Category: ho hum

Perhaps better silent. Or, if possible, with the dialogue cut, but moans and screams and echoes intact. I must say I did enjoy this movie, and to be honest would not have enjoyed it in the theater. At home, I could cut all the lights, sink into a chair, turn the sound mostly down and speed through just to catch cool visuals. And there are a slew of great visuals: it’s a genuinely creepy aesthetic, and there’s rarely a shot that doesn’t have some nice touch, some cool glint off a moist surface or a sharp angled line through a beautiful wide shot. The story is of course piffle, and I feel bad for Alice Krige, who I first recall from the lousy film adaptation of Ghost Story, playing there and then playing everywhere ever since a spooky evil woman. Would have been nice if this had been simply strange, instead of trying to explain… or if there was a clearer, more starkly-defined sense of urgency to the thing. Instead, it works as a not-terribly-frightening but still malicious dream.

Depending on your appreciation of Keillor’s conflation of schmaltzy cornpone and dry, sly sting (which brings out, in the actors, ham on wry), either a dreamy afternoon in good company or a forceful lug-wrench to the soft area between your forehead and your ear. I fall in between: I am a sucker when Keillor stops singing and wanders around flatfooted, mumbling out yarns and sidestepping emotional reactions; I’m equally smitten with the extravagant “Midwestern” dramatics of Meryl Streep’s Johnson sister or the equally outsized snap of Lily Tomlin’s more bilious, bibulous Johnson sister. I also happily confess to loving John Reilly and Woody Harrelson shamelessly twanging and slanging away in the wings.

I’m less keen on the many false notes struck by the framing narratives (an odd misplaced wandering death angel, a vision more in keeping with Michael Landon than, say, Bergman; a dull plot about the end of the show, and a mean old capitalist from Texas, ably and acutely played by Tommy Lee Jones without one hint of whimsy but also lacking any hint of dramatic purpose); the waste of Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph and a few other stray supporters, left drifting with the wisp of character and comic “bits”. And I almost always turn off the radio “Prairie” (if Kris will let me) whenever anyone starts singing; that ain’t my cup of joe, and it wears about as poorly when seen as when heard.
Continue reading Prairie Home

Mostly dead. I so wanted this to be a sly, subversively funny dismantling of disability tropes which employs–and then implodes–cultural stereotypes. Instead, it was not so sly, rarely funny, even if still nicely subversive of said tropes.

For those interested, it’s about a loser-wimp type (the ingratiating Johnny Knoxville) who tries to make some needed money by playing “disabled” so that he and a scurrilous uncle (the game Brian Cox) can rig bets on the Special Olympics. What’s kind of neat is that the film’s producers (the Farrelly Brothers, who have I think an *excellent* track record in upsetting disability tropes) engaged with the Olympics and it was filmed on site, with in-jokes and inside humor (sidestepping the frequent criticism of “laughing at”) and with performers with variously different abilities. One of the good jokes is that the other athletes recognize how bad Knoxville’s mimicry is, while the “norms” all get suckered. What’s less good is that the filmmakers employ a mix of actors, some of whom are playing disabled, and doing so generously but not persuasively (i.e., the movie’s central gimmick is itself replicated by the movie, inartfully).

I wanted it to be funnier, or even just funny. Nope. I recommend instead the under-appreciated Stuck on You and the brilliant documentary How’s Your News?.

I watched a couple of films–neither great, neither bad–which grub in the troughs of contemporary horror scenarios but with some more high-falutin’ goals in mind. I could probably write an essay that excoriated the directors for not taking their slumming seriously enough; the films don’t really succeed as horror, and the pretensions swell up and occasionally burst the seams of the well-knit genre conventions. But I’ll assume they were serious fans of the genre conventions, and simply suffered from grand ambitions–in trying to make seriously scary and yet seriously serious flicks, both ends of that equation kind of suffer. We get middling melodramas, admittedly well-shot and showing promise.

Continue reading Horrors in fancy pants