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Monsters Vs. Aliens, The Haunting in Connecticut, Z, and Shall We Kiss?
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Monsters Vs. Aliens (Three Stars)
U.S.; Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon, 2009
     
Monsters Vs. Aliens seemed a little better to me while I was watching it than it does in retrospect. But it’s still a pretty nifty show: a fast-paced parody horror sci-fi comedy extravaganza with an all-star cast and lots of gaudy 3D effects. If you see it in 3D (and you should), it looks great -- the kind of movie where the ingenious technology takes on an added measure of delight because its handled so skillfully and playfully.
    
Monsters is also a love letter to some of the most entertainingly cheesy horror movies of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, with specific references to The Attacking 50-Foot Woman (who becomes voice actress Reese Witherspoon’s Ginormica/Susan Murphy), The Fly (who becomes Hugh Laurie‘s fiendishly laughing Dr. Cockroach), The Blob (who becomes Seth Rogen in the role he was born to play, laid-back, Jell-O-bodied, ultra-blobby B. O. B.), Mothra/Godzilla (who becomes Insectosaurus, a behemoth who never speaks, but whose silence, according to a hot Hollywood rumor, was dubbed by either Joaquin Phoenix, or by Ben Stiller imitating Joaquin Phoenix, or by the late Marcel Marceau) and, I guess, The Gill Man/Creature from the Black Lagoon or maybe Eeegah! (who become Will Arnett as The Missing Link).
   
A formidable lineup indeed -- though sadly, there was apparently nothing here for Phil Tucker‘s immortal crybaby Robot Monster, which, considering the modest expenditure on R. M.’s costume (a gorilla suit and a fish bowl, as I remember), seems a shame on all concerned. How soon we forget! But there are good enough jokes about s.f. icons Steven Spielberg (“Close Encounters With an E. T.”), George Lucas (it takes place in Modesto) and Stanley Kubrick (Kiefer Sutherland as Gen. W. R. Monger apes George C. Scott’s sublime Gen. Buck Turgidson, and there’s a Strangelovian war room for President Stephen Colbert).
    
The plot is wickedly ingenious and ingeniously…wicked. Susan, a Modesto TV gal about to be married to her preposterously vain news anchor fiancée Derek (Paul Rudd) -- who owes his career to the new masturbation fantasy strategy of selecting TV news anchors (and movie critics) -- is plunged into a meteorite shower, swollen to near 50 foot proportions, dumped by disgraceful Derek, and then hurled by Gen. Monger into the secret subterranean whoozits which is home to the rest of the Monster Mob,
    
The fearsome fivesome’s life-or-death mission: to battle and destroy the unstoppable extraterrestrial invasion of a gigantic robot and his maniacal employer, four-eyed Gallaxhar (played to nasty perfection by Rainn Wilson). Gallaxhar, like Chuck Jones’ Marvin the Martian in the Duck Dodgers cartoons, is loaded with gadgets and doesn’t go down easy. The robot utterly ignores Pres. Colbert’s touching grand gesture of intergalactic peace and love, a spirited rendition of the “Close Encounters” theme, segueing right into the equally throbbing theme from Beverly Hills Cop. Perhaps the next number in this thrilling Colbertian medley was “Can’t Stop the Music.” But we’ll never know; the robot rudely marched off to tear down the Golden Gate Bridge, without even a nod to Ray Harryhausen.
  
If you have blood in your veins and popcorn in your mitts, how could you not enjoy something like that? Especially when the filmmakers -- directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon and writers Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky -- immediately flex their 3D muscles by hurling meteors at us and bopping a paddleball, “House of Wax”-style right in our faces? How could you not be utterly entranced by a 50-foot-tall cartoon Reese Witherspoon, in 3D yet? And how refreshing it is to see a current movie where Paul Rudd doesn’t get the girl -- or the guy.
   
The technical ingenuity of the better contemporary cartoon features is now such a constant that its easy to ignore it and complain about something else, like the script or the 3D glasses. But Monsters vs. Aliens keeps projecting right off the screen, in ways you can’t ignore, especially when Ginormica is around.
    
Kids be damned. I had a good time at M.V.A. and sometimes you’re lucky to get even that. Meanwhile, we can confidently await the inevitable sequel, this time in 4D, “Destroy all Monsters! Destroy all Aliens!“ -- where Colbert and fish bowl-headed Robot Monster (Seth Rogen in the role he was born to play) sing “Sometimes When We Touch (The Honesty’s Too Much)” to a rampaging octopoid-android and The House Republican Glee Club does a frenzied can can cameo to “No, No, Nanette,” Anne Coulter does a Gypsy Rose Lee strip to her original song, “Destroy All Liberals,” while the MSNBC Hardball-ettes answer smartly with David Daniel‘s “Barack Around the Clock.“
    
I don’t see how it can miss -- especially if they have a paddleball scene.

 
The Haunting in Connecticut (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Peter Cornwell, 2009
   
The Haunting in Connecticut is a haunted-house horror movie, supposedly based on fact, and it’s dismayingly full of shadowy rooms, dingy décor, rotting corpses, a bedeviled family, screaming kids and a loud, clanging clamorous soundtrack to cue the scares. There’s even an exorcist of sorts, played by the always intense Elias Koteas -- who manages the movie‘s best performance, despite the scene where he suddenly realizes he may have screwed up.
     
The movie as a whole seems about as real as a three-dollar cadaver, but there’s no accounting for taste. Grisly, cliché-packed, unimaginative horror movies desperately trying to repeat the horrific successes, and excesses, of the past have popped up regularly recently. And Connecticut, which might also have been called “The Amityville Snorer,” is no worse than some. Then, again, watching it is about as much fun as waking up with a corpse in your bed -- which in this movie would have been followed by a shock cut, a scream and a loud clang.
     
The hell-hounded family of The Haunting in Connecticut are the Campbells -- including cancer-stricken son Matt (Kyle Gallner), courageous mom Sara (Virginia Madsen), excitable kids Peter and Mary (Ty Wood and Sophi Knight), lively cousin Wendy (Amanda Crew), and troubled dad Peter (played by Hal Hartley stalwart Martin Donovan). Peter, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, has a drinking problem, but, unlike Jack, he doesn’t have any great tantrum scenes. (“Heeeere‘s Johnny!”) He does however have a bland drunken snit fit about the family leaving too many lights on. (Isn't that the cinematographer's job?)
    
Ah, the poor Campbells. Ignoring the danger signs, including a friendly warning from the landlord, and funeral documents and equipment that don’t seem to have been removed since the 1920s, they move into the house -- hoping, despite its bad reputation, that living there will help Matt’s treatment and recovery. Had they but known! Fairly soon, all hell starts breaking loose, highlighted by the continuous appearances of those rotting corpses, who keep popping up like skeletons on a carnival scare ride, along with another group of pale, dead but very active, “Hellraiser”-looking dudes who have strange, incomprehensible inscriptions written all over their bodies -- perhaps this movie’s screenplay.
    
Director Peter Cornwell, in his feature debut, shows some talent for gruesome atmosphere, and editor/songwriter Tom Elkins works overtime trying to crank us up. But the script never jells, most of the live actors seem dispirited, and the movie, overall, seemed less scary to me than the nightly stock market report. Devotees of rotting corpses, however, will get more than their fill, as will lovers of shock cuts, dingy decor and loud clangs. Devotees of haunted house movies are advised to stay home and rent The Shining.

 
Z (Four Stars)
France; Costa-Gavras, 1970
    
Back in 1969 and 1970, Costa-Gavras‘s Z looked like he hippest, fastest, gutsiest thriller you could possibly make and when Gavras and writer Jorge Semprun wrote at the end that any similarity to real-life events wasn’t coincidental, but intentional, the campus crowds I saw it with, roared their approval. The movie, which present’s Gavras and Semprun’s view of the Greek political Lambrakis assassination, and the ascension to power of the tyrannical Greek Colonels, was both an impudent, in-their-faces docudrama and a blistering thriller -- and it was exhilarating on both levels. I happen to love Gavras’ earlier forgotten comic film noir The Sleeping Car Murders, and his later Missing, but he never made a better movie than Z, and probably never will.
     
The movie is excitingly shot and brilliantly cast. Yves Montand (a Sleeping Car vet) and Irene Papas radiate integrity as the victim and his widow, producer Jacques Perrin and Jean Louis Trintingant (two more Sleeping Car alumni) are the intrepid reporter and incorruptible prosecutor and Renato Salvatore and Marcel Bozzufi are among the gargoylish, malevolent collection of high-level and low-life villains.

Z, as Pauline Kael wrote, damned near…blasts you out of your seat -- as much by sheer political audacity as its gut-punching thrills and shocks. Daring too is its final coda, which reveals how justice can be transgressed even when the truth will out. Sadly, Colonels of one kind or another are always with us. But Z suggests that at least they can be indicted in the tribunal of the movies.
 
Shall We Kiss? (Three Stars)
France; Emmanuel Mouret, 2008
    
Emmanuel Mouret is a true hyphenate, a French comedian-actor-writer-director with the brain of a littérateur, the body of a doofus and the soul of a moralist -- and his new movie Shall We Kiss? demonstrates all three, to often delightful effect.
    
It’s a movie I enjoyed more than the recent hit American relationship comedy, He‘s Just Not That Into You, -- in which big city Baltimore yuppies played by an all-star Hollywood cast gab, snipe, brood and screw -- because in the end, Kiss is smarter, funnier, and even nicer, a movie that gently amuses you with the curious spectacles of both sex and non-sex.
    
In it, Mouret -- who has three other hyphenate films comedies to his credit -- plays Nicolas, a somewhat sex-obsessed math teacher with a gift of Gallic gab and a slightly David Schwimmerish-Adrien Brodyish hangdog look. Nicolas is able to talk his long-time best friend, researcher Judith (Virginie Ledoyen) into sleeping with him, in order -- or so he says -- to break down a psychological block he has about physical affection.
   
Although the subsequent sex between the two long-time platonic chums is supposedly non-erotic -- they proceed from first base to home run in a presumably, purely experimental, pals-in-the-sack sort of way -- flesh triumphs over spirit, and they wind up in love, which is bad news for both Judith‘s pharmacist hubby Claudio (Stefano Accorsi of Gabriele Muccino‘s The Last Kiss), who loves Judith passionately, and also Nicolas’s amazingly tolerant girlfriend Caline (Frederique Bel), who digs Nic in a more casual he’s-a-cute-little-rascal way.
    
The tale of Nicolas and Judith, however, is not the only carnal-or-not encounter Mouret portrays here. There is a framing story in Shall We Kiss? in which another couple, Gabriel (Michael Cohen) and Emilie (Julie Gayet), meet accidentally, enjoy a pleasant evening together, and go to her room -- after which she balks at giving him a kiss. Why? It‘s just a kiss, after all, n’est-ce pas?…Her reasons, she claims, are perfectly illustrated in the aforementioned story of Nicolas, Judith, Claudio and Caline, which she says she is relating third hand.
    
Will she or won’t she? What’s so wrong about one little kiss? And what, really, does the tale within the tale have to do with the framing story? Writer-director Mouret, skilled in the arts of both devious seduction and gentle suspense, keeps us hooked until the very last ... embrace? We’ll leave that, for the moment, to your imagination.
      
Several critics, including Variety‘s Derek Elley, have commented on the ways Mouret the actor-writer-director seems to subsume, in Shall We Kiss?, the artistic spirits of both Manhattan‘s motor-mouth wise-cracker Woody Allen and Paris’ cinematic philosopher Eric Rohmer. And they’re right. But there’s a more intricate design to this filmic double whammy. Kiss is notable for the way its Woodyisms are folded inside a Rohmerian envelope, or for the way it encloses a Woody Allen-style romantic comedy, about a neurotic romance between two talky intellectuals, one of whom may be a sneaky little devil, inside another, less salty but no less talky romance, which owes more to Rohmer.
    
In fact, the Gabriel-Emilie framing story is -- in form, structure, mood and tone -- somewhat in the mold of one of Rohmer’s celebrated Six Moral Tales (La Boulangere de Monceau, La Carriere du Suzanne, La Collectionneuse, Ma Nuit Chez Maud, Claire‘s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon). It’s about a man, Gabriel in this case, who loves or desires one woman, and then meets another whom he also desires, Emilie, maintaining a platonic (and wordy) encounter with the latter, before (spoiler alert, I’m afraid) ...

 

 

 

... going back to the first. Mouret doubles Rohmer’s Moral Tale structure by putting Gabriel’s very articulate object of desire (Emilie) in exactly the same position, and showing them working out their dilemmas, through mutual erotic conversation, simultaneously.
    
Meanwhile, in the inner Woodyish story, we see Nicolas, at least in my mind, pull a fast one on everybody -- getting chum Emilie to go all the way thanks to a set of intellectual arguments which struck me as (conscious or not) malarkey and subterfuge. Nic the Dic also assuages Judith’s guilt about breaking the heart of her lover, whom she still loves, by talking his own lover Caline into aiding them by seducing Claudio, to make the betrayed druggist feel better about things. Nicolas is shameless, and he even uses Claudio‘s other passion, his intense artistic admiration for the music of Franz Schubert, to help Caline ensnare him. (Schubert’s ultra-romantic melodies meanwhile irradiate the soundtrack.)
    
So Mouret is able to play his Woody side off against his Rohmer side, thereby potentially satisfying both. Woody gets the laugh; Rohmer supplies the moral. (We should remember perhaps that “Woody Allen“ and “Eric Rohmer“ are fictions too: assumed names and artistic identities for the artists born Allen Konigsberg and Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer. Rohmer’s adopted name comes from a sadomasochistic commingling of his youthful idols Erich von Stroheim and Sax “Fu Manchu” Rohmer; as for Allen, for all I know, his made-up moniker comes from his youthful hero Woody Woodpecker.
     
Mouret is good at every hyphenated skill here: acting, writing, directing and casting other actors. His cinematic style, like both Allen‘s and Rohmer’s, is both sharp and austere. Mouret’s own impersonation of the selfish Nicolas is exact and funny and utterly without vanity; he seems willing to sacrifice his dignity for his comedy any time. Ledoyen is a touching straight man -- or straight woman-- and Gayet, Cohen and Accorsi are more touching still. Bel costarred with Mouret in his last movie, Change of Address, and she’s as sexy as she is funny. And, of course, Schubert is a good man to have on your soundtrack -- especially if you use him in an affectionate and unpretentious way.
    
I’d recommend Shall We Kiss? to anyone who wants a smart, pretty romantic comedy, not necessarily starring Ben Affleck or Jennifer Aniston --and especially if you’re intrigued at the idea of Hannah and her Sisters dropped inside Ma Nuit Chez Maud. It’s a movie that demonstrates something the Old Hollywood comedy classics knew well, even as they coped with the censorious idiocies of the Production Code: that faces and talk can be as sexy, onscreen, as actual sex.
    
There‘s another good reason to patronize this film. If you’ve gotten sick recently of listening to the yowling, smirking tirades of the right wing crew on Fox News TV or talk radio, remember that these guys -- Blimp Rushbomb, Sean “the Sham” Hammity, Bill “Riled Up Riles” O’Reilly, Glenn "the Wreck Beck" and all the rest of the whole sick crew -- often seem to hate the French and therefore French films, which Tucker Carlson (we’ll leave his name alone, despite the temptation of “Schmucker”) once compared to having acne. (Actually, it’s possible that acne was one of Tuck’s most profound artistic experiences.)
    
Did any of these Raging Bullshitters ever actually sit through a French film, Emmanuelle movies accepted, unless they were on the make? Anyway, Emmanuel Mouret, dreamer-maker of Shall We Kiss? has more to say about politics (at least sexual politics) than those Fox-and-elsewhere maestros of merde. Vive la France. Vive le cinema. A bas Blimp, Confusion to the Sham and Down with The Wreck. Cool out, Riles. And long live Woody-Rohmer Mouret. And Woody Woodpecker.

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
March 26, 2009

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