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OK, ladies and gents, here is the first split rating.  It’s probably a “4″ cinematically, and a “7″ in-genre.  It also deserves more than a moviemath rundown.

First off, I’m taking the “based on a true story” bit off the table.  Completely.  Short of the disgusting marketing of actual video of a killing spree as “horror”, and (on the other extreme) Blair Witch doing a meta-media-take on the documentary business, it just gets shuffled off.  I ignored it for Wolf Creek.  I credit it in The Wicker Man (the original, damn it) for being an innovative lie, but that’s the exception.  If I had to weigh it, “Based on true events” it would probably count against the movie.  But I’ll ignore it.

I haven’t seen Hostel.  By choice.  I don’t go for torture-porn.  Wolf Creek is about as close as I’ve gotten, and that was because I was going in blind and deaf.    This film might, in torture, be closer to Hostel.  I don’t know.  So I’d have to sum this up as Wolf Creek meets The Wicker Man.

OK, I invoked The Wicker Man.  That’s like invoking Citizen Kane or the Beatles.  But it’s not an empty comparison, and Borderland effectively ups the ante from its inspiration: it shows a four-way intersection of Catholic, Southern Baptist, and Santeria faiths, with extreme pathos due to all the practitioners being equally benighted, with a liberal atheist whose character arc is the most compelling to me.  I seriously related with Ed.  The movie shows what I’m willing to confess, that the most liberal among us is hours away from taking up arms against a sea of tyranny.

What’s good?  That depends.  Cinematically,

0 stars as a presumptive exploitation base, with
+1 star for effective use of over-exposure, 16 mm (?) filmstock, and Avid skipframing as poor man’s horror devices.  It assures me that not a ton of money was wasted on this film.  Then,
+2 stars for quite competent acting, by everyone except Rider Strong, and
+2 stars for Sean fucking Astin going against type, probably to the benefit of his career, and winning the screen, seemingly being the only one in the bunch, including the director, who groks that banal evil is scarier than overplayed horror, with
-1 stars for corny musical stings

OK, that’s cinematically.  In-genre, I’ll forgive half the musical stings bit, which starts us at
4.5 stars, with
+1 stars for the male Americans (again, excepting Rider Strong), the Mexican female lead, and the priest and priestess being scorchingly hot while the thugs were inhumanly ugly, adding on
+1 stars for it not falling into the new cliche of everyone having to die, and
+1 stars for a truly scary window and rooftop scene, with
-.5 stars for the closing panels that show what happened to the characters afterwards.

Emotionally?  Taxing.  Really fucking taxing.  Horror review for me is an academic exercise, and usually I’m immune to the tropes of the genre, but this took its toll.  It has tremendously increased the standards from last year’s festival, where nothing was close to as good.  This is a good movie.  And a sincerely scary movie.  And a rather exploitative movie.  I don’t really like being wound around a director’s finger, but that’s what this movie did to me.  It’s going to steal sleep hours from me, and I don’t forgive that easily.  But it was my fucking choice to go see this nonsense and try to review it, so I really have no one else to blame.

Recommendation: Make up your own mind.  If you’re not disturbed by this movie, what the hell is wrong with you?

2 points for a 2-bit teen remake of Rear Window, with
+1 for David Morse creeping me the hell out, and
+1 for Carrie-Anne Moss playing a normal human being convincingly, and
+1 for dear lord is Sarah Roemer chaud

Recommendation: Steal it

I’ve seen this film at least half a dozen times.

5 point base for good political action thriller, with
+1 for not having to watch Rebecca Pidgeon in the Tia Texada role, and
+3 for Mametese, and
+1 for rewatchability, and a big
+1 for seeing Ed O’Neill hold his own against Bill Macy and Val Kilmer, but with
-4 points for suffering through Mamet directing Mametese dialogue

Recommendation: Buy it

“Faith is stronger where weakness rules” — Liv Kristine Espenæs

Wow, Liv, that was worth the price of admission.  And the price of admission in the US is over forty dollars.

In context:

Life is a wonder
I’ve entered the gate
Time can be healing
If you just learn to wait

Pain makes tears flow
But it tells you to pray
And the night is our fortress
When we’re tired of the day

Opposite thoughts make me wonder sometimes
“Is there something out there”
I don’t know

But your smile makes me wonder,
“Did you mean what you said”
And a million thoughts went through my head

Your words make me cry…
And laugh, I guess
I am caught in an ocean of blue emptiness

Faith is stronger where weakness rules
Changes will open your eyes when it hurts
A coin has another side staring at you
And love causes freedom and prison in you

But the faith and the trust and your strength is my harbour
Faith, trust, and love I carry within me

I remember when I “upgraded” from a backpack to a messenger bag / briefcase type thing.  I felt so grown up.  “It’s in my briefcase,” I’d say with half-hidden glee.

Well, now I’m old.  And you know what?  Backpacks are better.  You can ride on your bike with them, they hold more, there are special ones designed for notebook PCs, and what the hell do I care what other people think?  So I’m switching back to a backpack.  So there.

4 stars for being a really good epic, with
+6 stars for special effects, with
-1 for the queen’s monologue, and
-1 for a disturbing rape scene, and
+.5, I guess, for her twisting the rapist’s words while she twists the sword, and
-1 for dead elephants, and
+1 for David Wenham, though
-.5 stars for criminally underutilizing him

Recommendation: Queue it

5 stars for better special effects than I expected, with
-1 stars for acting, and
-1 star for Jessica Alba’s acting, and
-1 star for Jessica Alba’s makeup, and
-1 because it deserves another knock, but with
+2 stars for being a comic book movie appropriate for kids

Recommendation: Ignore it

7 stars for what I guess people mean when they describe this film as having “visual poetry”, if that involves cherry blossoms, waves, and animals made of plants, with
-1 for my not grokking the story grammar, and
-1 for having a tough guy who talks like a wimp, and
-1 for not upsetting the genre enough to have him be a decent human being, and
-1 for the wife character, and
+.5 for the junkyard owner character and
+.5 for how the final suicide was cinematically handled

Recommendation: Ignore it

4 stars for being a serviceable thriller, with
+1 stars for Jim Carrey in a compelling role where he does not talk out of his ass, and
+1 for stars-playing-multiple-roles, and
+.5 for Rhona Mitra, with
-3 stars for Schumacher being a total douchebag, and
-1 for the wrong ending, redeemed with
+.5 for the almost-sufficient explanation in InfiniFilm of why they chose the wrong ending

So why not 3 stars?  You’ve got me.

Recommendation: Queue it

I said I’d start exploitation cinema at 0 stars, right?  So:

0 stars, with
+1 for Michael Biehn, and
+3 for gleefully exploiting the genre without exploiting the audience, and
+1 for Bruce Willis, and
+1 for the shocking anti-gun moment in an otherwise pro-gun movie, though
+1 extra for Rodriguez hiding this from his son, despite
-1 for the sickening use of meat throughout, except
+1 because I’m fairly confident it was meant ironically

Recommendation: Buy it

3 stars as a serviceable PG-13 horror movie, with
+2 stars for John Cusack carrying the whole damn thing, except for
-1 stars in the two places he drops the ball, with
+1 stars for the alternate endings, and
+1 stars because I was in a kind and generous mood

Recommendation: Steal it

God, where to start?  From zero, I guess, where exploitation cinema should always start.

+1 for Tarantino dialogue, and
+2 for Tarantino direction, and
+3 for casting Deluxe-process saturated red as a character who makes a high-impact cameo at the end of Act II, and
+1 for the bookending of “what it means to be a girl now” in contrapoint to “what it means to be a girl when tropes are upended”, with
+1 for Zoë Bell’s acting, and
+2 for her stunts, and
-1 for the telegraphing of the leg-out-the-window bit, with
+1 for Tarantino getting nuances out of Kurt Russell that I didn’t think possible, truncated to
9 stars because I refuse to give 10-star reviews in all but unreasonable circumstances.

Recommendation: Buy it

3 stars for being a ballsy and therefore uncomfortable documentary, with
+1 stars for the brilliant director of Boys Don’t Cry’s commentary (who reminds me so completely of my sister-in-law that it is bizzare), and
+3 stars for the subtle statement that the sedate and appropriate life of the private investigators would unreasonably get an NC-17 from the MPAA, and
-1 stars for John Waters trying to convince viewers that his movies should not receive NC-17 ratings

Recommendation: Queue it

5 stars for being a relevant biopic with
+1 stars for it being a woman, and
+3 stars for it being Cate Blanchett, whom I adore, and
+.5 stars for turning the gender relationships in the genre on their head, with
-2.5 stars for Joel Schumacher trying to be gritty and instead just being an ass.

Recommendation: Queue it

OK, here’s what I think I’ll do about movie reviews.  I’ll inline them in my blog.  I’ll tag them all “moviemath” for reasons that should become readily apparent.  I’ll try to avoid blatant spoilers, and be annoyingly concise, but at the same time try half-assedly to troll for dumb comments by passers-by.  But that’s between you and me, you being the dedicated mcgees.org reader.  The people whom I troll will be the Googlers.  If there’s anything really spoilerish, I’ll put it in the background color, so you’ll have to hit CTRL-A to read it.  That will lower my Google rating, but hey, life’s short, and spoilers suck.  So prepare to be inundated as I go over the films I’ve watched recently, then watch it slow to a trickle as it slows to match my viewing rate.  So, onwards and upwards.

It’s happening again.  I am getting a terrifying premonition of an imminent, terrible earthquake.  Like tonight.

Why am I writing this?  To freak you out?  Quite the opposite.  I’m just a normal guy, with normal fears, but almost no one reports their misses, and even fewer people remember them.  That’s why psychics seem to be so effective.  People recall the successful predictions and discard the ones that didn’t come to pass.  So here it is, the evening of the 11th of November 2007, in Southern California, and I’m predicting an earthquake.

I wouldn’t write this tomorrow, because I’d either be (1) embarrassed or (2) dead from an earthquake.  So here it goes on the record.  This website will be on Internet archives forever.  The web server is safely in Illinois.  Bookmark this page if you’d like.  And the next time someone reports a successful prediction, point them here.

Seriously, read (and seriously read) Atheist Ethicist.  He has far more patience than I, and where I tend to just be an asshole, he actually takes the time to take apart arguments step-by-step.

So I may end up referring you to that site, rather than my own, for explanations of:

1. why someone responding “it’s good” to a question of how food tastes drives me batshit
2. why I can comfortably dismiss the existence of ghosts without having seen your particular documentary program (on a fiction network or otherwise)
3. why I hit an absolute impasse with my sociology of religion professor when he decided to get down to brass tacks and said, “We all believe some things are good and some things are bad, right?”
4. why I look at you as if you were Martian when you make certain moral or theological assumptions, or conclusions, or, frequently, conclusions that are also your assumptions

Sweet baby cheeses.  I would have thought that devising theoretically-unsolvable Solitaire puzzles would be difficult, a problem beyond Microsoft’s grasp.  But I have now played 1.232 trillion games of Solitaire on my mobile phone, and have yet to win a single one.  Shenanigans!

Creepy — the priest stalks Conan O’Brien, demanding to hear his confession before he offers “absolution”, refers to himself as a “stalker” and a “dangerous fan”, and even contacts O’Brien’s parents.

Leaves’ Eyes will be in North America next year.  Anyone want to go to the Santa Ana, CA show with me?

They will also be in (let’s see, where are some of my other regular readers?) BC, Seattle, IL, NYC, and Florida.

Donate to Wikipedia.  You all use it.  You know who you are.  Keep the dream alive

I just watched a TV special about a 9.2 Earthquake in the United States (twice the magnitude of the San Francisco quake) within my parents’ lifetimes.  How the hell have I never heard of this?  More here.

Over 10,000 aftershocks were recorded following the main shock. In the first day alone, eleven aftershocks were recorded with a magnitude greater than 6.0. An additional nine more occurred over the next three weeks. It was not until eighteen months later that the aftershocks were no longer a danger.

Some portions of earth moved 400 meters (!!).

moarfunny pictures

Honey is, really, bee vomit.  I know this.  So the following didn’t weird me out as much as it could have.

At a tea party, the host brought out a canister of long zhu, which translates to dragon balls, or, more nicely, dragon pearls.  Long zhu is black and formed of little, tiny spherical pellets.  What is it?  Well, it’s old pu-erh tea.  That’s been fed to bugs.  Then their feces is gathered.  That’s long zhu.

No, I don’t know what kind of bug.  But hey, bee vomit, bug shit, what’s the difference?  I was game.

He took an almost microscopic amount — less than a gram — and put it in a strainer.  Then we started brewing 1950s pu-erh gong fu style.  For those who were willing to try it (which eventually was everyone in attendance) he would pour it over the long zhu, into the cup.

First off, this stuff is strong.  Flavor-wise.  It is also delicious.  It enhances the flavor of the tea to which it’s added, makes a dramatic differences, and we’re talking about just pouring the tea over the pellets, not dissolving them.

Secondly, this stuff is strong.  Psychotropically.  It is, really, a drug, it turns out.  I didn’t know this.  One gets high, and stoned, but somehow has subjectively clearer thoughts, even though there feels like a cloud in your head.  It’s also, I think, allergenic.  Everyone in attendance had their nasal passages clog immediately, and some developed sinus headaches.  But did we stop drinking it?  No.  We kept asking for cup after cup.  I probably had about 300 ml.

Yes, all the dumb jokes were made, mostly by me.  “This is good shit!”  “Where can I get some of this shit?”

I had been planning to comment near the end of the party that, since I had now switched from whisky tastings to tea tastings, I could safely drive home afterwards.  I hadn’t counted on dragon pearls.  Er, bug shit.