See, you try to corral a few zombies for some yucks, and what do you find yourself faced with? Annihilation. Happens to everyone tho, right?

We have passes for three Southern
metropolii for CHUD.com readers who follow the rules to the contest and
don’t forget to include their mailing addresses. Oh, and once again,
readers from Nashville… THERE IS NO POINT IN MAILING ME AN ENVELOPE TELLING ME TO ADD YOU TO THE LIST OF FREE PASSES.
It won’t happen, as there is no list. Just follow the rules below and
hey… why not click around the site and read it. Reading the site is
more important than the occasional free movie pass. It’s the gift of
plenty.

I ran all the way across town and ended up late for the movie. My mood was the exact opposite of the beautiful sunny day at that point – I had sat on that slow, often stalled, train and been stewing in annoyance. I was in a bad mood and had missed the first ten minutes of the movie – this film didn’t stand a chance with me.

Except that it completely won me over. The deck was stacked against Once, but when the end credits came up I was wiping a tear from my cheek, having fallen in love with this beautiful little musical love story.

I’ll review the movie for real once I’ve seen it again, but on one viewing Once is a strong contender for my eventual ten best of the year. The movie it most reminded me of, weirdly, was Hustle & Flow, in that it’s a musical about the creation of music, and that we get to experience the moments and thoughts and feelings that go into creating a song. The film is set in Dublin, where a street busker, played by real life musician and one-time member of the cinematical Commitments Glen Hansard, meets a beautiful Czech woman, played by multi-instrumentalist Marketa Irglova. They fall into friendship, and maybe something more, and together make gorgeous and heartbreaking music. Once is a simple movie, very low budget and without much in the ways of bells and whistles beyond the powerful talents of Hansard and Irglova and their electric connection. It’s moving and wonderful, but never maudlin. The sign that a movie is magic is that you want to live inside of it. I came out of Once wanting to live in Dublin, to know these people, to sit in a recording studio with them as they created more amazing music..

Tomorrow is the press day for Once, and Hansard and Irglova will be performing songs – I couldn’t be more excited. Many of the songs from Once were apparently taken from their album The Swell Season, which you can get a listen to here at MySpace. There’s also a trailer for Once, but it’s massively misleading. I’ve attached it at the bottom of this article.

But not Sigourney Weaver.

Either Lorne Michaels is a lot better at that sort of thing than I am — I’m talking about working on a whole other plane of understanding — or he’s from the same dimension as Oscar winner Chris Kattan because that’s the group he’s got lined up for Baby Mama, a comedy in which Fey’s career woman hires Pohler as a surrogate mother to carry the baby she so desperately wants. In addition to being tall and commanding, Sigourney will be the head of the surrogate agency.

Not since Nikki Finke blew the cover off the Spider-Man 3/Sony Internal Tracking Data story has the film industry been so collectively inclined to shrug and scroll down to the next story on Defamer. Basically, what probably happened is some marketing muckety-muck at Fox named Pam Ward called up Alex Woodson at the struggling Hollywood Reporter and wowed him with the awesome power of her Nielsen Buzzmetrics numbers; next thing you know, the story is up and getting ridiculed all over the internet by everyone from Movie City News’ David Poland to a bunch of foul-mouthed cynics on the CHUD Message Boards.

But regardless of the derision, Ward’s done her job and is no doubt receiving congratulatory pats on her yoga-hardened tush this morning from her superiors over on the Fox lot. Not only did she get the story published in the industry’s second-tier, but still widely read trade daily, she also got Woodson to print a whopper like "It confirms that there’s a real hunger in the marketplace for a straightforward action movie without the gimmicks and the CGI" without a caveat acknowledging that this is precisely what the heavily blogged-about trailer for Live Free or Die Hard is promising.*

What’s amusing about this to everyone but Fox is that Live Free or Die Hard could’ve distinguished itself in the marketplace had it emphasized what made the first film in the series special rather than mimicking action beats from True Lies. John McClane was relatable because he got progressively bloodied up as he used his New York City cop-honed wits to pick off Hans Gruber’s Eurotrash henchmen one or two at a time. He was the perfect action hero everyman in a decade dominated by Sly and Schwarzenegger. After two outsized adventures in the subsequent sequels, the only reason to bring McClane back (aside from a tidy payday for Willis and producer Arnold Kopelson) would be to return to that grittier aesthetic, especially since practical action is suddenly all the rage (as evidenced by the success of Casino Royale and the Bourne movies). From the looks of The Most Massively Blogged-About Trailer Ever, the only thing Live Free or Die Hard has in common with the first movie is a title and a catch phrase (and there’s some speculation that phrase might get watered down if the studio pushes for a PG-13 rating).

One thing working in LFoDH‘s is the lack of new product over the July 6th weekend; if audiences are really in the moviegoing mood this summer (and many are predicting record business over the next four months), they might be inclined to check out their second viewing option after getting their fill of fireworks, hot dogs and Champale. That’s why, if Fox is so desperate for a selling point, they should ditch this blog bullshit and embrace the R rating – anything to remind audiences of John McClane’s glory days. It could be the difference between a puny $105 million gross and a respectable $160 million take.

I must admit, though, I did a bit of research into the whole "Biggest Movie in the Blogosphere" claim via Google, and while I found no shortage of Live Free or Die Hard entries, they weren’t exactly positive. To wit: In a conclusive online poll conducted by gossip blog Popsugar (catering to all your celebrity upskirt needs), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was overwhelmingly voted the most anticipated movie of the summer, while literally no one threw in for John McClane and the Flying Cars. Granted, only seven people had responded when I cast my vote (for Evan Almighty, natch), but that’s what you call a microcosm, folks. And for Live Free or Die Hard, it’s a real poopy microcosm.

Zoo isn’t a sleazy look at the event. Devor’s film is, more often than not, a tone poem, a beautiful and meditative examination of these men and their environment. It’s a fascinating movie, one that will disappoint anyone looking just for Stile Project-level nastiness. This, of course, puts Zoo in a weird position – it’s a gorgeous movie about an unpleasant subject, and the people who would appreciate it might tend to stay away, while those with a juvenile interest in the subject will surely be disappointed.

How did you first become aware of the strange fate of Mr. Hands?

It was pretty difficult to avoid it in Seattle. I think it was front page news on many newspapers. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I know it was covered extensively on TV and radio and then bloggers got a hold of it, so it was out there. It was the biggest story in the history of the Seattle Times, which has been around for a hundred years. It was quite a sensational moment.

What does it say about the world we’re living in, when a story about a man dying from having sex with a horse becomes the biggest story in the history of a hundred year old paper?

It probably means there is a grim redundancy of other kinds of news stories. This type of disastrous news tends to sell more papers than positive stories, and this was in particular was a strange twist on bad news. But you know, the Seattle Times is a conservative newspaper, and I was told by people that were involved that there was an agenda, an effort to whip up a frenzy about moral decline. There is always a war going on between left and right.

For a lot of people their interest in the story is a salacious one, but your film is about as far as you can get from a salacious look at this story. What was the hook that got you into this story and made you decide to make a movie like this?

For us the whole impetus of deciding to make the film was, can we attempt to resurrect a man’s ruined reputation posthumously in some small way with this film? That was our initial creative challenge, and so we thought we might have more access to people who might speak on his behalf, but that’s the not the case. It kind of shifted a little bit, but we always knew that it would be a little too easy to make something that would snicker at the circumstances. We thought there’s probably some mystery and some poetry somewhere in this, especially given the beauty of the physical surroundings where these men met, in the shadow of the volcano in these beautiful green fields with these horses in the summer evenings. And beyond that we knew a person died, and that people were mourning and there had to be some friendship and some decency and some love amidst these people would meet. That was the goal, to give these men – and also the horse rescuer Jenny Edwards as the horse rescuer – to show them as compassionate people who were hurting on some level for the death of the man or for the animals themselves that were involved. We were pretty sure there would be some somber elements to the film as well.

You go out of your way to not divulge Mr. Hands’ real name, which is in the public record at this point. Why did you decide to keep his name out of it?

Number one, his family asked that we not put their last name in the film. They declined to participate but that’s something they requested; I think it would have been silly to play hardball and say, ‘If you’re not going to participate we’re going to put the name out there.’ I don’t think the name is that important. I don’t think naming somebody, outing somebody is that important. The second aspect of it is that the men who were alive were participating and we agreed not to use their real names, so we were using their internet handles – Coyote, Happy Horseman, etc. So that fell into a nice anonymous blanketing of the cameras.

You have a scene where people are shown video footage of a man having sex with a horse. I’ve seen that footage online, and maybe you can clear something up: that’s not the video of Mr. Hands’ final encounter?

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told. My impression is that that was always rumored to be the death tape, and one of the gentlemen in the film wanted to make sure to let the world know there were some conclusions that were jumped to, and that a man is going to groan mightily in the middle of such an act. Those are not the death throes of Mr. Hands.

You show that footage obliquely. We see bits and pieces, although you do keep the soundtrack, which I think is the most affecting part of the video anyway, but why did you decide not to show the video in more detail?

The fact is that the ranchers who owned the horse had to sit down and watch a bunch of videos in front of the police and say, ‘Yes, that’s my horse.’ We thought that was grimly funny, that they would have to do that. We were more interested in seeing the faces and reactions of the people in the room. And number two, the sex was not something we wanted to overload the film with, and in fact it wasn’t that important to us. There are some things you can leave to the imagination, and God knows if there’s one thing you can leave to the imagination, it’s this story.

It’s interesting that you say the sex isn’t that important to you, but it really is the sex that makes these people different from anyone else who just happens to really love and commune with horses. That is the dividing line.

It is. But there isn’t anything on this Earth that someone hasn’t sexualized, and there are hundreds of thousands of subsets of sexuality. But it was the commonality that these men had with everyone else that was of interest to me – gatherings, as boring as they were, where they would watch some movies and have some drinks and hang around, saying nothing in particular. That was more interesting to me than the sex, per se.

How important do you think the internet is to this subculture? Do you think this sort of a subcultural can exist in a serious way only with the internet, or do you think there was as large a subculture before the internet?

The internet was extremely important to them, and I think most of them said that unlike other subsets, subcultures, these guys, many of them thought they were involved in something where they thought they were the only people doing it. The internet gave them the impression that there were hundreds of thousands of people doing it, so I’d say the internet changed everything.

There’s an interesting line in the movie where someone says that the internet allowed them to see that sex with horses could actually be done, which means that the guy was interested in it, but never had the ability to physically do it. Is it your impression that the internet made this more common, since people who had the interest but didn’t know how to go about it suddenly could?

I’d say that’s fair to say. Absolutely.

Your film has drawn a lot of attention right from the beginning. Some people have seen it sight unseen, in fact, and one the attacks I’ve seen leveled at Zoo is that it’s part of a culture of grey morals, where if someone likes an activity we have to accept it and not make a moral judgment. What’s your response to that?

My feeling is that this is human behavior. You can either accept it or not. I don’t believe you can put this in the category of behavior that can be fixed or altered. We often say we see ourselves as more like anthropologists who have the opportunity to travel deep into a remote part of the world and see a group of people, a culture, who are doing things that are extremely foreign to us, and I think that our job was to bring back and document what they said and to not overcontextualize it and editorialize it and make contradictory statements that would rebuff their practice. This was a chance for them to present themselves; this was clearly more their document than anyone else’s. You have to remember that these men did not have their time in the press at all; these men did not have one shot at saying anything. There was a big hole in the balance of the story, and there’s been plenty of stuff about how wrong this is and how immoral this is and how it’s bad for the animal. The points of view that were not gathered and disseminated were those of the men themselves. It doesn’t mean we agree with it, but we felt that as documentary filmmakers that it was absolutely worthwhile to let these men speak. Not that we would ever compare these men to other characters that are dangerous and evil, but certainly Americans have no problem interviewing and fictionalizing all sorts of criminal behavior for the sake of entertainment. This was just an investigation into who these men were and how they felt about this issue. That was it.

I was interested in seeing how both sides of this issue, Jenny the horse rescuer and the men both assign certain anthropomorphic qualities to these animals. On one side it’s that these animals can’t consent and they’re like children, while on the other side it’s that these animals wouldn’t get involved in this if they didn’t want to do it. Where did you end up at the end of this process?

We’ve
tackled our essentials list and the continued revelation of our Kills
List from 2003, and now that we’ve begun the beguine, we must continue.
Behold:

The CHUD.com Top 50 Disappointments.

A
quick word on the criteria. We could very easily have spent this whole
article discussing sequels and prequels and adaptations of television
shows and called it a day. Instead, we tried to go a different route.
Also, from a master list of over 100, the involved parties (Devin,
Jeremy, Micah, Russ, and myself) all killed off a choice for each one
we claimed. As a result, we’ll run a big list at the end of this of the
‘ones that got away’. So, here is day one of many where we chronicle
the 50 Biggest Disappointments. Two a day, every week day for five
weeks. In no particular order:

#40 – Art School Confidential (2006. dir. Terry Zwigoff)

I never expected such a hateful wreck from their union. There’s
something more terrible than when a pair of proven creators fall on
their face: when they do so with a project that seeks to refute any
possibility of beauty or humanity.

This isn’t simply an acidic stab at artistic pretentiousness but a
denial of honesty and expression. The one sincere character is a
murderer, and the lone artist demonstrably working for the sake of
expression is not only bad* and burdened with terrible taste (he paints
pop art while rocking ‘Stacy’s Mom’) but duplicitous. The ‘hero’ is a
limp dishrag we’re never meant to sympathize with but who also can’t
project enough personality for anyone to consider in any light,
positive or negative. His romantic interest is one rimjob shy of being
a burnt out art whore who, after seemingly acknowledging some form of
beauty, goes right back to her sell-out lifestyle.

Think I’m being venomous? I’m a goddamned Care Bear compared to Art School Confidential.

Like most of our disappointments, this one has its positive points,
most of which are broad barbs fired off in the film’s first act.
There’s no larger, easier target than a bunch of self-conscious art
students, but bitter as most of the jokes are, they’re also accurate and occasionally very funny. And, as Devin pointed out in his review,
until the movie completely goes to hell in the last act, there’s a
chance that it’s going to have something useful to say.

In the past, I’ve admired both Zwigoff and Clowes for being able to
channel their misanthropy into something that championed minor
victories instead of denying them entirely. If so determined to reverse
that trend, they could have saved a lot of effort by scrapping this
film and using the budget to hand out cyanide laced razor blades at art
schools instead.

Travesty Scale (1-10): 6 out of 10

#39 – Lifeforce (1985. dir. Tobe Hooper)

In the blink of an eye, the terror begins.

Such a cool tagline, so much promise for a feature adaptation of The Space Vampires, such a huge opportunity for Steve Railsback to rocket himself up into the middle of the C-List. But alas, it was not meant to be.

Tobe Hooper was fresh off sorta directing the monster hit Poltergeist and had already established himself as a TRUE master of horror when this big budget (25 million for ol’ Golan and Globus) came up and truly set itself up to be the next major genre effort. It had so many ingredients. Alien mastermind Dan O’Bannon. Hooper. A very capable source novel. A Henry Mancini score [apparently one which Hitchcock turned down for Frenzy]. A very naked Mathilda May. That tagline.

Lifeforce is at best a failure, good pretty much only for a few kills and the plentiful full-frontal nudity scattered throughout. Many a horror fiend in my age group got repeat value from Lifeforce, but not because of terror beginning in the blink of an eye. If they were wise, they’d have repackaged this thing with the tagline ‘In the blink of an eye, you fire a load onto the Betamax, rinse and repeat’.

What I’m saying is that there’s more pubic hair in this film than in all the Poltergeist flicks and I consider Tom Skerritt’s ‘stache in III to be a pubic one. Everything else about this one falls flat. It’s leaden in its pacing and delivery. The sensual allure of the shapely space vampire (unshaven, if you were wondering) is a powerful force, one I suppose we can attribute to Halley’s Comet since according to this flick it’s the source of vampire energy, but still fairly boring. I think they meant Frehley’s Comet because have you seen Anton Fig up close? Madness ensues, London becomes a haven for the undead and Steve Railsback tries to end the madness by driving a lead stake 2 inches under the heart of the scourge. Yeah, the old folklore was off by a few inches and elements. Such is life….force.

Patrick Stewart shows up with hair. There’s John Dykstra effects, but the bottom line is that this could have been a true sci-fi/horror gateway film and instead is at best a dumb, boring mess and at worst the reason so many of my generation’s men have hairy palms and male pattern blindness. – Nick

Travesty Scale (1-10): 5 out of 10

Previously Disappointing:
The Ladykillers
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Ultraviolet
New York, New York
Billy Bathgate
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Willow
Superman Returns
Blade: Trinity

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