Spottswoode’s plan: Terrorists are known to be planning to meet at “a bar in Cairo.” The Team America helicopter will land in Cairo, and four uniformed team members will escort Gary, his face crudely altered to look “Middle Eastern,” to the bar, where he will go inside and ask whazzup. As a satire on our inability to infiltrate other cultures, this will do, I suppose. It leads to an ill-advised adventure where in the name of fighting terrorism, Team America destroys the pyramids and the Sphinx. But it turns out the real threat comes from North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong II (voice also by Parker), who plans to unleash “9/11 times 2,356.”
Opposing Team America is the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G., ho, ho, with puppets representing Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Matt Damon, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn (who has written an angry letter about the movie to Parker and Stone about their comments, in Rolling Stone, that there is “no shame in not voting”). No real point is made about the actors’ activism; they exist in the movie essentially to be ridiculed for existing at all, I guess. Hans Blix, the U.N. chief weapons inspector, also turns up, and has a fruitless encounter with the North Korean dictator. Some of the scenes are set to music, including such tunes as “Pearl Harbor Sucked and I Miss You” and “America—F***, Yeah!”
If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I’d be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it. The White House gets a free pass, since the movie seems to think Team America makes its own policies without political direction.
I wasn’t offended by the movie’s content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone, and company is to sneer at both sides—indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they’re wrong that all of us are fools and dead wrong that it doesn’t matter.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(DIRECTED BY MARCUS NISPEL; STARRING JESSICA BIEL, JONATHAN TUCKER; 2003)
The new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a contemptible film: vile, ugly, and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as “style” or “vision” or “a commentary on our world.” It is not a commentary on anything except the marriage of slick technology with the materials of a geek show.
The movie is a remake of, or was inspired by, the 1974 horror film by Tobe Hooper. That film at least had the raw power of its originality. It proceeded from Hooper’s fascination with the story and his need to tell it. This new version, made by a man who has previously directed music videos, proceeds from nothing more than a desire to feed on the corpse of a once-living film. There is no worthy or defensible purpose in sight here: The filmmakers want to cause disgust and hopelessness in the audience. Ugly emotions are easier to evoke and often more commercial than those that contribute to the ongoing lives of the beholders.
The movie begins with grainy “newsreel” footage of a 1974 massacre (the same one as in the original film; there are some changes, but this is not a sequel). Then we plunge directly into the formula of a Dead Teenager Movie, which begins with living teenagers and kills them one by one. The formula can produce movies that are good, bad, funny, depressing, whatever. This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes, and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it? There were times when I intensely wanted to walk out of the theater and into the fresh air and look at the sky and buy an apple and sigh for our civilization, but I stuck it out. The ending, which is cynical and truncated, confirmed my suspicion that the movie was made by and for those with no attention span.
The movie doesn’t tell a story in any useful sense, but is simply a series of gruesome events that finally are over. It probably helps to have seen the original film in order to understand what’s going on, since there’s so little exposition. Only from the earlier film do we have a vague idea of who the people are in this godforsaken house, and what their relationship is to one another. The movie is eager to start the gore and unwilling to pause for exposition.
I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams. I think of filmgoers on a date, seeing this movie and then—what? I guess they’ll have to laugh at it, irony being a fashionable response to the experience of being had.
Certainly they will not be frightened by it. It recycles the same old tired thriller tools that have been worn out in countless better movies. There is the scary noise that is only a cat. The device of loud sudden noises to underline the movements of half-seen shadows. The van that won’t start. The truck that won’t start. The car that won’t start. The character who turns around and sees the slasher standing right behind her. One critic writes, “Best of all, there was not a single case of ‘She’s only doing that (falling, going into a scary space, not picking up the gun) because she’s in a thriller.’” Huh? Nobody does anything in this movie for any other reason. There is no reality here. It’s all a thriller.
There is a controversy involving Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bilclass="underline" Volume 1, which some people feel is “too violent.” I gave it four stars, found it kind of brilliant, felt it was an exhilarating exercise in nonstop action direction. The material was redeemed, justified, illustrated, and explained by the style. It was a meditation on the martial arts genre, done with intelligence and wit. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a meditation on the geek-show movie. Tarantino’s film is made with grace and joy. This movie is made with venom and cynicism. I doubt that anybody involved in it will be surprised or disappointed if audience members vomit or flee. Do yourself a favor. There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited—or more scared, if that’s what you want. This is not one of them. Don’t let it kill ninety-eight minutes of your life.
13 Ghosts
(DIRECTED BY STEVE BECK; STARRING TONY SHALHOUB, EMBETH DAVIDTZ; 2001)
13 Ghosts is the loudest movie since Armageddon. Flash frames attack the eyeballs while the theater trembles with crashes, bangs, shatters, screams, rumbles, and roars. Forget about fighting the ghosts; they ought to attack the subwoofer.
The experience of watching the film is literally painful. It hurts the eyes and ears. Aware that their story was thin, that their characters were constantly retracing the same ground and repeating the same words, that the choppy editing is visually incoherent, maybe the filmmakers thought if they turned up the volume the audience might be deceived into thinking something was happening.
When the action pauses long enough for us to see what’s on the screen, we have to admire the art direction, special effects, costumes, and makeup. This is a movie that is all craft and little art. It mostly takes place inside a house that is one of the best-looking horror sets I’ve seen, and the twelve ghosts look like pages from Heavy Metal, brought to grotesque life. (The thirteenth ghost is, of course, the key to the mystery.)
The screenplay, inspired by the 1960 William Castle film of the same name but written in a zone all its own, involves dead Uncle Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham), whose research into the occult included a medieval manuscript allegedly dictated by the devil. He leaves his house to his nephew Arthur (Tony Shalhoub), whose wife has tragically died; Arthur moves in with his son, Bobby (Alec Roberts), his daughter, Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth), and Maggie the Nanny (Rah Digga). They’re joined by a wisecracking ghostbuster named Rafkin (Matthew Lillard) and Kalina (Embeth Davidtz), a paranormal who knows a lot about Uncle Cyrus, his research, and how the house works.