Well, I'm still at the job--it's still better-paying, more rewarding, and more interesting. Life at Chateau Fluffy actually took a bit of a dive in terms of incident after my favorite co-worker and friend was "droped from the schedule" (again, a weasel tactic of shithead bosses who want to avoid dismissal paperwork), to say nothing of Fluffy's own long hoped-for departure. Luckily, life in my present basement kitchen promises much--my pleasant co-workers have a cool, diverse taste in music and quite a line in filthy banter, the above-stairs staff, particularly the attractive female ones, seem to regard us (well, me) as troglodytes in every sense of the word (natrually allowing for my own habitual paranoia on that score), and our kitchen manager is a sort of priapic, cycling hippie autocrat given to sayings as "I'm not wrong, I'm the boss" and who espouses quite a vocal belief in the aphrodisiac powers of organic greens, no matter how wilted, an obsession that extends to a drink he invented for the deli widely perceived as unfit for consumption by several co-workers (I'd drink it if there wasn't anything else in the house). It's a slight exaggeration, of course--the last couple of days have been rather enjoyable from that quarter. I'd gotten a creepy feeling from some of the things I'd heard about the place that it was near perfect, and I'm utterly delighted to find the same crap there that spices up most other restaurant jobs (oh, and there's no escaping World of Warcraft aficionados, either--just as well since I've had a great time with the ones I've known), which I suppose is inevitable in a place with nearly two hundred workers, six different departments, and a spotless reputation among Ann Arbor rentiers.

Of course, most regular jobs don't follow an open-book finance policy or pay you to take classes. These can be food, service, business/personal finance, or computer classes. I've had to take several to get through "orientation," a procedure that's supposed to take about two months after which one qualifies for a pay raise, access to benefits, etc. The especially informative ones, of course, were on food--one comparing and contrasting our food with similar items from around town, and one on chocolate. I'm glad I took the latter as I didn't know chocolate could be so genuinely good. I like it, but I'm not crazy about it the way I'm crazy about cheese (can't wait for that class). Fortunately, our instructor took us through the different types of chocolate we carry (one fantastic example from Sao Tome e Principe), how it's made from cacao beans (never seen a cacao bean until that moment, I don't think), what to look for, and why Hershey's is basically chocolatized vanilla. One of the things I most want to do there is learn about food, and it looks like the place won't lack for opportunity on that score.

 My dreams are improving, too. I found myself back at Chateau Fluffy working for my last boss (we'll call him "Biff"), moonlighting a couple of days a week in some cushy job I couldn't quite understand, as the whole place went to hell in a handbasket with Biff's wife behind the counter and an unwelcome surprise return visit from Fluffy with a bunch of friends who looked like they listed Live at PJ's as a "residence." The place actually looked really good, like a really tasteful Middle Eastern restaurant, with soft, pale stucco and a strong Moorish cast to the architecture. Unfortunately, Fluffy decided for whatever reason that I was being "rude" (with her inimitable screech when upset and I chose that moemnt to check out what happened to the kitchen. Wow! The rather cramped space morphed into a vast, cavernous structure of a medieval flavor, rather resembling the Bernadones' warehouse in Franco Zefferelli's 1973 St. Francis biopic Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Wandering around, I climbed further and further up until I found a gorgeous loggia overlooking a stunning Mediterranean harbor (hard not to associate with the vaguely Southern European city that keeps popping up in my dreams). Overlooking me? A sour-faced middle-aged duenna and her gorgeous, scantily-clad young ward (I got the impression that they were more than "just friends"), carving puppets and the latter with an enigmatic smile on her face. Hell, yeah.

I'm now over a month into the new job, and rather enjoying it. It was truly eerie at first getting used to not working weekday mornings. For four years, I worked a more-or-less nine-to-five Monday-through-Friday schedule, and was worried about what having my weekends mashed up might be like. Of course, the last time I worked weekends, I'd just moved to Ann Arbor and had no idea what was going on. Though I've barely seen any friends or gone to any shows, I've managed to keep busy with the old reading and writing (and recently watching old episodes of Wodehouse Playhouse--oh, Pauline Collins). After a break of two weeks during whcih I could get used to the new schedule, I started writing again with an alacrity I didn't have the last time I broke after an extended period--both fiction and a series of sixties-era British horror film reviews for an online chum's book project. I'm now on the last of three days off in a row--very rare--and am surprisingly going stir-crazy from the freedom. Things are cool.

 The business itself has a reputation for treating its workers very well. Few businesses get known for that, so this distinction in itself is one of the things that brought me to apply. Simply put, I generally work less than I did at the old job for the same amount of money, with a raise at the end of two months and probably another one at the end of six (with the chance to apply for health insurance in the meantime). The place has a codified approach to training that to some might seme a little cultish, but coming off a job with effectively no approach to training, I'm not complaining. It's a little odd, to be sure, going from a place with five or six workers maximum to one with fifty at a time (over a hundred total), but not that odd. I do prep work in a deli kitchen and get the chance to take classes offered by the company that are eventually intended to benefit the latter through educating me (food, business, etc.). So it's quite a step up from Chateau Fluffy, and I can think of few better places to wait out Ann Arbor. They wanted a year commitment, and I think I might do two, especially if I can move to one of their other businesses--preferably the bakery or creamery--and learn more there.

Super Furry Animals, Hey Venus! (2007): I held off on writing anything about my favorite living band's latest album largely because I was initially disappointed. The productive, wildly imaginative Welsh rockers have kept up a rarely less-than-excellent run over their near-fifteen years of existence, although sometimes I've had to give a few albums several listens before I finally came to love them. Such was the case with Hey Venus!, perhaps because of lead singer Gruff Rhys' burgeoning solo career (with gems such as 2006's Candylion) and other collaborative projects (such as Neon Neon, an 80s-retro outfit whose album Stainless Style is taking its sweet time in winning me over)--I worried that they might be spreading themselves too thin. Fortunately, it turned out to be just another case of needing a little time. While songs like "The Gift That Keeps Giving" and "Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon" hark back to the neo-folk stuff they've perfected on Phantom Power (2003) and Love Kraft (2005), hardr-rocking tunes like "Neo Consumer" and "Into The Night" take up a gritty style that last predominated on albums like the glorious Radiator (1997). Some, like "Baby Ate My Eightball" and "Show Your Hand," simply defy references to the band's past (or easy classification) and prove that the SFA still have what it takes (which in their case is a lot more than most) even after a decade, with not one duff album in the bunch. I look forward to their next.

I put in my two weeks notice at work today. I've been dreaming about doing this for the past three years--I've worked at Chateau Fluffy for four and a half--and it really feels weird, not quite what I'd expected. The decision isn't an impulsive one--that's why this has taken so long. I'll be starting Monday on the kitchen production staff of a nationally renowned delicatessen, one with its own local business empire of sorts, to which I've been applying approximately every six months for longer than I've been working at Chateau Fluffy. It's pretty much the best place to work as far as Ann Arbor restaurants go, if you're in my line, and I'm very excited and rather nervous both about the new situation and about changing jobs in general.

This mood seems to go hand in hand with a lot of other extraneous factors--"spring in Michigan," with its occasional temperatures in the upper thirties, the continuing eulogies for Leopold Brothers'--closing at the end of the month; Starling Electric will play there tomorrow night--my desire to write every day contributing to some consciously duff work, the ongoing national political drama (I'm not a Clinton supporter by any stretch, but I don't see how having two candidates vying for a party's nomination at this late stage in the game--this would have been considered ridiculously early at one point--is any worse than simply holding an effective coronation of one almost at the outset), a dim consciousness I felt earlier this year and late last of a good many things changing--attitudes, people, ideas... put it all together and you have a very unsettled fellow. Not unhappy, just unsettled.

Giu La Testa / Duck, You Sucker! / A Fistful of Dynamite (1971): Sergio Leone's final spaghetti western is in many ways nothing of the sort. Where his earlier films--A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)*, and Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)--were intensely stylized renditions of good vs. evil archetypes with the occasional lusty Sancho Panza figure thrown in**--Giu La Testa takes place in a concrete historical reality, namely, the early years of the Mexican Revolution (after Madero's assassination and before Huerta's downfall, so 1913-15).*** Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger), a Tuco-like Mexican bandito (the role was originally to go to Eli Wallach), robs a stagecoach full of wealthy, snobbish passengers and tries to keep afloat during the growing institutionalized violence between the government and the rebels under Pancho Villa. Along comes John Mallory (James Coburn), an Irish explosives expert with a dark past whose contract with a wealthy German mining magnate comes to a brutal end. The two team up to rob a bank in a nearby city, only to find a hornet's nest of further violence, politics, guilt, and hard choices. Juan's avarice and understandable distrust of what happens to people like him in revolutions play well off John's tormented memories, gorgeously filmed in memorable musical flashback sequences, of what happened when he was involved with an earlier cause (this latter leading to some historical fudging, I think, on the movie's part). In many ways, it isn't so much a spaghetti western as it is a sociopolitical adventure-thriller that happens to take place in a spaghetti western-like setting. Unlike many of the earlier protagonists of Leone's films, "Juan and John" are real human beings who change and actually grow during the course of the movie, their respective cynicism and disillusioned idealism reinforced by the revolutionary goings-on of the story (if I remember right, Danny Peary likened the earlier spaghettis to ancient myth, with the gunfighters as gods who mix with mortals, their world vanishing as people increasingly lose their belief and turn to civilization, embodied in the advancing railroad of Once Upon A Time In The West). Leone's own disenchantment with the radical leftism professed by many of his fellow Italian filmmakers (I'm guessing Gillo Pontecorvo was pretty high on his list)  is reflected in the growing moral equivalence between the government and the rebels, both of which ruthlessly use ordianry people to get what they want. A major exponent of the latter is the engimatic, bourgeois Dr. Villega, played by Romolo Valli, who'd prominently figure in Vittorio de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that same year. He continues a fine Leone tradition of strong supporting performances by great Italian actors despite their being dubbed to the gills (for instance, Aldo Giuffre in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Gabriele Ferzetti in Once Upon A Time In The West). One of Ennio Morricone's most charismatically loopy scores lends the film extra dollops of humor and pathos, and it's nice to see a western of any sort treat Mexico as a real country with real problems, as opposed to the "south of the border" fantasy to replace a vanishing American frontier (even in such ostensibly critical films as Sam Peckinpah's 1969 The Wild Bunch and 1973's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid--the latter also starring Coburn).**** The recent rerelease of the film on DVD features a fantastic restoration, as well as a couple of decent documentaries with film historian and Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling, as well as frequent Leone screenwriter and collaborator Sergio Donati (and a number of curators at the Museum of the American West putting together a Leone retrospective).***** Giu La Testa, which must have puzzled as many Leone fans as it pleased, deserves to be remembered as one of the great westerns and great political films of the era.

*I commonly claim this as my "favorite movie," although it's really one of ten or so, as it ranks on so many "top ten lists": Westerns, war movies, soundtracks, opening shots, opening scenes, etc.

**Generally played by a distinguished American stage actor largely associated with the work of a particular playwright, viz. Eli Wallach (Tennesse Williams) as Tuco in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Jason Robards (Eugene O'Neill) as Cheyenne in Once Upon A Time In The West.

***Again with the endnotes; while The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly takes place during the American Civil War, with the New Mexico Campaign of 1862 as a backdrop, it's arguable that the conflict has been leached of any real meaning so that it can stand in for any war. 

****I saw this not long after Alfonso Cuaron's wonderful Solo Con Tu Pareja (1991), which rejected nationalistic and tourist fantasies of Mexico City in favor of the growing middle-class culture that was starting to make its mark at the time (reminiscent of Almodovar's approach to Spanish culture).

*****Leone's films on DVD are an odd bunch--The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, with surprisingly lackluster extras (including a sub-History Channel documentary on the New Mexico Campaign that creepily and inaccurately refers to the Civil War as the "Second American Revolution"), went for around $25-30, as did Giu La Testa, whose extras were rather more interesting, but Once Upon A Time In The West, with several different commentaries and documentaries, including a wonderfully filmed retrospective with Gabriele Ferzetti and Claudia Cardinale, is still going, so far as I know, for $10 at Borders, making it one of the great DVD bargains--an inscrutable situation.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937): I gave Rhode Island's great contribution to world literature a whirl in either high school or college, and found him rather distasteful, wallowing in the kind of overwrought gloom I generally try and avoid in fiction, both in my own and others'. I think part of the problem was that I stated with "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919), a chilling little tale that nevertheless takes place in a graveyard, which I guess I thought was a silly, cliched idea until I started living across the street from one. I suspect this introduction threw off my reactions to his other stuff, in particular the now-superb novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931). There was also the cultish whiff about the man (hardly his fault, mainly due to the posthumous work of his collaborator August Derleth), like a darker Tolkien, that warned me away. Fortunately, that meant that I got to rediscover his stuff recently with very pleasant results. Lovecraft, now widely recognized as the greatest of American "horror" writers, wrote around sixty short stories and three novellas, just about all of which I've now read over the past couple of months. He was a central figure in the growth of what I used to call "speculative fiction" and what I now happily term "weird fiction," like most scholars (it sure sounds better), along with Britain's Lord Dunsany and the States' Robert E. Howard (of Conan fame) and Clark Ashton Smith, whose stories I've also been reading a lot lately.

 What I love most about Lovecraft is that he operated in an era before the rigid stratification of genre fiction (which, for the purposes of this discussion, means horror, fantasy, and science fiction) and wrote stories that could be placed in any of these categories, or in most cases, in all trhee. Since the early 1960s or so, most fantasy to my knowledge has been pretty much imitation Tolkien or Celtic mythology fan-fic, with not all that many writers going back to the period when one could ignore genre and write with a more fluid understanding of what was possible in stories. For my part, the chance discovery of Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973) at a used book sale several years ago was a major revelation in this regard. Carter's impassioned partisanship on behalf of pre-Tolkien authors like the great William Morris, Dunsany, Howard, Smith, and--especially--A. Merritt* opened my eyes to the possibilities in this kind of writing, one that pretty much bypassed the late-twentieth-century domination of genre literature and allowed greater latitude in subject and style.

As a result of all this, I was much more amenable to Lovecraft than I might have been before. I still have a hard time with some of his stuff, particularly the earlier stories he wrote when he was more under the influence of Dunsany, but that's probably because I've grown a little disenchanted with the kind of Dunsany in which Lovecraft was interested. Dunsany wrote some of the most dazzlingly baroque, enchantingly loquacious short stories ever, beginning in his early career with imaginary religious fables told in a mystical, poetic cadence (his 1905 The Gods of Pegana was probably the first instance of an invented religion for a fantastic world, a device that would later become pretty standard for most "fantasy" writers), but I've gotten rather bored with that sort of thing--it can be excessive--and greatly prefer his later, prosier, non-fantastic tales (his hilarious yarn "The Pirate of the Round Pond" beats anything by Tolkien for me). Lovecraft's 1927 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath crowned and completed his Dunsany worship, although I found it much better going this time around (boring and incomprehensible when I first read it several years ago). Beginning around "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft evolved an imaginary "religion" of his own, which wasn't based so much on actual gods (Lovecraft was a fervent materialist) but on powerful extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional beings masquerading as or mistaken for gods. The "mythos" has given rise to at least one popular role-playing game of the 80s and 90s and reams of imitative homages, and informed much of the rest of Lovecraft's fiction, including his superb short stories "The Colour Out of Space" (1927--Lovecraft considered this one his own personal favorite), "The Whisperer In Darkness" (1930), "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931), and "The Thing On the Doorstep" (1933), which combined traditional horror themes with more scientifically-based threats to create a memorable and hugely influential form of literary brew. While Lovecraft's ideas were fascinating and probably daunting for writers used to more orthodox forms of "supernatural horror" (M.R. James was no fan of Lovecraft's) as he put it himself in his informative and occasionally illuminating 1927 treatise Supernatural Horror In Literature, his main contribution lay in the establishment of a brooding and sinister mood, an area in which he matched and occasionally surpassed Poe, his putative idol. Lovecraft frequently reached too far in trying to set said mood (he was well-aware of this, too, as seen in his amusingly self-parodic 1922 story "The Hound"), but he always got the job done, and if you can't go overboard occasionally in weird fiction, then when is it ever possible?

Scott Smith--and Carter A. Smith, The Ruins (2006 and 2008): Scott Smith's novel fits well into the now-burgeoning "American tourists menaced by foreign things in general" sub-genre, with a cast of four attractive young collegians on vacation in Cancun who decide to investigate the recent disappearance of a casual acquaintance's brother (?). Their journey takes them into mainland Yucatan and a mysterious archeological site with a horrible secret. Once they're at the site, the locals won't let them leave... While the leads aren't really that sympathetic, their plight and increeasing paranoia is well-rendered, although the latter is done at such talky, excruciating length that it nearly neutralizes any pathos the reader might feel. It's competent enough, but I really couldn't understand what the big deal was, apart from an inventively grisly moment involving bodily fluids (yes, it's one of those). The reviews seemed to treat The Ruins as some kind of reinvention of the horror novel, when the Lost Patrol trope's old as the hills and the concept of its central threat has been well-plumbed in various ways by several writers, including John Wyndham and even yours truly (in a story I had in The First BHF Book of Horror Stories which I wrote back in 2004). In the end, The Ruins is a decent story, but the time Smith takes to tell it and the encrusted hype make it difficult to truly enjoy. Fortunately, Carter A. Smith's surprisingly not-bad movie manages a serviceable end-run around the novel's shortcomings, though the moral of the story seems to be in many ways "never go anywhere with anyone who looks and sounds like John Phillip Law." The central threat, while a time-honored trope (and deservedly so--it's creepy as hell), is brilliantly realized by what I assume to be CGI, and the circumstances surrounding it are fairly fresh. The male characters do well enough, but the heroines are as appealing a pair of horror protagonists as I recently remember. I'm willing to see just about anything featuring the lovely and fiendishly talented Jena Malone (and occasionally pay the price, as with the lukewarm Saved and the wretched Life As A House), but the gorgeous Laura Ramsey's nearly as good (better, according to the excellent review in the Detroit Metro Times--again proving its superiority to the obnoxious Entertainment Weekly), and "does terror" extremely well. In the end, The Ruins wasn't anything especially groundbreaking, but was certainly an improvement on an overhyped novel.  

V.C. Andrews, Flowers In The Attic (1979): It took me forever to get around to reading Andrews' modern "classic," probably because of its (well-deserved) hokey Gothic, Dark Shadows reputation. Now more amenable to that sort of thing, I had a crack at it after reading a few friends' negative comments. It's listed in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog as a "teen novel," and it's one hell of a kinky one. Four profoundly annoying children (the grotesquely prim cadences of the elder two reminded me of Zoey Dean) enjoy a relatively idyllic life with their hardworking father and Corinne, their princessy mother, until the former dies in a car crash. Corinne, whose extravagant lifestyle has led to a crisis in their financial affairs, takes her brood to live with her fabulously wealthy parents in Virginia. Once they arrive, however, things go sour. The grandfather, a demented old coot who's ignorant of his grandchildren's existence, informs Corinne that the only reason he hasn't disinherited her is because she hasn't had children (he'd opposed her marriage for reasons that become starkly apparent throughout the novel). The grandmother learns of the children and agrees to keep the secret, albeit by keeping the kids locked up in a set of attic rooms for what turn into years. As time goes by, the children learn that all isn't what it seems. Frequent whippings and incest can add an agreeably grotesque twist to a story, and Corinne, at least, is a memorably realized character, but it's all so overdone and unintentionally comical (and less suited to the latter than similar stories) that the end comes as a blessed relief.

Pay it no mind, it's just a song.

One minute, I'm dreaming of doing the things I usually do--read, write, cook, watch movies... when an old friend/crush from Akron--"Circe," we'll call her--shows up at the door, in the midst of one of her famed "chaos road trips." We get decidedly intimate and I understandably opt to join her. Stopping at her parents' house, I discover that she's Circe's evil twin, who fights the real one and loses. I then proceed with the real Circe, only to find our bliss short-lived. Surviving a hair-raising chase down a freeway where a truck ferrying tuna salad has skidded and crashed in the midst of a driving rainstorm (rendering the freeway a raging torrent of rainwater, rusted aluminum, and tuna salad), in which I have to get out in the water and lead Circe and the car to safety (like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen), we come to my own "house" (which I'd never seen before) where a different extended Irish-American family to the one I actually have is carrying on a wake/get-together. Circe bids me a tearful farewell, explaining that she's gotten a scholarship to study in Dublin. My pain fails to deflate even on discovering that my house is now a ski resort. Yielding to my "relatives" (who include an annoyingly bufferish old Anglo-Irish "Ascendancy" squire who probably resembles influential early twentieth century fantasist Lord Dunsany), I agree to go sledding only to find an ominous rumble start up once we get to the top of the hill. Fortunately, it didn't sound too bad, so I had the presence of mind to shout "quasi-avalanche!" just before I woke up. Thank heavens for that.

The middle of the month and I and my blog are practically strangers. I've been writing a lot and reading almost as much. In between, I've been cooking, filling out applications (only two, but one was obnoxiously long), and, as one might imagine, watching movies. If I don't see anyone soon, have a happy rest of the month.

The 1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie riffed on This Island Earth (1955--funnily enough, the first movie my high school friends and I chose to inaugurate our semi-regular movie nights in 1989 or 1990) and did nothing with its funniest line. I still gape.

 At what point do certain movies make the leap to being good? I wonder...

 Hostel (2005): An online acquaintance of mine had a high enough opinion of Hostel 2 that I've decided to ignore its practically universal critical damnation and watch it eventually. First, though, I figured I should watch Hostel to make sure. I didn't think I'd like it very much, but it managed to be rather... I shrink from the term "good," as it's a classic aughties case of style over substance, but some of the style is pretty decent. It's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be, let's put it that way. Three massive dipshits--two Americans and their Icelandic buddy--are in Amsterdam further dragging the Republic's name in the mud. Anyone who's ever had to spend any time in close proximity to college campuses or sports bars will recognize Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) immediately. Of course, being Americans in Amsterdam, the only thing they can think to do is hit the hash bars and whorehouses. They meet Alexei, a roguish Russian (probably) who tells them about the unsurpassed fleshpots of, yes, Bratislava. So, as you or I would, on the first suggestion of some guy they meet after missing curfew, they immediately change their travel plans from Barcelona to Slovakia (Oh, the hell with New Orleans--let's go to Toronto!). Admittedly, things seem to look up at first, with a comically better hostel than the Dutch can apparently offer. They end up quartered with two pathologically slinky Slavic beauties who take them to the spa and then the disco, and that's when people start disappearing. Hostel was directed by up-and-coming auteur Eli Roth, a director widely disparaged for being all style and no substance. This is largely true, but if the style works, I'm willing to forgive a few things. I certainly wasn't expecting this to be The Wicker Man or Don't Look Now (both of which wind up clumsily--yet effectively--"referenced" in Hostel). The sense of location is fantastic; I don't know if it was actually filmed in Bratislava (Prague seems a better guess), but there's a nice mix between the post-milennial sheen of Amsterdam and the post-Communist grunginess (and faded Habsburg grandeur) of the former Czechoslovakia. The big red flag for many critics was the question of "torture-porn," and, yes, there are some very grisly scenes during the movie (as well as stupid and occasionally offensive plot points). I found myself baffled, though, as much of it isn't terribly worse than a lot of other stuff that's come out over the last four decades (five, if you count Mario Bava, or--if you must--Herschell Gordon Lewis), and it doesn't take up a lot of screen time either, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at most (and this scattered throughout the movie).  The characters start as douchebags, and I love that Josh is supposed to be an aspiring writer (not that I don't believe he is--I've known some sacks whove gone on to moderately successful and intensely localized literary careers)--"Prague? Oh, yeah, Kafka's cool." Paxton's apparently the less sensitive one, and does have a marvelous line of dialogue when encouraging Josh to be a little more adventurous in the space-age Amsterdam brothel: "When I'm studying for the bar exam, and you're doing your thesis, this... is what we'll think about." Aim to fail, fellas. After Oli ("the Viking") vanishes, though, Paxton and Josh start to show a little believable humanity, which makes this thing better than it might have been, and a few creepy character turns by the villains add a nicely sinister touch. So, it's no masterpiece, but it looks really good, and is way better than Saw, but surprisingly slightly below former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider's Strangeland (1994).

Scarecrow Gone Wild (2004): "If you say 'let's split up,', I'll bitch-slap the pair of you!" A long time ago, the Meijer on Ann Arbor-Saline Road held a colossal clearance sale of an Alexandrine library's worthh of cheap DVDs, of which I barely took advantage. I promised myself the next time it happened that I wouldn't be nearly so chary of loading up on what promised to be hugely entertaining crap, and found another chance a few weeks ago, just before I saw Cloverfield, at the location on Carpenter Road. I wound up with four, one of which was Scarecrow Gone Wild. The basketball players at what looks like a tremendously run-down state university satellite decide to go hit the beach one weekend, but not before running some of the going-on-thirty freshmen out to the cornfield for a little haz--I mean, "instilling character and upholding tradition." Paul (Matthew Linhardt), one of the team's stars, is practically blood brothers with Sam (Caleb Roerhig), one of the freshmen, and encourages him to ask lovely Beth (Samantha Aisling) out on a date. No sooner does he do this than the rest of the team drag Sam off to the cornfield, and Paul and Beth take to running around campus and making out in a gazebo; some real friendship right there. The team, though nominally run by the coach (Ultimate Fighting luminary Ken Shamrock, billed on the DVD case as "The Most Dangerous Man Alive," with an indescribably funny expression on his mug), seems to take its orders from Mike, who appears to be fighting both a Napoleon complex and an "outie." Why a cornfield? Well, there's this legend, see, that some scarecrow took on the soul killed in the cornfield and now he goes around... killing people. Sam's hypoglycemic, and you can sort of guess where this is all going. I was fully prepared to find Scarecrow Gone Wild utterly loathsome, but it was really far more entertaining than it had any right to be. There's the usual bucketload of unintentional laughs (at one point, the pathos in Paul and Sam's relationship threatens to turn into a "Lifetime Original Movie"), but there are a few genuinely funny bits as well, and writer-director Brian Katkin (who wrote some of the music--never a good idea, ask John Carpenter--along with some band called the Filthies) sems to know his audience rather well. One cast member death is particularly welcome. While certainly not good, it's short, fast, and well-paced; I was never bored. The DVD is from York Productions, an outfit also responsible, according to the "previews" extras, for Aquanoids (which actually looks like a lot of fun) and Alien 51 (which doesn't--it stars Heidi Fleiss as some sort of carnival ring-mistress and has that weird late-80s B-movie feel to it). I remember being afraid at one point that the decline of VHS would result the death of in movies like these, but thankfully I needn't have worried. 

"He's basically Ed Wood, but with an inexhaustible supply of money."

--"Moodie" of the British Horror Films Forum on George Lucas.

Yes, it's Oscar season, apparently, and this year marks the first time (I think) that I've ever seen all five Best Picture nominees in the year of their eligibility. I'm happy about that, as this has been a really decent year for that sort of thing, with one glaring exception that I mentioned earlier. I'm behind There Will Be Blood, although I'll only get irritated if Atonement wins.

Michael Clayton (2007): Tony Gilroy's moody 70s-homage thriller played for a day at the Michigan Theater, and as I missed it earlier at Showcase, I decided to catch it before I left. Michael Clayton (George Clooney) wokrs as a fixer for a wealthy and influential New York law firm on the verge of merging with a London concern and going global. His friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the firm's most lethal and feared counsel, flips out and strips naked during a deposition in a class-action lawsuit against one of the firm's clients, a sleazy Archer Daniels Midland simulacrum called UNorth (their TV commercials are priceless bits of satire on the fim's part). Yes, Arthur's having a crisis of conscience, and the firm's head honcho (Sydney Pollack) sends Clayton to Wisconsin to manage the meltdown. Arthur's actions and the apearance of a damning memo from UNorth's scientific staff spark rebellious impulses in Clayton (once an idealistic lawyer working in the D.A.'s office), which grow after ambitious UNorth executive Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) tries to interfere with his search for the truth. I really enjoyed this; I hadn't seen a good meat-and-potatoes flick like this in a while, and while it doesn't have the linguistic, visual, or thematic fireworks of fellow Best Picture Oscar nominees There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men, it's got an appeal all its own, and I don't remember applause breaking out at a crucial scene during the other two movies. The idealist-lawyer-against-the-system story is one of the most dependable--and hackneyed--storylines in American movies and television, and it's a credit to Gilroy and the actors that they manage to make the story seem fresh and inspired (especially with its relatively downbeat ending).

Juno (2007): Will and Ariel Durant, the longtime eminences grises (usage?) of middlebrow "you-can-own-the-entire-set" history, once wrote of a British playwright (I think it was Sheridan) that his "wit dulled by excess." Something much the same could be said for Juno. Sixteen-year-old Juno McGuff (Ellen Page)--a confused, hyper-articulate, but still very likeable mess, much like the movie itself--gets pregnant by off-and-on boyfriend Paul Bleeker (the great Michael Cera of Arrested Development) and, after a weird set of happenstances, decides to carry the baby to term instead of aborting it, and searches for a couple looking to adopt. She finds Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (the great Jason Bateman of Arrested Development--I wish there had been more of a pattern there), a cartoonish pair of yuppies, advertising in the Penny Saver and quickly strikes up a business relationship with them as a surrogate mother. Juno herself is very nearly unbelievable, were it not for the fact that she reminds me very strongly of an old friend of mine (who actually had a similar origin to her unusual name from Greco-Roman mythology).  First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody (who's also one of the only reasons to read Entertainment Weekly these days) trowels on the quirkiness to the extent that the first half of the movie, at least, feels a lot like a live-action cartoon. I might have taken more umbrage at the suffocating hip of Juno's own dialogue if it hadn't been so damn funny. It's not just Juno--her family and friends are similarly sarcastically gifted, with only Mark and Vanessa left out (for the most part). The latter's well-to-do suburban uniformity gets run through the satirical wringer with the same daring and originality with which it's been done in other movies over the past thirty or forty years. Fortunately, by the time the movie rolls into the second half, the power of the story and the overall excellence of the acting (I've thought of Bateman and Cera as Michael and George Michael Bluth for so long that their prowess in dramatic scenes is genuinely revelatory) break throught he dialogue and twee soundtrack (it's hard to miss the Wes Anderson vibe in the latter, what with all the mid-60s Kinks and post-Cale Velvet Underground--it really ought to be the other way round, although it goes without saying that Juno beats the pants off Royal Tenenbaums). Page has been hailed for her winning performance, and rightly so, but the real surprise for me was Garner--I was never into Alias, and haven't seen her in much of anything else besides Pearl Harbor, but she was really good in Juno as a character who's very nearly a yuppie caricature. To be sure, it's almost impossible not to like a movie in which two characters argue over whether Herschell Gordon Lewis or Dario Argento was the greater horror director (and the answer is Argento, for fuck's sake)*. Speaking of horror, watch for Ginger Snaps' marvelous Emily Perkins as the abortion clinic receptionist. In the end, Juno's a lot like musician Kimya Dawson, late of the Moldy Peaches, many of whose songs appear in the film. I heard her at the Blind Pig several years ago out of curiosity. The actual music didn't rock my world, to be honest, but the warmth and sincerity of the show itself melted my heart, to the extent that I gave her a huge hug after she hand-stenciled a T-shirt for me (so that I could send it to my aforementioned Juno-reminiscent friend, strangely enough). In the end, that's what I wanted to give Juno--a hug (the final scene really is terribly sweet).

*I noticed, however, that Michael Reeves, Larry Cohen, Pete Walker, and George Romero all went unmentioned.