Monday at the Movies - January 21, 2013

Welcome to the first “Monday at the Movies” of 2013!  (Somebody went to the movies a lot in January.)  This week, two features that elicited less-than-favorable reactions – though you may be surprised which one I enjoyed more...

Red State (2011) – Kevin Smith is a talented (if loquacious) raconteur, but I’ve never been a big fan of his movies; Chasing Amy is just okay, and Mallrats has its moments.  It just seems that Smith doesn’t have very much to say in movies filled with chattering.  With Red State, Smith approaches a theme – that extreme belief in anything, be it God or country, is dangerous – and then bludgeons you over the head with it.  Smith clearly has an axe to grind with Patriot Act-ers and the Westboro Baptist Church, but his disapproval of these groups is so unsubtle that (no joke) Smith actually cameos to shout “Shut the f--- up!” at a preacher.  The film imagines Westboro as Hostel-style torture pornographers, murdering local homosexuals and adulterers on the orders of Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).  The film escalates when Cooper’s church kidnaps a trio of teenagers before the ATF – led by John Goodman – bumble their way into a raid on the compound.  Red State is, surprisingly for Smith, quite violent, but there’s neither mirth nor menace in the bloodshed; instead, the movie plods along without any suspense or momentum.  The film is populated by many character actors – Goodman, Melissa Leo, Stephen Root, Kevin Pollak – but surprisingly the standout performance here is Michael Parks, surprisingly because Parks hasn’t really been acting when I’ve seen him team up with Quentin Tarantino.  As Cooper, Parks is equal parts charismatic and terrifying, subtle with a manic gleam in his eye; thanks to Parks, it’s not difficult to see how Abin Cooper could have acquired such power.  Parks’s performance, combined with an odd compulsion to see how this mess will all turn out, ends up redeeming the film and making it watchable, though faith in Kevin Smith as a filmmaker has yet to be earned.

V/H/S/ (2012) – I’m a sucker for a good horror film, only there are so few of them around that I almost always write off the genre as a dumping ground for most of what Hollywood would be unable to sell without some blood and breasts.  Paradoxically, one of my favorite movie experiences is watching a truly scary film with all the lights off, allowing that sense of dread to creep into my very being as the movie washes over me.  None of this was my experience with V/H/S, an amateurish-at-best attempt to capitalize on the dying craze of found footage.  The film revolves around a group of friends who break into an abandoned house to steal a videotape, allowing the film to take on an anthology format as we watch the tapes with the characters.  Perhaps using a dead medium like the VHS tape is a perfect analogy, because V/H/S is better off left in the basement with those moldering relics of a bygone era of home video.  There are almost no good scares here, only two memorable moments of palpable dread (a knife-wielding camerawoman and a haunted house with arms coming through the walls), and a cast populated by “fresh faces” so unskilled that their bad acting is entirely distracting.  You’d think that any anthology would have at least one redeeming entry (even the disappointing New York, I Love You, after all, did), but the rubbish acting, the unconvincing gimmick (why, for example, would a Skype call be on a VHS tape?), and the generally misogynistic tone make V/H/S an unredeeming waste of time.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!