And as such, my posts here will be slowing down a bit. I’m in the process of outlining the book I plan to write, and that’s eating most of my writing time.

(I also spend time in the NaNoWriMo forums, sharing ideas and advice with other wanna-be writers.)

If anybody’s interested in joining (or just learning more about) the mayhem, visit http://www.nanowrimo.org. 50,000 words in 30 days is a lot harder than it sounds…

Practical Magic
Released: 1998
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director: Griffin Dunne

“Practical Magic” is one of those movies that’s kind of hard to pin down. It’s not a horror movie, although it certainly has elements of one (raising the dead, possession, evil spirits). It’s sort of a movie about overcoming loss, but that’s kind of a sub-plot rather than the main plot. It’s sort of a movie about overcoming abuse, and while that is somewhat the main plot, it’s overshadowed by so many other elements that it doesn’t drag the movie down. It’s kind of a romantic comedy, it’s kind of about a community coming together, it’s kind of about family.

I actually tried to read this book once, and found it a dreadfully boring experience. As I recall, I never actually finished the book. It never fails to amaze me when a director takes dull source material and turns it into something special. I’m also fairly impressed that he guided Sandra Bullock and Nichole Kidman – two actresses I’m largely indifferent to as performers – through performances I found charming and enjoyable.

I love the symmetry of the family presented in the movie, and their ties to traditional folklore…maiden, mother and crone. The relationship they build between Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nichole Kidman) is believeable and heartwarming. Add in the aunts, Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Frances (Stockard Channing) and Sally’s daughters (who look remarkably like their mother and aunt), and you have a family that feels surprisingly real and solid.

Of course, I should mention at this point that I’ll watch pretty much anything with Stockard Channing in it.  Honestly, she’s the reason I was willing to sit down and watch this movie in the first place. Thankfully, there’s a lot more to enjoy in it than another of her wonderfully dry, sarcastic performances.

And considering these four actresses, it’s no surprise that there are stories about how much fun they were having on set. There is, for example, a rumor that during the scene where the four of them are getting hysterically drunk, they really were getting drunk on a bottle of really terrible tequila that Nichole Kidman brought to the set.

I think the way this movie draws on traditional folklore for many of its elements, some of which flash past so quickly that most people never notice them. For example, just before Sally’s husband dies, he’s being followed by a black dog. Most people watching the movie barely even notice…but in some traditions, black dogs are a harbinger of trouble and death. That’s a nice detail to have thrown in.

This is a movie with a story that could have stood comfortably on its own without the elements of magic and the supernatural mixed into it, and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to remove it from the movie with a bit of rewriting. But it’s those elements that elevate this movie from a simple story about loss and abuse and turn it into something special and highly entertaining.

At the same time, it’s a story that could easy have become mired in its more serious elements (like the book). Again, it’s the elements of magic and the supernatural that gave the director the opportunity to lighten the darker moments of the movie with moments of brilliant humor and warmth.

Stack on top of that a really lovely soundtrack by Alan Silvestri and a couple of good pop songs, and you have all the elements necessary for a charming, spooky movie with a couple of good messages about the importance of family and community.

In the end, this movie isn’t just about escaping abuse and overcoming loss. It isn’t just about family, or about a community pulling together, and it isn’t just a cute romantic comedy. It’s all of those things, deftly woven together into a tapestry that is far more than the sum of its parts.

And, like “Bell Book and Candle,” it is a perfect movie for the Halloween season.

Bell, Book and Candle
Released: 1958
Studio: Sony Pictures
Director: Richard Quine

Pretty much any movie with Jimmy Stewart in it is worth watching. But some stand out in my mind more than others. “Harvey” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” immediately spring to mind.

“Bell, Book and Candle” is one of his movies that stands out to me. Partly because of the cast – adding talent like Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold and Elsa Lanchester on top of Jimmy Stewart’s dry humor added all sorts of different dimensions to the movie. Partly because it has a lovely soundtrack, and is beautifully filmed and framed. But mostly because the story is so purely entertaining that even the cast appeared to be having a good time on-set.

The movie is a little thin on plot – a modern-day witch (Kim Novak) steals her upstairs neighbor (Jimmy Stewart) away from his fianceé using magic, only to fall in love with him for real, resulting in the loss of her magic. It’s not complex, and there are a couple of funny sub-plots surrounding it, but for the most part the movie is a light romantic comedy.

Which is not a bad thing. I confess that I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy. I’ve enjoyed movies like “Ever After,” “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” and “The American President” (which yes, I consider to be a comedy, in spite of its serious undertones). You’ll notice that the common denominator there is that the romantic relationships just HAPPEN. They don’t seem forced, and aren’t shoved down our throats like most of what passes for “romantic comedy” these days. In my mind, films like “Bell, Book and Candle” were the prototypes for these movies.

Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak have, in my opinion, an amazing amount of on-screen chemistry. They form the lynch pin for the story, around which the other characters rotate, act and react. It’s vital to a movie like this to have a strong center…without it, everything falls apart. And they were charming together.

In fact, the entire cast turns in some genuinely charming performances that make their off-kilter (and sometimes outright bonkers) characters a tremendous amount of fun to watch. Sadly, “Bell, Book and Candle” marked the last movie in which Jimmy Stewart played a romantic lead – he celebrated his 50th birthday during the filming of the movie, and felt that he was getting too old to convincingly play the part anymore.

My only real complaint about the movie is it’s rather lopsided ending, which delivers a message – whether intentional or not – that amounts to: It’s okay to lose what makes you special in exchange for love. I’m not entirely sure it’s a bad message, really…sort of…maybe…after all, love is a very special thing in and of itself…but the message is that it’s OK to give up the thing that makes you special to have love instead, which is kind of odd…

It’s as awkward to watch as it is to explain.

But the rest of the movie more than makes up for it. And even though the majority of the film is set around Christmas, it’s a perfect movie for the Halloween season.

Eight Legged Freaks
Released: 2002
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director: Ellory Elkayem

I hate spiders. They terrify me. It’s the only real phobia I have.

I started with that statement because I want people to understand how bizarre it is when I say how much I enjoy this movie.

“Eight Legged Freaks” is an affectionate parody of the giant-critter movies of the 1950s and ‘60s, going so far as to directly and indirectly reference some of them (it even has a clip from “Them” playing on a TV during one scene). And its plot is about as complex as those older films: a small town is terrorized by spiders mutated to enormous (and physically impossible) size by toxic waste (instead of radiation), while the hero and heroine dance around one another and finally get together.

Fortunately, I’m of the opinion that every movie doesn’t need to be of Shakespearian quality and complexity.

It’s a movie loaded with bad jokes and satirical moments that take shots not only at itself, but at the horror genre as a whole. The gag that sticks out in my mind is one early in the movie, where we’re introduced to a rather strange older man who runs a literal spider zoo…and owns a parrot. The parrot, of course, likes to chat, and there’s a seemingly throw-away joke about the fact that since the parrot saw “The Sixth Sense,” all it ever says is “I see dead people!”

Shortly thereafter, the spiders begin to mutate and the parrot’s owner is brought down by them, to the parrot’s frantic squawks of “I see dead people! I see dead people!” just before a spider pounces on it.

That’s what kind of movie this is in a nutshell.

There are plenty of other genre references liberally scattered throughout. Much of the action near the end of the movie takes place in a deserted shopping mall (a nod to the two Dawn of the Dead movies), one of the townsfolk ends up dressed like Jason from the “Friday the 13th” movies (complete with hockey mask and machete), and so on. There’s even a scene where an adult comments to the movie’s token hyper-aware child character that it’s stupid when adults don’t listen to kids.

But the movie’s main theme is a down-tempo orchestral rendition of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” (which even gets used as the closing credits song). That alone should tell you something about what the director was aiming for.

The special effects are largely pretty good, and the places where they’re kind of cheesy it’s obvious that they were meant to be (mostly). The actors chewed up the scenery, and the characters are all a lot of fun to watch. You can even tell who to root for to survive or get killed. In a pleasant (and well-played) inversion, the male lead is largely incompetent (but not outright useless) until presented with an insanely specific set of circumstances that only he knows how to take advantage of, while the female lead is the action hero who accurately blasts spiders to kingdom come.

And it has one of my favorite scenes in horror movie history, where one of the giant spiders comes marching out of the wreckage of a burning tanker truck, still on fire and trailing smoke. For a second, you think it’s going to attack…then it falls flat to the ground with an exaggerated thud and a gasp of surrender. I’m not sure why it makes me laugh, but it always does. Probably for the same reason I still enjoy watching the old Warner Bros. “Looney Tunes” cartoons on occasion.

It’s not perfect. There are some scenes that are so dumb they’ll make you want to throw something at your TV. For example, there’s a scene of some teenagers on motorbikes getting mowed down by jumping spiders that’s eye-rollingly bad (even the effects fail to look convincing in that scene). But in the end, it’s a fun little flick, good for a few laughs and perfect for viewing as we approach Halloween.

Krull
Released: 1983
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Director: Peter Yates

When did it become a bad thing for a movie to be silly and overblown, as long as it’s at least moderately entertaining?

I’ve seen some people blasting this movie lately, not because it was bad (which it can be at times) but because it was over the top and absurd. I found it particularly amusing when one critic accused it of being a fantasy world “too similar to our own” because horses are used for transportation and swords are the weapon of choice.

/facepalm

Granted, this isn’t a particularly good movie. “Krull” is weighed down almost to the point of collapse with clichés, and some of the acting is painfully wooden, especially the performances of Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony (the hero and damsel, respectively). It’s one of those rare cases where the supporting cast (some very familiar names, including Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Freddie Jones, and Francesca Annis) saves the main cast from disaster.

And the movie’s special effects leave a lot to be desired, in spite of its budget. When “Krull” was made, its budget of roughly $26 million was considered lavish…and it sort of fell flat on its face. (By comparison, “Star Wars: A New Hope” – to which “Krull” is often unfavorably compared because of its plot – was made for $11 million a few years earlier.) Some of the effects are pretty neat for the time…pretty much anything involving the Slayers comes to mind immediately (especially their very unusual deaths and the way they have of rising out of the ground in the swamps…a conventional but extremely effective effect). And the hero’s magical weapon, absurd as it is, is kind of neat.

Also, much of the budget would appear to have gone into the soundtrack, the costuming and set design, as well as casting and the one blockbuster effects shot of the massive crystal spider in its huge web. But this unfortunately short-changed the rest of the effects, and some were particularly awful near the end of the movie. Anyone who’s seen it knows what I’m talking about (the badly rotoscoped, out-of-focus fish-eye-lensed Beast, and the hero’s flame-thrower hand…oy).

But it’s a movie with a tremendous amount of heart. Even Marshall and Anthony manage to turn in a couple of overeager but emotional scenes (the wedding scene, for example). The majority of the best work in the movie comes from the secondary characters, though. Freddie Jones’ wise old sage routine, for example, is always worth watching, and the scenes he did with Francesca Annis are emotionally charged and loaded with unspoken subtext-backstory that enriches the setting as a whole.

“Krull” also has one of James Horner’s most triumphant and entertaining soundtracks attached to it. It’s a rich body of music with excellent use of themes, heroic and tragic as needed, and only sounds a little bit like his score for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (from the previous year, and on which it was pretty obviously based). The overture in particular is a magnificent piece of choral and orchestral music, and the later “Ride of the Firemares” track is one of my favorite pieces of fantasy film music.

Make no mistake, this is not a terribly good movie. There are parts of it that are actually painful to watch (due to bad acting or bad effects…or both…), and the ending pretty much trips over its own feet and falls flat on its face. And it’s possible that a lot of the value I find in the movie is purely nostalgia…when I was a little kid, it was a GREAT MOVIE!

Heh.

But it’s not an awful movie, either. It’s what I call a “popcorn” movie. It’s a light piece of fluff, parts of it are great and parts of it are tough to get past, and when it’s over you might feel a little guilty about having enjoyed it. You might even wonder why you enjoyed it.

That’s okay. Try to remember that not every movie needs to be a masterpiece. And even a bad movie can be entertaining.

(Aside: Anyone who’s familiar with James Horner’s body of work knows that my comment above about repetition in his work isn’t criticism. His film scores have a tendency to reuse themes from movie to movie, to the point where you can hear his brief Klingon theme from “Star Trek II” not only in other Star Trek movies…but also in “Aliens,” and it can be tracked back to its rudimentary form  – still recognizable – in his very first score for Roger Corman’s “Battle Beyond the Stars.” You can hear themes in his score from “A Beautiful Mind” which were clearly lifted from his score for “Bicentennial Man,” which in turn lifted themes from his score for “Braveheart,” and so on. It’s just how he works, building and evolving a theme until he’s apparently content that he’s said everything there is to say with it.)

The Ghost and the Darkness
Released: 1996
Studio: Paramount
Director: Stephen Hopkins
Written by: William Goldman

There’s not really a lot to say about this movie. But it’s one that most people don’t recognize the name of when I mention it in conversation, and it’s one that I’ve enjoyed repeated viewings of.

Though “The Ghost and the Darkness” is a movie loaded with historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, it is, nevertheless, really based on a true story as it claims. There really were two man-eating lions that harrassed a bridge-building effort in Tsavo, in East Africa, and they were killed by the real Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson in 1898. He kept the lions’ skins, and they can now be seen on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Which is pretty much where the truth ends and legend and fiction begin.

Fortunately, the screenplay was written by a very creative and clever writer, and the director was able to successfully frame and shoot an exciting movie. Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas obviously enjoyed the script they were given, and were strongly invested in their characters. And the film is loaded with actors who brought to life secondary characters that could have destroyed the movie if they’d been wooden and uninteresting.

The dialogue is – as one would expect from the man who wrote “The Princess Bride” – sharp and witty. “The Ghost and the Darkness” runs the full range from dark and tragic to cheerfully funny without any of it feeling forced or out of place. And it has a really lovely soundtrack.

As with a lot of movies I’ll be reviewing, this movie has not received a lot of critical acclaim. And, truth be told, it’s not a spectacular movie. It’s not high art, and it was never destined to win any awards. It’s not a complex movie, it doesn’t have any strangely dramatic twists, and it doesn’t have a surprise ending.

But it does successfully what many movies today never manage to do: it sets itself to tell a story, start to finish, and does so without stumbling over itself. Its story is involving, the characters are interesting enough to make you hope things turn out well for them, and it has just the right mix of action and talk to keep the pacing of the movie steady.

It’s a good addition to any collection. And if, when it’s over, you’re interested in what really happened, you might be able to track down a copy of The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, written by Patterson himself. You can also visit the Chicago Field Museum’s website about the exhibit at http://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibits/exhibit_sites/tsavo/default.htm, where they have both pictures of Patterson and his lions, and a brief factual writeup on their history.

Speed Racer
Released: 2008
Studio: Village Roadshow Pictures (distributed by Warner Bros.)
Directors: Andy & Lana Wachowski

Let me start by saying in no uncertain terms that I’m not a fan of the original cartoon or the manga. I find both incredibly boring and often offensively stupid. The name Speed Racer dredges up no childhood nostalgia for me.

Which should put the rest of this review into some sort of context. Because I honestly believe that fans and critics alike are much too hard on this highly entertaining movie.

The fact that I so abhor the source material says to me that this movie is a great example of what can be done by two clever film-makers with a real love for said source material, when given a budget, a good cast, and a passionate desire to do something nobody’s ever done before. The Wachowskis wanted to make a live-action cartoon, one which paid tribute to something they’d loved as children. They succeeded. To the point where their love of the material made me go back and take a look at the old cartoon again, to see if maybe I was being too hard on it.

(I wasn’t. I still can’t stand it. Which makes this movie that much more impressive to me.)

I’ll be honest…this movie isn’t art. It’s loaded with absurdities and silliness, loud noises, bright colors, and occasionally hammy dialogue. It was made purely for the sake of entertaining its audiences. But that’s not to say it’s not a GOOD movie. If you’re prepared to let yourself believe in all of the absurdities that make up Speed’s world and can look past them, you’ll find a surprisingly good story and a very well-constructed film.

One of the things that really stands out to me about “Speed Racer” is that the Wachowskis often manage to portray the characters’ emotions and thoughts without a single line of dialogue. For example: during the introductory scenes, we have a shot of a young Speed being picked up at school by his older brother, Rex. Before either of them says a word to one another, you know beyond all doubt that Speed worships the ground Rex walks on, and that Rex really cares about his little brother. The dynamic is just there…it doesn’t need to be explained, described, or shoved in the audience’s face with dramatic dialogue.

It simply exists.

It frames the rest of the scene, which is Speed convincing Rex to let him come along for racing practice. It’s not hard to believe that Rex would cave in and let Speed come with him. Rex never says anything like “All right, Speed, I’ll let you come, but only because I really love you, you rascal.” He doesn’t have to. We know.

That’s great film-making right there. And the movie is loaded with little moments like that, where we don’t need to be told about the Racer family’s dynamics…because it shows in the way they treat one another.

This is a movie where the good guy literally wears white (heck, even his cars are white), one of the bad guys has a fish tank filled with piranha, and cars can be used for martial-arts. It has a great cast (John Goodman and Susan Sarandon, amongst others), and they were obviously having a lot of fun. It’s silly, it’s way over the top, and has a pallette of bright, primary colors. It has a moral, and delivers it with all the subtlety of a bomb going off (it’s actually a newspaper headline at the end of the movie). It’s loud, cheerful, and energetic.

And fun.

Get a copy of this movie. Make some popcorn, grab a soda, sit back…and pretend you’re a kid again, watching Saturday morning cartoons. That’s the feeling it evokes, and the spirit in which it was made. It’s a great movie for a dreary day.

Clash of the Titans
Released: 2010
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director: Louis Leterrier

Beware, spoilers below.

Okay, I know I’m a little bit behind the curve on this one, but I didn’t get to the theater to see it.

Thankfully.

First of all, let me say that I’m a fan of the original movie. It’s not exactly high art, but it’s a fun flick, and it was some of the best work that Ray Harryhausen did before his retirement.

This movie was not “Clash of the Titans.” In fact, if anything, it was a live-action version of Disney’s “Hercules.” All it was missing was the satyr sidekick, and from about fifteen minutes into the movie until the end it was almost scene-for-scene the same thing, with a few elements lifted from the original “Clash of the Titans.”

Which is fine. A remake should always try to build on the original rather than simply reproducing it shot for shot. Mind you, that’s “build on,” not “abandon almost entirely.”

The 2010 version of “Clash of the Titans” is a total failure in almost every respect. But most galling is the fact that it falls squarely into a trope the folks at TVTropes.com call a “Broken Aesop.” The Broken Aesop is a movie (TV show, book, whatever) which states in bold terms a moral that it intends to teach the audience…then proceeds to tell a story which blatantly displays precisely the opposite message.

“Clash” makes no bones about the fact that it has a Message (capital M). Its Message is pretty simple: Mankind can get by just fine without the Gods. In fact, several characters in the movie harp on this repeatedly over the first hour, over and over stating that they don’t need the gods, they can do it without them, culminating in one of the soldiers telling Perseus “Tell them Men did this.” just before being killed by the Medusa.

Yet in spite of this repetition of the moral to be taught, when push comes to shove, everyone but our hero (a demi-god) is killed. And even our hero (said demi-god) is incapable of achieving his goals without resorting to the use of his divine powers and talents. And the magic sword Zeus gave him. And the magic horse Zeus sent him.

And when all is said and done, our hero has evidently decided that the gods aren’t that bad after all. He has a friendly chat with Zeus, acknowledges him as his true father…and is given back his dead girlfriend “Because you’re a son of Zeus!”

But we don’t need the gods!

Throw in a side order of the two characters who abandon our hero turning up in a later scene, having been rewarded for their abandonment with a tame giant scorpion to ride around on; some of the worst costuming continuity problems I’ve ever seen (pay attention to Io’s costume…her clothes change radically from a mini-dress to a flowing gown during conversations); and a slap in the face to the original movie by way of the brief and very insulting cameo made by the mechanical owl from the original, and you have the makings of a world-class /facepalm.

Like I said, I love the original movie, so it’s possible I’m biased against the new one. But I tried to  go into it with an open mind, and I did enjoy a lot of what I saw. The battles against the scorpions and Medusa were quite spectacular. Medusa in particular sticks out in my mind as a magnificent representation of the mythical creature. Likewise, the Pegasus in this movie was by far the best winged horse ever done on screen, and there have been some good ones.

But the movie reeks of development hell and executive meddling, and I suspect large chunks of it ended up on the editing room floor. It’s a fair guess…a quick look at the credits on the IMDb show that the movie had three screenwriters, four executive producers and two producers. Ouch.

In the end, I’m sadly disappointed. It wasn’t bad, per se…but it was a bit of a train wreck in terms of story and editing. And that’s not even getting into the acting, which I can’t decide if it suffered from the actors being apathetic towards the movie, or if it was just badly edited. I suspect badly edited.

I hope to see a director’s cut of this movie someday, especially if they edit back in a significant amount of footage (more than, say, 15 minutes worth). I suspect it would be a more cohesive and entertaining movie…and a less insulting one.