Willard
Hilarious if you can stand the squirming masses of
rats.
Definitely not for the squeamish, this remake of the 1971 movie stars
the
deliciously peculiar Crispin Glover as a shy loner who trains an army
of
rats to wreak vengeance. Amazingly for a horror movie, the
director
isn’t afraid of long shots with no cuts, which gives it a more adult
pacing.
I don’t know how much of it is intentional, but Glover is hysterical,
deadly
serious as he talks to the rats. He doesn’t speak for the first
ten
minutes or so of the movie but says volumes with his expressions and
his
body language.
The DVD includes a documentary on people who love rats (one woman says, very seriously, that if she could have trained an army of rats to tear people up, she would have) and a music video for “Ben,” sung by Michael Jackson in the original movie (and in a brief clip in this one) and by Crispin Glover over the closing credits and in this video. I watched it with Glover’s commentary track; he talks non-stop, without taking a breath or putting any inflection into his speech, for the entire length of the video, half of which is a pitch for movies he’s directed.
(I enjoyed the movie, but ever since, when I'm
sitting
around my apartment late at night, I keep thinking I see something
moving
out of the corner of my eye...)
Lost in La Mancha
Wouldn’t you love to see Terry Gilliam make a movie
about
Don Quixote? Well, you can see how he tried in this documentary
about
his attempt – and failure – at the story that also foiled Orson
Welles.
It looks like it would have made a great movie. You get an inside
look at how movies are put together as a series of setbacks that, on
their
own, would not be fatal, add up to a death knell for Gilliam’s
vision.
Included on the DVD is a conversation between Gilliam and Salman
Rushdie;
the parts I watched were interesting, but it’s awfully long, and I kind
of tuned in and out.
Home Movie
By the director of American
Movie, this documentary about people who live in weird homes
shows
everything from an elderly woman who lives in a treehouse in the
Hawaiian
rainforest to a gadget-obsessed tinkerer who’s turned his home into a
funhouse.
Although it’s entertaining, it’s scattered and tries to cram too many
houses
into its hour-long running time.
Auto Focus
Telling the sad story of Bob Crane, Auto Focus
is squalid and depressingly opaque. Greg Kinnear is very good as
Crane, as is Willem Dafoe as Crane’s sleazy friend, John Carpenter (not
to be confused with the director), who leads him into the low life and
may have murdered him. It’s competent enough and mostly kept my
interest,
but somehow it keeps you at arm’s length. I never felt much
emotional
engagement with Crane, and he doesn't exactly progress as a
character.
If you're particularly interested in Bob Crane for some reason, I
suppose
it's worth watching, but as a film on its own merits, it's
disappointing.
All the Real Girls
This movie’s amateurish feel is both its charm and its
downfall. A nicely focused story about two young lovers (Zooey
Deschanel
and co-writer Paul Schneider) who can’t quite make it work, it doesn’t
go where you’d expect it to, and the low-budget atmosphere makes it
feel
real. But sometimes the actors stumble over stagy lines, and some
key events and background just don’t seem believable.
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