Paul Schrader doesn't think much of horror movies. He says as much in his commentary for his remake of Cat People, which catches him in the act of grossly underestimating his film's much superior predecessor.

Naturally, the geniuses in Hollywood hired him to make a sequel to The Exorcist. Now they're regretting their decision.

Look, I think Schrader's film should be released as he shot it, based on the Caleb Carr script that Morgan Hill apparently paid for. But you didn't have to be a genius (fifth item from the top) to predict that this particular venture wasn't going to have a happy ending for anyone involved. Why is it so hard for the movie industry to match directors with interesting, appropriate scripts?

Evanescence
“Going Under”
Directed by Philipp Stolzl

OK, this horror movie in miniature is an improvement over this band’s breakout clip, in which singer Amy Lee, all decked out in a willowy white nightgown, hangs from the side of a building as a guy helpfully identified by MTV as Paul McCoy From 12 Stones grips her arm and does what he can with the voice his mama gave him over a limp Bizkit-style riff. (I swear, I must have seen that video a dozen times, and I still can’t hum a bar of the song.) This time, the frontwoman of these erstwhile Christian rockers takes the stage and confronts the scariest thing in the world – her own audience. As she performs, the faces in the crowd Photoshop themselves into twisted demon leers. If the visuals in Mark Pellington’s “Black Hole Sun” creeped you right out the way they did me, this may get a little under your skin, too. Stage dives take her underwater; wearing that same fucking nightgown, she swims amongst the jellyfish. I’m not sure I want to know what all this has to do with their status as Christians, but it sure is a surreal video. Rammstein-video veteran Philipp Stolzl busts some new moves, like animating the lens flares so they become part of the genuinely impressive visual strategy (I expect to see this effect used in a feature film inside of nine months). Mildly unnerving and with a zinger right at the very end, this is probably better than, say, anything Dario Argento’s done in the last 16 years. And I still can’t hum a bar of the damned song. B

Note: I had written a glowing review of the new Audioslave video "Show Me How to Live" to go in this space, praising it for its authentic sense of desert locations, but then I sussed out that much of the video is actually lifted wholesale from Vanishing Point, which I've never seen. At this point, I really don't know what to think. But I do suddenly want to see Vanishing Point.

Fountains of Wayne
“Stacy’s Mom”
Directed by Chris Applebaum

I guess the guys in Fountains of Wayne, who are a little bit older than me, would have been the perfect age to appreciate such gems of music video history as Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” and to have their hormonal worlds rocked by the Phoebe Cates tit shot/masturbation gag in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That explains the sharp-dressed little dudes with sunglasses at the top of the video as well as the MILF stepping out of the pool and unhooking her bikini top at the bottom. Supermodel Rachel Hunter plays the titular mother figure, and spends most of the video semi- and quasi-naked. The band, who are seen in cutaways – they appear in picture frames on the wall and on the TV set — barely register. It’s not particularly well made, but your reaction to the video probably depends mainly on your feelings about Ms. Hunter’s ample rack, which is pretty generously displayed. As a throwback to the ‘80s pop-video norm, it’s fairly efficient. But I say it’s about half as sexy as, say, Billy Idol’s Fincher-directed rock-your-yuppie-world “Cradle of Love” or Aerosmith’s Silverstone-and-Tyler double-header “Crazy.” (And the song is only about half as rockin’ and nowhere near as playful as Tsar’s brilliant “Kathy Fong is the Bomb,” which is in the same vein.) C

Linkin Park
“Faint”
Directed by Mark Romanek

The king of visual effects returns with another clip that is, like last year’s “Cochise,” so good-looking that it hardly seems to feature visual effects at all. Some digital enhancement no doubt took place, but there’s a live feel to the grandly staged spectacle that feels electric and immediate, and the editing is spot on, complementing the musical beats while keeping you from looking at any particularly striking image long enough to fully parse it. Like the best music videos, it’s enough to make you a believer in a band that otherwise leaves you cold. Must be nice to brainstorm ideas like this without worrying about who's gonna pay for them – the first section of the video is shot entirely from behind the band, the camera looking out over a sea of about 1,000 screaming fans, arms raised high, as a bajillion volts of juice is pumped through a wall of blazing lights stacked four or five stories high behind the audience. When the camera finally does a 180 and shoots the band from the front, they’re seen performing in front of a mocked-up bombed-out building — an appropriate testosterone showcase for a nation at war, for sure, but it feels more like the tragic rave-up at the end of the world. Or am I reaching? B+

New Pornographers
“The Laws Have Changed”
Directed by Brian Thurier

One thing I love about music videos is the pace. Thirty seconds in, I can generally tell whether or not I’m wasting my time. It’s less than 20 seconds into this one when a fabulous blonde in a red minidress steps out of the desert to implore a sandaled, self-important Messiah type, in subtitles, “Come down and return to the world.” Fantastic, I thought to myself. It’s The Last Temptation of Christ starring Sarah Cracknell. What could be better? He accompanies his date to a club where a New Pornographers tribute band is lip-syncing this single. Our man dresses well enough but hangs around the bar looking dour and sipping whiskeys as his temptress boogies down, grinning minxishly. Another thing I love about good music videos is their relatively high concentration of perfect moments. And the moment when she suddenly turns to face him, half the girls in the club falling in behind her in perfect choreography, is utterly sublime. Our man at the bar is stunned by the display. It’s fun, it’s sexy, and it’s all for him. In the face of such womanly showmanship, Christ gets his groove back, takes to the dance floor and spazzes right out like the party animal you always knew he had to be. “Form a line to the throne,” wails the band, in harmony. “The laws have changed, yeah.” Fin. A-

God bless The New York Times, which has just given the Angelika Film Center the trashing it richly deserves. Oh sure, I could have done without the blah blah blah about how hip the Angelika used to be. (I note with some pride that I hated this place while it was still cool.*) And I object to the assumption, perpetuated in this article, that "newer" necessarily equals "better" where moviehouses are concerned. Often it does, especially in a city with as high a concentration of crappy little theaters as New York. But there are a number of older theaters that were built with comfort and quality in mind. Some of them haven't been subdivided yet into a multiplicity of miserable screens, and it would be a shame if theatergoers abandoned them completely to patronize the personalityless googolplexes.

Interesting tidbit -- the folks at IFC are apparently ready to start renovating the old, unlamented Waverly on Seventh Avenue downtown, across from the basketball cages. As locations go, that's a pretty good one.

* To be fair, the Angelika has upgraded in recent years. The last time I was there (for Irréversible and Spider) the sound system had a little more oomph and a little less eeek, and the seats were slightly less than utterly uncomfortable. I did, however, get hassled by an usher whom the popcorn guy had convinced I was double-dipping. I was innocent, and had my double-feature ticket stubs to prove it. In your FACE, buddy.

According to the mavens at KungFuCinema.com, Miramax is unsure whether it will dub and drastically edit the terrific Shaolin Soccer for a wide release in North America.

What apparently has been decided is that the film will go out subtitled, in limited release, on September 5. It's unclear whether a wide release will follow. So that's good news -- I loves me some subtitled films -- and bad news. The bad news is Miramax's prevarication was apparently prompted by a poor test screening in Calgary, meaning the company has certainly lost any gumption it may have had for aggressively marketing the release to a broad audience.

Here's what confuses me. According to the articles linked above, instead of cutting some 20 minutes from the film, the studio now plans merely to trim the limited release only slightly, to obtain a PG-13. Interestingly, the MPAA Web site lists a PG rating for Shaolin Soccer; either Kung Fu Cinema meant to say the movie would be trimmed for a PG, or those nuts at the MPAA actually gave the unedited version an R. Sad to say, the latter scenario wouldn't actually surprise me, though it would prove just how completely irrelevant that organization has become.

I don't wanna go off on a rant ...
In related news, Newmarket Films (warning: the preceding hyperlink points to one of the most irritating Web site interfaces on the Internet) has apparently been ordered by the MPAA to remove from all its advertising an Ebert blurb instructing audiences to "take the kids" to see Whale Rider. Because the film is rated PG-13 (a bong is apparently visible in the background of one shot), and because the industry has (stupidly) agreed -- under pressure from the previous administration in Washington -- not to market PG-13 films to children, the MPAA said Ebert's comments cannot be used in conjunction with advertising for the film.

OK, the marketing-to-children policy is irritating, but as Ebert cogently points out it's only one indicator of the real problem -- that, as far as the MPAA rating board is concerned, Whale Rider and Charlie's Angels' Asses: Full Throttle are comparable in terms of "adult" content. God knows I don't think we need more ratings to address the problem, but we do need to use the G and PG ratings for what they were originally intended to convey -- a G-rated film is not completely inoffensive, but is suitable for "General Audiences" (famous G-rated titles from back in the day include Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dracula Has Risen From the Grave; look 'em up yourself if you don't believe me), and a PG-rated film contains some potentially bothersome material. As it stands both G and PG are reserved for incredibly tame material, meaning nearly every major movie with stronger content than, say, the PG-rated Freaky Friday gets saddled with the increasingly meaningless PG-13. Come on — what kind of bizarro world do we live in where the movie version of S.W.A.T., attacked in its day for bringing TV violence to new levels — gets a PG-13? Either the MPAA is cutting the film an undeserved break, or the picture itself isn't delivering the level of wanton violence that the franchise deserves.

Along the same lines, Elvis Mitchell published a welcome piece in the Times yesterday on the near-disappearance of actual human sexuality from the movies, and the conventional-wisdom impossibility of a major-studio release actually hitting theaters with an NC-17 rating.

So with the G and PG ratings marginalized as kiddie fare on one end of the spectrum, and the NC-17 deemed box-office poison on the other, we're actually worse off now than we were when we had the simple G-PG-R-X ratings system. These days, every major film gets either a PG-13 or an R, a thumbs up or a thumbs down on attendance by the under-17 crowd. The MPAA continues to claim that parents are, by and large, happy with the system. If so, then parents aren't nearly demanding enough.

http://www.texaschainsawmovie.com/

OK, I'm probably as skeptical as anyone about the chances that this will be worth seeing. Contemporary teen horror tends not to be a particularly challenging or frightening genre, and the cast here looks bland-o-rama. But I'm mildly intrigued by the fact that Daniel Pearl, who shot the original, has returned to his D.P. duties this time around, ensuring at least that some vestigial memory of the amazing achievement that was Texas Chain Saw may influence the atmosphere of the new one in meaningful ways. But really, I'm hoping that the folks who edited the trailer have something to do with the film proper, because it works pretty well. Halfway through, when the screen went completely dark and the cast starts to sound increasingly panicked, I got myself some goosebumps. The ensuing chainsaw-fueled chase scenes don't quite feel like old times, but they do pay the proper homage and they don't seem to be played for laughs. All hail the return of the serious American horror movie, maybe.

"The industry is still overscreened, but they've come a long way in cleaning up their act," says one analyst quoted in a New York Times story on the current state of the movie-theater business. The exhibition industry is "a cash cow," says another.

It's not so many years since every article you read about the state of exhibition was a sob story detailing the overexpansion that drove much of the industry into bankruptcy in the late 1990s. I always responded cynically to this state of affairs. After all, if exhibitors hadn't spent so much of the 1980s and even the early 1990s building crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel theaters, they wouldn't be in a position where competition (from new multiplexes with stadium seating and digital sound systems) forced them to build entirely new ones. I remember seeing The Frighteners in mono at a local first-run multiplex. This was in 1996. There was no excuse for that.

Anyway, to hear the Times tell the story, it's fat times again for movie theaters -- at least the mammoth Regal chain, which snatched up the United Artists and Edwards Cinemas chains. The bucks are rolling in partly due to new marketing strategies, like the 20 minutes of limp programming (really an excuse to show ads) that precedes screenings at Regal-owned theaters or the practice of attaching actual promotional CDs to drink cups and the like. As long as this is perceived as a solid strategy -- as advertisers worry about TiVo-owning home viewers skipping past (or simply using the john during) commercial breaks, the captive audience at the local cineplex looks more and more attractive -- expect the movie-theater experience to become more and more commercialized.

Cash cow indeed. I paid 10 bucks for this?

In Manhattan, the moviegoing situation has improved steadily since the mid 1990s. At one time, you might have no good options for seeing a big Hollywood commercial release in the Village, but the arrival of the UA 14-screen plex on 14th Street helped change that. The reign of the Angelika has even been challenged by the arrival of the five-screen Sunshine Cinema, a terrific place to see a movie, just a few blocks east on Houston. (They're even programming a midnight film series, so if you've been waiting to see The Goonies or Barbarella on the big screen, well, get in line.)

Sadly, outfits like The Quad, Cinema Village, and Film Forum -- all of them vital to the New York film scene -- don't have the bucks (or the space) for stadium-style makeovers. At Cinema Village a few years ago, "renovation" meant carving up the old auditorium into three pieces, a welcome move only in that it offers up two more screens for programming, keeping smaller movies in town a week or two longer. Whenever I'm on the west coast, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to check out the programming at grand old venues like The Castro in San Francisco and the Egyptian Theatre, run by the American Cinematheque, in Hollywood. It's one thing to see something like Pirates of the Caribbean at Mann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It's quite another, even finer thing, to see a Seijun Suzuki movie thrown onto the big screen at the Egyptian right across the street.

I try not to just recycle links from sources like Metafilter, but as an image geek my discovery of this amazingly simple tactic for posting 3D images to the Web was too good not to share.

I guess you need a special (vintage?) 3D camera to get the images in the first place, and there are obvious limitations to the process. But wouldn't it be cool if someone figured out how to make this kind of no-glasses-required stereoscopic image move? All's I know is I'm dying to see more of these things.

In other news, Ananova reports on a minor controversy involving Angelina Jolie's nipples.