Jonah Hex

Posted on October 12, 2010 at 8:00 am

Josh Brolin plays Jonah Hex, a man transformed by loss in a fantasy western set just after the Civil War, based on the series of comics and graphic novels. The war is over in the United States, but it continues to haunt Hex, who rides the West as a gun for hire still wearing his Confederate Uniform.

Hex has no friends, at least not any who are alive. He has one enemy, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who made Hex watch as he ordered his men to make Hex suffer as he had, to watch as he loses everything he loves and has to live on, scarred inside and out. After Turnbull burns down Hex’s home with his wife and child inside, he orders his men to apply a fiery brand to Hex’s face, burning through the skin to the jawbone. “Every day that mark will remind you of the man who took everything you had.”

But that physically and psychologically searing experience gave Hex something, too. “It left me with the curse of talking to the other side,” he tells us. And so he rides, feeling nothing but vengeance, a gunman for hire, haunted by the dead and answerable to no one but himself.

Turnbull steals the most powerful weapon ever made, a sort of pre-industrial age H-bomb, And President Grant (Aidan Quinn) orders Lieutenant Grass (Will Arnett) to get Hex to find Turnbull and stop his plan to bring down the United States government as it reaches its 100th birthday.

It has a trim just-over-80 minutes running time, so I’m guessing there will be a future DVD release with a lot of deleted scenes. But the lean story-telling works well for its taciturn characters and spare settings, beautifully presented by cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, and well scored by Marco Beltrami and John Powell with assistance from Mastodon. The blend of history and fantasy, both tweaking and saluting the conventions of both genres, works better than the clumsy references to current concerns like terrorism and tea party anti-government sentiment. Brolin is as at home in the role as he is in the saddle. As (of course) a prostitute with a mean right hook and, at least for Hex, a heart of gold, Megan Fox has to learn that a husky voice and a smoldering look are not enough to create a character. On the other hand, in that wasp-waisted corset (reportedly a Scarlett O’Hara-size 18 inches in diameter) she should get an award for staying upright.

Jennifer’s Body

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 6:00 pm

“Jennifer’s Body” is not scary enough for horror and not knowing enough for commentary on horror.

“Hell is a teenage girl,” says Needy (Amanda Seyfried of “Mama Mia” and “Big Love”). And she should know. She is a teenage girl. And her Best Friend Forever Jennifer (made-for-Maxim hottie Megan Fox of the “Transformers” films) is both, quite literally. She may wear a BFF charm in recognition of friendship going back to the sandbox days, but she is more of a frenemy, one of those people who are in our life and have great powers of influence even though we are not sure why and we don’t like them very much. Jennifer tells the appropriately-nicknamed Needy (for Anita) to break a date with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) and accompany Jennifer to the town’s only club/bar so they can watch an up-and-coming group called “Low Shoulder.” Needy says yes to Jennifer, no to Chip, and they are on their way.

Some nasty things happen, and Jennifer turns into a demon who preys on the bodies of helpless and terrified victims. (They have to be helpless and terrified; she’s something of a picky eater in that respect.) Needy is the only one who sees her for what she is, and as the remains begin to pile up and funerals clog everyone’s schedules, Needy has to figure out what to do. And it wouldn’t be a horror movie if it didn’t get personal.

When Diablo Cody (“Juno” and many opinionated but very cool and clever essays in Entertainment Weekly) takes on the horror genre, it is fair to expect some snappy honest-to-blog patter and if not obvious po-mo air quotes at least something a little meta. But it does not work as straight-on horror or as what has now become an established and rich little sub-genre of the snarky, self-aware horror film that delivers on two levels, like the “Scream” series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” or “Shaun of the Dead.”

It actually is not that much of a stretch between “straight” horror and meta-horror. Straight-on horror films deliver thrills with a combination of the predictable (woe to any teenager who has sex and if the camera zooms in close, there’s something terrible just out of frame) and the unpredictable (you know, the part where some one or some thing jumps out and splits some hapless victim down the middle). And they often have a sense of humor about themselves and their conventions, with serial killers Freddy Kruger (of “Nightmare on Elm Street”) and Chuckie (the demon doll) tossing off wisecracks and bad puns as they slaughter.

Cody has a few nice points to make here about the frenemy dynamic of some girl-girl relationships: the drama, the connection, the power plays, and the excitement. “Not high school evil; evil-evil” is an theme worth exploring, but it is hard to improve on “Buffy.” The idea of the indie band’s song “Through the Trees” being used at the candlelight vigils for the dead classmates is well-handled. And there are some cutesy winks at the audience, as when the indie band talks about getting on a movie soundtrack as a path to fame and fortune, as happened to the Moldy Peaches on the soundtrack of “Juno.” Casting everyone’s favorite boy next door Adam Brody as an “agent of Satan with a really awesome haircut” is fun. Director Karyn Kusama and cinematographer M. David Mullen find some striking compositions, though it is unfortunate that a pool scene recalls the much better teen vampire movie “Let the Right One In.” And what is the deal with that 80’s prom dress? Now that’s horror.

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 8:00 am

Oh, dear. #TransformerFail

I truly loved the first Transformers movie. It was everything you need in a big summer explosion movie, with stupendous special effects, shot through with heart-thumping adrenaline, with just enough character and storyline to allow us to catch our breath and keep us interested. Our hero, high school senior Sam (Shia LeBeouf), is befriended by a car that turns into a friendly robot called Bumblebee, one of a cadre of good-guy transforming robots who fight against the bad-guy robots, called Decepticons. He is aided by a beautiful girl who is very good with cars (Megan Fox) and an armed services division led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel).

This sequel has some great special effects, but the story and the characters are poorly handled and the pacing is a mess. When the robots give a better performance than the humans, we have a problem. When the action is so complicated we can’t figure out who is where and in some cases why they are there, we have a bigger problem. When the characters are so irritating we begin to consider rooting for the bad guys, well, you know what kind of a problem we have. And when the racial humor gets so completely out of hand that it becomes uncomfortable at best and genuinely disturbing at worst, it’s a serious problem.

LeBoeuf is always appealing, Fox looks good stretching over machinery, and the movie briefly takes an interesting turn when both human and transformer characters show that they can learn from their mistakes and switch over to the side of the good guys. A stop at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum leads to Jetfire, an engaging junkpile of an autobot.

But it is too loud and it all goes on much too long. The bloated running time is well over two hours, overstuffed with pointless and increasingly annoying attempts at comedy — Sam’s mother accidentally gets high and talks about his sex life, Sam’s father doesn’t get high but talks about his sex life, good guy robots talk like the end men on a minstrel show, and Sam’s college roommate is a loudmouth who wants to get with some ladies and shrieks like a little girl when he is scared, which happens a lot. There’s another series of confrontations between a clueless bureaucrat and our know-better heroes. But the last movie’s clueless bureaucrat somehow switches sides. I would complain that this is not adequately explained, but I don’t really care. By this point, I began to think the Decepticons might have a point about how they could do better with our planet than we could.