At the movies: Halloween II.

I’m amazed at how much hate is pouring out on this film, from all sorts of places. I had an ambivalent response to Robert Zombie’s take on the John Carpenter masterpiece Halloween last year, but that had more to do with having to take on established classic. With this film- that’s nowhere near the case.

Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II: nearly thirty years on and it’s still crap. It’s got Jamie Lee Curtis in one of the worst wigs in cinema history, sure, and it sticks in the back of the mind of anyone who has to go to the hospital, yes. But it’s a terrible movie.

So I guess I’m not saying much when I call Robert Zombie’s Halloween II much better than the original Halloween II. It doesn’t really hold together on a narrative plane, nor does it haunt the shadows of the daylight world the way Carpenter’s original did. But this is a film that has some interesting ideas and a nice visual sensibility (firstly, I’m glad Zombie went back to the 1.85 aspect ratio, because he was not at his best working in cinemascope on last year’s Halloween). It’s got several incredibly brutal kills (including a face stomping that makes you forget about American History X and actually manages to rival Irreversible in terms of ‘did I just see snuff footage in the theatre?’ provocation) and a fairly game cast (with Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris, and one-scene wonder Margot Kidder doing most of the heavy lifting). But more than that, it’s got a real sense of free-form ‘anything can happen’ madness afoot.

The pretentious ghostly visions don’t bother me at all (and truthfully, I’d like to see a little more pretension in all movies. Nobody has ever blundered into transcendence by keeping the bar low), and I’m always happy to see Sheri Moon Zombie in any film (does no one else remember that hers was the best performance in the previous film?). Malcolm McDowell’s scenes feel tacked on (and they were), though his interaction with Weird Al Yankovic is kind of priceless.

My one main criticism of this film is that it never really explains why both Michael and Laurie are having these ghostly visions at the same time. The character of Deborah Myers was horrified by Michael’s actions (so much so that she killed herself), but now she is the embodiment of the death urge? In the meantime, she’s gone shakti on us? Perhaps a clearer DVD cut can fix some of this, but I’ll still gladly take this over Rosenthal’s Halloween II any day of the week.

18. A case of the Beasles.

At the movies: Taking Woodstock.

Director Ang Lee likes to tell stories about people making their way out of repressive lives and finding their own paths to liberation, and Taking Woodstock fits that theme perfectly. It’s a subtle, small film that nonetheless makes late-60s hippie ideology appealing, specifically because of how it shows the impact of those ideas on a lonely life.

In 1969, Elliot Tiber (The Daily Show’s Demetri Martin) is trying to keep himself afloat while helping keep his parent’s upstate New York hotel in business. When a fledgling rock ‘n roll festival finds themselves in need of a place to take over for a few weeks, Elliot decides to open up his small town to the Woodstock nation (as well as his own compartmentalized self to the possibility of genuine smalltown eroticism- "you smell good,like an apple fritter" possibly being the best pick-up line the cinema has given us so far this year), making history in the process.

It’s a strange world we live in right now, and despite a dismissive debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Taking Woodstock is the kind of film that feels like it has a place in the modern multiplex. It takes the abstraction of liberation that the peace and love moment offered up, then shows us that working on a person-by-person basis, with the end result of making the viewer feel a little bit better about humanity when the film ends. It’s a sweet trifle of a film with great performances from Martin and Liev Schreiber (as cross-dressing former marine Vilma), and its genial sense of warm-hearted community will win you over completely.

At the movies: The Final Destination 3D.

I’m on record as being willing to watch 3D anything.

Call it a weakness for gimmicks or just being enraptured with the visual representation of physical space, I’m more than willing to luxuriate in stereoscopic cinema under just about any circumstances.

The analogy I’ll always use is The Polar Express. As a film, it’s near unwatchable. But in 3D, it’s pretty fascinating to look at and to experience.

So take that perspective, and apply it to something that I really love- in this instance, the Final Destination films. The most egalitarian voice in contemporary cinema, these films posit that we are, in fact, mortal beings, and that moral perspective and/or actions are completely irrelevant to our own survival. That's eminently subversive these days, when movies generally are just little slices of immortality, things that flatter us into believing that by watching films, we somehow are learning skills that will let us avoid the tragedies that befall others. But whether it's cancer, some poisoning arthropod, or a randomly careening bus, we all will die at some point. It's what defines us. And the Final Destination films' baroque setpieces are cathartic experiences that even the Ancient Greeks would have responded to.

And as for those deaths: we get what could best be called a Chuck Palahniuk kill (possibly the only moment that felt like it had been trimmed for the purposes of the MPAA, because just the idea of this one is unbelievably nasty), a beauty parlor sequence which will terrify anyone even thinking of getting a pedicure at any point in their future, an escalator encounter that somehow manages to recall both Wile E. Coyote and nine inch nails' "Happiness in Slavery" video, countless flying or impaling objects, and, in the meta-moment of this year's cinema, something catastrophic that happens at a 3D film.

This is a movie that works both as a shameless deployer of pointy things at your face and as a great example of using physical space in a captivating way. Director David Ellis (who directed the series peak Final Destination 2, the superweak Asylum, the pretty awesome Cellular, and the thuddering misfire Snakes on a Plane) has a gift for playing both our perceptions and our own senses of foreboding, and there is no body part he won't make go splat, no dream he won't head off at the pass, and no viewer he won't play like a finely-tuned instrument.

At the movies: Inglourious Basterds.

A new film from Quentin Tarantino is always a big deal.

Last time around was the interesting Death Proof section of Grindhouse, a fairly artsy take on exploitation from the man who has made a fascinating career out of combining and recombining the two to often glorious results. That fusion, it seems, is the blueprint for all the man's future work, it seems; artsploitation as a defining characteristic and its own reason for being.

So now, with a big star (Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine), a big budget, and WWII-era Europe to play with, we’ve got QT getting down and dirty with big, resonating chunks of human history and hewing out a world where loving the movies isn’t just the right thing to do, but the thing that may save your life.

In the midst of occupied France, smack dab in the midst of World War II, a secret phalanx of elite Jewish-American soldiers are on a mission to sow the seeds of chaos and fear throughout the occupying Nazi forces. At the same time, a dedicated group of resistance fighters and British operatives are trying to strike a decisive blow against the German High Command. And a woman, survivor of a massacre that obliterated her family, happens to meet cute with the means of eliminating the upper echelons of Nazi power. When the paths of the soldiers, the Nazis, the woman, and the fate of the world happen to intersect at a moviehouse smack dab in the middle of Paris, all hell will break loose.

It all comes down to a chance for Tarantino to play loose with history and wage a cinephilic act of vengeance on Nazis that riffs on Carrie, Raiders of The Lost Ark, Confessions of a Trickbaby, and the actual scientific properties of nitrate film stock.

The titular squad of Basterds isn’t nearly in as much of the film as you’d expect, but that’s okay; like a master chef, Tarantino knows for the most part how to keep his ingredients in balance. There’s a masterful scene involving the occupants of a bar that would have made Alfred Hitchcock jealous, and a sequence set to David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder’s “Putting Out Fire (Cat People)” that is just magnificent.

Inglourious Basterds isn’t the utter masterpiece of Verhoeven’s Black Book (which you should go see, as soon as possible), but it’s a strange animal that makes for generally enjoyable viewing and that provides a different kind of experience for you.

It’s also a film that is using a very specific milieu (WWII) and plays out using the tropes of down n’ dirty exploitation films, which means that it’s going to offend a lot of people. Being a Tarantino film means it’s going to be experienced by a huge audience in comparison to all the component parts that comprise its foundation, and it’s much more fitting to look at these Basterds as a bigger-budget version of the Nazisploitation films of the 70s rather than going back to ‘traditional’ WWII cinema. Keep that in mind, because this film certainly is not for everyone. Though truthfully, Life is Beautiful is a much more offensive take on the Jewish experience during WWII.

Putting out fire... and doing it- rough.

I love the fact that Inglourious Basterds is making millions of people aware of "Putting Out Fire," the magnificent David Bowie/Giorgio Moroder collaboration that served as theme to the 1982 Cat People. But here is Miss Tina Turner turning this song out. Has this ever been released anywhere? And if not, that's a shame.

17. What hot chicken does.