The Mist (2007)

I have wanted to see this for a while, because I kept hearing good things, and Nick finally gave in and brought it home the other day. It's a Frank Darabont-directed movie - he did "Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile" and is kind of, as Nick put it, "a Stephen King auteur," which is a funny idea. (And indeed, when we watched the special features at the end, with Darabont and King, it was truly embarrassing to see D. kiss K.'s ass - I had to scream at Nick to turn it off.)

Regardless, this is truly terrifying and affecting, and even Thomas Jane's habit of acting by moving only the middle parts of his eyebrows could not mar that for me. Jane and his little blond child (a boy probably about seven) go to the supermarket, and while they're there a mist falls over the small New England town where they live. After a couple of bad incidents, the people trapped in the supermarket figure out that the mist hides some terrible creatures, and they start to freak out.

In the best apocalyptic-movie sense, the worst and scariest things that happen are things that could have been avoided, but for the human propensity to become irrational in the course of trying to self-preserve. Marcia Gay Harden plays an evangelical Christian who sees the invasion as her chance to convert people before the Apocalypse comes to pass - and she succeeds, much to the chagrin of the few people in the supermarket who don't drink the Kool-Aid.

The relationship between the boy, who spends most of the movie crying, and the dad, who tries to figure out how to explain what's happening to his son, is truly affecting, and feels very real. It's wrenching almost (but not quite) on the order of Haneke's "Time of the Wolf."

Darabont says in the interview with King at the end that he had to extract a promise from the studio and take a pay cut in exchange for them allowing him to keep the ending the way it is. I can see why - it's certainly not kid-friendly, for example, and it may make some people feel like throwing up - but I can't imagine the movie without it. Oh yes, actually, I can - it would be a lot like "I Am Legend."

Blood Car (2007)

Sorry I haven't posted in so long. (Who am I apologizing to - Cristie? Bridger?) Nick wrote a paper about remakes of 70s movies, and so we spend a month or so sort of half-watching the two versions of "The Longest Yard," "Alfie," "The Stepford Wives," etc. Nothing I really wanted to write about - though I did get to see both "Shaft"s, and the first "Shaft" is awesome. (Did you know the photog Gordon Parks directed it? I didn't!)

Last night we watched "Blood Car," a campy low-budge film about a guy who discovers a way to make cars run on blood. We got really excited when we saw the movie in "I Love Video," because there was this awesome moment at the end of the Peter Fonda movie "Idaho Transfer" when future humanoids use people as fuel for their cars. It was totally terrifying, and by far the best moment in the movie (the rest of it was kind of boring).

This "Blood Car" is about a future in which gas costs 32 dollars a gallon, and so nobody drives. Not much commentary on possible other effects of this change - nobody talks about not being able to see relatives in distant places, dying b/c of not being able to get to the hospital, whatever; the kids are still in school, the society still basically functions. People are just annoyed that they can't use their cars.

To me, this failure to look at the problem holistically kind of indicates a lack of ambition of the part of the filmmakers - and maybe that's okay. This is just a movie about a cute, mild-mannered, skinny vegan schoolteacher who is so desperate to get laid that he kills people in order to power his car, which in turn garners him the sexual favors of a hot, unlikeable young thing named Denise.

There are funny moments, to be sure, and the concept is still basically fascinating, but a bigger-budget movie could do much darker things with the plot. (Though of course, shooting kids in the head in order to get fuel is pretty dark.)