Every director should make at least one Western. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if they’re in vogue or out, whether they make money or not. If you hope to be worth a damn behind the camera, you need one Western under your belt. Landscapes, violence, sweat, grit, faces with evil intentions or grimy fear, moral peril. It encourages you to use every last damn bit of your frame and start seeing things from an ethical perspective, as opposed to just moving your characters around a stale plot like so many chess pieces. If you can make one, you can make any other kind of movie you set your brain on. There is more than one reason to mourn the latter-day death of the Western. Guys like Sergio Leone were the last guys who thought big and didn’t crop and truncate their images for that all too lucrative home video market.

James Mangold is now officially worth a damn. I won’t bestow Grand Master privileges on him just quite yet, because he did after all inflict Kate & Leopold on us. But 3:10 To Yuma finds Mangold at his best and most composed. This is a film that takes its time, lets us get to know the people and the situation, and only reveals to us what the movie is REALLY about in the last half hour.

3:10 To Yuma is a remake of a 1957 film starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (beloved by many, unseen by me) which itself was based on an early short story by the great author Elmore Leonard. After getting his foot shot off in the Union army during the Civil War, Dan Evans (Christian Bale) hopes to take up ranching in Arizona, which is made difficult with a drought and a railroad dispute over his land. His wife (Gretchen Mol) is disappointed in him and his oldest son William (Logan Lerman) was never appointed with him all the way to begin with, to get to the “DISappointed” stage. He may not even like or obey his father all that much, but he is awash with hero worship for an outlaw named Ben Wade, upon whose exploits many dime novels were written.

A movie made for (and presumably by) Cheeto-eating stoners has no reason to have such a convoluted and intrusive and overbearing plot. I finally pick something up that I WANT to be meandering and pointless and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters actually manages to fuck THAT up with some ridiculousness about an exercise machine that has the power to destroy the universe. This actually wouldn’t be so bad if it were just some goofy thing to hang gags on. But what kills this movie is the assumption that we actually care. We don’t. Directors Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis have gotten by HOW LONG on the Cartoon Network with random bullshit and fart jokes? And they deviate to the Syd Field method NOW?

I used to watch the eleven-minute weekly cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Cartoon Network with some regularity, until I realized that every eleven-minute episode was the SAME eleven minutes over and over, just with a revolving door of oddball supporting characters. Of course, now that I said that, I will have gotten some nerd’s geek-panties in a twist and they will educate me on the subtle and minute differences between “Baloonenstein” and “The Broodwich.” And I’d tell these folks to use the energy they expend cataloguing the adventures of talking junk food to go out and get laid, but I’m not sure I want the people who worship this show breeding.

NOTE: This was originally going to be a straight review of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. Sitting at the keyboard, it just kinda turned into this.

I don’t mind that Rob Zombie‘s remaking Halloween. Really, I don’t. My reasons are simple. Take into account that in 1999, Irish author Seamus Heaney had a worldwide international bestseller that was a shock to everyone. Why was it so surprising this book sold an assload of copies?

Because it was a translation of Beowulf, the epic poem that we all had to read in High School English and is widely known to be the oldest story in the history of the English language. I say this to ask a question”¦

How many of us (of a certain age) knew WHO Michael Myers was before they saw their first Halloween movie? Knew what he did and how big a threat he was? It was true for me. I didn’t see Halloween until after I saw Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in a theater back in 1995. I was twelve, and it was my first trip to Haddonfield. But I knew Myers had a white mask and slaughtered teenagers by the truckload.

When a character in a film seeps into the American subconscious like that, doesn’t it make it more than a movie? Doesn’t that make it Oral History? Like… Umm… Beowulf?

I couldn’t possibly tell you what the film’s about, and at this point I don’t know if David Lynch could. It’s become sort of a pastime — Laura [Dern] and I sit around on set trying to figure out what’s going on.

-Justin Theroux, co-star of Inland Empire

David Lynch has finally outweirded himself with Inland Empire, his self-financed and self-distributed experiment with digital filmmaking. It begins with a desolate sitcom featuring people in rabbit costumes and ends with a dance sequence featuring a lumberjack and a one-legged woman. In between there are shifting levels of reality, dream sequences that pretend they’re set in waking life, and vice-versa. The only thing odder than the movie is the fact that I dig it whole-heartedly. It ain’t Mulholland Drivebut, then, what the hell really is?

Okay, here’s how I figure it. If you see the name “David Lynch” under the director credit, and you have the gall to complain that the film “doesn’t make any sense,” then you seriously have to turn in your moviegoer badge. He’s been making movies for decades and you JUST figured out he’s a little off-kilter? You DO know who David Lynch is, right? He’s the guy who makes “David Lynch Movies.” It’s like watching Charlie Chaplin movies and then, after the third one, you think to yourself “Wait a minute. These movies are silent! BOOOOOOOOO!”

Truth be told, I haven’t been a Lynch fan for very long. His earlier stuff makes my ass ache, with its dependence on corny dialogue and retro-kitsch. Imagine what would happen if John Waters all of a sudden took himself extremely seriously one day, and you’ll get what I think about Wild At Heart and Blue Velvet. But as he’s gotten older, he’s gravitated towards my personal way of thinking. He’s dropped all his encumbrances and become more sincere. Yeah, Inland Empire is bizarre, but it’s bizarre from the heart. I don’t mind if you’re strange and nonsensical, but mean it. Don’t look like you’re putting on airs.

We all have our dream movies. We read a book, play a videogame, or watch an old movie thinking to ourselves “I want to see this on the big screen, and THIS guy would be the right guy to do it!”

I have my dream movies as well. Six of them, as a matter of fact. I just thought I’d share them with you, and maybe you’d kill to see these on the big screen almost as much as I would”¦

It has been confirmed that Michael Bay, in his next bit of Spielberg impression, is set to direct the big-screen version of the videogame Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time … And did anyone else get ill just reading that sentence. How can I put any finer an exclamation point on it, other than to say “No?”

The fact that I haven’t liked a single Bay film doesn’t mean I think he’s a bad director. No, I think of him more as a top-of-the-line pistol that hasn’t been fired at anything worthwhile. How about instead of directing a film based on a videogame that had the strong suits of subtlety, magic, and clear storytelling, how about one more suited to Bay’s strengths?

Enter Hideo Kojima‘s brilliant-but-flawed Metal Gear Solid. The game that refined the stealth genre into what you see today in games. Hopefully, Bay can fix some of Kojima’s shortcomings (forty minutes of scenes where nothing happens and convolution for the sake of convolution) and vice versa (anything resembling a “plot” in a Michael Bay movie). It’s like they were made for each other.

In high school, I read Jim Thompson‘s brilliant novel The Killer Inside Me, about a small town sheriff in Texas, who gets his jollies by, well, killing people. I was amazed by how author Thompson managed to write a king-hell crazy book without romanticizing the character of Sheriff Lou Ford one iota.

Now if one were to make a movie, this aspect of the book would not play to a lot of folks. Some would regard this as nothing more than a sleazy, violent sideshow. But if you absolutely HAD to make a movie off of it”¦ Why not go all out?

Thank God for Rob Zombie, who can make artful sleaze. His fevered imagination and cinematic pyrotechnics could make The Killer Inside Me fresh and exciting. His common sense and grasp of film could make it a forced to be reckoned with.

After watching his adaptation of James Ellroy‘s novel The Black Dahlia, I was concerned that Brian DePalma may mellow with age, even though I was one of the four or five people who liked the picture. It was DePalma in his oft debated “restraint.” There is nothing more depressing than to see a great lion like himself drop into the filmmaking equivalent of “domestic tranquility.”

Well, BALLS TO THAT, man! DePalma needs to get himself ass-deep in king-hell crazy again. And I can think of no better potential project to do that with than a remake of the Russ Meyer-directed, Roger Ebert-scripted Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. It’ll be like a schizophrenic getting his own meth lab. I’m telling you, it’ll be NUTS!

Drugs and trannies and acid rock”¦ Oh my”¦

Is it just me, or is Wes Anderson just Ernst Lubitsch, only with more visual trademarks? He doesn’t flatter his characters, for he sees their flaws with a magnifying glass, but he DOES love them, and hopes for the best as they coast upon capricious fate. And does anyone need more love than Ignatius J. Reilly of John Kennedy Toole‘s novel A Confederacy of Dunces?

Granted, Reilly may be more boisterous and uncontainable than any of Anderson’s prior ennui-nauts, but there is a flaw inherent. NO ONE is a good match for Reilly. He is unquantifiable. So why not give the book to Anderson, who will sit back and watch the fireworks like he usually does? He has a thing for distance, flattening the events so they seem more funny when you watch them.

The last time I checked, A Confederacy of Dunces was in the works by David Gordon Green (George Washington, Undertow). But I’m still pulling for Anderson because he doesn’t have a hateful bone in his body.

No videogame has more defenders with fewer copies sold than Tim Schafer‘s Psychonauts. It’s the story of a young boy named Razputin sent to a summer camp for psychic youths only to find that not all was what it seems. The game was hailed for its wonderful story, engaging dialogue, and endearing, laugh-out-loud characters.

Oddly enough, so have the films of Brad Bird, like The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

If there has ever been a property more tailor-made for a director, I haven’t seen it. Get Pixar on it and watch the money pour in, as well as the sequel to the game that fans (like me) want. I mean seriously the guy behind The Iron Giant collaborating with the guy behind Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle? HOW DOES THAT NOT BLOW YOUR LOAD?!

Well, he’s writing the comic book right now. Do I REALLY need to go further with this one?