Tips from Chip

Time Off

2013-05-18T00:10:00.000-04:00

This is just a quick note to let you know that I will be away for up to a week, and part of being on vacation or taking a trip is getting away from the computer for a while. I probably won’t watch any movies, either (gasp!) Since I’ve already reached this month’s goals for the Oscar Nominees, and passed 1,000 films seen from the 1,001 Movies list (more info to come in my May Status post), I also don’t feel any pressure from skipping a week of churning through those two lists.

Unfortunately, right now it doesn’t look like the weather is going to cooperate, so I may cut it short. If I do get some nice weather then look for some hiking posts to intermix with my current Movie First Sightings and 2013 Big Summer Movies posts.

Movie – Star Trek into Darkness (2013)

2013-05-16T19:12:00.000-04:00

While the 2009 Star Trek reboot film had its flaws, one of the things that was extremely smart about it was the fact that the storyline included the time stream being irreparably altered. This meant that the filmmakers had rid themselves of the burden of more than four decades of Star Trek continuity. They literally were free to do any story they liked about the ship and crew. Because of this you’ll understand my puzzlement when I discovered today that for reasons which, quite frankly, escape me, director J. J. Abrams chose to remake one of the original Star Trek movies. And he didn’t pick just any old movie, but the one that many consider to be the most iconic: The Wrath of Khan.

Sure, the openings of the films are quite different, but by around the midway point they are converging, and then finally towards the end this newest film is even replicating scenes and shots from the original film. Don’t worry if you have not seen The Wrath of Khan; I will not be spoiling those ending moments in this post.

This film opens with a huge action scene with the Enterprise crew trying to simultaneously escape from natives and extinguish a volcano that is about to erupt. Abrams immediately establishes that he has not yet outgrown his fondness for shakycam. In fact, there is a later action scene where there is a gun battle that occurs on a planet’s surface and I frankly cannot tell you much of anything that happened in it because the camera was bouncing around so much. There were two guys in red shirts that I assume died because that’s what happens to those guys, but if it was shown onscreen I wasn’t able to pick up on it. It sounded like an exciting scene, though.

And this time around Abrams has added another “hey, look at me” element to his films: lens flares. I first noticed an abundance of them in a couple of last summer’s action films. Back then I joked that apparently the lens flare is the new shakycam. I guess Abrams has jumped on this bandwagon, too, because there were a ton of them in this film.

Anyway, what is the film about? After the aforementioned natives and volcano sequence, during which Kirk violates any number of Star Fleet directives, he is busted down to First Officer. That lasts for approximately one day and he is once again back on the job as the Enterprise Captain, leading a hunt for a man (Benedict Cumberbatch) who blew up a Starfleet facility. Not everything is as it first appears, either with the bad guy, or with the entire assignment. Kirk has reason to question both his own motivations and the orders he received. There are impossible-to-miss parallels with 9/11 and the actions of some in power in the aftermath of it. In fact, there is a tribute to 9/11 First Responders in the credits.

Joining all the regulars this time around are Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller), who gives Kirk the assignment, and his daughter Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), who sneaks onboard the Enterprise. Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) also returns from the first film, once again trying to give Kirk good advice and most of the time being ignored.

Among the regulars – Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as Bones, Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, and Anton Yelchin as Chekov – it is Uhura whose part is most pumped up from the reboot. She seems to accompany both Kirk and Spock in many of the key scenes in the film. The filmmakers also throw in some relationship squabbling between her and Spock, with Kirk sometimes playing marriage counselor.

Everything you’ve read so far may not make the film sound that exciting. Most big action films are only as good as the villain that is in them. Imagine John McClain without Hans Gruber in Die Hard, for example. Well, Benedict Cumberbatch as the bad guy is what makes this film work. He is far more effective onscreen than Eric Bana was in the reboot, although to be fair that was from bad writing on the first film more than anything else. This time around the writers (the same as on the reboot) learned from the mistakes of the first one and created a much more effective and three dimensional antagonist for Kirk and his crew.

I mentioned up top that this was a remake of The Wrath of Khan. When this became apparent I was a little disappointed, but I went with it. As they started replicating some scenes, though, I got a little frustrated. When they finally had the iconic “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN” yell I had had enough and literally said to myself, “Give me a break.” The filmmakers do put enough of a different spin on things to keep it from being a total redo, though. And it will be fresh for anyone who has not seen the original film, of course.

If you watch Star Trek into Darkness throw any kind of logic out the window. Like its predecessor, it’s a big, dumb, loud summer action movie. Big, dumb, loud, summer action movies can be entertaining, though, and this one is. If anything you read here makes this movie sound interesting then I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Movie – Back to School (1986)

2013-05-15T11:13:00.000-04:00

Back to School was a comedy vehicle for Rodney Dangerfield. He had been doing standup for years, but his appearance in 1980’s Caddyshack had made him known to a whole new generation of people. He also became almost ubiquitous in advertisements for Miller Lite beer in the early 80s. By the time this film came out he was a full-fledged star. Not a star yet, but one that soon would be, was Robert Downey, Jr. He plays a prominent supporting role in this film. It was the first time I ever saw him in a movie.

Rodney Dangerfield plays Thornton Melon, a businessman and self-made millionaire. His son Jason (Keith Gordon) is headed off to college, but Thornton is worried his son doesn’t have what it takes to survive. He decides the best way to help his son is to attend college with him. This would normally be a problem since Thornton never even got a high school diploma, but one hefty donation to the Dean (Ned Beatty) for a Melon School of Business and Thornton matriculates with his son.

Jason is going to be rooming with Derek (Robert Downey, Jr.), but Thornton has again arranged things. Their adjoining rooms have all been remodeled to an immense single room that just screams “party central”. In fact, Thornton hires Oingo Boingo to play a party. People of my generation know who they are. People who are younger will know one of their members – Danny Elfman – as a multiple Oscar nominee who has scored dozens of films, including just every Tim Burton movie ever made. Others might know him as the man who wrote The Simpsons’ theme. Speaking of music, this film also has a song by Michael Bolton when he was a metal singer (really.) Related to this party is both an inside joke and an early example of product placement. Thornton brings in truckloads of Miller Lite beer for the party. At the time it got a big laugh from the audience I saw this with. Nowadays the joke has been lost.

Thornton has issues with his business professor (Paxton Whitehead), who knows nothing about how to run a business in the real world, but thinks he is far better than someone of Thornton’s background. Making matters worse, this professor is romancing Thornton’s English professor (Sally Kellerman), who Thornton fancies now that he has just gotten a divorce from his gold-digging second wife (Adrienne Barbeau). He has his chauffeur (Burt Young) run interference for him sometimes.

Meanwhile Jason and Derek have been getting to know others. A young woman named Valerie (a pre-Star Trek Terry Farrell) catches Jason’s eye. She has also caught the eye of Chas (William Zabka). Back in the mid 80s if you needed a bad guy in a teen film, Zabka was your man. From beating up Daniel-san in The Karate Kid (1984), to terrorizing the school in Just One of the Guys (1985), to being a jerk in this film, no one was better. In fact, when the filmmakers who made Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), a movie about traveling back to the 80s, needed someone to be a jerk they very fittingly went out and got Zabka for the cameo.

It’s not bad enough that Chas is competing with Jason for Valerie; he is also the champion diver at the school – the sport that Jason is also going out for. Thornton was a champion himself in his younger days, and Jason is trying to live up to his father’s legacy. Will Thornton’s patented Triple Lindy dive make an appearance? (I’ve seen other movies and TV shows use the term “triple lindy” as a reference back to this film.) Jason’s life is made even harder when his father turns out to be a lot more popular on campus than he is.

As you might expect, Thornton doesn’t do well in his classes. (Watch for an early appearance by Sam Kinison as a professor). At one point he has a paper due on Kurt Vonnegut and there is no way he is going to be able to complete it. There’s a knock on the door and it’s Kurt Vonnegut himself whom Thornton has hired to write the paper. In one of my favorite jokes, the professor rejects the paper because it’s clear it’s not Thornton’s work and “whoever wrote that did not know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.” To me that just says everything about people who earn money making up all kinds of crazy theories about what writers, artists, and filmmakers really meant when they did something, rather than the completely obvious and straightforward interpretation.

Thornton’s lack of work comes back to bite him. He has to take an oral exam from each of his professors to prove that he has learned their subjects. Seeing Rodney Dangerfield reciting Dylan Thomas’ poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is worth the price of admission all by itself. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

Downey, Jr. plays the loud mouth, smart aleck, outrageous friend to perfection. In some ways his character is not that different from his most famous character now – Tony Stark. You could almost picture Downey, Jr.’s character of Derek as how Stark was when he went to college.

This film was probably the pinnacle of Dangerfield’s movie career. Keith Gordon didn’t stay with acting much longer. He moved into directing. Among the films he did were Mother Night (1996) based on a Vonnegut novel, and The Singing Detective (2003) where he directed his former co-star Robert Downey, Jr. As I mentioned up above, Terry Farrell would go on to do Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Watch for another future Star Trek alum in Back to School – Robert Picardo.

Back to School is filled with lots of jokes, some of them raunchy. Because it has little to no violence in it, it has a PG-13 rating, which is fair. (The MPAA hadn’t gone insane yet.) If you share the MPAA’s current opinion that a quick flash of boob will scar your child for life, though, then you will not want to watch this movie with them. For everyone else, if this sounds interesting then I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Note: the video below contains a clip of Robert Downey, Jr. in Back to School. It’s not a spoiler. It’s not exactly an Oscar-worthy performance, either, but it’s the only clip I could find where you could see what he looked like in the film.

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

2013-05-13T18:16:00.000-04:00

What with the subject matter in the movie, and with the word “grape” right in the title, it’s impossible not to use the word “bittersweet” to describe the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Johnny Depp is the star and he was already a household name when the movie was made. Also in the film, and someone who I had never heard of before I saw it, is Leonardo DiCaprio. He plays a mentally retarded younger brother of Gilbert’s. Because I knew nothing about DiCaprio, and because he did such a good job in the role, I honestly wondered if the young man they got to play the role really did have that condition. I must not have been the only one who was impressed because DiCaprio received an Oscar nomination for his performance. He didn’t win, though. Those of you who saw the film Tropic Thunder know why.

Writer Peter Hedges adapted his own novel about a young man named Gilbert Grape who has numerous sources of both joy and frustration in his life. Gilbert and his family live in a small town in Iowa. Gilbert’s father died several years before and his mother (Darlene Cates) never got over it. She has become extremely obese and has not left the house for years. Gilbert has basically taken over the care of his entire family. That includes his sister Amy (Laura Harrington), his brother Arnie (DiCaprio), and his youngest sister Ellen (Mary Kate Schellhardt). Arnie is a handful. He is a danger to himself, especially from his obsession with climbing the water tower in town.

In addition to his family, Gilbert also has issues dealing with an ongoing affair he is having with a married woman (Mary Steenburgen), and with the fact that a large store chain has come to town and the small grocer Gilbert works for might be put out of business. Thrown into this mix is Becky (Juliette Lewis), a young tourist who has become stranded in town when her family’s camper broke down. Gilbert does have a couple of friends played by John C. Riley and Crispin Glover.

Gilbert is an outwardly calm person. In fact, I’ve read some comments on this film that Depp was boring for much of it, but Hallstrom has said that he and Depp both felt this was the right way to go with the character. I don’t agree that he was boring, since you know it is all building towards something. With all these things going on even someone as seemingly calm as Gilbert will reach a breaking point.

As I wrote up top DiCaprio was very convincing in his performance. I consider it the best work he has done so far and he was only 17 when he made this movie. I also want to mention Darlene Cates, who played the mother. She had never acted before. The filmmakers needed to find a woman who was very heavy to play the part. They happened to hear about Cates, who for a time had been depressed and not left her house for years. That was exactly the same kind of situation the mother is in in this film, so they contacted her. Luckily she was game for it, she obviously understood the character, and she was able to hold her own with the others. (She has since become a speaker on subjects related to obesity and self-esteem.)

She did have some concerns about how her character (and by extension herself) were going to be presented in the film, but once she talked to the author, who had based this mother on a woman he knew, and once she found out it wasn’t just a “let’s make fun of the fat person” role, she felt better about it.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a different kind of film. It has some funny moments, but it is not a comedy. It has some sad moments, but it is not heart-wrenching. It’s small, but it has an incredible cast in it. It has Depp’s character in relationships with two different women, but it’s not a romantic comedy. What it is is a film with a good story and good performances. If this sounds interesting then I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Note: the video below contains clips of Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. The scenes do not have any real context to them so they should not be spoilers.

DVD Instant Video Paperback

Movie – Belle Epoque (1992)

2013-05-11T12:28:00.000-04:00

Belle Epoque is one of the few comedies to ever receive an Oscar in any of the Best Picture categories. In this case it was the 1993 Best Foreign Language Film winner. It also won nine Goyas (the “Spanish Oscar”), including Best Picture, in its own country. It is the first film in which I ever saw Penelope Cruz. She was about 18 when it was shot. It’s also the first time I ever saw Maribel Verdu and Ariadna Gil, too, but they are not as well known in the U.S. despite the fact that both were in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – Verdu as the housekeeper and Gil as the mother.

The comedy in Belle Epoque is not the pie in your face kind, but more the witty and/or subversive kind. For example there is a scene where some men are playing cards in a brothel. Suddenly two men run in with an urgent message. We only then find out that one of the men playing cards is the priest in town and when he gets up to respond to the message another man stands up and says that since he is the Mayor he’d better go see what is wrong, too. One of the men who ran in is shocked to find the priest there, but the Father explains that he needs to go wherever there is sin in order to better combat it.

The film takes place in Spain in 1931 – a period of unrest between people trying to maintain the monarchy and those who are trying to create a republic. A young man named Fernando (Jorge Sanz – Amantes) has deserted his military assignment. He’s only a bugle player and doesn’t have any convictions strong enough to die for. Fernando meets up with an older man named Manolo (Fernando Fernan Gomez – The Spirit of the Beehive, All About My Mother) who lets him stay at his home.

The two get along well, Fernando cooking and Manolo feeling a little like he’s found the son he never had. All good things must come to an end, though. Manolo’s four daughters are coming to stay with him for a while because the area where they live is too dangerous. Manolo feels he can’t have Fernando living in his home with them, so Fernando agrees to move on. They go to the train station, Fernando to leave on one and Manolo to meet his daughters on another. As luck would have it, the daughters’ train arrives first.

Fernando watches wide eyed as they get off the train and greet their father. Each one is more beautiful than the one before. First comes the oldest, Clara (Miriam Diaz-Aroca – High Heels), then Violetta (Ariadna Gil – Pan’s Labyrinth), then Rocio (Maribel Verdu – Y Tu Mama Tambien, Pan’s Labyrinth), then finally the youngest, Luz (Penelope Cruz), in pigtails.

The title of the film translates as “The Age of Beauty”, so it is aptly named. The only other four movie sisters that I can think of to rival the ones in Belle Epoque are those in 2005’s The Upside of Anger – Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, Erika Christensen, and Evan Rachel Wood. Even then I don’t think they have the sex appeal of the four Spanish actresses.

After witnessing all of this, Fernando decides that maybe, just maybe, he might stick around a little longer. He “misses his train” and goes back to Manolo’s house to just spend the night until he can catch the next day’s train. Between his handsomeness and his cooking, he immediately meets with the approval of all four sisters. Rocio goes so far as to make a move on him that night when she is upstairs making his bed up for him. They get interrupted, though.

You might think that Fernando is some kind of lothario who is going to use one or more of these women before moving on. He might even be thinking that himself. A good deal of humor comes from the fact that if anyone ends up getting used it’s Fernando.

Rocio catches him later, hugs him, then uses the opportunity to fall onto a bed behind her while not letting go of him. She then starts exclaiming about what a devil he is making her do this, all while she is kissing him. He is very confused about whether she wants him to have sex with her or not.

Will Rocio be the one to get him? Luz develops a crush on Fernando and it bothers her when he moons over her older sisters. She loses the pigtails pretty quickly. Clara is a young widow, knows what it is like to share a bed with a man, and now has gone without a man for several months. Violetta would seem to be the one most immune to Fernando’s charms. She wears trousers, smokes cigarettes, hunts, fixes a vacuum cleaner, chops wood, etc. The other sisters explain that their mother wanted a son, so she dressed Violetta as a boy all the years she was growing up.

So, Violetta’s off the table, right? Right? Actually, no. Take a little bit of Some Like It Hot cross-dressing for a costumed festival, a little bit of wine, a funny tango with a very confused Fernando-in-drag, and Violetta decides Fernando makes a fine looking woman. Their sex scene is quite funny for his reactions. On the one hand he really wants to have sex with Violetta, but on the other hand the entire situation is freaking him out.

He’s not a cad, though. The next morning he decides he is in love and tells Manolo about this and that he wants to marry his daughter. Manolo is stunned. Unfortunately, Fernando forgot to check with Violetta to see if she felt the same way. Needless to say, Fernando finds that the path to love is not as easy as he thought it was.

In addition to this main story, there are subplots with a rich man in town who wants to marry Rocio even though his overbearing mother would prefer he stay home, with the aforementioned priest who doesn’t seem to be that devout, and with the ongoing fight over monarchy vs. republic.

All of the performers do quite well. Cruz stands out, even among the other actresses playing her sisters. So does Verdu, whose naughty looks Fernando’s way speak volumes about what she’d like to do to him, if no one would find out. In addition to the female beauty on screen, the countryside that the movie was filmed in is also quite beautiful, as befits the title.

If all of this sounds interesting, and if you would like to see early performances from Penelope Cruz, Maribel Verdu, and Ariadna Gil, then I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Note: the videos below are specific points in the movie. The first is when the sisters get off the train, including Penelope Cruz in pigtails. The second is when Cruz’s character has lost her pigtails. Because this is the entire movie, each will continue to play all the way to the end unless you pause it. For the second video, stop watching before 1:38:15 to avoid a spoiler.

DVD

Movie – Empire of the Sun (1987)

2013-05-09T11:38:00.000-04:00

Empire of the Sun was the first “serious” Steven Spielberg movie that I saw. Yes, he had done The Color Purple two years earlier, but I never saw that until about a year ago. Spielberg was tired of being passed over by the Oscars because people thought he only did popcorn movies. He started doing “serious” movies to change his image, although it still didn’t work until he did Schindler’s List (1993), which even the old grumps in the Academy finally couldn’t ignore. Empire of the Sun is also the first film in which I ever saw Christian Bale, who plays the lead character. I consider this movie to be the best Spielberg film that relatively few people have heard of.

Empire of the Sun was adapted by Tom Stoppard from the 1984 book of the same name by J.G. Ballard. Known early in his career for writing science fiction, Ballard decided to write a semi-autobiographical novel of his experiences as a boy in China during World War II. Like the character of Jamie, Ballard was kept in an internment camp by the Japanese, although he was still with his parents. (The “J” in his name stands for James.)

The film opens in 1941 in Shanghai, China. Jamie (Christian Bale) is a roughly 12 year old boy of privilege. His father is a rich British businessman. They live outside the city in a mansion with servants catering to all their needs. Jamie is fascinated with planes and wants to be a pilot when he grows up. This bothers his wealthy father.

Jamie is also a spoiled brat. He treats the servants horribly, demands things all the time, is bored a lot, and just generally gets whatever he wants. Things are about to change in a big way for him. The Japanese, who had already taken over northeastern China, invade the area around Shanghai. During the insanity, Jamie gets separated from his parents as they all try to escape. He makes his way back to the mansion, which is being looted by the servants. One takes time out to deliver a good slap to him, which may be the biggest surprise of all for him.

Jamie manages to live alone at the mansion for a while, eating the food and drinking water from the pool. He finally has to go into Shanghai, though. He finds the Japanese are firmly in control. He runs into a man named Frank (Joe Pantoliano) who takes him back to meet his partner Basie (John Malkovich). The two are in the black market and are doing whatever they need to in order to survive. That includes trying to make a deal to sell Jamie as a laborer.

Jamie pleads with them not to do it, and tries to negotiate by telling them about the rich mansions out where he was living. They go there, but the Japanese have taken them over and they are all captured. They eventually get taken to an internment camp for all the foreigners that were in the country.

There is a great transition in the film at this point. Up to now we have seen a pampered Jamie, maybe with some baby fat still on him. Reportedly, Spielberg shot all of these scenes first thing, and then delayed for a bit before shooting the rest. This allowed him to take advantage of what puberty was doing to Bale’s appearance. The transition shows the formerly pampered brat as a lean, more mature expert at working all the cons at the internment camp they are in. Jamie runs throughout the camp, swiping a bar of soap here, trading for that item there, constantly running and running. His hair is shorter, his face leaner.

Basie has sort of taken over the camp, with Jamie as one of his helpers. Every now and then, though, we are reminded that the Japanese are still very much in control. This includes them beating Basie so badly that he ends up in the infirmary.

Among the diversions Jamie has is a Japanese boy about his age that he can see through the fence of the camp. They form a bond because that boy seems to be as excited about planes and flying as Jamie is. The fact that there is an airfield right nearby thrills both of them.

I won’t say what else happens in the internment camp and who does and does not survive. I will say that the story does go through to the liberation of that region. It’s not so much about that, though, as it is the story of this boy who has to go through a lot to try to survive.

Bale did a great job in this film. I can’t honestly say that I thought to myself, “That boy’s going to win an Oscar someday”, but I did definitely remember him and checked out a few later films he did before he became famous. (Watch for him in Branagh’s 1989 film Henry V, for instance.) And showing that even as a child it’s “who you know”, Spielberg only considered Bale for the part because Amy Irving, Spielberg’s wife at the time, had strongly urged him to do so because she had worked with Bale on a TV mini-series.

Speaking of early roles, in Empire of the Sun watch for small appearances by Miranda Richardson and Ben Stiller. I’ve read that originally their parts were more extensive, but that the film was cut down for release and that much of their performances hit the cutting room floor.

The film received six Oscar nominations, although Spielberg was left on the outside looking in. One of the nominations was for Cinematography, and it definitely deserved it. There are many beautiful shots in this film. By the way, watch for a re-creation of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Freedom from Fear early in the film when Jamie’s parents tuck him in to bed.

As I mentioned at the top, this is probably the Steven Spielberg film that people know the least and that’s too bad. It is a very good drama about the impact of war from a boy’s perspective, but without getting cloying or manipulative (like the recent War Horse). Bale does a good job in his first major role, as does Malkovich in support. If you have never seen it, then I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Note: the video below contains clips of Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun. There are no real spoilers for the film in it. In fact, it is not a single scene, or even a sequential set of scenes, but rather a bunch of unconnected short clips of Bale from the film not shown in any particular order. You get to see what he looked like both before and during his imprisonment.

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Paperback Kindle

Video - Spock vs. Spock

2013-05-07T16:46:00.001-04:00

Technically, this is an advertisement for Audi cars, but it was so funny that I had to post it anyway. I have no affiliation with Audi and I get no money from it. I just thought you might get a kick from it, too.

I'm sure even the loosest fan of Star Trek got some of the references in it, but some of you might not have known what the song was that Nimoy was singing in his car. If you want to find out, just watch the video below. (You may want to brace yourself.)

2013 Big Summer Movies Schedule and Reviews

2013-05-05T12:36:00.000-04:00

“Summer!” – The cast of Firefly/Serenity (they would yell Summer Glau’s name whenever they messed up a line because she reportedly never screwed up herself.)

The purpose of this post is to give you a quick reference for the big films that are coming out this summer movie season. I will be writing separate reviews of the movies I see that are good enough to recommend, and I will put the links to those here. If the movie is not good enough to recommend I will add a short review into this post. Either way you may want to save this post for future reference.

[By the way, you can see my 2011 Big Summer Movies and 2012 Big Summer Movies posts by clicking on those titles.]

Note – so many movies come out every summer, and so many of the smaller ones get moved around or even postponed, that I concentrate on the “big” movies. These are the ones that are heavily advertised, expensive to make, have big names in them, and/or have had their opening dates scheduled for a long time.

First, the list, then a little more about each movie:

May:

3^rd	Iron Man 3	Read my review
10^th	Nothing looks big (maybe The Great Gatsby)
17^th	Star Trek into Darkness	Read my Review
24^th	Fast & Furious 6
	The Hangover Part III
31^st	After Earth

June:

7^th	Nothing looks big (After Earth left a hole)
14^th	Man of Steel
21^st	Monsters University
	World War Z
28^th	Nothing looks big (maybe The Heat)

July:

3^rd	Despicable Me 2
	The Lone Ranger
12^th	Pacific Rim
19^th	Nothing looks big (maybe Red 2)
26^th	The Wolverine

August:

2^nd	Nothing looks big (maybe the 300 prequel)
9^th	Elysium
16^th	Kick-Ass 2
23^rd	Nothing looks big (maybe Mortal Instruments)
30^th	Nothing looks big (maybe One Direction)

May 3^rd:

Title: Iron Man 3

Stars: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce

Summary: Iron Man returns, but how have the events of The Avengers movie affected Tony Stark, and who is this new terrorist threat called The Mandarin?

Review: Read my review here

May 17^th:

Title: Star Trek into Darkness

Stars: All the crew from the first film, plus Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve

Summary: Sequel to the Star Trek reboot with J.J. Abrams pointing his shakycam lens on a reboot of another iconic Star Trek story. Will it play with fans?

Review: Read my review here

May 24^th:

Title: Fast & Furious 6

Stars: Everyone from every prior movie

Summary: Director Justin Lin actually made this a franchise, with each film from number 3 on being better than the ones before. Can he continue the streak?

Review:

Title: The Hangover Part III

Stars: All the same guys, plus Heather Graham returns, and Melissa McCarthy is added to the mix.

Summary: Everyone bands together to try to help one of their own, but their road trip gets interrupted by a kidnapping. Will this end the trilogy with a bang or a whimper?

Review:

May 31^st:

Title: After Earth

Stars: Will Smith, Jaden Smith

Summary: Will and his son re-team for a film, but this time they are in a big science fiction movie where they play a father and son who get stranded on Earth 1,000 years after humanity abandoned it. The father is injured and the son must go for help. Will there be too much Jaden and not enough Will to satisfy movie viewers?

Review:

June 14^th:

Title: Man of Steel

Stars: Henry Cavill, Michael Shannon, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne

Summary: Zack Snyder’s attempt to reboot the Superman story. Like Bryan Singer before him Snyder feels he has to “fix” both the iconic costume and the origin story. Will he succeed, or is he making the same mistake Singer did with Superman Returns?

Review:

June 21^st:

Title: Monsters University

Stars: voices of John Goodman and Billy Crystal

Summary: Pixar’s prequel to their 2001 film Monsters, Inc. See how Mike and Sully first meet in college and how they learn to become monsters. Is Pixar cannibalizing yet another previously popular film, or do they have a real winner on their hands? (And enough is enough; where is the damn Incredibles sequel already?)

Review:

Title: World War Z

Stars: Brad Pitt

Summary: Pitt takes on the zombie apocalypse movie genre. Buzz was good for it until people learned that massive re-shoots had to be ordered to try to save the film. Zombie fans will turn out for it in droves, but will it bring in the other movie viewers?

Review:

July 3^rd:

Title: Despicable Me 2

Stars: voices of Steve Carell and Al Pacino

Summary: Sequel to the surprise 2010 hit. This time Gru is recruited by the Anti-Villain league to try to stop a dangerous new bad guy. Will it have the magic of the first film or is this just a cash grab by the studio?

Review:

Title: The Lone Ranger

Stars: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Helena Bonham Carter

Summary: Reboot of the Lone Ranger story, but this time with Gore Verbinski at the helm. Depp plays Tonto, with Hammer as the title character. Will this be another great Verbinski/Depp pairing (Pirates of the Caribbean, Rango) or will their string of successes end here?

Review:

July 12^th:

Title: Pacific Rim

Stars: Ron Perlman, Idris Elba, and a young, photogenic, international cast

Summary: Giant monsters from another dimension have invaded Earth and man builds giant robots to combat them. Anticipation for this film is high, and you should never doubt director Guillermo del Toro, but I just keep getting a Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla feel every time I see the trailer. Will it be able to sustain itself after the first weekend?

Review:

July 26^th:

Title: The Wolverine

Stars: Hugh Jackman

Summary: Long-delayed sequel to 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This time around the film is based on the classic tale of Wolverine’s time in Japan and his attempts to fend off an old enemy while figuring out his future. Is there still enough interest in this character or is this one too many movies with Wolverine in it?

Review:

August 9^th:

Title: Elysium

Stars: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley

Summary: A space station holds all the rich people, while the Earth is where all the poor live. Can one man rectify this situation? This is director Neill Blomkamp’s first film since 2009’s District 9. That movie was much loved by critics, but was only a modest success at the box office. Has there been enough growth in his fan base since then to make this a hit, or will this film be his “sophomore slump”?

Review:

August 16^th:

Title: Kick-Ass 2

Stars: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jim Carrey, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Summary: Sequel to the fantastic 2010 film Kick-Ass with the title character and Hit Girl returning to combat the threat of the Red Mist. This time around they have a whole team of other heroes to help them, but Red Mist has countered with a team of villains. Will this be as great as the first one, or is the release date change from late June to mid-August a bad sign that the studio doubts the box office potential of this film?

Review:

Movie – Iron Man 3 (2013)

2013-05-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

I’ll answer the biggest Iron Man 3 question that all of you want to know the answer to: yes, there is a post-credits scene. What’s that? That’s not the question you had? You want to know how this movie stacks up to the first two Iron Man movies, and to The Avengers? Well, Iron Man 3 is a big improvement over Iron Man 2. I would still pick the first Iron Man as the best of the three, but the third one is almost as good. And no, it’s not going to touch The Avengers on how entertaining it is. However, considering that The Avengers is the best superhero movie yet made, and that Iron Man is one of the best, saying that Iron Man 3 is not as good as them still leaves a lot of room for a really fun movie.

There is a ton of carping on the IMDB boards about Iron Man 3. Most of it seems to fall into one of two categories: Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of The Mandarin was not what the comics fanboys were expecting, or just the general trashing from Dark Knight fanboys that accompanies every Marvel movie that gets released. (More than 1,000 Nolanites have already rated Iron Man 3 as a 1 out of 10 on IMDB.)

Iron Man 3 opens with Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) talking about how things have changed “since New York” (meaning The Avengers). In the movie they give Stark a somewhat random “anxiety disorder” to cope with. It was an element that just didn’t seem to work, but thankfully it was minor.

Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) are now living together in his huge Malibu house. He hasn’t been able to sleep because of his fear since New York. He has been spending a ton of time in his lab, tinkering. Among the things he has been working on are small computers injected under his skin that will allow him to mentally control the various pieces of the armor and make them come to him and form the armor around him, or also remotely control the armor.

We see a flashback to Tony at a New Year’s Eve party in Switzerland in 1999. (Watch for a fun cameo from Shaun Toub – the man in the cave with Tony in the first Iron Man movie who told Tony they had met once before.) Tony picks up a female scientist (Rebecca Hall) at the party. She is working on what appears to be a form of nanotechnology and is testing it on plants, trying to get them to re-grow the parts of them that are damaged.

While busy with her, Tony blows off a nerdy guy named Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) who has founded a think tank called Advanced Idea Mechanics, or AIM for short. The comics readers should immediately recognize this name. Back in the present, a now very successful Killian comes to Stark Industries to meet with Pepper Potts about maybe doing business.

Reprising his role from the last film is Don Cheadle as Colonel James Rhodes aka War Machine, who has now been renamed The Iron Patriot and given a paint makeover in the colors of Captain America. He is protecting the President (William Sadler) and Vice-President (Miguel Ferrer), as well as searching the globe for a new terrorist threat – The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley).

Also reprising their roles in this film are Jon Favreau – who is back as the character Happy Hogan even though he did not direct this film – and Paul Bettany as the voice of Jarvis. If you are wondering if any of the other people from The Avengers or SHIELD show up, the answer is sort of, but not like how you might expect.

The emphasis in Iron Man 3 seems to be on the question “Who is Iron Man if he doesn’t have his armor?” After threatening The Mandarin to come and get him, and as a result having his home destroyed, Stark finds himself almost on his own and without a working suit of armor. Consequently, several times during this film we are shown Tony still acting the hero even without having armor to protect him. I’m not sure I completely buy into Stark being an action hero on his own, but it is fun to see and it didn’t feel too over the top.

I mentioned up above that there is a scene after the credits. This has happened with at least five of the most recent Marvel films. I can’t believe that everyone has not caught on yet, but a good 25-30 people walked out of the theater today when the credits started to roll. The rest of us sat there and enjoyed one more scene. And it was probably a minute long or so, making it one of the lengthier ones. In the credits the filmmakers thanked Joss Whedon. This might have been because he did an uncredited script polish, but I think he might have written the post-credits scene. The humor in it just feels like his work.

The trailers spoil two of the three great moments in the film. The best of the three has thankfully not been shown in them. And I will not be mentioning what the other two are so that I do not spoil them for you if you have somehow not seen the trailers, or have not picked up on a couple things in them.

I have to say that this was a three star film for me until a huge, action packed ending that had a great payoff during it. That raised it to four stars. If you’ve seen the other Iron Man movies, or even just The Avengers, then this is a worthy follow-up to them. I think you will enjoy yourself. Unless you are a militant Mandarin fanboy, I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

April Movie Status

2013-05-01T09:53:00.000-04:00

I saw 68 movies in the month of April, plus 3 movie re-watches. I mentioned last month that my goal for April in regards to the 1,001 Movies list was to get my remaining blocks of 100 (101-800) all under 20 unwatched in order to balance things out better. I was able to achieve that. I also discovered that I was not done with entries that were more than 2 ½ hours long like I had said last month; in April I found two more 3 hour long movies I had not seen and promptly watched them.

I’m not sure if I’m going to try to knock off more short term goals in May. I should pass 1,000 entries seen at some point during the month. (I’m at 986 as I post this.) I might just continue to try to balance out the remaining blocks of 100 or I might decide to finish off the 1930s (6 entries) and 1940s (12 entries) during the month. I haven’t decided. It might come down to whether or not Netflix ever sends me Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) that has been sitting at #1 in my queue in “Very Long Wait” status for close to 8 weeks now. Without it I cannot complete the 1930s.

As for the Oscar Best Picture nominees, I continued to plug away at them in April. I stalled out on a nearly 3 hour long tearjerker made for the women who were at home during World War II – Since You Went Away (1944). It sat there for over a week before I watched it. I did finally bite the bullet and watch the more than 4 hour long Cleopatra (1963), though.

For May I might try to complete the 1960s (4 nominees left) and the 1950s (5 nominees left). Two more movies after that would make me complete from 1945 – up. Prior to 1945 they had 10 nominees per year, so I have more gaps from that point and earlier.

Here are the 68 new movies I saw in April. Highlighted movies are ones to which I would give at least three stars out of five. I will single out the four and five star films, as well as the worst films, in the paragraphs below the lists.

1,001 Movies (49): Jules and Jim (1962), Badlands (1973), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Kes (1969), The Man from Laramie (1955), The Paleface (1948), Johnny Guitar (1954), Silver Lode (1954), Spring in a Small Town (1948), The Music Room (1958), Shaft (1971), The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), Ride Lonesome (1959), Ariel (1988), Satyricon (1969), Faces (1968), The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Wanda (1971), Klute (1971), Red Desert (1964), The Killers (1946), Targets (1968), Bigger Than Life (1956), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Ladies Man (1961), Le Boucher (1970), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Gimme Shelter (1970), Story of Women (1988), Written on the Wind (1956), Eyes Without a Face (1960), The Wrong Man (1956), Contempt (1963), Barren Lives (1963), Gertrud (1964), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Ashes and Diamonds (1958), The Conformist (1970), La Notte (1961), L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1961), Pierrot le Fou (1965), The Bigamist (1953), Shadows (1959), Forbidden Games (1952)

Oscar Nominees (7): Anchors Aweigh (1945), Johnny Belinda (1948), The Yearling (1946), Cleopatra (1963), Since You Went Away (1944), In Which We Serve (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1943)

Other Movies (12): We Bought a Zoo (2011), Get Low (2009), The Secret World of Arietty (2010), Summer Lover (2008), Bachelorette (2012), Too Big to Fail (2011), Shallow Grave (1994), New Year’s Eve (2011), Valentine’s Day (2010), Topkapi (1964), Gog (1954), Castaway (1986)

Re-watches (3): Night of the Comet (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), The Insatiable (2007)

TV Series (0):

I had one five star film in April and that was Gimme Shelter (1970). When I decided to see all the films in the 1,001 Movies list I had already seen almost half on my own. As I watched more and more of the remaining ones I gave up hope of ever finding another great entry from the list. Sure, I’ve seen a number of four star movies since beginning, but I figured I must have already seen all of the very best films already. Then after having watched around 450 more films from the list I finally encountered one I would rate at five stars. Gimme Shelter has great music in it, and not just The Rolling Stones, but also Ike and Tina Turner and others. The thing is, this is far more than just a concert film. It is nothing less than a recording of the death of the hippy ideal of peace, love, and understanding. You are there as it happens. Seeing the events that occurred at Altamont at the very end of the 1960s was sobering, but what added an extra level to it all was seeing the reactions of the Stones as they were watching tape of the concert footage at a later date.

My four star films in April were Johnny Belinda (1948), Shaft (1971), The Secret World of Arietty (2010), Too Big to Fail (2011), and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

Johnny Belinda is a movie about a deaf/mute woman in a small fishing village. She is befriended and taught sign language by a doctor. Jane Wyman won an Oscar for her performance. Her character has bad things that happen to her and her family, though. I should note that I was surprised that a 1948 film took on one of the topics in this movie. I won’t spoil what it is.

Shaft is the original black action hero. (I’m talking about the Richard Roundtree version, not the remake with Samuel L. Jackson. If you’ve seen it, try to scrub it from your brain.) Shaft was probably the most mainstream entry I had left on the list and it delivered for me.

The Secret World of Arietty is another winner from Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki didn’t direct this, but he did write the screenplay, adapting it from the classic children’s book The Borrowers.

Too Big to Fail is a re-telling of the near economic collapse that occurred at the end of George W. Bush’s second term as President, and his subsequent bailout of the banks. There are quite a few high-powered actors and actresses in the movie. It was done by HBO and in many ways it reminded me of their 1993 film And the Band Played On about the unchecked rise of AIDS in the U.S. in the 1980s while Ronald Reagan did nothing.

Smiles of a Summer Night presented me with two things I thought I would never see: 1. A Bergman film that wasn’t about death and despair; and 2. A Bergman film that is not only humorous, but that also has some naughty fun while it is at it. It reminded me in some ways of Max Ophuls’ early 1950s films La Ronde and Le Plaisir. This is easily my favorite from among the 10-12 films of Bergman’s I have seen.

The 1,001 Movies list is reliable for providing me with at least one 1 star movie every month. In April I had two. They were Satyricon (1969) and Wanda (1971). I probably would have watched Satyricon (aka Fellini’s Satyricon) at some point from sheer curiosity regardless of whether it was on the list or not. I found out it was just terrible. And no, I was not offended by it. It was simply pointless, other than “Hey! Look what we can get away with now that movie censors are going away!”

I had never even heard of Wanda before seeing it. It follows the aimless wanderings (get the pun in the title?) of an aimless woman. She doesn’t even have hippy ideals of “dropping out” of life. She is just the single most apathetic person – man or woman – I have ever seen in a movie. Does this sound like the makings of an interesting movie, especially when she is in nearly every shot? Yes, it is supposed to be a feminist movie, but other than the fact that a woman wrote, directed, and stars in it, it is hardly feminist. It is far from a positive portrayal of women or their struggles. In fact, if a man had made it I’m sure there would be cries of misogyny. Any way you slice it, I felt it was a bad movie.

Bird in a Garage

2013-04-30T10:15:00.000-04:00

Not "my" bird. Just a random pic I found to help illustrate.

No, that’s not the title of yet another obscure movie that I will be reviewing. It’s also not the title of the Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawn pairing. That was Bird on a Wire. I wish that had been the title of what I experienced.

Yesterday I went out to my mailbox to get the latest DVDs from Netflix (see, this is a movie related post. Well, sort of). I went out through my garage because a bird has been building a nest on top of my porch light right next to my front door. I didn’t want to disturb it. Unfortunately, the birds chose not to show me the same courtesy.

When I returned to my garage I found that a bird had flown into it. (I had left the door up since I was only going to be gone for a minute.) A bird coming into the garage isn’t usually that big a deal. I’ve had it happen before; they fly out when I walk back into it. This one didn’t. It just flew around in a circle.

I decided to try to herd it towards the huge open door to the sunlight, but it was either the world’s stupidest bird, or the world’s most stubborn. It simply would not fly out the six foot wide, seven foot tall opening. In fact, it seemed to think the raised door made an excellent perch.

I spent 15 increasingly frustrating minutes chasing this bird around my garage. It occasionally dropped me a present, which made me even more frustrated. I started out in “shoo” mode, progressed through “stun” mode, and finally ended up in “die motherf*cker” mode.

I tried closing the door for a minute to say to the bird, “See, you lost your opportunity. Better take it if you ever get the chance.” No dice. When I opened the door to all the sunlight it just perched on it again. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing the same way expecting a different result. I closed and opened the door again. Still no exit by the bird.

I finally realized that as stubborn as I was, this bird was either too stubborn or too stupid even for me. I had worked up a decent sweat and I decided to say to hell with it, close the garage door so other animals didn’t get in, and give the bird the night to dwell on its situation.

This morning I once again needed to go to the mailbox (to return the Netflix DVDs. See, still about movies.) I quickly stepped into the garage so the bird couldn’t fly into my house. I saw no motion. I then opened the garage door, sure that the noise and activity would get the bird to reveal where it was. Nope, still no motion. I then looked around and finally saw it perched on my lawnmower handle.

It had somehow managed to apparently shit its own body weight during the night. Not only did I have spots in several places, I had a frigging stalagmite under my lawnmower handle. I took a couple steps towards the bird…and it flew directly out the open garage door without the slightest hesitation.

So, anyone ever have this happen to them? How did you get the bird to leave? I’d like to have some semblance of a plan if this bird isn’t too stupid to breed, and passes on its genes to the next generation.

Note: My apologies to those folks who are breathlessly (yeah right) waiting for my next review to find out what film I first saw Christian Bale in. It’s actually going to be a few days before I get to it, so I will tell you now; it’s Empire of the Sun. Look for the review around this coming weekend. It’s going to be that long because tomorrow is the first of the month, which is when I always do my Movie Status post for the month that just ended. After that I’ve also got to put up my annual Big Summer Movies parent post in which I link from and to all my reviews of, you guessed it, the Big Summer Movies. An Iron Man 3 review should soon follow that.

Don’t worry, though. I have not dropped the Movies Where I Saw Someone for the First Time category. Just like the other years I have done this, I will do an occasional Big Summer Movie review then I always return to the category I am doing until I complete it.

As I leave you with this, all I have to say is….”Papa Ooo Mow Mow”.

Movie – Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

2013-04-28T12:33:00.000-04:00

Drop Dead Gorgeous is a mockumentary in the style of This is Spinal Tap, except instead of covering a rock band, this film covers a small town Minnesota beauty pageant. Like Spinal Tap everyone in Drop Dead Gorgeous plays it straight – as if the outlandish things that are going on are completely normal. In and of themselves pageants are funny anyway. Now add in the small town gossip, rich family/poor family, good girl/bad girl, pervy judges, amateur talent productions, sabotage, death, and much, much more and you’ve got a funny, tongue in cheek comedy.

We meet Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley) the wife of the richest man in town, the organizer of the local American Teen Princess pageant, and a former winner herself. Her daughter Becky (Denise Richards) is the odds on favorite to win this year. Her main rival is Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), who is as much poor white trash as Becky is a princess. Amber doesn’t let it get her down, though. She works multiple jobs, including doing the makeup for the deceased at a local funeral home. She enjoys the job because she can bring happiness to their families and because she can practice her tap dancing for the pageant at the same time. She’s the nice girl to Becky’s evil girl.

Amber’s mom (Ellen Barkin) is a full on drinking, smoking, trailer-living stereotype. When the documentary crew first follows Amber home her mom asks, “Are we on Cops again?” She loves her daughter, though, and would do anything for her. She’s best friends with Loretta (Alison Janney) and the two try to guide Amber the best they can. Sample advice: “If those camera guys ask you to take off your top, get the money up front.”

Also competing in the pageant are Lisa Swenson (Brittany Murphy) and Leslie Miller (Amy Adams). This is the first film in which I ever saw Adams, and it turns out to have been the first movie she was ever in. She plays a cheerleader who’s a little dim and a lot hot to trot. If you’ve only seen her in her more recent sweet and/or serious roles, this is a fun change of pace. She utters my favorite line in the film. When Amber’s pageant outfit is stolen Lisa supports her and tells her she’s got to go out on stage anyway (meaning in whatever clothes she can find). Leslie earnestly responds, “Unh uh. They won’t let you compete naked. I already asked.” I’ve included a set of clips of Adams in this film at the bottom of this post.

As Drop Dead Gorgeous goes along we see many scenes of the competitors preparing for the pageant in their own ways. The documentarians seem to keep running into one of the judges taping all these girls, too – purely for preparation in his upcoming role as a pageant judge, of course. Things take a turn for the (mock) tragic, when one of the competitors is involved in a fatal “driving and smoking” accident. Amber doesn’t believe it was an accident (“yeah, she liked to drive her dad’s thresher, but that was because she said the heavy vibrations helped her think. I know for a fact that she only smoked after a good drive”), but the local police are satisfied. Bad things start happening to Amber then, including an explosion at her mom’s trailer. Gee, I wonder who could be behind all of this. (One of the running jokes is that it is completely obvious from the “documentary” who is behind it, but that none of the subjects catch a clue.)

If you saw “Minnesota” above and wondered if they put on heavy Minnah-SOH-ta accents, the answer is “You betcha”. (Fargo, set next door in North Dakota, had been a big movie just a couple years earlier.)

This movie is not perfect. You have to buy into the fact that all the people in the “documentary” are real, which some viewers may have a problem with because they are so outlandish. Denise Richards was in her late 20s when she made this film. While people that age commonly play teenagers in both movies and TV, when you stand her next to Kirsten Dunst, who really was 17 at the time of filming, it’s obvious Richards is much too old to still be in high school. And there’s a scene involving vomit near the end of the film that is intentionally over the top. It is actually pertinent to the story, but I turned my head for a couple seconds while it was happening.

Writer Lona Williams was herself from small town Minnesota and had competed in pageants. She was the runner-up in the national Junior Miss pageant. Because of this she certainly knows the subject matter in the film. If you like the concept of mockumentaries, and if you are looking for a fun movie, then I recommend you give Drop Dead Gorgeous a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Note: the video below contains clips of Amy Adams in Drop Dead Gorgeous. While there are no major spoilers for the main characters, there are some minor ones for her character. If you want to avoid even those then stop watching at 1:50 into the video.

DVD

Movies Where I Saw Someone for the First Time

2013-04-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

“Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!” – Julian Marsh, 42^nd Street

Over my years of watching movies I have sometimes taken a special notice of a performance from an actor or actress I have never seen before. Sometimes those people have gone on to become household names in later films; sometimes they have not. I honestly gave up a long time ago in trying to figure out why some of them made it and some didn’t.

Obviously, just about every movie I have watched features someone I have never seen before, so I needed to come up with some ground rules to limit the number of films in this category.

1. The person has to be a reasonably well known name today.

2. They have to have been relatively unknown when I first saw them (i.e. Sandra Bullock in Love Potion #9).

3. The film I first saw them in cannot be the one that made them a star (i.e. Tom Cruise in Risky Business).

4. Even if the film didn’t make them a star, it cannot have been a blockbuster (i.e. Eliza Dushku in True Lies).

5. I cannot have first seen them on a TV show (i.e. Anne Hathaway on Get Real).

6. I cannot have forgotten them from that first sighting (i.e. Jim Carrey as the rock star in The Dead Pool).

7. The movie cannot be so bad that I would not recommend it (i.e. Johnny Depp in Private Resort).

8. “First movie” is the first one I saw them in, not the first one they ever acted in (i.e. I’ve now seen Tom Cruise’s 1981 debut movie Taps, but that was years after I had seen him in Risky Business).

Even with these restrictions, I still came up with 20 films from my own movie collection. I will list the names of the performers now and I will add the links to the reviews of the first movies I saw them in as I post those reviews.

By the way, the first film that I saw both Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire in is probably not the one you are thinking of.

Amy Adams – Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

Christian Bale – Empire of the Sun (1987)

Sandra Bullock – Love Potion #9 (1992) (posted October 9, 2011)

Kevin Costner – American Flyers (1985) (posted August 24, 2012)

Penelope Cruz – Belle Epoque (1992)

Leonardo DiCaprio – What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

Robert Downey, Jr. – Back to School (1986)

Katherine Heigl –

Angelina Jolie –

Nicole Kidman –

Jude Law –

Matthew McConaughey –

Carey Mulligan – Pride & Prejudice (2005) (posted February 11, 2012)

Keanu Reeves –

Charlize Theron –

Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh –

Julia Roberts and Matt Damon –

Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta –

Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire –

Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Forrest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and Judge Reinhold –

On to the reviews…

Movie – Eating Raoul (1982)

2013-04-24T11:22:00.000-04:00

In my prior review I noted that that film (The Insatiable) was probably the least overtly comedic of the films I had written about for my horror comedies category. This time up the film I am going to recommend is probably the least horrific – at least in terms of what appears on screen. Eating Raoul is a dark comedy about an ultraconservative couple who find they can kill people for profit and rid the world of “perverts” at the same time. The film is played straight, not as a spoof. In other words, it is filled with deadpan humor (and that was a pun, but if you haven’t seen the film, you won’t get it yet.)

Co-writer/director/star Paul Bartel (1975’s Death Race 2000, 1976’s Cannonball!, 1989’s Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) concocted this funny, nasty little piece of business without much funding. He shot when and where he could. He plays Paul Bland, a wine seller who loses his job. Long time Bartel collaborator Mary Woronov plays his wife Mary. Paul and Mary have had a dream of opening their own restaurant, but do not have the money for a down payment. Now that Paul is out of work that dream has pretty much disappeared.

To make matters worse for them they are an extremely prudish couple. They sleep in separate beds and do not believe in sex. The most they do is some kissing and cuddling. This would only be their private problem except for the fact that the building they live in is a haven for an entire community of sexual swingers. Paul and Mary try to avoid these “perverts” as best they can, but one evening a man wanders into their apartment by mistake, thinks Mary is pretending to play hard to get, and starts to try to get physical. Paul comes to the rescue by killing the man with a frying pan blow to the head. Paul and Mary dispose of the body, but not before going through the man’s wallet and finding a lot of money. When a second man comes there for the same reason, Paul utilizes his frying pan again, and he and Mary suddenly realize they’ve got a great new source of income. And as they see it, they are also improving the world by getting rid of these deviants.

They consult with their neighbor, Doris the Dominatrix (Susan Saiger), on how to enter this world that is foreign to them. They start advertising for sex partners, these people show up, Paul gets out his trusty frying pan, and the Blands keep getting richer. (And now you know why “deadpan humor” is a pun.)

They decide that they need to improve their security so people don’t continue to just wander in. They hire Raoul Mendoza (Robert Beltran – Star Trek: Voyager) to put in better door locks. Unfortunately for them, Raoul’s legitimate job is just a cover for his real source of income – breaking into the homes of the people he’s just put the locks in for. He shows up at the worst possible time, right when Paul has killed another person. Surprisingly, he doesn’t have an issue with that. In fact, if they cut him in on the deal he knows how the three can make even more money – by selling the bodies to a dog food company. Raoul makes some money of his own by secretly selling the cars of the people being killed.

Things are going great (except from the perspective of the people being killed, of course), until one day when Paul makes a shopping trip. Mary wants him to buy a new frying pan because she’s a little squeamish about cooking with the one Paul has been killing all these people with. While Paul is gone, a client/victim shows up ahead of time. Mary tries to fight him off, but Raoul is the one to come to her rescue and kill the man this time. Something awakens in Mary and she and Raoul have sex.

Things are now out of balance in this bizarre three-way partnership and two-way sort-of-marriage. Emotions start getting the better of all three. Needless to say, Raoul and Paul start escalating their attempts to win Mary over to their side and to eliminate the other. Who will come out on top?

I mentioned earlier that this is the least horrific movie in this category in terms of what appears on screen. There’s no gore and not even much violence other than the frying pan killings. It’s the concept of what is happening that is both funny and horrific at the same time. There is also a scene at the end of the film that really puts it into macabre territory.

In addition to the principals in this film, keep yours eyes peeled for Buck Henry, Ed Begley, Jr., Edie McClurg, and John Landis in small roles. This movie also has a connection to another film I reviewed for this category – Night of the Comet (1984). Both Woronov and Beltran appeared together in that movie two years after doing Eating Raoul, although as different characters. Bartel and Woronov did do a cameo as their Bland characters from this film in Chopping Mall (1986). I’ve read that there was some talk about doing a sequel to Eating Raoul, but funding didn’t come through and Bartel succumbed to health issues.

Eating Raoul is not for everyone. The humor comes from some macabre scenes, and from the dichotomy between this boring married couple (their surname of Bland is very apropos) and their chosen method of making money. If this sounds interesting, then I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – The Insatiable (2007)

2013-04-22T13:24:00.000-04:00

I hesitated on including The Insatiable in my Horror Comedies category. It is a little more serious than the other films I have reviewed. While there is humor in it, it is more understated than in movies such as Zombieland. In addition, the rating for this film on IMDB is only average, which made me wonder if I was not remembering the appeal of this film correctly. I did something I don’t often do and watched this film again before deciding to write this review. My re-watch confirmed for me both that I like this film and that it has enough humor in it to be included in the horror comedy category.

I read through the comments on IMDB to try to get a sense for why some people didn’t like it. The vast majority of those came from an apparently piss poor presentation of the film on the Sci-Fi Channel. It sounds like it was heavily edited and that they obscured the ending of the film with advertisements for what they were going to be airing next.

I also think that this film surprises people by not being what they expect. For some people that is a very bad thing. The Insatiable stars Sean Patrick Flannery, but not as the heartthrob he played in Young Indiana Jones, nor as the badass he played in The Boondock Saints. Fans of either hoping to see more of the same instead encounter his character of Harry Balbo, a bit of a nerdy schlub who is in a dead end office job and who is constantly badgered by an asshole at work (Jon Huertas – Castle).

It’s a horror movie about a female vampire and it’s titled “The Insatiable”. This probably meant gorehounds watched it hoping for lots of carnage, while others watched it hoping for some kind of softcore film. This movie defies those expectations, too. It has Michael Biehn (The Terminator) in it as Strickland, a vampire hunter. He’s not a complete badass, either. He’s a paraplegic in a wheelchair who specializes in tracking them, not killing them. He also has only a smallish supporting role in the movie.

Finally, I also saw one person on IMDB say that the vampire Tatiana, played by Charlotte Ayanna (Training Day, Love the Hard Way), was “not that hot”. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this woman is incredibly beautiful and carries herself with a restrained sexiness that is perfect for the role. She also has the most intense blue eyes. Don’t just take my word for it, though. If you want a second opinion then she won the Miss Teen USA contest as a 16 year old complete amateur – in a $37 evening gown her foster mother bought her, no less – and this was against women who had been doing the pageant circuit their entire lives. In contrast, her entire life to that point had been spent in and out of foster homes.

So, we’ve got a vampire movie without tons of gore, or sex, or badass vampire hunters, but instead with a more intelligent story than you would expect and an ending that you may not expect. Toss in little bits of humor and it was a movie that I liked enough to recommend.

So what is the story? Harry (Flannery) leaves a convenience store having just bought a hotdog for a homeless guy. When he looks for him, though, he sees a woman savagely attacking the guy in an alley. When she is spotted she leaps a couple stories through a window and gets away. She is the “head ripper” killer that the papers have been going on about. She’s also apparently a vampire.

The cops don’t believe Harry for a second, of course. They ask how a woman could pull somebody’s head off when even a body builder would struggle to accomplish that. He insists she is a vampire, so she has the strength, and that she is also smart because pulling the heads off her victims means both that no bite marks on the neck are noticed, and that the authorities are looking for some massive guy. The cops thank him for this theory and send him on his way.

He tries to research vampires by doing things like watching Nosferatu (1922) and going on the internet. The only thing he finds is that female vampires are a form of succubus, the demons who appear to men at night and drain them on their life essence. When he is talking to the same convenience store clerk the next day, and the guy is actually complaining about how his new girlfriend is “draining him dry” in bed this triggers Harry’s interest. That night he peeks in the clerk’s apartment window and discovers none other than the same woman he saw in the alley. She spots him, lunges through the window, scratches his face, and tastes his blood.

Harry is seriously freaked out and tries to contact the person who runs a website on vampires. It turns out the man lives in the same apartment building. Harry sort of acts as the super in order to get his rent lowered and when he is called to Strickland’s (Biehn) apartment and discovers all the stuff about vampires Harry reveals who he is. Strickland explains that Harry “is f*cked” because once a vampire has tasted your blood they can follow you to the ends of the Earth. It’s only a matter of time before they come for you.

Strickland tries to convince Harry to kill the vampire. Harry’s a milquetoast who would probably have guilty feelings over killing a housefly. Strickland tells him that he has to if he wants to live, so Harry reluctantly agrees to be Strickland’s vampire killer. Strickland has been plotting the locations of the “head ripper” kills. He adds Harry’s information to it and his computer software spits out some probable locations where she might be hiding during the day. Strickland explains that the software was originally developed to locate serial killers and what is a vampire if not a serial killer. He goes on to explain that vampires are actually easier to locate than serial killers. When Harry asks why Strickland says, “Because they rarely drive…and they have to be home before sunrise.” Strickland explains that he likes to recruit people like Harry because they’ve got nothing to lose. When asked how often these people succeed, Strickland replies, “Assuming proper attitude, planning, and determination…almost never.”

Harry makes a funny trip to the hardware store buying various tools for breaking into buildings and staking a vampire (which as Strickland explains is just to hold it in place until you cut its head off.) The hardware clerk barely blinks when Harry asks for “a big knife, you know really big, like maybe a cleaver.” Harry finally finds the vampire, but can’t bring himself to kill her. She looks like a beautiful, helpless woman and when she awakens (in her weakened state because of it being daytime) she pleads with him for her life. Harry can’t go through with it.

He doesn’t want her to keep killing though, so he devises an alternate plan: he will trap her in his apartment building’s basement. He uses himself as bait and is successful in getting her into a strong cage he has built there. This is where the movie really becomes interesting. Tatiana (Ayanna) is very much a caged animal. She is a tigress, stalking the dimensions of her enclosure – a tigress that is very intelligent and very aware of the appeal she holds for men in general and Harry in particular. She also knows that he is fascinated with her just for what she is. She tells him, “I can show you things you’ve never imagined” and you know she means it both sexually and vampirically.

Harry is determined to resist her. He believes he can appeal to her better nature and get her to stop killing. She impatiently explains to him that she has to eat to live, just like he does. If she doesn’t eat she will slowly starve to death in this cage and that he is actually being crueler than if he just killed her outright. She asks if he has any enemies; she could kill them for him and she could feed. It would be a win/win. He mentions the asshole at work and she keeps bringing him up, tempting Harry not just with sexual satisfaction, but also the satisfaction of offing this guy who he hates.

Harry is determined to win her over to his side. In one amusing scene he orders blood over the internet, heats it to a perfect 98.6 degrees, places it in a soup bowl on a platter, adds a red rose, and brings it all down to her. She’s not impressed with the romantic gesture. “It’s dead”, she points out (meaning the blood). They compromise on him bringing her rabbits to feed off of when what she really needs is live humans. Don’t worry animal lovers; no rabbits are shown being harmed on screen.

Will Harry win her over, despite the fact that she keeps trying to point out to him that she is who she is and that she cannot change? Will she instead be the one to win over Harry and get him to start bringing her humans, or at least entice him into her cage to his own probable doom? It’s a battle of wills.

I mentioned at the top that this film is a little more serious than comedic. Tatiana has several scenes where she is talking about who and what she is, trying to convince Harry to let her go. She is neither pure evil, nor pure sexual temptress, nor innocent victim of her needs, but rather a mix of all three. In addition, Michael Biehn has a good scene where he explains how his character ended up in a wheelchair.

I also said that the humor in this film is a little understated compared to some of the more out and out comedies I have reviewed for this category. Examples are the chalk outline of a victim in an alley…but with no outline of the head (“head ripper killer”, remember?) Another is after Harry and Tatiana compromise on rabbits they cut to a scene with Harry at his dead end office job with a post it note attached to his computer monitor that says “pick up rabbit.” When he does come to her cage with it, she says in a mock romantic voice, “You brought me a bunny. How sweet.”

Without spoiling who it is or how it happened, at one point Harry does have to dispose of a body. He heads back to the same hardware store where he bought all the breaking, entering, and cleaving implements and this time buys all the obvious things someone would need to dispose of a body – 55 gallon plastic trashcan, hacksaw, plastic, duct tape, cleaning agents, etc. As the clerk rings up each one he starts giving Harry a look that says, “I see nothing. I hear nothing. Please don’t hurt me.”

Is The Insatiable a vampire movie that will change the world, or even the genre? No, but it is a fun B movie with a little more depth than you might expect on the nature of a vampire and whether love truly can conquer all. If this sounds interesting, then I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD

Movie – Man Bites Dog (1992)

2013-04-20T11:30:00.000-04:00

What if a documentary crew had been following the lead character of Alex from A Clockwork Orange around, Spinal Tap mockumentary style? What if he was even more violent than we thought? What if he chose to share his innermost thoughts on life, art, culture, and music while simultaneously killing people? What if he had his own Spinal Tap “Stonehenge” and “lost behind the stage” moments? What kind of movie would that be? The answer is Man Bites Dog, an ultraviolent, seriously twisted, dark dark satire on "reality" programming. I was saying to myself, "I shouldn't be laughing at this." It’s a movie that is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Man Bites Dog is one of the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. The title of this Belgian film was familiar to me, but I knew nothing about it before I watched it. When it had shakycam shots early on I was dismayed at first because I hate shakycam. Once I realized that the cameraman, and even the “documentary” crew themselves, were a part of the movie, I became okay with it.

The subject of the “documentary” is Ben (Benoit Poelvoorde), a serial killer. He is being followed by reporter Remy (Remy Belvaux), cameraman Andre (Andre Bonzel), and a rotating cast of sound engineers, who all seem to have the life expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer. Note the use of the same names as the real people, adding a bit to the illusion that this is a real documentary. All three are the co-writers (with Vincent Tavier, who plays one of the sound men) and co-directors of the film Man Bites Bog, just to add another level of “meta-ness” to the whole thing.

The concept that a documentary crew would even follow a serial killer around, and that he would be happy to have them there, is absurd right out of the gate. From this we are immediately shown that this is a very biting comment on the state of reality TV and people’s obsession with both the inner lives of strangers, and the criminals in our society. And this was all done more than 20 years ago before “reality programming” really took off.

We see Ben make a kill and then he proceeds to go through the homes of the people, commenting on their taste in decorating. At one point he is seriously offended when he finds one of his victims to be the owner of something he considers to be “wrong” – which is coming from a man who just cold bloodedly killed someone.

I should mention that this film pulls no punches on the violence. In fact, back when the MPAA still had enough sense to consider violence worse than sex they gave this film an NC-17 rating purely because of the violence. The “torture porn” horror movies nowadays have worse violence in them and they receive R ratings from the MPAA. Show a clothed man making more than three thrusts towards a clothed woman, though, and that’s what merits an NC-17 rating from the MPAA now. But I digress.

As the film goes along, the documentary crew starts to blur the line between their subject and themselves. When one person is getting away a crewmember warns Ben, who is then able to catch and kill him. A little later they are having problems getting funding and Ben commits a crime to get some cash so that the documentary can continue. (In a case of life mirroring art Man Bites Dog faced funding problems because of its subject matter.) Finally, the documentary crew completely erases any line between themselves and Ben when they start to participate. In addition to being a comment on society, Man Bites Dog is also a biting comment on the state of documentary filmmaking itself, especially the growing tendency at the time to manipulate people and events to better fit into the narrative the documentarian has in mind. (Something that has only increased in the 20 years since this film was released.)

Some of the humor in the film comes from the extreme dichotomy between Ben’s actions and his other activities. Watch him play classical music with his girlfriend. Meet his extended family at a big dinner, during which he kills someone and his family doesn’t even react. Watch him run into another documentary crew and get jealous of the subject of this other film. Watch him intentionally scare an old woman into a heart attack and happily note that it saved him a bullet. There is humor from the crew, too. Watch as the reporter gives a touching memorial to the first sound man killed, and then see him repeat it almost exactly when the next one is killed – and in both instances the deaths occurred because of his desire to film this serial killer.

All of this may sound horrible to you, and frankly, it is. That is the whole point of the movie – people’s fascination with the macabre and the entertainment they derive from it. You definitely have to have a twisted sense of humor to laugh at this film. I do have one, but even I felt wrong at some of the things that made me laugh…yet I have to admit that I was amused at times by things I never in my life imagined I would find funny.

The film has been censored in various countries, but the Criterion Collection edition of it (for which I have a link below) is the uncut, unedited version of the movie, right down to using the original movie poster image on the DVD cover. If you dislike violence then you should definitely avoid Man Bites Dog. For everyone else, I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

DVD Instant Video

Movie – The Lost Boys (1987)

2013-04-18T15:34:00.000-04:00

The Lost Boys, combined with the release three months later of Near Dark (1987), signaled that there was a new kind of vampire movie out there and it wasn’t your parents’ creature of the night. With nary a tuxedo, cape, old mansion, or coffin in sight, these two movies made a major redefinition in how people presented vampires. These creatures were young, cool, and badass. As the tag line for The Lost Boys says: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” Don’t think these are cuddly Twilight vampires, though. They are still brutal killers and there are no sparkles to be found (except maybe from sequins in all the 80s outfits).

The Lost Boys opens with an aerial POV shot coming in over the ocean to a coastline amusement park. We immediately are put in the position of feeling a little like what it would be like to be a vampire. This is accompanied by the theme song for the film – Cry Little Sister. Rock music plays a big part in the movie – yet another sign that this wasn’t a stodgy Dracula film. I literally dug out my movie soundtrack CD and I am listening to it as I write this. (I can’t believe I bought it more than 25 years ago.) In addition to the main theme, there are also covers of The Doors' People Are Strange by Echo and the Bunnymen and Elton John's Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me by Roger Daltrey. New songs in the film include Good Times by INXS and Jimmy Barnes and Lost in the Shadows by Lou Gramm. How much does rock and roll factor into the film? Well, my favorite vampire kill in the entire movie is the Death by Stereo scene.

Lucy (Dianne Wiest), a divorced mother of two teenage boys, is moving her family back to Santa Carla, California to live with her father (Barnard Hughes). The sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) are not that thrilled to be there, especially when they see someone has spray painted “the murder capitol of the world” on the back of the “Welcome to Santa Carla” sign. This unease only increases when they find out what a character Grandpa is. Sam is distraught over the fact that there is no TV in the house and he won’t be able to watch Mtv. As Grandpa explains, he gets a subscription to TV Guide, reads it, and he then doesn’t need to watch the TV shows.

Lucy, Michael, and Sam all hit the ocean boardwalk and amusement park in town that night. Lucy quickly finds a job in a video store owned by Max (Edward Herrmann). Michael and Sam are watching a concert when Star (Jami Gertz) walks by. She’s all wild untamed hair, gorgeous face, and fantastic body, which immediately makes her the most important thing in the world to Michael. Seriously, if you’ve only seen the middle aged mom Jami Gertz played on her TV sitcoms you owe it to yourself to see her at 21 in this film. She made a huge impression on me, too, when I saw this back in 1987.

On the flip side, Jason Patric became a massive heartthrob for teenage girls. A poster of Jim Morrison appears quite prominently in the film and after this movie came out it was mentioned just a few thousand times that Patric bore a vague resemblance to Morrison. In regards to heartthrobs, The Lost Boys features the very first team up of “the Coreys” – Messrs. Haim and Feldman. The two would go on to do several more films together and like Patric they also became idols for teenage girls.

When Michael takes off after Star, Sam wanders into a comic book shop. That’s where he meets the Frog brothers – Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan (Jamison Newlander) – two locals who are his age. They immediately try to interest him in a vampire comic, but he’s not into that. They tell him it might save his life. He ignores them.

Meanwhile Michael has caught up to Star, but just then four guys on motorcycles show up. We saw them earlier in the film and we know they are trouble. One is played by Alex Winter, who is better known to movie fans as Bill S. Preston, Esq. Another of the four, David (Kiefer Sutherland), is Star’s boyfriend, so he decides to have some fun with Michael. He challenges him to some stunts to see how brave he is. Michael ends up in an old hotel that has sunk into a fault during an earthquake and that these all these guys are squatting in.

They keep testing Michael, seeing if he will chicken out. They finally hand him a bottle and tell him there’s blood in it. They drink from it, so Michael does, too. He gets wasted and ends up hanging off a railroad trestle while a train passes overhead. He doesn’t wake up until the next afternoon. The sun bothers him so he puts on his sunglasses even inside the house. Without thinking he starts to attack Sam, but the family dog stops him and brings him back to his senses. Sam notices that Michael’s reflection in the mirror is see-through. He does what any kid brother would do – “You’re a vampire! Wait until Mom finds out.” Michael begs Sam not to tell on him. Sam’s not sure – “It’s not like you got a D in school.”

Sam consults with the Frog brothers, who immediately advise him to stake Michael. Sam won’t. He did finally read the vampire comic and he counters that if they can kill the head vampire then Michael will turn back to human, since he’s only partway transitioned. It’s not until he makes his first kill that he becomes fully a vampire. There’s a funny scene where the three kids decide that Lucy’s boss, who is now dating her, is the head vampire. They dose him with garlic and holy water to no effect.

They decide to go right to the main nest and kill all four since they don’t know which one is the head. The also decide to rescue Star and a young child, both of whom are like Michael – only partially transitioned from drinking vampire blood. Chaos and hilarity ensue. They manage to get back to their house, but they know that come sundown they are going to be in serious trouble.

This film was definitely a big influence on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show. The phrase “vamp out” is used. It refers to the vampires’ faces changing from normal human to a much more bestial appearance. There is sex appeal among the vampires. It is teens that are hunting the vampires. The sunken hotel in this movie had to have been the inspiration for the BtVS first season sunken church that the Master was trapped in. There is humor mixed in with the horror. In fact, The Lost Boys has one of the greatest and funniest final lines in cinema history. (Please don’t spoil it for those who have not seen the movie by quoting it in the comments. Thanks.)

This film does have plenty of blood in it when the vampires are starting to get killed. If that bothers you, then you may want to skip this one. If you are old enough to have been a late 80s fashion victim, you may also get some negative flashbacks from all the big hair and clothes featured in the movie. For everyone else, I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

2013-04-16T16:35:00.000-04:00

The Cabin in the Woods is an interesting take on the generic American horror movie. On the one hand it is given the usual kind of skewed version of a story you can expect from writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. On the other hand, the film and the characters within it function as parallels to the entire movie industry, from the people who make the movies to those that watch them. There are a number of references to other movies for the true horror fans, as well as some familiar faces for the Whedonites. And to think, this film sat on the shelf for almost three years before it got released.

This was the directorial debut for Drew Goddard. He had started out writing for Whedon on both the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel television series. He then transitioned to the TV shows Alias and Lost where he worked for J.J. Abrams. He later wrote the screenplay for the Abrams-produced 2008 movie Cloverfield. It was in 2009 that he and Whedon finished the script for The Cabin in the Woods that they had been kicking around for years, and Goddard got to direct the movie. The studio didn’t know what to make of it, so they shelved it.

Fast forward to 2011 and the movie Thor is released. In addition to being popular, it is a lead in to an announced Avengers movie that will be coming in 2012 – to be directed by none other than Joss Whedon. Someone at the studio must have said, “Hey, didn’t we have a movie that Whedon was involved with and that had that Thor guy (Chris Hemsworth) in it?” They did, so they dusted off The Cabin in the Woods and released it just a few weeks before The Avengers hit theaters. Critics really liked it (92% at Rotten Tomatoes); audiences were a little less enthusiastic (76%), probably because it wasn’t the kind of movie they were expecting from the marketing, which had made it look like your standard horror film.

The movie opens not with a death, a killer, a group of young photogenic people, or even any kind of thrill at all. Instead it shows two middle aged men in some kind of huge facility just talking about mundane aspects of life like any other two boring co-workers would. That probably lost some people right there. The men are Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford). A woman named Lin (Whedon-alum Amy Acker) approaches them with an issue with “the Swedish group”, but they tell her not to worry because “the Japanese group” always comes through.

The scene switches and we do finally get to meet the five college students who are going to be taking a trip to, you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. They are Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt (Chris Hemsworth), Jules (Anna Hutchison), Marty (Whedon-alum Fran Kranz), and Holden (Jesse Williams). Some throwaway references are made to the fact that most of them have been acting strange lately and that getting away will do them some good.

We find out that Sitterson and Hadley are monitoring these students for some reason. As the film goes on we see a lot of the standard horror movie clichés – from the unfriendly local, to the scary objects in the cabin, to the five students seeming to fit into the generic Horror Types (more on that in a bit.) The students have no idea they are being watched. They of course trigger a deadly threat (in this case an old family brought back from the dead) and they start being “horror-fied”. In the midst of this, one of them finally finds a small camera attached to a cable and realizes that something even stranger is going on here. This is only the first half of the film. Where things go from there, and why all of this is happening, is what sets this film apart from most other horror movies, so I will not be spoiling it (except for a small piece of it as part of the discussion of archetypes in a well-marked spoiler section below.)

Much of the humor comes from the people working in the huge, mysterious facility. There are ongoing conversations between Sitterson and Hadley, with other characters dropping in now and then. One of the funnier scenes is the betting pool the office workers have going on what creatures these students are going to call up to kill them. There’s a small appearance by another Whedon-alum Tom Lenk as Ronald the Intern.

We also see the two main guys watching monitors of Sweden and Japan where other culturally specific horror scenarios are playing out. Japan shows a bunch of schoolgirls being terrorized by a spirit, while Sweden shows some kind of failure with a house burning. By the way, the best guess of this non-horror fan is that the “culturally Swedish” horror scenario refers to some of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but I could be wrong.

I mentioned earlier that the five students fit into the generic horror types mold. This turns out to be very important; so much so, in fact, that the facility has actually been manipulating these kids for weeks to become more like these types. If you pay attention you find that the Virgin (Dana) had an affair with a college professor, the Fool (Marty) is actually kind of smart, the Whore (Jules) was not really anything like the person she becomes under the influence of the facility, the Athlete (Curt) is not usually an asshole like he is acting, and the Scholar (Holden) is also on the football team with Curt.

Here is where I am getting into partial spoiler territory, so if you have not seen this film you will probably want to skip down below this section.

SPOILER WARNING

Not only do the students represent the horror character archetypes, everyone in the film represents someone in the movie-making and movie watching process. The two main characters in the facility, Sitterson and Hadley, represent the writers of the movie because they try to control what events these students will go through. The students are the actors, who sometimes go off on tangents no matter what the writers want. The other people in the facility represent the trades like cinematographer, editor, etc. that are part of movie making. We finally meet the director of the facility (movie director) in a great cameo from Sigourney Weaver at the end of the movie. And those “Elder Gods” who must be appeased by the Americans, Japanese, or Swedes? They are you and me. They are all the horror movie fans that want to see blood, that want to see these horror characters get what’s coming to them. And if the Elder Gods are not appeased (fans are not happy with the movie) then there’s hell to pay – as we see in the film.

Reportedly Drew Goddard was taking questions after a preview screening and the very first thing he was asked was “Will there be a sequel?” He responded, “Did you not just see the end of my movie?” Filmmakers have got to just love the idiots that manage to get passes to these things.

END SPOILER

My one complaint with the movie is how the reveal of the facility is handled. Well, “complaint” is too strong a word. Perhaps “I wish it had been different” is a better way to phrase it. They should have kept the entire facility a secret to the viewers until the first camera was found. Show the student looking at it and only then, for the first time, show these men in white shirts and ties watching him on a monitor and realizing that they’ve been discovered. It would have been a killer reveal (pun intended). It would have gotten “holy shit” responses from people in the theaters. Instead we are shown the facility from the beginning and the story proceeds from there with us already knowing they are the ones making things happen.

There is certainly more than enough blood and gore in this movie to satisfy almost every horror fan, so if that is not your cup of tea then you may want to steer clear of this movie. The humor is not the pie in your face kind, but the turning the tables or witty lines kind that you can find in most projects Whedon is involved in. And for horror fans there are numerous times you will probably want to pause the movie to take in the amount of detailed references to many other horror franchises and horror archetypes. If any of these things sound interesting, then I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – Slither (2006)

2013-04-14T12:02:00.000-04:00

Slither wears its B movie horror comedy pedigree not with shame, but with pride. Writer/director James Gunn had previously written the screenplays for the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and the 2002 live action Scooby-Doo movie. Take the tone of both of those films, mix them together, throw in some people like Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks who can do both comedy and drama, and you’ve got Slither. It’s a fun movie, but it’s not for everyone. I’ll explain.

I bought this movie for a little bit of nothing at a rental store’s DVD sale. I liked it a lot more than I expected. The problem was that they had put a Full Screen (aka Pan and Scan) movie in a DVD case that said it was Widescreen. I wanted to see the whole film and when I later happened upon a new DVD for five dollars I bought it again. I gave the first DVD to a good friend who I knew sometimes watched horror. His wife started the movie with him, but it wasn’t long before she asked my friend, “Chip paid money for this movie?...Twice?” It was obviously not to her tastes.

Slither’s basic premise is that of an old fashioned alien invaders/parasites take over humans kind of story. Part of the fun of the movie are the tons of references to other horror films, many in the names of people, places, or things. Examples of referenced movies are Rosemary’s Baby and The Thing (1982). I’m sure I missed a ton of them myself, but I will mention one since I just reviewed Tremors. At one point in Slither the Earl Bassett Community School is seen. That was Fred Ward’s character in Tremors. And with Nathan Fillion in the movie there are multiple references to his TV series Firefly and the film Serenity. I’ll leave those to the fans to find.

Slither opens in a small, rural town where an alien pod crashes in the forest. Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) sees it and investigates. He is taken over by an alien. It starts to slowly alter his appearance. His wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) notices something is wrong when his face starts looking really messy. He tries to blame it on an allergic reaction to a bee sting.

Meanwhile, the town is getting ready to celebrate its annual Deer Cheer Festival. Sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) and his deputies are being harassed by Mayor Jack MacReady (Gregg Henry), who wants everything to go well so he will get re-elected. The other major character in the film is teenager Kylie Strutemyer (Tania Saulnier).

The alien parasite controlling Grant makes him start doing some weird things. He kidnaps a woman and starts buying all kinds of meat to feed to her. I won’t spoil what this leads to, but let’s just say that a whole lot more alien parasites show up. When they do they start taking over the people in the town by entering them through their mouths.

In fact, the Sheriff, Deputies, and Mayor are all attacked by the first wave of these creatures that look like foot long slugs. A few of the Deputies are infected, but the others quickly learn to cover their mouths and eventually the horde disperses into the woods. The Mayor, who has most of the best lines in the film, goes off after this incident. He first says, “Thing tried to get into my mouth. What kind of creature wants you to eat it?” A little later they find that the infected Deputies are still alive and a woman says, “Praise Jesus!” The Mayor looks at her in disbelief and says, “Praise Jesus? That's f*cking pushing it! This shit's about as far from God as shit can get! Either of you ever seen anything like that? You even heard of anything like that? Huh? Me neither... and I watch Animal Planet all the f*cking time!”

The alien parasites don’t just infect humans. They also go after animals. One gets inside a deer and let’s just say that the annual Deer Cheer hunting festival is going to have a whole new meaning this year when the hunter becomes the hunted.

There’s one scene that will probably give most women the willies (pun intended). It’s the one you see on the DVD cover above. Kylie is just trying to take a quiet bath when the alien slugs invade her family’s home. One enters the bath with her. It still goes for her mouth, but just the thought that it might try somewhere else would probably creep women out.

While all of this has been going on, Grant has been changing to the point where he is far beyond human. He has scared off his wife Starla, but he still loves and desires her. His emotions are broadcast to all the other possessed humans and all of a sudden Starla finds everyone in town is after her. Both she and Kylie end up on the run and eventually join up with the Sheriff and Mayor. Never mind if they can stop the invasion; can they even survive the night? (If the Mayor doesn’t get some Mr. Pibb soda, he might not.)

Gregg Henry, as the Mayor, steals most of the scenes he is in, including several with Nathan Fillion, so that’s saying something. Fillion gets a bunch of good lines, too. Elizabeth Banks has a very funny scene where she takes out some frustration on a possessed person.

The movie also has some cameos. James Gunn appears as a teacher. His then wife Jenna Fischer has a small role as the 911 operator and dispatcher for the town. You should also listen for a voice cameo by Rob Zombie as a doctor. Another fun little thing is that this film has another short scene after the credits.

Some people just watch a movie and never spend a second on all the Special Features that also come on the DVDs. In this case if you do that then you will be missing out. Of the many DVD extras there are three that you have to watch. They are the Set Tour with Nathan Fillion, the comedic feature Who is Bill Pardy?, and the Gag Reel. Those will make you laugh at least as hard as the film did.

I had a lot of fun while watching this movie. It does have a number of grotesque scenes in it involving the aliens affecting the appearance of humans, though, so it’s not a cakewalk for those who hate anything gross. In fact, at one point a character says, “Now that is some f*cked up shit”, which probably should be said by a character in most horror movies, if you think about it. If those kinds of scenes don’t bother you, though, then I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – Tremors (1990)

2013-04-12T10:19:00.000-04:00

I can’t remember exactly why I rented the movie Tremors when it came to video back in 1990. I’m not a big horror fan, but I do remember liking to watch Saturday afternoon “Creature Double Feature” movies on a local channel when I was a kid. Maybe it was because this looked more like a “creature” movie than a horror film, or maybe I had seen the trailer to it and it looked like it might be some fun. Whatever the reason, when I saw Tremors I liked it a lot and I started telling my friends they should watch it, too. I got some funny looks, but those that did give it a try told me they also liked it. It’s a fun film that works as an homage to the 1950s creature B movies, but it also has a decent story and a big sense of fun that makes it stand on its own.

Two men, one with the unlikely name of Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon), do handyman work in a dusty valley somewhere in the western U.S. The other, Earl Bassett (Fred Ward), is the older of the two, but he doesn’t seem to have any more ambition than Valentine – “Val” for short. The two are driving around the valley one day and happen upon a pretty female college student, Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), who is doing some seismological studies in the valley. Earl tries to get Val to ask her out, but she’s not the fantasy woman that he’s been dreaming about.

They drive to a friend’s place, but find him dead under mysterious circumstances. It looks like he strapped himself up high on a telephone pole and eventually died of thirst. They wonder what the heck he was so scared of. They decide to check with a neighbor of his, but find that neighbor’s entire car has been buried in the ground. Seriously freaked out, they head to the small town in the valley to warn everyone. Their truck is stuck at first, but they finally manage to free it. When they get to town they discover some kind of large snake wrapped around their rear axle.

The town is tiny – maybe a dozen people – and a shopkeeper sees the “snake” as a tourist attraction and offers to buy it. A teenager makes fun of Val and Earl for being scared. A survivalist couple, Bert (Michael Gross) and Heather Gummer (Reba McIntyre), feel they have prepared for anything and are also not worried. (Their license plate reads “UZI 4U”.) When it is discovered that the phone lines are down (kids, this was before widespread cell phone coverage), Val and Earl try to go for help, but find the only road out of the valley is blocked.

They head out on horses, but are attacked and end up on foot. They run for their lives and jump into a concrete drainage ditch just as something massive slams into the wall of it. They discover that the “snake” is just a tentacle coming out of the mouth of a much larger creature. It apparently travels by digging very fast through the sand and earth and can sense the smallest vibrations from people walking on the surface. (The sandworms from Dune had to have been at least a partial inspiration for them.) Rhonda happens on the scene – “Did you two notice anything weird a minute ago?” When they explain, she realizes this creature is the cause of the strange seismic readings she has been getting. She double checks, though, and scares Val and Earl when she lets them know that there is no way this single creature was the cause of all of her readings; there have to be more.

All of a sudden they realize the very ground they stand on is unsafe. They make it to some large rocks just as another creature attacks. They find that it is not only very patient, but also very smart. They manage to finally get off the rocks, to a truck, and away from the immediate area. They get back to town to warn people again, especially about not making any big vibrations. They can’t get Burt and Heather on the radio, though.

Just then they can hear some kind of noise coming from their house. The two are down in their basement “Rec Room” cleaning some casings in a machine that causes a lot of vibration. The others can see the signs of a creature heading for the Gummer’s house. What follows is a scene right out of ever gun nut’s fantasy. Even though I’m not a gun person, it is also my favorite scene in the movie. It is very funny so I won’t spoil it for those that have not seen this movie.

By the way, director Ron Underwood would do the film City Slickers the very next year. Remember the automatic coffee grinder scene? That was probably inspired by this scene from Tremors.

Val and Earl come up with what they hope is a way to get out of the valley. They gather the surviving townsfolk (including a pre-Jurassic Park Ariana Richards) and try to get away. I mentioned that these creatures are very smart, though, and they are not going to let these literal meals on wheels get away that easily.

Bacon and Ward have a breezy camaraderie on screen. It is very easy to believe they are good friends who have been hanging out together for years. Michael Gross didn’t have to wait long to answer the question of what he was going to do now that his long-running TV show Family Ties was ending – he started making this film the very next day. Reba McIntyre was purely a country singer when she did this movie. She had never acted before. Since Tremors she has continued to perform in movies and TV shows and may now be better known to the current generation as an actress rather than a singer.

Tremors didn’t do that well at the box office, but it became a sensation on the rental market. It eventually inspired three direct to video sequels and a short-lived TV show. I have not seen any of those so I can’t comment on how they compare to this film. The original is probably the best, though, and unless you hate any kind of scares at all then I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – Night of the Comet (1984)

2013-04-10T11:05:00.000-04:00

Return with me, if you will, to the early 1980s (aka the Valley Girl Ages). Frank Zappa’s song Valley Girl had been a big phenomenon and had captured a moment in time of “teen speak” from his southern California daughter and her friends. It became a bit of a social phenomenon and even Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. There were a string of movies about empty-headed valley girls. Towards the end of this run the movie Night of the Comet hit theaters. Long before Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame had the thought “what if a monster follows a pretty blond girl into an alley and she kills him?” this film made two valley girls the seemingly sole human survivors of a global catastrophe. They weren’t empty headed, though, and their military man father had trained them in self defense and how to fire a weapon. The result was a very tongue in cheek film – one that most horror fans were not ready for.

Regina, played by Catherine Mary Stewart (The Last Starfighter), is a teenager who works in a cinema. Her boyfriend runs the projector. Her boss isn’t the greatest to either of them, so they feel like they can do what they want when he’s not around. That night Earth is going to pass through the tail of a comet and everyone is going to be watching it. As a teenager what’s more important – a comet or having sex? The decision is an easy one and she spends the night in the steel-lined projection booth with her boyfriend. This saves her life (long before the movie Scream made jokes about having sex in a horror movie always gets you killed.)

Meanwhile Regina’s younger sister Samantha, played by Kelli Maroney (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), has gotten into a fight with their stepmother (Sharon Farrell) and decides to run away. She doesn’t get very far; she sleeps in their steel garden shed.

Regina and her boyfriend wake up the next morning. He goes outside and gets killed by, well, might as well call it a zombie. (The working title for the film was Teenage Mutant Horror Comet Zombies – before anyone had ever heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) While she is waiting for him to return Regina plays a video game because she is pissed that someone with the initials “DMK” has beaten her high score. I mention this because you should watch for a funny call back to “DMK” at the end of the movie.

Regina finally goes looking for her boyfriend and also gets attacked. Because she knows self defense she is able to fight off the zombie, get to her boyfriend’s motorcycle, and get away. While riding home she sees the streets covered with empty clothing and all kinds of red dust blowing around. She doesn’t see anyone. She finally gets home and finds only her sister Samantha still alive. Regina tries to explain that everyone else is dead. The comet must have been the cause.

They hear a DJ still broadcasting on a radio station and head downtown to find what they think is another survivor. It turns out the station is automated, but they do run into Hector, played by Robert Beltran, who many years later would play Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager. Hector is a truck driver and had spent the night in his steel trailer having sex with a woman he had met. (Once again, sex saves lives – in a horror movie, no less.) The woman had panicked the next morning, run off, and been killed by a zombie. He heard the same broadcast the girls did and had gone to the station for the same reason.

The three decide to broadcast live from the station, asking anyone still alive to contact them. Soon a group of scientists call and let them know what happened. The comet did turn everyone to dust, but those who were only partially exposed are turning into zombies – how fast depends on how exposed they were. The scientists will send a rescue team to pick up the three the next morning. With a night to kill Hector decides to drive to his parents’ house to see if they are still alive. What would Valley Girls do to kill time? Why raid a military armory, of course. Oh, and they also go to the mall.

There’s a funny scene where Samantha (still in the cheerleader outfit she was wearing when she spent the night in the garden shed) is firing a machinegun at a car to test it. She very professionally tries to clear a jam, then turns to her older sister and accusingly says, “That’s what’s wrong with the Mac-10. Daddy would have gotten us Uzis.” Regina, in order to cheer up Samantha both about the guns, and about the fact that Hector only has eyes for Regina, takes her younger sister to the mall. Cue a montage scene where the girls are wearing fabulous clothes they would never have been able to afford, set to the strains of the quintessential early 80s pop song - Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. (This is just one of the many scenes in the film that fried the brains of horror fans because they had never seen anything like it in something that was supposed to be a horror film.)

I won’t go into too much more detail, but being at the mall isn’t the safest place to be, and these scientists have more up their sleeves than they originally let on. There’s a great line from one of their nurses – “I love working with children” – in a context that is really twisted. Naturally, I laughed quite a bit at it.

Both Stewart and Maroney do great jobs as the teenage girls who are both initially horrified by what has happened, but quickly become ecstatic about what they can do to have some fun. For example, while broadcasting on the radio station Samantha announces that “as one-third owner of the greater Los Angeles basin” she is lowering the legal drinking age to 12.

This is a fun, “totally awesome, for sure” movie – if you are in the right mood. If you are looking for more serious horror fare then you will probably want to skip this. On the other hand, if you are looking to have some fun while two valley girls save the world, then this is definitely a movie you will want to see. I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Instant Video

Movie – Zombieland (2009)

2013-04-08T11:48:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you take three Oscar nominees and a Golden Globe nominee, throw them together in a movie about zombies, and let them do their thing? Zombieland (which is, according to someone with way too much time on their hands, the highest grossing movie ever to start with the letter “Z”.) While this may be sacrilege to Night of the Dawn of the Day of the Twilight of the Midmorning of the Shaun of the Dead fans, Zombieland is my favorite movie about zombies.

The film establishes its “zombie cred” at the opening when we see in flashback how the entire world was overrun by them. Most of what gore is shown in the movie appears during this sequence. The rest of the film probably does not have anything more explicit than your average TV police show which shows bodies in various states of decomposition.

The opening is narrated by Columbus, played by Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network). We learn his rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. They include cardio (“the fatties were the first ones to go”), the double tap, and to beware of bathrooms. These rules appear on the screen in humorous ways as we are told about them. We quickly learn that even if there hadn’t been an outbreak of zombies, Columbus would have had issues from all his neuroses. His first sign that anything is wrong is when his gorgeous neighbor, 406 (Amber Heard), tries to attack him.

Out on the road he meets Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson (The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Messenger). After some initial distrust they decide to continue on together. Tallahassee is the opposite of Columbus. He plays things loose and isn’t worried at all about how to keep himself safe from zombies. He stops at a supermarket in his constant quest to find a surviving Hostess Twinkie to eat. That’s where Columbus and Tallahassee meet Wichita, played by Emma Stone (Easy A), and Little Rock, played by Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine).

You’ll note no one is given a real name, not even the hot neighbor. After the zombie outbreak people adopted the usage of where they were from as their names so that if they ran into other people from there they could maybe find out news. The movie never goes into detail on why the sisters Wichita and Little Rock are from different cities, even though they are shown as being together before the zombie outbreak.

Things don’t go well when Columbus and Tallahassee first meet Wichita and Little Rock – the girls end up with their guns and their truck. Tallahassee finds a Humvee loaded with weapons (“thank God for rednecks!”) and he and Columbus go in pursuit of the two girls. Eventually they all work out their differences and decide to travel together. Wichita wants to take Little Rock to the west coast where she has heard there is a safe zone. The men know this is probably false, but Wichita lets them know she is doing this for her little sister, to keep her hopes up. They go along with it.

I won’t spoil anything that happens when they do get there. There’s a great cameo by yet another Oscar nominee. I would say who it is – far too many reviews spoil the reveal – but I will say that it’s a lot of fun. There is also a short scene after the credits with an additional appearance by this person.

Harrelson and Eisenberg make a good Odd Couple, while Stone and Breslin are believable as sisters. There’s a funny little scene that was adlibbed by Breslin where Little Rock is trying to explain the greatness of Hannah Montana to Tallahassee. According to the movie’s commentary Breslin was just as fascinated with the show as other girls her age, despite being an actress herself, and everything she was saying was her own feelings about Hannah.

Reportedly this movie started out as a TV pilot, but was eventually turned into a movie. Even while it was still in theaters people were already talking about a sequel, but it has not happened yet. As I write this there are reports now that it might finally be on TV as a series, but without any of the movie’s performers, of course. Harrelson and Breslin were already well known and both Eisenberg and Stone’s careers have taken off since this film. In fact, now that Eisenberg has starred in The Social Network as the founder of Facebook there’s a fun moment for people in Zombieland when Eisenberg’s character mentions that one of the good things about living in Zombieland is not having to update your Facebook status anymore.

Comparisons between this film and Shaun of the Dead (2004) were numerous. In fact, I saw Zombieland called “the American Shaun of the Dead” on many occasions. I don’t know that that’s fair to either film. Yes, they are comedic horror movies about zombies, but that’s about where the comparisons end. Shaun of the Dead is a more traditional zombie movie where a number of people try to get to a shelter while zombies close in and kill them one by one, while Zombieland is more of a road movie where zombies are the biggest hazard the travelers have to face.

I like Zombieland a lot. It is very funny and entertaining. In fact, you could almost say it is a comedy first and a horror movie second, rather than the other way around. Unless you can’t stand any kind of zombie movies at all, I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Movie – Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010)

2013-04-06T11:22:00.002-04:00

You know the drill: a bunch of college students decide to go camping in the woods. They stop for supplies and meet two scary looking hillbillies. A nubile coed catches their eye and they cast unsavory looks at her. The students continue to their camp site where they encounter the hillbillies again. Carnage and chaos ensue. Don’t be so fast to judge, though. Have you ever asked yourself, “What is the story from the hillbillies’ perspective?” Maybe, just maybe, they are innocent creatures in the wild who are more scared of the students than the students are of them. What if they are just innocent victims of profiling?

Meet Tucker and Dale, two good friends who have just bought a “vacation home” on a lake. Dale (Tyler Labine) is very shy and nervous around women. Tucker (Alan Tudyk) tries to encourage him to try new things. He tells Dale that he can impress women by telling them he has a vacation home, and that he should be friendly by laughing a lot. When Dale sees Allison (Katrina Bowden), one of the college students, at a store he tries to take Tucker’s advice. He walks over, but can only muster some nervous laughter. Allison and the other students react badly. Maybe that’s due to the scythe that Dale was going to load into the back of his truck and that he is still carrying.

Tucker and Dale continue to their cabin on a lake. The term “fixer upper” would be a very generous description of the place, but their enthusiasm is undiminished. With some hard work they figure they’ll have the place looking great. Meanwhile, guess who has camped nearby? That’s right: the college students.

The leader of the group of nine, Chad (Jesse Moss) tells them a scary, mostly true story about hillbillies attacking a group of students 20 years ago not far from where they are now. You can tell that Chad has a big distrust of hillbillies that borders on hatred. We later learn why.

The students decide to go skinny dipping. Guess who’s out doing some fishing? Tucker and Dale startle Allison while she’s disrobing and she falls and hits her head. Dale dives in and saves her from drowning. Tucker yells out to the other students that he’s got their friend, expecting them to come get her, but they all run off in fright. Puzzled, Tucker and Dale decide to take Allison back to their cabin and tend to her injury. When she wakes up she is scared, but soon realizes that Dale is a just a big teddy bear.

The students decide to spy on Tucker and Dale. One goes on ahead and sees Tucker sawing some wood with a chainsaw. As luck would have it, Tucker saws through a beehive. He wildly swings the chainsaw around to try to fight them off, scaring the crap out of the hiding student. Tucker finally decides to run…right at the hidden student. The student takes off and both he and Tucker, still holding the running chainsaw, run through the woods. Something bad happens to the student (I won’t spoil it, but it is very funny in a twisted way.)

The other students find their friend and Chad convinces the rest “it’s us or them”. They’ve got to take these hillbillies out and get Allison back from them. When they get back to the cabin Allison is digging a hole, which they assume is for her grave (it’s for an outhouse and she’s doing it to help out Dale), and Tucker is now running some of the wood he cut through a chipper. Yes, it does play a part in the demise of another student. Tucker and Dale come to the only logical conclusion: these students have come out into the woods as part of a suicide pact. Tucker and Dale figure they can’t go to the cops, though, because who would believe that the hillbillies were innocent bystanders when their wood chipper is all covered in blood?

In the meantime Chad’s not done stirring up what’s left of the students to take his revenge. Tucker and Dale are going to have a lot more evil coming their way. Are they hillbilly enough to stand up to it?

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a refreshing and funny take on the clichéd plot of students in the woods being killed one by one. You can always count on the versatile Alan Tudyk (Serenity, Death at a Funeral, Dodgeball) for performances both comedic and dramatic. I was not familiar with Tyler Labine before seeing this movie, but he does a good job of playing the shy, sweet, nervous guy. Anyone who’s ever tried to approach a girl he thinks is out of his league will probably identify with him.

While being very funny, this is still a horror movie. There are some gruesome deaths in this movie, completely in keeping with the genre. Many of the scenes are played for twisted humor, though. If you are a fan of the horror genre then you should definitely see this movie. If you don’t tend to like horror, but this film sounds interesting, then I recommend you give it a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

DVD Blu-ray Instant Video

Roger Ebert 1942 – 2013

2013-04-04T17:11:00.000-04:00

Just yesterday I read a short article that famed film critic Roger Ebert had found out that his cancer had returned and that he was taking a “leave of presence” while he battled it. He planned to scale back his work and only review those films that he truly wanted to see. I then go on the internet today and I find that he has just passed away. Needless to say, it was a shock.

I’ll let others detail his life accomplishments and awards (i.e. the first, and I believe only, film critic to ever win a Pulitzer Prize); I’m going to write about what he meant to me.

I first became aware of him in the early 1980s. He and fellow critic Gene Siskel (who died in 1999) had a syndicated half hour show where they would give their famous “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to films that were being released that week. I wasn’t yet watching movies to any great extent, but I liked listening to what these two had to say about them. While I did not watch their show every week I did usually tune in to it when I thought of it. And kids, this was in the days before the internet, so if your local paper did not have a film reviewer (which mine didn’t) then this was literally the only way to hear about movies.

Over time, and as I started to see more films, I found that I tended to agree with Ebert more often than I did Siskel. As I grew older I watched their show less and less, but whenever I happened upon an Ebert review I would usually take the time to read it.

As newer critics came along they seemed to be a nastier sort of person. I would get the distinct feeling that they would give negative reviews of some films solely because they had thought of a good insult they could make from the title of it. While Ebert would certainly not hesitate to call a movie out if he felt it sucked, he seemed to usually do it with more class than the newer crop.

It may be strange for a person who has been writing his own reviews for more than two years, and who has seen over 6,000 films, to say this but I really don’t put much stock in ANY professional film critic that is out there. They all seem out of touch to one extent or another, whether they are obviously frustrated screenwriters who are slumming it, or people who feel that a certain filmmaker did not pay enough attention to their “advice” on how to make their films better. Ebert was the only one who I would even marginally pay attention to when he said a film was great or when a film was bad. I didn’t always agree with him (Kick-Ass is a recent example where I completely disagreed with him – he hated it), but no one agrees with any other person all of the time.

I can’t say that I am the movie lover I am today only because of Roger Ebert, but I can say that listening to his (and Siskel’s) comments on movies made me want to see more of them. That led to me discovering a whole other world that I could enjoy.

I will miss Roger Ebert. Film lovers are the worse off for his passing.

Laugh Until It Hurts (Horror Comedies)

2013-04-03T12:15:00.000-04:00

“When lights flicker, this sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your home is possessed by demons. If you’re not sure whether your house is possessed, see The Amityville Horror, a fine documentary film.” – Dave Barry

As a genre, many modern horror films don’t do much for me. Over the years I would watch a horror film for the suspense and scares, while others would watch them for the blood and gore. It feels like in the last 20-30 years that the “gorehounds” are the ones buying all the tickets to see horror movies so studios have been catering to them more and more.

In addition, I find most of the chase scenes boring, not suspenseful. The woman is being chased by the killer/psycho/monster/alien. She trips (gee, didn’t see that coming.) She hides behind a door/tree/rock. She keeps looking back the way she came and doesn’t see the pursuer. Suddenly, she is killed from a different direction, with a loud noise in the musical score to tell us we should now jump (gee, didn’t see that coming, either). There are only so many ways that filmmakers can show this same scene and they ran out of new ones a long time ago. The only way to make them different is to increase the gore factor over what has been seen in earlier films.

In all honesty, if I’m going to watch a movie with little to no plot then I would much prefer to see a beautiful woman naked, with her insides where they belong – on the inside. Seeing various organs and intestines scattered all over the place has never held any appeal for me. (Please note that I am not opposed to a certain level of bloodiness; I just don’t find it entertaining.)

When I have mentioned this in the past I usually get the horrified (pun intended) response, “You don’t like horror movies?” I would tell them that of course I like some horror movies and then proceed to name off a bunch. After I did it a few times, though, I noticed a pattern where many of the ones I was naming had comedic elements in them in addition to the horror.

Oh sure, I like plenty of “straight” horror movies, too. 28 Days Later (2002) is a very good, modern horror film that has a whole other layer about human nature in the face of a breakdown in society. The Descent (2005), in addition to being scary, inspired many debates about whether it had a positive or negative portrayal of women in it. The Haunting (1963) is one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. (Know how much gore is shown in it? Zilch. Nada. Nary an intestine to be found.) These are just a few examples.

Horror movies that make me laugh, though, seem to be the kind I prefer. I’ve already written reviews of enough horror comedies for other categories that I could fill this new category with just those. I will include the links to them below, but I will also be writing reviews for roughly ten more films that I feel you might like.

A few notes: I will not be reviewing Evil Dead II (1987) here. I am saving it for a “Sequels That Are Better than the Originals” category I will do someday. The same goes for Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), which will go in a future “What the Hell Did I Just Watch?” (title subject to change) category. Finally, I have seen Cemetery Man (1994) twice and I still don’t know what the heck is going on in the second half of it, so I can’t in good conscience recommend it.

After I post each review for the films in this category I will add a link to them here:

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Zombieland (2009)
Night of the Comet (1984)
Tremors (1990)
Slither (2006)
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
The Lost Boys (1987)
Man Bites Dog (1992)
The Insatiable (2007)
Eating Raoul (1982)

An American Werewolf in London (1981) – reviewed August 29, 2012

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) – reviewed April 17, 2011

My Name is Bruce (2006) – reviewed August 26, 2011

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) – reviewed December 17, 2011

Serial Mom (1994) – reviewed December 20, 2012

Shaun of the Dead (2004) – reviewed April 7, 2011

On to the reviews…