Omnibus at the movies: The Last Mistress, Traitor.

Here's a quick catch up of what I've been seeing lately that's opening in Nastyville this weekend.

Here's my thoughts on the new Catherine Breillat, Une Vieille Maitresse.

And the Don Cheadle terrorism drama Traitor.

At the movies: Mirrors

This one was a catastrophic disappointment. I've been on the Alexandre Aja train ever since Haute Tension, and I maintain that it's a work of damned near genius. His The Hills Have Eyes remake was a bloodthirsty and brilliant rethinking, and I'm eagerly anticipating his 3-D take on Piranha. But this effort, a julienning of the Korean film Geoul sokeuro and Poltergeist III, is just not up to snuff.

Kiefer Sutherland, sidelined as Jack Bauer due to the writer's strike, is an alcoholic cop recovering from accidentally killing another cop. His family life is in turmoil, and he's crashing on his sister's couch and working as a night watchman in a creepy burnt-out edifice of a department store that was once a hospital.

Anyway, there's something evil in the mirrors. The explanations are ridiculous, the dialogue is just awful, and even Kiefer is in over his head. Some of the effects are great, but the gore is often too CG-based and the final confrontation is just stupid. The only part of the film that actually feels like an Aja movie is the opening pre-credits sequence, which uses the cinemascope frame and incidental reflections in a way which remains stylistically of a piece with his amazing work on Haute and Hills. The rest feels like something some studio execs stepped on (20th Century Fox, I call you out), and the main musical theme seems to be ripping off the same bolero that The Doors' "Spanish Caravan," Jam & Spoon featuring Plavka Lonich's "Right in the Night," Fantastic Planet's "Carry on Columbus," and the main theme to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm films all rip off.

The film is thirty minutes too long by far, and surprisingly boring, especially for an R-rated horror film. What really strikes me as odd is that for a film that rips off so much of Poltergeist III, it doesn't angle for any of the really creepy mirror stuff in that film.

I will give full credit for the remarkable set work that Romania's artisans helped craft- in particular, the edifice of the Mayflower department store is a marvel. But that doesn't make up for just under two hours of shock stabs and creepy light phenomena. There's some good moments and two really gory deaths. That's about it. I still have hope for Piranha 3-D, though.

A question of grammar: "Why Me"

Queen of pageant songs Irene Cara. Synth god Giorgio Moroder. Don't forget Harold Faltermeyer and Keith Forsey. Put them together and you have absolute freakin' magic.

The chorus is where things get a bit tricky.

Why me? Why me?
Why me when I was the one who could set your heart free?
Why me? Why me?
Why me, you took all the love I gave up selfishly.

Now, does she mean that she, as the narrator of the song, gave up her love in a selfish manner, perhaps as a passive-aggressive means of controlling her lover? Or is that concluding adverb meant as an indictment of the lover (which would best be visually represented as "You took all the love I gave up, selfishly"). Either way is intriguing, though I'm guessing it's meant more as an indictment of the lover..

"Bubba wouldn't hurt me."

There's been a lot of gloom and doomery about how DVD is already a dead format. But then you get news like this.

And everything seems just a little more right with the world.

So I read this: Skinema by Chris Nieratko.

Loosely tied into the Jackass/Big Brother guys, Chris Nieratko took an ostensible porn review column and turned it into a Joe Bob Briggs-Proustian venting of his subconscious and drug-fuelled and sex-laden adventures. I admire what he accomplished, and I dig his style and utter disdain for what criticism truly requires, but I feel like there could have been more to it.

I mean, he's got a flair for picking stuff with great titles, but he jettisons an sense of giving a shit about the material, and in turn he comes off as a total asshole. He's got some wit and can tell a good story, but it can be deadening if you read it like a book. File it with your diaries, and it'll fit just fine.

My main hope after reading Skinema is that someday I will have the opportunity to publish some of my own rambling and tangential stuff. Sort of like here...

"Am I the meanest?"

Character actor Julius Carry died two days ago from pancreatic cancer. I had the fortune of seeing a 35mm print of The Last Dragon last month, and his performance as Sho'Nuff, The Shogun of Harlem, stands the tests of time. I didn't realize that he was also Lord Bowler from The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. So I'll take that as a sign to rewatch Brisco County for the first time since it initially aired, back during my first year at NYU.

True story: I was in the midst of an intimate moment in my dorm room back in the day while an episode of Brisco County was on in the background, and the guy I was with caught a glimpse of the TV and was like, "Is that Ash?"

Which is very funny if you happen to be naked at the time.

Anyway, RIP Julius Carry. Truly you were the meanest. Truly you were the prettiest. Truly you were the baddest mo-fo, low down, around this town...

So I read this: Adverbs by Daniel Handler.

I didn't really know all that much about Lemony Snicket when I was given Daniel Handler's first novel The Basic Eight, which is exceptional- like Fight Club for girls. I also dug his novel Watch Your Mouth, which was written as an opera, which isn't that much of a surprise considering Handler is an occasional Magnetic Field and you know how good ol' Stephin Merritt is about operas and such.

But it makes me ecstatic that the success of the Lemony Snicket books has allowed Daniel Handler to experiment with the form under his own name, and Adverbs is a humdinger. I don't know if it completely works, but when it hits, it does so beautifully. Adverbs is a sort of rondelay that explores love, birds, and disaster, in many different varieties.

This isn't an easy book to get in to, and at times things seem deliberately difficult. The connections between stories and characters seem arbitrary and elliptical throughout, though when everything does in fact get brought together, it adds the kind of thematic and narrative urgency that makes you want to go back and reread all that you've experienced, so that's a recommendation.