Hey kids. I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but I've been busy. Not useful-busy, not I-can't-find-time-to-write busy, just, you know, "busy." I know it's a lame excuse, but too bad. Besides, it's not like I have any readers, let alone adoring fans who I'm disappointing by not posting for four months. So, to all you purely hypothetical admirers who deserve an apology. . . Fuck you, and on with the show.

Today's Thursday, which means Movie Day. Typically, Movie Day means an hour with my shrink, followed by pasta at Bottega Fiorentina, maybe a little grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, and a movie. As it happens, I've been picking up extra Thursday evening shifts at work for the last several weeks, which has meant no Thursday movies. That, of course, has been making me cranky; and since work is a mindless, hellish, soul-sucking experience anyway, I made an early New Year's resolution a couple weeks ago not to work on my days off anymore. Needless to say, I'm in a better mood these days. (It helps that Manager Meathead was caught last week surfing porn on work computers, and the ensuing coverup Management is trying to pull looks to blow everything to shit by Christmas. Oh, and pot. I've been smoking pot again. That helps too.)

So this Thursday's flick was The Fountain, by Darren Aronofsky, whose Pi was considered the Very Best NYU Student Film of 1998, and whose Requiem for a Dream received Academy recognition as 2000's Film Every NYU Film Student Should Be Really Really Impressed With. The Fountain should be up for similar awards this year, most likely the Steven Soderbergh Award for Very Very Artsy Acheivement, Even With a Budget and Studio Backing.

My somewhat belabored point is that Darren Aronofsky is a technically and aesthetically talented filmmaker, as far as any book about making movies is concerned. I just wish he'd cut loose a bit more. I mean, every shot in Pi is mathematically determined (so I hear, anyway). I'll bet anything an analysis of Requiem for a Dream ends up in a future edition of How to Read a Film, because it's plain that Aronofsky intends to write it.

The Fountain is no different. Three different stories go on in it: in the first, set in sixteenth century Spain and Central America, a conquistador, Tomas (Hugh Jackman), is sent on a mission by Spain's Queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz) to find the Tree of Life, which will bestow eternal life on whomever drinks of its sap. The second story is set in the present day, and concerns a neurologist, Tommy (Jackman, again), searching for the miracle drug that will save his wife, Izzi (Wiesz, again), from an encroaching brain tumor. The final story takes place in, presumably, The Future, with Hugh Jackman as a bald-headed Buddist monk traveling through space with the Tree searching for the Mayan underworld of Sebulba, which is a dying star. Seriously. And they're in a snowglobe. I'm not kidding. Guest starring Rachel Weisz as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Man, this stuff is so artsy you'll shit. The movie is shot through with visuals that echo back and forth between the stories. A Moorish design on the wall behind Isabel's throne shows up later etched in glass on the door to Izzi's hospital room. Tommy's car racing into downtown Montreal becomes Tomas's horse racing to the castle. Subtle it ain't.

To be fair, this sort of gimickry is somewhat necessary in these sorts of past life movies. It's part of the tone. Unfortunately, Aronofsky treats his characters the same way. When Izzi calls Tommy "my conquistador," it feels like she's been fed a line. But Tommy takes it in stride, as though he read the script for the rest of the film.

All of that said, it's still a pretty decent, and even occasionally heartfelt film. Jackman puts in a solid performance in all of his roles, and his grief when Izzi dies (really, I'm not giving anything away with that revelation) is palpable. I can't really say the same for Weisz, but that's mostly because I don't think she's much of an actor. The film doesn't really push her, either; mostly it's content to use her face as a tableau. There are hardly any other performances worth speaking of, but that's all right, as the film is ultimately a romance.

By the final twenty minutes, it also becomes an almost lyric rumination on death and the fantasies inspired by loss. It's overly mannered, yes, but, considering how rationalization is a common defense in the face of death, its self-conscious cleverness isn't wholly inappropriate for a story that is ultimately about watching someone you love die.

Get Down

Told you I'd be back. Lucky you.

And I return bearing good news. It's been a long, hard struggle, but now our days of worry are finally over. I know, you thought you'd never be scared again. You thought Scream had sounded the death knoll. You thought Scary Movie had fitted the noose. And when they remade Psycho, you knew that nothing was sacred anymore, and horror really was dead.

And then came a nasty little low-budget knockoff of Se7en called Saw, and you got a little hope. You'd almost forgotten what you'd been missing, until you saw what it had. Crappy writing? Check. Atrocious acting? Check. Cary Elwes' maniac laughter as he hacks off his own leg? Hold. The. Phone.

Sure, there was Cabin Fever a couple of years before, but that was a fluke, right? Except then Eli Roth came back last year with Hostel, hot on the heels of a sequel to Saw, and a remake of The Hills Have Eyes that somehow was even more hideous (in a good way) that the first one.

And now, after a drawn out decade of post-modern, self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek, teeny-bopper horror crap, I think I can safely say it: the bad old days are back, kids. And I couldn't be more pleased.

A moment of confession: I haven't yet seen Cabin Fever, Hostel, Saw II, or The Hills Have Eyes. But believe me, they're in the Queue now. And what makes me gush over a handful of flicks I haven't seen yet? The bad boy they've all been leading up to: The Descent.

Oh. My. God. I've been waiting for this one for years.

The first thing you see as the movie opens is three women in a raft on a river. For anyone steeped in '70s slasher flicks, this is a big ol' flag. And if that weren't enough, right after the credits come up, we get a shot of two women in a car tooling along a lonely mountain highway in...the Appalachians.

Oh yeah. This isn't going to end well.

One of these gals is Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), who's a year away from a horrible car accident that killed her kid and I think maybe her husband. She's one of a clutch of Scottish thrill-seeking chicks who go white-water rafting and spelunking, and are led by American bitch-jock-queen Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Juno's invited everyone out to seriously rural Virginia for a little therapeutic cave-diving and female bonding. On the way to the cave, Juno, the mischevous little scamp, "forgets" the guide book and takes the girls out to an undiscovered--and hence less touristy--cave system. 'Cause, as she puts it, it ain't no fun without a little risk.

And that's about all the introductions you're gonna get. Seriously. Everyone else is cannon fodder. I'm not even sure how many people were in the group to start with. It wasn't until a couple of people had died already that I decided I ought to start learning everyone's name. Lessee, there's Sarah's friend Beth (Alex Ried), Juno's reckless "protege" Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), and a couple other girls (Saskia Mulder and MyAnna Buring) whose relationship is, to put it lightly, unclear (Really. One review I read identified them as Swedish half-sisters, and another said they were mother and daughter. I thought they were a lesbian couple. Go fig.).

Director Neil Marshall (who did 2002's Dog Soldiers, which is also pretty amazing and which I also haven't seen) ratchets up the tension as soon as everyone gets underground, lighting them in emergency flare red or Glo-Stick green, and piping them through birth-canal-sized tubes of rock. By the time one of these tubes collapses, trapping them two uncharted miles underground, my claustrophobia buttons had been mashed a few times, and I could feel my pulse through my thumb. And then Holly falls down a hole and breaks her leg, complete with splintered bone sticking out and all, and I'm writhing sympathetically in my seat. Damn, but I do miss that feeling.

Then come the cave-dwelling cannibals. Hot damn.

And that's pretty much it, plot-wise. The rest of the flick is a relentless trip to hell. But not an unstylish one. One of the best images is of the traumatized Sarah, newly risen out of a pool in the cannibals' feeding room, soaked in blood and offal, her climbing axe covered in cannibal brain-matter, and looking like both Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Sissy Spacek in Carrie. It is truly an awesome sight.

That's no accident, either. Marshall knows what he's doing, or at least what he wants to be doing. He liberally sprinkles The Descent with quotes from Nosferatu, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Day of the Dead, and any number of '70s slasher horror flicks. They're effectively used, too, not just clever film-geek wanking. This guy is definitely down with the old-school gore flick.

The movie's best quality, though, and what sets it apart from the post-Scream crap of the late '90s, is it's dedication to scaring you. From the get-go, this movie is fucking grim. Even the slumber party banter of the women before they descend is shot through with the occasional jab, and anything that may have been funny in those scenes is quickly forgotten once things get rolling. After that, I think there is exactly one joke in the rest of the movie. Beth tells it to Sarah to keep her from freaking out when she gets stuck in a narrow passageway, and the tension in her voice renders it incoherent. Down here in the caves, there's no room for funny.

One thing the Great Joe Bob always did at the end of his reviews was run through a few vital stats for the flick. I'm now going to totally rip him off. Bear with me now, this is my first time.

Eight bodies. No breasts. Neck eating. Intestine eating. Copper pipe to the face. Rock fu. Flare fu. Climbing axe fu. Blood spray. Protruding bone. Evisceration. Gratuitous violence. Gratuitous girl power. Gratuitous rotting elk. "One bat. Two bats. Fifty bats. Ha ha ha..." Flicker Award Nomination to Natalie Mendoza for killing anything that gets in her way, or at least leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Flicker Award Nomination to Shauna MacDonald for braining it with a rock rather then leaving it to be eaten by bat-people. Joe Bob Briggs Memorial Award Nomination to Neil Marshall for doin' it the drive-in way. Four stars. Uncle Ovid says check it out.

(Apologies to Joe Bob)

*tap tap*

*tap tap tap*

*tap tap crick* Aaah...

Now, we just stretch the old arms, kick aside the broken eggshells, and have a look around.

....

My, it's uh, dark. Well, okay. I can deal with that. In fact, I'd call it appropriate, all things considered.

What things would those be then? Well, they would be, well, movies. Films, motion pictures, cinematographs, or, in my preferred terminology, flicks. Hence the title Flicker Shack.

Okay, that all sounds a bit dumb. But, as I doubt anyone (let alone anyone I know) will be reading this, I'm not going to worry about it. But I will expand on it a bit, maybe get a proper mission statement out of it.

Primarily, this is a journal, of sorts. I'm not really the journal keeping type, though. I had one, which I kept pretty religiously back in eleventh grade. It lasted the whole year and read like a 'Gilmore Girls' fan piece. Jesus, it was awful. I filled the last page on the last day of school, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and buried it in the backyard. It's lain there undisturbed for the past, like, twelve years, and hopefully, will continue to do so until long after my earthly passing, at which point I hope that it's unearthed by some curious, alienated, romantic sixteen-year-old desperately in need of companionship and sympathy and a sign that someone, somewhere has felt the things he feels. God, but I hope he has the sense to burn it.

So I'm not much of a journal keeper. But I do flatter myself with the belief that I can write, and I figure that, with regular practice, I can inflate that delusion into a proper mania.

So, what to write? Well, frankly, I think a "journal" of "thoughts" and "feelings" is, in the modern parlance, "gay." So you get none of that. Instead, you get my harshly opinionated views on le cinema, or, in other words, a bunch of movie reviews. I arrived at this decision upon observing that one of my very favorite hobbies is watching movies, and another of my favorite hobbies is going on and on to anyone in earshot about what I think about them. I also think that movies make vastly more sense than real life, so I like to view life through the cinematic lens, as it were. Movie reviews, as I see it, make a nice context for commenting on the rest of my life.

Furthermore, I want to point out a couple more things about this--for lack of a better term--experiment. One, I have no training as a journalist. So no journalistic rules or integrity or fair and balanced reporting here. I read reviews, and I plan to crib from them shamelessly, as well as trailers, interviews, websites, DVD commentary, and anything else I want to. Reviews, I've noticed, seem to want to approach movies as if they existed in a vacuum of unbiased purity, accompanied only by the holy text of a press kit. They don't, for instance, ever make any mention of what they were expecting from, say, the trailer. Well, fuck that. I'm not getting a press kit, and I'm not getting paid, so I have the luxury of not giving a fuck. Flicks exist in the context of the hype surrounding them, and my own integrity requires that I acknowledge that.

Second point: I'm doing this as, as I said, an experiment. Maybe exercise is a better term. See, I'm kinda trying to establish a writing style. And the inspiration I'm drawing on is the collected work of the late, great Joe Bob Briggs. For those of you who don't know of the Great Joe Bob, he is, or rather was, the self-titled Drive-In Theater Critic of Grapevine, Texas. He had a column in the Dallas Observer for several years, and later hosted a show on, as I recall, TNT called Joe Bob's Monstervision. He was a champion of the phenomenon known as the drive-in theater, and a connosieur of the low-budget B-grade trash that seemed to get created specifically for that venue: cheap-o horror, sexploitation flicks, and the like. His columns characteristically ended with a rundown of vital stats for a film: body count, breast count, highlights of the violence depicted (called "fu," as in kung fu, chainsaw fu, meathook fu, paper shredder fu, etc.). And he made a point of sounding like a total hick throughout, which belied the fact that he knew way more about movies that most people. Highlights included his savaging of The English Patient, in which he points out the absurdity of sympathizing with a guy who decides not to save the world from Nazis because he'd rather die in the desert with his girlfriend; and his glorious review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he compares favorably and convincingly with Psycho and the films of Luis Bunuel. Monstervision was just as good. He themed his shows, usually showing double features of, say, Jaws and Orca; or the first two Phantasm movies; or Alien and, uh, whatever movie that Alien was a remake of. He'd appear at commercial breaks or whatever and give trivia about the movies and stuff. My personal favorite episode was when he showed Back to the Future I & II and, at the breaks, explained the science behind the time-traveling. Turns out Joe Bob has a pretty good grasp of relativity. Not that I'm surprised, because Joe Bob is THE MAN.

Hmm. Reading over that, I realize that I give the impression that Joe Bob Briggs is dead. That's not true. He's still got a website up, but I don't think he writes columns anymore. He abandoned writing a while ago to (ill-advisedly, I'd say) focus on his acting career. If you're interested, you can see him in Face/Off as the surgeon who does face transplants.

One last thing. I do write already, albeit sporadically. Turns out I'm pretty gifted at two things: poetry and bitchy memos. I'm also working, slowly and badly, on a novel. You've been warned.

At any rate, welcome to the Flicker Shack. I'll be back tomorrow with a review.