MIRANDA AND STEVE, SEX & THE CITY (2008)



So, you know that whole thing about how men and women are different? Well, here’s a good example: for women, last year’s big-screen adaptation of the beloved HBO estrogen-fest was a feel-good romantic comedy, while for many straight guys, it was nothing short of torture-porn. And no, I’m not talking about Kim Cattrall’s sex-positive female drag queen Samantha, who got all the best lines and looked pretty damn hot wearing nothing but sushi. And I’m certainly not talking about the sweet pairing of Kristin Davis’ ray-of-sunshine Charlotte and her frog-prince fellah, Harry (the closest thing in the Sex-iverse to a normal, healthy relationship...albeit one padded by Davis’ relentlessly cheery demeanor, perfect cheekbones and boundless Upper East Side gelt). I’m not even talking about SJP’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, two gigantic pains in the butt who truly deserve each other. No, the couple that curdles my gonads even worse than Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho or Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery is, yes, Steve and Miranda, that terrifying nightmare combo of pussy man and man-eating pussy. David Eigenberg’s Steve is every spineless masochist convinced that low self-esteem = sensitivity, while Cynthia Nixon’s endlessly miserable harridan Miranda is the sort of castrating, ball-busting career woman stereotype that men get branded as chauvinists for perpetuating and women (at least Sex & The City fans) somehow find empowering. After months of celibacy and endless abuse, Steve finally cheats on Miranda, who subsequently withholds even more sex and unleashes even more abuse in retaliation, until she finally deigns to forgive Steve at a meeting in the middle of the usually romantic Brooklyn Bridge. But my only thought as I watched Steve (through my fingers) approaching his awful, awful wife was, “NO, STEVE! NO!!! RUN AWAY!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!” But Steve didn’t listen. Characters in horror movies never do.

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As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column, although this time the rules will be somewhat different. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Of all of the United States’ contributions to popular culture, one of the most enduring has been the Western genre. In the mid- to late-1800s, stories about cowboys and the Wild West carved out a particularly American idiom in literature, and after the invention of the motion picture, many of the most popular movies- such as Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery- were Westerns. In the classical age of Hollywood, few genres were more popular throughout the world than the Western.

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15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)



Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

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It's been a busy week for screenings; imagine my surprise when a DVD of the new (well, newish; it opens in limited release here in the States this Friday, but it was actually made in 2007) movie by Takashi "The Filmmaker of Love" Miike showed up in my mailbox.  Miike, the mind behind such twisted cinematic fare as Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, has a reputation for extreme weirdness, and his new one is no exception.  It may bewilder, confuse and infuriate, but it certainly isn't going to bore.

Set in some nebulous time zone between the Battle of Dannoura in the 12th century and the wild and wooly days of the Wild West (or, in this case, the Wild East), Sukiyaki Western Django essentially does to A Fistful of Dollars what Dollars did to Yojimbo:  lifts its plot wholesale and plops it into a western setting.  But, since it's Miike behind the lens, you know you won't see the story of warring clans bloodily competing for gold done up in any kind of pedestrian fashion.  Taking his cues from Sergio Leone, he sets the movie's action in "Nebada", a section of the old west that's about as authentic as the remote deserts of Tuscany.  He also instructs his actors -- almost all of whom are Japanese, though see below -- to speak in an extremely bizarre form of phoenetic English, which proves to be extremely distracting, if sporadically amusing.  And in one of the movie's most ridiculous divergences, Quentin Tarantino plays a freakish admixture of the Man With No Name and the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski.  Tarantino, who cannot act in his native language, also cannot act in Japanese, but Miike simply has him imitate the other actors, who are speaking cod English with thick Japanese accents, and the result is...well, you really just have to see it for yourself.

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SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen Audition, stop reading and rent it. Like, right now. We’ll still be here when it’s over. 

Halloween and horror have always gone together, and it took some time to choose the scary movie to spotlight here.  Should I write up an old standby, I wondered, or something more modern? But in the end, there was only one logical choice — Takashi Miike’s Audition, made in 1999 but already a horror classic. I first heard about Audition in 2001, during its American release. A certain amount of hype had risen around the film. I was skeptical — genre fans are prone to hyperbole, praising every buzzed-about title like it’s one for the ages. But in the words of Joaquin Phoenix, "the nerds were right," and Audition has become one of my Halloween traditions.

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They're making a biopic about Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, the Notorious B.I.G., and given the special nature of Biggie's sizable presence — he was over six feet tall and weighed close to 300 pounds at the time of his death, at age twenty-four — an open casting call seemed to be in order. In an online plea for auditioners, Voletta Wallace, the rapper's mother and one of the film's producers, says, "Anyone who felt that they can fill that shoe, can do that swagger, can try the lyrical tone, I’m welcoming them." About a hundred candidates showed up. As reporter Melena Ryzik puts it, they came "on foot, by Escalade or late-model sedan, men of all ages and backgrounds — but mostly one body type." They also came from all over, though in keeping with Biggie's roots, a go-Brooklyn vibe was apparently evident among the locals: "If I don’t get it," one contender told Ryzik, "I hope somebody gets it from Brooklyn." — Phil Nugent