Carrey, Zemeckis: Stay away from Christmas

I really want to get behind Disney's A Christmas Carol. Believe me I do.

I have been a Jim Carrey supporter long past the point where it was fashionable -- if it was ever fashionable -- and I have liked Robert Zemeckis' career directorial output as much as anyone. Plus, my wife and I have a special place in our hearts for Charles Dickens' classic tale. It was at a local staging of A Christmas Carol, five years ago next month, that we first met.

But history tells me to be cautious. Christmas and Jim Carrey and Christmas and Robert Zemeckis have been a toxic combination.

Let's take Carrey first. Still have the bad taste in your mouth after Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, directed by Ron Howard? I do, and that was nine years ago. It was loud, garish, malevolent and in all other ways crass. The Whos looked perverse, and Carrey as the Grinch was no better. That movie buckled under the weight of expanding outward to feature length from a short Dr. Seuss classic. It left few of us happy, and Carrey's over-the-top antics were one of the things ringing in our ears when we left the theater.

And speaking of the age-old difficulty of making movies out of extremely short stories, Zemeckis sapped all the joy out of Chris Van Allsburg's wonderful storybook The Polar Express five years ago. (That very same Christmas I met my wife, in fact -- I knew it all had to be interconnected somehow). Zemeckis did a pretty good job with the book's signature soft-focus look, the one I found so magical when reading this with the family when I was younger, but the filler plot was a total mess. Instead of the straightforward trip up to the North Pole from Van Allsburg's book, Zemeckis got obsessed with the train being constantly out of control, with the children aboard suspended in a constant state of mortal danger. Plus a dozen other set pieces designed only to plump up the running time. Not exactly how you want to feel during your family-oriented holiday fare. Then of course there was the most infamous element of this film, the fact that the not-quite-perfected motion-capture animation style (which has been a hallmark of every Zemeckis film since) left all the characters with dead eyes and jerky motions, most notably Tom Hanks appearing in about seven different roles.

My fear is that A Christmas Carol will represent the worst of both of these films.

The Polar Express vibe is the one that comes off more strongly from the trailer. What most people have seen of A Christmas Carol is the extended sequence in which Carrey's Ebenezer Scrooge is blasted into the air on the rocket-cone depicted in this poster. (The single-image declaration that this is not your father's Christmas Carol, I suppose.) The cone proceeds to disintegrate as Scrooge is about level with the moon, and he continues swimming/falling forward through the air, yelling out a supposed-to-be-hilarious "Humbug!" at the height of his arc. At some point in this whole affair he shrinks (?) to the size of a mouse and does a waterslide down some kind of pipe, which disgorges him on the slanted roof of a building. His momentum continues him onward through a line of icicles, which smash into his tiny face and torso as he slides downward, and he eventually lands in a sack being carried by a man on the street below. The last word we hear him emit is, again, "Humbug," but this time in the voice of Alvin or one of his chipmunks.

Huh?

Warning flags going up left and right. What the hell does this have to do with A Christmas Carol?

Obviously, Zemeckis is not in it for a straightforward retelling of A Christmas Carol. That I can appreciate. There have been no less than 27 stagings of the tale in cinematic history, all of them relatively straightforward. But the specific way in which Zemeckis plans to reimagine the story really reeks of all those out-of-control trains in A Polar Express. Not to mention the fact that Carrey plays at least four characters here, echoing Hanks' role in A Polar Express. If Zemeckis hasn't learned any lessons from where he went wrong there, it's going to be a long night on IMAX 3-D for a lot of people this weekend.

But if A Christmas Carol tanks, Carrey will have certainly played some role in it as well. I'm not sure I love the idea that he plays all three ghosts in addition to the main character -- and Bob Cratchett? And Bob Cratchett's wife? And Tiny Tim? And Jacob Marley? And Jacob Marley's chains? I'm not sure whose idea it was, but playing many roles probably made Carrey a lot more interested than if he were just playing Scrooge. To be sure, Scrooge would have given him ample opportunity to exercise his love of scenery chewing. With at least three other prominent roles in the film, will we feel as bludgeoned by his Jim Carrey-ness at the end of it all, as we did at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

However, now that it's officially Christmas season -- finish up that Halloween candy, because gingerbread is right around the corner -- I'd be a bit of a Grinch/Scrooge myself if I didn't try to end this post with a bit of hope. So here goes.

I have really loved Zemeckis' last two films that used his now-signature technique. Monster House (2006), which was produced by Zemeckis and directed by Gil Kenan, started me backpedaling on my doubts about the effectiveness of this motion-capture technology. It was a fun, unique summer movie for kids and adults alike. Then the following year, the Zemeckis-directed version of Beowulf drove my wow factor over the top. Watching that film in IMAX 3-D was nearly a religious experience -- rarely have I felt so surrounded and absorbed by the world a film was trying to create for me. This is not to say it's a perfect film, just that it is executed in a way that makes you feel, momentarily, like it is.

And Carrey? Well, I'd be lying if I said that Carrey was at his peak right now. Last year's Yes Man was quite the disappointment; the previous year's The Number 23, all the more so; 2005's Fun With Dick and Jane, somewhere in between those two. But the more germane subject here is what Carrey has done with outsized characters that we've enjoyed. He was wonderful in the vastly underrated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in a similarly Scrooge-like role. Most would agree that he gave a bravura performance as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. And don't forget that original role way back when that put him on our map -- Ace Ventura, one of the most over-the-top characters in film history. I remember I watched the original Pet Detective at least two and possibly three times on the same rental.

My wife and I won't see A Christmas Carol this weekend -- we've got a number of movies, most notably Paranormal State, still standing in front of it. Besides, I'm not in the Christmas spirit yet. I always think it's a mistake to release Christmas movies this many weeks before Thanksgiving.

But we will see it eventually, and I'd love for it to be good, just as a symbolic celebration of our five years together.

Prove me wrong, Carrey and Zemeckis. Prove me wrong.

A wonder stuck on one hit

Back in 2003, shortly after I first saw Donnie Darko, I was having a conversation about it with a friend. This was my second friend to show a slavish devotion to this one-of-a-kind film, the friend who introduced it to me being the first. Seeing that others were crazy about it as well helped deepen my appreciation of the cinematic discovery I'd just made.

The name of the director, Richard Kelly, came up, and I asked my friend what the deal was with him. Ordinary name, no previous credits that I was aware of. "I don't know," answered the friend, his voice rising at the end to indicate his own amazement. "He just came out of nowhere I guess."

And so I came to mythologize Richard Kelly as some kind of J.D. Salinger of filmmaking, a guy who had burst on the scene to present us this singular vision, then might just slink back into the shadows of seclusion. I cautiously dared to hope for an impressive follow-up to Donnie Darko, but I almost couldn't imagine Kelly producing anything else. It was like Donnie Darko was so mind-blowing that it could exist as the entirety of his career, and that would be enough. What else was there to say?

And maybe he should have stopped right there after all.

You see, Richard Kelly is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as the rest of us, and his subsequent career choices have each been painful reminders of that fact. The Box, his third directorial assignment, due out tomorrow, does not figure to change that.

But let's take things in chronological order.

1) Domino (2005, Tony Scott). The first time Kelly's name materialized in the credits after Donnie Darko was in this hyper-stylized assault on your senses, a truly vulgar creation designed to glamorize the life of Hollywood princess-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley). Tony Scott took his worst instincts and turned Kelly's script into a jittery, stroke-inducing strobe light of a movie, which fetishizes violence, cigarette smoking, and pop culture. I blame this turkey more on Scott than Kelly, but mostly because I have Kelly on a pedestal -- the bare bones of his script couldn't have been that good.

2) Southland Tales (2007, Richard Kelly). All the large-scale ideas that got smaller-scale execution in Donnie Darko get driven over the top here. A truly epic mess about a cross-section of truly idiotic characters in Los Angeles of the not-too-distant future, Southland Tales tackles nothing less than Big Brother, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, neo-Marxism, celebrity, alternative energy, drug abuse, the Iraq War, and time travel. Most bizarre is the cast of has-beens, featuring the likes of Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, John Laroquette, Wallace Shawn, Nora Dunn and Curtis Armstrong, with Seann William Scott, Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mandy Moore serving as the supposed A-listers of the group. It's as bad as it sounds, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it occasionally crosses into the territory of "so bad it's good." Will probably be a cult film at some point, but not the way Donnie Darko is considered a cult film.

3) The Box (2009, Richard Kelly). As this movie has not come out yet, I am left only to speculate. But let's just say the ads have not inspired me with very much confidence. The scenario -- "if you press this button, you will be given $1 million, and someone you don't know will die" -- almost sounds chilling. But the ads have inadvertently echoed the terminology of the Saw franchise, as Frank Langella (missing the left half of his face) says the words "Make your choice," echoing the command spoken by Tobin Bell's Jigsaw numerous times throughout that series. What's more, outside of Langella, it's not a very heavyweight cast -- Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have their time and place, but a Richard Kelly mind-tripper doesn't seem to be one of them. In fact, the cast is one of the main elements that undermined Southland Tales, though that wouldn't have been good even with a slate of Oscar winners. To give a couple more first impressions: The footage looks grainy and washed out, and the poster is as generic as can possibly be, befitting an anonymous thriller from the 1980s more than a potential masterpiece from a supposed wunderkind.

4) Other projects. Kelly's name is often heard in connection with Knowing, the Nicolas Cage vehicle that came out earlier this year. He was once attached as director (The Crow's Alex Proyas eventually did the deed), and he is listed as a screenwriter on the film some places, but not others. The confusion is just as well for my current thesis, since I actually liked Knowing. Then there are a couple other films he's produced through his production company, called Darko Entertainment, including World's Greatest Dad and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I liked the former and did not see the latter, but I thought the trailer for the latter looked absolutely terrible (a bachelor party gone horribly wrong -- ho hum). It's funny, in looking up Kelly's credits, I see he is also listed as an executive producer on a film I'm going to be seeing this afternoon, in an advanced screening, called Rogue's Gallery. My wife works for/with one of the other executive producers, which is how we're getting in.

Since there are really only three main films after Darko where Kelly's been credited with a significant contribution -- one of which has not even come out yet -- it may be both premature and unfair for me to go on record as disappointed in him. After all, The Box could just as easily give me those Darko chills again. I should know, from plenty of experience, that films are often much better or much worse than they appear in their ads.

So instead of specifically indicting Kelly, let me just say this: It ain't easy being a genius. You have to keep following up and following up and following up, and any future project that isn't viewed as improving on your body of work, inevitably detracts from it instead. Maybe Kelly will never again make anything nearly so good as Donnie Darko. Since I currently have the film ranked as my third-favorite of all time, I could hardly blame him for this.

Here's hoping that Richard Kelly can settle somewhere in the middle -- that he can stop monkeying around with bombastic, untranslatable visions, in a vein effort to duplicate Darko, and can just be satisfied making solidly crafted movies instead.

Before he was the director of Donnie Darko, Kelly was just a film student at USC, a guy with two short films to his credit. He was human like the rest of us, and can be so again.

Approved - psych!

Or it is "sike"? I don't know, it's stupid teen-speak anyway. But it fits here.

In the past, when people have asked to read my reviews, I have regretfully told them that they can't search the website by my name. So I offer them a ridiculous alternative way to find my reviews: I send them a list of all the films I have ever reviewed. Hey, I said it was ridiculous, and I usually only do this if it's someone I know well. But I figure, this way, they can choose which films they actually want to know my opinion about, rather than just giving them a handful of my greatest hits.

When I send this list, I invariably include the following qualification: that there are approximately 30 of these titles where my review no longer appears, or never appeared in the first place. As I may have mentioned before, some of my reviews have been replaced over the years if another writer thought they could better summarize the consensus opinion about the film, or if they just really wanted to review that film. And then there were a handful of times when two writers received approval on the same film at about the same time. I figure I ought to tell my prospective readers this, in case the first title they choose happens to be one of those 30. Don't want them to think I'm delusional, especially since I've just sent them a list containing 1,000 movie titles.

Well, now I have another one to add to that list.

Last Thursday I submitted a review of Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer. I had gotten approval to review it the day before. It was accepted, processed and billed, since Thursday was the last day of the billing period.

Yet when I went to look for it on the site, I found the work of another reviewer appearing instead of mine.

I don't really know what happened. Actually, I had been kind of surprised that the film was still available to review in the first place. Even if the full-time staffers weren't reviewing almost every new release in real-time these days, this would still be a movie that would draw special attention because of its hip cast and narrative structure. Bewildered, I decided to request the review for myself, and was granted permission.

One of three things probably happened:

1) The woman who ended up reviewing it -- who was the logical person to review it, given her history -- had had it assigned to her all along, but hadn't gotten around to reviewing it until this past week. Approving it for me was, then, a mistake on my editor's part.

2) The review was written back in July when the film first came out, but due to some kind of glitch, it never posted. Seeing a new review by me made someone realize the oversight. Approving it for me was, again, a mistake on my editor's part.

3) I was legitimately approved to review it, but when they saw my somewhat negative review, they hurriedly got her to write up something that would more accurately reflect the 4.5 star rating they had given the film.

It doesn't really matter, because I get paid either way. Not like the time I wrote a review for the documentary American Teen, then realized I had not actually been approved to review it, and that another writer's work was already up on the site. I didn't even submit it in that case.

But it's probably just as well. I did, indeed, like (500) Days of Summer less than the average person. And for a website that makes its money selling content to sites that are trying to move DVDs, it's problematic when you have a lower-than-average opinion about a movie most people consider to be quite good.

So if you saw my Most Recently Reviewed section to the right, and were biding your time to read my review of (500) Days of Summer, now you'll understand why you won't see my work on the site. This is only, of course, for people who actually know me, and actually know the correct website to visit.

Hey, gotta have my qualifications. Especially since I am now making my day-to-day movie activities so public on this website. I don't want you to think I'm delusional -- or more delusional than you already think I am.

And since it will never appear on the site, I thought I would publish my review of (500) Days of Summer here, for your edification. Let's see if you agree or disagree with my perspective:

(500) Days of Summer has a hip cast, hip structure, hip songs, unhip songs reinvented as hip songs, and even hip titular punctuation, which shows a hip disregard for convention. None of this, however, can help Marc Webb's film linger in a viewer's memory. One basic problem is that the ipod shuffle narrative -- scenes from the relationship between Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are shown out of chronological order -- can't rise above the level of clever gimmick. Committing the same sin Alejandro Gonazalez Inarritu committed in 21 Grams, Webb doesn't offer a compelling reason why viewing these events out of sequence contributes to our understanding of them. It's as random a decision as why we're given their relationship to study in the first place, since the details of their life together are unremarkable, and it's established in the opening moments that things don't work out for them. What's more, both characters are a little frustrating. Summer is presented as whimsical yet capricious, Tom as a doting walkover. Surely, Webb's going for a non-traditional love story here; in fact, in the opening narration, the film actually declares that it isn't a love story. Some details do stand out, such as when Webb presents two versions of the same events side by side on the screen -- one as Tom wishes they would unfold, one as they actually do, with only slight yet telling differences. There's also a delightful musical number where Tom and a cast of dozens kick up their heels to Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams," one of the aforementioned unhip songs turned hip. In all, though, (500) Days of Summer doesn't feel as original or as different as it clearly aspires to be. The result is a pleasing enough viewing experience with minimal staying power.

Okay, I didn't exactly punch the movie in the gut. But it's no 4.5 star review. And I wouldn't buy the DVD on my recommendation, would you?

Animation indiscrimination

Why did I see Astro Boy on Sunday?

I was asking myself that question even when it was Sunday, when I was sitting in the darkened theater waiting for the movie to start. I had this itching sensation that I didn't really want to be there. I was seeing this movie out of some rote diligence to a principle in my head, a principle that states that animated movies must be seen on the big screen in order to soak in the fullness of their grandeur.

I felt even less enthused when a line full of six boys came in and plopped themselves down next to me, in that spasmodic way that spills them over into your personal space. I'd selected my seat -- on the far left of the first raised row, the one with the bar in front of you -- for its relative isolation, especially in a theater that was only a third full. I never imagined that I'd be sitting not only close to, but directly next to, an eight-year-old boy. Yet there he and his friends were. I should add that they were completely commendable audients, with the notable exception of this one random moment when one kid stood up on his seat and yelled something to his mother, two rows back. But that incident was over pretty quickly.

The fact of sitting next to the boys was not, in itself, anything more than a colorful environmental detail that sounds sort of funny in the re-telling. I didn't question why I was at Astro Boy because I thought it made me look like some kind of predator, a 36-year-old man attending a 2:35 Sunday afternoon screening and sitting next to a line of six boys. (Hey, I was sitting there first!)

No, I questioned attending Astro Boy because I didn't have any specific reason to think I would like it. I had only a sense that its anime-influenced computer animation looked pretty polished, and that the character design seemed reasonably good. I didn't have any idea about the pedigree of the writers, the history of Astro Boy as a Japanese entertainment property, or even which studio was releasing it.

Yep. Animation indiscrimination, pure and simple.

And I should have known better. In my piece ranking Pixar's ten films earlier this year -- in which the most recent three occupied slots 7 through 9 -- I came face to face with the realization that animated films weren't casting the magical spell over me that they once did.

So what do I go and do? Yep, I see 9, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and now Astro Boy in the theater. An attempt at a market correction.

In fact, that makes a total of six 2009 animated films that I've seen in the theater, ranked as follows:

1. Monsters vs. Aliens
2. Coraline
3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
4. Up
5. 9
6. Astro Boy

So I guess you could say my viewing of Cloudy did have the intended effect, to some degree. At least I liked it better than Up, and yes, I do expect to be cast out of the Pixar fan club after admitting that. Yet its overall ranking out of the 53 films I've seen this year is not very high, somewhere around 23. This from the guy who once regularly ranked his favorite animated film in his top ten each year -- and currently has two animated films ranked in his top ten all time (see sidebar), with Toy Story ranked at #1. (Monsters vs. Aliens currently stands at #15 this year, but will probably be pushed significantly downward by the cavalcade of high-profile releases coming out between now and late December.)

As I was waiting for Astro Boy to start, it occurred to me how perfunctory this trip to the theater was. And as I watched the trailer for Planet 51, due out in a couple weeks, I wondered if I'd be back here for that, maybe in this very seat, wondering the same thing:

What am I doing here?

Astro Boy was not terrible. It had its moments. It had its cool robots (along with its stupid ones), and its cool action set pieces (along with the ones that seemed too intense for kids -- but more on that in a moment). But it's the first animated movie in a long time that I would actually give a thumbs down. I hemmed and hawed about it as I was leaving the theater, but by the time I got home, I put my foot down. Go with your convictions, Vance. Thumbs down.

I guess I didn't want to be reminded of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence that many times when watching a kids movie. For starters (spoiler alert!), the Astro Boy of the title is a robot, not a flesh-and-blood human. You probably knew that already. But what you might not know is that he's a robot designed to look like the son of his inventor, who gets vaporized when trapped inside a military experiment gone wrong. That's right, you meet Toby, the model for the eventual Astro Boy, for about ten minutes at the beginning of the movie before he basically blows up, leaving only his baseball cap behind. I'm not saying you see chunks of little kid raining from the sky, but the fact remains -- this little boy gets killed at the start of the movie. Heavy, and not in a good way.

What follows is a dreadfully formulaic story of the robot simulacrum getting cast out by its creator (and how mean is that, character voiced by Nicolas Cage?), then trying to find his way in the world in the hopes of eventually trying to win back the love of his "father." Along the way Astro Boy meets a handful of precocious kids (who are being looked after by a Fagin-like character, in the umpteenth Oliver Twist reference I've seen in a film recently), and crosses paths with a bunch of British-accented robots who belong to the RRF (Robot Revolutionary Front). Booo-ring. Didn't really want to be reminded of 2005's Robots while watching this, either. Another thing we tend to count on in animated movies, in addition to the visuals: that the script will be good. But the dialogue was almost totally without cleverness, the story irredeemably trite.

And the visuals themselves? Those have to be the saving grace, the trump-all, the real reason I decided to buy a ticket -- right?

Good but not great. A little washed out.

Maybe I'll wait for video on Planet 51.

Not so prudish after all

A couple weeks back I wrote a piece about Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, the pretentious piece of experimental art that features a graphic oral sex scene -- a scene designed merely to shock viewers into talking about Gallo's film at the water cooler.

In that piece I also mentioned that this two-minute segment of pure pornography disqualified the film from being carried by Blockbuster. (At the time I said that Netflix also did not carry it, but later realized I had mistakenly lumped Netflix' morals in with Blockbuster's morals.)

Blockbuster has long been considered kind of the Wal-Mart of rental companies, in more ways than one. Wal-Mart, of course, is famous for trying to protect its customers from what the company considers morally dangerous segments of popular culture -- most prominently in the form of refusing to carry the works of certain rappers and other edgy musicians. Blockbuster is not nearly so extreme nor so public about its censorship, but it does keep a wide berth of films like The Brown Bunny.

I'm pleased to say, however, that Blockbuster -- the company I've sided with for a variety of reasons that I've cited several times before -- is not quite so grandmotherly as we might have thought.

This weekend I received in the mail a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, the infamous cult film from 1978, which features a brutal gang rape, and then the brutal retribution carried out by the victim. In that same Brown Bunny piece I discussed how Roger Ebert had given this film zero stars, which is what put it on my radar back in the 1980s. Writing about the film a few weeks back put it on my radar again, and I received it on Friday.

I saved watching it until my wife was out of the house. She wouldn't have judged me for watching it any more than she would have judged me for watching The Brown Bunny. Still, there's something about watching a movie you know is famous for a brutal gang rape that feels a bit icky. Best done in the privacy of a single-person viewing, and without going out of one's way to advertise that you actually watched it. Which is why, you know, I'm writing a piece about it on my blog. This is like my super-public confessional, and you all are my priests.

As with The Brown Bunny, I had no prurient interest here -- I just wanted to see what all the fuss was with an infamous film that was likely to shock me. It would make up for all the other times I'm not shocked in the slightest, during hours and hours of middle-of-the-road fare.

As I was preparing to watch it, I was also preparing for it to be a seriously neutered version of the original film. After all, this is not what Blockbuster usually endorses. Although I Spit on Your Grave has the alternate title Day of the Woman, critics at the time -- Roger Ebert in particular -- did not consider this anything close to a feminist film. Even if the main character draws out her revenge against the men who raped her, taunting and teasing them before finally killing them in the most gruesome ways imaginable, there's still the inescapable fact that she gets her clothes torn off, gets sodomized against a rock, and has a bottle jammed inside her. Some of this is suggested -- some of it isn't.

Yet I saw it all. There was no evidence of a clean, Blockbuster-friendly version here. If there were images removed from this film, I don't know which ones they could have been. Anything more than I saw here would have prevented this from getting a theatrical release, even in the more-permissive 1970s. There was full frontal nudity from both genders, and stomach-churning violence intermingled with it. In fact, during the aforementioned scene against the rock, Camille Keaton's shrieks were so loud and horrifying, I had to hurriedly close the windows and turn down the volume so the neighbors wouldn't think I was watching a snuff film. (Part of the reason the film was so controversial at the time, I think, was that Camille Keaton is Buster Keaton's grand-niece.)

And in the end, I think Ebert was a bit extreme with his zero stars. The movie is not super long on plot -- it basically consists of four upstate New York hillbillies catching the woman, raping her in three different locations, and then being picked off by her one by one several weeks later. But it's actually done with a decent amount of artistry -- shot well, edited well, and paced in a way to draw out the agony, but not for sadistic purposes. It seems like director Meir Zarchi's intention is to make the viewer really identify with the horrors experienced by a rape victim, to spell out exactly how brutal and terrifying non-consensual sex really is.

I actually do think there's something feminist here. I understand that merely putting these images into the world is in some way harmful toward women, but there's no ambiguity here about who is evil and who is righteous. And as Keaton's character goes through and delivers these men their just desserts, it's exquisitely satisfying. The film takes on the form of social critique in its portrayal of the men, several of whom lower their guard in her presence because they innately believe that she's truly back to seduce them, rather than exact revenge on them. The men seem to think that rape victims are "asking for it" to such a degree, that a few sultry words spoken in deceit by her are enough to convince them she's insatiable, back for more. It's so extreme that Zarchi's only intention can really be to point out just how morally bankrupt these men are, how programmed to view women as objects they can bend to their will, to the extent that it blinds them to threats to their safety.

The interesting thing about I Spit on Your Grave is that it exists simultaneously as exploitation and feminism. Either way, it's not something a person is likely to forget anytime soon.

And I have the surprisingly permissive standards of Blockbuster to thank for giving me the full, unfettered experience. What I found even more interesting is that Blockbuster listed the film with a slightly altered title -- like many cult classics, I Spit on Your Grave seems to have several different titles depending on various re-releases, in addition to its alternate title Day of the Woman. Blockbuster actually listed the film as I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave, and at first I was wondering if I would actually get the version of the film I was supposed to get. Not only am I sure I did, but the two new words in that title -- "piss" and "corpse" -- are both words that a skittish company like Blockbuster would usually try to steer clear of. Yet they went out of their way to include these words in a title which, when listed in its more standard version, has only the less-sensitive words "spit" and "grave" in it. That might have been more shocking than anything I actually saw in the movie.

Now if Wal-Mart is the next company to surprise me, then I'll really be shocked.

Diluting Halloween

I must not have much of a social life, because for the last five Halloween nights, I've been home watching a scary movie. Or at least a movie that was trying to be scary.

Up until this year, I have had a decent excuse. The previous four Halloweens fell on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. And yeah, you might go out for Halloween on a Friday night, but not if you're old, like my wife and I are. In fact, people less old than we are would go out any night of the week, and damn the consequences.

This year? Well, the Halloween party we usually attend was held on the previous Saturday, and my wife is in the midst of a really (I mean really) busy time. We did stop briefly by the Halloween bash being thrown by our next-door neighbors, which included karaoke, people who had flown in just for the occasion, and nearly 100% participation in wearing costumes. But we stayed for only 10 minutes, so I hardly think that counts. Besides, we had to get back to watch ... another scary movie.

And because those previous Halloweens all fell on weekdays, I'd seen nothing but scary movies on Halloween since that 2005 starting point of the current five-year streak/tradition. (I started keeping track of the dates I'd seen movies in 2002, but didn't watch anything on Halloween in 2002, 2003 and 2004). By that I mean none of them were days when I realistically could have gotten two movies in, since I was working. I guess the notable exception there was 2006, when Halloween was my last day of freedom before starting my current job. I did watch a second movie that day, and while it doesn't quite qualify as a horror, it is pretty damn grisly -- the craptacular Caligula, which includes gruesome disembowelments and plenty of other violence. So I count that as sticking with the theme.

This Halloween was a Saturday, which meant I had a full day open for potentially watching movies. Errands? Around-the-house projects? P'shaw. (Actually, I did get my hair cut). And my wife was out all day with one of those many things that are keeping her very busy. Even more of an opportunity for a mini-marathon.

So I diluted my Halloween horror streak about as blatantly as I could, watching a romantic dramedy about a highly mischievous dog: Marley & Me.

I actually had a handful of choices in the scary movie category. I'd borrowed both Poltergeist and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a 1971 horror I knew nothing about except the title, from the library. But I didn't know which one we might watch that night, and besides, I started watching Marley & Me with my morning coffee. Horror before 9 a.m. just isn't that scary.

So sometimes I just like to let the choices come to me randomly, to cherry-pick them off the selections available OnDemand. When I saw Marley & Me, I knew that was probably going to be the choice. I like both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, and had read an A- review of it in Entertainment Weekly when it came out last December. So Marley & Me it was.

Since that was all I really wanted to write about today -- the not-as-interesting-as-I've-made-it-out-to-be "irony" of watching Marley & Me on Halloween -- I might as well make a short story even longer by giving you a quick rundown of the titles we've entrusted to scare us over the last five Halloweens.

2005: Saw (2004, James Wan). My love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the Saw series began on this date four years ago, my last Halloween that I lived alone. Perhaps it was being alone in the house that made this one creepier than it would have ordinarily been. After all, some of my friends left the theater laughing after Saw. But it worked for me, and got me excited enough about these films' potential for squirmy gore that I saw the execrable Saw II in the theater less than two weeks later.

2006: The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexandre Aja). Aja's High Tension has one of the most bogus endings you will ever seen in a movie, but up until that point, it was pretty freaking great, so I was interested to see what he could do with the Hills Have Eyes remake. (Despite not having seen the original.) I lived with my wife/then-girlfriend by this point, and she was okay with it too. Invigorating technique and some exquisitely graphic and disturbing scenes, but weird structure: Instead of killing off the innocents one by one throughout the movie, the ones that die are killed off within a ten-minute period in the middle of the movie.

2007: Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro). Pan's Labyrinth had whetted our appetite for del Toro's earlier work, and we'd heard this one was creepy. I honestly don't remember it that well, but his interest in bugs -- seen a few years later in Mimic, then regularly in the rest of his work -- was already present here. It was macabre and squirmy enough to do the trick on Halloween.

2008: One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette). For the first time in this tradition, we did not prepare by renting something, so we let OnDemand dictate what we might watch. Bad move. One Missed Call came up massively short of the standards set by its predecessors, failing even to be as good as most bad Hollywood knock-offs of Japanese horrors that probably weren't as good as they were hyped to be in the first place. Please, I don't want to laugh on Halloween. I've got to learn not to let a good poster (featuring a ghostly face with two screaming mouths for eyes) hold undue sway over my better judgment.

2009: Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John Hancock). Ah, the 1970s. Back then they really knew how to creep you out -- no sophisticated gore effects necessary. I'm surprised I'd never heard anything about this film, since it absolutely gave me the willies for almost the full running time. A mentally disturbed woman, her husband and one of their friends leave the city for the countryside in order to try to clear her head, but end up in a mansion that's known to locals as the potentially haunted home of a woman who drowned in the lake behind the house in the late 19th century. Hancock does more with a vacant look, a whispered voice and an eerie soundtrack than all the buckets of blood and startle scares used by hacks in the last 20 years of horror filmmaking. Highly recommended. An additional testament to the film -- even the fact that karaoke was blasting through our closed windows didn't break the mood. (On a side note, we were referring to it as Let's Make Jenny Scared all night because that's the title my wife absorbed from a quick glance at the DVD cover.)

Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.

Jumping the gun

Up until two days ago, I had never heard of a movie with the ungainly title Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief. It's based on the first in a popular series of books by a gentleman named Rick Riordan, and it's directed by a gentleman named Chris Columbus. It also has a lot of well-known names in the cast: Uma Thurman, Pierce Brosnan, Rosario Dawson, Catherine Keener and Steve Coogan.

The fact that I wasn't aware of it isn't so unusual. After all, with everything that exists out there, there's an exact moment when you become aware of it, before which, you were not aware of it.

What's unusual is that it's coming out in February, and that the first place I ever heard of it was from a poster at a bus stop.

That's right -- movies coming out in February are now being advertised at bus stops in October. Coming out on President's Day, to be exact, which is what caught my eye as I was driving by. (Probably not exactly on President's Day, since movies only come out on a Monday if Christmas falls on a Monday, but that's what the poster said.)

That might not strike you as very strange. Trailers play in theaters sometimes as long as a year before a film is released, though we would more appropriately call those teasers rather than trailers. The Super Bowl frequently has ads for movies that aren't due out until August. And you sometimes see billboards hyping a film three, four months in advance. We never bat an eye at any of these. The earlier and more often you can get your product name out there, the better chance you have of raising awareness and lining yourself up for a big opening weekend. (To a point -- you also want to be careful about overkill, which can have the opposite economic effect).

But bus stops? Bus stops have usually been the site for more immediate concerns, for films coming out in the next month. If Percy Jackson were being advertised everywhere else, and also at bus stops, then that would just be a full-on media blitz, and I would understand it better. But I've seen nary a trailer, billboard nor TV ad for this film, and I tend to be more exposed to this stuff than the average person.

The actual location of the ad is not what strikes me as oddest, however, nor the exact number of months ahead of its release. It's which months those are, and how many other films are being released during that time. You've still got four major holidays to get through before then -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. You can also throw in Martin Luther King's birthday if you want another potential three-day weekend, which is when studios think they'll have a better chance at grabbing your disposable income.

Seeing the words "President's Day" on a movie poster right now creates some kind of mental disconnect. "President's Day?" you think. "Is that a mistake?" Or at least, that's what I thought.

Right now, even the Christmas releases don't have that much of an advertising presence. How many ads have you seen for Avatar, for example? The trailer plays in theaters, but there are few billboards up. No, right now, they're concentrating on Thanksgiving, on Old Dogs and Twilight: New Moon. The real Christmas blitz probably won't begin for a week or two.

And then there's also the idea of crossing that magical border into the year 2010. Part of the reason that's strange is that we typically don't think of movies coming out in the first few months of a calendar year as being very hype-worthy. It's true that big-budget releases are now starting to come out year-round, just as the TV networks can no longer really take the summer off. I'm already aware of two movies coming out in January 2010 that seem like they have massive budgets, which in the past would have meant they'd be released closer to the summer: Legion and The Book of Eli.

But making us think of next February, now, has the effect of hurrying us along through all we have to do in the next couple months -- the Halloween costumes we have to make, the Thanksgiving logistics we have to coordinate, the Christmas presents we have to buy, the New Year's plans we have to schedule.

After all that's done, then let us worry about Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

I don't know, maybe it's just me.

My first gala premiere

A couple years ago I experienced the twisted joy of getting to review Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints, a truly wretched piece of filmmaking made all the more so by the circumstances of its origins.

Duffy was a Boston-born bartender/wannabe screenwriter living in Los Angeles -- and thanks, Troy, for giving Bostonians such a vicarious bad name. His script for The Boondock Saints, a crime movie about scripture-spouting Irish vigilante killers on a spree in Boston, found the right audience and won him a huge deal from Harvey Weinstein, who also agreed to help him buy the bar where he worked and become its co-owner. As he also bore ambitions as a musician and was planning to record the film's soundtrack, Duffy quickly became totally impossible to deal with, telling various execs to shove it and making ridiculous demands like "Get me Bob DeNiro!" Before long he had totally torpedoed his own career, and the completed version of The Boondock Saints screened in only five theaters, even though it featured a handful of recognizable names (Sean Patrick Flanery, Billy Connolly, Willem Defoe). The whole nasty and protracted implosion was captured in a great documentary called Overnight, which was made by some of Duffy's former friends whose good will Duffy poisoned in the process of becoming a fascist dictator.

That should have been the end of that, but the legend of the film became so great that it developed a cult following on DVD. (Ironically, the film intended to bury Duffy -- Overnight -- probably contributed.) By hook or by crook, somehow, the giant turd Duffy shat out nine years ago was permitted to have a sequel.

Which directly led to my first gala premiere on Wednesday night.

About a week ago my editor asked me if I wanted to attend the Los Angeles premiere of The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, to write a review that would appear on the site's front page this Friday. Of course my answer was yes. Even though these reviews of new releases require a lot more words for the same fee, volume has never been a problem for me (you read my blog, you know), and these are some of the rare times when the company actually gives me an assignment -- the rest of the time I am simply requesting films to review and being approved to review them. Plus, it's kind of fun to go to these screenings, which usually involve small screening rooms in obscure skyscrapers scattered all over the greater Hollywood area.

Not this time. This time, I was being invited to "the Los Angeles premiere," which probably was also pretty close to the world premiere. Duffy probably had a screening in Boston before this, so this would probably be #2. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were no actual critic screening scheduled, since studios sometimes fail to screen movies prior to their release if they fear they have a turkey on their hands. Better no word of mouth on opening weekend than bad word of mouth. Then again, in the case of The Boondock Saints, isn't bad word of mouth part of the appeal? Still, if there had been a screening for critics, that's probably what I would have been invited to.

Instead, it was a red carpet affair at The Arclight in Hollywood, one of LA's most prestigious theaters.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I reluctantly pulled away from the World Series at about 6:20, somewhere in the fourth inning. The screening was scheduled for 7:30, so this should have been plenty of time to get there. And for the first half of the drive it seemed like it was, as I made good time on both freeways. But as I started to get stuck behind the dozens of traffic lights on La Brea Avenue, I was pretty glad I'd left when I did, and no longer expected to have much time to kill. I might sit and listen to a couple more batters on the radio, but that would be it.

Of course, when I made a left turn rather than a right turn on Sunset, that pretty much eliminated any margin I may have had. And a bit of panic set in.

You see, even having written over 1,000 reviews for this website, dating back to the year 2000, I still have a paranoia that any slip-up will cause them to rethink using me as a freelancer -- especially in this economy, when freelance dollars are tight. In fact, only earlier this week, when I was signing a new freelance agreement with the new parent company, it took great courage to summon the will to ask them for a $5 raise per review. My standard thinking on the subject is that if I ask for a raise, not only will they reject me, but they will decide they can do without my future contributions, thank you very much. Fortunately, my editor made an extremely nice comment about my work only a day before that, so I gave it a shot. Predictably, they told me that no raises are possible within a freelance budget that's already been scaled back. But at least they were very nice about it.

So missing a screening -- one of the few times I'm doing specific work that they've requested of me -- is just out of the question. At least that's what the paranoid Vance thinks.

So I come-on-come-on-come-on!'d my way down Sunset in the correct direction this time, figuring I'd lost at least five minutes, maybe more, on the mistake. As Murphy's Law states, the parking garage that serves The Arclight was also packed, forcing me all the way to the roof, where I've had to park only one time before. Plus, the duffers in the cars ahead of me had to stop at each level and ask the parking attendant some inane question, or examine the orange traffic cones blocking certain paths to see if they properly understood what these cones indicated.

When I finally secured a spot, I raced over to the elevator, which disgorged me on a ground level absolutely teeming with activity. If I weren't in my desperate "make the start time or bust" mindset, I would have instantly recognized this activity as stemming from the Boondock Saints premiere. I guess I wrongly assumed the hustle and bustle might have something to do with This Is It, the Michael Jackson documentary that was also opening today. So I pushed through these crowds and into the theater proper, at which point they directed me back outside, of course.

I didn't have much luck at the long table where five staffers were seated, each with placards reading things like A-F and L-O in front of them. Apparently, they were holding tickets only for special invited guests, not press like me. One of the women referred me to another woman named Sarah (I don't actually remember her name, but that was close enough) and pointed in the general direction where she expected Sarah to be. As there were a good 200 people out here, many of them gathered around the red carpet and brightly lit area where photographs were being taken, I laughed at the idea that I might be able to find one individual person named Sarah. So the woman described her as an Asian woman in a long jacket, and I found her on the red carpet itself.

It was kind of an absurd scene -- Sarah was involved in wrangling actual celebrities (I noticed Norman Reedus, one of the film's protagonists, with a beautiful woman on his arm), and here I was, a guy with wild hair, a slightly untacked dark green L.L. Bean shirt and khakis, trying to get her attention about a ticket held in my name. The funny thing is, I actually did get her attention without much difficulty, and she was actually rather nice. As is usually the case, however, she wasn't the correct person to talk to either, so she referred me back to the table. When I rejoined that they'd referred me to her, she said "Well then, just wait here for a second." When a second turned into a minute and she hadn't returned, I decided to give the long ticket table a second go-around.

This time I was referred to a guy named Paul (also not his name), who was standing much closer and didn't have anything to do with paparazzi or movie stars, at least not at this moment. He was described as the tall guy in the trenchcoat, and he turned out to be a priggish son of a bitch, though he did end up being the one holding the clipboard with my name on it. However, he wasn't going to admit me without some humiliation. "You're just getting here now?" he asked incredulously. "You've missed almost the whole red carpet." "And I'm very sorry about that," I said. "I had some traffic issues." He seemed to retract his judgmental stance toward me somewhat when I explained that I wasn't going to be interviewing anybody, only reviewing the film. But the attitude returned when I asked him if he had a press kit. "No, I don't, since press check-in is closed." Whatever, dude.

By now I knew this movie would not be starting at 7:30 -- it was already 7:32, and the stars were still having their pictures snapped -- but I was still in go-go-go mode, so I hustled into the theater as quickly as I could, leaving behind a scene that probably would have interested me under other circumstances. (Hey, I've been known to gawk from time to time, and Dexter's Julie Benz (Rita) is in this movie.) When they'd torn my ticket, I noticed that there were free sodas and small popcorns set up in rows outside the theater. Which was good, because I was wondering if I would survive the whole night on the boil-in-bag Indian dish I'd scarfed down before leaving the house.

The theater was less than half full, with those standard papers taped to the best seats, reading "Reserved," and in some cases the name of the person for whom they were reserved. I had to empty my bladder, and by this point realized it was something I could probably chance. I nonetheless asked the two female ushers on my way out if they had an estimated time for the start of the show. When they hemmed and hawed, I clarified that I needed to go to the bathroom, and they relaxed and told me I was fine on time.

Though I hate to do this, I brought my drink and popcorn in with me. There was no good waist-high surface on which to rest them, where I could also keep an eye on them, so I rested them on the floor. Ugh. At least the bathroom was immaculate.

Returning to the theater, I decided I had time to grab a couple salt packets for my popcorn. Standing next to me at the salt was legendary porn star Ron Jeremy. How perfect.

Of course it was still a full half-hour before the film actually started. People were milling about like milling about was going out of style. I caught glimpses of a few of the actors I'd been expecting see, including Billy Connolly and Clifton Collins Jr. In fact, I nodded at Clifton Collins Jr. on my way back from the bathroom, when I remembered to go up and get my parking validated. He didn't return the gesture, apparently considering a polite nod to be the early stages of stalking.

I grew bored very quickly and was on my blackberry in no time. Part of me was interested in spotting other celebrities, especially since the people around me were busy pointing them out. I tried really hard to see where Peter Fonda was, for example, but never spotted him, even though the guy behind me had described to his friend what Fonda was wearing. I posted a couple status updates about what was going on, and checked ESPN, glad to see the Phillies leading 4-0 in the 8th.

In fact, I started to get a little agitated by the conversations around me, as each snippet I could hear seemed to be somebody talking about some accomplishment they had made in the film industry. It really made me miss watching movies with normal people. In that moment I felt a real kinship with other critics, actually. Stereotypically, the critic is the slightly awkward shlub dressed in clothing that doesn't quite fit him right, and that's exactly how I felt tonight, two days unshaven (but not in a fashionable way), too-long hair windblown by the Santa Anas, and a wardrobe that wasn't the least bit flashy. Meanwhile, women with too much makeup and cleavage were all around me, not to mention uber-hip guys with perfect bedhead. I felt like I spoke for the common man in all of us, just sitting there in what I'd worn to work that day.

By about 8 o'clock, the master of ceremonies (whoever he may have been) asked everyone to be seated, and handed the microphone over to Troy Duffy himself. Although Duffy kicked into at least ten minutes of thank yous, he was actually not as insufferable as I thought he'd be. He had a friendly crowd of fans and associates -- though I noticed the theater was not actually full -- and they seemed to eat up what he was saying. (Including one line when he thanked his wife, who appeared as just a blur of boobs and makeup from where I was sitting, and told the crowd that yes, he was "hitting that.") And even though he wasn't, as I said, particularly insufferable, I did refuse to applaud each and every cast and crew member he introduced, and sat on my hands especially hard when the audience gave one particular guy (I think it was his producer) a standing O. I do feel a little unusual not clapping along with everyone else -- I usually default to what everyone else is doing -- but I excused myself on the basis of my critical impartiality. Not to mention the fact that I saw The Boondock Saints, I saw Overnight, I know Troy Duffy sucks as both a filmmaker and a human being, and he'd have to do a lot to win me over.

And surprisingly, he sort of did.

Oh, I started with my arms crossed, and shook my head imperceptibly a couple times during the film's opening ten minutes. Those ten minutes were as bad as any ten-minute stretch of the original. But the film found its footing as it went along. I'm not going to say it's, you know, a good film -- it's still a guilty pleasure at best. But I did find myself laughing at some pretty funny lines. And the most encouraging thing was that Duffy didn't take himself so seriously as he had nearly a decade ago when he made The Boondock Saints. There was plenty of winning self-parody embedded into the movie, even while there was also plenty of John Woo gunplay and labored attempts at seeming cool. Still, the movie worked for me.

I told my wife before leaving the house that I hoped it would be bad -- that I was so negatively disposed toward Troy Duffy that I wanted this film to continue his trajectory downward, perhaps with increasing speed. In fact, I hated The Boondock Saints so much, I was appalled that he had somehow transformed it into a success story, something that could spawn a sequel.

Yet I couldn't deny that I liked it. Liked it? Yes, that's an appropriate description to use. I liked The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. There, I said it. Can't take it back now. In fact, not only did I write the review when I got home -- a necessity of my deadline -- but I also tweaked it for at least an hour after I'd gotten a version that would have worked perfectly fine. A minor miracle, to be sure.

Now, will my newfound tolerance of Troy Duffy cause me to revisit The Boondock Saints?

That's one miracle I wouldn't wait on.

A good alternative to nothing

It was blowy as hell in my neighborhood last night, and we lost power from around 7:30 until the time I went to sleep. It was the second outage in three weeks, the last one coming about 15 minutes earlier in the evening. But that one lasted only a half-hour, and occurred early enough that it didn't endanger any of our scheduled DVR recordings for the evening. Last night was a different story -- good thing Tuesday nights are a pretty light TV night for us.

When it became clear that this was not going to be a momentary power flicker, the next thing that became clear was that I don't know what the hell to do with myself during a power outage.

Like most people would have been doing, I was technologically multi-tasking at the time of the blackout. I had my laptop in my lap and a basketball game on in the background. Actually, the game I cared about -- the opening night matchup between the Cleveland Cavaliers and my Boston Celtics -- had been over for about ten minutes. But because I was engrossed in my laptop projects, I was willingly subjecting myself to the Lakers being presented their NBA championship trophy. I know, crazy.

When the power cut, and once we'd done the necessary things like finding our flashlights and lighting a dozen candles, I was then so lost for ideas of what to do that I literally lay on the couch staring at the ceiling for five minutes.

Have we fallen this far? Is our dependence on technology so great that we no longer know how to pass an evening without it?

We gave the power about a half-hour to come on before we decided I should forge ahead with making dinner. It was a pretty easy one -- carne asada fried up in a frying pan, one of our standards, and a Greek salad I'd gotten from the salad bar at the fancy Ralphs. I know, carne asada and Greek salad don't go together.

We ate by candlelight -- it was nice -- and then had a whole evening in the dark ahead of us.

We had tossed around the idea of playing Scrabble. Board games were how we passed the time during power outages when I was a kid. But we didn't discuss it too seriously. Now that my wife and I play Lexulous against each other online, we've lost some of our verve for the actual physical version of the game. In fact, I've gotten so much more accustomed to Lexulous than Scrabble that I think I would be confused about having only seven letters rather than eight, and the Q being 10 points instead of 12. Another way technology has defeated our ability (or desire) to do for ourselves.

And so it was that we decided to watch a movie on my portable DVD player.

I should be honest and tell you that this was one of the first ideas that came to me as soon as the lights went out. You know by now that I'm always looking for my next score, and I knew I had a freshly charged battery on my DVD player, a consequence of failing to make it to the gym last Friday afternoon.

My wife agreed, and we popped in The Class, a 2008 French film about an ordinary teacher trying to get through to an unruly group of mostly lower class students in a French public school. To continue the discussion I started here, The Class is not its actual French title, which would literally be La Classe. Rather, in France the movie is called Entre les Murs, which my wife translated for me as Between the Walls. Why that couldn't have been its English title, I may never know.

Interesting film -- very French. While I was expecting a French Stand and Deliver with an inspirational ending, instead, the film is very ambiguous, and quite bleak. The protagonist is kind of a dick, and suffice it to say there is no moment when his efforts with the students bear fruit in some obvious way. I'm still processing, but I think I'm going to ultimately say that I really liked the film. It's brave and uncompromising, I'll give it that.

There's also little doubt that it eventually took a toll on me that The Class was 128 minutes, subtitled, deliberately paced, and on a small screen in the dark. I found myself fighting off sleep for the last 30 minutes.

But that's really just as well. It left me without another tough decision of what to spend my time doing without power. Like watching a movie, sleep is definitely also a better alternative to doing nothing.

However, it's pretty telling what my wife's next decision was: to put in another movie. When I got up this morning, I saw the DVD cover for Election sitting out on the coffee table. I'm assuming she watched it until the battery was juiced, at which point, she joined me in the bed as well. And at some point after that, the power finally came back on.

Ah, technology -- our crutch, our drug.

No such thing as partial credit

As I have become more and more of an obsessive eccentric regarding my film-watching habits, I've also developed some pretty eccentric rules.

One of which is: I don't want to see part of a movie, even if it's a movie I've already seen before.

I didn't use to have a problem with this. In fact, in 2004, when I moved out of an apartment I'd been sharing with a roommate for the first three years I lived in L.A., I used to have parts of movies on in the background at my new place all the time. It was a way to be reminded of what you liked about the movie without committing to giving it your whole attention, or watching the whole thing. I was probably getting some kind of introductory package of all the movie stations on cable at the time as well, which made this little hobby all the easier.

In the five years since then, I've gone completely in the other direction. And the reason is pretty simple: I now keep track not only of the new movies I see, but of the old movies I revisit. You certainly know this, as it's been a feature on the right side of my blog for the entire time I've been writing.

It's all a question of "counting."

For example, if I watch 85 minutes of a 110 minute movie, does it "count" as a viewing? What about 100 of 110 minutes? What about 109 of 110 minutes?

Since I don't like to ask myself these questions, I just try to avoid it altogether.

Which is why, when my wife had on The Sure Thing Saturday night when I returned from the movies, I specifically tuned out. She was about 20 minutes in when I got there. She had already watched the movie, which she got several weeks earlier from Netflix, but was re-watching in order to take notes about what plot developments occurred at what junctures of the script. It was research for a road movie she's working on herself.

Now, this was not easy. I love The Sure Thing. Catching even 15 minutes of it here and there should only improve my affection for it, should show me things I might not have caught on my last viewing, or remind me of the parts that I know and love. And what's the harm in that?

But here's my unusual viewpoint on it, which you'll admit has some merit: The more I watch of it now as a partial viewing, the less inclined I'll be to sit down and watch the whole thing anytime soon. Partial credit now will delay full credit later on.

I experienced this phenomenon with another comedy I truly and dearly love, Dean Parisot's Galaxy Guest. My old roommate and I both loved this movie, and it happened to be on cable all the time in the last year or so I lived with him. We'd catch snippets of it here and snippets of it there. Though I've probably only seen the film from start to finish three times -- two of which were on consecutive days in the theater in 1999 -- I've probably seen enough parts of it for six or seven total viewings. Around that time, I also found the DVD in the store at a good price, but thought, "You know, I've seen this enough lately." And so a movie that I should by rights own, given how much I love it, has never made it into my collection, and I have yet to see it again.

I know this standard is unreasonable. But I've nonetheless lived by it probably since the middle of 2006. That's when I started keeping track of films I revisited, and the date I revisited them. That's when everything started "counting." And maybe this has made my intimacy with the films I love necessarily shallower. Maybe I can't quote lines from movies like I once could, though I'd argue that's because there are fewer quotable lines these days -- a subject for another time. But we eccentrics hold to our rules especially tightly, and this is one of mine.

I do make an exception to this rule now and again. When I find myself over at a friend's house, and the decision of the group is to catch the second half of a movie we love, I'll acquiesce. And in that case, I don't count it as a legitimate revisiting of the movie. It just goes unrecorded altogether, and, you know, that's ... fine. Of course it is, it's ... okay.

However, if it's a movie I haven't seen at all, I will do my best to put the kibosh on that particular partial viewing. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

So on Saturday, I watched about 20 minutes of the movie with my wife. Nowhere near enough time to make me wonder whether it "counted" or not. And besides, part of these 20 minutes included the sing-a-long with Tim Robbins and his wife in the car, and then John Cusack trying to freak out the dirty old man who picks up a hitchhiking Daphne Zuniga. "A guy who would rip your heart out and eat it ... just for pleasure!" Gets me every time.

But then I calmly pulled away from The Sure Thing. I got my ipod headphones, plugged them into my laptop, and listened to first some Azure Ray, then some Coldplay on my itunes until the movie was over. Making sure you don't partially see the movie is only half the battle. The other half is not partially hearing it.

Like all rules a film lover has, these too may be relaxed at some point in the future. But for now, and for me, watching movies is an all-or-nothing experience.

It's just the system I'm "partial" to.

Double feature: converted

It had been since January that I'd done one of my good old-fashioned two-for-one double features. You know, where you buy the first ticket, then take advantage of the lax security/apathy at the theater to see the second for free. So Saturday I decided I was due. Plus, I wanted to give my wife some time alone in the house to work.

I had it all lined up to see a 2:30 showing of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and a 4:30 showing of Couples Retreat. Cloudy is only 81 minutes long, but factor in the trailers and a not unreasonably long amount of down time, and I thought it should work out quite well. Even though I left my magazine in the car, I had my ipod as well as the internet on my cell phone, so I should be fine.

The x factor was whether I could get away with it. You see, I'd never attempted one of these at The Bridge, the theater at the Howard Hughes Center, about a five-minute drive from my house. It has never seemed like an opportune place for this kind of thing, since the theater has an upstairs and a downstairs, each of which contains half of the screens. More importantly, each floor has a ticket-taker at the entrance. And since you can't tell online which movies are playing where, matching up the start times is not enough. There's a decent chance you could be shut out of the half of the theater where you need to be for your second feature.

When there is a chance you won't be able to pull it off, the smart thing to do is line it up so that the movie you have more interest in seeing plays first. It worked out this way on Saturday. I obviously wasn't hugely jazzed to see Cloudy, since it's been in the theater for over a month already. But lately it had been eating away at me that this was the kind of movie where 3-D might be really fun. Meatballs raining out of the sky? Yeah, that's just begging for a 3-D viewing. And though Couples Retreat's Bora Bora setting would also look quite nice on the big screen, it'd look only slightly less nice at home on TV. At home on TV I'd lose Cloudy's 3-D altogether.

But I didn't think there would be a problem pulling it off, and here's why: The last time I saw something at this theater, they seemed to have scaled back their operations. They had only a single ticket-taker at the main entrance. After you passed him or her, you were free to roam the whole building. In fact, that was the primary reason I had even moved this theater into double feature consideration.

No sooner had I purchased my tickets, with about five minutes to go before showtime, than I realized I'd miscalculated. The last time I saw a movie at this theater -- I believe it was Surrogates -- it had been a Friday afternoon right after work. This, however, was a Saturday. I didn't actually slap my forehead, but I realized that of course The Bridge probably staffs differently depending on how busy they expect to be.

I'd still be okay if Couples Retreat happened to be downstairs, where Cloudy was playing. So I scanned the digital readout that tells you whether you're supposed to take the up or down escalator for your movie. Unfortunately, there are a ton of movies playing at The Bridge, and Couples Retreat wasn't displaying on this particular scroll-through of the titles. I knew I couldn't dilly-dally, both because I needed to make a bathroom trip before the movie started, and because the greeter at the entrance was on the verge of coming over to ask if he could help find my movie. Instead of treating that as an opportunity to find out for sure one way or the other, I thought I should get moving to avoid suspicion.

So I passed through the downstairs ticket-ripper, and remembered another peculiar thing about this theater: They don't actually list the movie title at the entrance to each screen. Instead, they list the screening room number on your ticket only. So I wouldn't be able to suss out Couples Retreat even from down here.

But at this point my priority was to the movie I'd actually paid for. Bring on those three-dimensional meatballs.

When Cloudy ended, I busted out my blackberry to try to find what else might be starting at the right time. Couples Retreat might be lost, but that didn't mean I couldn't find something else for that second slot. It couldn't be something I'd already seen (like Zombieland) or something I was planning to see with my wife (like Where the Wild Things Are or Paranormal Activity), but that left plenty of other titles. And it gave me a little thrill, I must admit -- I love having circumstance force me into seeing something I wasn't planning to see. It's how I've ended up seeing such classics as Gothika and Three to Tango.

But my blackberry was uncooperative. Or, I should say, the limited version of moviefone.com available on PDAs was uncooperative. I navigated to The Bridge just fine, but when I clicked to see what was showing, the only thing it showed was one of those live theatrical performances that they sometimes show in movie theaters via satellite -- it was called Aria something.

So instead of trying to make the blackberry work for me, I decided I would just take matters into my own hands: I would simply walk into the other theaters in my downstairs wing, and see whether people were gathering for something, or better yet, trailers were already playing.

As soon as I got out I saw that there were a couple employees setting up the secondary snack bar, which was not open yet. The majority of the theater entrances were clustered around them. Oh well, I just had to gamble that they cared as little about their jobs as I guessed they did. It turned out to be a good gamble, but if asked why I was scurrying around suspiciously between theaters, I was prepared to say I was just looking for some friends who had gone into the wrong theater.

The first theater had a few people gathered, but nothing playing on the screen yet. Okay, good start.

The second was Law Abiding Citizen, somewhere in the middle. Just as well. Zero interest.

The third was Where the Wild Things Are, somewhere in the middle. Just as well. Seeing it with the wife some night this week.

The fourth was in the closing credits. Darn it. Would be at least a half-hour before the movie showed again, probably closer to 45 minutes. Too long to wait on an unknown commodity.

The fifth was a totally empty theater. Must have just let out five minutes earlier. Again, too long.

The sixth was another theater where people were gathering for the movie to start. And here I had my best brainstorm of the day: I would simply ask the arriving patrons what movie it was. Nothing fishy about that -- there are plenty of Americans who might have difficulty getting to the correct theater without the name appearing outside. Today, I would be one of them.

"Paranormal Activity," the guy told me with a helpful smile. Darn it. Have that planned for a possible Halloween night screening with my wife.

The seventh theater had a bin for depositing your 3-D glasses outside. That meant it could only be the Toy Story double feature, which I thought was supposed to have closed already by now. Might be worth consideration if I hadn't seen one 3-D animated movie today already -- and if I hadn't already given up my own pair of glasses.

The eighth was the theater where I'd just been sitting for 90 minutes.

So there was only one choice left -- the first theater where people were gathering. Whatever was playing there, I would see.

And even though I'd already committed to this course of action -- unless of course it was one of the off-limits movies -- I still decided to ask a woman sitting in the front row what we were about to see.

"Couples Retreat," she said with a helpful smile.

Here comes the Saw again ...

Falling on my head like a guillotine
Falling on my head like a new contusion
Oooh -- oooh ow!

I want to walk on a broken shin
I want to cook like human stew
I want to dive into your blowtorch
Is it Sawing with you?

So baby butcher me
Like human stew
Chop up me
Like human stew
Crockpot me
Like human stew

(Dental drill solo)

Here comes the Saw again
Sawing in my head like a -- well, like a saw
Tearing me apart like a knife intrusion
Oooh -- oooh ow!

I want to breathe in the poison blend
I want to kiss a vat of acid goo
I want to stretch out on your sawhorse
Is it Sawing with you?

So baby eat through me
Like acid goo
Dissolve my teeth
Like acid goo
Melt my knees
Like acid goo

(Chainsaw solo)