I love the LA film festival. I always know summer has begun when I'm chilling at a porch party on the top level of 8000 Sunset Blvd. drinking free vodka and eating free food. All for writing about a few movies.
Everyone in every job should have at least one time in the year when they feel so valued professionally.
My favorite bartender Chris is back in the red room, and already I'm meeting new people. A charming actress named Angela, and a guy named Jeff who likes to talk about buttcracks. I told someone else that I actually paid Jeff off to make me sound more classy by comparison.
And the movies have been good too. First up is...
HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE
You're going to think I'm insane, or kidding, but honest-to-God this is one of the year's best films; possibly the best movie comedy about an all-nighter ever made (sorry Bob!). It's from Danny Leiner, the director of DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?, and plays like an R-rated second draft of that film, which, I remind readers, went from concept to finished product in under 7 months.
Harold (John Cho, of the second and third AMERICAN PIE movies) and Kumar (Kal Penn, MALIBU'S MOST WANTED) are indeed stoners looking to feed their drug-induced hunger pangs, but they're no dummies. Harold is a lower-tier employee in some kind of fancy office job, and Kumar is the son of a doctor who deliberately screws up med-school interviews to piss off dad. As the movie begins, Harold's obnoxious bosses conspire to make him do all their work for the next day's meeting, but Kumar calls and insists the two of them get stoned first. They do, and see a commercial for White Castle. Now all they have to do is get there.
Not as easy as it looks. En route, they will run into an escaped cheetah, a boil-encrusted redneck who wants the two stoners to fuck his beautiful wife, Neil Patrick Harris (amusingly playing himself, as a dangerously horny junkie), an escaped cheetah (did I say that already? Dude, man, I forgot) more than one instance of gay panic (the funniest courtesy of VAN WILDER himself, Ryan Reynolds), goofy racist police, and much, much more. I never really dug the movie AFTER HOURS as much as other critics did, but I got why it was supposed to be appealing. This movie does it right, for me at least. Reminds me ever-so-slightly of how much I enjoyed ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING as a kid (haven't revisited that one lately to see if it holds up or not).
It's also a bit like BRINGING UP BABY, only with two guys in both lead roles. I wouldn't say there's gay tension between them (nothing so blatant as Ashton and Seann making out in DUDE), but they do bicker like a married couple. And Harold's love interest (Paula Garces) is very peripheral, more an object than a person. Kumar's true love is weed -- there's a very funny sequence that takes this notion literally and to the extreme.
Oh yeah, there are hooters. And profanity. And drugs. And really weird trippy shit that hits you from out of nowhere. This is an R movie for sure, not a phony one like SOUL PLANE where the rating's only R because people say "fuck" a lot.
Many of the jokes are obvious, but a lot are not at all so. Watch for the scene in which Kumar decides to urinate on a bush, and then must fight for his urination turf with a crazed stranger who favors that same bush. It doesn't play out quite like you'd think.
According to imdb, this is the first movie credit for the screenwriting team of Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. Someone else hire these mofos now.
Danny Leiner is a mad genius who needs to keep making stoner movies. Seems his next is a black comedy about post 9-11 New York, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Olympia Dukakis. Oughta be something to see.
HIGH TENSION
From France, a genuine grindhouse/slasher homage that doesn't wink at the audience, pretend to be smarter than the material, or get too postmodern (Hmmm, wonder which hipster director I'm obliquely referring to?). Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco, the alien opera singer in THE FIFTH ELEMENT) and Marie (Cecile De France, the female lead in the new AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS) are two hotties heading out to visit Alex's family in the country to...do something. They say they're gonna work, but at what isn't clear, nor does it matter much. Some guy (Philippe Nahon, the fat guy who actually utters the signature line "Time destroys everything" in IRREVERSIBLE)) in a big rusty truck like the one the Jeepers Creeper drives is staking out the house while getting himself some head -- literally, you know, pleasing himself with a severed head.
The guy wears a workman's jumpsuit and a baseball cap; he looks like a cross between M. Emmett Walsh and Michael Myers. And when he comes to the door in the middle of the night, he doesn't fool around, taking the family out one by one. He doesn't see Marie, though, so it's up to her to play hide and seek (I really hate when people mislabel this kind of thing as "cat and mouse"; for one thing, in the real world the mice never have a chance against the cat) while trying to figure out if she can escape or kill the guy before he figures out where she is.
It's great to see a slasher flick that takes itself seriously. We've gotten so used to the jokey spoofy thing, or even the one-liners in otherwise scary movies, that it's jolting to see one of these films where there's no humor at all, but much violence. Fans of wrestler Cactus Jack will particularly get a kick out of the use of a certain weapon that's rarely seen outside a hardcore WWE bout.
Director Alexander Aja (unknown in the U.S. so far, but that will change soon) knows his cheap thrills. Early in the film, he deliberately fucks with us by using creaking doors and whistling kettles as red herrings. Later on, even while trading in the familiar trappings of the genre, he manages to make the audience wince as, for example, a character removes a piece of broken glass from deep within her foot.
There is a bit of a twist, though, and it doesn't quite work, logically. I'll say no more on that. '70s grindhouse flicks didn't always make sense either -- what matters is that they scare you while you're watching them. And HIGH TENSION certainly does.
