“In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman’s voice, mechanical and heavy: “Why don’t you sleep? Go to sleep.” Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.”

I’m reminded of nothing so much as the distorted, creepily out-of-proportion mouths so popular in modern horror movies. Click here to view an example from The Ring, but only if you want to see something creepy. There must be some others: I feel like I’ve seen a lot of horror movies recently where significant scare or at least startle value arises from the way someone’s mouth just… keeps… opening. The Ring example isn’t quite what I was picturing. Maybe someone can suggest some more titles.

Perhaps needless to say, I will be waiting to suggest this book to Coen until at least fifth grade.

One county resident, who also happens to work for the federal government, recently wrote to the Missoulian: “Do I need a daily letter from the sheriff to enter my home and talk to my wife, or will there be provision for some sort of blanket authorization?”

Now, another Ravalli County resident wants to change the Montana constitution.

“Cathy Hackett of Stevensville this week launched a proposed constitutional initiative campaign to put the boundaries from Montana’s original 1889 constitution into the state’s 1972 constitution. These boundaries spell out, in latitudes and longitudes, where Montana is situated.

“I really think that places our state sovereignty in jeopardy if we don’t have official boundaries in our constitution,” Hackett said Tuesday.”

Hackett, who describes herself as “a bit of a rebel,” is worried that—without the state’s boundaries spelled out in the state constitution—”if you get charged with breaking a Montana law, you could very well use that as a defense and get off.”

I don’t know if this is correct or not, but then, neither does Hackett. Stating the obvious, the reporter advises us that Hackett “is not a lawyer.”

Then there’s this:

“Qualifying a constitutional initiative for the November 2010 ballot is no easy task. To do so requires the signatures of nearly 49,000 registered Montana voters, including 10 percent of the voters in 40 of the 100 state House districts. The signatures must be turned by June 18.

“There’s people all over the state I believe can help me,” Hackett said. “I was part of the Ron Paul thing when he was running for president. We still e-mail each other. I’m counting on those people. I’m confident that they’ll agree with me.”

In other words, Hackett finds it safe to assume that a Ron Paul supporter can be engaged in a quixotic and time-consuming effort to rectify a problem that no state legislator, legal scholar, defense attorney, or jailhouse lawyer has yet noticed and that mainly sounds problematic only if one has just recently begun learning about the subject in a relative vacuum.

I’m not saying this doesn’t sound possible, but—if I were among these Ron Paul supporters—I wouldn’t take the nature of Hackett’s faith in them as a compliment.

Did you know you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? No more than one email per day (and then only if there is anything new to report). What’s not to like?

I don’t know why Matchstick Men doesn’t get mentioned more often in discussions of Nicolas Cage’s better work. It has an enjoyably intricate caper/long-con type of storyline, and Cage chews up the scenery as an OCD grifter who finally meets his match.

I enjoyed the original, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, especially the scene where the titular character, played by Harvey Keitel, is smoking crack in a tenement hallway and an old woman sticks her head out of her door to see what’s going on and he pulls his gun and yells at her to go back inside, crack smoke pouring from his mouth, his NYPD badge swinging on a chain around his neck.

I do love a good tableau.

Anyway, I probably wouldn’t watch a straight sequel of that movie (and the original didn’t bear re-watching the one time I tried, although maybe a first date was the wrong setting), but I sure as hell will watch what Scott describes as “neither remake nor sequel” but rather “its own special fever-swamp of a movie, an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist.”

And did I mention that Nicholas Cage stars?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes he does:

Fueled by Nicolas Cage’s performance — which requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged — Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. …

Mr. Cage’s New Orleans cop … clings to an insane sense of professionalism even as his demons drive him around every bend in the Mississippi River.

[Cage] is a jittery whirlwind of inventiveness, throwing his body and voice in every direction and keeping [his character], the movie and the audience in a delirious state of imbalance.

Sometimes his loose-limbed shuffle and sibilant drawl suggest Jimmy Stewart as a crackhead.

What more do you need to know?

Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?

I’ll admit I’m eliding a lot of other plot elements listed here, but still: somehow, this just doesn’t sound very interesting.

On the other hand, I think I’ve thought the same thing about the initial descriptions of at least half of the Coen brothers’ movies over the years, and yet I can honestly say I’ve never seen a bad movie from these guys. Including Intolerable Cruelty, which you shouldn’t rent if you’re looking for something like Blood Simple, but as long as you read the description and know the type of movie you’re in for, it’s not bad.

Although the A Serious Man preview is better than the description, it still doesn’t exactly set me on fire. Still, who am I kidding—I know I’ll see this movie someday, simply because the Coen brothers made it.

No wonder that we named our kid after don’t mind the coincidence that our kid has the same name as the Coen brothers.

The occasion for the profile is the upcoming release of his new science-fiction movie, Avatar. I’d heard about this movie, the plot of which revolves around human efforts to subjugate an alien race on some distant planet, and figured it would be the kind of cheesy CGI mess that sci-fi movies cursed with unlimited money usually turn into these days.

Then I came to this part of the New Yorker profile:

“The digital elements of “Avatar,” [Cameron] claims, are so believable that, even when they exist alongside human actors, the audience will lose track of what is real and what is not. “This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”

Intrigued, I clicked over to the trailer and saw… the kind of cheesy CGI mess that sci-fi movies cursed with unlimited money usually turn into these days.

What is it that happens to movie directors that causes them to be so impressed by this stuff? If I were the studio head that gave this guy $230 million to make this film, I’d have a very sinking feeling right about now.

Thank God he made Aliens before digital animation got “advanced” enough to rely heavily on.

Perhaps all of this should go without saying, except that twice in the last two months I found myself tempted by progeny productions, although with contrasting results. The first was Surveillance, directed by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer and produced by the oddly coiffed auteur himself. I’ll admit that the Lynch name was part of the draw, although it didn’t hurt that the movie starred Bill Pullman, whom I’ve enjoyed ever since Spaceballs and who did what I thought was great work for David Lynch himself in the underrated Lost Highways.

Surveillance was okay. The script has a nice twist to it, the camera work is often beautiful (if that’s not an odd thing to say about a film that is also often horrifically violent), and the actors acquit themselves well, including two scenery-chewing supporting actors playing cops who seem like the wacky staties in Super Troopers, only not played for laughs, if that makes any sense. The movie has the screwy perspective and squirmy discomfort with the surface of the normal world that first drew me, in about ninth grade, to the work of David Lynch himself, at the same time that it is no mere imitation of the senior Lynch’s work. The movie’s IMDB listing describes the movie thus: “An FBI agent tracks a serial killer with the help of three of his would-be victims – all of whom have wildly different stories to tell.” If a storyline like that has the slightest appeal to you, especially if you know it will be told with an at least somewhat David Lynchian sensibility, you will probably enjoy the way Surveillance unfolds.

I cannot, however, recommend Staunton Hill, directed by George Romero’s son, Cameron. Recently reassured by the daughter Lynch’s work in Surveillance, I was open to the possibility that a descendant of the man who made Night of the Living Dead might at least have started with good genes. I should have paid attention to the bad feeling I got when I noticed this quote from George Romero on the box: “This is as scary as it gets.”

In fact, no. While I can’t immediately recall any movies that scared me less than this one, I seem to remember once wailing with fear during a scene in a Lassie movie involving kittens needing to be rescued from a burning barn. (I was three, I think, but still.) Seemingly made by someone who had memorized The Texas Chainsaw Masscre without ever noticing what made it good, Staunton Hill only ever had me in true suspense when I was wondering if the first death/etc. scene was really going to get that extreme and bloody. (It did.)

For some reason Cameron decided to set the movie in 1969, though at some point I remember thinking that, if the numbers “1969″ hadn’t appeared on the screen for a few seconds during the opening scene, there wouldn’t have been a single aspect of the movie that would have suggested to me that it took place any time but now. There is a scene of activisty confrontation between the one black hitchhiker and a racist mechanic, and—though the former does wear a hair pick—I find it hard to believe that a black man in the 1960s would feel safe talking to a potential Klansman the way this guy does. Then there is a weirdly awkward use of the verb “dig it” that might have been an outtake, so close did the actor seem to come to just going ahead and making little finger quote marks in the air.

Overall, the movie feels more like a student effort, not because of its production values, but because of the sense one gets of someone completing an assignment to make a movie in the style of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ticking off the rubric elements on which the effort will be graded: car trouble, check; obese hillbillies, check; freakishly strong imbecile; remote rural setting, check; etc. It’s like Romero senior gave his son a homework assignment. Maybe his quote comes not from an enthusiastic assessment of the film, but from the letter he sent to studio execs, advising that they break their contract with his son: “This is as scary as it gets with my boy, so I think you can see he shouldn’t quit his day job yet.”

On the other hand, if Coen made a horror movie, I’d probably give him a good quote for the box, too.

Though that terrible day is not explicitly mentioned in the 2008 movie documenting Petit’s daring feat, Man on Wire, the viewer cannot help but be reminded of it, whether by archival footage of the initial assembly of the buildings’ distinctive exoskeleton-like trusses — the remains of which would stand twisted and scorched above the rubble piles — or by a chilling photograph, taken during a reconnaissance mission, that frames not only Petit but the top of one tower and a plane pointed toward it. As a result, the movie has a melancholy air that would otherwise not be present in what is, on its own terms, simply a meditation on the indomitability of the human instinct for adventure, exploration, and creativity. But the melancholy is the smaller part, and this is by no means a sad movie.

If all I’d known about Man on Wire were the simple facts of its subject matter, I probably wouldn’t have rented it. Petit’s stunt is easy to mock, especially for those of us who have gradually gotten our guard up against the weak arguments of so many second-rate “performance artists” and other provocateurs concerning the alleged value of transgression for its own sake. But the movie made enough critics’ top-10 lists, and the previews I saw expressed such an infectious enthusiasm for the story, that I eventually decided I wanted to see it for myself.

I’m glad I did, even if Petit’s stunt — indeed, Petit himself — remain easy to mock, even after viewing. The man, who is given to silly statements such as how, if he had died in the course of his wirewalk, it would have been “a beautiful death,” exudes pretension and self-satisfaction (the French accent doesn’t help), and of course he wasn’t the only one he was putting at risk. The process of stringing 200 feet of cable between the buildings, while hiding from guards, could easily have resulted in the fall of one of his helpers. And of course a misstep by Petit himself could have resulted in his flattening an innocent pedestrian in the plaza below (though of course the odds were steeply against this.)

Still, many of these same criticisms can be leveled against the latest climbing party to attempt Mt. Everest or K2, especially since such climbers can no longer be said to be “exploring” or showing the rest of us what humans are capable of or anything, really, other than indulging themselves. At least it is possible to say that Petit was attempting something that no one had ever done before and which — even today, with the photographic evidence before us — it is difficult to believe really lies within the realm of human ability.

The most affecting element of the movie is not the wire walk itself, but rather Petit’s single-minded determination to pull it off — across years and years of planning, and despite one failed attempt. In an interview segment, Petit reminisces about first reading of the World Trade Center construction plans in a magazine while he waited in a dentist’s office to be treated for a toothache. As he tells the story, he was so excited at the thought of one day wire-walking between the two towers that he tore the page out of the magazine and left before seeing the dentist, claiming that the pain of a toothache was nothing compared to the exhilaration of having found his dream. I’m suspicious of the details of the story — Petit doesn’t strike me as someone who would have scruples against a little self-dramatization — but there can be no doubt that it at least accurately represents the thrill of discovering what your dream is, an experience we should all be lucky enough to have.

He wanders the new-releases aisle at the video store disconsolately, casting his jaundiced eye on the latest offerings.

After long experience, he knows that the best he can realistically hope for is that the movie he selects won’t insult his intelligence too much. Still rarer is the movie that is written well enough that the viewer can identify with or at least worry about the fates of the characters all the way through to the end. There are legends of horror movies that transcend their genre and qualify as works of art on their own, but these are as rare as unicorns.

My last post, a rumination on “why movies suck,” spilled out of my brain as I tried to begin a review of the 2008 horror film Quarantine, recently out on DVD and rented by me this past Saturday night. I decided to spin those thoughts off into their own post when I realized they would be out of place in a review of a movie I actually enjoyed.

But the point I made about Hollywood’s obvious interest in pleasing teenaged movie viewers — its best customers — applies in spades to horror, a genre that has its lifelong fans but which appeals almost across the board to young people, simply as a function of their being at an age when they are just beginning to realize how pleasurable autonomic nervous-system arousal can be — especially when it causes one’s date to snuggle closer through no potentially humiliating effort of one’s own. So, while it’s fairly difficult to find a newly released film aimed at a wider audience than 14-year-olds across all genres, the odds are even poorer when the field is limited to horror.

So I was pleasantly surprised by Quarantine. When I rented it, I knew nothing more about it than the description on the back and the fact that someone at the web site Bloody-Disgusting.com (previously unknown to me) considers it “quite possibly the best horror film this year”; intending no disrespect to that web site in particular, I was braced for disappointment. But the movie was clearly positioned as part of the zombie sub-genre, a type of horror movie particularly near and dear to my heart (possibly because one of my earliest horror-movie viewing experiences was sneak-watching Night of the Living Dead one night in early middle school when my parents were out), so I decided to give it a shot.

Quarantine is not really a zombie movie, of course. It’s a disease movie, and in that regard shares some scare territory with the masterful 2002 Cabin Fever, in that part of what is disquieting about the plot setup is not just the threat of infection that the characters face, but also how the characters behave toward each other as they realize that any one of them could at some point begin to pose a fatal threat to the rest. But this element is much more pronounced in Cabin Fever, where the disease simply causes its victims to sicken and die. In Quarantine, infection eventually results in extremely aggressive behavior manifested in a pronounced desire to bite other people; in other words, infection essentially turns people into the sort of “fast zombies” popularized in 28 Days Later (2002) and the 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.* They’re not really zombies, but they are the next best thing.

These pseudo-zombies are encountered when a TV film crew — one anchorwoman and one cameraman — tag along with some firefighters to a medical call at a small apartment building in Los Angeles. No sooner has the realization dawned that there is something unexpectedly dangerous in the building than the emergency personnel and residents realize that they are trapped, with no hope of assistance from the outside world.

The movie is full of smart references to other horror classics. The shot of one sickened woman staring blankly at her snowy television screen is straight out of Poltergeist, and — speaking of Night of the Living Dead — the Romero film is evoked by a television interview with an unfeeling police official as well as by the sniper’s headshot that kills one of the uninfected characters, in the same sort of “better safe than sorry” mentality that is evident at the end of that early classic. And at the risk of seeing references that might or might not be intended, there is even a blood-cleaning scene in which one character all but starts quoting “out, out damned spot” as he furiously scrubs his — well, I wouldn’t want to give away one of the most creative zombie-killing weapons/scenes I’ve ever seen.

One problem for some potential viewers is the fact that Quarantine is shot entirely from the TV camera on the cameraman’s shoulder. (And we only know what happened because of the footage found later, etc.) This sort of technique, used — I thought — to great effect in The Blair Witch Project, has two main potential problems.

One potential problem is logical and risks hampering suspension of disbelief, i.e., some viewers won’t be able to keep from wondering why the camera operator doesn’t put the damn camera down, given that his or her hands might be better employed bashing zombies or otherwise doing something other than recording everyone else’s deaths for posterity.

The other potential problem is what you might call ergonomic: the recent release Cloverfield (which I enjoyed), was presented as if shot entirely from a handheld mini-video-camera, and was as a result so shaky that there were reports of people having seizures in the theaters, while Amy left our viewing sick to her stomach.

Quarantine handles both problems fairly well. As to the first problem: on the one hand, the cameraman is a news professional, so it’s not surprising that he would be disciplined to keeping rolling even during moments of extreme duress; on the other, as events build to a more and more fatal head, the power goes out, and the light on the camera is one of the only handy sources of illumination. As to the second problem (potential shakiness, etc.), the Quarantine camera man is a professional with a shoulder rig, so there is relatively little shakiness and reeling.

Quarantine is a remake of the 2007 Spanish movie Rec, which I have not seen but which everyone on-line seems to agree was much better (well, except for commenter bmgpimpin13@hotmail.com on this post). Still, despite being a remake, Quarantine was clearly shot by some people with at least a little wit (there’s this scene with a rat that made me laugh out loud) and more than a little skill. (Have you ever considered, for example, how much directorial and acting skill goes into these “handheld camera” movies? There are necessarily some very long takes, which requires quite a lot of planning and blocking and, needless to say, knowing your lines.) It’s far from the first movie I’d recommend if you want to start watching horror/zombie movies, but if you’re a fan already and recognize it’s a mass-market Hollywood effort, it’s a decent little picture.

Footnotes:
* I’m predisposed toward and more likely to find real artfulness in slow zombies, again possibly because of having had my first exposure to the genre through Romero’s groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. In the shambling gait of the reanimated corpses of that film, you have something like the prospect of death itself: far away at first, approaching you predictably and — for the most part — avoidably, if you just pay attention and take some precautions. It should be easy to stay away from or defend yourself against slow zombies, but inevitably mistakes are made, sheer numbers overwhelm, irrational decisions are made, and isn’t this how it is with life itself? But this isn’t a debate worth having about Quarantine, because — insofar as some people make the dubious argument that fast zombies aren’t “believable” (as opposed to zombies in general?) — of course it’s believable that people who have simply been infected with a disease would still be able to move relatively quickly, as opposed to, say, reanimated corpses in varying stages of decomposition.

One could be forgiven for thinking that it’s because the people in charge of Hollywood no longer have even the sense they were born with, but this conclusion only holds if one assumes that Hollywood is actually trying to make good movies.

Why on earth wouldn’t they be trying to make good movies? Well, in order to make more money, of course.

I wouldn’t be the first to point out the vastly increased role of the various Hollywood studios’ marketing departments in every stage of the creative process these days. Whereas marketing departments once usually stepped in only after a movie was completed, marketers are now involved in decisions about what scripts to buy and how to rewrite them, whom to cast, and how to film, all in the service of sales strategies targeting specific demographic groups. (I’m not arguing that this never used to be the case, back in some Edenic halcyon age of moviemaking for movies’ sake, but if you imagine a continuum between “moviemaking for movies’ sake” and “moviemaking for the shareholders’ sake,” I think it’s pretty clear that we used to be a lot closer to the former and are lately tending a lot closer to the latter.)

And if there’s one demographic group that causes Hollywood marketing directors to hear old-fashioned cash-register kaching noises while their pupils are replaced by dollar-bill signs, it’s 12-24-year-olds, because they buy the most movie tickets. In 2007 — the most recent data I could find after 30 seconds of googling — this age group bought almost 40 percent of all movie tickets sold. (The next biggest purchasers are 25-39-year-olds, responsible for only 29 percent of 2007 ticket sales.) For an idea of what kind of money these people are putting on the table, consider that the spending power of 12-17-year-olds alone nearly reached $190 billion in 2006 and was predicted to top $200 billion any year now. (I imagine that more than a few allowances have been revised downward since that prediction was made, but still.)

One interesting question I’m not sure how to answer is what came first — teens buying the most movie tickets, or movies being aimed more and more at teens. But at the moment, if you are a Hollywood executive who wants to be able to report good news to your company’s shareholders, you couldn’t be blamed for deciding that marketing to teenagers needs to be a pretty important part of your strategy.

In other words, the preponderance of idiotic movies does not mean that Hollywood is run by idiots. It means Hollywood is run by very smart people who are very good at separating 14-year-olds from their paper-route money.

So the next time you — i.e., a non-12-24-year-old, or anyone interested in movies aimed at people with a little more life experience and perspective — are scanning the new releases at the video store, or checking the paper to see if there might be a movie playing that you are willing to spend $7-$15 to see, remember that you are trespassing in the sandbox. The movies don’t look good to you because they aren’t made for you. (This is why, in general, I rarely pay attention to movies that take up more than a shelf or two in the video store new releases display. The more copies the store ordered, the worse the odds that it’s anything I need to see.)

Maybe you should take up knitting or something.