Manson reincarnated

Halloween II «½

R, 101m., 2009

Cast & Credits: Sheri Moon Zombie (Deborah Myers), Chase Wright Vanek (Young Michael), Scout Taylor-Compton (Laurie Strode), Brad Dourif (Sheriff Lee Bracket), Caroline Williams (Dr. Maple), Malcolm McDowell (Dr. Samuel Loomis), Tyler Mane (Michael Myers), Margot Kidder (Barbara Collier). Written and directed by Rob Zombie.

I went to see Halloween II with an impending sense of dread. I had no love for screenwriter -director Rob Zombie’s unsettling version of John Carpenter’s independent horror suspense thriller, Halloween (1978). As a means of protesting how much I loathed the remake, I wanted to have Carpenter’s creepy musical score from the original playing at work when my phone rings at the helpdesk every few minutes.

Zombie’s version of Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) re-introduced the towering indestructible psychotic giant as a ticking time bomb with no regard for human life, not even for those who tried to befriend him. The one exception is his dead mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) whom he misses. I was convinced had Myers not murdered his stepfather and older sister, he could have successfully pulled off a Columbine or Virginia Tech style massacre and gotten away with it.

To quote the phrase, “too much information”, such was the problem with Zombie’s version. Carpenter’s original was so effective because we knew so little about the young kid in the clown costume. That made his impending murder spree as an adult all the more frightening.

Halloween II takes place a year after Myers broke out of the mental institution in the original and returned to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to embark on a killing spree to mark the twenty-first anniversary of his rampage.

Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), the lone survivor under the care of a psychiatrist (Margot Kidder) and living with a foster father (Brad Dourif) and his daughter is still having nightmares thinking Michael Myers is still out there. I can’t blame her. She swears she pulled the trigger on the psycho that fateful night. Trouble is, police never found the body.

This isn’t the only grief she has on her plate. Upon reading an investigative tell-all book by Myers’ former psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), Laurie learns she is the murderer’s baby sister.

Whereas Carpenter’s Myers was indeed “the boogeyman,” Zombie’s Myers is Charles Manson reincarnated. The film exhibits the kind of unsettling violence you’d find in a Quentin Tarantino movie, except here, we get no memorable dialogue.

In an attempt to unite with his baby sister, Myers leaves a significant number of bodies in his wake. Night-shift nurses are brutally stabbed to death in such rapid succession not one of them has time to scream. Heads are severed from bodies. A guy’s face is stomped on by Myers several times until you can’t tell he was an actual person. A stripper is bashed head first into some glass several times before she is finally dead. A hospital security guard gets the ax, literally.

Even a dog isn’t spared the butcher knife as it becomes dinner to help settle Myers’ bloodthirsty appetite. If convicted killer Charles Manson ever escapes from prison, this is probably the kind of graphic mayhem he or his new set of followers would unleash.

Like his remake, Halloween II, is not scary. It is not suspenseful. It is not fun. It is instead a disturbing, tragic take on what happens all too often in real life murder cases. The film is an echo on the life of twisted serial murderers and a tabloid take on how authors make money writing best-selling crime books about the subject without any thought for the victims.

Midway through the film when Loomis makes an appearance to promote his new book on the Haddonfield killings from a year before called The Devil Among Us, a victim’s father shows him a picture of his daughter, who Myers murdered. Modeled after that other infamous crime story about the Manson case, Loomis’ book is his Helter Skelter.

Other than being disturbing, there is now one other word I can add to describe Halloween II and that is predictable. Like the first one where just when you think the prey killed the murderer, the psycho comes back to life, something we’ve seen happen in almost every mad slasher film, Halloween II is filled with that infamous horror cliché where the victim tells the person they are protecting, they will be right back. You know they won’t. Just like we know that Michael Myers isn’t really dead, no matter how many times Loomis tells reporters.

As unsettling as the premise was for these films, I do have to admire Zombie for approaching the material with some originality. Unfortunately just like with his remake, he ruins it in Halloween II with a ripoff ending similar to the climax of Psycho (1960) where Strode boasts an evil smile similar to the grin Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates displayed while that great musical score from Carpenter’s Halloween plays in the background.

I have to give Zombie credit. Halloween II does have a cold, creepy, dark, depressing, eerie, lonely, macabre look to it. The best scenes are the dream sequences where Myers sees the ghost of his dead mother dressed in white like she is the Angel of Death telling him to carry out his mission and how it won’t be long before she, Michael, and Laurie will all be together on the other side. There is also a chilling graveyard sequence where Laurie dreams she is lying dead in a casket and suddenly wakes up frantically trying to get out.

Such shots show that Zombie is capable of delivering the stuff nightmares are made of when he puts his mind to it. I can’t help but wonder if in the coming years he delivers us a great horror movie as frighteningly memorable as The Exorcist (1972), as suspenseful as George Romero’s black and white classic, Night of the Living Dead (1968) or as humorous as Dawn of the Dead (1978) or even an edge of your seat thriller that Carpenter’s Halloween was. Perhaps these sequences are his way of teasing us while he secretly works on his private masterpiece.

As much as I loathed both his Halloween movies, I have to admit I am curious to see what his vision will be when he remakes the 1958 classic, The Blob, that starred a young Steve McQueen.

©8/28/09

District 9 boasts a clever idea but I wouldn’t want to live there

District 9 «««

R, 112m., 2009

Cast & Credits: Sharlto Copley (Wikus Van De Merwe), Jason Cope (Grey Bradnam – UKNR Chief Correspondent), Nathalie Boltt (Sarah Livingston – Sociologist), Sylvaine Strike (Dr. Katrina McKenzie), Elizabeth Mkandawie (Interviewee), John Summer (Les Feldman – MIL Engineer), William Allen Young (Dirk Michaels). Screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. Directed by Neill Blomkamp.

District 9 is a cross between those interactive computer games where part of the game tells a story and then when that chapter stops, the player uses their mouse to do battle in hopes of winning so the story can continue. On another level, it is like watching one of those in your face documentaries like NBC’s Dateline where various officials are interviewed about a tragedy that unfolded in some country.

At least that is how District 9 begins as we meet officials and engineers working for the corporation, Multi-National United (MNU), who are interviewed about how space invaders arrived over 20 years ago stalled and hovering over Johannesburg in a rundown antique that, unlike the Millenium Falcon from the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983), really does look like a piece of junk.

When city officials and MNU learn the invaders called “Prawns” are stranded here, they decide to house the race, who look like deformed walking roaches in early infancy, in tents outside Johannesburg that reminded me of the temporary rundown areas under the Florida interstates Al Pacino’s Cuban gangster Tony Montana and his boyhood pal, Manny Ray, had to spend their time in Scarface (1983) before breaking into the cocaine business.

Times have changed, however, for the “Prawns” in District 9. The citizens of Johannesburg no longer want them around and MNU has decided to evict their race and move them to another area. Just like any human being who wouldn’t react kindly to being served eviction notices by law enforcement much less the government, the Prawns put up a fight when MNU agent Wilkus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) attempts to serve them papers.

“Get your fookin' tentacle out of my face,” Van De Merwe says.

It’s at this point where if District 9 were an interactive video game, we, the viewer would help Van De Merwe successfully get the aliens moved out of the area with the help of the military. If we lose, Van De Merwe would…well, it’s not my job to give you a complete rundown of what happens in movies. Yes, something tragic does happen to Van De Merwe and for me, to tell you that what he goes through reminded me of what happens to Jeff Goldblum’s scientist character in the remake of The Fly (1986), then I have already given away too much.

Van De Merwe, at one point, even utters those words Goldblum’s Seth Brundle said to Geena Davis.

“Help me, please help me.”

I have to admit on one level, I found it hard not to compare District 9’s plot elements to other memorable science fiction movies of the past. The alien spaceship looks like an early discarded drawing director Steven Spielberg might have said no to as to what he wanted the mother ship to look like in his classic epic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for example.

The in-your-face documentary style footage reminded me of Cloverfield (2007) where everything was shot on a hand held camera, except here, there are no jerky camera movements that cause dizziness.

By casting an entire group of unknown actors, the same technique director and writer Paul Greengrass did when he made United 93 (2006), District 9 is much more effective and makes us think this actually happened in real life, even though it is all fantasy. The film would not have worked as well if we saw, for example, George Clooney in the Van De Merwe role. We’d feel as though we’re watching George Clooney versus newcomer Sharlto Copely, who according to trivia facts on IMDB.com about District 9, has no acting experience and was never intent on pursuing an acting career to begin with.

Someone once told me when it comes to writing, you should write about what you know or base it on your own experiences. By comparison, the same probably applies to filmmaking. Director Blomkamp based District 9’s idea on his childhood experiences living in South Africa during apartheid’s racial segregation that took place between 1948 and 1994 according to wikepedia.com.

The difference here is instead of putting human beings into racial groups, it’s aliens from space who are being put into their own classes. On that level, District 9 is an originally clever idea, making it an interesting place to visit but I sure as Hell wouldn’t want to live there.

I have one simple request to make to Hollywood though. It’s no biggie and I know they aren’t going to listen to me but I’m going to say it anyway. Now that District 9 is considered a box office hit, please don’t do a sequel the way you greedy executives all felt compelled to do an unnecessary follow-up to Oscar winning director Danny Boyle’s zombie thriller, 28 Days Later, called 28 Weeks Later (2007). Let the sci-fi/horror fans who got all excited about District 9 at fantasy conventions held over the past year hopelessly wish for a sequel that should never come.

By comparison, let the government officials in District 9 wonder if the aliens will come back in full force in ships the size of giant pancakes like the ones from Independence Day (1996) to go medieval on the human race’s ass as a result of Johannesburg’s cruel treatment of them. Let Van De Merwe’s wife hold out hope that her husband is still out there somewhere in the city of Johannesburg or perhaps living among the “Prawns” rummaging through dumpsters and eating cat food.

Of all things I don’t wish to learn about, the number one thing I don’t want to read while browsing on comingsoon.net one morning is the news that Hollywood is making a sequel to District 9, aptly titled “District 10.”

©8/19/09

Say it ain’t so, Joe! “No imagination” best describes G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra «½
PG-13, 118m., 2009

Cast & Credits: Dennis Quaid (General Hawk), Channing Tatum (Duke), Sienna Miller (Ana/Baroness), Ray Park (Snake Eyes), Rachel Nichols (Scarlett), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Heavy Duty), Said Taghmaoui (Breaker), Marlon Wayans (Ripcord), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Doctor/Rex), Christopher Eccleston (McCullen/Destro), Jonathan Pryce (U.S. President), Lee Byeong-heon (Storm Shadow), Arnold Vosloo (Zartan). Screenplay by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett. Directed by Stephen Sommers.

I went in expecting G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra to not be as bad as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and on that level, the movie delivered.

Just don’t go mistaking that as a good thing. The only two positive things I can say about “Joe” is that one, at 118 minutes, the running time was satisfyingly less than what it took to sit through Revenge of the Fallen (150 minutes). Two, the film is not filled to the brim with sexually suggestive, vulgar, unfunny innuendos as the second Transformers.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t have some female eye candy to gawk at. This is for young boys above age 10 who have yet to be told the word defining their being sexually stimulated when they see a beautiful woman on screen is called puberty. Like Transformers 2 which had Megan Fox, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has The Baroness played by Sienna Miller who sports a black latex, leather outfit. The costume looks so tight around her chest as a corset that it looks like her breasts can’t wait to get free.

The two words that best describe G.I. Joe is “no imagination.” The film’s supposed $175 million budget is the equivalent of giving a kid a 5,000-plus piece exclusive Lego set that had to be special ordered. Without instructions, the kid would have no idea what to build.

The idea of Lego building is creating something out of one’s imagination. You would think the same goes for making movies. The filmmakers had $175 million to play with, and the most they could give the audience was lots of car chases, explosions, and the big payoff shot of the Eiffel Tower crashing down on hundreds of French citizens. It’s as if director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy-1999) was in competition with Revenge of the Fallen’s director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to see who can fill their film with the most visual effects. I don’t mind sitting through stupid, dumb expensive movies as long as they are fun. The filmmakers, however, left the “fun” out of this.

When G.I. Joe takes a break from the action, we are inundated with subplots echoing better movies, as individual characters recall fateful moments from their pasts, like the anti-heroes in Watchmen (2009) did. When a martial arts villain kills his master out of jealousy, the scene reminded me of what Daryl Hannah’s assassin character did to her sadistic instructor in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004). The final martial arts sword fight between Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and his villainous brother takes place above a chasm that looks like the shot was ripped off from the lightsaber duel between Liam Neeson’s and Ewan MacGregor’s Jedi Knights against Darth Maul in Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).

The plot? Well, like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, there doesn’t seem to be much of one. The good guys, who I will call “the Joes,” are an elite army team led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid in a role I could easily picture John Wayne doing since Quaid’s character is so patriotic) whose home base is somewhere out in the desert, perhaps Saudi Arabia. The bad guys reside in an underwater lair out in the Antarctic led by a military industrialist named McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), who threatens the world with some special missile technology that when fired, unleashes some mechanical bugs that eat steel. As to the reason why he wants to threaten the world, I am about as clueless as the President of the United States’ general staff is.

When the president (Jonathan Pryce) asks what the villain’s demands are, we get no answer.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to my knowledge of Transformers and G.I. Joe toys, I have to confess I am very ignorant. Like Transformers, I never watched the G.I. Joe cartoon series from the 1980s, much less read the long-running Marvel comic book. I have never owned a toy transformer in my life, not even a Star Wars one. The closest I came to even touching a G.I. Joe action figure was when I first moved to Texas and spent the first few weeks at my cousin’s house because the furniture hadn’t arrived yet. (He had G. I. Joe toys).

That was back when I had just graduated from grade school. The most I know about any “Joe” character is that Destro has a silver head.

Just about all the characters here are as soulless as the plastic ¾-inch and 12- inch Hasbro action figures you see littering the store shelves of Toys R’ Us. Like last year’s The Spirit (2008), G.I. Joe is nothing more than a big budget mass marketing toy, much like the action figures from Hasbro on which this film is based. There is not a single character we care about, loathe, or root for. The only thing interesting about the characters are the code names they are all given, and that is provided you already know who they are without looking at the end credits. Other than The Baroness and Snake Eyes, I have no idea who “Duke,” “Heavy Duty”, “The Doctor”, “Storm Shadow”, “Dr. Mindbender”, “Hard Master”, “Zartan”, or “Ripcord” are or what their role is in the “Joe” universe.

G.I. Joe does have one thing going for it and that is Sienna Miller. It’s no wonder the toymakers at Hasbro made an exclusive 12-inch doll of her character, The Baroness, that was available for purchase at the San Diego Comic Con last July. (You can get it for $69.99 on Amazon.com.)

Miller has a unique gift of uttering one-liners (“That redhead is starting to piss me off!”) any screenwriter could have written. If they had been uttered by anyone else, the audience would laugh at both their performance and the dialogue. The way Miller says her lines, she makes them sound believable.

Miller acts like she secretly knows just how ridiculous a film project this really is, but decides to make the most of a lousy situation. She chews up the scenery, firing machine guns in both hands, struts around in leather boots or expensive black pumps, engages in catfights with a female redhead “Joe” named Scarlett O’Hara (Rachel Nichols), and utters lines like “Nice shoes,” as she throws a woman out of an elevator at a Paris mall. She’d make a great James Bond villainess should she ever want to venture into other action adventure roles.

I wonder how Miller would react upon my telling her I didn’t agree with the comment she made to the entertainment media recently where she said "G.I. Joe is not going to be the best acting work I've ever done.”

©8/10/09

Is there no end to actresses taking on roles in TV shows once held by male actors?

“Where are all the men?”

Such is the question I have thanks to the increasing number of so called made for cable “We know drama” television shows I have seen aired in recent years featuring Hollywood’s top actresses in roles once played by male actors.

Tinseltown, it seems, no longer cares about what the male audience wants to see in terms of TV shows. Their primary goal now is to make sure most, if not everything they air, pertains to women only.

I have found such recent programs as TNT’s crime drama, The Closer, starring Kyra Sedgwick and the medical shows HawthoRNe starring Jada Pinkett Smith, and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie starring Edie Falco might as well be called “The I am woman, hear me roar hour.”

Up until recently, I refused to watch The Closer thanks to the commercial promotions I saw last season. One promo, in particular, showed a few people confessing their sins to Sedgwick’s L.A. Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson from an overweight African American chowing down on donuts who tells her “My wife thinks I am on a diet” to the little girl who says “My daddy cheats on his taxes.”

I got the impression the makers behind the show, and perhaps Sedgwick herself who also serves as co-executive producer, feel the series’ main selling point is that women and men get sexually aroused confessing their deepest, darkest sins to a take charge female, who isn’t afraid of beating the hell out of them if the situation warrants it.

The one word that came to mind watching a recent episode dealing with the murder of two Los Angeles police officers by a couple Nazi racists was “catfight.” I sat there wondering if Sedgwick’s Johnson, who oversees a department of all male detectives, would throw down and start trading body blows against co-star Mary McDonnell’s Captain Raydor whose job was to paint the criminals as victims and the deceased cops as the ones who started the shootings.

Sedgwick’s Johnson is like a dominatrix without the whips, leather, and black stilettos, though she does have the handcuffs. She doesn’t need a whip or a dungeon. She has that stern southern, no nonsense New Orleans accent of hers she can use to threaten any suspects with prison time.

"You don't need an attorney because if you get an attorney I plan to sit down with your fiancee and have a nice long chat with her about what you've been doing with your penis,” Johnson tells a suspect in one episode.

If the Bush/Cheney Administration had someone like her to carry out interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo or in Iraq, we would have never heard of water boarding.

Some of my favorite “male” fictional characters in past medical dramas were those that were egotistical, self-centered assholes like Mandy Patinkin’s Dr. Jeffery Geiger on Chicago Hope, William Daniels’ Dr. Mark Craig in St. Elsewhere and Paul McCrane’s Dr. Romano on ER. I just know I was the only one in mourning when McCrane’s character got killed off when a helicopter crashed on top of him.

Now those roles have been taken over by actresses like Jada Pinkett Smith and Edie Falco.

I just know females were rooting for Pinkett Smith’s head nurse on HawthoRNe, a widow and mother who pays more attention to her patients than she does her own family. In one episode I saw parts of, Hawthorne tells her daughter how she didn't ask for the job of teaching her how to drive. That job was supposed to be her late husband's.

"I didn’t ask for this particular right of passage," Hawthorne says. "You know potty training, I filled that stupid chart with all kinds of gold stars. Riding a bike, I kissed every dang booboo. Your first bra I took you to Macy’s. I got you one of those training deals, which by the way you didn’t even need, but this right here, driving lessons? That’s not for me, that’s daddy’s gig."

Yes. Nothing like a mother, who when her daughter needs someone to teach her how to drive, the parent wants some "Me time" only. How will Nurse Hawthorne react when her daughter needs someone to talk to when she's in serious trouble? Perhaps she'll get one of her nurses to do it the way she asks one of them to teach her daughter how to drive.

Like episodes of The Closer where Johnson utters quotes that easily define male bashing like “I'm going to have to deal with some pompous, arrogant oaf who doesn't know thing one about investigating a murder”, the promos I have seen for HawthoRNe show scenes of male nurses being portrayed as incompetent and are mocked and scolded by the female staff.

I have no desire to sit through one complete episode of Pinkett Smith’s series to find out if I am actually right in my assessment.

At least the nursing community is not too happy with Edie Falco’s pill popping-Vicodin addicted, adulteress Jackie Peyton on Nurse Jackie.

"I almost fell out of my chair when I saw 'Nurse Jackie'," said President of the National Federation of Nurses Barbara Crane in a June 9, 2009 article by the New York Daily News. "I found those things she did - forging a donor card, stealing money, throwing people's body parts away - extremely insulting. It makes me really sad. That's not who I am, that's not what I do."

“We’re not saying this is a show about nurses,” Falco said in the Daily News article. “This is a show about a nurse.”

Falco’s comments lead me to make a predictable conclusion. If Nurse Jackie were a show about someone going through real life issues at home and at the workplace that those in the nursing profession could relate to, no one would watch it.

“This is a show of fiction, and its purpose, first and foremost, is entertainment,” said Stuart Zakim, vice president of corporate communications in the Daily News article. “We are confident the viewing public will understand that and can differentiate between a work of fiction and a documentary, which this clearly is not.”

I don’t share Zakim’s confidence. I find a majority of television’s audiences to not be all that bright and that most actually believe what they are watching goes on in real life.

If the lead characters in The Closer, HawthoRNe, and Nurse Jackie are the kinds of females women aspire to be, they should start looking for some better positive role models.

There is no disputing that Sedgwick, Pinkett Smith, and Falco are as talented as they are attractive.

I can’t stop Hollywood, excuse me, “Hollyweird”, from waving its pro-feminist flag and offering more shows that feature women in take charge roles once held by male actors.

They cannot, however, stop me from shouting at the top of my lungs the line “This is a man’s world” from a classic James Brown song either when it comes to what I prefer to watch on network and cable television.

When it comes to the entertainment industry, there should be a rule that says when it comes to actresses taking on roles once held by male actors, “Don’t send a woman in to do a man’s job.”

©8/6/09