The Dailies 3/29/09: Zombies, Depression and Bromances!

Welcome back to the Dailies. We’re actually going to get balls deep into four films/documentaries today, so buckle in!

Planet Terror (2007) – originally released as one-half of Grindhouse
Dir: Robert Rodriguez
Principle Actors: Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Josh Brolin, Mary Shelton

Planet Terror is a classic example of a movie in limbo; one that’s too funny to be scary and too scary to be funny. Because of this, it’s not really effective as a horror movie or a comedy. It simply exists as a bloody spectacle that’s mildly engrossing and ultimately forgettable.

In Planet Terror, like in quite a few horror movies, the plotline is simple and direct. Poisonous, zombie-creating gases are “accidentally” released into the atmosphere at a secret military base, zombies summarily ensue from the gas leak, and they wreak havoc on the surrounding area. Planet Terror isn’t exactly breaking new ground, plot-wise, though this plotline has been intact in zombie movies for over forty years now.

We follow a cadre of survivors who are seemingly impervious to the zombie gases. One is Cherry, played by former Marilyn Manson-fiancé Rose McGowan. She is a local stripper who loses one of her legs in a zombie attack towards the beginning of the film (how she does not turn into a zombie due to the attack is not explained). The other is Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), a gunslinging hombre whose mannerisms would place him more at home in a Sergio Leone film than a George Romero one. Cherry and Wray are the de-facto leaders of the surviving populace and spend the movie trying to fight off hordes of zombies who wish to eat their delicious brains.

McGowan and Rodriguez carry the film nicely, and they get some support from Josh Brolin, a vengeful doctor, and his wife Mary Shelton, a closet-lesbian housewife and mother who also works at the local hospital. Some of the best scenes in the film are the tension-filled exchanges between these two. Rodriguez does well to have some of the film set in the local hospital, where schools of patients are being treated for mysterious zombie bites. It provides a nice touch of realism to look at the practical side of zombie infestation; what would a local hospital look like with something like this going on?

The film has some major problems, however, most having to do with the zombies themselves. This is a zombie picture, after all, but the film only presents the zombies as a threat when it needs them to be. Part of what makes a zombie film work is their sheer numbers, and your empathy with the heroes in the face of overwhelming odds.

Here, the zombies are terrifying forces when the scene calls for it, and they’re easily dispatched nuisances when it doesn’t. By the end of the film, the zombies are easily destroyed, and we start to feel like they’re not really a threat to the surviving humans. In a way, they almost resemble the Mario Bros. koopa-troopas; sure, they can conceivable kill you, but as long as you have your wits about you they won’t be a problem. By its end, Planet Terror trades the zombie terror story for the Wray and Cherry love story. When the zombies fail to be a threat in a zombie movie, we’ve got significant problems.

Planet Terror was released along with Death Proof in a 2007 double-bill called Grindhouse, a notorious flop despite the involvement of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Grindhouse featured two full gory flicks with a running time a little over three hours. To top that off, it was released on Easter weekend, which isn’t a time most people want to watch films like this.

But the point of Grindhouse was to create a feeling of watching a low-rent mid 70s brutal slasher, with wooden acting and a predictable story. It really doesn’t work. The Planet Terror section of Grindhouse does the easy things (choppy film, missing reels), but it doesn’t feel old at all. There’s an unmistakable sheen of money and contemporaneousness that undermines the entire concept, so truthfully, it even fails at achieving its stated main goal.

There are good scenes in Planet Terror, and competent people at the helm. But too often, the movie stops to look in the mirror without getting to the business of being scary. If it stuck to its guns and went all out we’d have a better movie.

C

Magnolia (1999)
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Principle Actors: Tom Cruise, Phillip Baker Hall, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly

Sometimes writing a review of a truly great film can be a serious burden, because one’s words have trouble articulating its greatness. At points like that, I just want to write a one-sentence review: “See this movie”. I feel like such a review would be appropriate here.

Magnolia is a fascinating, touching, emotional study of human fragility; about people at their wits end and what they do to cope with their situations. Its characters are amazingly self-aware; they realize their problems and ineptitudes. How they deal with them and react to them serve as the basis for the film.

And what characters Magnolia has! This is one of the finest ensemble casts I’ve ever seen. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Phillip Baker Hall, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melinda Dillon, Jason Robards, Melora Walters, William H. Macy and Tom Cruise perform brilliantly and together create a web of life, death, redemption and rebirth. Every performance in this movie is excellent.

Each character is involved in a plot line and most of them intersect in one way or the other. A brief overview of them all: Hoffman is caring for a dying Jason Robards, whose son, Tom Cruise, is a “how to get laid” motivational speaker. Hoffman is tasked with getting in touch with Cruise to compel him to visit his dying father, whom he hasn’t spoken to in years. Julianne Moore plays Robards’ young trophy wife, who is struggling with the situation. Elsewhere, desperately lonely cocaine-dependent Walters forms an unlikely love with bumbling, lovable cop Reilly. Phillip Baker Hall, a game show host, is battling cancer but forces himself through a live edition of the show. A young contestant, Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) is near setting a record on the show, but rebels against his father and the other adults forcing him to participate live on the air. Meanwhile, a former participant of that same show, Donnie Smith (Macy) is also desperately alone and trying to find someone to love. Their stories all tie together in various ways. Does this make sense? There are a lot of little alleys and crevices the film ventures into as well, but I swear it makes sense while viewing it.

Though the story lines often tie together, that’s not crucial to the plot. Everyone is dealing with their own situations and their own problems; it just so happens, like in real life, that one’s problems often intersect with another’s. The movie is one long narrative that continues to build on itself for its three hour run time. It’s like a soap opera, in a way. The story cuts from character to character, and once you think, “I haven’t seen William H. Macy in a while”, that’s the point when the film cuts back to him. Unlike soap operas, Magnolia is endearing and truthful, and not cheesy and predictable.

Magnolia, on the surface, is actually a simple movie. It simply follows these characters through the course of one day. The characters are what provide the suspense and the complexity. We see them change throughout the movie and we know why they change. We understand and appreciate what they are going through. This is due to the ingenious plotline and great acting.

Explaining individual scenes is largely pointless, because they build on each other and each one is predicated on the previous scene and the next scene. Nearly every character has a breaking point in this film, and those points are so well acted and seem so organic (though we’ve been witnessing a slow burn towards them for hours) that they reach a point of sublimity.

Magnolia proves that you don’t need big locations or big stunts to make an epic film. Life itself is epic enough.

SPOILERZ AND ASIDES

One topic that has come up quite a bit in a negative way is Magnolia’s ending. At the conclusion, it starts raining frogs on the characters and actually affects the action in a few cases. People have said that the frogs ruin what had been a fundamentally human film to that point, and while I understand that viewpoint, I don’t agree with it.

Despite such an abrupt fantastical ending to the film, I feel like it’s a perfect way to end. I’ve read about the frogs being a religious allegory and so on, but I don’t look at it that way. The frogs provide such a release from the tension and emotion we’ve been following for three hours. I don’t mean to say they’re comic relief; they simply provide a feeling of closure and cleansing to the proceedings. I think the frogs are also meant to show the characters in the film that life is unpredictable, but also ridiculous, and they shouldn’t spend so much time worrying about it all. The frogs show the characters, in this way, not to be so hard on themselves.

Finally, I want to state that I’m not a big Tom Cruise guy. Most of his movies are lame dogshit. In Magnolia, he was brilliant. I have no idea why he doesn’t take challenging roles like this more often, because even amongst all of the talent in this film, he was the best part of it. Hopefully, despite the Scientology, he’ll take a few more roles that will show his acting chops and not how fast he can motorcycle away from explosions.

A

Nominated: Supporting Actor (Cruise), Original Song, Original Screenplay

I Love You, Man (2009)
Dir: John Hamburg
Principle Actors: Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg

Since Judd Apatow took the world by storm with The 40 Year Old Virgin in 2005, he and his cadre of comedic actors have been a box-office force. Though Apatow has only directed The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, he has been associated with a number of other projects and his work has had the side-effect of launching several movie careers. Any comedy that Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, and Seth Rogen are in at this point I choose to lump in with the Apatow-helmed films, which is not a knock at all. Nearly every movie since and including The 40 Year Old Virgin that these players have been involved in is hilarious, including last year’s Role Models. I preface the review this way because I Love You, Man presents a rare misfire from this group, and hopefully they can find their Midas touch again with their next project.

The film stars Paul Rudd as a newly-engaged real estate agent. He has no real guy friends, and one night he overhears his fiancé and her girlfriends talking about how Rudd will probably be clingy and needy because he has no one else to spend time with. Rudd decides he needs to start a “bromance” and goes looking for platonic guy friends.

After a few misfires (gay guys, geriatrics, soccer fanatics) he meets Jason Segel, who seems like a nice guy. The two start hanging out all the time and become best of friends. The movie is largely about the relationship between Rudd and Segel and its effect on Rudd’s impending marriage.

I Love You, Man has decent gags. The omnipresent one-liners which are often the best part of these films are here in spades. Most of them are very funny. There are very few guffaws; most of the comedic power is provided by Rudd, who is perfectly awkward and timid in his pursuit of male friends. Segel is competent as Rudd’s man-child buddy, though the script should have allowed him to let loose and be a bit more biting and sarcastic.

The story of I Love You, Man is unbelievably predictable, to the point of laziness. Other aforementioned films like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin may be predictable as well, but they arrive at their predictabilities in new and interesting ways. That is, standard movie conventions may be present, but the film takes a new approach to them.

Here we don’t get that. Rudd meets Segel, slowly begins spending too much time with him, his fiancé gets upset about it, Rudd’s relationships with both Segel and Jones begin to deteriorate, and the relationships are both repaired in the end. We even get the uber-cliché confrontation of Rudd by Jones, where she calls him out for hanging out with Segel too much and then leaves in a huff. There were no surprises about it, and to be honest, it was boring. Not even an appearance from Canadian power-trio Rush could get me back into it.

Rudd and Segel hit mostly the right notes in the film. The problems here aren’t really their fault. Unfortunately, the film is very vanilla, the storyline is easy, and big laughs are too few and far between. This is a disappointing outing from these guys, and hopefully they can get back on track with their next picture.

C

The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made (2004)
Writer: Brandon Christopher

I won’t go into too much detail on this documentary, The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. The idea is self-explanatory. This hour long documentary briefly summarizes what it terms the fifty worst movies ever created, complete with narration and clips from the offending films.

It was only an hour, and no documentary that really wants to cover its subject can be done in an hour. I wish it could have been a bit longer, because what was included was very funny and interesting. These movies look truly wretched, with the fifty entries combining both Hollywood bombs and self-produced shit that Mystery Science Theater 3000 wouldn’t even touch.

I’d like to see a documentary like this that goes into the makings of these films and why they were made in the first place. All I can say about The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made is that it was an entertaining way to spend an hour and it made me run to Wikipedia immediately after viewing to look up every single one of its entries.

B-

John Lacey