Celluloid Heroes

Laugh while you-a can, Monkey Boy!

Mix theoretical physics, rock’n’roll, neurosurgery, Orson Welles and Rastafarian aliens from another dimension and you get this goofily eccentric genre-bending science-fiction action comedy. This is definitely one of those “love-it-or-hate-it” movies that you recommend to friends with caution. After watching this, they will either thank you profusely or recommend you for civil commitment.

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I’m not taking the vows. I’m only going to play the organ.

There is low-budget, ultra-low-budget and no-budget. I don’t know what term you’d use for a movie that could have been made with the change you dug out of your seat cushions. This is the only dramatic film made by industrial documentary filmmaker Herk Harvey, and you could be forgiven if you think you’re watching a lost episode of Twilight Zone. This simple but moody tale is as long on atmosphere as it is short on production values and running time.

Made for a paltry $30,000, Carnival of Souls was built around the dilapidated Saltair amusement park, which had been built by the Mormons on the shore of the Great Salt Lake during the late 19th Century. After decades of misfortune, fire, depression and war, it finally closed in the late 1950s. When Harvey spotted it while driving past, he thought the lonely structure, perched hundreds of feet from the receding shoreline it had once straddled, would make the perfect setting for a horror movie. He might have been on to something there.

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Eight dollars for beer nuts? This room is evil.

1408 seems to prove the existing axiom that, when adapting Stephen King to the screen, restraint trumps excess almost every time. The best adaptations of the author’s work, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, eschew raw grand guignol gore for the rich characterizations that exemplify King’s best writing. Ninety-percent of the disposable films bearing his name are guilty of the same crime, namely tossing overboard the elements that raise even mediocre King stories above the genre’s normally low standards.

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Let’s hope they don’t discover oil here. Then we’d have real problems.

Blood Diamond is a political thriller with a conscience that veers close to being slick commercial exploitation of a serious subject matter. It never crosses that line but other flaws keep it from being perfect, namely an overly complicated ending that seems to drag out the second half of the movie. The film’s virtues, however, more than compensate.

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You will soon be standing where we are now.

Only the young and idealistic would believe that they could reverse the course of a murderous regime with a few thousand mimeographed leaflets, but that is what the members of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi student resistance group, tried to do and that is the crime for which many of their members, including 21-year-old Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), were executed.

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Hey, you want to lay the fate of the world on the kid’s Camaro? That’s cool.

When Hasbro gets a production credit, you probably shouldn’t expect a deep, introspective, emotionally fulfilling cinematic experience. Combine that with direction by Michael Bay, and you have the movie-going equivalent of eating all of your little brother’s Halloween candy. It’s nutritionally empty and, after you come down off your sugar buzz, you feel guilty about enjoying yourself. While everyone involved but the special effects teams will probably keep their Oscar acceptance speeches on ice for another year, the truth is that Transformers succeeds in being exactly what it tries to be. Of course, when you aim low, hitting your target is often just a matter of gravity.

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You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

Economists have a term known as creative destruction. That’s when a new innovation appears on the market and the established order of an industry has the proverbial rug pulled out from under its feet. The introduction of synchronized sound, especially dialog, had that sort of effect on the film industry. Not only were careers ended for performers who couldn’t adapt to the new demands, but silent films already in production were either shelved or reshot with sound. Within a couple of years, silent films had gone from being state of the art to yesterday’s relics. They were the 1920’s equivalent of last year’s iPod.

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You gonna do somethin’ or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?

Tombstone was the first shot fired in a double-barreled blast of Wyatt Earp movies in 1993 and 1994. While Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp was too long, plodding and ponderous, George Pan Cosmato’s entry in the O.K. Corral sweepstakes was violent and operatic, a noisy revenge tale told at a fever pitch. It was also the better movie, even if its fidelity to the facts of Earp’s life was less than letter perfect. Movie audiences have never been that picky about historical accuracy in their westerns. Young Guns did all right and it was hardly a scholarly work on the life of Billy the Kid.

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What is it about the free world that pisses the rest of the world off?

The last time Kevin Costner got anywhere near John F. Kennedy’s presidency, namely Oliver Stone’s cinematic hallucination known as JFK, history took a beating like a narc in a biker bar. Thankfully, Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days doesn’t take anywhere near the number of liberties with the truth (how could it) and its historically questionable aspects are minor and forgivable as necessary dramatic licenses in the service of a tightly honed political thriller that also happens to be mostly true.

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Four guys against fifty bikers… and they’re the posers?

This mutant, bastard stepchild of Easy Rider and City Slickers was miscarried some time during the process of conception. While William H. Macy can be counted on to deliver up some respectable films more often than not, he finds himself ensnared in a perfect storm found at the nexus between the cinematic dead zones known as Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence comedies. For his part, John Travolta’s career has been running on fumes for a while now. It’s probably time for him to do another Tarantino movie.

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