Not Another Teen Movie4/20/2002
What’s Good: Took me completely off guard with its spot on satirizing of dumb teen cinema. 
What’s Not: My only gripe here is that it may be a five or so years premature for parody of this magnitude. The Title: "Ten Things I Hate About Clueless Road Trips When I Can't Hardly Wait to Be Kissed" would have been better. 
Also Try: Josie and the Pussycats
IMDb Plot: At John Hughes High School, the students are the same as just about every other teenager in a teen movie.

      The teen movies of the nineties were so bad that they were begging to be made fun of by, well, another teen movie. Look at the sad facts from my generation’s jaded decade: “Can’t Hardly Wait” the worst film of 1997; that God awful Kirsten Dunst mess with the most caddy title of the last decade, “Bring it On;” any movie where Drew Barrymore pretends to be young, hot and thin; any Julia I-Can't-Do-Shakespeare Stiles movie; every Freddy Prinze Jr. movie; and any Freddy Prinze Jr. movie with Julia Stiles and what’s his name from “SLC Punk.” What were we thinking, paying for this shit? With the exception of “SLC Punk,” “Cruel Intentions,” and “Election,” my generation’s “youth movies” rival the 80’s slasher flicks (Mr. Krueger excepted) and anything with Elvis in the title as the worst thing, like, ever.

    I’m afraid many people mistook “Not Another Teen Movie” as a dumb gross out comedy fully equipped with tired gags like exploding excrement, semen, incest, and pie fucking. And it is all that but, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t take itself seriously—at least I hope it doesn’t. As a parody of wretched teen films that were, in essence, so bad that they were self parodies themselves (there’s no way “Save the Last Dance” was a serious was there?), so it’s fine thing that this film tops “Scary Movie” (the first, not the beyond awful second) which was itself a parody of the film that was already a decent horror parody staring that "SLC Punk" guy, “Scream.” “Not Another Teen Movie” rips into its subject like Howard Stern listening to press junket interviews with that hung over ditz, Heather Graham. As I see it, we just have to cherish the Molly Ringwald cameo that ends with her disgusted line, “fucking teenagers.”

    I laughed more times during "Not Another..." than the “American Pie” films (and most of the crumby satellite films that resulted in: "Road Trip," "Loser," "Dude, Where’s My Car"… you name it) combined. Granted, there were shameful, hidden laughs but the film tries so hard I felt obligated to give in just a bit. Sure, we all know the big broad jokes from the trailer: The scene where the jock who wants the obligatory “pretty ugly” to fall for him so he serenades her in front of a crowd with the song “Janie’s got a gun;” or the version of the “Cruel Intentions” lesbian kiss complete with spit bridge; or, my favorite, the naked foreign exchange student… and these bits are great, don’t get me wrong, but my grade is so high because the film was consistent in its valiant attempts to make us laugh. As with “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” this is not a trailer movie where all the jokes can fin in a nicely packaged two minute TV spot. The film is overflowing with noble ideas, some work, most don’t, but the "Airplane" spirit is there nonetheless. In the end, what sold me were the hundreds of quite visual jokes like this: as students are walking into the cafeteria (I forgot what they were talking bout) in the very back of the set there’s a hotdog stand with a tiny marquee that says, “Hot Dogs: For practicing blow jobs on.” Now that’s something special.

    It's odd that this film was the third brilliant parody to be released in 2001. And despite the fact that this film is getting a higher grade then “Josie and the Pussycats” and that great unnoticed 80’s summer camp parody “Wet Hot American Summer” initially did, this film almost redeems all those hours I sat through those dumb teen movie because there was a chance Kirsten Dunst might show some nipp… er, because my girlfriend dragged me to them. Still, not even "Out of Sight 2" could make up for the horror of sitting through "Get Over It," but this is a good start.  

 Frailty4/19/2002
What’s Good: A simple and effective horror film with a thought provoking script.  
What’s Not: A rather unsightly production design. The film's ultra low budget shows. 
Also Try: The Shining/ Eye of God...
IMDb Plot: The FBI searches for a serial killer who calls himself God's Hands.

      I think it’s telling that the best recent horror films have been ones without special effects, monsters, or even that Kevin Williamson irony that fizzled by the third “Scream.” After “Final Destination” I figured the intellectual horror genre to be a fluke. A year later was Sam Rami’s sly physic mystery caper, “The Gift.” Next came “Donnie Darko,” a brilliant sci-fi horror film that proved: yes, it is possible in these flashy modern times to spin a crafty tale that is more geared towards ideas and atmosphere then how often your reflexes make you jump out of your seat. And just a few months after “Darko” comes “Frailty,” Bill Paxton’s new film. Paxton seems to have taken it upon himself to star in and direct a film with all the chewy physiological matter of a Sam Rami flick (remember, Paxton was in Rami's "A Simple Plan") and all the urban horror of a King novel. This is the kind of film where a majority of the gruesome horror exists in the characters heads and depending on how you want to read it; the film could represent a cautionary tale about religious zealotry or it could be an ode to how super God is. Either way, this is an effective (though unpolished) work. 

    The films opens with Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) finally breaking down after the apparent suicide of his brother and walking into the local FBI office so he can repair sins of the past by  s l o w l y divulging --through “when I was young” flashbacks -- how his situation came to be. The situation turns out to be quite macabre as we learn of  Fenton upbringing in a once perfectly quaint blue collar family. 10-year-old Fenton Meiks (Matthew O'Leary as a young McConaughey) his brother Adam Meiks and Dad (their mom died giving birth) live content lives until one night, out of the blue, Dad wakes the kids to tell them of the divine mission God has just entrusted him with. There are evil demons abound and after God sends down a list of names and blunt “holy weapons,” its up to this enlightened threesome to kick some unholy ass-- and Dad knows who is evil just by touching them with his bare hands. Anyways, young Fenton placates his father but eventually, as things go too far during one too many nice family affairs like hacking peoples heads off and burying them in the local rose garden (that's more fun than Candy Land I guess), the kid must find a way to stop his crazy pop. He tells Dad to stop killing people and Dad says "I have never in my life killed a person. I only kill demons."
    As McConaughey is telling his tail or woe to the agent (another fellow Texan, Powers Boothe), we see the flashbacks of this mans lost childhood but the film isn’t really a horror retread of those overrated golden summer films such as “Stand By Me” and “Hearts in Atlantis.” It’s too smart for that. Nor is it a fragmented “The Usual Suspects” clone that makes you go “ah hah” at the end despite logic. No, “Fraility” is a film that borrows aspects from the best of em’ (“The Shining” "Usual Suspects," "Deloris Claiborne") and meliorates them into his own rich fable of fatherhood, faith and trust.  

    Contrary to what I expected, Paxton, the director, does offer an answer indicating whether certain characters are either tortured souls committing these criminal acts out of some chemical imbalance, or actually crusaders of good who are doing God’s bidding and in doing so, ridding the world of murderous idolaters. (Just wondering: Why weren't any of the bitches from "The View" on Paxton's list?) Immediately after the film, I was slightly disappointed and thought it owed it to us not to definitively make that mystery clear; after all, if “K-Pax” could leave things with an air of ambiguity then this film has no excuse to spell things out for us? In retrospect, though, the film seems to have only been enriched by this no-mystery caveat. It is an old fashion bumkin epic with a stratifying ending that ultimately does make you think for reasons I shouldn’t divulge—for those of you who read or saw Roger Ebert’s critique, I apologize, he’s an idiot for giving away the films best secret and I was glad to have avoided all reviews of this film prior to seeing it. I will only say that characters that seemed one way (i.e. good or bad) by the films conclusion are -- through me playing the film out a few more times in my tiny little head--- now seen in a different light and, thus, the film has taken on a whole new dimension.

     Ultimately, this is the kind of dialogue saturated work that will see it’s total box office take dwarfed by the time the less cerebral “Jason X” is only a couple days old. But one thing gives me solace; if you consider those kinds of fuck-and-run, immediate gratification, meaningless films as the evil works of Satan, and this kind of absorbing film as something God friendly, then it all kind of makes sense that the Frailtys out there should be embraced by those “pure ones” like us, and the people behind those “Jason” or “13 Ghosts” movies must…MUST, MUST, MUST…be hunted down and "extinguished." 

Grade: B+