Let me cut straight to the point – Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is phenomenal. It is a ceaselessly gorgeous showcase for Miyazaki’s unmistakeable cinematic genius. It is potentially his finest film since 1997′s Mononoke Hime, and perhaps the most joyful motion picture to be made by any director since his own My Neighbor Totoro first hit screens in 1988. It has been labelled as a “light” and “simplistic” film, but it is also a powerfully deep (if brief) journey to the core of all of Miyazaki’s key motifs – environmental integrity, social equality and feminist determinism.

I don’t throw the word “genius” around lightly. With Ponyo, it becomes clear that not only does Miyazaki appear incapable of making a film that is anything less than revelatory, but that as he approaches the grand old age of 70, he is still making films with the exuberance and passion of a young man. It is an unrelentingly ebullient picture, every second packed with an almost rapturous glee for the boundless potential of humankind.

If that sounds a little excessive, just wait until Ponyo hits American theaters next month; from the the first frame to the last, I guarantee you’ll have a mile-wide smile plastered on your face. In fact, I smiled so much that, in retrospect, it seems difficult to believe that a film that is so fun could be so very profound.

Ostensibly about a young boy and a goldfish, the more left unsaid about the highly compartmentalized plot, the better. Thematically, it borrows liberally from all of Miyazaki’s own films (particularly his screenplay for Whisper of the Heart), but there is a certain undercurrent of Grand Scale science fiction that evokes the works of Osamu Tezuka and Leiji Matsumoto; there is even an unmistakable tip of the hat to Walt Disney’s Pinnochio! It is the first time that Miyazaki has overtly paid tribute to the animators who influenced him, and it seems as if Miyazaki has accepted his place in the pantheon and allowed himself a moment to paint in the broad strokes of his predecessors.

With Ponyo, Miyazaki has tapped into the mainspring of his art and created a film of surpassing power and beauty. It appears difficult for me to express my respect for his work without degenerating into pure uncut enthusiasm; suffice it to say that Miyazaki is forever making exactly the kind of movie I want to see: rejuvenating, optimistic and permeated by a sense of wonder. Time and again, he flawlessly executes the loftiest aspirations of the cinema, and Ponyo is no exception.

Note: I have not seen the Disney dub, and don’t intend to, and can only encourage filmgoers to see this (and every) foreign feature in its original language with subtitles.

Less about baseball and more about the difficulties inherent in being Chinese and bi/homosexual, City Without Baseball has received no small amount of press in Hong Kong. This is, without question, the most mainstream, high-profile film yet from HK addressing one of China’s great unspoken taboos. It’s also a fascinating exercise in creative casting: all of the actors are non-professionals who are actual members of the Hong Kong Baseball Team, and the story is woven loosely from anecdotes they provided.

On the surface, the plot is about the their battle to win in the Pan-Asian League despite being from Hong Kong, a city that is generally unaware that it even has a baseball team. But the real story is that of a number of players experiencing conflicts of sexual identity. This struggle is graphically illustrated by another of the film’s major talking points: it features a copious amount of male frontal nudity. It is hard to underscore how rare this is in any kind of Chinese film – one can only imagine that the pseudo-documentary nature of the picture allowed the censors to even consider it for release; and it’s not even Cat III!

The movie certainly represents a sea-change in HK’s traditional portrayal of young men. Though a smooth, idol-oriented veneer is applied, these are all young professional athletes at the peak of their physical shape being highly sexualized in the service of humanizing homosexuality in a culture notoriously adverse to the subject. For this alone, it is deserving of a certain amount of scrutiny.

Which is not to say, pun inevitable, that this is a home run of a picture. Lawrence Ah Mon directs, and coming from a lengthy spate of second-string action and triad pictures, he brings his typically glossy, vacuous aesthetic with him. The intersecting plots hang by flimsy threads, and the cinematography is wildly incongruous to the subject matter. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to be pulled into this film, thanks to the phenomenal amateur performances from the members of the Hong Kong Baseball Team and the frankly wonderful script by first-time screenwriter Scud.

Even in an industry obsessed with nicknaming its talent, it’s hard not to pay attention to a pseudonym as symbolically potent as Scud. Not only is his maiden film a bit of a tactical blow aimed at a country already obsessed with pretty young men, its overt phallusy (let me invent a word, dammit) is certainly reflected in the film’s frank examination of sexual crisis. All this aside, the important thing is that this boy can write. Many a scene veering dangerously close to traditional, overpoweringly nostalgic Hong Kong melodrama is saved at the last moment by a line of dialogue so revelatory that more than once I was jolted back to attention.

Its calculated sexuality is surprising because it focuses on men, and in a brazenly straightforward and even lurid fashion that would never, ever fly even in an America offering. Its script is shockingly competent and oftentimes sincerely wonderful. By all rights, a film by a b-list director from a first-time gay writer with a cast made up entirely of non-actors focused around a sport no Chinese national cares about and featuring a lengthy procession of naked men has no right being this engaging. If not necessarily a triumph of filmmaking, its popularity is certainly a triumph for the visibility of gay rights in China, which is an honor very few other films in the history of queer cinema can share.

Pretty heady for a picture that is ostensibly about how everyone in China hates baseball.

Yes, Slumdog. I agree with the consensus complaint that it is completely contrived that Jamal knows the answers to every question because something happened in his past that informs every answer, but let me add to that by saying that the questions are all common knowledge in the first place, and it drives me insane that the questions just happen to follow the progression of his life chronologically. I mean come the fuck on.

What’s significantly worse than that, though, is that Latika has zero personality, is raped and forced into a decade of prostitution, and then everything is magically fixed when Gangster Brother says, “I hope you can forgive me”. Bathtub, guns, pew pew, etc. Everyone’s happy! Fuck that shit. Why does she even want to be with Jamal? What is going to happen? Are they going to hold hands? He doesn’t know her fucking last name!

I understand that I’m the guy who watches exploitation films with significantly more brutal abuse for significantly more abstract reasons, but that’s an entirely different paradigm predicated on shock responses. Latika seems to have been written to play the role of the sympathetic but retarded fuckdoll in a Nazisploitation film, but instead they’ve inserted her into what we are meant to believe is a serious film about true love. I think that respecting this movie is dependent upon enjoying the idea of an utterly gorgeous but completely vacuous abused woman who will fall madly in love with an ugly guy because he stalks her for long enough.

Fuck. That. Shit. …Fuck it!

Never mind that the basic premise of Good Brother/Gangster Brother/Shared Love Interest feels lifted from every other HK Triad film out there, or that the much-touted final dance sequence is like a really shitty version of the end of Kitano’s Zatoichi.

But hey, the music was good. And I liked the kid jumping into the giant vat of shit; it was like a metaphor for the rest of the movie.

Mirrors started off really creepy, but even though I had taken an ambien after several drinks when I decided to start watching the movie, it still seemed really dumb at times. I had expected improvisational drug and alcohol abuse to really help this type of flick. Oh well.

Now, I totally adore Alexandre Aja, mostly because High Tension is so scary and creepy and delicious, proving so even on second and third viewings, that it’s hard to expect anything less than that from Aja’s other directorial efforts. But even with Kiefer Sutherland’s innate creepiness (which my lovely husband decries, but I maintain that’s just because he hasn’t viddied Eye for an Eye or Freeway which galvanized the basic B-list actor in my mind, changing him from the goofy looking son of big Donald to Kreepy Kief) it just can’t maintain that big scare factor all the way through. I understand that people associate Kiefer Sutherland with 24 more than anything else these days, but I don’t watch that show, so they can believe what they want; I know the truth. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, there were too many dumb, ridiculous moments in the movie that didn’t make sense, and they didn’t even make the film as a whole scarier or creepier. For this, I blame Kreepy Kief.

But we’ll come back to that. The burning, gory pieces of people that were visible in the mirrors but “came to life” in the reflection, (so, real life) were great—pretty much all of the first half of the film was quite frightening, and the scene with Amy Smart’s mouth ripping open was delightfully gory and perfect, but the whole nun story line with the multiple personalities explanation seemed contrived and downright annoying. Just…didn’t…work.

I think this is what the problem is: you can’t put a creepy actor in a film about said actor being harassed by creepiness. You need a non-creepy actor to successfully put the main character through creepiness in any effective way. Now if Kreepy Kief had been doing the creepy stuff, I think it would have been a much better flick. It was still fun to watch though. Do better next time, Aja! I have high hopes!

Honestly, I didn’t expect much from The Ruins. I didn’t expect to be scared or even freaked out. But there was something about this flick. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t really make any mistakes. Usually, in what Mike has coined “The Don’t Go On Vacation” flick, you have stupid Americans who ultimately possess no redeeming characteristics, and yeah, they get slaughtered, but it’s all in fun and you don’t really feel that bad for them. But this is amazingly different since these kids seem a lot like me on vacation. Maybe they’re a little impetuous, but really, I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity that they have. And sure, you’re a shitty American if you can’t habla a little Espanol on vacay to Spanish-speaking countries, but no one expects you to know Mayan.

It’s really like there are four tragic heroes. Each of the four main characters has some obvious tragic flaw, but they also each act fairly intelligently, at least for a horror flick. And the horror was Japanese-style creepy. The whole the-monster-is-inside you, near zombification of the characters, is perhaps the freakiest type of horror, and The Ruins pulls it off quite horrifically!

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. Throw in a healthy dash of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a little 28 Days Later, and a weird curveball’s worth of Gladiator, and Marshall has created a monster – an amalgamation of other people’s genre triumphs (well, roll with me on Thunderdome) that somehow manages to be lumbering, dumb, and ready to throw a little girl into a lake.

The kicker of it is, Marshall is (was? will be again?) a fantastic director – I feel comfortable calling his first feature, Dog Soldiers, one of the best werewolf films of all time, and his 2005 picture The Descent is without question the best British (if not flat out best) horror film of the new millennium. But Doomsday is so unforgivably bad that, try though I might have to enjoy it, I couldn’t help but be crushed under the weight of its ample absurdity – and this is coming from me, whose academic focus is firmly rooted in exploitative trash.

It’s clear that Marshall is shooting for a Carpenter-style pulp-actioner, but he makes the fatal mistake of playing it utterly straight. Whereas Carpenter’s Escape movies, or for that matter They Live or Big Trouble in Little China, deliver serial-style thrills with a generous side-order of nudges and winks, Doomsday shambles on humorlessly, destroying what could have been enjoyable scenes with grim determination. And for a movie this insane, a movie that asks so much from its audience, levity should be essential.

Doomsday doesn’t just jump the shark. It jumps the shark, then finds the shark’s mom and fucks her up the ass for half an hour. In a film full of silly mini-premises that run from clever to barely-tolerable, you will eventually experience what will henceforth be known as The Twist, capital letters, a “surprise” so fucking unbearably stupid that it defies all defense. It is not an overstatement to suggest that I was desperate for this movie to end.

Right before we hit The Twist, Adrian Lester (whom I resolve to still like despite his role in this catastrophe) prophetically throws his hands up and says, “Fuck it!” I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the film’s motto, if it was embroidered on the wrap jackets of the cast and crew. If you want to see what Marshall can do, pick up The Descent and prepare to be blown away; should you find yourself eyeing Doomsday, even out of sheer curiosity, I urge you to follow Lester’s example, and fuck it.

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly.

For awhile everything was going fairly well. Not great. But not horribly. Things were rolling along in that not too uncomfortably scary way that The Descent started, and I was expecting Marshall, in M. Night Shyamalan-style, to replicate the format that had worked for him before—to twist it up a bit, pull out all the stops half way through, rock me to my core, and make me crap my pants a little. And then it happened. And I wanted to crap my pants, but for a different reason. Somehow, in some sort of ill-advised homage to Lord of the Rings, 28 Days Later, and Braveheart, Marshall instead, and unfortunately, delivered a mixture of Nothing But Trouble, Waterworld, and Queen of the Damned (remember? with Aaliyah? yeah…). Right, I’m embarrassed for Neil Marshall. And I feel a little cheated. Why, Neil Marshall, why did you do this to us?