Robert D. Siegel, USA, 2009, 86 min.

We all have an obsession or obsessions, but most of us are able to put them into perspective. This film tells the story of someone who is so obsessed that he has no room in his life for anything else.

Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) is a Giant’s fan. He’s such a big fan that he puts LCD to shame. He lives at home with his mother and has a job as a parking deck attendant. Paul keeps his life structured in such a way that he has no commitments or responsibilities besides watching, talking, living and breathing Giant’s football.

At night, he calls up a sports radio show and dukes it out over the airwaves with Philadelphia Phil, an Eagles fan. The Giants/Eagles rivalry is growing strong as the season progresses and Paul carefully writes his speeches so he can be the best Giant’s spokesman he can be.

His obsession isn’t unrealistic, and Patton Oswalt plays the character perfectly. Only a short time into the film Paul feels real. His only friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan), and Paul’s family are also well-written and well-acted and breathe even more life into the main character.

The story really starts when one day Paul sees his favorite player, Quantrell Bishop, at a gas station. He follows him from Staten Island all the way to Manhatten and tries to meet him.

Things don’t go as planned. The film takes a dark turn and Paul is put into a position where he actually has a chance to do something for his team. Something at great expense to himself, and something that his family does not understand. This causes a rift, and things come to a head when Philadelphia Phil brings the rivalry to a personal level. So Paul, doing the only thing he feels he can do, sets out for his version of the perfect revenge.

The film is gritty and naturalistic. The direction and cinematography have a very 70′s feel to them, and the locations and events round out the great performances to complete the package. Big Fan is a good, solid film. Patton Oswalt gives  a great performance, creating a real character. And instead of forcing us to feel a certain way about Paul, the film lets the audience judge him for themselves.

Jeff Lieberman, USA, 1981, 90 min.

A group of young people are terrorized on a camping trip in the remote wilderness. Not too original, right? But this film has a lot going for it. It has strong performances, a great location and solid direction. This is one of the rare, good slasher films. Written and directed by cult favorite Jeff Lieberman, the film takes the slasher genre and almost perfects it.

The story starts off with the prerequisite murder. The villain and location are introduced in bloody fashion. A standard opening that continues with the introduction of the main characters, a group of twenty-somethings on their way into the woods for a camping trip.

The film then gives way to what really makes it worthwhile. The wonderful locations found in the Oregon wilderness are put to great effect by cinematographers Dean and Joel King, and Lieberman keeps the film tense and interesting without resorting to cheap tricks.

Its a location and direction that work well to create an atmosphere that is genuinely creepy, and it keeps it up until the well-earned climax. The ending is different as well, and tries to reverse the gender roles of the time period. I have a slight quibble with the transformation of the main character, which reinforces gender stereotypes as well as subverts them, but thats understandable for that time period.

The slasher genre is not really known for producing great films. I can probably count how many I like on one hand. This would be one of them. It’s creepy, scary and fun. A solid slasher film that rises above others of its ilk and makes you wonder why they all couldn’t have been this good.

In case you were wondering what we have been doing all week, here is a list of the films we have watched since last time.

The Cinesthete:

1. Last Starfighter - A fun film for the 80′s generation. It’s every kids dream come true. I wish I saw it 20 years ago.
   
2. Twilight – A hilarious atrocity. I’m glad LCD made me watch this.
   
3. Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project – I was looking forward to some stand-up, but I more importantly got a glimpse into film history. Eye-opening.
   
4. Eight Days a Week – Funny late-night teen comedy. Better than most.
   
5. Soylent Green – A great idea,  but a bit cheap and not executed as well as it could have been. Also, if you know the ending it loses alot.
   
6. District 9 - A good film, but try to take all the hype with a grain of salt. It’s not that good.
   
7. Iron Giant – Well-animated, great characters, touching story. You can see how Brad Bird moved on to Pixar after this.
   

The Lowest Common Denominator:

1. Die Hard with a Vengeance - Bruce Willis kicks ass while Samuel L. Jackson does his patented angry not quite yelling thing.  It’s a totally awesome match made in heaven.
   
2. The Last Starfighter – Classic 80s sci-fi adventure about a boy escaping the trailer park to take on intergalactic tyrants.  The Last Starfighter kicks ass despite the prehistoric special effects.  Michael Bay should take note of what you can accomplish by utilizing outdated film concepts like decent storytelling and likable characters.
   
3. Twilight – The best unintentional comedy of the past decade? I think so.  This movie is bad, so bad it’s kind of unbelievable.  This is the kind of movie you’d expect to see on at 3am as part of some hokey late night horror program.  It’s like a lifetime movie that reinforces all the stupid things chicks do for boys.  Remember ladies, if you want that bad boy to love you, all you have to do is give up everything you are and conform to everything he wants you to be!  Also, don’t pay any attention to his severe character flaws like acting nauseated by the near sight of you, wanting to suck your blood until you are a hollow husk and sneaking into your room at night to watch you sleep.
   
4. In Bruges – off-beat comedy about two hitmen on the lamb in Bruges, Belgium.  Funny and well-made, I’m not sure how it managed to fly so far under the radar with a cast of Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes.
   
5. District 9 - Harkens back to the days of yore when filmmakers actually cared about producing something worthwhile instead of just throwing together a loosely connected plot and having a bunch of shit blow up.  Everything a summer blockbuster used to be.
6. Rocky IV – how can something be so bad and so good all at the same time?  I don’t know either, but Rocky IV manages to be both a captivating masterpiece and a hollow piece of crap in the same breath.  One great, big glorious breath of awesomeness!
   

Neill Blomkamp, USA, 2009, 112 min.

District 9 was the tits!  It was absolutely awesome.   What’s this? A summer flick that has not only some sweet battle scenes, but also a plot  (what the?) and a theme(gasp!)?!?!  Don’t Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp realize that  it’s just a movie and as long as a bunch of shit blows up, the viewer won’t care if the actual plot of the movie is otherwise a festering pile of shit riddled with holes? The part of me that has been dying inside every summer with the proliferation of  stupid, unintelligible Michael Bay-ish summer shitfests (I’m looking at you, Transformers and G.I. Joe) rejoiced and was given hope that perhaps, somewhere around the corner, the summer blockbuster will return to its roots of awesomeness instead of continuing the ugly trend of films whose plot  exists solely to enable directors and demolitions experts to satiate their pornographic need for explosions.

The plot is relatively simple.  Thirty years ago approximately 1 million aliens became stranded on Earth in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa.  Unable to cope with vast cultural differences, the aliens were eventually relegated to their own separate slums just outside the city.  Presently there are closer to 1.8 million of the aliens, who are now called Prawn because of their relative resemblance to the sea creature.  Humans have yet to be able to find a happy balance with the creatures and, due in large part to public outcry, the prawn are to be evicted from their homes and moved to a new “settlement” 200km away from the city.

The movie begins the day before the prawn are scheduled to be evicted as Wikus Van Der Merwe leads a team in charge of serving the prawn their eviction notices.  During the process he is exposed to a substance that alters his genetic structure, making him the most sought after and valuable object in Johannesburg and forcing him to choose between fulfilling his own selfish human desires or helping the prawn.

Like I said, this movie is awesome.  The first half to three quarters of the movie is shot in a style very reminiscent of Cloverfield, only without the motion sickness inducing shakey-cam.  It’s an interesting way to tell the story and lends itself to a peculiar sense of intimacy with the characters.  Believe me, if even an emotionless shell like me feels connected with the characters on screen, the technique is doing it’s job. 

District 9 also does a great job of relaying its theme.  It certainly paints the human race in darker tones than most other films I can think of.  I was worried about the possibility of a heavy handed handling of message of the film due to it being set in South Africa and having obvious parallels to apartheid, but those fears proved to be unfounded.  While at certain points in the film there is literally not one likeable human character, I can’t say that any of the treatment the prawns received was historically inconsistent with the treatment experienced to this day by different minority groups around the globe.  Neill Blomkamp does an excellent job of creating sympathy for this race of seemingly unlikable aliens without stretching the boundaries of reality (well, you know, aside from having them here in the first place). 

District 9 rocks out with it’s immeasurably long cock out.  It is everything a summer action movie should be (even though it only cost $30 million to make).  The writing was tight, the characters were complex and the whole thing just flowed.  Nothing felt forced at all.  There was an actual causal relationship between the action sequences and other events in the film, it wasn’t just a bunch of “well, I’ve got a couple mill left in the budget, let’s blow some shit up!”. 

I really don’t think that’s too much to ask of a summer flick, do you?

In case you were wondering what we have been doing all week, here is a list of the films we have watched since last time.

The Cinesthete:

1. Orphan – Predictable, cheap-scare horror. The only saving graces are Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard
2. Brick – Film noir set in a highschool. Unique and engaging.
   
3. Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Michael Bay should watch this film and bow. It’s amazing that this film was made without computers, and that it is still so fantastical and fantastic.
   
4. Eddie Murphy: Raw – He does some great stand-up, even if it is a bit blue.
   

The Lowest Common Denominator:

1. A Haunting in Connecticut – this actually should have been in last week’s log, but I had forgotten about it.  That should tell you all you need to know.  The acting was surprisingly good for a horror flick, but the scares were all cheap and the story is absolutely nothing like what truly happened.
   
2. The Bourne Supremacy – The Bourne Identity is about as faithful an adaptation as if someone had only read the plot synopsis online and was hired to write the movie based only on that information. The Bourne Supremacy takes this faithlessness to an entirely new low.  Paul Greengrass has a name like a failed porn director and he makes feature films like it too.  What’s the point of having awesomely choreographed fight and/or action scenes if you can’t tell what the fuck is going on because the camera is shaking like the DP is having an intense seizure?  Still, Supremacy manages to be a fun action movie despite Greengrass’s ineptitude, even if it is one of the worst book adaptations I’ve ever heard of.
   
3. The Bourne Ultimatum - Basically the same as above.  Fun action movie, nothing else to report on.  Would have been much better if Greengrass had invested in a steadycam but, whatever.
   
4. National Lampoons Vacation – I felt the need to watch a John Hughes masterpiece after hearing of his shocking death.  Vacation was everything filmgoers of the 80s would eventually come to expect from a film written by John Hughes.  It’s hilarious, geniune, surprisingly poignant without being too sappy and manages to have a message without being overbearing.
   
5. The Goonies – another 80s classic.  This is the movie that should have given pirates their position of glory rather than those terrible Johnny Depp movies nearly 20 years later.  Listen, if I really have to tell you how great this movie is you should probably just crawl back under the rock you’ve been living under for the past 25 or so years.