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Cool Stuff About Business and Entertainment in the Greater Harrisburg, PA Area. |
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Cool Stuff About Business and Entertainment in the Greater Harrisburg, PA Area. |
| B-Movies and Couch Classics by Arik Ben Treston eXistenZ While this film didn’t scare me, it sure made me nauseous at times. This twist of virtual-reality centers on Alegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a whiz computer programmer who has just finished her masterpiece, eXistenZ, a mindbending ride of a game where you plug in, turn on, and tune out. These games are housed in near-living pouches that burble and quiver. You need, of course, to have a port installed near the spine of your back to plug in. (This is where the queasiness starts.) Once you plug in the intestine-like cord, you are set for the trip to another place, where our reality ends, and eXistenZ begins. These V.R. games are so real that an anti-virtual reality group are out to stop people like Alegra from spreading these alternate and (to them) harmful games. Ted, (Jude Law, Gattaca) becomes an ersatz bodyguard to Alegra when these realists threaten to kill her. During their road-trip escape from the realists, Alegra and Ted decide to plug into eXistenZ, but first, Ted needs a port in his back. Being in the country and away from anyplace that can provide this service, they happen on Gas (Willem Defoe), a (what else) gas station attendant who agrees to give Ted an illegal port. From this point on, they plug into the game and we are never sure anymore where we are. Is it reality, is it the game, or is it Memorex? Watching the film, I really didn’t care much about it at all. I couldn’t care less what was happening to them but somewhere, deep down, I was intrigued by the premise. Cronenberg is a master of uneasy grotesqueness (remember the stainless steel gynecological tools from Dead Ringers?) and he knows what buttons to push to make us feel sick. Case in point, these game pouches are about the size of a cow’s liver, are organic in form, and can actually die if not treated right. There is a whole factory set up in crossbreeding frogs in order to harvest certain biological items for use in these devices. Real gross stuff. I didn’t finish the film thinking I liked it, but I also could not get it out of my mind. Though I wanted to turn it off in frustration many times, I couldn’t. Cronenberg has a knack for keeping the viewer mesmerized through the whole film, no matter what we may think of it. While not something I would watch again (The Matrix, with its similar reality bending conundrums, was much more exciting), I would still recommend this to those who want an experience that is out of the ordinary. Not horror, just horrific. Since we are (or at least, I am) on the
subject of the recent death of good scary movies (anyone see the
laughable Deep Blue Sea? Come on!), let’s look at The
Haunting 1999, Dreamworks, MM. While there are still a
few weeks until it hits video, a Halloween issue is a good place to talk The film, based on Shirley Jackson’s book, “Haunting of Hill House” (and not to be confused with the upcoming film, The House on Haunted Hill) involves three sleep deprived subjects: Taylor (Dogfight, Ransom); Wilson (Bottle Rocket, Co-Writer Rushmore); and Zeta Jones (Entrapment, Mask of Zorro.) They come together in this wild mansion to spend a few nights being studied by a doctor (Neeson) but they are unaware that he is really there to study the effects of fright and isolation. We are left studying the effects of boredom, with only mild concern for the characters. The movie never sets up a premise strong enough to buy into. The haunted house actually becomes less scary toward the end. The possibilities for a great fright movie were here, but the filmmakers blew it. If we stop going to see dreck like this, maybe we’ll get across the message that we want a decent story to go with all the great effects that Silicon Valley can produce. Is that too much to ask? Here are a couple of good, creepy, scary films (because Big Daddy won’t be out for another few days).
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I’ve
come to the point in my film-viewing life where it takes more than BOO!
to scare me. Decapitated heads just don’t make me queasy. Puss-ridden,
oozing holes through torsos don’t sicken me. Am I just getting
hardened or is Hollywood not trying hard enough to scare the Hell out of
us anymore? I’m not sure. Just when I think it’s the movies, along
comes eXistenZ, David (Crash, Naked Lunch, Dead
Ringers) Cronenberg’s latest gore-fest.
about it. The tagline for the film is “Some Houses Are Born Bad.”
Yeah, well so are some scripts. Oofah. This bad example of how to film a
cliché came to us from quickly-falling director Jan De Bont (Speed,
Twister, Speed 2). It reinforces the adage that if you don’t
have a good script, you won’t have a good film no matter how good your
actors (Liam Neeson, Lilly Taylor, Owen Wilson, and Catherine Zeta
Jones), or how great your movie looks with special effects and sets.
Ultimately, I suppose, we can’t put all the blame on the director.
Nowadays, big Hollywood productions have multiple writers, script
doctors, and everyone’s brother, each with their own idea. Each new
writer feels they have to change the entire script so it will seem
worthwhile having them on board and you end up with a muddled story that
cannot be saved.