Author Archives: J Caleb Mozzocco

Who knew a cautionary tale about illegal river pollution could be this wildly entertaining? In 2000, an American on a South Korean military base instructs his employee to empty hundreds of old, dusty bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River against regulation and, six years, later, a gigantic monster emerges to wreak havoc.

Said monster is an interesting looking creature. About the size of a small bus and tadpole shaped, it has two massive frog-like legs, a long, whip-like prehensile tail and a half-dozen other little tails jutting off it’s hulking body.

It’s impressively designed and even more impressively rendered on computer. Director Bong Joon-ho eschews the Jaws/Alien strategy of hiding the monster through most of the movie to build suspense; this amphibious beast emerges almost immediately, and engages a thrilling, broad daylight attack on a crowd of people enjoying the river. Bong’s confident in his monster–no hiding him in rain, darkness or fog ala the Jurassic Parks or that Godzilla abomination–the river monster is on full display throughout, and the animation holds up incredibly well, through the very end of the film (Its death scene is less than convincing in its veracity, but then, the movie’s over at that point anyway).
Continue reading →

I imagine I would have learned to spell and read and count just fine without the Muppets, just as I would have whiled away hours watching something else on television without Jim Henson there to provide it for me, but, as it turns out, my life was enormously impacted by the man who gave life to a sock-like frog.

I learned to count with the Count, and to spell with Oscar, Big Bird and Cookie Monster.

I learned about getting along with others (and about gay people) with Bert and Ernie.

The first prime-time show I remember watching with my family was The Muppet Show, which also introduced me to my first celebrities.

I used to be afraid of Skekses from The Dark Crystal stealing me from my bed during naptime.
Continue reading →

Julianne Nicholson, probably best known for her role as the hard-nosed, pixie-haired Detective Wheeler on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, is Nicole Reilly, a freckle-faced, devout Catholic New York transplant from Missoula. She has a drawer full of flannel pajamas, although she never wears them herself.

“I guess someone told my dad that girls liked flannel pajamas,” she explains to smooth-talking PR guy Stuart Sawyer (Weeds‘ Justin Kirk), “and nobody ever told him any different.” The exchange is just one small part of their courtship, an interesting moment in the relationship that the film chronicles, but is it the most important moment in the film?

No, not really. So why’s it called Flannel Pajamas? I don’t know – because Nicole and Stuart is a stupid name for a movie?
Continue reading →

If you go to the Wexner Center to watch this documentary about the Chinese clothing factories that provide the West with jeans, be careful what you wear to the screening.

If you’re wearing jeans or denim while you’re sitting there watching the story of Little Jasmine unspool, you’ll probably start to feel uncomfortable about ten minutes into it.

By the time the credits roll and the lights come on, you may feel more comfortable walking out of the theater in your underwear than in jeans that so many Chinese women suffered to put into your wardrobe.
Continue reading →

The legendary soldier culture of ancient Sparta and its battle at Thermopylae provided the perfect subject matter for comic book creator Frank Miller, an ideal story through which to express his manly-man worldview, his penchant for arresting violence and his increasingly right-leaning politics.

The former Batman and Daredevil artist tackled the topic in his late ‘90s graphic novel 300, and now writer/director Zack Snyder (he of the Dawn of the Dead remake) has turned it into a feature film, closely following Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City formula of sticking as close to the source material as possible, and doing most of the work in front of green screens.

It’s hard to imagine a more slavish adaptation. Snyder seems to have used the graphic novel as storyboards, and he’s lovingly re-created whole panels from it. He and his three-person screenwriting team have transposed all of the narration and dialogue, for the most party word for word. Absolutely nothing is subtracted from Miller’s comics, and relatively little is added or changed.
Continue reading →

“There’s something quite delicious about writing the first words of a story, ” the accented voice of Renée Zellweger rings out at the very beginning of Miss Potter, “you never quite know where they’ll take you.”

That might very well be true for a lot of writers, including the one she plays here, but it certainly doesn’t apply to this particular story. Given that Zellweger stars as Beatrix Potter, one of the most revered children’s authors and artists of the last century, we know exactly where this story will take us.

So there’s very little in the way of suspense in the early scenes of the prosaically titled Miss Potter (Wouldn’t The Tale of Beatrix Potter have been a more appropriate title, given the strict formula after which she titled almost every one of her own stories?).
Continue reading →

David Fincher has a lot to answer for.

While he’s not directly responsible for all of the formulaic, empty-headed serial killer and horror movies of the past decade, his stylishly directed 1995 Se7en proved so popular and influential that it heavily informed just about every movie about someone killing someone else that came after it.

In the absence of an apology, I’ll gladly settle for Zodiac, which sees Fincher returning to the subject matter that made him his name, but rather than a dour and demented creepshow, it’s a well-acted period piece police procedural; an endless episode of Law and Order with seventies style and occasionally virtuoso visuals packed between the suspect interviews of ever-changing date-stamps.
Continue reading →

MP3: “Stackolee” by Samuel L Jackson

Craig Brewer follows his 2005 critical darling Hustle & Flow with a deeply weird but ultimately (and improbably) fun and funny film, one which seems to need it’s own new genre just to be classified in—call it inspirational exploitation.

The title refers to one of the main characters’ name for the voice in his head that calls up negative emotions and can’t be dismissed, although drink, the blues and the friendship of someone similarly afflicted can certainly help drown it out.

It’s a voice that Christina Ricci’s sexually-abused Rae is pretty familiar with, and for her it means ominous flashbacks that somehow translate into a sort of raging, painful nymphomania that nothing save doing it with whoever’s nearest can calm.

I don’t know enough about human psychology to speak to how accurate Brewer’s take on the causes and symptoms of nymphomania really is, but my initial reaction is that it can’t be very; he studiously avoids ever actually using the word “nymphomania,” contributing to the tall tale-like unreality of the film, which is full of superstitious characters.
Continue reading →

Pauline Kael, the patron saint of film critics, once famously referred to An Officer and a Gentleman thusly: “It’s crap, but it’s crap on a motorcycle.” Writer/director Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider may just be the ultimate crap on a motorcycle movie.

Yes it’s deeply stupid, and yes it’s full of shoddily created special effects and dozens of scenes that look like homages to other similarly crappy, CGI-filled movies. It’s still on a motorcycle.

And what a motorcycle it is. Ghost Rider’s bike comes when he whistles for it, it rides up the sheer sides of buildings and on the surface of water (beat that, Jesus!), and, when G.R. places his flaming, skeletal hands on it and says “Aaaaargh!”, it automatically pimps itself into a weird-ass monster bike with flaming wheels and a face like it’s rider.
Continue reading →

The first image that awkwardly-titled, based-on-a-true-story spy thriller Breach throws at the viewer is news footage of ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft announcing, during one of his many grandstanding press conferences, the capture of Robert Hanssen, America’s most successful double-agent, who worked as a mole inside the FBI for years before finally being brought down in February of 2001.

There are few faces more divisive and polarizing than that of Ashcroft, so it’s perhaps as good a place as any for Shattered Glass director Billy Ray to begin his tale, as it is essentially a story about reluctantly sympathizing with a devil, a man who one could love or hate depending on the angle you view him from and how much you know about him.

Hanssen is an evil scumbag who betrayed his country, costing it billions of dollars in damage and at least three agents their lives, sure. But he was also brilliant, clear-sighted and easy to admire, as the young agent assigned to catch him, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillipe) comes to find out.
Continue reading →