Author Archives: J Caleb Mozzocco

Few films demand sequels less emphatically than Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 28 Days Later, a rather unlikely foundation for a franchise.

Their smart, savvy and occasionally even beautiful horror film ended with finality few in the genre do (With either a happy ending or an unhappy ending, depending on which cut of the film you saw). But more importantly, it set off the current zombie craze that, five years later, is stronger than ever.

In a sense, every zombie movie to follow Boyle and Garland’s has been a sequel to it; even 2004’s Dawn of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead (a remake of and an fourth installment of zombie cinema’s most prestigiously pedigreed franchise, respectively), seemed to be spiritual sequels to 28 Days Later more so than Night of the Living Dead.

The biggest surprise about 28 Weeks Later then is that not only is it not awful, but that it’s actually quite good. It certainly lacks the originality of its predecessor, which benefited from being the only game in town for zombie movies, just as it lacks the creators and cast of the original, but it’s as worthy a successor as could be made, given the superfluous nature of a sequel to 28 Days Later.
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Apparently Sam Raimi doesn’t realize the way these big film franchises usually work, with a predictability approaching an ironclad rule–these things are supposed to get worse and worse, not better and better. Sequels are almost always worse than the originals, and certainly by the point you reach the third film in a superhero franchise, things are supposed to start rapidly falling apart (It was the third Superman movie, for example, that introduced Richard Pryor as the Man of Steel’s sidekick, and the third Batman film in which Joel Schumacher inherited the reins from Tim Burton).

Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 actually improved upon the original, and this third installment offers no dip in quality–the creators are unchanged, the cast is unchanged, the lived-in New York City setting is unchanged, and the tone that blends elements of drama, horror, high comedy and special effects-laden action is unchanged.
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Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood output bears the distinction of being some of the most totally awesome terrible movies ever produced. Showgirls, Basic Instinct RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers–none of these are what you might call “good” movies, or even “not completely awful” movies, but they’re also all modern classics; bad movies everyone’s seen and a lot of people can watch over and over again (I’m almost ashamed to admit how many times I’ve seen Total Recall in the last 17 years).

Before moving to the states to make some of Hollywood’s best bad movies, Verhoeven turned out more respectable genre fare in his home country, like 1980’s Spetters and ’83’s The Fourth Man (Which the Wexner Center screened a few years back), plus Dutch World War II film Soldier in Orange.

Last year’s Zwartboek (Black Book) found the director back in the Netherlands, working with his long-time Dutch collaborator Gerard Soeteman on another WWII film focusing on the Dutch Resistance, one which applies all the lessons of the Hollywood action flicks and thriller he’s picked up (and mastered) over the years to the subject matter he first explored in Soldier in Orange.
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It should come as no real surprise that The Condemned, a WWE Films vehicle starring the WWE’s Steve Austin, is a terrible film.

I was quite caught off guard by how terrible it was, however, and the many, surprising ways in which it is terrible. Not content to simply be an unredeemably bad movie, The Condemned goes to great lengths to convey the fact to the audience that the creators know it’s a bad movie, they feel bad about the fact that they made it and look, it’s just as much our fault as it is theirs–after all, we keep showing up for shit like this, cash in hands.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say that Deep Focus Film Fest founder, programmer, director, promoter and flier-passer-outter Melissa Starker, currently the assistant editor of local weekly Alive!, is a friend and former co-worker of mine. So there’s a chance I might be biased in her favor when reporting on endeavors of hers, like this year’s Deep Focus, which kicks off in a matter of hours.

But the festival is sponsored by The Dispatch Printing Company and Alive!, which fired me from their employ for yet-to-be-revealed reasons about a year and half ago. So there’s a chance I might be biased against any endeavors they sponsor.

So I imagine those two things cancel each other out, and you can all assume I’m being totally objective here, right?

Okay, cool.

So The Deep Focus Film Fest is in its third year now, which is still relatively young. In the past two years, it brought some of your favorite movies to Columbus before they managed to snag regular theater engagements, like Brick, District B13, The Aristocrats, Murder Ball and My Summer of Love. Looking back, Deep Focus sure managed to anticipate what would be indie hits and bring them to the city’s attention months before they’d otherwise have arrived.
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A few years back Hollywood saw a surge of ‘stealth remakes,’ movies that took their plots from previous films while keeping the fact that they were even remakes on the D.L. Think 2002’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing, which rewrote Can’t Buy Me Love for a new generation of teens, or 2005’s Guess Who, which dumbed down Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to see if Ashton Kutcher was this generation’s Sideney Poitier (He wasn’t).

In the same tradition comes Disturbia, although instead of an ’80s teen comedy or a ’60s melodrama, it’s remaking an Alfred Hitchcock classic, and it doesn’t even bother giving screenplay credit to John Michael Hayes or Cornell Woolrich, who wrote 1954’s Rear Window, which Disturbia so closely resembles.

In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart was a housebound photographer who fought cabin fever by spying on his neighbors, until he began to suspect one of them may be a murderer, and he recruited his friends to help him investigate. In Disturbia, Shia LaBeouf is a housebound teenager who fights cabin fever by spying on his neighbors, until he begins to suspect one of them may be a murderer, and he recruits his friends to help him investigate.
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When the theater went dark after Inland Empire, my first thought was, “Oh shit, I have to write a review of that, don’t I?”

My friend who saw it with me immediately pointed and laughed at me and my predicament of having to make enough sense out of it to fake my way through a few paragraphs. Another friend who had seen it said it was “essentially a three-hour experimental film.” And I’d seen at least one critic refer to it as more of a video installation than an actual film-film.

I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but on the David Lynch Scale of Totally Fucked Up Shit, with The Straight Story being a 1 and Mulholland Dr a 10, Inland Empire is an easy 25. The lack of a cohesive story or a less random narrative can be frustrating because there is a fairly solid framing sequence (actually, two or three framing sequences around one another, like a series of parentheses), and enough of a story that at times it seems like all the clues are there to figure out if you spend enough time with the film (as in Mulholland Dr).

But at other times it just seems like Lynch is throwing in random craziness because he thinks it’s funny. For example, the film’s joyous end-credits sequence involves a capuchin monkey and a lumberjack sawing on a log while dancers lip synch a Nina Simone song around him.
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Like two friends daring one another to take it a step further, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez dispense with the pretense of simply making movies that nod to the lurid, exploitive ones of their misspent youths and actually create a double feature of the sort that might have played at the grindhouses young Quentin and Robert may have frequented. Hell, it’s all right there in the title, isn’t it?

Like Tarantino’s Kill Bills, which were little more than a comfortable cinematic quilt stitched together from homages, allusions and straight samples of ’70s genre entertainment, Grindhouse is a valentine to the era, a museum of retro pop culture curated by an aficionado and tour-guided by a boisterous carnival barker.

And like 1995’s Four Rooms (which the pair directed the very best bits of), it’s an anthology picture showcasing A-List directorial talent, with Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Rob Zombie (House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects) and Rodriguez himself providing trailers for four outrageous films that have to be made (Particularly Rodriguez’s; I’ll say nothing more of these for risk of spoiling their awesomeness).
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Pity poor Kevin Munroe. The writer/director had the unenviable task of crafting a coherent and, his studio masters hoped, successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film.

While comic book superhero films are always something of a challenge, seeing as their makers are often tasked with boiling decades worth of stories from several different media into a single story, in a way the turtles present an even greater challenge, as their fan base is so wildly divergent. There’s the adult fans of the original dark, violent indie comic book series. There’s the younger adult fan base who grew up with the cartoon and toys of the late ’80s and early ’90s. And then there are all the little kids who are fans of the current turtles cartoons and toys.

Yikes.

Munroe attacks the problem head on, trying to make his film all things to all fans. Trying to please everyone is almost always a recipe for disaster.

Now congratulate Kevin Munroe, because he succeeds wildly with the new TMNT, the fourth turtles film, and the first in fourteen years.
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Muppets can do much more than educate youngsters and reinvent Vaudeville-style variety shows for a new generation. The particular combination of puppetry and filmmaking that Jim Henson devoted himself to is also uniquely suited to fantasy world-building, as the second installment of Muppets, Music & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy demonstrates.

The day-long program will climax at 7 p.m. with back-to-back screenings of two of the brightest spots of ’80s fantasy film, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, both of which owe a great deal to designer Brian Froud.

1982’s The Dark Crystal is an incredible visual accomplishment, creating an entire alien world without a single human being visible (Unless you count those long-shots of Jen running). The story seems birthed of the same post-Toelkein, Joseph Campbell-ian spirit of the ’70s that Star Wars was, focusing as it does on an invented universal myth. And it’s a myth that comes complete with a New Age-y lesson about living with others that wouldn’t be out of place on Sesame Street.
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