Evan Locci

Basically, a poor concept film. Think, Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like The Breakfast Club, it has all the stock characters of the school's mythologized hierarchy (the jock, the outsider, the brain, the popular one...). And, like the film it verbally associates itself with, Invasion... or Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; run-of-the-mill Ohio (middle America) is the site of an insidious plan to re-populate the Earth with Alien parasites. The concept and narrative thrust of the film is re-tread material at best. There's absolutely nothing new or interesting in this film. Robert Rodriguez's direction is woefully uninspired and Kevin Williamson's script is his worst yet.

It appears that with the release of this film, coupled with the recent and terribly executed remake of Psycho, John Carpenter's Vampires, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer - that the fairly recent and much talked about "re-birth" of the horror genre has come to an abrupt (and welcome) end. Consequently, the wait for a new horror film to come along and breathe new life into this once again tired genre has begun.

There are two big misconceptions that must be pointed out before I start:

1. It's not a sacrilege to remake a great film. Any serious art-form regularizes this as a standard practice.

2. Any discernible talent that Van Sant showed with Drugstore Cowboy, has apparently left him in droves.

With these in mind, I was sorely disappointed with this lackluster remake. Poorly conceived and executed in an amateurish fashion, this new film's failure can be directly attributed to Van Sant and his decisions. Perhaps too extensive of a list to mention point by point; the biggest mistake of the film was to cast Vince Vaughn in the lead role. While the rest of the supporting cast was surprisingly poor as well, they at least tried to give their charcters a new spin. Vaughn, it appears, was totally incapable of conceiving a new Norman Bates. His parody of Perkins' Bates was laughably horrible. Compare Vaughn's imitation of Anthony Perkins with Kenneth Branagh's imitation of Woody Allen in Celebrity. While I deplored Celebrity as a film, Branagh's imitation was certainly right on the mark. For me, Vaughn's Bates went permanently south the moment he copied Perkins' little laugh in the opening moments of his performance - not an auspicious beginning by any stretch of the imagination.

This glaring mistake aside, the film also suffered from poor directorial choices: 1)The poorly parodic addition of a Hitchcock-like character in a short background scene, 2)The addition of whispering voices barely audible in the Bates House, 3)The not-so-subtlely oneristic voyeurism scene, 4)The Silence of the Lambs-like aviary scene at the end of the film, and, finally, the horribly "chic" conception of Lila as a vengeful dyke ...all of which played generically off-key. The film's over-arcing problem lies squarely with Van Sant. His attitude, that the film is perfect and should be honored by a shot-for-shot remake, was erroneous. The film, which is certainly great, is far from perfect. A really talented director would have realized its shortcomings and, in the ultimate gesture of reverence, tried to totally reconceptualize the film and make it better. As a result of all these errors, the film lost all it's internal and Freudian complexity and exists as a cheap and superficial remake. Moving from Drugstore Cowboy, to the generic Hollywood melodrama Good Will Hunting, to the aping of a hollywood classic - Van Sant's career is shaping up to be fairly inept. Why, it couldn't even hurt a fly.

Consistently well-written and acted, Oz is without a doubt the best thing on TV. Quality wise, it's up there with the first 4 seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street as the most compelling hour of television drama. Presenting a harsh and realistic view of prison life, Oz is a wonderful mixture of superb acting and character development; all of which rides on a nuanced and erudite core (Foucault's Panopticon is the inspiration for Em City's design...and ultimate failure). It is the only show on TV, that I can think of, that has presented characters who were intensely dislikable one moment and oddly empathetic the next. That I am repulsed by, sympathetic with, intrigued about, and involved with every character that has lived, died or survived on the show, is no small feat. Good TV exists. And, for my money, Oz is not only good TV, it is better than most films released throughout the year.

The most sophisticated of Cameron's films to date; the theatrical release of The Abyss suffers from one of the most notoriously bad endings that I have ever witnessed on screen. Fortunately for fans of the film's preceding brilliance and potential, The Director's Cut manages to save the film and our faith in the director. It's important to remember, I think, that the end of the film is more than just a weak ending. The Theatrical release's original sequences are among the worst ever filmed. This fact cannot be overlooked in any serious estimation of this film's worth. In any event, the film, in both guises, clearly outclasses Titanic and, for my money, best defines his talent as a filmmaker.

Woody Allen's latest film, Celebrity, proves that his noticeably acerbic, angry and dull-witted string of recent films (from Mighty Aphrodite onwards) is symptomatic of Allen's diminished skills as a filmmaker/writer. At turns appallingly misogynistic and predictably cynical to downright boring and generic, Celebrity is perhaps the film that has finally forced me to give up on Allen as a serious filmmaker and concede the fact that his cinema is completely comatose. Mired, it seems, in an unassailably rigid state of self-justification for his widely criticized life - his films are thinly veiled vehicles of explication. As if Deconstructing Harry wasn't a sure warning sign of a man/filmmaker at the ends of his creative tether, Celebrity's final sequence perhaps provides the audience with a clear and emblematic image of cinematic distress. And, as it turns out, a perfect surrogate for myself sitting dumbstruck in the audience; recalling the mess I had just witnessed and thinking about what might have been.