Ringing in the New Year

The first week of the new year brings the first Netflix Roundup. I know you've all missed it. There's not denying that. If this column feels more rockin' than usual, it's because I'm listening to Black Mountain. If it doesn't... well, that's on you.

Chawz -- Jeong-won Shin
On all fronts, this a ridiculous Korean movie. Chawz is nowhere near the caliber of the work of Jee-woon Kim, Chan-woo Park, or Joon-ho Bong. It's more in line with an original SyFy creature feature. And that's OK, because Chawz is a lot of fun. What attracted me to the movie was that I heard it was basically a remake of Jaws except it takes place on land with a giant wild boar. Hell yeah! That's basically what it is. Chawz hits many of the Jawz story beats and takes more beats from some of Steven Spielberg's other films. I kind of wish that I'd done a Jaws/Chawz double feature just so the former was fresh in my mind. Chawz isn't great and it depicts the Korean population (especially the police) as a bunch of bumbling fools who can't remain on their feet for more than five minutes. Even without the Jaws inspiration, I'd recommend Chawz based solely on the depiction of the people. It's an odd and entertaining movie.


The Harold Lloyd Collection -- Hal Roach
I like the Harold Lloyd persona. He's got a sort of dope-ish, nerdy confidence that makes him very appealing. Unfortunately, while I was watching this collection, my iPod crapped out on me just before I was to fly across the country and I was trying to deal with that while watching this. I don't know how many of you have tried to watch silent films while trying to work on other stuff, but it doesn't really work. There was a lot to like, but I feel disingenuous forming a solid opinion. Fear not, though. I jumped volume two of the collection near the top of my queue and shall not be distracted the second go 'round. This is my promise. This is my oath.

The Happiness of the Katakuris -- Takashi Miike
One of the more bizarre movies I've ever seen. It's Miike's take on musical comedies with a little horror thrown in. I was enthralled by the opening stop-motion work (oh yes, there's stop-motion), but the film couldn't really sustain that momentum, nor do I think it could. Katakuris errs a bit too far on the light-hearted side of things which is weird to say about a movie that features a fair number of people dying. It would have worked better with a more sinister, blackly comic streak going through it. That said, there are some really amazing scenes or even pieces of scenes that make it hard to look away from the screen. Additionally, there's a really intense showdown near the end that plays all to real and feels like it's out of another movie. Somehow, in light of everything that's come before, the scene totally works for me. Even though I tend to hate musicals, Happiness of the Katakuris is by far the most satisfying Miike experience I've had. It's playful, bizarre, and very silly. There's not many movie-watching experiences like this one. It'd be fun to pair it with Forbidden Zone or Phantom of the Paradise.


The Ward -- John Carpenter
It's better than Ghosts of Mars... Actually, The Ward isn't terrible or even bad. It simply doesn't offer a lot of new or interesting ideas to the genre. It feels workman-like, hitting all the necessary beats and throwing in some nonsensical scares just to keep the audience engaged. The scares are effective and there is a fairly palpable tension running throughout this story of a group of haunted girls in a mental ward, but by the end of The Ward, it all feels a little pointless and silly (in the bad way). The ending calls to mind a movie from 2003, which if I mention it's title, will give away everything, so everything feels like well-worn territory. Still... it looks nice and it's cool that John Carpenter is making movies again. I just hope he picks some better material to work with next time (notably, he didn't write the screenplay or do the music for The Ward).

11 Harrowhouse -- Aram Avakian
I like Charles Grodin. I really do. He can be very entertaining and engaging. But in 11 Harrowhouse, he may as well be a corpse. I've never seen someone sleepwalk through a movie like this and I've certainly never heard someone sleep-narrate a movie. It's almost as if the producers and director shot the movie without any narration, realized it was a tremendous bore and tried to punch it up and turn it into a comedy by adding snarky Grodin narration which he delivers with a disinterest one reserves for those people who come to your door preaching their particular version of the "gospel." He must have been in the booth watching the movie, waiting for his cues, barely able to keep his eyelids open. Seriously, a movie about a jewel heist should NEVER be this dull. At least James Mason brings his A-game, but then, he just has a sympathetic tenor to his voice that makes it near impossible for him not to bring some gravity to a role.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- Martin Scorsese
It totally makes sense that this was turned into a TV series. Most of the time, I felt like all of the various plot lines and vignettes were rushed and wanted to spend a little more time developing them. Of course, the movie would have been four hours long, so like I said: TV show. I wonder if that's just the nature of this style of film. M*A*S*H is also episodic and was turned into a TV show. Maybe that's the secret in successful translations: the source material should be episodic. Anyway, I thought I was really going to like ADLHD a lot at the start, but it kind of drifted in and out of interest for me. The relationship with the son is pretty odd and the relationship with Kris Kristofferson felt like it turned without much prompting. Seriously, where'd this rage come from? But it was affable and Ellen Burstyn was mostly good (though occasionally she seemed like a cartoon version of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence). I kind of wish that Scorsese had stuck with the stylistic aesthetic of the opening scene, though that probably wouldn't have worked out in the end.