Last night, I settled in to watch Right At Your Door, a movie that I read a memorably positive review of about a year back. It's set in Los Angeles, just after an unidentified group of terrorists set off a series of dirty bombs. When I was a kid, I was simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to nuclear holocaust-type books and movies, especially the 'realistic' kind, with nuclear winter and rotting body parts. Based on a couple of reviews, I was expecting that sort of thing.

What I got was a movie where the husband spends the first twenty minutes risking his life to find his wife in a L.A. consumed by fear and martial law. This is pretty much what I was hoping for. A cheap B-movie about survival in a disaster area. But then the man gives up on his search and, at the first urging of Homeland Security, duct-tapes himself inside his house. Then his wife comes home and he won't let her in the house because she might be contaminated and then she'd contaminate him and so he'd die. So they spend most of the rest of the movie talking through duct-taped windows, while his wife slowly starts coughing more and more because the dirty bombs are some sort of biological weapon or something. There's also a little boy named Timmy.

About half an hour in, I completely lost interest. My girlfriend, acknowledging that the movie was completely horrible, wanted to keep watching it. So I decided to read the new issue of Esquire.

I don't usually read Esquire, but this issue of Esquire has a cover story on Barack Obama by Charles P. Pierce. I've become obsessed with reading glowing media portraits of Barack Obama. But I started reading this piece, titled The Cynic and Senator Obama, and it's one of the worst pieces of magazine writing I've ever read. The writer refers to himself as "the cynic" all through the piece. The cynic experiences car trouble. The cynic is cynical because he's never had someone to believe in before. Here are five sentences from near the beginning:

There is one point in the stump speech, however, that catches the cynic up short every time. It comes near to the end, when Obama talks about cynics. Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he’s wrong. The cynic doesn’t think he’s wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else.

It is unreadable. It's barely skimmable. It's atrocious.

So I turned by attention back to the atrocious movie. The man and wife are still talking through plastic. But then, near the end, because it's time for the movie to end, there is a twist so bad, so completely unbelievable, that it would've been more emotionally honest if everyone in the movie just stopped, looked directly at the camera, and shouted "TWIST!" in unison. Plus, I think the whole goddamned movie ripped off this post-nuclear-apocalypse episode of The Twilight Zone that I saw in the late eighties. I looked at the movie. I blinked. I looked at the magazine. I blinked again. I was surrounded by awful, awful things.

I hope that your weekend is better than this, is all I'm saying. Hell, I hope my weekend is better than this.

I don't quite know what to make of this:

Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's "Bad Lieutenant" with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.

Project, also called "Bad Lieutenant," is due to be announced at Cannes. Production will start in late summer.

Werner Herzog? Really?

Let us return then, you and I...

...to that far, far away galaxy:

A booze-fuelled Briton pretending to be Star Wars villain Darth Vader was punished Tuesday for a bizarre surprise attack on two Jedi fanatics.

Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27 -- who has a chronic alcohol problem -- donned a black bin bag for a cape and used a metal crutch for a lightsabre when he impersonated the Dark Lord of the Sith on March 25.

He then lept over the wall of a "Jedi Church" where Barney Jones and his cousin Michael were duelling with lightsabres while filming a documentary.

The fans of the Star Wars films established the "church" last year in Holyhead, northwest Wales.

Hughes hollered "Darth Vader" as he swung his crutch about, whacking Barney Jones over the head with it and punching Michael Jones in the thigh.

The Jedi are guardians of peace and justice, and the force was with them at Holyhead Magistrates' Court as district judge Andrew Shaw punished "Darth Vader" with a two-month suspended jail sentence and a 100-pound (195-dollar, 126-euro) fine.

The guardians of peace and justice? It has just occurred to me that Jedi Knights are drawn directly from Plato's Republic. They are the communistic guardians--men and women who are trained to protect and increase the good in society.

Defamer has an excellent postmortem of Speed Racer's atrocious opening weekend (it may actually have come in third at the box office, after What Happens in Vegas, which all but guarantees a sequel for the Kutcher/Diaz romantic comedy, probably called What Happens in Des Moines?). Even international moviegoers, who inexplicably fund a lot of bad Hollywood dumb-assitude, stayed away in droves.

I saw the movie, at a Saturday 10 am showing, and I have to say: it just kind of happened to me. It wasn't horrible--granted, it was way too long, and we didn't need a semi-complex discussion of economics in the middle of a car-go-vroom movie--but there was no part that was great. The visuals often descended into quickly moving panes of color against a speed-line background. I don't think getting stoned and going to see it is a very good idea, if just because of the aforementioned lecture on economics and the length of the goddamned thing (two and a half hours? Really?).

I do have to say, though, that, for the first (and probably last) time in my life, I found myself wildly attracted to Christina Ricci. I'm not sure what was going on. Maybe I just clung to her face as a giant, moon-shaped island of sanity in the midst of all the blinding flashes of color and deafening bursts of noise, but: (to paraphrase one of the most preeminent poets to ever call Seattle home) I got sprung. After leaving the movie, I wrote in a text message to a no-doubt horrified coworker that I was confused by my longing for Ricci. I believe the exact quote was "It would be like fucking a human cereal box." As though that could somehow be a good thing. And that's the only magic that Speed Racer has: It somehow made me temporarily sexually attracted to a human being who, in the movie, is little more than a shiny advertisement for nothing.

Fast version! I'm slammed with preparing our exhaustive SIFF guide for you guys, so I don't have a ton of time. But here's what's going on in the film section this week:

Andrew Wright reviews Speed Racer ("Freakishly perverse, this is an immense, Otter Pop–colored nostalgic thing that expends so much energy replicating every last widget and geegaw from its source that it forgets to be, you know, fun").

Bradley Steinbacher reviews Son of Rambow, finally arriving in theaters after serving as the opening night film of SIFF 2007 ("In Garth Jennings's admirable Son of Rambow, two fatherless boys—the sheltered and devoutly religious Will and the bullying and all-but-abandoned Lee—bond while trying to remake First Blood for a BBC competition, encountering near-death experiences, religious interference, and très cool French exchange students along the way. For both boys, the Stallone flick offers an escape—Will finds a dream of a father; Lee sees a chance to impress the brother who ignores him—and while they shoot their little remake, Son of Rambow positively soars").

I review Shotgun Stories, also a SIFF 2007 alum ("The greatest virtue of Shotgun Stories, which was coproduced by David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls), is the sun-baked cinematography by Adam Stone. From bursting cotton bolls to wan fish farms, the images are beautiful and nearly worth the price of admission. At the same time, their meditative pace exerts a dangerous inertia on the rest of the film").

Charles Mudede reviews Redbelt ("The film as a whole is not satisfying. The society of the spectacle turns out to be too simple, too obvious, too easy a challenge for a man who draws all his moral strength from the age of the heroes") and interviews Chiwetel Ejiofor.

And Paul Constant assesses My Brother Is an Only Child ("exactly the kind of stereotypical foreign movie at which casual American filmgoers turn up their noses").

Bradley Steinbacher reviews What Happens in Vegas... ("Only after the end credits start to roll is there a moment of inspired lunacy—and it's not nearly enough to make up for the drudgery that preceded it. In a word: ugh").

Lindy West writes about the challenge of going to the Valley 6 Drive-In with a platonic buddy.

For all your movie times needs: use us. Hidden away in Limited Runs this week are such offerings as the first ever French and Francophone Film Festival at the UW (with fancy 35 mm prints care of the French gov't) and Translations, Seattle's annual Transgender Film Festival. The Varsity has French slasher film Frontier(s) and the French Bond spoof OSS 117--both totally worth checking out. At Grand Illusion, prisoners meditate in Dhamma Brothers and GI Joe Stop-Motion Film Festival. And SIFF Cinema keeps truckin' out the classics in the United Artists series.

Fact #1: I love the Central Cinema, the Central District cinema pub featuring second-run movies, stone-oven pizzas, and beer and wine, all brought to your table while you watch.

Fact #2: I've been longing to re-watch Brokeback Mountain ever since Heath Ledger's stupid, awful death.

This weekend, my love for Central Cinema and longing for Brokeback Mountain overlap, with screenings Fri-Sun at 7 and 10 pm.

Hurray, boo-hoo, burp.

P.S. If Brokeback Mountain isn't gay enough for you, Sunday afternoon brings a Mother's Day brunch screening of Mommie Dearest.

Just a quick observation on blockbusters before Annie does Movie News this afternoon:

Speed Racer is currently at 35 on Metacritic, which is lower even than What Happens in Vegas, which is at 37.

I'm a total summer movie whore, though, so I'll probably see Speed Racer. In fact, I'll probably see it this weekend. And by 'probably' I mean 'definitely.'

And I finally saw Iron Man. Boy, that sure is an awfully...American...movie, ain't it?

Action figures of Heath Ledger's Joker are selling like hot cakes...

Heath Ledger may be gone, but commerce lives forever. The New York Post says toy stores across town are selling out of a plastic version of the Joker from The Dark Knight so quickly, they can’t keep shelves stocked.

The $9.99 action figure has been ending up on eBay at a substantial markup, including at least one seat of the Joker and Batman going for $55. “There are none left in the warehouse, either,” a Toys R Us employee told the paper. “You will be waiting a while if you want one.”

This just in from Cthulhu director Dan Gildark:

We were picked up by Regent Releasing for worldwide distribution which includes a theatrical platform release in Seattle and Portland (as of now I don't know the dates) it also includes pay-per-view on the Here! channel. This is the same company that just released Shelter; the biggest film they have done is Gods and Monsters. They focus on horror and gay and lesbian film.

Congrats to Dan and Grant!

Also, I kinda called it:

It wasn't long ago that a horror film with gay content would have had no hope of landing a major U.S. distributor, but in today's niche-driven industry, the sexuality of Cthulhu's main character may well prove a savvy marketing move. On the one hand, gay and lesbian film festivals have cultivated an audience that's been proven hungry for movies with gay themes, regardless of hype or production values. More and more mainstream films are testing the sexuality barrier (both Cogswell and Gildark pointed to the upcoming Brokeback Mountain, an upcoming Ang Lee Western that explores a sexual relationship between cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, as a potential crossover hit); and specialty theatrical distributors like Strand Releasing have a long history of successfully marketing art-house films with gay and lesbian content. On the other hand, fans of horror films are equally voracious for new examples of the genre, making the prospect of home video and DVD sales particularly tantalizing. The possibility of uniting the two markets isn't lost on other filmmakers: Hellbent, which is marketing itself as "the first ever gay slasher film!" is currently receiving a rolling national release, and opens in Seattle this Friday. Cthulhu may be chasing the zeitgeist.

Via Slog tipper Joe in DE.

There is no cinema in this form of isolation:

This form of isolation, however, is the ideal climate for cinema:

Filipino soldiers paid extra for being lonely on the frontline in the disputed Spratlys

PAG-ASA ISLAND, In the South China Sea: This sun-splashed island is so remote that soldiers are paid a "loneliness fee" for deployment here, and the few residents are encouraged with free meals to live in a nascent village without a single car, store or Internet access.

When a Philippine air force C130 cargo plane flew in Friday with a fresh supply of rice, beds, chessboards and a flat-screen TV, a few women hitched a ride and quickly sought out their husbands among the troops for a little personal time.

The battle for ownership of the potentially oil-rich Spratly Islands has settled into an uneasy stand-off since the last fighting, involving China and Vietnam, that killed more than 70 Vietnamese sailors in 1988. The other claimants are Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan.

But for dozens of Filipino troops and villagers on steamy Pag-asa, the biggest of seven islands and two reefs occupied by the Philippines in a swath of the South China Sea, it has been a constant struggle against isolation, broiling sun and fierce storms.

The water, the sun, the giant trees, the heat, the machine gun, the waiting and waiting--we are in the realm of Beau Travail.

You better like the superheroes. After Iron Man's $100 million dollar opening weekend, Marvel Comics has already greenlit Iron Man 2 for an April 30, 2010 release date. And then, a couple months after that, on July 4, 2010, they're releasing a Thor movie. Marvel Comics' Thor, if you're unaware, is an immortal Scandanavian who talks in an imbecilic faux-Shakespeare dialect. He is also the god of thunder.

And then, on May 6, 2011, there will be a Captain America movie. (You know who Captain America is, right?) And then, two months after that, all the characters from the Iron Man, Captain America, Thor (and possibly Hulk ) movies will be teaming up in an Avengers movie.

Despite inspiring millions of touch-free comics fan orgasms this morning, this news story makes me feel nauseous. I'd like to go on a limb and say that most of these movies will not be any good--Thor is ridiculous, and I don't know if they can sell a Captain America movie, even in President McCain's post-post-ironic, mega-Patriotic, uber-fucked America. Regardless of quality, all these movies combined will make as much money as a large South American nation's GDP.

News:

Wee but savvy Picturehouse may merge with struggling distribution label Warner Independent Pictures.

Nicole Kidman is set to play Dusty Springfield in a biopic written by--uh oh--Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Evening).

Paul Verhoeven thinks Jesus was the product of a rape!

Opening this week:

You have precisely one week to see the following image on the big screen (at the Varsity):

Charles Mudede reviews Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien's tribute to the beloved '50s French film The Red Balloon, which recently got a handsome DVD release from Criterion. Charles takes advantage of this opportunity to write about why we go to foreign films: "The class of people who frequently watch foreign-language films must not be separated from those who frequently travel to faraway places to experience other worlds. The foreign-film lover is a species of this larger type, the tourist, with the sole exception that he/she doesn't travel far to see strange things, wonderful places, bizarre habits."

And in the print edition of On Screen this week, the no-good, very-bad rom com Made of Honor (me: "Do not make me address the abhorrent pun in the title"—though I kind of wish I had written: "Made of Honor is made of poop"), Helen Hunt's directorial debut Then She Found Me (Paul Constant: "It's hard to imagine anyone clamoring for Helen Hunt's directorial debut [outside of Helen Hunt, of course]"), and—oh my goodness, this one isn't excruciating—the dark pop musical Love Songs (me: "The film never fails to fascinate, if only for the exceedingly French way it deals with ethnic types, from comic lines about Ismaël the uncircumcised Jew and Erwann the gay Breton to self-consciously sober shots of more exotic immigrants passing silently in the streets").

Only to be found online this week is Andrew Wright's review of Iron Man ("The megabucks cinematic adaptation is pleasant enough, but it doesn't live up to the promise of its almost obscenely qualified and willing cast").

Also online only: The DVD column returns! For an issue. Here is the inimitable Michael Atkinson on the stop-motion auteur Ray Harryhausen: "Unlike CGIs, Harryhausen’s homely behemoths obey the same laws of movement that constrain the actors, and inhabit the same space, turf, gravity, and sunlight. Their three-dimensionality is not illusory, and their hesitant, abruptly animalistic, unblurred motions remain qualmy and loaded with frisson."

Lindy West went to the Seattle Polish Film Festival last weekend, and found more stop-motion genius. Scarecrow Video would like you to know that, no matter what the Seattle Polish Film Festival asserts, they do have a copy of The Tale of the Fox. It's PAL, though, so for region-free players only.

Tucked away in Limited Runs this week is every single movie playing at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival. Quite a few filmmakers are attending, and the info is noted in the film short--I'm told Everything's Cool director Judith Helfand is quite entertaining. Also: Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Egyptian, NWFF's Duel of the Cool--pitting the Jean-Paul Belmondo of Le Doulos against the Marcello Mastroianni of 8 1/2, the nutso Japanese creation Maiko Haaaaan!!! at the Grand Illusion, Four Sheets to the Wind and more in Northwest Folklife's City Folk Film Series at SIFF Cinema, the "sweet, nostalgic" Graduation at the Varsity, Rawstock at ACT Theatre, Young Frankenstein at Central Cinema, and, starting again Tuesday, more United Artists films at SIFF Cinema, including Marty, In the Heat of the Night, and Night of the Hunter.

For all your movie times needs, use ours.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is the midnight movie at the Egyptian tonight and tomorrow. This 2007 release, overseen by Ridley Scott on the occasion of the film's 25th birthday, is a new digital print with polished special effects, audio remastered in Dolby 5.1, extended pivotal scenes, more violence, and some minor dialog and plot alterations.

Go, especially if you haven't seen it since you were a kid in the ’80s. The dystopian classic is more gripping, more lush, and sexier than ever.

...when you can read hilariously thorough synopses of today's top films for free at KidsinMind.com?

The site's stated mission:

The purpose is to provide parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film's content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids. We make no judgments about what is good or bad or anything else. We are not affiliated with any political party, any cultural or religious group, or any ideology. The only thing we advocate is responsible, engaged parenting.

It's a perfectly noble goal, carried out with scientific precision, with every reviewed film dissected for Sex/Nudity, Violence/Gore, Profanity, and Substance Use. The resulting text makes for some good, weird reading, as every "adult" component of a film is spelled out plainly. (The voluminous cataloguing of Sex/Nudity in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay ranges from "A man is shown masturbating under sheets (we see rhythmic movement and then see a spurt of semen hit his face)" to "A young man's arm accidentally grazes a young woman's clothed breast," and "A man massages a woman's ankle.")

Best of all are the final messages presented for each film.

Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: "Revenge is not always the answer to pain. 19th century London was an awful place."

The Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light: "If you love what you do, you can achieve excellence and longevity. Music is about feeling and teamwork."

Juno (in which "A young man is shown in running shorts in several scenes (bare legs to the thigh)"): "Love is hard work. Parents seem to assume that teenagers are not sexually active, when in reality they are."

Jenna Jameson's Zombie Strippers (whose vast Sex/Nudity roundup reads like porn written by a computer): "Zombies can do anything."

Explore for yourself here. (And parents: Don't let my camp appreciation of the site deter you from availing yourselves of its offerings, which really do lay out every single potentially objectionable detail for a given movie, from come-splattered faces to caressed ankles.)

Thanks to MetaFilter for the heads-up.

Local production company More Dust Than Digital created this 30-second Obama ad for MoveOn.org:

It's competing alongside 14 other entries for a possible MoveOn ad buy--among the judges are talented documentary filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (The Trials of Darryl Hunt) and Rory Kennedy (The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib) and producers James Schamus (Brokeback Mountain) and Ted Hope (Towelhead).

Some of the other entries are a bit less, uh, artsy-fartsy Seattle, so I don't really think it will win. But there's always People's Choice!

Shadows
Last night, my dream happened to be in this movie.
Is there a more hip American film than Shadows? Its state (jazz cinema) of hipness is near (or is) perfect.

Ludwig
Concerning a conversation with Golob that happened moments before the packed Gong Show began on Saturday night in the Chop Suey:

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

This simple passage from the closing (and best) pages of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus says what I failed to express during our discussion. My goal was to somehow connect this understanding of eternity with the fact of biological replication. Biological replication is an effort to mirror the present, which is timeless and limitless. This idea is also expressed in the heart of The Symposium. This is Diotima's revelation. Why replicate? Because all things aspire to the condition of the now, the present.

The problem I have with my poorly expressed idea (biological processes as a--weak--mirror of the present) is it revives the mystical. To think of the physical as aspiring to the present is to regenerate dead Aristotelian/scholastic concepts of sympathy and affinity. That is one problem. Another is the of end of this aspiring is closely related to the end of Phenomenology of the Spirit--the mystical absolute. How does one remove the "transcendental moonlight" from this idea?

News: Jane Campion may have lamented the lack of female directors at Cannes last year, but there's a positive drought this year, with only Lucrecia Martel's (The Holy Girl) La Mujer Sin Cabeza—uplifting title, that—screening in competition. One other film is co-directed by Daniela Thomas, working alongside a much better-known male director, Walter Salles. Making up for this dearth entirely are gorgeous starlets Alexandra Maria Lara and Natalie Portman on the jury. Naturally, The Third Wave, screening out of competition, is about the 2004 tsunami.

Opened Last Week:

My review of Expelled appears this week, rather than last, because the production company preferred to conduct advance screenings for church groups and Christian schools instead of asking for objective criticism. Generally, avoiding critics means the movie is reprehensibly bad, and I have to admit, even I was surprised by the film's condescending, simplistic assertion (popular among creationists) that since Hitler used Darwin to justify evil acts, reading Darwin will incline you toward similar evils. You couldn't get farther from the merits of the argument if you tried. Other critics have made that point with more vigor than I could (I just think it's sad), so my review hones in on the interesting gap between what intelligent design proponents say in public forums or in courts of law and what they tell friendly audiences.

The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent-design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn't that former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can't be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film compares science with Nazism and Stalinism (though it does, repeatedly and remorselessly). What's truly weird is that the filmmakers don't seem to understand the tenets of intelligent design.

Proponents of intelligent design—which is essentially a legal strategy, developed in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rejecting the teaching of creationism in public schools—try to discern traces of an intelligent designer in the universe and in living things. Crucially, however, the "theory" remains agnostic as to the identity of that designer. This was an important component of the legal underpinning of the movement: If intelligent-design proponents ever hinted that the designer was God, the teaching of intelligent design in schools would, like the teaching of creationism, constitute an infringement on the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. At the same time, though, not naming the designer meant that intelligent-design proponents like Michael Behe had to allow the possibility that their designer is one of many gods, or even an intellectually superior alien. (This problem was memorably satirized by followers of the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

So when Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist who is a prominent critic of intelligent design, concedes to Stein in Expelled that he is open to the idea that aliens may have seeded our planet with life, intelligent design has actually scored a point (even if Dawkins never argues that an alien visitation could be somehow inferred from the evidence, and even though the theory of natural selection isn't particularly preoccupied with how life first began). But this modest victory means nothing to the movie's target audience of evangelical Christians, so Stein takes the intellectually bankrupt way out and makes vicious fun of Dawkins for believing in aliens.

I linked to a document by a Discovery Institute shill up there, and he attempts to bolster his assertion that intelligent design doesn't point to a creator God by citing Of Pandas and People, of all things. Thanks to a little trial in Dover, we all know that Of Pandas and People is a hastily rejiggered creationist textbook. See Chapter Ten of the NOVA episode Intelligent Design on Trial for hilarious proof.

Opening this week:

Andrew Wright reviews Jenna Jameson's, uh, film debut? No. Theatrical film debut? No. Commercial theatrical film debut? Why is this so hard? Anyway, Zombie Strippers. Andrew: "Of the many damning sins it commits against acceptably skeezy exploitation filmmaking, perhaps the cardinal one is this: The two most attractive women in the cast never even take their tops off. That faint thumping noise you hear is Russ Meyer doing donuts in his grave."

In (the print version of) On Screen this week, you'll find reviews of The First Saturday in May (Jen Graves: "When brothers Brad and John Hennegan set out to follow six trainers and six horses on their journey toward the ultimate horse race in 2006, they had no idea that one of their animal stars would prove to be more of a draw than any of their human subjects. Now, the movie's publicity materials boast about 'never-before-seen footage of a young Barbaro,' and he, truly, is the highlight of the film"), The Life Before Her Eyes (me: "The Life Before Her Eyes has its bright spots—Evan Rachel Wood is irritatingly great at the half-seductive, half-self-destructive thing—but every retouched color [the tomatoes in this movie are from another planet] and dramatic visual effect [blotches of blood keep morphing into other things] serves to pollute the movie's already sloppy metaphysics with an unpleasant strain of hysteria"), and Deception (Bradley Steinbacher: "The idea of the driven and privileged turning to anonymous encounters for sexual fulfillment is interesting, but outside of some overwrought sex scenes, Deception clearly has other, far more standard, issues in mind—namely blackmail, kidnapping, and corporate theft. And it's here, unfortunately, that the film slowly starts to fray").

In web-only content this week:

Lindy West reviews Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay ("The smart jokes are too stupid and the gross jokes are too gross and the diarrhea is too loud and the forced blowjobs at Gitmo are just lazy"). And Megan Seling gives a qualified thumbs up to Baby Mama.

Hidden away in Film Shorts this week are reviews of Planet B-Boy at the Varsity, Breathless and Divorce—Italian Style at Northwest Film Forum, and yet more screenings of Senator Obama Goes to Africa at Capitol Hill Arts Center. Also of note: the Seattle Polish Film Festival (including two programs of work [shorts tonight, The Story of the Fox tomorrow] by the early 20th-century animator Władysław Starewicz) at SIFF Cinema, Greg Araki's The Living End at SIFF Cinema, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane and The Nanny at Grand Illusion, and much more. See our Movie Times page for all your movie-going needs.

And for dessert, Lindy West on local horror.

Despite three 3+ hours movies, Tolkien has yet to be wrung dry by Hollywood:

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who produced "Pan's Labyrinth," will direct two big-budget films based on J.R.R Tolkien's book "The Hobbit," the Hollywood studios involved said Thursday.

That tingling you're feeling is your ass already going numb.

James Caan has quit the new David O. Russell movie, Nailed, over a dustup with the director. He couldn't even make it through the first day of a two-day shoot with the famously volatile Russell.

This isn't the first time Russell has had a hard time dealing with actors. There is the notorious video of him fighting on the set of I Heart Huckabees with Lily Tomlin, where he has a complete freak-out and calls her a cunt and a bitch. Lily Tomlin! Seriously!?

In a recent New Yorker profile of George Clooney, the actor discusses working with Russell:

Clooney’s memories of “Three Kings” include Russell shouting, “Why don’t you worry about your fucked-up acting!” Although Russell has been quoted calling Clooney “a super-political, extremely manipulative guy,” his comment today is: “I feel lucky we got to make a really good film together.”

After the way he acted toward Lily, I'm off his movies for good.

I'm working on getting all the programs in the Seattle Polish Film Festival (wrapping up this weekend) into our Movie Times calendar, and I stumbled upon this seriously amazing film from 1912. The Cameraman's Revenge, a stop-motion film about a highly anthropomorphized beetle couple, Mr. and Mrs. Beetle, is part of a program highlighting the work of the early 20th-century filmmaker Władysław Starewicz. If you've ever wanted to see beetles wear hats, ride on bicycles, wave their antennae, and cheat on each other...

... this is your lucky week.

The Cameraman's Revenge plays this Friday at SIFF Cinema. Tickets and more info at polishfilms.org.

This awesome, incredible movie is getting exactly four more screenings: 7 and 9 pm, tonight and tomorrow at Northwest Film Forum.

Chop Shop
This exquisite verité film (from Ramin Bahrani, the director of the equally fine but totally demoralizing Man Push Cart) is about Alejandro, a 12-year-old mixed race street kid who dreams of owning a taco truck. Ale’s will to live and work seems superhuman—until he catches his beautiful older sister giving truckers blowjobs for $40 a pop. You can almost see Ale’s worldview start to crumple. Chop Shop is flawlessly shot, and you won’t soon forget the primary location, a muddy stretch of industrial Queens near Shea Stadium. Best of all, though, are the characters, most of which are played by non-professionals. There is no precedent for the natural intensity of this film in the history of American independent cinema. It will make you treasure life. (Annie Wagner)

I also highly recommend interviews with the director, an Iranian-American who was born in North Carolina and graduated from Columbia before moving to Iran for three years to learn to make movies. Greencine has an excellent, influence-heavy one, IFC's is a bit more political, and The Fader goes deeper into the location. Bahrani wants your kids to see the movie too--just be prepared to answer questions about what Isamar was doing in that man's truck.

By the way, NWFF is holding an online auction for filmmakers and musicians right now--filmmaking advice from two-time Academy Award nominee James Longley is stalled out at $125! Bidding closes tomorrow at 6 pm.

... is off to a brilliant start with Expelled, an agitdoc proposing that a vast conspiracy has risen out of the academy to shut down free thought and inquiry. The evidence for this supposed conspiracy is completely anecdotal (here, an underperforming assistant professor being denied tenure, there, an unpaid research assistant being moved to another office at the Smithsonian), but that hasn't stopped the movie from doing a rollicking business at the box office.

The Discovery Institute has been covering the movie obsessively on its blogs: Ten of the last ten posts on its Evolution News & Views blog are dedicated to the movie (sample headlines: "Discovery Salutes Expelled; "Is There a Connection Between Hitler and Darwin?"; and, my favorite, "Opponents of Academic Freedom Using Outlandish Rhetoric"). Officially, however, the Seattle think tank denies any connection to the documentary. This official position is belabored during the movie itself, in a scene where host Ben Stein wanders the streets of downtown Seattle struggling to locate the organization's headquarters. There are reasons to doubt this official story (in an unguarded interview with the Christian film site Past the Popcorn, Stein explains he learned about arguments for intelligent design from one of the film's producers, Walt Ruloff, and someone named "Steven Meyer"—presumably a transcription error for Stephen C. Meyer, vice-president of the Discovery Institute and cofounder of the intelligent design movement).

But even if you charitably assume that the Discovery Institute was not directly involved with the production, an alarming percentage of the people who helped make the film have Northwest connections. The production company is located in Vancouver, B.C.. Producer Walt Ruloff lives outside of Vancouver and made his millions selling a software company to Microsoft. Almost all of the intelligent design proponents interviewed in the film are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, including Meyer, senior fellows David Berlinski, William Dembski, and Jonathan Wells, and fellow Paul Nelson. Meanwhile, several of the academics who claim to have been discriminated against for their ideas about intelligent design have a Seattle connection. Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who was denied tenure at Iowa State University, received his PhD from and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. He is now a Discovery Institute Senior Fellow. Robert J. Marks II, an engineer at Baylor University (which declined to host his intelligent design website), taught at the UW for 25 years and served as the faculty advisor for the UW's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ for 15 years.

So when the Discovery Institute tries to brag about box office performance in my hometown, it annoys me:

Across the country this weekend, people did a rare thing and turned out in droves for a documentary. In Ames, Iowa the line to get into Expelled stretched around the block Friday night. In Seattle theaters were crammed with students—on a Saturday afternoon, no less.

In the spirit of anecdotal sharing, I'd like to point out that Pacific Place at the 3:10 pm Saturday screening was hardly "crammed with students." There were about 20 people in attendance, most of them sweet, delusional older couples. A couple of teenagers pranced in about halfway through, but I suspect they, like me, had not bought a ticket to this particular show. (Don't worry, Pacific Place--I did buy a ticket to 10,000 B.C. and several items from the concessions stand.)

My review of Expelled will be in this week's issue of The Stranger. For now, please enjoy the National Center for Science Education's anti-Expelled website, expelledexposed.com.

I got no time for news this week, but if anyone has anything choice, stick it in the comments.

Opening this weekend:

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, from Judd Apatow & friends, kicks off On Screen with a great deal of excitement (Lindy West: "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I am going totally Geronimo-banana-bonkers over here. Someone actually made a really and truly enjoyable romantic comedy!"), followed by The Visitor (Jen Graves: "The movie is fine, but Richard Jenkins is a miracle"), My Blueberry Nights (yours truly: "When a semiconscious, visually obscured, human-napkin makeout session is the emotional core of your movie, you've got a problem"), The Forbidden Kingdom (Andrew Wright: "Chop-socky icons Jackie Chan and Jet Li do briefly duke it out in The Forbidden Kingdom, but, somewhat disappointingly, they spend most of their time on wires battling CGI ninjas and imparting life lessons to a young audience surrogate"), Backseat (Brendan Kiley: "Watching it is like eating at a Chili's—another replication of a familiar experience that offers no surprises and gratifies every expectation. Which is just fine, if you're into thirtysomethings, gnawing self-doubt, and jalapeño poppers"), Priceless (oh, it's me again: "It's not often that one finds oneself yearning for a French film to indulge in a touch more cynicism, but this is what Audrey Tautou hath wrought"), Young@Heart (Christopher Frizzelle: "The group's director is a not-old guy, Bob Cilman, who thinks men and women in their 70s and 80s singing songs by Sonic Youth and Coldplay is hilarious, inspiring, a good thing"), and Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (me once more: "Morgan Spurlock should really stick to hamburgers").

There's some fantastic stuff in Limited Runs too. Most notably, Chop Shop, from NYC director Rahmin Bahrani (yeah, he's Iranian-American--his depressing first movie was inspired by Rumi), at Northwest Film Forum:

It's the kind of film that renews your faith in cinema. Don't miss it. Also tucked away in the calendar: the paralyzed Iraq vet doc Body of War (co-director Phil Donahue in attendance 7, 9:20 shows at the Varsity tonight); Jezebel, The Virgin Queen, and The Nanny in Grand Illusion's Bette Davis series; Charles Burnett's Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation wrapping up the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival this Sunday (Burnett will be in attendance); more short films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul at NWFF; the Seattle Polish Film Festival at SIFF Cinema this weekend, followed by fair-trade agitdocs The Price of Sugar and All This in Tea; another vintage gay nightlife movie, The Detective, from Three Dollar Bill Cinema; and a last-minute booking that didn't make it into the print edition: Superman in 70 mm all week at Cinerama. See Movie Times for everything.

Confidential to Cogswell: The people want to know about a Cthulhu DVD release. Got anything to tell 'em?

I don't know what Lindy West is going to say about it (she's reviewing it in next week's paper), but she and I saw the Seattle premiere of a locally produced horror movie, Frayed, at the Egyptian last night.

The three guys who wrote and produced and directed the movie, Rob Portmann, Kurt Svennungsen, and Norb Caoili are from Auburn, Puyallup, and Renton, respectively. (The place was packed with cheering friends last night.)

The trio are obviously Friday-the-13th-style horror movie aficionados. Frayed is a straight-up enthusiastic knockoff of early '80s slasher movies. It's got psycho ward escapees, sexy teenage girls on camping trips, child molesters, clown suits, creepy kids, chases through the woods, headlights on eerie back roads, and lots of stabbing.

I was pretty much hooked from the first scene—ominous grainy home video footage of a creepy birthday party.

Like the grainy video intro, the movie is a bundle of cliches (nod and wink style, I guess). My favorite moment last night was when the guy who's getting chased through the woods stumbles upon an isolated house and called out, "Anybody here?" Lindy retorted, "Ummm... No."

But I must say, I had a blast, and was even looking over my shoulder when I got home to my apartment.

The movie was picked up by Lionsgate and is being released on DVD.

The new trailer for Battle in Seattle (which, if you haven't heard, is the opening night film at SIFF this year):

And the theatrical trailer for Medium Cool.

Oh my goodness, I meant to Slog this last Friday with This Weekend at the Movies, but I'm sort of glad I failed, because it really deserves a post of its own.

Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire writes,

Circulating among insiders involved with Sundance '08 grand jury prize winner, "Trouble The Water," is an anectdote that the film remains without distribution amidst buyers essentially telling the filmmakers that the doc may be "too black." "Why aren't more white people in the film?," an exec apparently asked back in Park City. I've heard similar versions of this story from a few different people connected to the movie.

It's a documentary. About Hurricane Katrina. Why aren't more white people in the film, indeed.

Tomorrow night at the Northwest Film Forum, Three Dollar Bill Cinema continues its "I Love the Nightlife" series with Some of My Best Friends Are..., Mervyn Nelson's little-seen, barely-regarded, still-unreleased-on-DVD-or-video film of 1971, tracking a dramatic Christmas Eve in a Greenwich Village gay bar.

Here's the trailer, which eschews actual film footage for a public service announcement about how seeing this film might break your brain.

As the preview puts it, "For those who can stand the truth...it is a provocative adult entertainment."

As Vincent Canby's New York Times review of October 28, 1971 puts it, "At one point or another in the film, Mr. Nelson manages to discover and exploit every stereotype of homosexual literature...When most of the characters in a movie are as full of dopey sentiments, as well as of self-hatred and of self-exploitation, as the movie that contains them, it's almost impossible to differentiate between an intentional second-rateness and serious moviemaking of no great quality."

I can't wait! In fact, I'll be introducing the movie at tomorrow night's 7pm screening. Fans of gay history, camp film, and Rue McClanahan (who plays an aging fag-hag—she was already "aging" in 1971?) shouldn't miss it.

Last Friday, at the end of a talk at the EMP's Pop Music Conference, I look up and see something special.

The street, the smoke, the rise into the twilight, the flying to the corporate pyramids, the meeting with the CEO, the long table, the golden sunset, the owl with fire in its eyes, the sharp steps, the black dress--her lips, her hips, her hair--the interview with a replicant.

Seattle filmmakers arrested in Nigeria!

WARRI, Nigeria - Four people from a Seattle-based film crew and a Nigerian man accompanying them have been detained for illegally traveling by boat in restive southern Nigeria, officials said. Security forces fighting militants in the Niger Delta consider much of the vast wetland region a military zone and have barred outsiders from traveling there without express consent by authorities.

Nigerian Brig. Gen. Wuyep Rintip said the group was seized Saturday for flouting the ban and were to be flown to the capital, Abuja. He did not identify the detainees. A US Embassy spokesman had no immediate comment on Monday.

According to a news release issue issued Sunday in Seattle, the Americans were Sandi Cioffi, director of the documentary "Sweet Crude;" Tammi Sims, Cliff Worsham and Sean Porter, also part of the crew, and Joel Bisina, a peace mediator and founder of Niger Delta Professionals for Development in Warri.

I'm surprised the filmmakers couldn't bribe their way out of this situation.

UPDATE!
For more information go here.

It looks like the intelligent design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed will be opening at the Uptown and Pacific Place this weekend, and we haven't been invited to a screening. (So much for open debate.) For now, please enjoy Scientific American's feature package on the film.

And if you do go to see the film in the theater? For the love of god, please buy a ticket to another movie and sneak in. No need to give the producers of this film any more money than they're already going to get from church groups and other organized suckers.

Ain't It Cool News has a link to Michael Chabon's early draft of a screenplay for Spider-Man 2. It's not bad--a little slow--but at least his Spider-Man tries to crack wise, which is something that the movies never really got a handle on.

This is also good inspiration for people who are doing Script Frenzy, the write-a-film-script-in-a-month exercise. If Chabon can write a rough script that weighs in at a super-unwieldy 250 pages, 100 pages in a month is no big damn deal at all.

(Thanks to Slog Tipper Brad Steinbacher, who I think just didn't want to let the world know that he reads Ain't It Cool News.)

News:

If you missed it Wednesday, the opening night film at SIFF this year is Battle in Seattle. I think it's a good choice, even though the film itself is bound to be disappointing. We're all so invested. The party will be full of people bitching about which direction the wind pushed the tear gas and whether it was a Starbucks or a Gap store that got its windows bashed. Fun times!

Pedro Almodóvar is starting a blog. Sample self-consciousness: "I get the impression that we’re skipping a stage in the natural process of 'living to tell the tale.'" (If you don't believe Almodóvar would say such-and-such a thing, blame the translator. The blog is also available in Spanish and French.)

A dish to whet your appetite for next week's releases: Wong Kar Wai talks about his My Blueberry Nights. Apparently blueberry pie is not, in Wong's judgment, cinematic. Good. I'm working on the review now and the word that keeps coming to mind is "rubbery."

Odds & ends: Will The Incredible Hulk suck? Will Iron Man be a juggernaut? Is Gillian Anderson's hair way too long in the new X-Files movie? Discuss.

Opening this week:

In On Screen this week: Smart People (me: "Smart People isn't reliably smart (even the most preternaturally talented college students don't get their first poems published in the New Yorker*), but it is extremely funny and sweet"), Chaos Theory (Bradley Steinbacher: "In this middling dramedy, Ryan Reynolds stars as Frank, an efficiency expert whose life is calculated down to the second. 'List-making is your harbor in the storm of life,' Frank's motto goes, and to help live up to it he scribbles incessantly on note cards."), Sex and Death 101 (Andrew Wright: "Daniel Waters's reunion with former muse Winona Ryder offers only trace hints of the satirical magic that once was"), Blindsight (Paul Constant: "One of the kids says, 'We are blind, but our hearts are not blind!' and you can practically hear the director moan ecstatically offscreen"), Street Kings (Steinbacher says it's "an unthinking man's cop movie, complete with a laughably dense protagonist"), Muriel (Brendan Kiley: "This chilly, melancholy portrait of sex and its discontents—jazzed up with occasional bursts of disorienting new wave style—is a vintage pleasure"), and The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (me: "With its pretty cinematography and the novel milieu of a Sao Paulo Jewish quarter in the 1970s, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is entertaining enough, but you won't remember much of it a week later").

You will remember this embroidered cutie, though:

Why are the most charismatic child actors always from other countries? It's so alarming when you haven't heard anything about them forever and then--remember that sweet child from Fucking Åmål? According to Wikipedia, she now has two kids.

Plus: Lindy West on The Ruins.

Limited runs are absolutely packed this week. The Seattle Jewish Film Festival is wrapping up this weekend with the Seattle premiere of Jellyfish and more. A Tibetan series kicks off at SIFF Cinema to coincide with the Dalai Lama visit. The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival starts tomorrow with two docs by St. Clair Bourne and continues through next week. Tron in 70 mm is returning to Cinerama for almost an entire week. If that's not enough stoner movie for you, try Super High Me at the Admiral--it's a spoof of Super Size Me (duh) with pot subbed for Big Macs. Three fairly obscure films (Irina Palm, starring Marianne Faithfull, and two special-interest docs) are playing at the Varsity; we didn't love any of them. We do, however, love Bette Davis, who's getting a retrospective at the Grand Illusion for the next month or so. There are plenty more opportunities to see Senator Obama Goes to Africa this week--pick the venue to suit your demographic. And for avant-gardists and microcinema fans, you have a bunch of intriguing options this week: Jon Behrens at Vermillion tonight, Janice Findley at Northwest Film Forum tomorrow, an LA magic lanternist/film restorer in a program called Keep Warm, Burn Britain! at the Rendezvous Sunday night, and a bunch of Apichatpong Weerasethakul shorts on Tues-Wed, also at NWFF.

* It has come to my attention that several talented college students have had their first poems published in the New Yorker, including Seattle's own Heather McHugh, Caroline Kizer, and (sort of) Elizabeth Bishop. But the movie makes it sound like getting a gold star on your homework or something.

Maker of atrocious films Uwe Boll has a minute-long rant up at his newest film's website about the anti-Uwe Boll petitions that are circling the Internet, and why he's the only genius in the moviemaking business. I don't want to contribute to the overuse of this word, but it's totally, toe-curlingly sublime.

(Via Defamer.)

The opening night film for SIFF '08 is going to be--unsurprisingly--Battle in Seattle, a Medium Cool ripoff (sans documentary footage) about the WTO protests starring Charlize Theron, Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta as Mayor Schell--I mean, Mayor Tobin.

Here's the Variety review.

Maybe we can get some fancy turtle protesters down at the opera house? It's the evening of May 22.

...is dead.

Newsy:

Professional print film critics are dinosaurs, explains the New York Times. David Poland's analysis goes a little further.

On the other hand, the wisdom of the internets is sometimes admirable. Check out IMDB's keywords for the intelligent design agitdoc Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (described by its boosters at the Discovery Institute as "Ben Stein's expose of Darwinist thought control in our institutions of higher learning"):

Quite true. Expelled opens April 18th, but so far has no Seattle theaters booked. You might have to go to Bellevue.

Meanwhile, Errol Morris has been doing some interesting advance publicity for his Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, out in Seattle on May 16. His movie distinguishes itself from previous films like The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib by giving us a much clearer view of the participants' personalities, including the laconic Lynndie England (with her colorful Appalachian vocabulary), the charismatic but weak-willed Sabrina Harmon (who was in a committed, long-distance lesbian relationship during her time at Abu Ghraib), and the smart but totally unreadable Megan Ambuhl (who married ringleader Charles Graner after he impregnated England). Recommended: this scary New Yorker article, cowritten by Morris, featuring Sabrina Harmon's letters home to her girlfriend; Morris's NYT defensive blog post about his use of reenactments in documentaries (including the great The Thin Blue Line).

Opening today:

On Screen this week kicks off with Charles Mudede's preview of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which opened last night--notable upcoming films include Sweet Mud, Orthodox Stance, and the Seattle premiere of Beaufort. I'm also curious about Arranged , written by an Orthodox woman from Brooklyn who was inspired to try her hand at a screenplay after seeing Ushpizin, and Children of the Sun, a doc about the first generation of kids raised in kibbutzim. Apparently, they were potty-trained in unison:

On Screen continues with the soccer doc/art film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Jen Graves: "Zidane comes across as a creature on the prowl. He has a loping gait, characterized by mindless toe tapping. He spits like he's hissing, and he sweats profusely. When he breaks into a run, the camera struggles to follow his unpredictable motion. His stony expression changes only once the entire 95-minute film"); the Lebanese beauty salon-set film Caramel (Charles Mudede: "The women want to have sex without fear, sex in the open, sex with other women, but the society blocks the fulfillment of their hunger. And the blockage is all the crueler because the women dress to kill")...

...plus Martin Scorsese's Stones concert film Shine a Light (Andrew Wright: "Save for a few frantic preshow moments, Scorsese tones down his onscreen persona familiar from previous docs, concentrating instead on putting the camera at absolutely the right place at any given moment. As for the band themselves, they're tighter than even a truckload of Botox could account for"); the immigration heartstring-yanker Under the Same Moon (Paul Constant: "This manipulative mess, which markets itself as having 'an ending so touching, it could make Lou Dobbs cry,' is a blunted dart aimed at hearts that already bleed"); the casino mockumentary The Grand (Brendan Kiley: "Imagine Werner Herzog, stroking a bunny, staring into the camera, saying in his flat Herzogian accent: 'Most people drink coffee, but I sink of sis as se beverage of se cowards,' and explaining how, as a pick-me-up, he kills a small animal each day with his bare hands"), and The Singing Revolution, a documentary about Eastern Europeans who warble their way to freedom (me: "'Can culture hold a people together?' the voiceover (Linda Hunt) asks breathlessly, as if anything but culture could define 'a people.'").

In Limited Runs this week, also accessible through our fancy, newly formatted Movie Times page: Boarding Gate has been extended through Tuesday at Northwest Film Forum, which is also playing the previously mentioned Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait through Sunday and the magical Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness starting Monday. The Varsity has a fascinating (if occasionally pretentious) enviro documentary about land use and community activism in 1990s Austin, TX: It's called The Unforeseen, and it should do smashing business in Seattle. Grand Illusion has a pair of better-than you'd expect movies: the graffiti doc Bomb It and the security-camera POV film Look (with director Adam Rifkin in attendance both shows). And SIFF Cinema has a multipart miniseries that sounds horrific (it's about a globetrotting filmmaker with a palatial Manhattan loft and a pair of annoying-sounding "lovers"), but is actually bizarrely absorbing: Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (Part 1 and Part 2, director in attendance some shows). Plus Donnie Darko, Cave of the Yellow Dog, Cabaret, Brats: Our Journey Home, and more.

And last but never least, Lindy West takes on Tyler Perry's newest, Meet the Browns, in Concessions.

The best American film of the year, Paranoid Park, is doing bad business in America.

In Europe, however, it's doing excellent business. This must not be a surprise to Gus Van Sant. He knows what we all should know by now: Great art is homeless in the land of junkspace.

On the much brighter side of things, there's this being, this Lebanese, this wonder woman: Nadine Labaki.

Her film, Caramel, opens today. I will say no more.

This review didn't fit in today's print edition:

The Grand

dir. Zak Penn

The word “mediocre” comes from Middle French and literally means “halfway up a jagged mountain.” Not just any mountain—a jagged one, implying that the mediocre have struggled and sweated and cursed to get where they are. But they’re sitting on a rock, panting, and can’t go any higher.

The Grand, then, is mediocre. It wants to be an improvised mockumentary, in the style of Christopher Guest, about a Vegas poker tournament and the eccentrics who play in it. But it is too pat—too obviously the product of minds struggling to be funny—to pass as candid. Woody Harrelson stars as a drug addict who inherits a Vegas casino, loses it to a real-estate vulture, and enters a $10 million poker tournament to win it back. He plays against a procession of gambling clichés: the Asperger’s guy, the aggressive jerk, the goofball from Minnesota, the woman, and the old-timer who mourns for the Vegas of his youth, with its underage hookers, parking-lot violence, and racism.

And then there’s “the German,” played by Werner Herzog, the best thing about The Grand. The German is as much a cliché as the rest: an inscrutable Teutonic aesthete and sadist who has traveled the world, gambled with yak bones in the African desert, and played Russian roulette with slave traders. But Herzog brings heat and effortlessness—a comical life—to his scenes. (Maybe because it’s not so hard to imagine Herzog actually gambling with actual yak bones.)

Imagine Woody Harrelson with muttonchops talking about his life as a stoned ne’er-do-well. Yawn. Now imagine Herzog, stroking a bunny, staring into the camera, saying in his flat Herzogian accent: “Most people drink coffee, but I sink of sis as se beverage of se cowards,” and explaining how, as a pick-me-up, he kills a small animal each day with his bare hands. That moment stands up and grows wings. It soars above mediocrity, up the jagged mountain, all the way to its peak. BRENDAN KILEY

You'll find more movie reviews on our Film page.

Please enjoy the preview for Mike Myers' forthcoming film, The Love Guru.

Oh my aching sides.

Thank you, Defamer.