You know what?  I think this ep is actually better than our Fifth Anniversary Episode.  It has singing, sound effects, Fox Business News, Freud, Jung, 3D and a slight mention of Slavoj Zizek.  What more could you want?  Also reviews of HUGO, THE MUPPETS and A DANGEROUS METHOD.

Running time: 1 Hour 03 minutes and 48 seconds – 61.3mb

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Thoughts on the beautiful and disturbing tone poem that is DRIVE and an exhortation to participate in the exciting new film COYOTE REQUIEM.  Oh, and Gareth saw THE IDES OF MARCH apparently.

Running time: 40 minutes and 30 seconds – 37.2mb

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I suppose there’s some virtue in showing revolting acts as revolting, and if nothing else, Eli Roth nails that segment of his tragically overreaching statement on globalization, the HOSTEL diptych. As Roth depicts it, torture is dehumanizing and sadistic, as well it should be. What’s more, his crassness keeps him from taking the easy way out, really challenging—insofar as such a film can—notions of deserved violence. Because the entitled hero-victims of HOSTEL are the ugliest Americans (and one Icelander) imaginable, laughing off any cultural experience and even throwing their weight around at a club—“I’m an American, I have rights!”—Roth gives us decidedly unsympathetic protagonists and then tortures them. The position is clear. Even these guys don’t deserve what’s coming (not that they’re warlords or something, either). There’s a parallel in HOSTEL: PART II where the torturer is trying to extract information from her victim. It shouldn’t work, as studies show, but it does, and not out of irresponsibility. It works to show the extreme: even if torture were efficacious, is it worth it?

There’s been some discussion lately about challenging yourself to sit through certain films like SALO or IRREVERSIBLE. It seems to me that lately the horror supergenre has been held rapt not by terror of what’s to come or horror of what just happened but revulsion. Torture-porn, a term that fits the subgenre like an overly starched hand-me-down suit jacket it wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, isn’t about scaring you but revolting you, which is its own kind of endurance test but one that, for me, lacks the fun of anticipating a good scare. Like the B-movies I rail against, it’s mired in self-seriousness with nothing to counterbalance. It’s 100-proof melancholy. HOSTEL always struck me as something that would mostly have my stomach in knots for a couple hours, so when I say I finally watched them, I mean I rented the DVD for HOSTEL in the full sunlight of noon and watched HOSTEL: PART II sanitized for my protection on Syfy. It’s not much different from covering your eyes through the grossest parts and having your parents cover your eyes during the full frontal. Personally, I’ll take it. When are they airing WOLF CREEK?

The grand guignol style weakens whatever topicality Roth is going for, because the obvious response is “CIA torture would look nothing like that.” But as horror, the HOSTEL films cleverly refute the afterschool morality of HALLOWEEN or the ‘80s slasher flicks. Innocence is no shield; only street smarts and a lot of luck can save you here, in—forgive me—a post-9/11 world. But there is hope, if only barely, and that’s a crucial distinction from the films of Michael Haneke or THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. The problem is what that hope represents. Because as near as I can tell, the primary point of HOSTEL isn’t to let a bunch of gorehounds dream up creative ways to autopsy living humans. The HOSTEL films are revenge fantasies. Whatever nonsense Roth says about blowback for America’s foreign misadventures, HOSTEL gives our protagonist every comical opportunity to get even with his tormentors, and by that point, who isn’t cheering him on? Run over those prostitutes or they’ll just lure more unsuspecting kids into the torture factory! Slit that guy’s throat or he’ll strike again! Catharsis doesn’t come from surviving. It comes from killing the bad guys. Are we still talking about geopolitics, Eli?

DEMONLOVER has a few years and tons of style on the HOSTEL films, successfully navigating this labyrinthine (how long until I can use Assayasesque?) multinational corporate infrastructure that treats human beings like toys all through the haze of a good drug trip. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found HOSTEL: PART II much stronger than its predecessor, even with Derek Richardson’s wrenching performance, though both are tonally flat, blunt exaggerations whose cinematic style seems to rely entirely on drawing parallels, for instance, between an Amsterdam brothel and the torture factory (and a train, so . . . who knows what Eli Roth was trying to say with that). PART II follows in DEMONLOVER’s footsteps, fleshing out the inhumanity of its capitalist enterprise and illustrating the impossibility of toppling such a powerful organization. A bunch of rich white guys bid on victims, a scene with all the rhythm and release of masturbation, not really caring that all this money they’re spending eviscerates—literally—actual human lives. The message is that everything is a game to the superwealthy, not least the running of the world, because they will always be insulated from real life as the rest of us experience it. Both DEMONLOVER and HOSTEL: PART II are vertically integrated, but Assayas intellectualizes while Roth physicalizes. There’s a bold image at the end of the first HOSTEL of blood splattering across a crowd of bystanders. Provocation is HOSTEL’s greatest success, but the series’ impact is achieved with concision in a single frame: the grisly photo of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi that greeted so many of us when we woke up Thursday morning.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for  the AV Club, the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

It’s the Occupy Wall Street Show as we review films that pit the little guy against the boss:  REAL STEEL and MONEYBALL.  Also we talk with director Jason Lehel, producer John Gordon and star Nicole Herold about their beautiful new film COYOTE REQUIEM as part of its exciting Kickstarter Campaign.

Running time: 43 minutes and 14 seconds – 41.6mb

Please do check out the $2 Kickstarter campaign for COYOTE REQUIEM - it’s a great opportunity to be part of the change in cinema culture!

[Photo by Jett at top: Producer John Gordon gives a hand to actor Kevin McNamara on the set of COYOTE REQUIEM]

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Cough, cough.  Eck.  Cough, it’s CONTAGION folks and Gareth’s Film of the Year THE GUARD.  All that plus Jett’s thoughts on the films of TIFF 2011 including THE BROOKLYN BROTHERS BEAT THE BEST, THE HUNTER and THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH and a brief mention of the new Criterion Jean Vigo Collection.

Running time: 35 minutes and 58 seconds – 34.6mb

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This is just one example of WARRIOR’s overinflation, but most of the two-and-a-half hours is actually muscle. Sure, it’s largely masculine melodrama, but like the MMA process* it’s painstakingly procedural, showing every step of the characters’ reunion. [*Well, every step of the physical MMA process; for some reason they elide the scene where Joel Edgerton gets his vanity shot taken for the program.] It may be lengthy, but that’s because the characters—especially the unstoppable Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte—are so damn restrained, so unsure of how to say the things they’ve bottled up for fourteen years. There are fatty moments— like when the principal refuses to let Edgerton’s students watch the fight in the auditorium, and it’s played like a cancer diagnosis as the sound drops out and thuds boom and they walk away for nine minutes—but WARRIOR doesn’t pretend to be any grand artistic statement. It’s a sports film, right down to its costumed predictability. It’s not trying to be Greek myth, but it sure would like to be a statue.

Unfortunately, they don’t give statues for pretending. The clearest sustained shot of MMA is from the nosebleed section, although there are a few exciting fly-bys including a gasp-worthy body-slam. But mostly O’Connor just wants us to know that two bulls are charging each other, not the specifics of their athleticism. This isn’t the first film to cover for its actors-not-athletes as they manage a demonstration of physical performance sufficient for the film’s purposes and no more—BLACK SWAN, GLEE, BUCKY LARSON—but WARRIOR is practically embarrassed of its sport, like a weedy kicker refusing to take his shirt off at the football team’s pool party. Oh, we get plenty of that, by the way, in this beefcake parade, and it only puts the rest in relief: WARRIOR may be a film about muscles and physicality, but it has no interest in the particular application of those muscles, which is what sports is all about (thereby honoring strength, perseverance, character, and other poster slogans). It gives us trains and factories and old-fashioned crank slot machines and a story about someone ripping a door off a vehicle and a philanthropist who pointedly turned his back on digital Wall Street in favor of sports, but the only physical labor we see is Nick Nolte struggling not to laugh at how typecast he’s become. It’s an exciting, moving male weepie, but it’s hard to concentrate on the fight between the heroes when the real tension is between the filmmaker and the film.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for  the AV Club, the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Want to understand the recent Riots in England Dear Listener?  Than you must must must start with Joe Cornish’s brilliant sci-fi kitchen-sink action dramedy ATTACK THE BLOCK.

Running time: 29 minutes and 20 seconds – 28.2mb

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That’s not to ignore the genre elements, which take as freely from ALIEN and TWILIGHT ZONE as MISSION TO MARS and RED PLANET, resulting in a plot that never lacks for an adrenaline injection, no matter how cheap. The found footage conceit is merciful: Unlike PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, López-Gallego never wastes our time watching nothing, and unlike THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, APOLLO 18 doesn’t save its horror for one garbled final shot. The SAW camera-flash-strobe lights our way through two exciting EVAs, some mild Cronenbergian body horror starts a ticking clock, and López-Gallego delivers at least one breathtaking composition straight out of Lovecraft. Cynics who wait at the exit instead of getting on the roller coaster find the solution to the mystery dumb and the plot derivative, but of course they are. APOLLO 18 has no anxiety of influence because it has no pretension, openly embracing its close friendship with truthers and moon landing hoaxers. It’s free to soar precisely because it wants to be the sleaziest flick of the year. It believes in the unwashed as much as the masses.

But what the Cliché Chorus miss is just how deftly made it is. Despite its skuzzy feel, the film respects us with its amateur found footage style. The handheld is a bit floaty but never epileptic, and the stationary security cams show nothing only to tell us that all’s well (for now), not to trick us into searching for some grainy ghost. Speaking of old-fashioned filmmaking, APOLLO 18 approaches the transformation of digital into film with modesty, reveling in sparing, convincing lens flares and enough noise to keep George Lucas busy between re-releases but never obscuring or distracting from the visuals; there’s just enough print damage to keep us in the Deepthroat ‘70s. The compositions take advantage of the naturally expressionistic lighting and color palette of the moon, but the primary visual strategy is in security guard montage, floating among the five or six NASA cameras and a magical one that captures some excusably gorgeous wide shots. The film wants us on our toes as it disorients us, while the silence and the shadows and the dread erect the atmosphere of a spooky deserted carnival.

Of course, some of those clichés I defend help to sink the ending, which is uncharacteristically slack even before the typical horror movie twists arrive to partially validate the arguments the rest of the film rabidly rips apart. But one thing the film never relents on is its faith in the people. Our astronauts are American icons, headstrong, creative, and uber-competent, and no matter what happens, APOLLO 18 depicts these political pawns as a society who will risk everything to help each other. It’s a shame that faith becomes a punchline.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Which isn’t to say it’s all fun-and-death, but the heavy bits are your basic cycle-of-violence stuff topped with a pitiable portrait of monomania. In 15 years, Cataleya never sways from her revenge mission, and as we prepare for the final showdown, her relationships transform into Achilles heels. All this exposed vulnerability requires its fair share of hand-wringing and worried staring, packing a bit too much fat on the muscular flick’s midsection, but it sure makes its point: Ahab had it better.

Of course, the real point is spectacular action, and COLOMBIANA gets right to it: Zoe Saldana’s entrance opens the film’s untoppable setpiece, a ludicrous ninja number that singlehandedly makes up for CONAN. If it weren’t already clear Megaton knows what he’s doing, the match cut from a trash can lid to Saldana slinking her way through an air vent suggests some wit behind that visual bluster. It also introduces the basic feminism of a SALT-style thriller about a woman whose womanhood comes in handy in a society that fails because it underestimates her. A lipstick flower is her calling card, but the cops maintain their mystery killer is a man, a stubborn attitude that Saldana turns into one of the film’s best punchlines. Like Angelina Jolie, Zoe Saldana delivers confessions as well as she does concussions, and her charisma is so strong it even subdues the film’s moralistic impulse (though that particular pendulum leads to such exploitative highlights as a closeup as Saldana’s lips twirl a lollipop). But so what? There’s a few laughs, a couple of surprises, and a fat guy walking on a glass sheet across a shark tank. The B-flick is back.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Of course the film doesn’t argue that explicitly, and Taylor’s direction is so generic there’s only one coherent purpose anyway. Taylor’s mission from God is certainly not to make cinema or even to tell a story well but to make us laugh and cry about the plight of black women in the ‘60s, not so it spurs us to any Stanley Kramer-style social action, because the film is so alien that it wouldn’t matter if it did offer advice beyond loving your enemies, and it doesn’t even dramatize that beautiful ideal, but so we experience catharsis, and having cried in a dark room of strangers and chatted with people of all races on the way out, we can look in the mirror and feel proud about how far we’ve come as the cast and crew, black and white alike, take the stage and grip that gold and thank Hattie McDaniel in heaven above for enduring so much for them, and everyone cheers, and who’s James Byrd again?

Saying Viola Davis was magnificent in her performance is something like saying she did a spectacular job riding that nuke into Moscow, which I guess she did, but how can you tell with such a shallow role? Jessica Chastain was the only one capable of summoning some inner richness in spite of her stereotype, and it helps that she knows exactly what movie she’s in, a broad melodrama that wants to be MAD MEN but winds up THE BLIND SIDE. You can tell by how Taylor bowdlerizes Matthew Weiner right down to his soundtrack choices, and for all the flak MAD MEN catches for supposedly sidelining race, when black maid Carla sits down next to white snob Betty just as JFK is assassinated, it’s an image years in the making tossed away by Taylor like an adolescent writing a fan fiction homage to his favorite show. Segregation is not some historical anomaly confined to an alien country with enough fried chicken to feed Precious for a month. In Margaret Brown’s 2008 documentary THE ORDER OF MYTHS about the racially segregated Mardi Gras parades in Mobile, Alabama, one black girl says to another, “You know, the whites, they probably gonna be better than us.” That’s the truth of institutional prejudice, the misshapen mole on the American experiment. THE HELP is just a big, fat zit.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.