Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Friday the 13th
Directed by Marcus Nispel
D-
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Now showing

Michael Bay's boutique production company Platinum Dunes must be stopped. Dedicated to remaking cheap-ass antique horror movies from the Paleolithic VHS era, it coasts on brand names, presumably with a mission statement to gloss up and sand down whatever crude pleasures such skanky pictures offered in the first place. Who could think of reduxing that 1980s pay-cable staple The Hitcher, only to scrap the famous severed-finger-in-the-french-fries scene? Bay's lackeys did it just a couple years ago.

There's no lazier slasher-flick series to adapt than the tiresome legend of Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th. A cheap knockoff cribbed from John Carpenter's technically adroit, dead-from-the-neck-up Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham's unstoppable series of rank ineptitude stumbled into a winning formula: Beautiful young people fuck each others' brains out, only to pay for it once that guy with the hockey mask and machete pops out of nowhere and mutilates them.

Sure, there's an entire essay that could be written tying this phenomenon to AIDS, the '80s and Puritanical cultural anxieties--but just between you and me, I don't feel like sitting through any of this garbage again to do my research.

Yet--as fervently explained to me by a critic friend who's also a slasher-movie aficionado--the whole appeal of these flicks is that when you're nerdy and lonely and not getting laid, you can at least watch a whole bunch of gorgeous, vapid people screw and then suffer horribly for doing so.

Leave it to bullying frat-boy Bay to misunderstand that part of the equation. Directed by Marcus Nispel, his new Friday the 13th isn't so much a remake as it is a mishmash of those first, second and third pictures, constantly rebooting itself whenever it runs out of annoying kids to kill.

The biggest difference here isn't in the sleek production values, silicone boobs and distinct air of Hollywood fakery you'd never find in the original pornlike efforts. It's that Bay and Nipsel zero in on their target audience for ridicule. Nerds and Star Wars fanboys die miserably in this picture. They're caught masturbating and are then eviscerated, enduring epic tortures while their wealthier, better looking, sexed-up cohorts are all dispatched relatively painlessly.

The fact that Travis Van Winkle's smarmy, rich kid Trent is a dead ringer for Michael Bay (right down to the haircut) has got to be some sort of inside joke, right?

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
Directed by Kevin Rafferty
B-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Feb. 20

Imagine a football game with all the starts and stops. Now imagine the game also constantly halts for talking-head interviews. You now have a pretty good idea of Kevin Rafferty's informative yet fairly lugubrious doc Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.

The subject is the infamous 1968 bout between the two Ivy League institutions, which culminated in Harvard making a ridiculous 16-point comeback in just 42 seconds. That should be fascinating enough, but Rafferty, who attended Harvard during the game, craves more context. Summoning team members from both sides--including Tommy Lee Jones, one of Harvard's offensive tackles--Rafferty (The Atomic Caf�, Feed) offers a Proustian evocation of a specific time and place.

Occurring at the height of the Vietnam war, the game (or, as it's dubbed, the Game) offered a brief respite from the antiwar rallies that were rampant at Harvard and less prevalent at the all-male Yale. Rafferty spends a lot of time on the war, but he also touches on the schools' gallery of future stars. Surely you knew Jones' roommate at the time was Al Gore. But did you know that Gore used to play "Dixie" on his touch tone phone? Or that Yalie Gary Trudeau probably based superconfident Doonesbury character D.B. on then-quarterback Brian Dowling? One Yale player dated a very quiet Meryl Streep, while another was roommates with our 43rd president (who's also the director's cousin).

Rafferty's style is almost comically minimalist. There's no music (except at the end), no fancy editing tricks, zero pizzazz. Armed only with plainly shot video interviews, archival footage of the game and the very occasional photo, Harvard Beats Yale plods through its material, toggling between largish chunks of the match and then people yakking about it. It doesn't feel like a film so much as a presentation--which in this case is the ideal way to annotate this event. (Rafferty also released a book, which may include more info, but just isn't the same.)

Initially the aesthetics are infuriatingly boring. But once Rafferty gets into the meat and potatoes, his film becomes unexpectedly addictive, which is a benefit of being insanely exhaustive.

The Wild Child
Directed by Fran�ois Truffaut
B+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Feb. 20

"To Jean-Pierre L�aud," reads the dedication at the beginning of Fran�ois Truffaut's 1970 film The Wild Child. That's not just a thank you to the French New Wave favorite--introduced as a teenager in The 400 Blows--but an acknowledgment that a decade had passed since that thorny ode to adolescence. In other words:Time to do it again.