Watch this, I'll tell you in a second

Watch it all.



Okay. Is it just me or does he look and sound like a Nick Kroll character without any of the punchlines?

Talkin' Bouncer: Raising Cain

My first knowing exposure to Alejandro Jodorowsky was the psychedelic western El Topo. It’s a hard movie to describe and a harder movie to watch more than once, but if I would have to describe it, it is about Clint Eastwood taking on the quest of Gilgamesh mixed in with the story of Siddartha Guatama and, I don’t know, a weekend with Timothy Leary if you added. . . I don't know, it's just one hell of a movie. Yeah. That is the ticket.

It wasn’t until years after I saw that movie that I realized Jodorowksy had transformed himself into a comic book writer (because the word “transformed” is the entirely appropriate when it comes to men like him) and that I had read some of his work previously.

He has a fairly storied career, at least among European comic book fans. He created the Metabarons and went on to work with no less than Moebeus himself (RIP) with The Incal.

Whether that is a detriment or not we can all agree that Jodorowsky's oeuvre is a unique lineage in the comic book medium. Thankfully, perhaps.

Bouncer: Raising Cain is less like The Incal and more like one of the screenplays I half wrote nine times during my freshman year in college. For those that are not me, that means that this book is far less awesome than the sum of its parts and could have, at some point, used somebody of authority and taste saying “No, get rid of this, this is gross. Please stop. You weirdo. Ick."

And so forth.

But that never seems to go down. Instead we get a crazy person's vision of a western and that, at least on paper, is a cool thing to have in existence.On paper this is a full-blooded western, a proper Western, even, especially when you consider that most of El Topo was dedicated to murdering queer yogi messiahs in the middle of the desert as I understand it. Also: Rabbits.

Anyways, the basic subject of the comic is about a young man looking to avenge the death of his parents at the hand of an evil Confederate brigrand. In order to accomplish this he seeks out a gunslinger who he believes will aid him in this task. In short, it is your basic “regeneration through violence” myth that is prevalent in the Western genre (and, well, American history), but written by a Jewish Chilean/French jack-of-all trades-cum-madman. That’s where the wrinkles appear.

Nothing in this story seems to exist without some sort of corollary symbolism—or at least strangeness that creates a gap where symbolism might be imagined. Things do not happen on a grand scale so much as they appear on some sort of theatrical scale. It is as if Jodorowsky fears that we’ll miss the importance of something happening if it appears to be realistic or that we will miss that something happens when it happens. His default position—and it appears this way in all of his works, as I understand it—is to point a high key light on the action.

People do not catch snakes, they catch three snakes. They do not find guns, they find guns from the devil (off screen). They do not get shot, they get shot and raped and decapitated. Oh, also: Illuminati symbolism (another carry over from El Topo). It might be that he isn’t just gilding things, it might be that he is actually attempting to weave in some sort of philosophy into his works. But if so, what?

You can see this in how the young man trains to be a gunslinger. His attempts at becoming a gun fighter more closely resemble a person looking to become a kung fu master or a lama than it does a shootist. It's a fun twist on the trope, if slightly contradictory. Hard though, it is to over analyze something like that when our main man's spirit animal is a legendary Scottish gunfighter who changed his name to "Butterfly."

It's at this point I would say "Yeah, it's that kind of a book," but the universe really doesn't allow for more than one of these kind of things to run wild at one time.

Adding on the fact that this young man also takes mushrooms to reach some sort of martial enlightenment seems to make me think that Bouncer comes across as El Topo Lite. While reading it, I wondered if some segments of Jodorowsky's abandoned Los Topos story (or stories) are what Bouncer became. It certainly feels like it. There's enough sexual violence, augery, and disabled people to pass for a sequel, even though this book seems to be set in America as opposed to some sort of a acid-washed wonderland. It wasn't until later (while reasearching this article) that I found out that El Topo Dos: Topo Mas Fuerte is actually, finally, possibly in production as we speak. And what is the title: Abel Cain.

Boom.

The real star of all of this is the artist, Francois Boucq. He draws in panoramic landscapes and amazingly drafted details that only really seem to exist in the European tradition of comics (or at least how I imagine that tradition to be). His line work is really just stellar. . . even if everyone in this book seems to be some sort of a caveman. That’s acceptable though, when you have the closest thing to John Ford panoramic that I’ve ever seen in comic book form. He’s a pretty swell drawer and I’m poorer for having just found out about him.

Though he does draw a revolver in the 1870's with a swing out cylinder, which is crazy, as that wouldn't have been invented for a good long while afterwards.I mean, who does he think he's fooling?

My real problems with this book is that it seems senselessly and bizarrely cruel. There seems to be a lot of rape and pederasty in this book. Considering the amount of psychosexual activity in El Topo (and just the trailer for the Holy Mountain), I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That movie starts with a naked eight year old, so I guess I really should have known better.

And also I guess my problem is with how light of touch these horrors have. People murder each other because they're bad! I guess! And people rape the children of the murdered because the world is bad! You know! That's how things are. Anyways, this diamond.

I mean, what? What is going on? If you're going to drop some dark, dank shit in my lap, you had best give me a fucking reason. Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author. He understands how to lay down some well reasoned horror and by extension I think I might, as well. Alejandro Jodorowsky, on the other hand is no Cormac McCarthy (and he is no me, which is a shame, I would have a much better beard if this were the case).

Now do we avoid these sort of things because we don’t want to put anyone in danger or do we avoid them because they’re morally wrong? Or do we avoid them because it can easily become exploitative? I don’t know that Jodorowsky knows. What I know is that there are large chunks of this book that make me feel icky. Oogie, even.

Then again the violence is so hyperactive and the plot and characters so surreal, so maybe there’s an argument for the sexuality being as weird as it is. When it all comes down to it, regardless of the actual reason or intention, there is only so much pederasty I am willing to put up with in my art.

Then the big redemption at the end of the story is. . . incest? I guess? I mean, they’re cousins and it’s olde timey, but, really? We’re supposed to be down for this? Is that the point? Is Jodorowsky so European as to make that his central feel good point? Do I care? There’s a lot to unpack and that’s without the fact that the diamond that acts as the story’s MacGuffin is hidden exactly where you think it would be. . . which I guess makes me a sicker man that three depraved murderers.

This book creeps me out in a lot of ways. Then again I bought it for five bucks at Vroman’s, so I do have the standing to be too irked.

Bouncer is a fine spiritual successor to El Topo and, fortunately, it is free of the nonsensical mysticism of that John Lennon championed film and instead replaces it with the use of child rape as a major plot point. Beyond that (if you can get beyond that), it has a passable story and some amazing art work. Outside of Jonah Hex it’s hard to find a decent western comic book and Bouncer: Raising Cain is most certainly decent.

SIDE NOTE: If you haven’t read up on Jodorowsky’s Dune yet, then you definitely should. It’s. . . well, it’s, um, completely fucking nuts. It has a gold toilet. Shaped like a dolphin. And the Emperor of the Universe uses it as a throne. And that Emperor is Salvador Dali.

 

**And even Jonah Hex isn’t even in the West anymore. He’s in Gotham. The hell is that about?

Too Late to Matter: A Review of Melancholia

Too Late to Matter: A Review of Melancholia
Or
How Being Rich and Pretty Will Kill You Right Fucking Dead
by
James Kislingbury

I'm really trying extra hard to not sound like a smart ass when talking about Meloncholia. Besides being an ostensibly portentous film and is directed by Lord Jag Hole, Earl of Fuckwad-upon-the-sea, the movie deserves better than that, not only because even shitty films deserve some level of serious attention before they're thrown down the well, but this film is actually pretty good. Pretty darn good, in fact. It even ends with a big explosion, which is nice to see after the appropriately named dirge that is Melancholia.

Let's get started with the rambling, shall we?



This movie made me think of the great "Cultural Vegetables"

(or your "Cultural Vegetables", or whatever) argument. The argument itself is a more or less bullshit and I've always felt that it was invented by people who didn't want to admit that movies without robots fighting made them dumb, but it's one of these things that loom large over the whole medium. It's not a terrible argument, at all, and I've certainly encountered the exact opposite of the robot-movie pride crowd at film school (which is guys who think that scenes of somebody driving from Barstow to Mexico in real time is the height of artistry and not just boring, pretentious nonsense).

The vegetable argument stems from this idea that movies are either supposed to be fun and critically bulletproof or boring and built for the elites (read: snobs). In this world films are only meant for popular entertainment and anything that deviates from that must be the opposite (and again, for snobs). That isn't the whole argument, it's just that for the most part I've only ever seen morons press for this worldview.

It's a crock of shit that wouldn't have flown back when people like David Lean were making blockbusters about Russian poets. It speaks of something else besides the content of movies. Of course there are boring movies and there are intellectually vapid movies and every other kind of movie on other. The fact remains, though, that just because something is serious, it doesn't mean that it has to be boring. The whole point of Melancholia is to make you feel bad-- and it completely succeeds for all of the right reasons. How is a movie being compelling and emotionally engaging a vegetable? There is value in a movie being as successfully unpleasant as this one.

A great example of this is The Seventh Seal which I just re-watched on glorious Blu-Ray. While watching it, I realized even the most infamously sullen film makers of all time, Ingmar Bergman, is capable of making light and funny scenes juxtaposed between, well, scenes of a knight playing chess with Death. It's not all chess and death is what I'm getting at. This bares on Melancholia, because, like Bergman's masterpiece (or one of them), this gloomy and existentially horrific story doesn't get in the way of it being a good film and, I dare say, an entertaining one. While The Seventh Seal is far and away a better film (which doesn't need to be stated, but here we are), I think this film falls into the same class of "movies that are explicitly about the end of existence, but are still kind of fun in a weird way."

With all of that said, Melancholia doesn't have any of the irony or even mirth that Bergman's movie does, as instead of being divided among an entire troupe, it's divided in two halves, "Part One: Justine" and "Part Two: Claire," which could be negatively described as "Catastrophically Poorly Thought Out Wedding" and "Catastrophically Unlucky Celestial Event." I don't think I'm out of line in saying that the first half, with its passing resemblance to Festen, offers the most laughter and mirth (I mean for catastrophe).

There's an entire worthwhile film in the reception alone. It has ancient drunken poon-hound John Hurt dancing with a fat chick, a rageaholic Kiefer Southerland, and Udo Kier doing his Udo Kier act. Oh, and it also has Stellan Skarsgaard and Alexander Skarsgard, which nobody else finds as funny of a pair as I do.

The second half starts sometime later with the sudden discovery of a massive doom planet that is (apparently) headed directly for earth. It’s a strange shift in content, but not one in tone. There is just as much of a looming demise on the horizon in the first half as in the second half, it’s just that at the wedding it’s not literal. There’s a lot more going on in the first half, which is odd because, again, there’s a giant metaphor headed for the Earth and you’d think that would be enough to keep one’s attention.

It’s almost as if the film was assembled from two entirely different scripts. Disconnect would be a good word for it, but both halves work on their own. It’s almost like complaining that Kill Bill Vol. 1 was all over the place. That’s kind of the point. In Melancholia it does work as this bizarre split as they’re tonally and thematically similar. With that said, if the first half of the movie was dragged out to be ninety minutes long and the arrival of the planet was ignored entirely, I’d be fine with that. In fact, I might prefer it.

With all of that said, as enjoyable and technically well put together as the movie is, there are hiccups within the story that go beyond the splitting of the two halves. The script is the primary hiccup and I can't tell whether it's because the script is purposefully overwrought or because this isn't von Trier's native tongue (at least Bergman was allowed to hide behind translators for the most part). Those moments of distraction are minor and even in the scenes they occur in it doesn't interfere with the overall tone (which is, in most scenes: Deep-seated psychological gloom teetering on sudden violence). The problem with the screenplay isn't that it’s a mess it’s that it has to compete with how everything else in the movie is so incredibly well composed. It sticks out more than it should as a result. So, even if it doesn’t ring true to the ear, it does ring true to the emotions.

If there's a weak link in the cast, I regret to say that it's Skarsgard (again: The hot guy from True Blood, not the sort of doughy guy from Thor—who are apparently father and son). For whatever reason he's played as somewhere between "affable dope" and "actor who isn't sure of his lines." I can put up with a lot of ambiguity (the fact that I liked this movie sort of proves that), but that's a distracting one as it just leads to me not wondering about the character but if Skarsgard is a good actor. He probably is. Looking at the rest of the cast I would find it odd for him to sneak through as a shitty actor. All of that said, it's an odd experience to watching a scene where a husband explains to his newly-minted wife that he bought them an apple orchard and having the sudden realization that he might just be Lenny and we're two steps away from owning a rabbit house.

It's that twilight area between normal guy and full-blown retard that I seem to be getting hitched up on. Maybe, though, that's the point as who in their right might would marry a woman that distressed and, well, sort of a bitch.

There are a few other, minor hiccups along the way. Or, maybe interrogative hiccups (like, the hiccup has a higher pitch at the end, somehow). Like, what exactly happens with her husband? And if she's this depressed and fucked-up why not just put her in a fancy mental home? And why would this dope marry her in the first place? The mind boggles.

If we had an answer, though, he wouldn’t have a movie. The entire movie hinges on poorly thought-out relationships. That and a planet colliding with the Earth. I guess the basic premise does require a little bit of leeway and in the movie’s defense, it handles these things pretty well. They are just hiccups after all.

Though that can of worms makes me start wondering why this movie exists. What is this movie's purpose? If it can’t handle something as basic as why the relationships exist, then either it’s missing something or I am.

As I said I enjoyed it, I would recommend it if you want a bummer movie, but I still don't know what the point of any of it is. "Being sad is shitty and it will kill you" is not the lesson we go to movies for. We go to be told killing the Nazis was great and that nice people bag the right member of the opposite sex and that black men in fat woman suits is hilarious. Sad semi-European people, though? Well that fucking escapes me to be honest.

I guess it's a worthwhile movie in that there isn't any apparent rhyme or reason to the work other than that idea that melancholia is not goddamn good. It's either a sign of excellent direction and vision to make a movie with no real answer to it or it's a sign that you have no fucking idea what you're doing. I'd like to think it's more the former than anything else.

Maybe the lack of a satisfying answer is somehow a reflection of depression itself? Too far? Sorry. I'll take that one back.

I'm lucky that the moment I gave up on was about ten minutes from the end and at the end I felt a kind of relief that I almost exclusively reserve for movies that suck (like Outrage, which I saw about a week later in the same theater. God. What a stinker). In this case I felt it because it succeeded in the task it set out to do, which was make a horrific, brooding meditation on depression. Mission accomplished. Melancholia works exactly how it should. It’s a well acted and well made movie and yet it’s not one I would recommend anyone to rush out and see. I’m glad my friends asked me out to see it because otherwise I would have spent the night dwelling on my own home-made misery instead of someone else’s on the silver screen.

But don't just take my word for it!



Alright, let me get my Melancholia jokes out of the way (ahem):
1) I'm really surprised that they had the budget to attract and crash an entire planet into the earth.
2) When I go to a Scandinavian wedding movie I damn well expect some laughs.
3) I can't decide which lame title is funnier to me "Melonbowlia" or "Cornholia." Both suck. Both almost make me want to giggle.
4) Watching The Seventh Seal immediately before this movie was not a great choice for a number of reasons.

Good. It's all out of my system now.

SIDE NOTE: Here's another article about defending "boring" movies. Unless I already posted it. Which is likely.

Hanna: Or How To Do That Rogue Super-Assassin Movie Right

Before even finishing watching Hanna my first instinct was to compare it with Drive. There's a lot of similarities to be found-- They're both directed by Europeans who are aping American blockbusters, they both came out this year, they're both modern fairy tales, they're both ostensibly genre films with a deep well of artsty-what-have-you, both have excellent soundtracks, and both have a really stellar kill with a length of pipe. A younger version of myself that had to finish a paper would have gone along for the ride. He also might have tried to wedge something about, I don't know, realism into the mix. Also, at the time of writing the first draft of this I was pretty drunk and the whole mess got away from me. It's probably for the best, I'm sure.

Now, before I get into it, the more important argument than any of this is that you should really watch the hell out of both of them. So unless you want to indulge me in my prolonged. . . I don't know what, exactly, then leave now. Go. Go now. Gone? Good. Then it's just me and the dogs in my head that won't stop barking. The reality is that the only way I could square writing about Hanna-- or Drive-- was to couch it in film schoolic nonsense, when I should have taken a breath and realized that it should be enough that it is a very good movie.

What I like about Hanna is that it takes a pretty simple premise and manages to twist it and turn it enough so that it's a better product than the sum of its parts.

On the surface it's a rogue spy movie and underneath that it's just Red Riding Hood. Neither is a particularly complex concept, but there's a reason movies and TV and books and comics and stories told around the campfire keep on coming back to premises as simple as this is because there is something in the human brain that finds it compelling. There's a reason that operas about three thousand year old legends are still being performed and that a new edition of Beowulf comes out every couple of years and it isn't because Adolf Hitler is running an endowment for the fine arts.

On the one hand you can make a hackneyed version of that familiar story and on the other hand there is something immensely satisfying about seeing that old tale told in a new and clever way. The simplicity of Hanna is probably it's greatest flaw. Despite that it still manages to be smarter, more fun, funnier, and more touching than the majority of the high-budget action films it would share a shelf with. At the very least if you want to see a young super-assassin take out a bunch of Euro-trash, this is the movie to see.

One of the reasons this modern fairytale stands out is its European in their style and sensibilities. That probably sounds like an obnoxious thing to say and it probably is, but give me a second here, I'm going to be complimentary. That's a sort of amorphous thing to say and I also realize that calling something "European" or "American" is usually just a code word for some sort of national hostility, in this case I mean it in a positive way. Hanna just feels like a kind of an action movie that could have only been made by Europeans in Europe (though I'm willing to bet that this had no little amount of American money involved in it).

Obviously that might have something to do with the cast, the setting, and the amount of electronica in the soundtrack. Personally I'd like to think I'm a little more cultured than that.

Also, on a base level, it is fun to see a movie where the people with the European accents are the good guys and the person with the over-blown American accent is the bad guy. You don't need to go far to find the opposite is usually the case. There are worse gimmicks to be hooked by.


This is a poster. Stare at it.

Looking at the basic ingredients of Hanna you can see how a lesser director and a stupid cast and crew might have made Bourne Identity: Teenage Edition instead. The movie is allowed to be a little messy and quiet in a way that a bigger budget movie wouldn't allow and it also avoids being just a cheaper version of those films, as well. By applying some sort of weird art judo Hanna, like its titular character, manages to beat the hell out of its bigger competitors by never actually directly competing with them.

Most of the time you see a foreign production make a straight attempt on an American genre it winds up being a version that's made with less money and by someone who doesn't quite get why the genre works in the first place. It's like listening to the Japanese play rock music or the French play the blues. It's a grotesquerie and I'll have no part in it. And just to put it in perspective, do you really want to see an American studio make a Bollywood musical or a comedy of manners?

The best translations of American genres are the ones that take what's good about those films and put their own spin on it. In the case of Bande A Part, Jean-Luc Godard took the American hard boiled novel and the film noir and managed to make a fun and resisted the urge to do a cheap press-plate copy*. The best comparison I can think of is a good cover version of the song-- If I wanted to listen to somebody sound exactly like Bob Dylan, I'll just go and listen to him-- you have to do something different in order to make it worthwhile.

Hanna proves a lesson to which the studios are completely resilient to, which is that you don't have to make a fun popcorn film and make it dumb, as well. You'd think The Dark Knight and Inception especially would be good enough argument for that. As the parade of board game movies and sequels carry on shitting up our streets and making us collectively dumber as a species, it proves that these studios and executives not only aren't listening but that they hate you.

Hanna, and Drive, as well, cost a fraction of the price that the average crime or action or chase film. It also made back twice its budget, which is pretty much the most important factor in all of this. I'm not one to argue for making art for art's sake, so when you see good movies becoming profitable and yet the tide of nonsense seems to only accelerate, it starts to feel like a Kafka story. I mean, if being well made and well liked and profitable isn't enough of an argument, then what the fuck do you even want?

And another thing, if you're spending two-hundred fifty million dollars on a movie and it isn't as good as a movie that cost thirty, what is all of that money going towards? Cocaine and Red Bull can't cost that much.

I was looking at this article about Amazon dot com and there was a line I read which just kind of confirmed something I've been hearing for a while, which is "[w]hen you try to have a conversation with the new Hollywood, it quickly becomes clear that you’re talking about movies and they’re talking about refrigerators."

It makes me hope that at least at this point in history while most film studios are looking to make fridges, there might be some relict community in Europe that still want to make movies. That's probably not true, I realize. I just want to believe it is.

But none of this has to do with anything.


Arctic mountain girl assassin is a good look. I predict a trend.

Besides the genre-bending going on, there's scene in Hanna that I think all of us would recognize as a standard pillow-talk scene between two lovers. In fact, I'm positive I've seen this scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except that instead of it being two lovers talking at point blank range under a sheet, it's two teenage girls.

The amazing thing is that even when one character kisses the other, it isn't creepy or weird or tinged by any sort of lechery. It's a legitimate sign of one person loving another. It's beautiful. Where this movie differs from the standard action-thriller can't be numbered, but this scene sticks out in my head the most, because while this is an ass-kicking, fuck-you-up, fugitive/chase/assassin movie, it's still about a little girl lost in the woods who found a friend.

I guess the fact that this scene is set-up in such a way and is not intended in any way to inflict boners gets me to believe that there is something greater at work. That this is so casually put in and then tossed away leads me also to believe that there's an alternative way of looking at things that doesn't involve dude boners or lady boners poking all over the place or being completely asexual.

I mean you've got people who have access to nude beaches making films, occasionally there's going to be some fissures between them and us in terms of what's normal. Or what is inappropriately titillating. One can only imagine what the Brett Ratner version of this movie would look like.

On second thought, don't.


Cate Blanchett points her weapon and ludicrous Southern accent at persons unknown.

Watching the special features, I also realize that the movie is better edited than most high budget affairs, in that, when people are fighting, I can actually tell that two people are fighting. What a concept.

Over the past ten or so years the art of editing an action sequence as gone from a coherent narrative to something akin to blurred objects fucking for a third of a second at a time. It's a shame and-- I, in no uncertain terms blame Sir Ridley Scott for all of this-- luckily Hanna manages to escape that trap. It's odd that we're at a point in our evolution where putting together a fight scene so that the human eye can comprehend it is an aesthetic choice.


Tom Hollander just straight up being a boss with his sexually ambiguous skinhead henchmen.

So what have we all learned here? I don't know, I kind of lost track of it here. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're going to make an action movie make sure that you have a competent director who is maybe from Europe. They seem to know a thing or two about using a smaller budget and also maybe story telling. And if you're going to make a movie that could quite easily fall into the realm of cliche or camp make sure you at least pack it full of well done action and fine performances. Also, I am kind of angry with the status quo of the movie industry. Again, fifty years ago one of the biggest movies ever made starred an Egyptian and was about a Russian poet who cheats on his wife. Today it is about people who jerk off to close-up shots of cars for a third of a second at a time.

Oh, also, the soundtrack deserves a mention. Composed by the Chemical Brothers also known as "That one electronica band nobody really has a problem with" and "Not, that's the Dust Brothers you're thinking of, they also do electronica music," the original score is pretty darn delightful just on its own. When inserted into the film it gives the subject a kind of light-heartedness and a playfulness that works perfectly with what's on the screen. Hanna isn't a perfect film but there are few movies I can think of recently where the soundtrack works with the visuals as in this film.

The music comes into the frame, so to speak, at just the right moments and isn't so overbearing that it telegraphs to the audience "We're doing something, you should be impressed right now," which is maybe a voice only I hear in my head, though I'm sure it's an experience we've all seen and heard in films (I'm going to blame oh, I don't know, David Fincher for that one. Yeah. He can take it. He'll be alright). It's like a character on its own, but it's not about to upstage anyone.

Anyways--If you want a sleek European action movie you could do worse. Go and see Hanna. You deserve a fun movie and it deserves the audience. It's the kind of movie I can't wait until my niece and nephew are old enough to watch.

On that note, let's let the Drive soundtrack play us out--

Yeah. That hits the spot.

And this fun little scene--

Horse hockey, they cut out the best line in this scene!

SUB-NOTE: Seriously, the worst thing about Hanna is that the title isn't an anagram. Would it have hurt them s much to add an H on the end?

SECOND SUB-NOTE: I couldn't find a place in the essay for this, but I'd like to point out that both movies have a pretty stellar kills with a pipe. A good year for elaborate pipe kills.

THIRD SUB-NOTE: Oh shit that's the guy from In the Loop and The Thick of It! Holy shit! I thought he was just some German weirdo they picked up off the streets. I love this movie!

FOURTH SUB-NOTE: Another thing I cut out before this "went to print" (laugh to self, wipe tear away) is how because this movie was basically a version of Red Riding Hood, but with paramilitary and espionage what have you inserted into the story it therefore shared some DNA with the Japanese film Jin-Roh.

FINAL SUB-NOTE: I just recently finished Fantastic Mr. Fox. I didn't care for it at all. I'm fairly certain everyone who thinks it's brilliant is insane, but looking at the negative reviews, I can't say anything kinder about the people who didn't like it. There is a weird anti-American sentiment regarding the movie, as though this fairly inocuous movie was final straw in an Anglo-American culture war that we didn't even know existed (which I'm sure pisses these passive-agressive English people to no end). It's a crazy thing to read consider that Wes Anderson is hardly the most bombastic or American film maker I can think of. "Oh that Anderson fella, always being loud and making overweight films!" I mean, really? Wes Anderson? That's the strawman you're going to burn for bastardizing your culture? Blegh. Idiots.



*Actually, thinking about it, the film noir is one of the few American genres that foreigners seem to do just as well. Hmmm. I might have to recalibrate my thoughts on this. Westerns are another good example-- Sergio Leone took the cowboy movie and injected it with an operatic glee that his American counterparts never had. Then again how corny are the movies that are trying to copy Leone? You know what? In general: Don't go around copying people if you suck.