Chaos

CBS dramas stick so predictably to a certain template (sober procedurals with interchangeable weekly cases and stock character types) that Chaos is jarring merely because it deviates a bit from that formula. It's still a procedural about a law-enforcement team, but it comes with a strained comedic tone and cast of quirky characters that seem like they'd be more at home on USA or TNT. The problem is that the show tries to have things both ways, throwing in painful bits of wackiness alongside deadly serious rescue missions against armed terrorists. Neither part succeeds.

The pilot is also full of so many double- and triple-crosses that it just gets exhausting, even though it seems sort of ironed out by the end. Freddy Rodriguez plays a newbie CIA agent who's assigned to spy on a team of unconventional operatives -- except they figure it out right away and he eventually becomes a genuine member of their crazy little outfit. So you've got the agents who don't play by the rules but get the job done, and their humorless boss (Kurtwood Smith, the world's humorless boss) who wants everything done according to protocol. It's a boring dynamic that isn't made more entertaining by the awkward goofiness. The show is trying way too hard to seem fun, but then it has to pull back to give enough seriousness to the team's deadly mission. Creator Tom Spezialy has worked on a lot of shows that balance comedy and drama (Desperate Housewives, Chuck, Reaper, Dead Like Me), but here he gets it all wrong.

Premieres tomorrow night at 8 p.m. on CBS.

Raimifest: Intruder (1989)

In honor of Things That Don't Suck's Raimifest, I didn't just want to write up one of Sam Raimi's well-known films, or even one of his misunderstood lesser works. Plus, I wanted to see a movie that I hadn't seen before, so I combed through Raimi's IMDb page and came up with Intruder, a 1989 horror movie written and directed by longtime Raimi associate Scott Spiegel. Although Raimi has a number of onscreen cameo appearances to his credit, this is one of only a few that looked to be actual decent-size roles, and indeed Raimi has plenty of screen time as one of the grocery-store employees getting picked off one by one in this mediocre slasher film. He plays Randy the butcher, who's really no more or less important than most of the other characters, although he does survive nearly two-thirds of the movie. Raimi isn't much of an actor, but he fits in perfectly well with the loose cast, which also includes his brother Ted (as a spastic, oblivious produce stocker) and fellow filmmaker Burr Steers (who went on to direct Igby Goes Down and, uh, 17 Again).

More than onscreen, though, Raimi's presence in Intruder is felt in the shooting style, which is full of odd, creative camera angles and swooping point-of-view shots that recall Raimi's work on the Evil Dead movies. Spiegel goes a little overboard with the visuals, seemingly unable to shoot a scene without placing his camera inside a phone or behind a glass bottle or under the floor. What at first seems impressive eventually just becomes distracting, although the by-the-numbers plot and shaky performances probably warrant the diversion. Whereas Raimi uses his stylistic flourishes in service of atmosphere or suspense, Spiegel just seems like he's showing off.

Still, the movie has an amusingly casual feel to it, like a bunch of friends just hanging out in an empty grocery store and deciding to make a movie. Spiegel obviously just rounded up everyone he knew and put them in the movie whether they belonged in front of the camera or not, and Raimi is clearly game for whatever ridiculousness is thrown at him. Unlike Raimi, Spiegel never went on from low-budget B-horror to bigger-budget productions and acclaim; his later directing credits include straight-to-video sequels to From Dusk Till Dawn and Hostel (coming later this year). But for one moment, at least, he had both the potential and the endorsement from the man himself to become the next Sam Raimi.

The Stash

As part of its ongoing effort to be a network you can watch while not masturbating, Playboy TV is introducing The Stash, its own version of The Soup (although not, as far as I can tell, an official franchise like The Dish, Sports Soup and Web Soup). It's exactly what you'd imagine Porn Soup would be: A snarky host (VH1 veteran Rachel Perry) stands in front of a green screen, introduces clips from porn videos and other sex-related videos, then makes jokes about them. It's about 50-60 percent funny, which is not a bad success rate, and its presence on Playboy means that there's no censoring of nudity or explicit sex acts.

I like that Playboy is willing to have a sense of humor about itself, and it's great that the producers hired Perry instead of a "funny" Playmate or porn star, but the show walks a sometimes shaky line between laughing about sexuality and laughing at it, particularly in a segment featuring fetish videos and another in which Perry goes to the Adult Entertainment Expo. Given that most of the other programming on the network is all about getting people off, it seems misguided to mock the ways that some people attain sexual pleasure, or to imply that certain healthy (if odd) desires are shameful. When Perry makes fun of the low production values, absurd plotting and dubious acting of mainstream porn, the tone is gentle and inclusive, but her dismissal of out-there sexual desires or unconventional products offered at AEE can come off as mean-spirited.

Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive, though, and merely by showcasing this material in a sort of no-big-deal way, in a format familiar from innocuous basic-cable shows, Playboy is doing its part to demystify sexuality and prove that it can be fun. That, plus jokes about Smurf cock, makes The Stash worth keeping an eye on.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on Playboy TV.

The return of CrossGen

I was never really a big reader of CrossGen, the short-lived, high-profile comics company that flamed out in 2004 and whose assets were subsequently purchased by Disney. I picked up one or two of their early launches, but those didn't really grab me, and the only series I read for any length of time was the Victorian detective book Ruse, which I stuck with until writer Mark Waid left. I also have the entire run of the creator-owned series The Crossovers that I picked up at a 10-cent sale, although I haven't gotten around to reading it.

Thanks to Disney's recent purchase of Marvel Comics, the CrossGen characters are now back in the hands of a comic book company, and Marvel has relaunched two of the properties as four-issue miniseries: Sigil, written by Mike Carey and drawn by Leonard Kirk, is a full-on reimagining of the old sci-fi series, moving from galaxy-spanning space opera to more grounded teen fantasy. Ruse picks up nearly where it left off, with Waid returning to write the same characters and artist Mirco Pierfederici taking over the art. Predictably, I liked Ruse more, but I enjoyed the first issues of both series, and I hope they sell well enough to warrant more. It's great to see Marvel branching out beyond its insular superhero comics, and the CrossGen characters offer a chance to explore multiple genres.

Both series play to the writers' strengths, too: Carey does a great job of combining the fantastic with the everyday in The Unwritten (and did the same with his underrated Crossing Midnight), taking as much care with character relationships as he does with mythic world-building. Sigil starts out with a fairly standard set-up, as a misfit teenage girl is picked on at school only to find herself manifesting strange powers and transported off to an unfamiliar world (one lifted from another old CrossGen book, El Cazador). The first issue mostly just sets things in motion, with a lot of vague references to secrets in the main character's background. Teenager Samantha Rey is a bit generic right now, and the issue ends just as it feels like it's getting started, but it has promise, Kirk's art is appealing as always, and I trust Carey enough with this sort of material to keep reading.

Ruse, however, is totally entertaining from the get-go, and feels both familiar and new at the same time. It's been quite a while since I read the original series, but I easily fell right back into the groove of arrogant detective Simon Archard and his long-suffering assistant Emma Bishop. Their banter is sharp and funny, the mystery-solving is just complex enough to be enticing but not so convoluted that it's too hard to follow, and Waid ends the issue on a cliffhanger that immediately left me wanting to read the next issue. The tweaks that have been made to the concept all seem positive: Instead of some planet that resembles Victorian-era England, the book now takes place actually in Victorian-era England, and Emma's vaguely defined magical powers (along with, it seems, all supernatural elements) have been eliminated. That makes this a much more straightforward mystery series, and allows Waid to focus on the cases and the characters. Pierfederici ably steps in for Butch Guice, with a slick style that reminded me a little of Daniel Acuna. With his work for Boom! (Incorruptible, Irredeemable, The Unknown) and now Ruse, Waid is really on a roll lately, and I can't wait to see what comes next.

Triskaidekaphilia: The Neighbor No. 13

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

At some point during these Japanese horror mindfucks, you just have to give in and go with it, or you'll end up hopelessly frustrated. I wouldn't say that the 2005 psychological thriller The Neighbor No. 13 (based on a popular manga series, and also due for the inevitable American remake, to be directed by James Wong) exactly makes sense, but it mostly holds together thematically, and that's really the most important thing in a movie like this. The plot is fairly recognizable: Bullied mercilessly as a child, Juzo grows up to be an angry, unstable adult. He moves in to the same apartment building as his one-time tormentor (living in the unluckily numbered unit) and plots revenge - or at least his unhinged alter ego does, as somewhere during the film Juzo splits into two different people played by two different actors. Or maybe they're just manifestations of the two sides of his personality.

There's a lot of "maybe" in this movie, and by the time you get to the confusing, surreal ending, you may be entirely lost. I admit I didn't quite understand how things wrapped up, and I was sort of at a loss as to what was real and what was just happening in Juzo's head. But along the way there is some decent suspense and some disturbing set pieces, as Juzo violently barrels through a few other people on the way to his childhood bully. The torments of his youth, too, are excessively cruel and unpleasant, and director Yasuo Inoue does a good job of building sympathy for Juzo even though he's clearly psychotic. The bully gets to be sympathetic as well, even though he's grown up to be just as much of an asshole as he was as a kid. There's a good amount of moral ambiguity to go along with the murky plotting, and that plus the eye-catching visuals carries the movie through its various slow spots.

New from Image: Carbon Grey, The Intrepids

Carbon Grey #1 (W: Hoang Nguyen/Khari Evans/Paul Gardner/Mike Kennedy; A: Khari Evans/Kinsun Loh/Hoang Nguyen) There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen on this one -- four credited writers and three credited artists. But it seems from the postscript by Hoang Nguyen (who's credited as a writer and artist) that he's the main force behind this book, and enlisted some help to bring his vision to life. It's an aesthetically striking vision, and the art seamlessly blends the styles of Nguyen, Khari Evans and Kinsun Loh, with a sort of steampunk-meets-WWI look that caught my eye and made me want to pick it up in the first place. The story, however, is kind of a mess, and I had to read over several bits multiple times to make sense of them, and only after reading Nguyen's essay in the back did I feel like I had a handle on what the story was supposed to be about. It's full of pseudo-profound narration and poorly established characters, and while I like the art and the setting, I'm not interested enough to pick up a second issue.

The Intrepids #1 (W: Kurtis J. Wiebe; A: Scott Kowalchuk) This one is a lot more fun, with a suitably silly Silver Age-style premise (four orphans taken under the wing of a scientific genius and given super-enhancements) and simple, appealing art that recalls the style of Darwyn Cooke. It's got a mix of goofy gimmicks (hot girls with jetpacks, cybernetically enhanced animals) and down-to-earth character development, and while it could be a little more lively, it's still an enjoyable read with a nice light tone and the potential for some more substantive character development down the line. I'll be checking it out to see where things go.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: Deception (1946)

It always helps when Bette Davis has strong male co-stars to match her energy; it never fails to disappoint when I see a name like George Brent in the opening credits of a Davis movie. Deception gives her not one but two strong actors to share scenes with: Paul Henreid plays the love of her life, a cello player of indeterminate European origin, and Claude Rains plays her former lover, an arrogant composer. Davis' pianist Christine is caught between the two, as she longs to be with Henreid's Karel, from whom she was separated during World War II, but is indebted to Rains' Alex, who provided her with a comfortable lifestyle while they carried on an illicit (for reasons that aren't quite clear) affair. It's a melodramatic concept that's played without overdoing it too much, thanks to the prodigious talents of the main actors (all of whom co-starred in Now, Voyager in 1942).

Davis plays a part somewhere between a romantic lead and a femme fatale - she's not really dangerous until the end of the film, although as the title suggests, she's a bit devious, keeping her relationship with Alex a secret once she reconnects with Karel. She spends most of the movie desperately trying to keep Karel from finding out about her past with Alex (even though she and Alex are no longer intimate), and Rains is enormously entertaining as the spiteful and wounded playboy who toys with his ex once he finds out that she's thrown him over for this wholesome musician. Henreid has to play the oblivious straight man much of the time, but he too gets to express jealousy and hurt as Karel tries to rebuild his relationship with Christine.

There's possibly some Holocaust-related subtext going on here as well, although it was hard for me to figure out what exactly Karel was supposed to have done during the war in Europe. But Christine mentions having taken on a "professional" (i.e., American) name, and they were obviously torn apart by the war. Part of her guilt certainly comes from having gotten away to America while Karel was trapped in Europe, in addition to the guilt of her romance with Alex. The whole thing comes to a head in a sort of silly way, but Davis stays fairly restrained, and the ending is surprisingly unresolved for a Hollywood movie of the time period. There's enough moral ambiguity and anguish on all sides to make the story seem complex and tragic rather than overwrought.

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior

It's been several years since I last watched Criminal Minds, CBS' extremely popular, extremely grim crime procedural about an FBI profiling team that investigates serial killings and other gruesome crimes. I found it so off-putting and distasteful when it first started that I never bothered to return to it, even as it became more and more popular. Unlike a lot of procedurals that function as sort of innocuous background noise, Minds always struck me as especially repugnant with the way it wallows in the ugliest, most debased crimes, spending time on the nastiest details without offering any redeeming insight.

And I'm willing to acknowledge that maybe it's improved, although judging from the first two episodes of spin-off Suspect Behavior (which as far as I can tell is just the same show with different characters), things haven't changed a bit. Suspect does all of the things I hated about Minds when I first saw it, coming up with the most unpleasant, pseudo-shocking details possible for its crimes, and luridly glorifying the nastiness even as its characters work to investigate it. It's appalling that a network show can blithely depict a victim with his eyes gouged out and blood running down his face, yet MTV gets boycotted for showing teen characters having sex on Skins (but that's another discussion entirely).

With stars including Forest Whitaker and Janeane Garofalo, Suspect is like Squandered Potential: The TV Show, and the entire cast is stuck with awkward, portentous dialogue, all of which is delivered in the same hushed, somber tone. Even the hints of character development are dour and off-putting: One agent is provisionally back in the field after having killed a child molester while apprehending him. Only Kirsten Vangsness, doing double duty on both Minds shows, brings a little levity to things as the exposition-factory researcher back at headquarters, but she mostly just seems out of place. For Minds fans, Suspect offers more of the same, but I can't possibly think of that as anything but a bad thing.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on CBS.

Triskaidekaphilia: The Thirteenth Guest

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Thoroughly insubstantial and frequently annoying, the cheapo 1932 murder mystery The Thirteenth Guest is really only notable for a spunky early performance from Ginger Rogers, who plays an heiress targeted for murder by one of her greedy relatives. Thirteen years earlier, her father had a dinner party with 13 guests, except the 13th guest ... never showed up. Also, her father dropped dead at the party and her mother insisted on leaving everything exactly as it was and immediately moving out of the house. So we've got a creepy old house, a mysterious presence and a killer with an elaborate method of murdering people (he electrocutes them via a mechanism attached to the telephone, then poses the bodies where they would have sat at the dinner party).

It sounds kind of menacing and eerie, but there's basically no tension, and director Albert Ray plays things so lightly that characters rarely even seem to be in danger. The main character is a rakish private detective played with a bit of sparkle by Lyle Talbot, and he has some nice chemistry with Rogers. But the characters are both one-note, and Ray keeps cutting to an irritatingly dim-witted detective as some sort of comic relief. The plot is full of holes and wraps up pretty much at random, and no one seems particularly put out by this whole rash of grisly murders. The killer in his weird hooded outfit spying on a victim while getting ready to pull the electrocution lever is an appealingly grim image, but like everything else in this movie, it's used to basically no effect. (Watch the whole thing yourself at the Internet Archive.)

Bette Davis Month Bonus: The Old Maid (1939)

I hadn't really given it much thought before, but sibling rivalry (specifically of the sisterly variety) is a prominent recurring theme in Bette Davis movies. A fierce screen presence even when dealing with mediocre material, Davis often steamrolls over her co-stars, and it takes a strong sparring partner for her to come off as evenly matched. Luckily, Davis played sister to the likes of Olivia de Havilland, Joan Crawford and even herself (twice), and when she had a worthy adversary, the results were often thrilling. Her counterpart in The Old Maid is Miriam Hopkins, and while the two reportedly had a bitter rivalry and were constantly trying to outdo each other, Davis clearly comes out as the winner, overshadowing Hopkins even as she gives a remarkably internal performance.

Davis' Charlotte and Hopkins' Delia aren't actually sisters, but they might as well be: They're cousins raised together by their grandmother, and they have a very sisterly relationship. Delia is the favorite, the older cousin and the one who has her life on track. She marries a wealthy man with good standing after ditching her flaky boyfriend (perpetual Davis co-star George Brent), and has a couple of kids before her husband dies in a tragic accident. Charlotte, meanwhile, picks up Delia's leftovers by getting knocked up by Delia's shiftless ex, right before he goes off and gets himself killed during the Civil War. Delia gets to be self-righteous and superior about living the better life and raising Charlotte's illegitimate child (who never knows her true parentage), while Charlotte plays the martyr, always reminding Delia how she sacrificed all of her own happiness for the sake of her daughter.

In short, it's a bunch of typically overwrought melodrama, and Hopkins plays it to the hilt. Davis, however, keeps things much more low-key, and conveys Charlotte's anguish with her eyes better than Hopkins manages with her entire body. The woe-is-me stuff gets awfully overdone after a while, especially in the movie's final section as Charlotte's daughter is grown up, about to get married herself and acting like a whiny ungrateful brat. In between the silliness, The Old Maid makes some pointed comments on the hypocritical sexual mores of the Civil War era, although really a movie set in 1939 about a woman with an illegitimate daughter could feature many of the same plot points. Most of its social relevance gets drowned in over-emoting anyway, but Davis manages to make Charlotte's emotions feel earned all the way through until the end.

Mechanics

Warning: Spoilers for both versions of The Mechanic.

The new Jason Statham-led remake of The Mechanic, a mostly forgotten 1972 thriller starring Charles Bronson, is itself mostly forgettable, just another in a long line of Statham action movies in which he shoots and punches people and looks pretty badass doing it. I like Statham as an action star, and I think that when given the right material (in movies like Crank or The Bank Job), he can really deliver. He's physically impressive but also a pretty decent actor, and he can add a bit of sly humor to a scene when it's called for. (Statham definitely beats out Bronson, who pretty much always sounds like that old Simpsons parody where he threatens to "fix Emmett.") Statham does what he can in The Mechanic, but it's a B-movie throwaway with nothing creative to add.

Taken on its own, neither version of The Mechanic is anything special, but it's interesting to compare the way B-movies then and now went about thrilling their audiences. In the original, directed by Michael Winner (who also directed Bronson in three Death Wish movies), the kind of jazzy experimentalism of mainstream 1970s American cinema seeps through in the wordless opening sequence (15 minutes before there's any dialogue) and the amoral, almost nihilistic tone. In broad strokes, the movies have the same plot: Veteran hitman Arthur Bishop (Bronson/Statham) is ordered to take out his longtime friend and mentor (Keenan Wynn/Donald Sutherland), which he does with little hesitation. He then finds himself taking on his mentor's son, Steve (Jan-Michael Vincent/Ben Foster), as a protege while the son has no idea that Arthur killed his father.

In the original, both Arthur and Steve are completely cold-blooded killers; we never get the sense that Arthur cares (or even knows) why he's killing the people he has to kill, and he shows virtually no remorse over having to off his old friend. Steve, too, seems to relish the joy of killing once Arthur takes him under his wing, and is completely indifferent to the fact that his father was murdered. In both versions of the film, Steve eventually tries to kill Arthur -- in the original, it's because Steve has become an effective hitman on his own, and Arthur's employers hire him to take Arthur out. Just as Arthur killed his own mentor without a second thought, so too does Steve blithely kill Arthur. It's only as Arthur is in his death throes that he admits to the murder of Steve's father, to which Steve responds with a smirk and a shrug: "Oh, you killed him?"

In the new version, Steve is tortured by his dad's death and driven to revenge -- part of the reason Arthur takes Steve in is to prevent him from doing something foolish in pursuit of ill-advised vengeance. When Steve discovers that it was Arthur who killed his father, he can't hold back, and he rigs an explosion to kill Arthur. Of course, a modern action movie can't end with the death of the hero, so while Bronson's Arthur dies writhing on a hotel-room floor after being poisoned, Statham's Arthur stealthily rolls away from his truck instants before it explodes, escaping to ride away into the sunset at the end of the movie. Steve isn't so lucky: In both versions, he succumbs to a car bomb planted by Arthur before Steve turned on him, clearly meant as betrayal insurance. But the effect is different: In the original, both amoral, hedonistic men finally pay the price for their arrogance, while in the new version the hero defeats the villain and lives to fight another day.

And that's the main thing: In 1972, Bronson could play a basically heartless killer as the main character of a cheap thriller and never have to deal with crises of conscience or moral equivocation. He was an assassin and he killed people -- end of story. But in 2011, Statham can't do the same thing. His Arthur has to kill only bad people (arms dealers, drug kingpins), and when he betrays his mentor, it has to be because he was being deceived, and he ultimately has to seek vengeance on behalf of the wronged party. The new film concocts a conspiracy and a villain, one that Arthur and Steve can unite in defeating because they both want to enact justice for Steve's father. In Winner's film, there's no justice except perhaps for the karmic justice that leaves both main characters dead at the end. In Simon West's take, the bad guys get punished and the good guys walk away. Moral complexity is gunned down, beaten senseless and blown to bits.

Fairly Legal

I did a short interview with actor and comedian Baron Vaughn, a Las Vegas local who's starring on the new USA drama Fairly Legal, and the show is a good fit for his breezy, goofy style. It's even more lightweight than the typical USA series, if that's possible, with main character Kate Reed (Sarah Shahi) taking on mostly low-stakes cases as a legal mediator (she used to be a lawyer but left the profession after becoming disillusioned). It follows the standard USA model of self-contained stories with a light dusting of serialized elements, although any ongoing plots on this show are even more inconsequential than usual.

Over time I've given up on most of the USA shows I've been following just because they quickly become repetitive, and the only one I do still watch (Royal Pains) keeps me coming back because of the character dynamics, not the procedural stories. Fairly Legal has some mildly amusing characters (including Vaughn's Leonardo Prince), but they're not really compelling enough to carry the show, nor do they get enough time to develop beyond a few brief details (Kate's angst gets a decent amount of screentime, but it's a little overdone). Legal will fit in well with USA's brand without coming close to transcending it, and that brand has become increasingly formulaic.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Being Human

It sounds like the set-up to a joke: A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost move into a house together. But Being Human treats this idea with total seriousness, with the result being a supernatural drama that's a little too heavy on the angst. I've never seen the British series that this new American version is based on, so I can't say how faithful it is or how well it captures the feel of the original. But on its own it's a mildly interesting show that will probably stand or fall on how well it moves beyond the typical supernatural cliches. Right now I'm not really intrigued by the latest iteration of a secret vampire cabal or a bloodsucker trying to reform; the vampire stuff on this show often feels like a de-sexed version of True Blood.

The other two main characters have a little more potential; werewolf Josh (Sam Huntington) is endearingly neurotic, and ghost Sally (Meaghan Rath) has a sweet vulnerability and nice spunk. Still, there are so many supernatural-themed movies and TV shows out there that it's really hard to figure out a new direction for this material, and so far (I've seen the first three episodes), Being Human hasn't done it. The mythology is either rote or left unmentioned (there's barely an effort to explain why vampire Aidan is able to walk around during the day), and instead the focus is on the characters' struggles with their monstrous nature. In Aidan's case, it's a bunch of vampire cliches, although Josh has a little more complexity to his neuroses (he does get to be human for all but one night each month), and Sally's melancholy is more identifiable. There isn't enough yet to set this show apart from other supernatural-themed series, but there is enough that I'll probably watch it a few more times to see where things go.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on Syfy.

Triskaidekaphilia: 13 Curses

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 2002 Spanish film 13 Curses is more accurately known as 13 Chimes (the literal translation of the title) or When the Bell Chimed 13 (the title that comes up on the DVD subtitles), but it was given a more eye-catching name for its U.S. DVD release, presumably to make it seem like a more ominous horror movie. I wouldn't call 13 Curses a horror movie, really, although it plays around with the supernatural and has some creepy moments. It's more of a psychological thriller and an intense character study, one that ends up with some disappointingly pedestrian explanations once everything is revealed.

Before that, though, it's got a nice unsettling vibe, especially thanks to Luis Tosar as an unhinged artist who, in the prologue, is murdered by his wife. Eighteen years later, his son Jacobo (Juan Diego Botto) returns from living abroad to find that his mother is alive (not dead as he was told) and institutionalized, and he goes back to his childhood home to pick up his father's long-abandoned final sculpture project. Jacobo is soon haunted and then possibly possessed by the ghost of his jealous, controlling father (played with intense menace by Tosar), and the middle of the movie, in which Jacobo struggles against his father's malevolent influence, is the most exciting and evocative part, with excellent use of inherently spooky old-world architecture.

Earlier, things get off to a slow start, and once director and co-writer Xavier Villaverde answers the question of whether Jacobo is really possessed or suffering from mental illness, the excitement of the mystery quickly fades. The movie opens with a wonderfully disturbing sequence of young Jacobo running and hiding in his father's cavernous art studio, full of hideous sculptures that seem to stare at him. At the end of the movie, we see this sequence again with all the events laid out as they happened, and the feeling of dread and evil is completely gone. Retitling 13 Curses may have been a misleading move, but a movie that actually lived up to that title would probably have been more interesting.

My top 10 non-2010 movies of 2010

I saw more than 400 movies for the first time this year, probably only a little more than half of which were actually released in 2010. So as I did last year and the year before, I'm putting together a second top 10 list, aside from the more attention-getting one of my favorite new movies of the year (which you can see in the next Las Vegas Weekly). Here then is my list of the top 10 movies I saw for the first time in 2010 that came out in previous years.

1. Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961) I actually got the chance to see this movie in a theater, as part of a vintage film series at one of the local Regal Cinemas. I didn't really have expectations either way -- mostly it was the most convenient movie in the series for me to go see with a friend -- but I was so surprised and delighted with how sophisticated, clever, stylish and moving this film is, with absolutely terrific performances from Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. It's so casually complex about sexuality, coyly but clearly referring to the way its main characters trade sex for money and other benefits. And it effortlessly captures that excitement of being young and living in a city; it made me want to move to New York in 1961. Yes, Mickey Rooney plays a horribly racist Japanese caricature, and, yes, much of the explicitness of Truman Capote's novel has been toned down. It's still a fantastic movie, a wonderful romance and a shining example of the best of the time period.

2. The Letter (William Wyler, 1940) I watched 30-plus Bette Davis movies this year for a project that's still ongoing, so I could probably have made this list into my top 10 Bette Davis movies of 2010. The Letter certainly would have topped that list, but it places deservedly among all the movies I saw this year. It's a masterfully shot, expertly constructed noir with Davis at her devious best, playing a haughty plantation owner's wife defending herself from a murder charge. Wyler (working from a play by W. Somerset Maugham) weaves a complex story full of shady characters and shifting allegiances, and he uses the Malaysian setting effectively to portray the perils of colonization. Read more in my original post.

3. Rock N' Roll High School (Allan Arkush, 1979) There will eventually be a full piece on this movie, which I watched for a project that I am still working on. For now I will say that, like Breakfast at Tiffany's, this movie is very evocative of a certain time and place, although it's more of a generic time of life (high school) and location (the suburbs) than something concrete. It's just an infectiously fun movie about teenage rebellion and thinking that your favorite band is the most important thing in the world and having debilitating crushes on classmates, and it's set in this kind of stylized fantasy world that amplifies and personifies the extremes of teenage emotions. Plus, P.J. Soles is great as Riff Randell, and the Ramones rock, too.

4. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) I'm consistently amazed at the kind of weird, off-kilter storytelling Sturges was able to throw into Hollywood studio films in the 1940s. This movie subverts expectations at every turn, getting its leads (played wonderfully by Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea) together at the beginning, splitting them apart and then not forcing them to fall in love again but instead demonstrating how hard they work to keep each other happy. It's goofy and funny and never predictable, another demonstration of Sturges' boundless creativity. Read some more in my post about Claudette Colbert.

5. A Christmas Carol (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1951) Of all the Christmas movies I watched for my Christmas in July feature, a version of A Christmas Carol is pretty low on the list of what I would have expected to be my favorite. But this austere and surprisingly affecting version starring Alastair Sim is not only the best of the Dickens adaptations I watched, it's also the best of all the Christmas movies I wrote about. No matter how familiar you are with this story, you'll get something out of Sim's deeply felt performance as Scrooge, stripping away everything that has made the character into a cartoon over the years and showing him as a damaged, sad and pitiable man. Read more in my original post.

6. 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) There's a full piece on this one forthcoming as well, with more on its manic visual style, self-referential writing and performances and giddy celebration of the Manchester music scene of the 1980s and '90s. Winterbottom is one of those directors whose greatest strength/weakness is working in pretty much every genre imaginable, but 24 Hour plays to his best instincts, with a funny, hyperactive lead performance from Steve Coogan and just the right balance of snark and reverence in regard to its subject, music impresario Tony Wilson.

7. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941) Hey, it's another William Wyler-directed Bette Davis movie. Like The Letter, The Little Foxes features Davis as a gleefully nasty schemer, although in this movie she's just one of several unscrupulous characters, all part of a toxic Southern family in 1900. The writing, by Lillian Hellman based on her play, is complex and unconventional, and Wyler's direction makes the stage-based material into something dynamic and cinematic. Davis always excelled at playing characters who are compelling in their awfulness, and in The Little Foxes she digs into one of her best. Read more in my original post.

8. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (Freddie Francis, 1970) I had no idea what to expect from this weird British cult horror movie when I volunteered to review its long-awaited DVD release. But it totally transfixed me with its surreal, unnerving take on the horror-movie staple of the demented family, and its complete lack of explanation or back story is chilling in the best way. Part sadistic horror movie, part social satire, the movie toys with its audience the same way its characters toy with their kidnapped victim. With creepy performances and a moody, evocative style, Girly really deserves a rediscovery now that it's on DVD. Read more in my DVD review.

9. Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009) When I saw Park's fanboy favorite Oldboy, I think I had heard too much hype, and I was impressed but not wowed. I came to Thirst without the same preconceptions, and I was drawn in much more effectively. The unconventional vampire story goes in all sorts of unexpected directions, and Park takes on over-the-top violence, severe crises of faith and all-consuming love with equal verve. The lead performances from Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-bin are every bit as intense as the direction, and the whole movie has a manic sense of danger that never lets up. It's totally insane, in a good way.

10. That Evening Sun (Scott Teems, 2009) I probably would have had this on my 2009 best-of list if it had made it to Vegas theaters in time, but as it stands I didn't get a chance to see it until it opened here in February. It's a lovely little character study with a great (and rare) lead performance from Hal Holbrook, playing an irascible old farmer who refuses to leave his land even when his son leases it to a new family. Teems paints an evocative portrait of the South as a region poised between tradition and modernity, and Mia Wasikowksa, who had a hell of a year in 2010 (with both Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are All Right), does nice supporting work as a teen who tentatively bonds with Holbrook's old coot. Read more in my review.

Honorable mentions: 13 Going On 30 (Gary Winick, 2004); The Catered Affair (Richard Brooks, 1956); Christmas Evil (Lewis Jackson, 1980); In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

Triskaidekaphilia: 13 Hours in a Warehouse

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I watched 13 Hours in a Warehouse last week at Las Vegas' great Sci Fi Center, as part of a sadly under-attended double feature showcasing indie horror actress Rachel Grubb (whom I also interviewed). I skipped out on the second feature, Terror Overload, but I found 13 Hours fitfully entertaining and occasionally suspenseful, albeit far too clumsy to work consistently. For her part, Grubb is effectively creepy as one of three female ghosts who haunt an old warehouse where a gang of thieves is hiding out.

The acting by the leads could generously be called uneven, and early scenes in which the group sits around and trades pop-culture banter like third-rate Tarantino characters are pretty painful. The bluster never quite seems real, and it's hard to buy these guys as genuinely dangerous thugs. But when they start getting scared and turning on each other, the movie becomes a lot more believable, and the actors are able to pull off those emotions much more convincingly than they're able to sell writer-director Dav Kaufman's stilted dialogue. It helps that there is a genuinely spooky atmosphere to a lot of the scenes, thanks to the empty, run-down location and some simple but evocative camera work.

Kaufman uses a cool effect on the ghosts, making them flicker and stutter like poorly tracked images on old VHS tapes (which eventually figure into the back story). It's a unique and immediate way to convey otherworldliness (it owes something to The Ring, but is handled in a very different way). He frames one shot with tiny nooses in the foreground that circle the faces of the characters in the background, and generally uses his visuals to indicate the danger of what's going on without drawing too much attention to it. You don't expect subtlety in a movie like this, and I appreciated it. The plotting is too slapdash, the dialogue is too awkward, and the acting is too wooden. But the style makes up for some of that, which puts 13 Hours slightly ahead of a good number of its direct-to-DVD horror counterparts.

Heroes for Hire #1

I sort of lost track of writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's Guardians of the Galaxy series, which seems to have morphed from an ongoing book into various miniseries that form part of a neverending Marvel cosmic crossover story. But for the time that it was running on its own, I found it pretty enjoyable, a solid old-school superhero team-up book with a variety of interesting characters and a range of ongoing subplots that were given time to develop. The only drawbacks were the ever-changing art teams and the necessity of reading several other series in order to keep up with some of the plot points (two of my biggest annoyances with mainstream superhero books overall).

Abnett and Lanning are back now with another similar book, Heroes for Hire, also arising out of a crossover event that I didn't read (Shadowland) and also featuring a large, fluid cast of B- and C-list characters, this time from the street-level section of the Marvel universe instead of the cosmic arena. The first issue jumps in with the kind of dynamic storytelling the duo brought to Guardians of the Galaxy, with the crossover having taken care of much of the back story and set-up (although it's perfectly clear what's going on even to those of us who haven't read the previous stories). It's not anything special -- the Falcon, Black Widow, Moon Knight and Elektra work to stop the smuggling of a new super-drug -- but it's action-packed and exciting, and it makes good use of the second-tier characters. It's similar in both its cast and its premise to Chuck Dixon's Marvel Knights series from a few years ago, which was an effective, unpretentious superhero series that never found the audience it deserved.

There's a twist ending involving team mastermind Misty Knight that hints at a larger story to come, and the art by Guardians veteran Brad Walker is clean and appealingly kinetic. I don't expect Abnett and Lanning to reinvent the superhero comic, but if they can keep telling these simple, direct stories and add some depth to oft-mistreated characters (and keep Walker around), then that's good enough for me. Just as long as the crossovers are kept to a minimum.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: The Scapegoat (1959)

Bette Davis played opposite herself twice, in 1946's A Stolen Life and 1964's Dead Ringer, both times appearing as a woman who took the place of her twin sister after that sister died. The Scapegoat, made five years before Dead Ringer, is another movie about a character impersonating someone to whom they bear an exact resemblance, although in this case it's Alec Guinness in the dual role, and Davis hamming it up as part of the supporting cast. She plays a morphine-addicted countess who appears in three scenes and is mostly bed-ridden, but she makes the most of the part, and is a catty, cackling contrast to the dry restraint of the rest of the movie.

Davis is practically comic relief given the somber tone of the rest of the movie, but the low-key approach works for this thriller based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier (who wrote the source material for Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and The Birds). Guinness plays a depressed, lonely college professor who happens upon his exact double while vacationing in France. The double, an amoral nobleman, tricks the professor into taking on his life and then disappears, leaving the professor to pick up the pieces (which include Davis' overbearing mother). Guinness does a good job of conveying two different personalities in the double role, although he's playing just one part for most of the movie. Still, there are complexities to playing a character who is pretending to be another character (that you also play), and Guinness pulls those off well, too.

The story is a little slow, and the direction is a little too subdued, but overall The Scapegoat is a nice thriller with a satisfyingly ambiguous ending. It finds Davis in her scene-stealing supporting-role mode, although she's given prominent billing in the credits. Mainly she's here to liven things up a little and offer an amusing counterpoint to the buttoned-down Guinness. On that count, she succeeds, and the movie mostly does as well.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

I went from a pleasantly diverting romantic comedy to this strained mess in my tour through the Bette Davis filmography. While It's Love I'm After was contrived and silly but ultimately entertaining and well-acted, The Bride Came C.O.D. is even more contrived but pretty consistently annoying, and my patience with it ran out quickly. Davis plays an imperious heiress who impulsively decides to marry a vapid bandleader (Jack Carson) whom she's known only a few days. Her father is apoplectic, so he hires the private pilot (James Cagney) flying the heiress and her fiance to Vegas to get married to instead take the heiress to her father.

It gets even more needlessly convoluted when the pilot and the heiress crash-land in a desert ghost town inhabited by a single old coot, but all the plot machinations serve the single purpose of, naturally, getting the two main characters together. Davis and Cagney bicker the entire time but have no chemistry, and the characters are both so unlikable that it's hard to root for them to end up with anyone. The heiress is spoiled and spiteful, and the pilot is dishonest and condescending. Those are not the makings of a great love story.

The plot works so hard to delay the inevitable that it's kind of maddening; the two characters spend a significant amount of time trapped in an old mine for no apparent reason. The difference between this movie and It's Love I'm After can be summed up by a comedic bit they both share, in which Davis' character barricades the door to her room only to have her unwanted suitor come in by the window behind her. In Love, Leslie Howard enters with a playful wink and soon the two are in each other's arms; in Bride, Cagney enters with a sneer and looks ready to pounce. Which of those sounds funny and romantic?