Even upon revisitation, Ghost World, which I'd hoped to find a spurting epiphany within, still seems to me to be awfully unremarkable. It's a good film, and a film with teenagers that feels much more right than any of the teen comedies being marketed left and right. It's a film about the teenagers usually pushed to the sides of the frame and labeled as "freaks" for amusement. Which goes to show just how many major critics were, in fact, just like Enid and Becky. If there's going to be an anthem to these characters - I'd like it to be one that touches all of us, not just everyone but me.

The problem inherent to Grateful Dawg is that every time you want to sit back and enjoy the old timey musical stylings of David Grisman and Jerry Garcia ("beards of a feather", Grisman's wife calls them), you're interrupted by a deeply amateurish documentary production. It's the kind of film, like Year of the Horse, where everyone who ever knew either of them contributes the same two cents: "They were so close, they had such a musical appreciation, they loved to play together, they've known each other so long, they were really good for each other". Eventually, the momentum drops, leaving us to pick through the rare, substantial pieces of the film (most of them being not-quite- visually-exciting stage performances). It's a film that excludes the viewer. Everyone has so much to say (most of it loopy and repetitious) about these two musicians, but rarely do we feel like we are being invited into something special. Another film where wonderful music is the reason to see it, but actually sitting through the damn thing is a tedious chore. For those seeking a window into Jerry Garcia's final years, expect nothing but a blinding instance of self-congratulation on the filmmaker's (Grisman's daughter) part: there is a near total elimination of any of Garcia's context with the Grateful Dead, let alone a full bodied idea of what the man was like in those last five years. Save yourself ninety minutes. Buy the soundtrack.

Here's a film so desperate to force its modern conventions into a period piece, it almost collapses in the process. The most irritating thing in the film is probably the love triangle. Granted. But its also the way the characters speak and act around each other. It's the idiosyncrasies like soldiers taking song more seriously than battle, earthquakes that stand crudely as metaphors and goopy, tin-eared add-on's like the one moment when Penelope Cruz says to Nicholas Cage: "You think you can come in here and turn my whole world upside down?" That, my friends, is the kind of dialogue that earns you a one way ticket to excessive mimicry in my house. I wanted so badly to find something in the film I could enjoy. Was rubbed horribly the wrong by the mixture of sudden, graphic violence with one of those love stories billed as old fashioned (but hopelessly updated until its nothing more than a flight of implausibility). Found little in John Hurt's wisdom-dispensing, ground-standing town doctor that didn't echo a dozen other characters just like him. Even Christian Bale, who gives the film's best performance (this guy should own Hollywood, in my opinion), has the kind of brutish, herky-jerky character arc that is used as a method of convenience rather than illumination. His acts of heroism seem all the less exciting because his character is introduced as one-dimensional (don't get me started on the love story between he and Cruz in the first twenty minutes of the film).  Everything about it seems to want us to call to mind The English Patient: the wartime errors, a love whose time has to constantly be rearranged, the love triangle itself, anti-war sentiment, peaceful settings disturbed by cannons and soldiers and on and on and on. Trouble is, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is so by the numbers and so full of over-the-top sentiment, that even its quiet scenes have a noxious air of pretense, an assumed motive. Rarely is anything allowed to play for its own purposes, or for the good of strengthening the vision. Almost everything about the film seems to contradict itself. Saddening, I think, as John Madden's last two films, Shakespeare in Love and Her Majesty Mrs. Brown, were absolutely stunning. Would be easy enough for me to blame the actors - but it doesn't seem like its there fault at all. Cage is a joy to watch (his accent, surprisingly, is terrific); Cruz is good enough (Oh, people won't know the difference between a Greek accent and a Spanish one (never mind that everyone else in the film speaks with a Greek accent); Bale, as stated, is tremendous, very believable; and Hurt, though he plays the type of character we've almost assimilated after watching years and years of films, does it honorably and convincingly. As I've become bored looking for places to assign blame (and why bother, am I right?) I'll leave this sentiment: There's a character thought to be deaf at the beginning of the film, but, on second glance, merely has a pea stuck in his ear. My advice is to stick a couple of peas in your ears. You'll miss the gracious, warming score - but you'll be spared any of the ridiculous, borderline laughable dialogue. Better yet, when your date suggests seeing, pretend  you have peas in your ears.

Prizzi's Honor works on the kind of passable level most Hollywood productions work (which is odd, because John Huston wasn't exactly synonymous with Hollywood): everything is logical; a story is told with minimum flash and gratuitous overstatement. The film wanes on for a great deal of its running time, perking ever so seldom with an absolutely out of the blue moment or line of hilarity. Most of what I liked about the film in particular was the performances. Jack Nicholson, in an accent that's borderline funny - but never satirical - is uniformly perfect, driving every second of the film through any inch of tedium it may encounter. Anjelica Huston is wonderfully, Shakesperian bitter, in effect also driving the piece, setting in motion most of the twists which befall most of the characters. Found myself tired of watching it for a good long time, wishing the film would dispense with the long setup and move right in for the kill (the kill, as I put it, being the realization that the married Nicholson and Turner are each, eventually, contractually bound to kill each other, a rare and luridly brilliant spin on wedding vows). After the second act's ba-boom climax, the third act does, in fact, save the film (which happens so infrequently, it's worth mentioning); so that when the conclusion rolls around, what is decided and how it affects the characters allows for the first real sense of actual emotion in the film. Maybe its too little too late and maybe the film isn't as clearly a fluff piece as it should be. Either way, it's not a bad film at all, but certainly not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. And maybe watching it in 2002, when the mob genre has saturated itself into a kind of functional afterthought (leaving only The Sopranos above treading depth), leaves me with an entirely limited perspective. One or the other, certainly.

Most of the animation is of the rather squiggly kind (by no means a bad thing, but contrasted with Disney's hardlined clarity, it stands to answer for a great deal nonetheless), the musical pieces rarely playing off physical actions as such, instead opting to sum up the mood of each piece. An admirable enough swipe at the idea cornered flawlessly by the Big Mouse in Fantasia (though in that film, you don't have sit through the incredibly silly, rather vacuous tumblings of a host, an orchestra and the artist that is supposedly drawing these imagination landscapes while we watch). Each of the pieces are good - but not that good. Found myself distracted, often horribly so, by how slowly and figuratively they seemed to arise. The whole thing is not on the highly recommendable side of solid. In fact, the only two I remember vividly are the ones where a coke bottle evolves and one where a stray cat uses its imagination to make an abandoned house live again.

That is defies a conventional structure is the least of which I praise this film. That Hugh Grant has launched a career in attempting to cram the character he nails here into every conceivable place (let's start with Bridget Jones' Diary and Notting Hill, to say nothing of films where it doesn't belong, like An Awfully Big Adventure or, say, Sense and Sensibility) doesn't bug me all that much. That he hits it so beautifully here, managing to upstage just about the whole cast (even though he's playing a rather pithy bloke, the withdrawen member of his little clique), seems a terrific feat. That the movie stands to be one of the most consistently entertaining British comedies released in recent years is another mark of an original - - - it spawned the Britcom, which has churned out more painfully mediocre to bad movies in the last few years than I'd care to recall. There's little else to discuss. This is a fabulously off beat diversion that offers us just what the title promises: laughing and crying, and also, the number "4".

I'm always conflicted when watching a film so interested in "fun", it becomes self-congratulatory in how effortlessly it delights in ignoring its narrative. In the case of Iron Monkey, the distinguishable "fun" is, of course, the fight sequences. And say what you will about the film, this is the kind of "fun" you experience, not merely recognize. The story itself is reminiscent of most of the floppy classical mini-epics we've bred here in the U.S.; the story isn't necessarily bad, just so whacked full of half-realized historical references and "bold in the neighborhood of cartoonish" characters, chucked at us as if it were a children's book, assuming we couldn't possibly grasp a single solitary subtlety - - - even, they say, if our very life depended on it. So, contextually, Iron Monkey is almost immediately forgivable for its host of hokey plot points and dialogue excerpts, on the understanding that every couple of minutes ever character in the film busts out complex kung-fu moves, beating to a deliciously bloody pulp every other character in the movie. In Iron Monkey, we're invited to enjoy another splendid aspect of the film: the somewhat accidental way its very narrative/fight scenes tend to act as parody to the sincerely incomparable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I say accidental with much credence, as Iron Monkey was, in fact, released eight years prior to Ang Lee's masterwork). What is incredibly likeable about Iron Monkey isn't the fact that it seems to have pared its narrative ever so carefully to avoid distracting a bloodthirsty audience with trite moments of character development or story construction, but, instead, that nearly every kung-fu sequence is entirely heart stopping and desperately breathtaking all at the same time. Even the first couple of times you watch three or four stunt doubles duking it out using a bag of tricks that will surprise even the most carefully astute Crouching Tiger fan, it seems like a flawlessly capable gimmick: this film was made to entertain in the way musicals are made to entertain: through the vast creation of imaginative, eye-popping visualization and radically unrealistic and superbly rendered choreography. And none is more saliva inducing than the final battle between a character who uses his seven foot sleeves as weapons in fighting off  two attackers (did I mention that all three characters must balance on the top ends of dozens of burning, wooden poles). If that doesn't at least perk your curiosity - go to sleep, you must already know everything.

There is a you-are-there terror to the way Wit achieves osmotic waves of panic in its study of a lonely cancer patient. The film is more than content to articulate what it’s actually like to be within a terminal illness. What separates it from the so-called legions of tear jerkers is how it earns its emotional tumbling: every moment of the film is as honest as the next, every revelation is placed as calmly and nakedly on output as medical lingo, both being dispensed like a long, slow death sentence. The loneliness isn’t even really confronted until after act two, but if you’ve been watching, its staring your right in the face. Every frame is intimate and uncomfortably close, feeling the breaths Thompson takes as time narrows and she finds herself unable to cease beating around the proverbial bush. Her performance is brave, something of power, really; a display of the utmost in vulnerability, but only at the end of a long, dark tunnel of doubletalk, of intelligence disguising wretched fear. The most important thing, for me, about Wit, was the emotional response it evokes. It doesn’t ever feel manipulative. I blubbered for Vivian Bearing (Thompson), as her disease progressed. I cried more for a human being than for a character (or so I thought). Up later reflection, I realized this: Here is this woman, wrapped for a lifetime in a certainty gained through an extensive, academic grasp of the poetic “what if’s” and here she is, now, finally faced with an unfeeling answer, and it turns out to be as plain as it is clandestine. We are invited to be sympathetic in the face of Vivian's staggering aloneness. And when others, characters who feel like strangers, care for Vivian - we feel like we’re the closest thing to her family and friends. We are closer than her elderly, always critical mentor.  And closer than her nurse, a professional caregiver.  It is a rare thing for a film to offer such a superior perspective to an audience.

For me, the movie in question begins and ends with the none too coincidental casting of Tom Waits, whose sandpaper throated lyrical landscapes are echoed in the impressively evocative rendering of 1930's era Albany. His character carries on like we might have expected a young Waits to be: pleasant, largely incoherent and snappier looking than the other bums in Ironweed. Unfortuntely, his character is on the slim side of the definition of supporting player, forced to wade in the neck deep artificial sentiment scattered throughout Hector Babenco's overlong, decidedly aimless film about a couple of bums wandering the streets, coming apart, serving little purpose and feeling very, very sorry for themselves. Nicholson plays an ex-ballplayer, shamed by the accidental death of his son some twenty years prior. Streep plays a musically talented rag of a woman, stricken by tuberculosis. Together, they drink, argue, wander the streets and shiver with haunt (which induce numerous moments of loud invective hurled hither and thither at ghosts which follow close at their heels). They rarely do much of anything of actual purpose, and the film seems to have adopted this wayward attitude, thinking it would accentuate these characters better. Fortunately, the performances are first-rate, which remain, next to the art direction, the only thing of interest. (Even the cinematography is largely gratuitous, with expansive, overly complex tracking shots popping up in the most unwelcome of places. Two exceptions: a rusty, broken down car sits next to a rusty, broken down bridge, and, Nicholson's shadow, walking along a fence. Perhaps a few more chances taken with the cinematography may have played well with the assimilation of a bum's life into the film's pacing). Nicholson eventually gets up the courage to revisit his past, with incredibly unrealistic, rather uneven results. All the characters do a great deal of grunting and wheezing, but rarely do any words of interest fall from their mouths. The sole great moment involves a bloated, greasy rag man explaining to Nicholson how he "gets offers" and "goes door to door" with the ladies. Most of the rest of the film is just bloated and greasy.

Let's think about the obvious flaws with Sling Blade. This is a movie about a gothic figure, a man capable of reverant kindness and despicable horror; a hulking backwoods philosopher who feels like he just walked in out of a Nick Cave song. He hides behind the shell of a outcast, a so-called "retard" who seems more otherworldly than slow, who demonstrates the kind of straight line livin' which never seems to make it on screen anymore. The movie is better when its being dark, as in the opening monologue delivered by Thornton (in his unbelievable peformance as Karl, the aforementioned gothic figure). Here, he purports to describe the story of, essentially, why he is the way he is. It's a slick piece of character development. Later, after we've based our entire view of this character on this one, ten minute speech, Thornton yanks the rug from under us, literalizing our imagination's vision of his world. (I'll never know why exactly he chose to do it, but I doubt anyone's mind's eye matched the disappointingly wan set design which poses as our reality check). Karl befriends a young boy and his mother. Scenes with the mother's gay friend (John Ritter) and with her viscious boyfriend (an Oscar caliber Dwight Yoakam) are racked with an uncommon suspense. Often times Thornton includes a froggy Black Sabbath hum, lending a grim, novel atmosphere. Too often, though, he includes a peppy guitar and emotional piano twinklin', undermining the seriousness of the piece. As the film wanes on, we're glad Thornton gives such a uncanny performance of endless fascination. Karl is a little slow. But so is everyone else he deals with. They've become mired in accepting how things are. Karl, who did so as a boy, doesn't just mire in accepting life as is - he no longer even seems to notice that he's alive. He's a selfless machine, a morally black and white caregiver - - - - and one of the most entertaining screen characters yet written.

I'm going to lend a serious word or two in a moment, but first, I'd like to note that Keanu Reeves would be perfect casting for a movie about a pissed off young priest. Reason being: He spends all of Hardball using the priestly, outstretched-arms-on-the-altar stance as his acting style (something new to the one-track stoner repertoir). He's got every right to be pissed off. He's stuck in a role as a compulsive gambler (betting big with no brain, it seems), being threatened by some of the lamest, garden variety sitcom baddies posing as collection thugs. His broker friend Mike McGlone, whom many of you may remember as the three time receipient of the "Not a Shred of Credibility" award, offers him five hundred dollars a week to coach a little league team - the most comprehensive and obvious stereotype team of token black kids. (Of course five hundred bucks a week isn't nearly enough for a guy whose thumbs are twitching, twelve large in the hole - - - but never mind that now). Later, assuming the only way to simulateously impress the boys' female teacher and keep his self respect, he pretends to work for his friend's securities firm. If self respect = power broker, why (you might ask) is the second half of the movie about Keanu's transformation from betting dunderhead to the caring, responsible surfer dude who can coach a team, charm a teacher, land a job as a gym teacher and give a coherent eulogy? The answer is: The film isn't sure if it's more interested in the alternately cute-as-a-button emotion and shock street terminology of African American kids or in a wishy-washy tale of redemption. And above that, it appears to have been directed as if it were an episode of any of Fox's "One Hour spells Drama Power" shows. Only with less appealing dialogue and even less appealing women (there ought to be a sticker on the box warning people that Diane Lane is pulling that "just because I'm as wrinkled as an old person doesn't mean I'm not smoking hot!" crap again).

This movie opens with a fifteen minute bank robbery which we're told took place ten years ago. Next thing you know, Oliver Platt is asking Michael Douglas to talk to a patient of his who continually mutters "I'll never tell..." for no real reason whatsoever. Scene after that, Douglas is courting a home life so All-American square - you could frame it. Eventually a risky plot strand finds its way, like a rusty needle, through all of these seemingly unconnected situations. A lot of times in movies, we can praise filmmakers for taking risks - even if those risks fail. Here, I'm not sure there's much to praise in the risk taken, as it seems kind of counterproductive. In an effort to tell a banal, rather uninteresting story in a flaboyant way, director Felder half-asses his way through time shifting technique and complex twist-and-turn hijinks. He never fully realizes the characters as connections to the decade old heist which opens the film, but he also fails miserably at giving us what seemed like the most satisfying aspect of the film: Douglas' play to unlock the indelible Brittany Murphy's secret (like the Taco Bell dog's "Yo Quiero Taco Bell", she'll go down in history as the "I'll Never Tell" girl). Furthermore, the movie's conclusion is so rushed and so strangely disconnected from the rest of the film (probably because it deals with the results of that score taken down in the opening sequence), we walk away feeling no closure - even though everything is as resolute as it could possibly be. Douglas sleepwalks through the movie, Sean Bean adds another example to the heaping stack of Euro-villains (I'd like to see this bloke in a romantic comedy - - - double dating with Gary Oldman, in fact....but I digress), Famke Janssen specializes in looking hot while nursing a broken leg, Jennifer Esposito is the biggest expository tool since intertitles and, in a small role, Victor Argo appears to be playing an old woman in a Victor Argo mask. The film has a pleasure: the blue tone it seems to be envisioned through makes New York a pleasant nightmare of late morning light, a not quite serious breezy day off sort of atmosphere. The ole New Amsterdam settings, in fact, are all first rate (my personal favorites being the overwhelming, eerie Potter's Field - like the old railways of the equally agonizing The Bone Collector - and the non-sterile, dirty green tile of a mental hospital that could pass for a prison). My advice: stop thinking about what might happen and think about where it is happening. Just stop thinking. That's a satisfying solution for both parties.

O, a puppet controversy for what reason I'm not sure (marketing strategy, I guess), is both a decent - and very poor attempt to transplant Shakespeare's Othello into the modern, mainstream youth consciousness. On one hand, the film manages what Shakespeare could not - which is to expand Desdemona's character (Desi, as she's called here) into a sort of....person. Here, Julia Stiles makes her a pure-hearted, absolutely singular character who stands up and deserves to be heard (although, God help me, I can't figure out why any of these prep-school dweebs would take the least bit of interest in her). It's a small victory, though, as the script shamelessly turns O (Mekhi Phifer as Odin James) into an ambiguous monster; a former crack addict imported to a wealth-ridden, non-diverse preparatory school because he can sink mad hoops. A couple of times, he flips out in ways that don't exactly seem fitting to his character, even if he is racked with jealously (destroying a backboard and lashing out at a young man, then holding the "O"-shaped rim over his head in triumph, that's the barnburning scene I'm describing). Instead of strength, this character is a mushy romantic, rarely showing any kind of solid leadership or respectability that the character seems to need in order to fall hard much later. But for all of Odin's character inadequacies, what lacks most about O is the Iago character (Harnett playing Hugo), who lacks charm, among other vital personality traits. The film seems to present his antics with an air of mischevious satisfaction, each of his dirty deeds coming together so seamlessly, so perfectly, one couldn't possibly miss the chance to at least admire how cunning and lucky he is. Hartnett chooses to wallow in his own self misery (the movie gives him a double dose of burdens: he is upstaged on the court and underplayed in his father's favor). He never seems do delight in his wrongdoing. His convictions of purpose are all too sincere; Iago is supposed to get off on entropy and to be a little bit racist. Here, he just wants some damned attention. Director Tim Blake Nelson gets the foreboding, grimly classical atmosphere right. A prep school was a good place for this setting; it is dark, but never rich; solemn but never too solemn to erupt its mood with a host of rap songs which don't seem to echo or project anything necessary or of real worth to the film. The dialogue has a real rhythmic motion to it, especially when spoken by Martin Sheen (who is so overemphatic, we almost wonder if he feels slighted, wishing he could participate in a real Shakespeare film). In the end, the film just comes off without a great deal of confidence. Drugs are introduced to cloud motive, jealously divided but emphasized (as if we'd miss that as the central theme) and the ending turns the film from a transplant to a literal update, leaving cold, ripped-from-the-headlines imagery your last impression as you leave the film's world; cameramen, police cars and handcuffs all seem shockingly out of place. The film is missing a final monologue (which would probably have to be delivered by Sheen or John Heard, who plays Desi's father). O closes too open ended to be remotely loyal to its parent text. By the time that ridiculous Hartnett voice-over about being a Hawk (the Basketball team's name) and about being free has ended, all thoughts of the Bard have flown the coop.

All the scenes in A Nightmare on Elm Street are, essentially, interchangeable. And all of them seem as if they're setting the scene for something to take place. When I'd realized half the movie was over, and that a number of main characters (or so I thought) were dying almost arbitrarily, I still didn't have a clue what the movie was about. A couple of scenes later, the main character (Heather Langenkamp, who later played pious on Just the Ten of Us) has a pow-wow with her mother, who tells her the story of that creepy villain Freddy Krueger - the one who has been terrorizing teenagers in their dreams. Trouble is, Langenkamp's mum doesn't really explain enough to give Kreuger or his motives context, or even a hint of clarity. Seems to me the film is just alternating scenes of teens trying to stay awake and teens realizing they are dreaming and then being chased by the murderous Kreuger (and where, for christ's sake, is it written that every time you fall asleep you begin dreaming straight away AND you're dream world starts in the very room you've fallen asleep in; Convenience abounds, you know?). The special effects, even by 1984 standards, are lacking. The film borrows from just about every successful horror movie imaginable to rather boring results (especially The Exorcist, but, more offensively, The Shining).  The only thing remotely close to interesting is Robert Englund's performance as Kreuger, where he seems at least menacing as the gray-and-red-striped-sweater wearin' bogeyman. Most of his scenes are staged as if they were music videos, which results mostly in laughter rather than fright. Oh, and last (but not least), the so-called surprise ending (spoiler alert), where Langenkamp realizes she only dreamed luring Kreuger into the real world in order to destroy him - - - this would work better if I understood what the hell was happening by the end of the film. Without even a flimsy narrative (not to mention more than one stable character), I couldn't seem to figure out why certain things were happening. I tried to understand the rules of sleeping and waking, but came to the conclusion that the movie either didn't follow them, broke them out of convenience or created them, but couldn't understand them either. To be sure, though, after you turn the damn thing off, it makes for a rather incoherent couple of minutes before you realize you can't remember any of what has just happened anyway.

Still not as crazy about this one as I am about Payne's subsequent Election (or the script for About Schmidt, due to be released sometime before the end of time, I think). Payne wisely sidesteps telling the story of the half-witted, ultimate loser Ruth (played with a pitbull slut attitude by Laura Dern, whose best work - and that ain't saying much - is in this film). Instead, Payne seems content to flesh out the two groups which fight over her: the uber-Christian Baby Savers and a Pro-Abortion, seemingly Wiccan group made up of a Vietnam Vet, two tree-hugging lesbians and an all-black wearing skinny dude with a lisp. Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor have a great deal of fun to make and, though sometimes they linger in message territory (which they don't seem to be arguing so much as capitalizing on for metaphor purposes, methinks), the little touches they bring to America's most empassioned, unavoidable morality debate are priceless: a wooden-walled conference room in a shabby hotel hosting the Baby Savers, Burt Reynolds' calmly asking a reporter whether or not she has a network affiliate, Alicia Witt as the Baby Savers' first family's rebellious daughter and many, many more. The movie never really gels, but the harmoniously confident sketches of the pro-choice and pro-life camps more than compensate.

“When people asked me if I was going to see Dogma, I told them I wasn’t sure but that I would probably not see the film because Smith’s last two movies let me down”.

And what's sad is that the few times I switched over to the commentary track, it sounded as if John Boorman still has some wierd idea that his film was merely underrated.

Every horror movie needs a priest. And in Soul Survivors, that frock-meister is a kindly, melodramatic Luke Wilson, who shows up ever so briefly to pinch hit as Cassie, the main character's, source of solace. Later, we find out - ooooooo, scary - that he's been dead for twenty years. At first, it seemed like yet another valid gripe I could have with that universal darling of thrillerdom, The Sixth Sense. Why is it every time somebody dies in a movie nowadays, I can't take it at face value, why do I now have to question whether or not the person is really dead? Why, if they're dead, can't they just be, you know, dead. Later, I called off my dogs, realizing that it probably didn't matter much in this case. That wasn't the biggest question I was tired of being unable to answer. There are an innumerable amount of ridiculous things that take place in the relatively short running time of Soul Survivors. I'm not sure I can afford the web space to list them all, but my particular favorite happens just as the movie opens. (Second place goes to a wildy superfluous - granted, entirely welcome - clothed shhower scene between the two female protagonists). ...Alright. Cold water. Back to the point... An angry girl leaves a frat party alone. She gets jumped by a guy wearing a translucent face mask and another guy, who has long hair and scars on his face. They hold her down, slit her wrist and catch every drop of the red gooey that drips out of her veins. This, as far as I can figure, is a scene meant only to establish these two characters as bad. Later, one of the main characters spots the two men at a creepy goth club. To get into this club, you have to have your hand stamped. When the main characters reach the gate, the imprint turns out to be made with a thick red liquid - kind of like blood. To sum up: near as I can figure, the two guys kill young women in order to get their precious blood, which doubles as the fuel for a rather unsanitary "Stamp your hand for re-entry?" Later in the film, when they're chasing the main character around, I wondered if perhaps they were running short on blood for their bizarre hand stamping rituals. (As a sidenote, I've noticed ink does pretty much the same job as blood, and if you must kill for it, your local Staples cashier should satisfy your blood lust just as well as a good-looking, busty blonde frat girl type).  The two baddies seem exceedingly obligatory, as do most of the plot points in Soul Survivors, a film that couldn't possibly make less sense. We open with a car crash and expect, then, that the rest of the film will be about whether or not the main character's now dead boyfriend (Casey Affleck) is contacting her from the afterlife or haunting her or, you know, something. She's got two weird friends. Eliza Dushku plays the friend who constantly cocks her head in classic bitch style and later, for no real reason whatsoever, cheats on her boyfriend (Wes Bentley) with the scariest looking lesbian in the history of lesbians. Bentley, on the other hand, plays a character who seems to exist so that every so often, he can confirm for the main character that whatever ghastly hallucination she's having, "it sure ain't real, but here's a touchy feely gropey hug to ease whatever pain you might be suffering from". In much the same way Antitrust overused the villain nearly catching the hero doing that which he should not be doing, the first hour of Soul Survivors is just one scene after another of the main character seeing your standard freaky movie imagery, wigging out, then being tenderly consoled. Seemingly, the writer-director saw overall low quality as a challenge rather than a dilemma and purported to turn the last half hour into something immeasurably worse than the stunted repetition of the previous chunk of the "film": A hyper-kinetic, MTV from back in the day with-the strobe-lights-and-everything montage that not only makes very little sense visually, but doesn't really resolve the burning questions (namely, "What the hell is going on anyway, man?"). And this isn't meant to be some hyperbole-ridden overreaction by some angry, arrogant critic. I still have little idea what the film itself was about, and even less of an inkling what is happening as it ends. In all honesty, the last half hour appears to have been cut by a blind, dyslexic music video apprentice. And he's probably off having a drink with equally handicapped screenwriter, the two of them laughing and laughing and eventually crying and contemplating suicide I hope.

I'm obviously not going to be the only one who assumes that the casting of rapper Snoop Dogg as a seventies-era pimp is a no-brainer. He practically plays that role to death in real life (at least he's marketed that way, which is basically the same thing, we'll also assume). For some reason, though, Bones' director Ernest Dickerson appears to be working overtime to transform him into a insignificant, nonessential character, even though he's the title character and the film seems to surround his haunt (pun largely intended). Dickerson seems more interested in the living - even though he's got a full blown scenery chewing opportunity on his hands (and, not a bad one at that). A messy, almost consciously contrived story wherein each weighing occurrence is more implausible than the next, Bones never seems to be confidant enough to warrant any actual acting, let alone special effects. Teenagers open a club in an abandoned ghetto house where a famous pimp (who even has his own jump rope jingle) once lived and died. Jimmy Bones is allowed to return for one of those imperative vengeance rampages, which turns ridiculously silly (my eyes got a good workout, though: first, some heavy squinting, later a good, sound eye rolling).  I'm not one for a painfully mediocre horror picture that all the sudden goes nuts with the CGI as well as the fake blood. Snoop is fine as long as he's onscreen (if you can you get past the mere fact that everyone in the cast seems poised to underrate him in the same, dumbass satisfying manner: "Oh, Jimmy Bones? Nah, he's not dangerous. He only rose from the dead with revenge on his mind"). The whole thing seems to have on its mind a clear agenda of where it is going to end up and no welcome surprises are going to spoil that. Besides all of the obvious blunders I spoke of, my question is why poor Katherine Isabelle wasn't the center of attention. Bitch could've grown a tail and started a wicked fight between her werewolf self (from Ginger Snaps) and that dog that Jimmy Bones' spirit may or may not have inhabited in the first act of the film. [Note: a key plot point seems to have been recast and dressed up from Training Day, see if you can find it. Better still, watch Training Day and forget I ever spoke of the two films in the same breath].

Such a glorious celebration of the greatest director of all time, at two and a half hours, I feel like it's much, much too short.