A Beautiful Fraud

A few weeks ago there was an interesting article in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times entitled "Up to Her Eyes in Gore, And Loving It," about how the latest strain of really grisly horror movies (Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek, et al.) is finding a large audience within a demographic studios never before thought of targeting for the genre: women. This didn't come as a complete surprise — I know a number of women who like a good stalk 'n' slash, and back in the day, my constant companion to movies like My Bloody Valentine, New Year's Evil and even Maniac was my gal pal Jamie. And the critic Carol Clover has written extensively on the appeal slasher movies hold for the women like herself (check out Clover's great book Men, Women and Chainsaws for her take on what she calls the figure of "the final girl"). But I had no idea that in the case of some really hardcore stuff — movies like Alexandre Aja's brutal remake of The Hills Have Eyes — girls might even be outnumbering the boys. Looks like it's high time we rethink what we mean when we say "chick flick."

But like so many commentaries on these recent, particularly sadistic splatterfests, the Times piece failed to mention what I think is a key starting point for this new horror cycle: Cube. OK, so it's officially a science-fiction movie, but in retrospect, Cube set the tone for a lot of what we're seeing now. In fact, the setup sounds exactly like a Saw sequel: A group of clueless victims are forced to negotiate their way out of a seemingly endless series of booby-trapped rooms without getting sliced, diced or otherwise eviscerated. Like the Saw franchise, it's nerve-racking and very graphic; like Hostel, there's a gleeful sadism at work quite close to the surface, and we're all invited to share in it.

All of which brings me to my Cube story, a tale that that perhaps reveals sadistic streak of my own. A week or two after Cube opened here in New York City way back in 1998, I found myself at a early afternoon showing of a movie called Shadrach, a gentle family-type film based on a William Styron short story and starring Andie MacDowell. The film had not screened for critics, so I went to the earliest showing possible at an East Village multiplex. I was easily the youngest person in the theater: Everyone else looked to be well into their seventies and beyond, sweet old ladies their gentlemen companions who had probably just cashed their pension checks and were treating themselves to a nice little movie set in the 1930s. But when the lights went down and the opening credits began to roll, I immediately knew something was terribly, terribly wrong: The projectionist had accidentally switched reels and was showing Cube instead of Shadrach. Now as I'm sure you well remember, Cube opens with the sight of victim No. 1 suddenly and quite shockingly diced into cubes by what looks to be a giant hard-boiled egg slicer made of nearly invisible, razor-sharp wire. I knew what was coming and made a beeline for the exit in hopes of alerting the projectionist in time and sparing these poor, unsuspecting dears the sight of something that nearly made me lose my lunch the first time I saw it. Alas, it was not be. Before I even reached the door I heard the swoosh of the sprung boobytrap on the soundtrack, the squishy sound of body parts hitting the floor and a dull roar of dismay as the entire room erupted in gasps, moans and nauseated groans, while a single voice rose above the hubbub but seemed to speak for them all: "Oh my gawd, what is this?!" Hey, I tried.

So whatever happened to Cube's cowriter-director Vincenzo Natali after making such a memorable impression, which I'm sure no one in that East Village multiplex will ever forget? He's currently working on an adaptation of Crash writer (no, not that Crash) J.G. Ballard's 1975 nightmare novel about civilization and savagery, High-Rise.

Well, I seem to have upset a lot of Dan Brown fans by suggesting that The Da Vinci Code is not a particularly good book. Okay, so I flat-out called it crap. I heard from one Brown-ie who thinks we shouldn't hold "entertainment" to any standards of quality and resents it when critics get all critical. Another mistakenly thought I meant to say that all fiction was crap, but went on to make the important point that just because something makes it to print doesn't mean it's true. One cryptic poster seems content to write off errors like calling Leonardo da Vinci "Da Vinci" as "idioms" without appearing to understand what an idiom is — even though he went through the trouble of copying the definition straight out of Merriam-Webster's online and pasting it directly into his post. (Unless he meant to argue that "Da Vinci" has somehow become idiomatic among those who just don't know any better, in which case I think I might have to agree.) Seriously, though, I really did enjoy reading all your responses (keep 'em coming — I can take it), and just to prove that I'm more than some failed writer who wishes he, too, could write a crap novel, or an embittered spoilsport who's out to gratuitously denigrate Dan Brown's deathless prose (or Tom Hank's bitchin' blow-back) I'd like to offer up what I personally think is an exciting book, and one that's very much in The Da Vinci Code vein: Theodore Roszak's Flicker. (Thanks for turning me on to it, FlickChick!) It was written way back in the late '80s, and while Flicker doesn't claim to be based on fact or borrow substantially from other people's work, it's a real page-turner, and not simply because there are only four sentences on each page. Flicker is a mystery about a film scholar who's researching the work of a nearly forgotten filmmaker when he uncovers a shadowy, centuries-old conspiracy involving the Knights Templar, the Merovingians and a powerful religious cabal called Oculus Dei. Sound familiar? The book had been out of print for years, but it's now back on shelves with a spiffy new cover, thanks to Darren Aronofsky's upcoming adaptation. But don't wait for the movie: This is one well-written read that deserves to be enjoyed in print, particularly by anyone who likes movies and good books.

I know I have to get over this because it's only going to get worse when The Da Vinci Code finally hits theaters on May 19, but let me vent just this once and then I promise to shut up about it. The man's name is Leonardo da Vinci. Now you can call him Leonardo, or you can call him Leonardo da Vinci. You can even call him Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, which is his full birth name. You cannot, however, call him "Da Vinci." Not ever. "Da Vinci" literally means "from Vinci," which is where he was born. It's not his surname. Leonardo didn't have one. So referring to him as "Da Vinci" would be like saying "from Stupid Town" if your name happens to be, oh, I don't know, "Dan Brown from Stupid Town." Every time I see that trailer with Tom Hanks in that ridiculous haircut gasping "Da Vinci!" I wish my drunken art-history professor was still around to make good on his promise to pound the snot out of the next person who says "Da Vinci" instead of "Leonardo." You'd think after making a kajillion dollars by turning the man's life and legacy into a crap book Mr. Brown would at least get the guy's name right.

Did anyone else catch that really entertaining piece about Werner Herzog in last week's New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker)? I know Herzog is generally considered to be one of the great auteurs of European cinemah-blah-blah, but the guy just plain cracks me up. I mean, here's a guy who got shot while doing press for Grizzly Man, and when British journalist Mark Kermode suggested they skedaddle, Herzog insisted on finishing the interview, saying "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid." (You can catch the whole interview, shot and all, here.) And this comes only two days after Herzog pulled Joaquin Phoenix from the wreckage after the Walk the Line star's car flipped over on a canyon road near Sunset. Simply put, the guy rocks. Hard. Not to mention the fact that Herr Herzog's currently at the top of his game: His recent documentary output, particularly Grizzly Man and The White Diamond, has been top-notch. Well according to the New Yorker article, "How Werner Herzog Makes Movies," Herzog is now in the jungles of Thailand with Christian Bale working on a feature-film version of Herzog's great 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Entitled Rescue Down, it's about a German-American pilot's harrowing ordeal after being shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War, and from the sound of things, the production itself has turned into quite a quagmire. As the New Yorker piece succinctly puts it, Herzog is caught between two groups of people: Those who came to the jungles thinking they were making a Werner Herzog film, and those who — like strip-club-owner-turned-producer Steve Marlton, whose Gibraltar Entertainment is also responsible for something called Bottoms Up! with Paris Hilton — thought they were getting something like The Rundown, only starring Christian Bale instead of The Rock. No one's getting paid, Herzog's ADs are quitting left and right, and the Hollywood crew is convinced that the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo knows nothing about making movies and are reshooting scenes behind the master's back, often with disastrous results. It's all almost too good to be true: I can only hope that someone like Les Blank, who shot the documentary Burden of Dreams during the production of Herzog's beautiful folly Fitzcarraldo, is getting it all down on tape.

Just caught the trailer for Poseidon on the Warner Bros. website, and I've gotta admit: I'm intrigued. I should also mention that I grew up during the heyday of disaster movies and was weaned on a steady diet of tidal waves, towering infernos, killer bees, Sensurround and Karen Black. (When I was 12, I even made my own Super-8 earthquake epic by shaking a table and setting fire to my train set.) So I was initially skeptical about a remake of such a seminal '70s experience as The Poseidon Adventure, but I figure if anyone's going to do it, it should be Wolfgang Petersen: His Das Boot still ranks as the greatest trapped-underwater adventure of all time. (If you haven't seen this claustophobic classic, now is the perfect time: Columbia Home Video just released the original unedited version on DVD). Screenwriter Mark Protosevich is also an interestingly unconventional choice. As loopy as his script for The Cell might have been, it was entertaining, and he currently has two adaptations in production that have definitely caught my attention: John Carter of Mars, based on the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series, and yet another version of Richard Matheson's classic end-of-the-world zombie vampire opus, I Am Legend, previously officially filmed as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man. Jon Favreau's directing John Carter; it looks like Constantine's Francis Lawrence is slated to direct Legend (Ridley Scott was one of the original directors attached to the project); and I'll definitely go see both.

I don't know about you, but I was about blue in the face waiting to hear what Brits count as their favorite — sorry, favourite — song lyric. Well, I can finally breathe again. According to those indefatigable pollsters at VH1, Britain's best-loved bit of pop poesy comes from U2's "One," that stirring ode to global community (although my pal John McP tells me that it's really about the bitter dissolution of the Edge's marriage) that goes a little something like this: "One life, with each other, sisters, brothers." What a lovely thought. But it seems not everyone in the U.K. feels so we-are-the-world-so-let's-start-givin' when it comes to what's on their personal playlists. Coming in at a fairly close No. 2 is a line from The Smiths "How Soon Is Now?", that vibrato-crazy masterpiece of self-pitying, me-me-me Morrissey misery that can be heard on soundtracks as diverse as The Wedding Singer, The Craft, Charmed and the trailer for Dario Argento's bizarre Phantom of the Opera. Heck, it was even covered by those pseudo-Sapphic-sisters in t.A.T.u. (remember t.A.T.u.?): "So you go and you stand on your own/And you leave on your own/And you go home and you cry and you want to die." Well put, Moz. Who can think about connecting with the world at large when you can't even manage to hook up at a gay bar?

Note to self: No more two-week vacations — ever! Exhausted from 10 days of bionic-power tourism and the best efforts on the part of Air France to make every connecting flight a living, screaming nightmare, I'm a wee bit jet-lagged and now facing two weeks of back work. But who's complaining? I was lucky enough to spend the time somewhere I'd never been before: Florence. It's just as beautiful as it's cracked up to be, but not nearly as movie crazy as one might expect in a town so deeply devoted to such lesser arts as painting, sculpture and architecture. Traces, however, can be found in the strangest places. Directly in the shadow of the glorious Ponte Vecchio — surely one of the most famous bridges in the world — stand the ruins of something called Cinema X, a theater advertising movies por adulti soltanto: for adults only. Sadly, Cinema X seems to have gone the way of the Medici, but I did manage to catch the totally cool “Omaggio a Sergio Leone,” which is being held as part of the Firenze Film Festival in the medieval belly of the hulking Palazzo Vecchio. For a mere fistful of euro — three, to be exact — I got to gaze upon costumes and props used in such Sergio Leone classics as Once Upon a Time in America ("We've got a suit worn by Roberto De Niro!", the ticket seller was sure to tell me in the same hushed, reverential tone Italians usually reserve for the pope) and was treated to a video projection of The Colossus of Rhodes, screened, along with other Leone faves, in a little makeshift theater. The festival is running until April 25, so if you're lucky enough to find yourself in Florence in the next week or so, definitely check it out.