Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

So who’s to take the blame for the stormy weather?
You’re never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze.
—Sonic Youth, Teenage Riot

If you’re looking for an upside to the last few years of endless war and terror in the world then how about this: at least it forced novelist J.K. Rowling into a thankfully serious turn in her otherwise whimsical novels of teen-aged wizards. Written during the unsettling time following the 9-11 attacks, the novel and now the film do an excellent job of capturing that uneasy quiet before the storm of full-on war, when the promise of Bad Things loom around every corner. I don’t care at all for Fantasy as a genre but the addition of modern angst and sensibilities helped to turn what could have otherwise been one of countless wizard stories into something that feels far more worthwhile.

Rising well above being merely the inverted novelization style of cash-in that began the Potter film franchise, the latest entry is brisk and attractive but still pretty emotionally satisfying. If you’ve seen either of the previous two Potter films, you’ll be happy to see that it continues the practice of being beautiful looking, exceptionally well-acted and written. It’s also impressively paced considering the size of the source material (why couldn’t the LORD OF THE RINGS films have felt this smooth?) and while the film series still seems to just miss Rowling’s infectious charm this is a good step forward for the stewards of the film wing of the Potter juggernaut in their search to find their own feet. While we do lose some of the texture and character of the Potter world, ORDER OF THE PHOENIX director David Yeats gives us hope that it’s solid craftsmanship that will fit the square Potter-peg into the circular cinema-hole.

As Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and friends return, it’s time for them to reach the angsty, snogging, and rebellious section of their story. Their newest antagonist is Hogwart’s latest dark arts teacher, the unfortunately named, pink-sweater wearing, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton). Priggish, and slavishly devoted to those in power, Umbridge’s concern is not only maintaining the status quo but moving the social clock back a click or two. While the wizard world refuses to admit their old enemy has returned, you can’t help but see the modern parallels as Umbridge, who personifies the essence of 1950′s style Conservatism, returns to the seat of unquestioned power usurping the more broad-minded and modern Headmaster, the wizard Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). And no, I do not believe that George Bush is Lord Voldemort but he certainly helps me understand Potter’s sense of dread and his uncertainty of how effective his attempts to organize and in any way rebel against the dark clouds gathering around his way of life will ultimately be. So if Bush is good for anything, he’s helped me to enjoy the new Harry Potter film. Bravo, sir.

The final Dumbledore v. Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) showdown is absolutely gorgeous, and easily fulfills the promise of the grown-up Big Magic that we’ve been teased with throughout the previous films. Here, you can see how easy it would be for the film makers to just go soft and rely on their special effects budgets and like a lazy contestant on Top Chef whose imagination has failed them, they could just stuff their dish with as much truffle oil and foie gras as their budget will allow. They’ve got their hands on the greatest actors of a generation and the rights to the biggest cash cow in modern literature, so it would be very easy for the producers to keep calling in the low-grade Spielberg disciples and just coast into their new, ruby-encrusted palaces, but you can see that they’re actually trying here and that in itself is enough to earn my respect. The bright lights and pretty colors of the film’s final sequence are mesmerizing but unlike the summer blockbusters that we’re used to, the finale isn’t just there to distract you from the short-comings of the film-makers imagination, it’s what the preceding events have led up to, and that they still bring it all back to Harry’s emotional/moral journey and keep the whole thing relevant and meaningful is no small accomplishment.

That said, and you’ll have to forgive me for a quick geek out… man, you have Helena Bonham Carter standing there and perfectly cast to boot, so why does she only have four lines of dialogue? There’s been no greater step by the film-makers at carving out their own identity than their history of creative casting. It fills my black heart with delight to watch Alan Rickman’s Snape commit random acts of violence on school children and luckily he’s in PHOENIX at least twice as much as he was in GOBLET, which sadly means he’s only on-screen for about five minutes. As the film’s pacing is so lean I feel we could maybe sacrifice a moment or to two to let the film breathe and let him smack Ron Weasely (Rupert Grint) around a little bit more. Or maybe just one or two more scenes of Maggie Smith looking at someone disapprovingly. Meanwhile, watching the lead actors Radcliffe, Grint and Emma Watson, grow into adulthood has been one of the more charming aspects of the series and through some stupendous luck they’ve all turned out to be talented and attractive. What are the odds that three cute little child actors would grow up to be sane, talented and attractive young adults? It may be that my take on this is distinctly American but with their enormous cast of child actors they’ve gotten tremendously lucky. Also, it should be mentioned that the newest addition of Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) is very charming but through no fault of this young actor I still prefer the Luna I imagined from the novels. Her character is just one of the aspects of this world best left in the ether of one’s imagination.

Admittedly, and obviously you can’t and shouldn’t fit all of a 900-page novel into a two/three-hour film. I don’t need to see a re-enactment of that one time when Neville gave Harry the spouting box of lying ginger-fruit or whatever, but at times I have to wonder whether or not I would be able to understand or even care about any of this had I not followed along in the books. I know it’s a film about the lives and loves of magical teenagers but even in a world of Deluminators and Occulemency can there still be such a thing as plausibility? The art department does a fantastic job of creating truly frightening villains, but it does just seem odd that they keep losing out to a squad of 15-year-olds and even more so once these scenes are pulled from the vagueness of one’s imagination. The book is pretty overwrought when it comes to the sorrow and the teenage angst, which is appropriate for a sad tale of angsty teenagers, and the film does a fine job of honing that angst into an understandable if slightly less fulfilling experience.

Halloween (2007)

“If that’s your best, your best won’t do…” –Twisted Sister

Starting this venture into film criticism, it’s probably time I set my baseline for what I consider a bad movie. I didn’t want to pick some lame, inconsequential Uwe Boll film that no one ever cared about, as that’s both obvious and dull, and so I’ve been hoping for something earnestly made and honestly dreadful to tee off on.

Thankfully, Rob Zombie has just made another movie.

I should probably admit that with the exception of the original, excellent TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, I can’t think of a single slasher film I would recommend without serious reservations and that includes John Carpenter‘s original HALLOWEEN. I have no patience for brutality and, moreover, slasher films are formulaic bores. Place pretty, talentless actress and friends in non-standard setting. Add sneaky, preternatural killer and watch everyone die horribly. Repeat ad nauseum for thirty god damn years.

I don’t want to sit here and condemn a film for emulating a genre that I dislike, and luckily I don’t have to; HALLOWEEN is so awful that anyone can hate it. I certainly understand and respect another person’s love for film and the desire to make them but this man just doesn’t have the chops. Being a rock star entitles you to trash hotel rooms and snort high-grade cocaine off the lady parts of your choosing. End of list. It does not entitle you to ignore the fact that you could painlessly edit out the first 45 minutes of your film.

I’m not a horror film purist, and so I don’t particularly care if Zombie reinvents Michael Myers’s background and transforms him into the sad product of a dysfunctional, redneck household, but I don’t understand why he would. If HALLOWEEN is a love letter to the original film, then shouldn’t at least Zombie care that he’s completely demystifying Carpenter’s invention? Originally billed as The Shape, Myers was the bogeyman, even his doctor called him “it” as opposed to “him.” But according to Zombie, Michael Myers murders people because his step-father was a drunken hillbilly and his mother was a stripper. As if this is in any way a sensible explanation for why Myers shreds high school girls like a puppy shreds a box of Kleenex. According to my research, as the original HALLOWEEN franchise progressed/degraded there were half-hearted explanations for Myers’s evil involving druids and secret government laboratories, but that’s still less ridiculous than Zombie’s “insights” into the human condition.

Aside from the fact that this back story is painfully cliched, it’s far more aggravating that it’s so incompetently told. Most noticeable is the leaden pacing and jaw-dropping dialogue. In the feels-longer-than-it-is opening scene, respected character actor William Forsythe taunts his wife (Sheri Moon Zombie) with the prospect that he’ll search out a particular waitress and maybe “choke my chicken and purge my snorkel all over them flappy-ass tits.” This is an actual line of dialogue in a film that exists in our universe and that’s far more mind blowing than anything I witnessed in INLAND EMPIRE. Yes, having that man as your father figure is probably not conducive to healthy self-esteem, but I think it’s far more likely to produce a very similar, boorish drunk than something as interesting as evil personified. However, I will admit this to Zombie, if this first scene had carried on any longer I probably would have killed somebody.

Essentially what Zombie has given us are two entirely different movies. The first is an unpleasant, poorly-conceived meditation on the making of a junior psychopath, and the second is a music-video-inspired, Reader’s Digest condensed version of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. These two unrelated films are clumsily welded together by a title frame which reads “15 years later.”

After roughly an hour we’re finally introduced to Laurie Strode, theoretically the film’s heroine. Played by Scout Taylor-Compton, Laurie looks more like a remnant of the SCREAM days of the self-referencing horror film that a genre purist like Zombie should be horrified by. She’s easily more Neve Campbell than Jamie Lee Curtis. Not that Taylor-Compton is especially bad, she isn’t. She definitely seems like she could be the next big moderately-talented, pretty young actress, but I don’t see any connection between her and the archetypal “scream queen.” In itself, it’s not a bad thing that Taylor-Compton doesn’t have the same vulnerability that Curtis had, that lost in the big world virginal glaze that set the standard for the legion of Carpenter wannabees, but it isn’t as if it’s been replaced by something more interesting. She’s just cute. That’s all.

When we’re introduced to Laurie at yet another painfully long breakfast, she taunts her mother by suggestively rubbing a finger through a bagel hole whilst breathlessly moaning that she’d been sexually molested by the local hardware store owner; that this delights her mother to no end is further proof that Rob Zombie is just not of this planet. Behavior this Zen-level weird doesn’t make me consider if this breakfast taunting is somehow connected to the snorkel-purging, chicken-choking breakfast taunting from the Myers home, it just makes me think that Zombie is a bit of a hack. If he is in fact contrasting this seemingly “nice” family to the one that spawned Myers in the first place then what exactly is the difference that he’s found? That in a healthier household, the taunted woman has a better sense of humor about crudeness?

I haven’t seen Malcolm McDowell in anything for a few years, so I’m not gonna fault an actor for picking up a paycheck, but it’s certainly hard not to pity the man when he arrives on scene with wild eyes and a stringy, Rob Zombie style hair-do to replace Donald Pleasance as the world’s most ineffective psychiatrist Samuel Loomis. And I have one particularly sniggly complaint to make, but if I’m going to take the film seriously enough to review then it’s worth wondering why it is that if Michael Myers is famous enough to elicit a media firestorm of controversy over his possible release from the mental institution then why does Dr. Loomis have to fight so hard to get anyone to care that Myers has escaped? Is it Thunderkissian commentary or just laziness that a released maniac is more interesting to the media than an escaped one?

As for the rest of the cast, does the acting even matter? How far can you take this dialogue? No one gives a “good” performance but generally everyone is better than the film deserves, or happily, than the genre demands. It’s always good to see Udo Kier, and he’s one of many cameos that won’t mean much to non-horror buffs, but the film is chock full of them. Sadly, they aren’t given much to do beyond lending Zombie some genre credibility or to bare their breasts long enough to get them spattered with blood.

While Zombie’s explanation of Myers’ fascination with the William Shatner Halloween mask is both poorly conceived and weirdly executed, it’s at least of some iconic relevance, but do we really have to investigate the origins of Michael Myers’ jumpsuit? In case you’ve been wondering, Myers murdered a jive-talking truck driver named Big Joe Grizzly (Ken Foree of DAWN OF THE DEAD fame) while he was on the toilet. Mystery solved.

With the exception of the classic HALLOWEEN theme music, which Zombie wisely relies on, the soundtrack is just awful. In a recent New York magazine interview, Zombie boasts that his slasher film isn’t built to sell a soundtrack, as was presumably the practice during the late 90’s slasher re-emergence, and I suppose this is a noble enough goal, but it doesn’t seem to be a terribly relevant one as I don’t remember anyone pushing a SAW soundtrack on me. So while it’s a non-accomplishment, there has to be a better way to achieve this than scoring your film with 80’s cheese-rock gods like Rush and (for the love of god) Nazareth. “Love Hurts”? Like the rest of the movie, the soundtrack is a creatively empty experience you’ll probably only enjoy if you yourself are Rob Zombie.

And probably the most damning thing I can say about this film is that it just isn’t scary. It may be a bit naive of me, but I still presume that frightening your audience is still somewhat the point of a horror film. Zombie seems to feel that he can trade the preternatural Myers for a far more brutal one and that it’s somehow an acceptable balance, but it simply doesn’t play out that way. Watching Myers march over and manhandle naked young girls isn’t as frightening as having him leap out of the shadows. It may seem unfair to continually reference the original, as I know Zombie has set out to create his own film, but he relies too heavily on our understanding of the source material to make his film work, and so he’s failed in that regard. To make it a Rob Zombie film he’s simply added rednecks. I would like to see this treatment for other genre classics. Here’s hoping for Rob Zombie’s THE GODFATHER starring the WWF’s Mankind as Michael Corleone and The Rock as Sonny. Sid Haig will make an excellent Luca Brasi. I will be in the front row.

Despite what Zombie may say in interviews about exploring the creation of evil in human beings, all we need to see is the ludicrous preponderance of rock star hair to understand that Zombie actually has no interest in pursuing any sort of truth about human existence and that all we really have here is sad, fan-boy, masturbation. For someone with so much love for this genre, Zombie doesn’t seem to have put any thought into elevating or even understanding this seminal slasher. Again, I have no love for the original, but to slap on such a lousy ending that fails to even attempt to strike the same mysterious final chord of the original is in itself mystifying. While doing nothing to raise my interest in the source of Michael Myers psychosis, this film certainly makes me wonder about Rob Zombie.

If this review wasn’t dismissive enough for you then send me an e-mail and I’ll see what else I can come up with.

INLAND EMPIRE

“I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don’t get it are ignorant scum.” –Steve Martin on the poor reception of Pennies from Heaven

The day after I first watched David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, I mentioned to an acquaintance that while I quite liked the film, it was an experience that he would almost certainly not enjoy and should probably be wary of stumbling into. Naturally, as sometimes happens to me after I say words to other people, he seemed a bit insulted.

In my head, I was being merciful and was trying to save this man from accidentally entering what could be one of the most boring, aggravating cinematic experiences of his life. Not that his plebeian mind couldn’t possibly appreciate a fine work of art in the way that I could. Not that his taste in films was less than discerning and not that he was, in any way, less than… but the man has BABY GENIUSES on his TiVo.

It may have been an insensitive declaration, but honestly, wouldn’t it be far, far worse to have someone all up in your face with a three-hour-long experimental film that you just HAVE to watch, “in fact, I have a copy right here. Have a seat!”

“Why?” he sputtered defiantly. “Why wouldn’t I enjoy it?” Well, let’s run through some of the basic facts, and you can decide for yourself whether or not you would be offended by my waving you off from David Lynch’s latest.

The facts of INLAND EMPIRE:

- Sometimes it’s a movie that is in Poland, other times, less so.

- Sometimes Laura Dern is one person and sometimes she is another, and sometimes she is possibly a third person and throughout all of this, there is the possibility that all of her characters are merely imagined by an entirely different character who is not Laura Dern.

- Julia Ormond is here as a spooky, potentially hypnotized, white trash psychopath and possibly a manifestation of Laura Dern’s fragile psyche. To sum up, she’s a kooky scamp who may or may not exist who sometimes uses a screw driver to stab people in their vagina.

- Laura Elena Herring appears very briefly as her shockingly attractive self and dreamily flirts with everyone around her. However, most of the time she appears as an ominous, ghostly, rabbit-headed demon.

- There are monkeys and anecdotes concerning monkeys, there are one legged women, and lumberjacks and Baltic circus performers eating hot dogs.

- There are also interrogators, murders, whores, a character known only as “the Phantom” who is either a pimp, a scorned husband or the devil; there are rumors of a gypsy curse–and most importantly–there is a “lost girl” who is trapped in a hotel room, doomed to watch a sitcom about the aforementioned rabbit-headed demons for all of eternity. Possibly this is because she had sex in this hotel room with a man who either made her feel like a whore or literally paid her money for sex; it’s not clear.

So, while it’s probably short-sighted to point someone away from such a wild film experience, that, hypothetically, could blow this square’s mind into some cosmic understanding and foster a new taste for such wicked inventions and possibly completely shatter their preconceived notions of identity and sexual politics, it’s entirely more likely that they would fall asleep within half an hour and in the future add a few more grains of salt to my film recommendations.

While many of Lynch’s favorite elements return-the logs, the lumberjacks, the angry static, the beckoning red curtains-the demons in EMPIRE don’t chase you down as aggressively as those of the TWIN PEAKS universe, they just tend to haunt the same rooms that you do. For the most part, INLAND EMPIRE is relatively slow, ponderous and as decidedly un-sexy a film as Lynch has made since THE ELEPHANT MAN. Sure, there are celebrity cameos, but I don’t think Mary Steenburgen or William H. Macy get the heart rates up the way they used to. Old men speak in Polish. People wander on icy, grainy Polish sidewalks. Laura Dern cooks scrambled eggs, stares through a hole in a silk blouse, is suddenly at a barbeque in rural California (maybe?) where her husband (maybe?) smears ketchup onto his chest as Dern looks on, horrified.

In general, my biggest complaints against INLAND EMPIRE can be summed up by a scene that takes place within the first five minutes of the film. A long time Lynch regular, the great Grace Zabriskie (the mother of Laura Palmer and almost mother-in-law of George Costanza), shows up to deliver an ominous warning about the new film that Dern’s actress character (and we the peoples) has just signed on to. Zabriskie cartoonishly spins threats of unpaid bills, brutal “fucking” murders, parables about the birth of evil and the tenuous nature of time, all while dueling extreme close ups with a very confused-looking Laura Dern (at least 70% of INLAND EMPIRE consists of Dern looking either baffled or horrified at strange people who are performing either baffling or horrifying acts), but the scene plays more as self-parody and alternates between being downright silly, pretentious and amateurish.

This is a film that Lynch shot in his free-time over the course of two years and sometimes it certainly feels that way. Being shot entirely on digital video adds certain elements to Lynch’s style- I actually quite enjoy the look of it-but it also strips him of some of the lovely cinematography he’s been able to pacify audiences with in the past. As entirely as EMPIRE’S shortcomings are exposed, Lynch doesn’t seem all that concerned with correcting them as his attention throughout the film seems to be elsewhere. His enthusiasm for the freedoms allowed to him by the medium of digital video is infectious, and his experimentation with the format buy him some elbow room with some of us anyway, but in almost every aspect, this is Lynch at his sloppiest. He’s in Ed Wood mode here, “it’s not about the small details, it’s about the big picture/we’ll fix it in the editing room/etc…” Not to mention the worst dialogue he’s written and yes, I have seen LOST HIGHWAY, thank you. Luckily for Lynch, his big ideas are pretty damned seductive and the man does some amazing things in the editing room, but these are not small complaints.

Which all begs a pretty fair question–what exactly did I like so much about INLAND EMPIRE? Well, almost everything else. This is a film about BIG IDEAS and strange ideas that I think a more guarded brain is unlikely to tolerate. This is a film as bull headed as the staunchest of Lynch’s critics, but through all of its impenetrable arrogance, there is something incredibly human, affecting and redemptive here.

While Rammstein is woefully absent from the film’s soundtrack, it still manages to flare up with a few treats like the wonderfully creepy “Ghost of Love” which Lynch himself wrote and performed. There are a few other classy tunes, all of which are surprising and effective, but for the most part, the soundtrack is either more ERASERHEAD style industrial clanging, haunting train whistles, or industrial-based orchestral music that’s the sort of dull, throbbing pulses and random ambient swooshes that, if placed on vinyl by themselves, would send the average pitchforkmedia.com reviewer into those spasms of infectious delight that drive me to, again, swear off Pitchfork for good. But it works wonderfully here, and I’d almost go so far as to say it sounds like the echoing, empty, howl of an indifferent universe but that might seem a bit overstated. So I’ll just say it’s a very nice soundtrack, indeed.

Also, it would be a huge disservice to the film not to mention just how stunningly good Laura Dern is in this. I’m not sure how the actor/director relationships work on a Lynch film, if he wrestles or coaxes or just inspires these sometimes grotesque but completely fearless performances from his leads, but they’re unlike anything else that exists in film. Jeremy Irons gets to be all haunting and detached, which is generally the only way Jeremy Irons is in any way tolerable, but it’s Dern that has to screech and moan and crawl around on Hollywood Boulevard vomiting blood and, well, she’s damn good at it. Like Sheryl Lee’s performance in FIRE WALK WITH ME, which was so insanely over the top that it’s generally, and unfairly, considered to be just downright unhinged, Dern is at that level of THIS ACTRESS GOES TO 11, and that such extremes manage to be both this effective and terrifying is nothing short of miraculous. Alternately, like Naomi Watts in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, once Dern has fully unleashed her inner Kraken, you can see that the earlier scenes where she seemed to be stiff and just generally delivering a half-assed performance are damn near as brave as all the wailing and the screaming and the bleeding. It can’t be easy for a talented actor to allow themselves to be portrayed as so seemingly talentless, no matter what the director has in mind for the later chapters, because what if he forgets about you like he did with poor Patricia Arquette in LOST HIGHWAY?

Whether or not you’re inclined to suffer any of Lynch’s wayward instincts is basically a question of whether or not you think the man has any credibility as a serious artist, and Lynch’s stubborn refusal to explain his awful behavior has plagued his career with angry film critics fuming accusations of both sexism and the more universally damning “weird for weirdness’s sake.” Most famously, Roger Ebert has never been able to forgive Lynch for Blue Velvet, and I’ll certainly admit that watching Dennis Hopper rape and humiliate Isabella Rosellini was far from one of my favorite scenes in film history, but I really don’t think Lynch rubs your nose in the bizarre or in brutal sexual violence from a lack of better ideas, or, worse because he finds it pleasurable; I believe there are recurring themes to Lynch’s films and they’re themes I appreciate and believe in. I think the man’s a romantic who firmly believes in a sense and order to the universe. It might be one that we little brains aren’t capable of fully grasping, but it’s there and it is, as the Phantom’s one-legged-sister gasps, sweeeeeet.

So, perhaps by challenging my acquaintance with INLAND EMPIRE, promising that there is in fact something of great value beneath the seemingly impenetrable layer of hellish surrealism, he’ll begin to grow curious about the film and seek it out with the intention of proving me wrong and finding the value in this weird, dark gem, but it’s almost entirely more likely that he’ll get distracted, angry and then fall asleep hating the universe, but at least it won’t be my fault.

You have been warned.

You want to know my spoiler-filled take on “what exactly happened?” swipe away at the INVISO-TEXT!

I have no fucking idea what happened. For seriously reals.