fine whine

Well, one thing I can say about Resident evil: apocalypse is that it is darker than its predecessor. Much darker, in fact, as the first film takes place in well-lit hallways, and this one in the poorly-lit streets of Toronto* at night.

Gotta love that Canadian film industry.

I never did decide if I liked the original Resident evil, but I'm pretty sure I didn't like this one (and the critics, and the AMG** agree with me). It's interesting to watch, for the action and the effects, but it's more a showreel for the stunt coordinators and makeup people and CGI technicians than for the director or screenwriter(s). Some of it is too cool of an idea for the time they give it: one major scene finds Milla Jovovich apparently running down the face of Toronto's City Hall, an effect done largely in-camera (with a stuntwoman). It's over in a matter of seconds, just before rational thought could kick in about how ridiculous the idea is as well as visual critique that she's leaning backwards (i.e. upward, against both gravity and momentum). It's certainly something I've never seen before.

I've never seen most of the characters from the games, either, but I assume rubber-masked Nemesis is one of them. He's got 'miniboss' written all over him, from the massive guns to ugly visage, and even what looked to be a characteristic weak spot that is never exploited in the hand to hand fighting (unless you think I mean the big guy's deep-down sentimentality) or other proceedings.

Everything moves so quickly that some of the more ludicrous ideas seem appropriate enough, or at least plausible in the sense of the movie. The aforementioned brawl between tiny Milla and the massive Nemesis is an exhibition fight, staged by the evil and overarching Umbrella corporation (how awesome of a name is that?) to test two 'strains' of research against each other. I must admit, taking the time to get real-world testing during a virus outbreak and zombie assault takes a certain dedication to R&D that most corporate leaders, particularly ones with clipped British accents, couldn't deliver.

This single-minded determination and outright eminence of evil actually bolsters the company's onscreen credibility, not weakening it. For a company to be as far-reaching and to have the capabilities that it seems to have would take coordination and motivation on every level of management; there is no chance that the people in charge aren't aware of exactly what they're doing.

Which, apparently, is the development of viruses that create undead killing machines as well as multiple (competing even) methods of making the living into super killers as well. One can but wonder what these weapons are meant for (i.e. other than killing) as such a huge corporation would probably be raking in profits well above the GDPs of the countries/superpowers to which they could sell such weaponry. From the look of it they have the (will)power and resources to just steamroll anybody anyway.

The movie betrays its origin in gaming many a time, or so I assume. The editing is disjointed and the plot breathlessly sprints from one event to the next, often without any explanation up front or ever thereafter. One scene finds a squad of special forces attempting to defend a poorly-chosen position a street corner that turns onto a crossroads of death and destruction. Later we see more so-called S.T.A.R.S. holed up in a theater with a skillful sniper defending the front door, but no apparent defense on the other exits. Which is fine, since those doors only ever open from the inside, right? When people leave the theater, after, or during the movie, which some people probably did during this one.

Of course the movie dispenses with these slightly more intelligent cops with some well placed bullets, thematically a searing indictment of rational thought, a point driven further home by the appearance of Mike Epps for comic relief. As usual, nobody shoots him, and against the formula, he lives for the whole film. That's a nice touch, I suppose, though his character is largely extraneous and slightly annoying.

Which, really, you could say about the movie. It has more than a few interesting bits here and there, but the rock-stupid plot and one dimensional characters and mindless action scenes to bring them together all combine to make Apocalypse much less than the sum of its parts.

* Or as they call it, Raccoon City. I'm assuming that is the name from the games, but since I have never played any of the Resident evil games*** that's just a guess.

** And wouldn't you know it, but the AMG synopsis for this one is also incorrect. Twice!

...Resident Evil: Apocalypse finds Alice (Milla Jovovich) still battling the living dead who are overtaking Raccoon City. She was immune to the contagion by treatments she unwittingly received from the nefarious and all-powerful Umbrella Corporation. Alice encounters Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), a former member of Umbrella's internal defense team who shares Alice's immunity to the zombie virus. Forming an uneasy alliance... this tiny band of survivors seeks out Dr. Charles Ashford (Jared Harris) ... however ... he'll help Alice and her partners only if [his daughter] is returned to him safe and sound.

and here was my response to them:

Jill Valentine does not share Alice's immunity to the virus; Angelina Ashford does. Jill shares Alice's affinity and skill with guns.

The tiny band of survivors is not seeking out the Doctor, but his daughter, and he is clear about that at the start of their dealings.

I didn't even address the thematic mistakes in the synopsis, as it describes Milla & co. as trying to save the world, not just get out of the city alive. The movie's bad, but not in a 'ten people to save the world' kind of way.

*** I'll admit I played a copy of the Japanese PS1 light gun game Biohazard: Gun Survivor which was eventually imported over here, sans light gun capability, as Resident Evil: Survivor (or Outbreak or something like that). I never played it in English nor did I play it at all after ten minutes or so, so my exposure to the canon is, as I mentioned, virtually nil.

The library reserve system works in mysterious ways. I request books, CDs and DVDs, and then I wait. Sometimes the materials come right away, and sometimes they take longer. Sometimes I get a postcard in the mail that tells me that my request just cannot be granted. I have no way of knowing if what I want will ever show up, and if so, when.

Well, it turns out that two DVD sets of second seasons of TV shows I enjoy showed up within a week of each other. I've long since given up on remembering when or why I request things, and for all I know I'd searched all DVDs for "complete second". Anyway, now I'm midway through watching both the second season of Dead like me (as I mentioned yesterday) and also Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. Jessica enjoys B.S.!* (as do I) so out of courtesy for her (and because I enjoy seeing her enjoy a DVD) I watch it only with her.

Formerly I would sometimes end up succumbing to temptation, watching episodes ahead and inevitably ruining the surprises and telegraphing the jokes by giggling early. So it takes some discipline to wait. It helps that I've got other stuff to watch on the side, too.

So anyway, we're watching the second season of these anarchic showmen and their exposés, and this time around the subjects are as sintersting as before, if not more, with the added benefit of them being more comfortable with confrontation and editing. The first season saw them addressing ESP, ouija boards, and bottled water, and this time they go after some bigger targets: P.E.T.A., the war on drugs, and 12-step programs. Here is a list of all the episodes.

One episode this season, however, stands out, even more than the first one's Secondhand smoke: Recycling. Their standpoint, which they back up with research from their crack team, is that recycling is largely not good for the environment or the economy. The make some sound points (it's cheaper, right now, to make new plastic bottles than to refine and reuse old ones to make new ones) and some that don't seem to stand up to scrutiny (there are more trees now than ever, mostly in tree farms, so saving paper doesn't save trees that don't need to be saved anyway) and some that are basically irrelevant (landfill space isn't exactly scarce). But they fall into the same trap that the network news and other sensationalist reporting does: they're out to entertain more than inform. They don't clearly state that they are focusing almost entirely on consumer curbside programs (which do, admittedly, waste a lot of time and fuel) and not the industrial re-use of waste, except in a brief mention on a toilet paper label, in a segment played more for a laugh than anything else.

But am I just being defensive because they've finally come after something that I put stock in and moreover, do? I don't think so. Their gleeful nihilism dismisses the eventuality that the costs of recycling will be cheaper than starting from scratch. They do point out that aluminum recycling is cost-effective and worthwhile, but they stop there at offering positive options or alternatives.

If ever an issue warranted followup or further explanation, it is this one. For them to dismiss it with the same sacred-cow-busting attitude as they do genuine nogoodniks like cosmetic surgery for children or the mortuary industry does everybody a disservice, if not the whole planet.

But I'm not going to stop watching them, of course.

* At least that's what the covers from the library's discs call the show. I'm happy that they buy the show, even if the title is potentially offensive.

As a champion of the misguided, I've learned to recognize it relatively quickly. Surprisingly I don't recall picking up on it when I watched the first season of Dead like me. Now that I'm working my way through the show's second season, I think I'm beginning to see why it didn't work out, what with the show being cancelled after two seasons and all.

Or at least I have one theory. Allow me to spoil things a bit*. The show's about 'reapers', the grim and not-so-grim among the undead tasked with removing the souls of the dead just before their demise. The show centers around one particular reaper named George who hangs out with a foursome of reapers on a particularly nasty beat: accidents and other untimely demises.

Supernatural shows always seem to have trouble staying on the air for too long without being cancelled, alienating their fan base, or getting really, really weird or worse. Dead like me isn't really making those mistakes, but other ones. From what I've seen so far of the season, they (and I mean the writers, etc.) are getting sloppy. For a show that tries to skirt the issues of fate and causality and whatnot, it seems to be faltering.

For one thing, the reapers themselves are beginning to play critical roles in the victims' deaths. Namely, it seems that the poor sap (or sap-ette) wouldn't kick the bucket if not for our heroes having provided him with said bucket.

It's also starting to get more mixed up in soap-operatic dealings between the main characters and the secondary ones. This is inevitable, I suppose, but there are good ways to develop characters and other ways. Those other ways include suddenly developing complicated relationships or heretofore unmentioned backstories. No evil twins arise, but I'm not through the whole season yet.

* The standard disclaimers apply. If you don't want to find out about stuff, don't read it.

Thinking about it, in general, that "it" is entirely unnecessary. I could just settle with "If you don't want to find out about stuff, don't read". For pretty much everything, not just this DVD.

I hate to do this to y'all, but ladies and gentleman, I am attempting to turn over a something of a new leaf. You see, 2 A.M. (EST) is too late to go to bed every night. This of course is not your fault, as I generally tell you that I'm going to bed a while before I actually do, in fact, go to bed.

It's not a lie, it's just a little stretch of the truth. Does that make me a dishonest person?

I'm a negative person. Or so it seems lately. This does not make me happy*. I'm also one to occasionally dodge culpability, so I'm putting the blame on those late nights. Lack of sleep and whatnot.

It's probably a completely incorrect diagnosis, but it's what I'm going with for right now.

In the few days that I've started getting to bed before 1:30 (once even before 12:45) I've not necessarily been more pleasant. I've been no meaner, to boot.

I've also been waking up earlier, since I'm stuck in that rut of however many hours of sleep I'm used to getting, from between two or three when I fall asleep until five sometime when Jessica's alarm sounds.

Of course I very rarely hear her alarm, or at least react to it in a way that I can remember later. When she leaves for work and I fall back asleep, I generally don't even notice it, until I wake up at eight sometime (my clock is rather... inaccurate. Consistent, but inaccurate) and hastily rush myself off to work.

So that's how things were before. Lately I've awoken before my alarm, sometimes even having moments of dreams. Happy dreams.

So what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm trying to go to bed earlier.

But enough about me. Let's get back to the west coast.

Tonight I watched The Hitcher. It's the story of a guy who's trying to get to San Diego.

At first I didn't quite understand why driving a Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego would place our protagonist in the middle of nowhere Texas. After I watched the movie I checked out the route, and realized/remembered that the vast majority of the middle of these great States of ours isn't crisscrossed with convenient diagonal highways. A flying crow wouldn't cross the Lone Star state's borders (barring poor air conditions) but those confined to wheels on the ground find themselves at the mercy of the interstate highway grid, and that grid appears to pass through Amarillo between the city of broad shoulders and America's finest city (or so they say).

But our protagonist, played by the same guy I'd last seen (and only seen) in Soul man, is at the mercy of something much more sinister. He encounters Rutger Hauer, who I'd last seen (and possibly, again, only seen) in Blade runner, an enigmatic dark stranger who seems to vindicate every old wives' tale and urban legend ever uttered about hitchhiking.

I'd been told it was a creepy movie, and I was told correctly. It's quite creepy. So as to not give anything away, like the excessive bodycount (lots, but almost all of the violence is served offscreen), or the surprise ending (revenge is served), I'll just mention that it is crafted well enough, for what it is, and enjoyable enough, for what it is. It's not 'horror' (so I don't know where I thought I'd heard that), and it's not particularly deep, but it does lend me a tiny bit of perspective into Highwaymen, directed almost twenty years later by the same guy.

Let's hear it for Robert Harmon. C. Thomas Howell doesn't do too bad (he makes for a good everyman coming unhinged) but Robbie's really the star of the show. This time.

* In fact, by nature of being negative, I'm not happy. By definition, even.

So today is the eleventh of September, a date to which has been given great significance here in America. If not for the recent destruction of New Orleans I'm sure there would have been more attention given to the annual rending and gnashing and whatnot.

Well, I'm not interested in gnashing nor rending. I'm aware of what happened in 2001, and it was indeed a tragedy, and I'm aware of what happened two weeks ago, and that too is a tragedy, but having an opinion of the events is about the extent to which I am involved with either, and that's about it.

So let's talk about escapist cinema. Tonight I finally saw Highwaymen*. The movie is as bleak and sparse as the highway that sometimes sets its stage. All of the dialogue is treated as though capital "I" Important, with some of the more obvious foreshadowing clichés.

Readers not interested in plot spoilers should skip a ways down, to the part after I mention how there's this guy killing people in an old El Dorado and there's this other guy who chases him in a Barracuda, but somebody else shoots the murderer at the end.

So there's this guy killing people with Cadillacs. The opening of the movie is an artfully shot (by which I mean "gratuitous use of slow motion and fast cuts mixed with over/undersaturation") and introduces us to Rennie Cray, yet another version of the unshaven, sullen-but-determined character that Jim Caviezel seems to play most of the time. He watches his wife (and a bag of citrus fruit) run down by a speeding, swerving maniac in a Cadillac. Fast forward five years and suddenly we're beset by angelic voices. Is this the score? Are we hearing the chorus because something significant or action-packed is happening? Alas, we are merely hearing some random choir practicing.

They practice on the stage in "Orchestra Hall". The city is never named, nor the highway, and so forth. It's obvious that the movie was shot in Canada well before the credits confirm that fact. The camera follows Molly (Rhona Mitra) out to the front of the Hall, where after a brief conversation with "Boone" (sorry, but the name just sounded silly when she said it) she hops in an old Mazda with her friend Alex (Andrea Roth). As the plucky little hatchback pulls away and eventually into a tunnel the Ontario license plates are visible. Oops. They'd been chased by a speeding and oddly menacing El Dorado and, already spooked, aren't ready for what scares await them ahead.

This town has a tunnel, and our ladies find it to be a scene of confusion and carnage before long, with upturned trucks and a spooked horse inside. One driver is obviously very hurt, and Alex runs out to get some help. Which, we all know, is a major movie mistake: never leave the main character alone and go for help (fittingly she's wearing a red shirt). She is hit by that menacingly "winking" Caddy (one set of headlights is not lit, though later the bulbs are in fact missing. I guess the continuity guy wasn't watching the car that closely) and dies a bloody death, but not before getting her friend Molly close enough to the car for the door to swing open and her snapshot taken with a bright flash. Somebody shows up, she escapes, and the next morning the cops come.

We meet Will Macklin (a familiar Freddie Faison), a state traffic investigator (for a state never named) who, surprisingly enough, isn't nearing retirement. He of course lives through the whole picture.

Actually, come to think of it, there aren't many deaths in the film. The opening titles use accident photos as a background and many are quite graphic and gory, but only six people, by my count, died during the proceedings; one off-screen (presumably) and another two or three times over in various flashbacks.

At its core it's a chase movie, a revenge thriller that puts the pedal to the metal and leaves it there the whole time. More or less, that's it. Back to the movie. Will finds Molly at the scene, Rennie finds her sleeping in the hospital, and Molly meets Will at his office, where it is revealed by some convoluted exposition that her family was killed in another accident. Well, that just sucks.

Will makes sure to mention that he doesn't carry a gun nor has he shot anybody. Idle chitchat, or foreshadowing? Only time will tell.

Molly is next shown as the only person wearing a brightly colored outfit amongst accident survivors in a sort of therapy session. The leader begins with "Here in America..." and I missed the rest as I laughed, having already seen the Ontario plates and guessed where "here" really was. Next we find Rennie and Molly engaged in some harmless banter in the hallway, and then some stronger words and intimidation that bring Molly to the point of agreeing to meet Rennie for a ride after choir practice, but as he waits for her then she is helped into an aging Saab by the aforementioned Boone, and the two drive off. Rennie is left to have a brief Adam-69 (two cars, facing opposite directions so the drivers can talk... it's fake cop lingo) with Will who is inexplicably also at Molly's practice, despite being a pretty sorry baritone. Rennie speeds off in his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda and Will can hardly keep up with his X-files surplus Ford Crown Victoria. Rennie gets away, and we cut back to Boone and Molly just before they are catapulted sky-high by a feat of leverage few square-fendered road yachts could hope to match in the real world. The sorry Saab soars and once it comes to rest Molly is shocked to find not only that Boone is likely beyond help, but that the madman has attached a tow chain, and she is soon being dragged at great speed in the upside-down Swedish coupe.

This sequence is quite cool looking, especially when Rennie appears, the knight in shining steel. He bashes off his door, and after some jockeying for position grabs her from the (now flaming) car. Immediate danger averted, he spirits her off to a convenient junkyard, where he will reveal to her his dark past (and thus his drive for vengeance), patch up her wounds, convince her to help him catch the guy, and find a new door for his car. Before that, though, we are treated to a ("Roger"-free, oddly) CB conversation, with closeups of an LED bar grafted onto an old CB radio to give some sort of visual effect to the scene.

Why they replaced the needle gauge that usually is there is beyond me, other than to punch up the visuals. Over ninety percent of the viewers wouldn't notice, and those who did probably wouldn't care. I'm not entirely certain that I care.

So some more stuff happens. In the sensitive moments in the junkyard office we learn that Molly "can't drive" because of the accident that killed her family.

Any time you hear an "I can't" or "I've never" or "I won't" or "I don't" in these movies it seems that the speaker "can" or "will" do what needs to be done, and this one is no different. It's a cliché, but apparently it works because this was the second movie in as many years to use that idea (the other was the dreadful remake of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon).

In that sequence we also learn that Rennie didn't just watch his wife get hit. He hopped into his Mercedes and chased down the killer Caddy in another artfully action-packed and effects-laden chase culminating in him t-boning the killer, totaling both cars and our antagonist. Rennie spent three years in prison and Fargo (somewhere along the line we learned his name) got 18 months in the hospital and re-hab being built into the near-cyborg that now roams the roads.

All of this of course builds to the tense final confrontation, but not until after Rennie sways officer Will to join him on his vigilante quest. Near the end he (and the camera) looks up to reveal an engine hoist or something else cross-shaped, and one can but wonder if he has any Christ-figure parallels in this movie as well.

Jesus always struck me as a Mopar fan, you know.

I really enjoyed watching Highwaymen. It's silly, and high-concept, and implausible, but it takes everything at face value and runs with it full throttle. Sure, director Harmon and his cast probably are capable of much, much more, but for what it is, it does well enough. Car chase fans and cheesy thriller buffs alike should give this a watch, if for no other reason to see something of a new take on age-old conventions.

* When first I saw the trailer for this, I thought it was a joke. I can't now recall the DVD that had the trailer for this, but it was a spoof or at least a comedy, and it didn't seem out of place on the disc to have absurd trailers for a fake film or two. This one just seemed so unreal, so contrived that it couldn't be real: In a world gone mad, two men speed around in 70s muscle cars, linked by killings and one woman who might just be the key to bringing the murderous streak to an end.

Well, it turned out that the film did in fact exist, and moreover to be available from my library. I reserved it, and, well, you can figure out the rest. Seeing as it was, in fact, really a movie, it has an AMG synopsis fraught with, well, one error. Matthew Tobey writes:

The culprit, it seems, had his heart broken by a woman long ago and now copes with his grief by hunting down and killing random women, using his green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado as his weapon.

As Caviezel's character explains, the homicidal maniac was the son of an insurance claims investigator who had been exposed at early age to gruesome accident photos. Growing up he transitioned from collecting the gory sights to staging them himself. The reason he only kills women is never explained. Likewise the reason he apparently always drives Cadillacs, as seen near the end in one or two shots of the dead cars in front of his motel. Some things, I guess, we were just not meant to know**.

** And some things aren't known by other people too. The subtitle authors for the DVD apparently weren't aware of what a Hemi was, nor did they have the script to work from, as Rennie's 'Cuda is described as "heavy" and not "Hemi" for the exceptionally large and powerful hemispherical-headed engine. "Heavy" indeed.

It has come to my attention that the phrase "Suffice it to say," has become the new "Actually..."*.

Well, I actually just made that up. But I am seeing that phrase all over the place, and I don't recall encountering it so much in the recent past.

One movie in which I do not recall hearing the phrase is the intelligently written and enjoyable Life aquatic with Steve Zissou. I just watched it and rather liked it, I'd say.

I'd been looking forward to seeing it, despite not knowing much about it (and having missed it in the theaters altogether, I believe). My ignorance was somewhat self-imposed, as I wanted to have as fresh an experience of watching this as possible. I skipped over all but the most vague of reviews and ignored specifics from the few people who told me they'd seen it. The plot somehow still was revealed to me: There's this oceanographer, and this shark who eats his partner. It's a revenge story... but that's a rather broad outline, into which Wes Anderson added his laid-back story, set it in an imagined world where oceanographers are superstars, and populated it with his standard players (and a few notable additions). The production design merits a special mention, at least for the (half) ship with its obviously fake set construction and 'tricky camera moves'. The fact that these people inhabit such a fake environment somehow makes it all the more real, in a way I cannot explain. It's not the Max Fischer Players Do Cousteau, but I could see that used as a catchy pull quote or pitch line.

The reviews I read (about) were rather mixed. Some writers felt that Anderson had lost his edge, that intimate quirkiness that emanates through Bottle rocket through the Royal Tenenbaums, and that by embracing action sequences, albeit in an artificially static fashion, he was selling out or cashing in or falling prey to some other cliché that so easily pours forth from the reviewer's scornful pen.

Others thought it was too deep for a mainstream film (two water puns!), Anderson notwithstanding, and the artificiality and extreme characterization would be too imaginative and off-kilter for audiences to handle, since they'd undoubtedly be seeking shallower fare (three!).

This being a revenge picture, more or less, one can but wonder how one of Hollywood's staple action heroes might approach it. Charles Bronson, naturally, would be my first choice.

But this isn't an action movie. It's a character piece that just happens to have explosions and gunfights and other bits of excitement. Zissou isn't a man of action, he's just some guy who is still playing at his childhood ambitions after many a decade, but slowly realizing maybe he's just going through the motions.

It's ambitious and whimsical, neither at the expense of the other. The little touches (snappy dialogue, imaginative stop-motion sea-life) don't distract from the bigger picture. It's all worth seeing, and I look forward to watching it again.

* However I doubt that I will fall prey to this as I did to "Actually", since "Suffice it to say" is at the same time cumbersome and stuffy. It's the sort of think I think people throw in to sound more sophisticated, or to cover for a lack of proper transitions or background information. This is not to say that I don't succumb to those sorts of things; I'm just not going to use that phrase. Er, anymore.**** Of course I always omitted the "it" anyway. Silly me.