by the pricking of my thumb, something bloggy this way comes

A character from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness peers deep into this Halloween-themed blogpost...

October can be among the best of times for film fans and cineastes, but how's the busy wage-earner/student/cat burglar supposed to stay ahead of the genre curve? Never fear, yo - the Booth is here. Though money may be short, thankfully art is long, and we can help you stay scared in these waning days of the Halloween season with some of our personal horror and thriller faves.

Dex's picks

Creepshow (1982) - A George Romero-Stephen King collaboration from the early 1980s with a cast sent from fanboy-heaven (Ed Harris, Gaylen Ross, Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, David Gale, E.G. Marshall, Tom Savini, and King himself, among others), Creepshow is a loving homage to E.C. Comics, ingeniously conceived, with a witty script from King at the height of his powers. I'm still at a loss as to why it still manages to be so woefully underrated, but I have to assume many horror fans were (and are) no doubt looking for something mind-blowing and intense, put off by the film's light touch - it's a shame, since vignettes three and four of Creepshow, "The Crate" and "They're Creeping Up on You" are among the best things Romero (or King) have ever done.

Safe (1995) - Todd Haynes brings his tale of suburban anomie and bodily dissociation filtered through ecological panic to a slow burn early...and lets it simmer..and...simmer. What will happen? Who knows! We've ruined the planet, we're all alone, we're all doomed, and nothing we do can save ourselves or our loved ones, no matter where we hide or how much money we spend. Happy Halloween!

Prince of Darkness (1987) - John Carpenter managed to make a perfect horror flick for Reagantime - Jesus is an alien, Satan's in a jar, and all around us, devil-possessed homeless and hot California winds - that managed to be stark, lean and far-out and trippy all at the same time, confounding critics and audiences. But next to The Thing (1982), this middle installment of John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" remains one of his best pure horror films, something that's still unnerving to see 20 years on.


Joaquin's picks

Peeping Tom - Michael Powell - UK - 1960
Psycho made a bunch of money while Peeping Tom destroyed a director’s career. Equal to Hitchcock’s visual genius yet far more sophisticated in its depiction of homicidal pathology, Powell’s serial killer movie is less interested in toying with spectator/character identification and more interested in revealing cinema’s inherent fascination with sadistic voyeurism and murder. This is by far one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick - USA - 1968
Although this is obviously one of, if not the greatest science fiction movie of all time, I consider it one of the greatest horror films of all time. There’s something about mankind’s unwavering toil to “advance” itself back to a stage of infancy that I find enthralling and truly terrifying. Living inside a talking computer suspended in outer space is my idea of horror.

Thirteen - Catherine Hardwicke - USA - 2003
We live in a sick, sad and twisted nation and it’s all aimed at our female youth. If and when you have a daughter of your own, you will understand why I consider this a horror movie; it scared the bejesus out of me. Be afraid. Be very afraid of your little girl’s teenage years.


Patrick picks

Mother's Day - Total trash, and yet I can't stop renting it every few years after the initial seven or eight times I saw it back in the 80's. The short version: three college friends reunite for a camping trip in an ill-chosen stretch of woods populated by "Mother" and her two idiotic sons who she's trained since childhood to protect her from "Queenie," her beast-like sister who may or may not even exist. The women are kidnapped, brutalized, escape, and exact their revenge, following the classic exploitation formula. But performances, dialogue, and set design of Mother's house are so great (for me) that they rise above most of the competing objets d'trash from the era.

Nosferatu - 1979, the Herzog remake of the Murnau classic. Kinski is as classic as Schreck in the role and Bruno Ganz is way more intriguing. I also like that Herzog changes the end to keep the film in line with the absolute aura of dread that permeates the whole enterprise. See the original, sure, but this one's way more empty and filled with despair for my money.

Day of the Dead - Until the recent couple of Dead films, this was widely considered the worst of the series (maybe still is?). But I love it and have fond memories, partly because my friend and I snuck in to see it. Well, we didn't exactly sneak in, but we were 16 and the film was released without a rating, meaning that no one under 17 could go, period. So we went to Aurora Mall to see it, held our licenses about 6 feet away from the girl working the booth and she (kindly) let us in anyway, even though there's no possible way she could've made out our birthdates. For that I got to see a man torn in half, a group of unpleasant people screaming at each other for two hours, a muddled ending (a dream? not a dream?) and a totally hopeless and bleak vision of zombie apocalypse that in retrospect is quite apropos to the middle of the Reagan era. I love it. Love it love it love it.


Andrew's picks

All I have to say is this:

An American Werewolf in London is the greatest horror flick ever.

we can't stop here - this is blog country! : bruiser, inside, gonzo: the life and work of hunter s. thompson

Do not fuck with Beatrice Dalle, yo. No, don't, dude. Don't.

Bruiser (2000.) - Originally touted as a comeback film of sorts for George Romero, who at the time hadn't directed a film since 1993's The Dark Half, a middling adaptation of an even worse Stephen King story, Bruiser would turn out to be considerably less (indeed, America's Best Horror Filmmaker wouldn't get his sea legs back until the prescient, po-mo Land of the Dead in 2005): in essence, the flick's a "Tales From the Darkside" script stretched thin over an hour and a half, with little of the entertainment value and a surprisingly garbled mish mash of politics and comment, which is generally where Romero excels. Jason Flemyng plays Henry Creedlow, a put-upon ad exec at a skin mag called Bruiser, lorded over by perverted tyrant Henry Styles (Peter Stomare, who plays Styles like Larry Flynt meets Bugs Bunny). After one particularly humiliating night, Creedlow wakes up the following morning with a disturbing, ghostly white visage instead of a face, finding himself suddenly far more aware of his true circumstances, and completely liberated from the norms he'd gripped so tightly to before.

Bruiser is a good idea, but it's simply never fleshed out in any satisfying way, and Romero doesn't take any of the opportunities the story presents to surprise us or really make it interesting. Ostensibly, Bruiser's part of the serio-horrific tradition that Romero has toyed with to some success in Monkey Shines (1988), but with heavy reliance on the suspension of disbelief, shitty heavy metal soundtrack, and party scenes which are supposed to look decadent but come across like "Melrose Place," it's a turn away from big ideas and real people. This plastic, soft-core-cable-phoniness permeates the film to the point of distraction - it just doesn't have the raw edginess that generally marks Romero's work. Bruiser's no Springsteen, all Mellencamp.


Inside ("À l'intérieur") (2007.) - Atmospheric, relentless, and grim from the very start, Inside could easily be mistaken by many viewers outside of Europe as merely an effective, hyper-violent thriller that utilizes primal fears of motherhood and vulnerability - a young, widowed pregnant woman, alone on Christmas Eve (when another, rather important child was born some time ago), stalked by a mysterious, merciless stranger, another woman (Betty Blue's Beatrice Dalle dressed to kill in black corset, long Victorian skirt, and combat boots) who plainly wants the widow's still-unborn child - as its working base. However, the heart of the film contains so much more, and it's this ambition and clarity of vision which elevates the film to the status of a minor horror classic: the real story Inside is telling is about pull and tug of racial oppression and violence that have unfortunately characterized the "inside" of the country of liberty, fraternity, and equality over the last decade or so, culminating in the riots that burned up in the Paris suburbs in 2005. As Inside slowly, bloodily unwinds, the ethnically vague Dalle goes from Freudian monster to a Foucaltian one, a political-metaphor-in-Pinhead-drag whose ugly, brutal actions scream out that the personal dishonesty and disinterest of the Parisian power structure (crucially, the young widow is a photojournalist, her friend and guardian a bored magazine editor) simply don't deserve France's future - in her own mad and broken way, she cares enough to do violence on its behalf.

I have no idea if the Dimension Extreme disc carries any background on the Franco-Arab situation, though producers of future releases may be wise to include some theory or commentary tracks with a solid background to give the movie more context - Inside's big flaw is that the film's subtle politics are drowned in all that Grand Guignol. It battered this hardy viewer, overwhelming me to the point that the person I was watching the movie with had to point out the passionate plea that forms the subtext.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. (2008.) - Documentary director Alex Gibney's latest offering represents an odd choice. Gibney had managed to wring a powerful and symbolic story of what happens when standards and communities yield to rapacious, wounded egos, politics, and greed in a personal fave, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), and walk back the tale of one man's murder at the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan into an indictment of the emerging paradigm of a "global war on terror" in the Oscar-winning Taxi to The Dark Side (2007); HST, who seems to live in most people's heads these days as a drug-addled Johnny Depp, doesn't seem like much of a story in this respect. But if there was any director who could uncover the real Hunter, it would have to be Gibney, yes?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. While Gibney correctly, entertainingly identifies the defining role eating, breathing, and writing politics had for Hunter, and we may have a bigger sense of the work of Hunter Thompson, we come away with very little of his life at the end of the flick. One gets the idea Gibney was trying to redefine Hunter away from what HST called "the drug book," but then why lean so much on footage from the movie about the drug book? What about the formative experiences - the Free Speech movement in Berkley, friendships with Allen Ginsberg, the peak highs and terrible lows - which had to have contrasted so well with HST's appetites for motorcycles, drugs, and music - of freelancing, "in the middle 60s?" What about a fuller, more real sense of Sandy Thompson, who had been Hunter's rock? What's this "American Dream" people in the movie keep yammering on about - if it existed for the Doc, what was that for him? What about his own political ambitions after the fateful McGovern campaign of 1972? And finally, what about Hunter's own goals for himself - alternately loathing and promoting the persona of the Gonzo journalist, while always, always, brooding over his desire to be a "real" writer, a "man of letters," like his hero F. Scott Fitzgerald?

It's insane to expect to distill a man or woman's life into two hours, or even two and a half, and Gibney must be given credit for the fine job he does identifying the major political events of Hunter's life, and just how much of an impact they had for him personally and as a writer. But I kept thinking of another recent doc on another complex and controversial writer, John Dullagan's 2003 film, Bukowski: Born into This, which managed to connect audiences to a bigger picture - that, like every single one of us, Hank was a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people, and that the writer's life, especially one so scrutinized, is never an easy one to track; Dullagan, aware of all of these competing personages, gave viewers a sense of that complexity, that Buk "wasn't just."

Hunter Thompson wasn't just the drug book guy or the political guy or the anti-social gun guy. He was all of those things, and because of this he was a whole lot more. Gibney's Thompson is certainly smarter, more passionately involved than what a lot of people may assume today, but the guy we see in this film isn't any more real.

blogger of tears: stuck, standard operating procedure, machine gun mccain, the apple, mother of tears

Ah, to be stuck someplace with you, Ms. Suvari.

Stuck (2007)/ Standard Operating Procedure (2008) – Has it been almost a decade, already?

If Danny Boyle, Eli Roth, and George Romero squired the first post-9/11 and post-Iraq horror flicks into theaters, Stuart Gordon and Errol Morris may have given us the first post-Bush genre pics: apparently very loosely based on a macabre car accident, Stuck's story hones in one celebratory Friday night with Mena Suvari that suddenly turns stupid and brutal, and nothing Suvari - an otherwise patient and well-meaning young nursing home attendent - does after helps herself or the hapless victim of her neglience, played by Stephen Rea, who skillfully manages to elevate the odd circumstances of his role to one commanding considerable empathy.

An entropy - a state of stuckness - permeates every corner of the wintry, despondent landscape Suvari inhabits: the elderly stuck at the nursing home she works at, the Latino immigrants in her neighborhood, stuck in a paranoid limbo of semi-citizenship, to Rea, stuck on the streets, stuck in unemployment, and Suvari somehow stuck with all of the above.

It would've be easy for Gordon (who I've more or less ignored since the mid-1980s, and after this I think I'll do some backtracking to see what else I've missed) to ride the metaphors and imagery of Stuck into the ground, but the film's brisk pacing and exceptionally clever script never droops into that kind of obviousness: it's depressingly easy enough for us to see ourselves in Suvari, stuck with our myriad momentary lapses - political, environmental, and otherwise - that've lead from one bad decision to a bigger one, and no one to blame but one another.

"Stuck" could be the explanatory title to Erol Morris' documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, the story behind the torture photos at Abu Ghraib. Morris sits down with a number of the soldiers who were tasked with "softening up" detainees herded into prisons after Iraqis began to buck the slew of draconian economic policies forced onto the populace by CPA chieftan L. Paul Bremer (otherwise known as the beginning of the insurgency). Of course, the guards at Abu Ghraib, in the wretched leftover from Saddam-time, weren't running the country: in many ways, they were only stuck there too. They tortured those prisoners, of course, even if on reflection the guards aren't entirely sure - it becomes clear, however, when the refrain of "we were just following orders" finally sinks in. Preparing people - people who were for the most part only there because they were of fighting age - for a more formalized, more "regulated" physical and pyschological torture is merely a part of the torture process.

Morris' gift isn't for the straight documentary, but giving the participants in his films the opportunity to create and own their stories, and then contrasting this narrative with imagery of his own. Morris deliberately apes a sort of slick, high gothic style for SOP (longtime Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman sits in for longtime Morris collborator Phillip Glass here), and is successful throughout. Nevertheless, Morris has caught a lot of flack for not being more tenacious and wending his way back to the CIA or other contractors responsible for the "proper" torture, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney or then-NSA head Condoleezza Rice, or Bush himself; after spending two hours with the Abu Ghraib crew, some of whom are utterly clueless as to the role they've played in the history of the early 21st century, SOP's shot here remains a tight close-up - not quite just the facts, but pretty much just the torturers. Sure - a few minutes with someone like Naomi Klein or Seymour Hersh or Dahr Jamail would've placed the guards' stories in perspective - but early on, Morris identifies the stories here as the soldiers', and the Standard Operating Procudure they participated in, the one that cost them - not Rummy or Dick or Condi or anyone else - time and infamy. They were just following orders. And maybe that's all that needs to be said.

Machine Gun McCain (1968) / The Apple (1980) – Two offerings by way of Turner Classic’s TCM Underground, a kind of TCM Essentials for the deranged: the first purports to be a hard-boiled, late 60s Italio-thriller, with John Cassavetes as the titular main character and Peter Falk as an ambitious mob boss. The plot – concerning Cassavetes’ release from prison to pull a Vegas casino heist on Falk’s behalf – lopes along without too much energy, perking up only briefly to show off Britt Ekland’s dresses and drop Gena Rolands into a short, emotional scene with longtime companion Cassavetes. McCain is a very particular kind of Italian film, one that appeals to a very particular kind of fan, and TCM should be lauded for presenting such a slice of esoterica. Alas, I am not that particular fan: I felt both Cassavetes and Falk were terribly miscast – the sort of tough guy Machine Gun McCain needed is more than likely found in something like 1967's Point Blank or squinting at the sun in a Peckinpah flick rather than this sensitive and tightly-wound duo.

The Apple was no doubt an attempt to make good on the Rocky Horror Picture Show phenom, and is thus interesting as a kind of cultural artifact, but the music’s bad and the leads forgettable so there’s little else to recommend it, aside from the idea of a corportatist-state-via-American-Idol and God strolling down from heave above to rescue this earthly plane’s folk singers and hippies.

Mother of Tears (2008) – Dario Argento has been coasting on the international community of horror fans’ good faith and generosity for the last 20-odd years, when he fobbed off his goofball horror-in-the-hotel movie Inferno as the second part of the “Three Mothers” trilogy he unofficially began with the legendary Suspiria (1977). The latter was such a high point, not only in Argento’s body of work, but in the history of horror and the thriller genres generally that given so much time, the last Mother movie had to at least come close to the flick that not only helped define horror in the 70s, but also lent splatterpunk its aesthetic, and even continues to influence directors today: and yet, Mother of Tears is such a mess of noise, gibberish, and mad dashes through twisty alleyways and train stations that not even Udo Kier’s eyerolling or the film’s gratuitous nudity could save this here blogger from boredom. There isn’t even an over-the-top set piece to take away, ala Inferno (1982) or Phenomena (1985). Mother of Tears isn’t merely bad, it’s just plain lazy, so I won’t bother recounting the plot here because it hardly seems to matter to Argento himself.

The farther Dario Argento has gotten from under the shadow of his cinematic fathers – Bava, Leone, Hitchcock – the more untethered his films have become from the idea of entertainment. A recent New York Times article generously offered that Argento was more concerned with the thrill of the chase than how he got there or what happened after that, and in this way was a kind of cousin to the stylist's stylist Brian DePalma. Once upon a time, this might have been a fair contrast. DePalma’s work, however, continues to be grounded in ideas, even if they aren’t sometimes fully-realized or maybe as good as they look on paper. Sadly (and I really do mean that) the chase, and whatever thrill that comes with it, lapped Dario Argento a long time ago.

why-am-i-so-smart-and-everyone-else-so-dumb thread

movie blogging to go

No toy?

Diary of the Dead. (2008.) There isn't a whole lot more I can say about Romero's newest zombie flick that Patrick hasn't already said better, but for whatever my two cents are worth: in spite of a shaky first five or ten minutes, Romero manages to not only dispatch once and for all the flock of witless no-no-but-in-this-one-they-run "of the Dead" remakes horror fans have been subjected to since 28 Days Later hit it big back a couple of years ago, but America's Best Horror Filmmaker also reinvents the NOTLD legacy for a whole new generation's neurosis, complete with an all new take-your-breath-away ending - they're dead, they're all messed up. If Land of the Dead was Georgie-Boy getting all relativistic and channelling Al Jazeera, Diary of the Dead is him doing 'The Daily Show': a brash, hilarious, and heartbreaking processing of the End of Days.

Drawing Restraint 9. (2005.) From everything I'd seen and heard, filmmaker Matthew Barney is a serious asshole, and I was expecting a right piece of ostentatious crap when I crawled out to the Esquire's Midnight Movie showing of the ninth offering in his continuing series of avant-chic movies. I was, however, pleasantly surprised: in #9, as he as done to some degree with most or all of the things in the Drawing Restraint series, Barney examines the tension in some very basic - primal? - imagery and feelings: things, living and otherwise, which organize into relationships, then decay, then pull apart, then organize anew. His aesthetic sense lends itself readily to medium of film, and even with a Japanese tea ceremony thrown into the middle of a movie I was watching at 1 A.M., I was intrigued and engaged the whole way through.

Goya's Ghosts. (2006.) I'm not sure what happened in this movie, really. Javier Bardem's an Inquisiton-era priest who likes art, and Francisco Goya in particular - who, just like everyone who has ever been in a Milos Forman movie, is hopelessly misunderstood by everybody - and then Natalie Portman is in it, and then she's not, and then Bardem gets chased away for being a heretic, and then Napoleon invades Spain, and Javier is back again, but he's all bummed out, 'cause he screwed Natalie Portman (who's insane now). And Stellan Skarsgard paints and goes deaf. Yeah, you know what? Don't see this. Rent The People vs. Larry Flynt instead.

Ten recent views (unedited - don't read if you don't like it long)

Diary of the Dead -
Romero's latest is a fine film indeed. Less ambitious than Land of the Dead and perhaps more successful as a consequence, since it hits its targets more fully. Then again, an explanation of the organizational principles of communism via a zombie film has to be a harder thing to put across than a satire on modern mass media. But compare to Redacted (which I liked, don't get me wrong) shows only that it's not so easy to do after all, and both Romero and DePalma have taken a semi-post-modern approach, deconstructing their topic while reveling in it (and Romero taking it a step further to even self-criticize, rather than a broad, blandly liberal condemnation).

Johnny Guitar -
Let me get this straight - a Western from the 50's where women are the primary power holders and movers of all the action? Wow. Color me impressed. And a minimal amount of the requisite gunplay - again mostly attributed to the women involved. Great story, great acting, very progressive film, as deeply feminist as any of Sirk's 50's classics. Crawford's character transcends the male-dominted society around her McCambridge's is bound to their power structure and vilified by both Crawford and the film. Gender studies film classes ought to have this in regular rotation.

Touch the Sound -
Documentary about Evelyn Glennie with Fred Frith often performing in tow (gotta pick up that record they're making throughout the film). Interesting look at her life and her philosophies of music-making. I like seeing how she works her way into other people's music and makes it work, as when she's not totally in synch with the Japanese performers at first but finds a way into their music. It's cool to see (and hear), but I'd still rather hear her music, see her live, etc. The doc on Goldsworthy is more valuable because I can't buy records of his works that do any justice to the deal thing. But this one's still fun.

Charulata -
Satyajit Ray marketed as Bollywood, which ridiculous (the menu screen offers songs as a choice (there's only 1 in the film)) but at least it's getting his films available in the west, so who cares? And this one's a good - maybe great - one in which a man who's been inattentive to his wife in favor of his work senses that he's losing her and makes the dual tragic mistakes of first inviting a (charming and younger) distant cousin to come visit and then asking another friend to take over his business so he can devote time to her. Anyone who's seen the Apu trilogy knows that Ray's work with interpersonal relationships is unparalleled in most of cinema and this is no exception.

Hi, Mom! -
Early Brian DePalma, back when he was known as a filmmaker with radical impulses, and if you've ever doubted it here's where you can learn that people who talk about the underlying subversive tensions of his later films (like me) aren't feeding you a line of bullshit. Bascially, Robert DeNiro plays an amateur filmmaker who thinks he can create a film of some merit based on viewing people's windows and behaviors out of his Greenwich Village apartment and seeks financing from an adult filmmaker. When he fails to produce the right level of prurient interest in his films, he begins working with a radical black arts group staging a play called "Be Black Baby" that aims to expose a middle class white audience to "the experience of being black." Trust me, the idea is taken about as far as you can push it on screen and weaves itself tightly into the themes of watching and voyeurism that pervade DePalma's work. It's almost like this plus Night of the Living Dead form a discussion between DePalma and Romero about race in America (with each offering up other ideas), and Redacted and Diary of the Dead offer up a dialogue about modern media overload. You think dePalma just does Hitchcock ripoffs and bad gangster films? You got a lot to learn, baby.

Melvin and Howard -
Charming Jonathan Demme trifle tells the story of Melvin Dummar, who gives a lift to an injured (and sick?) Howard Hughes and is later remembered in his will to the tune of 156 million dollars. It's nice the way Demme gets inside the actuality of lower-middle class life without seeming like he's slumming and the way Dummar is portrayed (presumably based on Demme's interaction with the real man, who appears in a walk-on). Lemat nails the red-blooded numbskull type perfectly, Robards is a great eccentric Hughes, Mary Steenbergen is great as Dummar's frequently-leaving wife. Overall, a nice little picture, of the kind that gave indie cinema a good name because it had a strange little story it wanted to tell, not because it thought it was so much smarter than mainstream cinema like too much of indie cinema today (and yes, I know Universal released it, but take a guess at what its budget probably was compared to major releases on 1980).

One, Two, Three -
Billy Wilder's strange little 1961 Cold War comedy in which Jimmy Cagney's Coca-Cola man in West Berlin is making inroads into East Berlin and the potential Communist market for his potential promotion to head of European operations. This is of course put into jeopardy by the company man's outrageous 17-year old daughter, a stalwart party member she connects with, and his own marital troubles (such as his ongoing language lessons with his bombshell secretary). A weird mix of patriotic display and cutting comments on consumer society that's kept moving at a quick clip by the kind of writing that makes Hollywood's Golden Age so golden (though this falls outside that era). Basically, it's a perfect little capsule of a moment that keep tongue firmly planted in cheek, doesn't really take sides even when it seem to, and doesn't mind making fun of itself, its stars, or anything else that crosses it (in 1961, jokes about missiles in Cuba were probably funny). Anyway, highly recommended.

Battle Royale -
Talked up so much to me that it was inevitably a disappointment. Onscreen violence ranked high, but as an idea, this didn't hold as much weight as it could - or should - have, which made the psychic violence - the ideas fucking with my head more than the gore I saw - pretty low overall. Tough to get a handle quickly on 42 kids and who you cared about. And even as it moved toward the ending which I felt in my gut was inevitable but thought in my head wouldn't happen (psychic violence woulda been higher if the game had played out as it was supposed to), I found that I didn't really know them or care much who lived or died since it was clearly presented as an outrageous fantasy that neither gave you much cause to side with the adults who made the hideous decision to make these games, or the youth who had to endure them. It's an interesting premise let down by ambition. And I guess if it had been delivered with fewer kids, or more readily focused on fewer of them, or even put across with a bit more flair, I would've liked it more. Or maybe I just didn't get past the hype.

Elephant -
Possibly Van Sant's best film. I wish I'd watched this and then Battle Royale - that film would've made much more sense after viewing this one, which hit me really hard and was what made me come up with the corny "psychic violence" idea because this one would rate about a 10 on that scale and really made me think of how much more a film hits you when it's got something of an ideology behind it rather than just a premise. I don't think it brings much to the discussion of Coumbine-styled violence except Van Sant's own theories about youth, but he's clearly in sympathy with all the kids portrayed here, not just some heroes who helped people, or the killers who gunned down their cruel tormentors. He's pretty in tune with what youth are like, due in large part, probably, to hiring a lot of non-professional actors and letting them improvise along his basic plot. A real heavy one and the best I've seen from him since Drugstore Cowboy.

The Dark Wind -
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris goes for the very interesting subject of a murder committed on land that used to be jointly shared between the navajo and Hopi people, but is now split, and the case keeps taking Officer Jim Chee (played by Lou Diamond Phillips) back and forth between his own Navajo people, the Hopi, and white FBI agents (and others) who have some part to play in the case, which gets exponentially more complicated as it progresses. Maybe too complicated for a first-time narrative director who's a master of visual form in his own style which allows him a much greater structural control over how a story is told than a dense narrative like this that needs a certain amount of telling onscreen. The problems of this interesting but flawed film might also have something to do with Morris's decision to leave the film due to artistic differences with producer Robert Redford. Or maybe it was that boom mike hanging way down in the frame in a crucial scene late in the film? Anyway, I watched it, I liked a lot of it, but it's got issues.