Paul Isaacs

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
Starring Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr. Written by Paul WS Anderson. Directed by Alexander Witt. (14A) 95 min.

The interlinked relationship between the Resident Evil movies and the original videogames is almost Borgesian in its complexity. The film being released now, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, is the first sequel to the original Resident Evil movie, which was itself partly based on the sequel to the first Resident Evil videogame, Resident Evil 2. Resident Evil: Apocalypse, therefore, is actually based on the third game in the series, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis — except unfortunately, by the time filming started, the name "Nemesis" had already been taken as the post-colon addendum to the 10th Star Trek (or fourth Star Trek: The Next Generation) movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. Which of course tanked. What all this means, then, is that Resident Evil: Apocalypse, while being an adaptation of Resident Evil 3 (the game), is actually Resident Evil 2 (the movie), and even though it's called Apocalypse, it's actually Nemesis. You got that? Live long and prosper.

Still, all you really need to know about Resident Evil: Apocalypse is this: Toronto gets nuked. Quite spectacularly, in fact. The film begins where the first left off, with wonky-featured supermodel and Mr. Potato Head stand-in Milla Jovovich roaming the zombie-fied environs of Raccoon City, a.k.a. our very own GTA. This time 'round she's set up against the non-eponymous Nemesis, a giant evil cyborg designed by the even gianter and eviller Umbrella Corporation, whose zombie-virus almost wiped out the city in the first film. Jovovich, along with her trusty band of human targets, must escape Raccoon City before sunrise, when for reasons too facile to explain, Umbrella plans to drop a nuclear bomb on top of it. Aside from a window-shattering abseil down City Hall, there's precious little to recommend here, and the movie doesn't even replicate the guilty fun of the original — admittedly very poor — film.

On the positive side, at least they can't come back here to shoot the sequel.




Q&A: TOMMY STINSON
Eye Weekly music section, Sep 9/04

Bassist Tommy Stinson was 14 when his former band, The Replacements, recorded their 1981 slacker-punk classic, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash — and he was still only 24 when the Mats broke up in 1991, with their swansong slacker-MOR classic, All Shook Down. Since then, Stinson's fronted the underachieving Bash & Pop, the non-achieving Perfect (whose long-shelved debut, Once, Twice, Three Times a Maybe, is out Sept. 14, a mere seven years after it was recorded) and has recently released his first, excellent, solo album, Village Gorilla Head. From 1997, he's also played bass for the petrifying behemoth that is Chinese Democracy-era Guns N' Roses. We caught up with Stinson on the tour bus with his backup band, Alien Crime Syndicate, somewhere the hell in America.

This is your first solo tour — how's life on the road treating you?
I'm totally fucked. We're travelling from Phoenix to Denver, and it's been a straight, 14-hour drive. Every tour there's one of these bad routing things — you just have to suck up and suck dick. I don't even drive, and the guys up front are fuckin' dying. I just sit at the back and loiter. [The noise of an engine cutting out is heard.] I think we hit a dead end.

It's been 11 years since you last released a full-length album (Bash & Pop's Friday Night is Killing Me). What took you?
I couldn't find the right guitar chords. I've been working on demos, but I only thought about putting a record together last March. The lyrics on a couple songs, like "Someday," date back from when I moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago. It just took me a decade to get the chords right.

The lyrics on Village Gorilla Head are pretty downbeat. They're very reflective of the trials and tribulations of a young postmodern poet. [Laughs uncontrollably for about 20 seconds.] Or maybe just an old man.

The Perfect record is finally coming out, but does Axl Rose plan to release Chinese Democracy in his lifetime?
We don't have a release date right now, but I'm out of the loop. I'll probably hear about it on CNN. That's also where I'll hear about the next tour.

Who's a better boss, Paul Westerberg or Axl Rose?
Axl, definitely. It's more of a collaborative effort with him. Paul would come into the studio and say, "This is the how the song goes, and this is how you play it," end of story. But I actually helped write some stuff on the Guns N' Roses record... or at least it was there last time I listened.

There's a song on Chinese Democracy called "TWAT."
Actually, it's called "There Was a Time." But we shortened the title to fit on the setlist.

Since the Pixies reunion has been a sell-out success, have there been moves to get The Replacements back together?
I've heard some talk about that, but I hope I squashed the rumours adequately. I don't want to close off the idea, but for the next few years I'm busy doing my own thing. If there's a need to do it, or a want to do it, it might make sense. But certainly not now.




EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
Starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco. Written by Alexi Hawley. Directed by Renny Harlin. (18A) 112 min. Opens Aug 20.

Never trust a film whose production history sounds more interesting than the movie itself. According to reports, Exorcist: The Beginning’s original director, Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader, was fired by the studio because his movie wasn’t gory enough and dwelt too heavily on Catholic religious themes — which is a bit like firing Woody Allen for being too Jewish, or complaining that Oklahoma! is too heavy on the singy-dancey.

Exorcist: The Beginning was already in the can when the studio told Schrader to shove his crucifix where Linda Blair didn't. His replacement, however — action hack Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea) — didn’t just re-edit and re-shoot extra scenes, but made the entire picture all over again. (Schrader’s version may yet be released on DVD.)

Schrader says his Exorcist was a “character-driven period drama”; the producers, on the other hand, wanted Event Horizon in a desert — a maggot-infested-baby-driven period drama, if you will. Stellan Skarsgård plays Father Merrin — a younger take on Max von Sydow’s famous role — who’s sent to a Kenyan archaeological dig where a church lays buried under the sand. The excavation unearths more than just buried statues, though: the whole town seems haunted, and the dig’s leader, Father Gionetti (David Bradley) exhibits decidedly un-Catholic behaviour: carving a swastika into his chest with a penknife, for example.

I initially thought the swastika scene was supposed to be a satirical comment on the Vatican’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis, but it quickly becomes apparent that Harlin only included the image because, y’know — stuff with blood on looks cool. The first Exorcist relied on psychological as much as visual horrors, but The Beginning is zaftig with such oogum-boogum ghost train clichés: CGI bats, severed heads, children’s nursery rhymes, and scenes that begin quietly and SUDDENLY GETS VERY LOUD! And then quiet again. AND THEN LOUD! And so forth. The studio has got their wish: this is a very gory film. But it’s also a total bastardization of the original — wait for the Schrader DVD.




WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
Starring Naomi Watts, Mark Ruffalo. Written by Larry Gross. Directed by John Curran. (14A) 99 min. Opens Aug 20.

We Don't Live Here Anymore is a small, drab, often excruciating movie — and thank the Lord for that. Based on two Andre Dubus short stories, it's a startlingly plain and intelligent picture: no special effects, no stunt casting, no edgy hip-hop soundtrack — just a whip-smart script and a bunch of great actors doing that weird thing actors are supposed to do but never quite manage. What's it called? Oh yeah, acting.

Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern play Jack and Terry Linden, two bored, thirty-something middle-class marrieds. Jack's an English professor at the local university, where he works with his best friend, Hank (Peter Krause), whose wife Edith (Naomi Watts) he's secretly schtupping between classes. Hank, meanwhile, reacts to his cuckolding only with amused indifference, more traumatized by his writer's block than anything: at one point, he grills his unpublished manuscript on the backyard barbecue, then sells a poem about the incident to The New Yorker.

The New Yorker namedrop seems apt here: we've seen this sort of adulterous academics escapade countless times before — and we've certainly read it before, in Updike, in Bellow and in the magazine itself. What distinguishes We Don't Live Here Anymore is the craft and sensitivity with which director John Curran approaches these well-worn clichés. His direction is almost touchingly boring in its realism, single-mindedly focusing on the mood swings and cover-ups of his central four characters at the expense of any grandstanding gimmickry.

In the hands of a Bob Rafelson or Alan Ball, this would have been a misogynist bluster, or just another predictable jibe at suburban mores, but Curran gives each of his characters the benefit of the doubt, which pays dividends during the movie's emotionally messy conclusion. The cast is also excellent: Dern gets her best role since 1996's Citizen Ruth, while Ruffalo, Watts and Krause give fully rounded performances.




SAMSARA
Starring Shawn Ku, Christy Chung. Written by Nalin Pan, Tim Baker. Directed by Nalin Pan. (14A) 145 min. Opens Aug 13.

This tale of high Buddhism and low sexual indiscretion is the first film to be shot in the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh, a barren, isolated region of India populated solely by farmers, monks and the odd goat. Though it's an ultimately sterile picture, that Samsara was made at all is an achievement: during principle photography, three Ladakh monks and a German tourist were shot by Kashmiri militants, the entire film set was flooded, the whole subcontinent almost plunged into nuclear war, and director Nalin Pan lost his dog.

Considering Pan's crew might have been reduced to radioactive ash at a moment's notice, it's a wonder so little of that behind-camera tension is worked into the foreground. This is a basic bildung, Eastern-style: the four boundless states of mind meet Five Easy Pieces. Shawn Ku plays a terminally unsatisfied, sexually curious monk named Tashi — a kind of Buddhist George Constanza — who starts to question the value of his monastic solitude after an encounter with a beautiful farmhand, Pema (Christy Chung).

Even the Buddha, Tashi reasons, was allowed to experience worldly pleasures before renouncing them forever. So when the local Lama, Apo (Sherab Sangey), catches Tashi indulging in some one-handed clapping underneath his monastery bedsheets, the monk decides to escape and settle down with Pema, with whom he raises a son. It's not long, though, before Tashi begins to also tire of his new life, starting a trade war with a local grain bandit (Lhakpa Tsering) and fawning over one of Pema's migrant workers, Sujata (Neelesha Bavora).

Although the performances excel, and the Himalayan photography is as intoxicating as you might expect, Samsara is little more than an Indian counterpart to one of those interminable (though crowd-pleasing) Giuseppe Tornatore coming-of-age pictures. The Miramax-loving foreign-film punters should go home happy; the rest of us will feel only a Zen-like indifference.




LITTLE BLACK BOOK
Starring Brittany Murphy, Holly Hunter. Written by Melissa Carter, Elisa Bell. Directed by Nick Hurran. (PG) 105 min. Opens Aug 11.

That Little Black Book is irritatingly acted, boorishly scripted and directed with all the panache of an Abdominizer infomercial, should not, on first accounts, distinguish it from any other number of dull, hyperbolic Hollywood movies currently doing the rounds. At the 75-minute mark however, this superficial Brittany Murphy rom-com steps over the line of being merely frightful to become what can only be described, in George W. Bush-style language, as a work of actual and terrifying evil.

Murphy plays Stacy Holt, assistant producer on a trashy, Springer-like daytime show, hosted by the non-amusingly named Kippie Kann (Kathy Bates), sorry victim of several hundred tiresome alliteration-related puns throughout. All is peachy with Stacy's life until she's told to prep a story about a bulimic supermodel, Lulu (Josie Maran), and discovers the model used to date her current boyfriend, Derek (Office Space's Ron Livingston), a shifty sports agent.

This chance encounter sets off alarm bells in Stacy, and, suspecting the worst about Derek, she steals his Palm Pilot and arranges to meet several of his old girlfriends, on the pretext of interviewing them for segments on Kann's show. Stacy starts to question the morality of her plan, though, when she develops an unexpected kinship with one of the exes, Joyce (Julianne Nicholson), and aches to reveal her true identity.

Little Black Book is so anodyne that viewers can gloss over the fact that Stacy would, in real life, be an unconscionable hatemonger. What's so vile about the movie isn't just Stacy's character, however, or the trashing of a talented cast, or the knuckle-skinning dialogue, or even Murphy's nails-on-a-blackboard, neo-Tracy Ullman performance in the lead — but the film's climax, an orgiastically misanthropic scene that simultaneously lets Stacy off the moral hook and lectures the audience for ever cheering her on (as if we ever would).

If Little Black Book were a dog, we'd shoot it. The evildoers must be punished.




JIM MUNROE'S PERPETUAL MOTION ROADSHOW
Sep 1, 8pm. PWYC. Gladstone Ballroom, 1124 Queen W. 416-531-4635.

Jim Munroe knows how to take his show on the road.

Jim Munroe is a little bit yuck. The self-proclaimed gutter-culture novelist, professional computer nerd, sometime corporate media scourge and biweekly eye columnist was feeling somewhat off his game last Friday. The day before, when he left his first message on my voicemail, Munroe spoke with a high, excitable drawl. The small press reading tour he organizes, the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, was loping into town that evening for a performance at Holy Joe's on Queen.

The next day, however, when I met Munroe at the Green Room over coffee and avocado sandwiches — they have to be vegan — his eyes were watery, the nose sniffley, the thick brown hair somewhat lank, and his previous chipperness had been absorbed into a thick, throaty baritone. "I've got this summer cold, so it was difficult to enjoy the show," he says. "I hope I didn't offend anyone."

That seems unlikely. The Roadshow, which Munroe describes as the "bastard child of a vaudeville show and a punk rock tour," brought in about 30 attentive punters to Holy Joe's tiki-themed, fairy-lit lounge — not bad for such a small venue with a line-up of as-yet-unfamous underground poets and cartoonists. "If there's only 20 people who are interested and engaged, that's fine," says Munroe. "You don't need a stadium or anything."

The whole atmosphere seemed pretty mellow and informal. As local artist Willow Dawson concluded her "improv drawing" recital — pencilling a live comic strip onstage to audience suggestions — one of the other speakers, San Franciscan poet Bucky Sinister, took a quiet yawn-and-stretch on a sofa at the back. Sinister's fellow performers have given him the touring nickname Roadkill. "This has been a lot of fun," Sinister says. "It's like the cheapest road trip ever."

Munroe came up with the concept for Perpetual Motion while promoting his third novel, Everyone in Silico. (Like all but the first of his novels, EIS was self-published by his own imprint, No Media Kings.) That tour, spent gigging at bars and crashing on friendly floors across the US, made life on the road pretty sweet. So from April last year, Munroe decided to use his expertise and cross-country contacts to organize the Roadshow, a tour circuit and PR vehicle for up-and-coming or otherwise ignored indie artists.

The idea is simple: shove three or four performers, Monkees-style, into a car together and shuttle 'em across a half-dozen venues around the northeastern US and Canada. The crew have to live, drive, perform and piss together for a week; money for gas and grub comes from pass-the-bucket audience collections.

"There's a quintessential complaint of the Midwestern author who works for a large publishing company: 'No one's paying attention to me.'" says Munroe. "It's because they don't make enough money to justify the infrastructure that could send them on a 20-city book tour. You have to book an Indigo or Chapters, pay for hotels, for food, for a publicist in each town — it's very costly. I'd be lucky to get a launch in my own town."

Perpetual Motion, then, is an organic, web-led antidote to the corporate, Chapters-in-every-city sort of book tour. As the tour's Svengali/promoter, Munroe helps to arrange venues and find sleeping-spots for the artists. Most of this is done via internet contacts and his website, www.nomediakings.org. The site, which features a blog, a resource guide for wannabe self-publishers and an Adbusters-style parody (Munroe used to be the magazine's managing editor) called Monopoly: The Media Edition, has built a large and profitable net community for the author. When he announced the publication of his latest novel, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, to his email list of 1,800, Munroe made nearly $1,000 in online sales within a day.

Munroe's beef with major publishers is longstanding: his first novel, the anti-corporate superhero fantasy, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, was published in 1999 by HarperCollins; subsequently Munroe has remained independent, and bought back the rights for Flyboy.

"Publishing isn't rocket science," Munroe says, "I'd been doing zines since I was 17, and I didn't see why I couldn't try books either."

The HarperCollins problem started with stickers. "It was more than just Murdoch himself, although there was that," Munroe says. "I had to bully the staff into helping me — and it wasn't like I had these outrageous requests. For example, I wanted to do a promotion for Flyboy, like giving out stickers or something. I knew that people who liked the novel would like stickers, but what to do about it, you know? I didn't like being stuck in a power dynamic where I had to force people to do what I could do fine on my own. Without any support, I was like, 'Why am I here?'"

No Media Kings gave Munroe access to a different sort of community, he says. "As soon as I became independent, I had all these new people that wanted to help. The readership has grown — people are a lot more interested now."

Munroe is marketing Unspeakable Evil with his usual combination of net-savvy and old-fashioned schtick: the author promoted Everything in Silico by namedropping as many corporate brands as possible within the text (Hershey's, Gap), then invoicing each company for a $10 product-placement fee.

The new novel follows the adventures of Kate and Lilith, two artsy Toronto gadflies, the latter of whom may or may not be a demon (its working title was Hipster Hellspawn). The book is written in the form of a blog named www.roommatefromhell.com and Munroe has begun posting one section per day from the book into a real-life blog with the same address. He's also certified the book under a Creative Commons license, which means readers are free to riff off the stories with their own fictional works (so long as they're not-for-profit).

"The same creativity I put into the books, I also try to put into getting the books out into the world," Munroe says. "It's not for everyone. I'm not interested in having employees come to help me out. I don't want No Media Kings to grow. It's a not-for-profit company."

"Actually," he adds, "it's more like an anti-profit company. And I only call it a company for fun."


An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil is available at bookstores now.