Saturday, June 30, 2007

Fido

Fido (Andrew Currie, 2007) - A-

Words can't express how grateful I am for this top-notch, hilarious satire right about now. A killer premise (humans won the zombie war and enslaved the zombies, who are now upscale commodities used mostly for house chores), an affinity for delightful non-sequiturs ("My nose was bleeding." "How did it get on your zombie?" "I wiped it there."), and a diabolical skewering of consumerism and corporate hegemony (only a licensed, expensive ZombieCon funeral can keep your corpse from coming back to life) combine to make what might be the best film of the summer. It could have rested on the laurels of its gimmick, but it goes all out instead, and doesn't skimp on the gore either. Like most great things, it's Canadian, and has Dylan Baker in it. I don't think it's doing too well, so run, don't walk, etc.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Fantastic 4

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Tim Story, 2007) - C

I cut the first one a lot of slack, but there are just too many things working against the sequel for it to come out ahead: Jessica Alba's persistent and frankly kind of impressive efforts to ruin everything she touches; the unimaginative depiction of the planet-eating villain Galactus (he's a cloud); the half-assed, techno-babbly story construction; and that's just to name a few. They do all of nothing with the near-omnipotent Silver Surfer character, a Laurence Fishburne-voiced special effect who shows up to menace the Human Torch before disappearing for a while and resurfacing to be summarily disarmed and tied to a table. And while the jokey, light-hearted tone lent the first film a goofy likability, a repeat only serves to highlight the shoddiness of this lumbering mess, which is shockingly unwieldy at only an hour and a half. Really, none of what fans had hoped would come to fruition here -- good villains, better action, less wanton stupidity -- in fact sees the light of day. Watching it made crystal-clear why the Spider-Man franchise, for all the problems of the third film, remains awesome: Sam Raimi effortlessly handles the sort of unabashed earnestness that Tim Story makes corny and cringe-worthy here. Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans are still strong links, but this franchise needs to be put out of its misery.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Steel City

Steel City (Brian Jun, 2007) - B+

In a season with distressingly few movies to love, I almost latched on to this one -- a straightforward, quietly touching dispatch from the sort of blue-collar universe we so rarely see in the movies (and no, Blue Collar Comedy Tour doesn't count). Fittingly, it takes a realist moral posture: the storyline involves a father (John Heard) who voluntarily goes to jail for his son's (Tom Guiry) deadly accident, but the movie doesn't lecture about abstract notions of responsibility; the focus instead is on the father's guilt about his relationship with the son, and the possibility that the latter could actually grow to be happy. Brian Jun's eminently small screenplay is filled with the sort of genuine, unpretentious emotion I've been missing at the movies lately. Sadly the story gets sidetracked in the third act, spending unnecessary time on the dad's issues, and for a while Steel City grows ponderous and a little boring. And while Heard is fine, Tom Guiry's steady performance could easily have carried the film.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Bug

Bug (William Friedkin, 2007) - B

Plays better in my mind's eye than on the screen, where it's a bit too heightened and hysterical to have the intended effect: it's strange, but one almost has to disengage from the film to appreciate what it's doing, else some of the characters' insane rants might induce inadvertent laughter. This is particularly true since Ashley Judd, despite being praised in some circles for the role, is just terrible, busting out a lot of method-actress writhing and twitching, though given the film's tone that might just be appropriate. Beneath the histrionics is a sad, vaguely allegorical story about a lonely woman who makes an unexpected connection with a paranoid schizophrenic, and the two of them spiral together to their doom. Though the film is almost actively offputting as it plays, its stage roots showing not in its one-set, two-character structure but in its exaggerated flourishes and dialogue that doesn't quite gel, in retrospect it's powerful, almost searing. There's a scene in which Judd's character kicks her well-meaning friend out of the house to tend to her manifestly insane new friend, and while I didn't think much of it at the time, I haven't been able to forget it -- and the same goes for Bug's last ten minutes. Marketing this as some sort of monster movie probably led to droves of dissatisfied moviegoers last weekend.