Monsters University

Crossing the Line
or
Big Monsters on Campus

They're ba-ack.  The monsters who regularly hide in your childhood closets to go bump in the night have returned.  And the whole premise of Monsters University is to show how Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James Sullivan (John Goodman) first bumped into each other in the first place.  It was a given in the first film (and one of its unstated charms) that a one-eyed puke-green bi-ped and a shaggy polka-dotted blue-green beast became friends in the first place.  M.U. feels the need to explain this monstrously odd color in the first place.  You just know that at some story-meeting, the Pixar geeks leaned back and said "they probably met in college."

Which leads to the question, what sort of college would that be?  Knowing that we, as an audience, had already suffered through the entire course-load at Hogwarts, M.U. was a good bet for movie-goers.  There are all sorts of easy ironies for a place of learning that specializes in scaring the tar out of you (just as there was in the "Potter" series), and the ways that faculty and staff can exert their own forms of terror can make for a fairly seamless story-line (Helen Mirren is brought in—seemingly the only Britisher not to appear in the "Potter" movies—as the dragony dean of studies).  And the writers have a good time expanding on the differences between Mike and Sully.  Mike has all the scary potential of a rubber ball, and his struggles through the "scare" curriculum makes him more of an over-achiever than he already is (one can easily see him pulling one-nighter's until his one eye is blood-shot, but they don't go there).  Sully has it easy—he's a legacy student and doesn't put much effort into it, until his own back is against the wall.  Both are campus mis-fits of a sort; they can't get into the fraternity lorded over by Johnny Worthington (Nathan Fillion) and can only get into the scary "animal house" of losers that are the nerds on campus.  Once all this is established, the story writes itself, as if by rote.

Ever taught at a University?  It looks kinda like this.

And that's the problem with Monsters University.  The basic concept does some stretching, but then it's "pixilate by the numbers."  Everything looks great-nobody makes a movie look as good as Pixar, whether it's a natural setting as in their Brave, or the unnatural one here, and the nuances of character draw from classic animation as well as a few wrinkles that Pixar tosses in.  But the studio's sequels (excepting the "Toy Story" series) have a sameness that feels like coasting, as opposed to the daring ideas like Ratatouille and Up.  The best of the Pixar films expand the horizons and stretch the form.  One like this one are more insular and shrink the potential and the possibilities.  At least it's better than Cars 2, which, basically, ran around in circles, as race-cars are wont to do.

The preview for the next Disney factory movie shows it's about airplanes.  *Sigh* It does not bode well.

Monsters University is a Rental.

One of the little details that makes me love Pixar:
A "traditional" styled map of Monsters U.

Flight

Flying Inverted
or
Cracking the Whip

It's been years since Robert Zemeckis made a live-action film (the last being Cast Away, all the way back in 2000, the time being taken up with his three motion capture animated films) and this one, Flight, is an interesting choice, quite unlike anything the director has done, but falling in line with his other films about people being left up in the air about fundamental choices in their lives.  

Captain Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington) is a pilot on cruise-control.  Unfortunately, it's a path that will ultimately crash and burn.  An alcoholic and coke-head, he'll do a layover with a stew (in this instance, Nadine Velazquez), get wasted, and then to get himself #1 on the runway will do a line, so he can do the "pilot walk" to the cabin—all confidence and casualness for the launching of "souls" into the wild-blue yonder.

Even before he takes off, Whip is flying.  But his nonchalance and bon homie gets him through, even through a difficult take-off through low turbulence.  He pushes the plane, but clears the clouds early and restores order to the flight, then settles back to cadge some booze samples, smuggle them into his orange juice and catch some sleep.  He wakes up just in time for a crisis: the plane bangs, then goes into a steep dive that terrifies the passengers and crew (and me) and merely gives Whip a much needed shot of adrenaline.  The only way he can take the plane from pile-driving into the ground is to bank it until he's flying upside down, then skimming the Earth until he can find a clear place to land, then cork-screw right side up and ditching for a landing.

Six people die, two on the crew.  Whittaker wakes up in the hospital with torn ligaments in his knees, lacerations around his eye and no idea how he got there.  First visitor is the pilot's union rep (Bruce Greenwood), then the NTSB who are all "just the facts" and deferential.  Next is Whip's "connection" (John Goodman), a Dr. Feelgood who waltzes in (to the tune of the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil;" Whip's is "Feelin' Alright"), tells Whip he's a hero, that reporters are hunting him, and criticizes the doctors' choice in pain-killers: "Amateur night!"  All Whip can think about is getting out, but it's not as simple as that.  He's under investigation for the crash (his simple response is "it was a broken plane"), has been lawyered up with an attorney (Don Cheadle) who doesn't like him, thinks he's a creep, but is going to do his job, and on top of it all, Whittaker must deal with a pissed-off ex-wife and a son who doesn't know him, and has no intentions to.

In the hospital, he meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly, you'll remember her as Dr. Watson's wife in the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies), who's recovering from an overdose and not in a good way.  Whip is attracted—she's female and weak, which seem to be all that's required—and he whisks her away to his family's small farm and failed crop-dusting business in rural Georgia.  He's already ditched all the alcohol, but after a couple days, he's back in the bag, drinking himself into oblivion while Nicole goes to AA meetings.  Whip visits, too, but when things get personal, he takes off.

Washington is brilliant in all of this, showing both the pilot's strengths and pitiful weaknesses.  His scenes of bleary drunkenness feel real and incomprehensible, and one watches his constant crashing after attempts to bring himself up are painful to watch.  The balance of the film is Whip's cart-wheeling from sober to sloshed, his best instincts superseded by his addictions—a man in constant denial, addicted to lying (and pulling himself out of a crisis) and risk-taking as much as to the hooch.  It's a rough ride to be a part of and even observe, Whittaker constantly pulling himself out of his dives, then going into another tailspin, and you just know the only time he'll level off is when he crashes.  The parallels between flight and addiction are obvious (how far can you push yourself before everything breaks and if you survive, how much further can you push?) and audiences who gripe about all the action being in the first 20 minutes, may not realize that they're watching a parallel course throughout the rest of the movie, only far more personal, and maybe (hopefully) not as relatable.  

It is a tough, emotional roller-coaster to be a part of, but everything is of a piece.  At one point, Cheadle's lawyer puts it succinctly: "Death demands responsibility," and responsibility is one thing Whittaker has never known.  The old Irwin Allen disaster movie posters used to scream "Who Will Survive?" The same applies here, even if the audience-grabbing disaster only occurs at the beginning, and we white-knuckle it to see who'll surface from the rubble.  This is a smart, troubling, painful movie to watch.  But, you can't turn away, either in horror or fascination.

Flight is a Full-Price Ticket.

Whip Whittaker's sobering flight is just the first leg on the itinerary.

Argo

Hoo-Ray for Hollywood (grumble)
or
The Best Bad Idea We Have...By Far

The 1979-1981 Iranian hostage crisis, the 444 day ordeal of the American Embassy workers captured and held by a well-organized angry mob (funny how those angry mobs in the Middle East have a sustainable infrastructure that can keep the ball...and the U.S...in the air for over a year), was an event that gave us our first taste of extremist Muslim terrorism and the presidency of Ronald Reagan (Way to go, Iran!  Can't wait to see the inadvertent fallout from your nuclear program!).

One of the back-stories of the whole magilla was what became known as "The Canadian Caper," where six of the workers walked out of the Embassy and stayed at the Canadian ambassador's residence for a nice chunk of the crisis and managed to fly home  under the noses of the cracked-down Iranian security thugacracy.  What was not known was that the operation to extricate those workers—on the QT, hush-hush, and only recently declassified—was the work of the very agency that was being blamed for the Shah's presence in the first place*—the CIA.

The story of the very weird "Mission: Impossible"-styled rescue is told in Argo, the third film to be directed by Ben Affleck (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) and it's his most assured movie to date.  It's also his safest and least nuanced.  Maybe the story is so bizarre, so full of dangerously easy irony and satire, that the director in Affleck felt the need to tone things down on his style (much the same way that Affleck the actor does here, as well, in his performance as CIA advisor Tony Mendez) and just "stick to the facts" and get his recreations down right (there's enough pride in this that the end-credits show a split-screen of archive footage and movie film footage to prove the point), thinking he'd be guilty of "gilding the lily" or even undermining it by...I don't know...showing any "style," other than switching film-stocks and shooting in a "found-footage" way of snatch-and-grab.  And yet, were that true, the film might have had a far more different ending, rather than the one Argo actually presents.  It would have been nice to throw in some of Affleck's previous shooting ingenuity, rather than create the dichotomy that Argo ultimately presents.

It is a story that captures the imagination.  Six of the American embassy workers in Tehran manage to hole up at the residence of the Canadian ambassador, but time is of the essence as the Iranian guard are closing in on their location after carefully piecing together intel from the embassy.  The wonks at the State department and CIA try to come up with a scenario that might get the workers over the border—bicycles—but Mendez is skeptical of putting the six out in the open for a "casual" bike trip of a couple hundred miles.  Mendez's scheme (hatched after a viewing of a "Planet of the Apes" movie) hides them in plain sight—have them pose as a scouting group for a sci-fi movie that needs a desert location (like, say, Iran) and have the group (who have appeared out of nowhere) just fly out under those assumed roles and identities working on a project viable enough to be fact-checked at the time of departure.

So, Mendez recruits an industry friend, John Chambers (John Goodman), who has done extensive make-up and prosthetics work for the CIA and the Army (as well as winning an Oscar for his monkey-faces on those "Planet of the Apes" movies) to start a project that has enough publicity splash to make it all the way to Iran. A producer, Lester Siegel (a fabrication and played by the masterful Alan Arkin), is recruited to lend industry cred and get the word out to the press, allowing Mendez to fly to Tehran to train the hostages on their roles, synchronize watches, and sweat the details, which are many and widely scattered.

The idea is so crazy and "out there" that it "just could work."  The beauty of it is that it did,  but not quite in the way Affleck and scripter Chris Terrio would have us believe.  In fact, the final "ex-filtration" is so nested with complications and roadblocks—and a seeming need to fulfill some perceived action quotient—that it becomes frustratingly conventional in a "Hollywood" sense. 

This is slightly gear-grinding.  By now, we should be so used to The Movies' need to dramatically enhance actual events, that it shouldn't come as a surprise that some fact-tinkering is involved.  But, Affleck's film is so cynical of Tinseltown tampering,** that it's a little cake-eating to then rely on such notions for a white-knuckle finale, as the actual situation is tense enough without having to also (oh, I don't know) stage a gunfight on the sinking Titanic.  And it strains credulity that at each checkpoint on the way out, everything must come down to the wire, in the very nick of time...every...single...time.  I mean, didn't anything go right on this mission? Sure, the whole thing was a "Hail Mary" pass, but some of the planning had to have come off.  The story had a genuine happy ending.  Did it have to be The Ultimate Happy Ending?

Maybe the election year has got my fact-checker in overdrive, because up until then, Argo is a measured, understated, restrained, almost bloodless film, that manages to be smart, clever, and tense.  And while there's very little of the flair displayed in his first two films, it is a fine example of Affleck's impeccable sense in casting (although—quibbling again—he might have had someone genuinely Latino to play Mendez), and having the great good sense of staying out of his actors' way.

It might not be Affleck's best work to date, but for all that could have gone wrong, the results are quite impressive.  Hmm.  Maybe art does imitate life.

Argo is a Matinee.

The "Canadian Caper" embassy workers with President Carter

Argo concept art, created by comics veteran Jack Kirby

* The movie gives some back-story but is a little cagey in what it leaves out.  The CIA "coup" deplaced the democratically elected Persian prime minister Mossadegh who had the affrontery to nationalize the Iranian oil industry (pissing off the British) and flirting with communists (pissing off the Americans) and returned the Shah, who'd only fled the country fearing a communist take-over, to power.

** There are more zingers at the expense of the film industry than any movie since Altman's The Player.  My favorite: "We're going to make a movie in the most desolate, dangerous, paranoid place on Earth." "Universal City?"

ParaNorman

Re-Animators
or
"I See Dead Puppets"

The town of Blithe Hollow depends on the supernatural for its tourist trade.  But, what the city fathers probably don't understand is that if you live by the sword...well, let's just say you'd better have a good cleaning crew.

One of the town's citizens is young Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smith-McPhee) and he has a problem—he sees dead people, all of them. He's ostracized from friends, family and reality...from life, really...as most of his acquaintances are non-corporeal and that leads to bullying, loneliness and a general lack of enthusiasm.  He'd be better off dead—as the only people he can relate to already are.

Then, there's his creepy Uncle (a wonderfully comic vocal performance by John Goodman) who tasks him with a special duty—saving Blithe Hollow from destruction by the wrath of the very witch of the town's fame, killed by the city elders centuries before.  To do so, he must go on a hero's journey with unlikely allies, many roadblocks both physical and emotional, while evading zombies, the undead, jocks, bullies and narcissistic big sisters to confront the evil witch.

ParaNorman is hilarious, quirky certainly, but also has a lot of depth and breadth to it.  It would be an easy—too easy—temptation to call it a Tim Burton knock-off (stop-motion animation, horrorific subject matter...it must be a Tim Burton knock-off), but it's actually far more concerned with story over effect than Burton, whose work can become tangentially derailed for a sequence or bit that the director finds funny, even if its a mismatch for the rest of the film and its nonsensibilities.  ParaNorman stays on track, managing to brings its humor out of character, rather than despite it, and with a sense of comic timing that's by turns subtle, surprising and goofy.  Yes, there are scary bits—it's rated PG, so maybe the littlest of kids shouldn't go—but its horrors are not there to shock, but to thrill.  And when the film does build up a full head of horror steam at the end, it provides some of the most awesome sights and effects that have been seen in animation in quite some time.  A hybrid of the Burton and Aardmann animation studios—directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell worked for both groups, respectively, and you can see aspects of their animation styles meshing, hallmarking the best of both stop-motion worlds—Burton's anticness and Aardmann's appreciation (and mining the comedic possibilities) of stillness.  Combine that with the story of an outsider who manages to collect a posse of co-adventurers who handle the auxilliary parts of the hero's main mission, and you have a well-rounded story that manages to surpass the limitations of the parts (making it, amusingly, a bit of a zombie-movie itself).  

What's nice is there's enough time in the plot (involving more than just the cemetery variety) to appreciate the artistry behind it—the way the town is laid out with abandoned squalor in the detail, the people with perpetually bemused expressions, and are, like us, anything but symmetrical, the way an ear glows with the back-lighting of sunshine, and in the ending that manages to combine moments of dark beauty and true psychotic scariness.  Lots to appreciate.  Lots to like.  It's a fine film that makes the most of its slim ambitions, and rises above them.

ParaNorman is a Full-Price Ticket.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Schell Game
or
An Irrational Fear of the Irrational

Not sure what the problem with young Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is: it could be borderline autism, or as is brought up, Asperger Syndrome ("the tests were inconclusive," he deadpans).  It could be "mean world syndrome" or "fusion paranoia," or something as simple as shock or grief, maybe even survivor's guilt.  But, coached by his father (Tom Hanks) who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11, he is on a mission to find answers by the same empirical methods Dad used to create scavengers' hunts throughout the city of New York.

To the young Schell, the events that took his father, literally before his eyes, yet in an abstract undefinable way (he literally vanishes, but there is no body to bury), it is all horrifyingly absurd, and the only way to wrap his mind around it is a quest, in the same way that his father distracted him from his fears, which are plentiful (closed spaces, crowded places, tubes and tunnels, things that fly, things that are loud, bridges that could collapse) all things that keep his logical, compartmentalized fact-file of a mind focussed on the task at hand, to the rhythm of the tamborine that he shakes to keep his own mind from being rattled by anything else.

One day, after visiting the shrine he's constructed for his father, he confronts for the first time his father's room and closet kept undisturbed since the Al Qaida attacks, smelling his clothes, trying to recall the sense-memory of him, when by happenstance, he finds an envelope (marked "Black") containing a single key.  Thinking it to be the ultimate of one of his father's challenges, he embarks to find the one lock in all of New York mated to that key.

It's a tortured, torturing metaphor.  What he's really looking for is something...anything...that might give him solace for his loss, an answer to why his beloved, obliquely protecting father might vanish so completely, without even the cold reality of a corpse to ground him to reality.  In the process, he neglects his mother (Sandra Bullock), his schooling, his life...for the ultimate answer of purpose, and thereby complete the education cut short by the death of his father.  It's a risky premise, one that, ultimately, can have no real resolution, but only absolve him of any complicity in the events of his father's death. 

What Oskar is actually looking for is his own penance.

Movies come in cycles, not only because of the economic consequences of box-office (nothing in Hollywood succeeds like excess), but also with the nation's zeitgeist.  Is it any coincidence that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a modern day version of New York film-maker Martin Scorsese's Hugo...about another boy's father-quest involving a key and finding something else more than himself?  Hard to say...anymore than that Hugo and The Artist are both explorations and celebrations of the era of visual story-telling displayed by the dawn of moving pictures.  But, EL&IC has the disadvantage of being a little too close to the theme without the benefit of artistic distance, while being a little too obvious about what it's trying to say...which, as it turns out, isn't much...other than "what are you worried about, kid, when you might be hit by a bus tomorrow."  Or dharma works, when runaway karma runs over your dogma.   Thanks, but I'd rather have Méliès be a cure for my malaise.

But, what a cast...Hanks, Bullock (basically in the background for most of the movie but allowed to shine at the film's resolution), John Goodman, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright and a steady stream of fine character actors as Oskar's many encounters and tough-stones on his journey.  But, the finest of the bunch is Max von Sydow as the Campbellian "helper by the side of the road" that he plays mutely without a word of dialog.  Again, the part is a little obvious and a little tortured, but von Sydow once again provides an actor's master class in taking a role os lightness and making it breathe with life and truth.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a Matinee.

Does Max Vo Sydow stand a chance of taking the "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar from Christopher Plummer?

The Artist

Portrait of the Film as a Young Medium
or
Silents is Golden

First off...GREAT sound-design.


(tap, tap, tap...is this mic' on?)

It's easy to be positively giddy over the success that The Artist has enjoyed (this week garnering ten Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture).  I've enjoyed Michel Hazanavicius' previous pairings with Jean Dujardin—the spy-spoof OSS-117 films*—even if they were a little uneven, they managed to nail the ambiance of the films they were parodying, while also chortling over their excesses, even while embracing them. 

And Dujardin is a terrific performer, light on his feet and hitting his comedy points with deft left jabs.  In the "OSS" films, it was pretty obvious that he was a superb cross-over entertainer, believable when playing it straight (if ever), but also knowing just how far to push things to trip it into comedy.  Unlike Peter Sellers, whose agents always seemed to be harboring deep-set inferiority complexes underneath their pompous egotism, Dujardin was always blissfully clueless, truly believing that he was terrific, and that the strings of pratfalls, misfires and collateral damage were just temporary set-backs, no matter how regularly they occurred, followed by a laugh that was too loud and went on far too long.

The Artist has no problems of pace, or of sequences that fall flat.  It takes its strengths from the medium it cherishes—the silent films on the cusp of sound, when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak and was somewhat quashed to accommodate the large pieces of equipment that could squeak and rumble and ruin a fluid camera movement, and when expression was King.  The world of film was silent and focused on image—I was struck in a sequence that showed a high angle of a motion-picture theater audience watching a film being projected with symphonic accompaniment, that the eye always wandered to what was on screen—it tells its story with the directness of vision of that particular era (okay, some close-ups belie the time and the film dispenses with fog-filters and other tricks employed then) and the clean image of glamour, even to the simplicity of a cold-water flat of an apartment.  Faces are carefully chosen for contrast and specificity of character, rather than overall performance, and one can only imagine the voices that accompany the expressions—appropriately, dialog cards are used, but sparingly—nothing aural spoils the picture contained within the frame, widening it or presenting the intrusion of a world outside of it, a point that is made quite literally at one point in one very clever sequence.  One is clued in early on, when movie star George Valentin (Dujardin) stands behind the movie screen as his film ends and awaits acknowledgment from the crowd.  Haznavacius holds on his image as he waits—there is only silence—until he raises his fist in triumph at the applause we cannot hear, and which is verified only by the enthusiasm of the crowd in the next shot.  The rules are set—we have to trust in what we see, not in what we expect to hear.  This is not verisimilitude—the illusion of reality imposed by sound and image—this is a heightened and false world of industrialized artifice, concentrated and crystallized in glamorous black and white fiction, flaws be damned.



"...the eye always wandered to what was on screen"

But, it's more than that.  Haznavacius isn't satisfied (as Mel Brooks was in his own Silent Movie of 1976) with just making a film without sound.  He takes pains to evoke the era in which they were made, choosing the Los Angeles locations of the film extraordinarily carefully, to emphasize the arid spaces and chiaroscuro-deco architecture of the time (one nice sequence of a chance meeting on a studio staircase between Valentin—on his way down—and plucky starlet Peppy Miller—Bérénice Bejo, on her way up—is filmed in the beloved Bradbury Building, as if Fritz Lang or King Vidor had filmed it—straight on—as if to emphasize the ant-like activity of the personnel.  And there is a visual grace to the story-telling that evokes the poetry that silent films were capable of in getting their point across without words.

Anything wrong with it?  Not really, even the "controversial" use of Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d'amour" from Vertigo is appropriate (far more than it was in 12 Monkeys), with its combination of dramatic urgency and heartbreak, for a sequence it was clearly designed for.  There are other films that were released last year with more reach (The Tree of Life) and depth (The Descendents), but The Artist is a great evocation of the joy of cinema, and its possibilties to entertain, even with limited means.

"...when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak"



The Artist is a Full-Price Ticket. 


* They were OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS-117: Lost in Rio (full reviews linked to the titles).  They were resuscitations of a James Bond knock-off series (although the literary source preceded Bond), where first film managed to recall the spare look of the early Connery-Terence Young films, while the second aped the scaled down characterizations and monument-based action set-pieces of the Moore era.  That second one didn't get much of a release in the U.S., either, being released straight to video.

Red State

Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011) You could actually call this an indie cult film, independently financed with an auction to distribute at Sundance (which Smith harpooned to distribute himself), only running in major markets to qualify for unlikely Oscar nominations (Michael Parks, maybe; John Goodman, possibly but not likely), then quietly announced "special showings" throughout the country, presumably because the subject matter—about a homicidal religious cult, making the "cult film" literal—is so "hot" that moving, circus-like, from town to town for a limited time will discourage the "crazies" (of whatever stripe) from making the scene, making A Scene and picketing theaters.*

Needn't have bothered, really.  Any media coverage would have actually helped this film, even if it doesn't really deserve it.  It's Smith stepping out of his comfort zone (and just about everybody's) making a horror film about a religious cult that attracts lustful men on a web-site, doping them, and killing them for their homosexual tendencies that are targeting America (and the world—cited examples being African AIDS, Thailand tsunamis, and Sin City hurricanes) for rapturous Armageddon.

Forget the fact that these guys are hetero's looking to score, but, now you're getting all logical on us.

The Five Points Trinity Church, led by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, doing the Smith-riffing like it was exploding out of his head and having fine, venal fun with it) is so bent on destruction and self-destruction there's no reasoning with them or the cache of automatic weapons kept in a vast catacomb-like basement, required for your "gotta-have-'em" horror film chases. They're all wild-eyed zealots, none more creepy than daughter Sarah (last year's Oscar winner Melissa Leo, going a bit over-the-top), who's the boy-bait for the serial-sacrifices.

An evening's services (with communal execution) goes a bit south, and when a deputy is killed (oops), the ATF is called out in the reduced form of Joe Keenan (Goodman, who's lost a lot of weight) and ASAC Brooks (Kevin Pollak, a natural to be in a Smith movie, I think), who roll their eyes with memories of Waco backlash in mind.  They don't want to be there.  They know there will be no negotiation, the best they can do is keep the carnage down, which is not what the Church is interested in (nor, frankly, is the audience).  And as interesting as a dialogue-crazy Smith directed hostage-negotiation might be, this is designed for horror audiences, so things go to hell quickly.

So, there's enough real-world identification with David Koresh and Fred Phelps** for Smith to get on his soap-box (and he does with a particularly annoying teacher character at the beginning of the film, who would no doubt lose her job for saying what she does in the film), but he's a little restrained in the wise-ass department here (other than coming up with the idea in the first place and he doesn't mention Star Wars once).  He takes his template from Night of the Living Dead with the church members as both zombies AND barricaded potential victims, with a cascading story-line that starts with predators turning into victims, and their persecutors in turn turning into victims.*** Shooting on the pure-video Red camera system (maybe that's where title comes from?), the film can go just about anywhere and attach itself to anything on the run, which Smith, who also edited, hacks and slashes to cut out the transitional fat and keep the film moving unpretentiously fast.  Should have cut a little faster and a bit more, as Smith uses the low-dig' horror format to make up for his short-comings as a shot-planner, but still keeps "the precious words" of his script intact.  Too bad.  There's a few things that could have easily gone in the out-takes bin that were redundant or not helpful.  And then, just when things start turning really interesting, Smith pulls the rug out on the film, never venturing past its "potential."  But it seems to me if you're going to be a barn-burner, you might as well burn it to the ground, rather than having the bucket-brigade near by to douse it half-way through. 

Which is sad to me.  Smith's career as the slacker's "geek-fantasy-movie-maker" still suffers from the poor execution of good ideas.  A not terribly good film-maker, he still has potential as a superb script-writer.  Problem is, he fancies himself a troubadour, a singer-songwriter, even though he can't carry a tune.  Another director might be able to take a Smith script and hone it, polish it, and adjust it, so there are no slow spots, has a good sense of pace, and some actual composition to the frame, all things that Smith seems incapable of doing.  He has a filmmaker's brio, but no taste and no judgement (especially where his own work is concerned). 

His best film is the early-in-the-going Chasing Amy, but sadly, like Silent Bob and the protagonist in that film he's been incapable of doing anything better, in effect, ever since he's been chasing Chasing Amy.  Still, if Billy Wilder's counter-maxim of "You're only as good as your BEST film, not your last" is to be embraced, so, too, is the career of Kevin Smith, just so we can have that one film added to the library of great films.



* Actually, Smith, whose humor has never kept him out of a fight (he joined a Catholic protest picket of his own film, Dogma) showed it to the daughter of Fred Phelps' daughter when he took it to Kansas City.  Phelps brought her under-age kids, and Smith warned her that the film was "R"-rated and pretty raw.  Didn't matter.  But, predictably, she walked out 20 minutes in, saying the film was "filth."  Um, yeah, wasn't that what Smith was saying?

** The Waco references are for the Koresh family, which was merely Messiah-based and collected weapons like lost souls with triggers, but Phelps (which is composed—if one can use that term—largely members of his family, and is mentioned in the film, so no one can say that they're being directly targetted), the guy who protests at funerals for slain American soldiers, is so extreme—and media-whorish—that Jerry Falwell called him outright "a first class nut," and the Ku Klux Klan has participated in counter-pickets, declaring Phelps' church "hatemongers."  And you know how much the KKK hates that!

*** Smith's original idea would have taken the idea even further to a Higher Plain, that actually would have been pretty neat to see.  But, it would have required expensive special effects for a film done on a shoe-string (the entire effects budget was $5k).  And it gives Smith a chance to have that all important tag that wraps up his film in one good line: "People just do the strangest things when they believe they're entitled. But they do even stranger things when they just plain believe."