This Week in Cinemasochism: Kirk Cameron's SAVING CHRISTMAS (2014)

I thought I had this movie pegged.  The poster said it all, I figured: the evangelical former teen idol Kirk Cameron at the center, in a Chuck Norris-like pose, wielding a candy cane like a sword and protecting a snow globe as if it were the baby Jesus himself.  The tagline, "Put Christ back in Christmas," suggests a full-on acceptance of our declaration of War on Christmas, and that Kirk will be there to meet us on the front lines.  Watch out, liberals and atheists, 'cuz evangelicals are coming to kick your ass!

I embarked upon this 80-minute film ready to get served a lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas.  But then the movie dug into its plot, and... well, I was humbled to find that I wasn't in the movie's crosshair at all.  It isn't even a straw-man attack on secularism so that evangelical audiences can cheer on the defeat of those who would insist on "Happy Holidays" in every store.  Though there's lip service paid to the "wet blankets" who don't want Christians to celebrate "too loudly," Cameron surprisingly aims to the right rather than to the left.  It's targeted at people who think Christmas needs to be more pure, more religious, more centered on Jesus.  Kirk positions himself as the liberal reformer, who's here to tell those stiffly stiffersons to lighten up: that all the decorating, singing, celebrating, gift-buying, and ho-ho-ho-ing is perfectly okay!

After a five-minute introduction featuring Cameron himself sitting in front of a Christmas tree musing about what Christmas means to him and sipping from what I'm pretty sure is an empty cup of cocoa, we go to a lavish Christmas party hosted by Kirk's sister (played by his real life sister--Bridgette, not Candace).  Kirk learns from his sister (she's billed only as Kirk's sister) that her husband, Christian White (the symbolism here is about as subtle as a brick), has been struggling with Christmas lately.

Rather than join in the celebration, Christian (played by the film's co-writer/director, Darren Doane) has elected to sit in his car and stew.  Kirk goes out to sit with him to try to bring him out of his Scrooge attitude.  Christian explains that he can't shake his skepticism about Christmas.  How does our celebration of Christmas represent the Christian faith at all?  Wouldn't the more Christian thing be to take all the money we spend on presents and trees and decorations and use it to feed poor children?

A question that leads even the most liberal among us to think: well, yeah, wouldn't it be?  Nah, I guess not, and the prospect of all those starving kids doesn't seem to bother Kirk a lot, since he listens to Christian's fairly legitimate quibbles with an unending smug grin, as if he's just waiting to deliver him a yuletide smackdown.

He never really answers the question about the poor children.  Instead, Kirk deters the conversation to an absolutely befuddling thesis on Jesus's swaddling clothes in the manger, the relevance of which I'm still attempting to grasp.

It's around this point that we realize that the entire movie is going to be made up of Kirk and this guy sitting in a car talking.  Kirk essentially runs through every element of Christmas celebration that has a pagan or secular origin and explains that, see, it's Christian after all.  The Christmas tree hearkens back not to the winter solstice but to the tree of knowledge from Genesis.  The act of material gift giving isn't materialistic at all; it's a representation of God's spirit being made material in the form of Jesus, get it?  And most ridiculously at all, the shape of the presents under the tree really seems to resemble the cityscape of Bethlehem!

Cameron, Doane, and crew must have realized soon into production that their car conversation wasn't enough to sustain a feature film, as most of the actors seem to have been directed to milk every beat for as long as they can.  The movie's barely an hour long if you take out Kirk's long introduction and the interminable final dance number, followed by a "credit cookie" outtake sequence that, if it isn't  hilarious, is at least loose and goofy enough to show that the movie was made by human beings and not robots.

There's little plot to speak of, though the monotony of Cameron's feature-length lecture is broken up slightly by the appearance of two Happenin' Black Dudes who occasionally converse about being restricted from celebrating Christmas.  It culminates in one of them delivering an off-the-cuff beat poem presenting a litany of conspiracy theories; it's here, I think, that the filmmakers mean to downplay the whole "War on Christmas" thing as kinda silly, which is commendable, though if you listen closely, the dialogue seems to equate fears of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United with 9/11 truthers and chem trail watchers.

The movie isn't completely unwatchable; it appears to have been made with a modicum of production value.  Cameron has a completely vapid screen presence, though Doane has a certain lumpy charm as the Scrooge character.  And though the movie is patently offensive, both logically and religiously, it is effective as a crass curiosity: here is, from the country's most prominent right-wing straight-arrow devout Christian, a defense of tacky materialism in the name of Jesus.  It's okay to get gaudy on Christmas; it's a little disingenuous to say the Bible told you to.

* out of ****

P.S. I didn't mention the "Game of Thrones"-style Santa Claus fight scene.  It's not as much fun as it sounds.

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #4: PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 (2015)

I haven't seen the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, though the hugely successful film has its defenders, even among critics.  Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and praised it for being "a slapstick comedy with a hero who is a nice guy," and extols star Kevin James as a combination of Jackie Gleason and Nathan Lane.

He's not wrong.  Kevin James is without a doubt a powerful comic presence and his character, Paul Blart, is certainly a nice guy.  But in the case of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, it's the movie around him that's nasty and mean-spirited.  No one in his or her right mind would wish the happenings in this movie on a person as genuine as Paul Blart.  Considering that James created the character and wrote both films alongside Nick Bakay, it looks like he's as much to blame for the movie's failure as he is for its few successes.

This sequel continues an unmistakable mean streak in the oeuvre of Adam Sandler, its producer.  Like Grown Ups 2, it's a celebration of almost caveman-like masculinity, at the expense of anything that deviates from the normative.  It's a shame, because in the slapstick scenes James makes Paul Blart into a meek, overweight Chaplin-type shlub who might have been a formidable comic hero if the movie were as sensitive as he is.

As I've said, Paul Blart is a nice guy.  That doesn't mean he's likable.  He's the kind of guy who waves to you from his front porch every morning when you get the paper, after which you nod and hurry inside before he tries to talk to you.  He's the type who's a little too talkative when he catches you arriving home from work, and doesn't take the visual cues as you slowly back away toward your front door.

It's Paul Blart's niceness that makes us pity him rather than sympathize with him, and it doesn't help that the movie is downright awful to him from moment one.  The first five minutes, honestly, had me gobsmacked.  After a brief recap of the events of the first film, it's revealed that Paul Blart's love interest (Jayma Mays) left him after six days of marriage.  It's okay, he thinks: he still has his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) and his mother (Shirley Knight).  Then his mother is hit by a milk truck.  It's one of those CGI-created "funny" hit-by-car scenes that's for some reason become common in comedies nowadays (Mean Girls, the Scary Movie films, etc.), in which everything seems perfectly pleasant and ho boy!  There goes a truck or a bus or something big.

It is inconceivable that anyone, particularly someone who's been in the business of comedy as long as James has, would think it was okay to begin any comedy this way, never mind a big-studio mainstream family-oriented PG-rated one.  I wonder if audiences were indeed rolling in the aisles as they watched Shirley Knight get bowled over.  I wonder if they're the same people who laughed as Donald Trump mocked the disabled reporter who questioned him.

As soon as Mrs. Blart is run over by the truck, the movie is dead.  No movie can recover from such a disastrous misstep.  The last 90 minutes of the movie could have been the entirety of Horse Feathers and it still would have been awful.

So when Paul Blart goes to Las Vegas to attend a security convention at which he's convinced he will be the keynote speaker, there isn't much reason to care.  His mother's death admittedly isn't written for entirely crass reasons; it's meant to lend a desperation to the character, as he becomes overly protective of his daughter Maya, who is afraid to tell him she wants to go to UCLA rather than New Jersey Community College.  While they're in Vegas, Maya stumbles upon an art heist and is kidnapped, and it's up to Paul to save her.

The bad guy, a slithery, well-dressed Wall Street type named Vincent, is played by Neal McDonough with such straight-faced dedication that he ends up delivering most of the movie's real laughs.  McDonough is one of the best conventional baddies out there, and this movie suggests he's due for a Christopher Walken-like second career as a comic foil.  Other than two no-good-very-bad scenes--one in which he conveniently blurts out the fact that he has an allergy to oatmeal, so that a character can rub some oatmeal in his face later to defeat him, and another in which he and Blart trade a series of silly lines about how crazy they both are--McDonough's performance is flawlessly smug.

Nespa?

Some of the movie's slapstick works.  I found myself laughing at a scene in which Blart is completely unable to incapacitate a villain with a stungun.  A scene in which he fights a giant peacock seems right out of nowhere, but works on a surreal level because of a completely deadpan performance from a nearby lounge pianist who witnesses the whole thing.

When the movie is in slapstick mode, it's considerably easier to take than when it attempts to be a comedy of manners.  The script is generally unkind to women, even beyond Blart's patriarchal attitude toward Maya.  When one woman (Jackie Sandler, Adam's wife) rebuffs the advances of a very drunk security officer (Nicholas Turturro), she is of course painted as a judgmental shrew.  The character who's set up as Blart's love interest, hotel manager Divina (Daniella Alonso), shows absolutely no interest in him nor any chemistry with him, but the movie dictates that she has to fall in love with him anyway... and then, when he turns her down, the movie dictates again that she needs to fall for the head of hotel security (Eduardo Verastegui).

As bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop is, I'm interested in checking out the first film to see if it does the character right.  I can imagine a good movie being made around Paul Blart, if it's kind-spirited and knows how to treat him.  This isn't it.

* 1/2 out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bombs #1, 2, and 3: The Neil Breen Trilogy - DOUBLE DOWN (2005), I AM HERE....NOW (2009), and FATEFUL FINDINGS (2013)

To be mentioned in the same breath as Tommy Wiseau is probably not a crowning achievement if you're an aspiring auteur, as writer-director-producer-actor-composer-editor-costumer-caterer Neil Breen clearly is.  But seeing as his Fateful Findings is attracting the same kind of midnight-showing attention that The Room once commanded, that is Breen's destiny.

I don't know quite how he feels about that notoriety, but it is beyond his help.  He shares with Tommy Wiseau a totally earnest commitment to his ideas, as well as a complete and utter blindness to his own dearth of talent.



But make no mistake: Neil Breen has something to say and he's going to say it, even if he has to write, direct, act, and cater it himself. Fateful Findings is the work of a man who's trying to make the Great American Movie.  What's it about?  It's about everything.  Life.  Friendship.  Romance.  Danger.  Politics.  Corruption.  Addiction.  Mental health.  The Constitution.  Mysticism.  Ghosts.  And Neil Breen is the only one who understands them all.

Oops, I meant "Dylan." Breen plays Dylan, our hero, a bestselling author/computer scientist extraordinaire/extremely handsome man of action and mystery.  He heroically shrugs off calls from his publisher for a new book, turning his focus instead to hacking into "secret government and corporate secrets" (his words).  But someone in the government isn't too happy with what he's been finding...

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie begins with Dylan being hit by a car (in an effect which is, considering the number of clumsy hit-by-car sequences that make their way into much more professional movies these days, not bad).  As he recovers in the hospital, he finds he's being visited by spirits, and may have been given special abilities...

Wait, I'm still getting ahead of the movie.  We meet Dylan as a child as he's frolicking through the forest with his best friend Leah.  They find a magic box hidden under a mushroom, with magic stones inside.  Leah moves away and a voice-over narration tells us that Dylan never sees her again... until she turns out to be his doctor after he's hit by the car.

If that made up the entirety of the movie's plot, it would be busy enough.  But Breen endeavors to make a film made up entirely of tangentially related sub-plots.  I haven't even mentioned the neighbors with the troubled sex life, their daughter who has a crush on Dylan, Dylan's wife and her pill addiction, or the two psychoanalysts who somehow play into Dylan's mystical quest.  All of the plots exist mostly to glorify Breen, who gives himself not one but two attractive love interests, and writes himself plenty of makeout scenes with both.

Virtually none of the plot threads are resolved, nor are they meant to be.  The only conclusive moment of the film comes in a third-act press conference, in front of a green-screen image of what might be the Supreme Court, in which Dylan announces to an invisible but very audibly cheering crowd that he's, indeed, been hacking into governments and corporations all over the world, and what has he found?  Greed, corruption, deception, etc.  Breen isn't even interested in telling us what kind of corruption he's found.  He simply cuts to a montage of reactions from four or five representatives of the corporate world, and what they do next is something I will leave for you to experience.  I have to admit, I was floored.

Fateful Findings is a rare bad movie that I'd recommend to everyone, not just masochists like myself.  It's truly captivating in its loopiness, and if Breen doesn't wear any of his hats particularly well--he's less a jack than a two-of-all-trades--he stacks enough themes on top of one another so that the film is never boring.  It's no surprise that he makes up most of the creative crew for the film; no one, upon seeing this script, would have agreed to collaborate with him on this.


If Breen's two previous films represent the same paranoid, self-aggrandizing vision, they unfortunately don't have the same gonzo energy.  In his debut, Double Down, he casts himself as Aaron Brand, a notorious computer hacker (Breen himself is an architect, and I can picture him delivering a Peter Cook-style monologue called "I would have rather been a hacker than an architect") who lives in the desert near Las Vegas because the government is trying to kill him.  They've already assassinated his girlfriend: a sniper takes her out while she and Aaron are both naked by his pool (with nudity awkwardly obscured).  He's visited by her spirit occasionally, so he can tell her things like "Thank you for loving me."

Double Down is, unfortunately, the most focused and professional-looking of the three.  Breen is also the superhero of this film, and the fact that Aaron Brand is essentially a domestic terrorist who threatens 9/11-style attacks on Las Vegas several times poses the question of whether Breen means for him to be an antihero, or he didn't think much about those implications.  I'd vote the latter, especially since Aaron seems to have hints of the same spiritual power that Dylan has in Fateful Findings.  If Double Down is generally more restrained than that film is, Breen restricts himself much less as an actor; while in Findings he has to remain stoic and mild-tempered, here he allows himself some wonderfully unhinged moments in which he runs through the desert screaming.


Seeing as Breen has viewed himself as infallible so far, it's only fitting that in his second film, I Am Here....Now (4-period ellipsis his), he literally plays God.  Clad in white robes, He returns to earth, looks at what man has made of it, and states clearly early in the film that he is "disappointed" in our "speechies," as he puts it.  We've ruined the planet and allowed corporations to buy our government.  Breen-God walks around Las Vegas helping the needy and meting out some Old Testament-style punishment to the wicked.

On the surface, this is an interesting premise, but overall I Am Here....Now is probably the nadir of Breen's not-exactly-illustrious three-film career.  Even though Breen has a history of writing himself into romantic relationships with seemingly much younger women (even while playing God), I Am Here....Now is the only film that reveals a truly nasty misogynist streak, in a sub-plot that follows a woman who is laid off from an unspecified job at a green energy company and has no choice but to become a hooker.  I know, I know--he's making a point about how corporations have the power to make or break us, yadda yadda yadda--but it's hard to imagine it playing this way if it were a male character.

The scenes which are meant to depict the horrors of gang violence are just as culturally illiterate.  Breen's idea of a gang culture is a bunch of dudes hanging around a condemned building, most of them carrying machine guns openly, occasionally punching each other in the face or shooting each other for no real reason.  A scene in which a character's hand is cut off, meant to be disturbing, is not far removed from Evil Dead 2.

Breen's lack of talent for storytelling is evident through all three films, since he elects mostly to dictate it to us rather than show it.  He never shows us what he's hacking into; he merely tells us about it (and then hurls some laptops around his office).  He can't show us the type of corruption being committed by corporatists; he has to have them muse at length about their crimes.  An example:

Businessman #1: "Now that we've paid off our fellow elected representatives in the legislature, that environmental solar panel development bill will fail next week."

Businessman #2: "Not to mention the cash it'll put in our pockets."

Of the three, only Fateful Findings avoids falling prey to the tell-don't-show method, and that's only because the plot is so ridiculous that it defies any explanation.

Still, Breen is an auteur.  His films all have a clear through-line about corporate greed and environmental stewardship, as well as the reawakening of adolescent romance (I'm guessing Breen had a childhood sweetheart he never reconnected with).  Strange motifs reappear with justification known only to Breen.  For instance, scenes in each film feature characters lying face down with their arms above their heads; it looks just weird enough to have been done on purpose.  As a matter of fact, that's a good summation of most of Breen's work: just weird enough to have been done on purpose.

WE HARDLY KNEW 'THEE: The Films of Alan Smithee, Part 1: HELLRAISER:BLOODLINE (1996)

When a director wants to escape his or her own movie, Alan Smithee is there to open the hatch. 

Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth in the series, was the first Smithee film I ever watched, when I was a teenager. Having been an avid Fangoria reader, I knew about the film's troubled production, and was an admirer of the actual director, Kevin Yagher. Yagher was a top-of-the-line animatronics and puppetry effects creator, most famous for designing the Cryptkeeper and directing the opening and closing segments of "Tales from the Crypt."

The film was taken out of his hands during production, and the script by Peter Atkins (who'd been on board the series since part II) was heavily rewritten. Whole subplots, like one featuring Kenneth Tobey of The Thing from Another World, we're dropped. Joe Chappelle, whose name was already mud among horror fans for ruining Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, was brought in to fill in the gaps. (To be fair, Chappelle has done some good things since, having directed many episodes of "Fringe" as well as the enjoyable Phantoms, in which Lawrence of Arabia teams up with Ray Donovan and the director of Argo to fight an ancient subterranean life form.)

So what's left of Hellraiser: Bloodline is a mess, but, upon recent rewatch, I was surprised to find it an entirely watchable mess. The plot is incoherent, as are the philosophical ramblings of the villainous Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who sounds like H.P. Lovecraft would if he were high at a Phish concert. But it's quickly paced and occasionally inventive in its sadism. 

We begin in space. Yep, in space.  Aboard the space station Minos, Dr. John Merchant (Bruce Ramsay) opens a puzzle box which fans of the series will find familiar.  The crew wonders what he's up to.  Explaining that he is attempting to destroy a demon, he tells the story of the construction of the puzzle box, from the distant past to the relative present and then back to the future, where the demon Pinhead is confronted.

Thanks likely to postproduction tinkering, the story structure is awkward, beginning in the 22nd century, flashing back to the 18th century, to the future again, to the 1990s, and then again to the 22nd century for the finale.  It doesn't help that the dull Ramsay appears as the protagonist in all three settings; he has the demeanor of a kinder, gentler Billy Zane, but fails to conjure any character or personality to go along with the demonic torture.

The film also shows little evidence of the talent of Adam Scott, who reportedly enjoyed working on the film but betrays none of that enjoyment on the screen.  As an 18th-century gentleman who (thinks he) enslaves a demonic princess (Valentina Vargas), the future Mr. Leslie Knope exists for a few dull scenes before he makes an inauspicious exit, though not before proudly displaying one of the Laughable Haircuts of Film History.

Not even hell on earth will stop the Catalina Wine Mixer.

The film hops on to a present-day architect (also Ramsay) who unwittingly designs a building-sized replica of the puzzle box that could be the pathway for all manner of demons. It's here that Pinhead makes his first appearance, threatening the architect's wife (the underused Kim Myers, of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and young son (Courtland Mead, best known as the really irritating Danny from Stephen King's miniseries of The Shining). 

Though the film is by no means a cohesive piece of anything, it's probably the best of the Hellraiser sequels so far, if we don't count Scott Derrickson's surprisingly decent Hellraiser: Inferno, which is barely related to the series at all. Bloodline's underlying pretentiousness elevates it above your usual run-of-the-mill sequel hackery. The finished product is a total disaster, but it's clear that somebody at some point had high expectations for this movie. You don't see the kind of high-minded philosophizing that spews from Pinhead's mouth in a Friday the 13th movie. 

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4: UNFRIENDED (2015)

Unfriended may not be the scariest piece of first-person-shot candy corn out there, but it is, especially for a low-budget 82-minute Blum House entry, ingeniously constructed.  It uses a premise that's almost unworkable, taking place completely within one person's computer screen and telling its story in real time via Skype, iMessage, Facebook, Spotify, and all manner of variations on the millennial self-contained social network center.  Less ambitious movies tend either to fail to make this sort of thing interesting, or to cheat and take the point of view elsewhere.  Give Unfriended credit: it never strays from the computer screen, and it held my interest long enough that I never felt like checking Facebook myself.

The first sequence is remarkable in its simplicity: an unseen computer user idly wanders toward a LiveLeak (read: banned from YouTube) link called "Laura Barns Suicide." Then, like every good Wikipedia user, we click through to what is labeled as the video that caused her suicide.  It's aptly named "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF." We see the first few seconds--footage of the titular Laura, very drunk, talking trash about someone at a party--before a boyfriend's Skype call butts in and we're forced to pause.

This shot sets the premise for the rest of the film, which we see from the point of view of a short-attention-spanned teenager named Blaire (Shelley Hennig).  The first-person storytelling is handled brilliantly as Blaire clicks back and forth among Skype conversations, instant messages, songs, websites, et cetera, which in the hands of director Leo Gabriadze never feels inauthentic.  Blaire is joined remotely by boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) as well as friends Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson), as well as a mysterious seventh person who somehow butts into their Skype conversation, won't hang up, and taunts them with otherworldly threats.

It isn't particularly scary--the characters are crudely drawn and the plot is ridiculous--but it's surprisingly a lot of fun. The actors wisely play the whole thing straight; any winking at the audience would ruin the movie entirely. Rather than take an ironic position themselves, the filmmakers let the kids' ironic detachment play into the story, as we occasionally see first-person user Blaire type something honest, pause to think about it, then delete it and type "LOL."

In the end it doesn't quite come together, as the manifestation of the ghost is just too silly and the characters are just too unlikable. But there's real skill at work here: the makers of Unfriended tried something risky, and it paid off. 

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: THE HARVEST (2013)

John McNaughton doesn't make films so often anymore, so any release of his is usually worth more than a cursory glance, especially since he's one of those directors like Alan Parker or James Mangold who refuse to be pigeonholed into one genre.  He started with possibly the most brutal serial killer film ever made (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), went on to make a wacky splatter comedy in which an alien occupies human bodies and makes their heads explode (The Borrower), then followed with a dark comedy (Mad Dog and Glory) and a twisty-turny noir thriller (Wild Things).  Other than some selected TV work, that's about it.

With The Harvest he returns to horror, but not the ruthless terror of Henry or the goofiness of The Borrower; rather, he shoots for a more sentimental, tragic horror.  It is a story about two monsters who have become monsters out of necessity.  It should be no surprise that one of them is played by Michael Shannon, who is able to exude a single-minded amoral determination and utter helplessness at the same time.

Shannon is Richard and Samantha Morton is his wife Katherine.  She is a doctor and he has quit his job to spend more time with their son Andy (Charlie Tahan), who is ailing of an unspecified but debilitating disease which renders him barely able to walk.  It's getting worse.

Meanwhile, Maryann (Natasha Calis, of Possession) moves in next door with her grandparents and swiftly befriends Andy.  Trouble is that his parents--mostly Katherine--are suspicious about letting anyone get too close to Andy, and it becomes apparent that they're hiding something.

The first half of the film is brilliant.  The relationship between the two kids is charming and believable.  Morton takes a cue from Bette Davis and plays Katherine as a woman who might seem irrational and shrewish, but is hiding a desperation.  Shannon is her complement, a man who is sincerely devoted to his son but sadly doubtful that his efforts will save him.  There's a great Hitchcock-like sequence in which Maryann tries to sneak Andy out for a game of catch, the ending of which is somehow both surprising and inevitable.

Once the entire plot is revealed, the movie loses its way, especially when Morton stops being the overprotective mother and becomes a typical psychopath.  The transition is not quite as seamless as it should be.  Even though the movie never becomes nihilistic, it leaves us wishing it had gone a more thoughtful route.  It may have made a more effective one-hour TV episode than a full-length movie, but it's still worth a look for its two likable leads, and for Shannon.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: AREA 51 (2015)

I was really hoping Oren Peli wouldn't be a one-trick pony, but Area 51, the director's second feature after his explosive Paranormal Activity, is so similar to that previous film that it barely has any real reason for existence.  It's skillfully made and entertaining, but it hits too many of the same notes.

The basic premise is the same: overly curious people tread where they shouldn't, gravely overestimate their intelligence, and film themselves facing the consequences.  This time instead of a haunting, it's possible alien activity and government conspiracies.  When Reid (Reid Warner) disappears from a party one night and reappears a few hours later without any idea where he's been, he and his two buddies launch an investigation into the titular government facility, leading up to an attempted break-in during which the three friends find more than they bargained for.

Because Peli is a good filmmaker, much of the break-in itself and its aftermath are appropriately tense, with a few well-placed surprises.  But the film doesn't have the slow-burn build to inevitability that Paranormal had, and it doesn't help that none of the three male protagonists is all that likable.  The ending does have one very well-executed first-person shot that I admittedly hadn't seen before, but where the closing scene of Paranormal still resonates even now, this one barely buzzes.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: THE NIGHTMARE (2015)

The Nightmare is both a documentary and a horror film.  That double-identity is difficult to pull off, and many have tried.  I've grown tired of "true story" horror films which try to have their cake and eat it too, assuring the audience of their veracity while fudging real events to make them spookier (see The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us from Evil, The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror).

The Nightmare does not do that.  It's not about scary ghosts but scary experiences.  Its people are haunted not by spirits but by something in their own minds that is beyond their understanding.

We meet eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis.  Each has had, with varying frequency, crippling vivid nightmares in which he or she finds himself or herself unable to move as frightening things happen around them.  They are as real as real life, so real that some have trouble telling the difference.

Director Rodney Ascher portrays each nightmare in gut-wrenching first person.  As in his first film, the Shining conspiracy-fan-theory exploration Room 237, there is no explicit directorial voice.  Every word we hear (save for some reenactments) comes from the dreamers.  We experience each dream as it is being narrated to us by its victim.  On a conventional level, it's scary, but the sincerity of the narrator makes it all the more brutal.

I can imagine a decent fictional horror film based around this affliction.  In fact, there was one: Insidious, which is cited by one of the film's subjects as a fairly accurate depiction of the disorder.  It's a naturally terrifying concept.  But Ascher goes a few steps further than merely depicting the subjects' nightmares; he explores the effect the nightmares have on their lives. The questions they raise.  The conclusions they lead to.  The struggles they cause.

I don't know what kind of research has been done on sleep paralysis.  Neither do the afflicted.  They're left to figure it out for themselves.  Most have been told by family and friends that they are "just bad dreams," and nothing to worry about, echoing common unenlightened assumptions about mental illnesses.  We notice that many of the images and sensations in these dreams are consistent among sufferers.  The tall, thin shadow men.  The tingling sensation in their nerves.  The dull, ambient voices.  The small black creature on their chest which could be seen as a cat (an image which dates back at least as far as 1787, in Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare").

But then there are the differences.  Some are overtly threatening, like a mysterious phone call in which an attacker demands to be let into the house.  Others are more ambiguous.  One subject reports a childhood dream in which he sees a bright light and is kidnapped by two tall thin figures.  As an adult, he watches the film Communion and discovers that Whitley Streiber's version of the conventional alien figure looks very similar.  Maybe those who purport to have been abducted by aliens are simply misinterpreting a case of sleep paralysis?  Maybe.

Ascher wisely doesn't provide an answer.  He stays with his eight subjects as they make sense of their own situation.  Some are inspired, as one woman finds her faith when reciting the name "Jesus" brings her out of her dream.  Some feel doomed, as one man is convinced that he will one day die in his sleep because of his paralysis.  He falls asleep every night thinking it might be the night.  And another takes some comfort when she first learns of the concept of sleep paralysis and discovers she's not the only one who suffers from it.  Or as she puts it, quite appropriately, "It's a thing!"

**** out of ****

This Week in Cinemasochism: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014)

It's always a shame to see a promising auteur collapse under his own weight. Seth MacFarlane, creator of the occasionally ingenious but now mostly tiresome "Family Guy," took to live action deftly a few years ago with the hilarious Ted. His second feature as director is, sadly, a labor of love: a rare comedy-western that aims to be equally a parody of and a tribute to the classic films MacFarlane loves. But while Ted was funny, smart, and never overstayed its welcome, A Million Ways to Die in the West is repetitive, dumb, and long. When he tries, MacFarlane can be crude without being crass, hip without being too self-referential, and witty without being smug. This film represents two full hours of MacFarlane's worst habits and none of his good ones.

MacFarlane plays Albert Stark, a mouthy but cowardly sheep herder who always finds himself on the wrong end of somebody's fist. He lives in a small frontier town in the late 19th century, and he hates everything about the place and time he lives in. When his doe-eyed girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him in favor of a handsome mustachioed shop owner (Neil Patrick Harris), he sinks further into depression. But then a gorgeous gunslinger named Anna (Charlize Theron) takes a liking to him, not revealing that she's actually married to Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), the most vicious gunfighter in the West.

MacFarlane's first mistake--and not his last--was casting himself in the lead role. It's clear what he's trying to do: the key lies within Woody Allen's early work, like Bananas and Love and Death, which placed Woody as a modern-speaking nebbish standing at a right angle to a conventional genre plot.  The difference is that unlike Woody, MacFarlane doesn't have a self-deprecating bone in his body.  He's always putting wisecracks and asides into his character's mouth, but in a way that makes him seem obnoxious and superior rather than charming.  That the strikingly gorgeous Theron is required to fall in love with him at first sight only makes the film more awkward.

Still, Theron is a trooper.  She's the best thing about the film, and should perform in comedies more often: with a better comic foil than MacFarlane to play with, she'd make an excellent straight woman.  In fact, everyone in the cast who plays it straight is quite good.  Neeson has some of the best scenes as the imposing villain.  As Albert's wiry nemesis, Harris's big laughs rarely fall flat; the mere look of him is funnier than any of MacFarlane's labored gags.

A few moments do work.  MacFarlane has a very funny Woody-esque monologue early in the film in which he runs through a laundry list of what a horrible time it is to be living.  Bill Maher's cameo as a hacky square-dance comedian is spot-on.  Christopher Lloyd appears in a scene that will melt the heart of everyone born in the '80s.  MacFarlane's talent as a songwriter (along with composer Joel McNeely, whose score is a likable Dmitri Tiomkin soundalike) stands out with two very good songs: a fun dance number at the midpoint, and a closing-credits title song sung by Alan Jackson that has more laughs than the entire movie.

The rest of the movie drags on for two full hours.  When MacFarlane tends toward the repetitively vulgar--as in a sub-plot featuring Giovanni Ribisi and his Christian prostitute girlfriend played by Sarah Silverman--the laughs wither soon.  When he has the characters speak in a "meta" style, the movie suffers too.  The numerous references to slavery and the massacre of the Indians are properly culturally sensitive but lazily written; he'll usually just have his characters comment flippantly on what's happening.

Some bad movies are a collaborative effort.  This one is pretty much entirely MacFarlane's fault.  It's not that MacFarlane is untalented, or as hackneyed as this material represents; he's done great things and will again.  He will write and direct a great film again.  Dare I say, he could even act again; though he's got an immensely better presence as a voice actor than as a live actor, he could be shaped into a good live performer.  But he should never be allowed to direct himself in a live-action film again.  Some auteurs need complete artistic freedom, but in every scene of this film MacFarlane desperately needs someone to check on him.

* 1/2 out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yeah, for the most part it is.

Pain level: Moderate to intense, depending on whether Neeson or Harris is on screen.

This Week in Cinemasochism: THE OOGIELOVES IN THE BIG BALLOON ADVENTURE (2012)

This Week in Cinemasochism takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic. Or not. 


The Oogieloves in The Big Balloon Adventure came and went with barely a whimper in the late summer of 2012.  With a budget estimated at $12 million, it made about 1 of those millions back in its short but wide release, setting the record for lowest-grossing opening weekend for a film running on over 2000 screens.

Children's films like this seem to fall the hardest.  In a world where we have The Lego Movie, Harry Potter, Shrek, the Marvel films, or any of the Disney and Pixar movies that appeal equally well to kids and their parents, enough producers still seem to put their money into films that aim for the lowest common denominator, forgetting that kids can enjoy smart humor just as well as silliness.

Who is The Oogieloves for?  Certainly not for anyone above the age of 3, I would think.  It's the brainchild of Kenn Viselman, whose name is announced by the opening credits with the majesty usually reserved for Walt Disney.  I read on IMDb that he's the producer of the "Teletubbies," and this film exists on about the same plane.  Unlike the TV tubs, the Oogieloves and their friends speak in words and sentences rather than in seemingly random noises, but that doesn't necessarily make them more coherent.  As with the 'tubbies, the aim of Oogieloves seems to be to fill the screen with colorful sights, constant action, and various silly sounds to appeal to very, very, very young viewers.

Certainly by now we all know what an Oogielove is, but I'll explain for the few who are uninitiated into the Oogielove phenomenon that has swept the nation.  The Oogieloves, we learn, are Gooby, Zoozie, and Toofie, three hideous giant plastic children--played by full-size adults in Teletubby-like costumes, whose faces barely move.  I've complained about the partially paralyzed look of motion-capture characters in movies like The Polar Express and Beowulf, but these decidedly analog live-action characters are even worse.  Smiles barely vary from frowns, and the three protagonists' stonefaced, deadened non-reactions to the wackiness around them makes them seem like refugees from an Antonioni film.

Like all good Ninja Turtles, each Oogielove has his or her defining talent and personality type.  Gooby loves science and wears glasses.  Zoozie loves sparkles and can speak any language (though most of her talent is dedicated to interpreting animal sounds).  Toofie is the party dude whose pants keep falling down.  The plot, so far as there is one, involves their excursion to retrieve five magical balloons as a birthday present for their pillow, Schluufy. (No word on whether Cthulhu or Azathoth will be on hand to help, but I eagerly await the presumed sequel: The Oogieloves in the Sunken City of R'lyeh.)

The movie continues in episodic structure as the three 'loves hunt down each of the five balloons while their harried father-figure, a vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar (a reference which no one in this movie's intended audience will get, and which no attending parent will find funny), waits impatiently at home.  Their mother-figure is Windy, a window with a human face (Maya Stange) not unlike the mirror in Snow White crossed with the creepy sun baby of the "Teletubbies."

The movie is so completely off its rocker that the fact that its plot is completely centered around a birthday party for a pillow is completely acceptable in context.  The balloons, which have talking faces not unlike Marshie the Marshmallow from "Homestar Runner," wind up in the hands of a cavalcade of celebrity guest stars, all of whom seem oddly happy to be there.  Cloris Leachman (as a dancer who loves polka dots), Christopher Lloyd and Jaime Pressly (as two flamenco dancers who pilot a flying sombrero with the power of dance), Cary Elwes (as an off-putting cowboy bubble salesman), Toni Braxton (as a constantly sneezing lounge singer), and oddest of all, Chazz Palminteri (as a the cheery proprietor of a milkshake shack), all bring their collective A-game to the film.  Their commitment is unearned but commendable.

The movie's main selling point is its supposed interactivity: kids are encouraged to get out of their seats, dance around, and talk back to the screen when prompted.  When a flutter of butterflies flies across the bottom of the screen, that's the clue that a song is about to begin and that it's time for the kids to get up and dance; when a bale of turtles walks across, it's time to sit down. (And yes, I did just look up those collective nouns.  It's fun to learn.)  Sometimes the turtles arrive shortly before the end of a song and it looks like the turtles are giving the movie the gong.

After a while, the prompting of the audience grows positively tiring.  The number of times we're asked to stand up and sit down rivals a game of musical chairs; sometimes we're asked to leave our seats for a mere two-line chant.  Near the end, the balloons ask us to rescue them by blowing them kisses.  Let it be known that I, a man who will still (as proven recently) applaud for Tinker Bell at the end of Peter Pan, was unable to swallow enough pride to blow kisses at a talking balloon.  I wonder if the few children who saw Oogieloves in the theater were so entranced.

Does the movie work as it was intended?  I think so; it may serve as an appropriate distraction for the toddler set, if nothing more.  Maybe they'll be rapt by the brimming romance between J. Edgar the vacuum and Windy Window.  Maybe they'll be utterly charmed by Schluufy, the pillow who uncomfortably resembles a mentally challenged child.  Maybe they'll love the climactic musical number from the talking balloons, which may as well have been called "We Couldn't Get the Rights to 'Happy Birthday'."

The movie deserves praise in one (1) area, and that is in the performances of its three lead actors.  It could not have been easy to move, let alone dance, in those gigantic costumes, but they manage, and even contribute a breakdancing number over the end credits which is actually impressive.  Because of their commitment, I'd be remiss if I didn't list their names: Misty Miller, Stephanie Renz, and Malerie Grady.

Is it really that bad?: You bet.

Pain level: Advanced.

THE LEGO MOVIE (2014): Everything is Awesome.

When we were kids we'd occasionally break out all of our action figures and playsets, set them all up opposite each other, and arrange a battle royale in which they all strategized and fought against one another.  Batman and the Ninja Turtles were on the same side.  Mario and Luigi, of course, were the Turtles' enemies, because the Brothers are plumbers and the Turtles are usually the ones getting plumbed.  The Ghostbusters sided with the Marios, as both were fighting monsters from another dimension.  The gang from The Nightmare Before Christmas sided with Batman, for obvious reasons.  The Care Bears attempted to remain neutral.

That's kind of what The Lego Movie is like.  It's a vast collection of recognizable characters from different mythologies, all living in the same city and interacting with one another.  Not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit? has there been such a gathering: there's Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Gandalf, Han Solo, both Michelangelos, and many more.  Tons of intercorporate legal haranguing will be necessary before we can get all of the Marvel heroes on the same screen, but here is the entire DC universe joining forces with Shaquille O'Neal, Abraham Lincoln, and William Shakespeare.

I never had the patience for Legos, but I always admired those who did.  They're a unique toy in that they require equal parts creativity and order.  Being able to invent is just as important as being able to follow instructions.  Each piece is tiny but integral.  That's the theme of the movie, too.

The hero, Emmet (Chris Pratt), is your average everyday working man in the town of Bricksburg, though a bit of an outcast and a dunderhead.  When he stumbles upon a strange artifact known as the Piece of Resistance, he becomes a target.  The good guys, led by wizard Vetruvius (a self-spoofing Morgan Freeman) and rebel gal Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), need the piece to defend themselves from the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who wants to use the "Kragle" (you'll see) to freeze all of Bricksburg.

The animation, perfectly mimicking stop-motion, is outstanding.  Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, fast becoming the best in their field, fill the screen with constantly dazzling images; each shot is so complex that it may take several viewings to catch every sly gag.  They don't depend heavily on their pop-culture references for laughs; their screenplay is consistently inventive and funny throughout.

The voice cast is spot-on: Pratt is a perfectly dull everyman, and Banks an appropriately standoffish love interest for him.  It's a little jarring at first to hear Ferrell as the bad guy--he doesn't often play heavies--but he does exceptional work here, particularly when his character takes an unexpected turn late in the film.  I won't reveal the actor who provides the voice for "Good Cop/Bad Cop," a policeman whose face literally changes from gentle to severe, but he delivers a performance unlike anything we've ever seen him do.  Will Arnett, as expected, makes for a completely shallow and self-absorbed Batman.

There's an inspiring lesson in the end, championing invention over conformity.  There is, of course, a correct way to assemble Legos, but after a while it's no fun unless you get to create something weird.  That weird thing is The Lego Movie, whose absence in the Best Animated Feature category at this year's Oscars is a travesty.  Few animated films are this creative and clever.  Few will appeal as potently to both kids and adults as it does.

*** 1/2 out of ****

THE INTERVIEW (2014): Beavis and Butt-head Do Pyongyang

"I still haven't watched The Interview yet because of credible threats from reviewers." -Andy Kindler

I imagine that before seeing The Interview became an act of patriotism, it was a better movie.  On its own terms, it's charming and often laugh-out-loud funny.  But it's not the champion for free speech that recent controversy has painted it as, nor is it in a class with the best comedies that have played against real-life political backdrops, like To Be Or Not To Be or The Great Dictator, or even Team America: World Police, the Trey Parker/Matt Stone puppet comedy, also set in North Korea.

It's a smart comedy about two dumb guys who are charged with assassinating a dictator.  It might have been funnier if it were a smart comedy about two smart guys.  It is, thankfully, not a celebration of the Ugly American tourist who lords his American exceptionalism over lesser furr'ners.  It takes a more surprising if less ambitious route and becomes a benign plea for good journalism in the face of unquestioned despotism.

But that's the movie's secondary ambition.  It's primarily a series of teenage boy jokes at the expense of the manhood (and heterosexuality) of its two lead characters, played by James Franco and Seth Rogen.  The gags are funny, if more juvenile than they need to be.  The elevation that the film received from its alleged targeting by North Korea unfortunately raised expectations that the film didn't meet.

Dave Skylark (Franco) is the host of a vapid talk show that specializes in encouraging celebrities to reveal their deepest secrets.  The opening scene, probably the funniest in the movie, has Skylark unwittingly prompting Eminem to come out of the closet (Mr. Mathers, it should be said, delivers an excellent deadpan performance).  When producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) demands that the show be taken in a more relevant direction, Skylark seizes upon a newspaper article which claims that North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un is a fan of his show.  The two secure an interview with the dictator, leading a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) to knock on their door and charge them with "taking him out."

Rogen and his directing partner Evan Goldberg set such a high bar with their debut film, This is the End, that it wasn't unreasonable to expect a thoughtful, complex, honest comedy about North Korea and the concept of assassination in general.  This is the End started out as a simple bro comedy and expanded far beyond that; The Interview goes the other way.  Early scenes promise a clever satire, but the rest of the movie is more concerned with the emasculation of its heroes and of its villain.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive--This is the End had plenty of bodily humor inside of its spiritual context--but by the end of The Interview, it seems that nothing has really been said, other than (1) hey, y'all, world leaders shouldn't be worshiped as gods, and (2) despite what you may have heard, Kim Jong-un has an anus.

As the enigmatic leader, Randall Park gives the most complex, interesting performance in the film, probably better than Mr. Kim deserves.  If anything, his regime has more to gain from this film than to lose; though his character has many embarrassing revelations--not the least of which is his closet affinity for Katy Perry--his character here is far more intelligent, tenacious, and crafty than the timid, oddball daddy's boy that much of the world sees.

Unfortunately he's not well met by Franco and Rogen, who give two of their lazier performances.  Franco plays Dave Skylark as what Ben Stiller might have described as "full r-word," when his character might have been more interesting as a clever but shallow opportunist.  Rogen doesn't have much of a character at all, other than as the harried straight-man to Franco's hysterics.  Women also don't have much of a role in the film, though Diana Bang is a promising talent as Kim's straight-arrow press secretary.  Lizzy Caplan is unfortunately wasted, disappearing for most of the film's second half, but very few actresses are better at playing the straight woman, and it's largely her doing that early "training" sequences for Dave and Aaron are sometimes uproarious.

Because Rogen and Goldberg are expert comedians, much of the lowbrow humor works.  I found myself laughing more than I expected at a scene in which Aaron, threatened by Kim's guards and a Siberian tiger, has to hide an important package in a very uncomfortable place.  Kim's casual seduction of Dave (likely paralleling the real-life Dennis Rodman visit) is a hoot.  The deadpan performances from James Yi and Paul Bae as stiffshirted North Korean guards lead to some of the film's best uncomfortable laughs.

But Rogen and Goldberg, probably unaware that their film would be elevated to national icon, are content to be merely funny without being provocative.  The controversy surrounding the film only reminds us how much better it could have been.  It flirts enough with the complexities of the place of North Korea in world politics for us to know that it has a brain in its head; it just doesn't use it.

** 1/2 out of ****

T.O.K.'s Top 20 Songs of 2014, or: Ariana Not So Grande, or: Iffy Azalea

We at T.O.K. confess that we have no idea how to write about music.  But we know what we don't like.  And 2014 had a lot of it.

Maybe it's just that '13 had a ton of amazing music, mainly from old timers who've still got it, like Bowie, McCartney, Marr, and They Might Be Giants.  There seems to have been little left.

Even the bad music was terrible.  The de facto artist of the year, Iggy Azalea, is as irritating and cloying as she is probably racist.  Her ubiquitous "Fancy" was catchy and earwormy enough to warrant my listening to her entire album, which is painful enough to be fodder for Guantanamo inmates.  The internet keeps insisting that I like Charli XCX, which I have faithfully tried to do.  The other song that was everywhere this year, Magic!'s "Rude," is unlistenable! but I'll cede the rest of that argument to Studio 360's Sideshow podcast, which this summer aired a very precise thesis on why the song is a crime against humanity.  Ariana Grande, another pop idol that seems to have gained popularity for no good reason, seems to have risen from the Disney ashes that respawn late-teen stars every few years or so.

I suppose Grande is just this generation's Britney Spears, but I seem to recall even Britney's music being better than hers.  I don't know if it's just that I'm an old man, but we in the '90s had much better bad music.  We had the rivaling boy bands of 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys, rivaling divas of Britney and Christina, and Limp Bizkit.  What do the kids have now to compete? (Taylor Swift, I suppose, who's growing more adept a businesswoman and less adept a songwriter with each release.)

There were a few bright spots.  Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, for the second year in a row, released a killer album ("Playland").  There were solid, though not exceptional, albums from Sharon Van Etten and Allo Darlin'.  Stars, whose "The North" was my favorite album of 2012, unfortunately underwhelmed this year, except for one song.  Copeland, one of my favorite emo bands, did not disappoint with their comeback record, "Ixora."  Veruca Salt's reunion, though short, was delightful.  U2, despite the botched publicity stunt around their album's release, came out with some of their best work in years on "Songs of Innocence." "Weird Al" Yankovic might have had the best overall album of the year with his first #1 on the Billboard charts, "Mandatory Fun."

Here are our 20 favorite songs of the year, in descending order.  Let these be an incantation against the rest of 2014.