"Dead Alive (Braindead)" - Film Review

Before he became known to a wider audience through The Lord of the Rings movies, Peter Jackson directed a number of films that were all but destined to become cult films. Dead Alive is a prime example of this. For anyone who came into the movie solely based on their familiarity with Jackson’s blockbuster works later in his career, they might be a bit baffled.

Dead Alive is a horror comedy. Well, actually, if we’re to be honest with ourselves, it’s really just a comedy. The horror aspects are just an excuse to be gutbustingly hilariously excessive. It’s a film that takes gleeful pleasure in trying to one up every setpiece and gory showcase that it’s managed. There’s tremendous pleasure to be taken from the buckets of blood and guts as they reach almost transcendental heights of parodic, rhapsodic over-the-topness. 

The film quickly dispenses with the explanations for the Sumatran rat monkey whose vicious bite turns people into decaying zombies, and instead gets right to its real purpose: blood galore! If this at all sounds crazy and absurd, it’s because it’s meant to be, and it’s totally in line with the sensibilities of the storytelling. As a friend described the film, it’s “glorious schlock”; a film that’s self-aware of its trashy, low-budget, campy nature and embraces it super hardcore.  

There’s enough underlying, very basic storyline at it center to prevent the film from completely going haywire as it gets involved in the horror bloodfest. There’s a romantic plot between our protagonist Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balmy) and a comely working class girl Paquita (Diana Penalver) who’s convinced of the supernatural. There’s also a mother-son relationship that might just put Psycho’s to shame. It’s this last element that has Lionel keeping those infected alive and locked up in his basement. He just can’t let go of his mother, even if in this state she’s not really his mother. 

Dead Alive wants to get a reaction out of us. It wants us to be shocked by its manic desire to be insanely bloody and weird, and in its best moments it succeeds. It’s truly hysterical.

Grade: B+

Doctor Who - "The Name of the Doctor" - Review

Well, you certainly can’t fault Doctor Who in the Steve Moffat era for lack of ambition. That’s for sure. In fact, I would say that the series’ greatest problem under Moffat has been too much ambition. And while I really appreciate ambition, even ambition that falls short of the mark, Moffat is simply trying to cram too many ideas into any given episode, and this has become an increasingly bigger problem as the time under his tenure has gone on. They’re frequently very wonderful ideas but rarely are any of them given enough time to breathe.

“The Name of the Doctor” has a lot to like. But it feels like an episode that’s trying to tell a story that ought to have parsed out over a couple of episodes. For example, did we really even need the appearance of River (whose appearance itself is a mystery related to her being trapped in a database after “Forest of the Dead”)?

I like the explanation for Clara’s multiple lives. And somehow it’s both totally crazy and somehow kind of sound in that way that really only Moffat is capable of pulling off. But when the show tries to achieve these complex narratives with the pizazz and coolness so typical of Moffat occasionally the storytelling gets a little too convoluted. 

Another problem is that we haven’t spent enough time with Clara. While I really enjoy Jenna-Louise Coleman’s performance, we haven’t been given enough time to really understand this character and her relationship to the Doctor (her going into the time vortex without doubts doesn’t entirely add up with what we know about the character even as it attempts to be a powerful moment, which it is, but it also feels a tad forced).

The series has tried to cram a season long story into half a season, and that came partially out of the need to service the story of Amy and Rory. But I just don’t know if creating this over the top mystery for the show to solve was the best path to enter as the show entered ostensibly a new chapter. This becomes somewhat apparent in how the show never fully explains the problem at hand, leaving the episode on an ellipsis with the reveal of another version of the Doctor played by William Hurt. Another mystery.

I say all this because the mysteries have somewhat usurped the narrative. And Doctor Who has never been about mysteries. There’s been wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey content here and there, but at its core it’s been about a mad men with a box getting caught up in to situations where he tries to help out and potentially save the day. Even his love for humanity was something that grew, begrudgingly, over time. 

Now let’s fanboy here for a moment because the above probably comes off as totally despairing and cynical. The scenes of Clara placed into stock footage are a real treat, even as they stretch the limits of the budget to a point where they don’t totally work. The idea of the Doctor facing up to his future death by heading to his tomb is emotionally rife and honestly the episode doesn’t get enough time spent with the Doctor confronting this.     

There’s plenty of the expected fun in “The Name of the Doctor”, but it tries much too hard to get across what it wants to convey. 

Grade: B

Mad Men - "The Crash" - Review

“The Crash” is a busy episode, and at times it’s a confusing episode. But it’s an episode that’s meant to be busy and confusing. The moment Don and the members of our now nameless ad agency take some doctor prescribed drugs the whole episode goes into a bizarre overdrive. The episode has the quality of a drug trip; it’s dream-like, fast paced, filled with unexplained jumps forward in time, and many elements seem arbitrary but potentially loaded with hidden meaning. But often, honestly, come off more arbitrary. Like what the heck is up with the creative team throwing exacto-knifes at Stan beyond adding to the already abundant sense of chaos and unproductiveness at the office?

After being dumped by Sylvie, Don becomes a wreck. He’s scheming of ways to win her back, and standing outside her apartment door, creepily hovering. The whole time Don has everyone convinced he’s working on the ad campaign for Chevy, but instead it turns out he’s crafting the perfect sales pitch to win back to Sylvie. If Don has been out of sorts before, he rarely has stooped to such maddening lows. When he collapses towards episode end, it feels like the only logical response to how much Don has been failing to tackle reality and the many things in his personal life (it also feels like the only logical response to the absolute craziness of this episode). For so long this season Don has been doing a terrible job at work and he’s been avoiding responsibility, in his marriage, at work, and with his children. 

There’s a general offness to this episode (well, there's an understatement if there ever was one). Everyone is talking in a highly mannered and fastpaced way that’s sometimes comical but mainly very strange and offputting. Even outside the office, the Sally B-plot is totally weird. A strange black woman breaks into the apartment and starts robbing the Drapers. Sally immediately recognizes that something isn’t right but she’s put into a fix by her age, her lack of knowledge of her father, and her general justifiable fear and confusion. 

Sally has been a character that’s been overlooked this season. After spending more and more time with her each season, it’s been disappointing to not see more screentime from the always great Kiernan Shipka. Shipka continues to nail the growing independence and rebelliousness of her character while still managing to undercut this with a youthful uncertainty. But Sally's storyline is part and parcel of the larger peculiarity of this episode and also has less to say about her than Don.

For this is an episode all about Don. We get more flashbacks to Don’s time living in a brothel, a formative experience. While these flashbacks don’t interest me nearly as much as some of the flashbacks in the past, they continue to fill out the backstory of Don and they set up the wonderful (if very on the nose) closing scene of the episode where Don equates the agency with a whorehouse (great resonance of “The Other Woman” here). We could have guessed that the prostitute introduced in "Collaborators" would deflower Don and it comes to fruition here. While the flashbacks aren’t the most interesting, they play off the episodes theme stated by soothsayer and daughter of the late Frank Gleason, “Does someone love me?” Don doesn’t want Sylvia; so much as he’s so damn lonely that he doesn’t want to lose the one thing keeping his mind at ease.   

“You have to let yourself feel it,” Peggy tells Stan in regards to his cousin dying in Vietnam. Don isn’t letting himself feel things though; he never has. He thinks he can just always reinvent himself and that will keep him one step ahead of the pain of his past. “The Crash” might literally refer to Ken’s car accident, forcing him to walk around with a cane. But it figuratively refers to Don, who has been all but destined to collapse in some form or another. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the series ended with Don having to own up to everything he’s been avoiding for five plus seasons, and when he does it will be messy and self-destructive no doubt.

Our other "Don", Peggy, not be getting exactly what she wants (she clearly wants to hook up with Stan, and she even more obviously wants to sleep with Ted). But Peggy can control her urge; she, for now, is going to stay true to her boyfriend. As we know from our other “Don”, Pete, that it’s best to stay on the straight and narrow. No matter how good you are at assuming some part of the identity of Don Draper, it almost always comes at a cost.  

Take Sally for instance. This episode wants to parallel Sally and Don, to an extent. Sally is acting like she believes her father would have and how she expects her father would have wanted her to. But this ultimately leaves her doubtful. She apologizes for screwing up. But, of course, Sally handled this as well as we’d hope a fourteen year old to. And more importantly still, as Sally herself states, she doesn’t really know her father (but then again: no one truly does).  Don is still that child at the whorehouse and he's that way because he never got the affection of a real mother. Hence trying to hold onto Sylvia.

The themes of prostitution have been abundant this season. And Don’s closing statement makes this blatant. Actual sex, in deed, takes place in the office. The people that get hurt the most when things are run on this sort of business model are people like kids (Don in the flashbacks or Sally and Bobby in the present) or people who mean well (the kindly prostitute, Ken). 

“The Crash” has a lot of ambition, and, while this ambition doesn’t always succeed, I really appreciate its ambition. At times this season, Mad Men has felt like it’s retreading a lot of territory we’ve seen so much of with not much new to say. It’s also felt like it has so much it wants to get in that it’s not necessarily being as substantive as it potentially could be. While this episode is often more style than substance, it's always nice to see the episodes of Mad Men that are structurally more adventurous, even if here it comes off as too frantic and hectic.

Grade: B+

"Star Trek: Into Darkness" - Film Review

There are a handful of reactions that you are pretty much guaranteed to have when you go to see a summer blockbuster. The big three are pleasantly surprised, mildly disappointed, and outright desiring your money back. There are summer blockbusters that are a rip roaring good time, that earn their spectacle through interesting situations and great characters. There are films that amuse you but leave you slightly dissatisfied. And then there’s those other ones you totally regret seeing it.

JJ Abram’s Star Trek fell squarely into the pleasantly surprised category. It was not the summer blockbuster that was most on my radar, but it was one that stuck with me after I’d watched the film. The film took something familiar and elevated it above the well-worn tropes that had made the series a cultural hallmark.

Star Trek: Into Darkness doesn’t stick with you the way its predecessor did. It’s what we might describe as mildly disappointing. 

Into Darkness reminds me of another recent summer blockbuster: Iron Man 3. Both are sequels to major successful franchises. Both fail to live up to the merits of a sequel. There’s more spectacle at times, but the spectacle never feels completely well-earned. The plotting is inelegant and the stories try much too hard to provide a gravitas that simply just isn’t there.

And this, mind you, is me talking about two films that I largely enjoyed. Into Darkness has some moments that are popcorn action at its most engrossing, but the plot is also frustratingly scattered. So much so that the film is often a collection of mostly good scenes that are somewhat disjointed. It takes a third of the movie to really get cooking, and even then the film has suffered from an opening sequence that’s uninteresting and perfunctory. There are also a number of twists piled on top of eachother that start to become tedious. 

There are many moments in the film that feel like they’re in this movie merely because the studio expects it’s the type of stuff we want in there. Scotty makes an off-handed quip. Kirk and Spock have disagreements over commanding the ship. McCoy amusingly suggests an alternative action to Kirk. Leonard Nimoy makes an appearance! But after a while a number of these moments come off as if they don’t service the narrative but rather are in place just to try to get a reaction out of the audience, to carelessly make us laugh or thrill us. And too much of it is leaning on our affection for these characters and this universe (granted, many of these previously mentioned expected moments really are a treat and arguably would have detracted from the film had they not been there). But as appealing as they may be, on their own a solid film they do not make. 

Don't get me wrong. The action of Into Darkness is wonderfully staged and addicting. This action is made all the more pleasurable by the tremendous performance of Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of the villain who vexes our heroes with his delightful scheming.  

There’s a lot of fun to be found in the film, but it just doesn’t step its game up the way a big budget sequel ought to. 

Grade: B

"Before Sunrise" - Film Review

Despite how cynical and jaded I may be about relationships, at heart I’m really a hopeless romantic. I want to believe in true love, and I go out of my way to watch rom coms because no matter how bad there’s something incredibly appealing about these romantic dalliances. But where the contrivance of romantic films so often undermines them, After Sunrise succeeds by taking a familiar story of a fleeting affair and turning it into something tremendously bittersweet.

The film manages this by taking the small steps towards the two lovers Jess (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) falling for eachother. At first, they’re merely intrigued by the other person, and in the spur of the moment they decide to get off the train and spend the day with eachother, ditching their original plans. But slowly their infatuation grows and grows, and the film, despite making this all preordained, makes it thoroughly satisfying to find the two become engrossed in their romantic feelings. The best part of this is how the film doesn’t bullshit us; it doesn’t build this up to the moment where they admit their feelings and get together. They’re talking about life, love, whatever comes to mind. They walk around Vienna, watching dancers, getting their palms read, and falling more and more for one another. But these two know they like eachother and they let everything about themselves and their feelings hang out there in the open. 

The film provides this all with a great sense of energy and spontaneity that you can’t help but root for these two. The Kiss, the one that was all but destined to happen, is dealt with fairly early on, and this removes much of the tension. Now they can be much more open with eachother, and their limited time together in turn becomes that much more problematic. They say that it’s for the best if they never see eachother again, never exchange numbers or addresses. But they’re really only fooling themselves.    

Much of this works due to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's amazing chemistry and how thoroughly they inhabit these characters. The pair is having an exciting, fun, memorable, occasionally transcendent, time, and thus we are too. 

The film’s pleasure comes in part from how simple this story is, and the little events that take place throughout the day. It feels very true to life. The conversations and incidences that take place come off as if they’re just occurring in that moment. But that simplicity is deceiving has it unravels to demonstrate hidden depths and really sweet and sad things to say about relationships, love, and life. 

After Sunrise is deeply romantic and bittersweet tale, and simultaneously very fun and rather sad.   

Grade: A-

"Room 237" - Film Review

About halfway through, Room 237 becomes absolutely mindnumbing. And it’s not because it’s a bad film (in fact, I’d say it’s a very good film), but rather because the theories it’s allowing people to elaborate on about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining are totally insane.

At times it’s easy to laugh them off, but other times the theories are so baseless and off-point that it becomes frustrating and painful: people actually believe this nonsense? These obsessive cinephiles have taken semiotics analysis to its most extreme trying to penetrate through the exacting perfectionism of Kubrick's vision. The perectionism that has them convinced that every little detail was purposely placed (and even has implications about the staging of the moon landing, the Holocaust, and the slaughter of the American Indians).

 

Like a horror movie that crawls under your skin, the documentary is unsettling and disturbing because it drags you into the strange and twisted views of people who have read into The Shining way, way too much. 

But the film also never looks down upon or judges its interviewees. It simply presents their arguments and leaves it for us to decide how we feel. In fact, we never actually see any of these indvidual but merely hear their voices. While they often come off as having a few bolts loose, we've all had that experience where we read into a piece of art too much and were convinced our theory was right.

Room 237 systematically unfolds these theories and provides a fascinating window onto an intriguing subject matter. 

Grade: A-

"Stranger Than Paradise" - Film Review

 

I imagine the best mood to be in to watch Stranger Than Paradise is to be super depressed, just full on doubting humanity.

The film isn’t morbid and it doesn’t traffic in sadness, but everything about the film screams loneliness. We constantly find characters isolated, either in desolate cityscapes, empty apartment or hotel rooms, or rundown cars. 

And no one seems really all that content; they’re restless and frustrated, and they don’t really know how to articulate it all that well. Everyone is deadpan, which at times is used for humorous effect. These people are hapless and unmotivated.

When his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) flies in from Hungary, Willie (John Lurie) isn’t happy to see her but rather is just really angry about the burden of dealing with her for a week. He’s a real jerk, dismissing her and never inviting her out anywhere. But over time a begrudging respect forms between the two. Enough so that when Willie decides to go on a vacation a year later with his friend Eddie (Richard Edson) they head out to Cleveland to visit her. They’re on better terms this time around, and the experience convinces Willie to head down to Florida with his cousin (title carded as “paradise” - although it feels like a warmer version of the shitty locales they've already been). But Willie keeps treating Eva lousy, ignoring her entirely, and he eventually blows their money gambling. She’s had enough and after running into some money through a misunderstanding (supposedly a miscommunicated drug deal) she hops on the next flight back to Europe. Willie runs to the airport but is too late to prevent her from heading home.  

Not much happens in the film. The plot is rather minimal, largely observing people and then at that mostly watching them sit around bored and disinterested. The film often feels more concerned with acting as a mood piece than telling a story. The film has a strong sense of atmosphere conveyed especially well by its low budget, black and white cinematography. Most of the time there’s not even dialogue, but just the actors inhabiting the places they’re in. The stripped down minimalism would be a point of inspiration for later American independent films and its style is familiar of many later indies.

There's a lot of low-key, understated humor to be found in the film and the obliviousness of its characters, as well as the occasional absurdity of events.      

A funny, dark, understated film that takes pleasure and finds humor in the everyday and the mundane. 

Grade: B