Colette Arrand

Category: Film

  • Movie Review: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)

    Movie Review: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)

    If A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Chistmas does anything—and part of its charm is that it so effectively does nothing—it’s that it finally, definitively unseats 1953’s The House of Wax from its throne as the King of 3D Sight Gags. No matter how many skulls Nicholas Cage threw at the screen, no matter how many detached, piranha-bitten penises were floated my way, it was going to take Hollywood’s best shot to top House of Wax‘s paddleball master, paddling his ball in all three dimensions as Vincent f’n Price commented on the utter banality of the gimmick.  Whereas most 3D films, including the aforementioned Drive Angry and Pirhanna—those being the modern standard-bearer for the use of 3D in ways unpretentious—have failed in their responsibility both to prove Price wrong and justify the ludicrous, attendance-killing practice of charging an extra matinee ticket for low culture films and a dimmer picture. Not A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. It lives in the third dimension, where protesters huck 3D eggs, Catholic priests have 3D teeth punched out of their 3D mouths, and Danny Trejo—playing Harold’s disgruntled, Christmas-loving father-in-law—ejaculates onto an eight-foot Douglas Fir tree because otherwise how would you know if the 3D surcharge was really worth it?

    Stuck a mash-up of every sitcom episode where a group of buddies set out to save Christmas, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) find each other at opposite ends of the spectrum. Harold’s now a married, successful business man with lame, white friends, whereas Kumar is single, alone, and buying weed from a mall Santa. They’re brought together again by a mystery package containing a gigantic joint that sets Harold’s father-in-law’s prized Christmas tree on fire. To save Christmas (I resisted the urge to type that in all caps), Harold, Kumar, Kumar’s pervert friend Adrien (Amir Blumenfeld), and Harold’s squarish “friend” Todd (Thomas Lennon), who, by bringing along his toddler daughter, will surely win Father of the Year. As you can probably guess, the plot doesn’t really matter in a movie like A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. When something happens outside the parameters of rescuing Christmas, it’s either to poke fun at the cheap commercialism of the season (Wafflebot, perhaps the best fake movie toy since Turboman), or, ironically, to cash-in on some easy product placement (the Russian mafia…playing Mafia Wars).

    The above is a no-frills plot summary, but I’ve got to admit, reviewing A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is hard. And pointless. The movie, like many comedies, practically gives itself to you through the trailer and previews, spoiling all of the best humor not involving penises in a vain attempt to draw attention to a Christmas movie that, for some reason, was released in early November. The list of things name-checked by the previews is rather impressive: Rankin-Bass claymation Christmas specials, stoned children, Chrismas in New York City, holiday TV specials, violence towards Santa, Jesus Christ, Neil Patrick Harris (even his best sight gag is in the trailer), marijuana, 3D, Wafflebot, and, jeez, even one of the film’s two big dick jokes (there’s no way to write around that). Odds are that something there appeals to you, and, obviously, your mileage will vary. Me, I like Rankin-Bass, New York Christmas movies, Neil Patrick Harris, the gleefully ridiculous usage of 3D as a gimmick, and the idea of a robot that makes and serves waffles.  I wish A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas had been released closer to the holiday it lampoons, as it would have made for effective counter-programming to Spielburg and Scorsesse’s 3D children’s films and whatever Arthur Christmas is,  but, for whatever reason, it’s here…and it’ll be back on DVD in time for Christmas (or Easter) next year, returning to taunt me with visions of Wafflebots, dancing in my head.

    The major let-down here is that, for however crazy those elements sound in my head, put together on screen they don’t do anything to push boundaries or get subversive. The shoehorned-in Neil Patrick Harris sequences are edgy when he’s using his presumed homosexuality to take advantage of the dancers in his TV special, but beyond that, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is a surprisingly warm-hearted, holiday-themed victory lap. It’s enjoyable enough, but, like the 32-inch 3D HDTV that promises to make Avatar look Avatarded, the movie is a little too lifeless, the bow topping it off a little too neat.

    Rating:

    A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. Directed by Todd Strauss–Schulson. With John Cho (Harold), Kal Penn (Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (Neil Patrick Harris), Thomas Lennon (Todd), Amir Blumenfeld (Adrien), and Danny Trejo (Mr. Perez). Released November 4, 2011, by Warner Bros.

  • You Know What Makes Perfect Sense?

    You Know What Makes Perfect Sense?

    Kim Kardashian going out for Halloween as Joel Schumacher’s Poison Ivy. Only Batman and Robin is more accomplished than any of the Kardashian sisters. I only bring this up because I’m a staunch defender of Batman and Robin (rubber lips may be immune to its charms, but I’m not), and because it gives me an excuse to troll for hits to point out that, in Hollywood, failure is the new success.

    vs.

    Not only are Uma Thurman’s scarf and sleeves are much more conscious of the season, but somehow, the costume from a Joel Schumacher movie manages to look more authentic than something made for use in real life, some fourteen years after the film’s release. You go, Joel.

  • Movie Review: Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

    Movie Review: Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

    The great sham of the haunted house film is the premise that something unknowable, something larger than the relatively normal tenants of its modestly upscale suburban houses (read: us) is lurking behind the drywall, in every creak of floorboard, in every blown fuse. Having ascended to the top of the food chain, few things beyond money and oppressive governments can smother us, so we fear the invisible, gods and monsters alike. The potential for truly great film-making lies within that premise, but the low-budget, low-on-horror Paranormal Activity 3 is not interested in the profundity of human fear. Its great sham is that this movie has already been made twice before, that the promise of filling in past events is enough to look past the law of diminishing returns, the number one killer of horror movie franchises.

    Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel, unnecessarily tracking back to 1988 and providing answers as to why the lives of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Kristi Ray (Sprague Grayden) are later compromised by paranormal activity. The answer is both rushed and fairly derivative—the film’s eventual interest in the occult is merely as a way to bring the film to a creepy conclusion. Until that point, however, Paranormal Activity 3 is more concerned with jump scares and the series’ well-established low-budget camcorder tricks. The big one here is that a camera is set on a fan’s oscillating platform. It pans away from a seemingly normal kitchen to the living room. It pans back, and the kitchen table and chairs have disappeared. That’s an effective shot, but most of the footage made me feel like I was being forced to watch some old home movie with the promise that something wonderful or shocking was going to happen. Paranormal Activity 3 revels in the waiting game, and its rewards for the patient are only moderately worthwhile

    That’s because the protagonists as as glassy-eyed and likable as the Teddy Ruxpin doll that serves as one of the movie’s early false alarms. Katie and Kristi Ray live with their divorced mom Julie (Lauren Bitner) and her new boyfriend, Dennis (Chris Smith), who’s business is wedding videos (giving him a good enough reason to document everything on his camcorder). Dennis becomes convinced that something is wrong in the million-dollar house he’s been invited into, but Julie isn’t too sure. Kristi Ray has an imaginary friend named Toby who sounds fairly ominous, telling her not to reveal his secrets, lest he dole out some dire consequences. It’s all fairly rote, as the signs of haunting begin small, then escalate to the point that Julie looks like an absolute fool for refusing to believe Dennis’ theory. The plot, and the characters moving it along, are facilities of real people and advancement. Even the home feels like a cheap representation, a pornographer’s stand-in for suburbia.

    Beyond the one really effective shot where the contents of Julie’s kitchen disappear, the film’s one creepy aspect is Kristi Ray, who at no point seems like a real child. Sprague Grayden isn’t precocious or precious; she constantly seems like the focus of an interrogation and, moreover, she seems to know it. The use of children in horror movies has always been fascinating to me—they’re never authentic, instead portraying a screenwriter or a director’s idea of the authentic, responding not to the emotion of the situation, but to very basic programming: Stare. Giggle. Scream. Horror movie children are automatons, looking and acting almost like you’d expect, but not quite. They’re flesh and blood, but firmly lost in the uncanny valley. I wonder if that’s intentional, half the time. If it is, the trick is too easy: That child’s the devil, break out the pitchforks. If it isn’t, the horror movie child is still indicative of lazy screenwriting: The child-in-peril will always draw our sympathy, fingershutter your eyes and hope nothing happens.

    I get the feeling that Paranormal Activity 3 wants us to have both reactions, at turns feeling sorry for Kristi Ray, her sister and their family while operating under the belief that she’s in cahoots with Toby, whose designs are anything but obvious. It’s a clever ruse, one that’s meant to grab the attention, to draw the eye closer to the screen. Hopefully, we’ll be so caught up in what isn’t happening that, when something does happen, it’ll shock. It’s a good sham, but we’ve seen it before. Worse, we’re expected to jump knowing that the little girls will live to be haunted another day.

    Rating:

    Paranormal Activity 3. Directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost. With Katie Featherston (Katie), Sprague Grayden (Kristi Ray), Lauren Bitner (Julie), and Chris Smith (Dennis). Released October 21, 2011, by Paramount Pictures.

  • Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

    Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

    Forget, for a moment, that The Thing is a prequel/none-too subtle remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, which was a masterpiece of latex and animatronics. The Thing, after all, was a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 The Thing From Another World, a McCarthian allegory for the secretly infectious capabilities of communism that had, at it’s source, the 1931 novella Who Goes There?, the elements of which have been mined again and again, often to rousing success. Yes, it’s moderately upsetting that, in a year where everything from Conan the Barbarian to Johnny English got a remake or a sequel, John Carpenter and Howard Hawks couldn’t escape unscathed, but if we want these things to remain sacred, we’re going to need to burn Hollywood to the ground. We can’t learn anything from that mindset.

    Instead, let’s note how The Thing is representative of the nadir in American horror films, the product of some 30 years of devolution due to the mistaken belief that the isolation at the heart of terror wasn’t what moved viewers to the edge of their seats, but buckets of blood, focus-tested plot machinations and, oh yeah, ear-piercingly loud spikes in the music. All of these things happen in The Thing, to the point where it’s a relief when the film, already under the impression that everything old is new, moves into the kitchen of the besieged Antarctic research station, where the Thing stalks its prey as if it’d morphed into a velociraptor. For two minutes, it was nice be reminded that, yes, movies have the capacity for real fear.

    Here, the discovery of an alien specimen and his (it’s never “her” in these instances) spacecraft below two miles of Antarctic ice is greeted with the sort of warm enthusiasm one expects from a classroom of bored students in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an American paleontologist, is asked along on a mission to the site by Dr. Sander Halverson (Ulrich Thomsen), who is unnecessarily built up as an unethical, slightly villainous dude with designs on unending fame for “his” discovery. You’d think that a movie aiming to massacre a group of people one by one in ways grotesque wouldn’t need a bad guy beyond the monster, but The Thing wants us to root hard for the American girl and the pack of misfits surrounding her, so Halverson is first a headstrong jerk, then a floating head awkwardly photoshopped onto a CGI conglomeration of limbs, stingers, and teeth. It is hard to register even a blip of sympathy for the men and women trapped in Antarctica; no matter how much blood flies: The word “prequel” renders the whole story non-essential, no matter which scientist is the megalomaniac with a questionable grasp on the scientific method. In fact, The Thing makes a strong case for The Thing as it’s hero. After crash-landing and taking a 1,000 year powernap, his crankiness at being woken up by an electric drill is nothing short of understandable.

    There’s really not much to discuss when it comes to The Thing. Winstead is able as the plucky paleontologist, and some of the scenes, under different circumstances, would have been quite tense. Most of the movie, though, is spent deep frying The Thing, or on second guessing party members who don’t quite understand each other. I’ve read that Winstead’s character was inspired by Ripley, from Alien, but that transformation doesn’t take place until the very end of the movie, when we’re good and ready to see the baton passed to Kurt Russell’s gang. The movie’s two most effective scenes happen right at the end. Unfortunately, they’re among the film’s most inconsequential.

    That’s a small part of why The Thing, despite the fact that it is by no means a terrible movie, represents the nadir of American horror movies. I suspect a large part of my misgivings ultimately has to do with my inability to separate The Thing and The Thing in one major department: The special effects. In a movie like this, special effects do the heavy lifting. In 1982, The Thing set a high watermark for special effects, and everything in that movie is more visceral, more convincing than what’s on display here. Having read a review or two, there seems to be the consensus that special effects today are better than they were in the 80s because of the advancements in computer technology, which has effectively rendered whole segments of special effects making useless.

    I think the people who say that the special effects are better now are wrong, for one big reason: Special effects aren’t special anymore. This has been the argument since the special edition re-releases of Star Wars, and while I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into rendering a monster like The Thing, I’m less impressed by the ability to point and click something into existence than by the effort exerted to make that thing exist in real time and space. You can argue that a filmmakers’ imagination is no longer shackled by physical or monetary restraint, and, to an extent, that’s true. But movies like The Thing were special because filmmakers like Carpenter refused to let what was possible get in the way of his vision. You give a team of guys a computer and no limits, and what do you get? A wriggling, incomprehensible being assembled from spare, gooey body-parts; a creature who looks incapable of even a facsimile of life.

    But this is where we’re at now. We’re over-saturated and overstimulated. Instead of doing something new, George Lucas has spent the better part of a decade adding bodies into crowd scenes and erasing puppets from his film prints. Instead of making his debut with something new and original, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has sucked the marrow out of something he idolizes, because old horror movies are the only ground studios are willing to allow new faces to tread on. And yet we, the audience, apparently clamor for more of this sort of thing, eating regurgitation after regurgitation, sometimes the regurgitation of a regurgitation. It’s like they see us, too, as The Thing, as if they’ve deemed us incapable of digesting organic material. Maybe they’re right.

    Rating:

    The Thing. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. With Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Dr. Kate Lloyd), Joel Edgerton (Sam Carter), Ulrich Thomsen (Dr. Sander Halversen), and Eric Christian Olsen (Adam Goodman). Released October 14, 2011, by Universal Pictures.

  • Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    It’s really hard to even begin a review of a movie like What’s Your Number? without selfishly floating a few things out there, so bear this in mind as I try to figure out what, exactly, I saw:

    1. As a man in a household consisting of myself, a sister, and a mother, I’ve seen a ton of romantic comedies. I was practically raised on a diet of Audrey Hepburn and John Hughes, so I’d like to think that I know what works, what’s funny, and what’s romantic. I consider myself not dude-at-a-chickflick, but an unbiased judge of these things.
    2. As a frequent grocery shopper, I often catch glimpse of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, the former being the magazine with the article that is the crux of this film. Other than learning a few overly-complicated methods to the male orgasm (hasn’t friction worked for centuries?), I’ve learned that a good amount of the magazine publishing industry relies on making women feel insecure about their looks, their weight, and how many men they have or haven’t slept with.
    3. As a human being, I can’t help but be sad (and a little angry) about how much money our society pumps into these industries. It seems like every other romantic comedy is an artless slice-of-“life” debating the merits of one relationship crisis article or another. He’s just not that into you? You’ve worn twenty-seven bridesmaids dresses but have yet to be the bride? You’ve slept with twenty dudes? Whatever. There are well over six billion people out there. Twenty isn’t a fraction; it’s a crumb.

    But our biological clocks are ticking from the moment of conception, so I suppose it’s not all that unreasonable to feel pressure/begin panicking when, on the eve of thirty, no significant headway has been made towards our mutual goal of not dying alone. This, I suppose, is why I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the plight of Ally Darling (Anna Feris), the woman who has slept with twenty dudes and who is freaked out about the Marie Claire article (researched by a Harvard doctor, no less!) that says she’ll never find happiness.

    This, of course, is absolute crap, but go along with it for a bit. In an effort to find her one true love, Ally decides to put off everything, including her sister’s (Ari Graynor) wedding, to track down her twenty ex-loves. Because a woman can’t be expected to do these things on her own, she turns to her neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) who, as the movie has it, knows how to find people. Of course, some people are right out. Colin, for one, since he’s a womanizer and would put her over her number. Julie, a girl she slept with in college, because she’s a dude now. Gerry, a puppeteer, because puppeteers are probably more interesting than divorced guys and Miami gynecologists. She’s really hoping to settle for two options, though: A Senate hopeful (Anthony Mackie) and the son of an incredibly rich guy (Dave Annable), neither of whom question her motives for looking them up again some 5 or 15 years after their last contact. Naturally, the one who’s right for her is right under her nose, having sex with every woman in Boston. Naturally, he comes to realize that she’s the only woman he’ll ever need to have sex with again.

    I’d feel bad about spoiling the end of the movie were it not a bastardization of the same ol’, same ol’. The film’s every element is predictable. For example, if I told you that the black senatorial candidate was a Republican, would you be able to guess his sexual orientation? If I said that Ally had a “weird” hobby, would you guess which smokin’ hot bro suggests she make it her career? If I told you that the events of the film surround the wedding of her sister, would you be able to guess which character would grab a fretting Ally by the shoulders on that day to say “Go to him?”

    If you can (heck, even if you can’t), it’s probably obvious that Ally’s not a person worth your interest. To the point, she seems like a terrible person, oddly infatuated with the idea of snatching money and power without earning either, to the point that she makes her sister’s wedding about her. None of this would be a problem were the situations comic in nature, but the movie can’t, at any point, decide if Ally is somebody we should be rooting for or somebody we should hate for being a slut, and Anna Ferris, once tabbed as one of the funniest women in Hollywood, can’t make anything about her stick. In a way, the movie’s funniest moment is when Ally’s father tells her to be herself. If she really followed through on that advice, she’d be a gibbering collection of lies she’s told men so she’d get laid.

    But getting laid, as every romantic comedy would have you know, is terrible unless it’s with one partner, for the rest of your life. Last night at a Waffle House, I wound up having a conversation with the waitress about this movie. She was pretty drunk during it and couldn’t remember much, but she said “There was nothing wrong with her [Ferris]. A number’s a number. You should own it.” Her number was one. At this, the restaurant Awwwwed. Maybe someday romantic comedies will go back to being about nice women like the waitress at Waffle House, who fall in love with nice people and whose lives are complicated by more than magazine-issue stereotype. Until then, we’ll always have the rom-com slut. We’ll always have our insatiable appetite for slutshaming.

    Rating:

    What’s Your Number? Directed by Mark Mylod. With Anna Faris (Ally Darling), Chris Evans (Colin Shea), Ari Graynor (Daisy Darling), Joel McHale (Roger), Blythe Danner (Ms. Darling), Andy Samberg (Gerry Perry), Anthony Mackie (Tom Piper), Dave Annable (Jack Adams), and Aziz Ansari (Jay). Released on September 30, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.

  • Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Throughout my educational career, I’ve managed to frustrate many instructors—most of them smarter than me—who liked me, who liked talking to me, who liked my work, but ultimately had to give me a grade lower than what I was capable of. My mom, she’d drive 40 minutes from the suburbs to Detroit and stand in line patiently to speak with one of my teachers, just to be told that I was failing to live up to my potential. There was much hand-wringing; all of it justified. What do you do with potential that refuses to realize itself? That’s a question you could ask of Kevin Smith, whose Red State represents the first film of his that’s free from the yoke of an overseer. It comes close, very close, to being his first film as a mature artist, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

    This can be said of most of the movies Smith has done since Clerks, which was a great first feature, a great independent comedy, but established the director as a maestro of dick jokes and Star Wars references. Chasing Amy was close to greatness, but for its solipsistic treatment of sexuality. Dogma came close, but couldn’t walk away from Jay and Silent Bob. Clerks 2 refused to grow up. After the failure of Cop Out, Smith threw up his hands and declared himself done with the mainstream. He was going to make a movie his way, on his terms, and thus we have Red State, which has few comedic elements and manages, at times, to be one hell of a gripping movie. Instead of being a platform for Smith, whose rabble rousing about the state of Hollywood and the width of airline seats has not gone unnoticed, it ends up being a scene-stealer for two old hands—Michael Parks and John Goodman—who dance around Smith’s weaknesses and deliver two of the more compelling performances of the year.

    To get there, however, we’ve got to get through some stuff about a trio of high school dudes who want to hook up with a chick in her trailer. None of the teens are really that important, save that they’ve got great names (Billy-Ray!) and some of the worst movie hair I’ve seen in a long time. If Red State is a horror movie, then it is very much a Dead Teenager sort of horror film, where the teens don’t count for much beyond cannon fodder. They debate whether or not sleeping with the same woman in succession is a “faggoty” endeavor, but are off on their merry way to meet a woman named Sarah (Melissa Leo), who isn’t quite what her online profile picture indicated. In short order, the boys are knocked out and taken to a compound belonging to the Five Points Baptist Church, headed by Pastor Abin Cooper (Parks).

    Five Points: They’re a lot like the Westboro Baptist Church in that they protest funerals (including “that dead pope’s funeral in Italy”), but their extremism is taken, well, to the extreme. They aim to entrap fornicators, philanderers and homosexuals, torturing and killing them in the name of the Lord. This’d be entirely ridiculous were it not for Parks, who delivers his film-dominating sermon with such conviction that the existence of a guy like Abin Cooper is nothing short of plausible. His congregation of sons, daughters and grandchildren are enthralled by his routine, responding to his every call, exalting his words, laughing as he moons around the pulpit. He’s a charismatic guy, and charisma’s really all you need. Worse though, he’s a charismatic guy on the lunatic fringe, which is what makes him dangerous.

    After an altercation with the police (including, as the chief, the underutilized Stephen Root), the ATF are called in to search the premise for illegal weaponry. The point man on the operation is Special Agent Keenan (Goodman), who is caught off-guard when Cooper and his clan open fire from the compound. Once he radios in this situation, he’s given an order he struggles with: The complete destruction of the Five Points church. Though the film rushes through it, Goodman is good in the ensuing firefight, as is Parks, but both men are at their best when the gunfire is quiet and both are allowed to speak. Like Dogma, Red State is a film dealing with the dangers of belief. Red State is much more ambitious than Dogma, however, as it’s clear how much Smith fears what our beliefs can drive us to do. The Armageddon of Red State is intense, personal—it is not an apocalypse of loopholes, and Goodman’s character finds nothing funny about a group of nutjobs willing to turn machine guns on the society that mocks them.

    But the movie itself does. Maybe it’s necessary to laugh at Abin Cooper’s demise, to see him brought low. If that’s what we, as an audience, need to bring closure to the film, then fine, Cooper’s a fine boogeyman-cum-fool. I’d like to think, however, that we’re smarter than that, that we can deal with and rationalize Cooper without the film reaching for obvious jokes. People like Cooper are, in conversation, legitimately scary. Sometimes it’s nice to laugh off fear. Sometimes it’s better to be scared. Given the continuing radicalization of American discourse, often upon religious lines, I think the latter would have been more effective. For now, that seems like a road Kevin Smith is averse to traveling on.

    Rating:

    Red State. Directed by Kevin Smith. With Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), John Goodman (Special Agent Keenan), Melissa Leo (Sarah Cooper), Stephen Root (Sheriff Wynan), and Kerry Bishé (Cheyenne). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.