Prawns and Monsters

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The basic idea behind Gareth Edwards's Monsters is a good one -- or maybe not the basic idea, because I don't know which of the film's three or four ideas was Edwards's jumping off point. But the basic narrative idea is a good one, and that idea is this: the Earth has been sort-of invaded by aliens, specifically one chunk of the Earth, and a man and a woman (played respectively by Scoot McNairy (!) and Whitney Able) need to travel from that chunk, to another, alien-less chunk. These aliens, while not obviously aggressive, are nevertheless alien, and therefore ignorant, enough of Earth and humans that they're causing a good deal of havoc. Also, while sometimes very large in size, they're not everywhere, so while this man and woman go about their difficult journey the aliens are spoken about far more often than they are seen, and when they are seen it's usually in glimpses, and more often than not on television.

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But Monsters takes some wrong steps early -- starting with some unfortunate dialogue, as when Andrew (McNairy), who has been sent by his employer to find Samantha (Able) because she is, in fact, his employer's daughter, greets her by announcing "I work for your father's publication" -- culminating in the realization (this on the part of the audience) that Monsters is an allegory about an Important Issue of Our Time. This is, I suppose, inevitable, because these days, and in all the days that preceded these, science fiction can often be divided into two types: action stories, and Important Issue of Our Time stories. That's when it comes to movies, anyway -- in literature, it's quite a different proposition, because in that medium the genre allows for quite complex books like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and its bleak yet hopeful approach to evolution, or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, the conceit of which is that Hitler never went into politics, but rather science fiction, and The Iron Dream is, indeed, supposedly written by Hitler, and well, I have to admit I've never read that one, but I do like the idea, and anyway I think it's safe to assume that James Cameron will never be tackling that kind of material, or, at least, not on purpose.

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What I'm saying is, science fiction on film is somewhat less varied, and while I won't presume to speak for you, I'm beginning to suffer for it. Monsters, for all its minor faults, has a really nice, theoretical approach to the idea of extra-terrestrials, or rather -- and this, unfortunately, is crucial -- "aliens", and here I mean on visual terms. Thematically, however, somewhere along the way (right from the beginning, for all I know) Gareth Edwards apparently thought "Space aliens are a lot like Mexicans," and Monsters as we know it was born. Because Mexico is in fact the setting for Monsters, and America has built a wall along the U.S./Mexican border, and at some point, swear to Christ, Samantha actually says, in reference to this wall, "It's like we're imprisoning ourselves." That quote is inexact, but, I assure you, just barely. Almost nobody has realized, even at this late date, that unless you know what you're doing, you should leave allegory in the fucking toolbox. Virtually without fail, the result of removing it from that toolbox, with the intention of actually using it, is either a lecture, or a mix of a lecture and a round of high-fives with all the people who walked into the theater already agreeing with you. And I swear to you, it's not the specific politics or philosophy that is the issue here -- the problem is a lack of imagination. Being stopped in your tracks when you realize that "aliens" can actually have two meanings...well, that's not the kind of barn-storming idea that kept your Wellses and Asimovs and Ellisons and Delaneys and Silverbergs chugging along -- put it that way.

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But oh ho! Monsters, as it turns out, has quite a surprise in its pocket -- I realize I sound like a sarcastic dick there, but I actually mean it. I won't give away the end of the film, but before turning its story into a silly loop-the-loop for not good reason I can figure, Monsters presents us with a pretty darn good look at these titular "monsters" (to Edwards's credit, the underlying meaning of his title is not that "we are the real monsters," and for that I can only be grateful), and they're huge and beautiful and astonishing and doing...something. This stretch of the film -- a good five minutes or so, focused on these creatures -- is quite honestly one of the greatest bits of science fiction filmmaking I have ever seen. For a film that wears its influences not so much on its sleeve as on its forehead -- a lot about Monsters will seem awfully familiar to an awful lot of people -- to suddenly go all dazzling and awesome (the original definition, as in "wonder-inducing", as opposed to the more familiar meaning, "pretty neat") was a bit of a jolt. And it seems to me that this is why Edwards made this movie, because he knew he could do this (and, not incidentally, he could do it for not very much money); what he needed was a reason to do it, and the uninspired 90 minutes (and the dopey, but non-fatal, "twist" that follows) that precedes this moment is what he came up with.

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But Jesus, you know...I'll take it! What this section of Monsters is doing is exploring true alienness. Not the alienness of "the Other", which in college classrooms often means "people who aren't white", but true alienness, otherworldly, science fiction alienness, which itself, just lightly buried, doubles as the entirety of what we don't know and will not know in our lifetimes, and would never understand even if we could witness it. It's about knowing you don't know shit, that we don't know shit, even though the majority of us seem pretty confident that in a relative eyeblink, universally speaking, we've amassed all possible world and scientific knowledge. Finally, for all its massive failings, Monsters put me in mind of one of the greatest, and purest, science fiction stories I know: Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (you can follow that link and read the story yourself), which is a rather brilliantly dark take on the idea of uncertainty, approached by Edwards in Monsters with a more positive, albeit speechless, sense of wonder. So that ultimately my take on Monsters is that it's really not a very good movie, until suddenly, and however briefly, it is a very good movie.

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But I don't know, maybe recent disappointments have just made me soft, or quick to forgive, given that disappointment is not my favorite emotion. What I'm getting at here is last year's weirdly beloved District 9, the triumphantly successful first feature from Neill Blomkamp. The thing about the critical reaction to District 9 is that it appears to have had a positive baseline, so that reactions needed to grow from the feeling that it was rather nice that such a film, on such a scale, came from a country other than America. Which, okay, but from my perspective this means that I'm supposed to think that I don't really like the movie, but at least it came from South Africa. I'll give you that, if you think it's so important, but I'm still left with this broken heffalump of a lecture -- er, movie, this broken heffalump of a movie, whose noble goal is to illustrate Blomkamp's take on South Africa's current ethnic and political situation without chintzing out on shots of people exploding. I appreciate that, I guess, even though it means that District 9 is a mix of the two types of modern cinematic science fiction I'm most sick of.

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I thought of District 9 a lot while watching Monsters last night, mostly in the context of believing they were equally bad, and for the same reasons, but I think it should be clear now that in a head-to-head race, I think Monsters comes out ahead. For one thing, Monsters is visually consistent -- as a piece of filmmaking, it knows where it's going. District 9, meanwhile, consists of a very uneasy split between faux-documentary and standard, third-person omniscient (or whatever the opposite of a documentary is) action spectacle. This split is all the more uneasy because the documentary style is eventually just unceromoniously dropped. More obnoxious to me, from a technical standpoint, is the entirely absurd plot element involving the main character, named Wikus Van De Merwe. Played by Sharlto Copley in a much-hailed performance (even though I can't see what he does here that is any different from any other actor who has played a self-important, twitchy beaurocrat in any film ever; the film's innovation, which is genuine enough, is to make this guy the hero), Wikus goes from a guy whose job is to evict the space aliens from the impoverished blotch of Johannesburg they've chosen to inhabit since their baffling arrival some years before, a job he takes to with some callousness, to a guy who has great sympathy for, and even fights to correct, the plight of these same space aliens. He gets there because the aliens have this fluid, see, which is on one hand fuel that they need in order to escape from this South African plot of land back to their ever-hovering mothership, and on the other hand is a goo that if a human gets sprayed with it, it will transform him into a space alien. What good, or even just impact, this particular chemical property has on the space aliens when they're nowhere near Earthlings -- which presumably, in the context of their entire species, is almost all the time -- is anyone's guess, but it sure comes in handy in District 9.

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And look, I'm really not a big believer in the idea that the science in a science fiction film needs to be spotless in order to pass muster, nor do I find much worth in those who would pick away at all the supposed implausibilites in a story (strange, quick digression: the most recent episode of The Office features a protracted and even vicious snowball assault by one character on another, and I've seen people criticize this plotline for being too absurd in general, and because in reality one of their co-workers would certainly have stepped in and called an end to it; it is my hope that these people never enter into the field of comedy writing), but surely there are limits. When your plot hinges on something that is not only nonsensical, but also manages to rub our noses in metaphor, then something's wrong somewhere. How about I write a movie about a poor minority kid who travels with his dog through an unforgiving countryside, until one day he sees a rich white man drop a loaf of bread, and when the kid feeds that bread to his dog the dog gains the power to sniff out free money. Whatever, it's a metaphor.

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So District 9 is quite a bit more plotty than Monsters, which is fine by me in theory, much less so in execution. Worse, though, is that outside of some nice shots of the mothership, Blomkamp has no awe for his aliens. He's not trying to make a science fiction movie -- he's trying to make an action movie that Says Something. However, since he thinks he's making a science fiction movie, in order to stitch the action to his point, he's got to go through this absurd business with the fuel/transforming goo. But he betrays his intentions by having no curiosity about his aliens. Science fiction, along with everything else, is about curiosity, and Blomkamp has none. His "prawns" are not well-imagined creations -- they're substitutes. Like so many others, Blomkamp doesn't realize that something can be a metaphor and still be the thing itself, or if he does know this he thinks that making his aliens fond of cat food (which, honestly, is very close to being a joke from ALF) counts.

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Monsters is curious, though. It takes a while to get there, and frankly it's almost not worth it. But in the end, I believe it is. For about five minutes, Monsters is the anti-District 9, and for all my bitching, it gives me hope for the future.

Turnips: A Preamble

.Most men are, according to the ladies at the beginning of Robert Wise’s Born to Kill, turnips. The women are Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard) who runs the boarding house in whose parlor this conversation takes place, and Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), and a turnip is any man who can be pushed around, who doesn’t take what he wants, and who – although this idea is never spoken, and would probably be sincerely if naively rejected by Laury and Mrs. Kraft – aren’t constrained by such useless emotions as guilt and regret. Whatever the polar opposite of a turnip is, both Laury and Helen have found their king in Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney), a man so completely unconstrained by guilt and regret that very soon he will murder Laury and Danny (Tony Barrett), the man Sam believed was “cutting in on” Sam’s claim to Laury, on impulse. Later, when Sam tells Marty (Elisha Cook, Jr.) -- who is sort of like Jiminy Cricket if Jiminy Cricket was the last guy you’d want for that job – what he did, Marty tells him that he can’t go around killing people like that. Sam wants to know who says he can’t, and Marty concedes that nobody does.

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So Sam’s no turnip, but there are several on the periphery of Born to Kill, and of film noir in general. In one sense, they exist in films like Born to Kill (and Danny was one, and Helen’s fiancé Fred, played by Philip Terry, is another) because, you know, without evil we would never understand good, although in noir that formula is often reversed. Film noir is, more often than not, not about the quest for justice by good men (there are actually a lot of noirs of this sort, but some time back a lot of people decided they’d rather not define the genre like that), but rather about the struggle of bad people – the struggle to live (or, more precisely, to not die), or to flip the course of their morality. Born to Kill is about both kinds of struggle, because while Sam fights to gain money and power and not die along the way, Helen Brent – who finds the bodies of Danny and Laury, and comes to love Sam not despite of, but because of what she knows about him, going so far at one point as to threaten the life of an old rummy (this would be Mrs. Kraft) if she ever yaps to anyone – is astonished to discover that her own soul is corrupt, that she is “rotten inside”. Throughout the film, Helen will alternate between trying to stamp out that corruption, and desperately embracing it.
.In Born to Kill, you have this core evil – Sam Wild – that radiates out, until it becomes diminished to nothing on the fringes. Just outside that core are Helen and Marty, and on the fringes are good people, turnips, like Fred and Audrey Long’s Georgia (good, but not always smart or perceptive, as Georgia, who is Helen’s sister, actually marries Sam). In between are folks like Arnett (William Slezak), the private eye hired by Mrs. Kraft to find out who killed Laury. Arnett is on Sam’s trail, but the audience can’t put a lot of moral faith into him, because we eventually learn that he is in possession of a soul only slightly blackened, in comparison to your Sams or Helens anyway, but blackened all the same. And of the points of view the film makes us privy to, Arnett’s is as close to coming from a decent person as we get. Oh, there’s Mrs. Kraft, but she’s a drunk (she’s good, though, and Howard is terrific in the role – her breakdown before Helen’s ruthlessness is perfect) and we don’t really follow her the way we do Arnett. Arnett's mixture of optimism in the face of poverty (Mrs. Kraft's patronage comes at a very good time) and cynical greed could mirror certain incongruous branches of Hollywood filmmaking at the time, if you wanted it to, but it more precisely and specifically encompasses the tug-of-war within film noir. Born to Kill isn't exactly the cheeriest of all such films (what would that be, I wonder? The Big Steal?), but outside of Danny and Laury (and even Danny was kind of a prick), those behind whom the big door is slammed pretty much, as is so often the case, have it coming.

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Meanwhile, the turnips -- Fred, for example, who eventually breaks it off with Helen because he can see the blackness welling up within her, and he can even see it winning against her better self -- make it out okay. Not without some scarring (Georgia's going to have to learn to pick better, for one thing) but their essential goodness saves them. They're not quite so fated, as Sam and Helen and Marty are, by the lives they've chosen, at least not negatively, and it's the bad kind of fate that is such a big deal in noir. But I don't know if it's fate so much as it is just plain begging for it. With Helen, it's fate -- her taste for the mean and bloody side of life surprises even her, which implies it's been dormant in her for a long time -- but Sam Wild seems content to pull on the various threads that will eventually leave his life completely unraveled. He's not terribly introspective, and there's a funny scene where he and Georgia have just come back from their honeymoon, cut short because the big dunce got angry that Georgia, who is quite rich, doesn't think it's such a swell idea for him to take over running the newspaper she owns. Clearly, Sam thought this position would be his right by marriage, and seeing his brick-like face cloud over with confused anger would be sad if we didn't remember poor Laury and Danny. Even so, Sam keeps plugging away with one thoughtless or stupid or violent action or reaction until he finds himself on the wrong side of a revolver. The only way his end can be called fate is if you take into account how blind he is. Otherwise, it almost looks like he's deliberately digging his own grave.

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This line of thinking is helped along when you have a figure like Lawrence Tierney planted front and center; he's one of the legends of film noir. Like Robert Mitchum with every ounce of warmth and basic human decency removed, Tierney lumbered through his films like a blank-faced ape made out of concrete. Someone with a keen eye and a sharp sense of character gave Tierney his big break in Dillinger from 1945, directed by Max Nosseck, and his reputation would be pinned by his subsequent work in Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, but sometime in the 1950s he turned into a less murderous, and less ambitious, version of Sam Wild, screwing himself over with a series of drunken brawls (he once apparently got into a street fight with ex-con, crime writer, and future Tierney co-star Edward Bunker), effectively killing his chances for a serious film career until Quentin Tarantino briefly revived him in 1992's Reservoir Dogs (and let us not forget Tierney's subsequent voice work on The Simpsons as Don Brodka, the Try-N-Save's head of security).

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I first heard of Tierney through Barry Gifford's book The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films, in which Gifford pumps up the 1947 Felix Feist movie starring Tierney ("He'll Kill Until He Dies!") as one of the blackest, looniest noirs ever made. I was able to see The Devil Thumbs a Ride about ten-plus years ago, but the copy was beat-down, the sound and image were shot, and I found it to be a very frustrating experience, with that frustration being my primary memory of it. I do remember something of Tierney, however, far less of the surrounding turnips, who are generally too busy trying to stay out of the way of guys like Tierney, or being uprooted and chopped up, to try to be interesting. Of course, though it would be boring to admit it, and regardless of the gender specifics of the ladies' conversation at the beginning of Born to Kill, we're the turnips, in reality scrambling out of the way of killers and thieves, and through the vicarious medium of film we're maybe following some kind of death fantasy (this turnip metaphor is threatening to break down) as we stare, through glass, in fascination (there it goes) at the prowling likes of Tierney, or the deceptively alluring and conflicted Claire Trevor.
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Back to Tierney, though: he made a lot of movies, but, in terms of availability, even the small handful of his early classics seems rather thin when we can't view a sharp, clean print of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, one of those notorious shithouse B-movies that seem to die off by the dozens every year. Well, but hey! As it happens there's going to be a fundraiser to help curb this very thing. This coming February, Marilyn of Ferdy on Films and The Siren will be hosting the For the Love of Film Noir blogathon (click on either of the preceding links), in support of the Film Noir Foundation. Give your money, or give your blogspace to it, whatever you can do. This post is but a taste of what I hope to bring to the table in praise of a film genre that is near and dear to my heart. And if you hate the shit I write, well, my guess is everybody-but-everybody is going to jump in this thing, and the riches will be positively embarrassing. Until then...

Do What I Like, Not What You Like

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I'm not exactly sure why this news story should break me out of my writing doldrums, but a few days ago Steve Martin was hosted by the 92nd Street Y, where he was interviewed by art critic, historian, and etc. Deborah Solomon. The place was sold out, 900 people paying $50 a pop, plus this conversation was streamed on the internet. The topic was art, and art history, both of which have been a, let's say, major league hobby of Martin's for decades now, and are also the subject of his new novel An Object of Beauty, which had been released just days prior to the 92nd Street Y gig. So that's what they talked about. You can read about the ensuing controversy more completely here, but basically what happened is the paying audience, or anyway a portion of that audience (probably an important point, actually), both in person and on-line, did not much like the fact that Steve Martin was talking about art -- not to mention his fucking novel -- and not about what it was like making The Lonely Guy, or what he thought the Festrunk brothers might be like now, in this modern world of 2010, or whatever it is they wanted for their fifty bucks. They so disliked this that they registered their unhappiness right then, as the conversation progressed, via e-mails to the 92nd Street Y, and, I'm assuming, through hissed whispers to that venue's staff.
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More alarmingly, the higher-ups in that staff agreed that this art talk must not be allowed to continue and went so far as to pass a note -- again, all while Martin and Solomon were conducting the talk they were being paid for -- to Solomon asking that she steer the conversation towards the earlier, funnier portions of Martin's career. The upshot of all this is, the evening has been written off as a debacle, to the extent that the 92nd Street Y has offered refunds to all 900 paying customers, and Solomon and Martin are left to defend themselves against charges of boringness, and of not meeting the 92nd Street Y's "standard of excellence."
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There are a lot of different ways I could begin talking about this, many of them less long-winded than the path I'm about to go down, but I find it very curious that so many people would be willing to lay down fifty dollars, not only to hear Steve Martin talk about the earliest phases of his career yet again -- he sort of wrote a whole memoir about that called Born Standing Up, which I recommend, and plus there's thirty-some years of archival interview footage that's probably just a click away -- but to pay that money even though they're evidently unaware that Steve Martin long ago changed from this person:
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...to this person:
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Now, granted, Martin himself has confused the issue by his film work, which at some point changed from the more personal stuff like Roxanne, A Simple Twist of Fate and L. A. Story, films that, whatever you might think of them, gave a pretty strong indication of where his own creative drive was taking him, to what would appear to be straight paycheck gigs like Bringing Down the House, The Pink Panther movies, and so on. But Steve Martin is not a hermit, and you don't need to be a superfan to know that his personal sense of humor has leaned, over the past several years, to the very dry (and I do not believe, by the way, that Martin, during this 92nd Street Y gig, completely stomped down on this humor in favor of some dull, professorial demeanor, but maybe I'm wrong). Not only that, but his interest in art is very well documented, and references to it stretch way back to his absurdist days (see the Winslow Homer piece in his first book Cruel Shoes). The point of all of this being that the 92nd Street Y -- who this month will be hosting an evening with the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Octet, and later another one with Ian Frazier and John McPhee (who will be talking about families and rocks, I'm guessing), and even later still will evidently be the site of live broadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show (I recommend audience members for those nights demand their refunds in advance, as a time-saving strategy), but nothing, so far as I know, on a night of comedy with Carrot Top, or any kind of evening that requires a warning that members of the audience will get wet -- hired Deborah Solomon, a woman who wrote a biography of Jackson Pollock, thinking, apparently, that she was going to ask Steve Martin if it was a lot of fun making My Blue Heaven, and then got all pissed off when she didn't.
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Oh, there are more specific things that the complainers have pointed out, such as the fact that a large chunk of the discussion was about Martin's brand new book, which nobody in the audience would have had a chance to read yet, but I guess the folks making that complaint are entirely unaware of the tradition of authors promoting their brand new books by giving live readings. There's also the question of how the evening with Solomon and Martin was marketed. Well, here's the page for it on the Y's website, and I'll admit it's a bit vague, though I feel the biography of Solomon offered at the bottom of the page offers some interesting clues.
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Regardless of all that, the real problem is this appalling desire that an artist be only what we perceive them to be, and to do what we both perceive and prefer that they do. Steve Martin talked about art; I wanted him to sing "King Tut" again. Give me my goddamn money back. Now listen, I completely understand the impulse to want an artist you've liked in the past to keep doing those things you've liked, especially if the more visible work they're currently doing doesn't seem to be as good (for the record, I haven't been interested in a Steve Martin movie since Bowfinger, and haven't really liked one since he appeared in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, but I find this personal, sideline work -- his novels, his banjo music -- really interesting and appealing, though I've experience not too much of it thus far). And you, and I, and everyone, has every right to wish an artist would do whatever the hell we might wish them to do. What nobody has the right to do is demand that they do it, even if we're putting our money down in the misguided hope that they'll read our minds.
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The analogy isn't perfect, but what this reminds me of (apart from that episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive and demands that they play "Takin' Care of Business" even though they'd just finished playing it, and then once they start it again tells them to "skip to the 'workin' overtime' part") is all the pissing and moaning from people who think that Robert De Niro has sold out. By turning up in two sequels to Meet the Parents and one sequel to Analyze This (which was no great shakes to begin with), as well as Hide and Seek and all that other stuff, I suppose, technically, he has sold out, but the attitude from some people is that De Niro has sold us out, as if by thinking he was so amazing in Taxi Driver we were somehow doing him a favor, one he's now refusing to make good on.
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Often, the line on this is that De Niro is "tarnishing his legacy." To those who say such things, let me first say "Fuck you, and until you've built up a legacy of your own, don't think you have any right to tell someone like Robert De Niro how they should go about handling theirs." After that rant, I would say that De Niro made films like Taxi Driver because he was a brilliant actor, and he wanted to make those kinds of films. Evidently, he no longer wants to do that. I don't want to get all slobbery and stupid and say that those dozen or so (or whatever, I'm not going to count them) astonishing performances De Niro gave in the first half of his career were his "gifts" to us, but I am grateful to him, as a fan, for doing that work. But I'm also not so delusional as to think he, or any other artist I like, owes me anything more, or even owed me what I've already gotten. Taxi Driver might have sucked, you know -- you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. The fact that it didn't can really be chalked up to our good luck.
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Artists don't belong to us. We have no rights in these matters. Be happy you can watch The King of Comedy whenever you want, or The Man With Two Brains or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Skip over what doesn't interest you, but maybe give An Object of Beauty a look, because who knows, maybe it's pretty good. Either way, don't buy a ticket for something you don't understand and then bitch about the fact that you don't understand it.

Affinity #24

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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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- Vladimir Nabokov

Remember, Remember, the End of November

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Boy, this has really been a thin month around here, hasn't it? What is this, only my sixth post? I can't remember the last time I've been so unproductive with this blog, and if anybody's sad about that, allow me to apologize. I don't really know what the deal is, but I suppose October took more out of me than usual.
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To add insult to injury, this post isn't going to be worth dogshit, either. I'm only popping in now to say "Oops!" and "I'm sorry!" and "Things will be better next month!" Hopefully, anyway. I should think they'd almost have to be, so I'm trying to stay positive. If nothing else, I'll be itching to post about Black Swan and True Grit when I see them in December, which is two posts locked down, right off the bat. Already things are looking better.
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But I'm afraid that's really it for November. Obviously, I'm going to be tied up with family-type deals through the weekend, and while there's an off chance that I might spark on something to write about before the month is over, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. So let's just call November a wash, and start fresh on December 1st. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving, everybody.
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PS - Exit Through the Gift Shop sucked. This has been a review.

A Cold Lonely Summer

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I continue to find it very peculiar that Jonathan Levine and Jacob Forman's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has still not only not been released to theaters in the US, but hasn't even been given a token DVD release. The story behind this is, at least as I understand it, not terribly compelling: using the box office failure of Grindhouse as their primary learning tool, the Weinstein brothers unloaded the much-less-wonky-than-Grindhouse slasher film onto another distribution company, which promptly went bankrupt. And so All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has languished, first as a much-whispered about horror film, of the "I got to see this, but you can't!" sort, talked up by those who'd caught it at one or another film festival, and more recently as a movie everybody has forgotten about because most people aren't easily able to see the damn thing. Of all the kinds of word-of-mouth that can build hype, the highly positive kind that nevertheless can't do anybody any good is by far the most powerful, but that power is finite.

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Talking about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane now, it's hard to know if one should even bother avoiding spoiler territory, and if one doesn't bother, if one should then bother adding a spoiler warning. It's not impossible to see All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and if you already own a region-free DVD player it's not even expensive. But you do have to already own that particular kind of DVD player, and you have to be willing to buy All the Boys Love Mandy Lane just because you want to see it for the first time. You really have to want it, in other words. With no offense intended towards the film, how many people feel enough residual hype now, four years later, to do that?

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At least one, since that's how I finally saw it, which I've now done twice. The second time was today, and the film holds up very nicely. Which is the thing about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: it is a good movie, almost undeniably solid, and perhaps insidiously powerful -- I say "insidiously" because it plays, with great ease, as a straight-ahead slasher film. But it has a brain, and even a heart, though not an especially warming one. Directed by Levine and written by Forman, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is about the titular female, who is of high school age, and how all the boys love her. Or rather, want to have sex with her. Mandy (played by Amber Heard, who is well cast for all sorts of reasons) is almost the typical perfect girl -- gorgeous, blonde, sweet, humble, completely without affectation and without a mean bone in her body. And she's chaste, too, which is why all the boys want to have sex with her, in particular -- "I claim this land for Poland", and so forth -- and why she's invited to a weekend getaway by a group of friends, one of whom has a farm, or rather his parents do, said parents being out of town. So, drink, drugs, sex. She agrees to go, and I'll leave it up to you to guess if the mysterious killer who shows up on the first night kills them one by one, or all at once.

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Okay, it's one by one -- so there's your spoiler. What's interesting about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is that the smart-ass, off-hand cruelty that is a staple of pretty much all movies about teenagers, not just slasher movies about teenagers, is not merely there, which is usually the case. As the film builds, it eventually becomes clear that this stuff, while not hammered on gratuitously, is sort of what the film is all about. The whole film is practically told in miniature in the first chunk of the film -- not quite a prologue, but near enough -- which involves a pool party, a jock who wishes most ardently to get all up in Mandy Lane, Mandy's quiet, nerdish friend Emmett (Michael Welch), and a terrible accident. Simply saying that I'm going to tread lightly here is already treading more heavily than I probably should, but in order to say anything about this scene, and really the film, I should note that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and primarily this scene, does benefit from repeated viewings. There also shouldn't necessarily be extra points handed out if you guess early who the mysterious, lurking killer is, not least because the film reveals his identity well before the end. And when you see what he's wearing, you might be reminded of certain violent high school stories you've heard about in the news, and how teenagers can be assholes, but also this hardly justifies certain actions, and so forth.

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Again, though, none of this is underlined very strongly, and this is to the film's credit. Neither Levine nor Forman are so stupid as to neglect their obligation to view, and portray, their story's victims as human beings, no matter how unlikable they may otherwise be. One guy, Jake, played by Luke Grimes, comes off as a right bastard, but before his worst qualities come out he's also shown taking some particularly bad verbal abuse -- bad for a teenage boy, anyway -- with both barrels. And the resident "mean girl", Chloe, played by Whitney Able, is usually seen dishing it out, but has a sad, lonely moment that proves she most definitely cannot take it. It's all surprisingly humane, something that can't often be said of slasher films.

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Jonathan Levine -- who has not returned to the genre since this film, which is pretty atypical of young modern filmmakers who get their start in horror -- landed on a nice visual style here, focusing first on a way to film Mandy Lane, and then radiating out from there. Heard as Lane is photographed in perpetual sunshine, or so it seems -- even when it's night, she still seems to be walking through a summer day. The rest of the film carries that same country summer feel, more so than any of its genre predecessors that chose roughly similar settings (I'm distinguishing the deceptively welcoming climate of this film from the also summery Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whose sun does not warm but rather bakes the dirt all to hell), and certain moments of daylit horror have a bright shimmer that's unnerving in its incongruity.

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That being said, I'm not sure I can say that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane built up a great sense of terror or dread, at least not in me -- at its best, the film felt more like a sad, brutal, moral disaster. It would feel like that even more often than it does if it wasn't for the fact that Levine and Forman apparently felt the need to undercut things a little bit too much, and a little bit too often, with needless, and ostensibly clever, touches. And there's that ending, which even threatens to undercut how we got where we got in the story, but watching it again today I'm not sure that's entirely fair. In one obvious sense, and from one important character's not insignificant point of view, the ending changes absolutely nothing. What the ending does do is cast that beginning section into a new light, a potentially interesting one, and a pretty dreadful one.

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Levine's final stylistic touch is to throw All the Boys Love Mandy Lane back to the grindhouse (I don't know, maybe the Weinsteins had a point after all), which is the thing to do these days, but I have to say he makes it work. He throws it even further back by playing us out with the song from which this post takes its title. It's one of those clever touches, but it works, too.

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So It's Pretty Clear I'm Not Breaking My Ass to Post Something New Here, Right?

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You know how it is. What with one thing or another, and I'm still getting over that one time, which was so hard. But let's never mind all that. Maybe what I should do is simply broach a topic to you, my readers, and see what fascinating conversation flows forth. This doesn't all have be about what I write; it can be about your words, too!

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So here's the topic:

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You guys remember these toys? Sectaurs? Somebody remembers these, right?

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Discuss. By the way, that last one is their castle.