Halloween

If you were to ask an average movie-goer to describe the movie Psycho, I suspect they'd have a pretty easy time of it until they get to the end. "So then, Norman jumps out dressed as his mother, only to be subdued before he can kill the girl. And then... um... he's arrested? I think..." Let's face it: Psycho is a brilliant film until the final scene - a scene so backwards and banal that most people don't even think about it. For those who don't remember, a refresher: we get a lengthy psychological explanation from a doctor as to why Bates dressed up as his mother and killed people. It's about as uninspired an ending as you can imagine to such a thrilling film. But what, you ask, could this possibly have to do with Halloween, Rob Zombie's re-imagining of the 1978 horror classic? Picture someone trying to remake Psycho (again) and centering the focus of the film not on Norman and his victims, but on that final scene stretched out for half of the run time. That, essentially, is Rob Zombie's Halloween.

Remakes are pretty much always a mistake. You generally have two options: you can either just retell the same exact story and update the setting and style to today's standards, or you can focus on a certain part of the original and go in that new direction. If you go the first route, you are basically saying there's no real reason to see the new version unless the first was deeply flawed. If you go the second route, you risk alienating fans of the original by going places no one cares about. Zombie chose the second option, and it is completely the wrong direction to take this story. What made Michael Myers so chilling in the original was that we didn't know anything about him. Why was he killing people? Why was he after Laurie Strode (an answer not given until the sequels)? By giving us explicit answers (and answers none too exciting or daring) it takes away from the suspense.

What's perhaps most jarring is that, for a film billed as a horror movie, there is a huge dearth of actual horror. The first half hour is spent with young Michael Myers and his deadbeat family. We see him verbally abused by his step-dad, tormented by bullies, and ignored by his older sister. But none of this is meant to scare us. Even when Myers snaps and kills his family, it's not presented in nearly as frightening way as the opening POV shot of the original. Instead, he just wanders around with either a knife or a bat, attacking whomever he comes across. There's no buildup, no suspense, no jump moments. It's all very matter-of-fact in the way it's presented. And once he does murder his family, we get a long period of him in the asylum with Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), talking about his fascination with masks. One would assume that Zombie is spending all this time boring us with details about Michael so as to make him a more interesting character in the second half of the film, but alas, once Michael escapes and heads back to Haddonfield in search of his baby sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), everything that has been established about the character is thrown out in favor of simple slasher material.

Really, where the first half bores us with its silly examination of what makes Michael tick, the second half is even worse. Imagine taking the original Halloween and cutting it in half and you'd get the second part of Zombie's version. But even that is to give this too much credit. In order to get the film to its conclusion in under two hours, Zombie cuts out all sense of tension or atmosphere. One perfect example that sums up why this half of the film doesn't work is to look at the way Zombie kills of Annie (Danielle Harris) vs how Carpenter did in the original. Carpenter spent a good five or ten minutes building suspense without showing us Myers. We'd get spooky POV shots of someone watching Annie change her shirt. We'd watch with bated breath as Annie investigates a sound out in the laundry room in the garage. It wasn't until we began to assume that maybe she was safe that Carpenter let Myers pounce. Zombie, on the other hand, has Annie fooling around with her boyfriend while Myers just stands behind them. No build up, no tension. There he is at the beginning of the scene. One gets the impression that Zombie believes that copious amounts of blood and nudity will make up for that lack of atmosphere, but it never does.

Perhaps the reason it's all so boring isn't just the lack of artistry in how Zombie creates tension, but in the way he creates his characters. The cast is almost unanimously awful and unsympathetic. One would think that Malcolm McDowell would be a fascinating choice as Loomis, but he plays Loomis as far too jovial and lacking in gravitas. We begin to wonder if he actually realizes how dangerous Michael Myers is. At times he treats Myers as more of a buddy who had a few too many drinks and went on a drunken rage than as a man who has murdered close to twenty people. Tyler Mane as the adult Myers is satisfactory, but then anyone with a good build could do this role in their sleep. I don't like to rag on child actors, but there's no getting around the fact that Daeg Faerch is miscast as the young Michael Myers. Aside from the fact that he simply doesn't look like a future mass murderer with his blond hair and baby fat face, he can't bring any menace to his lines. Nor is he sympathetic, something we assume Zombie wanted him to be. Scout Taylor-Compton is a non-entity, not showing up until late in the movie and not getting an opportunity to do much more than call her friends bitches and scream a lot. It's clear we aren't supposed to see her as the same Laurie of the original, but she isn't able to create a new, interesting version of the character either. The rest of the cast is largely cameos, and none do much with their parts. And only Rob Zombie would think to cast Danny Trejo as the kindly janitor at the mental institution.

In every possible way that this movie can fail, it does. Zombie's desire to humanize Michael Myers comes off as silly and dull. His attempts at horror are rendered fruitless because he can't seem to build any suspense whatsoever. His intention to reinvent the characters we already know prove fruitless because of the way the film is split into two halves, forcing him to rush through each half without focusing on the characters. I consider myself somewhat of a horror film aficionado, and I can enjoy even some of the bad horror films out there as long as they deliver on the basic promise every horror film makes: a few good jumps, some suspense, and even a laugh or two. Rob Zombie's Halloween does not deliver on any of these promises, and even the most forgiving, open minded horror fan will find nothing to enjoy. It's simply a disaster.

Superbad

Who'd have guessed? In a summer of threequels, giant robots, rat chefs, amnesiac spies, and The Simpsons family, it is the duo of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen that will walk away the real champs. Knocked Up started the summer off with a bang, and now Superbad - which Apatow produced and Rogen wrote - ends the summer on an even higher note.

Superbad sounds like many a teen comedy: a single day in the life of high school seniors looking to lose their virginity before graduation. Indeed, many of the plot points are straight out of other films: the two leads, Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), need to buy the booze for the party in order to impress their respective crushes. They enlist their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has a fake ID, to get the alcohol. From there their night is filled with many misadventures. In short, this could easily be a pretty generic movie. Yet somehow it is able to overcome the plot to be probably the best, most sincere, and funniest teen comedy since American Pie.

What makes it all work is a script that understands high schoolers. That could be a result of the fact that Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg first wrote the screenplay when they were in high school. These characters aren't high school stereotypes, but recognizable people. I don't know about you, but my high school didn't have nearly as defined cliques as John Hughes might lead you to believe. Yes there were nerds, yes there were preps, yes there were jocks, but there were also a lot of people who just were. They weren't popular, but they weren't losers either. That gray area is where Seth and Evan exist. They get picked on by people of higher status, but then in turn are held up in comparison to other characters. Not taking the characters to an extreme is what makes it so relatable, and so funny.

It also helps that it's really about something, not just getting drunk and having sex. At the core of Superbad is one of the best examinations of a friendship I've seen in a teen film. Seth and Evan aren't going to the same college after graduation, and you can tell from the beginning of the film that they're very uncomfortable about that, though they don't know how to broach the subject with each other. They've been friends since elementary school, and they aren't sure if their friendship can survive such a big hurdle. The ways in which the two come to terms with their impending separation is surprisingly touching and at times bittersweet, and it is this element that shines above all others.

Because the friendship aspect is so important, two really strong actors were needed. Hill and Cera do a great job of making you believe they've been friends for years. Hill can be a bit one-note at times, often going over the top. Yet Cera is able to reign him in every time with his subdued, subtler work. Indeed, Cera's Evan really is the funniest character in the movie, though you'd probably not be able to quote his lines like you might with the other characters. Instead, the laughs with him come from the smallest things, like way he looks at things, the way he walks, or the way he reacts to the world around him. The third member of the gang is Fogell, aka McLovin. A lot of people have already proclaimed him the funniest character of the summer. The hype isn't totally warranted, but he is still quite amusing. Had the McLovin jokes not been revealed in trailers, he might have seemed a lot more fresh than he came off as. Still, his story of getting booze for his friends could have felt like a major tangent to the film had newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse not been able to handle it so well, so he deserves some recognition for that.

But above all else, this is a comedy, and a very funny one. I'd say it's probably funnier than Knocked Up was, although it could be close. Even the opening and closing credits are handled in a very funny way. And often the humor is unexpected in that the film never repeat the same kinds of jokes. They hit us with a gross out joke, then hit us with an over-the-top fantasy sequence, then make us laugh at a silly childhood flashback. The film is constantly flowing and surprising, rarely allowing us to guess what jokes could come next. It all works really well, with the disparate jokes never feeling too out of place or contrasting in styles to each other.

While I liked the movie more for its examination of teenage friendship than for its story of a booze search, I can't deny that it all worked very well and I was never bored. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a franchise like American Pie did (the opportunity is clearly there). But then again, Apatow and Rogen have been consistently surprising us for almost a decade now, and if anyone could be trusted to make a sequel that is actually warranted, it'd probably be these guys.

The Bourne Ultimatum

When I first watched The Bourne Identity five years ago, I found it to be a passably fun time, but pretty forgettable. I had no real interest in a sequel and skipped The Bourne Supremacy when it was released. Yet I kept hearing from people who felt the same way as I did about Identity that Supremacy was far and away better than the first. One evening I stumbled across Supremacy on TV and ended up watching it. I was astonished. This was how to make a sequel, I thought. This was Aliens. This was T2. This was Wrath of Khan. A large part of this had to do with the new director to the series, Paul Greengrass. Greengrass understood why so many sequels are awful, and why only a few succeed. A sequel has to be more than just another adventure with the same characters, but a deepening of an audience's understanding of those characters and the world they inhabit. Like Supremacy before it, The Bourne Ultimatum is able to build on what we've seen so far to create a more than satisfying conclusion to an increasingly impressive trilogy.

Ultimatum does something I don't think I've seen a sequel outside of Back to the Future Part II do: it doubles back onto the previous installment, telling us what happened between the final action scene in Moscow and the epilogue in New York. As such, this doesn't feel like a new movie as much as a direct continuation of the last film. If you were to cut off the epilogue and credits on Supremacy and just insert this movie where they were, you'd never even notice that they were two different movies. This means that if you aren't totally up to speed on the last film, you'll be instantly lost. For some this might be a detriment, but to me it's a big plus. Greengrass and Co. assume you are an intelligent viewer who doesn't need everything spoonfed to you, and it makes for a much more fulfilling experience.

The basic premise should be familiar by now. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is an amnesiac hitman trying to find out who exactly he is. At the same time he is trying to evade people who want him dead before he remembers something that might ruin them. Unlike too many franchises, the Bourne trilogy makes a point of not just bringing back all characters who survived previous installments, but showing how their presence in the sequel is significant to Bourne's journey. Everyone has a connection to Bourne's story, and characters who played small parts in the first two installments prove to have a bigger overall role when everything is finally revealed. Take, for example, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles). She seemed so insignificant in the past, yet she kept popping up. This time around we begin to realize that she has a direct connection to Bourne's past that he no longer remembers. Also back is Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA head who realizes that Bourne may not be the villain that her bosses make him out to be. She has proven to be a strong element to this series, and she keeps the scenes not focusing on Bourne interesting and gripping.

If the film suffers, it's with the new cast members. Great actors all around, but none quite fill the void left by people like Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. David Strathairn is the direct descendant of the characters played by Cooper and Cox, but he is never as intense or menacing as his predecessors. Adding a bit of needed gravitas to the villainous side, but with far too little screen time, is Albert Finney, playing a mysterious man who may hold the answers to Bourne's past. Strangely enough, I think that had the two actors switched roles, it would have worked even better. Finney can play menacing much better than Strathairn, while Strathairn can play mysterious with the best of them. Yet this is a minor quibble: both get the job done, and neither is the reason we're watching the movie in the first place.

The action here is the best of the series. Whether it be a cat and mouse game in a train station, or a car chase through New York, Greengrass stages set pieces that leave you breathless. Many people have complained about his shakycam style, and to a degree I understand that complaint. Yet at the same time, it pulls you in so much more because of how real everything feels. The fight scenes, the car crashes: they all feel more impactful, more intense. Sure, on occasion it becomes difficult to tell what is happening, but by and large, things are easy to watch and understand.

What elevates The Bourne Ultimatum above other action films is that it's actually about something. Imagine waking up one day and learning that you used to kill people, some of whom may not have deserved to die. How do you deal with that? The whole trilogy has dealt with that in some fashion, but here it is front and center. Bourne must struggle with the fact that he was once no different from the people being sent to kill him, and that had he not been struck with amnesia, he'd probably be in their shoes trying to kill someone like him. It's an adrenaline fueled morality tale.

I don't know that on its own The Bourne Ultimatum is a four-star film. Yet as a conclusion to a trilogy, it most definitely is. I doubt anyone would watch this as a stand-alone film, so I think the four-star rating is deserved. Few, if any, trilogies raise the bar with each installment, and none really come together as tightly as this one has. Everything falls into place by the end, and this has proven to be a journey I am glad I took part in. There are still a few threads left unfinished, and the possibility of a fourth film is certainly there, but I suspect that this will be the end to the series. Then again, Greengrass has proven he knows how to raise the bar each time, so maybe a fourth one could be a worthwhile experience one day.