yet another season on ABC!) and Sex and the City. But now some braintrusts are itching to add Buffy to that list.

THR reports that the producers of the original film - you know, the one that came out in 1992 and bombed because the directing/producing team of Fran and Kaz Kuzui had mangled Joss Whedon's original script and turned it into a campy, schlocky mess - want to bring it back in feature film form. Sans Whedon, or any of the television cast.

Because that makes sense. If I had a turkey of a film that became a surprise television hit, I'd definitely try to re-do it as a film and strip away all the elements that made the TV version a success.

Best Films of 2008: My Picks

In a few hours, the Academy will crown their pick for the best film of 2008. And while I agree with some of their nominees (Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Reader), it seems like most of my favorite films didn’t even make the shortlist. Which isn’t surprising since my taste runs slightly off the main stream. So here are my favorite films of 2008.

#10: The Wrestler
Honestly, I was on the fence with this movie, but the ending is what pushed it into a favorite for me. Had it ended any other way, it would have been an overly sentimental piece of schmaltz. But the end is just perfect.

#9: Rachel Getting Married
Like The Wrestler, this movie to me is like the cinematic equivalent of a short story. Small but powerful.

#8: Repo! The Genetic Opera
There’s something about this I just love, tuneful and anarchic. Go rent the DVD now if you haven’t already seen it.

#7: Australia
This one got drubbed by the critics but I don’t care, it’s sweeping and romantic and lovely.

#6: Funny Games
Another movie that didn’t get the credit it deserved, an unsettling mix of A Clockwork Orange and The Strangers.

#5: Frost/Nixon
Michael Sheen and Frank Langella are wonderful in this. I feel like every wannabe journo should put this DVD next to their copy of All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein.

#4: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
This Romanian film is very savvy in what it shows and what it doesn’t show. The most harrowing parts take place off screen, but that absence makes the horror more sharply felt. This is an important film, worth hunting down on DVD.

#3: Iron Man
The hell with The Dark Knight, this was the best superhero film of the year.

#2: Slumdog Millionaire
Sweet and sharp, a feel-good movie that isn’t afraid to kick you in the teeth a few times before giving you a happy ending.

#1: Cloverfield
This movie is not just my favorite of 2008, it’s one of my Top 5 of all time. Cloverfield doesn’t reinvent any wheels, just takes the wheels and makes them awesome.

Films that just missed my Top 10: The Reader, Blindness, Tropic Thunder, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Charlie Bartlett, Wall-E, The Air I Breathe

And, to spread the love to my favorite movie genre, my Top 10 Horror Movies of 2008 are: Cloverfield, Funny Games, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Diary of the Dead, One Missed Call, Quarantine, Splinter, Mirrors, The Strangers, and The Eye

Okay, enough pre-show festivities. Tune back in at 8:30 for the Oscars liveblog!

Movies: The Reader and The Visitor

Okay, did a last bit of Oscar catching up this weekend and caught The Reader and The Visitor, so now I’m officially awards ready.

The Reader is a fantastic film. As Hanna Schmitz, Kate Winslet gives a phenomenal, nuanced performance that has well earned her an Oscar nomination and hopefully a win later tonight. But credit should also be given to David Kross and Ralph Fiennes for their portrayals of Michael Berg young and old. The film is largely single-minded, sticking close to the narrative of Michael and Hanna as they reconcile their own pasts and passions, but the narrow focus allows for great exploration of the larger historical issues of the Holocaust. This is a beautiful, complicated film that offers no easy answers, a film that will stay with you long after you’ve left the theatre.

Then there’s The Visitor. I see now why Richard Jenkins was nominated for his performance as a recent widower trying to reconnect with life, though I’m not sure his performance was quite strong enough to win. The Visitor is a sweet little indie drama that also wrestles with difficult questions – not as difficult as The Reader, mind, but immigration debates are certainly timely at the moment. The Visitor follows the standard indie template where lessons are learned and everyone walks away a little sadder but wiser. It’s worth seeing but not a must see by any means.

And now I’m finally ready to make my Oscar predictions. The show is shaping up to be interesting if the pre-show chatter is any indication – at this very moment E! is forcing all of their employees to do the Bollywood dance number from Slumdog Millionaire...

Movies: Friday the 13th

As you might have guessed, I take horror movies pretty seriously. I grew up watching the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series and all the other cheesy 80s slashers like Sleepaway Camp and Slumber Party Massacre. While nowadays I prefer psychological/supernatural horror flicks and zombie flicks, cheesy slashers will always hold a special place in my heart. Which is why I was apprehensive when I heard Michael Bay was re-making Friday the 13th. I wasn’t big into Transformers when I was a kid – my 80s baby memories are more defined by My Little Pony and She-Ra – so I wasn’t devastated the way some of my guy friends were by his hulking, messy crapheap of a movie adaptation. But Friday the 13th is something you just don’t mess with as far as I’m concerned. My friends and I even took a road trip one dark night to the Boy Scout camp that served as the filming location for the first movie. Which is why I’m relieved to say that the new Friday the 13th not only assuaged all my fears – it wildly exceeded all of my expectations.

Part reboot, part sequel, Friday the 13th dives right into the hack-and-slash terror with little preamble, which is exactly what you need for a movie like this. One group of unlucky campers is served up and sliced before the opening credits, after which a second set of campers rolls in and, well, you can guess what happens next.

This movie doesn’t reinvent the slasher wheel, it just freshens it up. Jason still plods along, dispatching pretty young things left and right. But there are several improvements on the 80s model. Director Marcus Nispel keeps the action tight with few narrative lags, and even when you know a kill is coming up, he keeps the tension going. And writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have delivered a crackling screenplay, filled with hilarious and true-feeling dialogue that will finally allow you to watch a slasher flick and cringe only at the copious amounts of blood, not the corny conversation. It’s well-acted, too. Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, and Amanda Righetti do a good job of carrying the movie, while Aaron Yoo and Arlen Escarpeta provide some great moments of comic relief.

You don’t have to be a Friday the 13th fanatic to enjoy the movie, it gives newcomers a quick nutshell summary close to the beginning, but if you are a fan of the older movies you’ll be pleased to spot several references to the first few installments. You know, the good ones, before Jason went to Manhattan and Hell and faced off against Freddie. If you’re only going to see one remake of an 80s slasher film this month, Friday the 13th is definitely the hands-down winner over My Bloody Valentine.

Movies: Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, and The Wrestler

It’s the time of the year when all would-be Oscar pundits have to try and catch up with the end-of-the-year glut of prestige pics, and I’m no different. I’ve even sacrificed seeing The Unborn, which is normally the kind of cheesy horror flick I’d be all over, in order to get Oscar prepped. I’m excited to finally be in on the awards loop. When I was in college, I kept up with television because I could watch it at 3 a.m. while working on papers, and I kept up with literature because that was my major, but I fell behind in movies because taking three or four hours off to go see something in the theatre just wasn’t an option. Last year when I watched the Oscars, for example, the only nominated movies I’d seen were Enchanted and Juno. Of course, it would be easier to get caught up if most of the nominated films hadn’t been released in the past month, but the NYT’s David Carr addresses that better than I ever could. At any rate, here’s my take on a few of the newly-anointed Must Sees.

Frost/Nixon
Of the two Broadway-to-film adaptations of the year, Frost/Nixon is my clear favorite. In fact, it’s one of my favorite films of 2008, hands down. Anyone who has read All the President’s Men already knows that the journalistic digging of Woodward and Bernstein was the most interesting facet of the whole Watergate case, and Frost/Nixon now provides an excellent companion piece for any aspiring journo. Frank Langella and Michael Sheen are perfect as Richard Nixon and David Frost, their rat-a-tat back and forths provide some of the most exciting on-screen scenes I’ve seen in years, and they’re surrounded by a talented supporting cast that provide a few moments of levity. This is a sharp, smart movie, and I truly hope it gets some kind of reward on Oscar night.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
This movie, on the other hand, disappointed greatly. It’s shot beautifully, has many warm and wonderful moments, and is mostly well acted, but there are two glaring problems that kept it from fully gelling for me. First is the framing technique of a present day narrative with Cate Blanchett’s character on her deathbed in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, reflecting on Benjamin’s life story, which serves as the bulk of the movie proper. The present day narrative does nothing to add to the main story, and in fact served only to pull me out of the story every time I started to get sucked in. The other problem is the title character. If you take away the fact that he’s aging in reverse, Benjamin Button is really dull as hell. He’s reactive, not proactive, mostly bouncing around wherever life takes him. He has no truly shining moments where he does something spectacular or interesting, aside from aging backwards. Brad Pitt’s performance is pretty lackluster, too, a little deadpan and a lot dead-around-the-eyes. Every other character and actor/actress in the movie dazzles, there are fine performances all around, but without anything to really play off of with such a dull central character, the whole thing falls flat.

The Wrestler
Mickey Rourke gives a great performance in what is a really good movie. The best movie of the year, no, but better than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk, both of which got nods for picture of the year. Director Darren Aronofsky would have done well to tighten the first act up a bit, but by act two it really starts rolling and culminates in a surprising, moving third act. I really like that the movie doesn’t go for the typical schmaltz that comeback/underdog films usually go for – this is a movie that will stay with you for a while after the credits roll. Although I do feel compelled to say that I grew up in the town next to the town where most of this movie was set and shot, and believe me, that area of New Jersey is nowhere near as depressing as The Wrestler makes it out to be. Seriously.

Movies: My Bloody Valentine 3D

There’s no shortage of scary movies getting released this January and February, which is why horror junkies should feel safe skipping My Bloody Valentine 3D and getting their fix elsewhere. Horror movies don’t necessarily have to include a thrillingly original plot, as long as there is some coherency and lots of nail-biting moments. This movie has neither.

The movie opens with newspaper clippings and faux-news voiceovers giving the scant background of the story (a mine explosion trapped six miners in a shaft, one - Harry Warden - went crazy and pickaxed the other five to conserve air before falling into a coma), then it goes right into Warden waking from his year-long coma and going on a cross-town massacre that takes up probably the first twenty minutes of the movie, ending when Warden is gunned down right before he tries to kill Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), the guy responsible for the mine explosion in the first place. Cut to ten years later, Hanniger is back in town for the first time in a decade, and Warden is back from the dead and killing again...or is he?

My Bloody Valentine is the kind of slasher flick they don’t make anymore – but that might not be a bad thing. I say this as someone who grew up watching the 80s slashers, owns the Sleepaway Camp DVD boxset, and can’t wait to see how badly Michael Bay messes up Friday the 13th next month. When slasher movies were exciting and new, audiences seemed more inclined to handwave the less coherent plot machinations. But now that we’re used to more refined psychological components to our scares, having a spooky psycho killer with hazy motivations just doesn’t cut it.

The characters are wooden and the acting is uneven. While Jensen Ackles and Jaime King do a fine enough job with their roles, Kerr Smith, best known as Jen’s gay BFF on Dawson’s Creek, turns in a completely unsympathetic performance, which would be fine if his character didn’t get a third of the screentime. Don’t look for imaginative deaths, either – the killer sticks with his trusty pickaxe the whole time, which doesn’t make for much variety. And when faced with several choices for who the identity of the killer would be, the producers went with the least interesting option, leading to an anticlimactic ending.

The film could have been a campy treat if it didn’t take itself so seriously. The scene where the killer hacks up first a little person (played by Selene Luna, Margaret Cho’s personal assistant) and then a naked girl who is cursing a blue streak could have been a cheesy highlight in a film that embraced its camp value. But My Bloody Valentine positions itself as serious horror, and it really, truly isn’t. The original version was not a cinematic masterpiece, either, but at least its plot was coherent.

I should say, the theatre I saw My Bloody Valentine at was not equipped to do 3D, so I missed out on what I’m sure would have been several cool moments of severed jaws flying at my head and a pickaxe swinging towards my face, things that might have marginally improved my enjoyment of the film. But those are ultimately fun little tricks that can’t replace a well-made and entertaining movie. To be worth your money, a movie must be able to stand alone as a 2D experience as well as a 3D one. Unfortunately, My Bloody Valentine does not stand alone, and is not worth your money.

Worst Movies of 2008

Okay, I wanted to have this up earlier in the week, but then a plane crashed a couple hundred feet away from where I was working and I had to do the Media Thing of helping to cover it, which oddly enough doesn’t leave much time for mocking dreadful movies. But that’s what the weekend is for! As long as a plane doesn’t actually drop on my house as I'm writing this I should be okay.

So these are my picks for the worst movies of 2008, but with a caveat: no one is paying me to go see movies and review them (yet), I am under no obligation to see any particular movie and won’t part with much cash to see an obvious piece of crap if I can avoid it. So while I’m sure The Love Guru would have made the list had I seen it, I didn’t. Because that movie looks just terrible. So these may not be the definitively worst movies the year had to offer, but they were certainly a waste of my time, and if you’re a Netflixer, then maybe I can keep them from being a waste of yours, too.

10) The Ruins – This one wasn’t offensively bad, it was just bland. The characters were interchangeable, the horror was toothless. There was potential for a pretty good movie here that was mostly squandered with unimaginative direction.

9) 27 Dresses – Again, there was nothing offensive about this movie, but I literally cannot think of one single reason to recommend anyone sitting through it.

8) Sex and the City – I went into more detail about how this film fell flat in my review, but this is definitely one TV series that should have stuck with the high note it ended on instead of dragging its desiccated carcass onto the movie screen.

7) Jumper – Proof that a cool-looking trailer does not always translate into a cool movie. I still don’t understand why they felt the need to use two sets of actors and actresses for the older and younger characters when the age difference was something like five years. Incomprehensible plot, unimpressive action. Cool trailer, though.

6) Vantage Point – This was like eight different movies in one, and none of them any good.

5) Prom Night – No tension, no horror, no reason to waste your time on this remake-in-name-only.

4) Untraceable – Convoluted for the sake of being convoluted and boring as hell.

3) Made of Honor – A romantic comedy that’s neither romantic or comedic. Michelle Monaghan deserves better material than this.

2) The Happening – A couple years ago, I was on a cross-country flight when both my iPod and laptop ran out of juice, so I decided to watch the in-flight movie, The Lady in the Water. It was so terrible that I unplugged my headphones after thirty minutes and spent the rest of the flight staring into space. I thought that would be the worst movie M. Night Shyamalan could ever make. Let the record show that 2008 was the year he proved me wrong on that account.

1) Doomsday – I was nearly apoplectic with rage after sitting through this flaming pile of dross, because there was so much potential here. I love post-apocalyptic movies, I love plague stories, it looked like it would be amazing. And it starts out pretty well, until it suddenly veers off into bizarroland. No plausible explanation is given for why the isolated population of a country nigh overrun by cattle decided to go cannibalistic, or why the other half of the population is Medieval Fun Times With Malcolm McDowell. It was like the filmmakers couldn’t decide what kind of film they wanted to make, so they decided to make them all and, like Vantage Point, made none of them well.

If no movie I see in 2009 is even half as bad as The Happening or Doomsday, then I’ll give this year a solid win over the one that just passed, I swear.

Tropic Thunder Redux

I finally got around to watching my Tropic Thunder DVD this weekend. Sadly, upon second viewing the movie isn’t as hilarious as I remember. Some parts are still laugh-out-loud hilarious, of course, mostly the jokes that are character-based, but the overall impact is a little dulled. That’s always the risk with movies that rely a lot on outrageous gags for laughs, they don’t have a high repeat laugh quotient.

DreamWorks stuck an, um, interesting little surprise on the first disc. If you go to the main menu, click Special Features, click More, and click under the Previews on the thing that says DreamWorks Public Service Announcement, you’ll get to watch a minute and a half long PSA about people with intellectual disabilities, that says “People with intellectual disabilities deserve only one R word. Respect.” Alas, there is no PSA about not donning blackface, so they haven’t really covered all their bases as far as making reparations to the people they offended.

Also, the most popular Google search leading people to this blog is “Who played Rick Peck’s son in Tropic Thunder?” Like, at least a few people a day, every day, which – huh. Surprised that there are so many people out there caring, it’s such a throwaway bit in the movie. At any rate, I still don’t know the answer to that, just that he’s not really Ben Stiller’s nephew Carl but rather some unnamed actor. The cast commentary is not really enlightening on that front. Over the brief shot of the kid and McConaughey in the first act, Jack Black says, “Dude, that kid in the picture was the same one we used in the, uh, in the MTV short.” And Ben Stiller says, “Yes, we ended up using that kid in the MTV short because the kid was so good.” Then they go back to the commentary, which is amusing in some places, but mostly unsettling because Robert Downey Jr. chose to do the majority of it using his Lazarus voice and patois. Until the end, when he switches to the Australian accent. The man is a mad genius – and from day to day I vacillate between which half of that phrase to emphasize.

I still say the movie is worth seeing, and the extras are pretty good as far as these things go. And damn if Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson aren’t still the funniest freaking people to hit the screen in a long, long while.

Movies: Doubt

My favorite playwriting professor was fond of saying that in the theatre, the playwright is god. When compared to their Hollywood counterparts, the underpaid (compared to the director/talent) and underappreciated (compared to the key grip) screenwriters, this is certainly true. The playwright, after all, retains rights to their script forever and ever amen. This is the lone advantage of not having a union like the WGA backing you. So if you write a play (for example, Marsha Norman’s incomparable ‘night Mother), then some nutball amateur director wants to do something really out there with the setting (for example, changing the house to an ice floe), then you have the right to say no. Which, from what I hear, is precisely what Ms. Norman did. The playwright has the final say on everything. It’s an amazing kind of power to have – a power that, alas, seems to have gone to John Patrick Shanley’s head in creating the film adaptation of his Broadway play, Doubt.

The film, which is set in a Catholic school in the 1960s, concerns a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a pair of nuns (Meryl Streep and Amy Adams), and the suspicion that the priest played a round of Knock the Pope’s Hat Off with an altar boy. No concrete evidence is given, of course, leaving plenty of room for Doubt. (Did that pun make you roll your eyes and groan? Then skip this movie. Trust me.) Hoffman and Streep give fine performances – when don’t they? Streep is especially effective as exactly the kind of scary nun my father remembers from his Catholic school days in Newark in the 1950s. He likes to say their school colors were black and blue. (It’s okay to groan at that one, too.) Amy Adams, usually so lovely, is a weak link. Her wide eyed, shivering innocence reads like they’ve stuffed Giselle, her Enchanted Disney-princess-in-real-life character, into a habit and shoved her onto the soundstage. Viola Davis as the mother of the maybe-maybe-not-molested boy is a real standout. If any character in the movie could have used more screentime, it’s hers, but alas, she retains the one allotted scene the character got in the stage version. In fact, hers is the sole character to not get the supersizing treatment on celluloid.

Shanley chose to both direct and write the screenplay in an act that is nothing short of this film’s undoing. What on stage was a tight, focused narrative about the power of conviction and the peril of doubt has morphed into a meandering, bloated, self-important narrative that says the same things said by the stage version, but in a much less elegant manner. Was there a minor character mentioned in passing in the play? Let’s give them a whole arc in the movie! Was one character’s long winded bloviating not enough to establish their character? By all means, give them several scenes worth of set-up – and retain the bloviating speeches to boot! Shanley ladles out the worst of both worlds in his screenplay. Not only is nearly every word of the play lovingly preserved – not always in the same order as on the stage, mind, with whole scenes chopped up and redistributed, making sure every word is crammed in there whether the transition feels natural or not – but Shanley gave himself carte blanche to follow his every whim in padding out the story. And his sole previous directing credit is that 1990 masterpiece, Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also penned. So while I suppose he can be forgiven for his inelegant framing of shots and unfortunate tendency to focus the camera on the wrong character at the wrong moment, what can’t be forgiven is the fact that he didn’t hand the movie over to someone who did know what they were doing. Similarly, he should have entrusted the script with someone who had enough emotional distance from the source material to excise the excess and bring the best parts to the fore, not bury the whole thing in a thick, rancid layer of offal.

But he didn't, and so we're left with this movie which further proves that Hollywood is no place for a god.

Movies: Revolutionary Road

I really, really wanted to love Revolutionary Road. Oh man, did I want to love this movie. Enough to brave the massive crowd at Union Square at 7:30 p.m. on Friday night to see it. Which, by the way, never in my life have I shown up thirty minutes early for a movie and still had to sit in the third row because nowhere else in a cavernous, ~250 capacity theatre-with-balcony had two adjacent seats left. Jeebus. But really, I love Kate Winslet, I love Leonardo DiCaprio, I love (or thought I loved) Sam Mendes...it looked like a no-brainer to rank as one of my Top 10 movies of the year. What went wrong?

Well, not the acting, that’s for sure. Kate gives a gutsy, stripped down performance. She is the rare beautiful actress who isn’t afraid to be ugly and broken down, and looks all the more breathtaking for it. And Leo acts the hell out of a character with no real redeeming qualities. Michael Shannon, best known to New York theatre audiences for his roles in the Tracy Letts plays Bug and Killer Joe, is a scene stealer as a crackling wire of a man who was recently released from an asylum, and whose multiple electroshock treatments have given him both clarity of vision and lack of filter in reporting on what he sees. His brief appearances are easily the highlight of the film.

I also couldn’t find fault with any individual scene within the movie. Each one is shot and framed beautifully and the characters interact in interesting and meaningful ways. No scene felt extraneous or indulgent. And yet. All of those beautiful scenes played out by skilled actors do not add up to a coherent, satisfying story. This problem is revealed within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, when the opening scene where April (Winslet) and Frank (DiCaprio) first meet goes into a scene of the couple, already chafing at their suburban married life, having a snarling fight on the side of a road. The movie only flashes back a few times to fill in the time between scene one and scene two. I understand that this is a movie about the disintegration of a relationship, so too much time can’t be expended on the happy, early days of the courtship, but it’s hard to be moved by the death of a relationship to which we’ve yet to grow attached. The stakes just aren’t there.

I was surprised because I thought that Mendes had said something wonderful and profound about the American family in American Beauty. But after we got out of Revolutionary Road, my friend and I decided to take advantage of one of the last nights of decent weather we’ll see for a while by walking the forty blocks uptown rather than taking the subway, so I had some time to think. And I realized that, in retrospect, American Beauty is nowhere near as deep and profound as I found it to be when I first saw it at age sixteen. Which probably comes only as breaking news to me and me alone. American Beauty, in fact, is much like Revolutionary Road - a series of beautiful and interesting scenes that, strung end to end, do not make that satisfying a narrative.

The script is a little too earnest, barely salvaged by the skilled actors bringing it to life. Several lines that I’m sure were meant to evoke some kind of genuine emotion in the audience instead led to gut-splitting laughter in my section of the theatre. Granted, we were all kind of woozy from lack of blood to the head, since we were craning our necks to watch the giant screen that was only a few feet away from us, but I can’t imagine those lines garnering a different reaction farther back in the theatre. Especially the very obvious Titanic car sex shoutout - I could hear the laughter over that little doozy ringing down from the balcony. The first half of the movie also drags on far too slowly. During one scene, I checked my watch, certain the movie must be drawing to an end. I was surprised to see we were only at the halfway point. It does pick up in the second half, where the narrative also starts to come together from the disparate parts, but by then it’s almost too late to salvage the film.

Still, it is a movie worth seeing, if only for the performances of Kate, Leo, and Michael Shannon. It’s wonderful to see Kate’s April and Leo’s Frank fall out of love, back in love, and definitively out of love once and for all, as they try to balance their own hopes and ambitions with society’s expectations and, in Frank’s case, their self-sabotaging tendencies. And even if he can’t tell a cohesive narrative, Sam Mendes does still know how to frame a scene beautifully. There’s one mostly silent shot towards the end of the film, where April is staring out the window of her suburban prison cell, that I guarantee will stay with you long after you leave the theatre.

Movie Review Index

2009

Friday the 13th
My Bloody Valentine 3D

2008

Australia
Blindness
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Diary of the Dead
Doubt
The Duchess
Eagle Eye
Frost/Nixon
Funny Games
Ghost Town
Hancock
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The House Bunny
The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man
Lakeview Terrace
Midnight Meat Train
Milk
Mirrors
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Pineapple Express
Quarantine
Rachel Getting Married
The Reader
Repo! The Genetic Opera
Revolutionary Road
The Ruins
Saw V
Sex and the City
Shutter
Slumdog Millionaire
The Strangers
Tropic Thunder
Twilight
The Visitor
Wall-E
Wanted
The Women
The Wrestler

You can access this list any time from the side bar on the main page.

Movies: Milk

Some movies have a message, and some movies have entertainment value. Many have neither! (Doomsday, I’m looking at you, you exorable piece of dross.) But a few, those happy few, have both. Milk comes at a time when something hateful like Prop 8 can pass, when gay marriage and adoption rights are not the no-brainer they should be, when we’re not as far away from Stonewall as we might like to think we are.

As a movie itself, Milk manages what many true stories turned cinema don’t, which is to keep the tension in a narrative we all know the outcome of, whether from history itself or from the movie’s press junket. And as a message movie, well, it’s hard to ignore the parallels between now and thirty years ago, though even if you were inclined to ignore them, director Gus Van Sant expends no small amount of energy hammering that point home.

The movie has an awful lot going for it. The performances across the board are nuanced, crisp, and unexpected. Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is flawed and realistically rendered, while Josh Brolin’s Dan White is sympathetic even as he’s committing unforgivable actions. Brolin plays White as a man constantly on the brink of being good, choosing right, not doing what you know he will do. It makes his final act all the more heartbreaking as you wonder what small act might have prevented this tragedy. James Franco does solid work as Milk’s longtime lover Scott Smith, though his part as written is so even-keeled that it doesn’t give the tack-sharp Franco any real chance to spread his glorious wings. His performance earlier this year in this summer's Pineapple Express is actually more a credit to his acting abilities than this one. Emile Hirsch gives the real scene-stealing performance as Cleve Jones—his frenetic energy onscreen is something to behold. Victor Garber also makes the most of his few scenes as Mayor George Moscone. The film is a visual marvel as well. There’s one scene of Dan White playing with his baby, seen only in the reflection of a television tuned to Harvey Milk speaking to a reporter, that easily ranks as one of the best shot scenes you’ll see all year. And Van Sant deftly weaves archival footage in among the movie scenes so seamlessly it’s not always possible to distinguish between the two.

For all Milk has going for it, however, there are a few flaws that keep it from outshining the other big ticket Oscar-baiting movies of the year. Many of the small, human moments are lost to the political machinations. There are two scenes of Milk speaking by telephone to a boy in a wheelchair. These scenes are stunning and let Milk the man connect with the audience in place of Milk the politico, who dominated the film. But these are only two brief scenes. Adding some similar interactions would have gone a long way towards giving some depth and variance to the story. Van Sant also underestimates the intelligence of his audience with several spoon-feeding gestures designed to deliver the message to audience members who were too busy texting to Get It. For example, there’s a ham-handed, blatantly foreshadowing scene early on with Harvey and Scott in bed, where Harvey says that he’s 40 and has never done anything important with his life, and wonders whether he’ll live to 50. Well, if you’ve seen any of the trailers you already know what part of that statement will be reversed and what part won’t. The scene itself is mostly forgivable, but what isn’t forgivable is Van Sant’s insistence upon rerunning the scene towards the end, as clearly the audience isn’t bright enough to make the connection between the end of the film and a scene from a whole hour and a half earlier.

But the one thing I can’t get past is the woman issue. Alison Pill as Anne Kronenberg is asked to represent her entire gender, and while she certainly does an admirable job, the nearly complete lack of women in the film is absolutely unconscionable. I cannot fully respect a film that’s trying to make a statement about one marginalized minority that completely cuts out another. When Kronenberg, an out-and-proud lesbian, makes her grand entrance into Milk’s circle, the boys boo and hiss at the appearance of a woman, even if it’s a woman who is fighting the same exact fight they are, who as a fellow homosexual is every bit as discriminated against. When she says that rumor has it Milk’s boys hate women, only Harvey makes a transparently weak attempt to refute it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen lesbians pushed aside in favor of gay men when it comes to the gay rights movement and visibility. Listen, I’ve worked in theatre and I’ve worked in publishing/media. I’ve met no small amount of gay men in my life, enough to know that gay men do not conform to any specific, predictable pattern of behavior any more than do their straight counterparts. That being said, I have met a few that conform to the fun, bubbly stereotype of female-empowering, boob-grabbing, glittery balls of awesome. (And, confidential to straight men, if you ever want to have a bit of fun, go to a gay bar one night – if a straight woman’s in there accompanying her gay BFF for the night, you can usually grab her breasts and say all sorts of lewd things to her, and get nary a knee to the balls for it because we’ll just assume you’re one of the boys having fun!) But I’ve also met a few who conform to that other, less flattering stereotype – the gay men who are just hateful towards women (like Stylista’s DyShaun) and would be happier living in a vagina-free mantopia. Which is a ridiculous stance to take because there are plenty of hateful straight bigots who would love to live in a gay-free world – so I don’t understand how anyone who has been the subject of hate and prejudice could turn against another marginalized group in a similar way. I’m aware that I come from a position of relative privilege. I’m white, and I’m straight, and though my family is solidly working class with no completed college degrees on my father’s side, I clawed my way up into and out of a good school (with a mountain of debt to show for it) with the vague hope of getting some upward class mobility for myself, something I would not have even had the opportunity to do had my background been, say, solidly lower class. But I am trying to break into an industry that clearly favors the male gender. And while I haven’t been mutilated, forced to wear a burqa, or prevented from driving, I have been in situations where I was fully cognizant of the fact that I was being treated differently – often worse – solely because of how I was born. It wasn’t pleasant and it is not anything I would wish to turn on any other person who’s been made to feel less because of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, or skin color. No movement for equality can effectively advance over the backs of others – that will only result in a lot of trampled bodies littering the ground while the majority remain the majority.

Milk comes close - very close - to being a great film. But with one entire half of the human population underrepresented, it’s only a good movie.

Movies: Australia and Changeling

As with most Baz Luhrmann movies, Australia will only be truly appreciated by a small group of fans, and probably not until long after it has left the theatres. (Which, at least in my area, it already has.) While this three-hour epic isn’t as visually creative as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, the big beating heart under the rough and tumble western façade is pure Baz. The movie feels more like a sprawling miniseries than a movie, which may explain why it did so poorly in the theatres of our ADDled nation, where viewers rarely have the attention span to digest one thoughtful story, let alone three packed into one. But Australia is well worth your time – all three hours of it. It’s as lush a love story as you’ll see in years. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s relationship is more adult than Baz’s other star-crossed lovers, but no less passionate. And for once, you won’t use up an entire box of Kleenex watching a Baz movie. You’ll use up half a box in the middle, sure, but for once Luhrmann leaves his audience with hearts intact, and I think the movie is no worse off for ditching the sucking-air-from-chest impact for a bit of hope. This is easily one of my favorite films of the year.

And then there’s Changeling. I had great hope for this movie, but it fell irrevocably flat in the second half. The first half, driven by Christine (Angelina Jolie)’s search for her son and fight against a male-dominated, corrupt justice system, zips along nicely with good tension and acting. Jolie’s performance is not very layered – she see-saws between a wet-eyed, plaintive “I want my son back” to a snarling, animalistic “I WANT MY SON BACK!” for the duration – but has its effective moments. But the mystery is resolved with half the movie to go, at which point the film completely deflates. I understand when you’re working with a real life story and you want to cover certain events, you can’t always work with a traditional climax, but I feel like someone of Clint Eastwood’s skill and verve could have found a way to keep the tension going through non-linear narrative or something of the like. The ending itself is a bit of a sour note, too, as a text overlay tells you how Christine spent the rest of her life in false-hope limbo. Not exactly uplifting or giving of closure. Still, it’s in the least a historically interesting story, an unflinching look at the difficulty women had – and sometimes still have – navigating a patronizing legal system.

The Most Fun You Can Have With Someone's Hand Inside You

There are few things that can't be improved by the addition of puppets, and of those few things, well, it's probably not for lack of trying. One of my favorite episodes of Angel was "Smile Time", where the titular vamp turned all felty.

So I was delighted to turn up this puppet rendering of the song "Zydrate Anatomy" from one of my favorite films of 2008, Repo! The Genetic Opera. You can read my original review here and compare the puppet version with the film version. Thankfully, only one of the clips contains full-frontal felt-on-felt action.

2009 Golden Globe Nominations

The Golden Globe nominations are out today. Not a lot of surprises to be had. Most of the nods are for the awards-baiting flicks that haven’t even been released or wide-released yet, making it a little difficult to weigh in. But the Globes do often paint a decent thumbnail of what we can expect from the Oscar noms in January, so for that they’re interesting. Here are the motion picture nominations. I haven’t included the television nominations because they’re just a watered-down version of the Emmy awards, but if you want to check them out for yourself you can do so here.

BEST MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
FROST/NIXON
THE READER
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Not a lot of surprises. I knew Australia would unfortunately get shut out. I know a lot of people hoped for a Dark Knight nod, and the Oscars may still surprise us there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Ditto Wall-E. I am surprised, however, that Reader got a nod over Milk considering the bad buzz Reader’s been garnering. Even though I haven’t seen most of the nominees because they haven’t yet been released (which, hi, can we please stop stacking all the awards-baiters on Christmas in the future?), I’m still rooting for the under-Dog.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

ANNE HATHAWAY – RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
ANGELINA JOLIE – CHANGELING
MERYL STREEP – DOUBT
KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS – I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG (IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T’AIME)
KATE WINSLET – REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

Could this be Kate’s year to bring home Oscar gold? Hard to say. At least she’s not competing against herself since the Weinsteins positioned her Reader role as supporting. Anne and Angelina both did wonderful jobs in their roles, but I didn’t feel like Angelina’s was particularly special, and not compared to Anne’s balls-to-the-wall, gutsy turn.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

LEONARDO DICAPRIO – REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
FRANK LANGELLA – FROST/NIXON
SEAN PENN – MILK
BRAD PITT – THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
MICKEY ROURKE – THE WRESTLER

Voters love a comeback story, and since Robert Downey Jr.’s The Soloist was pushed to '09, that leaves a spot open for Rourke.

BEST MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

BURN AFTER READING
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
IN BRUGES
MAMMA MIA!
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

I think Burn After Reading has an edge with the Coen Bros. still riding on their No Country buzz from last year, but VCB could win in an upset.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

REBECCA HALL – VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
SALLY HAWKINS – HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
FRANCES MCDORMAND – BURN AFTER READING
MERYL STREEP – MAMMA MIA!
EMMA THOMPSON – LAST CHANCE HARVEY

Sally Hawkins got a lot of good buzz for her Happy-Go-Lucky turn, but the character might be too one-note to snag the award.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

JAVIER BARDEM – VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
COLIN FARRELL – IN BRUGES
JAMES FRANCO – PINEAPPLE EXPRESS
BRENDAN GLEESON – IN BRUGES
DUSTIN HOFFMAN – LAST CHANCE HARVEY

James Franco was good in Pineapple Express, but if he wins this award it will be because of his performance in Milk and overall good standing in the acting community.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

BOLT
KUNG FU PANDA
WALL-E

The dog and panda don’t stand a chance.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (GERMANY)
EVERLASTING MOMENTS (SWEDEN/DENMARK)
GOMORRAH (ITALY)
I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG (FRANCE)
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (ISRAEL)

I’m surprised Bashir didn’t place into animated, and I’m surprised Let The Right One In didn’t get a nod.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

AMY ADAMS – DOUBT
PENELOPE CRUZ – VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
VIOLA DAVIS –DOUBT
MARISA TOMEI – THE WRESTLER
KATE WINSLET – THE READER

From what I know of the play that Doubt is based on, I don’t think either of the nominated roles here are meaty enough to win the category. I’m betting on Cruz, and maybe Winslet if Winslet doesn’t get lead actress for Revolutionary Road.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

TOM CRUISE – TROPIC THUNDER
ROBERT DOWNEY JR. –TROPIC THUNDER
RALPH FIENNES – THE DUCHESS
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – DOUBT
HEATH LEDGER – THE DARK KNIGHT

No Franco for Milk? That’s a surprise. Tom Cruise is a really, really big surprise. His role was funny, but award-worthy? Hardly. Glad that Heath got the nod. And I’m thrilled Robert got a nod, but they’re not gonna give an award to a role performed mostly in blackface. Downey’s Thunder nod is only because RDJ is Hollywood’s favorite sweetheart at the moment, and they couldn’t possibly nominate two superhero movie characters in one season (his Iron Man performance was heads and shoulders above his Thunder performance, and above most other performances this year to boot), and The Soloist isn’t eligible this year. This will be an interesting category to watch.

BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

DANNY BOYLE – SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
STEPHEN DALDRY – THE READER
DAVID FINCHER – THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
RON HOWARD – FROST/NIXON
SAM MENDES – REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

I think Boyle will get this in lieu of Best Picture.

BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE

SIMON BEAUFOY – SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
DAVID HARE – THE READER
PETER MORGAN – FROST/NIXON
ERIC ROTH – THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY – DOUBT

If Roth's adaptation of the Fitzgerald story is strong enough, he could snag this.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE

ALEXANDRE DESPLAT –THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
CLINT EASTWOOD – CHANGELING
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD – DEFIANCE
A. R. RAHMAN – SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
HANS ZIMMER – FROST/NIXON

BEST ORIGINAL SONG – MOTION PICTURE

“DOWN TO EARTH” — WALL-E
Music by: Peter Gabriel, Thomas Newman
Lyrics by: Peter Gabriel
“GRAN TORINO” — GRAN TORINO
Music by: Clint Eastwood, Jamie Cullum, Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens
Lyrics by: Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens
“I THOUGHT I LOST YOU” — BOLT
Music & Lyrics by: Miley Cyrus, Jeffrey Steele
“ONCE IN A LIFETIME” — CADILLAC RECORDS
Music & Lyrics by: Beyoncé Knowles, Amanda Ghost, Scott McFarnon, Ian Dench, James Dring, Jody Street
“THE WRESTLER” — THE WRESTLER
Music & Lyrics by: Bruce Springsteen

I would have liked to see Repo! The Genetic Opera get a nod in either of these categories, along with Australia, but ah well. There’s still hope for the Oscars.

Movies: Slumdog Millionaire

If Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale, then it’s more in line with the original, Grimm versions where toes are hacked off than the Disneyfied takes where little mice help you get dressed. There’s plenty of magic, sweetness, and a happy ending, sure, but Danny Boyle and Co. spare no amount of grit in getting you there.

Thanks to Boyle’s deft direction and Simon Beaufoy’s tight screenplay, Slumdog flits effortlessly back and forth between two narratives. One has the grown Jamal (Dev Patel) defending his winning streak on the Indian version of Who Want to Be A Millionaire? to the suspicious authorities who don’t believe that a “slumdog” could get so many answers right without cheating. The other narrative shows the younger Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as the Youngest Jamal, whose scenes are all in Hindi with subtitles in contrast to the rest of the film’s English, and Tanay Chheda as Middle Jamal) growing up in the slums, falling in love with Latika (played by Freida Pinto, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, and Rubiana Ali from oldest to youngest), sparring with his older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), and learning everything a young slumdog needs to know to survive (and win a game show).

The prize money is hardly the point for either the movie or Jamal, who only went on the show to attract the attention of his lost love Latika. The real thrust of the story is Jamal’s rough and tumble childhood and unflagging devotion to Latika. Slumdog spins admittedly familiar elements – star-crossed love, a ragtag group of orphans overseen by a menacing Fagin-like figure (Ankur Vikal), brothers at odds – through the kaleidoscope of Mumbai and Indian culture and winds up with something utterly entrancing. As the movie unfolded at the tiny Angelika Theatre in downtown New York City I noticed something amazing. The after-work audience, who started out as restless and chattery as after-work audiences tend to be after being trapped in cubicles for eight hours, quieted down, becoming entirely engrossed in the film, until – to my immense chagrin - I realized I could perfectly hear the squeaking of my Chucks against the floor. (I was engrossed, but that didn’t make me any more able to sit still after spending eight hours at a desk.) It’s hard to think of many flaws to nitpick. The movie makes its only stumble at the very, very end, when clumsy, saccharine dialogue is used where silence would have resounded louder, but this little misstep can be forgiven in light of all the beauty that precedes it. Slumdog is a simple story, beautifully told.

It was, however, difficult to watch the scenes in Mumbai in light of the recent terror attacks on the city, especially when anti-Muslim crusaders attack the slums in a scene rivaling the gunning down of Bambi’s mother for sheer heartbreak, but Slumdog is nothing short of a love letter to the city – warts and all – and the joyful, Bollywood-style dance scene at the end goes a long way towards applying a bit of balm to the still-raw situation.

Hardwicke Off 'Twilight'

Nikki Finke is reporting that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke has been fired from the film franchise. This should come as a shock to anyone who has been watching the film’s grosses creep higher and higher. Often, a successful movie outing helps to guarantee the creatives and actors their spots in sequels in hopes of replicating the success of the original, though of course there are always exceptions.

This comes as a blow to everyone who was excited to see a female-helmed film do so well. In fact, Twilight was the highest grossing film helmed by a solo female director. And I certainly feel like Hardwicke did an admirable job of excising the dopier parts of the book and delivering a solid movie adaptation. But what bothers me here is not that a female director, and a good director, is being fired. No, what bothers me is the language being thrown around to describe the situation. From Nikki:

The word from inside Summit is that Hardwicke, the acclaimed Thirteen director, "was 'difficult' and 'irrational' during the making of Twilight," one insider explains to me.
…
.. and Summit thought Hardwicke's [CAA] agent Beth Swofford was alternately ineffectual and hysterical."

Emphasis mine. It makes my skin crawl to see certain words applied to women…it’s the same old quandary women in the workplace have always faced: if we’re too aggressive we’re labeled bitches, whereas our male counterparts are simply aggressive. go-getters, and other positively-couched traits. I just can’t see anyone calling a male agent “hysterical” and I certainly haven’t heard of many male directors getting fired for being “difficult” when the final product is solid (and solidly profitable).

Of course, a lot of it probably comes down to money as it so often does. Hardwicke has made no effort to keep quiet her gripes about the stingy budget for the first movie. From the upcoming Entertainment Weekly cover story (the third of the year, by the way):

As of press time, Hardwicke — who now holds the record for best opening-weekend box office for a female director — hadn't signed on. But she spent much of the weekend sequestered in meetings with lawyers, agents, and studio executives. She felt hamstrung by her modest budget through much of the Twilight shoot. ''I had more elaborate stunt sequences designed and very crazy, cool stuff that I wanted to do,'' she says. ''We had locations taken away. We had five days cut before we started to shoot. But, you know, I kind of got past that, I just had to let it go.''

After the grueling production, Hardwicke now wants to make sure the studio shows her the money to properly tackle New Moon's tricky plotline — which includes location shooting in Rome and several characters who must realistically morph from teenage boys into werewolves. Summit's Feig has nothing but praise for Hardwicke, but he maintains that the sequel doesn't necessarily demand a bigger budget. ''I don't think there was anything excessively lavish about Twilight, and yet the world was fully realized,'' he says. ''We'll do exactly the same thing with New Moon.'' Still, the studio might want to throw more money at the universally trashed special effect that was supposed to make Pattinson sparkle magically in the sunlight but left him looking merely sweaty. ''People make realistic CGI dragons, so you wouldn't think making people sparkle would be that hard,'' says Meyer.

Keep in mind New Moon requires sets that look like Italy and werewolf transformations and, yes, it would be nice to see vampires that sparkle instead of glisten. And the effects for Twilight were reviled by even the hardcore fans, so throwing some extra money at the sequel should have been a no-brainer.

So maybe Hardwicke and Summit just couldn’t see eye to eye on the budget and that’s fine, I have no problems with someone being fired because they’re not the right fit for the job, but if this was a male director, would the words “irrational” and “hysterical” really be bandied about? And, of course, as the Republican party learned from the Sarah Palin debacle, one vagina doesn’t necessarily replace another and Twilight fans won’t necessarily be placated by the hiring of another female director in Hardwicke's place, but I would hope that there will be some disgruntled rumblings if Hardwicke is replaced with a guy with the assumption he’ll be able to keep his icky emotions in check.

Black Friday Alternatives

Take some time away from your shopping (or from contemplating the horrors of consumerist America) with some quality entertainment tonight. Here are a few suggestions.

1. The Psych 2008 Christmas Special

The clearly-superior-to-CBS-rip-off-The-Mentalist fake psychic / real detective show is back with a Christmas special tonight on USA. I’m sure it will air a few dozen times between now and Christmas so there’s technically no rush to go see it, but all the cool kids are gonna watch it tonight, and you want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?

2. Australia

I’ll do a full review this weekend, but I went to go see it this afternoon and holy crap is it fantastic. Normally, anything resembling a Western makes me break out into hives, but never fear, this is a big, lush, sweeping romantic epic that’s sure to please any fans of Baz’s other movies (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet), as well as anyone with a still-beating heart in their chest.

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Namesake

Thanksgiving’s all about celebrating immigration (and the slaughter of indigenous people...with pie). In that vein (immigration, not slaughter), why not pick up two great books exploring recent immigration experiences, The Brief Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican author Junot Diaz and The Namesake by Indian author Jhumpa Lahiri.


Or just watch this hilarious clip from yesterday's Thanksgiving Day Parade:

Twilight: The Movie

Despite having been a shrieky, obnoxious teenage girl myself only six years ago, I have limited patience for large packs of squealing hormone bombs, so I waited for a 10 p.m. Sunday night showing before venturing out to see Twilight. The theatre was pretty empty. Two or three clumps of giddy but well-behaved young girls, two couples on a double date, and one older woman who I initially thought was saving seats for three of her friends, but who I realized later just brings a boatload of crap along to the movies and spreads it out among the empty seats around her. (Don’t take this to mean that Twilight will see an inevitable audience drop-off in the coming weeks – while it certainly might, my movie theatre is almost always that empty at shows that are before 4 p.m. and after 10 p.m., which is why I usually go before 4 p.m. and after 10 p.m.) I mention all of this only because I didn’t get the Mystery Science Theatre treatment that other filmgoers got when watching this. All the line readings were allowed to ring earnest unaccompanied by laughter, which was sometimes painful, sometimes less painful than I expected.

By now, you probably know more about Twilight than you ever wanted to, but in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks, a recap: Bella, age 17, moves from Arizona to Washington. There she meets Edward, age 17 (give or take a century), and his family of “vegetarian” vampires, who feed only on cuddly woodland animals. These vampires are more in name only than full-out Nosferatu – they don’t sleep in coffins (they don’t sleep at all), garlic doesn’t repel them (but they’re no more inclined to eat it than they are any other human food), and sunlight doesn’t harm them but they have to stick to shadows anyway because their non-human status will be given away by how their skin sparkles in the sunlight (more on that later). Bella and Edward fall in love because Edward is super dreamy and Bella smells inexplicably extra-tasty compared to other humans. Which is all fine and well until they run into a trio of less progressive (Republican) vamps who see Bella as more of a snack than a romantic interest, and so it goes. That book spawned three sequels, with ever-increasingly-complicated mythologies, half-hearted romantic rivalries, and a fanbase of squealing hormone bombs and their daughters. So how does the series fare in its first big screen outing?

Twilight as a book-to-film adaptation succeeds because it manages to stay true to its source material while still making concessions that allow it to work as a film in its own right. The trio of non-“vegetarian” vamps who scuffle with the main characters in the film’s climax appear only at the end of the book as almost an afterthought when the author realized she needed more conflict than Edward’s feeble attempts to stay away from Bella. Melissa Rosenberg wisely weaves the baddie vamps more throughout the entire plot, giving the story a firmer trajectory. Scenes and characters are artfully collapsed in such a delicate manner that will prevent both devoted fangirls and off-the-street newbies from having aneurysms, as enough of the source is protected while still streamlining it for the masses.

The casting is spot-on (although I may be biased as I read the books very recently, long after having seen countless trailers and read an interminable number of articles, so I certainly read it with these actors already in mind). It was well-acted throughout, and the chemistry between Robert Pattinson as Edward and Kristen Stewart as Bella sizzles and carries the movie nearly entirely. Pattinson said in an Entertainment Weekly article that he played the part of Edward as manic depressive despite attempts to make the film more comedic. I was worried that this clash would give the movie a weird tone, but it works surprisingly well. The movie earns a few laughs on its own terms (and not just at the expense of the cheesy effects and turgid romantic lines) while Pattinson’s performance lends it more gravitas than it rightly deserves. Kristen Stewart’s Bella is appealing, whip smart, sarcastic, and vulnerable, even if she is seemingly incapable of ever closing her mouth. The supporting cast of Bella’s high school classmates and Edward’s vamp fam are all very engaging, though none of them get nearly enough screentime. It’s hard to fault writer Melissa Rosenberg and director Catherine Hardwicke for making the movie so Bella-and-Edward centric, as they are the core that the rest of the series will be built upon, but some more balance might have been found. Luckily, the sequel has already been greenlit so they’ll get another crack at giving the audience more exposure to the other characters. (The movie is a major win for the relatively new Summit Pictures – it was made for about $37M and grossed $20M this weekend, the highest gross for a solo female-directed film to date, making it a win for those who want to see more female-helmed movies do well, too.)

The movie does have a few roadblocks that may stand in the way of it becoming a lasting mainstream hit. (Make no mistake, it will absolutely live on in the hearts of the current crop of young girls the same way Titanic and Baz L.’s Romeo + Juliet live on with my generation, and the way Pretty in Pink and Say Anything live on with the generation before mine.) The cheesy special effects, for starters. The movie was made on a limited budget, so much is forgivable, but it wasn’t necessary to have little jingle-jingle sounds accompanying the shots of Edward’s skin sparkling in the sun. Although I do have to give the movie credit for finally making the “vampires sparkle in the sun” thing make somewhat organic storytelling sense to me. When I read it in the books, it seemed utterly ridiculous and made me suspect the author had spent a little too much time out in the sun herself. “Hm, vampires bursting into flames in the sun is so cliché. Instead, my vampires will sparkle like diamonds!” Hey, I had a minor body glitter addiction in the summer of 1996, I can relate. But throughout the books the vampire skin is described as smooth, cold, and hard like stone, and sure enough, the movie effects did remind me of the way some polished marble and limestone can sparkle in the sunlight. So maybe there was actual rhyme to Stephenie Meyer’s reasoning in that detail. Or maybe she’s just a little loopy.

The movie also has a tendency to resemble a music video, which I’m sure is no problem for the target demographic but might frustrate older viewers. And I can’t say I agree with the reduction of key scenes depicting Edward and Bella falling for each other into montages of them talking, leaving us to infer that something deep is transpiring but not giving us any tangible proof of such. Granted, this is not something the book properly explored either – it’s a love-at-first-sight kind of deal for the pair, which I am not against as a rule in the star-crossed lover genre. Romeo and Juliet didn’t exactly have a heart to heart where they compared their politics, moral values, and life’s hopes and dreams before pledging undying fealty to each other, and that’s fine. But one semi-poignant conversation would go a lot further than hinting at conversations the audience can only infer are poignant. For all we know, Edward and Bella could be cooing “You’re so pretty!” “No, you’re so pretty!” “No, you’re so pretty!” to each other.

Finally, there are certain things that might seem swooningly romantic to the Clearasil set but might make older skin crawl, like when Edward confesses to breaking into Bella’s room for the past few months to watch her sleep. It’s a testament to Pattinson’s charm that I didn’t flee screaming from the theatre at that point, because I already have a paranoid streak and OCD urge to check and re-check all my windows before I go to bed each night.

Still, as with the book it’s based on, it’s easy to look past the cheesy or unsettling parts of Twilight and get sucked into the romance and adventure. There’s plenty to satisfy the ardent fans, from near-slavish devotion to preserving purple-yet-beloved lines from the book to little easter eggs like Edward recreating the iconic book cover and a cameo by the author in a diner scene. For everyone else, it’s a solid flick, entertaining and well-paced with a bevy of great actors inhabiting charming roles. It might not be The Second Coming of Potter – this fact is underscored by the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that’s attached to Twilight, which took over Potter’s original release date when Potter got pushed back to next summer – but it’s worth parting with $10 to see, even in this economy.