Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture A Duckling, 1972, which was released in the UK as "Don't Torture Donald Duck," was a splendid piece of trashy Italian exploitation. Someone's killing kids in this tiny village, brutally, and there's no shortage of suspects. There's the town idiot, the spoiled rich heiress who is a former drug user, (read: prostitute), the priest, and the strange gypsy woman whom we see in the opening credits sequence digging up the bones of a dead baby. Guess who did it? (COLETTA FACTOR: DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING) It was the priest, but of course, the gypsy woman was arrested and released. At this point I'd have been surprised if a gang of townsmen hadn't shown up with chains and sticks, in order to beat the gypsy woman to death while some funky American soul music is playing on the car radio. I think it unlikely that Quentin Tarantino had this scene in mind when he filmed the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, but I'm sure he had seen it, at least, and the memory of it was rattling around in his head. All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.
It was announced this week that the release of the film version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will be pushed back from Thanksgiving to next summer. Same thing happened to the new Star Trek film. (JJ Abrams doing Star Trek? Are you mental, that's gonna be awesome!!!) I don't want to wait until next summer to see Shaun Of The Dead playing Scotty, or to see Snape [REDACTED BY THE COLETTA FACTOR POLICE] Dumbledore.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, 2008, was much better than I expected. Genuinely creepy, moody, and more graphic than his other films, this one is about an outbreak of sorts. It starts in Central park one morning, then it hits Philadelphia and Boston, then smaller cities, and soon the whole Northeast is Ground Zero. At first everyone assumes it's terrorism, but by the end we are led to believe it's [REDACTED BY THE COLETTA FACTOR POLICE]. Basically what it does, this toxin that is introduced, is make you kill yourself, preferably in a really gruesome way, like climbing into the lion's den at the zoo and taunting the cats, or turning on a riding lawnmower and laying down in front of it. Mark Wahlberg is not as thrilling here as he was in I Heart Huckabees or The Departed, but that's only because the material Shyamalan gives him is straight cookie-cutter horror movie hero. John Leguizamo is interesting as the best friend who leaves his little girl behind to go look for his wife. (Guess how that turns out for him?) Zooey Deschanel, whom I last saw as Dorothy in the Sci-Fi Channel's Wizard of Oz reimagining, Tin Man, was, well, she was awfully cute.
The trick to enjoying movies is to revise your expectations. Every movie is not going to be The Godfather or The Devil's Rejects, but if you know what to expect, and acknowledge the shortcomings of a genre or an adaptation, you can enjoy the movie for what it is, rather than get mad about what it's not. For example, I saw Goblet of Fire before I read the book, and all I really expected was that I would enjoy it as much as I did the first 3 Harry Potter movies. I was not disappointed. That moment at the end when Harry and Cedric touch the cup and [REDACTED BY THE COLETTA FACTOR POLICE] was amazing. By the time I had gotten that far in the book, I didn't really like the movie that much anymore. They had left too much out, combined characters, added a few unnecessary bits, it was 'orrible. If you watch an Italian horror movie from the 70s, you know you are getting bad dubbing, virtually no character exposition, and gore effects that don't look realistic at all, but you know it's gonna be scary and bloody and fun to watch. If you go to see a summer-action-superhero-blockbuster, all you expect is great action and maybe a laugh or two, and most of the time you get it, except for Transformers. That movie sucked ass.
Honorable mention to Primer, a no-frills, bare bones movie about two guys that build a time machine in their garage. This movie proves that you don't need a Hollywood budget to make an intelligent film. Big ups also to Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, and all of our Olympians whose accomplishments make me proud to be an American, or they would if I didn't live in George frakkin' Bush's America.
Speaking of which, Jesus, is this election over yet? Does McCain think he's actually got a shot? One of the smartest things Bill Clinton ever said was, "It's the economy, stupid." After feeling the budget squeeze under 8 years of Republican policies, with 70 percent of Americans thinking we're on the wrong track, does McCain honestly think he has a snowball's chance? If there were any dirt on Obama, surely the Clintons would have dug it up already, right?
Ok, that's enough for one night. To sum it up: Italian horror and Zooey Deschanel: good. Transformers and making me wait for good movies: bad. The Happening and being on my own for a week: a little from column A, a little from column B.
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