Triskaidekaphilia: 'Gen 13' (2000)

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

In a way, Gen 13 was ahead of its time: These days, DC churns out several PG-13-rated direct-to-video animated movies a year, based on specific comic book storylines and geared more toward hardcore fans than general audiences. In 2000, it was more of a risk to adapt the Wildstorm/Image superhero team Gen 13 (created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi) into an animated movie aimed at adults, complete with surprisingly intense violence, swearing and sexual situations. And sadly, the risk did not pay off: The movie was never officially released in the U.S., since Wildstorm was sold to DC Comics before the scheduled release, and Touchstone Pictures parent company Disney apparently wasn't interested in releasing a movie based on a property owned by a rival studio (DC parent company Warner Bros.), even before Disney owned Marvel Comics. The movie ended up with a limited home video release in some foreign countries, and it's pretty easily found online.

Not that it's really worth looking for, unless you're a hardcore fan of the Gen 13 comics. It's a creative failure as well as a logistical one, a poor adaptation of what was a fun (if inconsequential) superhero series that took a lot of cues from Marvel's X-Men spinoff New Mutants. The mature elements feel out of place, the plotting is on the level of a really long pilot for a Saturday morning cartoon, the animation is subpar and ugly, and the voice acting (even from animation pros like Mark Hamill and E.G. Daily) is stilted and awkward. Artist J. Scott Campbell gave the comic book a distinctive look, but none of his style comes across in the movie, which looks like a generic late-'90s action cartoon.

The plot is an extremely slow-paced origin story, focused on just three of the original five team members, with one other making a couple of brief appearances and one left out entirely. It's mainly about Caitlin Fairchild (voiced by Alicia Witt), who's recruited into the top-secret Project Genesis program that is secretly experimenting on the children of former super-soldiers. Caitlin and her fellow students Roxy (Daily) and Grunge (Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in a truly terrible performance) undergo training and gradually discover the secrets of the facility, led by the evil Ivana Baiul (Lauren Lane) and the smarmy supervillain Threshold (Hamill). It isn't until the movie's climax that the characters actually get their superpowers, and before that they deal with a bunch of clumsy humor and ineffective suspense.

The action sequences from director Kevin Altieri (an animation veteran with numerous episodes of Batman: The Animated Series to his name) are generic and sometimes confusing, especially the long, drawn-out finale. The excessive violence (with multiple bloody character deaths) feels gratuitous, as do a few early semi-explicit sexual references, and they don't add anything to the storytelling. If anything, they make it feel less mature, like a teenager trying to sound grown-up. The movie never got an MPAA rating since it was never released in the U.S., but it probably would have been a hard PG-13, skirting up against an R. That's a poor fit for a movie that otherwise would be best suited for an unsophisticated tween audience. Years later, DC figured out a better balance for this kind of movie, and has done strong business with its PG-13 home-video features (although the ones I've seen have been mediocre at best). Gen 13 was probably better off being left on the shelf.

Summer School: 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome' (1985)

With so many summer franchises returning this year, I'm catching up on previous installments.

Given its reputation as the worst in the series (and my less-than-enthusiastic response to the first two movies), I went into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with pretty low expectations. I was actually pleasantly surprised at first: You can tell that series creator George Miller (co-directing this time with George Ogilvie) has taken advantage of the popularity of The Road Warrior to produce a movie on a much larger scale, with much greater resources. If Mad Max looked like a threadbare exploitation movie and The Road Warrior looked like a resourceful, action-driven B-movie, Beyond Thunderdome looks like a mainstream Hollywood production, complete with name stars (Mel Gibson, quite famous by this point, plus singer Tina Turner), elaborate sets, multiple locations and a large cast.

Miller and Ogilvie use those resources well in the beginning, following Max as he stumbles upon Bartertown, a pocket of semi-civilization in the vast wasteland of the Outback (the apocalypse seems to get retroactively worse in each installment of the series). There he meets up with Turner's Aunty Entity and agrees to fight a hulking brute in the arena known as Thunderdome, for the chance to recover the vehicle and belongings that were stolen from him at the beginning of the film. The Thunderdome battle is a creative and exciting action sequence, but it ends with a moment of goopy sentiment, which then sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

Exiled from Bartertown, Max is picked up by a group of children living in an oasis in the middle of the desert, and Beyond Thunderdome turns into an entirely different movie. The annoying kids (seemingly modeled after Peter Pan's Lost Boys) speak in a cutesy patois and decide that Max is their savior, and while his character arc is the same as in The Road Warrior (being captured, then reluctantly agreeing to help a group of survivors), it's played with much more sentimentality. Eventually they all head back to Bartertown, and the movie culminates in another well-crafted car chase, but even that sequence is tainted by dumb kiddie stuff, with the action taking on a more slapstick tone (including some of the kids smacking bad guys with frying pans). There's less emotional resonance in Max's relationship with this whole group of kids than there was in his relationship with the one feral boy in The Road Warrior. The movie ends essentially the same way as the previous one, with Max continuing to drift while the people he helped find peace, but there's no impact to it this time. No wonder Miller had to wait 30 years to get another chance to bring Max to the big screen.

Summer School: 'The Road Warrior' (1981)

With so many summer franchises returning this year, I'm catching up on previous installments.

After the disappointment of watching Mad Max, I didn't have high hopes for The Road Warrior, but I was much more impressed with director George Miller's sequel. I wouldn't say that I was blown away, but I could definitely see how this movie has become a beloved classic, and its influence on so many other post-apocalyptic movies is obvious. With a larger budget, Miller was able to stage even more impressive stunts, and he also does a better job of sketching the post-apocalyptic world, providing the context that the first movie was missing. The plot is still pretty thin, and the characterization is minimal, but at least this time the action and the atmosphere make up for it.

Suddenly Max's world is way more post-apocalyptic than it was in the first movie, even though an opening recap of sorts tries to make it seem like this is a natural progression. Narration explains that wars and a scarcity of oil have turned the world into a wasteland, and the police force and tranquil home environments that supported Max in the first movie seem to have disappeared. (There's no mention of Max's wife, who was still alive in the hospital at the end of the previous movie.) Max wanders the Outback in his badass car, evading the marauding gangs that are so familiar from the pop-culture representations of the series. He comes across a colony of survivors who are trying to move their tanker of precious gasoline to the coast, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and he reluctantly agrees to help them escape the gang's attacks.

That's it for the plot, which leaves a lot of motivations and logistics vague. It's clearly secondary to the action, which Miller once again stages with energy and style, helped by all the crazy vehicles he gets to use and all the colorful characters (the mohawk and assless chaps seem like impractical attire for the villain, but they do look cool). It's pretty amazing what Miller can do without the aid of CGI, and the stunt work here deserves all the acclaim it gets. But even so, I got kind of bored after a while, since I didn't really care whether Max succeeded in his plan to get the survivors to safety (partly because he didn't seem to care much either). The mute, feral boy (whose adult self is revealed as the narrator) is kind of endearing, but none of the characters really held my interest. Mel Gibson's stoic performance carries more weight than his performance in the first movie, but Max by design is a sort of inscrutable figure. I suppose for fans this movie is a triumph of style over substance, but while I admire the style, it only carried the movie so far for me.

Summer School: 'Mad Max' (1979)

With so many summer franchises returning this year, I'm catching up on previous installments.

Of all the blockbuster series coming back this summer, Mad Max is the only one that I wasn't previously familiar with. I never saw the original Mad Max movies as a kid, and I don't remember having any friends who were into them, either. Maybe I am a little too young to have been part of the original target audience, but the movies were all on video when I was growing up, and for whatever reason they just never reached me. So my only sense of Mad Max going into this movie was from various parodies, references and homages, which are apparently all based on the style and plot elements of the second (and most beloved) movie in the series. Imagine my surprise when I put on this movie expecting to get a gritty post-apocalyptic action movie full of grotesque villains in leather outfits and instead got a mildly futuristic revenge/exploitation movie with a couple of decent car chases.

None of the hallmarks of the series' post-apocalyptic world are explained or even apparently present in this movie; the world doesn't look post-apocalyptic at all, really, just a bit dingy and under-populated. "Mad" Max Rockatansky (an impossibly young-looking Mel Gibson) is a cop who specializes in intercepting criminals on the run, and the movie opens with its best scene, a dynamic and exciting car chase as Max and his fellow officers pursue a gangster who killed one of their colleagues. Director George Miller stages some seriously impressive stunts on what was obviously a very small budget, and the opening promises a fast-paced action movie to come.

Unfortunately, that's not what we get. What follows is some familiar B-movie sleaze with the biker gang terrorizing a small town and attacking a young couple, then killing Max's partner after he roughs up one of their members. In between there are dull scenes of Max at home with his wife/girlfriend (never exactly clear) in a nice suburban house that doesn't look post- or even pre-apocalyptic. Once Max's partner gets killed, Max decides to quit the force, and what follows is a dull stretch of Max on vacation with his family, which now includes a baby boy (who either showed up out of nowhere or appeared so briefly in earlier scenes that I completely missed him).

Eventually the action picks up again when the gang comes after Max's family, and there's another fairly exciting action sequence to end the movie. But the whole revenge storyline doesn't get going until the movie's almost over, and the plot up until then is pretty slow and meandering. Miller is often praised for his world-building, but the world of Mad Max is pretty thin, made up of a handful of cool-looking cars and some leather police uniforms. Had I not known that this was the start of an immensely popular film series, I'd dismiss it as a mildly entertaining '70s Ozploitation movie, and not a particularly distinguished one.

WonderCon round-up, part 1

It's been a very long time since I wrote anything about comic books on here, but I am still an avid (if sometimes slow) reader, and a few weeks ago I attended WonderCon in southern California for the third time, doing some news coverage for Comic Book Resources and hitting the convention floor. As usual, my convention strategy was to focus on indie publishers and artists' alley, to look for some interesting discoveries. If something caught my eye and I could pick up an individual issue for $5 or less, I gave it a shot.

The Children's Vampire Hunting Brigade (David Blake Lucarelli/Henry Ponciano) There isn't really anything new in this series inspired by the true story of hundreds of Scottish children searching a cemetery for a vampire in 1954. Lucarelli uses that as the jumping-off point for a typical vampire tale, with one of the grown-up children warning modern-day teens about the dangers of vampires. It's a solid setup with decent art, but there isn't enough of a unique angle to really hook readers in. Plus the "Scottish" dialogue reads like it's all being delivered by Banshee in a 1980s X-Men comic.

Cirrus (Graham Sibley/Hillary Bauman) The first issue of this sci-fi series opens with a huge text-page info-dump about the development of weather-controlling technology, a super-virus that wiped out nearly the entire human population, and the rise of animal-human hybrids who could resist the disease. But almost none of that seems to have any bearing on the story, which is vague and sometimes hard to follow, despite the overabundance of back story. There is a mysterious weather-controlling figure who breaks some other mysterious figure out of a mysterious holding facility. The characters appear to be human, but Bauman's painted art, which can be evocative when depicting landscapes, is clumsy when it comes to faces and people, so it's hard to tell whether they're hybrids or regular humans or something else. The issue's end is meant to be a shocking cliffhanger, but to me it was just more confusion.

Havenhurst (Tanya Bjork) Bjork offers up a familiar concept, with a girl who's inherited magical powers ditching her heritage and living among humans. The art is cute but sometimes a little awkward, especially during an unclear fight sequence near the end of the issue. The main character is a bit inscrutable as well, which is problematic when the entire series is based on the idea that she's abandoned her heritage to live in the world of humans. There aren't quite enough distinctive elements here to make me interested in reading another issue.

Nutmeg (James F. Wright/Jackie Crofts) I really enjoyed the first issue of this teen crime drama, billed by the creators as "Betty and Veronica meets Breaking Bad." There isn't any actual crime in the first issue, but writer Wright sets up the ominous vibe at the all-girls junior high where the story is set, with basic but effective characterization for the main characters and their mean-girl nemesis. Crofts' art is both simple and expressive, with just the right balance of sweetness and menace. It's a strong debut, and the next two issues are already available on Comixology. I plan to get them both.

Rök (Katie Longua) This cute series launched in 2011, according to the indicia, and the first issue is a little slim and slight (Longua relies a little too heavily on splash pages). The concept is that the Norse gods have come down to Earth and formed a rock band, which is somehow key to defeating their enemies. A young woman turns from fan to participant when she ends up with the power of one of the gods. The art and the combination of rock music, hipster style and supernatural threats reminded me a bit of Scott Pilgrim, although without as much self-aware humor. The story barely gets started in the first issue, but it has the potential to be goofy, exuberant fun.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Apartment 1303' (2012)

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

The 2007 Japanese horror movie Apartment 1303 is not exactly a stellar example of the genre, but the dreadful 2012 American remake makes it look like a masterpiece. It's sort of appropriate that a third-tier J-horror movie has been remade as a low-budget, basically direct-to-VOD American horror movie, featuring C-list actors clearly hard up for roles. Apartment 1303's only real selling points are its stars, specifically Mischa Barton in the lead role as a woman investigating her sister's mysterious death and Rebecca De Mornay as the sisters' mother, whose part has been greatly expanded from the original. But both actresses are terrible, with Barton giving a wooden performance that feels like she's marking time until the shoot ends and she can go home, and De Mornay overacting wildly as a drunken washed-up rocker who smothers her daughters.

The plot outline is basically the same, with timid 20-something Janet (Julianne Michelle) moving into her first apartment and encountering the ghost of a young woman who forces her off the balcony. Janet's sister Lara (Barton) then attempts to find out what happened, discovering the story of a mother and daughter who are now haunting the apartment, pushing all the young female tenants off the balcony. Writer-director Michael Taverna spends more time with Janet before she falls to her death, and he compresses the lengthy back story into a few quick explanations. Neither of these changes improves the plotting, especially since Michelle is extremely irritating as Janet, who's constantly talking to herself so she can over-explain her feelings and what's happening in the story.

Clearing out the flashbacks also makes room for more scenes of De Mornay, dressed like a second-rate Stevie Nicks, chewing scenery, but her performance is more desperate and sad than campy. A couple of months ago I watched the obscure Sam Rockwell indie movie Lawn Dogs on DVD, and was pleasantly surprised to see a remarkable performance from a 10-year-old Barton in one of her first roles. She apparently peaked early, because she's clearly completely checked out by now, barely putting any effort into her performance. Not that this material deserves much effort; Taverna's screenplay includes such dialogue gems as "Apartments don't kill people. People kill people," which is such a crucial line that it gets repeated three times throughout the movie.

Taverna's film is also a mess visually, with cheap-looking effects and some basic failures of blocking (there are multiple scenes in which he can't even bother to put the two actors who are facing off against each other in the same frame). For some reason this movie was released in 3D in a very limited capacity, but I can't imagine how the flat images and drab sets would be improved by seeing them in 3D. I dismissed the original Apartment 1303 as dull and forgettable, but that's a welcome alternative to a movie this inept and tedious.

'The Comedians'

On the FX comedy The Comedians, Billy Crystal and Josh Gad play versions of themselves who are pathologically desperate for attention and validation, and who reluctantly team up for a sketch-comedy show even though they have no chemistry or creative compatibility or mutual respect. That doesn't seem too far from the truth about this show, which is strained and painfully unfunny, bringing out the worst in its two already hammy leads. The format itself is tired, with more disingenuous self-deprecation from celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves, alongside a parade of awkward cameos.

The jokes about the shallowness and insincerity of show business are cliched, and dated enough that they could have come out of a sitcom from 20 years ago. Crystal seems like he's reluctant to really dig into his persona, so his character is more put-upon than actively unpleasant, but that just makes the potential satire even more lifeless. Gad is more willing to mock himself, but he's not really famous enough to have enough material for mockery (there are far too many jokes about 1600 Penn). The supporting cast features some cliched show business characters (the pretentious writer, the lazy production assistant, the stressed-out producer), and plenty of the humor is just moldy and stale (Steven Weber has an unfortunate two-episode arc as a wildly miscalculated transgender character, and there's an entire episode devoted to Crystal and Gad getting high and wandering a supermarket).

I'm honestly not sure whether the occasional sketches from the show-within-the-show are actually meant to be funny, or meant to be funny because they are terrible, but they don't succeed at either one. I may have been disappointed with the last season of Louie, but at least Louis C.K. is pushing boundaries and expanding the idea of what can be done in a show featuring a celebrity playing himself. Pairing The Comedians with Louie just highlights how backward and regressive and pathetic it is. For a network known to take chances and foster artistic ambition, this is a lazy, clumsy misfire.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on FX.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th' (2000)

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

It's probably not a good sign when the best way to identify your film would be as "the poor man's Scary Movie." Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th was released direct to video a few months after the first movie in the alarmingly successful horror-movie parody series, and while Scary Movie has spawned four sequels and is apparently beloved by many, Shriek has been justifiably forgotten. As far as quickie spoofs go, Shriek is at least more structurally sound than movies like the works of infamous duo Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and the filmmakers (writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms, director John Blanchard) have a decent grasp on their most obvious targets (Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer). The opening scene is a fairly impressive re-creation of the opening scene from Scream; the only problem is that none of its jokes are remotely funny. At times it's not even clear what the jokes are meant to be.

That problem pervades the generally laugh-free movie, which, like Scream, takes place in a small town menaced by a hooded and masked killer. Obviously plotting isn't a major concern in a spoof, but Shriek is so listless that the incoherent plot ends up dragging it down, and the requirements of a parody mean that the filmmakers have to include large chunks of plot from both Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. There are also the requisite references to other horror movies (including Child's Play, Halloween and, of course, Friday the 13th), as well as an inordinate fixation on Dawson's Creek, which extends to naming one of the characters Dawson Deery (a play on Dawson Leery), even though he does nothing at all that's reminiscent of the character he's named for. There is exactly one clever idea in the movie, a brief bit about the characters being aware that they're in a parody (much like the characters in Scream are aware of the rules of horror movies), which might have made for some successfully self-aware commentary on self-awareness, but it disappears as quickly as any of the other half-formed comedic riffs.

The cast is a who's-who of people who needed money at the end of the '90s, including Tiffani Thiessen, Tom Arnold, Simon Rex, Coolio, Heather Graham's sister Aimee, Artie Lange and, uh, Shirley Jones. Buffy the Vampire Slayer recurring players Julie Benz and Danny Strong (now an Emmy-winning writer) play two of the main characters, and while Benz actually comes off fairly well, Strong radiates desperation as the nerdy virgin character (who ends up in a running, half-assed American Pie parody). The producers seem to have spent most of their money on casting, because the movie's aesthetic is grubby and cheap, with limited sets and fake-looking special effects. The art of filmmaking is even less of a concern than plot mechanics in a movie like this, but the lack of style and grace speaks to how little anyone involved seems to care about the finished product.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Parachute Jumper' (1933)

Bette Davis apparently cited Parachute Jumper as the worst movie she ever made, and clips from it were used in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to illustrate the terrible roles her character was forced to take. To be fair, Davis is pretty bad in this movie, but the film itself isn't nearly as awful as plenty of others she churned out in the '30s, or some of the truly dreadful stuff from late in her career. Maybe because she was annoyed at being stuck with yet another faithful girlfriend role, Davis coasts through Parachute Jumper, affecting a terrible, inconsistent Southern accent as a woman nicknamed "Alabama." She's the third most important character at best, behind star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as former military pilot Bill Keller and Frank McHugh as his buddy and fellow former airman Toodles.

The two of them get booted from the Marines after going AWOL and getting drunk in Nicaragua, and they find themselves broke in New York City at the height of the Depression. Although it's mostly a lighthearted caper, Parachute Jumper does show some of the harsh realities of the Depression, including Bill and Toodles sharing the same worn-out suit to look for work, and Bill and Alabama joking about eating a stray cat. That comes soon after the two of them first meet, and she immediately shacks up with Bill and Toodles, amid plenty of sexual innuendo. The pre-Code naughtiness is Parachute Jumper's greatest appeal, and it includes lots of double entendres, drug-dealing and murder, characters in their undershirts, and Toodles giving the middle finger to a rude driver.

But the plot is a bit of a mess, jumping from the trio looking for jobs to Bill getting hired as a chauffeur for a randy socialite to its eventual focus as all three go to work for a suave gangster named Weber (Leo Carillo). They come across as simultaneously naive (believing Weber's story about border patrol agents really being hijackers) and devious, and they eventually scheme to bring Weber down, mainly because working for a criminal organization has become too risky to justify the money. They manage to escape without any legal consequences, and the movie ends with Bill and Toodles rejoining the military (from which they couldn't wait to get away), because that's apparently the only reliable source of income, and slightly less risky than working for the mob. It's a haphazard ending to a haphazard movie that never really figures out what it's supposed to be about.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Friday the 13th' (2009)

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

Having exhausted all the movies in the original Friday the 13th series that have the number 13 in their titles, I've moved on to the 2009 series reboot, which could probably have been branded as yet another sequel without much alteration. It's not a remake of the 1980 original, and it's certainly less of a radical retooling than, say, Jason X, which took Jason into space. Instead it's just the latest iteration of Jason the unstoppable killing machine murdering a bunch of young pretty people, with the requisite gore and nudity. It does open with a black-and-white prologue that sort of recontextualizes the ending of the original movie, with Jason's mother stalking counselors as revenge for their letting her son die, but that seems to exist primarily to get the expected story beats out of the way, so that horror nerds can't accuse the producers of ignoring the original concept of the series.

The thing is, with its impressionistic flashes of black-and-white images, the prologue is probably the strongest, most distinctive part of the movie. It certainly has more style than what follows, which is an uninspired rehash of familiar slasher-movie elements, with some slight adjustments to Jason's approach. For reasons that are not quite clear, he kidnaps rather than kills one of his victims (Amanda Righetti), whose brother (Jared Padalecki) then heads to Crystal Lake to search for her, encountering the standard group of sexy morons ripe for the slaughter (following the previous group of sexy morons slaughtered after the prologue but still before the opening credits). Director Marcus Nispel (also responsible for the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift run through some of the series' greatest hits, from Jason's mom's rampage to Jason himself discovering his iconic hockey mask (after first wearing a cloth hood) to Jason's expected final surge up from the bottom of Crystal Lake.

They don't add any meaning or context, though, nor do they tell a compelling or original story. The acting from some familiar young faces (in addition to Righetti and Padalecki, the cast includes Danielle Panabaker, Ben Feldman and Ryan Hansen) is passable, but the female characters especially are essentially interchangeable (and deployed mainly for their nude assets, in several instances). Travis Van Winkle gets some amusingly campy moments as the entitled douchebag who doesn't believe in Jason, but even his entertainment value is minimal. (His funniest moment involves dropping his gun in a ravine while running away from Jason and then yelling, "Where the fuck are you, gun?"). Instead of reinvigorating or reinventing the franchise, the reboot is little more than another desultory sequel. Naturally, there's another one planned for next year.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Ex-Lady' (1933)

For a film made in 1933, Ex-Lady features remarkably progressive values, but its open-mindedness (helped by being made before the implementation of the Production Code) only carries it so far. It's refreshing and even a little jarring at first to see single career woman Helen Bauer (Bette Davis) carrying on a sexual relationship with ad executive Don Peterson (Gene Raymond), and to stand up to her very old-fashioned parents when they try to pressure her into getting married. It's obvious these two are having plenty of premarital sex with no consequences, and that they are completely happy about it.

Unfortunately, the movie has them get married anyway, at Don's insistence, although at least becoming a wife doesn't mean that Helen has to stay home and cook all day. She joins Don's advertising firm as a junior partner, and it's clear throughout the movie that her skills as an illustrator and graphic designer are in much higher demand than Don's skills at whatever he does. But this isn't quite the proto-Mad Men it sounds like; the intrigue is mostly dull and plodding, and the characters lack the spark they seemed to have at the beginning of the movie. Once married, Helen and Don immediately get into a rut, made worse by financial troubles at the ad agency.

Despite their early hedonism, they both turn out to be rather dull, and even Helen's antipathy toward marriage is more about her being a stubborn stick in the mud than a free-spirited lover. She decides that getting married was the cause of their problems, just as she predicted, so they decide to separate and become lovers again, living apart and going on dates every so often, while half-heartedly pursuing (but never consummating) dalliances with other people. There's no sense of what drew Helen and Don together in the first place, nor any real sense of what then pushes them apart. The movie ends with the pair making a renewed commitment to married life, but again, it's hard to see what has changed that will make their second effort any more successful.

As usual, Davis is strongest when she's playing Helen as a feisty, independent woman, and she's less appealing once Helen gets needy and indecisive. Raymond is more of a blank slate, and he plays Don as a reluctant reactor, just as likely to go along with Helen's progressive marital ideas as he is to fall back on convention, depending on who's around. It makes for a mismatched relationship, with little audience investment in whether the pair will stay together or not. As carefree, rule-flouting lovers, they're refreshing, but as a couple, they're a total bore.

'Man Seeking Woman'

The generic title of Man Seeking Woman doesn't indicate the surreal tone of the comedy starring Jay Baruchel as a lonely single guy in Chicago, and it isn't going to do the show any favors in its struggle to find an audience. Relegated to FXX, the network where FX sends shows to die (exception: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Man Seeking Woman seems destined to air for a single low-rated season and then disappear, leaving only semi-fond memories. It's not a terrible show, but it's not distinctive enough to overcome its disadvantages, nor is it outrageous enough to compete with It's Always Sunny, whose 10th season serves as a lead-in.

The bare bones of the premise are as simple as the title implies: After getting dumped by his longtime girlfriend, slacker temp Josh (Baruchel) is looking to meet someone new. He has a best friend (played by Eric Andre) and a sister (played by Britt Lower) who help him. But Josh's mundane relationship struggles are portrayed with a heavy dose of surreal fantasy that exaggerate the metaphorical difficulties of dating. Ever feel like you've been set up on a blind date with a troll? Josh ends up having dinner with an actual troll, who lives under a bridge and eats garbage. Ever feel like your ex's new significant other is the worst person in history? Josh's ex-girlfriend turns out to be dating Adolf Hitler (played by Bill Hader). And that's just in the first episode.

While these bits offer amusing takes on the overblown drama of relationships, every joke is drawn out into a set piece that lasts several minutes, meaning that they're consistently beaten into the ground. When Josh gets dragged into a relationship courtroom for perceived violations against his new girlfriend, it's sort of funny, but by the third time he's there defending his case, the joke has entirely lost steam. I was mistakenly hoping for a grounded but raunchy romantic comedy along the lines of the excellent You're the Worst (which recently received the FX kiss of death by being transferred to FXX), and the weird thing about Man Seeking Woman is that it's still trying to be that kind of show amid all the fantastical touches. But the fantasy bits just end up putting the emotions in air quotes, since every step in Josh's dating journey becomes a belabored sketch. A show about a single guy who actually dates trolls and fends off sex aliens might be refreshing, but Man Seeking Woman reduces those elements to cheap punchlines in what turns out to be a pretty unremarkable romantic comedy.

Premieres tonight at 10:30 p.m. on FXX.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Sins' (2014)

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

It's been several years since I wrote about the Thai thriller 13: Game of Death (also known as 13 Beloved), which was apparently a huge hit in Thailand, winning awards and spawning a sequel as well as an American remake, 13 Sins. The remake sticks to the same basic premise, with a downtrodden loser getting a mysterious phone call offering him huge amounts of money to engage in ever-more-depraved acts, starting with something mildly unpleasant and ending in murder. Like the original, 13 Sins has a tough time modulating its tone, shifting from dumb comedy to brutal horror to sappy melodrama, and not finding much success in any of them. 13 Sins also alters and adds to the mythology behind the sinister game, using it to bring in a final-act twist, but not in a way that makes the story more effective or illuminating.

Mark Webber, who's been solid in indie-movie supporting roles, is a bit of a wet blanket here as sad-sack main character Elliot Brindle, whose troubles include losing his job, trying to plan a wedding to his pregnant fiancee, and having to care for both a mentally challenged brother and a racist, destitute elderly father. He doesn't really hesitate to play the game that starts with the command to kill a fly, and soon he's gleefully engaging in mayhem and property destruction. But his journey from meek and passive to wild-eyed and aggressive doesn't have much depth, and it's hard to care about whether or not he can complete his tasks and turn his crappy life around.

Director and co-writer Daniel Stamm doesn't help things by giving extra focus to the nonsensical mythology, with Ron Perlman wasted in a supporting role as a detective tracking Elliot, and Pruitt Taylor Vince playing a stereotypical conspiracy theorist who helpfully explains the backstory. It just leads to disappointment with the anticlimactic twist at the end, and the supposed ethical dilemmas presented by the situation aren't as complex as the movie makes them out to be. Devon Graye is irritating as the mentally challenged brother, who, in typical movie fashion, is as intelligent or oblivious as the plot calls for him to be at various times.

The movie closes on a dumb laugh line that undermines the potential horror of what came before, not that it was all the disturbing to begin with. The higher production values give this version of the story some added gruesomeness (although the infamous shit-eating challenge from the original is left out), but that doesn't give it any added intensity. The original may be inconsistent, but at least it has some vision behind it; this is just an anonymous retread.

My top 10 non-2014 movies of 2014

Just under the wire for the end of the year, here's my annual list of my favorite movies I saw for the first time this year that were initially released in previous years. (Some comments reproduced from Letterboxd.)

1. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969) I watched this movie on an old tube TV in what was almost certainly the wrong aspect ratio, while I was visiting my grandmother over the summer (it was one of a random assortment of DVDs she had gotten from the library) -- and yet it completely captivated and surprised me the entire time. It's a brilliant inversion of the typical inspirational teacher drama, with a young (and lovely) Maggie Smith as a history teacher at a girls' school in Britain on the eve of World War II. At first she seems like the typical iconoclast who connects with students over the objections of the stuffy administrators, but soon it becomes clear that her influence is toxic and even deadly. The movie is impressively frank and forward-thinking about sex, not afraid to take dark turns, and incredibly well-acted. It was easily the most welcome surprise of my movie-watching this year.

2. The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) After seeing Unbroken, I have an even greater appreciation for this classic World War II epic about prisoners of war being forced by the Japanese army to help build a bridge in Thailand. Not only is the movie's sheer scope amazing (the final sequence, for which the filmmakers blew up an actual bridge, is one of the best in movie history), but the characters are also incredibly well-drawn, with Alec Guinness, William Holden and Sessue Hayakawa giving great, multi-layered performances. The movie is long but consistently engrossing, with a sense of tragic inevitability as it reaches its end. I can only imagine how immersive it would be to see on a big screen.

3. King of the Hill (Steven Soderbergh, 1993) I'm glad I managed to watch this before it left Netflix streaming (with literally a minute left), because it's easily one of Soderbergh's best, and possibly the most heartfelt, emotionally affecting movie he ever made. Jesse Bradford (who has gone on to a mostly undistinguished career) is wonderful as resourceful teen Aaron, who is forced to fend for himself thanks to a combination of irresponsible and/or sick parents, poverty and callous authority figures. The cast is filled with future famous faces, including Adrien Brody, Katherine Heigl, Lauryn Hill and Amber Benson, all of whom give strong performances. Soderbergh realizes the Depression-era setting masterfully, and his screenplay finds the perfect balance between nostalgia and disillusionment.

4. Ain't Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery, 2013) "The best Terrence Malick movie of 2013," I called this on Letterboxd a few months after seeing Malick's To the Wonder, which I did not care for. But I wouldn't want to reduce Lowery to a simple Malick imitator; although he also uses hushed narration (in the form of letters sent from one character to another) and idyllic nature shots, he's more plot-focused than Malick, and offers up more concrete character detail. Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara and Ben Foster are all excellent, giving the movie's central tragic love triangle a sense of real stakes, without one obvious correct path. Lowery builds up emotions that are real and honest, tied to a suspenseful, thrilling narrative, and that's more than Malick has been able to do for a while now.

5. Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) I'm grateful for this year's 75th-anniversary theatrical re-release, because otherwise I probably would have kept putting off seeing this movie (it takes dedication to set aside four hours for a single movie). It's quite the theatrical experience, too, complete with overture and intermission, and I think seeing it with an enthusiastic audience helped me to get swept up in the epic story. The flaws (mainly in the whitewashed portrait of slavery and Southern life and the gender politics) are obvious, but as an embodiment of old Hollywood grandeur, it's pretty spectacular. And Vivien Leigh is amazing. I was kind of blown away by the depth and complexity of Scarlett O'Hara, especially given how sexist and limited the movie's view of women can be.

6. A Life Less Ordinary (Danny Boyle, 1997) This has to be due for a reassessment, right? I remember it getting mostly negative reviews when it was released, and in general I think it's dismissed as one of Boyle's lesser films. Sure, it's a bit of a mess, but it's a delightful mess, with winning performances from Cameron Diaz and Ewan McGregor and an invigorating anything-goes mentality. The one lovely mid-film musical number makes me think it would probably work like gangbusters as a stage musical.

7. Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948) In past years, the TCM Festival has been responsible for a number of top picks on this list, and while I didn't make any amazing discoveries there this year, I did catch up with some enjoyable classics and obscurities, including this beloved Judy Garland/Fred Astaire musical. It's a strong mix of plot-driven and revue-style musical, with an infectious sense of joy and a typically spectacular performance from Garland, who is absolutely magical. I still haven't seen a lot of classic musicals, but whenever I see Garland onscreen, I want to see more.

8. Employees' Entrance (Roy Del Ruth, 1933) This campy pre-Code melodrama (another TCM Fest viewing) is basically Sexual Harassment: The Movie, but it's completely entertaining, with Warren William as the world's most ruthless department store manager preying on Loretta Young's vulnerable young employee. Loads of sexual innuendo, some gay subtext, and plenty of hilarious nastiness from start to finish.

9. Cutie and the Boxer (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013) I have very little patience for the social-issue advocacy that dominates documentaries these days, so I'm always happy to see acclaim and attention for a movie like this, a lovely and moving personal story about people who've lived fascinating lives. Both temperamental artist Ushio Shinohara and his endlessly patient wife Noriko are complicated, talented people who can't be reduced to simple talking-head interviews, and Heinzerling takes in the range of their daily experiences with insight but without judgement.

10. Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997) It's sad that we're at a point where it's a relief to see both Johnny Depp and Al Pacino playing normal human beings in a movie. They both do solid work here, in a crime drama that may be derivative of better movies but still packs a punch thanks to the slow-burning tragedy that is the relationship between the two main characters.

Honorable mention: Best Worst Movie (Michael Stephenson, 2009); Concussion (Stacie Passon, 2013); Curse of Chucky (Don Mancini, 2013); I Never Sang for My Father (Gilbert Cates, 1970)

Previous lists:

• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008