'30 Days of Night' review

Rating: *** out of ****

“Bar the windows. Try to hide. They're coming,” warns the Stranger from behind bars. “They? Who are they?” asks Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett). ‘They’ are bloodthirsty vampires and they have arrived in the sleepy, secluded town of Barrow, Alaska. Once a year, the town of Barrow comes under 30 days of complete darkness. According to Wikipedia, Barrow is the northernmost settlement on the North American mainland and one of the northernmost towns of more than 2,000 residents in the world. That makes it the perfect feeding ground, as the vampires arrive (of an unknown origin) and plan to use this month of darkness to have a never-ending orgy of feeding. The ghouls use a variety of devious and head-on attacks to pick off the residents of the town one by one. The fate of the town resides in a band of survivors who manage to elude detection, hiding in basements and attics, remaining silent for presumably weeks on end. The band is lead by the local Sheriff Oleson (Hartnett) and his estranged wife, Stella (Melissa George).

Vampires, like zombies, seem to be running their course in horror movies. There can only be so many incarnations of the same villain. Though it is an original premise, these are still your run of the mill vampires running through the usual motions: kill, feed, assimilate, repeat. These are not your French, romantic vampires though. These filthy, vile creatures do not feed, but mutilate and are intriguing on certain levels. Sure, they have the usual superpowers, but these vampires feel tangible, with weaknesses. I believed these were actual living organisms instead of super beings. After all, a swift axe to the chest or face will take care of them. Danny Huston delivers a solid and often chilling performance as Marlow, the head vampire. He brings personality and legitimate suspense to a species that can be quite autonomous.

The film is strongly cast. Its talent elevates the material to grounds higher than necessary. Hartnett and George ably play the couple-in-arms. He comes across as strong without seeming like an action hero, while she is believable as a police officer. She carries herself with confidence and a natural beauty that is not distracting for the character. The de-evolution of the sheriff is compelling; he gets a bit detached with every citizen he must kill due to their changing into the undead. You can tell he has rarely seen violence in his isolated world and yet does what he must. Surely though, the film is stolen by the performances of Huston, and Ben Foster as the Stranger. Foster proves here that after ‘Alpha Dog’ and ‘3:10 To Yuma’ that he is becoming one of the strongest character actors working today.

‘30 Days of Night’ is flawed though. It disappointed me that with all its creativity and talent, it ends up as just another splatter-fest. The ending takes a drive off the deep end and some back-story to accompany Huston’s performance would have made these the most compelling vampires in a while. But alas, they merely appear when conveniently needed, whooshing past the camera in close-up. The film plays out quite quickly even with sporadic subtitles indicating how many days have passed. I never believed that these characters have been fighting or hiding for 30 whole days. In the end, it felt more like ‘The Long Weekend of Night’.

The film was directed by David Slade, who made 2005’s terrifying ‘Hard Candy’. The material isn’t as strong here, yet Slade and his cinematographer Jo Willems bring style and an eye for gore to the film. Though it is not worthy of its predecessor, ‘30 Days of Night’ will be enjoyed by fans of the graphic novel and horror fans in general. For those who wish to be truly terrified as opposed to nauseated, rent ‘Hard Candy’ and try to keep your eyes open.

'Weirdsville' review

Rating: **1/2 out of ****

Remember the day when disposing of dead hookers was easy? No? Well, the characters in Allan Moyle’s’ new film ‘Weirdsville’ don’t seem to either, as they have quite the difficult time doing so. I suppose we can’t be too hard on them. Before the night’s out, they’ll encounter Satan worshipers, mafia enforcers and medieval midgets (sorry if that’s politically incorrect but the alliteration is priceless).

‘Weirdsville’ stars Scott Speedman as Dex, an introspective stoner who has recently quit the junk. One night he gets a call from his friend Royce (Wes Bentley), the so called ‘idea man’ of his troupe (his ‘ideas’ include ‘Spray-onnaise’, a spray on mayonnaise). It seems that Royce has a dead hooker in his living room and needs Dex’s help disposing of it. It turns out that the dead hooker is their friend Matilda (Taryn Manning). Unfortunately, for Dex and Royce, Matilda has overdosed on the crystal meth that they have stolen from a gangster named Omar. Now they must dispose of this body while trying to get Omar his money by morning. Things get even more out of control when they discover Satanists performing a ritual sacrifice right where they were going to bury the body. That’s how ‘Weirdsville’ unfolds. Its story is a series of dominoes - each toppling in a row, revealing more and more plot, characters and bizarre situations. Part of the fun of a movie like this is how said events unfold and so I will only reveal as much as is necessary to accurately review the film.

The problem with ‘Weirdsville’ is that it is not as clever as the writer Willem Wennekers would like to believe. Though it gets points for originality, I found myself rarely caring what was taking place or what happened to these characters. They merely occupy the space as opposed to taking the audience on a journey with them. I’m not even sure that the journey would be very interesting, since the leaders of it seem to care less than we do. These characters react very blandly to events that should be exciting or horrifying, like multiple dead bodies or running from murderers. That slacker mentality must be ingrained deep in them, as they don’t even attempt to subdue their would-be captors when they have each other and their captors are half their size and only have a knife. The captors for that matter don’t ever seem too concerned with finding Dex and Royce, even though they are eyewitnesses to a murder. It seems more like an inconvenience for them. Everyone in the film seems very apathetic about everything, and not with the same sense of self-indulgent glee that someone like Brett Easton Ellis writes his characters as having.

Dex is introduced as the kind that wants to change his life. He has reoccurring visions that play as warnings he would be wise to heed. Yet he relapses at the drop of hat, doing nothing to stop himself and starting his cycle over. Royce is the kind that enjoys his life of drugs and little else, and that’s fine. However, he and Matilda vow to go clean for no other reason than to go clean. True, in life, being sober is enough. In fiction though, going clean for clean’s sake isn’t. We need a reason to hope these characters get clean and succeed. I’m afraid that reason isn’t given, or maybe it just isn’t enough.

In the end, we haven’t really learned much about these people; little has changed. The hope of change is tacked on, and it feels just that. And of course, the night culminates into the inevitable conclusion we’ve seen a thousand times before – where all the characters, good and bad, conveniently end up in the same place at the same time. Tony Scott has done this same scenario many times over, all of which are far more fun and interesting than this.

‘Weirdsville’ falls in with so many other films like it where the heroes pursue their MacGuffin deep into the night, stringing along a chain of events that will eventually conclude before last call. If this kind of plot sounds familiar, it is. This has been carried out in countless other films of its kind, and with more skill and more fun. The film works, I guess, on its own level. It just seems to try too hard and yet not hard enough at the same time. It contains scenes and stories that are aptly bizarre and yet there is really nothing here that distinguishes itself from every other film it’s trying to be. Like it’s two main characters, the film seems very happy taking the middle of the road and doing just enough to get by.

'I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry' review

Rating: * out of ****

What a sad, frightened film this is. ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry’ could have been a comedy with a heart, a message and the gross-out humor to match it if only it had the guts to stand up for that message from the get-go. Instead, it operates on constant gay jokes, racism and homophobia. I understand that gay jokes come with the territory. After all, it’s a film about two straight men pretending to be gay. However, the tone of most of these jokes are not parody, they are cheap and obvious. I’m sure it is a well-intentioned film, but nevertheless.

Adam Sandler and Kevin James star as Brooklyn Firefighters, Chuck and Larry. Two years after the death of Larry’s wife, his insurance benefits lapse because he has not claimed a new beneficiary. Being that the date for submitting has passed, Larry (James) fears that his kids will be orphaned if something happens to him in the line of duty. Uh huh.

In order to fix the situation, Larry hatches a scheme to fake a domestic partnership with his best friend Chuck (Sandler). With good reason, people are skeptical that these two are for real and an investigation begins that may ultimately reveal the characters’ fraud. They are assigned a defense lawyer to help with the case played by Jessica Biel. I like Biel, but it pained me to see her phoning it in so badly. Her character is a hapless twit who freaks out after a moment of embrace between her and the Sandler character, and yet earlier in the film she had no qualms about letting him grope her breasts.

Chuck is a womanizer. Every woman he encounters is unattainably attractive and, most of the time, brain-dead and easy. It’s hard to believe so many women would be attracted to him. Not only is he unattractive, Chuck is a pompous, manipulating pig who only seems to objectify women. And in what world is Adam Sandler a calendar model?

Larry is a widower and family man. He has a son who seems to be gay. How do the filmmakers get this across to the audience? By implying, ‘the kid’s weird because he likes to sing and thinks cockroaches are icky.’ It doesn’t help either that Larry seems afraid of his son most of the time or that he endlessly tries to pressure the kid into baseball over dance recitals. By the way, I’m heterosexual and I think cockroaches are icky too.

Chuck and Larry’s perceptions of homosexuals are exaggerated - they have to be or it wouldn’t work very well as a comedy, not that it does anyway. However, their perceptions are based on the shallowest stereotypes. The writers’ seem to think, ‘Since Chuck and Larry are straight men acting gay then both sides must be represented in the basest of ways in order to keep the distinction clear’. The funny thing is that even when Chuck and Larry are straight, it is also based on stereotypes: they’re firefighters who play basketball, the Brooklyn environment provides them with the go-to accent for sounding tough, sports are better than arts, sleeping with endless women is better than just one, etc. The protagonists have to be as masculine as they can be so it will be that much funnier when they act gay. Uh huh.

The main problem with ‘Chuck & Larry’ is that it can’t seem to decide which side of the fence it’s sitting on. It wants to be left wing and support the homosexual communities, yet at every turn there are badly drawn jokes and moments that only fuel the right-wingers’ anti-gay fire. This movie wants to have its cake and eat it too – it wants to get the glory of being a pro-gay movie while at the same time squirming in its seat. You can’t have ninety minutes of gay jokes and then slap on a ham-fisted message in the last twenty minutes and think everything is OK. Even when there seems to be a ray of light with a moment of sincerity or endearment, it is buried under the refuse of clichés and formulas. I pitied Dan Ackroyd when he had to simultaneously be the last minute witness, and deliver a tired filibuster.

Note: Rob Schneider hits new lows here as an Asian minister in Canada. It’s a rip-off of Mickey Rooney’s character Mr. Yunioshi from ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’. Was it ironic to anyone else that Chuck and Larry come to a place that is more accepting and yet contains the harshest ignorance in the film?

More 'Incredible Hulk' Set Pics!

Superhero Hype! has posted a big batch of new photos taken of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ production on the night of October 4^th in Downtown Hamilton, Ontario. Starring Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth and William Hurt, ‘The Incredible Hulk’ opens in theaters June 13^th, 2008.

Computers, Photos Stolen for New 'Indiana Jones'

Source: Los Angeles Times

Computers and photographs for director Steven Spielberg's upcoming film "Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull" were stolen, and DreamWorks Pictures SKG has asked local law enforcement to investigate, a studio spokeswoman said.

"An investigation is being conducted by law enforcement," said Kristin Stark, a spokeswoman for DreamWorks.

Stark declined to say where and when the theft took place. Officials from the Los Angeles Police Department, the FBI and the Sheriff's Department could not immediately confirm that they were investigating.

Marvin Levy, Spielberg's spokesman, said the director was concerned that the thieves might be trying to sell the materials.

"We want to warn the media that anything that is offered is stolen property," Levy said. "We know it is out there."

He said that he didn't know specifics about the crime but that he believed it had occurred fairly recently.

Stark said the stolen items contained "confidential and proprietary materials" related to the movie, which is considered a potential blockbuster for next summer. There is much anticipation about the film, which will hit the big screen 19 years after the last installment in the series. The movie stars Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett.