Over the late holidays I decided to renew my acquaintance with Movie Madness, the popular video store in Portland, Oregon, on about SE 43rd and Belmont. Movie Madness is fabled for having everything, or at least hard-to-find videos, and though there are several other stores in the area with an equal interest in the non-pedestrian (such as Video Verité in the Mississippi area of town), Movie Madness also offers DVDs and VHS tapes of films that are, strictly speaking, not available on DVD or tape, which compels film buffs to drive to the store from all outlying regions. But my reasons for visiting the shop were to absorb the new layout.

For many years, MM has been a long, low blue building with a rabbit warren of tiny cramped aisles, like a coastal book shop. In 2007 owner Mike Clark began extensive renovations. Outside, the building is gray, with a new movie style marquee and a private office with its own staircase in the back for the owner. Inside, the rabbit warrens are broken up and the store is one long retail space, with the store’s fabled memorabilia housed behind glass along the new west wall diorama. Managers and other elites now have small windowless offices along the east wall. One of the peculiarities of the new layout is that upon virgin scan it seems as if there are fewer DVDs in the place, instead of more, an unexpected consequence of the more open layout. And the employee area that houses the actual discs looks just as cramped and tiny as the old store.

But some things never change. Over the course of several holiday visits, I was reminded of MM’s quirky personality. Do any of the people who work there actually like movies? Or are they all in a band? In my non-scientific sampling, the only things shown on the TV in the corner are rock videos and old TV shows (which musicians apparently love). Doesn’t anyone put on an old Hawks film, or a Tarkovsky epic? Also, as is well known, the clerks are often cranky, indifferent, and contemptuous employees (especially if Mr. Clark or a manager are not around), more inclined, on a slow afternoon, to talk amongst themselves in loud tones about their relationships and what band they saw last night rather than leap to aid a customer. One tall Asian lad refused to actually face me; he leaned against the counter with his arms folded and his back to me, looking away, until the last possible moment when he had to take my credit card. Just this past Monday, I tried to get the counter clerk to look for a disc in the back despite the fact that I couldn’t find the box, but she found my explanation so utterly familiar and repetitious that she kept interrupting me with impatient “heard it all before” tones. When I complained about being interrupted, she went quietly livid — but couldn’t do anything more, because her manager was standing right there; God knows what gale wind force I would have faced otherwise. Instead, she came back from the rabbit warren and, in that passive-aggressive manner honed by retail clerks over centuries, practically threw the discs at me, muttering emotionlessly and in as few words as possible the mantra “back on Saturday.” Granted, I’m a shambling, unpleasant-looking person who clearly doesn’t deserve the respect that ordinary people are accorded, but being a clerk is part problem-solving, part salesmanship, and part therapy, and some common courtesy is appreciated even by the dregs of the earth - for that is, after all, the job. Netflix, by contrast, is never rude. Still, Movie Madness remains a great resource, as long as you learn to minimize contact with the employees.

MSN TV has just posted my latest article. It’s a survey in gallery form of Steve Carell’s career as a new “master of all media.” As I lead off by saying, “Carell’s career bears some resemblance to the success story of many other top comedians, from lowly beginnings as a writer to a spotlight position on a popular weekly show. What follows are some of the high points of the top TV star’s career trajectory.” Catch the whole thing here.

Parody has no power. At least, movie parody doesn’t. Didn’t Planet Terror just come out, a parodistic celebration of cheap horror films and their narrative tropes? Now comes AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, and it goes for the same narrative situations, only with a straight face, and none of the panache of Rodriguez’s film.

If I follow the plot (credited to Shane Salerno and a host of writers who invented the original separate franchises) there is a ship in space that breeds Aliens for the Predators to hunt. On the occasion of the film’s beginning, some kind of half-breed Alien-Predator is born. In any case, the ship crash lands on earth, near the rural town of Gunnison, Colorado, the kind of small, quiet, “nice” town that Rambo could leave in cinders in about two hours.

But the ship has landed not in a Rambo movie but in a disaster film. AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is less like a horror film than a ’70s suspense film set on a ship or a town about to get all shook up. The script methodically introduces us to a succession of disparate people who are going to find their “mettle” when confronted with the implacable force of the egg-laying Aliens and the clean-up-crew Predator out to get them.

While the characters are unfurled (ex-con returning to town, his nerd brother in love with the town blonde and victimized by athlete bullies, sheriff, diner waitress, returning female Iraq vet and her husband and her ungrateful brat of a daughter - all essentially nameless and essentially actor-less), the Predator planet has sensed that the breeding ship has crashed. Like Mighty Mouse, one of the Predators goes into action and takes a quick trip to Earth.

I didn’t understand the Predator’s motivation in this film. Why does he have to dash off and clean up the mess of the crash landing? Is there an Alien-Predator supervisory body that frowns on messy events such as this? Is the breeding secret? And who cares, in the universal scheme of things, whether the Aliens crash land on Earth and breed? Isn’t that a good thing, creating a nice hunting ground for the sporting Predators, like Dick Cheney’s bird release farms?

The film quickly falls into a rhythm in which people talk boringly to each other so that we have an idea of their personality so that we will “care” whether or not they die, alternating with mini-suspense set pieces in which a lone character will slowly, boringly stumble upon a stray Alien-Predator and get offed, with a long close-up of a bloody, dead face as a punctuation mark. These narrative delaying sequences are not interesting in and of themselves, especially when they are offering character “color.” For example, the tiresome almost-subplot about the soldier’s daughter being resentful of her mother’s reappearance is very much a TV show “injustice” seen in shows such as CSI Miami where it appeals to the soap opera masochism of female viewers.

Besides borrowing from the kinds of Carpenter-like films that influenced Rodriguez, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (while also availing itself of the rogue-cop alliance, the dispersal of guns sequence, the congregation in the diner, the run-for-it to the chopper, and so forth) also makes glancing references to such films as The Blob, where the cops wouldn’t pay any attention to the kids’ warning, ’cause they were just kids.

Little things don’t make sense, and occur solely for screenwriter convenience. The bullies throw the nerd’s keys into the sewer. When nerd and ex-con brother go later that night to fetch them, why are the keys so very, very far away from where they would have landed in reality? Why do characters keep saying that it will take a long time for the National Guard to arrive, only for them to show up in seconds? In the realm of special effects, things happen that couldn’t or wouldn’t in the real world. For example, a workman in a hard hat simply waits for an Alien steel tongue to enter his head. Wouldn’t a real person react, however minimally? And do heads really remain frozen as spiked tongues enter them? Wouldn’t they bob around or recoil in reaction as, say, physics might dictate? And the antagonists look too much alike in the steel blue coloring of the world created on the film; the Predators have dreadlocks and the Aliens have big steel tongues, but otherwise they are indistinguishable, especially in the dark and the rain.

Fans, such as they are, of the Alien and the Predator series, will no doubt enjoy seeing their “heroes” again, with the signature heat vision, the weird clicking sounds, and the ability to go invisible. The Aliens maintain their villainy, but the Predators have graduated to the status of heroes, like Hannibal Lecter; that is, they are not above viewing human beings as easily-disposed-of impediments. Ultimately, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is the latest example of a hybrid genre, not quite horror, not quite science fiction, not quite suspense, or war film or blockbuster, but a blend of all three with its own rules and regulations and audience expectations. This weird genre still awaits its synthesizing auteur.

It takes a great deal of energy to get up and go see a movie musical these days. They are usually too “big,” and demand too much from you. Worse, they aren’t “fun.” Since Andrew Lloyd Webber and his ilk destroyed the musical in the 1960s, the genre has tilted toward ambitious operatic subject matter, such as chess matches or the fall of Saigon. A musical is now supposed to cap a big evening, and leave you prostrate with its overwhelming emotions, but the tunes are sing-songy instead of songs and the music tends to be non-melodious seesawing. Weirdly, despite the fact that the movie screen is inherently an artificial medium, musicals seem even more strained and phony up there. The screen traps a musical in amber, like prehistoric bugs. Westside Story innovatively took the musical to the real streets, but the same director, a few years later took on The Sound of Music, and rendered it as static (see the staging of “Climb Every Mountain”) and discomforting as every other contemporaneous big idea musical, especially its near contemporary My Fair Lady.

My resistance to seeing Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, though, was based less on the fact of the film’s musicality (a fact nearly hidden by the film’s trailer) than that I am not all that enthusiastic about its director Tim Burton. He’s fine, I like him better than Lynch, but I never feel the need to dash out and see his every film (several of which I still haven’t caught up with, such as the twee sounding Big Fish). He seems trapped in the world and style of Goth, Emo, ‘Mo, or what have you, while trying to harness yet exploit his oddity in order to walk the delicate line of commercial viability. The consistent quality of his vision disguises the actual unevenness of his films, which can go from the poignant Ed Wood to the disastrous Mars Attacks to the simply dull Planet of the Apes.

Sweeney Todd gives him the chance to dwell on the Gothic again, as the Dickensian environs of mid-1800 London lend themselves more readily to pale faces with raccoon eye circles. Like Burton’s second Batman movie, the film begins with the cloaca, following blood and debris through the sewers, then switches to an arriving ship, which, like Dracula’s, brings death in the form of Todd, the former Benjamin Barker, returning to London after 15 years of penal servitude in Australia. His return is Dantes-esque, as he is back to exact revenge on the judge (Alan Rickman) who unjustly imprisoned him in order to get at Barker’s wife, who then presumably poisoned herself. In short order, Todd opens up a tonsorial parlor, and then conspires with the Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) downstairs to turn his victims into meat pies (it wasn’t exactly clear to me why he was killing so many people, when his goal was originally to kill the judge and rescue his daughter). Todd gets his revenge, but not without complications.

One thing that is an aide to the success of the film is that Burton’s movies are already rather musical, in that they are impressionistic, free associative, outlandish, operatic, and full of big emotions. Though there is no music in the accepted sense in the Todd world, the viewer nonetheless accepts an occasional outburst of song or unlikely duet. On the other hand, thanks to the numerous shots of geysering blood plopping into the camera lens, it’s hard to imagine the film becoming another holiday standby like Sound of Music, shown every year at Xmas. But that it is a superior musical is clear from the scene in which the secondary character Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who loves Todd’s imprisoned daughter from afar, sings a song to her from the street. Burton squeezes a lot of cinematic juice out of the sequence, which is really just about a guy walking down a street. But compare the sequence to the similar moment in My Fair Lady, in which director George Cukor has no idea what to do visually with the song “On the Street Where You Live.”

Sweeney Todd is a big musical, despite its chamber piece limitations of cast and setting. It took two companies — Warners and DreamWorks (which is Paramount these days, and thus a third company), plus the Zanuck company (a fourth) — to put on the once-hit musical. Some day all the companies will merge and once or twice a year there will just be the one big movie. In any case, all these companies have done their best to minimize the perception that Sweeney Todd is a musical, and the role of Stephen Sondheim, who co-wrote the original. Perhaps, ultimately, they were just nervous about making another movie that took a sympathetic view of a serial killer. It is at times difficult to see just how we are to take Todd, who has the potential to evoke the same sympathy as Norman Bates in Psycho. And after all, this is Burton’s specialty, outsiders who are often near-monsters on whom Burton insists that we shower interest and compassion.

Finally, the real reason to see the film is for the acting, which is all around excellent. Depp, who can apparently do anything, acquits himself well as a musical star (he used to be in a rock and roll band, but then didn’t everybody?). A De Niro-like muse to Burton’s Scorsese, Depp’s acting, especially in the final scene, is superb. The shot of Depp looking down at the floor and slowly realizing who is really lying there may just be one of the great moments of “realization” in all screen acting, supported by the newfound vigor and maturity of his face. Also good is Helena Bonham Carter, who begins by acting with her cleavage, but spends the rest of the film employing a convincing and fluid voice.

For the record, the film comes in several long cinematic acts. Act One ends at the 21-minute mark, when Todd gets his razors back; Act Two ends when he wins a barbering contest and makes a name for himself, around the 40-minute mark; Act Three ends when Todd finally meets up again with the judge, at the 60-minute mark, followed shortly by the forming of a partnership with Mrs. Lovett at the 71-minute post; and the last act begins with the celebration of the pie shop as a huge success. The rest, after that, is, at least as far as mortality goes, all downhill.

The XJ is coming along great, and I should have more content and pictures soon! I have had a bit of a time with uploading the pictures here on the Voice blog, BUT the fix is in, so come back this week to see the build and read the task! But until then, if that’s not fast enough, you can also follow the build on SORE4×4.com.