Baghead is a story of four struggling actors who take a trip out to a forested cabin to write a screenplay that is sure to rocket them into the realm of movie stardom. They decide to write a story about a group of friends who are tormented and stalked by a creep in a bag mask. Well, it just so happens that their fictional tale is brought to life when a an actual person in a bag mask starts to terrorize them.

Baghead is the perfect mix of the ...]]> It’s nice to find a horror movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Baghead is a story of four struggling actors who take a trip out to a forested cabin to write a screenplay that is sure to rocket them into the realm of movie stardom. They decide to write a story about a group of friends who are tormented and stalked by a creep in a bag mask. Well, it just so happens that their fictional tale is brought to life when a an actual person in a bag mask starts to terrorize them.

Baghead is the perfect mix of the less chauvinistic and sexually-driven moments from The League and the creepier action from The Strangers. It’s as if the Duplass brother, in some sort of mad and backward science experiment, took the digital copies of that TV show and movie and melded them together in such a way that the mildest elements of each film were conjoined into two, high functioning and socially adept Siamese twins, each with a specific and unique skill set that the other could only understand, but never fully acquire. By this, I mean that you will be equal parts frightened, amused, unnerved, and hysterical throughout the majority of the movie. As one twin psychologically deconstructs any confidence you have ever had, the other twin is there to pat you on the back and tickle you in all the right places.

Like any other horror movie that takes place in a setting defined by natural beauty and geographical isolation, there are some elements to this film that will feel more than familiar. Everything goes perfectly and to plan upon arriving to the cabin. Of course, there is a turning point about halfway through—some drama amongst friends, sexual tension, a murderous villain with a bag over his head. And then, the movie really peaks at the end; however, not at all in the way that you might expect.

Baghead unravels slowly and, in the end, reveals itself to be a true mystery. Instead of relying on gore and the exposed navels of barely legal college coeds to entice its audience, Baghead utilizes wit and adult fun to captivate whoever dares to watch it.

I saw Billy Elliot for the first time when I was only eleven-years-old. It was news to me then, news to me that a boy could be a ballet dancer, a “ballerino” if I may. However, I had just entered junior high at that point in my life and decided that the pursuit of dance would only make my walks down the hall that much more difficult.

Billy Elliot was also my first introduction to Jamie Bell, an actor who I can now not help ...]]> There has only ever been one movie that has inspired me to take ballet classes—this is it.

I saw Billy Elliot for the first time when I was only eleven-years-old. It was news to me then, news to me that a boy could be a ballet dancer, a “ballerino” if I may. However, I had just entered junior high at that point in my life and decided that the pursuit of dance would only make my walks down the hall that much more difficult.

Billy Elliot was also my first introduction to Jamie Bell, an actor who I can now not help but love. It is the story of an eleven-year old who discovers his love for ballet while in the midst of the 1984 Thatcher closure of British coal mines. His father and older brother are less then excited when they find out that Billy has shunned his boxing prowess and hung up his gloves for a life of pirouettes and frappes.

Perhaps the most charming quality of Billy Elliot concerns his earnest desire to dance. At first, the only support he receives comes from his closeted friend, Michael Caffrey. Even Billy is wary about ballet at first and signs up for classes across town without his father and older brother knowing. Of course, his father and brother are not pleased in the beginning, but eventually they come to champion his efforts to tryout and join the ranks of the Royal Ballet.

It is rare to find a movie with this combination of tenderness and grit. It is certainly a coming of age story that deserves to be seen by boys and men of any age. I saw this for the second time once I had entered college and this second viewing prompted me to start taking ballet classes both at my school and at independent dance studios. In this sense, this movie is also a rarity in the film world—rarely am I provoked to follow through on the emotions that I felt while sitting in the theater. In this case, I was.

So, I may have exaggerated a bit, but for all the credit we give to American Graffiti, Stand By Me, and The Sandlot, it only seems fair to ...]]> The coming of age flick that flew so far below the radar that it dipped its talons into the water, plucked a pregnant trout from beneath the surface, and carried it off into the majestic sunset and beyond the horizon to feed and nourish itself so it may soar off into the clouds again and allow any human eye keen enough the chance to glimpse it in all its wonder once again—Liberty Heights.

So, I may have exaggerated a bit, but for all the credit we give to American Graffiti, Stand By Me, and The Sandlot, it only seems fair to give this movie the exaltation that it has deserved for the past decade. Plus, Adrien Brody is just so damn charming. How did he manage to do that, be charming?

Anyway, Liberty Heights follows two brothers in 1950’s Baltimore, father-son relationships, interracial puppy love, and anti-Semitism amongst teenagers and twenty somethings. This is the sort of movie that, even though the characters endure harassment, embarrassment, awkwardness, and a short-lived kidnapping, you want to have their lives. Well, maybe not their lives, but you want to have that one night when things just go completely and perfectly awry.

Van, played by Adrien Brody, is the older brother who plans to defy his Jewish lineage by attending a WASP party and pursuing a voluptuous, blonde debutante. Ben, played by Ben Foster, is the younger brother that falls for a black student, spends his time innocently listening to records in her room, and eventually attends a James Brown concert. A night of moderate mayhem and mischief ensues.

This movie might feel a bit clunky or odd at some points, but it also manages to cultivate a warm nostalgic glow that you will want to bask in for the rest of your life, or at least the rest of the night. Oh to be a teenager.

American ...]]> After watching this, I wondered about a few things. I wondered about whether or not I can really call myself a dreamer. I wondered whether or not I was more of a measured dreamer, one who dreamed dreams interspersed with calculated and realistic benchmarks and goals. Maybe this makes me a half-assed dreamer. Maybe this makes me a realist, a cynic, a copout—who knows? Either way, American Movie will sure make you wonder about your own dreams. It’ll make you take a good and hard look at what you’ve done with your life and what you could have done differently.

American Movie follows the dreams of Mark Borchardt and his mission to complete a short horror film that he has been working on for over three years. With the help of local Milwaukee talent, immense credit card debt, and a few grand from his suspicious Uncle Bill, Mark really puts all of himself into completing a movie that most people might pay not to see. Still, the story is not about his god-given talent as a filmmaker. It is about his relentless pursuit to realize his dream of becoming a filmmaker. It is really a testament to all of us who have ever wanted to do something with our lives, but were to afraid to try for whatever reason—kids, school, bills, education, or whatever else you can think of as a reason not to do something.

While I might not personally advocate Mark’s level of dedication, I can certainly appreciate and learn from it. It is nice to see a group of guys from Milwaukee with long hair and army jackets get blackout drunk and get behind a camera. It’s almost magical, and if not magical, it’s certainly hilarious, charming, and startlingly inspiring.

This might not be the quintessential American movie, but the fact still remains—it is an American Movie. It is an eccentric and bloody blend of family drama entrenched in the stench of local lager, cheap whisky, and brain cells that never had a chance.

Roadie is about a man, who after 25 years of being a roadie for Blue Oyster Cult, is fired by the band and forced to return to his home town ofQueens. His return home is anything but glorious. His mother is old and alone and quite forgetful. His old love has married his high school nightmare, and his high school nightmare still refers to him as “testicles.”

What really surprised me about this movie is that it all ...]]> I thought something was going to happen. I was waiting for something—anything—to happen. And when it did, I simply wondered why it was happening.

Roadie is about a man, who after 25 years of being a roadie for Blue Oyster Cult, is fired by the band and forced to return to his home town ofQueens. His return home is anything but glorious. His mother is old and alone and quite forgetful. His old love has married his high school nightmare, and his high school nightmare still refers to him as “testicles.”

What really surprised me about this movie is that it all takes place over the course of one day, the day of his return. I was expecting to see things unfold over the span of a few weeks, so in this sense, I was disappointed. I don’t know why I expected this or why it really matters, but it does.

So, Johnny spends his day drinking beer and taking shots of Wild Turkey at a local bar. He drinks and drives with his high school bully and snorts enough coke to immobilize a full-grown Bull Elephant. When is it ever a good idea to get loaded and hangout with the person who not only terrorized you in high school, but married one of your first loves, in a motel room no less?

Well, after things go crazy and people fly into a coked-out rage of brutal honesty and rage, the movie sort of unravels. His old bully verbally berates him and his old crush stands by and does nothing. He stumbles home, gets his ass handed to him by a preteen, gets into a fight with his mom the next morning, and wimps out on life. For hanging with a rock band and going on tour for the last 25 years, I expected this guy to have a little more gumption.

The acting felt solid and the story had promise, but the story started with a whimper and ended in a dull moan. This guy seemed like a roadie in the sense that he had never made a decision for himself in his entire life.

There are no scenes of dismemberment or undead creatures feeding on warm human bodies. Pontypool does not rely on brutal death or quick scares. Pontypool mostly takes place in a small ...]]> It’s nice to see a movie that doesn’t directly correlate the idea of ingenuity with high budgets, cutting edge special effects, and international stars of the silver screen. It’s even nicer to see a movie improve and innovate a genre that really does not have a lot of room left for new idea. Pontypool is a low-budget, Canadian horror film that puts a new spin on zombies and scare tactics.

There are no scenes of dismemberment or undead creatures feeding on warm human bodies. Pontypool does not rely on brutal death or quick scares. Pontypool mostly takes place in a small radio station, occupied by its three crew members. While inside the radio station, reports of death and destruction start to flood the radio waves. First, the crew members start to receive reports of random acts of violence. Before you know it, they pick up frequencies that talk about full-scale riots and the intervention of the Canadian government. You see, what really works for this movie is the fact that there is so much mystery. As an audience, our only access to what is going on in the world is no better than the radio station crew. During the first half of the movie, the crew hears various eyewitness testimonies about what is going on outside of the radio station. People are going crazy. People are losing it. People are dying. This is at least what our imagination leads us to believe.

As it turns out, Pontypool is a zombie-esque movie. However, people are not getting bitten or savagely torn apart. No, this sort of virus is spread my language. Yes, language. I won’t go any further into it than that because I don’t want to give anything away.

I’m not really sure how I felt about the ending. It did feel fitting for the general tone and vibe of the rest of the movie. Still, part of me thinks that they simply ran out of ideas. Either way, it was a pretty cool idea. Not the greatest movie, but a cool idea.

C.R.A.Z.Y is ...]]> From Stand By Me to My Girl and The Sandlot to The Breakfast Club, the coming of age film genre embodies elements of film that are both entirely unique and personal, as well as completely universal and relatable. While these types of films deal with the coming of age experience—growing up, adapting, growing older—each of them means something slightly different to everyone who watches them. More often than not, these films deal with family drama and tragedy and triumph. Well, C.R.A.Z.Y is no different in these respects, but in other respects, it is absolutely and positively different and fantastic.

C.R.A.Z.Y is the story of a 1960’s Montreal working-class family. One of five sons, Zac knows that he is different. He shares not only in the birthday of Christ, but also the healing powers of the Son of God, or at least that is what his mother was told by a Tupperware saleswoman when he was young. Zac is coddled by his mother and shunned by many of his brothers, even the youngest one. He is confused most of the time and spends the rest of his time trying to impress and please his highly skeptical father. Zac is gay.

This movie is colorful, and no, that is not a pun of any sort. It’s a veritable rainbow in every way imaginable—the mother, the father, the junkie brother, the clothing, the story, the fights, the beginning, the ending—it is all bursting with life. There is not a dull moment. There was not a single isolated instance in which I did not feel the dull aching throb that seemed to persist so secretively during the period of adolescence, which seems so synonymous with growing up. And of course, it always helps to have such an immense cast to help stir up the family drama.

The plot and story go places that I would never have imagined, spanning Zac’s life from childhood the adulthood. And I must say, the ending is something to really cherish.

50 years in the future, the sun is dying. Its brightness is fading and its rays are not reaching quite as far. So, a team of astronauts is sent out into space to revive the sun with a payload the size ofManhattan. Well, this team fails and this is ...]]> Innovation in the realm of science fiction is not as easy as it sounds. Just because you come up with a new name for something—crumple-horned snorkacks and deluminators and whiskerwompers—does not mean you have a great story. It takes more than creative names to make great science fiction, and Sunshine has this—more.

50 years in the future, the sun is dying. Its brightness is fading and its rays are not reaching quite as far. So, a team of astronauts is sent out into space to revive the sun with a payload the size ofManhattan. Well, this team fails and this is where the movie really begins, 7 years later when a new team of astronauts is rocketed into space to reignite the sun and save planet earth.

There are no notions of heroism or glory in this movie, no space cowboys who hookup and drink cheap hooch and mess around. This is no Armageddon. Sunshine is built on a creeping suspense that swallows you into the vacuum of space and puts you right into the Icarus II with the other astronauts. As the astronauts approach closer and closer to the sun, you can feel the loneliness and suspense and weight of the mission, of being in charge of saving the earth with theoretical science and an 0-1 record as your only viable tools.

The movie relies on a slow pace, and by slow, I do not mean boring. By slow pace, I mean a sneaking, creeping, sinking suspicion that something isn’t right. Just when you think the entire movie will stay on the same course, the team discovers the Icarus I (the ship that carried the first team 7 years before them) and that slowly building creeping suspicion rapidly morphs from a seedling of a feeling into a full-grown and rabid beast.

If there were ever two movies that deserved to be packaged and sold together, it would be Sunshine and Moon. Both films deal with a future planet earth in some form of a dire energy crisis and both films absolutely nail the subject matter with an artful perfection.

If you’ve ever seen The Brave Little Toaster, then you know that scientific researchers are evil and soulless. Well, that is not quite the case with Nim. Many of the families and teachers ...]]> The story of Nim follows a chimpanzee that we tried to make human. In the seventies, Nim was plucked from the arms of his chimp mother and placed in a New York brownstone to be raised by a human family. This was all part of a language experiment that was being conducted through Columbia University—can a chimp learn sign language and create grammatical structures to communicate with people?

If you’ve ever seen The Brave Little Toaster, then you know that scientific researchers are evil and soulless. Well, that is not quite the case with Nim. Many of the families and teachers that had contact with Nim absolutely fell in love with him. Once you’ve seen footage of an infant chimp playing with a cat or an empty box, you are bound to suit up in full camouflage gear and head out to your neighborhood zoo to snag a chimp of your own. Really, Nim was just that cute. However, with all of the movie’s cuteness—Nim playing with the dog, being breastfed, asking for hugs, and smoking joints—there was a great deal of sadness in this story.

Nim had a high turnover of human relationships. While one teacher would quit because of an odd sexual relationship with Herb Terrace, the project’s leader, another would leave because Nim bit her in the face. Yes, Nim does bite quite a bit. The movie doesn’t show it, but everyone talks about it.

As Nim grows older, Herb shuts down the project and delivers Nim back to where he came from, an ape research facility in Oklahoma. So, Nim makes yet another transition, only this time it is a move from a swanky, New York countryside mansion, formally occupied by the president, to a cage and the wrong end of a cattle prod in Oklahoma.

The journey does not end there. Nim bounces between a medical research facility packed to the brim with fellow apes being injected with Hepatitis B vaccines, to a Texas animal sanctuary with no apes and plenty of loneliness.

Project Nim is a revealing tale about how a chimp affected the lives of so many people. It is also a story of how people severely altered the life of a chimp, creating a being that lived halfway between the worlds of humanity and the wild.