New Moon (Not the Chinese Restaurant)

**Warning. If you're remotely attracted to men, you might have already seen this movie. Every straight, single, painfully awkward woman between 14 and 25 on earth might have been in the theatre with me.**

The words "New Moon" conjure up strange feelings for me-- I think back to the joyful harvest time during my youth, when my father would tell us children to go out and "make cider" out of the several hundred bushels of apples we had collected over the course of the month by running each and every rotted fruit through a loud and dangerous press the size of a 1996 Subaru Forester and just about as safe and reliable. I am also reminded of my girlfriend's period, which is often accompanied by mood swings that would make Mr. Hyde look like Carlyle Cullen and often reduce the otherwise amiable girl into a firebreathing actress diva capable of destroying Tokyo 37 times. In general, my associations aren't good.

And, after having returned from New Moon, the second chapter in The Twilight Saga, these negative associations are firmly intact.

First, I had to buy my tickets in advance. I had to buy tickets *two weeks* in advance. As a movie reviewer who is not habituated to paying for movie tickets whatsoever, this was a big deal to me. The theatre I went to had a midnight showing of New Moon on every one of it's six screens save one, which was showing Twilight as a throwback to the diehard Twifans who had been camping in front of the theatre in their Edward Cullen snuggies and long name-brand pajamas since dawn. It was as if Harry Potter and Anne Rice had a baby directed by Steven Spielberg on crack. This baby had grown in the minds of many young women into some sort of raging monster of misplaced sexual metaphors, capable of taring down even the most basic elements of story structure and plot. What else would you expect from a Stephanie Meyer crack baby?

Nevertheless, it's fair to say that every single drop of estrogen in the city of Portland Oregon was present in the theatre that night. Sorority sisters displaying proud "me too" college sweatshirts giggled in the row behind me. Japanese fangirls bubbled in the seats next to me. Diehard 43-year-old twimoms in makeup heavy enough to make Vincent Price go "Dayyymn, girl" waited with bated breath on every mangled perversion of the english language that came out of Edward Cullen's light-rouge colored mouth. I facepalmed.

And then the movie began.

Or, as I should say, then the music video began. It's unfair to movies to call New Moon anything else-- the not-montage segments of the movie are outnumbered two-to-one by the "fresh from VH1" sections of the movie. The filmmaker decided that the best way to represent the surprising absence of plot was to cover it with light acoustic guitar covers of every song ever composed that featured a lyric about the moon, and then pad the movie by making every other shot in glamourous slow-motion like some sort of pre-teen Sam Peckinpah. Whereas Twilight brought us the wildly misplaced but incredibly good Muse song "Supermassive Black Hole," New Moon brought us a man with a soft beard gently strumming an open-G on his Aston 388 in the back of a local Starbucks. Whee.

The plot introduces Jacob, the will-be werewolf from the first movie, as an unlikely new love interest. In the first Twilight movie Jacob was a lovable and punchable version of Thomas Builds-The Fire. In this movie he has apparently put on enough muscle to qualify as an action figure, considering his neck is now the size of several industrial components illegal in the United States. He is prone to 'roid rage and joins a gang. Not even kidding.

And the plot? You want to know about the plot? LOL. *sobs uncontrollably*

I walked out of the theatre and watched the teaming masses of girls and women pour from the theatre doors and push their way down the up escalators and through the emergency exits to their cars. In my mind, they were fleeing.

And they were running from the werewolf version of this guy:

Say Anything (Else)

**If you hear the 1989 cassette cut of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" blaring outside your window, don't call the cops. Find a condom.**

There are few things in this world that make me feel romantic.

1989's "Say Anything" is one of those things I have experienced in my life that accurately, if somewhat ineptly, captures the feeling of falling deeply, and irrevocably, in love. When John Cusack lifts that boombox over his head and makes those nervous facial twitches, I can't help but going week in the knees like Eagles' tackle Jerome McDougle at the prospect of actually playing football.

And to put my statement in context: although I am a sucker for romance films (I cried during "A Walk to Remember" like I hadn't cried since Littlefoot's mother died at the beginning of "The Land Before Time"), I never get involved with romantic subplots. If the badass hero of an action movie is in love with his sexy heroine, I just go along with it without ever actually batting an eyelash. But a pathetic, lovable kickboxer played by John Cusack standing outside my window blaring the top 1000 pop hits of the 1980s one by one from a jimmyrigged cassette player? I would make love to him on the spot, and not just because he's my boyfriend.

But, since I am The Midnight Movie Guy and not The "Sleepless in Seattle" Guy or The "such a pussy, why won't he stop crying in his room every time he hears Coldplay on the radio?" Guy, I might as well point out the aspects of this movie that get me every time.

First, "Say Anything" starts with the great granddaddy of cold opens. It's an ice opening. A liquid nitrogen opening. A breezy day on the north pole of Pluto opening. Starting from the moment the Twentieth Century Fox tag appears, it takes less than 15 seconds for us to go through exactly one establishing shot, two title-overs (the director's name and "Say Anything..."), and a plot-heavy opening line accompanied by someone absently noodling on a guitar. I had to restart the movie THREE TIMES because each time I thought I had missed some sort of exposition, establishing shot, or theme music that would make this opening less frigid. To make it worse, the "beginning" that's supposed to happen after the cold open never actually comes. Instead, we're launched into an incomprehensible mess of cinema verite screenwriting, drunk cinematography, and teenybopper direction which, when put together, could be called "romantic comedy" only by those who have a very forgiving definition thereof. If you're the kind of person who needs to be lulled into suspending your hard-earned disbelief, forget this shit and stick with the slowest film ever made.

And what follows is the mushiest possible romance late-80's realism will allow-- consider, for example the name "Loyd Dobbler." It's as if a group of Hollywood screenwriters locked themselves in a room and brainstormed until they came up with the most awkward combination of sounds in the English language and slammed them together with two capital letters. Cusack delivers his lines with the nervous rush of Dennis Miller with a speech impediment, and comes off simultaneously witless and witty in a way that makes you want to kiss him every time he says "...um," which is far more often than any other actor could pull off.

But by far the most annoying aspect of Say Anything is the screenwriting. The screenwriter uses a trick where each scene begins in the middle of a conversation, and then suddenly cuts off before the end. We never linger or stay to listen, as if the cameraman had such severe attention deficit disorder that he couldn't follow a whole conversation without his head exploding like a David Cronenberg extra. Not only will the scenes suddenly stop, but with them goes the entire soundtrack! If you ever want to hear more than eight measures of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," you better go out and buy the cassette because the sound editor aborts the song mid-lyric like a musical George Tiller.

But for everything bad I could say about the writing or the direction or the music or the cinematography, the last scene could remind even this cold-hearted cynical moviegoer what a good romance should be. I don't care if the rest of the movie feels like a frenetic late-80's music video, When Cusack and Ione Skye sit on the airplane to England together, waiting for the "ding" of the seatbelts sign, suddenly the artfulness of the work shines through in a simple act of symbolic realism. It's like Waiting for Godot except instead of Godot we've got the rest of the 1990s waiting for us, and any artist that could say that could say anything.

I would fly off with John Cusack any day.

John Cusack, Professional Hunk

**Warning. If you are pregnant, nursing, or may become pregnant with spoilers, for the love of god keep reading.***

Over the last few days a lot of strange things have happened in my life.

I moved to a new apartment, got a haircut, and started classes. I made new friends, became single, and even watched two straight men shotgun nitrous oxide between their naked bodies during a showing of Wild Zero.

But one very important thing happened in the last few days: I rekindled my love affair with actor John Cusack.

John and I are inseparable. He? An aging but remarkably youthful 80's teen star who never quite transitioned to the 90's. I? A youthful but remarkably aged child born in the 80's who never quite got the whole "sit down and shut up" thing in kindergarten. We were made for each other. So, just for a moment, I'm going to put aside furiously masturbating to Peter Gabriel 8-tracks and talk about my one true love.

This weekend John and I stopped our pointless in-fighting and constant disagreements and bonded over a movie we both loathe: High Fidelity. John loathes this movie because it's a romance that proves that he is little more than just a cute piece of the 1980's who still romances girls who listen to Bowling for Soup. I loathe this movie because it's actually passably good. So passably good, in fact, that there is very little to say about it except that it feels like something John should have done back when he was popular with people other than me.

Why, you ask, do I have a crush on John Cusack? Why is The Midnight Movie Guy infatuated with this two-bit hack who could never quite live up to the few seconds he spent waving a boombox around like that mildly retarded strangler from Do The Right Thing? Because John Cusack is one affable motherfucker. He plays the "well, I dono" hero: he has the ability to let the audience see things through his eyes, just like Keanu Reeves if Reeves could move his face properly.

Also, aside from the aforementioned musical stalker incident, it's really easy to forget that John Cusack is even in the movies he headlines. Can you remember the last time you sat down in a theater and said to yourself, "I'm really looking forward to this John Cusack movie?" Or, for that matter, do you remember the year you last walked out of a movie theater saying: "John Cusack was really brilliant?" What's remarkable about Cusack is his ability to pull an Alan Cumming and be in a lot of different movies, but somehow manage to be so bland, so normal, that you forget he's even an actor. To prove my point, I'm willing to bet one Golden Internet that you can't name three movies starring John Cusack.

(Sixteen Candles, Being John Malkovich, Say Anything)

Okay, yeah, whatever. But I'll bet you two Golden Internets you've seen at least one of these titles and couldn't tell John Cusack from the Key Grip.

(Igor, War Inc, 1408, The Ice Harvest, Must Love Dogs, Runaway Jury, Con Air, Grosse Point Blank, The Thin Red Line, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, True Colors, Broadcast News, High Fidelity)

Winning so far? I'll bet you four Golden Internets you didn't know that John Cusack played Dimitri in Disney's Anastasia. Ana-fucking-stasia.

And another thing: did any of those movies I mentioned pop out as particularly John Cusack? My point exactly.

Currently my boyfriend John is working on "2012," the new film by Roland Emmerich. Roland Emmerich is a filmmaker who has garnered his entire career on exploiting an innate desire in the heart of every New Yorker: the undying, untamed longing to burn that fucking city to the ground. What Michael Bay is to explosions, Roland Emmerich is to giant, city-smashing tidal waves that always manage to knock off the head of the Statue of Liberty, which then goes on to have wacky adventures in various inappropriate Burroughs of New York. It's like Sex in the City except instead of women it's the severed head of Lady Liberty and instead of upscale nightclubs everyone is running for their lives from Godzilla!

Can you imagine John Cusack in that movie? Neither can I. So before I go, I'll leave you with the greatest scene in Cusack's career.

TOP GUN Part One: The Soundtrack

**Over the next few weeks, I will be posting three spoiler-filled reviews of the 1986 blockbuster TOP GUN. Did I mention the spoilers?**

There are a lot of good things that have happened to me at sunset.

I had my first kiss at sunset. Before my grandfather passed away we watched a long orange sunset disappear over the icy Atlantic. Just last year I shared a beer with a beautiful woman and watched the sun go down over the spring leaves of Oregon. But not once, not in all the sunsets I've seen in my entire life, did the Top Gun Anthem fail to start blaring out of my ears like the half dead ghost of Glam-Rock out of the 80's. It's become part of the experience.



If you're like me and suffer from Top Gun Soundtrack Syndrome, I suggest that in lue of downing a bottle of roofinol with a bottle of Jack every morning, you seek professional consultation in the form of a wildly superior John Williams soundtrack.

Every single freakin' time that "nao-nao-nao-na-na-na-na-nao-nao-na-na-NA-na-na-NA-NAAA-NAAA" plays in my head, it's like my inner DJ just OD'd on painkillers after locking the booth and putting in the most annoying record ever made. Okay, so it's not that bad. I just wish I could enjoy the image of a setting sun without thinking of Maverick and Goose attempting a 4G Inverted Dive against a MiG-28 for the express person of giving someone the finger.

Top Gun is a Tony Scott movie produced by the legendary Jerry Bruckheimer, a man so powerful he once took a Technical College of Passidena dropout whose only claim to fame was a few "Got Milk" commercials and an unintelligible Meatloaf video and turned him into Michael Bay, Power Director. Top Gun was Bruckheimer's attempt to captured the essence of the 80s. In fact, I would venture to say that the seminal moment of that whole decade occurs within a single scene of Top Gun. That moment is when pre-Scientology Tom Cruise makes awkward love to an excessively permed Kelly McGillis as blue-tint silk drapes billow in the background and the retarded thumps of Take My Breath Away start... for the sixth time. I dare you to respond with something more essentially 80's than that.

But why do I associate this movie with sunsets, you ask? Because Top Gun is a movie about three things: Fighter Jets, Tom Cruise sex, and the Jeopardy category "Things that Happen at While the Sky is Orange." Every single scene in this movie, from the opening credits to the very last shot, happen with a setting sun in the background. There are even scenes where the opening shot happens at sunset, then the scene is shot during the day, and then the ending shot is at sunset again. Sunsets in the real world last for 8 minutes. Sunsets in the Jerry Bruckheimer world last longer than the breakfast shift and Denny's.

But there is one song, beyond the Top Gun Anthem, that has stuck with me through those many long years. That song is Kenny Loggin's Danger Zone, which is an 80's power ballad whose lyrics appear to have been written on the dare to incorporate every slang term in aviation into one highly repetitive verse.

Danger Zone isn't just a little bit repetitive. It's very repetitive. The refrain goes: "Highway to danger zone. Gonna take it right into the danger zone. Highway to the danger zone. Right into the danger zone." This feeds into the first of the 6 rules to the Top Gun drinking game, which is to drink whenever anyone or anything says the word "dangerous" or any variation thereof. If you played with this rule alone, you could be decently buzzed by the time the (8 minute) opening credits are over, and be unconscious by the time Maverick is going through his aviation crisis.

Nevertheless, for all the invocations of "danger" in this movie, none of the scenes actually make the audience feel any of that danger. A practiced movie viewer will know from the moment the jets streak across the sky and a generic military voice fills us in on the plot exactly how things are going to go down. By the last scene, watching Tom Cruise blow up Russian fighter jets like pinatas filled with bombs is not only tired and unsurprising, but markedly uninspiring as well.

But there is more to this movie. Next Tuesday.

District Nine (And Three Quarters)

**Warning. This movie is not actually part of the HALO franchise. If it were, I would be giving you a much stronger warning. Also, Bruce Willis is a ghost.**


This is my list of things that really hit the spot at three in the morning:

Super Big Gulps
White Castle
Lots of Pancakes
Seeing some goddamn tanks (especially walking tanks)

And though, I will admit, this night was not epic enough to involve tiny cheeseburgers or a trip to the legendary Portland Hotcake House, I am sucking on a huge Mountain Dew right now and completely satisfied with Neil Bloominkamp's District Nine.

Neil Bloominkamp is a South-African director who was tapped to direct the highly anticipated HALO movie, based on the popular video game franchise for the Xbox. As much as I know the HALO movie will suck, District Nine rocked. It focuses on a group of aliens who landed on earth 20 years ago and were forced to live in slum-like internment camps. If you've seen the ads you know this film is sorta-kinda doing the Cloverfield cinema verite thing, which is pretty cool because the movie plays out like a Mondo version of ID4. Our hero, a worthless bureaucrat sent to oppress the aliens, gets turned into an alien himself and then must help another alien restart their Independence-Day-like mothership so he can return to his home planet and get help. The ads play the movie up as if it's a preachy allegory for xenophobia. Blah-blah-blah, humans are racist, apartheid is bad, humans are the worst aliens of all, blah-blah.

But it's not like that.

This movie is too busy kicking ass and taking names.

Put it this way: the film ends with the same bureaucrat piloting a giant Gundam through the streets of Johannesburg screaming "come get some!" as he punches rockets out of mid-air and throws them back using a gun that not only shoots bolts of lightning, but bolts of lightning that make people explode as if they were kernels of popcorn in a nuclear reactor. It's like Transformers except with a strong R rating for lifelike kickassery.

Sure, this movie has it's problems. For one, the aforementioned bureaucrat character, whose name I can't even remember, is so wimpy and whiny that he makes Toby McGuire's Spiderman look like the biggest badass who ever lived. And that even goes for emo-Spiderman. The character has no redeeming characteristics, and I mean none. He doesn't even seem to have a personality. Imagine if Milton from Office Space were Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, and that's who this guy was. He's the hero, but at a certain point I either wanted him to man-up or just get killed already. Even when the film moves into buddy movie mode toward the end and the hero has to team up with aliens to save the world, the main character is not above hitting his alien savior with a shovel and whining mercilessly about his own dull plight. Yawn.

And if you think the alien characters are any better, you're wrong. The main alien hero is a monolith of generic alienhood. Why is he the only alien among millions who knows how to restart the mothership? How did he find the special parts to get it started again? I dono. He's an alien. I guess he must be special. The character has an alien son, who apparently knows enough about technology to jimmyrig their infinitely complicated mothership using only broken parts from machines that look like they once ran Windows 96, but I can overlook this because this character doesn't really have any more development than anyone else, including the hordes of thugs our hero mows down in the streets using his lightning gun.

Also, did I mention that the alien technology itself looks like it runs on Vista? No wonder their mothership crashed. *cue rimshot*

However, by far the most annoying thing about this movie is the music. The music director alternates between dramatic Hollywood thumps ala The Dark Knight and annoying, vaguely African-sounding vocalizing that made me think that any minute the sky would open up and someone would rename the main character Simba. The music director plays this music whenever there is a pause in the violence for more than 5 seconds, as if we're supposed to step away from our ass-kicking state of glory and reflect on the horrific nature of human greed. Pissh. More lightning guns.

Speaking of, lets talk about the real reason this movie rocked.

This movie is really about the weapons. Yeah, the plot plays around with the whole "weapons companies are bad" thing, and even depicts local warlords hording alien weapons and cutting off people's hands as if the filmmakers were trying to imitate the infinitely better film, Blood Diamond. Nevertheless when the whole thing is said and done, more than half the film's running time is spent either confiscating, trying to purchase, stealing, or using alien superweapons. Yeah, it feels nice when the main character finds the special liquid that fuels the plot, but it's so much cooler when he grabs a forcegun and blasts mobsters straight through brick walls as if they were sock puppets. When the main character finally falls inside the alien Mech, there is no amount of ridiculous violence he can unleash that the audience wouldn't eat up. This movie is pornography for the readers of Guns and Ammo.

Maybe that explains why more than %50 of the theater-goers around me were young men between the ages 0f 20 and 25 paired off into groups of exactly two? I could barely stand the stench of Axe bodyspray and budding Bromance.

All in all, this movie sells itself as "The Color Purple" for the "lets blow some shit up" set, and it delivers. If you want a painfully simplistic look at apartheid and some creative cinematography with your huge explosions, this is the movie for you. Until then, I'll give you a look at the only character I can think of wimpier than this one: Peter Parker.

Bonus Flick: Jay and Silent Bob Do Stuff

**Warning. This post contains marijuana.**

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a 2001 film set in director Kevin Smith's View Askewaverse, is one of those innocent classics that some of us, especially those of us who hail from the Jersey area, picked up in adolescence as a guilty pleasure like some people pick up an addition to heroin or murdering hookers. Smith movies were for boys what Spice World was for girls: low production value star vehicles with extremely low-brow humor and even lower ambitions, mind numbing sight gags, intentionally horrendous acting, and a avid fanbase chomping at the bit for anything with their star's name on it like a team of slobbering rotwilers.

Even though I am years away from The Midnight Movie Child who first watched the Jay and Silent Bob DVD on the floor my bunk long after lights out, re-watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back still brings back those old familiar feelings I first had when I leaned against my camp duffel bag and first pressed the spacebar on my friend's computer.

Those feelings were nausea, boredom, and the incredible, inescapable craving to smoke some serious fatties.

Marijuana has never really done anything for me. Now, of course I've killed a couple of dank bowls in my lifetime because smoking is, after all, the official pastime of Oregon, but I don't get a good buzz off of it. I haven't smoked more than once or twice, and it usually isn't worth the bother. Nevertheless about twenty minutes into this movie, about the time when Jay and Silent Bob started performing cunnilingus on a nun, I had the incredible desire to blaze a bag of dank-ass chronic as if I were casting a poor man's version of Fireball.

As for my non-intoxicated feelings on the film, I'm not sure I can put it better than Peter Griffin.



I found this film difficult to watch, or, at very least, I found it very difficult to keep my attention on the film while watching. There were so many more interesting things to do, like catch up on my college readings, wax my floorboards, or find out why a bear is driving the car.

The movie breaks the 4th wall on numerous occasions in increasingly uncreative and unfunny ways, as if Mr. Smith did not get the Hollywood memo that a metafilmic reference has to be good in order to be funny. For the record, Mr. Smith has made two films: Clerks, and Dogma. Every other film, television show, and cartoon he's made has just been an extension of those two movies, as if he were making a five-hour special DVD Box Set for his crappy black and white stoner comedy.

And also for the record, Any film where a major plot point is the main character beating the crap out of internet film critics is not going to make my top ten list. For all the nostalgia this film may bring, it's just not as witty as Clerks, not as funny as Dogma, and not as well made as Chasing Amy. So in conclusion, I'll leave you with the one good meme to arise from this flick, a meme not so much about the movie itself, but rather about the reviews the film knew it would get: "Fuck Jay and Silent Bob. Fuck them up their stupid asses."

The Mission

My name is Roger Hobbs, and this is my mission to go to every midnight film showing in the city of Portland, Oregon. Each new showing will be followed immediately, that same night, with a report on my first takes of the flick. In addition, I will also be Twittering whilst I watch, so feel free to follow my running commentary on the filmic experience.

Movies are a changing art form, and the Midnight Premiere is quickly becoming the last vestige of the 20th century theatrical experience. If you ask someone old enough to not know how to use Facebook, they'll tell you that people used to laugh and cry in the isles, throw popcorn at the screen, and talk back to the obvious bullshit. This theatrical experience is why I go to movies in the first place, and it's one of the only things left that makes seeing the film in the theater different from watching it ten minutes later on the monitor of your Mac in your living room while off-handedly mining for gold in WOW. I treasure that old filmic experience almost as much as I treasure my epic mount, and I treasure the surreal experiences I have sitting in my seat and watching the flickering lights. Like where else but a midnight show can you watch a guy with a bucket of fish toss a salmon at the screen every time Mark Walberg does that creepy thing with his eyes?

You know what I'm talking about if you're one of the 6 people who actually paid money to see Max Payne.

Yeah, I am that guy in the back who won't shut up. So what? Am I really ruining your deep, Zen-like personal connection to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chung-Li? If I am, then don't go to midnight movies because you're better off hacking and wanking anyway. However, if you're on the other end of the spectrum and can handle watching the occasional on-screen train wrecks, then by all means, follow me into the flickering darkness and join me in my heavy consumption of artificial butter-like popcorn topping and covertly smuggled bottles of rum and coke.

Who am I, you might ask? I am your typical starving writer in Portland, Oregon, which means I have two things going in my favor as I take on this mission: first, I have plenty of time to watch movies (read: drink heavily), and, second, I live in one of the oddest cities in the continental United States. But I'll get back to that in a later post. Until then, you can call me The Midnight Movie Guy.

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/midnitemovieguy