The MacGuffin

The Muppets: So, there’s a new Muppet movie. You may have heard of it; it’s called The Muppets. I LOVE The Muppet Show, but the only Muppet movie I have every really cared for is Muppets From Space. (I am fully aware that this is an unpopular choice for favorite Muppet movie. There are some who would like to forget this film was ever made. Pshaw, I say to them. It’s lovely.) My husband nagged me and nagged me to go to this, and since I force him to watch an unusually large number of Bob Hope movies, I graciously complied.

I’m so liberal I think the Democrats are fascists. Therefore, one might be led to believe that I would not like a movie that would even suggest that the right thing to do with out-of-control drug dealers would be to torture them for information and then shoot them in the head. You could not be more wrong. While that is not the whole plotline of Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, it surely does happen once or twice, and I could not be happier about it. This film is Brazil’s entry into the 2012 Academy Awards and it is an amazing movie. It’s brutal, it poses a lot of questions that it can’t answer, and it proceeds at a breakneck speed to a conclusion that is somewhat anti-climactic, but it kicks butt all the way.

I think most Alexander Payne movies are good, but I have a hard time talking myself into liking them. In fact, the better they are, the less I enjoy them. I can see that Sideways is a good movie, but I find everyone in it repellant, and there is no emotional resonance for me. Election is the same way; it’s a really well made film, and I don’t care about the characters at all. I appreciate that Payne is a real director who makes films for adults who like to think about things, but appreciation and enjoyment are not the same thing. His new film, The Descendants, is pretty flawed, but I was able to connect to this film in a way that I never have with any of his others.

There is one movie in my life that has messed me up beyond all others, and it is , a 1986 two-part television miniseries about serial killer Ted Bundy. At the time it first aired, I was just about to graduate high school—about the same age as many of Ted Bundy’s victims—and lived in the Pacific Northwest, which meant hearing about serial killers all the time because we seem to breed them here. Everybody I knew watched this miniseries, and we were all totally creeped out by it. (Nobody seems to make very many good miniseries anymore. Which is unfortunate; it’s a good way to tell a longer story. The last one I really enjoyed was Storm of the Century, and I am looking forward to Bag of Bones coming out in December.)

I watch at least 31 scary movies in October for no other reason than I can. It’s fun, and why the hell wouldn’t I? This year I kicked off a little early on September 30^th by watching Alien on the big(ish) screen at the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle. During my film journey this month, I’ve watched a couple of other movies that predate Alien, but are surprisingly similar to it. I don’t know for sure that the creators of Alien saw these movies, but I would not be at all surprised if they had. All three movies deal with rescue missions on inhospitable planets, but each one is enjoyable for a completely different reason. Also, for full disclosure, I can never tell the difference between airshafts and engineering access tunnels in space movies, so I’m just gonna call them airshafts. This will make more sense later.

A lot of mediocre and bad movies seem to follow the same formula when it comes to dealing with estranged parent/child relationships: parent and child meet or reconnect, there is resistance from one or both of them, they are forced together by circumstances beyond their control, bonding events occur, they reconcile in the end. Every once in awhile, a good movie will use this same formula and manage to avoid most of the sentimental pitfalls a reconciliation movie is prone to. Janie Jones is one of the good ones. It’s not a great movie, but certainly good enough not to make me regret attending the press screening on a rare warm October day in Seattle.

Let me just say this upfront: the new “prelude” to John Carpenter’s movie The Thing (hereafter known as The Thing (JC)) is not an abomination. The Thing, also the name of the new movie, is an adequate bug hunt movie. If you have never seen The Thing (JC) and you liked Aliens, and you don’t like movies with subtext, then you might enjoy this. It has lots of explosions, monsters jumping out at people, tons of CGI gore, and fire. The plot proceeds logically and somewhat makes sense. There is a place for this kind of movie, and what it severely lacks in originality, it kind of makes up for by being competently directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. If you have seen The Thing (JC), then you will realize that this is a middle-of-the-road remake (of a remake) that is pretending not to be one. It’s not offensively bad, but it is completely mediocre and you would be better off just watching The Thing (JC) again.

I will admit to having a small weakness for David Hyde Pierce. I never really got into Frasier, but I’d occasionally watch to get a little Niles action. And, although I thought he was great in Wet Hot American Summer and other films, I’ve always been curious to see how he would do with a more substantial role. He gets his chance to show a wider range in The Perfect Host, and he doesn’t squander it. It’s an uneven, twisty little film that benefits greatly from his performance, as well as that of fellow actor Clayne Crawford. The two are so enjoyable to watch, we overlook some of the (giant) holes in the script.

Cruising

Cruising is the story of cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who has accepted the task of going undercover to investigate the murders of several gay men in New York City during the late seventies. He has no police backup, can’t tell his girlfriend what is going on, and all of the action takes place in gay S&M bars, which is not a milieu with which he is all that familiar. So he packs a suitcase and moves to the gay part of town, where he spends all of his time in bars hunting for the serial killer or hanging out with his nice neighbor, Ted (Don Scardino). As time passes, he changes, losing sexual interest in his girlfriend and having doubts that he can handle this situation. Things get more and more out of his control until he thinks he has found the killer.

I asked the kids who sat behind me (they looked to be about 5, 9, and 14) how they liked Dolphin Tale, a new family film directed by Charles Martin Smith, and they all really enjoyed it. Even before I asked them anything, they were talking about how great it was. So, if you like cute marine animals, kids who do things rather than sit on things, and positive messages about involving yourself in the greater world and what it means to be whole, then you and your family might enjoy this movie. I did not. The first two-thirds of the film were okay, if somewhat uneven, but the last third of the movie was so preposterous it was offensive. I honestly believe that a Scooby Doo villain-removing-his-mask ending would have been more believable and more honest than what happens here. I would love to explain in detail about how stupid the end of this movie is, but I don’t want to spoil the movie for the people who are going to go see it. And therein lies my conflict: I thought this film was crap, but your kids could be seeing stuff with way worse messages. What is more important in a family film: the messages it teaches or the quality of the movie? Are movies art or teaching tools? Should the same standards of quality apply to kids’ films? Should we punish poor filmmaking the same as crass commercialism? (I know we don’t really punish anyone for that; it’s wishful thinking.) I don’t know.