This Is My Last Movie Review

"Unbeknownst to most moviegoers, the saddest story in films concerns the emergence of brutal scorekeeper critics." (film critic Manny Farber in 1965, as quoted this year by film critic J. Hoberman, Harpers magazine, July 2010)

"For the past month, I've been trying to fully engage with the social layer. I joined and contributed to such services and platforms as Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Blippy, Swipely, DailyBooth, Goodreads, Daytum, etc., etc. I tried to tweet five times a day. I gave two sites access to my credit cards so I could share my purchases with friends. I did my best to check in wherever I went on Foursquare. And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious - that I didn't have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him." (Bartholomew Cooke, GQ magazine, December 2010)

The Social Network (four and a half stars total) has the second best soundtrack of the year, the first being Inception, which is all about the music, in my opinion. Just based on those movies' trailers, I'd already awarded a blue star to each, long before I ever saw either one. The music on Inception's trailer instantly inspired parodies on YouTube (including an acapella one) and The Social Network's trailer earned a record deal for some Belgian women's choir (Scala & Kolacny), all because of their version of Radiohead's "Creep." The trailer for Catfish, AKA "the other Facebook movie," even tried subtly connecting itself to The Social Network by playing a children's choir (Langley Schools) version of The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." I mention this for my own future reference, but also to point out that music is very important to me, moreso than story or visuals in a movie, therefore the different-colored stars under my "movie review guide" are not all equal. Whether that's a flaw in my system or a flaw in my use of the system is up to you. This applies to The Social Network in that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg created a system for communication that, according to the movie, is either flawed by its very nature or at the very least, used by some for very flawed reasons. I'll admit that I don't have a Facebook account nor do I know the exact defintion of the term "algorithm" but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating a movie derived from these things. The story is metafictional enough to comment on itself with lines like "there's got to be a land speed record for talking" (the dialogue and pacing require multiple viewings). I've heard people complain about the ratio of fact to fiction in this unapologetic "biopic," but they do make it easy to tell the difference whenever there's a melodramatic scarf burning or cinematic workplace violence. If reality is what you want, look no further than the irony of the special effects "twins." Where most movies would have stopped short with that "achievement" by itself, this movie gave each twin a unique personality. Now that's how you use special effects for the story's sake, and not the other way around! But back to music, when "Baby You're a Rich Man" started playing over the end credits, I knew one era had ended and another had begun. Much like the movie's protagonist, The Beatles' back catalog has spent far too much time in litigation, but if these kids with their new-fangled Webhacktweeterwalls can save the past from itself and get oldies playing on the big screen again, maybe they can save the future too.

The First CD of Christmas

There are lot of Christmas movies and animated TV specials with songs and instrumental scores that I like: White Christmas (1954), Babes in Toyland (1961), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), The Small One (1978) and Gremlins (1984). I only own one Christmas movie soundtrack on CD and that's Home Alone (1990). I didn't own a CD player when the movie came out, but when I started buying CDs, it was one of my firsts. It's not just a Christmas thing either. Every year at Thanksgiving, my mom's whole side of the family would get together and my uncle would offer to take all my cousins and me to the movies but it never happened. To this day, I've only ever been to the theater on Thanksgiving once, when all my aunts and uncles together took us to Home Alone. I think of that every Thanksgiving as it's one of the happiest memories of my life, plus I saw the trailer for Edward Scissorhands (another somewhat Christmas movie with a great soundtrack). I learned to comb my hair and put on deodorant from the aftershave screaming scene so you know the movie's ingrained in my daily routine. Speaking of the aftershave scenes, without the lip-synching one I might never have been exposed to Mel Tormé, and I personally think he's better than Bing Crosby OR Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately for the time being I don't own any of his Christmas albums. I just rewatched the DVD with the director's commentary and I learned that John Williams wasn't the first choice for composer on Home Alone. The director wanted Bruce Broughton, who coincidentally did lots of other holiday-themed soundtracks, including The Thanksgiving Promise (1986) and Miracle on 34th Street (1994). Nobody thought John Williams would do a "kiddie" movie, but then he followed this one up with Hook (1991). That leads me to my final point. What's so great about Home Alone is that John Williams didn't treat it like a "kiddie" movie and neither did the rest of the cast or crew. Director Chris Columbus even claims that he was inspired by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations (1860) and Oliver Twist (1837), which are both dark stories about kids in over their heads. This reminds me of an IMDb comment I read recently, by Lou Pine from Dublin, about the movie Parents (1989):

"There is an aspect to childhood that is too often (and in the case of Hollywood almost always) forgotten and that is the dark side. The world for a child does not always appear as a bright, shining place of wonder and joy; more often than not the world is strange, forbidding and completely out of our control. That appearance is not deceptive; what is deceptive is the web of fictions we build up over time to help us deal with this. For me part of the thrill of horror (real horror, not simply the slash and stack variety), is the remembrance of that childhood chill, the memory of what Lovecraft termed cosmic horror and Freud called the Uncanny. Regardless of who those people are, parents as the symbol of unimpeachable, unquestioned authority whom we have to trust regardless of their real motives, are a potent representation of this chaotic universe, a universe that could crush us at any moment if it wanted to, but which we're stuck with."

Recent Supernatural Thriller Versus Classic Supernatural Thriller

"One of the most important things about the bedroom is the position of the bed (or, in the case of the first movie reviewed here, the crib). It must not be placed in front of the door leading to your bedroom. This bed position is called the 'coffin position' and it signifies death. If you have a master bathroom, you should not be able to see the toilet or have the bathroom mirror reflect your bed. In fact, it is inauspicious to have a mirror anywhere in your bedroom. Full-length mirrors on the doors of built-in wardrobes are considered to be particularly harmful. Feng shui practitioners believe that the resting occupant is disturbed by spirits created by the reflection of you in the mirror while you are sleeping." (Antonia Beattie and Rosemary Stevens, Using Feng Shui: Easy Ways to Use the Ancient Chinese Art of Placement for Happiness and Prosperity, p. 72)

Paranormal Activity 2 (four and a half stars total) Add babies or little kids to any horror movie and it's automatically scarier. Top that off with a language barrier between characters, a family pet getting hurt or killed, and you can add confusion, depression and frustration to the mix. Paranormal Activity 2 (opened in theaters last weekend) isn't as funny as the first Paranormal, but I do believe a sequel can be better than its predecessor (see my 12/22/08 "Defense of Movie Sequels" post), and it has nothing to do with budget. Overall, there seem to be less effects shots this time around (no fire or footprints), although I admit the "dragged out of bed" scenes are much longer. If anything, the security cam slideshow on PA2 is more monotonous than the tripod, time-lapse photography on the original. The reason I think this sequel is better is that it has more of everything else: characters, rooms, and most importantly, ideas. It didn't make any sense for them to film each other while surfing the internet, to not have handy flashlights or a spare set of keys, but in our current economic climate, I'm still reeling over the idea of a family ancestor gambling on their posterity for wealth (for more on firstborn male heirs, see Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, 1995). It's not necessarily a novel concept to have an average, American family feeling powerless to effect change against unseen forces (global warming, the rising cost of college tuition and oil prices). Here are some sample morals I got from this movie, which you do have control over: Don't try to make contact with demons. Don't leave toys all over the living room floor. Don't fire your housekeeper, especially if she recommends abstinence to your teenage daughter. Do learn a second language.

RiffTrax Live! House on Haunted Hill (four stars total) For almost as long as I've lived in San Diego, I've seen pre-show advertising at different theater chains for live entertainment like The Met Opera, UFC matches and FIFA World Cup games. Until now I've always wondered, who actually goes to the theater to watch these events? This week I attended one of these satellite broadcasts for the first time and I was shocked to find the room filled to capacity (screen number "13" for what it's worth). RiffTrax ("we don't make movies, we make them funny!") features the later hosts from Mystery Science Theater 3000 doing comedic commentary from three, little, split-screen boxes on the side. Apparently they're based in San Diego and they've already done other live shows like last year's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) and then Reefer Madness (1936), earlier this year. I was excited to see a RiffTrax version of House on Haunted Hill (1959) because I'd forgotten most of the plot details since I last saw it, but also because I wanted to understand why other people seem to deride B-movies so much. Everybody laughed at the first jump scene, with the blind ghost rolling out of the closet, but I think that scene's scary. Maybe I like letting my imagination fill in the cracks, when budgetary constraints leave me cracks to fill in (for more on this, see my 4/5/10 "Fine Art Versus Popular Culture" post), or maybe other people just laugh nervously more than I do. The hosts made an astute observation that "the hill is what's haunted - the house is perfectly fine," but mostly they inserted current pop culture jokes about Jersey Shore, Lady Gaga, and Vincent Price's involvement with Michael Jackson's Thriller, along with the usual race and gay jokes. I came to the realization that the educational short films the comedians show before the feature presentation act as icebreakers while they get warmed up. I came to accept that audiences aren't any harder on B-movies than the characters in those movies are on each other, and I learned that the house in the movie was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in real life, so I think it's safe to say I had a very enlightening evening in a dark, old house.

Recent Japanese Thriller Versus Classic Japanese Thriller

"CGI running may be faster than real running, but it never seems like anybody is really working at it. We're watching an effect instead of an achievement." (Roger Ebert's review of The Promise, 2006, included in his book, Your Movie Sucks, p. 231)

Casshern (one and a half stars total) As anal retentive as it may be, there is a difference between war and wartime movies. This movie and the other one reviewed below are evidence of that. Avatar (2009) would be a war movie. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) would be a wartime movie. What both of these sci-fi/action movies share in common with Casshern (2004) is that they all were shot with digital backlots (live actors performing in front of a greenscreen) and they all suck. My wife really likes Sky Captain but what bothered me was all the times Gwyneth Paltrow's character put the movie on pause to stare at her camera. There are lots of lingering shots in Casshern too. My complaint isn't about the overall pacing on either movie. My complaint is that some scenes just need to be left on the editing room floor/computer hard drive. They may be redundant within the context of the whole movie (Sky Captain), but more often they are devoid of any meaningful content no matter what their length or position (Casshern). I've already written about movies with video game sensibilities elsewhere on this blog (see my 8/14/10 Scott Pilgrim review), so I'll just close by saying that I have no appreciation for most video game graphics, the world doesn't need another version of Frankenstein (1818), and while I own the original Metropolis (1927), I'm less and less motivated to the see the anime (2001) that it inspired with each Japanese movie I watch.

"The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so?" (Roger Ebert's 2002 review of Rashōmon, included in his book, The Great Movies II, p. 362)

Onibaba (three stars total) Would someone please explain what's up with Japanese movies (anime or otherwise) and sex perversion? I haven't seen a lot of Japanese movies, less than a half dozen by director Akira Kurosawa, plus a couple of Cartoon Network imports (the "adult" in Adult Swim should've told me everything I needed to know). I've tried to read a fair share of (non-Shōjo) manga and all of it has included at least a passing reference to either cross-dressing, hermaphrodites, incest, striptease or supernatural rape. Onibaba (1964) literally translates as "demon woman," but the English title could just as easily be Cougar Serial Killer Mother-in-Law. An old widow throws herself at a neighbor who's half her age, but he goes after her young daughter-in-law instead. Nothing about this movie is suitable for network TV, and the funny thing about that is it's almost 50 years old. The setting alone is a horror movie waiting to happen. Two women, not blood relatives, are forced to live together in a rural swamp with no honest way to support themselves. They've taken to killing samurai and stripping them for items to pawn. When the older woman offs a samurai with a demon mask, she steals it to scare the younger woman away from the object of her disgusting desire. If you're familiar with the Goosebumps story, "The Haunted Mask" (either the 1993 book or the 1995 TV episode), you already know what happens next. Supposedly this movie (and probably the one reviewed above) are about the aftermath of atomic warfare, but not in the same way that Godzilla (1954; Casshern marks its 50th anniversary) is about the effects of the bomb. In one way or another, are all Japanese movies about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or just those that find their way to the U.S.?

'50s Psychological Thriller I Just Saw for the First Time

"(The leading foe of horror comics) Fredric Wertham's dishonest, bullying 'science' also had much in common with the increasingly sophisticated and cynical efforts of Madison Avenue to control the attitudes, anxieties, and consumption patterns of American women. And expanding postwar incomes was enabling psychiatry to make vast inroads into outpatient-land. The as yet unnamed category of drugs to be known as tranquilizers was already on the drawing boards, and would soon permit the psychiatric medicalization of a whole class of postwar discontents, many essentially social and economic in origin." (David J. Skal, The Horror Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 237)

The Bad Seed (one and a half stars total) My middle brother and the guys we grew up with had an inside joke about the way my dad talks. We used to say that anytime he opened his mouth, he was "gettin' technical." As with most men, my dad's not big on chitchat. If you ask him a question, he'll tell you everything he knows with relation to that question and then that topic will be exhausted. Sometimes I catch myself "gettin' technical." This blog is the perfect example. The dialogue on The Bad Seed (1956) works the same way. It's all exposition. None of it flows naturally. The characters might as well be reading passages from Dr. Spock's book, Baby and Child Care (1946), like newscasters with a teleprompter. For those of us that didn't grow up with the revolution that was the antiwar protester, Dr. Benjamin Spock, he was the first pediatrician to apply psychoanalysis to child-rearing. The Bad Seed might be the first horror movie to apply the word psychoanalysis verbally to a family line of female serial killers. It was definitely the first horror movie to be nominated for (count 'em up) four Oscars, including Best Actress in a Leading Role, two for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and the most surprising to me, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White. The movie takes place mainly indoors and features people sitting on couches for much of its running time, so I'm not sure what cinematography it was nominated for, unless it's the "grace of God" lightning scene at the end. I've already mentioned the acting, but I must specifically mention Nancy Kelly in the leading role. Her hoarse, smoker's voice is so weak and whiny it's like nails on a chalkboard. While most audiences were probably thinking the bad seed's character just needed a good spanking, I was wishing I could grab the mother's character by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. The daughter's character, played by Patty McCormack, may act like she's been spared the rod and spoiled for sure, but she doesn't look like she's been spared the ugly stick. She has the same wild-eyed unibrow and bad teeth as Ernest Borgnine's title character from Marty (1955), which swept the Oscars the year before. Back to spankings, the moment of triumph on The Children's Hour (1961), another movie based on a play with similar themes, comes when a proud old woman finally disciplines her rotten granddaughter, who is partially responsible for a lesbian schoolteacher committing suicide. Such a scene only comes to those who wait till after the "curtain call" styled closing credits on The Bad Seed, and by then it's too late.

'60s Psychological Thriller I Just Saw for the First Time

"The New American prosperity of the early 1950s was won atop the largest bone pile in human history. World War II had claimed the lives of over 40 million soldiers and civilians, and introduced two radical new forms of mechanized death - the atomic bomb and the extermination camp - that seriously challenged the mind's ability to absorb, much less cope with, the naked face of horror at mid-century. And only five years after the fall of Germany and Japan, America was once again at war, this time a 'police action' in Korea haunted by the specter of the H-bomb, a looming necro-technology now shared uneasily with the Soviets. If America in 1950 was filled with the smell of new cars, it was still permeated by the stench of mass death, and the threat of more to come." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 229)

Carnival of Souls (one star total) was released two years after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) changed everything about horror movies, three years after The Twilight Zone (1959) turned Cold War terminology into an abstract but mainstream TV series, and four years after the Saltair Pavilion (1893) was closed down on the southern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. That should tell you where the ideas might have come from for a young, unmarried woman driving cross-country toward a twist ending, and an abandoned amusement park haunted by Death. Having lived in Salt Lake City, where Carnival of Souls (1962) was filmed, I recognized a few locations immediately. Aside from Saltair (now a concert venue where I saw The Strokes and Third Eye Blind), there's the wall surrounding Temple Square, the most historic tourist attraction downtown, where the main character gets "ignored" by a cop. There's also a scene in the park at City Hall when she passes out, right at the corner where my wife and I used to go for bubble tea. I can't help but wonder, was the idea for a job as a church organist was inspired by the Salt Lake Tabernacle pipe organ? The "theater" organ she's hired to play (pictured below) is minuscule in comparison to the Tabernacle's, but apparently it's capable of sounding creepier. Forget the familiar story that gets recycled in Carnival of Souls because the movie's really more about imagery and a particular point in pop culture. Stained glass windows and big, empty, old cathedrals have scared me since John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) but here, church and recreation come together in a dreamlike danse macabre. 1962 marked the "death" of the Golden Age of Radio with the final broadcast of one of its most popular programs, Suspense (1942). Whether the "TV generation" needed more sights than sounds to be horrified, or whether this transition gets indirectly referenced in Carnival of Souls is my own conjecture. The rise of TV was blamed for a lot of things, including the closure of the Saltair Pavilion. When the main character is unable to find anything on the radio but old-timey gospel music, it could just be to create atmosphere. Then again, it could be signifying the "death" of an era - the switch from swing dances to counterculture peace rallies, poodle skirts to mini skirts and "The Greatest Generation" to the baby boomers. After all, if teenage drag racers weren't hallucinating zombies before Carnival of Souls, they certainly were after JFK's assassination the next year or the increased draft to Vietnam the year after that.

'70s Psychological Thriller I Just Saw for the First Time

"The cinema of horror provides its highly secularized audience with their last - perhaps their only - opportunity to experience mystery and miracle . . . The great frenzies of chaos, creation, disobedience, disaster, solitude and evil which have been rendered vague or bland in the well-bred church and synagogue services of the '70s are restored to their terrifying proportions in the half-light of the movie theaters. Priests of the horror cinema still recite incantations that count." (Leonard Wolf, "In Horror Movies, Some Things Are Sacred," The New York Times, April 4, 1976, as quoted by David J. Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 386)

The Wicker Man (two and a half stars total) I had to look up the definition of "straw man" arguments. It's been too many years since high school speech and debate class. I was curious to see if it would have any correlation to the movie, The Wicker Man (1973). I admit that anything can be twisted to mean anything for argument's sake. This ties in directly with "straw man" arguments, which directly tie in with The Wicker Man, no twisting necessary. The police sergeant who goes to investigate the report of a missing person wants a "proper" Christian burial and to enforce laws against public indecency. The pagan islanders he's investigating want religious tolerance and a "miracle" that will restore their crops in the coming year (never mind their own elaborate involvement in the machinations). The policeman's "reasoning" with the islanders is a logical fallacy because he's only attacking his own "distorted" version of their position and that fails to constitute an attack on their actual position (see Wikipedia for a full list of logical fallacies). It's so cruel the way they talk down to him at the end, explaining everything in layman's terms that even a self-righteous blowhard can't argue with, but I guess it's no more dismissive than when he laughs at their custom for "supernatural impregnation" toward the beginning. As a kid, I thought the title referred to the villain's name, but the truth is much more terrifying than that. The villain is just actor Christopher Lee, dressed in purple and yellow drag.

If there were such a thing as the "Twelve Days of Halloween," they might start tomorrow. This is debatable because the "Twelve Days of Christmas" either end on Christmas Day or the day before Epiphany (see Shakespeare's Twelfth Night), so who's to say whether you should start this make-believe holiday extension by counting down from October 20 or October 31? Holiday blending like "Chrismahanukwanzakah" or "Festivus" really get to me. Christmas alone is an example, blending the displaced Nativity (December 25) and the arrival of the Wise Men/baptism of Jesus (January 6) with the ancient Roman Saturnalia (December 17-23) and the pagan Germanic Yuletide/winter solstice (December 21-22). Somewhere along the line, Halloween has transmuted into a second tier Christmas Day, probably because it's the second most commercialized holiday in the U.S. For me, Halloween will never be just an appetizer or a speed bump before Christmas. It's neither the anti-Christmas nor a dark twin to its neighbor holiday. Don't even get me started on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Would this still have happened if Halloween were in June? Unfortunately, its proximity to Christmas has led to atrocities like Halloween wreaths, trees, stockings, pumpkin "snowmen" and "haunted" gingerbread houses. Soon there won't any distinction between holiday celebrations. Alas, it's the only politically correct way to go.

'80s Psychological Thriller I Just Saw for the First Time

"Popular 'amusements' have a flip side that is often less than sunny, and the very world 'recreation' has some usually overlooked connotations. Any process of re-creation or rebirth necessarily entails a death of one sort or another. This may explain the prevalence of sugar-coated intimations of mortality in carnivals and fun parks - spook shows, wild rides involving heart-stopping plunges and near-collisions, and the omnipresent, endlessly cycling wheels and whirligigs of chance, fate, and destiny. Freak shows similarly offer a glimpse of ourselves, re-created along strange physical and behavioral lines. Nothing is fixed, and everything is possible." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 30)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (two stars total) I once ran into Ray Bradbury at San Diego's Comic Con and no one else around us seemed to recognize him. That's probably my only random celebrity encounter (I say "probably" because - again - no one else recognized him as a celebrity). I've sat close to many movie and TV stars on panels and such, but never on a plane or at the store. Back when Comic Con used to put artists doing autographs in the far corner of the exhibit hall, I was standing in line for David Finch to sign some Moon Knight comics (there are some more "big" names you'd have to be a nerd to know) when I noticed Bradbury was parked against the wall right next to me. I asked him if he was also waiting and he replied: "No, I was just looking for a quiet place to sit." If I'd seen Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) at that time, I would've asked him how he felt about the casting of the bad guy, Mr. Dark. I've read that Bradbury wanted Peter O'Toole or Christopher Lee for the role, but I feel that Jonathan Pryce is scarier than either of those bigger-name actors. I can't be the only one who feels that way because he's been cast as other bad guys since then (Stigmata; Pirates of the Caribbean), even as the Bond villain on Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Pryce wasn't the bad guy on Brazil (1985; the first movie I ever saw him in), but that movie disturbed me so much that anything remniscient of it scares me.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is pretty scary for a Disney movie. It wouldn't fit on my "Unintentional Horror Movies" list (see my 10/30/09 post) because it's definitely trying to be scary. It shows a severed head and nightmare spiders, plus the usual thunder and lightning. I like movies where kids are quicker at figuring something out than their parents. It adds a layer of horrific betrayal to what's usually an impossible predicament from the start. There's extra pathos to the predicament in this movie because the narrator/protagonist's father (the old guy from Dream a Little Dream) has a weak heart and already feels guilty over not being able to protect his son (the kid from The Monster Squad) years earlier. I'm a sucker for father-son movies, and I just realized that the ones I've most enjoyed recently have all been thrillers of one kind or another: How to Train Your Dragon (2010), The Road (2009), Gran Torino (2008; "surrogate" father in this case), 3:10 to Yuma (2007; better than the 1957 original BECAUSE of the added emphasis on the father-son relationship), and last but not least, Rocky Balboa (2006). What do thrillers have to do with fathers and sons? I don't know, maybe nothing. Or maybe guys just like a little danger in movies that are supposed to be about them.

'90s Psychological Thriller I Just Saw for the First Time

"The symbolic flesh-eating and blood-drinking of the Catholic mass has the same ancient roots as vampire legends; when gay demonstrators ('life-eating' monsters to the far religious right) disrupted the communion service at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1991, primitive and unarticulated blood-themes shadowed the publicly stated issues . . . A surprisingly high number of vampire aficionados (gay and straight) do turn out to be Catholics or ex-Catholics - at least in this writer's extensive, if unscientific, observation. In The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice calculatedly imbued her ambisexual vampire with the traits of a pagan/Christian savior." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 348)

Stigmata (three stars total) For yesterday's "Recent Psychological Thrillers" post, I originally intended to review a pair that are possibly still playing in theaters somewhere, Ryan Reynolds' "stuck in a coffin" movie, Buried (premiered at Sundance), and M. Night Shyamalan's "stuck in an elevator" movie, Devil (opened 9/17/10). The former wins my award for "Feel Bad Movie of the Year" and that's all I have to say about that. The latter would've just led me to write about my theological stance on angels and demons (not the Dan Brown novel, but we'll come back to him). I didn't want to be redundant with Shyamalan's final point on Devil, so I held off. Then the same themes showed up again in Stigmata (1999), so I'm taking that as a sign, but not like "Jesus in a pancake" (an actual line from Devil). Disconcerting as it may seem, I believe the devil's always around, but I also believe that angels are everywhere. I agree with Shyamalan that "we don't need the devil because man is capable of all evil alone." I also believe that temptation only matters inasmuch as we give in to it (this is where Stigmata comes in). Bad priests (or parishioners) can't discredit the good that any given church does. The devil is powerful but God's still in charge. The devil was allowed to let loose on Job but not to take his life, and in the long-term it was all for Job's good. I don't believe that the devil was ever trying to help Job in the long-term, nor do I believe he ever tempts us with what really matters. Conversely, I don't believe that God would ever try to hurt us in the long-term, nor do I believe he ever blesses us with what doesn't really matter. God gave Jonah an all-natural punishment inside the whale but I don't believe he would ever punish a person with the unnatural stigmata. I don't believe the movie Stigmata favors science over organized religion, nor do I feel it should shake anyone's faith in a loving God. It speculates on a conspiracy to suppress truth the same way that Dan Brown does in The Da Vinci Code, and it does so with better acting but worse music (here's looking at you, Chumbawamba).

Recent Psychological Thrillers I Just Saw for the First Time

"In his essay The 'Uncanny,' published at the end of the first world war, Sigmund Freud first discussed the relationship of the castration complex to macabre fantasy stories. In Freud's view, the doppelganger (the basis of all monster images) is a defense mechanism; the unconscious mind, sensing a mortal danger to the ego, eye, limb, or genital, creates an imaginative stand-in for the threatened part." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 76)

May (two and a half stars total) I've heard a psychological explanation for feeling uncomfortable around people with physical defects (amputation; blindness; cerebral palsy) which is that they make you subconsciously consider the possibility of sustaining similar defects yourself. You've probably heard that obesity and smoking are considered contagious because people feel more comfortable with their own bad habits when they have friends or neighbors with similar habits. May (2002) is all about social anxieties, like whether or not desperate advances from a gay coworker (a goth Anna Faris) can turn you gay too, whether or not it's a faux-pas to make out while watching horror movies, whether or not you should even admit to watching horror movies (Jeremy Sisto, better known as Elton on Clueless). I have a lazy eye that I know has bothered people and a teddy bear that I treat with the same respect I would a living person, so you'd think that May's eyepatch and talking doll collection would hit home for me. However, I find eyepatches and dolls just as creepy as the next person (according to this movie, talking dolls sound like glass breaking). It's perfectly natural to put yourself into fictional stories (actually, that's the whole point), but the only part of me that I could see in May was her choice in stereo equipment. Have you ever watched a movie where a character wears an outfit that you also happen to own or a scene is filmed in your hometown - perhaps down your street or at a restaurant you frequent? My coinkydink connection isn't that rare, but it turns out I have the exact same Sony boombox that May plays at her veterinary clinic (yay for me and product placement). Speaking of her job though, I would never try to compensate for a lack of human interaction by caring for animals. If you're the kind of person that need lots of attention, maybe a cat's not the best pet for you. I'm not saying that cats don't love their owners, they just do it on their own timetable, and they can't defend themselves as well as humans against sudden, violent outbursts. So to all you cool cats and kittens out there, stay away from May.

"In a horror movie-esque situation, even when the axe is about to drop, don't let the intensity get to you. Because in a horror movie, once people start to pick at each other, those same people start to get picked off. Maybe killers' dislike for fights stems from an unpleasant home life during childhood. Most murderers grew up in less than ideal situations, and arguing mothers and fathers top the list of Reasons to Become a Murderous Psycho. Alternatively, it could be a dislike for loud noises (although they've picked a strange profession if they dislike screaming)." (Meredith O'Hayre, The Scream Queen's Survival Guide, p. 146)

The clue to solving the "locked room mystery" in Session 9 (three and a half stars total) comes in the form of advice given by the first victim (played by the coach from Glory Road) to the new kid (played by the shoplifter in Empire Records) on an asbestos cleanup crew: "Just have an exit plan, dude. You stick with this job long enough, it'll mess you up, man. It gets inside you - the stress." Interestingly, the character mentions stress over the threat of asbestos exposure, but that's the tip off. I don't mention this to spoil the plot for anyone, just to show that it's a tightly woven plot and it's the little things that you glance over that come back around. Most mysteries aren't fun the second time around because they hinge entirely on the ending, but that's not the case with Session 9 (2001). I used to hate old Matlock (1986) and Perry Mason (1957) episodes where you'd think you had it figured out only for them to introduce to a brand-new character in the last five minutes and reveal that they were the killer instead. Session 9 is a "locked room mystery" and that means that the killer HAS to be one the few characters present all along. What's more, the "locked room" in this mystery is the real-life, isolated and empty Danvers State Insane Asylum (pictured above), birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy. Five years after Session 9 was filmed there, it was partially demolished to be rebuilt as apartments, but those caught fire the very next year. Ominous history, wouldn't you agree? In my parents' hometown, there used to be an old, abandoned hospital on a hilltop, smack dab in the center of town (that's my brother pictured below, trespassing with me on the roof). Just like the hospital in the movie, ours was a public health hazard, a hideout for the homeless and a gallery for gang graffiti. We used to brave broken glass and the threat of a police record to secretly explore this dark, deserted dungeon. As a dumb kid, I never considered the possibility of falling or getting beat up without anyone to rescue us or know where to look for our bodies. Now I'm wondering if there were any other dumb kids that might have died there and continue to haunt that hillside to this day (insert scary noise here).

Boris Karloff, Mad Scientist

"Very rarely is the purpose (of a movie doctor) to save a life or effect a cure . . . The favorite purpose of an operation on the screen is either disfigurement or the creation of a monster . . . Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this pseudo and sadistic science is its immaculateness . . . The blacker the heart of the surgeon the more fastidious he is likely to be in his professional methods . . . Ghosts and goblins that used to lurk in dark corners to pounce upon the unwary pale into ineffectual shadows before the grim figure of the demon surgeon brandishing his scalpel." (The Times, London, August 4, 1936, as quoted by David J. Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 195)

The Ape (three stars total) Whenever I hear Boris Karloff speak, I can't help thinking of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966 TV special). Fortunately his role as Frankenstein's monster doesn't include too many lines of dialogue, so I can still watch that undistracted. His appearance changed more from film to film than Bela Lugosi's did on the six that they made together. Personally, I'll take his devil-worshipping widow's peak on The Black Cat (1934) or his eye hanging out of its socket on The Raven (1935) over Lugosi's consistent formalwear and supposedly "hypnotic" stare, which could be mistaken for constipation (it turns out he suffered from sciatica and that's how he became a painkiller addict). On The Ape (1940), Karloff wears a moustache so that - I'm assuming - he'll look grandfatherly and he wears glasses so that - I'm assuming again - he'll look smart. Like a medical doctor. Or like a mad scientist, because the lenses make his eyes look bigger. Why is it that crazy people are always portrayed with eyes opened as wide as can be? This was Karloff's fourth film to derive its title from an animal (the first was The Sea Bat, 1930, about killer manta rays off the coast of Mexico). Silent film fans sometimes complain about the unbelievable number of "old dark house" mystery plots involving apes (giant or otherwise, it's usually just a guy in a gorilla suit). Karloff flips that here by actually revealing himself to be the guy in the gorilla suit in a twist ending and practical explanation for the cheap special effects. If you're a Universal monsters enthusiast, you may recognize the name of Curt Siodmak on the opening credits for screenplay. The very next year he would write The Wolf Man (1941), along with the stories for Son of Dracula (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944), plus a dozen or so other horror titles. This is the fifth film I've reviewed from Mill Creek Entertainment's $10 Horror Classics double-sided DVD collection (The Corpse Vanishes yesterday; Nosferatu last week; both The Phantom of the Opera and White Zombie last year, 10/5/09 and 10/6/09, respectively). You can look forward to Bluebeard and Carnival of Souls next week. If I never watch another title from the set, I'll still have paid less than $2 each for almost ten hard-to-find and historical hours of entertainment!

Bela Lugosi, Mad Scientist

"Michael Jackson is often compared to Peter Pan, but Peter Pan is rarely acknowledged as the variation on Dracula that he is - a late-Victorian fantasy being who flew into young people's bedrooms with a problematic offer of life everlasting . . . The fantasy still flies. Rejuvenation and eternal youth are the driving illusions of the cosmetic surgery business, to which Michael Jackson's image is forever wed." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 320)

The Corpse Vanishes (one star total) This is the oldest feature film to be riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1942 to be exact). It's one of those movies that would be unbearable to watch without the mocking commentary. There's a scene a little over halfway through where the same musical phrase gets repeated over and over. Before I even had a chance to fast forward though, Crow, Joel and Tom Servo started humming along like kazoos. Talk about taking lemons and making lemonade! Granted, everything sounds funnier coming out of a robot's mouth. Say anything in a robot voice and try not to smile. That's not to say that they speak robotically on MST3K. Well, Joel Hodgson does, but I think that's unintentional (he left the series after 100 episodes because he didn't feel comfortable acting in front of the camera). On this particular episode, he does a Bela Lugosi impersonation that sounds more like Sesame Street's Count von Count and it's still better acting than Lugosi's. Out of 198 total episodes, 66 (that's exactly one-third) are available for instant streaming on Netflix. If you do attempt to watch the original, unedited version of The Corpse Vanishes without the aid of MST3K, at least do so in the company of others. You could try riffing yourself about how the movie's family of freaks looks like Dick Tracy rogues' gallery or wonder aloud why "ace" reporters and "hard-boiled" newspaper editors were so popular in the early '40s. Without a doubt, someone will make a lewd comment about the mad scientist's wife moaning all through her rejuvenative procedure and everyone will laugh when she later slaps the journalist who's simultaneously barged into her home AND into the overall plot of an otherwise serious mad scientist movie.

Gene Wilder, Mad Scientist

"Dracula and Frankenstein are significant modern myths, gods that have descended periodically into ineffectual kitsch, but only to rise again, stronger than before. Each icon defines the other; they rarely travel alone. They embody nothing less than the centuries-long war between science and superstition - Apollo and Dionysus at the Saturday matinee. In the age of AIDS they have spent an inordinate amount of time admiring each other, perhaps, in part, because they both 'reproduce' as AIDS does - one through transfusion and one through transplantation. The dark twins are palpably present when the most advanced communication technology in history brings home, almost nightly, the most psychically primitive juxtapositions of blood, sex, and pestilence, a new kind of living-room war, a psychosexual Vietnam." (David J. Skal, The Horror Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 351)

I'll be honest, Young Frankenstein (two and a half stars total) is the only Mel Brooks movie I've watched all the way through besides The Producers (1968), which I saw for the first time a few years ago and enjoyed for Zero Mostel. I made a friend change the channel when he tried to get me to watch The History of the World, Part I (1981) and over the years, I've seen enough bits and pieces of Spaceballs (1987) to equal a whole movie, but they never made me laugh. Recently, I started Blazing Saddles (1974) but quit early and while I have Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) on my Netflix instant queue, we'll see how far I make it. Audiences nowadays have been trained by the marketing machines to expect a movie to be all funny or all serious. Were Young Frankenstein (1974) released today, I'm sure they would call it a comedy, but to me, it's pretty serious stuff. As with William Castle's The Old Dark House (1963) and The Munsters (1964; have you heard they're remaking it on NBC?), the atmosphere and the scenery is so perfect. They're even better than the movies they're spoofing. You could almost turn the volume down, ignore the sitcom setups and dreadful music numbers ("Puttin' on the Ritz") and pretend that you're watching a classic horror movie with modern sensibilities. I expected all of Young Frankenstein to be double entendres and general '70s sleaze, but that doesn't start until twenty minutes in. Before that, it's quality time with Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the script and has the kindest eyes south of Santa Claus. If you can stand all the standard, horror movie screaming from the twenty minute mark on to the end, you'll be treated to an early Gene Hackman comedy cameo. And that's funny.

Wilford Brimley, Mad Scientist

"Here, in science fiction form, is an orgy of hate and fear and futility, with no hope of escape, no constructive element whatsoever. The child with whom one is asked to identify is bereft of any security from father and mother, from constituted authority, and the adults burst into meaningless violence . . . For a time we hope there will be an answer in this projection of the formless fears abroad in our world of technological annihilation and savage ideologies, but the terror and dread only pile higher." (Transcript of 1953 PTA reports on Invaders from Mars, as quoted by David J. Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 251)

The Thing (four stars total) If you were putting together a team of adventurers to accompany you in Antarctica (I used to imagine such groups for role-playing game campaigns), the real-life Wilford Brimley might make a good candidate. Before becoming the face of Quaker Oats oatmeal, he was a ranch hand, a bodyguard for Howard Hughes and a stuntman in western movies. I like him because he's Mormon and you don't see too many of those in Hollywood. John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982) isn't a traditional mad scientist movie, and Wilford Brimley doesn't play a stereotypical mad scientist. He's just a scientist driven mad by the same body-snatching, tentacled, alien invader that he eventually becomes. Now allow me to interrupt this review for a word on tentacles. At a preschool age, I saw two things on TV that scarred me for life. Only one of them was definitively horror, and that was the first BBC miniseries adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1981; a year before The Thing). When I saw a little boy my age get lashed in the face by a Triffid's tentacle, just for pruning the garden, I couldn't believe my dad saying that the horror in the book (1951) lies more with humans than with alien plants. As an adult, the most shocking horror I've seen is the alien/mecha "tentacle porn" on Meatball Machine (2005; there's so much of this crap in Japan, the term has its own Wikipedia entry). Needless to say, I wasn't too excited with The Thing when a wolf's face blossoms like a bloody Triffid flower and tentacles whip out to lasso the other dogs in a kennel. I could've easily fast forwarded through that scene but never the one with Wilford Brimley (without his trademark moustache!) smashing a computer room up with an axe.

Marlon Brando, Mad Scientist

"By the mid-1920s, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol of Paris had achieved a worldwide reputation for its repertory of short, horrific plays that subjected human characters to the same kind of exaggerated violence that was formerly the province of the little guignol, or Punch-and-Judy show. The difference was that the 'big puppets' bled, or convincingly seemed to. The Grand Guignol was founded in 1897 (a benchmark year for horror, with the publication of Dracula, the exhibition of Philip Burnes-Jones' painting The Vampire, and - incidentally - the coining of the term 'psychoanalysis') by Oscar Méténier, a playwright and former police clerk. Méténier had cofounded an earlier avant-garde venture, Théâtre-Libre, which had produced some of his sensational and sordid playlets. The brief sketches presented life at its most squalid, utilizing the language of the streets and the most unsavory situations and characters possible . . . Since naturalism was deemed to be 'scientific,' Méténier's excursions into the lower and criminal classes were permissable for bourgeois audiences, who could vicariously contemplate base humanity - and their own baser selves - from a fashionable remove." (David J. Skal, The Horror Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 55)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (three and a half stars total) Celebrate Columbus Day with a United Nations negotiator (how perfect is that?) whose plane crashes while headed west overseas. Edward Douglas, originally shipwrecked Edward Prendick in the 1896 book by H.G. Wells, expected to meet with foreign diplomats but was introduced to "new men" instead. Christopher Columbus expected to initiate a trade route but ran over the "New World" instead. They both learned the hard way that all disappointment stems from unmet expectations. Just as contemporary school teachers seem to hate Columbus, critics and the Razzies hated this third film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996; the centennial anniversary of the book). Perhaps their disappointment stems from unmet expectations for stars like Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, the $40 million budget or a script that was continually tinkered with until the end of shooting. I had no expectations for the movie, no knowledge of the book and apparently I had nothing better going on because I enjoyed it all, even fifteen years after it was released in theaters. I didn't expect to hear Deep Forest, an electronic world music group I listened to in high school, nor did I expect to hear Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" performed by or for monkey-men. I didn't expect to see Fairuza Balk, an actress that's creeped me out since Disney's Return to Oz (1985). You may remember her as the bad witch from The Craft (1996 was a busy year for her). Back to those top-billed actors mentioned above, I never could've expected to see Marlon Brando in a dress or Val Kilmer doing an impersonation of Marlon Brando in a dress - in the same movie. Now those are some MAD scientists, and they're probably as scary as Columbus was to Native Americans.

Adrien Brody, Mad Scientist

"The wreckage of the jazz age was a forbidding new landscape. Millions waited for a scapegoat or a deliverer. A new and controversial kind of entertainment - the gangster picture - served as a lightning rod for public anger and cynicism; audiences vicariously took part in adventures outside the law and standards of fair play that now seemed utterly irrelevant. The popular interest in gangsters wasn't an entirely vicarious identification: Prohibition, after all, had literally turned millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. But the most lasting and influential invention of 1931 would be the modern horror film. Monster movies opened up the possibility of psychic lawlessness; a monster, for Hollywood, was a gangster of the id and unconscious. Cataclysmic junctures in history usually stir up strong imagery in the collective mind, and the years following the 1929 economic crash were no exception." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 114)

Pick a topic, any hot topic, and chances are good you'll find it in Splice (two stars total; released on DVD last week). From the title alone, you know it includes animal experimention and and human cloning, but it also tells the story of a couple making major life transitions involving abortion rights, gender roles, overprotective parents, rural relocation and sex education. I haven't even mentioned corporate restructuring and the pharmaceutical industry, which are the most important issues to the plot. All this comes during our nation's current financial crisis and uncertainty over health care reform. If that seems contrived, cutting edge or just plain relevant, refer back to the quote above, about horror movies during the Great Depression. They say there's nothing new under the sun, but I guess there's nothing new under microscopes either. I never saw Species (1995), but I get the impression it shares a lot in common with Splice (2009). Maybe this is just me, but does anyone else have a problem with only being able to see certain actors in the role that you first saw them? For me, Adrien Brody will always be the jealous, mentally-challenged, murderous psychopath that he played on The Village (2004), which was the first movie I saw him in. That's what made it so hard for me to see him as a romantic lead in King Kong (2005) or as a tough guy on Predators (2010). But I can totally buy him as an adulterous, mad scientist that listens to "über" music.

Recent Vampire Movies I Just Saw for the First Time

"How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening a vampire rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except the act of killing. And that vampire goes out to die. No one will find his remains. No one will know where he has gone. And often no one around him - should he seek the company of other vampires - no one will know that he is in despair. He will have ceased long ago to speak of himself or of anything. He will vanish." (Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 1976)

Daybreakers (four stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - a world where vampires are the majority and humans are an endangered species

Basically, what we've got here is the reverse of Richard Matheson's sci-fi/horror book, I Am Legend (1954). The whole point of that title (and what was missing from the 2007 movie adaptation) is that humans come to realize they're a greater threat to vampires than vampires are to them. Instead of a sunlight-immune female vampire sent to spy on the only living human, we get a sensitive male vampire who's invited to the human's secret hideout. Willem Dafoe is a former vampire/born again human that has stumbled upon the cure for vampirism (exposure to sunlight minus oxygen for bursting into flames), but he's comic relief, not the Vincent Price or Will Smith lead character. That part goes to Ethan Hawke, a resentful vampire who's ironically still working on a synthetic replacement for human blood. I agree with most of the reviewers on IMDb that the conceptual world of Daybreakers is its most interesting aspect. Unlike I Am Legend, it's not a post-apocalyptic world and the streets are not empty during the day (tinted car windows, wide brim hats and sunglasses go from pimp to purposeful). When I first watched Ethan Hawke's other movie, Gattaca (1997), I hated to see it end because I wanted to hang out a bit longer in its near-future world with zoot suits and self-driving cars. Same goes for Daybreakers (I hated to see its ending because of the cheesy slo-mo and pounding score as well). All you get to see is that coffee shops would serve blood au lait and the homeless population would die real quick without safe shelter, but I could spend all day thinking of ways in which a world full of vampires would be different. Take accidental death and disease out of the question and the healthcare and insurance industries would be gone. Fitness gyms, food and agriculture too, except livestock might still be used for blood, but most country fields would be left overgrown. How would people entertain themselves without drugs or alchohol? What would there even be to escape from if they didn't have to plan for retirement and they couldn't procreate? I know - they would worry about the possibility of starvation without death, which is actually what the movie is about.

Let Me In (three and a half stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - what happens when vampires try to ingest food and go where they're not invited

Like it or not, one of the great and terrible rites of passage in mortality is puberty. What would it do to a person, psychologically speaking, to live forever without ever experiencing those pesky hormones, eternally damned in what is commonly referred to as "the awkward stage?" That, ladies and gentlemen, is horror. The concept of an old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl is not new. It went mainstream with the book, Interview with the Vampire (1976) and even before Dracula was published (1897, exactly 25 years before), it was featured in Carmilla (1872). Nothing is really new in Let Me In, but what can you expect from a remake? Yet that's precisely why I wanted to see it. I had to know if it would have more music (it telegraphs everything, but the '80s soundtrack includes Freur's "Doot Doot"), if it would have better special effects (except for the car wreck, it has worse, actually), stronger actors (I'll come back to this) or more exposition (the storyline just jumps back and forth this time around). I could be a whiner and complain that they left out my favorite scene (the cat attack) from the original Swedish movie. What I'd rather point out though, isn't the remake itself, but the perspective I brought to it. Having heard that it's a faithful adaptation, I was free to ignore minor plot points and focus on the characters. "The father" figure, played by Richard Jenkins, exhibited more the humanity of getting old and tired, coming to terms with it and embracing death. Was he the vampire's first familiar, or did he see that he was part of a centuries-old cycle? Chloë Moretz acts more like an old lady than her vampire predecessor, Lina Leandersson. Her fictional maturity may go a little unnoticed at first, next to Kodi Smit-McPhee, seeing as how girls tend to mature faster than boys. Back to my question up top, what would happen if two prepubescent kids met at the same age, but only one grew up? How would that play into the relationship? That's something I didn't think about before. Nor did I catch a possible moral to the story - don't put cardboard up in your windows lest you look suspicious to police investigators.

August Books

"To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can't really multitask reading a book. You're either reading a book or you're not." (Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times Book Review, August 29, 2010)

These are some titles from last month's New York Times Book Review section that I might like to read at some point:

Fiction

Bad Things Happen - Harry Dolan; "This first novel is full of tricky reversals and dry academic humor, as a killer picks off contributors to a literary mystery magazine to the consternation of its editor."

Far North - Marcel Theroux; "Postapocalyptic road novel will inevitably be compared to that other postapocalyptic road novel Oprah liked, and while Theroux (son of Paul) is not the existential stylist McCarthy is, he is a superior plotter."

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen "cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information - about equity finance, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in Eastern Europe, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann."

Meeks - Julia Holmes; "In the dystopia of this wry first novel, a hierarchical society forces young bachelors to find brides - or else."

My Hollywood - Mona Simpson; "But the nannies know that one wrong move could land them on a plane back to Manila. Ignoring that specter, they jockey for position like trophy wives, aware at all times of the risk of divorce, rupture, reversal."

The Pages - Murray Bail; "A philosopher and a psychoanalyst travel from Sydney to a remote sheep station to evaluate a manuscript in this novel about different ways of thinking."

Star Island - Carl Hiassen: "A paparazzo attempting to kidnap a drug-addled pop star grabs her stunt double by mistake."

The Surf Guru: Stories - Doug "Dorst's acclaimed debut, Alive in Necropolis, folded sci-fi, horror, and noir elements into a layered coming-of-age story, and a similar mix of lively imagination and love of craft are on display in this excellent collection."

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart; "A tender but doomed love affair in a future America on the verge of collapse." (See also: Can America Survive? - John Hagee; "A pastor sees 10 signs that we are the terminal generation.")

The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell; "Reinvents himself with each book, and it's thrilling to watch. His novels like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas spill over with narrators and language, collecting storylines connected more in spirit than in fact."

Nonfiction

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement - Jane Ziegelman; "Keeping faith with their native cuisines, the newcomers made a series of counteroffers - sauerkraut, spaghetti, borscht - that changed the national palate forever."

The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture - Nathan Rabin; "I found my lasting family in the art and junk that has sustained me."

Encounter - Milan Kundera; "Illuminating essays on the arts in the context of a 'post-art' era."

The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English - Ray Peter Clark; "A manual for the 21st century endorses breaking rules that make no sense."

Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture - Thomas Chatterton Williams; "Transformed from a skinny teenager who shoots hoops, gets into bloody brawls and smacks his girlfriend, into a philosophy major and author."

Memoir: A Memoir - Tom Grimes; "His memories are steeped in the writerly process, but the book also encompasses more universal themes: expectation, disappointment, and the need to impress your heroes. What Grimes does, beautifully, is emphasize the communal elements of a solitary profession."

Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities - "Surveying Socrates, Rousseau, Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore and others, she investigates the key insight of progressive pedagogy through the ages."

Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language - Patricia T. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman; "Take on the 'linguaholics' who rigidly follow meaningless restrictions, like the ones against splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions."

The Self Sufficient-ish Bible: An Eco-Living Guide for the 21st Century - Andy and Dave Hamilton; "Making your own deodorant, baby wipes, dandelion wine, cough syrup and more."

Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens - Andrew Beahrs; "This is a culinary stunt book fixated on the nostalgic list of American foods Twain included in his 1880 travel memoir, A Tramp Abroad.

Book Versus Movie, Part II

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (three and a half stars total) As far as movies with video game sensibilities that don't look like The Matrix (1999) go, it's all up to Tron: Legacy (2010) now. Watching the trailer for Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), it saddens me to think that a more than decade (that's right, over ten years!) have passed and we're still seeing action movies that look and sound and feel like wholesale rip-offs of The Matrix. Children have been born and already reached puberty during this time span and we have yet to see any originality in the action movie genre. Then thankfully, Scott Pilgrim came along. For an adaptation of a graphic novel series, I had really high hopes that Scott Pilgrim could break the CG-Matrix-style kung fu mold, but then it went its own direction in the final half hour and replaced the original subspace ending from the books with an unoriginal light saber duel (may Tron: Legacy avoid any comparisons to The Matrix OR Star Wars). There were things that the movie did that books could never do, like play an 8-bit beeps and blips version of Universal's theme music (and beeps and blips over Julie's profanity as well), turn 180 degrees to show that Scott's childhood home is across the street from his current basement apartment and add a TV sitcom laugh track. Music and sound effects are what this movie's all about, and it's not for people that don't have favorite bands. And by bands, I mean rock bands - no sure-fire, trendy but cheesy '70s funk or disco here, and how refreshing that is I might add (nothing against cheesy '70s funk or disco, but enough inundation already). I would've given Scott Pilgrim four stars (same as I did other polished popcorn fare this year: Iron Man 2, The Karate Kid and Inception) except I disagreed with most of its acting and casting choices. Michael Cera's long hair made his eyes look even smaller, not manga-style big like they were originally drawn, and his high-pitched voice made Scott's character seem effeminate, which I never got from books. The actor playing Young Neil would've made a better Scott, which is ironic because that character is like a copycat Scott in the books. Kieran Culkin is not the epitome of cool, which is what I saw Wallace's character as. If anything, Kieran is the opposite of coolness. Finally, as much as I like actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead and loved Ramona's character in the books (even though she gave me no reason to), they made Knives prettier and more likable, so I guess that's one point for the movie, unless you take a point for Ramona. At Comic-Con this year, I went to the panel with Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan O'Malley and someone in the audience (not the costumed person pictured below) asked him if he realized that the book series could be just as much Kim's story as Scott's. He agreed but I bring it up here to point out that the same couldn't be said for the movie. For having such a large and diverse cast of characters, only one perspective is made possible on the big screen. But I'll still give you a taste right here. Let's take a look at my very favorite lines from each book in the series:

Vol. 1 (an edited version of this quote is used in the movie)
RAMONA: "It was in the seventh grade. It was football season, and the little jocks were in high gear. For some reason they all wanted me... Matthew Patel was the only non-white, non-jock kid in school. Probably the only one for miles around, or in the entire state, for all I know. So, of course... We joined forces and took 'em all out. We were one hell of a team. Nothing could beat Matthew's mystical powers combined with my brute strength. Nothing but pre-adolescent capriciousness."

Vol. 2 (aside from the Seinfeld scene, there is no cooking in the movie)
SCOTT: "Chopping vegetables keeps us out of trouble with the law."

Vol. 3 (Envy gets a lot more backstory in the books, plus she looks better)
ENVY: "You unbelievable-"
RAMONA: "BELIEVE IT!!"
ENVY: "Wow, Ramona, isn't this kind of unfair? One swing of your burly man-arms and my little head is pasta salad."

Vol. 4 (an extended version of this quote is used in the movie)
SCOTT: "Who's the guy in bed? Just a guy?"
WALLACE: "Just a guy. Presumably you saw his junk, and I apologize for that."

Vol. 5 (Kim gets a lot more backstory in the books, plus she looks better)
SCOTT: "Do you know anything about cats?"
KIM: "I know they smell like cat pee."
SCOTT: "Cool, I'll make a note of that."

Vol. 6 (Knives gets to turn 18 in the books, plus Scott almost fights her dad)
SCOTT: "So... uh... how's it feel to be... uh... no longer a child in the eyes of the law?"

July Books

"If you're like me, you tend to regard plot summaries as a necessary boredom at best. They're the flyover country between a reviewer's landing strips of judgement, revealing almost nothing about the way a book actually works, almost nothing about why it succeeds or fails. If plot were the crucial measure, there'd be no difference between a story about the fish that got away and Moby Dick. Reading such summaries (or writing them) is usually as beguiling as listening to some addled fan of Lost explain what happened on that botched ruin of a show." (Will Blythe, New York Times Book Review, July 11, 2010)

These are some titles from last month's New York Times Book Review section (and various issues of Entertainment Weekly magazine) that I might like to read at some point:

Fiction

Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power - David Pogue "is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. Each week, he contributes a print column, an online column and an online video. His daily blog, Pogue's Posts, is the Times's most popular blog. David is also an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News and a frequent guest on NPR's Morning Edition. His trademark comic tech videos appear each Thursday morning on CNBC. With over 3 million books in print, David is one of the world's bestselling how-to authors."

American Music - Jane Mendelsohn; "A series of haunting impressions trace the story of a family, the history of 20th-century America and the evolution of its music."

Citrus County - John Brandon; "With a smart hero somehow mean and bighearted at once, Brandon grippingly hybridizes the crime novel with the novel of rural adolescent longing, even as he subverts the expectations of both."

City Dog, Country Frog - Mo Willems; "What are you doing?" "Waiting for a friend. But you'll do."

‎Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories - Michael Sims; "Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla to Guy de Maupassant's The Horla and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker's own Dracula's Guest — a chapter omitted from his landmark novel."

The Frozen Rabbi - Steve Stern; "Starts in a small Polish village, where Rabbi Eliezer is so blissed out during a pond-side meditation that he doesn't notice a storm lifting the waters around him. In one of the effortless liberties the master fabulist Stern takes with reality, the rabbi survives underwater until winter comes and he's encased in ice. This all happens before Page 7, testament to how rapidly this book chews through plot, characters, decades and continents."

Shark Vs. Train - Chris Barton; "Who will win the face-off between two favorite toys: the shark or the train? (A dinosaur must be waiting in the wings.) Lichtenheld's high-energy drawings are the main appeal in a series of contests that could have built to more drama. (The opponents bowl, trick or treat and... make lemonade?) At the end, two boys drop the game and break for lunch.

Still Missing - Chevy Stevens; "Blistering debut follows a kidnap victim from her abduction to her escape - and the even more horrifying nightmare that follows. One moment, realtor Annie O'Sullivan is taking one last client, a quiet, well-spoken man with a nice smile; the next moment she's being marched out to a van at gunpoint, unaware that it's the last time for months that she'll see the sky or breathe open air."

Nonfiction

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error - Kathryn Schulz; "Case histories of a Klansman who became an unlikely advocate for civil rights, of a doomsday prophet whose apocalypse wasn't now, of a sexual assault victim whose mistaken testimony jailed an innocent man."

The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements - Sam Kean; "The best science writers, like the best science teachers, bring an enthusiasm for the material that infects even those of us who wouldn't usually give a flying photon."

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language - Katherine Russell Rich "responded to job setbacks and cancer by travelling to India - not to spend a few months at an ashram, like some people, but to study Hindi seriously. "This book both recounts her experience and presents the research of linguists about what happens in the brain when we learn a new language."

Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour - Rachel Shukert; "Scrap your preconceived notions of travel writing. We're not talking The Innocents Abroad here; this irreverent, profane journal of Shukert's college trip comes off like a cross between David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk. Nothing escapes her eye - not the cute boys or creepy older guys, not the booze, not even European culture."

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India - William Dalrymple; "The stupefyingly diverse religious world of the subcontinent, explored through nine remarkable individuals."

The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness - Oren Harman; "Covers the entire 150-year history of scientist' researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?"

Suck It, Wonder Woman! - Olivia Munn; "The first lady of nerd, and newly minted Daily Show correspondent, has written a book that covers everything from sex to videogames to her undying love of pie."

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut - Rob Sheffield; "The author of 2007's Love Is a Mix Tape reaches back to the '80s in his second collection of music-themed memories."