Charles Mudede on Claire Denis and the modern urban family:

The urban family has a different and deeper set of values that are not connected by a sense of soil, wholesomeness, health, or devotion, but by the condition of being with (and close to) others who share the same fate, loneness, and melancholy. The urban family exists in a disenchanted world—science, capitalism, and cosmopolitanism have made it clear to everyone that life is short and death is final. All the urban family has are shared moments in time.

Read the whole thing HERE.

George Clooney: magnificent idiot.

You can forget about Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler and all the rest: George Clooney is the best actor in the world if you're looking for someone to play a credible idiot. A George Clooney idiot is shallow and utterly self-involved, but he is a complete person—a complete, shallow, self-involved person. Traditionally, Clooney has saved his best idiots for the Coen brothers—his doltish performance in Burn After Reading is a masterwork—but Clooney's Lyn Cassady, the psychic warrior who drives the plot of The Men Who Stare at Goats, gives his best fools a real run for their money.

Read Paul Constant's whole review HERE.

Under no circumstances should you see this movie, even if you think you want to see this movie, says Grant Brissey:

Countless hours of interview footage with shiftless layabouts and various unidentified bores are whittled down to what seem like countless hours of interview footage with shiftless layabouts and various unidentified bores. In an apparent attempt to introduce some variety, Ferrara splices in public-access-quality reenactments of more interesting times—Sid Vicious passed out on a bed, Nancy Spungen getting stabbed in the stomach, Janis Joplin drinking whiskey.

Read the whole thing HERE.

• imdb.com
• Spine of the Devil!

Lindy hates scary movies, and personally I'm not one for the a-hockey-mask-wearing-killer's-on-the-loose-so-I'll-just-go-off-in-the-woods-alone-in-my-bikini genre. But a truly GOOD scary movie has a healthy emetic effect on the psyche.

So, for Best Scary Movie I Can Think of Right Now (in Honor of H'ween), I would like to nominate:

The Devil's Backbone (available on DVD, short review to be found here)

No breasts, just a giant ticking time bomb and period-piece sheer terror.

Also: Last night I watched part of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and became too creepified and had to turn it off. Had weird dreams. Feel good today. Emetic!

Also: The symphony is playing along live to Psycho tonight and tomorrow night. Best idea ever. FREAK OUT.

• 'Sup.

I know it's that one week a year when we semi-arbitrarily eat very small Three Musketeers bars and get all spastic about mummies, so one might expect me to devote this column to my top five ways for a hill mutant to rip out a sorority girl's eyeball (okay, fine: 5. grapefruit spoon, 4. mutant telepathy, 3. bug vacuum, 2. voodoo chicken bone, 1. prehensile toe). However! I have gone on record many times explaining that STRANGELY ENOUGH, I DO NOT ENJOY THE FEELING OF WARM TERROR-PEE FILLING MY PANTS, BUT THANK YOU OH SO MUCH FOR OFFERING. No, I shall not partake of the frights this week.

Read the whole thing—which includes short reviews of Amelia, Couples Retreat, and Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (and not one single fart joke [I don't think!]!)—HERE.

Jon Frosch is less than impressed:

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier has staged some sadistic bits of filmmaking in his time. Little blind Björk hanged at the end of Dancer in the Dark. Lovely Nicole Kidman raped in Dogville. Every excruciating minute of Manderlay. But the opening sequence of his new movie, Antichrist, which screened to gasps, guffaws, and a dry heave or two at Cannes last May, makes his previous work look like a Sunday stroll. Shot in voluptuous black-and-white slo-mo and set to a gorgeous Handel aria, von Trier shows us a couple—Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, named in the credits as "He" and "She"—having shower sex (cue close-up of anal penetration). It looks like some kind of sumptuous pornographic perfume commercial... until the director cuts to the couple's toddler jumping off a several- story-high window ledge. Never one for subtlety, von Trier films the kid's fluffy brown teddy bear hitting the snow-covered ground—just in case we missed the tragedy in an innocent child falling to his death.

Read and comment on the whole thing HERE.

The first three-quarters of Orphan is a creepy, albeit insanely dumb, horror movie. It's got a lot of queasy-making moments (while it's not Saw-level gross, they could have easily titled the movie Children in Graphic Peril, and a really uncomfortable moment near the end will cause any reasonable adult to squirm in disgust), and they got a cast full of brilliant actors to polish this turd. There's Vera Farmiga playing a quite-unlikable mom; Peter Sarsgaard, awash in yuppie smugness; the always-delightful CCH Pounder as an expository nun; and Isabelle Fuhrman is phenomenal as the titular orphan. Sure, the plot explodes as soon as you apply any miniscule amount of common sense to it, but the cinematography, direction, and performances are more than just unbad; they're really quite good.

And, yes, the twist is everything I had hoped it would be. The last quarter of the movie ups the dumbness factor to insane levels. But really: Nearly every horror movie drops the ball in the last reel. Let the Right One In is a rare exception, and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is, too. And Joshua (a movie that could be Orphan's fraternal twin, and one which also stars Farmiga, who is perhaps publicly working through some children issues) already took the best possible ending that an Orphan-like movie could wind up with. So I can appreciate the filmmaker's decision to just totally go over to the deep end and embrace the idiocy. It does what mainstream horror movies are supposed to do, in that it soothes the audience after riling it up for an hour and forty-five minutes. That Orphan chooses to calm the audience down with laughter by twisting itself into a hilarious pretzel of a plot twist would be genius if it weren't so dumb, and it makes Orphan a fine leading-up-to-Halloween horror movie.

Holy Roller posted this comment on my review of Good Hair, a film about the billions that black women spend to have hair that looks like the hair of white ladies, wrote:

The whitest black guy in Seattle calling out white folk, glad your white editors enjoyed this, Chuck.

Take your pick! (Pick The Headless Woman.)

"Boooooo!" says Paul Constant! "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

The plasticized American abomination that is the new Astro Boy film can’t kill the weirdness of Astro Boy’s origins—a young boy dies in a scientific accident and his father single-mindedly builds a robotic replica that can never be injured—but it does sap the concept of its joy, its cleverness, and its heart.

"Yaaaaaay!" says Charles Mudede! "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!"

The standard arrangement for a crime film has been this: The viewer watches the detective watching, focusing on the world he is in. With The Headless Woman, we have a new arrangement: The viewer watches the film from the position and with the same intensity of a detective. Set in modern Argentina and centered on a middle-class, middle-aged woman with blond hair, the movie begins almost immediately with a crime—a crime, however, that is as much in the head as it is in the world.

Find all our reviews, recommendations, and movie times HERE.

David Schmader on Crude:

On one side: the 30,000 residents of the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, who claim that three decades of criminal irresponsibility by U.S. oil giant Texaco has so polluted the air, land, and water that the residents' very existence is in peril. On the other side: Texaco, which denies all claims of wrongdoing and is ready to spend unlimited millions to make sure the case never sees a courtroom.

And Andrew Wright on Ong Bak 2:

Set in 1421, and bearing only the slightest connection to the original film, the story follows the saga of Tien, an orphaned son of a nobleman who undergoes a series of deadly tests in order to fulfill his destiny as king of the pirates. Should you be burned out on the whole Joseph Campbell hero thing, be advised that said tests include swordfights, duking it out with a voracious vampire woman, and punching an elephant.

Read the full reviews (and more filmy stuff) HERE.

Charles Mudede reviews Chris Rock's new documentary:

So black people would learn nothing new from this documentary. What about white people? Is it for them? Are they the ideal spectators? Not really. Why? Because what is it to them that blacks are burning their scalps and inhaling toxic fumes for the sole purpose of looking like their masters (their bosses, politicians, movie stars)? At best, a white person, one with a soft heart, might feel pity for blacks. It's nothing but sad that all of these poor people are paying through the nose to become what they are not and could never be—European. To the white person with a soft heart, this is only further proof of the damage that white power has done to the cultural and natural world.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Dominic Holden says:

The Wild Things take on the characteristics of Max's emotions and fractured family: an overworked single mom, an awkward boy, and a teenage sister outgrowing her kid brother's antics. The beasts still have terrible teeth and claws—and the animapuppemagic of the Things is utterly convincing—but they are jealous, petty, insecure, passive-aggressive things. Not wild things.

And the debate rages!

Thanks for crushing my dreams.

What I find interesting is that both the positive reviews and negative reviews say pretty much the same things—that the beasts are melancholic, the tone of the film hyper-emotional. If you're the sort of person who remembers childhood as being sort of empty and sad, if you've ever defended Morrissey's solo work, if you're the sort who cried every time the Arcade Fire song in the previews hit the big, Hallelujah chorus (don't look at me like that) . . . you'll probably enjoy the film (or so I'm hoping).

I've been waiting for a 'kid's movie' to tackle realisic 'kid's' emotions ever since E.T. I want a 'kid's' movie that is as much for adults as it is for the little ones. I want a 'kid's' movie that will make me FEEL something other than sick that I wasted my $15 on effects with no soul behind them. Seems like this film goes there. I can't wait to see it.

I could not agree more! Thanks for giving an honest review of this movie, rather than stroking Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers. This movie was absolutely awful, an hour and a half of my life I'll never get back! If you say you liked it, you're a liar!

Read the full review—and join the fray—HERE.

Vintage Zizek:

...[W]hen I saw The Matrix at a local theatre in Slovenia, I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film-namely, an idiot. A man in his late 20's to my right was so immersed in the film that he disturbed other spectators all the time with loud exclamations, like "My God, wow, so there is no reality! So we are all puppets!"