It’s basically only acceptable to talk during a movie in three cases – first, when the movie is so awful that it’s subjectively awful and no living thing can find any enjoyment in its viewing; second, when it’s a horror movie, because the sort of fun, pop horror that you want to see in a theater is practically a dialogue with the audience; and lastly, the sort of fist-bump dudebro explodey action film of which The Expendables is the perfect bannerman.

It’s either extremely bad luck, auditory dementia, or some kind of shadow conspiracy whose goal is the slow and subtle disintegration of my psyche, but whenever I go to the movies, there’s always someone sitting near me saying inane things. Whether it’s someone asking “who are all those guys and why do they look the same?” during the Smiths Vs. Neo fight in The Matrix Reloaded, a little girl plaintively asking her mother what those men are doing to that girl during a 10:30pm screening of Last House on the Left, a man commenting incessantly on the quality of the cars driven by people in Thor, or the woman leaving The Social Network who insisted that Trent Reznor was the frontman for Metallica. Like a mild headache or a constant craving for the taste of gin, theater-talkers are typically not awful enough that they detract from my ability to go to the movies and enjoy them. Natasha might even opine that my fondness for going to the movies is actually just a byproduct of the joy that I take in being enraged by others, and I suspect she might be right were that her opinion.

If she’s right, then The Descendants was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years. There were ten people in the theater when Natasha and I went to see it last Wednesday and, you guys, eight of talked so much that they seemed to miss important plot points in the film because they were too busy talking. I know that I’m prone to hyperbole, but this is no exaggeration.

In the row behind us, two middle-aged women chatted ceaselessly throughout the film. Their commentary was occasionally punctuated by a rondo of “Oh No”s that started whenever something mildly interesting happened. It became so omnipresent that at one point, in response to Shailene Woodley’s declaration that she had ordered mahi for George Clooney, I found myself saying “Oh no” aloud.

It got so bad that I started having improbable revenge fantasies about what I was going to do to these people. These may have included making two middle-aged women think that they were being haunted by ghosts.

The haunted house story is a timeless story that is rooted firmly in the economics of its time. One of the persistent lessons of horror is that we are not the masters of our collective domain that we think we are. There are monsters and sharks and mutants that will kill us for our arrogance. And mutant shark monsters. But that’s all ‘man against his environment’. The haunted house story is still about that same illusory control we exert on our surroundings, but it is in a setting we explicitly control – our homes. In the real world, this is basically a foreclosed mortgage – the final reminder that this thing that you claim as yours actually belongs to an intangible entity that wants you to leave – but in fiction, it is almost always a ghost or some kind of gremlin. But even when it’s a ghost, it’s nearly always the economy, too.

When shit starts to go bad – shit always goes bad in these stories – and the audience is shouting at you to get the hell out of the house, man, it’s generally a matter of money that keeps that from happening. You have your exceptions – Bag of Bones is one, since the Rich Writer can afford to go back to his other house (even then, the economics of Rural Maine is a recurring theme in so much of King’s corpus and it’s very heavily present in Bag of Bones) – but they serve to prove the rule, I suppose. Whether all your money is tied up in the house or the flip you’re in the middle of needs to be a success or you’ll lose everything or the housing market is so bad that you could be stuck for a year or more just trying to sell it and where will you live in the meantime?  There are often other things in play when it comes to the motivations of a haunted house story’s characters, but the economy is almost always one of those factors. Watch a few episodes of American Horror Story and see how often the housing market gets mentioned. I’ve seen critics say that you couldn’t make a movie like Horrible Bosses or Tower Heist before the economy went to hell in 2008, but I find myself wondering why exactly there aren’t more Don’t Be Afraid of the Darks in the current climate as well.

One of the odd things about Paranormal Activity as a narrative and as a shorthand for the type of story it tells is that money has nothing to do with any of the characters’ motivations. Micah needs to prove that he’s the alpha male, Dennis wants to document what’s happening in his home, and Daniel wants to protect his family from intruders. With the exception of the explicitly wealthy Daniel, the cameramen/protagonists in these films also seem to live in implausible homes – at least one or two of them are, in California, likely to be million-dollar homes.

It’s funny, how this franchise trades on its evocation of realism and yet is fundamentally constructed on a thread that’s easily pulled at. As “real” as these documents may seem to be, there is also a kind of fantasy element to them at the same time, and it’s maybe most apparent in the third film. We don’t know what the girls’ mother does for a living – there’s no hint of it, really – but we do know that Dennis is a kind of down-on-his-luck wedding videographer.  But other than an offhand comment about the cost of videotapes, there’s not much going on that explicitly clues the viewer in. The supposition – most of these people are living beyond their means.  Micah and Katie, had they lived, would likely be completely underwater on that house of theirs right now. Maybe that’s a cue that the first two films are set in the calm before the subprime crisis, but that’s a stretch, because the narrative doesn’t do anything with it.

But this has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Six hundred words later.  It’s fitting that I should go off on a tangent about the fantasy-house thing: it’s one of the many things in Paranormal Activity 3 that pull me right out of what is otherwise a very taut and effective found-footage film.  It hit me early, though not as early as the thing that bugs me the most about the movie.

In the prior Paranormal Activity films, there’s an acknowledgement, which hearkens back to that stinger at the front of The Blair Witch Project:  “In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary…. A year later their footage was found.” It let you know that you were watching evidence from a murder investigation.  However, the third film focuses on the footage that was stolen from Daniel and Kristi’s home before the hauntings resumed in earnest. There is no explanation of what happened to these tapes, no intimation of who has them. This doesn’t do anything to damage the story on the tapes, but it does do a number on the plausibility of the films’ frame story by completely forgetting that it has one. I can’t help but be annoyed by it, despite knowing that I’m probably just being fussy. Otherwise, the third outing manages to be a perfectly standard entry in the series with some scares designed to up the ante on the ones from this film’s forbears. Well, right up until the end, at least.

If I am being fussy about the excision of the frame story from the franchise, the utter explicitness of the ending is at least something reasonable to be disappointed by, I think. It is as tonally out of place as The Last Exorcism’s ending and about half as interesting, which is to say at least half as forgivable.

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but he seems to understand Why horror tropes are horror tropes. That particular sensibility is displayed a lot more joyfully in Final Destination 5, but it’s also in this movie’s DNA. There is something here with the ‘black guy dies first’ thing that is handled with a bit of a smirk and a wink that I enjoyed quite a bit. Horror is a genre about building a tower of blocks and then knocking it over and Heisserer’s work that I’ve seen so far has featured fun and intricate block towers.

2. The prequel is amazingly faithful to the Carpenter film. So much so that its final shot is Carpenter’s opening shot (stay during the credits to see it). I basically watched the 2011 film back to back with the 1982 film yesterday. It bridges very well and doesn’t cheapen the main film.

3. Annalee Newitz complains about not knowing The Thing’s motivations in this one, and I think that it would be fair to say that ‘survive’ is its main motivation. The film shows us only the first day or two after the alien is revived, after all, and it’s likely disoriented. By the time it gets to Station 31, it’s had more time to strategize.

4. Has anyone considered whether or not the alien in the ice is the actual alien or just another imitated host? I think you could make a case for the former after a close watch of the prequel.

4a. I would definitely watch another prequel to this story set on an alien spaceship that ends up crashing into Antarctica 100,000 years ago.

5. Mary Elizabeth Winstead = The New Jaime Lee Curtis

There are maybe only four modern films that I have ever really enjoyed watching in 3D. Three of them have been horror films – My Bloody Valentine, Piranha 3D and now Final Destination 5. The opening credits alone speak to why that is – a cavalcade of sharp objects, fire and broken glass flying right at the audience’s collective face.  It’s a proof of concept statement, basically: Here is what you can expect from us over the next 90-and-change minutes. It delivers on its promise gleefully.

FD5 is a recovery for the series, a strong uptick from a lackluster fourth installment. Both darkly clever in its plotting and darkly comic in its execution, it is a horror film for fans that delight in watching the Rube Goldberg machinations of the fictional kills. The camera taunts you with, for instance, a rusty screw on a balance beam (as seen in the trailer). It places the gun on the table and you know with surety that it will fire by the end of the scene, but the scene keeps going on about its business. It is as blithely unaware that the screw is there as the audience is spring-loaded tense waiting for a wayward foot to land on it. When the trap does spring, it happens in a way you don’t expect – clever and bloody and oddly fun. This is how each scene unwinds alongside easter eggs for faithful series fans and gallows humor.  And the film is commendable for managing to keep its characters from wandering too far into the realm of cheap stereotype.

Perhaps most exciting for fans of the series, Final Destination 5 adds some new toys to the films’ mythology toy box that aren’t revealed to be a red herring or some elaborate antagonistic scheme on Death’s part. Unlike the fourth film, Death is not a manipulative prick – like the other films in the series, it’s an unwavering natural force with a wicked sense of irony.

Horror fans shouldn’t sit this one out. It might even be worth it to shell out for 3D.

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling that we seem to share with less and less frequency is wonder.

There is a tension, when it comes to comics, between commercialization and myth.  Superheroes are, as so many people have pointed out so many times, our modern gods.  But they exist inside a medium that has always baldly run itself as a business, not an art or a faith. Every time that the grand myth of comics makes changes that serve the business of things, it breeds a dissonance that turns into dissatisfaction that, in the worst of cases, becomes betrayal. After all, if comics are our mythology, then it is surely just as jarring to discover that creators can’t understand Wonder Woman as it is to learn that God does not answer back. So we manage our expectations, and that’s the bane of wonder. Comics are a medium where we often tout that anything is possible, and that is what wonder is all about.

Captain America is an example of the sort of movie that can be made when you stop forcing concessions from wonder and just tell the story you know the myth deserves. The film watches like a macrocosm of Steve Rogers himself, internally and wholly noble and decent, always the film that its makers want it to be from start to stop without ever being grim and gritty or sexed up. It may not have the flying battle armor or the warring gods of the other Marvel movies, but that character it radiates is just as literally wonderful.

Just a few seats away from us in the theater, a man sat with his two young sons. All three were edge-of-your-seat engaged in the movie from start to stop but the youngest, who looked about six, shouted and whooped and cheered whenever it was appropriate. He was open to it; he didn’t know how to not be. When the Avengers teaser happened, the kid freaked out. That is the way I want to feel. That kid is my hero.

It’s problematic.

I look at a lot of the things I love in fiction – fantasy, science fiction, superheroes – and I see that that same basic story structure that props each hero’s journey up ultimately tends to be a little fascistic.  Because when Boy X gets Sword Y and learns how to fight from Bygone Hero Z so that he can confront Ultimate Evil Villain W all by himself, there’s a kind of wish-fulfillment tendency to put Boy X in charge of everything, because only he can save us all. If you delve deeply into genre, you see it all over the place; delve too deeply, and you might start thinking it’s the solution to other problems, too – that there’s One Magical Person who should just be able to do what they want and it will save everything (and I’m thinking primarily about political discourse when I say this).  It’s all just ‘I am Right because I have this weapon and I know how to use it.’

I think one of the things that makes the Harry Potter franchise special is that it very pointedly doesn’t do this. It has a propehecied hero, to be sure, and an ultimate villain and some very, very powerful magical baubles and artifacts. To the casual observer, just glancing at the surface of it, it certainly looks like another example of ‘Special Boy’ fiction.

On the contrary, the story of Harry Potter is the story of a normal boy who is faced with exceptional circumstances and rises to them. He achieves victory not because of his powers, but because of his virtues – loyalty, friendship, tenacity, compassion, selflessness, love. He has to rely on his friends and allies to help him win. And ultimately, when he gets that ultimate Elixir, that reward of godlike power, he rejects it. Because he is, after all, a normal boy now become a man.

It is deeply meaningful to me, then, that the “fuck yeah” moments in the finale belong to a housewife and awkward teenage boy who finds a hidden wellspring of fortitude and courage within him when pressed to the extreme. That is exactly where those moments belong.

That story is special. It may have wizards and dragons, but it’s also a rubric by which any person of any age can live their lives happily.

Potter gets compared to Star Wars a lot because of its epic scope and its rabid fandom, but it’s likely not a coincidence that the two stories have the same core narrative. In Return of the Jedi, Luke wins a mystical victory, it’s true, but it means nothing without the military victory of both the fleet and the ground mission on Endor, which itself hinges on the timely intervention of the moon’s native population.

One of the most resonant moments in Star Wars for me is the moment when Luke throws down his lightsaber.* It’s not a gesture of surrender or weakness, but of victory. It demonstrates not only that a real and meaningful victory is not won with weapons or with power alone, and also completes Luke’s arc as a character, his transition from craving instruction on how to fight Vader to realizing that he never needed the weapon to win in the first place.

Over the next few weeks, there will be a lot of talk about what the “next Harry Potter” will be, where it will come from. I think it’s impossible to tell what the next thing to resonate that richly and deeply with such a large audience will be, but I am pretty sure that whatever it ends up being will share the same message at its heart.

*There are myriad reasons why the prequels are not as effective as the originals, but the lack of a true emotional and philosophical echo to this scene is undoubtedly part of what feels ‘off’ to many critics of the prequels.

There is a moment that comes, maybe 2/3 of the way through Transformers: Dark of the Moon, when the audience can really and truly see the ethos of not just DotM, but the entire Michael Bay-helmed Transformers saga, with riveting clarity.  As a giant robot knocks over a skyscraper, a special forces soldier tumbles out of a window and plummets to the streets of Chicago below. The camera follows him down, down, down until it starts to focus instead on the incidental detritus that went tumbling out of the office window along with the real, live person. The audience spends the final seconds of this shot watching a desk light, a computer monitor, and some other random office supplies as they crash to the pavement, the human being forgotten a few yards away.

What is the shot telling us? Are the humans the equivalent of pens and lamps, just set dressing being thrown into the churning maw of Decepticon mayhem? Based on the way that 98% of the humans in the flick just spend their time hefting guns around and speaking solely in ‘jingoistic catch phrase’ before getting vaporized or crushed or crusherized, it wouldn’t be an unfair takeaway to construct for yourself. Perhaps even more true, though, is this reading: the filmmaker doesn’t know whether the movie is about the people or about the robots and that dichotomy has been omnipresent in all three of Bay’s Transformers movies. Are the movies about Sam Witwicky trying to become a man and find his place in the world, or are they hyperactive robot-on-robot explosion festivals?

The problem, really, is that they try to be both.  Michael Bay is certainly talented enough at long shots of choreographed, spiraling ordnance or crafting a strange amalgam of Brian De Palma’s opening shot in Snake Eyes and Frank Miller’s notorious “one fine ass” script to page one of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #1 (both of which appear in Transformers 3), but sententious action set pieces and beautiful women are one thing; comedy is definitely another, more difficult, thing and without Bay’s Bad Boys leads Will Smith and Martin Lawrence around to ad lib most of the laughs, he isn’t a competent enough director to make something like Ken Jeong mounting Shia LeBeouf in a toilet stall while screaming ‘DEEP WANG’ funny. Few directors could, granted, but the act of being funny is always just beyond Bay’s grasp in Dark of the Moon and its predecessors.

If you were, for the sake of argument, to reduce the run time of this movie to about five minutes and make it the most expensive Linkin Park music video ever produced, it would probably be the best music video the world has ever seen, all jaw-dropping FX shots and how’d-they-do-that camera work and fire and sex and explosions and giant fighting machines with glowing energy swords and axes and giant implausible guns. It condenses the best things about the movie into an easily consumable package and discards the plot and character development almost entirely.

Because here’s the thing: as great as the armageddon nonsense stuff is, the way it gets to that point is pretty balls terrible. Sam spends literally half of the movie whining about what a loser he is and, sadly, he doesn’t actually do anything to correct this – the universe corrects it for him and then every character in the film gets to give a conciliatory ‘you were right, Sam, you are super important’ speech and he gets to have his pet robot humiliate his obnoxious boss (played somehow by John Malkovich) and also reveal that the hot rich guy his poor, poor girlfriend is making eyes at is actually a Decepticon conspirator and the Blue Angels write his name in the sky and a dinosaur wrestles a giant bear and then there’s a dance number (NOTE: some of these things do not happen).  It’s not that Sam doesn’t get any respect from people undeservedly – he gets no respect from people because he’s a whiny prick who doesn’t take anything that doesn’t have a robot punching it seriously. He gets called out on this multiple times, but it becomes moot as soon as robots punching things starts to become a big deal again. He’s like a creepily obsessive stamp collector who is finally told that the world can only be saved with philately.  “I don’t understand why I’m not successful in the real world, Carly! I collected stamps two times! The most important stamp in my collection is my best friend!” Incidentally, much has been made of how unlikely it is that a hot British supermodel would never date some shlubby manchild who can’t support himself, but I think that it’s a lot more plausible than a hot British supermodel dating any guy who whined and complained constantly.

What I’m saying here is that Sam doesn’t grow – the rest of the world comes to him and we are, as we’re leaving the theater, supposed to accept that as growth instead. This is like if the guys that kill Jack at the end of Brokeback Mountain instead drive up to him, throw confetti and announce that gay marriage is legal now, cowboy! Or like Sauron helpfully flying Frodo to Mount Doom so he could blithely toss the ring in.

This shouldn’t be surprising to anybody, especially since the movie casts everybody’s favorite Robo-Aslan, Optimus Prime, as a hawkish, warmongering asshole. After spending two movies crowing about defending human sovereignty and respecting the freedom of the people of Earth and blah blah blah he just loves giving speeches, Prime fakes his death and allows Megatron to decimate Chicago before showing up to save the day. Because we needed to learn our lesson about listening to Optimus Prime. I’m not making this up. This is coming straight out of the movie’s dialogue, here. I have already thrown a ridiculous amount of comparisons in here already, so I’ll just stick with one: this is like Batman letting Gotham get burned to the ground so that they would learn to appreciate Batman just a bit more. If you are thinking But Jeff, Batman doesn’t roll that like, then that is exactly the right thing for you to be thinking. And make no mistake, Chicago gets straight up destroyed in this movie. Massacred. Because we had it coming. Thanks, Optimus.

Which says nothing of the gaping plot holes in the script, Megatron wearing a cape and toting around a shotgun built out of scrap metal, the continued existence of John Turturro’s character or the fact that the entire movie follows the same structure (there is a secret history of Transformers being on Earth that the government is lying to everyone about and as a result the Decepticons could possibly team up with a scarily powerful new Transformer who has a superweapon that can destroy the entire world unless a whiny, entitled manchild and his asshole truck pal can stop them – also there is some patriotism) as the previous movie with an extra bit of polish on it (which also has gaping plot holes in the script and John Turturro’s character) and minus the very specific list of things that people didn’t like about it (Megan Fox, horrific racial stereotype characters, robot testicles) which have been replaced by things that are just barely better.*

But despite all of this very specific bitching about what didn’t work in Dark of the Moon, the thing that didn’t work at all was an emotional connection. I marveled at the pretty fighting and explosions, yes, but I didn’t feel a single thing beyond a vague feeling of being impressed by what I was seeing. Which isn’t surprising, considering that it was made for an audience of desk lamps and computer monitors.

*The racial stereotype robots have been replaced by stock cars that for some reason have the personalities of British soccer hooligans. At one point Frances McDormand (why!?) remarks that the Wreckers, as they’re called, aren’t allowed to leave the facility they’re stationed at “because they’re assholes.” This line of dialogue is perhaps the best and truest thing in the film.

Succinctly, Priest is a movie about priests who are nothing like priests fighting vampires who are nothing like vampires. Instead, priests are stoic kung-fu warrior monks. We are told they have special powers, but unless ‘stoic kung-fu’ is a power, you never actually see them in use. Likewise, the vampires are eyeless xenomorph knock-offs who specialize not in drinking blood but in leaping around like children on LSD laced with pixie sticks. Their bite infects their victims with a disease that causes them to turn into goth elves ‘familiars’.

Heaped on top of this all is a helping of trite anti-Christian subtext (who am I kidding? It’s text) that is bound to be perceived as edgy and insightful and downright anarchic by a bunch of teenagers who snuck out of another movie to sneak into this one because their mothers don’t like them to see blood and killing.

Like Legion, Paul Bettany’s other collaboration with Director Scott Stewart, Priest is stuck squarely between ‘not awful’ and ‘not exactly good’.  I’ll even award it ‘better than I expected,’ because I expected the film to be a disaster on the scale of Ultraviolet and it wasn’t. It was just a mediocre badass throwback action flick populated by a gruff, barely-speaking hero, the stoic warrior-woman who loves him from afar (Maggie Q in a stirring performance as Every Michelle Yeoh Character Ever) and the reckless young kid (Twilight alum Cam Gigandet, who once again proves to be a swirling vortex of negative charisma that violently sucks the like out of others around him and manages to make even impassioned anger sound like ineffectual whining) and the cool-looking, quippy bad guy who wants revenge (Karl “Doom” Urban more than Karl “Star Trek” Urban).

If you miss the way that sci-fi action movies used to be when there were still Highlander movies, then Priest is maybe worth checking out at a matinee, but even that might be a stretch depending on your tolerance for the unoriginal and unimaginative trying to play dress up.

According to the LA Times, Vin Diesel believes that Fast Five should be an Oscar contender. It goes without saying that Vin Diesel, if he actually, really, deep in his heart believes this, is in full-on ‘listen to tales of my drow witch-hunter from The Forgotten Realms’ mode or has maybe done about a bathtub full of mephedrone (those are just two possible options).

I say this because Fast Five is not a very good film. And yet I loved Fast Five more than any other movie I’ve seen in a theater this year (except possibly Thor) and it’s an undeniable force at the box office, having already amassed a worldwide total of $holyshitthisnumberonlyexiststheoreticallyandoncomputers.

People who love things like period dramas, blatant Oscar bait and quirky romcoms that are neither truly quirky, romantic nor comedic find themselves puzzled by the rampant success of not just this fifth fucking installment of a movie franchise about bromance and tuner cars and slick music-video cinematography, but by genre film-making en toto.

Consider it: you’ve seen the same question posed slightly different after every runaway horror hit (often grieving the death of horror prior to the coming of Scream/The Blair Witch Project/The Ring/Saw/Hostel/Paranormal Activity/Paranormal Activity 2).  The genres that get derided the most by snobby critics, though, are often the ones that require some degree of audience interactivity to really be successful.

Roger Ebert said that games can’t be art because the game has to be played while art is basically just observed and absorbed. I’ve argued against that in the past, because it’s a stupid argument to make, but genre cinema’s success or failure rides on its audience’s ability to make the people watching it buy in, whether through a fear response some other emotional component of the viewing experience. This is why a good horror film is more like a good roller coaster than a good movie – it is manipulating you through its tight series of loops and turns in a way that you can’t control. Those who don’t ‘get it’ are basically choosing not to ride the ride and therefore the experience fails for them.

It’s the same thing with The Car Movie, really, which is the new Western is the new Swashbuckler. They are movies about good-hearted bad men who want freedom. They are what our superego imagines our id to be, maybe. The cars or horses or ships are cool set dressing, but any power that they have beyond that is imbued on them by what the movie makes them represent – living on your own terms, a quarter mile at a time, by your own code, ad infinitum. If that is not a fantasy that you respond to, then Fast Five or Drive Angry or Torque or any of them is just a stupid movie about people driving illegally. But we don’t flock to car movies to just watch car movies – we want to watch what they represent and inhabit that for an hour or two before having those pleasant fictions shattered when the lights come up.

The other thing, really, is that where are you going to see a ridiculously expensive car get driven over a cliff otherwise? You’re certainly not going to do that shit yourself.

After a brief hiatus, I’m back at Bloody Good Horror with a review of the Chris Pine vs. Zombies flick Carriers.