A Horrible Way to Die

Directed by: Adam Wingard
Written by: Simon Barrett
Full credits at IMDb

You know who's worse than serial killers? Fanboys! That's the punch line to this one-gag thriller, in which Amy Seimetz meets-cute nice-guy Joe Swanberg at an AA meeting. She'll eventually take her clothes off for him (though not as quickly as Greta Gerwig would have), and then involve him in a deadly situation when her serial-killer ex escapes from custody. The miserablist A Horrible Way to Die crosscuts the awkwardly blossoming romance between these two troubled types with the tastefully edited road-trip rampage of an unleashed sociopath with a large Internet following. (AJ Bowen plays this mustachioed schlub, who, in a different context, could pass for a character in a Joe Swanberg movie.) It's mumblecore with homicidal tendencies.

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Conan the Barbarbian

Directed by: Marcus Nispel
Written by: Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Sean Hood
Full credits at IMDb

Of course Lionsgate would tap Marcus Nispel to direct this, right? The Platinum Dunes hack-for-hire has become the modern master of the schlockhouse reboot. Proving he could capably revive the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw franchises, why not move him on to some other cheesy 80s property like Conan? This new movie has been in the works for almost a decade, as part of a carefully rolled out rebranding of the Conan character, who dates back to Robert E. Howard's Depression-era fantasy stories but "had grown plain weird," as Brooks Barnes recently reported. The company that owned the rights withdrew all Conan merchandise from the market in 2002, and has been slowly reintroducing new stuff ever since: new comics, a strong-selling computer game, and now the film. This carefully controlled strategy has culminated in a movie tailor-made for boys, who'll be thrilled into buying new things by the copious gore and bare breasts without being bored by things like character development or smart pacing. (Here's the structure: violence-violence-violence-exposition-violence-violence-violence. Repeat for 110 minutes.) But what's inoffensive for one demographic is exhausting, exasperating for another.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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30 Minutes or Less

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Michael Diliberti
Full credits at IMDb

[In one scene, a] lady, the stripper, reveals and then fondles her breasts when Danny McBride brings up his potential $1 million inheritance—because the very mention of money makes ladies' nipples hard? This movie is so full of unfunny misogyny and racist cliches! But maybe its characters [are] just trying on action-movie cliches. If you think about it, this is like a terrible, tone-deaf Hot Fuzz, with its characters' reverence for action movies (for movie night, Jesse Eisenberg rents Lethal Weapons I & II). They construct their lives around them; the whole ludicrous plot is based around that genre's tropes (hired assassins, car chases, bank robberies, etc.) But 30 Minutes doesn't send them up—it embraces them, then just crowds them with labored one-liners.

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Bellflower

Written & Directed by: Evan Glodell
Full credits at IMDb

"Propane is for pussies." So declares a character in the combustible Bellflower, which is fueled by blood, fire, whiskey and diesel. In his feature debut, writer-director Evan Glodell roughens his dippy romantic banalities with a post-apocalyptic aesthetic. (Because break-ups and doomsdays share that "end of the world" feeling.) Bellflower Southbys its Sundanceness, Texifies its Utah-grown clichés— it Mad Maxes them. Woodrow (Glodell) and Milly (Jessie Wiseman) meet cute in a SoCal bar by competing in a grasshopper-eating contest. "I'm building a flamethrower," he tells her, subverting the sweetness with badassery-aside from the homemade flamethrower, there's also a muscle car that shoots fire from its exhaust pipes-and foreshadowing what's to come: fuller versions of the gruesome flashes glimpsed in pre-credits jump shots, the goofy charm lost in sad violence.

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Directed by: Rupert Wyatt
Written by: Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
Full credits at IMDb

I came into this pretty intrigued by what I assumed had to be a necessarily unhappy ending, just like Revenge of the Sith couldn't end well. As a franchise-rebooting prequel to 1968's Planet of the Apes (and not 2005's Franco-directed The Ape), which famously ends with the revelation that the earth's human population has been decimated and its civilization destroyed, this movie had to climax with a great war, or a great plague, or both, or something equally depressing—a human-and-humanity-ending apocalypse. But, rather terrifically, director Rupert Wyatt makes this devastation a bittersweetly happy ending; he aligns our sympathies with the apes, and so as they battle the humans in the awesome climactic action sequence, we're rooting for them—even as they're beating up police officers and civilian bystanders. In other words, we're rooting against ourselves!

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Cowboys & Aliens

Directed by: Jon Favreau
Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hank Ostby
Full credits at IMDb

Cowboys & Aliens...lampoons the Western's archetypes, including in this case a man with no name, his unlikely pairing with a headstrong woman, a preacher with a taste for drink, a spoiled scion, local corruption, a coming railroad, and the exoticized Injun, with his painted face and strange magiks. As for symbolism, well, it feels like there's not much here. For me, potentially, the most interesting aspect of the movie was how it would play with genre, mashing up science fiction with the Western. I mean, sure, why do we so rarely see alien invasion narratives outside of the 20th century? (Besides, I suppose, 2001's apes-visitng monolith, or episodes of Doctor Who.) So, I appreciate the conceit, but it's not exactly smart, is it? I mean, is there any reason for overwriting the anxieties of one genre (race/science) onto another (race/settling down)?

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The Devil's Double

Directed by: Lee Tamahori
Written by: Michael Thomas
Full credits at IMDb

Uday Hussein and his body double Latif make a strange couple: in The Devil's Double, a smart and ontologically complex gangster movie, they represent the duality of man, the clash of id and ego, even the realization of Narcissus's longing. Indeed, Latif's tragedy is like that of the clone, who tries to assume another's identity but cannot extinguish his own...

Uday, the modern-day Arabian prince, lives like an American drug dealer, surrounded by weapons, women, drugs, cars and designer clothes; he's steeped in Western decadence down to the discotheques, where he snorts cocaine and grinds against women. “My cock is well known in Baghdad,” he tells Latif. “I love cunt more than I love God.” The Husseins are not exactly Taliban. It's like Tony Montana elevated to emir, suggesting that to idealize crime lords is to celebrate tyrants. We may love our gangsters, our tales of lavish underworld debauchery—director Lee Tamahori quotes The Godfather with a shoot-out at a vehicle checkpoint—but can the Scarface glorifiers really bring themselves to glamorize Uday Fucking Hussein? Cowardly, the movie offers them an out...

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Directed by: David Yates
Written by: Steve Kloves
Full credits at IMDb

Just two weeks ago I was saying that all American disaster movies exploit 9/11 imagery because it's our most visceral shared-iconography? Well, it's telling how very British the Harry Potter series is, that when it comes time for its own war to define a generation—equivalent to Autobots vs. Decepticons—it doesn't play off of pictures from the coalition wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or 7/7, but those of W.W. II! I guess that over there, the war on terror has a moral ambiguity it doesn't share on our shores, and so to find an example of unimpeachably righteous violence, the English have to go back to the fight against the Nazis. And so you have here students at wizardry school marching in Riefenstahlian lockstep, wearing the colorless uniforms villains have worn since the American Civil War, and Snape hissing like the emperor in Star Wars. (Which played on a Nazi aesthetic, too, right?) When Hogwarts is attacked by Voldemort's army, it looked like The Blitz, the skies all lit up with the swirling lights of exploded munitions, like van Gogh's "Starry Night" gone martial...

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Horrible Bosses

Directed by: Seth Gordon
Written by: Michael Markowitz and John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein
Full credits at IMDb

Hey, wouldn't this have been a million times better if it had been about kids trying to kill their teachers? Imagine, it's called Bad Teachers (oh, wait), and instead of a sexy dentist you have an assaultive nun, etc. etc. I mean, these characters were just little kids in big-kid bodies, playing at murder helplessly and ignorantly, armed only with knowledge from Law and Order reruns, the same way they play at everything in their lives: sex (it's pretty good!!), work (it's hard!!). I wouldn't be surprised if the script had been rewritten to turn the characters from boys to men. Written as adults, they become an archetype, The Suburban Schmuck, multiplied by three. What a resilient cliche; I remember it from the television commercials of my youth, when some poor schlub couldn't program the time on his VCR! But if I had to pick one offensive element above all others? Geez, I'd probably go with the laziness of the writing. Jamie Foxx has those three scenes as a contracted "murder consultant," and the gag seems to be that he's like a script doctor—overpaid for his pat insights. But he's also a deus ex machina; at every act break, the characters run to him and he tells them how to proceed: why not break into all your targets' homes? Or try to blackmail your boss (even though it's obvious that the time has come to call the police)?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Directed by: Michael Bay
Written by: Ehren Kruger
Full credits at IMDb

The Transformers franchise traditionally fetishizes automobiles, because it's literally "based on" a line of toy cars. But watching this third installment, I got the feeling that Michael Bay's feelings about cars have changed. The resurgent Decepticons far outnumber Autobots in Dark of the Moon; it's hard to make a movie that appreciates the automobile when most of your car-characters are bad guys, right? When one Autobot traitor declares, "Let the humans serve us or perish!" I couldn't help but think of the Decepticons as the Lemons from last week's Cars 2 who wanted to restore oil hegemony. Geez, is a Michael Bay movie really saying that cars are bad?

I mean, the Decepticons wanted to make the humans their slaves—just like cars make Americans slaves to oil? The Decepticons drooled oil, like they were literally thirsty for it. In the battle scenes, a mechanic's shop was destroyed, as well as more than one parking lot. There are battles on highways, causing accidents and widespread carnage. Are the Autobots, then, supposed to be hybrids? Or electric cars, or something? Since they're so righteous yet so underrepresented in the movie's general automobile population? Or, shit, I think I got it: since they fight with the Americans, they represent the American auto industry, don't they? And the Decepticons, the flood of foreign ("alien") competitors?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Fading of the Cries

Written & Directed by: Brian A. Metcalf
Full credits at IMDb

Brian A. Metcalf is like one of those little dogs convinced it has a big dog's body. The writer-director's Fading of the Cries, a fun horror fantasy, feels like a blockbuster despite its indie budget, demonstrating the first-time feature-director's professional experience as a photographer, storyboarder, and visual effects supervisor on myriad shorts and advertising projects. The movie tells an archetypal story of an ordinary girl plucked from obscurity and placed in extraordinary circumstances: Sarah (Hallee Hirsh) is strolling somnolent streets, sipping stolen spirits with her bestie, when a zombie mob attacks; she's rescued by a sword-wielding protector (Jordan Matthews), who whisks her around town while they're attacked by more zombies and also demons, all commanded by Mathias (Brad Dourif), a sorcerer who wants back a powerful necklace—like many fantasy narratives, the movie hinges on a magic piece of jewelry (which is totally not a ring)—from Sarah, stolen from him by her uncle (Thomas Ian Nichols), whose destructive descent into magic unfolds in parallel flashbacks.

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John Carpenter's The Ward

Directed by: John Carpenter
Written by: Michael & Shawn Rasmussen
Full credits at IMDb

Thirty years later, it looks like John Carpenter really wishes he'd helmed Halloween II; because time travel doesn't exist but Rob Zombie does, he has made John Carpenter's The Ward instead. Like Rick Rosenthal's underappreciated 1981 sequel to his slasher milestone, Carpenter's first feature in a decade is set in a hospital, emphasis on the long corridors, and it feels like a sequel, though to a movie that wasn't made: a young girl is kidnapped, hung from a ceiling, and sexually abused—she's tortured and porned—but that suffering unfolds in scattered flashbacks. John Carpenter's The Ward focuses on what happens next, the rocky recovery process.

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