L.A. Post, #3: The Movies

1. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut (Director: Richard Kelly)

The cult hit Donnie Darko made very little money upon its original release, which is funny because nearly everyone who watched it liked it, even if they didn't know exactly what happened (I guess that's why it achieved "cult" status). This director's cut adds scenes and includes little "notes" from Roberta Sparrow's time travel book that Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is given to sort of make better sense of the whole thing. What made the movie really great is the troubled but extremely intelligent Donnie's interaction with high school absurdities, the great soundtrack and score, the performances from all players (including an offbeat casting of Patrick Swayze as a self-help guru), and that odd time travel story that confuses and makes people discuss what really happened.

If you are not in the know, I will attempt the plot synopsis: A young man gets beckoned out of bed, out of the house, in the middle of the night by a man dressed in a bunny suit and is told the end of the world is coming at the end of the month. During his sleepwalking, a plane engine falls from the sky and lands in Donnie's room--no one knows where it came from. Donnie, now knowing his life has been saved, interacts with the world differently, stepping up to authority, trying to figure out higher meanings in life. The man in the bunny suit and this new interaction lead to an ultimate consequence involving time travel--I make this movie sound so weird, but most of the time it's pretty straight, interesting, and funny. This is a classic in my book. The director's cut does explain a little bit of the mysteries of the earlier Darko, but it's not exactly telling you everything.

2. Ju-On (Director: Takashi Shimizu)

This Japanese horror film takes it's cue from Hideo Nakata's Ringu (later turned into The Ring) by giving audiences freaky sound effects that always mean danger and especially freaky "monsters" with a blank, but always threatening, expression. Now, this movie doesn't make much sense if you are to try to explain some things, but that didn't actually bother me much--this is a horror movie that never stops. It's broken up into chapters, people's names, and usually those people go to a house where they go on an odyssey by which they will become monsters themselves. Ju-On refers to a curse that inflicts all who get touched by it (Shimizu has also directed in Japan 3 other Ju-On movies. The first two are Ju-On: The Curse, and the next two are Ju-On: The Grudge). And basically, it gets no more complex than that. It's a creepy-ass movie that is getting remade by Shimizu himself as simply The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. It opens October 22.

It also begins a trend where the Japanese director gets a chance to remake his own movie for American audiences. The Ring 2 will be made by Nakata and is slated for a March 24, 2005 release. He's already made a sequel in Japan, so I wonder if this is a remake of a sequel. The American Ring did not differ greatly from Ringu, so he's not going to have that obstacle to overcome.

3. Mean Creek (Director: Jacob Aaron Estes)

Here's a film that's being given comparisons to Stand By Me (kids go on an adventure to see a dead body) and Bully (kids plot to kill a bully). In this movie, bully George (Josh Peck) beats the hell out of Sam (Rory Culkin) and Sam tells his older brother Rocky (Trevor Morgan). From there, Rocky tells more older kids, including Martini (Scott Mechlowicz) and a plot to humiliate George is sprung. The idea is to invite him to a birthday party for Sam, to extend a sort of olive branch, and then get him out on a boat, strip him, and leave him naked to run back home. What follows is surprising, tense, and tragic. What the kids do to figure out their problems is realistic. The performances from everyone, all under 18, are quite amazing.

4. The Brown Bunny (Director: Vincent Gallo)

I was trying to come up with words to describe this awful, awful movie, trying to see if I could get away with merely saying, "It's bad," and then signing off. Unfortunately, I can't. I wonder if Roger Ebert and Lisa Schwarzbaum thought about dismissing this movie in the same way and then realizing that they couldn't describe a movie as powerfully bad or awful without explaining themselves. Everyone must know what you mean when you say you've seen one of the worst movies ever. Here's a hint: when I got up to use the restroom, a guy next to my friend Zac, not knowing I was coming back, apparently told him, "Now that guy's got the right idea." The movie opens on a motorcycle race--not a tense, bare-knuckle race with expert editing and speed, but a camera following one cyclist (Gallo) from the stands, and this happens for five uncut minutes at least. Then he gets in his black van and drives to a gas station. We see him fill his car, in real time. He meets a girl in the station and asks her to come along, which takes forever. He then takes the girl to her house so she can gather some things, and then drives off without her. Then more driving. All the driving takes forever. He goes to a house where a former girlfriend lives and talks to the parents. Long, static dialogue occurs. He drives off. And so on, and so on, until finally he meets the girl he's been looking for all this time, Daisy (Chloe Sevigny). During this scene, Sevigny gives Gallo a full-on, not-simulated blowjob, a scene that would make the guys at Vivid Video applaud. And then there's a surprise! A twist ending in a movie like this is like having unexpected bowel movement in an organic biology class. The only consolation you can have, guys, is that this movie may never make it over here, and may never make it to video, either, at least here.

This whole thing is amazing, since Gallo directed and starred in Buffalo '66, a very good movie with things happening in it.

Those are the four films I saw in L.A. 3 were good, 1 was atrocious.