The Fly (1986) and The Fly II (1989)

David Cronenberg’s nightmare love story horror flick “The Fly” is mad genius, sickly twisted, and lets Jeff Goldblum spin gold as a loner nerd scientist named Seth Brundle who wants to change the world as we know it. He doesn’t, but sure as hell changes his own corner when a teleportation experiment goes wrong and he zaps himself and a house fly from one souped-up self-built transport pod to another, two go in, one comes out. Cronenberg fires on all bloody cylinders, starting with a romance between Goldblum and Geena Davis as a reporter, then sci-fi fantasy, then body horror as Seth morphs to a superman assured he has jumped the evolutionary ladder to mad man when his body starts falling apart, and becoming ... another. Twenty-six years on “Fly” still shocks with Goldblum’s transformation under makeup, and then the stop-motion creatures that replace him. The lines are cheesy – “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” – but the visuals burn deep, as does Cronenberg’s obsession with dying and disease. Last note: Mr. C must release a director’s cut soon: Check out a cut scene on YouTube, as Seth makes a monkey-cat as part of his own healing scheme shown later. Insane. A

In “The Fly II,” Cronenberg buzzes off to better films, and we’re stuck with Chris Walas – the makeup guy on the first film – as director of a “Like Father, Like Son” spookfest. Let’s give it points: “Fly II” flies in a different direction as Martin, the mutant flyboy of Goldblum’s scientist and Davis’ reporter, is raised inside a mega-corp lab, and as a 20-year-old (really 5) falls in love, all flowers and dancing sweet. Sure as hell, though, we get a grisly transformation and all goes to shit fast with bad visual effects and a LOL “Alien” rip off as Marty McFly (tee-hee!) goes on a bender against his surrogate Mr. Burns daddy, so boring bad, he could be a 1970s Disney villain. Lee Richardson is the old man, and Eric Stoltz – he did “Mask” before this – is young Martin. It’s all a maggot baby so unworthy of Cronenberg I wanted to take a rolled-up magazine and … well, you know. C

Pina (2011)

Ignorance truly is bliss. I knew nothing of the documentary film “Pina,” or Pina Bausch, the avant-garde choreographer and subject of this brilliant movie/eulogy, when I entered the theater. What a wonderful education. Bausch was a German-born contemporary dance performer/ instructor/artist/feminist/chain-smoker who died weeks after agreeing to let director Wim Wenders (you know him, right?) make a 3D documentary of her work. She died and then the film died, but her dancers/followers/disciples resurrected the latter to honor the former. An Easter miracle. This is one of the films of 2011, documentary category and overall, shot in glorious big-screen 3D, which I sadly missed out on. 

Wenders starts his film on stages and dance studios within literal film frames, and then takes us out onto the streets, industrial parks, public swimming pools, EL trains, parks, and mountains of Pina’s home country, her dancers, young and old, performing works that touch on love, nature, water, and violence, the movement onscreen and the music so new and thrilling to these naïve eyes and ears, so energetic and beautiful, I was spell bound. He skips the boring this-than-that-happened of most bio-docs and lets Pina’s art speak for her as we watch men and women contort their bodies in unspeakable ways, out of tribute, love and joy. 

The best/most disturbing sequence has a pack of men picking/ jabbing/clutching a woman, it’s harrowing to behold, but amazing: Pina showing how sexist, condescending men openly treat women as a meat product or a car, an object to be bought. No heart. And yet Pina’s heart still beats damn strong. A must watch and listen. A

A Dangerous Method (2011)

When David Cronenberg -- master of exploding head psychological atom bombs, and violence mixed with sex – said he was making “A Dangerous Method,” the ménage a trois between pioneer head-shrinks Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, I was stoked. I wanted envelopes torched, singed paper ashes blown in the faces of prudes. So count me wanting, put out, so to speak. Except for a few wha? spanking scenes, “Dangerous” is all talk, and I should not be surprised, as this was once called “Talking Cure.” Our focus is on Spielrein, German Jew, wealthy, and hysterically mad, put in the care of Jung (Michael Fassbender), the protégé of master head doc Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Sabina bends Jung’s tight-starched collar, and Freud feuds, and Word War I dawns, and Jung’s last scene has him going like Michael Corleone’s last scene in “Godfather, Part II,” lawn chair and all. No burning desire, no passion. Talk. Knightly’s accent grinds, and Mortensen’s Freud has all the zing of Ask Jeeves, so it’s Fassbender’s show, and he’s damn good, but a notch below “Shame,” the 2011 sex-obsessed flick that’s all dangerous method. B-

The Gate (1987)

“The Gate” is one of those late-1980s hell-is-rising horror flicks that, if I saw at age13, I can’t recall. With a then-new diet of HBO’s “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Shining,” “Alien,” and much other horror, I may have laughed myself silly. I did this viewing, age 38. This story is all pre-CGI smoke and rubber-suited demons and zombies chasing after a middle schooler (Stephen Dorff) and his sister and best pal, after a portal to hell is uncovered in their back yard. Naturally. Silly, harmless, with big hair, and big phones that melt to the wall, the real fear here isn’t hell or ghouls, but the reaction Mom n’ Dad will have when they come home and see a smoldering mess of a house. How do you explain that? “The devil made me do it!” Forget the plot, it’s not worth the hassle. Dorff, sweet and innocent, has since carried a career playing vampires and guys who go thump in the night. Love the stop-motion effects. B

Black Death (2010)

Few sights are as sick as some bigot spouting off about the evil of Islam, as they uphold the Christian Church as the Shining Symbol of Humanity. They should watch “Black Death,” a grisly horror-thriller about the mid-1300s Black Plaque that ravaged Europe. The power-mad Church calls the plague God’s punishment against the unfaithful, and the only way back to His (its) grace is absolute submission. (Sound familiar?) Eddie Redmayne plays a naïve monk conflicted about his oath to God who travels with several Christian soldiers to hunt an untouched village, for it must hold sinners. Director Christopher Smith and writer Dario Poloni don’t go simple, for that village has a blood thirst greater than the Church. Sean Bean is the head Soldier of Christ, and his demise is one for the Sean Bean Movie Death record books. Too bad Redmayne is so boyish he makes Tin-Tinseem like Jason Statham and fails huge at the darkest scenes that end this blackest of tales. Smart, tense, and wide-open as the similar-themed “Season ofthe Witch” is dull, dumb and CGI’d to hell, “Death” coolly reminds us that Men of God are rarely ever that. B

A Separation (2011)

“A Separation” follows two families in modern Iran, at war with and amongst each other, boxed in by iron-clad rules of a sick, empty theocracy. Writer/director Asghar Farhadi makes us a participant in his first, bold scene: A young, devoted married couple nonetheless seeks a divorce, spouting their arguments directly into the camera. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to raise their daughter in a free nation, while Nader (Peyman Moaadi) insists they stay, to care for his Alzheimer’s stricken father. “He doesn’t know who you are,” she pleads. “But I do,” he says. Within a minute, Farhadi makes his cast fully universal, as he nails the staggering toll of Alzheimer’s on any family. Simin moves out, forcing Nader to hire a caretaker for his father. That hire will cost everyone involved greatly as deceits and fears abound. In brilliant, wordless cutaways, Farhadi uses the pained faces of two girls to show a nation of lost, exasperated adults so fully separated by religion, sex, class, economy, and have and have not, they and it will never move forward. American Christians, take note. Screenplay, cast, camera work, the very feel and noise of Tehran, and that finale ... all flawless. A

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey (2011)

“Being Elmo.” A movie about Elmo? Not quite. But the man whose hand, voice and soul inhibits the wildly popular “Sesame Street” character worshipped, revered and awed by college-age youth and under, down to preschool. Kevin Clash is his name, and this feel-good documentary tells the tale of the African-American Muppeteer, the first to work for Jim Henson, from shit-poor upbringing to Oprah’s couch fame. Director Constance Marks goes for uplifting, as light as “Street,” and as cuddly as Elmo himself. She eschews hurt and pain: Clash’s childhood years of being bullied is glossed over, he is divorced before we even realize he’s married, and his daughter is back in good grace before we see her all-too-apparent unhappiness. Softball? Yes. But Clash is (portrayed as) such a kind human being, and shy – he becomes alive only through Elmo or his other puppet creations – it’s impossible to resist. When he interacts with a child whose dying wish is to meet Elmo, it’s a heart breaker, you can see the responsibility wash over Clash. Makes a guy want to hug Elmo. B+