Village of the Damned

John Carpenter's film that most resembles a Stephen King story (which is no coincidence considering King's Under the Dome book which has an opening almost identical to this film), VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is a totally weirdo film that is vitally weird. It opens with an introduction of the village people, typically (of Carpenter) intrusive and wonderfully direct. Thus, by the time a citywide epidemic that puts everyone to sleep for hours and impregnates a dozen or so of the town's women comes about, who everyone in town is and how they're going to react, is perfectly justified and sensible. Cynically-arrived government officials headed by Kirstie Alley's Dr. Susan Verner guide the townspeople through the sudden pregnancies, which all of the women go through with after consulting with their husbands, and ending with a tent of crying, screeching women giving birth as they clutch the hands of their husbands. Carpenter has an astounding flair for setting up townspeople as real people, and its a moving moment to watch a usually publicly paraded about event that ends in the private act of giving birth as a private act of quasi-rape ending in a publicly paraded about mass-birthing. Soon after the children become cognizant beings though, terrible things start to happen, and Alan Chaffee (Christopher Reeve), the town doctor and our protagonist in the film, experiences the horror himself when his wife jumps off a cliff near their house. The children grow up into hyper-intelligent, feared look-alikes with platinum hair and dialogue that feels like they've come from another planet, even though A. They have and B. They still grew up around "regular" humans. But the children become a weird force in the town, coming to be known as people who are not to be trifled with (even by their parents). The rejection of this known evil essentially destroys the entire town and everyone in it, horrifically, with only a few who escape absolute destruction. It's a minor Carpenter film with some flaws, but it's a pretty good film because it commits to its vision of evil as something burgeoning out of a communal township, and ending in their eradication.

3/5 Stars

Friday

It's not really that FRIDAY is a film that employs every possible stereotype about black people with its storyline, or that it uses bad, speachifying statements on adversity within idiocy, or that everyone in the film is an idiot that makes FRIDAY a bad movie. Rather, it's the laziness that caused these secondary problems that is so pervasive. The film begins, oddly, with Ice Cube playing an unemployed black man who is still living with his idiot parents and bossy sister. He is unemployed (obviously?) because he stole from his last job and was fired on Thursday, which was his day off. Now it's Friday, and in his house and everyone gets ready and talk about nothing in particular, Ice Cube's character (as his name is not impressionable enough to remember) eats cereal, but with no milk. This leads to the only good joke in the film, where Ice Cube's stoner, drug dealer friend who is so odd that he could not possibly exist, tells Ice Cube that he doesn't have anything in his house that fits with anything else. "You got peanut butter but no jelly, crackers but no cheese, cereal but no milk!" In the morning as Ice Cube looks over his cereal and complains to his parents even though he is still living in their house and eating up their food anyway, his father demands that he look for work, leaves for his job (a dogcatcher), returns after being bitten in the ass after being gone for 20 minutes, and sits around the house for the rest of the day. This is the kind of laziness that FRIDAY has, where, just to have him deliver a supposedly profound statement about adversity later, he returns home after being at work for 20 minutes. Not only that, but he never questions Ice Cube about why he didn't look for work. Instead, Ice Cube and the stoner / dealer friend from earlier, laze about smoking weed and looking at weird people across the street. Again: laziness. This film has no plot. Nothing happens for a good hour, and then Ice Cube and the friend realize that they smoked so much weed, that the dealer from whom it came from expects his money's worth because the duo were supposed to sell the weed, not smoke it. For a movie that isn't about anything, you would think that FRIDAY could be slightly funny, but it is so mired in an alternate reality where things are odd and that means funny, that it is not only obnoxious and juvenile, but weird and obliquely offensive. Never does the film push it in your face that everyone is unemployed or a drug dealer or an idiot, but when you get an hour into it, that realization slowly occurs. Also, it's not like Ice Cube is some great exception to this, and any payoffs of laughter or plot occur so late in the film that any sane or sober person would have walked out on this lazy farce to have seen them.
Friday: ★1/2

Get Shorty

Get Shorty is really not a great comedy, but it is a decent one. Perhaps its close parallel to the movie industry is what gained it such praise, and perhaps if I came from or had experienced actual strife within movie production, the film would have meant more. But Get Shorty without knowledge of such things stands alone as a pretty good comedy. It follows a stoic and one-look John Travolta as an ex-loan shark named Chili Palmer. Chili has enjoyed his time as a loan shark and has been able to accumulate some tough-guy attitudes, but his heart really lies with the movies. He knows every last bit to Touch of Evil and makes it clear that he loves movies perhaps too often. He plays around with pretty much everyone else in the film including Danny DeVito as a popular movie star, Gene Hackman as a director/producer of schlock who tries to get some money off of Chili, a loser from the loan shark days, a loser who got lucky, a sensitive bodyguard, and a floozy. So perhaps Get Shorty's greatest strength is also its weakness. For, the architectural plot also undermines some of the scenes. We always feel like we're speeding somewhere in Get Shorty, and then some of the payoffs pass by without us noticing. This is to the film's detriment, but also the idiocy of the characters against a complicated plot ends up making for a quite funny film. And that's really all we ask out of a comedy: for it to be funny. Get Shorty has some quite hilarious moments in it as well. It's a solid comedy.
Get Shorty: ★★★