Connie Lane Gives A Long Clear Look At BUTT-NUMB-A-THON 9!!!

Call me Connie Lane. ********* Upon checking in, we were each given an envelope with three tickets - one for an official BNAT shirt, one for our swag bag, and one for a surprise item that we would be told about later. I quickly took in the new surroundings. It was strange, for example, having looked at the old-school marquee all those years, to see the new digital marquee as I walked through the front door of the Ritz. And for some reason the flat screen TV in the lobby was playing a lot of Bill Murray clips. Harry was seated at the back this year, and a camera was set up so that he could appear in front of us on the screen. There were the usual pre-show clips and introductions, the mention of our first film, and the assurance that we would be seeing the usual array of the coolest trailers ever. One of these trailers was, of course, the famous STUNT ROCK trailer, which this time concluded with Tim League, dressed as King of the Wizards and slamming his staff on the stage, sending confetti everywhere (which the Alamo staff would spend the next 24 hours trying to sweep up). The show had officially begun. What happened before our first movie, though, was that we got a walk-through of how HD-DVD works and what you can do with a HD-DVD player. This might have seemed superfluous, but we had just been told that WE WOULD ALL BE RECEIVING TOSHIBA HD-DVD PLAYERS ON OUR WAY OUT THE NEXT MORNING. TADA! TADA FOREVER! After that excitement, it was finally time for our first feature. THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940) This film was chosen in honor of the writers' strike, because Preston Sturges was paid a whopping $10 for writing it - possibly the biggest screw-over of any screenwriter. Of course, Sturges also got the privilege of directing this film, and his screenplay won the Oscar, so that worked out pretty well for him. This is a movie about a guy who's played crooked all his life and was able to make it all the way to the office of governor. He could have reached any level of power he wanted, using his brains and lack of scruples, but he slipped up and did something good (fell in love with his wife and family, and tried to make them happy) in "one crazy minute" and lost it all. This movie has a lot of great character actors - the kind you'll swear you've seen before but you can't quite place them. The movie also has a lot of man-tussles between McGinty and The Boss. It isn't Sturges' best, by any means, but it's definitely a classic and worth checking out. It's always amusing to witness the crowd reactions at BNAT. There are a lot of moments in this movie that were (probably) unintentionally funny, but it was great to watch our crowd melt at the family scenes with the kids and the dog. CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007) Most of the reviews I've read for this movie are by people who don't seem to like it very much, but I found it incredibly compelling. I was concerned, watching the previews for this and having never read the book, that the movie was glorifying what America did in Afghanistan and overlooking the fact that, for all the good it did in our conflicts with Russia, it created a new conflict with a new enemy - one that we are still dealing with and are still no closer to resolving. But of course the movie doesn't overlook it. They just can't push that in the trailers, because that's the twist of the story. Well, not twist in the sense of something we suddenly learn, but it's kind of the poisonous punch line of the film. The meat of the movie belongs to Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I had all but given up on Hanks as an interesting actor. For the past several years, he has seemed to be just playing the Tom Hanks character in any movie he was in, but his Charlie is a refreshing step in a new direction. It's unnerving at first to see him in a hot tub with a bunch of hot naked babes - not to mention the rear nakedness of Hanks himself - but he's very believable as a deeply flawed politician who has charm and at least a drop of human decency (though not much more). Hoffman is always amazing, but he really takes a bite out of Sorkin's writing and goes to town with it. Oh yeah, Aaron Sorkin. He of the occasional platitudes and preachiness, but don't you wish you could preach like he can? This is one of my favorite bits of Sorkin writing. It's not as stirring as some of his most characteristic writing. It's much more subtle, and I think all the stronger for that. It pushes buttons, certainly, but you'd never really know it. It brings the point home firmly but quietly, without fanfare. Perhaps it's Mike Nichols' direction that reigns it in, but there are no great speeches about how the victory in Afghanistan has led to our troubles in the Middle East. Just a story Hoffman tells about a Zen master and a quote from the real Charlie Wilson about how yeah all this was great, but then we messed it up in the end. Critics who slam the film for painting the US as the white knights are missing the point entirely. This is what America has always done - go in to some situation we know very little about, put a band-aid on it, and then leave, not thinking or caring how what we've done affects the future. Perhaps this movie doesn't really tell us anything we don't know, but ... I'd be willing to bet that lots of people who will go to see this movie don't know already what the movie is trying to tell them. PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) Richard Widmark is Skip McCoy, a pickpocket who lifts a wallet from a girl named Candy, unknowingly setting off a disastrous chain of events. Unbeknownst to Skip, Candy's wallet contained a film that she was supposed to deliver to an associate of her ex-boyfriend's. Candy's ex forces her to find whoever took the film and get it back, by any means necessary. What Candy doesn't know is that this film contains top-secret information that she was (also unknowingly) passing to Communist spies. She manages to find Skip and tries to seduce him and bribe him into giving her the film, but his price is far too high. In the middle of all of this is Thelma Ritter, playing an unofficially paid police informant who sells stolen neckties as a front. The relationships in this are interesting. Candy falls in love with Skip, and he obviously likes her as well, but it's rather a funny setup and it makes Candy look not so bright for falling for him. They'll be slapping each other around, stop for five seconds, and Candy would just melt for him. Then, after a few moments of passion, Skip would ask if she brought the money he was trying to get for the film. This is another film that heavily features man-tussles. There's an especially intense man-fight at the end, in a subway train. The movie essentially belongs to Skip and Candy, but its heart is Thelma Ritter, who I think was never better (or more heartbreaking) than she is here. MONGOL (2007) This is apparently the first part of what is hoped to be an epic trilogy spanning the life of Genghis Khan. MONGOL covers his early life and shows us a side of him that we don't normally read about in history books - the son, the lover, the father, and the warrior. We first meet the man who would be Genghis Khan, known to us only as Temudgin, when he is nine years old and traveling with his father to choose a bride. However, on their way there, they stop at another village and Temudgin chooses a bride from that clan instead, paying a great insult to the other clan and setting up a later conflict. Temudgin eventually becomes a slave, but with a bit of help, manages to escape. In his twenties, he returns to marry Borte, the bride he chose as a child, but she is soon taken from him. He enlists the help of a childhood friend to get her back (though the friend makes him wait a year to get this help), and they succeed, but Temudgin refuses allegiance to this friend when he suggests that Temudgin be his second-in-command. Temudgin leaves his friend, taking a few of his most trusted warriors with him, and this creates a rivalry between the two Khans. Temudgin suffers several more trials and eventually breaks out of prison (with the help of Borte). There is a great battle between his army and the much larger army of his former friend. Temudgin's army is the victor, and the film closes here, only slightly glancing ahead at the legend Temudgin would become. A gorgeous movie, and I would gladly see it again. THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971) This is an absolute classic cult film, but I had never seen it before, and it was great to see a really beautiful print of it. There are some really hilarious bits with the Inspectors and Scotland Yard, and the music gives the film a lot of its character (I particularly love the organ rendition of "Over the Rainbow" that accompanies the closing credits). But the film's real allure comes from Vincent Price, who is so delightfully campy and over-the-top. His character speaks through a sort of primitive vocoder that attaches to the side of his neck. His refrain of "Nine killed her ... nine shall die!" is a thing of cheese-o-rific beauty. SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007) Let me get this out of the way first. People who are talking about this film's Oscar chances are probably wasting their breath. I see Depp possibly getting a Best Actor nod, but this is not a "Best Picture" kind of movie - maybe at the Golden Globes, but not the Oscars. That is not to say - AT ALL - that this is not a good movie. It's a wonderful movie, a great piece of film, and what I think is the perfect film that could possibly have been made from the stage musical. It's just not the kind of movie that Oscar voters tend to recognize. This isn't just because of the stylized violence and blood - though that's probably part of it - but it's a very particular kind of movie, and (much to its credit) it doesn't try to be anything else. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the basics of the story, but here's a recap. Sweeney Todd was once known as Benjamin Barker, a barber who had a good life, a beautiful wife, and a baby daughter. Judge Turpin lusts after Mrs. Barker, and uses his power to have Barker sent to prison for life on a false charge. Barker breaks out of prison and returns to London fifteen years later, only to find his wife and child gone. He swears revenge on the Judge his stooge, Beadle Bamford, and after missing what might be his only chance to kill the judge, he decides to practice and sharpen his razors on the throats of his customers. His neighbor, Mrs. Lovett - baker of meat pies with no meat - is besotted with him and helps him, eventually cooking up (*cringe* so sorry for that awful pun) a scheme in which they'll dispose of the bodies by using them as meat for her pies, which become the culinary hit of London. And of course, as in all great stories, complications arise, secrets are revealed, and almost everyone dies. Great holiday entertainment for the whole family! It starts with a lovely animated credits sequence, highlighted by the underscore to the omitted "Ballad of Sweeney Todd." There have been complaints about leaving this song out, but I didn't really miss it. The orchestration of it permeates the film, and "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd ... his skin was pale and his eye was odd" is just not the way to start a film. A play, yes - a film, no. In addition to the Ballad, two other whole numbers were cut - the Judge's song "Johanna" and "Kiss Me." "Johanna" is a wonderful characterization piece that has what I call a sort of masturbatory melody - very fitting for what we are learning about the character. But on film, we learn all that we really need to know on that score when we see the Judge look through a peephole at his 16-year-old ward, Johanna (who also happens to be Todd's estranged daughter). I have never been a great fan of "Kiss Me," and felt it was stretching the bounds of acceptable levels of over-the-top-ness, even on the stage, and would have killed the film. So I didn't personally miss it. As far as other songs go, they're all there, though not necessarily in their entirety. That being said, there are quite a few bits of extended singing (I'd say about 75-80% percent of what is communicated in the film is sung, not spoken), and Sondheim's songs are very dense in lyrics, so if you're not familiar with the show and the songs, I recommend being a very careful listener. One of my handful of concerns with this film is that people might miss important things that are being said because they're part of a song. Because we're not really used, as audience members, to actually listening to what people are singing on screen. The performances are all superb. Depp, as usual, is stunning. He's only the slightest bit overdone, but that is essential to the character and the style of the film itself. And his singing voice, while not the roaring monsters of Len Cariou and George Hearn, is instead subdued, which is perfect for the medium of film (but he does know when it's time to roar, and does it admirably). I was surprised how much I liked Helena Bonham-Carter. I was not wild about what I'd seen in the previews, and as much as I adore Mrs. Lovett as a character, I can't stand most of the portrayals I've seen of her. Sacha Baron Cohen is only in a couple of scenes, but his Pirelli owns them both, as well he should. Alan Rickman seems a bit over-the-top in diabolicalness, but again, I think that's part of the style of the story and the character itself. His duet with Johnny, "Pretty Women," is one of my favorite moments in the film. Jayne Wiseman and Jamie Campbell Bower are lovely, with even lovelier voices, and I enjoy their part in the story - they're kind of like a Disney couple who took a wrong turn and ended up in a horror movie. I've always thought that you could play the story in a loop, because Anthony and Johanna are setting themselves up for the same kind of fate that befell Sweeney and his wife. The real find in the cast is Ed Sanders, who plays Toby. On the stage, Toby is traditionally played by a man in his late twenties or early thirties. This gives the impression of Toby as a sort of man-child - a boy in his late teens at the youngest, who never quite developed into an adult. But Sanders is an actual child, probably about 12 years old, which creates a very different dynamic. There's a difference between Pirelli smacking a man around and smacking a child around. There's a difference between a grown man singing to Mrs. Lovett "Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around" and a child singing that. Sanders plays Toby as a Dickensian child, abused by 19th Century London and the people who inhabit it. A disturbingly chronic (especially for a child) imbiber of gin, but literally the only truly selfless character in the story. As a total package, this is a FANTASTIC movie - a home run for Burton and everyone involved, as far as I'm concerned - and I can't WAIT to see it again. It's not an "award-bait" kind of movie, and the stage show wasn't an "award-bait" kind of show. But it's a success in every way that I think matters, and it's an armful of absolute joy, coming out just in time for Christmas. I hope everyone loves it as much as I do. I'd also like to take this opportunity to declare my love for whoever came up with the idea to bake 200-something meat pies and pass them out to everyone in the middle of this movie. That was an absolutely perfect touch. LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962) This was probably my favorite "classic" that we saw. It stars Kirk Douglas, in what he has said is his favorite movie. There is an incredible supporting cast, including Walter Matthau, Gena Rowlands, and Carroll O'Connor in one of his first movies (well before his Archie Bunker days). Douglas plays Jack Burns, a transient worker and ranch hand, much like the old-school cowboys. He rejects much of the modern world - he won't get a driver's license or social security card, and there's an hysterical scene at the beginning where he tries to ride his horse across highway traffic. A friend of his was sent to jail for trying to help illegal immigrants, and Jack purposely gets arrested so that he can go to jail and get him out. The friend refuses to try and escape, because things will be worse for him if he's caught, but Jack breaks out himself and is on the run from the police for much of the movie. Apparently Sylvester Stallone was inspired by this movie in writing FIRST BLOOD, and there are many obvious similarities. This is a gorgeous film, and it's well-acted and mostly well-directed and written. But it does suffer from an almost unbearably long chase/pursuit section. It's still wonderful, though, and definitely my favorite of the older stuff. THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES (2007) This was introduced as a documentary. It didn't take long at all for me to figure out, however, that what we were watching was not a documentary at all. But we were clearly supposed to think it was, even down to some ambiguously formatted closing credits. And this is where I think the film crossed the line. There's a good kind of disturbing, and this was not it. I have a pretty damn good sense of humor, if I say so myself, for things that most other people find offensive or off-putting, but this film crossed my threshold. I love the HOSTEL movies, I think AUDITION is brilliant, and I think the whole furor over "torture porn" (and even that phrase itself) is terribly overblown by people who don't understand what other people find appealing or interesting about these movies. But this film is not HOSTEL or SAW or AUDITION. It presents the story as if it is absolutely factual, even though the writing and acting is such that any person with a lick of sense can tell otherwise. It plays on what I consider to be a rather disturbing trend in our culture of fascination with real-life horror - that thing that makes people want to watch real videos of war prisoners getting their heads cut off or the execution of Sadaam Hussein or even those investigative reporter shows where the story is reenacted by actors, but they're enacting things that really happened. This movie revolves around the finding of some videotapes that a serial killer made of himself stalking, torturing, and killing his victims. And then the "FBI experts" show us their collection of the tapes - a ridiculously large amassing of videos, about half of which they claim are of one victim in particular, Cheryl Dempsey. We're shown some of Cheryl's tapes. The stalking is actually genuinely creepy, but when it gets to the actual torture ... I don't know. I think my real problem here is that this is presented as if it were real, and then the movie failed to make it feel real, and tried rather ham-fistedly to be absurd and darkly funny, which is completely out of place. The torturing of supposedly real people is not funny. Or entertaining. The thing about HOSTEL and AUDITION and these other films is that we know it's fiction, and those movies never try to pretend they're anything else. The films are saying something about people or about society and THAT is what we're meant to take away from those films. I have nothing against "found footage" films, and I actually quite liked THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Where BWP succeeds and this film doesn't, I think, is that BWP put you completely in the point-of-view of the victims. You experience almost the entire story through their footage, and the emotions it taps into are the emotions that you share with the characters - fear of the unknown, the unseen. What we know is what they know. You care about what happens to the characters because you're with them every step of the way. In Poughkeepsie, we don't get inside like that. The audience is the all-knowing voyeur. I feel for people in the FBI who have to see stuff like this every day and witness these horrors with the context of the crime that the victim blessedly did not have. And I don't care for how this film pushes those buttons in me and almost physically nudges me, whispering annoyingly in my ear "Isn't that horrible? Huh? Huh? Doesn't that make you sick?" Yes, it does. But if that's all the filmmakers had to say, I don't think it's something to be proud of. TEEN LUST (1979) I'd love to say I hated this movie, but I don't think I did. The timing of when this movie came out is significant, I think. If it had been made in the 1980s, it would have been a screwball sex comedy. If it had come out a bit earlier in the 1970s, it would have been a twisted mind-warp film like TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN. But being on the cusp of the 70s and 80s, it's kind of a bizarre combination of those two. This is the movie that dares to ask "Can we fit some more boobs in this scene?" The nudity is exceptionally gratuitous, as to almost be laughable, but ... I think there's method behind the madness. It's almost as if this film is taking you directly into the minds of its characters (I use the term "characters" rather charitably here, it should be noted). All they think about is sex and T&A, so that's a good chunk of what we see. There is certainly an element of badness (a rather large one, if I may say so) in this movie. Despite all the nudity, there's a lot of "tell, don't show" in the, uh, plot (for lack of a more accurate term). There's all kinds of things in the main character's family that are all kinds of wrong and most of the characters seem generally unfazed by it. There could be a drinking game from all the times Carol's dad asks her for a kiss, for example. It's bad, very bad, but sometimes bad movies can be good, you know? STAR TREK: CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER This was in HD-DVD, so you could REALLY see the blue eye shadow on the male actors, especially George Takei. Really beautiful on the big screen and in HD, though. And it was great watching McCoy go nuts. XD FEELS SO GOOD Picture (if you dare!) a short film documenting a urethroplasty, accompanied by Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good." This was probably the best "audience response" film of the entire event - lots of howls of terror and horrified laughter, and eventually we were all clapping to the beat of the music. Goodbye, TEENAGE MOTHER! There's a new sheriff in town! GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971) Okay, here's the thing. This was, arguably, the most painful experience of any BNAT I've attended. I think it manages to nudge TIPTOES out of the top spot there. But a lot of the time, it's strangely and unforgivably compelling. I think I may be a BNAT masochist, but I love seeing the painful stuff with this audience, too. You may remember that a couple of years ago at BNAT 7 we saw a film called DRUM, which was introduced as - and I thought at the time pretty accurately - one of the most offensive movies ever made. GOODBYE UNCLE TOM covers some of the same ground that DRUM did - the extreme sexualization of black slaves in America, to pick a not-so-random example - but from a different perspective, and it dials the shock factor up several notches. Most of the movie is filmed as if the viewer is a journalist in the time of the Civil War (or is it that the filmmakers have traveled back in time?), being told about how slaves are brought in and sold, and how their masters see them and how the masters justify their treatment of them. This is one of those films where, with some effort, you can see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but it's so misguided and screwy and intolerably exploitative that the boundaries are pushed, pushed, pushed to the edge and then over a cliff to the rocks below. There is one particularly painful scene where a 13-year-old slave girl is berated by her "Mammy" for being a virgin, then offers herself to the journalist (who is, lest we forget, the viewer) in an incredibly disturbing "do not want" manner. I'd try to describe it more fully, but I can't bear to. At one point, I heard my neighbor, who had been one of the more enthusiastic viewers of the urethroplasty clip, say "Please, make it stop." Sadly, it didn't. I don't know how long this movie actually is, but it felt like it lasted for several days. And then there's this weird sort of coda to the film, where we're in present day (the 1970s, that is), and this black man is sitting on the beach reading William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. The point here seems to be that race relations are the same now as they were during the days of slavery. And … yeah, there's just nothing to say to that. I'm all for "telling it like it is" and not watering down the more colorful parts of our country's history, but damn. It should still be treated responsibly, and not like a piece of pornography. I also can't help rolling my eyes that this was supposedly the filmmakers' attempt to acquit themselves of racism after the poor reception of a previous movie. To which I can only say that if you want so badly to acquit yourself of something that you start soaking money into a moviemaking venture, you're probably not innocent of the charge. TRICK 'R TREAT (2008) This is a really cool film, styled after the multi-story, horror comic book structure of the CREEPSHOW movies. But with a twist. There are (I think) four stories. But they are all happening in the same place, and weaving into each other. So the story divisions are more time-related. We start with one story, jump back a few hours and meet some other characters in the same town on the same night having a few different adventures, then jump back again, etc. There's no point even trying to explain the stories, because they all overlap anyway. And some of the stories - well, all of them, really - have rather nice twists that I hate to spoil. But here's a glimpse of some of the characters. Dylan Baker is Steven, a school principal who has some rather morbid entertainment standards and carves some special jack-o-lanterns with his son. Brian Cox is his crotchedy neighbor who is visited by a trick-or-treater in a very distinct costume who appears at some point in all the other stories. Anna Paquin is Laurie, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and seen as the weak virgin in her group of four friends. And then there are a bunch of kids who go too far in a prank and end up getting more than they bargained for. This is a perfect Halloween film. It really sinks its teeth into the holiday and the superstitions, there's all kinds of fun costumes, and there are some great creatures. It's also a wonderful take on the horror genre. There's not just one monster/killer, and it doesn't really follow the horror formula at all, which is quite refreshing. And afterwards we had a nice Q&A with the director Michael Dougherty, who was just an all-around cool guy and had stayed for the whole event. Another great Geek Christmas - Thanks, Harry!