Mostly, these are Sparky’s concerns, though I share them. Carter isn’t good with the cinematic stuff. It’s kinda like George Lucas and his directing. He’s best when he doesn’t actually do it himself. Remember the last movie? He had a chance to introduce us to Scully and Mulder in the grandest of fashions, with big-screen flair and hair-raising drama. Instead, when they make their first silver screen appearance, they’re … brace yourself … chatting on the cell phone. It was one of the biggest wasted opportunities in film history (this also determined through diligent polling.)

Still, though I expect more of the same, this X-Phile will be at the first available screening, legs kicked up, ready for action. Let’s hope Carter’s matured a bit in the ten years (ten!) since the last flick.

Since I have to post form work, and that generally requires that I have some free time, I’m unable to post at all. At least not with any real substance. That’s why I’m all about the video posts these days. So here’s another. The trailer for the new Coen Bros. movie is online and not only does it look like classic Coen material, it kicks off with “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow, about whom I just blogged. Remember? Nice use of the tune, naturally, which is why I’m posting about it. Synergy and all that.

Enjoy.

Now that’s creepy. Or at least Bryan Bertino thinks so.

Proving the old, tired adage, that the way to the director’s chair is to start as a grip, Bryan Bertino’s directorial debut, The Strangers, hit theaters next month. Bertino also wrote the script, which is about Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler and how they love each other very much. Oh, and there are three masked weirdos intent on busting up the love affair. I caught the trailer the other day. It’s a reasonably creepy affair, and impossible to judge, but its sweetest moment comes just after the minute mark. Tyler and Speedman are in one room of their remote cabin, fretting about stalkers and strange noises and income tax when in the other room, someone sets the needle down on Joanna Newsom’s “The Sprout & The Bean.”

ZOMG.

First of all, we applaud the hip couple. Nice going. Joanna Newsom on vinyl. Then things get hairy. Axes come through doors, there’s screaming, there’s blood. Someone bumps the record player. The track gets stuck in a groove, the record skips. As the action gets more intense, the record skips faster and faster until…

The Strangers. Coming soon.

While the whole thing seems calculated, and the effect itself doesn’t make any sense (why would the record skip faster?) I love it anyway. I’m always interested in the creative use of music in film, and if it takes a contrivance to show me something creative, I’ll go along. I dunno if it’s enough to make me see the movie, but… but I… but…

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I’ll see it.

Interesting side note: the tune in the trailer is “The Sprout & The Bean” until it starts skipping, at which point it’s clearly no longer Joanna Newsom. I wonder if that was part of the rights deal? They could use then Newsom song, but they couldn’t distort it?

There are things for me to learn about Music Supervision…

The film is based loosely on a 1981 Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho, written by Valeri Petrov, and is about a bedridden, suicidal man who tells a young girl (a fellow patient in a hospital) fantastic stories in order to help him get the drugs he needs to off himself. The tales are vivid, adventurous and colorful, and they draw upon people in the real world around them. The new script is by Dan Gilroy with an assist by Nicol Soultanakis and Singh himself.

Check out the trailer below. It looks like another great storyteller film in the vein of The Princess Bride, or even Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s hard to get a sense of how good the film will be and the question remains whether Singh can keep the visuals from overwhelming the characters the way they did in The Cell, but there are some really great images in there. And as a bonus, the trailer makes extensive use of that marvelous, dirge-like Second Movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

The Fall: imdb, official site

The best (and least understood) of his films is the creepy Session 9, a moody tale of five men hired to strip the asbestos from a decrepit asylum who find themselves in caught in a haze of murder and fear. It’s brilliance was in Anderson’s control of information, his awareness that the less we see, the spikier the fear. Also key to the film’s brilliance was the clever use of a parallel storyline that, while never touching the main conflict served as an excellent thematic mirror to it. This is what confused a lot of people, and why I slap the “least understood” label on it. I remember explaining it to a lot of befuddled Rocket Video customers in a desperate bid to restore their trust in my recommendations. A losing battle, as it turned out.

His follow up, The Machinist, I liked less. It was moody and well-shot, and Christian Bale’s brittle, emaciated performance was a sight to behold, but here Anderson was too strict with the information, and robbed of any possibility of being able to work out the mystery on our own. When the final twist steps from the shadows in the film’s finale, we felt cheated, manipulated–not to the absurd extent we did at the end of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, which had its characters engaged in a desperate pantomime in an effort to keep the wool over our eyes–but enough to banish the film into the faddish “twist-ending” pile.

Still, it was clear Anderson was capable of some great suspense and I’ve been hoping to see a new effort. Transsiberian sounds like a new iteration of Anderson as a director, a throwback to the location thrillers of decades past. I can’t wait to see it, but as of today, it still hasn’t found U.S. distribution.

Below, the trailer. And then after the jump, the advance one-sheet followed by the far inferior release one sheet.