Here it is!

This is a crazy, crazy movie. Ragingly anti-consumerist, it’s like what you’d get if The Communist Manifesto were filled with aliens and set on film. I almost can’t believe it got made. John Carpenter has done some amazing work.

Up at the Herald.

Although I kind of liked it, I’m not sure how well I got across the overall dumbness threaded through this movie. I think it would have been much more obvious if anyone but Dafoe had played the wild and woolly roughneck character who’s full of deliberately memorable lines and pragmatic folksiness. If someone had played the role as it was clearly meant to be played–i.e., to the awful hilt–I think the whole movie may well have collapsed.

From a speculative fiction perspective, however, I liked some of the extrapolation they did here. It’s possible the Spiereg brothers will do some interesting work in the future.

Here it is.

I thought this book was dumb when I read it in high school (something like twelve years ago, frowny-face) and I thought the movie was dumb when I saw it a few days ago. This dumbness was for varying reasons–even though the book was clearly written for oversmart, undersexed teens (i.e. right in my high school wheelhouse), I thought the characters were almost uniformly repellant, downright sociopathic, and their utterly singleminded focus on sex wasn’t anything like the perspective of my peer group.

Maybe I knew the wrong people. Maybe I was the wrong person, if I’m allowed to use the past tense on that one. But the thing about smart kids is they tend to be interested in a stupid amount of smart shit, and however heavily sex may have suffocated our brains, we spent a lot of time thinking and talking and doing other things, too. Even, sometimes, homework.

A couple of my friends did like the book, but even as a freshman I found it sophomoric.

After seeing the movie, which preserved the exasperating and overwhelming selfishness and singlemindedness of the characters, I walked out thinking “Gosh, the plot wasn’t anything like the movie at all.” Then I did a little research, which I understand writers who care do sometimes, and found out the plots were nearly identical. Shows how well the book stuck with me.

That really crippled the movie, though. The book is a tome. It’s 544 pages. In stomping all that material into fewer than 100 minutes of cinema, it robbed the central romance of the time it needed to be emotionally significant. I’m starting to repeat my review here, but this movie barely clung to the slippery edge of its C- rating. Once you drop down into the Ds, it’s hard to properly call whatever you’ve made a “movie.” At that point it can better be termed “a confusing and regrettable waste of what little jerk-off time I have left these days.”

Also: please take a different role, Michael Cera. You’re a multimillionaire movie star, and as such I find it increasingly impossible to believe you as an awkward, friendless virgin. It worked a few times, and may be worth revisiting later, but for now it’s time to find something new. You probably shouldn’t be taking career advice from someone who doesn’t have one, but I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Available here.

In my minimal research, it looked like a lot of people really, really liked Let the Right One In. I thought it was pretty good; probably a B+ by my usual standards. It had a literary feel to it, which I appreciated, but it also felt a little loose in a sense that may work wonderfully in the novel but which doesn’t play quite so well in movie form. Still, a good take on vampires, and it did one of the things I like best in books and movies: while playing perfectly well as a genre piece, it also dove with equal skill into real-life drama.

That’s no mean feat, and I may be underrating it just a bit. Big ups to the director, though. Hope more of his work makes its way stateside in the future.

Can be found here.

Given that it hasn’t been transferred to DVD, and it only has 548 votes on IMDb, I would have expected this movie to be several times worse than it was. Oh, there was plenty of bad, but there was a lot of fun stuff, too. Luis Guzman chiding Christopher Walken’s crew after they killed all his drug buddies for cash was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Paraphrasing, Guzman delivers the following sentiment with the attitude of a disappointed parent: “You guys just killed a lot of people for not very much money. Why, you think nobody cares about drug dealers? We’re scum who sell drugs to 8-year-olds? You see any 8-year-olds around here? C’mon, guys. You can do better.”

So could McBain, incidentally, but it was still worth the $3.50 it took to track down a VHS copy.