Review – Happy-Go-Lucky

This sort of movie isn’t my usual cup of tea, but every once in awhile I like to take a break and watch something silly and romantic. And this movie fit the need nicely. Sally Hawkins plays Poppy, a perpetually cheerful woman who weathers the ups and downs of her life – including a stolen bike and a psycho driving instructor – with quirky good humor. The plot flow (to the extent the movie even has a plot) is a bit uneven, but that actually works in its favor. If it had been entirely, relentlessly upbeat, it probably would have turned to treacle after awhile. As it was, this was a pleasant little picture that probably won’t win a lot of Oscars but nonetheless did a better job of pure entertainment than most movies with bigger stars and more lavish budgets. Worth seeing

Review – The Signal

The first couple of minutes made this look so much like another low-budget pile of torture porn that I almost shut it off. However, I’m glad I stuck with it. After they got the opening vignette out of their systems, the film-makers get down to a much better piece of indie horror. The thesis seems familiar at first: a mysterious signal transmitted by televisions and phones causes everyone to go insane. However, unlike King, Romero and other predecessors, this time around the victims don’t become mindless, blood-crazed zombies. These lunatics retain at least some capacity for thought and can even pass for normal when they have to. Of course that makes them far more dangerous than shambling corpses. The picture is a bit uneven, at least in part because the running time is divided between three different writer/directors who take slightly different approaches to the same set of characters. But overall this is a lot more innovative and interesting than the DVD box made it look like it would be. Worth seeing

At least say “trick or treat”

I suppose none of us ever really grows up to be what we thought we’d be when we were kids. Sometimes the best we can hope for is avoiding becoming the kinds of adults we hated when we were younger. Thus I was considerably upset when – after some recent self-examination – I discovered that I’d turned into one of the most loathsome creatures ever to haunt childhood’s otherwise happy hours.

I’ve turned into a Halloween Grinch.

When I was a kid I absolutely loved Oct. 31. Next to Christmas – of course nothing could compete with Christmas – Halloween was the best holiday ever. To this day I remember my costume from just about every year. The werewolf get-up complete with my first full-head latex mask and furry wolf paws my mom sewed for me. The invisible man costume with sunglasses – not the smartest idea for crossing streets after dark – and bandages that swiftly unraveled, leaving me more “burn victim” than “invisible.” Even the store-bought jobs had their own measure of magic.

When I got too old to trick-or-treat, I switched to distribution duty. Throughout high school, college, grad school, law school, and even the real world, I’ve tried where possible to station myself next to the door from dusk to 9:00 or so with a plastic jack-o-lantern full of candy. And that’s good candy, by the way. Not those vaguely-peanut-butter-flavored things that come in the orange and black wax paper wrappers and are universally considered nasty by everyone everywhere except maybe the folks who hand them out.

Indeed, one of the things I was really looking forward to as a new homeowner three years ago was really getting into the Halloween thing. One of my teachers in junior high used to convert his front yard into a mini-graveyard. He’d dress like Frankenstein and shamble after us down the walk once his wife had dished out the treats. I’m too short to pull of the Frankenstein thing, but the rest of it would have been really cool.

Early in October of our first year in our current neighborhood, we got our first hints that things might not work out exactly as planned. The neighborhood association’s newsletter said that kids in our area would trick-or-treat a day early in order to avoid some vague, undefined problem with the traditional day. It made me wonder what exactly I’d moved into.

Then I found out. I was out of the house until late that first All Hallow’s Eve, but I arrived home to a scene of utter pandemonium. Honestly, I hadn’t seen that large a crowd of cars parked on the streets and people milling around since I lived less than a block from the KU football stadium. Actually, except for the Nebraska games, even the football fans weren’t this numerous.

To be honest, the crowds and the chaos didn’t especially bother me. I admit that the tradition I recall from childhood was no more than three blocks – give or take – in any direction from home. That’s a far cry from kids coming in from so far away that they have to be driven into the neighborhood. But I’m willing to adapt to new customs. And it’s not like I can’t afford a few extra bags of treats for kids that pile out of cars with out-of-state tags.

However, I’m less flexible about a few other Halloween traditions. So this year I’m asking parents to help their children help me un-Grinch myself. If you have kids who are planning to trick-or-treat this year, please pass three things on to them for me.

First, 13 is the limit. The moment you can officially be called a teenager, trick-or-treating is officially over for you. Even if your birthday is Oct. 31, you’re still out. Sorry, but that’s the rule. Maybe it isn’t fair, but if you’re 13 then you’re old enough to understand that life isn’t always fair. You’re also old enough to leave the candy for the kids.

Second, you must wear a costume. Michael Vick is scary. You in a Michael Vick jersey ain’t. I’m not asking for much. Don a ratty old coat and beat-up hat and go as a hobo. Throw on overalls, blow a buck on a straw hat, and go as a hillbilly. Put your clothes on backwards and go as Mr. Crazy Backwards Man. All I’m looking for here is some effort.

Even if you can’t manage either of the first two simple requests, please at least try to master this third one. Spend 20 minutes or so practicing it in the bathroom mirror if you have to. Two simple phrases. The first is “trick or treat.” The second is “thank you.” No magic words, no magic.

And if Halloween isn’t about magic, what is it about?

Most of this entry was originally printed as a column in the Kansas City Kansan.

Review – The End of St. Petersburg

This film – Pudovkin’s take on the October Revolution – would make an interesting companion piece to Eisenstein’s October, assuming one could endure two over-edited Soviet silent movies in one sitting. My favorite part about this picture was that it was less grandiose than most other cinema treatments of the Russian Revolution (October, Doctor Zhivago and Reds in particular). The plot focuses on a peasant who comes to the city seeking work only to find himself caught up in the turmoil of the times. Before the end, he’s suffered just about every ill experienced by the lower classes: starvation, homelessness, labor riots, military service in World War One, and so on. Though the production is plagued with Soviet propaganda clichés such as the Honest Workers versus the Greedy Capitalists, it still manages at least a little genuine human interest. Mildly amusing

Review – Earth

This may be a classic of Soviet propaganda film-making from the late silent era, but beyond that it’s mostly just weird. The bare bones of a plot is about a collective farming champion murdered by a selfish landowner. Throw in an atheist funeral, a grieving wife thrashing around naked, some powerful tractor obsession, and a motivational speech about the glories of Communist aircraft, and you’ve got some idea of just how odd this picture is. So while it’s a brilliant piece of cinema as graphic art, it leaves something to be desired in the talking-the-peasants-into-giving-up-their-land department. Mildly amusing

Review – The Curse of the Living Corpse

This crappy old horror movie is a lesson in how awkward foreshadowing can ruin a production. Assemble a gaggle of greedy relatives at the reading of a millionaire’s will. The will states that the relatives have to take special precautions to make sure the ol’ guy isn’t buried alive. If they fail to perform their duties, he’s going to kill them using whatever they fear most (fire, drowning, etc.). So right away the audience knows 1. the guy was buried alive, and 2. he’s going to kill them using whatever they fear most. The only remedy for the ensuing tedium is to pull a twist out of left field at the end of the picture, a cure that’s almost worse than the disease itself. This experience is noteworthy as an early appearance by a very young Roy Scheider and not much else. See if desperate

Review – The Mysterious Doctor

For a movie that barely makes a 60 minute running time, this sure does pack a lot of weirdness into a small amount of space. In the first half of the 1940s, even horror movies often ended up working for the war effort in some way. So here tin miners in England have been frightened away from their jobs by a headless phantom, costing the motherland access to a badly-needed resource. The whodunit that ensues is bound to involve a Nazi saboteur, but I admit I was disappointed when the culprit turned out to be a life-long limey with distant German ancestors. The once-a-kraut-always-a-kraut racism was an unwelcome element from this distant time and place in film history. Mildly amusing

Review – Persepolis

Usually I wince and prepare for a big face-full of Film Board of Canada anytime blockishly-animated characters start speaking French. But this was a pleasant surprise. For starters, it’s an actual French production, not a Canadian grant-funded tax dodge. But more than that, it’s the genuinely touching story of a woman growing up in Iran (and as an exile in Europe) in the late 70s and early 80s. The chunky animation doesn’t even come across as cheap; instead, it’s an artistic mirror of the style used in the minimalist comics that served as the basis for the movie. This is welcome proof that movies don’t have to be expensive and elaborate in order to be profound. Worth seeing

Review – Torn Curtain

It’s a spy thriller from the height of the Cold War. Alfred Hitchcock directed it. Paul Newman and Julie Andrews star. How can it possibly be this bad? The major failing here is that the plot is set up to keep the protagonists in edge-of-your-seat peril constantly, and it sacrifices logic, character development, and just about everything else for the sake of maintaining tension throughout. In particular, the characters’ willingness to do things that only the most mentally-atypical spies would ever do (such as meeting a contact on a tractor in the middle of a field with absolutely no cover story for why either of them should be there) is absolutely fatal to the story. What a disappointment. See if desperate

Review – The Golden Compass

If nothing else, it’s nice for Hollywood to take a chance on a story that doesn’t treat organized Christianity as the realm of benevolent, CGI lions. Instead we get the Magisterium, a sinister organization that seeks to dominate the universe by stamping out individualism. The effects are the real star of the show, presenting a steam-punk world in which every human has an animal “demon” for a companion. Though the pictures are pretty and the plot is at least somewhat thought-provoking, overall this just isn’t all that interesting a movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Diary of the Dead

What a dreadful disappointment. The first two entries in George Romero’s “Dead” series are genre classics, and the last two – though not quite as good – are at least entertaining. This one, however, is almost nothing but Cloverfield except with zombies. Romero is a more talented director than the boneheads that made Cloverfield, but that just makes his mindless preaching about media addiction all the more annoying. See if desperate

Review – The Kremlin Letter

This is one of those movies from the 60s that leaves one wondering how a cast this good could make a movie this bad. Orson Welles and Max von Sydow are just two of the actors who briefly decorate this boring excuse for a spy thriller. The McGuffin is a letter that exposes a plot involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Perhaps a more straightforward production might have been able to do something interesting with the set-up. This one, on the other hand, immediately strays into an almost surreal parade of macho posturing that goes on well beyond the point where it loses all entertainment value. Some good spy stories came from this period in film history, but this certainly isn’t one of them. See if desperate

Review – The Cry

The first La Llorona movie I tried to watch was so terrible I had to shut it off. So I went into this with a fair amount of trepidation. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. The horror here is masterfully understated, relying on creepy editing and spooky voice-overs rather than tons of gore. The script is good. The acting is good. Of course the nature of the legend requires that children be the targets of the evil spirit’s wrath, so that element – however essential to the plot – is upsetting. But overall this is one of the better genre movies I’ve seen in awhile. Worth seeing

Review - The Fall

I was rooting for this picture most of the way through. It was an interesting blend of a bracket about a man in a hospital who tells stories to an injured child and the stories themselves. The visuals were rich and colorful, artistic enough to keep things interesting even when the plot got slow. But then with around half an hour to go it was like the film-makers decided we were all having too much fun and started pouring ice-cold water on our heads for the rest of the running time. The storyteller begins making his story tragic to the point where it’s an act of unwarranted cruelty against the girl he’s telling it to. If it had ended before it took that particular twist, it would have been a much, much better movie. See if desperate

Review – Dolores Claiborne

I liked this better than I thought I would. That’s at least in part because Stephen King novels usually make such lousy movies that even a tolerable production turns out to be a treat. I must also admit that the source novel isn’t exactly one of my favorites; I like King better when he sticks to simple scares rather than exploiting serious issues such as sexual abuse of a minor. Thus my expectations were sufficiently low to make this seem like a good movie just because it didn’t suck. Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Strathairn and Christopher Plummer all do solid jobs in their roles. The highly-filtered cinematography gets overworked in spots, but otherwise the production values are quite good as well. If only other King movies could have focused so strongly on character and spent less time relying on the booga-booga shot. Mildly amusing

Review – The Bible Tells Me So

This documentary examines Christian and Jewish attitudes about homosexuality. The main focus is on how religious families react when their children come out of the closet. Reactions range from parents who accept and even advocate down to others who reject (including one woman who came to acceptance only after her rejected daughter committed suicide). The movie also examines various interpretations of scriptural references to homosexuality. I suspect that this might make good viewing for folks who find themselves torn between the love of their kids and the values they’ve learned from a church. Mildly amusing

Review – Scoop

Woody Allen turns out a cute little comedy about a journalism student (Scarlett Johansson) who gets the scoop of her life: a hot tip from a ghost about a handsome British aristocrat (Hugh Jackman) who may be a serial killer. Though it features some classic Allen touches here and there, for the most part this is a silly but inoffensive farce and not much else. Mildly amusing

Review – To End All Wars

Just before Kiefer Sutherland’s career got a shot in the arm from 24, he played a supporting role in this stinker about inmates in a POW camp during World War Two. For the most part this plays like a grittier, preachier and (fortunately) somewhat shorter version of The Bridge on the River Kwai with a non-humorous dose of Stalag 17 stirred in for good measure. See if desperate

Review – Speed Racer

I really like the original animated series. Even if I didn’t have fond childhood memories of it – and I do – I think I’d still like it for its earnest-yet-inept quality from the early days of Japanese animation. This movie, on the other hand, is a heartless Hollywood attempt to capitalize on the staying power of the original. Gone is the charm, replaced by a relentless parade of flashy special effects. If you find yourself easily distracted by loud noises or shiny objects, this masterpiece of ADD theatre may be for you. Otherwise it’s just a two-plus-hour parade of witless smirking and video-game action. See if desperate

Review – Shrooms

Five American twenty-somethings journey to Ireland for a magic mushroom drug tour. Or was it four? Or six? They look so much alike that it’s hard to keep count. In any event, the movie starts sucking almost immediately, with unnecessary animal death quickly followed by a descent into total plotlessness. The result is a picture that reeks of Blair Witch Project only with a slightly bigger budget. Hey, at least it’s plausible that if you’re stoned on mushrooms you might actually not be able to find your way out of the woods. Wish I’d skipped it