"Pontypool" (2008, rated R)

I promise that this review has not been influenced by the fact that Netflix hit some kind of weird Internet frost-heave at the end, resulting in the last 15 minutes being viewed on YouTube, with German subtitles.

Because, stoppage or no, the whole movie had been a great low-budget big-imagination take on the typical zombie apocalypse discovery genre. A skeleton staff at a news radio station in Ontario starts hearing reports of townspeople acting bizarrely — smacking on people's car windows, pouring like an explosion of cockroaches out of a local doctor's office, even seeming to eat each other, if their not-quite-in-a-helicopter traffic guy is to be believed. We don't see any of it, but from the fragments, we can picture it so well, just like the conflicted characters in the radio booth, who wonder if they're being pranked, a reversal on the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast of almost 75 years ago.

Director Bruce McDonald (read my review of his film "The Tracey Fragments" here) keeps things tense and interesting and original up until the poison pill that slowed down my enjoyment far more than the spinning "loading" indicator: The High Concept. Here's how I looked when the movie unveiled its cute little explanation for why everyone in its Ontario town was getting all dumb and shambling and bloody and chompy:

We call this awesomeness "The Sharon Needles."

Station employee Laurel-Ann, a recently returned Afghanistan war vet played by Georgina Reilly, a thinking man's Kristen Stewart, got shafted on this role. Here we are, in a dark, secluded Ontario radio station with a cast of three — aside from Laurel-Ann, there's shock jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) and Sydney Briar (McHattie's real-life wife, Lisa Houle) and we're all receiving the same second-hand reports that Ontario is under siege from zombies. But Laurel-Ann's combat skills are for naught, and she unfortunately becomes the movie's first red shirt casualty.

Sorry, The Hyena Dog Robbery, but I don't trust any band that can't make criminally scrappy posters.

Fine. I'll accept it. Sydney and Mazzy can carry the rest of the movie. And they do, bouncing off each other — Sydney with her professional instincts smacking down Mazzy's cheap desires to infuriate people even if he has to make up phony resolutions to actual news reports. That is, until the aforementioned doctor arrives at their office and turns into a living embodiment of The Plot. (As Stephen King said in his book "On Writing," "A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question.")

As in, "What if something strange — an apparent infection — overtook a small Canadian town?" How would those in the radio booth, tasked with informing their listeners but suspecting they can do little with their power, react? Is the interesting story about the mechanisms of the infection, and why this is happening, or is it the experience of not knowing what's going on? To me, the confusion, the being blocked off from information, the panicky sifting of information in a bizarre situation, is what we want to see. Not the medical expert bursting in to sell us an awful, loathe-yourself fantasy about how the English language has been infected by something that spreads via certain words and phrases, and the only thing we can do is channel our inner slam poets to spread vomitous haikus to heal ourselves.

"Except in very bad French!"

An explanation like that reminds us that we're watching a movie. A movie less interested in entertaining than being highbrow. And once we're at that point, you might as well be trying to pitch us the movie while we're in the lobby blinking at the horrible carpets and trying to remember where we parked. Without going into the quirky fantasy, half-Tarantino, half Luhrman, way the movie ends post-credits, part of the resolution involves a monotone obituary-reading the movie started with. Except listeners aren't hearing about 80-year-olds dying of cancer and finding out where their memorial services will be: We hear about entire young families who died at each others' hands, and that they were survived briefly, sometimes a few hours, until they were killed by others. We don't hear why. The distancing language of sensitive obituaries keeps the scenarios in our imaginations — where they unfold most brilliantly. In a work like "Pontypool," that's supposed to be the whole point, that being alone with our imagination is often more terrifying than hearing a dissected, factual play-by-play of what really happened.

Ashley Meeks (@AshleyMeeks on Twitter) reviews movies that aren't in theaters anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.

"High Hopes" (1988, rated PG)

My stepmother introduced me to the films of Mike Leigh. Her unparalleled cool credentials include a solo trip across Asia, wearing real kohl on her eyelids and being a fan of the Pixies for longer than and wearing punkier black clothing than me, so it was a real head-scratcher when she turned on this film that starts out with a cheery lady leading a classroom of little girls in impromptu dances and exercise as schmaltzy music cheers about “happy holidays.” Tilted letters, usually used to indicate candid camera shows or baby blocks, spelled out “Life is Sweet” on the screen. What the?

Bringing Dad the pineapple. I must have this in poster size.

The 1991 satire about a working-class British family and social network was instantly one of my favorites of all time. It follows the cheery lady home, to — among others — a husband who dreams of striking it rich with a fast-food roach coach, a snarling, bulimic, anti-capitalist daughter (the supremely underrated Jane Horrocks, indistinguishable from her other star role in “Little Voice,”) and a pitiful friend who’s just opened a restaurant so artsy it includes housepet taxidermy and being named after an Edith Piaf lyric.

Moving south from writer-directer Leigh’s version of suburban North London in “Life is Sweet” is his version of central London, King’s Cross, in “High Hopes." Sardonic and sweet, it’s also populated by characters ranging from lovably dopey — like the main characters, mid-30s Cyril Bender and Shirley, scruffy hash-smokers who are torn by the idea of raising a child in Thatcher’s 80s — to nails on-chalkboard suburbanites and yuppies. Those include falsetto-giggling Valerie (Cyril’s sister), an aspiring yuppie in multi-layer mauve power suits and their mom’s uber-yuppie neighbors, Rupert and Laeticia Booth-Brain, all furs and bow ties and Harrods bags and criminally trendy triangle-studded pill-box hats.

Like “Life is Sweet,” “High Hopes” deals with the uneasy truce people make in their lives when they’ve realized their parents probably shouldn’t have become parents. Cyril and Shirley are the only kind presences in the slowly deteriorating life of the widowed Mrs. Bender, a shut-in who hasn’t seen the cityscape of London in ages. Shirley, like the mother figure in “Life is Sweet,” longs to put her hopes into the sweet innocence of a new life. But Cyril, probably in part because the woman who gave him life seems to be completely drained of it and longing for death, can’t quite quash the guiltiness he’d feel in participating in that act.

The best part about “High Hopes” is the couples. Valerie and her “jerk in a Merc” husband are museum-quality, mint badness, with a decorative lucite chess set (the pieces are in the wrong arrangement) to boot. “You start,” she whispers in one scene to the half-asleep schlub, splaying her arms across the gold-plated headrest and diagonal pink wallpaper. “Start what?” he mutters. “You’re Michael Douglas—” she coos. “Who’s Michael Douglas?” he grunts. “—and I’m a virgin,” she murmurs, prompting a tremendous guffaw from her hubby. Their ridiculousness is obvious to Cyril and Shirley, possibly the most real couple ever imagined on screen, who still get a thrill out of kissing each other on the couch in unshapely, unsexy sweaters. The traditional romantic treatment would invariably play Cyril as the bad guy and introduce some stud with a valiant chin and virile sperm to
sweep Shirley off her feet. Instead, the audience can’t help but feel curled up with both of them, no matter how immature and idealistic. Cyril steals a gold-plated banana from a bowl full of such fruit at
his sister’s house, then sneaks up on Shirley later. You get the idea.

After taking in Wayne, a lost, naive job-seeker from Surrey, they put him up in a spare room with a tiny boom box to listen to as he falls asleep. From the other side of the wall, Cyril and Shirley giggle to each other in whispered parental caricatures: “Wayne! You turn that music down!” “You think this is a bleedin’ discotheque?” After one irritating interaction with his brother-in-law, Cyril and Shirley
exchange a look, and she shuffles to him, grinning, lightly bonking her forehead with his in empathy. In one scene, they visit Marx’s tomb, where Shirley notes that even he had children. “The philosophers have always interpreted the world, the point is to change it,” she reads from his tomb. The seriousness and double meaning is broken as she skips down the Highgate path. “Oh look! It’s the chairman of the South African Communist party!” she calls out.

Most movies can’t get right even one of the multitude of things Mike Leigh nails: class warfare, social climbing, and especially a particular, working-class dissatisfaction with the world that
nonetheless doesn’t cripple one from getting up each morning and giving it one’s best shot — whether as motorcrycle delivery man, like Cyril (riding down a skyscraper elevator in silent contempt at the two identically power-suited women in front of him) or as Andy in “Life is Sweet,” banging about and grinning in his rusty, greasy, hot dog caravan. Leigh taps in to the kind of real love and ambition that might not ever get you anywhere but to intermittent joy, which is more than one can say for most people. Plenty of couples have babies. Few of them have what Shirley and Cyril have.

So thanks, Maxine. I’ll never be able to repay the cinematic debt — at least not until you and Dad are willing to try watching my favorite movie again.

Ashley Meeks reviews movies that aren't in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, and yes this is another reference to Lebowski.

"The Departed" (2006, rated R)

Some days, going to the movie theater is a lot like coming home to a half a bowl of ramen noodles sitting in the refrigerator. And it's mostly broth. And the fridge's compressor crapped out last night.

But "The Departed." "The Departed" is coming home to steak just slapped on the grill and a good bottle of wine and working appliances. You want to go up to genius director Marty Scorcese and kiss him right on those funny furry eyebrows, pinch screenwriter William Monahan's big Boston jowls, and say "Honey! You shouldn't have."

Loosely based on a Hong Kong thriller, "The Departed" is more than steak and wine. With a passel of surl and crude-wit from Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin, it's the movie version of that gourmet dinner that made headlines in Bangkok where guests paid $25,000 for a eight-serving meal of lobster, caviar, truffles and creme brulee of foie gras. (Lead female Vera Farmiga, as Madolyn, is the unknown of the cast - the foie gras creme brulee, as it were. I don't know how good a burnt cream custard could be made out of goose liver, but for some reason, none of the regular Hollywood cheesecake showed up to take the role, and from what I can tell, for the better.)

In this version, Frank Costello, an Irish mob boss in Boston, implants Colin Sullivan as a mole inside the Massachusetts State Police. Simultaneously, Billy Costigan is employed by the police to
infiltrate Costello's crew. When the two catch wind of the other's involvement, they are dispatched to discover each other's identities.

The origami-complex loyalties and betrayals of the movie recall the best of The Sopranos, the finest of James Bond. Policeman Colin Sullivan (Damon), has been in Irish mob boss' rock star Frank Costello's (Nicholson's) pocket since youth. Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) is hired by the police to infiltrate Costello's gang. And though the audience appears to be the only party in on the plumbing efforts of the police and the mob, as they try to find their own leaks, the movie pays off in the end, when everything gets turned upside down once and for all. Money was spent in buckets on The Departed, from the graphic novel-like editing and multitasking storytelling to the soundtrack (The Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline, Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, and especially the Dropkick Murphys, which provide the rollicking drunk
Irish heartbeat of the film). And without falling in love with fast cars and stuff that blows up to conceal weaknesses, there are still enough skulls being stove in at delis and bodies falling from high rises to keep things interesting, to keep the bloody soup from scumming over.

The bucks were well spent cementing the film firmly in "classics" territory. How can you put a price tag on Costello's comment after a seaside execution of an unknown screaming lady, where he grunts,
"Jeez, she fell funny"? Or the predilection of Costigan, who got kicked out of boarding school for mauling someone with a folding chair, for drinking cranberry juice? Or the deadpan code-laced
conversations Costello and Sullivan have about dinner? Or the name Myles Kennefick?

Of course, there's a whole subclass of people who are lost causes when it comes to the blue language and crimson spatters that color the movie. People who think even movie criminals should be above
lines like "no ticky, no laundry." As any good story about crime and punishment and deceit and trust should be, it's juicily vile and politically incorrect. But if you prefer your men prancing and mincing
in little green tights, go pick up a DVD of Disney's "Peter Pan."

Ashley Meeks reviews movies that aren't in the theaters anymore. She posts things on Twitter @AshleyMeeks and lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.

A Heartbreaking Blog of Staggering Genius

I wrote the following like ten years ago and it has fuck-all to do with movies. By request, I channel Dave Eggers, circa his work of genuinely staggering genius:

So, okay, today Toph and I go to Whole Foods to get some trail mix, and we decide once we get there that we could save a lot of money by making our own GORP. We get raisins and I grab a bag of peanuts from the bulk section, I mean, we are like the United Nations special task force on making GORP. But then Toph decides he wants dried apricots in it. Soon, I was giving in for yogurt-covered carob balls and then it was all over. It was M&Ms, pretzels — we nearly dumped a pound of Anasazi beans in it.

We found a rusted-out wash bin in the attic and dumped everything in it, together, mixing it using part of a hockey stick, and then we went to work gorging ourselves in front of old 'Murphy Brown' episodes on the TV that night.

"Ugh."

"Ugh you."

"I can't eat any more."

"That's because you are a weasely little geek who should get his head chopped off by terrorists."

"You're a terrorist."

"And now you will eat my fist, little man."

Kicking the bowl over at him with my feet in socks: "Come on, turd-herder! Put this monstrosity away, lest I crawl inside it and go to sleep."

Toph stares out the window, suddenly silent. "I hope you do."

I all of a sudden have one of those moments where the weight of the actual parental impulse is so heavy it feels like it has my lungs in a vise. If I could, I really would crawl inside that rub, and when Toph gets up to dutifully go put the GORP away, I want to grab him and josh him around and take the bottle of Midori out of the freezer as a reckless surprise and each of us take just a capful (or two) (or 14) but my mouth felt like garbage and the moment was gone and forgotten.

I think Ben Folds said that. Which is just about so typical, you know?

"Marie Antoinette" (2006, rated PG-13)

If only beheading complaining aristocrats were still in style.

Like Sophia Coppola's previous films, "The Virgin Suicides" (message: no one understands how hard it is to be a pampered, gorgeous, blonde girl living in Michigan) and "Lost in Translation" (message: no one understands how hard it is to be a pampered, gorgeous, blonde girl vacationing in Japan), "Marie Antoinette" focuses on the misunderstood flouncings of someone who should really know better than to complain.

Marie Antoinette, played by an idly posh Kirsten Dunst, is delivered by cake-like coach from France to Austria as a 14-year-old for diplomatic reasons, like captive pandas required to mate. The French (much like the modern-day crowds who booed this film at Cannes) aren't keen on her, nor is her betrothed, Louis XVI (played by Coppola's cousin Jason Schwartzman, who took his acting cues from a moist valerian root).

Marie tries to woo her new husband, asking him, "So, I heard you make keys as a hobby?" "Yes," he says. "You enjoy making keys?" she prods. "Obviously," he snorts.

It takes approximately seven years for their relationship to progress from this to a smooch in bed. Over time, Marie snuggles in more and more to the riches of her position, gorging herself on champagne,
cheese, cakes, gambling, fancy gloves, diamond-studded fans, bright satin shoes, and Marge Simpson hairstyles studded with small boats and fake birds. She amasses a posse of posh pals and they party till dawn. Somewhere along the line, she and her hubby become king and queen, and she becomes an adulterer to the tunes of pampered rockers The Strokes. They pop out some questionably royal heirs, with whom she plays at fake naturalism in a custom built wee village on the castle grounds, like a modern day peanut-free play-school/baby hatha yoga mom.

For the target audience, youngish, Paris Hilton aspiring hipsters for whom real costume dramas send them into a torpor, this style of Marie Antoinette could not be more pitch-perfect in its blending of
historical costume drama (think corsets and horses) combined with modern music and lazy slang (I don't think anyone ever said "yeah" in "Howard's End.") Honestly, who cares about the poor? The daughter of Hollywood royalty Francis Ford Coppola makes it all too clear that such matters are not only boring, but repulsive.

The director should listen closer to the lyrics of the songs she picked for her movie, especially the rambling "Natural's Not In It" by Gang of Four: "The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure ...
Coercion of the senses ... Sell out. Maintain the interest ... This heaven gives me migraine." The young Coppola's style has always been one that shellacs over substance like lip gloss over an oozing canker sore, and beneath the transparent shell of Coppola's oeuvre, the nepotistic nougat inside reeks with the ennui of a pampered rich girl. Underneath, it fails to resonate with all but the Louis Vuitton iPod case set. Underneath, it is a style that recalls the films of Leni Riefenstahl, who filmed the exquisite, stylistic documentary propaganda films for the Nazi party.

Contrast this with "Trainspotting" — the gut-wrenching classic about junkies that showed not only the deluded glamor of heroin addicts but also the filthy reality. The problem is not portraying a morally
bankrupt way of life. It's that "Marie Antoinette" excuses it. Not until the final moments of the movie is the massed howling of the outraged mobs of France even heard from outside the castle walls. Not
until then does the queen grudgingly decide to stop buying diamonds, without mentioning the fact that the taxpayers, who subsidize those jewels, can't buy food.

As is noted in the movie, the real Marie Antoinette probably never said, dismissing the peasants, that if they couldn't buy bread, "let them eat cake." But the subtext of the spoiled royal's life was clear
— she might as well have suggested they eat another four-letter-word instead.

Ashley Meeks reviews movies that aren't in theaters anymore and writes other short things on Twitter @AshleyMeeks. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.

"Tucker and Dale vs. Evil" (2010, rated R)

A fact: When searching IMDb.com for "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil," another result comes up, for a "related" 1988 film called "Vampiros Sexos." Wait. It has an alternate title: "I Was a Teenage Zabbadoing and the Incredible Lusty Dust-Whip from Outer Space Conquers the Earth Versus the 3 Psychedelic Stooges of Dr. Fun Helsing and Fighting
Against Surf-Vampires and Sex-Nazis and Have Troubles with This Endless Titillation Title." In West Germany.

That double take you just experienced is sort of what happens when you watch the story of the threadbare overalls-wearing rural duo's encounter with a group of vacationing college kids, each girl more pneumatic than the next, each boy clearly on loan from a hotwax-mandatory Abercrombie & Fitch commercial. (You can almost smell the cologne and jello shots through the screen.) This is a very enjoyable movie, and it could have even been barely, one-time-only tolerable if it had gone the stupid, obvious route: Over a three-day vacation in the woods (someplace so out-of-the-way that you might spot a shirtless boy, who probably has ringworm, pumping water) a buxom blonde in daisy dukes gets separated from her friends and wakes up in the kind of cobwebby log cabin where one of four things is guaranteed to happen: moonshine, murder, mental illness or an episode of antiquing reality show "American Pickers." Her friends attempt to rescue her, but are met with gruesome deaths, like a bloody, incompetent version of "Saving Private Ryan" with more cleavage and popped collars.


But after five minutes of seeming vapidity, the movie ditches the script we all know. It happens when the storekeeper reads Tucker and Dale's shopping list back to them. It includes a brush-clearing scythe, clamps, lubricated condoms, a hand-drill, feminine napkins, a stone bit and a one-eighth hole saw. As we're puzzling that outside the store, Dale attempts to make innocent conversation with one of the girls, but he's carrying the scythe, and the kids scatter. Tucker tells Dale that his problem is an inferiority complex. Dale — like a big, American, rural Simon Pegg — responds by examining the front and back of his hands.

So circumstance lands the cute girl, Allie, in the hillbillies' cabin. She wakes up, sees a shadow looming in her room and screams, startled, and Dale — the source of the shadow — thinks it's because she's not a fan of pancakes, which is what he was trying to serve her (hence the looming). The quick Allie soon realizes the two are wholly amiable fellows: nothing bad is going on, there's no conspiracy, no danger, and there's an explanation for the way everything ends up unraveling over the course of the movie, an explanation that doesn't involve Tucker or Dale doing anything mean or untoward. Why are the unattractive teens dying in gruesome, sudden ways? Is it, Tucker and Dale ask, a suicide cult?


And in fact, it's the guy with the popped collar — Chad, who would be cast as the typical hero in the version of this movie we're used to seeing — who ends up being evil. (This is quite satisfying. Why should "American Psycho" corner the market on slick, Ivy League psychos? Millions of us have been terrorized by the practices of greedy, childish prats like Chad over the last decade. They should be the bad guy in a few pictures.

Who do you think is more willing to carve you up with a chainsaw — I'm voting for the guy who's already done the same with your retirement savings. Besides, I don't see many hillbillies getting millions in bonuses for laying off thousands of workers and ruining their lives.) Chad's motivation is a little bogged down in back story, which is
unneeded, but after his semi-wooden "why I'm an evil guy" speech, one of the other characters pokes fun at the convention, deflating it: "Um, OK. Thank you for sharing with us, Chad."


"Tucker and Dale" is writer/director Eli Craig's first foray into feature films, and, one hopes, one of many movies to come that will upend convention and make us guffaw. Like a good killer, "Tucker and Dale" depends on you underestimating it. It lures you in with panties and abs and then whacks you with smarts — and it will take you
someplace far stranger than a spooky campsite.


Ashley Meeks reviews movies that aren't in the theater anymore and has been providing trenchant critiques on turkey guillotines on Twitter (@AshleyMeeks) since 2007. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.

"Your Past Is Showing" (1957, not rated)

Do I have to give a spoiler alert about a film that came out in 1957?

"I never should have gone panty-less in that mini skirt!"

Because "Your Past Is Showing" (also known as "The Naked Truth") ends with a sequence in which Nigel Dennis, a scandal-mag reporter, taken hostage and flummoxed from repeated head wounds inflicted by some of the semi-prominent people he's tried to blackmail, tries to step out for some fresh air, not realizing he's on a zeppelin. Then, Peter Sellers' character fires a celebratory shot from a pistol in glee at Dennis' death, piercing the vessel and sending it — and my thoughts on the movie's humor — spiraling into the ocean like a child's balloon.

Almost always the worst idea to have in any situation. Unless you are "MythBusters."

Too bad, because there's so much to like about this film, particularly the performance of the stately Peggy Mount as plagiaristic author Flora Ranson, who we meet when she is swinging out of a window to leap to her death. But wait! She's coming back inside — to finish her tea. And when her boisterous jump kills nothing but a shop's awning beneath her, she brushes the very public experience off with the clever nobility of a house cat who has just tumbled off a window ledge in sleep. Ransom doesn't just pinch plots from other authors — she arguably steals the show from Peter Sellers in this production.

"Your Past Is Showing" very nearly succeeds at being one of those successful, silly summer movies people refer to as a "frolic," where the actors are clearly having great fun and the happy audience forgets what they watched a few seconds after leaving the theater. But after a string of amusing set-ups — one blackmail victim's humorous failure when she tries to gas herself in an oven, her head on a pillow, another victim's too-polite attempt to purchase "a Mickey Finn," and another victim falling in a river, then a lake, when ruses meant for Dennis ensnare him instead — the production turns as cheesily frenetic as an "Animaniacs" episode (probably No. 104, "Hercule Yakko," with the "finger Prince" joke.)

"Jersey Shore," the really, really, really, REALLY early years.

While this study of gossip, desperation and conspiracy does an overall decent job in making punchlines out of suicide and murder, the last half hour contains so much ham it needs its own sugar glaze. In the hands of writer Michael Pertwee and director Mario Zampi, Peter Sellers' formidable wit is inexplicably muted in the character of Sonny MacGregor, the TV personality with a million personalities. When MacGregor learns his secret income from being a slumlord is about to be made public, he decides to kill Dennis by planting a bomb — which he clearly has to go to Ireland to get. Was that a laugh line in the theaters? Because it's so lazy. 

We're lucky, though. Seven years after "Your Past Is Showing" came out, Sellers would be lucky enough to redeem bomb jokes for all time — as the star in "Dr. Strangelove."

Ashley Meeks reviews movies that aren't in the theater anymore and has been providing trenchant critiques on turkey guillotines on Twitter (@AshleyMeeks) since 2007. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.