For those wondering why there was no review last week, it's because I had placed the finishing touches on what is now this week's review, only to watch MS Word crash and delete everything when I tried to post it, and it's taken me this long to muster up the energy to rewrite it. Regardless, I should mention that I had originally intended to write a review of the first season of Walking Dead, only to find that I couldn't muster up the energy for it (for the record, it's a solid show so far, but hasn't really developed enough in the first six episodes for me to say for certain of its quality one way or the other), and wound up deciding to review Jackass 3D instead. I'm glad that I did too, because it was the funniest damn movie of last year, with the Jackass guys getting everything right that Todd Phillips got wrong with Due Date.
For those that are much more cultured than I, Jackass began as a show on MTV based around the likes of Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O and friends all getting together to perform a bunch of ridiculous stunts that mainly involved them hurting themselves in stupid, stupid ways. After a few seasons, I suppose they realized that it would be better for their health if they were to end the show and just do everything in movie format once every few years.
I admit, I was a tad bit disappointed with Jackass 2. While it was certainly funny, even just a couple months after watching it, the only bit I could remember was the four-way teeter totter in the middle of the rodeo. With this, however, I can absolutely affirm that the series is back on track, with a great many instances of incredibly stupid and dangerous stunts, such as when they test the theory that music can soothe the savage beast by going into a ram's pen armed with a tuba and trumpet, or when Knoxville decides to go rollerskating in the middle of some charging buffalo, or when they decide to see how well they can withstand the winds created by a jet plane. There's a notice in the end credits about how the ASPCA was around for several scenes to ensure no animals were harmed, though I have to assume they weren't there for the beehive tetherball.
Of course, there's also two segments that are a little more memorable than any in the previous two films. In one, they play a prank on Bam for his fear of snakes by letting him fall into a disguised pit and then dropping dozens of live snakes down in there with him, marking what might be the first time Bam has ever cried on camera. In the second, what's meant to be a bit of a goof involving Knoxville messing around with a bull almost leads to a very uncomfortable end to the series when the bull flips him around so that Knoxville lands hard right on his head, making sure to get in a kick to the head right as he's landing for good measure. It's the sort of fall that's designed to paralyze or kill a person, and while Knoxville was able to get up and awkwardly stagger away to safety, it's pretty telling that, while with most of the painful stunts in the film we get all the non-participants off to the sides laughing at their friends' pain, here they're all just immediately terrified that he might be crippled. It's a rather uncomfortable way to underpin the warnings at the beginning and ending of the film that viewers should never try any of these at home.
Now, having said all of this, should you watch this movie? All I can give you are the facts, and quite simply, I laughed more and harder during this film than at any other movie this past year. It's frequently disgusting and about as horribly offensive as any good-natured movie could be (I feel I have to put that in, because there are movies I find much more offensive in a rather mean-spirited, hateful way -- like Expelled, for a recently watched example), but if you can withstand watching several people vomiting one by one, or a man that goes bungee jumping inside a Port-A-Potty (with all that such a premise implies), then by all means, you should absolutely give this a view. Though please, don't try this at home, at least unless you have some solid friends that are ready to post it on Youtube even when you kill yourself.
Rating: *** 1/2
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Jackass 3D
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Megamind
So I should probably explain what the hell happened to the blog last week. Basically, I got a new job, and while I’m in training, I have to make a three hour round trip drive to my classes, because why wouldn’t they be on the other end of the state, plus a good hour or so of homework each day. Therefore, until the training is finished, this blog’s going to go from being updated five times a week to once a week. It’s only for the next couple weeks, though, so have no fear. Also, thank you to the guys at Red Letter Media, who seem to give me hundreds of new readers each and every time I mention them. Also, thank you to the makers of Megamind, for making a pretty darn good movie to start the week off right.
The film stars Will Ferrell as Megamind, a brilliant alien supervillain who has had a lifelong rivalry with his heroic counterpart Metro Man (Brad Pitt). After one of his fiendish deathtraps turns out to be unexpectedly successful, he finds himself ruler of Metro City, and has no idea what to do with himself. He finds himself falling for plucky reporter Roxanne Ritchie (Tina Fey), but realizing she’d never go for him as Megamind, disguises himself as a Clark Kent-looking reporter and gets himself in tight as her new partner so that he can better woo her. Of course, his continued villainy seems strangely empty without a hero to challenge himself against, and so he decides to take some shlub (Jonah Hill) and give him all of Metro Man’s powers (begging the question, of course, of why he never used that on himself back when he was regularly fighting Metro Man) to have a new hero to pit himself against. Of course, things turn horribly awry when Hill decides to use his new powers to conquer the city rather than save it, and now it’s up to Megamind and Roxanne to stop him.
This film, by director Tom McGrath (whose previous efforts in the Madagascar films were not half as good as this), is much funnier and more clever than the trailers had made it out to be. There’s a lot of great little bits of humor (such as Megamind crash landing on Earth as an infant in a Prison For the Criminally Gifted, and the warden evidently deciding that he should just remain a prisoner there for no discernable reason), and the voice talents are all wonderful (Ferrell is particularly delightful, and shows that maybe he should be allowed to occasionally play a role where he’s not a complete moron). The visual design isn’t quite on par with Tangled or How to Train Your Dragon, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that by this point every animated movie that comes out of Disney or Dreamworks is going to look pretty darn impressive and colorful.
Now, I know it’s been getting compared a lot with Despicable Me, as it’s one of those awkward coincidences where two movies with similar premises (in this case, an animated film where the protagonist is a super villain) come out within a few months of each other, but the two are fairly different beasts. I mean, granted, they’re both animated, they both star supervillains voiced by famous comedic actors (Steve Carrell in Despicable Me), they both have their villainous leads start to imagine changing their villainous ways due to love of another (Roxanne here, and the three little girls in Despicable), they both dramatically show their villainous leads transforming into heroes by way of having them fight it out with other villains (Jonah Hill as Titan here and Russell Brand as Dr. Nefario there), and they both inexplicably end with everyone dancing, but…seriously, is there some secret website that just comes up with like a half dozen basic templates each year that every movie then gets patterned off of here? It’s ponderous, is what it is.
Still, that’s not to say either one is bad, or even that they necessarily had anything to do with each other (in fact, I‘d say it‘s pretty damn unlikely they were in any way connected). Both are pretty great films, though I’d say this one is the superior film. It’s funnier, more emotionally and intellectually satisfying, and it’s filled with some nice rock music from the likes of AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne. That Megamind’s got some good taste, yo.
Though, ugh, did they have to end the movie by having everyone dance to Michael Jackson?
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monsters
While this doesn’t really qualify as a horror movie despite the monsters alluded to in the title and so doesn’t qualify for the Top Ten Horror Movies of 2010 list I’m still considering doing for this blog, I’m quite glad I saw this, as it’s one of the more intelligent and subtle films of the year. I’m not sure whether to say the social commentary is blatant or subtle, as it’s rather blatant that they’re making social commentary, but somewhat subtle in what exactly it is they’re talking about.
The film is somewhat minimalist in its cast, mostly just following around two characters, Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha (Whitney Able). He’s a photographer that’s finally managed to get clearance to photograph the giant aliens that have taken up residence in Mexico (I could be wrong, but the map of the Infected Zone does seem to encompass that entire country), but finds himself stymied by having to first secure passage for his boss’s daughter back to the United States. They miss the ferry after being robbed the night before, and so he has no choice but to escort her all the way through the Infected Zone of Mexico.
The aliens, who came here on a NASA probe that was sent out in a search for extraterrestrial life, are pretty massive, though not quite on a Godzilla or Cloverfield scale. The United States has erected a wall around the Infected Zone (Subtextual Hint: Much like the border fences our government has put along the Mexico border) and frequently sends soldiers out to kill the monsters, though they seem to be fairly docile unless attacked first. The bulk of the movie is just the two of them, wandering through the forests of Mexico, learning about each other and the aliens, who he still hopes to photograph in hopes of defining his career.
There really isn’t much in the way of a story for the film, it’s mostly just a premise that gets the two leads talking and bouncing off of each other. For example, she asks him how it feels to do a job where he doesn’t make any money unless someone’s in pain, to which he replies “you mean like doctors?” Of course it goes a bit further than that, but it was a nice immediate rejoinder to her intentionally antagonistic bullshit. Point is, they have some great chemistry together, and they don’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, which is kind of essential for a film whose main purpose in existing is to quietly explore such issues under the guise of a sci-fi movie.
Of course, there are some problems with the film, if you’re a nitpicking asshole like myself. First, while I appreciate that it’s less a straightforward movie than it is an extended metaphor, it would be nice if there were still a bit more plot to the film. I don’t need action every minute, but when close to half the film is just two people walking through the jungle talking, it can get a bit taxing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need a big gun fight every ten minutes or anything to be happy, but I do want something more to happen. Sure, they have to deal with occasional encounters with the aliens, and it does become rather tense when they reach the edge of the Infected Zone and call in the military to get evacuated out, but the majority of the film is just two people talking. It’s mostly interesting conversations, but come on.
Still, it is a mostly fascinating movie, and if there’s not enough going on, at least it’s more intelligent and thoughtful than most films that came out last year. This was writer/director Gareth Edwards’ directorial debut (aside from some TV work that I’m not counting), and it makes me pretty damn eager to see what he’s got up his sleeve next. He did a damn fine job with this film, and should hopefully have a nice long career ahead of him.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Let Me In
I was a little torn about whether or not to watch this film at first. It had gotten rather mixed reviews, and there frankly didn’t seem to be much need to make a remake of a film that was released a mere two years earlier, particularly one that ranks as one of my favorite vampire movies of all time. Still, I was kind of curious to see the first new release of the revived Hammer Studios, and I’m glad I did. While this isn’t as good as the original, it still manages to be one of the best horror movies of 2010.
The film stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen, a young boy that lives with his mother in an apartment complex in a small town in New Mexico. He’s continuously bullied at school, and only finds some measure of solace when he befriends a girl named Abby (Chloe Moretz) who lives next door to him. She doesn’t really behave like most girls her age, and Owen slowly comes to understand just how different she is (though it’s pointed out to us long before it is him). Yes, she’s a vampire, and one with her own problems, such as how she’s “twelve. But…I’ve been twelve for a very long time.” Indeed, she’s rapidly outliving the old man that’s been posing as her father, as he begins botching things when he kills to supply her with blood, as he’s sick of the mockery of life he’s living. The two children find solace with each other and draw the strength they need from each other to (mostly) help deal with their various problems.
Aside from a small and unfortunate flirtation with CG, co-writer/director Matt Reeves (whose previous film Cloverfield showed none of the skill he shows here) makes a subtle, powerful film, more concerned with exploring its characters and situation than with mindless scares (and thankfully no attempts at sexiness, a problem that plagues far too many vampire films). It’s also nice how the film focuses all its attention on our two young leads, to the point where other cast members have names like Owen’s Mother, The Father, and The Policeman. The pair give fantastic performances, showing all the hurt, confusion, and anger that people on the cusp of puberty go through, and which disturbingly few actors their age can manage. They are, of course, aided in conveying this mood by the gloomy winter coastline. Oh, how I’ve missed the sinister Hammer landscapes.
Of course, I can’t avoid the fact that I can make every last one of those bits of praise (slightly modified so far as the New Mexico landscape goes) for the original Swedish film as well. Indeed, for a film that claimed it was just starting from scratch in adapting the novel instead of being a straight remake of the original movie, it sure does hew pretty damn closely to its predecessor. Seriously, the first film skipped like half the novel, they could have easily made some significant changes here. That they claimed they were going to and then went ahead and just did a straight remake of a film that’s two years old is fairly insulting to everyone involved. It’s not exactly like the original was all that obscure, either, when it appeared on a great many critics’ Top Ten lists for 2008, so I can only assume that this was made specifically to appeal to people that wanted to see the original but suffer from illiteracy and so can’t read subtitles.
Still, while there really doesn’t seem to be a point to this film beyond that it’s in English instead of Swedish, I can’t deny that it’s a really effective effort. In a year filled with so few worthwhile horror movies, this stands out as one of the best. It’s good both as the first vampire movie of the new decade (well, the first released in theaters anyway, I’m sure there were dozens of the damn things that went straight to DVD) and as the debut release by the new Hammer. While it may not prove as iconic an effort as The Curse of Frankenstein (itself a remake) was, anytime we get a quality new British horror movie is just fine with me.
Rating: *** ½
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Tekken 4
I’m at a bit of an impasse here, as I have made it my mission this year to automatically do a review of every video game I beat, and yet I’m fully aware that it’s largely missing the point to be playing a fighting game on single player mode only, particularly when over half a decade of avoidance (this is literally the first time I’ve played a fighting game since all of my college friends graduated before me in 2003 -- well, outside of Smash Brothers) has led to my fighting game skills very badly atrophying. Still, if nothing else I owe it to my own perverse sense of self-hatred, and so you can all enjoy what is no doubt going to be one of my more awkward reviews of the year.
For those that don’t play many video games, Tekken is a long-running series of semi-3D fighting games that features a fine blend of real martial arts styles and video gamey violence. It also, as tends to be the problem for a series with so many playable characters, has an increasingly convoluted and insane storyline, filled with robots and devil energy and there’s two bears that have their own storylines and several of the endings overlap and I don’t know what else is going on.
I made sure to play the game through once with each character, both to get a feel for everyone and to see all the endings, and Namco seems to have done a good job of making a character for pretty much anyone’s preferred fighting style. There’s the standard mix of strong-but-slow and fast-but-weak fighters, a Bruce Lee clone, a Jackie Chan clone, a robot that keeps switching to a different character’s fighting style with each new fight (one of the more frustrating characters to try to beat the game with), and Yoshimitsu, who has now added to his repertoire of swordplay and teleportation some freaking giant insect wings and a voice that makes him seem like he’s auditioning to be a new Protoss unit. He just wasn’t ponderous enough beforehand, I suppose.
While most of the characters from Tekken 3 have returned, there has been some replacement with different characters. Eddy’s gone, though he’s been replaced by his protégé Christie, who has the same capoeira fighting style while also dressing like a stripper, so it’s really an upgrade there. Gun Jack is also gone, but since Kuma and Panda both have the same moveset he was kind of redundant anyway. Really, the only thing I’m very much upset about so far as vanishing characters goes is the news that Armor King was killed in some lame bar room brawl by new character Marduk, who’s one of the stereotypical strong-and-slow guys (he towers over all the other characters), and isn’t very interesting at all. Somewhat better is Steve, a British boxer who doesn’t have much of a story line, but has a neat fighting style (he doesn’t kick, except when getting up off the ground -- instead, the kick buttons just have him duck his head to the left or right to set up more powerful punches).
The gameplay is largely the same as in the previous games, with a couple minor modifications. It’s still largely 2D with the ability to swerve into the foreground or background, which means that whenever I fought on higher difficulties any time I fought a faster opponent they’d just spin all around me whenever I tried to attack and made me look like a jerk. That stupid girl Xiaoyu was particularly annoying at this, as she’s such a small opponent to begin with that it was sometimes a struggle just to keep her from getting a Perfect on me. The levels now also have some barriers to them, so that you can sometimes deal extra damage to your opponent by smashing him into a statue or pillar or the wall. Of course, the same thing can just as easily happen to you, so you have to constantly watch where you are on the level.
I’m not sure what else there is to really say. It’s a very fun game, and there’s a lot of variety to the different fighting styles (though you can get pretty far on Easy with most characters just by doing basic kicks and grabs), though playing a fighting game by myself didn’t really give me the best possible experience the game could have offered. Still, if you happen to enjoy fighting games, it will make a fine addition to your library, though I suspect if you like fighting games and have a Playstation 2 then you’ve already picked this one up. Still, enjoy the confirmation of your good taste here!
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Fighter
It’s gotten much easier this week for me to make predictions about which of the Oscar bait movies I’m watching is likely to actually get a nomination, since they announced the nominees yesterday (No nomination for Tangled? Nothing for The Town but a Best Supporting Actor nod?), so I think I can confidently state now that this movie will indeed have gotten nominated for several awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. As to whether it fully deserves to have been one of the most nominated films (with seven nominations, it was fifth behind The King’s Speech, True Grit, Inception, and The Social Network), I don’t know that I fully agree there.
The film follows Massachusetts boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) as he struggles to improve his career. With him is his brother/trainer Dicky Eklund (a fairly unrecognizable Christian Bale), who helps train him whenever he’s not disappearing to score crack. It becomes clear very quickly that a large part of Micky’s career troubles are coming from his family: his brother is completely unreliable and obsessed with his own personal fame from his glory days years ago (we get to hear him talk of how he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard a great many times through the film), and his mother Alice, who also manages him, and his five or six sisters, are all as overbearing as a family could possibly be. Wahlberg has surprisingly few lines in the film for a lead, perhaps because his character’s family talks so much that he’s used to never being able to get a word in edgewise.
After a humiliating defeat (his fourth loss in a row) when he’s pressured by his family into accepting a last minute fight against a fighter in a higher weight class, his new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) manages to convince him that maybe his family doesn’t exactly have his best interests at heart, and he starts to look into other avenues for his management and training. As one could expect, with his new manager and trainer, he finally gets back on a winning streak, much to the consternation of his jilted family.
Let’s get one thing out of the way here: this is absolutely Christian Bale’s show. He is so wild and energetic that he steals every last scene he’s in. The film opens with Wahlberg trying to get some road work done for his main paying job, and Bale just keeps trying to box him and mug for him that he just gives up from weariness, and joins Bale in posing for Bale’s camera crew. Bale has been telling everyone that the HBO crew is there to film Bale’s comeback, though of course it’s very soon uncomfortably obvious what the documentary’s really about (Hint: Bale eventually gets to see it while in prison). Now, I’ve never thought Wahlberg was that exciting an actor to begin with, but he’s not being given a chance paired off with Bale like this. He might as well be one of the audience members that gets dragged onstage during live theater and tries to gamely play along, but mostly just stands there awkwardly smiling while everyone else just acts around him. He’s a fairly internalized actor at the best of times (The Departed notwithstanding); here, he might as well be a wooden prop in half of his scenes.
Which is not to say that he’s outright bad here, he’s just largely a nonentity, almost serving more as one of Hitchcock’s MacGuffins rather than being an actual person. Somewhat more clumsy are the fights, which almost look like old Hulk Hogan matches. In most of the fights we get a good look at, we just see Wahlberg getting pounded on mercilessly until it’s time for him to win, and then he suddenly Hulks up and drops his opponent with a few well-placed hits. Granted, the movie as a whole is a bit over the top, but come on.
Still, these are fairly minor complaints, all told. The movie as a whole is just plain exhilarating and fun, filled with people that make you better appreciate your own, calmer family, and a lot of great performances by everyone not named Mark (since I haven’t really said it earlier, some mention must be made of Amy Adams, who once again shows why she’s one of the brightest stars in Hollywood). If I don’t quite agree that it’s a Best Picture worthy film, nor should David O. Russell have gotten a Best Director nomination instead of Christopher Nolan, it’s still a damn fine movie.
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Machete
While it seems that I’ll have to eventually get a BluRay player just to properly enjoy Grindhouse at home, it’s very nice to see how its legacy is still living. Of the four fake trailers made for the movie (plus a fifth semi-official one that only played in Canada and select cities that were nowhere near me), we now have Robert Rodriguez’s Machete made into a feature length film as well as Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving coming out later this year. I can only hope we also get Edgar Wright’s Don’t before this wonderful madness is over and done with, but I’ll happily take Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS instead if it means he stops doing terrible remakes for a while.
As an offshoot of Grindhouse, this is by glorious design overwhelmingly trashy and exploitative, and may well be the most energetically race baiting film since Birth of a Nation. If this all sounds somewhat hyperbolic, then so be it: this is a very hyperbolic film, after all, one where there’s no use in the main character just stabbing a group of villains with all of his knives if he can attach them all to the end of a rope and swing them at everyone instead, and one in which Lindsay Lohan can’t possibly be expected to seek revenge against her father’s killer without randomly putting on a nun outfit first. It’s the exact kind of madness and space logic that you would get in the best exploitation films of the 70s, when you wouldn’t be able to watch the movie without understanding that some serious drugs were involved in the film’s making.
The film, before I get too carried away, stars Machete (Danny Trejo), who lives the life of an illegal day laborer in Texas after a haunting prologue where his career as a Mexican federale ends in his wife’s murder. After showing off his skills a bit in a street fight, he’s hired to assassinate a hardline conservative politician (Robert DeNiro) who’s clamoring to close off the border (with a literal electrified fence) and has been connected with a vigilante group that may have been “disappearing” illegals as they try to cross the border. Of course, it’s all a setup to boost the politician’s voting base by showing how dangerous illegal immigrants are, and soon Machete is on the run from the police while finding allies in the most unlikely places: his priest brother (Cheech Marin), an immigration official (Jessica Alba), and the head of an underground group that helps Mexicans sneak across the border (Michelle Rodriguez).
Of course, all of this is making it sound like there’s a more coherent plot than was ever intentioned: according to IMDB the film was so ridiculous that Chris Cooper refused to be in it, saying it was “the most absurd thing I’ve ever read”, and he was in Adaptation. It’s largely an exercise in connecting as many scenes of graphic violence (and wow is it violent) and hot naked women (you even get to briefly see Lindsay Lohan’s tits, for all of you that have been clamoring to see them, though Jessica Alba is still all about that No Nudity clause) as it can, and that utter disinterest in plot does unfortunately mean that all the scenes in between the action-based ones and the naked ones tend to be somewhat boring, but they’re fortunately mostly brief. Supposedly he had already filmed more than half of the movie when making Grindhouse with Tarantino, and just gathered up some friends and big names to film the rest of it. That helps explain the disjointedness somewhat, even though I wasn’t paying close enough attention to know which scenes were filmed when, beyond the ones that made the original trailer.
Still, the sex and violence in this film is completely ridiculous. Not only is Lohan topless (and while Alba and Rodriguez don’t get naked, they are in skin tight outfits in every scene), but two other women (as well as a body double for Lohan) are completely naked the entire time they’re in the movie, because why shouldn’t they be? There’s also, as one might expect from a film called Machete, nonstop stabbings, slashings, beheadings, shootings, explosions, a guy that gets his guts yanked out of him and used as a rope, a guy that gets burned up in an explosion, a man is crucified, Steven Seagal shows up with a sword a couple times…I’ll be honest, I’m a lifelong horror fan, and I can’t think of more than a handful that were gorier than this was. I noticed Roger Ebert never reviewed it; he probably would have been horrified enough for another hospital stay.
I think what I most enjoy about Rodriguez and his films is that he’s never afraid to go as low as possible to entertain his fans, and he has never before gone so low or so far as he does here. It’s entirely an exercise in being as wild and extreme as exploitation fans all wish the drive in movies of the 70s had actually been, and in that it succeeds perfectly. If it doesn’t have anything else really going for it, well, that’s still more than enough for me.
Rating: *** ½
P.S. I’ll be in Florida next week, so no updates for any of you. Yes, I know how this breaks your hearts.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Help!
I’m rather more a fan of later period, trippy Beatles than I am of their earlier straight pop efforts, so it’s rather interesting to me that, of the four movies they made, their two best were the ones made during this time. Help! isn’t quite on the level of A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s infused with the same level of silly charm and chaos that their first film had.
The film opens with a beautiful young girl about to be sacrificed to the goddess Kali, when the ritual has to be called off. It seems that for Kali to accept the sacrifice, she needs to be painted red and be wearing a special ruby ring, but being a teenage girl in the mid-60s, when she got it she mailed it off as a gift to her heartthrob Ringo Starr. He’s of course now wearing the ring, and since it appears to be stuck on his finger, he now gets to spend the entire movie getting chased and attacked by the worshippers of Kali, who are now trying to paint him red so they can use him as their sacrifice. It’s just enough of a plot to give them the chance to film anything that came into their heads, and good on them for it.
In an essay that comes with the DVD, director Richard Lester said that, even when he was making A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, he knew he would always be known specifically for them. Indeed, while he’s made some good movies since then, I doubt he’d ever want to be remembered for the only other high profile films he made afterward (he took over Superman 2 after Richard Donner was let go, and also filmed all of Superman 3 -- yes, the one with Richard Pryor). He directed this movie with a wild passion that was nowhere to be found in those later films, giving us a movie that hurls about everywhere it can possibly imagine: we get a mad scientist that accidentally shrinks Paul down to mouse size, a pub with a trap door leading to a wine cellar with a deadly Bengal tiger that can only be soothed by singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to it, a brief military battle, etc. One would almost wonder why they didn’t just say “screw it” and throw an actual kitchen sink in, though it might have been repetitive after the Beatles destroy the sinks in a bathroom. And interspersed throughout are lovely music videos (and yes, I believe we can safely call them that, since almost none of them have anything to do with the rest of the movie beyond starring the four main characters) showing off the band’s latest music, ostensibly the entire reason the movie was made.
The band itself was rather disappointed in the movie, mainly in how they’re not in it as much as they should be (Lennon in particular complained that they were made extras in their own movie, though he later revised his opinion and admitted a large part of the problem the band had with the film was in how they spent the whole movie stoned and so didn‘t really understand what was going on), and the lion’s share of their face time is given to Ringo. While the cultists (led by the delightful Leo McKern) do appear on screen quite often, I don’t know that it’s a completely fair criticism to make, particularly when just a few years later they demanded that other people do their voices for the animated Yellow Submarine film. Plus, while Ringo does dominate so far as the Beatles go, the appalling amount of hatred the rest of the band openly expresses for him was one of my favorite ongoing jokes in the movie. Right when the cultists first start coming after him, he complains that something weird’s going on and they all monkey pile on him that he’s making up stories again and shouldn’t be trying to drag everyone else down to his level. Later, after they learn of the cultists, and have their lives threatened, John, Paul, and George all chip in to try to convince Ringo to cut off his finger, since he never really uses that one anyway, and he’s really just being selfish putting them in harm’s way like this. I’m not too proud to admit that I was giggling uncontrollably for a good chunk of the film.
And that’s what I love about the movie. It may not have the depth that A Hard Day’s Night did, but it went out there with the specific aim of being as funny and silly as possible, and it succeeded brilliantly. Released just one year before Vietnam made the entire western world miserable, it’s a film that was designed specifically to make you smile, each and every one of you. You know what else makes me smile, thinking about the movie? Not once in this entire review did I call it pop-art, like every other review I’ve read of it has. Oh, damn.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, January 3, 2011
Greedy
The fields of comedy are littered with mistakes where they just throw together a bunch of comedians and assumed that the humor would automatically come, only to find that a good script and talented director were also needed (witness the weak tea that was Transylvania 6-5000 or Who’s Harry Crumb? for some perfect examples). Fortunately, Greedy had the wonderful Jonathan Lynn at the helm, whose previous efforts had included the likes of Clue and My Cousin Vinny, so we wound up getting this wonderful, incredibly hateful and mean-spirited black comedy that’s just filled to the brim with great comedic talent.
The premise of the film is that Uncle Joe (Kirk Douglas) is a rich old man whose nieces and nephews all come to his mansion to suck up to him for his birthday in the hopes that when he dies soon they’ll be the ones favored in his will. It seems that for their entire lives, Uncle Joe has been nothing but mean to them and tried to pit them all against each other, and his relatives (led by Phil Hartman and Ed Begley Jr.) have put up with it so they could get at his fortune, but now they discover that he’s recently hired on a sexy young “nurse” (Olivia d’Abo) that seems to spend most of her time swimming naked in his pool, and are terrified that he’s just going to leave his fortune to her instead. They work out a plan to bring in fellow nephew Daniel (Michael J. Fox), since Daniel’s father was the only family member who was able to walk away from Joe’s money, in the hopes that Daniel will be able to make Joe focus on his family over his hot new houseguest. Unfortunately, soon the money starts to eat away at Daniel’s principles as well, and he winds up being as much of a schemer as anyone else.
While some may disagree, I’m of the opinion that comedy is usually at its best when it’s really dark and mean-spirited, and boy, is this one as mean as one can get short of having Danny DeVito direct it. The dialogue is about as cutting as you can get without just filming divorce proceedings. Right from the start, when the family all sits down for dinner with Joe, they immediately begin revealing each other’s dirty laundry, from alcoholism to a divorce (the pair still showed up together so that nothing would seem awry) to my personal favorite, the blackmail photos Phil Hartman acquired of his cousin with an aerobics instructor:
Glen (Jere Burns, examining the photos): This isn’t me.
Frank (Hartman): No, but it looks like you and that’s all that matters.
And all through this, and after Daniel arrives, Uncle Joe is obviously toying with all of them the entire time, lying to Fox and d’Abo about what the other had told him to see what they’ll try next to prove their greater worth of his fortune. And escalate they do: while Hartman goes the rather unsubtle route of telling d’Abo that “people have accidents”, d’Abo takes to walking around in lingerie and see-through clothes to attract Douglas’s interests, and Fox goes even farther, in a payoff that it would not be fair to reveal here.
The film does unfortunately go on a little too long, and it has a borderline sentimental climax and ending that don’t really fit with the rest of the movie. However, while it is always annoying when a movie doesn’t end as well as it begins, it’s certainly not enough to be a fatal flaw here, and if an overly long runtime also means more of Phil Hartman, then that’s something I am willing to take. There really weren’t enough good movies with him before he was murdered, and I would say that this was the best we got outside of his TV work. Oh, and obviously everyone else was good too, aside from the child actors, who were largely miserable in their brief performances. I suppose it’s an inherent flaw in the material; ask a child for his character to behave like a monster, and he’ll end up acting like the same kind of annoying child that you’re hoping not to get stuck sitting near in the theater. They don’t get much face time, though, as well they shouldn’t.
These are all small problems, though. The film as a whole is a hoot, and I highly recommend it to anyone that likes their comedy nice and dark. Put it this way: if you proudly own a copy of Death to Smoochy in your DVD collection, you should absolutely try this film out.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tangled
After a good two weeks of trying, I finally managed to get to the theater to see the latest Disney movie (no, we still aren’t done with them, thank you), and it’s a damn good one. As I said in my Princess & the Frog review, Disney’s been doing great since Pixar took control of their animation department, and if this isn’t quite as good as that previous effort, it’s still a damned impressive outing.
This film actually took roughly a decade to be completed, as its main developer and initial director Glen Keane (who sadly didn’t get to see the film through to completion due to other engagements) had a grand vision for the visual scheme of the movie that the best technology Disney had at the time couldn’t achieve. He basically wanted the film to look like a moving, 3D painting (specifically Fragonard’s “The Swing”), and combine that with his firm belief that all Disney needed to do to reclaim their animation throne from Dreamworks was to get back to basics and tell a simple fairy tale. Well, by the time the film was finally finished, under the joint helm of Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the idea of getting back to basics had already been co-opted by The Princess & the Frog, which also managed to be a slightly better movie, but this may still be the single most visually incredibly film Disney has ever made. It’s tough to say if Disney will feel that it’s been worth it financially: after such a long development time that was mostly spent on creating new technology, the film ended up costing a crazy $260 million (making it the second most expensive film ever made, behind only Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End at $300 million -- what the hell is up with the rampant spending, Disney?) , which is about how much the film has grossed worldwide so far, so it’s going to take some time on DVD before it can even make back its marketing budget, but at least now Disney has a completely incredible new visual capability that it can use for any of its future films. So I guess it’s all a matter of how many uses the company finds for all its new toys.
The film, for those who’ve managed to miss all the commercials, is based on the story of Rapunzel, and features a girl (Mandy Moore) with magical, ridiculously long hair that must never be cut, who is locked away in a tower deep within the woods by an evil witch (Donna Murphy) that has made Rapunzel believe she’s her mother, and is only keeping her there to help protect her from all the menaces of the outside world. Oh, and also to use her hair’s magical powers to keep restoring her youth, since she’s several hundred years old. Of course, as her 18th birthday approaches, she encounters a dashing young thief named Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) who invades her tower while trying to hide from some soldiers, and winds up taking her away on a grand adventure, of the kind which her adoptive mother does not approve.
While the film does largely achieve its goal of being a more traditional Disney film (incredible visuals aside), it apparently wasn’t always going to be that way. From what I understand the first draft of the script was very much a product of Disney’s recent obsession with aping Dreamworks, and was filled to the brim with horrid pop culture references and juvenile humor. While these have thankfully mostly been excised from the film, faint traces can still be found, particularly in the opening narration by Flynn which made me more than a little nervous at the film’s start. Another issue I had is that, while there are songs constantly throughout the film (thanks to the musical talents of Alan Menken and the lyrical talents of Glenn Slater), they’re mostly pretty damn bland, with only a couple standouts (namely the two songs by Murphy, where she is just trying to terrify Rapunzel, and the big chorus number in the bar). I don’t really know that any of them will prove as memorable as numbers like “Almost There” or “Friends on the Other Side” from Princess and the Frog, which I don’t mean to keep bringing up, but since it’s the very last Disney film prior to this one, and they both feature brand new Disney princesses (since neither film has really done gangbusters in theaters, I’m going to assume Disney will be backing off from all the princess films for a while after this, though I suspect that in this case it‘s at least somewhat due to the rather ghastly trailer, which can be found below), so it’s kind of hard not to directly compare.
Still, I don’t mean to be so harsh on the film. It’s definitely the best animated film I’ve seen all year (with The Illusionist being the only major effort I haven’t watched yet), and if it loses out on Best Animated Film at the Oscars to something like Toy Story 3 or Shrek Forever After, I will be very surprised. It’s sweet, clever, funny, imaginative, it has an awesome horse, and may very well be the best visual feast you’ll find outside of Avatar. You need to check it out.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Fantasia 2000
As much of a classic as the original Fantasia is now considered to be, I have to confess that I find Fantasia 2000 to be superior in virtually every way. There’s more variety to the musical selections, the animation is nicer, the intros to the various numbers are better, it has a shorter running time, and for those that missed it despite the original film being packaged with the sequel, they even included the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from the original in full. Sadly, no Night on Bald Mountain this time, but we play the cards we’re dealt.
Given that these films are vignettes rather than standard narratives, one could actually view this as a continuation of the first film instead of an actual sequel, particularly when one of the hosts mentions that Walt Disney’s initial vision for the original was that it would never be properly finished, but instead would be perpetually re-released with new material replacing some (though not all) of the previous release. Oddly, while I complained yesterday about the overall inconsistent quality of the original film, the quality of this sequel-or-possibly-continuation manages to be much more uniformly good, despite this one having no less than eight different directors, and despite it being less groundbreaking (apparently, to help improve the audience experience, Walt Disney decided to invent surround sound for the original, because that‘s just how he rolled).
Part of that increased quality, it must be said, comes from the improved music, and I’m pretty sure that can be attributed to the use of conductor James Levins and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra doing this film, instead of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which did the original (aside, of course, from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment, which reuses the original film’s score). Another improvement is the decision to use different celebrity narrators to introduce each segment, rather than the lone narrator from the original (Deems Taylor) talking to us as though Disney had never even entertained the thought that anyone that wasn’t a child would be watching his film. While all of the narrators here give it their all, the obvious standouts here are Steve Martin, who cheerfully claims all credit for the orchestra’s musical ability, and Penn & Teller, who inject some much-needed dismemberment into this Disney film.
Once more they leave the opening segment fairly free form visually, giving us geometric shapes vaguely resembling butterflies flitting about to the tune of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, but the film quickly rebounds with a deft one-two punch containing Respighi’s Pines of Rome, featuring a family of humpback whales that decide to leave the ocean and go swimming around in the sky with the birds, and (easily the high mark of the film) Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was a wild, jazzy piano number set in 1930s New York.
The other two big highlights are the all too brief Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals bit, where a flamingo is totally hated on by his brethren for playing around with a yo-yo, and the closer, which gives us part of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite while showing us the trials of a wood sprite as she is attacked by the deadly Firebird as it exits a nearby volcano and lays waste to her forest. The Fantasia series is now batting 1.000 for closing the film out with their darkest number, a trend I am eager to see with Fantasia 2060. Because I plan on still being alive at age 80--err, at age 30 Again. Yes.
I think the 74 minute running time really helped this film, as it ensured that there wouldn’t be any of the padding that riddled the original. While I think that may have hurt the film somewhat at the box office (it made $60 million, not quite making back the $80 million production cost -- I guess these films are still ahead of their time), I doubt the film would have worked nearly as well if it had had the two hour running time its predecessor had. That said though, if they make these more of a regular event (and there is no reason at all to believe that, unfortunately -- I would personally love for this to become one of Disney’s key franchises), I certainly would like to see how they would manage doing a Fantasia based entirely around one long concerto or symphony, or perhaps two mid-length ones. This series, if not quite done perfectly (sorry Disney, but to me the perfect blend of animation and classical music pretty much always involves the likes of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck), is still a rather noble and brilliant use of the art form, and as much of a latecomer to these films as I am, I would love to see them continue further. Come on Disney, you make enough of a profit off of your other ventures, you can afford to lose money on one of these every decade, right?
Rating: *** ½
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Princess and the Frog
The transformation Disney has undergone over the past decade has been nothing short of astonishing. Faced with a combination of lagging creativity in their film department and the first actual animated competition in the form of Dreamworks that the company has ever had, the company spent the bulk of the decade outright panicking, eventually settling on the idea that the key to regaining their old glory was to completely ape Dreamworks. This is the great plan that gave us films like Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, and worked out so well that when Disney finally purchased Pixar a few years later, it was with the demand that John Lasseter not only retain creative control of Pixar, but that he would also take creative control over all of Disney’s other animated studios. While the lengthy development time of animated films meant that there were still a couple years more of lousy movies, The Princess and the Frog finally arrived last year to show what a traditional Disney animated studio could do with Pixar guiding them along.
And quite a movie it is, too. The company’s first traditionally animated film since 2004’s Home on the Range, this is as visually beautiful as anything Disney has ever made (and looks much better than their ghastly efforts at 3D animation), particularly when the style shifts for the song “Almost There” to a style based off of painter Aaron Douglas (I looked it up, I‘m not that much of an art expert). We also get a great villain in the form of the Shadow Man (Keith David), a voodoo priest visually based off of the voodoo god Baron Samedi. I’m a little disappointed that he only gets one song in the film, though since this is Disney I suppose he’ll have plenty of time for new musical numbers when they start churning out fifty sequels.
But yes, the story: Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) is an expert cook/waitress at a New Orleans restaurant who is determinedly trying to save up enough money to buy her own restaurant, when she runs afoul of Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), heir to the throne of Maldonia, who himself has recently run afoul of the Shadow Man, and been transformed into a frog as part of an elaborate plot to give the Shadow Man control of all of New Orleans. Naveen convinces her that all he needs is for her to kiss him like the frog prince in the children’s story and he’ll turn back to human form, but of course the kiss backfires and transforms her into a frog as well. Soon the pair is on the run, from partygoers, the Shadow Man, a pair of hunters, and some alligators out in the bayou (though in keeping with the film’s praise of New Orleans music, they do actually befriend one alligator that wants nothing more than the chance to play his trumpet), and find their chances of being turned back run out at midnight. I’d say things do not look good, except of course that things in this movie in fact look so very, very good.
Honestly, there is nothing not to enjoy about this movie. The music by Randy Newman features some of the catchiest songs Disney’s made in over a decade (seriously, The Lion King is the most recent film I can think of that could match it), and there was a great commitment made to crafting actual interesting, likable characters, eschewing the recent Dreamworks-inspired trend of having characters that mainly exist to spout off horrid pop culture references. It feels like a very intentional effort was made to use this film to get the company back to what it has traditionally done best* (which likely explains why this is the first film since 1998’s Mulan to give us a new Disney princess -- and in a surprise twist, it‘s also the first Disney film since 1946‘s Song of the South to have a black main character, so good on them for diversity), and it succeeds beautifully.
If I don’t quite give this film four stars, that’s only because it’s not quite at the level of the films Disney was routinely putting out in my formative years. It’s not really on the level of an Aladdin or a Little Mermaid or a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but in all honesty, I’d rather watch it again before I watch a few of the four star films I’ve reviewed here. And not just ones like Sick, either.
Also, don’t go by the star ratings, read the actual reviews.
Rating: *** ½
* You can see some of the overtness involved in that in the trailer below, which goes on about the company’s 75 years of excellence (including a brief clip of Aladdin picking up the lamp), and in the new animated Disney logo of Steamboat Willy at the start of the film.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
A Christmas Carol
Alright, so I can’t completely avoid the proper holiday here, particularly not when my mom keeps getting as many family films as she can fit under her coat. Still, in choosing today’s movie I reasoned that if anything could snap me out of the holiday spirit, it would be Disney’s new version of A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and the various ghosts, and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who has made the curious career decision to stop making any more movies except those that he can film as live action and then cover up with frankly creepy animation (his previous two films, of course, being Beowulf and The Polar Express, and whose next film is another animated effort in the form of a remake of Yellow Submarine, in which the Beatles will no doubt be played by your childhood nightmares).
Of course, that being said, part of what makes Charles Dickens’ novella such a classic is its perfect blend of sentimentality and creeping darkness, so Zemeckis’ new directing style surprisingly works incredibly well with the material. The story, I would hope, is already familiar to everyone: a horrid old miser in 19th century England is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, repents of his wicked ways and becomes a wacky, beloved socialist, and Tiny Tim has God bless us, everyone. Zemeckis adds a few flourishes, such as shrinking Scrooge down to rodent-sized and having him ride an icicle across a rooftop, but these flourishes largely seem less like natural outgrowths of the story and more like an attempt to keep any children in the audience from getting bored by throwing in a few mindless action scenes here and there.
Despite that, the film works surprisingly well, though I doubt it’s the sort of movie children raised on Dreamworks cartoons will enjoy. It’s slow-paced, dark and foreboding; in short, it’s the exact opposite of drivel like Madagascar or Chicken Little (yes, I know that was a Disney movie). It’s also a complete feast for the eyes: the benefit of doing this as animation instead of keeping it in live action, aside from providing a more seamless blend between the actors and the effects, is that each ghost brings with it a new visual style. Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) glows bright blue and green, looking as though he wouldn’t be out of place in the next Ghostbusters movie, while the Ghost of Christmas Present flings about so much multicolored lights that his segment rather resembles a Skittles commercial, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come gives us more of a Sleepy Hollow-ish nightmare scenario. It’s the rare film that actually makes me feel a little disappointed that I didn’t see it in IMAX 3-D.
One thing that was a little surprising, after Polar Express, was in how hidden Carrey was in the film. While with Polar Express Zemeckis made the animated characters all look like Tom Hanks (he did most of the voices, this wasn’t some crazed Being John Malkovich-type scenario), here Scrooge looks nothing at all like Carrey, aside from a possibly over expressive mouth. With Carrey toning himself down (aside from the ending, at least) heavily while affecting a British accent, it doesn’t even sound like him, to the point where if you took his name off the credits I doubt any of his fans would recognize him. Actually, does Carrey still have fans, at least to anywhere near the extent that he did in the 90s? It seems like the last movie he did that has any kind of following is Eternal Sunshine, and that movie’s fan base mostly showed up years after it died in theaters. I‘m digressing here.
While this may not be quite the Christmas film people would want, I daresay it’s the Christmas film they all need. After all, the original story is largely responsible for Christmas becoming a major holiday again when it was first published (Go Wiki it if you don’t believe me), so it’s only right that it keep getting remade to frighten and delight us all (elsewhere on this blog I also reviewed one from the 1950s with Alistair Sim as Scrooge, though I have to say I prefer this version). This one has the makings of becoming a new permanent holiday fixture.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The Cure: Trilogy
Back in 2002, Robert Smith and the Cure decided to record what was less a proper concert and more a historical document: live performances of three of their biggest and gloomiest albums from start to finish, without any flourishes (aside from an encore of two songs from a fourth album), in front of a sold-out crowd in Berlin. What emerged from this idea is arguably the ultimate Cure concert video, dark, musically brilliant, and with the whole band mostly just standing there sulking the whole time.
The three albums in question, Pornography, Disintegration, and Blood flowers (yes, plus a brief encore from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me), are considered by most fans to be high notes for the band, and while there are naturally plenty of songs from other albums that I would’ve liked to see them perform as well, what we get here is both pretty damn good, and pretty damn long (really, how many bands out there are willing to perform for three and a half hours?). Of course, your enjoyment is going to be pretty heavily predicated on whether or not you’re a big fan of the band, but fortunately for me they’ve been one of my favorites since high school, and to hell with all of you that don’t like them.
Of course, as mentioned before, there are some issues that I have with the concert, mainly involving the lack of visual variety on display. There’s little to no effort put into anything beyond playing the instruments or singing: the guitarists will occasionally walk around a bit, but always looking at their guitars the whole time like nothing else exists to them, and Smith occasionally does not-quite dances with his hands (such as on the song “Lullaby”, where he briefly imitates a spider crawling), but it stays as thoroughly basic as it can get. The non-band attempts at breaking up the visual monotony are pretty basic, mostly limited to lots of camera changes to capture the whole band and lots of multi-colored lights bathing the band. Having seen the band live before, I can confirm that this is exactly what they’re normally like in concert (the most exciting thing Smith did at that show was sit down on the stage halfway through a song like he was about to have a heart attack), and while their music is good enough to make up for such monotonous visuals, it would be nice to have at least a small amount of variety. I don’t ask you guys to be Marilyn Manson or anything, but give us something here!
While there’s really not much more to say about this, I will mention one thing here: that fairly high rating I gave it? That’s because I’m a huge fan of theirs. If you happen to dislike them, or only like some of their stuff (particularly if you mostly just like their poppier efforts), this is not the DVD for you. However, if you’ve read all the above and still feel intrigued, or you’re in high school and are just starting to learn how much fun it is listening to gloomy music and quietly hating everyone, then you should definitely check this out. You’ll be happy you did.
Rating: *** ½
P.S. The idea of a trailer doesn’t work for something like this, so here’s the first song from the concert:
Monday, November 1, 2010
Giallo
Given the history of the giallo genre, it seems a little crazy that a movie like this had never been made before now. Just think, an entire film subgenre that’s called by the Italian word for yellow, and it took Dario Argento almost forty years since his first entry in the genre to think of making one about a villain whose skin is actually yellow.
Argento has been in a pretty major renaissance lately, after his career hit some pretty big snags over the course of the 90s (full disclosure, I’ve only seen two of his films from that decade -- The Stendhal Syndrome had its moments, but was overly long and fairly dull, and Phantom of the Opera was just terrible). Giallo, however, comes at a much better time in his career, following as it did Do You Like Hitchcock?, his two Masters of Horror entries, and Mother of Tears. Quite frankly, he’s been on fire lately, and I’m eager to see what kind of film he does next (more supernatural stuff, please).
Anyway, the plot: a serial killer is going around, picking up attractive foreigners with his cab in Milan, and dumping their carved up bodies several days later. He eventually makes the key error of abducting Celine (Elsa Pataky), an American model, while she is on the phone with her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner), prompting Linda to seek help from the inspector (Adrien Brody) tasked with tracking the killer down. The two of them team up, as inspectors and civilians in gialli often seem to, and it soon becomes a race against time to find the killer before he finishes Celine off.
The film has almost everything you could want in a giallo. It’s got sexy women being cut up and murdered, some astonishingly obtuse clues that lead to the killer (seriously, if that one girl actually wanted her abductor caught, she could have tried not reciting poetry while she was dying), a killer that looks at photos of his work on the girls on his computer while jerking off, some really cool scenery, and just a whole lotta blood. There’s only a couple things it gets wrong, really: the title actually connects logically with the film without even so much as throwing an animal into it, and the killer is both revealed rather early and is largely known solely as a killer, rather than being a seemingly random cast member whose killer status is revealed with five or ten minutes left to go in the movie with no plausible explanation given. Some might say the lack of these two elements was an improvement, but really, if you can’t respect tradition then what can you respect?
If anyone has been hearing about the giallo genre but was worried that it might be too weird or Italian for them, this is a good choice to dip your toe into the water. Argento has long been the unparalleled master of the genre, and while this isn’t quite his best (that would be Opera), it’s definitely the best one to show to a potential new viewer. While Opera was more of a filmed nightmare, of the sort that he frequently made in the late 70s-mid 80s, this one will be more appealing to regular thriller fans -- at least the ones that don’t mind a nice hard R rating. And if they do mind, let’s be honest, there’s not a single Argento movie they’ll ever approve of, the uptight tools.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, October 18, 2010
Feeding Frenzy
This is exactly what a low budget horror movie should be like. It’s the newest film by the guys at Red Letter Media, who have risen to some measure of internet fame from their video series critiquing the Star Wars prequels. With Feeding Frenzy, they have shown that, given a budget less than 1% of the first half of Phantom Menace, they can make a much better movie.
The film, which cheerfully advertises itself as an homage to “Critters, Ghoulies, and all the other films that ripped off Gremlins,” features the villainous Mr. Plinkett (Rich Evans) of the Star Wars reviews as the owner of a hardware store that also has a side gig killing hookers. His employees have begun to suspect something is the matter, particularly after he destroys the security tape from Monday night. Refusing to bow down to any of their demands for answers, he instead unleashes an army of little rubber monsters he’d been keeping locked up in the store’s basement. The monsters, well-trained little scamps that they are, immediately begin hunting down all the store’s customers and eating them, which any retail employee can agree is only a good thing.
The main thing one notices about the movie is that it’s so damn funny. Much like Gremlins 2, it focuses on the comedy first and the blood second (though frequently both at once), which anyone who’s seen their videos on Youtube can agree was a good choice. I would compare the film to the works of Broken Lizard, except this is a great deal more successful than their horror comedy Club Dread. It’s the sort of film where girls find they are in serious need of some caulk, where hardware employees need to wear Hazmat gear when cleaning “tomato sauce” off of the floor, because it’s probably contaminated with AIDS, and where a middle aged Russian woman goes off to fist herself in celebration at her husband being eaten.
The movie moves along at a pretty fast clip, too. It makes the mistake of letting its only weak scene open the film (when Plinkett has his fun with a prostitute, who lets him know she charges extra for the handicapped), but once the rest of the cast arrives it doesn’t stop zipping along until the end credits. Which is not to say that everything’s rushed, mind you; there are, after all, a few scenes where characters just stare at each other in uncomfortable silence just to sell a joke. There’s simply no part in which the film stops being interesting, which is generally something of a rarity for a zero-budget horror movie (So Mort It Be is the only thing close out of the thirty-some movies I’ve so far seen in the Tomb of Terrors collection, and even it drags a bit at times), even one that’s mainly a comedy.
This holiday season, horror fans should be happy to find a movie this entertaining showing up. The past month has seen several quality horror titles getting DVD releases, and while the bigger theatrical releases like The Wolfman, The Crazies, and A Nightmare on Elm Street may not have been all that good, at least the less famous titles this year seem to have largely kicked ass. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you order yourself a copy of this.
Rating: *** ½
P.S. While Amazon does not have the film available for purchase, you can order yourself a copy here.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
Well, it seems that my shift away from New Jersey-based horror to Germany-based was a resounding success, as it let me finally see what has got to be the single most original horror movie to come out in my lifetime. In a time filled with lame remake after lame remake, it may not be the movie we want, but it is absolutely the movie we need.
The film begins with Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), two American girls on vacation in Germany, as they go driving one night, get lost, and then get a flat tire. Going for help, they stumble across a mansion in the woods that belongs to Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), a surgeon that’s just a little bit tightly wound, and who winds up drugging the two of them and tying them up in his basement laboratory. His goal, as anyone who has heard of the film already knows, is to create the ultimate life form: a human centipede made of several people surgically connected mouth to anus. He already had a Japanese man that he had kidnapped, and is overjoyed to discover that the two girls are a match with him.
The film is fairly slow-paced, though it does manage to throw in a few surprises, as when one of the girls tries to make a break for it pre-op. With such a small cast, all the characters are allowed to be fairly intelligent, and her attempted escape from the mad doctor was rather refreshing in how both characters tried to outsmart each other instead of, just as an example, having her run as fast as she could in a straight line through the woods only to have the doctor magically standing by the street when she emerges. A smart character is always more interesting than a dumb one.
That was a nice surprise, but what was a nice non-surprise was in how they actually pull the trigger and have him complete the surgery, and one that will hopefully lead to many more films based around anus-to-mouth human centipedes (a sequel is already being worked on, so there‘s at least one). It’s infrequent at best for a horror movie to even come up with such an insane idea, let alone have the nerve to go through with such a thing. Maybe Takashi Miike could have come up with something like this, but I can think of few others. Writer-director Tom Six should be commended for his dedication to such an utterly horrible idea.
The climax, while ending a teeny bit on the cliché side for me, is mostly pretty great as well. The doctor has to deal with the dual threat of two detectives that suspect him of making off with the girls and the trouble of a rebellious human centipede. This leads to one of the best and funniest scenes in the movie, which I believe is the slowest, most agonizing chase scene that has ever been filmed. It unfortunately devolves into a gunfight afterwards, but it’s still awesome right up until it falls apart.
This is honestly one of the oddest reviews I’ve ever had to write, as I’m fairly certain that everyone that hears the premise already knows whether or not they will see this, and any real argument I try to make for or against will be going unheeded. I will say that this wound up being quite a fun movie, and definitely one of the best we got this year (as evidenced by how it was released on a massive 19 theater screens here), and I’m trusting all of you to hunt it down. Don’t fail me on this.
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Town
While Ben Affleck’s acting career has been pretty hit-or-miss both quality-wise and box office-wise, he is now two for two with great directing jobs. His Boston, here just as in Gone Baby Gone, is as textured and crime-riddled as New York was in the 70s. If it isn’t quite on the level of his directing debut, that’s only because he set the bar dauntingly high for himself.
In addition to directing and co-writing here, Affleck also stars as Doug, a professional bank robber who’s just completely beaten down by the life he’s been born and raised into. His life finally takes a turn when he meets Claire (Rebecca Hall), the manager of a bank he and his crew rob. Following her to make sure she isn’t talking to the police, they accidentally start talking and soon move on to dating. Through her, he sees the chance of a life that’s better than the one he has, and begins to fool himself into thinking he can escape from his old life. Unfortunately, his old ties, particularly his boss Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite) and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) are determined to do everything in their power to keep him right where he belongs.
So I’m making the film sound like more of a character study now than a crime movie, and while that’s certainly true, that’s certainly not intended to ignore the action scenes and ever-mounting tension to be found in the film. There are three major action scenes spread throughout the film: the opening bank robbery, a car chase with the police about halfway through the film, and a massive shoot-out with the Boston PD and the FBI at the climax, all of which work extremely well. The car chase in particular is quite possibly the best I’ve seen in a film in the last ten years, and I think part of the reason it works so well comes from how emotionally invested we’ve gotten in the story and its characters. Compare this to, say, the part in G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra when the Joes are chasing after Cobra agents through Paris and trying to recover a dangerous warhead from them. Guns are firing, cars are being destroyed, there’s explosions and chaos everywhere, and it’s completely impossible to give a damn about any of it because all the characters are such bland ciphers that nobody on the entire planet could have any emotional stake in the outcome.
The tension in the film also builds itself up at a perfect, steady pace. The film rarely feels the modern need to scream at the audience that they should be nervous, but like a classic noir we can still feel, as the movie progresses, the slow and inevitable feeling that doom is hovering over all of the characters, merely biding its time before it descends upon all of them. Consider one masterfully done scene partway through. Doug and Claire are eating lunch at a sidewalk café, when Jem shows up and introduces himself to Claire. Doug knows that Jem has a tattoo on the back of his neck that Claire can’t be allowed to see or she‘ll know that he was part of the crew that robbed her bank, and tries to silently signal to Jem that he needs to leave immediately. Jem is unaware that his tattoo would be a giveaway, though, and decides to ignore Doug’s signaling, staying around to torment Doug and express his great displeasure at Doug dating a witness that could potentially get them all thrown back in jail, all while seeming polite and cheerful to Claire. You almost want to start screaming when you watch the scene unfold, because Jem is such a loose cannon throughout the film that we have no idea from moment to moment what he’s capable of doing next. We get the feeling that, should she discover the tattoo and start freaking out, he might just pull out a gun right then and there and shoot her publicly, worrying about the consequences later. Indeed, between this film and The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner is really showing a virtually limitless range as an actor. He so fully embodies his role here that we start to wish the film had been about him instead. Where Affleck’s character is mostly dead inside, Renner is so full of life that he almost jumps out of the screen, leaving chaos wherever he goes.
I’m really liking the recent resurgence in quality crime movies. With this, Gone Baby Gone, The Departed, and others, we’re very slowly starting to get some films that properly evoke the great noirs of the 40s and 50s, crime stories that you can really get down and dirty with, and I for one could not be happier. This may be a bit slow-paced for the ADD generation, but for those who like an absorbing film that actually takes the time to say something, you can’t go wrong here.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Left Bank
And we close out our month of HROHFYSSBYD with this quality gem, a recent Belgian effort that’s so confident in itself that the DVD proclaims it to be just as important a film as Let the Right One In. While that’s just shameless hucksterism there (though seriously, you should also go see let the Right One In if you haven’t -- best vampire movie of the past decade, easily), it’s a tribute to the quality of Left Bank that I wound up more amused and annoyed by such a claim.
The film stars Eline Kuppens as Marie, a young runner who finds her dreams floating away from her after fainting at a shoe store and learning that she’s too badly ill to compete at a major meet in Portugal in two weeks. This comes shortly after she has a chance encounter with a naked man (Matthias Schoenaerts) who borrows her towel in the locker room, and so naturally rather than suspect he might be in any way connected to her sudden illness she instead agrees to go out with him. Her horror movie survival skills are not incredibly strong here, though in fairness that may well just be due to Belgium not having had a “major” horror movie since 1971’s Malpertuis.
Anyway, she quickly falls in love with him, and after a really hot sex scene (on their first date -- good for them!), she soon moves in with him in his apartment in Left Bank (a really notoriously sketchy neighborhood in Antwerp), where she discovers such things as that the apartment complex was built atop a seemingly bottomless hole of black mud, the girl that used to live in her new apartment mysteriously disappeared, and that the building was also made directly atop a ley line. And also Samhain is rapidly approaching, which I always enjoy in a movie, because it lets you know how they’re talking serious occultism here, unlike us Americans and our bastardized Halloween nonsense.
I am of course being a little snarky here. The movie is actually done really well, establishing a world filled with dark possibilities, and giving us a heroine that isn’t afraid to be somewhat less perfect than most Final Girls. Despite my teasing earlier, she does eventually twig to the fact that her new boyfriend isn’t quite on the up and up, and does try to escape and hide from him. That she doesn’t quite succeed isn’t really completely her fault; she is working alone, after all, and he’s got his whole crew helping him.
Also, while I’m not the biggest fan of children in the world, this movie may be especially resonant with would-be parents or those going through difficult pregnancies, or perhaps also those who had kids and then wished they hadn’t. The theme of childbirth is a pretty strong one throughout the film, beginning with her doctor informing her that she’s only had three periods all year, and if she doesn’t take a break from her training she might never have children. She has multiple dreams involving children, and at one point she wakes up, feels something in her underwear, and when she checks to see if she had her period, instead finds ashes have come out of her vagina. Ladies, I may not be a professional doctor here, but when you have black soot coming from your private region, you may not even want to waste the time needed to get fully dressed before you leave for the hospital.
I hope you enjoyed this past month. I’ll be finishing out the week with some reviews of movies I had seen over the summer but couldn’t fit into these theme months, and then most of the remainder of September will be an extended Q & A session due to my abbreviated schedule then. Feel free to fire off some questions then.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Jigoku
It’s fun watching a movie whose DVD case carries such statements as that the film’s director is the “father of the Japanese horror film”; it makes you feel as though you’re in for a movie that can’t possibly live up to the hype that’s just been tossed its way. Bless it’s heart, though, the film certainly does its best, though in a typically Japanese weird and tangential manner.
Indeed, the first hour of the film, after a brief intro where we get a university lecture on how many different religions believe in the concept of a Hell (which is what Jigoku translates to), and how it exists to punish those whose sins went unpunished in life (which is not how I have ever heard Hell described before, but alright), feels more like a crime movie by Seijun Suzuki than anything else. It follows a student named Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) who goes driving with his irresponsible friend one night, only for them to accidentally run over a drunken gangster before panicking and driving away, leaving the yakuza’s mother and girlfriend to track the pair down and plan their revenge. As it must with such tragedies, further sins continue to pile atop their initial sin, until we reach the one hour mark and the entire cast winds up dead.
I don’t think I’m spoiling much here, as the main focus of the film comes over the final forty minutes, as all the characters are now in Hell being tortured for all that they have done. It comes off like the segments in Hell from Awakening of the Beast (yes, I know Jigoku came first, that’s just the closest comparison I can think of), hyper stylized, and filled with screams and torture. We are treated here to just about every vision of Hell that one could hope for, from the circles of fire to the Greek irony of masses desperately clutching for water they can never quite reach to a more Dantean lake of blood to punish the lustful. Our protagonist even finds himself haunted here by the sounds of his unborn baby now crying for eternity around him, with him doomed to spend all of time trying and failing to rescue her.
It’s a pretty trippy and intense experience, and to the best of my knowledge it’s the first film ever made that actually tried to depict Hell, so it definitely gets some bonus points for that. The film does come off as somewhat disjointed, as it’s essentially two different films that connect at the hour mark, but I can’t really fault it too much for that. After all, both sections are still engaging, and the grand finale wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if we didn’t have such a sense of who these people are and how they wound up in Hell in the first place. Sure, we could wind up getting a great deal more gore scenes then (side note: according to IMDB, this was the first movie to use elements of gore as FX, which I assume means that it’s the first film to show violence in a manner beyond just splashing victims with red paint), but there wouldn’t really have been any emotional element to really make it click.
Regardless, due to the nature of its disjointed narrative and its overall strangeness, I can’t really give this one as unreserved a recommendation as a more standard film. All I can truly say is that I personally enjoyed it quite a bit, and if the above description sounds interesting to you, you may enjoy it quite a bit as well. I honestly hope that you do.
Rating; *** ½
