The Mist, Batman, and Jack Black
I’ll just jump right into the haranguing today.
The Mist: I saw this movie a few days ago. It’s another Stephen King adaptation by Frank Darabont, who has previously adapted King’s “Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile” for the big screen. This film is more outwardly terrifying than those other two movies.
It takes place in a small town in New England, like pretty much any King story. A nearby military base performs some sort of terrible experimentation and apparently opens some sort of link to an extremely misty parallel dimension that is filled with an extremely large variety of different things that want to kill us. I thought that was kind of an amusing thing about the otherwise bleak film–everything in this entire dimension seems to be some sort of deadly horror. It seems like a decidedly unpleasant place.
It’s a pretty scary movie, because you just have no idea the whole time what is happening to the poor inhabitants of the town, who hole up in the local grocery store and try to hold off the misty evils. Bunker-state of mind sets in pretty darn quickly, and the greatest atrocities of the movie are committed by the cloistered population as it descends into paranoia and extremism. It is a somewhat anti-Christian film, as King’s sometimes are. The real villain of sorts is a dogmatic Christian woman who preaches that the end times have come and demands blood sacrifices.
It is a very powerfully morose movie. Do not go looking for a happy ending, and sugar-coated fluff. Some reviews have blasted the film for being over-pessimistic and hopeless, but I just thought that made it more interesting. I for one was taken in by the sad ending, expecting things to work out better for the characters. I’d read enough Stephen King to know that he usually likes happy enough endings. It turns out, though, that Darabont created a much bleaker ending than in King’s original story, which probably helped the film. As the pre-eminent King film-maker, I guess Darabont gets to do what he wants.
Hollywood needs more movies like this. This is a horror movie in the vein of what horror movies can and should be, and not what Roger Ebert likes to call “Torture Porn”. We are living in an age of Saw movies, of Hostel movies, of “horror” movies which consist of nothing but women being captured by crazy people who torture them. I for one am tired of it. The last two Stephen King adaptations to hit theaters, “The Mist”, and “1408″ are real horror films.
The Dark Knight: I haven’t talked about it before, but “The Dark Knight” is the title of the next Batman movie. If you’ve been living under a rock, let me remind you that Heath Ledger, of all people, is playing the Joker in this one. I’m not sure exactly how to feel about it, so I am sticking with “Cautious Optimism”. A full-photo of Ledger in his full Joker getup was just released though, check this out. THE JOKER.
Be Kind Rewind: I had never heard of this movie until a minute ago. I clicked over to the site to watch the trailer, thinking that it looked stupid and that I would be making fun of it. But you know what? It’s really pretty interesting. The site design is especially neat.
The movie has a dumb premise, but bear with me: Jack Black and Mos Def run an old VHS video store. SOMEHOW…Jack Black’s body becomes magnetic, erasing all the tapes. So he and Mos Def refilm all of the films in their library themselves, movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Driving Miss Daisy”, all sorts of stuff. And people really dig the movies. Then Black and Def battle the FBI for violating copying policy. Check out the trailer. It’s more interesting than it sounds.
Walk Hard: They dropped a new trailer for Judd Apatow’s “Walk Hard” movie with John C. Reilly. Reilly, for those who don’t know him, was Ricky Bobby’s wingman in “Talladega Nights”. The trailer is rated R, well, because there’s somewhat more people being cut in half in it than most. Watch.