Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

I am jumbled, and I wonder if I oughtn’t wait until another viewing. But screw it, first impressions are important, on top of which it’s one of my few first shot times, so I’ll take it. And then cheat by first talking atmosphere. I know I go on about the Alamo Drafthouse mystique, but it was in fine enough fettle tonight to run down. Someone went to the effort of editing up the Cartoon Network Clone Wars endeavour down to its essential “here’s the bits that are related to the movie” bones, and then showed it, interspersed with all kinds of Star Wars filmed coolness and uncoolness, from Troops to Anakin Dynamite to a Muppet Show appearance to the Turkish Star Wars rip-off to the much maligned (and rightly so!) 1978 Christmas special. A very pleasant way to pass a couple of hours while waiting for the last big event movie of quite a while, and I commend them once more.

Then, there’s the movie itself. The scroll cleared the screen just in time to drop into an unrelenting action spectacle with all the right touches of humor and explosions alike. And then… well, things got a little wooden. Never bad, but never quite great. Motivations that were a hair off, decisions that very nearly made sense, enemies that were inches south of believable. Nothing enough to make me stop enjoying myself, but so much that came close to working perfectly that I had to be disappointed when it didn’t. The real irony I think is that it was the longest Star Wars movie, yet really needed another ten or twenty minutes of scenes expanded in just the right ways to achieve the brilliance it was in sight of.

That said, there’s a moment that I choose not to ruin[1] in the main portion of this review past which everything comes together again. It’s still never quite as perfect as that opening sequence, but the complaints from that moment on are nits to be picked, not faults to regret. It’s a hell of a thing, to know essentially everything that’s going to happen (not due to spoilers but to the logical consequence of having already seen the galaxy twenty years down the road from that moment) and still be kept on the edge of my seat, wondering what will happen next, if there’s a way out of it, how it came to this. For that, I’ll offer Lucas my thanks and my kudos. When he got to the important part, he made it work.

If you watched the other two movies, like or dislike, go ahead and see this one, at least the once. Even with the mis-steps, it’s worth it.
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The Cestus Deception

A week or so ago, I got caught up in Star Wars excitement despite myself, and snagged a Clone Wars novel at Half-Price Books, the second one I’ve read now. The whole idea is the thing where they can do some guided merchandising, build a bit of storyline between the two movies, and just generally synergize. Still, though, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. (See also how I’m writing this from a line I’ll be sitting in for the next ten or eleven hours in order to see that one movie at the back half of the two I previously referenced.)

In any case, I finished The Cestus Deception a couple of nights ago, and have now found time to leave general impressions. They are largely the same as the impressions I had of Shatterpoint last year. You’ve got your exciting lightsaber duels, only with Obi-Wan instead of Mace Windu (also a tentacly-headed Jedi named Kit Fisto), an army of Force-sensitive bio-droids being manufactured to kill Jedi, and also lots of clone troopers. They are busily being humanized even as the Jedi are slowly being crushed by the pressures of the War. You have to admire Palpatine’s strategy; he’s put them in this impossible position where if they sit back and do nothing, everyone hates them, but if they step up and do what needs to be done in order to win the war (like force the cessation of Jedi-killing droid manufacture if it can be handled diplomatically, and I think we all know that it cannot), they get their hands dirty and nobody trusts them anymore. Much like Shatterpoint, this is more of the dirty hands storyline. I really hope the movie tonight touches on some of this theme before things start going bad, so that it’s understandable where the popular lack of support came from. If not, well, at least there are lots of people with the talent to make it clear in non-movie places, and I can just take the whole thing as one piece. Frankly, I’d rather be able to rely on the movies for everything, though.

House of Wax (2005)

So, wow. I can honestly say that I did not expect what I got out of my trip to the movies this morning. House of Wax looks on the surface to be a typical teen slasher pic, with vaguely recognizable male leads (unless I was a 15 year-old girl, in which case I’m pretty sure I’d have posters of them all over my bedroom) and more recognizable female leads (since my house is mostly packed for moving already, I can safely remain mute on this particular topic) all chosen for their relative shirtless hotness, and then sent out into the killing fields for 90 or so minutes of blood-splashing fun.

Don’t get me wrong. It absolutely was every bit of that. It would have to be, in order to achieve an accurate description as ‘American horror, subgenre teen’. But it had several other points of interest. First, I’m noticing a shift in the killer rationale. It used to be, all you had to do to get dead in one of these movies was engage in any of underage drinking, drug use of any kind, or pre-marital second base. These days, it seems like you have to be an asshole first, and then all that other stuff just impairs your judgment instead of being casus belli themselves. I like this, because the killer is then a bit more human.

Additionally, it looks like some people are finally getting it through their heads that it’s time to get back to the root of what made horror movies in the 70s and 80s great. I started out feeling like I knew who would live and who would die, of course, because the trends have gotten way too easy to spot. But by the halfway mark (before anyone actually had died, you understand), I was no longer confident in my picks at all. That’s a good feeling, because it also serves to make everything feel a lot more real.

Most of all, though, from the opening frames, I never felt like they held anything back. Every iota of promise the movie had, it delivered on, including a scenery-chewing finale worthy of Nicholson being directed by Scorsese (although perhaps not in precisely the way you think I mean). Well, almost every iota. There were essentially no boobies, despite half of the female cast being best known for them. (And the topical Paris Hilton jokes were both few and transparent to future viewers who may not get them.) Still, though, I’m prepared to call this the best American horror movie since Scream, or Scream 2 at the outside. (I purposefully leave out Japanese horror and British horror (well, Shaun of the Dead, anyway) to make this comparison. Still, though, it’s high praise. If you see one horror movie this year… well, probably see Dark Water. But if you see one non-Japanese horror movie this year, pick this one. Because it was really, really good.)

Sethra Lavode

One of the problems with having a booklog is all the books that you had read just before you started chronicling all the books you read, that probably were the very books that led you to say, ‘Hey, there are books out there that people deserve to know about!’, and thus inspired you to get started on such a singularly self-involved project as a booklog. (I know what you’re thinking. ‘You read crap books all the time, nearly constantly in fact, and how dare you pretend that this is something people deserve to know about?’ Well, I do think that very thing, because I have to warn people of the bad stuff too. It’s just that serving as an object lesson wasn’t sufficient impetus, in the way that flagging down the really good books has been.)

My point, which I assure you I have one of, is this. I’ve finished the last published Dragaera book, The Enchantress of Dzur Mountain (or as the publisher insisted it be renamed, Sethra Lavode). The author has explored the recent history of this world extensively: in nine first-person books chronicling the rise to prominence, subsequent fall, and so much more of Vlad Taltos, an assassin and businessman in a world where he is a second- or possibly third-class citizen; in a single book that I haven’t yet read about Vlad’s people; and in five books written in the Alexandre Dumas historical style (and in fact directly ripped off from the Three Musketeers and later books, though gradually less directly over the course of the story) about the people in whose world Vlad moves. Sethra Lavode is the final novel of the latter group.

As with the Vlad novels, the voice of the author is the most distinguishing characteristic. In this case, the voice is that of one Sir Paarfi of Roundwood, a historian of no small renown in his own time, who has been at work on the historical cycle for a matter of some three to five centuries. (Dragaerans are a long-lived people.) As with all of the previous novels, I knew essentially how the story must end, and was so able to immerse myself completely in the telling of it. I found that Paarfi has become a much more settled and sedate author, even as his personal life has gotten ever more glamorous and, dare I say, wild. Honestly, I’m not sure I approve. The Paarfi who wrote The Phoenix Guards would never have followed the story so strictly or with so few of the divergences that made him famous in the first place. Still a very good book, just not quite up to the standards I could wish for it to hold.

As for people who have not read any of these books, or few enough of them that my review doesn’t make sense: Sorry about that, and the best thing for you to do is read them, and then see if you agree. I promise, you really do want to.

xXx: State of the Union

…then, at the end of the weekend, after everything had been packed up, loaded, and unloaded, I caught the final Sunday night show of XXX: State of the Union, only to find that it was not a porn flick with characters that are meant to represent real people, like the First Lady and Vice-President, but instead have made-up porno names, like Laura Bush and Dick Chainy, and so forth.

Based on the facts behind the thoroughly forgettable action film genre, that was supposed to be the start and end of my review. Unfortunately, XXX was so pedestrian that just by having a script that made a lick of sense on its own behalf, instead of being a thinly veiled excuse for the next eXtreem stunt, this became a sequel that surpassed the original movie. That’s a rare enough occurrence that it deserves the recognition.

Samuel L. Jackson was phoning it in, which happens a lot these days. It’s nice for him that he can still look more talented than most people on the screen while doing so, but sooner or later he’s going to have to be cast in a good role again, or else devolve into permanent self-parody. (John Malkovich is also always teetering on this brink.)

Also, if you do see it, and the last few lines of the movie strike fear in your heart as they nearly did in mine: I’m pretty sure they were making fun of themselves, and not actually sowing the seeds of another sequel.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

What better time, I figure, to see a lot of movies than when you’re supposed to be doing something else entirely? This weekend, for example, I was supposed to be putting all the non-essential bits of my life into boxes, so as to then move the boxes to storage spots, and therefore have less to take care of over the next few weeks. All of which I did, you see, but I also saw movies.

First, I got to the head of a line that only ended up forming a few minutes before start time, because of how I cleverly picked a movie that started before most people got off work, and thereby avoided the opening day mega-crowds. Which there may well not have been, though I hear it did the best of the weekend, a victory for sci-fi movies everywhere, says I. In particular, because it has a horror movie to contend with next week and so cannot possibly maintain first place two in a row.

The upshot of all this meaningless preface is that I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy unreasonably early in the release cycle to only now be reviewing it. Except, see, for the packing and loading and moving and unloading that I had to accomplish. Plus, there was tiredness. In any case, my bad.

I’m going to say, Good Movie. It didn’t quite nail the bureaucratic morass hilarity of the opening scenes, but it proceeded to lampoon it thoroughly throughout the rest of the movie, so that was pretty cool. It certainly welcomed the unfamiliar viewer with open arms, but had enough new jokes to provide more than just comfortableness for the initiated. The romantic subplot was expanded, which I didn’t mind on the face of it, but I also didn’t find that either lead could really pull it off.

Additional thing: Adams wrote in a new villain character. This did not bother me as much as it was supposed to as a loyal reader/viewer/listener/player/whatever, I think. Really, I liked it a lot, because it added another facet to the whole ‘each “book” should end with tremendous ease-of-use toward having a sequel’ thing that Adams has always had going for him. Which sequel I’d like to see, because when you get down to it, watching everyman Arthur Dent react to the galaxy in all its myriad insanity is fun. I do have a concern over the whole Douglas Adams died and will not have writing credits on future sequels aspect, though.

The problems: It was merely good. Probably this is true of the books as well, and I just don’t know by having avoided them lately. Certainly it’s not a problem for going to see it, because, well, things that are good are worth seeing. But it’s not good for longevity, either in the individual sense or as the basis for a series of movies. That said, lots of not-at-all-good movies have spawned sequels, so. And also, the opening and closing dolphin song was kinda terrible, in the made me want to claw out my eardrums if only that would end the pain sense. But I can avoid it on any future viewings. I will avoid it on any future viewings, unless I’ve been strapped down like a prisoner being forced to listen to Vogon poetry.

On a completely irrelevant note, I was not shown the expected Serenity trailer before the movie. How dare they?

Jan-Gel 3: Hillbilly Monster

I need to preface this statement by pointing out that I was watching the DVD on my laptop, from work. Which is to say, instead of actively working. Now that I’ve made this point, I shall continue.

That was the longest and least-well spent 82 minutes of my life.

Apparently, being in the Ed Wood acting pool is sufficient grounds for making movies of your very own these days. Thusly, Hillbilly Monster. The heartwarming tale of… I’m not going to lie. To explain the plot, it would have had to actually have a plot. What it had was a loosely related series of events surrounding the titular beast and his escape from a carnival freakshow and subsequent sojourn at a sanitarium.

It was the biggest waste of film I can ever remember seeing. I’m not saying that as a metaphor for ‘it was bad’ (although it was; it was terrible, with only rare flashes of so-bad-it’s-funny (although the zen state taken on as the movie progressed made these moments not merely funny, but actively hilarious, so there’s that)), but as literal fact. There’s just a ton of footage that went on too long, added nothing to the story, and often both at once. Also, of course, the acting was largely tragic even for the parts that needed to be there in the first place. I sincerely believe that a completely random sampling of people would have resulted in more talent on average. I would also here claim that I was writing better scripts at the age of seven and directing better films at fourteen, but I don’t feel comfortable doing so without finding and verifying the things in question; time may have inflated the minimal accomplishments in my mind.

Lastly, though, I want to take the opportunity to make reference to a cinematic oddity this reminded me of. Apparently, the half-human and half-ape creature is a descendant of the original Jan-Gel, whence the reference in the title. The oddity is the lack of a Jan-Gel 2, so far as I could determine. This reminded me of the House movies (The Greatest American Hero owns a haunted house and hangs out with Cheers and Night Court co-stars), which consisted of House, House II: The Second Story, and House IV. Even though imdb exists now and I’ve solved the mystery of the missing House movie to my satisfaction, still: stuff like this is of genuine interest to me. What other horror movie sequels have vanished into the mists, only to be seen in some parallel dimension? Rest assured, I’ll never stop seeking them out. Never! Well, okay, probably not Jan-Gel 2, because, my God. But in the general case, never!

As far as this movie, a better use of your time and money would be on the largely brilliant Freak Show, by the Residents. Or HBO’s Carnivàle, obviously. I mean, unless you like this kind of thing. Some people do, I hear. Even, apparently, me. (But other people, too. I swear I’m not making this up.)

Chakushin Ari

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I have a sense that I’m occasionally going to have to plan trips to Austin solely for the movie-watching opportunities. You know, after I move. Right now, all the planning it takes is remembering to walk out the door a touch over an hour before the movie starts. Which is sufficiently non-trivial that I skip out on lots of stuff I’d love to see, already. So, yeah, that whole going to Austin thing is gonna suck. Perhaps I’ll plan weekends around it, based on cool-movie density. Until then, though, I get to review randomly awesome movies that nobody else has ever heard of.

Such as the one I saw last night, One Missed Call. Yet another Japanese horror movie (as you could probably already tell by the confluence of the imdb-transliterated entry title and my well-documented movie tastes), and it’s getting to the point where there are definitely tropes for the genre. A couple of obvious ones are that the scary avenging spirit must have bad, face-concealing hair and that mirrors are more trustworthy windows on reality than unaided eyes. Plus, there’s the thing where technology has a terrifying dark side. I think that’s what keeps me coming back, and why American horror can’t compete. There’s nothing that terrifies us as a people united, the way that Japan was terrified by the atom bomb in 1945. Without that cultural consciousness to lend gravity to generations of authors and film-makers, we’ve just got people throwing darts and then duplicating the things that work, over and over again, without any solid idea of why they worked. Thus endeth my sojourn into the comparative anatomy of 25 years of US horror movies vs. 10 years of Japanese horror movies.

As far as the movie at hand: It was longer than I’m used to a horror movie being, because it was trying to be a lot of things. “They’ll kill us through our cellphones” is one of them, and it worked now as well as Ringu must have in 1998, because everyone has a cellphone / everyone had a VCR, so immediately your audience is going to identify with what makes it fundamentally scary. So, that was successful. It was also trying to be “The media does not care if it destroys your soul in the quest for ratings”, and that one also worked. That particular sequence makes me think that someone will want to remake this for American audiences, because of how well we can understand what the film-maker was going for. In point of fact, I wonder if it was a jab at the American media specifically, or if Japan has it as bad as we do.

Sadly, the rest of the things it was trying to be (“Look out for the psycho-killer”, “Stop abusing me, mommy”, “A glimpse of the afterlife”) were less effective. Not because any of them are uninteresting themes, but because they kept being crowded out by the primary two and by each other. The way it worked out in the end was that I found the imagery sufficiently disturbing for the cheap thrills part of my brain, and the themes scary enough for the analytical part, that I was completely satisfied by the horror movie experience. Despite that, I had a couple of niggling questions, things that I wish I had understood better and wonder if I would have, coming at it from the Japanese mindset instead of my tragically self-involved Western one.

If you have a way to rent it or see it somewhere and you liked the Ring, you should catch it. A bonus spot for me was that I could tell the people apart. This makes me feel less bad about myself over the Ju-on thing where I couldn’t. Instead of blaming it on my cultural insensitivity, I can now blame it on either the out-of-order narrative or the casting director for actually picking people who did all look alike. Another bonus spot: unexpected boobies. I didn’t think they did that in Japanese horror. Unless you are me, probably you should watch it only for the first reason, and not based on the bonus spots.

The Amityville Horror (2005)

MV5BMzc1Njc2NDc3NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODYyNzI3._V1__SX1217_SY911_There should be more horror movies showing, because it makes it a lot easier to hit the theater when there’s not really anything that you particularly want to see. Sure, it may not be great, but at least you can be sure of good, clean, passable fun. And sometimes, it is great.

In the case of the Amityville Horror remake, I was solidly in the former experience. Which was disappointing, but only because it started out with such promise. The cast was trimmed down and the plot tightened up over the original, keeping the focus on the house and the family, where it needed to be[1]. Both the camerawork and the script kept the three-story house and multi-acre lot feeling claustrophobic, all the better to let all manner of Indian ghosts, angry woodsmen, and imaginary friends leap into frame at any moment. Which, you see, results in terror.

The problem was a little too much reveal. So many visible scary images so early on left the director without any room to escalate gracefully, and as a result, the final act was overwrought at its best, laughably silly at its worst. I think what makes me the saddest is how easy that would have been to avoid, and make the story feel as believable at the end as it was at the beginning.

[1] Oh, right, the plot in 60 seconds, if you don’t know it: The Lutz family moves into this house a year after the previous family were all murdered in their sleep by the eldest son, who claimed that voices told him to. Lots of strange badnesses occur, and they are no longer living there a mere 28 days later. Based on a true story. (Y’know, maybe.)

The Da Vinci Code

200px-DaVinciCodeI’ve been pretty dismissive of The Da Vinci Code as a phenomenon, not so much because I’d previously been aware of most of the information it contained[1] as because I’m occasionally guilty of believing that nothing is any good if other people like it[2][3]. But I’m not above borrowing books I wouldn’t bother to buy, so when my dad snagged it and finished up, I took the plunge.

My initial impression, which was largely unchanged by the end: quintessential airport book. Very short, sometimes nibble-sized chapters ranging from one to (for deep topics) six pages in length. Occasional over-explaining, which smoothed out as the book progressed. Action that was, if not tightly plotted, at least rapidly plotted enough to disregard any deep flaws, for the most part. Plus, there were lots of puzzles to solve throughout the book, and that kind of thing is fun. I worked out two of them before the characters did, which leads me to believe that the author dumbed them down rather a lot. I should not be able to outpace a Harvard professor of anything, nor a cryptologist, at solving puzzles. But, okay, suspense is required at times.

However: The bad guy reveal pissed me off enough that, rather than finishing last night like I thought I would, I took a twelve-hour cooling off period. Then I went back, verified that, okay, it was mildly feasible. But still. Total crap! Whatever. It was more fun than not, despite that, and if the information was news to me, I’d probably have liked it quite a bit. Certainly, not bad enough to regret the day or two reading it, and if I’d had it actually on an airplane as God intended, it probably would have been bliss.

[1] although I had; you don’t follow medieval literature and fantasy fiction based in medieval European settings for this long without having a pretty good grounding in the Knights Templar, the Mithras religion, and especially Grail legends in their myriad forms.
[2] Despite all the links to purchaseable items that I make, I’m not getting kickbacks. So, if you feel an urge to purchase, do so with a clean conscience.
[3] But, seriously. I was able to keep the cover hidden most of the time, to avoid drawing anyone into a discussion about the book. Some people (mostly readers themselves, I think) will ask about what I’m reading just because I’m reading it, no matter what it is. I can usually stand to talk to these people, although I’d rather not if I can help it. But then there are the people who want to talk about something because they’ve read it too! This is exactly the kind of book where that would happen. I had it for about 48 hours, one stretch of which was at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription to be filled.[4] The desk girl felt compelled to tell me “[she]’d seen the special on TV, although [she] had not read the book yet, and the information was interesting, but some of it was, come on, that’s pretty hard to swallow”. I smiled and nodded, not just to escape the situation in as few words as possible but also because if she really does read it, it’s hardly my place to start spoiling it for her. But in my head, I wanted to shake her by the shoulder and scream, “Of course it’s hard to swallow, the central premise of the book is that the Catholic Church and likeminded institutions have been working for the past 1500 or more years to make you have a hard time swallowing it, yes, you personally. Sheesh!” This kind of thing is why I subscribe to the T-shirt philosophizing that spawned this footnote.
[4] Birth control, if it’s any of your business.[5]
[5] Which, obviously, it is not. Even if (as you probably are) you’re aware that my lack of ovaries or girlfriend makes that a blatant lie.