Why give PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE a two-star rating? I dunno, I can’t really justify it. All I can say is that few movies offer as much sweet, sweet joy as Ed Wood’s 1959 sci-fi opus. This film’s appalling anti-artistry is as funny as anything Hollywood has come up with in the last five decades.

To be fair, I haven’t seen it the way Wood intended. I’ve only seen the version where the MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER guys are mocking it the whole way through. Still, you get the idea: flying saucers that look like hubcaps (when one of them gets blown out of the sky, I was reminded of the scene in BACK TO THE FUTURE where Doc Brown’s model Delorian bursts into flames); aliens played by B-movie actors wearing the galaxy’s loudest purple tee-shirts; establishing shots that don’t connect; out-of-left-field stock footage; unintentionally hilarious dialogue; etc.

Most of this was par for the course in the field Wood was working in: 1950s exploitation movies. But what makes PLAN 9 an unsurpassed triumph-of-sorts is its campy entertainment value. There’s something crazily bad going on in every scene, if not every shot. My favorite bit involves a detective who keeps absentmindedly pointing his gun at everything and everybody. Then there’s the alien who delivers the single greatest line in movie history: “You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”

Sure, it’s horrible. But it’s also fun, and harmless fun in any form is something to be celebrated.

Richard Kelly’s new film, The Box, is based on a short story by Richard Matheson. As a fan of their work, I’ve been wanting to see this for awhile now. I was in Borders the other day when I decided to sit down and read the source material. (Isn’t it great how you can just sit down and read something in a bookstore, without anyone coming up to you and asking, “Are you going to buy that?” But I digress.)

The story, named “Button, Button,” is only six pages long. (I should tell you that I’m going to give away the ending to Matheson’s story; I don’t know if it spoils the ending of Kelly’s adaptation or not.) It’s about a New York couple named Arthur and Norma Lewis. One day, they find a mysterious box on their doorstep. A mystery man named Mr. Steward arrives, and he makes them an offer: If they push the button on the box, he’ll pay them $50,000, but someone they don’t know will die. Arthur is disgusted, but Norma tries to convince him (”a chance to take that trip to Europe we’ve always talked about…”). On page 5, Norma presses the button, and Arthur dies in a terrible accident. It’s soon revealed that he had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy, which doubles in the case of an accident. When Mr. Steward calls again, Norma is hysterical: “You said it would be someone I didn’t know!” To which he replies: “Mrs. Lewis, do you really think you knew your husband?”

Again, I have no idea if the movie will have the same ending. It probably won’t, because there’s only one page of the story left after Norma presses the button. I’m guessing the button gets pushed in the first 30 minutes or so.

All I know is that “Button, Button” leaves Kelly a lot of room to take the story in whatever direction he wants. I already know he’s changed some stuff. For instance, the couple in the film (played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) live in Virginia, not New York. Mr. Steward offers them $1 million instead of $50,000. And the facial scars that Frank Langella sports in the trailer aren’t mentioned in Matheson’s story.

Having read it, I can’t say I’m more excited to see The Box now than I was before, but it hasn’t diminished my expectations either. This will be Kelly’s first period piece since Donnie Darko. (Southland Tales was supposed to be set in the near-future but, ironically, ended up being set in the present day because its release was delayed for so long.) He has a few spotty credits to his name (Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, for example, and the screenplay for Tony Scott’s Domino). But this is still one of the most exciting filmmaking voices of the new century. Southland Tales is wildly underrated; that and Joe Dante’s Homecoming are the two best movies ever made about the Bush years. And Donnie speaks to young people where they live in ways that few movies can. I think it’s a safe bet that The Box will be a gift when it opens on Nov. 6.

Greetings, faithful readers! Just wanted y’all to know that we launched FilmNet yesterday. “The circle is now complete!”

Go to the site now. It looks pretty great, if I do say so myself. Check out our blog to hear about all the cool features we have to offer. Watch some cool videos and (shameless self-promotion!) read the reviews.

Did I mention the address? It’s FilmNet.com.

“These men were high priests who gave their lives to serve the only god they knew and worshipped – art. Their reward was to produce great works that, at the time I knew them, went largely unappreciated and unnoticed. The price they paid to produce such art was inordinately high; they sacrificed any chance at ordinary happiness and love. No doubt, their anguish was part of what fueled their art. But the depths of their passion, pain, and poverty terrified me.”
–Elliot Tiber, Taking Woodstock

This is the story Charlie Kaufman wants to tell in Synecdoche, New York: an artist living the artist’s life. Needless to say, it’s a tough movie to sit through. Some people may have an anthropological interest in such a story; I don’t.

I’ve seen it twice – absolutely loathed it the first time. When the egghead crowd started gushing over it, I felt compelled to watch it again. My impression the second time was that it’s a movie of moments. It captures what Elliot Tiber describes above: instances of staggering beauty, situated between long stretches of miserable nothingness that make you wonder if it’s all worth it.

Here’s what I love about Synecdoche, New York (warning: some spoilers); the rest I’ll leave to the masochists.

1) Early on, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) puts on a production of Death of a Salesman, in which Willy and Linda Loman are played by actors in their 20s.

2) When Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) tells Caden that she’s leaving him, she says: “Everyone is disappointing – the more you know someone.”

3) Caden inexplicably appears in one of his daughter Olive’s cartoons.

4) Caden’s would-be girlfriend, Hazel (Samantha Morton), lives in a house that’s always on fire.

5) On the phone from Berlin, Adele blurts out: “I’m famous!”

6) When Caden goes to Berlin to visit Olive, Adele’s friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) shows up speaking in a ridiculous German accent.

7) Caden’s therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), tells him a hilarious story about a 5-year-old literary genius “and his ultimate degradation at the hands of a black ex-convict named Eric Washington Jackson Jones Johnson. Jefferson.”

8 ) On her deathbed, one of Olive’s tattoos wilts.

9) Madeleine pays Caden a surprise visit on an airplane.

10) After Sammy (Tom Noonan) joins the cast of Caden’s epic production, Sammy and Caden are hanging out on Caden’s balcony, and a zeppelin passes overhead.

11) In the epic production, Emily Watson plays Samantha Morton’s character – two actresses frequently mistaken for one another in real life.

12) Emily Watson gets naked – which, happily enough, causes Caden to stop crying.

13) Sammy’s suicide speech.

14) Everything that happens in the last 10 minutes of the movie after Caden puts in the earpiece.

15) The minister’s speech, which I think is worth reprinting here in its entirety: “Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”

Much of the controversy surrounding the upcoming release of Lars von Trier’s outrageously provocative Antichrist has to do with two extremely graphic scenes of sexual violence. I was able to endure the first one – mostly because it caught me off guard, and I had no choice but to sit there watching it like a deer in headlights. But the second one – involving a rusty pair of scissors and a certain sexual organ (I’ll leave it to you to guess which one) – I saw coming a mile off, so I spent that scene studying my knees.

What I did watch I liked. Not in the “enjoy” sense of the word, but I appreciated what von Trier was doing. He takes the movie’s religious themes very seriously. Some audiences might think they’re being punk’d, but I don’t think so. In terms of Catholic imagery and iconography, he’s every bit as sincere as Mel Gibson – and perhaps twice as crazy.

The movie begins in devastation, and then spirals downward from there. He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – we never learn what their names are – are making passionate love in bed. (For no apparent reason, the scene includes one of von Trier’s patented insert shots of unsimulated sex.) While this is going on, their young son climbs out of his crib, crawls up to a ledge, and falls out of a window.

The mother is inconsolable and has to be hospitalized. Using his expertise as a psychoanalyst, he attempts to talk her down from her depression. At least, I think that’s what he’s doing. In the way he delivers his lines, Dafoe kinda makes you wonder about the guy’s motives. We think, “If I had that voice in my head, I’d probably go crazy too.”

He suggests they drive out to their cabin in the woods, which is named Eden. But nature is the last thing these people need; nature is Satan’s playground. How do I know this? Because the fox with the exposed entrails told me so.

What actually happens in Antichrist is loopy and over-the top; what matters is HOW it happens. The dream sequences are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Von Trier and his cinematographer, Oscar winner Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire), overcrank the camera and shoot from way overhead. The effect is like stepping into a waking nightmare. When Stanley Kubrick was filming The Shining, Stephen King accused the legendary auteur of making a movie that would “hurt people.” Sometimes I wondered if von Trier was trying to do the same thing.

At the Cannes Film Festival, Antichrist was named “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world.” I honestly don’t understand this charge. The women in Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Manderlay are all victims of degradation. He’s saying women are sometimes victims of violence – especially sexual violence; how does that make him a misogynist? (If he was saying they DESERVED it, then that would be something else.) I don’t see how Antichrist is any more or less misogynistic than von Trier’s previous work.

More than a religious allegory or a battle of the sexes, the film works best as an all-out shocker – thanks in no small part to two of the most extraordinary performances in horror-movie history. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is a genuine experience – an almost unprecedentedly wrenching one. I recommend seeing it in theaters. You don’t want to miss seeing all those people covering their eyes and running for the exits.

When I got my first DVD player, back in The Year 2000!, it came with several free movie offers. The first disc I got was Contact, the 1997 big screen adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel, directed by Robert Zemeckis. It’s one of my favorite films. Last week, it was re-released on Blu-ray and one couldn’t ask for a better package.

The transfer of the movie itself is absolutely pristine, preserving the 1.85 theatrical aspect ratio and crisp detail of the original theatrical release. This is especially apparent in the majestic opening shot that takes us through the entire universe, as well as in the many sequences where the film switches between video-textured broadcasts and actual film.

Thankfully, the BD retains all of the bonus features from the original DVD. These include multiple feature-length audio commentaries by Jodie Foster, Robert Zemeckis & Steve Starkey, and Ken Ralston with another visual effects supervisor. There are also a number of featurettes that overview key visual effects shots. What’s great is that these features are now clearly presented whereas they were inconveniently buried in the original DVD’s awkward menu. Unique to the BD edition is a music-only audio track. (I am a huge fan of composer Alan Silvestri’s work and fully intend to sit through the whole movie, listening to this track.)

Another detail which I personally like is that the movie begins playing directly upon loading the disc. It does not start with a menu. This is a forgotten attribute of early DVDs that I find very convenient.

It’s a superb Blu-ray disc of a film that deserves to be presented in this way. I highly recommend, nay, demand that you go out and purchase it right now.

I.Q. is a high school horror movie made by people in high school. If that sounds awful, get ready for a surprise: This is a wildly precocious piece of work.

It was made by the Keeling brothers, Aaron and Austin, who grew up in Lansing, Kansas. They started tinkering with their parents’ camera in junior high, making silly short films. By the time they got to high school, their work had evolved considerably. Influenced by the surreal, nightmarish films of David Lynch (as well as his scrupulous approach to sound design), the Keelings’ Playtime with Schlompkins and Pop Spoon are about as professionally made as anything you’re likely to see by teenage moviemakers.

I.Q. is their first feature. Aaron wrote, directed and shot it, while Austin edited, directed and co-starred in it.  (They also performed numerous other tasks – too many to name here.) It took 344 days to complete, and the finished product runs 79 minutes. It’s a testament to their skills (and the Keelings have got MAD SKILLS) that about an hour of it is fun to watch; you often forget you’re watching a high school production. The best thing about it is that, perhaps for the first time, the Keelings have something to say.

It’s set in a high school where all the students are being left behind. The principal, Mr. Thompson (Bobby Parsons), is under enormous pressure to boost the school’s standardized test scores. He’s desperate when the devil shows up in his office in the form of a salesman (Brian Snodgrass), who pitches him on the idea of distributing a miracle drug called NCLB-240. All the students have to do is pop a little green pill every 30 minutes, and their intelligence levels are guaranteed to rise.

Five students – Amy (Jenny Curatola), Mike (Andrew Shafer), Caitlyn (Katie Cook), David (Austin Keeling) and Rachel (Amanda Pina) – are chosen to test the drug based on their lousy grades. Their scores improve dramatically, but pretty soon they’re all going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

There’s some playful social satire going on here. The five unlucky students are assigned to a class taught by Mrs. Robinson (Bianca Elliot), who kindly urges them to “come take your pills, kids.” The Keelings are making a subversive statement about standardized testing, which became such a central aspect of the public education system in this country under Bush II. They may be the first filmmakers who grew up in the Bush years to actually make a feature-length movie about growing up in the Bush years.

The opening sequence is a real grabber, hinting at the terror to come, but after that there’s a lot of exposition to get through. I’m not sure what to make of the subplot dealing with Amy’s boyfriend breaking up with her. Aaron Keeling’s script never quite sells us on the idea that the parents would be left completely out of the loop when it comes to the drug experiments. Of the younger performers, Austin Keeling is the best at delivering his brother’s dialogue, but the other actors have their moments. Pina is especially moving in the scenes where Rachel falls behind the rest of the class and starts taking more pills.

Just when you think the film is about to test your patience, the side effects of the drug start to kick in, and the Keelings unleash a tidal wave of imaginative horror imagery.

The most terrifying things happen inside an operating tent, which the students visit in their dreams. (I love the Wizard of Oz touch of casting Parsons in the role of a mad doctor conducting gruesome experiments.) I won’t soon forget seeing the guy with the dripping head wound, or the other guy with the birthday candles sticking out of his chest. In one of the most unsettling scenes, the students have their mouths sewn shut and buttons sewn into their eyes. I bet the Keelings were pissed when they saw Coraline had beaten them to the punch!

I should single out Elizabeth Decker for her spectacular makeup FX work. The original score (by Chase Horseman) and sound design also contribute to the film’s overall air of professionalism. As do the cinematography and editing, from first scene to last.

The Keelings go out on a high point, finding an ingenious way to encapsulate some of the ideas rolling around in their heads. It’s a stunning finale, one that hints at great things to come, and I expect nothing less from these talented young filmmakers.

I.Q. is available on DVD. It has full-length commentary, deleted scenes and bloopers. You can buy it here. The trailer for the film is on YouTube.

On Saturday I went to Animation Supercon, South Florida’s annual pow-wow of gamers, anime fans, cosplayers and comic-book guys. I fall into one or two of those categories, but mostly I was there to see the cast reunion of Futurama. Fry, Bender, Kif and Hermes were all there to help promote the show’s glorious return to the airwaves.

The highlight came when David X. Cohen, who created the show with Matt Groening, gave us an exclusive sneak peek at the new season. It was a little crude - just animatics and voice work, no color or CG - but still, we got to see brand new Futurama scenes almost a year in advance!

The three-minute clip picked up right where the ending of Into the Wild Green Yonder left off. After being sucked into a black hole, the Planet Express Ship ends up back in Earth’s orbit. Fry and the Professor are left relatively unscathed, but the other crew members aren’t so lucky. So the first episode is all about putting Bender, Leela, Hermes, Amy, Kif and Dr. Zoidberg back together again. There were some big laughs, and I came away with the impression that the new episodes will retain the two-jokes-per-second pace of the first four seasons, rather than the slower pace of the straight-to-DVD movies.

Cohen divulged other secrets. Of the 26 episodes that will begin airing on Comedy Central next year, 10 of them have already been written. In one of the new episodes, Leela and Zapp Brannigan get stranded on an Eden-like planet.  In another, Bender has an affair with Amy, which made me think of something Bender once said about humans dating robots: “Humans dating robots is sick. You people wonder why I’m still single? It’s ’cause all the fine robot sisters are dating humans!” There will also be a “What If Machine” episode, and the Hyper-Chicken (my favorite minor character on the show) will make a cameo appearance.

I’ll throw out a few more tidbits that should entice fans of the show: Finglonger, Space Pope, Roberto the Insane Robot.

So there you have it. A new season of Futurama is definitely on the way. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes!

Phil LaMarr, voice of Hermes Conrad. One of Phil's first screen roles was as Marvin, the kid who gets shot in the face in Pulp Fiction.

John DiMaggio, voice of Bender Bending Rodriguez. John is a highly skilled beatboxer.

Billy West, voice of Philip J. Fry. Billy does a great Glenn Beck impression.

Series co-creator David X. Cohen. David studied physics and computer science in college.

That's Maurice LaMarche on the far left, the voice of Kif Kroker.

While reading a review of a new book about Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, I discovered that Todd Haynes’s infamous short film is available to watch online. I’d been dying to see this thing for years, so I quickly downloaded it as a QuickTime movie off of illegal-art.org. You can also buy a DVD copy, and you can watch the whole film in parts on YouTube. It runs 43 minutes.

Haynes made Superstar in 1987 as a grad student at Bard College. (Cynthia Schneider co-wrote and co-produced the film.) It quickly became a cult classic, but was removed from circulation in 1990 when Richard Carpenter won a copyright infringement lawsuit. Haynes had used 10 of the Carpenters’ songs without permission.

Part thesis statement, part horror film, Superstar is no ordinary musical biopic. It chronicles the battle Karen Carpenter fought and lost with anorexia nervosa. The entire cast is made up of Barbie dolls, and if that sounds like a joke, it’s not. It’s impossible to imagine this story being told in a more powerful and affecting way.

The Carpenters - Richard and his kid sister, Karen - were responsible for such squeaky-clean ’70s hits as “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” They were embraced by the right as a response to the more revolutionary sounds of the ’60s, and were even invited to sing at the White House by President Nixon. But, as Haynes points out, there was more to the Carpenters than their wholesome public persona. The film - with its shock cuts and ’80s slasher-movie score - is like a veil being ripped away from America’s idyllic self-image.

The film identifies several possible culprits in Karen’s demise, including a music critic who referred to the impressionable singer as “chubby” in a magazine article. Haynes is unapologetic in his depiction of her family. Karen’s parents and her brother are shown treating her more like a mental patient than a member of the family. It’s these scenes, more than the use of the Carpenters’ music, that most likely led to the film’s suppression. Haynes insinuates that Richard was gay by having Karen say: “I’ll tell them about your private life.” Evidently, that didn’t sit too well with Richard.

Superstar is by no means for everyone. The title cards seem deliberately hard to read, and the film’s use of Holocaust footage is upsetting to say the least. It’s clearly a thesis project; at one point, Haynes gives us an overview of food production in the U.S. after World War II. But it’s also a stunning work of art. The director’s choices - obsessive close-ups of Ex-Lax pills, the bizarre sight of Karen being spanked by her father as an adult - go right to the core. And the Barbie dolls are a masterstroke. They get at the root of the problem: society’s unrealistic expectations for girls. Superstar ranks alongside Safe and I’m Not There as the most radical and profound thing Haynes has ever done.

“Four white guys getting together on a weekday - that’s not a business meeting, it’s a crime scene.”
-The Informant!

On the surface, The Informant! shouldn’t be a fun movie to watch. It’s about one of the 21st century’s most reliable bad actors: corporate greedheads who think they’re above the law. (In most cases, they’re probably right.) Its story takes place in the 1990s, when business transactions were still conducted face-to-face in conference rooms and executive suites. The characters are forever trudging through airports and whispering conspiratorially in telephones. This is the drabbest world imaginable to set a movie in.

And yet it’s a terrific entertainment. It features Matt Damon’s most chameleon-like performance since The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it zips along thanks to some very funny writing and some very amusing casting choices.

Director Steven Soderbergh, delivering his first good movie since 2005’s Bubble, is working in the deadpan style of a Coen Brothers comedy, like Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading. Unlike a straight corporate thriller like, say, Michael Clayton, the outrage is just below the surface. Soderbergh appears to be following the old adage that if you want to drive out the devil, the best way is to mock him.

The hero (of sorts) is Mark Whitacre, who in the mid-1990s became known as the highest-level American executive ever to turn whistleblower. He worked for Archer Daniels Midland, and started cooperating with the FBI when it was investigating a price-fixing scheme. There’s more to this story, but to reveal exactly what Whitacre was up to would be to spoil the fun. It’s one of those stories that’s only believable because it has the virtue of being true.

Soderbergh tells this story in a witty, tongue-in-cheek way, using an ironically bubbly score and a seemingly random collection of thoughts delivered in voiceover. (Later we learn that Whitacre had bipolar disorder.) Damon gives the man a wide-eyed innocence. He packed on weight for the role, and his jaw always seems to be dropped. His outlook is so imbued with wonder that you almost expect a bluebird to fly in and land on his shoulder. But like Tom Ripley, his sunny disposition masks a cold and calculating personality. This is a very complex character and a great performance.

The dialogue (written by Bourne Ultimatum scribe Scott Z. Burns) sparkles, and it’s delivered by some of today’s most prominent comedians: Patton Oswalt, Joel McHale and Paul F. Tomkins, among others. Quentin Tarantino did something similar in Inglourious Basterds, hiring comedic actors for essentially non-comedic roles. But this strategy is even more effective in The Informant! It’s Soderbergh’s way of letting us in on the joke. And the story of Mark Whitacre is nothing if not a joke, one you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry at.