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.

Stephen King has said that the worst thing that could be said about the book was that it felt like a short story that had been inflated beyond necessary. He should know. His short story, “The Raft,” is the archetype for the “college student stranded someplace and menaced by a primordial evil” story. I can see the argument. The novel blew by in mere hours. It felt like something much shorter than its 300+ pages. But although it is a quick read, its better passages were able to… uh, get under my skin. As it were.

But it also felt enormously calculated. If there were ever any book that seemed destined to be made into a movie, this is it. But that’s exactly the problem. Its premise — five dumb college students find themselves in mortal jeopardy — groans beneath the weight of some serious cinematic baggage, and if the theme hadn’t been pummeled into the dirt by an endless parade of bad horror, it might stand a chance. King’s own novella, “The Mist” suffered a similar fate last year. As a work of horror fiction it established the precedent for the “group of ordinary yokels trapped someplace and menaced by a primordial evil” archetype, and in the time it took to become a film twenty-plus years have spooled through the world’s projectors. It no longer seems fresh.

Will that keep me out of the theater on April 4? Not likely. Here’s the new red band trailer for The Ruins. Incidentally, Scott Smith also wrote the screenplay and Jena Malone plays one of the teenagers. And after the jump, check out a pair of alternate one-sheet designs. I’m especially intrigued by the beach scene version. It’s an interesting approach.

About a year and a half ago I ditched most of my possessions. I was always a collector. I had a thousand DVDs. I had a thousand CDs. I had hundreds of comic books and hundreds of original movie posters. Scores of books. I got rid of them all. But the one thing I couldn’t bear to ditch were my MST3K tapes. I can’t tell you how much love I have for Joel, Mike and the Bots. That make me a geek? Well, yes, I suppose it does, and it’s a proud geek I make. Many, many episodes of the show are now available on DVD, but not enough to risk tossing the collection. There are too many rarities to be had there. I can’t give ‘em up.

Imagine my joy when I discovered some months ago that Mike Nelson, the show’s head writer and, after Joel Hodgson’s departure, its host, kicked off RiffTrax. We always knew that modern cinema deserved the MST3K treatment, but of course we also knew that no was about to admit his or her film would benefit from an MST3Kommentary. RiffTrax solved that. You download an mp3 commentary tracks written and performed by Mike and guests and queue up to the beginning of the movie to be roasted. Hilarity ensues.

Now imagine my ecstasy upon learning that Joel Hodgson, the show’s creator, is turning back to what made him famous. He’s assembled most (not all) of the original cast and kicked off Cinematic Titanic. The concept? Much the same, but without the Satellite of Love and (sadly) Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo. The inaugural episode, in which they harpoon a film called The Oozing Skull, is now available. As is the trailer (both on their website and at YouTube.)

Click here to buy the disc.

Hilarity awaits.

Anyway, yesterday’s post about Erik Enocksson inspired me to hunt down the trailer for the film in question. It’s sprinkled liberally with Enocksson’s music and actually looks really good. And I was right, Judd Apatow has nothing to do with it.