At the movies: Let The Right One In.

Oskar is a young boy dealing with his parents’ separate lives and with an escalating problem with bullies at school. He doesn’t have too many friends, that is, until he meets Eli, who is everything Oskar could have wanted in a potential girlfriend. She’s smart, self-sufficient, and a vampire. And nothing helps nurture one’s first crush like an escalating body count…

Riding a rapturous wave of response from genre enthusiasts, gorehounds, hopeless romantics, foreign film junkies, and lovers of fairy tales, Let The Right One In is the real deal. It’s a perfectly-balanced thriller, equal parts sweet and merciless, as well as the kind of dark tale that, while dealing with a child’s milieu, understands and uses the tropes that can’t help but make adult audiences shiver as well. There also hasn’t been an iceskating scene this unnerving since The Dead Zone.

If Twilight is the sensitive middle sister and HBO’s True Blood is the wild bisexual oldest sibling who just moved out of the house, then Let The Right One In is the youngest child in the theoretical family of contemporary pop culture vampirism. All share elements that draw on our desires to truly know the dark, but this adopted Swedish child has gazed deeper into the heart of what lies beyond the pale, and it wins as both an object of beauty and an instrument of cruelty.

At the movies: Ashes of Time redux.

In this moody reconstruction of his 1994 wu xia (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Curse of the Golden Flower) epic, Wong Kar-Wai (In The Mood for Love, Chungking Express) brings us a series of interconnected tales of men and women, wounded by love and betrayal, enduring recursive patterns in their lives, waiting for another chance at happiness to find them.

After the mixed response to his 2007 English-language debut My Blueberry Nights, rightfully acclaimed director Wong Kar-Wai decided to undertake a restoration of this film, but when they tried to begin the process, they found the original negatives in horrible shape, and a more radical course of action was deemed necessary. So Wong re-edited the film, adjusting the colors and eliding some moments. The digital recoloration of Christopher Doyle’s remarkable cinematography and slight tweaks and edits here and there don’t diminish any of the film’s grandeur, though they do allow it to take its thematic place amongst Wong’s more recent work (especially 2046). And because of it, the mere sight of a wicker birdcage will fill you with an immense and timeless sadness

It’s mind-boggling to audiences today to look at the cast Wong has at his disposal here. The late Leslie Cheung, both Tony Leungs (Chiu-Wai and Ka-Fai), Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung, and even Sammo Hung handling the abstract and unusual action choreography... So much has happened since then, both globally and in the lives of those icons of Hong Kong cinema; that wu xia itself is now an exportable film genre couldn’t possibly have been predicted. But it is a testament to all involved that Ashes of Time has endured as a modern classic. As dizzyingly romantic a night at the movies as one could hope for.

Forgotten dance classics: American Fade - "I'm Alive (Let's Move On)"

Something for all to keep in mind.

Do not think all is sunshine and roses. I am truthfully happy regarding Barack Obama's victory, but let's not have too much back-patting and 'haven't we come so far' discourse.

So I read these...

Now that I'm back from the NYC and re-enmeshed in the workday, I've been reading more, and I've finished quite a few in the past couple of weeks.

Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.
Pretty good, though since it's occuring in well laid-out time periods in the Dune-iverse, there aren't any big surprises. Still, I love spending time with the characters and the seventeen or so millenia in which the Dune-iverse unfolds.

The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America by Lawrence J. Epstein.
Interesting history of both the Jewish-American experience and the evolution of humor and stand-up comedy. A little dry for my taste, but still a brisk and fascinating read.

Silent Bob Speaks by Kevin Smith.
A collection of previously published pieces. Smith is a fun conversationalist and writer, but this collection feels like a cash-in. No offense to Smith, but his bloggery is more immediate and enveloping.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.
A delightful little read, full of whimsy and deadpan humor. Sort of an Afro-Caribbean Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Light in tone, and, as always with Gaiman, witty and imaginative.

At the movies: Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

In a way, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the perfect synthesis of what defines the cinema of writer/director Kevin Smith. Coarse and liberatingly filthy, it also wears its deeply-felt emotions emblazoned on its proverbial sleeve, and the two modes of thought actually combine rather nicely. It’s been a source of amusement to see the minor controversies that have risen up (from the film’s initial poster and now, its title) around the film, because it’s an American film with a truly liberated and responsible sensibility about sex, recognizing that the act of love is complex and can be recreational, nasty, liberating, profitable, or life-changing in its impact, and sometimes mixing those elements around beyond easy definition.

So why exactly do Zack and Miri make a porno? Mostly a combination of financial crisis and long-term comfortability. Bills have to get paid, and options are few and far between. So they take inspiration from what the world has given them (and an encounter with adult film star Brandon St. Randy, played here by comic treasure Justin Long) and decide to put themselves out there for the world to see. One can see many of the emotions that motivated Smith in the making of his first film, 1994’s Clerks, on display here in the ragtag “let’s put on a show” enthusiasm he gets from the cast (with special accolades due Craig Robinson, from Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, who steals every scene in the movie), and you also are allowed to see cult icon Traci Lords make peace with her past in the adult film industry. The balance between sleazy and sweet is maintained here much better than in any of Smith’s films since his 1997 masterpiece Chasing Amy, and it boggles the mind to think that a film this sweet and heartwarming can also feature one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen in a mainstream comedy. I’m talking Salo filthy. I’m talking Jackass filthy. I’m talking Sweet Movie filthy.

The first ten minutes are a bit rough, and there are some emotional shifts that seem a bit abrupt in the latter third, but for the most part, Zack and Miri is a delight. There are countless scenes which on their own could have made the movie worth seeing (the Brandon Routh/Justin Long sequences, a surprise use of Bronski Beat, a discussion of Lost, unscrupulous realtor Tom Savini, the Jermaine Stewart-scored closing credits, boating equipment from the Netherlands, and a few others), but in conjunction with one another, you have the most satisfying film Smith has made this decade. *** ½

At the movies: Poultrygeist.

When it says Troma, you know what you’re getting: gore, breasts, monsters, mutants, a representation of national diversity that makes Hollywood product look insular and unadventurous, and at least one (but often more) moment where the only response you can have is to say “well, I’ve never seen that before.” The typical Troma film, if you can even define such a thing, is like a madcap collusion between Frank Tashlin and the Marquis de Sade that works on whichever level you want it to. No setpiece too gross, not pun too outrageous, and no patience for subtlety; but still the Troma brand remains absolutely true to itself, and its take-no-prisoners style of social splat-ire doubtless will offend a significant portion of the population.

What else could we expect from a film positively enraged by the course of human life at this point in the aughts, explicitly attacking the legacy of Native American disenfranchisement, the way that food has become a corporatized industry, the Abu Gharaib photographs, and the way that entropy brings down countless social movements from the inside. Which is a remarkable agenda for a film about chicken monsters and dismemberment. There is no bodily mutilation, desecration, or violation that one could conceive of that remains unexplored during the course of Poultrygeist, and its gleeful willingness to gore up the place a little bit is a welcome breath of fresh air when you look at the disturbing ideologies splatter fans are made to implicitly support, through efforts like the Saw series or something like Quarantine, just to get a little grue.

The former frustrates because of its cruel and faux-moralistic undertones (perfectly served up for the Dr. Phil/Sarah Palin side of America), the later disgusts because of its dumbing-down and eviscerating of a quality foreign film/classic that didn’t need to be remade in the first place. And that’s where most modern horror is stuck. So even if Poultrygeist’s tone never strays far from slapstick farce rather than exploring more serious responses to horror, it still slings righteous social anger like the finest of documentary offerings and splatters the walls in ways that make this year’s Inside and Mother of Tears look restrained and dainty. Director/cowriter Lloyd Kaufman once again manages to find the gorgeous within the gruesome, and there’s no other splatter musical willing to talk about issues and sever limbs with such wit. ***