Videodrome: The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods paints by numbers and doesn’t even bother to use any new colors. It is the quintessential slasher movie that exists in all of our cinematic collective memories. It follows the pattern so closely that you could predict its outcome with your eyes closed. That is until it breaks from those patterns so completely that you have no idea what you’re looking at anymore.

The set-up (see if you can’t guess it before reading this next paragraph): five high school kids go for a weekend retreat to a remote cabin. You have your slut, your jock, your sensitive intellectual, your burnout, and, finally, your virgin, who is hilariously introduced to us in only shirt and underwear. When they get to the cabin, these five horror staples manage to go into the cellar and mess around with objects that they shouldn’t. They incur the wrath of some zombies and ghosts. In the end, they all die. Most of them die in the exact manner that you’d expect them to die given the universe they occupy. Did I say too much? Probably not. 

Videodrom: A Separation

A Separation will be released on DVD on August 21st. Really, you need to see this one. 

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film back in February. The reality, in a field that included the likes of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Help, is that this movie ought to have been nominated for Best Picture. And I wouldn’t have been disappointed if it had taken home the big prize; at least not as disappointed as I was when they gave it to a gimmick film named The Artist.

A Separation is the type of movie that ought to be experienced first hand, with as little foreknowledge of the plot as possible. The film has been inappropriately compared to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but seeing it really is an act of discovery if you can go in with a blank slate.

Videodrome, Cinephile Edition: The Artist

Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way first: The Artist did not deserve to win Best Picture; not in a field that included standout movies like Moneyball, The Tree of Life, and The Descendants, and certainly not in a year with my personal favorites Meek’s Cutoff, Of Gods and Men, and Drive. This doesn’t, of course, mean that The Artist is a bad movie, but it does make Michel Hazanavicius’ little tribute to the glories of silent cinema easier to hate. And that can be the real shame of the Oscars – rather than promoting goodwill and good faith among ranking cinephiles, the Academy’s shameless acceptance of studio marketing campaigns and cronyism has replaced the act of critical judgment. Well, maybe “replace” is the wrong word to use here, because I’m not sure if critical judgment has ever been the watchword among Oscar voters.

If The Artist is easy to hate because it won an award that it surely did not deserve, then it is doubly easy to hate because it (or the filmmakers behind it) want so badly for you to like it. Almost cloying in its efforts for your affection, The Artist has the sweet flavor of cotton candy. A little too much and the stomach begins to turn.

Videodrome: Chronicle

The climax of Chronicle pits two teenagers against each other, floating in airborne battle right next to Seattle’s famed Space Needle. The city has already been given its fair share of damage, thanks to these two warring parties; Andrew, the disgruntled teenager with telekinetic powers, and Matt, the more philosophically-minded teenager, also with telekinetic powers. Hovering next to the Space Needle, Matt is trying to convince his once friend now rival to put an end to the madness. In the dark of the theater and without a pause button, I didn’t have time to write down the entire exchange, but IMDB confirms the climactic plea was this: “You have to stop this right now, okay? This is really, really bad.”

This is a prime cut of dialogue, am I right? And if a line as memorable as that can make it into the high point of the movie, you don’t have to use too much imagination to figure out what the rest of Chronicle sounds like. On a conceptual level, Chronicle is ripe for the picking, but the execution makes for an excruciating experience.

Videodrome: Haywire

Haywire will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 1st. 

What made you want to make this?

It really was because of [Gina]. If she had said no, then I wouldn’t have thought, “oh, well I still want to go and do this.” She was the reason to do the movie for me.

- Steven Soderbergh interview, Cinemablend.com

It’s not often that people would think of Steven Soderbergh as a whimsical director. With a few glaring exceptions (Out of Sight, Oceans), his work is usually serious in tone. But in his approach to choosing projects, he seems as playful as a child. He directed The Good German just to see if he could make something like Casablanca in the modern cinema and he made Bubble largely to experiment with digital filmmaking. Directing a movie just for the chance to make an unorthodox casting choice is nothing new to Soderbergh; he made The Girlfriend Experience just so he could work with Sasha Grey, a fairly notorious porn star. The idea of a porn star playing a high-paid escort isn’t that much of a stretch from a neo-realist perspective, and so it makes perfect sense to put retired MMA fighter Gina Carano in a spy thriller that requires her to show off mad fighting skillz at every other turn.

Videodrome: Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Sexy French assassin? Check.

Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, April 17th. Should you see it? Should you not? Answers within. 

There’s a good chance that if you have any interest in seeing Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, you’ve already gone to the theatre and had your fun. MI4, you see, dominated the box office last December when all the other prestige pictures couldn’t pull the monetary value of their pretentiousness. Fans of Tom Cruise and action films lined up for this international spy thriller and came away satisfied.

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of Cruise or action movies. I started losing real interest in the genre when Daniel Craig (an actor I otherwise like) sucked all the blood and fun out of James Bond. Then when Paul Greengrass inundated me with a bazillion cuts in the Bourne trilogy, I checked out completely. But the prospect of Brad Bird (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant) directing his first live-action movie was too enticing to pass up, even if it was the fourth installment of a franchise that hasn’t been exciting since Brian De Palma was in the director’s chair. So, I pulled my car into the parking lot of my second run theatre, did a few jumping jacks, bought my ticket, and sat while the action played out on the big screen in front of me. 

Videodrome: War Horse

The second of Steven Spielberg’s 2011 movies, War Horse, will be released today on DVD and Blu-ray today. You know what Spielberg is capable of, right? Well, all the good and all the bad of a Spielberg film are wrapped into this little nugget. 

A few years ago Steven Soderbergh tried to see if he could make a classically designed, yet modern, version of Casablanca. He called it The Good German, and it reeked of artifice when placed alongside the standard multiplex fare of its time. He had shot the film, after all, with techniques and equipment from the classical era; his set probably came closer to a classic studio lot than we’ve seen since the early 40s. Soderbergh’s gambit was obvious, and all the more admirable for it. It was a welcome anachronism in an American film industry where style has become an act of homogeny.

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is in the same short-lived tradition. It is a movie that harkens back to a different era; not only because it is a period piece and carries the look (sometimes copied shots) of a John Ford movie, but because it reeks of a sentimentality that only Spielberg could produce – the type of deliberate, unapologetic weepiness and heroism that Old Hollywood and its production code produced on a regular basis.

Videodrome: Young Adult

Young Adult will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 13th, which could be tomorrow, today, or yesterday, depending on when you’re reading this.  

This is a truly awful poster for Young Adult.

Over the past 50 years, the age at which a person is expected to engage in the “adult” responsibilities of career and family is being pushed back further. Marriage is being held off as adults out of high school pursue lengthy college careers or just take a lot of time to figure out who they are. Couples, if they do have children, are waiting longer, holding out for the “right time”. While there’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong about this phenomenon, it is skewing the essence of adult maturity. The lines between child/youth/adult are being blurred to almost excessive levels. Jason Reitman’s Young Adult takes this recent sea change as its subject and gets nasty about it.

Videodrome: The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on March 13th. Young Adult will also be coming out on the 13th, so I’ve decided to give you a heads up on this.

Videodrome: J. Edgar

J. Edgar Hoover lived what is perhaps the most ironic of American lives. Consumed by his desire to make America safer from threats both foreign and domestic, Hoover became the singular force behind the FBI that we know of today. His pioneering work in fingerprinting, crime scene preservation, and organizational file-keeping altered criminal investigation methods forever. Hoover wanted to base his investigations on cold, hard factual evidence instead of dumb logic. CSI: Miami wouldn’t be possible without him.

But beyond the towering public figure that is J. Edgar Hoover there was a duplicitous private figure who was willing to blackmail his enemies, fabricate stories about himself, and, like the Communists he hated, attempt to destroy anyone who didn’t agree with his particular vision of America.  In Hoover’s world, perceived threats to American freedom and democracy justified the bending of federal laws to preemptively preserve what is rightfully ours. Does this sound like it could relate to our current age?