FILM CLIPS C O N T I N U E D
“EPIC!
A CINEMATIC MASTERPIECE.” “A MONUMENTAL ACCOMPLISHMENT.” “STUNNING!” “DAZZLING!” Jake Jake Hamilton, Hamilton, CBS-TV CBS-TV
Kurt Kurt Loder, Loder, MTV MTV
Jeremy Jeremy Smith, Smith, AIN’T AIN’T IT IT COOL COOL NEWS NEWS
H. H. Scott Scott Jolley, Jolley, VANITY VANITY FAIR FAIR
to his race. Series star Kate Beckinsale wisely passed on this nonsense. Instead, we get Rhona Mitra as female vampire (and Viktor’s daughter) Sonja, and she’s every bit as wooden here as she was in last year’s Doomsday. The first two films in the series weren’t great, but at least they offered up some fun and excitement. (RI) At Muvio Egyptian 24. WALTZ WITH BASHIR Filmmaker Ari Folman’s animated documentary uses personal stories as a way into a larger-scope, but still highly personalized treatment of the 1982 Lebanon War—one that invites the filmmaker’s own unwelcome war flashback, an ambiguous and surreal scene of the war’s Sabra and Shatila massacres, which leads Folman to worry that he’s repressed memories of his involvement in the killings. Waltz With Bashir does a suspiciously tidy bit of buckpassing toward its conclusion, but the stark, unfiltered scene of heartbreaking carnage at its end indicts all of humanity. (JM) At Landmark Harbor East. THE WRESTLER Director Darren Aronofsky’s bleak, strangely inspiring tale of a lonely man struggling with age and a desperate dedication to the brutal grind of
professional wrestling: Mickey Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a hulking, good-natured (outside the ring) jock who has—surprise—alienated his daughter Stephanie ( Evan Rachel Wood), and the pathos of an absentee dad trying to salvage a relationship with a neglected child is compelling. Smokin’ hot (and talented) Marisa Tomei plays world-weary single-mom exotic dancer Cassidy, whose scenes with the Ram coalesce into a picture of an awkward, unsure courtship. Aronofsky’s unvarnished strip-joint scenes and graphically violent wrasslin’action ain’t very pretty,but Rourke finds a way to connect to a man enduring humiliation and mortification of the flesh to remain part of the thing that gives him purpose: performance. (JM) ■ —The City Paper Clippers: John Barry, J. Bowers, Michael Byrne, G. Brian Davis, Anna Ditkoff, Serena Donadoni, Edward Ericson Jr., Steve Erickson, Jason Ferguson, R. Darryl Foxworth, Lee Gardner, Violet Glaze, Ian Grey, Evan Guilfoyle, Brooke Hall, Corey Hall, Jess Harvell, Cole Haddon, Eric Allen Hatch, Geoffrey Himes, Robert Ignizio, Martin L. Johnson, Joe MacLeod, Marc Masters, Bret McCabe, Al Shipley, Lauren Svrjcek, Wendy Ward.
DVD AGAINST THE DARK SONY PICTURES
STARTS FRIDAY, MARCH 6 - CHECK DIRECTORIES FOR LISTINGS AMC COLUMBIA 14 Mall of Columbia 410/423-0520
AMC LOEWS WHITE MARSH 16 White Marsh Blvd. & I-95 N. 800/FANDANGO #738
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60 | city paper
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SPECIAL MIDNIGHT SHOWS THURSDAY, MARCH 5 MARCH 4, 2009
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THE MOVIE When you’re a Steven Seagal fan, sometimes the direct-to-DVD market just gives and gives. This market—in which action-hero auteur Seagal has worked for most of this decade—has yet to produce something as blithely entertaining as On Deadly Ground, but sometimes an Against the Dark gets made. Full disclosure: Against the Dark is awful—this coming from a fan of both Seagal and awfulness—but the way in which it’s awful makes it a borderline great awfulness. It’s a Steven Seagal movie so, yes, he plays the strong and silent leader of a small band of highly skilled men and women who know how to inflict bodily harm with hand-to-hand combat and a variety of firearms and elaborately curved blades. Tagart (Tanoai Reed), in fact, looks like he could do some serious damage in a cage fight when he’s not slicing open throats. Just what they’re fighting makes Dark so ludicrously risible. You see, Seagal’s band of men and women are more an urban myth to the other characters in the movie, who have only heard about a crew of hunters who clean-up the city after a virus outbreak has infected most of the population and turned them into blood thirsty vampires or mutants or zombies (let’s call them vamptantbies, for short). No, the movie isn’t entirely sure what they are. And, yes, you did just read that Steven Seagal is now officially a vamptantbie slayer. Just don’t expect that many horror-movie affectations here. Dark tries to make the zombie-mutantvampire movie conform to the typical Seagal flick, and they make strange bedfellows. One survivor pack of four young people run into another uninfected couple, Morgan (Danny Midwinter) and Dorothy (Jenna Harrison), inside a hospital that is, conveniently, going to close itself off if they don’t get down to a security door in the subbasement to escape. Seagal’s team is trying to clear said hospital while an off-site military unit led by Keith David is planning to “sterilize”-—read: carpet bomb back to the Stone Age-—said hospital by dawn. Of course, everybody inside the hospital keeps running afoul of various vamptantbies. That’s right: Dark is Under Siege meeting Resident Evil, and it sadly doesn’t make the most of the setup. Seagal, in fact, is underused, only every so often getting to save small children from roving packs of blood thirsty vamptantbies and then stoically saying, “We don’t decide who’s right and wrong, we only decide who lives and dies.” At least his character is named Tao. Dark, though, does make its vamptantbies fun. They can not only run at a good clip, but also talk, reason, and set traps. And one of the few ingenious horror moments features a hospital-gown clad vamptantbie filing her teeth down to meat-ripping points, and then the camera pans down to show the small dusting of dental enamel from it coating the floor. Ew. THE DISC A boilerplate making-of featurette and a small library of other straight-to-DVD previews, including one for something called Zombie Strippers starring Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson. (BRET MCCABE)