Weekanerd NYC: Shlock Horror, An Animator Speaks, Music Trivia & Prog Rockers

Monday, November 26th

• In The Mouth of Madness
  
• 10pm @ Metropol/Cinema Classics, 332 11th Street, Manhattan

This appears to be a C-list John Carpenter movie in which the lead character is based on Stephen King. Probably horrible, but it's free with a one drink minimum, and there are $3 PBR pints all night long. So if you bring a friend and get drunk enough you can have your own personal MST3K experience.

Tuesday, November 27th

• Animator Tom Sito
  
• 7pm @ School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, 3rd Floor
  

Sito was an animator at the House of Mouse during the mid 90s Renaissance, and worked on all their hits, starting with Mermaid and ending with Pocahontas. Good timing.

Wednesday, November 28th

• Music Trivia Quiz
  
• 9pm @ Freddy's Bar & Backroom, 485 Dean St, Brooklyn
  

Hey a trivia night, haven't done one of those in a while. Kind of a slow week. If you're the kind of music nerd that can field trivia questions about the last 50 years of alternative rock music, you might win some "scrill". That's mid-90s East Bay punk talk for "monies". $3 to play, free to watch.

Thursday, November 29th

• Claudio Sanchez and Ken Kelly
  
• 5pm @ Jim Hanley's Universem 4 West 33rd Street, Manhattan
  

What's with nerds and prog rock? Where you find one you always seem to find the other. Claudio Sanchez is the lead singer of Coheed and Cambria, and Ken Kelly is the artist who did the sci-fi-space-fantasy cover for their latest album, No World For Tomorrow.

Movie Review: The Mist

The premise of a good survival horror film should be familiar to anyone who had minor sadistic tendencies as a child; put some bugs in a jar, shake ‘em up, and watch the show. This scenario seems implicit in the plot of The Mist, the third collaboration between Stephen King and director Frank Darabont; a man finds himself barricaded in a supermarket with his son and about fifty of his small-town neighbors, with only a few plate-glass windows between them and a rolling mist containing a menagerie of limb-tearing nasties. But while the film boasts the heady tagline of “Fear Changes Everything”, this is not the man’s-inhumanity-to-man fable you might expect from the director of Shawshank Redemption, but instead a survival movie that believes the most horrifying monster of all isn’t mankind, but giant CG bug-things.


While the film starts with a confident, believable look at how people react when a problem from escalates from inconvenient to apocalyptic, before long we're waist-deep in typical creepy cralwer freak-outs, and the discord between humans is relegated to background. What little interperonsal conflict there is is stirred by Marcia Gay-Harden, playing a religious nut so intense she seems like she might have been walking around with a “The End is Near” sandwich-board even before the mist rolled in. The "Piously Insane Woman" is one of King’s specialties (most memorably portrayed by Kathy Bates in Misery), as are the alternately brave and dopey collection of townsfolk who make up the rest of the cast.  Visually, Darabont frames these exaggerated archetypes with jerky handheld shots, injecting realism in the cinematography when none exists in the script.

Of course none of this would be a problem if the splatter scenes were interesting enough to sustain the film, and they certainly try. Just about every bug monster related attack you ever learned from Pokemon gets some screen time; String Shot, Poison Sting, and Slash are all featured prominently, and let’s just say they’re Super Effective. There’s even an larvae-in-stomach sequence that would be more horrifying if it didn’t so closely resemble an Aqua Teen Hunger Force gag meant to mock such monster movie clichés. And while there’s a fair amount of energetic dismemberment and even a few gasp-inducing moments of body horror, the tension is diminished by how little you care about the characters. Thomas Jane plays the film's caring father protagonist (though title of "hero" belongs more to the unassuming clerk played by Toby Jones, in the film's most natural performance), and while Jane has an appealing screen presence he's saddled with a character that never aspires to be anything other than decent and bland, and your desire to see him escape with his son is about the same as your desire to see him eviscerated by giant spiders.

The only risk taken in this film comes at the end, where the movie encourages you to forget everything you saw in the last two hours and enjoy what could be mistaken for a five-minute episode of the Twilight Zone. That’s not a bad thing; if nothing else, the out-of-nowhere ballsiness of the ending leaves you with a lasting impression, as it certainly breaks down a few comfort barriers that you'd expect to remain in place, given how by-the-numbers everything that came before was.

AHR's Grade: Solid Hollywood C

Weekanerd NYC: Stephen King For Free, Future President Colbert, Johnnie To, and the Men of She-Hulk

Monday, October 22nd

• Pet Sematary
  
• 10pm @ Riffifi, 332 11th Street, Manhattan

Why is it spelled "Sematary?" That's not a word. Free, no cover, and $3 PBRs if you're into that kinda thing.

Tuesday, October 23th

• Stephen Colbert
  
• 8pm @ Kaufman Concert Hall, Lexington Ave and 92nd Street
  

Stephen Colbert, AKA our next president, promotes his new book I Am America (And So Can You!). Tickets are a whopping $35, but as an American, if you can't afford it you have no one to blame but yourself.

Wednesday, October 24th

• Election & Triad Election
  
• 1pm @ The Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center Plaza & W. 65th Street, Manhattan
  

Remember when Hong Kong action movies were really big for a while? Here's a couple of mobster movies by Chinese director Johnnie To. You can order tickets for $11 bucks each online, but they're playing back to back, so it seems like you can probably sneak into the second one, right?

Thursday, October 24th

• Peter David and Dan Slott
  
• 6pm @ Jim Hanley's Universe, 4 West 33rd Street, Manhattan
  

Slott and David will be signing She-Hulk #22. I don't know why I'm not reading this book, Slott and David are so awesome. Apparently issue #22 is the beginning of the new arc, so now's the time for slowbies like me to get with the program.