Review of Method (2004) by Jerome W — 01 Jan 2006

A huge surprise last Friday. I've been reading blather about Wes Andeson for a long time but never believed the hype. I tried watching "Bottle Rocket" twice but got bored and turned it off halfway through both times. I tried sitting through "Royal Tenenbaums" once and bailed after five minutes. His stuff was just too arch and self-conciously clever for me. Then last Friday I tuned in "The Life Aquatic" for the hell of it. A couple of hours I sat there delighted. I loved this movie. Anderson's dialogue was subtly off-center and the cast did wonders with it, especially Bill Murray who deadpanned his way through this thing like a champ, Jeff Goldblum who had his best role in a dog's age, and Willem Dafoe who did a hell of a job channelling Peter Lorre. Heck, even Owen Wilson was bearable. What gets me is that most reviews from Anderson fans were lukewarm about this movie. That I don't get.

Something else that has been a pleasant surprise lately, Showtime's [u]Masters Of Horror[/u] series. Horror anthologies are nothing new even ones done by big time directors. Not all the episodes of this series that I've seen have been that good, but two have been amazing, John Carpenter's "Cigarette Burns" and Joe Dante's "Homecoming". These episodes were the best things these directors have done in a long time.

Carpenter's was a brutal punch in the gut about a seedy film buff tracking down a film that supposedly turns its viewers into crazed killers. This was brilliantly creepy, had just enough gore to unnerve you and a sense of grandiose evil that is far beyond all the derivate spook, slasher and zombie movies out there.

Dante's picture was a very timely piece of satire that looked at one question: The soldiers killed in battle whom politicians always eulogize in the most patriotic of terms, what would they say about their deaths if they came back to life? Dante told that story in ruthless fashion as befits our times. He even threw in an Ann Coulter stand-iin who I'm happy to say, got shot in the head.