An Odd and an End from the Weekend

Two unrelated topics I wanted to touch on from this weekend, neither really worthy of a full post, so instead I'm just cramming them together, no matter how awkward the fit.
First and foremost, now we all know what happens when you don't read the Sunday Times on Sunday: you miss sweet ass articles like this one from Whitney Joiner. In her piece, Joiner gives readers the low down on Rodriguez and Tarantino's Grindhouse. For folks familiar with the film and its production history to date, there probably wasn't anything in the piece to knock your socks off. But what's important here is that A) it was in the New York freaking Times. They don't talk about any movie to come down the pipe. B) It's fucking Grindhouse for god's sake! I mean, this is going to be one of the messiest, bloodiest, most beautiful pictures of the year. And C) Joiner deploys a strong sense of the generic implications of the two films that make up this beast of a movie experience.

The set piece that kicks the whole story off is Rose McGowan's infamous prosthetic leg/automatic weapon. Joiner talked to both Rodriguez and Tarantino for the piece, and the former make a somewhat surprising statement about how he crafted the film:

“I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever thought of that [put an automatic weapon where a leg should be] before,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez said of his high-caliber epiphany during an interview at his Troublemaker Studios here last month. “Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.”

This sounds a little reckless, but Rodriguez's feel for genre seems strong enough to make this kind of writing philosophy work. A little later in the piece, he mentions John Carpenter an awful lot, which sets a pretty damn high bar, but could mean great things come release date. A couple other points from the piece are worth mentioning:

1. Weinstin Company is preparing their largest promotional push since their founding upon Harvey and Bob's acrimonious split with Disney.
2. The directors, in their effort to create that true grindhouse movie going experience, will be randomly dropping reels from the films.
3. Tarantino on developing his contribution: “Part of my fun in doing genre cinema, since everyone knows the rules well, whether unconsciously or not, is leading you down a road and giving you all the information that you’ve gotten in other movies, and then using your own information against you,” he said.
4. The possibility of a sequel is put firmly into play by Rodriguez, but sort of brushed off by Tarantino.

We'll see what he says after the box office numbers start rolling in.

Speaking of box office numbers, my second point from this weekend has to do with Epic Movie's mildly surprising victory in its opening week. When your only real competition is Smokin' Aces, you probably shouldn't go around getting a big head when you open at $18.6 million. Now, that being said, this is the second time in less than a year that one of these spoof films has opened at number one at the box (Scary Movie 4 went number one in April). Epic Movie's draw was also almost identical to Date Movie's last February.

Certainly no one is going to argue that any of these three films is anything substantial. While I haven't seen any of this line since Scary Movie 2, it would seem that the team behind these films has the process down to something of a science, which isn't surprising seeing as that they are, at the end of the day, genre films, and the most derivitive type of genre films to boot.

The strength of each of these films' box office openings, however, speak to audiences desire to laugh through so many of the generic conventions that have succeeded in films that are usually still fresh in their minds. Especially in the case of the Scary and now Epic series, there really is no telling how far these films can go, since they can simply rely on the previous year's crop of films when pulling material together. Then, simply play the exact same set pieces that earlier filmmakers leveraged for drama or scares, only for laughs this time around. I'm not saying you need to like it, but it'd be silly not to respect the racket that this group of writers and producers has set up.

This Week in Roeper

Apparently our friend Mr. Roeper got this week off because he hasn’t reviewed any of the new releases. It's a sin too as we're left to only imagine what he would have made of a treat like Epic Movie. But just because he didn't take on any of this week's releases doesn't mean he's getting off the hook. So in the interest of helping you feel just a little bit smarter, I went back a couple of weeks to find some new-ish literary gems for the latest edition of This Week in Roeper. Enjoy!

• Curse of the Golden Flower - “It’s operatic in its feeling and there’s a lot going on here. And there’s murders and betrayals, and affairs that are illicit, and women on horse-back and great fight scenes.”


• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - “Hated this movie. Hated it.”


• Miss Potter - “The story really grows on you and it’s very sweet and it’s beautiful to look at.”


• Pan's Labyrinth - “Del Toro’s made a lot imaginative films. I think this is his masterpiece to date.”


• The Painted Veil - “Sweeping vistas, period-piece sets, impeccable literary source, a little stolid at times, but ultimately quite impressive.”

This Week in Roeper

Regular readers of Rotten Tomatoes will know that there's a lot of random critics that have gotten themselves worked into the website's formula. This is part of what makes RT so much fun. For the truly snobbish however, the site still compiles a "Cream of the Crop" list of reviewers working for more established, highly regarded publications. Among these Cream reviewers, there's a lot of eloquent and thoughtful critics; men and women who understand film and know how to express an opinion that heightens their readers' understanding of a given film. And then there's Richard Roeper.

To recap quickly, Richard Roeper is a humor columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, a.k.a. the Chicago Tribune's ginger stepchild. After Gene Siskel's death left Roger Ebert without a partner, the producers of Siskel and Ebert gave a handful of folks a tryout to fill the empty seat. Roeper emerged victorious, despite a tragically inferior appreciation of film.

Now, I don't watch Ebert & Roeper, but I will read Roger Ebert's print reviews every once in a while. But conveniently, Rotten Tomatoes pulls a quote from each critic giving me a chance to experience a little bit of Richard Roeper every week. From what I can tell, he doesn't actually write any reviews, instead only delivering them orally, but that's no excuse for saying something that might as well have come out of the mouth of an eight year old.

Each Sunday, join me in enjoying the best of Richard Roeper, presented without comment to preserve it's original genius. So without further ado, here's This Week in Roeper:

• The Queen - "It’s beautifully written and the acting is just pinpoint perfect."


• Volver - "It’s very moving, It’s beautifully done."


• Notes on a Scandal - "It is a chilling, memorable performance by Dame Judith, who will earn many award nominations, as should Blanchett. They are the perhaps the most impressive acting duo in any film of 2006. And Bill Nighy is their equal."


• Night at the Museum - "It’s just so dopey."


• Dreamgirls - "As much as I appreciated the performances from the terrifically talented cast -- as much as I liked Dreamgirls -- I didn't love it. Maybe it was just a little too slick and over the top for its own good."

Sometimes They Come Back: Black Christmas

On as much of a regular basis as can be expected, I'll look at genre films, primarily horror, that have been remade in a reoccurring segment called "Somtimes They Come Back." Discerning horror fans will recognize the title from the mildly amusing short story in Stephen King's Night Shift, which was turned into a film in its own right and spawned two very ill-advised sequels.

Anyway, in this first installement I want to look at Black Christmas, which opened on Christmas day to some small hoopla by religiously minded folks.

Knowing I'd be venturing out to see the new film, I purchased the original version a couple of months back. I was only vaguely familiar with it at the time, but learned a couple of surprising bits of trivia. First, it was directed by Bob Clark, who helmed another, slightly less terrifying holiday film: A Christmas Story. Amazingly, Clark was also behind Porky's 1 and 2, and more recently, Baby Geniuses 1 and 2. What a career!

The original film, made in 1974, also carries the mantle of progenitor of the slasher sub-genre. I realize that choosing any film as the first is silly (sure there's half a dozen films that could lay claim to the lineage, and Peeping Tom and Psycho are both significantly older), but I, like a lot of people I would guess, took for granted that Halloween was the first slasher, and Black Christmas, which predates Carpenter's film by four whole years, clearly demonstrates that that is just not the case. Let's just call Halloween the classic slasher and move on.

So, while not tremendously highly regarded, the original film had a lot going for it. What I found particularly interesting when watching the film were is all the elements, both syntactic and semantic, that were intact by 1974. I won't waste time listing each here, this isn't an academic paper, but it is important to note that Clark at least appeared to know what he was doing from a genre standpoint. Just as interesting were the elements that didn't function as well. Black Christmas doesn't operate with the same sexual politics as later films, and thus the whole "final girl" convention is sort of wasted. It should be noted that Jess does survive to the film's conclusion, but she certainly does little if anything to thwart the killer, and in fact, mistakenly suspects her boyfriend and adds him to the body count herself. We never see her confront the killer, revealed only in the film's cryptic ending to be named Billy.

Thirty-two years separate this original from this season's remake, and what the 1974 film does with sublety, the 2006 edition does balls out and with tongue thoroughly planted in cheek. The basic elements of setting remain virtually untouched: giant sorority house; day before Christmas; suburban, wooded surroundings. Many of the plot elements remain as well. The characters in the 2006 version are influenced heavily by the original (the sassy, drunk sister; the naive Southern belle; the goofy house mother; etc.), and their order of demise holds relatively true to the source.

It should be noted that Black Christmas represents the sophomore effort for director Glen Morgan, whose previous feature work was itself a remake, the 2003 version of Willard starring Crispin Glover. Morgan's no rookie though, having cut his teeth primarily in TV, on two cult programs, The X-Files and Millenium, as a writer and producer.

In most of the ways that count however, the 2006 film looks and feels nothing like its predecessor. The most omnipresent of the changes stem from Morgan's decision (he also penned the film) to flesh out the character of "the killer." As mentioned above, Clark's original gives us virtually no information about the entity perpetrating the slayings. We get a first person shot of his ascent into the attic, one we see repeated in this year's version, but otherwise Clark tells us nothing of the killer's character or motive.

Morgan, however, puts the villian front and center, even going so far as to treat us to a genesis story that intertwines with our own narrative. This has been a strong trend in many of these remakes, opting for more explanation rather than less. Quint mentions this in his discussion of Rob Zombie's Halloween remake over at Ain't It Cool, but Black Christmas really might be the most egregious offender.

Billy, the film's Michael Myers stand in, grew up locked in an attic, unloved and virtually uncared for. There's some incest (of a particularly nasty variety I might add), there's some matricide, and finally Billy is taken away to the hospital for the criminally insane. Here's the shocker though, the house where Billy grew up, is the same house occupied by the delicious ladies of Delta Alpha Kappa! The sorority even embraces the killer's legend by wrapping a gift for him under the tree.


Horror, as a genre, is not usually about story. That is to say, that when we're watching a horror flick we're not asking questions like, "Hey, wasn't that the guy who said that thing about the other guy?" or even "Why is he stabbing all those people?" Horror is about a lot of things, but it's not usually about story. That being said, there's obviously a bare minumum of story that is necessary to carry the action, and more importantly, highlight the themes. We can't just have random murder and mayhem, well, we could, but that's a whole different argument.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the two Black Christmases are really at two ends of a spectrum within the genre of slasher horror. On one end we have the original, which is so bare bones that we are given next to no information about the killer. He likes the attic, and seems pretty indescriminate in his task, but, unless I'm mistaken, he's never even revealed to us as anything other than a disembodied hand or perhaps a lurking shadow.

On the other end of our spectrum is Morgan's film, which by comparison would seem a hulking mess of a film. We're literally treated to so much information about Billy, our psychotic antagonist, that we really don't know what to make of all the details. His mother hated him. She killed his father. He fathered his own sister, Agnes (who is mentioned in the original's cryptic ending). All this is before he digs out his sister's eye and eats it, chops up his mother and step-father and makes cookies out of them. I hope I'm making myself clear. This is all backstory. Backstory: that which comes before the story. While amusing and mildly entertaining, this amount of plot pulls the whole film into a swirling vat of molasses.

To be fair, Morgan's direction is adequate enough that my attention never really waned, but Jesus, he was challenging me. My point is that while the original left a lot on the table in terms of plot, leaving the viewer feeling somewhat shafted in the genre pleasure department, the new film tried to give us so much of this genre pleasure that we just felt full and sort of bloated.

This is where films like Halloween, Friday the 13th and even Scream work on a level unto themselves. The plot is nothing more than a dressing that the filmmaker can use to play through the slasher's conventions. We, the film viewers, know and expect this (well, they probably didn't expect it with the first Black Christmas as audiences probably weren't that versed in the genre themselves).

We don't need to know every slight and every wrong that turned Billy into the mess of human he has become. If anything, this information only serves to demystify the monster, to pull the curtain back on the proverbial Wizard. Looking back, Clark really didn't give us enough to work with. On the other hand, Morgan gave us enough for a whole slew of films. The sad part is that somewhere in between the two Black Christmases is a really terrific movie.

You Might Say I'm a Little Excited for this One

Horror remakes are all the rage these days, and with the surprisingly high quality of these retreads, it seems like everything that is old can be new again. More on that later though. For now, enjoy this pretty sweet trailer which I saw running in front of Black Christmas (itself a remake) this weekend. It's actually more of a teaser, but who am I to split hairs.

The clip is for the upcoming Hills Have Eyes 2 (3/2/07). It's that rare remake sequel, otherwise known as a requel, and it looks like it's also the feature writing debut of Craven the Second, Jonathan.

By all appearances, the new film doesn't look to share any similarities with the original sequel, instead opting for the time tested generic standby of military vs. monsters. Bringing in the big guns is always a great way to kick the violence up a notch (see: Day of the Dead, ROTLD 3, among others). Anyway, enjoy!

Going Forward, Looking Back

We're already two weeks into 2007, but I thought, what better way to kick things off here at Genre Matters than by pulling together a list of my favorite films of 2006. This list is in no way final or complete, and keep in mind it only includes films that I actually saw, so there's definitely some quality films not making an appearance.

Now, I was going to make this a top 10, but I couldn't come up with 10 films that I loved, so instead, here's a top 5 with some trimming at the end.

1. The Departed:
   There was so much to love about this movie, that I hesitate to mention any one thing. An excellent cast from top to bottom, fine direction, violence galore: this one really did have it all. I feel like it will have to be the Best Picture front runner come February, but who the hell knows at this point.


2. Children of Men:
   In my mind, this film's biggest success was a realistic and chilling vision of the future that seemed entirely plausible. Cuaron created a riveting fiction and then surrounded it with a spectacular script, with some of the year's best suspense. Bonus points for having an agenda but not slamming audiences in the face with it (ahem, Bobby).


3. Pan's Labyrinth:
   Between the brutal conflict of the real world and Ofelia's truly horrifying fantasy excusions, Del Toro wove a tale that cut deep and spared no remorse. Like Cuaron, Del Toro chose a genre that can easily come off hackneyed and silly, and proceeded to turn in a true stunner.


4. Brick:
   This rookie effort is the proud winner of the Genre Matters' "Genre Film of the Year." Bringing a traditional noir storyline to a California high school, writer/director Rian Johnson made perhaps the freshest, most invigorating film of the year.


5. Half Nelson:
   Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I was pretty sure Ryan Gosling was selling used cars in the Midwest. And then all of a sudden he comes out of nowhere with this gut-punch of a film and looks like the next big thing. Of course Gosling's co-star held her own as well, and for all you Shareeka Epps fans, good news, you can catch her in AVP2 later in 2007!

With the top five out of the way, here's my other notables, in no particular order:

• The Descent: A pretty creepy little film, and then the mutant, flesh-eating cave dwellers show up.
• Little Miss Sunshine: Favorite comedy of the year.
• Prairie Home Companion: Altman's last hurrah worthy of a mention for its music alone.
• Lucky Number Slevin: Definitely the most pleasent surprise of the year, really came out of nowhere on me.
• Borat: I probably would have responded much more to this film without the ridiculous amount of PR run-up.
• Casino Royale: I don't like Bond films, but Daniel Craig actually has me pretty pumped for another go around (that's number 22 for all of you counting).

So, take that for what its worth. I plan on expanding my discussion on some of these films, particularly those meaty in the genre department, as I go forward. Let's just call this a jumping off point.