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Friday, February 9, 2007
No telling what you’ll find down on the farm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I couldn’t blame Jess, the teenage girl in “The Messengers,” when she gets all pouty about having to move from Chicago to middle-of-the-boonies nowhere with her family.
Same thing happened to me when I was 10. My dad thought it’d be a great idea to get out of the city for a year and help my Uncle Dothan shake some profit out of his pecan farm.
If Pop had done a little more digging, he’d’ve found out the reason Uncle D wasn’t getting profit out of his pecan farm was because he was also trying to get profit out of an old-school moonshine still, hidden in the middle of all those pecan trees. Only he was drinking all those profits himself and spent most days passed out under a blanket of falling pecans … which he was too drunk to harvest.
We probably would’ve headed back to the city right away, only Pop was waiting for some sort of a restraining order to expire. But that’s another story.
Anyway, in “Messengers,” Jess (Kristen Stewart) and her family move into an old brown farmhouse the color of [excrement] in the middle of fields where there aren’t even any trees.
At least on the pecan farm, my brother and I had trees we could climb up and hide in whenever Uncle Dothan hit the airplane glue and mistook one of us for his ex-wife and chased after us.
Man, we had a couple of close calls, too. …
Funny, I hadn’t thought about those days in a while. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a whole lot to keep my mind from drifting while I was watching “The Messengers.”
See, Jess and her folks move into the farmhouse, and Jess gripes that her cellphone can’t get a signal in the stick-free sticks. And her dad chuckles and goes, “Out here, people remember you can have conversations without those things.”
And that’s just the sort of folksy, homespun sentiment people say seconds before their teenagers beat them to death with a hammer.
Not that that happens, exactly. But it turns out their farmhouse has seen its share of murders in the past. Only Jess’ dad (Dylan McDermott) didn’t bother to find anything out about the house’s history before he bought it. And nobody in the family seems to notice that the rooms in their new house are full of so much spooky smoke you’d think David Copperfield was down in the basement, testing the fog machine for his next Vegas show.
Actually, David Copperfield in the basement would’ve been a whole lot scarier than the things that actually are in the basement in this movie.
See, Jess sulks around the house acting bored, but that doesn’t last for long because her mute baby brother, Ben, starts toddling around the house pointing at invisible things.
And when they get visible, you see they’re those boring old herky-jerky Asian-style ghosts with gray skin like oatmeal and eyes like boiled eggs. And then you remember the directors’ last name is Pang. And then you feel a pang of nostalgia for the good old-fashioned American kind of ghosts that wore white sheets and went “boo.”
These ghosts have a few decent tricks, though. They can crawl along on the ceiling, and turn the cellar floor into a swimming pool, then back again into a floor — which would be a nice trick to have, especially if you live in a condo. Oh, and they throw furniture around and stuff, and drag Jess around by her hair — which is easy to do because Miss Stewart looks like she weighs about 20 pounds and somebody should make her eat a Wendy’s.
Jess’ parents don’t hear or see any of this, natch. McDermott is too busy trying to grow a crop of sunflowers and some chest hair. And Jess’ mom (Penelope Ann Miller — yeah, I thought she was dead, too) wanders around the house scrubbing walls and acting like it wasn’t Chicago they came from, but Stepford.
Oh, and did I mention the crows? There’s these crows, see, and they’re always flying around the house and acting all, like, spooky and “Birds”-ish, but not doing a whole lot.
But then it’s like all of a sudden, they check their watches and see it’s almost the 90-minute mark and realize they’d better peck one of the characters in the head, until he remembers he’s the bloodthirsty villain of the piece and can grab a pitchfork and start trying to kill everybody else so that the movie can end and we can finally go home.
And if you don’t figure out who the bad guy is from the second he walks into the movie, then you should maybe get out more — am I right?
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What Oscar needs is a touch of ‘Smackdown’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dear Mr. Smithee,
The Golden Globes telecast gives awards to both TV shows and movies in the same amount of time (or less) as the Oscars. What do you think about the length of the Oscar telecast? What could be done about it?
KATHARINE GILSTRAP, Warner Robins
Dear Party Pooper,
First, we should stress the need for full disclosure.
The Golden Globes bestow 26 honors, including the long-winded Cecil B. DeMille award so that Warren Beatty can natter on about nothing of any importance.
The Oscars this year will bestow 26 honors, including an honorary Oscar and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, which requires a rather lengthy explanation as to why we sitting at home should care when we clearly will not. Plus, some lucky B-list star with a new movie to plug will be allowed to come forward to announce - to no one listening - the many winners of the untelevised awards in science, engineering and technology.
That’s when you, Katharine, will learn of the very deserved honor for Peter Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin for “the design and development of the RE: Vision Effects family of software tools for optical flow-based image manipulation.”
Honestly, I can’t imagine how we’ve survived any summer film seasons without it.
The Golden Globes show is usually three hours. The Oscars, on the other hand, are required to continue until the last American has finally dozed off.
I don’t think the length of the show is the problem. It’s the content, especially this year when the expected winners are so expected it’s hard not to imagine the last American dozing off somewhere around the time of best cinematography.
Now, the AJC Channel Serf (a nice young woman who lately refers to me in public as “Little Mr. Sunshine”) has promised to divulge her own thoughts as television critic on the subject in the Sunday Arts & Books section on Oscar day, Feb. 25.
I, however, cannot wait that long.
The Oscar show should take a hint from its own movies - like “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest,” Ellen DeGeneres might say. “As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?
“Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you’re fired.”
We could then dispense with all the pretense of “it’s an honor just to be nominated,” drop the idiotic veil of civility and get down to what Hollywood really is at its most watchable - a free-for-all wrestling mud pit of human depravity, bloated egos and self-worship.
ALAN
.P.S. You get a “Because I Said So” apron and an “Ask Alan Smithee” T-shirt.
Dear Mr. Smithee,
Due to the colossal emptiness of the Hollywood creativity department, I am now addicted to renting movies from online (i.e., Netflix) because there are so many terrific films from Europe, Asia and other countries both old and new that most Americans never even hear about. What movies are some of your personal favorites from the other side of our world?
SCOTT FORESTER, Marietta
Dear Snob,
Of course, there are the myriad of films I mention fairly often - “Seven Samurai,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “The 400 Blows,” “La Dolce Vita.”
But looking just a little deeper, I have found solace in these in recent times: Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” Christoffer Boe’s “Reconstruction,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others” (which finally arrives in Atlanta on March 2), Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Nobody Knows,” Yoji Yamada’s “Twilight Samurai,” Vittorio de Sica’s “Umberto D,” Lars von Trier’s “The Element of Crime” and Nimrod Antal’s “Kontroll.”
That’s a good start.
ALAN
P.S. You get a “Children of Men” T-shirt and an “Ask Alan Smithee” T-shirt.
Dear Mr. Smithee,
Your column on Friday is about the best thing in the paper anymore. I’ve noticed, however, that Jordy “Ray” Purlky seems to miss more Fridays than he’s in there, and always for frivolous reasons. Why does he get more time off than you?
DONNA SPRINKLE, Woodstock
Dear Observant,
When I was a child, I talked like a child, and I thought like a child.
Master Purlky, dare we say, is unaware of grown-up ways.
ALAN
P.S. You get a “Smokin’ Aces” T-shirt and an “Ask Alan Smithee” T-shirt.
HAVE A QUESTION FOR MR. SMITHEE?
E-mail him at alansmithee@ajc.com or go to accessAtlanta.com and click on Movies. Please include your name, city and daytime phone number. Mr. Smithee can’t reply to every request but inquiries chosen for publication will receive movie-related prizes.
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