Closet Space (2008)
Directed by Mel House
Written by Jason Stewart
Starring Melanie Donihoo, Jovan Jackson, James LaMarr, Morgan McCarthy, Evan Scott, Peyton Wetzel, Tim Wrobel
Upstart Filmworks

In these recent years as a critic, I have had to sit through many a bad horror film. But these weren’t your garden variety bad horror movies. No, these were made by young men who were interested not in scaring us, the audience, but instead showing us how many other, better horror films they’ve seen. Homage-To-The-Genre horseshit. Out the window went atmosphere, imagination and good writing until low-budget indie horror, as a whole, turned into a poorly spelled myspace blog written by misogynists about their Netflix queues.

So incensed was I by these kayfabe-breaking motherfuckers that one of the reasons I dug There Will Be Blood so much was that a young man named “Eli” was bludgeoned to death by a bowling pin.

Dear Marvel Studios,

My name is Royce and I have been a fan of your films since X-Men came out in 2000. It marked a coming of age for the superhero genre as a whole, and were it not for that film, we wouldn’t have Batman Begins, V For Vendetta or Sin City. You have proven for the past eight years that the world of comic books is not only profitable, but accessible for those who have never picked one up in their lives. Not just for Marvel, but for DC and many other imprints. But because it started with you, I think the moviegoing public owes you thanks.

For my money, the best Superhero film ever made is your own Spider-Man 2. That film is what I firmly believe would have been the product, had the late, great Billy Wilder been a comic book fan. Worries over love and employment, ordinary men and women taken to extraordinary means, pure hearts leading a corrupt world. I know that movie came out four years ago, but you should still be proud of yourselves.

This isn’t to say, of course, that Marvel hasn’t been complicit in some stinkers. No, far from it. I have watched the silly (Ghost Rider), the dull (Fantastic Four), the beefheaded (The Punisher), and the flat-out pretentious (Spider-Man 3) come out of the movie wing of The House That Stan And Jack Built. But your average is still pretty high, and every film with the Marvel name on it is still a point of optimism for myself and many others.

But I am afraid that you may be slipping into bad habits again with Thor (which is scheduled for release on June 4, 2010), being as I have gotten my hands on a 2007 draft of the script by Mark Protosevich.

Up In Honey’s Room
Written by Elmore Leonard
HarperCollins
Mass Market Paperback
Price: $9.99
Release date: April 29, 2008

Elmore Leonard is God.

I’ve been saying it for years, but now I finally have definitive proof. It comes two pages into his latest, called Up In Honey’s Room (now in paperback). It’s a fart joke that actually gets a laugh. Think about that. If you can pull off a fart joke without actually hearing the fart or having someone in front of you tell you about it? You are possessed by divinity.

Leonard is, beyond the shadow of any conceivable doubt, the best crime writer the world has ever seen. This is not hyperbole, but rather critical consensus. But it falls into my own personal opinion that Leonard is one of the four best novelists alive today (the other three being Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy). Yeah, he writes about cops, robbers, and people on the low end of the spectrum, but so did Dickens and Dostoevsky. He possesses such uncanny insight into the way people think, act, see themselves, deceive others, lie themselves into trouble, shoot their way out, and (most importantly) talk, that it would make most so-called “literary” authors drool all over themselves in envy. That he’s so accessible anyone can read him is an asset, not a liability.

He’s been writing for over fifty years and he’s never written a bad book. He hasn’t even wasted a word. I know, because I’ve looked.

And Up In Honey’s Room doesn’t break the tradition. Devious bad guys suffering from delusions of grandeur, good guys walking on the edge of the same, women who don’t take any shit, cracker-jack plotting, and dead-on dialogue. A truly worthy addition to Leonard’s vast and formidable canon.

Dedicated in giving you the worst in motion pictures, this is Haz-Mat Theater”¦

Case One: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

Fuck this movie.

I wish I could be more delicate in my choice of words”¦ Well, actually no I don’t, but still. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is less a movie and more a war crime. It will turn you orange and sterile. It was directed by an evil man named Donald Petrie, who also did Just My Luck and Miss Congeniality, and the combination of the three broke my evil scale. Going beyond a warlord who will sentence you to torture and death because you smell funny, Petrie is actually the old guy in the trucker hat behind the supermarket, offering you spare change to touch your junk.

Before Judd Apatow movies got predictable and hackneyed, before you even knew who Judd Apatow was, romantic comedies were like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. For those of you with severely diminished memories, the rom-coms of yore involved impossibly attractive men and women who did their best to pummel and hurt each other both psychologically and emotionally through contrivance in a world that resembles ours in name only. Many women liked them because they were impeccably sad creatures who went mad over the fact that not all men wax. Men-folk did not like these movies, but did put up with them in the faint and often futile hopes of a squeezer in the parking lot of the theater for having to sit through ninety minutes of this torturous bullshit.

Cloverfield
Directed by Matt Reeves
Starring Lizzy Caplan, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman
Paramount Home Video
Release date: April 22, 2008

My complete misanthropy, combined with the large fictional beasts that make such a worldview fun occasionally, dictated that I would love Cloverfield on a complete instinctual level. And I do. I eye it with the same relish and love that vegans visualize the rotting corpse of Ted Nugent.

But after it came out, I noticed whining, bitching, pissing, and moaning from the people who saw it. Normally the rest of the world doesn’t agree with me, who liked Primeval and hated Juno, so the fact is that I wouldn’t come out on top with this one. But the complaints leveled at it were pretty angry for gripes so, well, asinine and stupid.

So instead of a conventional review, allow me to respond in kind and convince all of you who haven’t seen it to take the plunge and not listen to anybody who complains about it. Just imagine the following bold-faced statements in a nasal whine and you’ll get the right idea”¦

The camera’s too shaky!
– Really? The simulation of running is too much for your poor little stomach? That’s what it is, being as the movie is functioning as Hud’s (T.J. Miller) eyes, him looking through a camera and all. It’s nice to know how fat and stupid this country is getting when folks can’t handle SECOND-HAND FUCKING EXERCISE!