METH (2006)

I came across Meth on Netflix and streamed it (I just figured out that streamed movies are free so I'm kinda all into the idea). It's a documentary about you know what and, while somewhat interesting, is too limited in its scope and ultimately fails to tell the truth about meth, even while it pretends that that is what it's doing. Unlike the drug, Meth the documentary has no teeth.



Most of us know that crystal is a scourge that has somehow become a twisted rite of passage for lots of gay men. Personally, I believe there are very specific reasons for this, which are societal in nature and are connected to a pattern of extreme sexual behavior that has been in place in the urban gay community for decades. But I'm just some gay guy who's kind of lived through it and made observations, I'm not a professional expert on the subject. Neither are any of the men in this documentary. They are all current and former heavy users (most of them admit on camera to regularly "slamming" or injecting meth intravenously), which gives you an insider's perspective on the living hell that is meth, but also sends mixed messages. These guys talk about how awful it was and how dirty they feel, but only after they gush about how fabulous it was. Which perfectly encapsulates the fucked-up nature of meth, but doesn't give the viewer much perspective. This doc would have benefitted from throwing a few Dr.'s of something or other into the mix: perhaps a sociologist to talk about the very real societal pressures gay men face in our culture; perhaps a medical doctor to talk about what's actually in meth, what it's cut with, what it does to the brain and body (during and after ingesting it), the effects of prolonged use, and all the other messy details about it; perhaps a psychiatrist to talk about what motivates so many gay men in particular to enter into this dance with the devil, this ugly 3-way of gay men, meth and the sex that goes with it.

This doc doesn't suck, it's just very narrow and treats the issue with kid gloves. One of the interviewees talk about going to places that are "evil" without saying what that really means. "Evil" is about the strongest negative word a person can use...and yet, no details? What do you mean by that? Granted, the doc does go into many of the subjects' experiences of "hitting bottom" (and no, I don't mean hitting that bottom), some of which sound horrific. But it's a little like sitting in a group therapy session and gets pretty boring after a while listening to these men go on and on about themselves.

The same individual who refers to some of his past behavior as "evil" also talks at one point about how meth was the only drug he tried that he had trouble quitting. So he's going on about how "I could stop Ecstasy, I stopped coke, I stopped Special K," etc. Which begs the question: why do some of us just accept the use of illegal party drugs as acceptable behavior? I'm sure it has to do with our feelings as outsiders, outlaws, etc. I'm not passing judgment and I'm not saying I haven't done anything illegal myself. But it's an area worth exploring, that we just accept illegal behavior at face value without ever really knowing the possible legal consequences of getting busted for it.

There's a marked difference between the older guys, who kind of go on and on about the circuit scene of the late 80s/early 90s and how fabulous it was, and the younger guys, who are more like at-home users and don't fit the circuit boy stereotype. There's also a creepy guy who looks to be in his late 40s/early 50s who talks about how he just uses it to lure hot 20 year olds to his place for sex, and how it works like fucking catnip. So here we have what amounts to a predator, and yet we're just getting his side of the story. And he's from Orange, CA where I grew up. Ew. I looked at him closely, he doesn't look familiar.

Ultimately, Meth is an interesting baby step toward acknowledging this hideous aspect of gay life, but it just isn't enough. There needs to be a hard core, take no prisoners, "Scared Straight", NC-17 rated doc about gay men and meth to show the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so we can not only acknowledge how truly ugly meth is, and how destructive it is to our culture and community, but use it to just basically scare young gay men away from using meth in the first place.

THE MIST (2007)

[NOTE: I'm not spoiling the ending.] While writing this post, I started to question myself. Why do I like this movie so much? Why do I still even like to watch certain horror movies? Isn't it a juvenile genre to be interested in? What does that say about me? This movie touches on one of my favorite themes: the fragility of the social contract, and what happens when an unexpected event causes society to break down.

Then I realized, hey, this isn't about ME. This is about The Mist, a FANTASTIC creepfest creature feature, which I'm sure you know is based on a Stephen King novella of the same name. The story appeared in his short story collection Skeleton Crew back in 1985. The Mist has always been one of my favorite pieces of King's writing. For one thing, it's short. The man tends to get long-winded, and he was especially long winded back in the 80s (remember It? 1100+ pages!). The movie is pretty much a faithful adaptation, conveying the same characters, themes and events. There are some changes, but it's all for the good of telling the story in 2007 America. The strange thing is, things haven't really changed all that much in this country since King wrote his story more than 20 years ago.

One of the things that makes the Mist a great movie is the creature factor. There are many "oh shit" and "ewww" moments in this flick. The creatures are pure fantasy but rooted in real world biology...they are bizarre and scary. One of my biggest fears is suddenly finding myself somewhere other than at the top of the food chain. This movie definitely exploits that fear. Some of the CGI in the movie is a bit obvious, but for the most part it works because the creatures aren't anything we've seen on Earth...but you can kind of buy them being real, somewhere, because most of them look like things we recognize: insects, crabs, etc. They're just on a different, decidedly more threatening scale.

Another thing that makes this movie work is the excellent acting. Thomas Jane is a perfect leading everyman...somewhat idealized, a natural leader, pretty much possessing the qualities that most Americans like to think they possess. The cap above is from a scene in which his son begs him not to carry out a plan to go out into the mist to get to the pharmacy for medication. It broke my heart, and you can just feel that kid's panic at the thought of losing his dad. Marcia Gay Harden is also wonderful as the local evangelical religious nut. It would have been easy to make her character a cartoon, but she plays it straight and the character is treated with respect as a person of faith, however misguided she may be. Not one cast member sucks in this movie. They are all excellent, down to the smallest speaking part.

Everyone who worked on this flick deserves a pat on the back. The direction, the way it's shot, the creatures, the actors, everything just gels. And of course, the one person who deserves the most credit is Stephen King. He puts a bunch of Americans together in such a banal setting, a supermarket, so that when the shit hits the fan and things start to go bad, much of the ridiculousness of our daily lives is hilighted just by the setting.

This isn't one of those flicks that has you jumping out of your seat with in your face scares. It's more the concept that is horrifying, the sense of dread at what's happened and how the characters are going to get out of it, if they even can. Like I said before, there are many "Ewww!" moments. A note about the ending: I had heard that this is one of those movies with "an ending," and even knowing that, I was still blown away. So will you be.

In the tradition of many of the greatest horror flicks, this movie fucks with your preconceived notions, your expectations, your mind. I highly recommend it.

There's one unintentionally funny bit about this flick, but you'll probably notice it yourself. I'll just say one word: eyebrows.

THE BRAVE ONE (2007)

The Brave One is a contemporary vigilante revenge fantasy directed by Neil Jordan and starring Miss Thing. It's a well-made movie and is pretty much an old-school exploitation movie all gussied up in A-list Hollywood respectability, but that doesn't make it any less effective or enjoyable.

Jodie Foster turns in an excellent performance, one that is much more raw and satisfying than her turns in Panic Room and Flightlplan. She pretty much elevates the movie to a higher level than it deserves to be. It's also shot beautifully. The film covers its ass by making sure that the targets of the Foster character (Erica) are multiracial; nasty white men are prominently included in the mix of scumbags. Just so no one's left out, Erica purchases her illegal 9mm from an Asian guy. This movie doesn't show us a woman who is all that conflicted over what she's doing. There's some inner conflict, but not that much. The bottom line is, she's made up her mind and she's not turning back, no matter what. She then has to navigate the minefield that she's walking through as a result of the choice she's made. She never gives her choice a second thought, and that's one thing I really like about this movie: the lack of hand-wringing over the (im)morality of what she's doing.

There was a lot of interesting critical reaction and interpretation of the film, much of which focuses on socioeconomic class for some strange reason. Apparently, to depict such base human traits as hopelessness and revenge is to be tacky and should be derided by the educated and cultured among us. Well, la dee fucking dah. There's nothing wrong with a well-made revenge fantasy. It's a fantasy, for Christ's sake. It plays upon our fears of beng victimized, and our hope that, should we survive, we could mete out some justice where justice is due, especially if the system failed us. Obviously, this hardly ever happens in real life. That's where revenge fantasies come into play. For me, The Brave One is an enjoyable thriller that hits all the right marks and is extremely satisfying in the end. My only gripe (and it's a nearly insurmountable one): they actually use a Sarah McLaughlin song on the soundtrack at key "emotional" moments. It was damn near unbearable, and was completely out of sync with the tone of the movie. (I realize she's a respected musical artist, I'm just not into her).

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE (1958)

Another Time, Another Place is a low key melodrama about an American columnist living in London (Lana Turner) during WWII. Though she left a fiance back in NY City (who just happens to be her boss), she falls in love with a dashing BBC reporter (a very young, very hot, very bushy-browed Sean Connery) and they carry on with a torrid month-long affair before he lets her in on the fact that he's, er, married and has a young son, whom he loves very much. Well, they part briefly, but their love is too strong and they reconcile on the evening Connery is set to fly to Paris to cover the end of the war. Unfortunately, he's killed in a plane crash, and Lana is devastated.

And that's just the first third of the movie! The rest of it has to do with Lana seeking out Connery's village, "to see where he comes from," where she winds up living with his wife and son, who have no idea who Lana is.

Despite this film's measured pace, and despite the fact that it's melodrama (and why am I behaving as if that's a bad thing? I LOVE this shit!), it's a well-written movie that had me hooked through to the end. Part of reason I liked it has to do with my fascination with Lana Turner, who apparently spent at least half of her career playing women of questionable moral character who put themselves through hell but very often redeem themselves in the end. This film is a typical 50s Lana vehicle: she's promiscuous, she's heartbroken, she has a meltdown, she recuperates, she redeems herself, and she looks fabulous.

The first scene in the film sets the tone and foreshadows how the relationship between Lana and Connery is going to go: it centers on a bomb that falls without detonating, and the tense moments that pass while it's disarmed. Later in the movie, there's a great scene where a group of people are sitting around a table having an awkward conversation because all of them but Connery's widow know that Lana was having an affair with him. The actress who plays Connery's widow, Glynis Johns, is excellent and has her own meltdown scene that rivals those of Lana. On the whole, it's a bit contrived but I had fun watching it and will definitely watch it again.

HALLOWEEN (2007)

Here's the deal: I'm a child of the 70s and 80s who hit puberty right around 1979. I was right there when slasher movies exploded...the original Halloween was re-released each October for several years (this was before home video). I remember them all, even the ones I didn't see until years later: Friday the 13th and its sequels, Prom Night, Terror Train, Graduation Day, Nightmare On Elm Street, etc. etc. Halloween and its first sequel (however much the latter was panned by critics) scared the hell out of me. When I got home one night from seeing the sequel with a bunch of friends, no one was home and the back door to our house was ajar. I can't tell you how spooked and freaked I was having just seen Michael slaughter his way through oodles of horny nurses and lab technicians.

Anyhoo, I am not a big fan of Rob Zombie's movies. I admire him as an artist, and I relate to his visual aesthetic, rooted as it is in pre-slash 70s horror. But House of 1000 Corpses is ridiculous and The Devil's Rejects was just rude. All the promo stuff I saw of his take on Halloween made it look pretty damn good: a bigger, badder kick ass Michael Myers filmed in neo-70s realist grime. Yes, I was worried that Zombie would hit us over the head with sadistic brutality and gore, which he is wont to do. But I also held out hope that he would nail it, because I think he's more than capable. Unfortunately, this movie succeeds and fails simultaneously, at least in the eyes of someone who's viewing it as a remake of a great horror classic.

On its own merits, it's a well-made film. It seems like a documentary. We get all the back story about Michael's fucked up family, his serial-killer-to-be proclivities as a kid, his trip to the booby hatch, his suffering at the hands of a cruel world. Ok, so his family life sucked, he was bullied at school, nobody understands him, he's being exploited by the doctor who's supposed to be helping him, wah wah wah, boo hoo. Lots of us have crappy lives, but we don't all wind up being serial killers, so what's the point of trying to humanize someone who's supposed to be the embodiment of inexplicable evil? Do you really need to try and convince us that he turned out this way because his mom was a stripper with hella bad taste in men (in other words: A Bad Mother)? To someone who's never seen and doesn't care about the original, this movie is fine...in fact, it would fit in quite nicely with any hour-long true crime special that regularly airs on Lifetime or the History Channel.

But to anyone else, there are problems. It is a remake of one of the scariest movies ever made...but it isn't scary. There's no suspense, no tension. By the time we get to the third act, which is basically where Zombie gets around to remaking the original Halloween, we know all we ever wanted to know about Michael, and nothing about his soon to be victims, which means that when Michael finally goes on his rampage, we don't really give a shit about what happens to anyone. And neither does Zombie. He's wasted so much time giving us all the back story (and showcasing his real-life wife as Michael's stripper mommy) that he doesn't have any time left to build character or suspense. It's as if he's going through the motions of the events that occur on Halloween night as an afterthought. Another big mistake he makes is that the girls, particularly Laurie Strode, the "final girl", are old school stupid girls who scream and run. Ok, Laurie's not completely weak, but she sure as hell doesn't come close to touching Jamie Lee Curtis' version of the strong final girl who shows a knack for surviving under stress. This one falls into an empty pool, screams, yelps and cries when she's supposed to be hiding, and pretty much sucks ass as a final girl all the way around. She's not even that likable. The gore is updated, but the girls are retroactive...it undercuts one of the primary motifs of the genre, and it ruins it.

The movie gets a lot of stuff right. The actors all do good work. Zombie's got a great eye for 70s detail. His movie is somewhat timeless in that it could be 1978 or 2008. He pays homage to the original film in several specific shots and/or scenes, but he appears to only be paying lip service out of a sense of duty to other fans of the original, not his own respect for it. Zombie treats the source material as not really worthy of revisiting on its own merits. He seems to think he could do a better job of telling the story by telling a different story. As if the original story isn't really all that important. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake on his part and the main reason his "reimagining" fails.

This movie's worth a look if you're a fan of the genre. The gore's not anything worse than you'd see on an episode of CSI. The scares are nonexistent, ditto the suspense. The kills have that Rob Zombie brutality, but they're so staged that it's not as if you're seeing a real person get knocked off. Besides, none of Michael's victims are people we've come to get a sense of or care about, so whether or not they die becomes irrelevant. The commentary's interesting, but again, he doesn't express any affinity whatsoever for the source material, which I think should have been a requirement for anyone considered to direct the remake of Halloween. Ultimately, Zombie's take on the horror classic left me cold, unimpressed, and a little bit miffed that he felt he had something more to offer than the original did. As if!

THE DESCENT (2005)

The Descent is an enjoyable horror movie about a group of friends who go cave diving in the Appalachian Mountains only to wind up trapped underground and hunted by bloodthirsty humanoid creatures.

Compared to most recent horror films, this one's excellent. The setting is creepy and claustrophobic, the acting is above-par, and the tension builds at a steady pace. Since this is a creature feature, it walks a fine line between horror and camp. This movie does cross that line and degenerate into camp on more than one occasion. Once these girls turn Rambo and start killing the cave creatures, it becomes an over the top gore fest. And each subsequent victim of the cave creatures suffers a more bloody and undignified death. But the camp factor doesn't make it any less scary or creepy.

The set design is amazing and I didn't realize how awesome it was until I saw the special features and making of doc, which is quite funny. Most of the guys who play the cave creatures are sinewy and hairless, so it's fun to watch them clown around in their monster make up in the making of doc. It's also fun to see a bunch of tough athletic chicks do some bad ass cave diving and then fight as best they can to survive once the shit hits the fan. Overall, it's worth a rental on a night when you want to be creeped out and boo!'d.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)

Leave Her to Heaven is a thriller that moves at a slow pace, like a watched pot set for a boil. It's about a cold, calculating woman whose need to possess the men she loves leads her to commit heartless acts of murder. The pace of the film is similar to that of The Sixth Sense in that it builds slowly under a constant state of dread.

I find this movie fascinating, if a little slow. Also, many of the things that happen are tame by today's standards and a bit cliched, but were probably more surprising back when it was released. The tone of the movie, one of building dread and discomfort as the villainess' true nature is revealed, is sustained throughout. Watching it today, however, one can't help but wonder why family members didn't take matters into their own hands before she could wreak such havoc upon them all.

Visually, this film is STUNNING. It was filmed in Technicolor, and though it comes off as "colorized" at certain points due to the limits of the coloring process of the era, for the most part it's breathtaking. It's so rare that we can see this era in full color because most of the films from that time are in black and white, which creates a barrier between the viewer and the world of the film. This is the first film I can remember seeing that breaks down that barrier; it's the first time I've really felt I have an idea of what it was like to see the world as it was back then.

Gene Tierney is absolutely beautiful, even if she does come off as cold (that is, after all, the whole point). She got a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance (she lost to Joan Crawford in Mildred Pearce). Cornel Wilde is quite a hottie when he's caught at the right angle, although unfortunately we're never treated to a shirtless shot of him. We do see his muscular forearms and bulging bicep, which is just enough to make us wonder what the rest of him looks like. The wardrobe is breathtaking, especially the men's clothes. Oh to live in a time when every day one wore a jacket and tie, and in the New Mexico desert no less! The cinematography is the undeniable star of the film, the lighting and framing is simply amazing. There's a lot of great architecture to be seen, and the set design is interesting as well, although most of the sets are residential, which can tend to be somewhat boring and floral (yuk) in their domesticity. The train scene at the beginning is wonderful with the interior of the art deco styled lounge car.

The movie winds up in a courtroom (with a prissy Vincent Price playing the jilted District Attorney out for vengeance) before delivering its happy Hollywood ending, but the trip to get there is well worth the time...once again, I say this if you are at all intrigued by the actors or the era.