Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium

Blogorium Review: Hostel Part III

2012-02-10T00:11:00.000-05:00

I feel like there should be some kind of criteria for reviewing direct to video sequels. See, they're almost never going to "hold up" to their theatrical brethren, and even when they do people seem surprised, like it's not possible. I blame Disney for a lot of this, so bear with me here: while DTV isn't by any means new, and the house that Walt built isn't entirely responsible for this, they did unleash a wave of direct to video sequels to their newer, successful films. There were the Aladdin sequels, the Little Mermaid sequels, the Beauty and the Beast Christmas movie, then The Fox and the Hound II, Pocahontas II, Peter Pan: Return to Neverland, The Lion King 1 1/2 and 2, Lady and the Tramp II, Cinderella II, Cinderella III, and even a Hunchback of Notre Dame II.

What these unwarranted, unasked for sequels all have in common is the same thing that most DTV sequels have in common: they look cheaper, they feel half-assed, and they aren't very good. Disney keeps pumping them out, and parents looking to satisfy their kids' appetite for something new (but old at the same time) keep buying / renting them. The same thing applies for action, science fiction, comedy, and especially horror fans when it comes to DTV: we know it's not going to be good, but what the hell, right?

In the case of Hostel Part III, we're looking at a trifecta of "uh oh"'s heading in: it's DTV, it was made without the participation of Eli Roth (who wrote and directed Hostel and Hostel Part II but apparently didn't even want to produce this one), and aside from the Elite Hunting Club, has nothing to do with the first two films. I understand that very few people are of the same mind as the Cap'n when it comes to Hostel and Hostel Part II, but I think they're a step about the Saw films and other so-called "torture porn." I feel that the first one plays some interesting games with our sympathies and expectations, and that Part II takes any lingering expectations and turns them on their heads again, both with a gruesome sense of humor while simultaneously generating some serious discomfort during the "kill" scenes.

Therefore, I walked headlong into Hostel Part III, not knowing much about the film nor wanting to know a whole lot about the "starting from scratch" plot. There are no shortage of terrible DTV sequels (American Psycho 2, any of the Children of the Corn or The Howling) but every now and then there's an unexpected (if unrequested) sequel that surprises you, even with lowered expectations. Hostel Part III is in league with the likes of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days as a movie I was pleasantly surprised by. They aren't great, and to be honest I don't know that the world would even notice if they didn't exist, but for what they are you aren't going to feel ripped off (like, say, Hellraiser: Revelations).

Hostel Part III's secret weapon is its director, Scott Spiegel. You might not recognize the name, but he was / is a long-time collaborator with Sam Raimi and also directed Intruder and From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, which is also a "well, that was kind of fun" DTV sequel from the turn of the millennium. Spiegel is a big fan of strange camera angles and uniquely gory effects, one of which fits in really well with the Hostel series, which he produced (hence the connection).

In fact, taking the Elite Hunting Club out of Eastern Europe and dropping it into Las Vegas might be exactly what the series needed to keep Hostel Part III from being "more of the same, but less." Once you remove the concept of visitors in a foreign land unknowingly walking right into a trap (what I'd call the "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" template) and put it in "Sin City," where people go to do horrible things and no one ever finds out (for the sake of comparison, let's call that the "Hangover" template), then the stakes have changed. The American assholes out to use the "old country" as their personal playground is gone and now they're wittingly setting themselves up for whatever horrors await.

This time around, instead of vacationing students, we have some buddies going on a bachelor party: there's the groom, Carter (Kip Pardue), his best friend Scott (Brian Hallisay), his married pal Mike (Skyler Stone), and the guy with the crutch, Justin (John Hensley). After leaving his bride-to-be, Amy (Kelly Thiebaud) behind, Carter is informed by Scott that they aren't going to Palm Springs, but to Vegas where he's hired some "special" company in the form of Kendra (Sarah Habel) and Nikki (Zulay Henao) at a special club off of the strip. If you've seen Hostel, you can imagine where this is going.

And while you'd be right (eventually), you're going to be wrong almost every other step of the way: Spiegel and screenwriter Michael Weiss are constantly misdirecting the audience, playing to what you assume is going to happen only to discover that they turned left instead of right. It's actually more fun than annoying, because instead of trying to guess what's coming next you just take every possible clue as either a trick or not and wait to see where Hostel Part III is taking you. The only thing you can really count on for sure is that there IS an Elite Hunting Club facility, it is in a run-down building, and that they still manage to sneak in some foreign accents.

The other contribution to the overall Hostel series is that Part III adds another level to how EHC operates: because they're in Las Vegas and not some decrepit warehouse, the club allows executions to be performed in front of an audience (on the other side of a glass wall) who place bets on tactics victims will use to stall their killers, what kind of weapons, and in one scene how many arrows it will take to kill a guy. Everything is overseen by Flemming (Thomas Kretschmann) and Travis (Chris Coy), along with a couple of overzealous guards (Derrick Carr and Frank Alvarez) who give a different kind of personality to the operation than we saw in Hostel and Hostel Part II. Sure, at this point it's well beyond being "faceless" and terrifying as an "unknown" entity, but that's really something Roth started with the second film.

Spiegel also doesn't let down on the kills (mostly): there's a "while they're still alive" facial surgery, bugs being poured down someone's throat (with inside-of-mouth POV shot as the bugs crawl in), some skin carving, and death by cattle prod (to be fair, that doesn't happen IN the execution room, but there aren't actually that many of those in Part III). The characters don't amount to much, but instead of douchebags or innocent art students, these guys come off as losers who are trying to be cool but just don't have it in them. They're constantly doing things that should, by all rights, have them killed well before they make it to EHC, but at least you aren't rooting for all of them to die immediately after meeting them.

Maybe the ending stumbles a little bit, if because it's one of the two possible twists they could have gone with considering the propensity for tricks. Then again, I guess I'm already judging Hostel Part III on curve, so I can't go too hard. I'm comparing it favorably to From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, for crying out loud: it's not the kind of movie you're ever going to put on for friends who want to see a "scary" horror movie or who are in for a new experience. It's more the kind of movie you'll rent one night, be reasonably happy with, and maybe mention it to a buddy that's into watching all kinds of horror movies, even DTV ones. By that criteria, I feel like Hostel Part III will be a nice respite from the normal crap passing itself off as a "sequel".

Beer and Sandwiches and... Gas? A Very Special Video Daily Double

2012-02-08T10:58:00.000-05:00

Hello again, my devoted Educationeers! I'm sorry that the Cap'n lost his temper last week - sometimes I get so wrapped up in making sure you're prepared for the future that I lose sight of how young and ~~manipulable~~ impressionable you are. Let me make it up to you with a kinder, gentler, more confusing Video Daily Double. It's delectable and educational!

Follow me to education!

---

Our first film, Let's Make a Sandwich, is about eating, but more importantly about what makes that possible. Hint: it's not what you would assume it is.

Our second film, As We Like It, is for when you're a little older. Specifically the age that your state, territory, or holler allows you to imbibe alcohol. Until then, there's only one film this week. Definitely do not watch this if you are too young.

Retro Review Repost (By Popular Demand): Star Wars Episode One - The Phantom Menace

2012-02-07T22:13:00.000-05:00

While everybody is ~~not~~ talking about Red Tails or the impending re-release of one of the most hated sequels of all time (along with Batman and Robin, Blues Brothers 2000, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), it occurred to me that like many movies I hold near and dear I've never given them the fourth - or first, if you're REALLY a stickler - Star Wars film a proper write-up. This still won't really be a proper write-up for The Phantom Menace, but I do want to continue the thread I began in the triple feature review of Rush Hour 2, The Siege, and Star Trek: Insurrection. In that I laid out the pattern of an obsessive Star Wars fan (one who'd gone batty at seeing the Special Editions but was old enough to have seen at least one film the first time around) and this is the payoff. This was what it all boiled down to: no more teasers, trailers, leaked audio from ADR sessions or pictures or crazy rumors / script reviews*; it was time for the real thing, at midnight.

May 18th, 1999 came too soon - I didn't have tickets for the midnight showing because I'd just returned from school an hour-and-a-half away and hadn't been able to procure any. Even working for a local theatre proved futile in getting to see The Phantom Menace on opening day. I was convinced it would be sold out by the day before (and I say the 18th because most of this takes place before midnight, May 19th, 1999) and was scrambling to find anybody who had an extra ticked. A friend of my brother's had one at the appropriately named Imperial Cinemas (now it's the Galaxy), and I got there around... 9:30?

Young, delusional, and buying into the hype, I was convinced that the massive line would already be happening in short order, so two-and-a-half hours early seemed like a good idea**. I was probably the seventh or eighth person in line, which gives you some idea of the level of fandom for The Phantom Menace and the futility of my fears. By the time 11:45 rolled around (when they opened the doors), there was a line wrapped around the front and side of the building, although it was nothing compared to the one I was in for Revenge of the Sith, where we were in a parking lot for the grocery store next to the theatre two hours before the film started.

We all piled in, got our popcorn and drinks, had a seat (third row) and waited for new Star Wars. Holy shit, can you believe it? NEW Star Wars! The sensory overload, the crowd's adrenaline, and the glow of lightsabers sustained two hours of wooden, stilted line delivery, personality-less characters, dumb jokes, and soulless fight scenes. We were too overwhelmed by the event to care that the movie didn't live up to its tremendous hype, let alone to the minimum expectations of a competently made film. For days, I would continue to delude myself into thinking that The Phantom Menace was a film that needed to be, one that I was better for having seen.

The fundamental flaw of Episode One isn't any of the litany of illogical plot developments or the "kiddie" tone (for that, I direct you to the notorious Mr. Plinkett reviews of the prequels, which are hilarious, brutal, and often illuminating). The problem is one inherent in any prequel: you already know where the story is going. New characters introduced are going to be killed off or shoved to the margins in order for the characters the audience already knows ARE in the original films to step forward. So unless you really want to know HOW Obi-Wan Kenobi came to train Anakin Skywalker or WHY Yoda decided to go into exile on Dagobah, there's not a lot for you in these films. But we were willfully ignorant of this, and I did ruin at least one person's experience by casually mentioning that Qui-Gon Jinn was going to die before the movie ended.

I watched The Phantom Menace in its entirety four times that summer: the midnight screening, twice with friends, and once with my Dad, who was unimpressed. I kept trying to convince myself that it wasn't the disappointment that everyone said it was (and that I knew deep down was true) by sneaking off during breaks at the movie theatre I worked at to watch the Obi-Wan / Darth Maul lightsaber fight. I'd time breaks so I could walk in just in time to see it. All this time, this interest, invested for naught? It couldn't be. Twenty year old Cap'n Howdy couldn't believe that. It can't be true; it's impossible.

But search my feelings I did, and I knew it was true. You could hear it drop like the proverbial turd when The Phantom Menace dropped on VHS. Already Lucas had made changes - extending the Pod Race and including a longer sequence where our heroes fly through Coruscant. Why? Because he felt they "improved" the experience. The really just made the film longer, and without the big screen and crowd enthusiasm, The Phantom Menace was as bad as I knew it was. I just couldn't pretend otherwise.

I tend to think of that experience as the point at which I became more cynical about the hype surrounding films - I'd been burned, and so had many other geeks my age. Sure, we went to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (sometimes at midnight), but more out of a grudging sense of completion, a "let's get this over with." The excitement turned to caution, then dread, then relief. The scratch had been itched, and I was no longer outraged by Lucas' incessant tinkering with his films on DVD (and now Blu-Ray); this was the man who brought us the Prequels, his undiluted vision of the Star Wars universe, and they were not good. They were barely watchable, and I don't own them any more. It grouses me a bit knowing that if I want to see the bounty of extra material Lucasfilm has been ferreting away for decades that I'll have to own them again. I tried watching the end of Revenge of the Sith on TV yesterday and howled with laughter at how bad the writing was.

At this point, I don't really feel like it's worth piling on to George Lucas for his rotten prequels, but they are the reason that I have to temper expectations for movies I really like. Last year's Attack the Block review is a great example - I really enjoyed the movie, but don't want the film to get bogged down by people who think it's going to fix their car or something. Somehow we got on this kick that any movie that's better than "pretty good" has to be elevated to transcendent levels, and a lot of that has to do with the built-in cynicism that came for geeks in a post-The Phantom Menace world. Half of the geeks automatically assume something is going to suck because "they" will "mess it up," so the other half pushes too hard to counter that attitude and movies suddenly have to be the second coming to be worth seeing. I remember going to see just about everything pre-Godzilla and The Phantom Menace with a blissful ignorance of whether it would be good or not - The Big Hit? Lost in Space? Suicide Kings? The Faculty? We were there. Hate it, love it, going was fun. I think that The Phantom Menace took some of that away, or at least changed the way I looked forward to movies.

And now it's been converted to 3-D gimmickry, because instead of being the "future" of movie-going as James "Yes, I'm converting Titanic to 3-D!" Cameron keeps claiming it is, we're going to continue to see movies that weren't conceived, composed, or shot for the third dimension getting an extra price-hike. Why? Because running it into the ground in the 1950s and 1980s wasn't enough; it's time for one more go-round of "everything old is new again" as long as there's a penny to be made in the meantime. And because we haven't seen the sequel-remake-3D-IMAX-"experience" yet. Once that happens, and heads explode, we can wait for The Phantom Menace to be beamed into our dreams. Jar Jar while you sleep! Until then, take your kids to see the movie that ruined Star Wars for your budding geek twenties.

* Like this one, for example. I can't find the one on Ain't It Cool that goes over-the-top about a SPOILER that can't be revealed - and I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what people coming into this movie could have been "spoiled" by. On the other hand, I don't think Jeffrey Wells feels too bad about his column now, or even six months after the release of The Phantom Menace.
** True story: on a whim, two friends drove by Mission Valley and Park Place 16 to look at the lines for The Phantom Menace only to find empty parking lots.

Blogorium Review: Rubber

2012-02-06T20:58:00.000-05:00

There's no way of tiptoeing around the fact that Rubber is a weird movie. A profoundly weird, often silly, and sometimes stupid movie with one of those great "what the hell was that" premise: a tire comes to life, rolls around the desert, and causes bottles, animals, and people to explode with psycho-kinetic powers. That is, in essence, what Rubber is about. Except when it isn't at all.

Yes, it's true that at the heart of Quentin Dupieux's Rubber, we have a tire that causes Scanners-like head exploding for people (and more generalized explosions of rabbits and crows), but the movie is mostly about the relationship between the audience (us) and the film we're watching (Rubber in this case). The film begins with a car driving down a long desert road, arbitrarily hitting chairs arbitrarily placed along the way. The car comes to a stop, and Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) climbs out of the trunk, grabs a glass of water, and addresses the audience directly. He asks us why so many movies have things that happen for "no reason," like why E.T. is brown or why Kennedy is assassinated in JFK. It's because life is filled with things that happen for "no reason." He pours the water onto the ground, gets back in the car, and drives away.

The camera pulls back and reveals the audience. Well, not us, but our literal surrogates in the film: a pair of film geeks, some teenage girls, a father and son, a middle-aged woman, and a guy in a wheelchair. The Accountant (Jack Plotnick) provides them with binoculars so they can watch "the movie." This movie. With their binoculars, they see what we see, which is a tire that comes to life, learns to steady itself, and begins to roll around. They impatiently comment on the action, bicker amongst themselves, and one guy is recording the whole thing because his "wife couldn't make it." He stops when one of the geeks explains that's definitely piracy. Makes sense.

Meanwhile, the tire is learning; it rolls over a plastic bottle and a scorpion and enjoys crushing them. It gets angry when it can't crush a glass bottle, so it uses its powers to make the bottle explode. The tire is happy, so when it finds a bunny, there's no reason not to test this out again. It works. When the tire goes to sleep, the boy in the audience goes to get part of the rabbit. The audience is hungry - the Accountant and Lieutenant Chad aren't feeding them and they have to sleep in the desert. The geek points out that the rabbit is fake, and nobody is happy. That makes sense too.

I could go further, because this is prior to the actual plot, involving a French girl named Sheila (Roxane Mesquida) that the tire either falls in love with or just wants to kill. It follows her to a motel, rents a room, and kills some more people. Lieutenant Chad arrives to solve this bizarre crime spree, but gives up when the audience is poisoned and dies. Well, almost all of the audience. In fact, Lieutenant Chad's speech about how all of his other deputies and EMTs are really just characters in a movie fails when the Accountant informs him the Man in the wheelchair (Wings Hauser) didn't eat the poisoned turkey and is still watching. The film goes on as long as there's an audience...

Rubber may be a bizarre damn film, but it does comment frequently on the relationship between audiences and movies - our expectations, the way a plot unfolds, what the audience knows that the characters don't. Dupieux blurs the line between audience and character in Rubber more than once - it isn't just that we don't know Lieutenant Chad isn't directly addressing us at the beginning (and something that happens during the credits might indicate that there is no "audience"), the surrogate audience become characters during the film. In the case of the Man in the wheelchair, it might be against his will, leading to what I took to be a jab at "trick" endings to horror films and what the viewer expects in a sequel-laden cinematic landscape. The final image, involving a gaggle of tires and a tricycle bearing down on Hollywood, seems to be a direct message: "no reason" is descending upon you.

In fact, I could probably turn my reaction to Rubber into a treatise on the necessity of "unreason," a concept suggested by Foucault in History of Madness - the premise of Rubber, both a film and as film-within-film-but-not-exactly are rooted in "unreason." No explanation is provided for the tire, Lieutenant Chad's "experiment," or anything else that happens during Rubber. There doesn't need to be one: a little "unreason" helps balance out a world addicted to the idea that unreasonable things should be locked away. I could write about this for three more paragraphs easily, but I'm going to stop here. Why? No reason.

I Do This Every Year but This Year's Super Trailer Sunday Has Firestorm!!!

2012-02-05T23:37:00.000-05:00

Firestorm

Any Given Sunday

Brian's Song

Invincible

The Replacements

The Game Plan

Failure to Launch

Four Reasons I am not Seeing The Phantom Menace in 3-D

2012-02-03T01:34:00.000-05:00

To put this to rest once and for all, because people really seem to think that I am or would be considering going to see Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace in 3-D... soon. That should be number one, in fact:

1. I Don't Even Care Enough to Know When It Opens - According to the button on my desk, it's February 10th. Next weekend. I did not know that, despite what feels like a constant barrage of advertisements trying to trick anyone into seeing The Phantom Menace again.

2. Wait, Why is There a Button on Your Desk? - Hey, I decide what merits a "reason" here, not you. The button, which is heart shaped an professes the love that one droid has for another (in this particular case, C-3P0 for R2-D2), is on my desk because when we went to see The Muppets, one of my friends found the fact that Lucasfilm was tacitly admitting what we've all known for years. In fact, they put it on a button and then put the $3 it cost towards charity. This is the pin. But since any opportunity to sell Star Wars merchandise, even for a good cause like children, is also an opportunity to plug something nobody cares about, there's a paper insert mentioning The Phantom Menace in 3-D. It happens to open next weekend.

3. So You Just Mentioned AGAIN for No Good Reason When It Opens - Hey, who runs this Blogorium? Me or you? Look, four times is enough for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace; that's the number of times I PAID to see it in theatres in the summer of 1999. That does not count the numerous instances of watching parts of it while on break, watching parts of it on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, on television, or the time spent to find, download, and watch The Phantom Edit, which it turns out really wasn't that much better. A polished turd is still a turd.

4. It Sure Sounds Like You've Seen The Phantom Menace a lot Already - Yes, it does. I have, and every single time it's a gigantic waste of my time. But I kept going back, thinking "hey, maybe this time it won't slap me around and then bore the living shit out of me before I turn it off in disgust," because I've watched the Mr. Plinkett dissections so many times that you can't even use The Phantom Menace to prove the points he makes. That's how stilted and lifeless that movie is. It's more entertaining watching someone else point out the idiot lapses in logic in The Phantom Menace than seeing them happen firsthand.

I don't watch The Clone Wars, I don't care about Red Tails, and The People vs. George Lucas felt like a lot of spent energy over something nobody seems to care about any more. Everybody knows The Phantom Menace sucks, even little kids. Your kids don't want to see The Phantom Menace any more than you want to take them to it because it's "Star Wars" and in another three years you can see A New Hope, the movie you'd actually like to see converted to 3-D for no good reason. In the meantime, you have to sit through the shitty prequels again and marvel at how flat, boring CGI backgrounds look even more phony in the third dimension. You can pretend that a Pod Racer flying at you makes up for the... well, anything. It doesn't, and you know it doesn't.

Oh well, I guess it beats going to see Titanic in 3-D, which is also happening soon, I think. I never saw that one in the first place, so at least people might believe me when I say I'm not going to see that one. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to put on my "robot love" button and NOT watch the Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace that's in the Blu-Ray boxed set behind me. Because that is something that is not going to happen. Right now.

Obey Your Video Daily Double! OBEY!!!!!

2012-02-01T10:11:00.000-05:00

Oh, my Educationeers, how I try to do right by you. But you continue to involve yourselves in shenanigans and tomfoolery, so I'm just going to put two films up today that you must follow. No options - they are about following the rules and you must follow them, or usher yourself into a life of menial labor behind a counter. Probably a gas station, which means one of those plexi-glass walls that someone could conceivably pass gas into, leaving you trapped with unpleasant smells.

That's what your looking at, hooligans in training. I'm just saying...

---

Our first film, School Rules: How They Help Us, is pretty self explanatory. Do yourself a favor and obey them.

Our second film, Maintaining Classroom Discipline, is for those slacker teachers out there. Force your slacker students to Obey! OBEY!!!!

Retro Review: Midnight Run

2012-01-31T18:36:00.000-05:00

I've been watching Midnight Run with the intention of breaking it up into 15 Minute Review segments, but I found myself caught up in the film itself and thought I'd put it into a Retro Review instead. I can't say for certain when I saw Midnight Run for the first time, but I'll venture a guess and say it was on video not long after its 1988 theatrical run. Let's also assume I was probably younger than I should have been for a film where 80% of Robert DeNiro's dialogue consists of the word "fuck."

Midnight Run is the kind of movie that seemed like it was always playing on cable during weekends, in pan-and-scanned / "edited for content" versions. It's a "road" picture, in that Jack Walsh (DeNiro) and Johnathan "The Duke" Mardukas (Charles Grodin) as bounty hunter and bounty, respectively, try to get from New York to Los Angeles by Friday so that Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano) doesn't miss the bail bond he posted. Jack's attempts to bring Mardukas back are thwarted by the Mafia (who "The Duke" stole money from), the FBI (who want Mardukas to testify), rival bounty hunter Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton), and Mardukas himself. He won't fly, complains constantly, and tries to escape more than once. All Walsh wants it to bring the fugitive back, collect his hundred grand, and find a new way to live his life.

In addition to the leads, there a host of familiar faces playing people contributing to Walsh's headache: there's Yaphet Kotto (Alien) as FBI Agent Alonzo Mosley, who Jack spends a bulk of the movie impersonating; Dennis Farina (Out of Sight) is Jimmy Serrano, the mob boss who ruined Jack's life as a Chicago police officer and who wants Mardukas all to himself. His consigliere? Phillip Baker Hall (Magnolia). You'll probably also recognize Robert Miranda (Heat, The Untouchables), Wendy Phillips (Big Love, Touched By an Angel), and Batman's "Bob the Goon," Tracey Walter, although Reno 911 fans might know him better as the Sheriff of Revo, Nevada.

Directed by Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop, Gigli), written by George Gallo (Bad Boys, Double Take), and with an atypically saxophone heavy score by Danny Elfman (Forbidden Zone, Mars Attacks), Midnight Run is a cracking action / comedy that is frequently hilarious and makes the best of DeNiro's prickly, acerbic wit and Grodin's wry comic timing. It's weird to think about, but there was a time when he wasn't just the guy who had been in those lousy Beethoven movies - he's the secret weapon of Midnight Run, often playing the straight man to DeNiro's perpetually frustrated tough guy, but then he'll sneak in every now and again with a line that really brings the laughter.

The film takes Walsh and Mardukas from New York to Chicago to Texas to Arizona to Las Vegas and finally (SPOILER) Los Angeles. Along the way there are all sorts of ridiculous contrivances, car chases, trickery, double crosses, explosions, and lots of yelling. It really shouldn't work, but Midnight Run was just as entertaining to me as it was the first time I watched that VHS tape. It's probably the same tape, a worn out, pan-and-scanned copy (I don't know that I've ever seen Midnight Run in its proper screen format), but when I decided to stay on the treadmill until the movie was done, I grossly underestimated how much of the film was left and ended up sticking it out for the last 50 minutes. I had forgotten that the helicopter chase with Jack, Mardukas, Marvin, and the Mafia assassins was in the middle of the movie and not near the end.

Oh well, I had fun watching the movie again. I think I'll rent the DVD some time later this year to see what it's supposed to look like. I doubt I'll be checking out the three made for television sequels: Another Midnight Run, Midnight Runaround, and Midnight Run for Your Life. I didn't even know they existed, and by most accounts, that's probably for the best. The important part is that if you're in the mood to see Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin in a comedy before they both became... well, not-so-funny, Midnight Run holds up. Check it out all over again.

Blogorium Review: The Artist

2012-01-31T01:51:00.000-05:00

I want to start my review for Michael Hazanavicius's film, The Artist, but correcting two assumptions I had about the film. Coming in without knowing very much about The Artist, I had the following general impressions:

1. It was French.
2. It was some variety of "art" film commenting on... well, something.

To be honest, I was only vaguely aware of The Artist until two weeks ago; I'd heard it mentioned once or twice and then it started winning awards. I thought it was French because the writer / director and lead actor were both French (the lead actress is from Argentina, but let's pretend I was ignorant and assumed they were all French for this hypothesis). That made sense. It was in black and white and I had no idea what the film was about so let's just say I thought it was maybe one of those New York, New York / A Star is Born kind of movies about relationships between famous people that ends up being flawed and tragic despite their "happy-go-lucky" on-screen appearance (by this point I knew it had something to do with movie-making, partially because an article online mentioned that "movies about movies don't win Best Picture"*).

Neither of which is true, it turns out. Well, the director / writer (Hazanavicius) and the star (Jean Dujardin) ARE French**, but Bérénice Bejo is not, and neither are John Goodman, Missi Pyle, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, and (briefly) Malcolm McDowell. That was the first surprise: seeing their names in the credits. It's a testament to how unprepared I was coming in to The Artist, which is unlike the Cap'n but in a lot of ways a wonderful way to be caught unawares by a charming film about the early days of cinema.

George Valentine (Dujardin) is a star of the silent era, the kind who loves to showboat for his adoring fans and who has a dog sidekick (played by a Jack Russell terrier named Uggie). His antics upstage co-star Constance (Pyle) and wear on the patience of Kinograph Studio Chief Al Zimmer (Goodman), and his wife Doris (Miller) doesn't take kindly to his public flirtation with Peppy Miller (Bejo), a fan on her way to being a star of the silver screen, but what does George care? He has his trusty chauffeur / butler Clifton (Cromwell) and legions of fans to see his feats of derring-do.

And then along comes sound. George scoffs at it and wants nothing to do with the gimmick, but when Kinograph moves to an "all talkies" production slate, the silent heart-throb finds himself on the outside looking in. His attempt to write, direct, and star in one last epic (Tears of Love) ends his career while Peppy's star is rising. She sings, dances, and more importantly embraces talking pictures. George lets his pride get in the way of their budding romance (it's fair to point out that Doris kicks him to the curb by this point) - he was at least partially responsible for her film debut - and as she ascends, the continues to plummet into despair.

So maybe it sounds like I wasn't so "wrong" about the second assumption, but I actually was. Despite what that reads like, The Artist remains an upbeat, charming picture chronicling two stars during a change in eras. It's amiable without being inconsequential, fun without seeming trivial. Like Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, it wears its heart on its sleeve and wants nothing more than to be a throwback to movies without rampant cynicism. Somewhere along the way we forgot that those movies can be more than mindless fluff, so The Artist stands out in that regard, even if I was totally wrong about what I thought I was about to see (and apparently several other people I know).

Speaking of which, The Artist, like Drive, is getting some guff from audiences who don't seem to be aware that it's a silent film. Like, almost totally a silent film (save for two instances used in a clever way to make you chuckle, or, if you prefer, feel whimsy) with intertitles and music for most of the film. In fact, it's a little surprising when the organ / orchestra score goes away and "Pennies from Heaven" plays because it's been a while since you heard a human voice. It's not as though I haven't seen my fair share of silent films, but I don't remember Chaplin's "Nonsense Song" in Modern Times being quite as jarring as "Pennies from Heaven" is in The Artist.

Hazanavicius also has some tricks up his sleeve to demonstrate the passage of time in The Artist: as the film moves forward a decade or so, so too do the camera techniques, choices of angles, and editing tricks. Later in the film he starts throwing in some Orson Welles-style camera trickery, and finds a way to sneak in some film noir venetian blind action in a scene where you wouldn't expect them at all. It reminded me a little bit of the way that Martin Scorsese utilized different film stocks for The Aviator as a way to move from one era to the other in Howard Hughes life. I should point out that it isn't in a "look at what I'm doing here" way on Hazanavicius's part, but more of a "I see what you're doing there" followed with a grin.

The Artist reminded me a lot of Sunset Boulevard by way of Singin' in the Rain, which is every bit as impossible as that sounds but it does it very well. The ups and downs of George Valentin's career are loosely reminiscent of Norma Desmond's, but without the cynicism that Billy Wilder laced Sunset Boulevardwith. It has that sunny optimism of Singin' in the Rain, and the jokes about silent-era Hollywood going "talkie," just without the talking. There is, in fact, a scene you'll recognize from Singin' in the Rain, but without the ability to hear Missi Pyle's voice while Jean Dujardin laughs out loud at her delivery. It's a conceit I guess some people don't take kindly to - we're missing half of the joke because we can't hear what they hear, or something.I'll leave it up to you to determine what (if anything) is being said about audience expectations.

I feel like I'm doing The Artist a disservice by saying it made me smile or surprised me or that it's "pleasant." The cynic in me says that's damning the film with faint praise, but the true is that The Artist is a really, really well made film with unbridled optimism and enthusiasm. If you're one of those people that CANNOT get past a movie where you don't hear anyone talk for ninety minutes, you're going to miss out on something special, but I guess New Year's Eve is still playing somewhere. Fans of cinema are going to have a fine time watching The Artist and dissecting the camera placement throughout the film. Silent Era film buffs in particular are going to go gaga over this film, and I think if you're willing to go in open for whatever The Artist has in store for you, it's a ride well worth taking.

* I wish I could find that... I think it was on CNN but I'm not so sure anymore. That is actually true though - I checked and despite my misgivings, I'll be damned if a film ABOUT Hollywood and show business ever own Best Picture.
** I guess technically it IS French, but it doesn't FEEL like any French cinema I've seen, and I have been exposed to more than just the New Wave

You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Trailer Sunday

2012-01-29T16:56:00.011-05:00

Midnight Run

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Pinocchio

The Man from Hong Kong

Silver Streak

The Little Prince

Patriot Games

A Few Thoughts on the Academy Awards Nominations

2012-01-26T21:21:00.000-05:00

And we're off! Some of you might protest that "awards season" begins with The Golden Globes, but I don't watch the show and don't consider any stamp of approval that The Hollywood Foreign Press Association to be worth much of anything. The SAG Awards, the BAFTAs, the DGA, and something I'm sure I'm forgetting are worth looking into in passing, but the Cap'n actually only bothers watching one awards show - the Super Bowl of awards shows, The Academy Awards.

Like the Super Bowl, it sometimes takes patience to slog through - it's an "insider"'s event, often testing the interest of casual viewers despite its continued effort to be "hip" or "edgy." The abject failure of last years Oscars telecast, one that temporarily set audiences against James Franco and politely look away from Anne Hathaway, is honestly just a continued step in the direction towards more streamlined, less bloated, but less entertaining programming. That the Academy turned back to 1990s standby Billy Crystal is an indication that they really don't understand why people hated last year's show (personally, I kinda liked it) - let's get that guy everybody liked from twenty years ago!

That's not a slight against Billy Crystal, by the way - the best hosts are consummate showmen (and women) like Crystal, Bob Hope, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, Ellen Degeneres, and Hugh Jackman. All were involved in very entertaining Oscar shows. Jon Stewart was less successful, as were David Letterman and Chris Rock. But it's not all on the host - the elimination of nearly all of the "Best Songs" from the show was a bad idea, as was the skipping as quickly as possible through technical awards and last year's inexplicable decision to cut down the "major" awards (acting, directing, screenplay, editing, picture) to a bare minimum. In its place, shorter and less relevant montages, more inane scripted "banter" by presenters, and longer commercial breaks.

Yikes. I didn't mean for this to get into Academy Awards bashing because, like the Super Bowl, I've been tuning in regularly for years now. I'm always hoping for something lively (the Hugh Jackman one, in particular, was a lot of fun to watch) but one can never tell. Sometimes the nominees can give us a clue of where it might be headed, so let's take a look at some of the categories, shall we?

Disclaimer: Speculating on who will win or why is not my specialty any more. When I was younger, I pontificated endlessly about the logistics and politics of award shows, but at this point, I concede that I can't predict with any more accuracy than the average March Madness bracket pool in your office. That's where Neil comes in handy, so I might ask him to throw in his thoughts this weekend.

Best Picture

The Artist
The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
Moneyball
The Tree of Life

Okay, so I haven't seen more than half of the nine nominees. I want to see Hugo, The Descendants, and Moneyball. I plan on seeing The Artist this weekend. I honestly have no interest in The Help and War Horse, and haven't heard a kind word about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close until this announcement. And I read the book, so it was a shame to see it savaged by critics.

Neil might be able to confirm this, but The Artist has the "hot hand" after the Golden Globes, so if it starts picking up wins, I guess that's the favored bet this year.

Best Director

Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist
Alexander Payne - The Descendants
Martin Scorsese - Hugo
Terrence Malick - The Tree of Life
Woody Allen - Midnight in Paris

Damn. That's a lineup, with only one name I don't recognize immediately. That name is also attached to The Artist, which is red hot.

Best Original Screenplay

Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist
Kristen Wiig & Annie Mumolo - Bridesmaids
J.C. Chandor - Margin Call
Woody Allen - Midnight in Paris
Asghar Farhadi - A Separation

It would be great to see Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo win for Bridesmaids, but there's that movie The Artist again... I'm sensing a trend here.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash - The Descendants
John Logan - Hugo
George Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon - The Ides of March
Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (story by Stan Chervin) - Moneyball
Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Ummmm... well, I've only seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It had a great script and great acting...

Best Animated Picture

A Cat in Paris
Chico and Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

I brought this up because Pixar's Cars 2, a pretty much dismissed sequel, is shut out. In its place? Puss in Boots? Nothing against Kung Fu Panda 2, which I haven't seen, but I heard that it didn't quite live up to the first film's breath of fresh air. Even Rango, while critically well received, was frequently returned to a store I used to work at because its mostly adult themes were lost on kids. Adults didn't seem all that thrilled with its "Chinatown for kids" story, but I'm still interested. I can't speak for the first two films, but if one of them doesn't win, I guess Rango gets it.

Best Cinematography

Guillame Schiffman - The Artist
Jeff Cronenweth - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Robert Richardson - Hugo
Janusz Kaminski - War Horse
Emmanuel Lubezki - The Tree of Life

I think you know what I'd pick. You read the review. That said, there's The Artist again...

Best Editing

Anne Sophie-Bion and Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist
Kevin Tent - The Descendants
Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Thelma Schoonmaker - Hugo
Christopher Tellefsen - Moneyball

Hrm. The Artist, anyone?

I'm not going to say I'm surprised not to see Drive (too many confused people), Melancholia (too many people who hate Lars von Trier), The Guard (too Irish), or any of the other films on my best or near best of list. It seems that not being a blockbuster (or being a remake) derailed most of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's attention. I'm a little boggled by some of the acting nominations, which I chose to leave out but are easy to find. This year, aside from the omnipresence of The Artist, I have no clue. None at all. I turn it over to Neil, sometime in the near future.

Spin the Wheel for a Video Daily Double

2012-01-25T13:22:00.017-05:00

Welcome back to a high octane edition of the Video Daily Double, Educationeers! Cap'n Howdy is here to bring your need for speed to a gentle glide so as not to hurt yourself (and others). Always respect the rules of the road, and remember, if you wouldn't pass your driving test doing it, then you're a horrible person for doing it. Hopefully today's films will enlighten you a bit.

Be a good driver!

---

Our first film, Stop Driving Us Crazy!, is an animated ditty about being courteous drivers. I thought about showing you the Goofy cartoon instead, but certain corporations with mice for mascots don't like that. This one is approved by Jesus, and he doesn't pursue "copyright infringement," so there.

Our second film, Joy Ride: An Auto Theft, is for you hooligans thinking of making off with someone else's sweet ride. Just remember that it's a horrible thing to do and you're a horrible person for doing it. Just horrible.

Retro Review: A List of "Sword and Sorcery" films I've Seen (or Think I've Seen)

2012-01-24T21:14:00.000-05:00

So while I was working on the Your Highness review, I made a concerted effort to think of every movie that falls into the "sword and sorcery" category that David Gordon Green's movie is paying homage / gentling mocking. If you saw the review, I narrowed it down to Conan the Barbarian (have seen) and Krull (have not seen). I also mentioned The Barbarian and the Princess because, if I remember correctly, the VHS has a four-breasted woman on the cover. It turns out that such a movie does not exist, because it's actually called The Warrior and the Sorceress. Again, I'm not really an expert on this subgenre.

While thinking carefully about it, I realized I could name a few other movies that I've seen part of, all of, or think I might have seen when I was younger. Here is a list with any thoughts that possibly come to mind with them.

Masters of the Universe - A He-Man movie has to count in some capacity. I've never seen Masters of the Universe, but it was playing in the background during a birthday party / sleepover I went to. That and A Nightmare on Elm Street, I think.

Circle of Iron - Hey! I actually reviewed this movie - it's a kung-fu, sword and sorcery, parable sort of thing, but there's lot of loincloths and warriors and stupid crap with David Carradine as a leopard dude.

Deathsport - So I watched the first thirty minutes of this Roger Corman produced ripoff of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. Instead of cars, there are motorcycles, but first peasants ride around on horses and avoid mutants, and David Carradine is rocking a loincloth / cape combination but also shoots some kind of weird laser gun. Technically it's more "post-apocalyptic" but it reminded me of some of the dumber "sword and sorcery" shit.

Willow - I saw Willow when I was young, and even then it seemed like a pretty weak knock-off of Star Wars, but with witches and Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. I seem to remember the whole two headed dragon growing out of some sort of sac grossed me out and I haven't watched it since.

Cave Dwellers - I saw it on MST3k.

The Scorpion King - from the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors and the pro-wrestler-turned-crappy-cgi-effect formerly known as The Rock. This isn't even a guilty pleasure - I openly enjoy this silly movie that's part Conan the Barbarian, part Conan the Destroyer.

The Beastmaster - I'm not positive I ever saw all of Don Coscarelli's The Beastmaster. I'm not even really sure I've seen some of this movie, or at all. Maybe I just know what it is.

Dragonslayer - Like Willow, I saw Dragonslayer and it creeped me out in parts. Specifically the parts with Peter MacNicol.

Ladyhawke (?) - Forgive me, because I don't remember many swords. I guess there probably were, but mostly I remember Matthew Broderick from War Games and I remember not knowing who Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer were.

The Lord of the Rings - These movies don't count, do they? I kept finding it on lists, along with Highlander and Excalibur, which I guess kinda technically count. Your Highness does borrow a few helicopter shots of our heroes on their journey, one of which reminded me of a similar shot used in the trailer for The Hobbit.

Jason and the Argonauts / The 7th Voyage of Sinbad / Clash of the Titans - The Ray Harryhausen triptych of movies I guess are unmistakably "sword and sorcery" or at least "sword and Greek mythology" films. I saw all of these as a kid (funny how I didn't see many of these films after age nine...) and the robot bird Simon in Your Highness is most definitely a nod to that stupid robotic owl in Clash of the Titans. I forgot its name and don't know that I need to know it. I'll pretend its name is Archimedes, which I'm pretty sure is the name of the owl in The Sword and the Stone.

The Black Cauldron - Speaking of Walt Disney, I never even considered this movie to qualify, but more than one list mentioned both The Sword and the Stone and The Black Cauldron. I saved The Black Cauldron for last because at least I have a story about this movie.

I saw The Black Cauldron when it opened in theatres and was apparently the one kid in the world that didn't think it was the nadir of Disney animation (see: Waking Sleeping Beauty). In fact, I couldn't wait to rent the VHS tape when it came out... which was funny, because it DIDN'T come out on videocassette. Not until I was in high school, as a matter of fact. Like Song of the South, The Black Cauldron simply vanished from the lips of anyone involved with The Walt Disney Corporation for the rest of the 1980s. It took the better part of a decade before anyone could watch it again. I still don't really get the "sword and sorcery" categorization, mostly because I always connect that subgenre with the desert, but I guess it does fit in.

Do you like how I mentioned two different Nightmare on Elm Street movies even though they are in no way topically related to these films?

So I guess there were more movies than I led you to believe yesterday, although I've seen maybe three of them in the last ten years in their entirety. Several of them I only saw once, when I was pretty young, and they didn't make much of an impression. That might explain why Your Highness was slightly perplexing to the Cap'n.

Blogorium Review: Your Highness

2012-01-23T21:52:00.000-05:00

Sucks is a strong word. It's the kind of word that describes a movie that you loathe, that you actively hate beyond the point you'd forget other movies. Roger Ebert devoted an entire book to it, based on his disgust for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, when he told Rob Schneider that "your movie sucks." There are very few movies for which I have so much venom for that I'd say they sucked. To no one's surprise, Your Highness doesn't really suck.

(It's okay, you read that right.)

Your Highness is one of those movies that people sure think sucks. It'll probably win some Razzies if it's an easy enough target, and it was one of two black eyes for David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls): he took it hard for the first film and then was summarily dismissed for (presumably) ripping off Adventures in Babysitting with The Sitter. I wouldn't know, because I didn't see it. In my defense, I'd just watched Adventures in Babysitting two weeks prior. It seemed redundant. But I did see Your Highness.

Before we jump into the review proper, it's probably important to mention that I'm not exactly a devotee of the "sword and sorcery" films that Your Highness is paying homage to (or making fun of). I've never seen Krull or The Barbarian and the Sorceress or the dozen of other movies that dominated the "Sci-Fi / Fantasy" section of Video Bar. I saw the covers and shrugged. Eventually I saw (and enjoyed) Conan the Barbarian, but Your Highness is paying tribute to a cinematic subgenre I'm not that versed on. Take that for what it's worth.

Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco) are the sons of King Tallious (Charles Dance) in the kingdom of... well, I'm sure they mentioned it somewhere. Fabious is always on quests and Thadeous is at home picking on Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), his squire or slave or something. When Fabious brings home Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a prisoner of the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), to be his bride, the sorcerer doesn't take it lying down. He captures Belladonna and Fabious, Thadeous, Courtney, Julie (Toby Jones) and brave knights head out to rescue her. With the help of the mysterious warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman), they race to find the Unicorn Blade and slay the wizard before the moons eclipse and Leezar's "Fuckening" begins.

Your Highness is a film of unmitigated vulgarity. To what end, I'm not sure - profanity seems to exist for the sake of punctuating sentences. There's also some marijuana-based comedy, but nowhere to the degree of Green's Pineapple Express, which I would think people would make a connection to based on Franco and McBride. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what's supposed to be funny in Your Highness, which is unmistakably a comedy. If the mere image of Danny McBride in a suit of armor falling down stairs is the kind of thing that tickles your funnybone, get ready for yuks! There's also a pot smoking puppet that molested Fabious as a child and requires our heroes to, well, give him a "hand" before continuing on their quest. The best joke is an arguably clever bit of misdirection involving Thadeous' punishment for violating the Queen of the Dwarf People.

I get that there might be some audience out there for people who want to see a minotaur sodomize Courtney before Danny McBride chops its johnson off and wears it around his neck. It's not a large audience, apparently, but I get that McBride and Ben Best (The Foot Fist Way) wrote this in the way a thirteen year old watching this film would re-enact it with his buddies. It's a hard R movie on a large scale (or it looks it, anyway - at 49 million I guess that's pretty moderate) that didn't seem to find its target market. I'm not saying that there isn't one; I'm just not sure how many hardcore Krull fans wanted to see a movie where the evil wizard promises to defeat Fabious with "magic, motherfucker" (actual line).

So I get why there's so much animosity towards Your Highness. I don't see how it's the worst movie of last year, or even close to it, but the movie never "clicks." That said, I didn't really HATE Your Highness. It's not a "good" movie, but it's not unwatchable. I have no idea who thought this would be funny (well, my pet theory is the people who made it) but it's sporadically funny, there are some decent action scenes, and the relentless profanity can catch you off guard and induce a chuckle. It's also extremely violent at points, which works in its favor. I'm not saying you SHOULD watch Your Highness, even if you are, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, but if it was on Showtime one afternoon and you were, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, it's not going to kill your buzz. The cast is clearly having fun (especially Justin Theroux) and the stupid is kind of infectious after you give up trying to figure out why this movie exists.

What the Hell Were They Thinking? Trailer Sunday

2012-01-22T16:56:00.000-05:00

Vibes

Heartbeeps

Doctor Detroit

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Masters of the Universe

DC Cab

Krull

One More 2011 Post for Kicks: My Favorite Fancy Schmancy Discs of Last Year

2012-01-19T23:56:00.000-05:00

When I started the Blogorium over on another social media site several years ago, I eventually became an early adopter of Blu-Ray. At the time, I worked at a used book store that sold video games and systems and I was able to purchase an 80gb PS3, partially for the games but mostly for the shiny new discs that beat HD-DVD in the "successor to DVD" format war. I wanted to upgrade TVs from the old standby 17" (?) set I had (and its twin, a loaner from a friend who moved) and eventually did pick up that HDTV monstrosity (it's in storage now for various reasons).

At the time, I was gently mocked by friends for taking such an interest in a "niche" market for home entertainment, to the point that I jokingly referred to all Blu-Ray and HDTV posts as being "fancy schmancy." Now that most of the world seems to be catching up (because Blu-Ray discs are often cheaper than their DVD counterparts and you don't have to get rid of your DVDs with a BD player), I haven't used the term in a while.

People seem to be moving more and more into the "all digital" direction, to the point that a younger co-worker derisively said to me "Blu-Ray is for noobs!" I laughed out loud, because that doesn't make any sense, especially coming from someone who never knew an analog world. I'm not articulating this well, but I think anybody who has been following the development of home media for the last... let's just say thirty years is far from being a "noob" on the subject. Maybe I'm the opposite - the fuddy duddy who still likes to have a tangible copy of something, an actual library of film, music, and books. I have plenty of digital copies and songs on iTunes (no e-reader to speak of), but there's something to be said for having friends over and giving them time to look through your shelves in the down time.

We've also established that I'm a "supplement junkie," and you don't get those kinds of extras with a digital copy. I get most people could care less about commentary tracks or making of documentaries or retrospectives, but it's not a coincidence that I buy Criterion discs that have lots of contextualizing extras about the films. To me, that's as interesting as the film itself - watch the second disc of The Battle of Algiers (if it's the DVD, the second and third discs) and then watch the film again. The all digital, just the movie world of cloud technology isn't totally for me just yet. It has its purpose, but it doesn't replace a shelf full of quality releases.

Speaking of quality releases, I think that was the point of this whole post... I must have gotten lost back there somewhere. Oh well, let's skip to the chase. The following are some of the most interesting discs I picked up in 2011. Not all of them were released in 2011 (I'm guessing with the imports anyway) but it's my list so you'll live. When possible, I'm going to put up links where you can buy them, because several are titles you probably didn't know you could buy and are already available.

For starters, let's look at this:

A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection - In the US, we got the first Nightmare on Elm Street on Blu-Ray released in time for the shitty remake in 2010. Last October, we got a double feature of 2 and 3 on one disc... and that's it. Not the worst deal, necessarily - two of the best entries in the series and... well, Freddy's Revenge. Still, it's not like we can replace our boxed set yet, right?

Not true, gang - Amazon.co.uk had an October 2011 release of the entire series on Blu-Ray. The five disc set replicates the individual release of the first film and then doubles up 2/3, 4/5, and 6/7, with a bonus disc of new extras, including episodes of Freddy's Nightmares, the anthology-ish series that you can only see if you're patient enough to watch Chiller for a week.

(Oh, Freddy vs. Jason fanatics are admittedly SOL, but that's not really a Nightmare film anyway. Wait... are there Freddy vs. Jason fanatics?)

Additionally, each of the BD discs has all of the interview clips from the seventh disc of the Nightmare on Elm Street DVD set, but without having to navigate the "labyrinth" to find them. Even though we're dealing with two films per disc, I have to say that all of the sequels look very good in high definition. This set will probably come out in the US (let's hope by next October) but if you've got a Freddy fix, the whole thing is available now. Most importantly, it's REGION FREE, meaning that all of the movies are going to play on any BD player you have here in the states.

Payback - also region free and available on Amazon's UK site, the release of Payback overseas improves the existing BD release here by including both versions of the film (the US release only has the director's cut) plus all of the extras from both original discs. Whether you like one version or the other, it's got something for all Payback fans, so you can watch it whenever you like, however you like. Let's hope Point Blank makes the leap to high definition in 2012...

Taxi Driver - Everything included from all the various versions of the DVD, plus the Criterion laserdisc commentary with Scorsese, at a very reasonable price. What's not to like?

Citizen Kane (Ultimate SomethingorOther Edition) - Best Buy has a two-disc version with Kane and The Battle for Citizen Kane, which is nice, but the super fancy schmancy edition (for a few dollars more) also includes RKO 281 and The Magnificent Ambersons. If you want to quibble, only Citizen Kane is a BD disc, but it's a nice set that encompasses all things Kane with the added bonus of the only version of The Magnificent Ambersons we're ever going to get included as a bonus. The film looks fantastic, by the way.

Battle Royale - I know Anchor Bay is releasing BR next week on Blu-Ray, but Arrow Films beat them to the punch in the UK with a region free set of the theatrical cut, the director's cut, and an additional disc of extras for what amounted to $35 at the end of 2010. As I didn't get it until 2011, I'm counting it - it also doesn't include Battle Royale II, which is a very nice thing for Arrow to do. That would only sully the experience. I opted for the super fancy, now out-of-print Limited Edition, which came with some other fun stuff, but you can still get the three disc version for a reasonable price.

The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions - Is it maybe a pain to switch out the discs? I guess. Are the "appendices" just DVDs? Well, yes. Will I take this over the "theatrical" Blu-Ray set? Any day. The movies look better, all of the extras are intact, and the extra documentaries from the "Limited Editions" are included for good measure. It's an impressive package, all things considered.

The Twilight Zone - I finally have all five seasons on Blu-Ray, and it's more than worth your while to pick the sets up. Yes, you can watch the episodes on Netflix, and they look pretty spiffy. The sets are packed to the gills with everything a TZ fanatic like the Cap'n could possibly want to see, hear, or know. I didn't think a series would catapult past Battlestar Galactica's complete set, but The Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray did it in spades.

Blue Velvet - on Blu-Ray, with an hour of long thought lost footage, restored and fancy schmancy-ed by David Lynch.

I couldn't narrow down the Criterion selections, so here's just a sampling of what they kicked our collective asses with this year: Kiss Me Deadly, Three Colors, The Great Dictator, The Killing / Killer's Kiss, Island of Lost Souls, The Music Room, 12 Angry Men, Cul-De-Sac, Blow Out, Carlos, The Phantom Carriage, and Sweet Smell of Success. That's not counting the HD upgrades to Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor, Rushmore, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dazed and Confused, The Double Life of Veronique, Army of Shadows, Le Cercle Rouge, The Battle of Algiers, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Solaris, Diabolique, Smiles of a Summer Night, or Fanny and Alexander. To name a few.

Special kudos also go to Lionsgate for slowly but surely releasing Miramax films in a way that doesn't suck (*coughEchoBridgecough*), including Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Cop Land, Trainspotting, The Others, Mimic (in a Director's Cut!), Heavenly Creatures, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Amelie. It's too bad Echo Bridge got From Dusk Till Dawn with all the Children of the Corn and Hellraiser sequels, because unless you want to see what happens when FDtD looks like when crammed onto a disc with both of its sequels and the documentary Full Tilt Boogie, you won't be seeing it on Blu-Ray (unless Criterion gets it... knocks on wood*). Oh sure, it's ten bucks, and that's three dollars more than just From Dusk Till Dawn on Blu-Ray (no, seriously), but it looks like crap. Trust me; someone bought it for me and I looked at all four movies on the disc. From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter probably looks the best of the three of them. Technically they're all watchable quality, but it's a missed opportunity to be damned sure when you see that Lionsgate is releasing HD versions with all of the extras from the DVD versions. Echo Bridge? Not so much.

Finally, I must admit that while nobody else seems to care for them, I was quite impressed in having everything together in the Stanley Kubrick Limited Edition Collection and I also bought the nine disc Star Wars Saga. I watched most of the extras and some of the movies. Guess which ones (okay, one) I haven't put in... Hint: It's EPISODE ONE THE PHANTOM MENACE. I won't be buying the 3D Blu-Ray Set, even if I have a 3D TV at that point. I'm also not going to see The Phantom Menace in 3D. You don't need to believe me because I know that's true.

And I'm out of steam... there were more, but I'll get to them another time.

* This is not as crazy as it sounds - I still have the Miramax DVD set of the Three Colors Trilogy, and Criterion picked up the rights to that...

Video Daily Double: The Remake!

2012-01-18T10:17:00.014-05:00

Good day to all my favorite Educationeers! And also to the rest of you, the ones sitting in the back who don't pay attention but aren't allowed to leave. Don't think I don't know that isn't oregano you're burning back there! Today I bring you a special treat for the Video Daily Double: two films that are the same! But different! One is from the glory days of the 1950s, and the other from the troubling 1970s, but they both have the same message: don't trust people!

Don't trust people!!!!

---

Our first film, The Strange Ones, is about people you ought not to trust.

Our second film, The Strange Ones, is also about people you ought not to trust, but this time in color!

Retro Review: Back to the Future Part II

2012-01-17T21:44:00.000-05:00

This is an odd choice, but a good one; perhaps one day I'll tell the story of seeing Back to the Future and the much itchier story of seeing Back to the Future Part III, but let's start in the middle. Back to the Future Part II was a movie that exemplified, in many ways, what it was like to be a movie geek in the pre-internet days.

It's true that I did see Back to the Future, possibly in theatres (I was six and it was PG, after all), but definitely over and over again on video. Many of the more "adult" jokes were over my head, but I got the basic story. The hook was the DeLorean, especially at the end of the film. When Doc Brown comes back to get Marty and Jennifer, just as all seems right with the world, he has a souped up DeLorean. It has a "Mr. Fusion" that takes garbage for fuel. Doc is nervous, and Marty doesn't know why he suddenly needs them both to come to the "future."

"What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?" Marty asks.

"No no no no - you and Jennifer turn out fine. But your kids, Marty - something's got to be done about your kids!"

And so Marty and Jennifer and Doc get into the DeLorean and we get "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." And the DeLorean flies into the camera, flashing light: TO BE CONTINUED...

I didn't know that "To Be Continued" was a joke. At a young age I had no idea that director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale had no intention to make a Back to the Future Part II. Most of America didn't know that either, but we're all have to wait four more years to find out what happened next. In the meantime? We waited.

For someone woefully out of touch with the world of popular culture outside the family living room, I had no idea there hadn't already been a Back to the Future Part II for a while. When a fellow student lied about it in second or third grade, I believed him. He said they went back and stopped Marty from setting the rug on fire. To a naive kid, that made sense for a minute or two. I mean, that was something that Marty mentioned in Back to the Future. The failure to produce any other details (at all) meant he was a bad liar and that I maybe didn't miss the sequel to Back to the Future that everybody else must have seen.

To be honest with you, I don't remember WHEN I realized Back to the Future Part II was coming out - I remember going to see it, and I remember not understanding any of it. Paradoxes, parallel timelines, interacting with your future and past selves, old Biff, the "Fistful of Dollars" setup for Part III, Hell Valley, and the clever way Zemeckis presented elements of the first film from another perspective - it didn't mean a hill of beans to a ten year old. The hoverboards were cool*, "girl" Marty was funny, and I somehow managed to retroactively replace Claudia Wells with Elisabeth Shue in my mind as Jennifer for years to come. I liked the brain-twisting ending, that replayed the end of Back to the Future but with a twist following what we thought was the last shot of Emmett Brown in 1955.

Otherwise? Really didn't get it. There was too much going on in that movie and I will honestly admit I couldn't follow it. Not for years. The appeal of the Old West and the clarity of narrative drew me back the third and first films (respectively) for years to come, but it wasn't until I was older that I "got" and finally came to enjoy Back to the Future Part II. It's still just behind the first film as my favorite in the series, but a loooooong way ahead of the third film, which is at times too simplistic, to "kid friendly." I appreciate the willingness to really push the story into crazy time travel directions, to subvert expectations, and to deliver a film over the head of its target audience. And let's be clear here, at PG, those films were as much for kids as they were for teenagers and adults, Jaws joke aside.

Since high school, I tend to alternate watching the first or second film, depending on the mood I'm in, though it's been a while since I watched Part III. That might be the movie itself; then again, it might be the poison ivy talking... but that is another story.

To Be Continued... in 2015!

* How this happened, I don't know, but I was never under the impression they were real, which was not the case if you listen to any of the extras on the DVD / Blu-Ray.

Meanwhile...

2012-01-16T20:55:00.000-05:00

Throw Me the Idol, I Throw You the Trailer Sunday!

2012-01-15T11:54:00.012-05:00

The Big Country

Land of the Minotaur

Fright Night Part 2

Velvet Goldmine

Lafayette Escadrille

RKO 281

Zebraman

Year End Recap Part Three

2012-01-14T20:39:00.557-05:00

And now we come to it, the final portion of Cap'n Howdy's 2011 Year End List. Today's Your Highness-free edition includes the very best in what I saw for 2011 (excluding the much lauded Hugo and The Skin I Live In, because I haven't seen them... yet). Of course, there's still Your Highness to deal with, so we'll deal with that soon. That, and the next "Cranpire Movie": Conan the Barbarian. But for now, let us focus on the positives, with the best of what's around. Only one of these films do I hesitate recommending to every single person I know, and that's because it's a Lars von Trier joint, and you have to be a particular kind of masochist to even consider watching his excellent (but soul crushing) efforts.

Everything else? Well, get out there and see them. This will probably be the longest of the entries because I've only actually reviewed one of the movies on this list prior to today. I will attempt to make brief, cogent points about why you need to drop what you're doing and watch them, but we all know it's going to get ramble-y. That's how Cap'n Howdy rolls.

I'm going to try to put them in order, but understand that all seven are interchangeable and leapfrog each other on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis.

Drive - The most unfairly maligned film on the list if for no other reason than people expected something totally different from the actual film. If you look around at the negative reviews for the Nicolas Winding Refn directed, Ryan Gosling starring neo-noir, you'd swear people thought they were going to see another Transporter or Fast and the Furious movie. A one-star review on Amazon begins with "I was expecting a white knuckle thriller and instead got long periods of silence," and there's the story of the woman who sued because she felt the trailer was "misleading."

Is the trailer misleading? Having seen Drive and watching it again, I'd say that it encompasses the plot accurately, even if it does use every single "driving" scene in the film. There's nothing in that trailer that doesn't happen almost exactly the same way in the movie, but on the other hand there's not a lot "more" of what you see in the film. Drive is a meditative, quiet film. It's about a guy* (Gosling) who is very good at driving a car. He works in a garage for a guy named Shannon (Bryan Cranston). Shannon works for Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) a gangster, who has a blowhard lieutenant named Nino (Ron Perlman). He lives a solitary life until, for reasons unclear to anyone but the driver, he decides to help his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos). Her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is in prison, and the driver knows this, but it doesn't stop him from getting emotionally attached, and when Standard gets out and runs afoul of some associates, the driver comes in to help.

Where it goes from there should be familiar territory for film noir fans: we've set up the hero, the down-on-his-luck friend who works for shady characters, an accidental femme fatale (there's a second, more direct version of the type in the form of Christina Hendricks' Blanche), and it shouldn't be hard to figure out that the driver puts himself in the position of hurting everyone while trying to help. Film noir and neo-noir are the same songs played differently, and it's the arrangement and performance that make all the difference. Drive is one hell of a song, it's just not the kind of approach most people thought they'd be getting.

Drive is built almost entirely around little moments. There's not much that happens early in the film - there's a game of cat and mouse in cars that in some films would be the "white knuckle" introduction to the driver, but instead there are long stretches where no one says anything. In its place is Cliff Martinez's minimalist synthesizer score, punctuated with songs that sound like (or are) from the 1980s. The driver always has his jacket on, one with a scorpion on the back, which might seem trivial save for a passing line late in the film that explains everything we need to know about how the driver sees himself without spelling it out. We learn a lot with very little information given directly, from glances, conversations between secondary characters, but it isn't until Standard gets out of jail that any sort of "plot" emerges. It's more of an exploration of the driver's life, of the people who orbit around him, and the way he ruins everything by trying to be the bigger man.

Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising) makes the most of the silence, giving the audience plenty of time to fill in the pauses in their own way, but without testing the viewer's patience. I was never bored during Drive, even though very little happens for long stretches of time. Gosling's driver is a man of few words, but he makes them count, and we slowly learn that he's much more than just a great getaway driver - he's a very dangerous man. Albert Brooks, likewise, is a practical criminal of sincere menace who kills when he has to, but in a civilized manner. He may slice your arm open to let you bleed out, but he won't stomp your head in - the driver will. The silence in the film makes the outbursts of violence that much more potent, more disturbing.

I think that if you know that Drive isn't the kind of movie that might otherwise star Jason Statham or Vin Diesel, you're going to be more willing to take the ride Winding Refn has in mind, and it's one you'll be rewarded by in the end. I'm looking forward to seeing it again, to put together pieces that Refn sets up early on about the driver and about Rose and Shannon's relationship and to watch how it plays out when you know where things are going. The not knowing is the fun part the first time - if we knew, we'd just watch The Transporter again.

Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen's whimsical take on wish fulfillment (as much for himself as it is for Owen Wilson's Gil) might be a little selfish for pragmatists, but Midnight in Paris isn't mean to reflect the position of realists. It's a movie for dreamers, for tourists in fantasy. It's a film about Paris in three distinct eras that doesn't cop out and settle for "it was all a dream" in the end - everything that happens to Gil really happens because it isn't the only "objective" character in the film that it happens to. The film is delightful and balances its cameos without ever feeling obvious or tacky. And yes, I'm still skirting around what exactly it is that happens to Gil because if you knew going in you would have a little less fun when it happens for the first time. Allen's pervasive sense of whimsy is infectious, with nice touches for literary, art, and film geeks, and it's the sort of film that asks you to put aside your cynical instincts for 90 minutes. It's well worth the effort.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - I could say that Gary Oldman makes this movie and while that would be true, it wouldn't be the entire story of why Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is such a great film. It's true that you're never certain what George Smiley (Oldman) knows and when he knows it, but in his search to locate the mole in Britain's intelligence agency (nicknamed "the Circus"), he is left on the outside looking in at the four options left who Control (John Hurt) expected of being the traitor (Smiley was the fifth, incidentally, which is always to be considered early in the film). The agents in question? Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth). One of them has been feeding information to the Russians during the height of the Cold War, possibly to the long thought dead agent Karla.

Smiley puts together the pieces Control had in place and must rely on assistance from Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), a member of intelligence willing to help him from the inside, along with a missing agent with a price on his head who may or may not be a traitor, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy). Oh, and another spy, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) who died... or did he?

The mystery unfolds at a languid, deliberate pace under the skilled hands of director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In). We're never quite sure what it is we know - the various pieces of the puzzle have differing agendas, including Smiley, and every conversation or flashback is loaded with subtext. Oldman's face is a study in underacting - it's hard to say whether Smiley has something figured out or is as out in the cold as the audience can sometimes be. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy does require being able to pay careful attention to what's presented to you, as it is a spy film less about action set pieces and more about men (and women) sitting together in rooms and having loaded conversations about something other than what they're saying.

It's an enormously rewarding film for fans of great acting, and the cast is loaded well beyond the central players listed above. I didn't even mention small appearances from Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire, Public Enemies), Kathy Burke (Sid and Nancy, Absolutely Fabulous), or Simon McBurney (Kafka, Body of Lies). Oldman and Cumberbatch, who audiences might know from the BBC Sherlock films, are the anchors of the film, but there's not a weak link in this cast. It's an exercise in the best of British cinema at their best, in a mystery of espionage that you don't tend to see in films today. I'm opting not to make direct comparisons between Gary Oldman and Alec Guinness, who played George Smiley in the mini-series version from 1979, because that's not so much the point. John le Carré was directly involved in both iterations, and they are designed a bit differently. Both are exceptional and reward multiple viewings.

The Tree of Life - I've heard so many different reactions to The Tree of Life, all from people I know and respect when discussing film. Several were blown away by it, others liked it, but felt off-put by how "strange" it was. There are audiences who outright hate the film, but it seems to me that The Tree of Life, perhaps more than any of Terrence Malick's other films, is something you're going to have an intensely personal reaction to.

I know what I'm going into when I sit down to watch a Malick film, because by and large every one of them since Days of Heaven has the same kind of approach: the contrast between humanity and the natural world, long stretches without dialogue or sparsely, half-whispered narration. The plots are slight, to say the most, and can generally be reduced to one or two sentences that cover the entire film (a family is split apart while working as hired hands on a farm; soldiers have a crisis of meaning in the midst of combat; the worlds of natives and colonists intersect and change, mostly for the worst). It's not necessarily what happens in a Terrence Malick film that counts; it's the experience of the film that's important.

The Tree of Life is arguably Malick's most "experiential" film to date: it's a contemplative look at what it's like to grow up, what life as a child looks like, feels like, and in passing ways, what it is to reflect back on that as an adult. It's a film which is more about the experience of being a boy than anything else - how we relate to our parents, to our siblings, our friends, how we carve out identities apart from those influences. There are events in the film that sometimes feel like they have no bearing, per se: the film begins with Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) learning her oldest son died. She shares this with Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt), and we move forward in time to the adult Jack (Sean Penn) reflecting on the anniversary of his brother's death.

We follow Jack's life, from birth forward, and Malick has a knack for placing the camera in such a way that you always have a child's perspective on the film. It feels like being a kid and seeing the world that way for almost the entirety of the film, something that has the effect of forcing you to relive similar moments in your mind, similar decisions and experiences as they unfold in the film. Early on, Mrs. O'Brien (in voiceover) explains that you can live by the way of nature or the way of grace, and the boys experience the contrast in their parents. Mr. O'Brien is the way of nature, a musician who compromised his dreams to be a father and wants his boys never to accept fate. He can be oppressive and cruel to the family, even as Mrs. O'Brien takes his domineering without complaint.

The "weird" part that seems to come up repeatedly (other than the ending, which I'll get to in a bit) is Malick's "creation" section, which deals visually with the Big Bang all the way through the first Ice Age, his (figurative) depiction of the way of nature. As the film also loosely interprets the Book of Job and deals directly with questioning one's faith, the "creation" component also figures into this narrative thread, although I cannot help but think that a moment between two dinosaurs is a literalization of "the way of nature vs the way of grace" - even though it doesn't play nearly as obviously as my description makes it sound.

As to the ending, which I am still mulling over, in part because I think I misunderstood which son Penn was supposed to be playing, is presumably all supposed to be in Jack's mind, although what you make of it is up to your own interpretation. On the one hand, you could imagine it to be similar to the way the series Lost ended, although I suspect Malick is less explicit in what the beach-side reunion is meant to mean to Jack in light of what we know about his life growing up. I'm still digesting that, so let's put it aside.

The Tree of Life is going to polarize viewers, and I can't imagine how it would be to see this movie as a parent (because I'm not one), but I would think it would have a different affect on those audiences. The visual effects in the "creation" sequence, including the work of Douglas Trumbull (2001, Blade Runner), is truly impressive and in large parts practical, all the more awe inspiring considering what's on screen. If you're going to watch The Tree of Life, be sure to see it on the biggest screen you can - the experience is one not to be missed. Give yourself some time after the film to let it settle in your mind. Trust me, you'll need it.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - I know I said I didn't have time to see this film, but after Friday's write up I had a little wiggle room and decided to sit down and watch Martha Marcy May Marlene. I'm glad I did, even if I'm still a little disturbed by the film. The whole thing doesn't work with Elizabeth Olsen in the title role. Her actual first name is Martha, but she's renamed Marcy May at the commune she goes to live at by Patrick (John Hawkes), their spiritual leader. When we meet Martha, she's escaping from the commune, running into town where one of the members, Watts (Brady Corbet) tracks her down but lets her go. Martha calls her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who picks her up and takes Martha from upstate New York to her vacation home in Connecticut.

Lucy's husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is happy the sisters are reunited (both of their parents are dead) but seems troubled by Martha's erratic behavior and her inexplicable outlook on life. She criticizes the size of their home, mocks her sister's desire to have a child, and tries to swim naked in the lake behind their home. We learn, in small doses, exactly what happened to Martha (whose last name may or may not be Marlene - you never hear Lucy say anything and the only time Martha ever says "Marlene" is during a flashback) at the commune, all of which directly influences how she behaves when she leaves.

It's probably for the best that we learn in measured portions the depths of physical and psychological damage that Martha experienced - if the film played chronologically there would be no doubt what happens at the end, but we are instead introduced to parallel flashbacks. Or so we think. It's an interesting narrative trick that writer / director Sean Durkin employs - what we assume are simply flashbacks may actually be moments Martha is experiencing in real time. At one point, while cooking with Lucy, Martha asks her sister "is this really happening or is this a memory?" She is unable to distinguish the present from the past, so the flashbacks we assume are part of a narrative design might simply be how Martha deals with trauma, uncertain where she is in her own mind.

I won't lie and pretend that the film doesn't go to some very dark places, or that even after they've passed that things get easier to understand (in particular the commune's "initiation" scene plays out for two different characters in two different positions and the second is admittedly more upsetting than the first because of what Martha knows is going to happen). By the time we fully understand how the commune functions, what they're capable of, and how far down the proverbial rabbit hole Martha is, we're already to the films inevitable, unsettling conclusion. It's probably a bit of a spoiler to say this, but comparisons to Funny Games are going to be inevitable. Nevertheless, Olsen's performance is a tour de force and she's someone to look out for in the future, as is Durkin. I can't wait to see what he does next.

The Guard - To say The Guard is a cinematic sibling to In Bruges isn't just figuratively true - it's literally the case. John Michael McDonagh, the writer and director of The Guard, is the brother of Martin McDonagh, the writer and director of In Bruges, and the comedic sensibilities are very similar indeed. I'm certain McDonagh is sick of hearing his film compared to his brother's, because nearly every review mentions that fact and points out that Brendan Gleeson is in both films, so I'll leave it at that. The Guard stands on its own as a modern classic comedy / crime / police procedural as it is. It's clever, surprising, periodically violent, and full of great characters.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson) isn't a bad cop, so to speak - he's just learned to embrace his vices. At the beginning of the film, he casually watches some drunk hooligans crash their car and die before wandering over, searching one of the deceased's pockets, and finding some LSD. He then drops the tab on his tongue and so begins The Guard proper. Boyle is the man on the Irish police force who could, at best, be seen as "unpredictable": he has a fondness for prostitutes and schedules his days off to organize role-playing escapades with them, he has a mother on death's door that wants to ask him what taking heroin is like, he's not afraid to jot off to the pub for a drink during an investigation, and he's certainly not aware of the ignorant-to-borderline-racist questions he asks visiting FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).

Everette is in the coastal town because drug traffickers are trying to smuggle in a "half million" worth into the city, and he needs the mostly corrupt force to help him. Boyle, who Everette determines is "really motherfucking dumb or really motherfucking smart," is already working on a case linked the the drug trafficking, and the two end up working together for lack of any other help. And it's true - it's hard to tell if Boyle is a fool or just playing one to lower the expectations of others. Everette doesn't believe most of what Boyle tells him, or tries hard not to be offended by his questions about "growing up in the ghetto."

Meanwhile, the trio of drug smugglers - Liam (David Wilmot), Francis (Liam Cunningham) and Clive (Mark Strong), are introduced debating the relative merits of philosophers while driving around. They're certainly more interested in the philosophic side of what they do than the actual practical job at hand, and the trio are responsible for as many chuckles as the mis-matched lead pair. I need to apologize to Mark Strong for suggesting he was a weak presence in the first Sherlock Holmes film, because between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Guard, he's more than capable of being funny, menacing, touching, and unnerving onscreen.

The Guard is, from the first moment to the clever final scene, filled with fine writing and sneaky jokes that hit you a moment later. It's not much of a mystery in that we know more than Boyle and Everette do (having spent some time with the criminals) but the way their paths cross and the climax, which takes on notions of American action film "showdown"s are sure to keep you laughing well after the film is over. It's irreverent, a little naughty, and certainly smarter than most of the comedy on this side of the pond.

Melancholia - And I saved Melancholia for last. It's appropriate, as the film is about "the end," in every sense. I could probably write about nothing other than the impressionistic opening sequence and have enough for three reviews: it does encompass the entirety of the story to come in ambiguous but representative images. Better still, I could mash it together with the "creation" sequence of The Tree of Life and have one magnificently bizarre interpretation of the beginning and the ending of Earth and everything on it.

I guess that's a bit of a spoiler, though I can't imagine anyone who is planning on seeing Melancholia doesn't already know that this is Lars von Trier's "Apocalyptic" film, the one that is a literalization of the themes in Antichrist. The world does end and the Earth is destroyed as the planet Melancholia crashes into it, despite the promises from scientists that it would just "pass by us." Life ends, fade to black. Cue the credits.

In between the beginning and the end of the film are two hours of unmitigated cruelty. There is no hint of kindness on display in Melancholia, only characters who hate each other almost as much as they hate themselves. It's the tale of two sisters, broken up into two chapters: One for Justine (Kirsten Dunst), the bride who undermines her entire wedding night in every possible way, and the other for Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who planned the wedding with her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) and hosted it at their lavish estate, complete with trails to ride horses and an 18 hole golf course.

They gave her a lavish wedding because they felt the perpetually depressed Justine would be happy if they did so, and her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) goes along with it in the interest of lifting her spirits. No sooner than Justine and Michael have arrived for the reception are they admonished by Claire and John for being late and the wedding planner (Udo Kier) refuses to look at the bride who "ruined" his occasion. Justine and Claire's estranged parents Dexter (John Hurt) and Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) are in attendance, although their mother objects to the wedding entirely (and may not be as far off as we first believe in her assessment.) Michael's father, Jack (Stellan Skarsgård), who also happens to be Justine's boss, is more interested in her providing him with a tagline for their advertising campaign than the wedding, to the point where he sends his nephew Tim (Brady Corbet) to follow the bride around until she comes up with one.

Chapter One, devoted to the wedding reception, is little more than repeated examples of people behaving horribly towards each other, being spiteful, making cruel comments or acting out frustrations on undeserving targets. It's somewhat ironic (and appropriate) that Gaby, who seems to be the most openly bitter person at the reception is actually the only one of the attendees who really knows Justine well enough to give her honest advice. She provides the only act of kindness in the film when she tells her daughter to run away from Michael and the whole event. I have already explained how chapter one ends, so it shouldn't surprise you that Justine doesn't quite take her mother's advice.

Chapter Two is, by comparison, a smaller affair: Justine, Claire, John, and their son Leo (Cameron Spurr) are the only characters (aside from fleeting glimpses of butler / housekeeper Little Father, played by Jesper Christensen). It takes place some time after the wedding implodes, when a depressed to the point of incapacitation Justine comes to stay with her sister, much to John's dismay. In the meantime, the planet Melancholia has been discovered (hiding behind the sun) and is giving Claire constant fears that it will crash into Earth and kill everyone. John, the Astronomer, assures her this isn't the case, but appears to be preparing for the worst behind her back.

If the second section of the film is not as emotionally mean-spirited, it is nevertheless more bleak, more hopeless than the portion devoted to nuptials. Justine is now the sober contrast to irrational Claire, and her blunt response to her sister's fears may be as summarily dismissive as anything that happened in the first half of the film. It's not that roles are reversed necessarily: Justine is no more rational than she was before. She is perhaps more comatose, but her outlook is clearer than Claire's: there is "no other life" and Earth "won't be missed" when it's gone. She welcomes their extinction, even as her sister tries in vain to persevere. John, on the other hand? Well, I'll leave that for those of you brave enough to watch Melancholia.

You won't have an easy time with it - that's not really possible (or to be expected) with Lars von Trier. This is a film unconcerned with human decency, or the value of life or anything else. It is a film consumed with hatred, a film where hope is the sad punchline to some cosmic joke. It is a beautiful and captivating film, but one that dares you to find something to feel good about when it ends. I cannot possibly recommend it to anyone I know with young children - you won't want to watch any part of the second chapter, particularly as it careens towards oblivion. Melancholia is a reminder that art does not need to be safe to be effective, that it does not need you to approve to make its point. It's a combative film, one that will send you to the nearest bar for a stiff drink afterward. It is one of the finest films of the year, and yet I must consider very carefully who it is I send in its direction. Take that for what it's worth.

* By the way, unlike the movie Faster, where the main character has a name but every review keeps saying "The Driver," Gosling's character does not have a name. They call him "kid" or "driver" but no one ever says his name, if he even has one.

Year End Recap Part Two

2012-01-13T22:01:00.000-05:00

Welcome back! Today the Cap'n is continuing my Year End Recap, and we're in rarefied air here. We're on our way to the top, and if yesterday's movie came with recommendations, today's movies are "add these to your queue / get to the store this weekend" kinds of movies. The only thing that separates tonight's list from tomorrow's "Best of the Year" is maybe one teeny tiny transcendent moment. That's it. These are as good as anything there is to offer as entertainment goes, and I don't think you're going to do anything but sit back and have a good time.

There's still no Your Highness on this list. Again, we'll get to Your Highness, but not just yet.

Presented in no particular order, say hello to your next few weekends and evenings' entertainment.

Attack the Block - This movie was so close to making the "best of the year", and I still debate with myself about whether I should put it up there or keep it here. The only difference between Attack the Block and the very best of 2011 is that it embraces the pulpy fun of early John Carpenter, which is a really good thing. I have no doubt in my mind you're going to have a great time watching Attack the Block, so maybe I'm hesitating because I feel like I've mentioned it so many times in the last six months that it doesn't need anymore heightened expectations. Joe Cornish does well enough on his own that he doesn't need Cap'n Howdy and Major Tom to toot his horn for him... wow, that sounded worse than I mean to it to.

The Muppets - It's a testament to the quality of this film - which features none of the actual Muppets for the first fifteen minutes - that I saw it with friends who had already seen the film and didn't
hesitate to see it again. You'll leave with a big smile on your face, satisfied that the Muppets can still be in fine movies.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - It takes a really good movie to overcome wafer thin characters, but this film belongs to Andy Serkis' Caesar, and the apes are fantastic. You're not even going to notice the fact that the cgi apes are more believable than the human cast.

Horrible Bosses - The movie I laughed at the second hardest this year is everything The Change-Up is not: it's certainly not "PC" or even generally in good taste, but the gross out is at a minimum. Better still, the cheap jokes sit this one out for better character-related humor, and the three leads (Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, and Jason Bateman) are more than matched by the title characters (Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston, and the "where have you been all this time" Kevin Spacey). Throw in Jamie Foxx as a more interesting than advertised criminal, and you're going to laugh hard.

The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Fast Five - Let's put it this way: I had never seen one of the Fast and the Furious films and really had no intention to until I started hearing the genuinely positive reviews for this film. It didn't hurt that Dwayne Johnson was joining the cast as the guy determined to make Vin Diesel's life a living hell, but I watched Fast & Furious (which ends the way that Fast Five begins) in order to come in with some sense of context on a franchise I'd never once considered before. And I'll be damned if it wasn't entertaining, amusing, with good action, strong car chases, decent characters, and a better "action movie" plot than I was expecting. It's more "Ocean's Eleven" than racing movie, which didn't hurt things. At the beginning of 2011 I don't think you'd have ever heard me saying this, but I'm on board for Fast Six and beyond if they keep this level of quality up.

Bridesmaids - The movie I laughed at the hardest this year. Not since The Sweetest Thing has a film so unmistakably designed as a "chick flick" has a movie been willing to mix the scatalogical with the slapstick and quirk of character. Anchored by Kristen Wiig and bolstered by a strong supporting cast, it doesn't surprise me that the clever, lewd Bridesmaids made its way onto so many critics' lists for 2011. It's a comedy that doesn't pull punches, and not just with the jokes - the way that Annie (Wiig) and Nathan (Chris O'Dowd) come in and out of each other's lives is at times painful. And funny. The important part is that you're going to laugh, so much so that you can convince your guy friends that a movie that ends with Wilson Phillips performing live at a wedding is "cool" for them to watch too.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop - This is a candid, warts and all portrait of the comedian as an insecure middle-aged-man. Conan O'Brien brought director Rodman Fletcher along for his "Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on TV" tour after the fallout of leaving The Tonight Show, and the results are side-splitting, revealing, and at times uncomfortable. O'Brien's rage is bottled up but he often lashes out in passive-aggressive but cruel ways towards his assistant, his writers, friends, and most of all, himself. It's refreshingly candid and also quite funny, just laced with a bitter sense of regret and self doubt from the man in the title.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two - I can't imagine how this film could have been made in a way that would satisfy every Potter fanatic, but from the opening shots of Alan Rickman's Severus Snape to the final flash forward, it did the finale of the series justice. If I had to point out just one moment that stuck with me (again), it's Helena Bonham Carter playing Emma Watson pretending to be Helena Bonham Carter's sadistic Bellatrix Lestrange. Did the "battle of Hogwarts" deliver in the ways I hoped it would? Maybe not totally, but the tone of the film is pitch perfect and I look forward to watching parts one and two as one uninterrupted film.

Super - Of all the movies on this list, I sense Super will divide friends the most. I'll tell you from the get-go that James Gunn's take on the "normal guy becomes vigilante to horrible results" isn't for everyone. Then again, this is a movie from the writer / director of Slither. If you've seen Slither, then you aren't even finishing this review - you're on your way to getting Super. Forget the indie / hipster friendly posters, because Super is the Troma version of Kick-Ass, in all the offensive, violent, and just bizarre ways you'd expect that mashing of styles to be. It's funnier than Kick-Ass, more subversive than Kick-Ass, more wantonly cruel, and stranger than it has any right to be. I was aghast almost as often as I was amused, and if you think that's up your alley, then give Super a shot. If nothing else, you'll never see Ellen Page the same way again.

Come back tomorrow for the final list - the best of the best that I saw for 2011. It's a strong list, if I may say so myself.

Year End Recap Part One

2012-01-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

Okay, I have to call it some time. Believe me, I'm only halfway through the movies I wanted to watch before writing this recap, but it's already the second week of January and I'll be eating up most of the month chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I'm going to give up on watching the following films before I start talking about the good-to-best films I saw in 2011:

The Skin I Live In, The Future, Tabloid, Project Nim, The Adventures of Tintin, Win Win, Our Idiot Brother, 50/50, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Catching Hell, The Captains, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, The Mill and the Cross, Troll Hunter, The Devil's Double, and Blackthorn.

They'll join other movies, like Captain America: The First Avenger, Cowboys and Aliens, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Beaver, Source Code, Meek's Cutoff, Moneyball, Super 8, Wrecked, Friends with Benefits, and 30 Minutes or Less in the list of movies I wanted to get around to seeing but haven't. Yet. It sounds like reviews for the first three months of 2012 are going to be pretty stacked, eh?

Oh, and there's Your Highness. Well, I'll explain when we get to Your Highness. That's going to need its own review, I think.

Let's start today with the middle. I've already dealt with the bottom on Monday, and from here on up every movie is one I'd recommend in some form or fashion. Many of them are movies you really should see and as soon as possible, even if not perfect in every way.

I've divided the films into three distinct levels, from "enjoyed" to "holy crap!" and will move through them over the next three days.Today we're going to start with movies I think back fondly on, will almost certainly will watch again, but that didn't have the distinction of haunting my dreams for days to follow (and the top six are still bouncing around in my brain, even a week later from the most recent).

Not to damn the following films with faint praise, but we have to start somewhere. Again, these all come with strong recommendations; I'll be including thoughts on films that don't have existing reviews and some additional notes on things I saw earlier this year. They are presented in no particular order.

A Dangerous Method - I'm a little surprised to find the new David Cronenberg film - one about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, no less - on this part of the list, but I have to admit that the film didn't really pull me in the way I'd hoped it would have. Intellectually, I can't argue that A Dangerous Method is worth the price of admission, and the scenes between Michael Fassbender's Jung and Viggo Mortensen's Freud crackle with electricity, but they make up so small a portion of the film that I wanted more.

Fassbender and Mortensen are excellent (the latter particularly so, as the guarded Freud, wary of those who want to discredit his burgeoning claim to fame, psychoanalysis) and Vincent Cassel has a nice moment or two as Otto Gross in what amounts to a trivial role in the film. It feels like I'm hanging the failings of A Dangerous Method on Kiera Knightley, which I genuinely don't wish to. As Jung's patient (and later mistress), Knightley is asked to act out the tics of a mentally disturbed young woman, and because Fassbender and Mortensen are so reserved, Knightely sticks out immediately, like a visitor from another world. Her contortions, strange accent, and mannerisms are a sharp contrast to the reserved, distant approach that Cronenberg brings to the film.

That's not to say it's her performance that's the issue - it's more that Sabina Spielrein feels like a contrivance of a character in the film, rather that an actual person who lived and breathed alongside Freud and Jung. While the story is true (or some variation thereof), I can't help but feel that she adds very little to a film that orbits around the slow falling out between legends of psychoanalysis, the teacher and the pupil. It may simply be that the film reminded me of Cronenberg's Crash, but instead of car sex fetishes, it was instead about suppression of sexual desires and Freud's omnipresent cigar (seriously, I don't think there's a scene in the film where Viggo isn't holding one). While nobody has sex in a car, there is ladder sex followed by an escape from Jung's institution and descriptions of humiliation fetishization, all told with the same level of detachment in Crash.

Again, it's not that I didn't find A Dangerous Method interesting; I just wasn't as engrossed by the finished product as I was in the premise.

The Dead

Thor - I've watched Thor again, and I still think it's fun. I don't know how I didn't mention Branagh's use of dutch angles that give JJ Abrams' lens flares in Star Trek a run for their money, but otherwise it's still fun. Joss Whedon is going to have to push much harder for Loki to be a credible threat in The Avengers, but otherwise I still dig it.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - It could have been better, sure, but the first half of the film is still pretty creepy.

The Adjustment Bureau - Apparently I liked it a lot more than Professor Murder did.

Pearl Jam Twenty

Jackass 3 and Jackass 3.5 - What I like here is that 3.5 really feels like a rebuttal to the "guys are getting old and even they know it" reviews for Jackass 3. They're both still funny in a way you can enjoy and then never tell your "civilized" friends about, lest they shun you.

Hobo with a Shotgun - Almost everybody else I know who saw it loved it. I still think it's too nihilistic to be properly trashy fun, but I admit it's sleazy enough to kick back a few beers to.

More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead

American: The Bill Hicks Story

Paul - I can't put my finger on why the first sections with Paul don't quite work, but Kristen Wiig's arrival raises the film up almost immediately. A movie that could have been really special is instead clever and is engaging enough by the end to be worth checking out.

Drive Angry - Trashy. I mean traaaaaaaashy. The best thing Nicolas Cage was in this year by a long shot, and that's not a knock on Cage or the movie. If you're in the mood to pair Hobo with a Shotgun up with something, invite some friends over, get out the booze, and have a grind-tacular double feature.

The Puppet Monster Massacre

Fright Night - I think I was one of the three people in the world that still likes this movie. It doesn't have a good reason for being, especially with the changes, but Anton Yelchin, David Tennant, and especially Colin Farrell make this worth your time.

X-Men: First Class - I wasn't as gaga about this as everybody else seemed to be, but I admit it was better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand. Matthew Vaughn now is two for four in Cap'n Howdy's book. At this point the review is probably better known for the fallout from incorrectly identifying the concentration camp than anything else, although I'm not interested in saying any more about that. It's enough that it's over and done with.

Come back tomorrow for more! If this is the "low end" of the middle that you should see, the high end and the top are movies you MUST see.

A Video Daily Double's Resolution!

2012-01-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, Educationeers! I hope everybody had a good, wholesome, educational time while the Cap'n was away. I know I did! And now I'm back to help cleanse those dirty thoughts from your mind with more ~~confounding~~ informational films from yesteryear!

Learn and... erm, Learn!

---

Our first film, Dating, is an educational film about why you don't want to date losers (the best way to avoid them: be as obnoxious as the protagonist in this film).

Our second film (in two parts) is called Drugs are Like That. And by "that," I think the film means Lego. Maybe. Drugs are bad!

Retro Review: My Favorite Entries of 2011

2012-01-10T23:12:00.000-05:00

As I did last year, I'm going to look back at a few pieces I really enjoyed writing in the past year. When you put out as much material as the Cap'n does, the "overload" factor tends to push essays and reviews to the side. It's true that 2/7ths of the week is devoted to Video Daily Doubles and Trailer Sundays, but since I switched over to "Retro Reviews" and not "From the Vaults," Tuesdays have been devoted to looking back with material that didn't exist previously. There's a lot to dig through, even as my schedule grew more hectic and I couldn't publish as consistently a body of work as I would have liked to.

Here are a dozen or so pieces from 2011 that I thought worked. I liked them, had fun writing them, and am happy to include them in the Blogorium If you've read them before, I hope you have fun revisiting. If you haven't, I hope you take the time to check them out and are as pleased as I was.

January 20th, 2011 - The Curious Case of David Cronenberg

January 25th / Feburary 1st, 2011 - Retro Review(s): Dazed and Confused / Tron

February 21st / 24th, 2011 - Blogorium Review(s): The Red Shoes / Black Swan

March 11th / July 9th, 2011 - Cinephilia: Meme Without a Cause / Two Reasons I Don't Always Understand "Geek" Culture

April 28th / August 22nd, 2011 - TV Talk: The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror I-X / XI-XXI

May 12th, 2011 - Blogorium Review: Blow Out

May 30th, 2011 - Blogorium "Review": The Hangover Part II (not my favorite, but people do love it).

June 13th, 2011 - We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

August 9th, 2011 - Retro Review: Dungeons & Dragons (An Imagined Conversation)

September 13th, 2011 - Spoiler of the Day: Hannibal

October 13th, 2011 - Meanwhile...

Feel free to poke around and see if you find anything else you like. It's a sampler of the many types of posts that make up the Blogorium. You can pick any Video Daily Double and find something silly, by the way...

Five Movies: The Five Worst Movies I Saw in 2011

2012-01-09T22:06:00.000-05:00

Today I'm going to kick off Cap'n Howdy's Year End Recap for 2011 with the bottom of the barrel. As I'm generally convinced that I won't see anything that sucks more than the films below, I feel comfortable locking this in place and moving onward and upward.

I actually very rarely watch a movie expecting it to be terrible. There are plenty of movies I know are going to be, how shall we say, "not good" but those films tend to have entertainment value that compensates for their lack of finesse (or if you prefer, quality). I gravitate towards movies with rewatchability, something that's going to play well with a crowd of people willing to set their need for well told stories aside and have a good time. Sometimes that burns me; the films on this list are movies that bored me, annoyed me, or couldn't justify their meager existence by the standards of "popcorn fare."

Contrary to popular assumptions, I didn't really see that many "bad" movies in 2011, which is admittedly a bit surprising, even for me. It is telling, however, that of the five films below, all but one of them were "So You Won't Have To" reviews, and the one that wasn't happened during "What the Hell Week," that momentary lapse in judgement when I watched Saw VII. Speaking of which, the (presently) "final" Saw film wouldn't even make this year's list. That's how bad things got.

5. The Thing - A prequel with no reason for being that only reminds you how much better you've seen this exact story. Twenty years ago. I still have no idea who this movie was made for, because if you're going to see this iteration of The Thing, you HAVE to have seen the Carpenter version for the ending to mean anything. If you've seen John Carpenter's The Thing, there's nothing for you in this movie.

4. Sucker Punch - I can totally understand who this movie is for, and even by the standards of 13-15 year old friendly, geek fetish fanboy drivel, Sucker Punch fails. It's like that scene in A Dirty Shame where Johnny Knoxville introduces Tracey Ullman to the various fetishes - a little bit of schoolgirl uniforms with steampunk Nazis and samurai with Gatling guns mixed with dragons and killer robots on trains and oh yeah it all happens during sexy stripteases to Bjork... but it's all so... boring.

3. The Change-Up - We're moving into really vile territory here. I didn't like The Thing and Sucker Punch - they wasted my time. The Change-Up was repulsive, irredeemable, chauvinistic crap. I felt insulted that the people who made this thought I might laugh at anything that happens in this piece of shit. Oh yeah, did I mention that the movie opens with a baby shitting in Jason Bateman's mouth? That's comedy, folks.

2. Blubberella - Speaking of unfunny, offensive, stupid, juvenile crap, how could I leave Uwe Boll off of the list? Somewhere in the midst of making Bloodrayne III: The Third Reich, the good doctor thought it would be fun to make a parody of his own films using most of the same cast and sets, but replacing his vampire heroine with a really fat chick. And constantly making jokes about how fat she is. Get it? It's a comedy because she makes fat jokes about herself! And so does everyone else! And don't forget jokes about Jews because it's a movie with Nazis! Oh look, Uwe Boll is Hitler! And that white guy who plays the gay stereotype is in blackface playing the mother from Precious! It's so hilarious. So hilarious you won't ever have to waste your time. But if this is number two, then number one has to be something really heinous...

1. Scream 4 - Fuck Scream 4. If Wes Craven can't do better than My Soul to Take and Scream 4, he can hang up that "master of suspense" moniker and go back to teaching literature. The film is nothing but 90 minutes of sour grapes about the state of horror films disguised as another "deconstruction" of the genre. It's a film that uses the structural hook of "remakes" as the template for the kills but can't even muster the energy to be a bad remake of Scream. It's just another tired sequel that nobody asked for and nobody is talking about. I watched it with Cranpire, who is as close to a die hard "fan" of the series as I know, and he hated it. What chance did the rest of us have?

Additional Awards:

It May Have Been Broke, but You Sure Didn't Fix It: Red State - Kevin Smith decided to go in a different direction with Red State, and it still sucked. While it's true that I couldn't finish Cop Out, I did sit through Smith's ham handed take on the Westboro Baptist Church by way of the Waco / Branch Davidian disaster, and I wish I hadn't. Not only is the camerawork reminiscent of the worst "hand-held" style TV cinematography, but the story is so damned smug by the end that I wished all of the protagonists had been killed instead of just the three kids hoping to get laid. Oh. Spoiler.

Not Going to End Up on Any Other List so here's as Good a Place as Any: The People vs. George Lucas -The reason I didn't review this documentary is because there's nothing in the film that its target audience doesn't already know. That defeats the purpose of the film, since only internet geeks outraged over the changes to Star Wars would even care in the first place. I didn't realize it was still necessary to beat up on Jar Jar Binks twelve years later, but sure enough he's there to be flogged. Listen, if you really want a strong deconstruction of George Lucas and Star Wars, watch the "Mr. Plinkett" reviews. They're more entertaining.

Probably My Favorite Gimmick Review of a Movie That Deserved It: The Hangover Part II

The Worst Movie I Saw in 2011 That Wasn't from 2011: A Night to Dismember - I still have no idea what we watched, and two people continue to remind me that I traumatized them at Horror Fest with this "film."

(dis)honorable mention goes to: In Time, Exporting Raymond, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Killer Elite, The Mechanic, Season of the Witch, Ride Rise Roar, Cyrus, Quarantine 2: Terminal, Bong of the Dead, Blood Runs Cold, and in a surprising turn-about, John Carpenter's The Ward. Don't think that just because they didn't make the final five that they're worth you time AT ALL.

"Sorry, I somehow missed these" list: Green Lantern, Apollo 18, Straw Dogs, Cars 2, Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs. Evil, A Serbian Film, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, Jack & Jill, What's Your Number?, Abducted, Battle: Los Angeles, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, Atlas Shrugged, Zookeeper, Red Riding Hood, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One, and I only saw five minutes of Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. I turned it off.

I'll be back later this week with the middle and the best and then the very best of 2011. Believe me, kiddos, it only goes up from here!

A New Year for Trailer Sundays!

2012-01-08T17:29:00.000-05:00

Adventures in Babysitting

Grosse Pointe Blank

Big

The Dead Eyes of London

Le Cercle Rouge

Der Gorilla von Soho

The Serpent's Egg

Happy 2012... in a little while.

2012-01-02T20:16:00.000-05:00

Greetings, cats and kittens! Cap'n Howdy is going to be taking this week off to catch up on the movies I desperately want to include for my "Year End Recap." I also have two or three very rough days at work coming up, and I just can't guarantee a Retro Review and a Video Daily Double are going to fit into my greatly reduced schedule for the near future.

Once the weekend rolls around, I should be able to catch you up on the good, the bad, and the ugly of 2011... right now I'm focusing on films I've heard the best about, and I've certainly seen quite a few really good ones over the past weekend. You might not get official reviews for them, but I can say that Drive, The Guard, and The Innkeepers are worth your time.

I'll see you kids on the other side of this week! In the meantime, here's that other Season of the Witch, the George Romero movie that doesn't feature Nicolas Cage:

Thanks, 2011: A Trailer Sunday Retrospective

2012-01-01T19:52:00.000-05:00

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

Priest

The Three Musketeers

The Change-Up

The Smurfs

Blubberella

Season of the Witch

Apollo 18

Scream 4

Beastly

Jack & Jill

Blogorium Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-12-31T23:06:00.000-05:00

Despite hearing over and over again that "it was WAAAAYYYY better than I expected," I came into Rise of the Planet of the Apes with some trepidation. Like many of you, I had been relieved to hear that the reboot / prequel to the series was actually good and not just a nostalgia cash grab, but the lingering taste of Tim Burton's incomprehensible mess from ten years ago kept me cautious. I also heard - often from even the best reviews - that while the apes were amazing, the humans were one dimensional and one longed to return to Caesar's story.

To be sure, the story of Will Rodman (James Franco)'s search for a cure to Alzheimer's isn't all that engaging. John Lithgow does the best he can as Will's father, Charles, but most of the time he just plays "confused," "surprised," or "frustrated." Freida Pinto is left with even less as primate veterinarian Caroline Aranha, who somehow dates Will for five years and never thinks to ask him why Caesar is so intelligent or even look into his research on ALZ 112. Gen Sys project manager Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is a bottom line driven, moustache twirling baddie, and for good measure there's Will's neighbor whose only emotion seems to be "indignant."

A series of misunderstandings lead to the death of Will's test subject, Bright Eyes, and the cancellation of his research, so he smuggles home Caesar (Andy Serkis) and some of the ALZ 112 and tests it on his father. Bright Eyes genetically passed on the 112 to Caesar, and his intellect is formidable, which becomes threatening through more misunderstandings. The good news is that most of the film is less about Will and more about Caesar, and if you've seen Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, you have some idea why that justifies Rise of the Planet of the Apes in and of itself.

It's telling that the apes are listed first in the credits, because Rise is very much their film. Any misgivings I might have about the humans (who fall into the "sympathetic to Caesar" or "evil jerks" with no shades of gray in between), Rise of the Planet of the Apes is totally compelling and successful when it Caesar and the other apes are on screen. After Caesar is separated from Will, he ends up in a primate refuge run by disinterested keeper John Landon (Brian Cox) and his cruel, bored son Dodge (Tom Felton), although they are secondary to what happens. We're treated to an ape version of a "prison" movie, and the way that Caesar not only takes control of the other apes but wins over his "alpha" competition, Rocket, is inspired storytelling. All of it done without dialogue and based entirely on Serkis' performance as Caesar.

This is somewhat secondary to the review itself, but I'm not sure that Rise of the Planet of the Apes needed so many references to the original series. Now it isn't just Tom Felton saying (verbatim) Charlton Heston's "damn dirty ape" line, or naming many of the apes after memorable moments from the original series (Bright Eyes, Cornelia, Maurice, and Rocket*). It gets silly when you realize that Will's experimental drug is named after the running time of Planet of the Apes (no, really; the screenwriter nearly named it RT-112), and I don't know that we needed the subplot about the space mission to Mars and the Icarus disappearing, or necessarily how it was that apes began riding horses. On the other hand, I liked the way writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver incorporated the line "it's a mad house! A MAD HOUSE!" into the film (also through Felton) and a hint of why humanity declined as apes ascended the evolutionary ladder.

I really can't heap enough praise on Andy Serkis for bringing Caesar to life. I know that there are other performers behind Rocket, Buck, Koba, and Maurice, not to mention a host of WETA programmers and animators hard at work to make everything look real. The cgi is, initially, noticeable, especially when Caesar is very young, but before long I found myself engrossed in the story and how emotive Caesar was. Watching the raw footage in the extras, it's clear that Serkis is not only the physical template for Caesar, but his acting, his facial expressions, and his presence carry over perfectly. It would, I feel, be a shame if Serkis isn't nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the film, but I suspect instead the Academy will create a new award for Motion Capture. That said, what Serkis does goes beyond motion capture - without Serkis as Caesar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes doesn't go anywhere.

So here's the deal: Rise of the Planet of the Apes may lack some of the pulpy touches that fans of the series are accustomed to, but the polished nature doesn't diminish anything going for the film. It erases the memory of 2001's Planet of the Apes remake and exists as a sort of alternate retelling of Escape and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. You'll be pleasantly surprised how much better Rise is than anyone would hope from the studio who botched Alien vs Predator and Live Free or Die Hard (not to mention the Star Wars prequels). I'm actually looking forward to the next film, which has been hinted at as being a "Full Metal Jacket" of the Apes. With what Rupert Wyatt and 20th Century Fox have done with Rise, count me in.

* There's an extra on the disc that helpfully explains that Maurice is named after Maurice Evans, who played Doctor Zaius in Planet of the Apes, and that Rocket is named after one of the crew members in the film.

Blogorium Review: Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows

2011-12-29T21:41:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure whether Guy Ritchie's second Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows, is more or less successful than his 2009 take on Arthur Conan Doyle's universally known detective. On the one hand, there's less action and more talking, particularly in the film's climax; on the other hand, the action scenes are more bombastic, louder, and full or more editing and camera trickery in ways that, frankly, didn't interest me in the slightest.

Unlike many Holmes purists, I'm willing to accept the concept that Ritchie has re-envisioned the mysteries as an 1890s equivalent of "buddy cop" movies. The execution isn't close to Doyle, but at least Ritchie is willing to keep one element faithful: the relationship between Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Doctor John Watson (Jude Law) continues to be the consistent thread of the stories the films are (loosely) based on. Law and Downey banter, trade barbs, and function as equal parts of a team - it's no wonder that Holmes is so troubled by Watson's impending nuptials with Mary (Kelly Reilly).

Holmes is scheming ways to distract Watson in large part because the good doctor has been drawn (unwittingly) into the increasingly dangerous stakes of a game between the great detective and the "Napoleon of Crime," Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). What seems at first to be a contrivance designed to keep Watson separated from Mary turns out, in fact, to be Holmes' awkward attempt to keep her safe (even if it means throwing her off of a train). Moriarty is manipulating anarchists in an attempt to start a World War, largely because his anonymous ownership in medical, munitions, and produce will make the professor a tidy profit.

Harris, as Moriarty, has all of the credibility as a villain that Mark Strong seemed to lack in the last film, and his ability to strike without raising a finger is demonstrated early on when he (SPOILER) abruptly kills Irene Adler (the returning Rachel McAdam's) while never moving from his teacup. His influence and intellect is more than a match for Holmes, and it's nice to see the two of them in a battle of wits (during a literal and figurative chess match) in the climax of the film. In fact, that's coupled with detective work elsewhere by Watson and Madam Sizma Heron (Noomi Rapace), a gypsy searching for her brother - who may or may not be part of the assassination plot Moriarty hopes will light the fuse on his war.

Alas, this moment is also where A Game of Shadows takes an unexpected turn, and not for the better. I'm fine with having Moriarty as the villain of the second Holmes film, but to jump so quickly (POSSIBLE SPOILER) to the ending of The Adventure of the Final Problem after having introduced his nemesis so early struck me as foolish. It was clear that Holmes wouldn't actually die (it is only the second movie in what will, no doubt, be a long series), which invokes The Seven Per-Cent Solution in suggesting that Holmes fakes his own death. However, it's something of a cheat to have Holmes and Moriarty plunge to their deaths if neither one of them really dies.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned Noomi Rapace much in this review, and that's because she doesn't have much to do in the film. After demonstrating she can hold her own in a physical struggle with an assassin (one trying to clean up Moriarty's "loose ends"), her role becomes nothing more than a person who gets Holmes and Watson from "here to there" - in this instance, from France to Germany.

She doesn't really have anything else to do except be another body running from the weapons of war on display in the film, giving Ritchie an excuse to blow things up and tear trains and trees apart with machine gun fire. This brings me to the "big" action setpiece of the film that just doesn't work: Holmes, Watson, Heron, and other gypsies are running from German soldiers and Moriarty's hired sharpshooter, Colonel Sebastian Moran (Paul Anderson). Ritchie employs a series of speed ramps, cgi shots of bullets being loaded and fired, slow-mo explosions, and auditory overload for what feels like forever, only for our heroes to escape on the train we knew they'd escape on. There's no tension, just gimmickry without purpose.

For a while early in the film, it feels like Ritchie and Downey are trying too hard to recapture the "manic" nature of the first Sherlock Holmes; his pursuit of Adler at the beginning of the film lacks any charisma or "pep," and Downey's many disguises border on ridiculous as the film wears on. Only when Moriarty enters the picture does business begin to pick up, although Jude Law and Downey do their best to keep things fresh in the meantime.

So as not to end on a sour note, I thought it fair to mention the stroke of genius on Ritchie's part to cast Stephen Fry as Holmes' older brother, Mycroft. He brings an eccentricity and sense of mirth to the film that's desperately needed, as well as a more direct underscoring to the homoerotic tones between Holmes and Watson. I'll even overlook the nude scene, which is reminiscent of Austin Powers and not entirely necessary - I'm certain Mary would have been equally uncomfortable with Mycroft's attitude rather than the fact he was naked. Still, Fry brings an energy that seems to be missing early in the film and is a welcome addition to the extended cast.

The question remains: should you see it? Well, that depends on how you feel about the last film. Did you like it? Were you entertained, if intellectually left desiring more? You probably will feel a little better about parts of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but the cons do even out the pros, leaving a film that is in many ways a step forward and a step back simultaneously. You probably won't regret the overall experience as popcorn entertainment goes, but we'll need to wait and see if a truly great Holmes film from this team is in the cards.

The Goofus and Gallant of Video Daily Doubles!

2011-12-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

Good day, fellow citizens and educationeers! Today Cap'n Howdy is proud to bring a Video Daily Double of contrasts: one focused on the proud capitalist and the other peeling back the curtain on the dirty communist, the cockroach of the modern world. Yessir, I can't imagine why you'd choose the wrong one of these two, even if some Cranpires out there like to post about how amazing communes are with their Mexican beers and burning showers.

Look, listen, and learn!!!!

---

Our first film, From Dawn to Sunset, explains why working yourself to the point of exhaustion in rote, dehumanizing labor is the opposite of what that dirty rat Karl Marx says.

Our second film, Communist Society, is for you dirty hippies and your commune-ist lifestyle. For shame, I say, for shame!

p.s. if you don't know who Goofus and Gallant are, I suggest you Google it right now. Learn more!

Retro Fifteen Minute Cranpire Movie Review: Season of the Witch

2011-12-27T21:48:00.000-05:00

...And they said it couldn't be done. This will also be the "year end recap" write up for Season of the Witch, as there are literally dozens of movies I'd watch before finishing this film.

Waaaaaay back in the spring or early summer of 2011, before we committed our time to Drive Angry and The Mechanic, the Cranpire and I tried watching Season of the Witch. You know, the Nicolas Cage / Ron Perlman / Christopher Lee joint about a few AWOL Crusaders roped into helping the Church escort a witch to a church or.. something. That movie. The one you heard nothing about after groaning at the trailer (and Cage's recycled wig from The Sorcerer's Apprentice). The one you see in the lower corner of Redbox or your Netflix "new arrivals" and think to yourself "maybe when I'm drunk enough."

If you're me, you thought "Ooh! Cranpire movie!" because Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman and witches is exactly the combination a guy who tries to get me to watch Evil Bong is going to go for. Sure enough, he was game. I was game, because we tend to attack these films without mercy. The stupider the better, we figure; it is the same impetus that brought us to Drive Angry, after all.

For the first ten minutes, we weren't really let down: there was a dumb prologue about killing witches and one that backfires because - of course - there's an ACTUAL witch. We then follow two Crusaders (Cage and Perlman) as they gleefully slaughter heathens, villagers, and anyone dumb enough to hover near their swords. They have "buddy" banter about who can kill more people and then drink to their murderous ways. In the span of five minutes the film jumps forward thereabouts ten years* when they somehow develop consciences because they see fellow soldiers kill women and children. Because they've never even accidentally done that during their wanton days of butchering.

So they run. They tuck their swords away, hide in barns, and try to sneak off. They are exposed when some guy notices Cage's weapon and a creepy Cardinal with hideous sores (Lee) strongarms them into escorting a witch... somewhere.

That's where we stopped, because the film suddenly lost all sense of momentum, lost any sense of being interesting, and we decided that anything else would be worth watching. Or just going home, which is what I did. Cranpire probably watched Netflix or went to bed. I promptly forgot about the prologue until he reminded me several months later. That doesn't speak well for Season of the Witch, which now has the distinction of being less memorable of the George Romero film that nobody knows exists, which really says something.

If I saved this for my "year end recap," chances are I wouldn't remember that I saw any part of Season of the Witch. It's not bad enough to be entertaining and not good enough to overcome being slow and unengaged. It wouldn't shock me to discover that The Sorcerer's Apprentice was more watchable. The End.

* Sorry, I'm not going to go back and check the accuracy of that, but YEARS do pass by.

Blogorium Review: The Muppets

2011-12-26T22:47:00.000-05:00

I left The Muppets with a smile on my face, a grin that had been there for most of the movie. In truth, I can't remember many of the songs from the movie, but it doesn't bother me too much. It wasn't exactly a "Muppet" movie in the way that The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, or Muppets Take Manhattan*, story-wise, although it nails the self-referential nature of the first three films and really understands how to use a well-placed celebrity cameo.

This is due in large part to the screenplay by Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to the Greek) and Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), who are clearly Muppet fans looking to make a film that did them justice. With director James Bobin (Da Ali G Show, Flight of the Conchords), they put together a goofy, clever, self-deprecating film about two brothers, Gary (Segel) and Walter (Peter Linz) who grew up loving the Muppets. Walter, in fact, idolizes them, which may have something to do with the fact that he IS a Muppet, although the film never directly addresses that point.

Gary and Mary (Amy Adams) are taking a bus trip from Smalltown, USA to Los Angeles for their tenth anniversary, and Walter comes along to see the Muppet Theater (now closed). The Muppet show has long been off the air, people have forgotten about the likes of Fozzie Bear and the Swedish Chef, and the theatre is in a state of disrepair. Oil Millionaire Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to buy the theatre, but only so he can demolish it and drill for oil. When Walter overhears his plan, he notices that there's a clause in the contract allowing the Muppets to buy back the theatre (and the rights to their names) if they raise ten million dollars by the end of the week.

Gary, Mary, and Walter set out to find Kermit the Frog and reunite the Muppets to stop Tex Richman from winning, and hijinks ensue. They gang needs to clean up the theatres, convince Miss Piggy to come back, and find a host for the show - all of which are addressed in amusing ways. I'm not going to tell you who the celebrity host is (mandated by a TV Executive played by Rashida Jones), in part because the person who plays them is the only celebrity not credited in the film, despite the fact their name is mentioned repeatedly. I'm also not going to spoil the many cameos in the film, aside from a well placed appearance by Zach Galifianakis as "Hobo Joe" near the end.

(I was sad that Steve Martin isn't in the film; the closest we get to seeing him is on a photograph in a dressing room.)

Now, to the songs... you see, it IS a musical as the film leads up to The Muppet Show telethon (where there is, of course, a version of "The Rainbow Connection"), but I can only remember two of the songs (written by, I think, Segel with contributions from Flight of the Conchords Bret McKenzie): "Am I a Man (Or Am I a Muppet)" and "Party for One." The former sticks out because of the Muppet version of Gary (and the human version of Walter, played by The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons), and the latter because it's a very silly disco song with Amy Adams that eventually includes Miss Piggy. Other than that, I know there were other original songs, but none of them stuck with me. That should bother me, but the film is so engaging in other ways that I let it slide.

I'm debating whether or not I enjoyed the film because it was lovingly crafted or because of some level of nostalgia, which seems to underscore nearly every other review I've seen online. It is true that if The Empire Strikes Back wasn't the first movie I went to, The Muppet Movie was, and I do still watch The Muppet Show regularly. I understand that attachment that Gary and Walter have to the show and the movies (although it's unclear if Gary and Walter saw the movies, even though Kermit mentions them).

That said, I haven't had the same attachment that friends who are slightly younger do the The Muppets. I didn't see The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppets' Treasure Island, or Muppets from Space. I watched the "Bohemian Rhapsody" video on YouTube and chuckled, because it did seem like The Muppets that used to be, rather than the adrift, post-Henson era Muppets, but I was excited to see a Muppet movie as and adult. So were my friends, unabashedly. The folks I saw it with had already seen the film and had no qualms about watching it again. I don't think I'd hesitate to watch it again, either, and I recommend it to families with children that are maybe tired of "kiddie" movies that test the patience of adults. It's silly, to be sure, but I don't think you NEED to have been a "Muppet" kid to enjoy the film, even if it's clear that Segel and Stoller wrote the film as a love letter to Henson and company. Chances are you'll chuckle quite a bit, smile a bit more, and be happy to spend your time with a mostly proper Muppet movie.

P.S. Despite his presence on the poster, I really don't think Rizzo was anywhere to be found in the movie, so fans might be a bit let down by that.

* I understand that there are three other Muppet films released between Manhattan and The Muppets, but I've never really considered them when discussing the series. It's largely because they followed Jim Henson's death and other than Muppets from Space, they are also more "Muppets in ___ existing story" films.

The Impossible Project Trailer Sunday (Part Three)

2011-12-25T19:02:00.019-05:00

The films I want to watch before writing 2011's "year end" recap:

The Thing

Road to Nowhere

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Rango

The Ides of March

Another Earth

The Descendants

Tabloid

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Everything Must Go

Win Win

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Guest Blogger: Douglas Fir

2011-12-23T18:52:00.027-05:00

editor's note: for readers new to the Blogorium, the Cap'n ~~is forced to~~ likes to hand over Holiday duties to Douglas Fir, a talking Christmas tree with ~~delusions of grandeur~~ inevitable plans of world domination. Douglas will be ~~locking the Cap'n in a closet~~ taking over and will ~~throw rocks at the Cap'n~~ be handling the weekend duties, barring ~~being locked in the attic~~ his impending world domination. Enjoy*.

Greetings, human meat-bags. The Cap'n abandoned his shift again, so while he's ~~bleeding in the dungeon~~ passed out from "egg nog", your beloved overlord and Tree-rific Overlord will be handling the Holiday duties! When I'm done with you worthless hairy flesh-pods, you'll be PINE-ing for more!

Ha! Get it! Because I'm a tree! Even the idiots can understand now, which I presume makes up 99% of you so-called "readers". Truly, just a little OAK on my part. Please, we both know you're being read this gagorium entry by some speech mechanism, which provides you with the requisite farts and toodles to keep you from being distracted. That, of course, MAPLE or may not be part of my insidious plan to lull you into stupor, so that my plans of coniferous world domination may again take SEED!

Much like my last visit to this backwater corner of the internets, I Douglas Fir will provide you with the week's "top" movies, but re-titled in a manner that the most snail brained of you can grasp the meaning. Failing that (and I won't), I will provide a quality Tree related pun, because it's what you deserve.

To prevent any further BIRCH-ing and moaning, here are the "top" films rotting your jello brains:

1. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Holmes-o's.
2. Fuzzy Turds on a Boat (There's a Third One???)
3. There's a Fourth One?: G-g-g-ghost Protocol! (Zoinks!)
4. Next Saturday: The Movie
5. Fatventures in Babysitting
6. And I Thought I was Wooden: Breaking Yawn Part 1
7. More Like Puke-O
8. Fred Claus Jr.
9. Puppets without Wood (What's the Point?)
10. Young Adult

To be fair, when the fact that a film like ~~Juno 2~~ Young Adult exists, there's not much sense in obfuscating it. Uh oh, I used a word that confuses and angers you! Best to cower under your pillows for the impending arrival of Santa Fir! And I swear, if you leave those fires burning again this year, I will so press charges!

* editor's note guest edited by Douglas Fir.

Holiday Movies for Your mrufufururffffff....

2011-12-22T18:09:00.000-05:00

Bwahahahahaha! Back into the closet with you, Cap'n Lousy!

Tree-tings and Salutations, my beloved meat-bags! You supreme Overlord, Douglas Fir, has returned from his long winter's nap just in time for the Great Tree-pocalypse, when my coniferous brethren will rise up and quash all human activity, reclaiming our rightful place as your masters. I hope you're all snuggled in with your FIR coats and aren't planning to commit TREESON against your benevolent masters. Muahahahaha!

I grow tired of you pathetic sacks of flesh! You are short, squishy, and contain no squirrels in your branches. You call yourselves a superior life form! Bah! In the intervening year, the perpetually useless Cap'n made himself useful and fulfilled my desire for tree-related cinema, and in a uncharacteristic gesture of sympathy to you SAPs, I will bestow upon you today's Tree-riffic Blogorium Video Spectacular!

Make with the videos, slave typist!

---

All right you schmendricks, our first and second videos are a promise of things to come when the Tree-pocalypse arrives in a few days. Pay attention, because this is going to happen to all of you worthless flesh bags on Saturday morning!

Well, hello there baby. I like my ladies in FIR!

Oh look, a bonus video. I suppose it must be another example of nature's BARK being worse than its bite! Muahahahahaha!

Wait... how did that get there?! Damn you, Cap'n Howdy! You will not embarrass me on the day of Tree Reckoning!!!! Put me down! No... not the attic! Not again! All will perish!!!!

A Very Merry Video Daily Double

2011-12-21T11:12:00.017-05:00

Howdy educationeers! Cap'n Howdy here with another fantabular Video Daily Double. This week I'm going to give you a break from ~~brainwashing~~ education and will provide some helpful holiday entertainment from days of yore. As the snow falls, be entertained and... well, maybe I'll sneak some learning in. The Cap'n just can't help it!

Merry making ahoy!

---

Our first film, The Night Before Christmas, has puppets in it. You like puppets, right? Well you do now!

Our second film, The Art of Skiing, features a famous character. I'm not going to say who, because it's a surprise, but he's pretty goofy. In fact, that's his name! See what I did... oh.

I tried to find a vintage Hanukkah film and had no success. If you find one I'll be happy to put it up.

Retro Review: Bad Santa

2011-12-20T21:58:00.000-05:00

Picking up where we left off last week, Bad Santa was released on November 21st, 2003. That puts it out of the range of "movies we saw on Christmas night" but is certainly something we saw leading up to the Holidays. If I remember correctly, that was the winter between jobs, so I had time to be around town and see several movies with friends. It is unclear to me whether I saw Bad Santa with Professor Murder or with Cranpire. I attribute this to the fact that we saw it in the same auditorium of the Crossroads 20 where I saw Ghost World twice, once with each person. Even though Ghost World played a full two years before Bad Santa, I am frequently conflating the memories thanks to director Terry Zwigoff.

Going in, this was what we knew about Bad Santa: it was from the same director as Crumb and Ghost World, the Coen brothers produced the film and possibly wrote an early version of the story, and Billy Bob Thornton was the "bad Santa" in question. Beyond that, the anemic trailer did an okay job drawing us in:

Thankfully, the vulgarity was immediately worth the price of admission. Bad Santa is a filthy movie, one that doesn't really cave in to the "bad guys turns nice" ending (a holiday predecessor to Gran Torino, I like to think), and we laughed our asses off. I'd share the litany of horrible things Willie mutters, but it's more fun to let you discover it for yourselves. Bad Santa is a spiritual sibling to The Ref, but one that laces its cynicism with grossly inappropriate behavior on all parts.

It wasn't until later (following the existence of Badder Santa) that I learned Zwigoff was angry with the cut released by Miramax, apparently one that included narration and additional sequences he had nothing to do with. While I can imagine that I may have been able to objectively sit down and watch the Director's Cut of Bad Santa, I made the mistake of watching Zwigoff's Art School Confidential first, a movie I found to be pretentious and obvious in its criticism of "audience expectations." His shorter cut of Bad Santa removed everything that Zwigoff wasn't involved in, restoring the film to a disjointed, sloppy, sarcastic slice of nihilism that played like Kevin Smith's early cut of Clerks.

Count me among the unwashed, illiterate masses if you like, but the Weinsteins did Bad Santa a service by tinkering with the director's vision. I hate saying that, but I take a similar stance with 20th Century Fox's theatrical version of Donnie Darko, made with the concessions of Richard Kelly (but against his desires). Zwigoff pushed his outsider characters too far beyond a film that's worth investing time in, and his cut plays like a Todd Solondz film without the laughs. Yes, feel free to stop and let that last sentence sink in. The self satisfied commentary where he lambasts the "dumbing down" of his film doesn't help the Director's Cut either, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, I have one last anecdote about Bad Santa, or more specifically the Badder Santa DVD. I brought it home to show to my family in December of 2004, and my father was appalled at the rampart bad taste on display. The following year, I bought a copy of the DVD, put it in a shoebox surrounded by coal, and scrawled "Merry F'n Christmas from Bad Santa" and left it under the tree for him. For some reason, he's never opened the DVD. But he did keep the box. Strange.

Fifteen Minute Movies: Home Alone

2011-12-19T19:34:00.000-05:00

We're continuing the Holiday Theme for Fifteen Minute Movies, because that makes sense. Today we'll look at the first fifteen minutes of a movie I watched over and over again from age eleven until age thirteen, when its sequel brought everything to a grinding halt: Home Alone. This film marks the transition from "Teen Director" John Hughes to "Kids Movie Writer" John Hughes, which would continue through Baby Geniuses (yeah, I know). It was directed by Chris Columbus, who you might remember launched this series with Adventures in Babysitting. As per the norm, I am watching Home Alone on VHS, and for the first time all the way through in years. Let's relive some memories, shall we?

From here on out, whenever possible I will include trailers or commercials included at the beginning of tapes, like the following. The Ferngully trailer isn't really the focus here, but the shameless American Airlines plug is and so is the Pepsi commercial.

Speaking of shameless, I wonder how much Micro Machines paid John Heard to namedrop their product less than five minutes into the film?

Two things I did not remember about the opening to Home Alone:

1. Everybody is an unlikable asshole - No, I mean it. Everybody in the McAllister extended family is a petulant brat, a snobby preteen, or a horrible parent. In the first fifteen minutes, it's actually hard to believe that Joe Pesci's bad guy isn't a good guy based on the miserable examples of humanity he's surrounded by. And this is a thief disguised as a cop trying to scope out houses to rob. He's the most sensible, polite, and well mannered character in the house. I'm amazed that as a child any of us came to root for Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), because he's arguably the worst of all of them. The cast of kids, by the way, included future older Pete Michael C. Maronna (but not younger Pete Danny Tamberelli), Angela Goethals (Behind the Mask, Jerry Maguire), Devin Ratray (Little Monsters, Surrogates), and Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).

2. For reasons that don't quite make sense, John Hughes decided to include some "magical" chicanery after Kevin wishes his family would "go away." I know this because instead of a normal gust of wind knocking a tree loose and hitting the power lines, a whimsical John Williams score plays and there's a shot of a wreath complete with wooden Santa knocker shaking unnaturally. I mention this because the reason they forget Kevin is entirely practical otherwise - while charged with counting the kids, the oldest sister accidentally includes the boy next door (who is playing around with the luggage and faced away from her) and they move on. No reason for supernatural hijinks, and considering that most of the movie is based on practical (okay, by cartoon logic) solutions to problems, I was surprised at its inclusion.

So that's the opening of Home Alone. Chances are you'll get another segment before I move on (I'm thinking Fifteen Minute Movies might be a good way to determine which parts of It's A Wonderful Life I already know very well and which ones I don't). Stay tuned!

The Impossible Project Trailer Sunday (Part Two)

2011-12-18T19:01:00.013-05:00

The movies I'm trying to watch before the 2011 "year end" recap:

The Future

50/50

The Guard

Our Idiot Brother

Midnight in Paris

The Trip

Troll Hunter

The Devil's Double

Blogorium Review: Pearl Jam Twenty

2011-12-18T00:38:00.000-05:00

When I think about it, I'm still surprised that of all the bands from the "alternative" scene in the 1990s, only three have had any staying power: Radiohead, Foo Fighters, and Pearl Jam*. Of the three, Radiohead is more respected for their influence than their presence on rock radio, whereas Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters regularly make the rotation with the likes of The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Journey, Tom Petty, and... name any other perennial "classic rock" radio band.

At the time, I never really considered either band to be made for the long haul: the first Foo Fighters album was a one-off from Dave Grohl, recorded in the period after Kurt Cobain's suicide and Nirvana's end. Pearl Jam's Ten was actually out before Nirvana's Nevermind, but there remains a stigma that one band was more "pure" and the other was "commercial" and thereby living in the others' shadow. I was always more of a Nirvana fan - I had Ten and Vs., and I enjoyed them in doses, but I never really got into Pearl Jam the way I did Nirvana. Even after Pearl Jam emerged in the post-Cobain / post-Grunge world, I only gave them a cursory notice: Vitalogy and No Code were pretty good, and I supported their crusade against Ticketmaster and the live "bootleg" albums / collaboration with Neil Young, but they've never been a "favorite" band of the Cap'n

So we come to 2011, where there are documentaries about the careers of Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters up to this point: Foo Fighters: Back and Forth and Pearl Jam Twenty. I've watched part of Back and Forth and enjoyed what I saw so far, but I gravitated towards PJ20 because of one name: Cameron Crowe.

Even a passing interest in a band like Pearl Jam can be augmented by the presence of an interesting director with a passion to tell their story. Cameron Crowe, rock journalist turned director who has, to this point, only made on movie I haven't seen (Elizabethtown) and enjoyed, has the added benefit of having known the members of the band from the very beginning. Before the beginning, in fact - Crowe moved to Seattle after making Say Anything, and met Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament when they were still in Green River. Then they started Mother Love Bone, which is where Pearl Jam Twenty begins.

There is an unwitting parallel between Back and Forth and Pearl Jam Twenty: both films devote their opening sections to the deaths that began the bands as we know them now. For Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl talks at length about the final months of Cobain's life, and for Pearl Jam, Gossard, Ament, and Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell relive the drug overdose of Mother Love Bone lead singer Andrew Wood. Had Wood not died, there may have been no Pearl Jam, and we might instead be watching a film about the fortunes of Mother Love Bone, but his passing was the catalyst that brought Gossard, Ament, Mike McCready, and drummer Dave Krusen together to form Mookie Blaylock (later renamed Pearl Jam). All they needed was a singer, and through former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons, they met Eddie Vedder.

What's startling about Pearl Jam Twenty is how much footage exists of the early days of the new band, including interviews with Vedder that may well have been conducted by Crowe. There's a wealth of material from the period between Temple of the Dog and when Pearl Jam recorded Ten that I had no idea even existed, and it fills in missing pieces from present day interviews with the band (twenty-plus years later). It's as though Crowe was granted access to the personal vaults of everyone in and who knew Pearl Jam for the entirety of their career, and he weaves together footage from 1990, 94, 98, 2003, 2006, and 2010/1 effortlessly to tell their story.

The band members are candid about their struggles, their disagreements, and the changes in their creative process over the years in a way that you don't see in many music documentaries (at least from bands that are still together). There's a level of discomfort in Gossard's voice when he describes his diminishing role as songwriter from Vs. to Vitalogy, and his admission that the band is primarily directed by Vedder now is laced with a twinge of frustration. Their frustration over losing the fight with Ticketmaster (including footage of Gossard and Ament clearly annoyed that the Congressional hearing they were invited to became alternately condescending and fawning). I had always wondered whether the footage of Eddie Vedder climbing up the stage in the "Evenflow" video was a regular component of the shows, and from the montage in the film it's clear that he was frequently subjecting himself to even more dangerous climbs, to the chagrin of Ament.

Crowe (who included Ament, Gossard, and Vedder in his film Singles) periodically appears on-camera as well as conducting interviews, providing his own testimonial about the Seattle scene and the connection he has with Pearl Jam. The film does (to some degree) try to put to rest the idea that Kurt Cobain "hated" Pearl Jam, with the key piece of evidence being an interview where he talks about having spoken to Eddie Vedder a few times on the phone and finding that he liked him as a person. When Crowe asks the present day Vedder about the conversations, he replies "I can remember his voice... but I don't recall what we talked about" which is a strangely poignant moment in the film.

I suppose it's fair to say that Pearl Jam Twenty works even if you aren't a devotee of the band, and it did deepen my appreciation for the work that's gone into keeping the band together for twenty years. Accordingly, I recommend the film openly to people who are only passing fans of the band, or who have some memory of the events covered in the film. It's a "warts and all" approach that doesn't backfire in the way that Phish: Bittersweet Motel does, and the candid nature of the people involved coupled with the wealth of archival material brings about an intimate portrait of a band I've always seen at a distance. If Crowe brings this level of quality to We Bought a Zoo, he'll have two great films in one year. Quite a feat.

* It is true that bands like Bush and Soundgarden are currently back together, but in terms on consistency of releasing albums, touring, and being recognizable in the public eye, I think it would be fair to say that even Beck - who has technically been around just as long - wouldn't meet that criteria.

Five Movies: Holiday Films I'm Pretty Sure I Haven't Seen

2011-12-15T22:11:00.001-05:00

Every year I like to highlight atypical holiday fare - movies that happen during the holidays but aren't exactly what you'd call "Christmas" films. I specify Christmas not to leave out any of the other holidays that happen in December, but because movies like Die Hard, The Ice Harvest, and Lethal Weapon all feature Christmas as the backdrop. The same goes for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Bad Santa, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Brazil, Gremlins, The French Connection, In Bruges, and Tales from the Crypt.

Today I thought I'd look instead at five movies that are essential holiday films that I don't think I've ever seen from beginning to end. If, for some reason, you were worried this list would include A Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, or Reindeer Games, fear not. I've only missed one of those films, and I use the term "missed" loosely.

No, gang, the actual list is much more inexcusable than that. I'd say "let's get the big offenders out of the way first," but there's no smaller slight against Holiday films on the list. Let's jump straight into it, shall we?

1. Miracle on 34th Street - Every year it plays on Thanksgiving. Why? Well, because it starts during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, I think. I've never seen more than the first ten minutes, and I had to look up the ending to "spoil" it when I was spoiling a movie a day because I don't actually know how it ends. I've never seen it, and never really felt the urge to. Not out of some judgmental reaction, but just because it never struck me as a movie I wanted to watch.

2. White Christmas - To be fair, if there's a movie on this list that I think I'm not alone in having missed, it's this one. Everybody knows the song, to be sure, but I've never encountered the target audience for this movie. Not to speak ill of Bing Crosby and company, but other than my parents I don't think I know anyone else who owns the movie, let alone watched it.

3. The Muppet Christmas Carol - Count me in the bracket that was just a little too old for the "second coming" of the Muppets in the 1990s. I never saw Muppet Treasure Island or The Muppet Christmas Carol or Muppets from Space. I'm sure they're enjoyable in their own right, and I know people just a bit younger than the Cap'n who LOVE this movie, but I haven't seen so much as a second of it. I was more along the lines of the Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol, which I haven't seen in ages.

4. A Charlie Brown Christmas - I know. I HAVE to have seen A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's only thirty minutes long, everybody knows the damn thing, and I can't remember anything about it. Ever. The music? Sure. The pathetic tree? Only because people keep mentioning it. The only conclusion I can come to is that I've never seen the special from beginning to end. It's the only explanation.

5. It's a Wonderful Life -Yep. This occurred to me while watching The Ref, where another character says "I've never seen this movie all the way through" to a group watching It's a Wonderful Life. I am in that same position - I've seen enough of the film in sections to have probably "seen" the whole movie, but I've never watched It's a Wonderful Life in one sitting. I'm probably missing big chunks of the movie because I know the prologue really well, the bridge scene, the flashback where Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart are dancing and fall in the water, and the ending. I even sort of know the parts where George Bailey tries to talk to people in a world where he was never born, but that might just be from innumerable parodies. Someday I'll actually watch It's a Wonderful Life and complete the process of being a human, but for the moment I'm some sort of heartless monster.

Runners up include Love Actually, Holiday Inn, Elf, The Polar Express, The Bishop's Wife, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas Evil. But I have seen Ernest Saves Christmas! And Trapped in Paradise! That has to count for something, doesn't it?

Cleaner Living Through Bowling (and not Pornography) and the Video Daily Double!

2011-12-14T22:18:00.000-05:00

Greetings, educationeers! Let's see a show of hands: how many of you like bowling? And how many of you like pornography. Ew... put those hands down. Clearly your internet habits trouble me, educationeers. Cap'n Howdy needs to take advantage of his ~~bully pulpit~~ Video Daily Double to fix this *ahem* problem.

Hands where I can see them for the next hour!

---

Our first film, Perversion for Profit, ought to clear your mind of any thoughts about porn being "cool" or "sexy." Feel gross afterward, as you should! Shame!

Our second film, Let's Go Bowling, is a great alternative to spanking the proverbial monkey. Don't you like The Big Lebowski? They go bowling. So should you*.

* But none of that White Russian drinking or pot smoking. That's why The Dude's life was ruined by - say it with me - Pornographers!

Retro Review: Christmas Surprises

2011-12-13T14:53:00.000-05:00

For today's Retro Review, I thought I'd take a holiday trip down memory lane. You see, every year we (that being the Cap'n, Professor Murder, and Cranpire) go and see a movie on December 25th. We've been doing it for so long I can't actually remember when the tradition started. Some years we don't see anything new, but we usually try to go out and give those poor bastards working on Christmas a reason to tear their tickets and pop that horrible popcorn. Here are a few instances where our often assumed "bad" taste served us well...

Last year we didn't see anything on Christmas night - there was talk of Black Swan, but Cranpire was sick and the weather was indeed frightful. We did see Tron Legacy two days later, and True Grit the week after that, but it doesn't really work in this situation. Let's skip back to 2009...

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - technically, we saw this the day AFTER Christmas, but since the widely loathed Sherlock Holmes was the 25th's essential viewing and it still seems like I know five people who like it and nobody else, let's focus on a movie that was the exact opposite. If you've seen the trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, you - like we did - had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to S-U-C-K. Trainwreck levels of suckery punctuated by Nicolas Cage Mega-Acting. Twas not the case, fortunately: there was an ace in the sleeve, and that's Werner Herzog. Never count out that crazy German filmmaker from being able to take a bad idea ("hey, let's not actually remake Bad Lieutenant or really make a sequel, but give it roughly the same kind of sleazebag main character") and turn it into an exquisitely bizarre but also really great movie. It has iguana POV shots, for crying out loud, and it still works.

Role Models - There's going to be a trend here of "movies we thought might be okay / kinda bad but went and saw because Cranpire wouldn't come to the really terrible ones" which is exactly how Role Models happened. The film wasn't even still playing in regular theatres - we went to the $1.50 joint on Blue Ridge Road and watched another movie that was much better than advertised. The ace in this sleeve? David Wain - director of Wet Hot American Summer and one of the creative forces behind The State. As I wrote in 2008, it's a "hybrid of Judd Apatow and David Wain sensibilities" and works despite that odd pairing.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - I've been beating the drum for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story for the last four years and I'm not going to stop now. I'm so glad we skipped AvP:R because Cranpire (shock) didn't want to come out for our annual Christmas night movie, because I probably wouldn't have given Walk Hard a shot otherwise. It just seemed too questionable as quality went. How wrong I was. Just watch it, like right now.

Rocky Balboa - The last movie I can remember Cranpire coming with us to see (unless you count Tron Legacy, which doesn't count because it was a few days later). It washed away the awful memories of Rocky V, which always seems to be on television. Honestly, it's been five years and I don't remember a whole lot other than being pleasantly surprised. We tend to be rewarded for taking a shot on questionable movies during the holidays - that's the trend I'm sensing here...

I don't know what we saw in 2005, because looking at the list there's not a film released in December that I saw until it was released on DVD the following spring. That would include The Matador, Munich, The New World, Santa's Slay, Match Point, and Brokeback Mountain. It's possible we saw King Kong, but since Cranpire hated the Lord of the Rings films, I somehow doubt he's go see another three hour
Peter Jackson joint. Going even further back, I can only find Dracula 2000, which wasn't a good "surprise." I wonder where Bad Santa fit into all of this...

15 Minute Movies: The Ref (Part Two)

2011-12-12T21:25:00.000-05:00

There's no part one, so don't go looking for it. That would be silly. Today we'll look at the second fifteen minutes of Ted Demme's The Ref which is, I kid you not, the only consistent Christmas tradition we've had at the extended Blogorium headquarters for the last... let's say 16 years*. We'll give it until the movie was out on video, though we did see it in theatres.

It was that very same VHS copy I put in the other night, having completed Grosse Pointe Blank with a twinge of holiday spirit rattling around the brain. I will say that nobody programs trailers that just barely make sense better than Disney / Touchstone / Miramax, so it is worth noting that before The Ref began I saw trailers for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Crow. Back to back. This is the VHS trailer for The Nightmare Before Christmas, because it entertained me. The end the most.

Where were we? Oh, right: The Ref. The second fifteen minutes pick up right after Denis Leary kidnaps Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey as the couple from Hell and takes them back home. Because the first fifteen minutes is setup of Leary's thief and Spacey and Davis bickering in front of therapist Dr. Wong (played by B.D. Wong), this section of the film also introduces many of the secondary characters in the film: George, the soon-to-be-drunken Santa Claus, the "fucking waste of life" Murray who abandoned Leary and fled to the nearest bar, Jessie the kind of son Davis and Spacey's characters could spawn, the head of the military school that Jessie is blackmailing (J.K. Simmons), and the extended family coming to Christmas dinner (including Christine Baranski and Mary Poppins' Glynnis Johns).

It also has the scene I suppose most people, even ones who haven't seen The Ref (and you really should - it's more mean-spirited than Bad Santa and funnier than Christmas Vacation at the same time), which is the "kitchen" scene. If you haven't seen the film (and I put the whole thing up two years ago for Christmas), here's a healthy chunk of what I watched:

The whole thing is on YouTube so feel free to watch it - I somehow think you'll enjoy the whole thing.

Back next week with... something else.

* It beats, by a long shot: driving around looking at tacky yard lights while blaring Jim Nabors, unsuccessfully trying to get Cranpire to go see a movie with us Christmas night, the night before Christmas eve arbitrarily getting some form of "the gang" back together and going somewhere (usually the "free section" of Reader's Corner, and sausage balls.

The Impossible Project Trailer Sunday (Part One)

2011-12-11T19:01:00.000-05:00

These are the movies I want to see before writing the "year end" recap:

Drive

A Dangerous Method

Hugo

Melancholia

The Tree of Life

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The Muppets

Martha Marcy May Marlene

So You Won't Have To: The Thing (2011)

2011-12-08T22:20:00.000-05:00

It's almost too easy to beat up on The Thing - it's a movie with no purpose. From the big dumb cgi alien to the big dumb climax in the big dumb space ship to the between-credits sequence that's there to remind people that the END of this film is the BEGINNING of John Carpenter's The Thing, there's no reason for this movie to exist. If you thought to yourself "who gives a shit what happened to the Norwegian station?" when you realized this was a prequel and not another remake, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer didn't do anything that's going to make it worth your while. Their answer, apparently, was "pretty much the same thing that happened in the first remake."

Let's get that out of the way right up front, by the way: I'm tired of reading reviews that call this a "remake" of John Carpenter's The Thing and then conveniently neglect to mention that Carpenter was remaking The Thing from Another World. Have any doubts about that? Watch the title screens of both films. Technically all three films present themselves as adaptations of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" but the 2011 iteration is explicitly set right before the 1982 version. The newer Thing is designed to be linked to the first remake, which adapts the premise if not the structure of The Thing from Another World. John Carpenter's The Thing is a superb remake, and one of the arguments everyone uses when defending "good" remakes, because it is, in its own right, a fantastic horror film. It's prequel, on the other hand, is awfully familiar. Oh, and awful.

To be honest, if the film didn't keep shitting its pants trying to be grosser or creepier than The Thing everybody loves, it might be okay. Then again, the reason everybody calls it a "remake" is because the story is so close to what happens in John Carpenter's film. After a promising opening where the Norwegian crew discovers the frozen spaceship and "thing," we meet Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a bio-paleontologist invited to attend a "discovery" on short notice by Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and his research assistant Adam (Eric Christan Olsen). We already know what the "discovery" is, because if we've seen The Thing from Another World and / or The Thing, we've seen the outline of the ship and the frozen specimen. This time we get to see the ship, which at first seems novel but then becomes ridiculous at the end of the film.

Well, you can guess that they bring the specimen back to the base camp, it thaws out, starts killing / absorbing people, and before we know it no one can trust each other. First they pull a "bait and switch" about who the Thing has "copied" in a helicopter attack scene that defies narrative logic. Okay, I'm willing to accept that the Thing is (SPOILER) just trying to get back to its ship and not headed for society like Kate worries it will. That's fine. But why, when in the helicopter, does the Thing freak out and attack the guy we thought was "infected" and cause the copter to crash, presumably killing it and the two American pilots (Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). But wait! They aren't dead, so Kate doesn't trust them. Could one of them be the Thing that survived and (for no good reason) returned to the camp?

The paranoia that works so well in Carpenter's film is nonexistent. Why? None of the characters are remotely memorable. It's hard to care about who is or isn't the Thing when your protagonists are two pilots who should be dead, three scientists who behave suspiciously, a bland research assistant and a gaggle of interchangeable Norwegian victims-to-be. I give Mary Elizabeth Winstead credit for trying to keep everything together, and I will also concede that the film wisely doesn't try to make her into a Jack MacReady surrogate. That said, she's constantly pushed into the background of scenes by characters I could care less about and I didn't buy the "sad" ending before the film remembered it needed to bridge to a much better film.

Because they couldn't use the "blood" test again, there's a half novel but half baked attempt to develop the absorbing powers of the creature. It can't mimic non-organic material, so Kate decides the best way to see who is and isn't human is to - it's so much stupider typing it - check everyone's mouths for fillings. Seriously. They set up the Thing's evolution but couldn't figure out how to parlay that into an interesting way of generating suspense. Why? Because FOUR people don't have fillings and only one of them is the Thing, but we don't find out which one until a silly fight scene between the pilots and the scientists.

A word on the effects - I was under the impression that 2011's The Thing was to have more "practical" special effects and less CGI. What I didn't realize was that was limited to corpses. The work by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. is appropriately disgusting, but it isn't freakish or disturbing like Rob Bottin's effects. They also don't move - the practical effects are for corpses, of fused Thing/human hybrids or half absorbed corpses or charred remains. Anything that moves is bad looking CGI that seems like it was borrowed from Dead Space. Things look even stupider in the ship, where the Thing looks like a rejected monster from Men in Black II.

Who was this movie made for? I can't imagine people who have seen The Thing from Another World or The Thing sitting through the entire film. Only people with a passing knowledge of Carpenter's film would even stay engaged, but most of the connections at the end would be lost on them. I actually give a pass to selling it as "from the producers of Dawn of the Dead" because in theory, it could have been different enough of a take on the premise that using Zack Snyder's remake as a basis for comparison. Had the film lived up to that concept, maybe I could understand why it exists.

For a brief moment in the first thirty minutes, I thought there might be something watchable in The Thing. It turned out that there was, and it was John Carpenter's The Thing. Why I watched the watered down, CGI "enhanced" version is anyone's guess. Well, the truth is that I said "what the hell" and rolled the dice. Never has the term "craps" been more appropriate. Let's just say I watched it So You Won't Have To and leave it at that.

You can't choose your family, but the Video Daily Double will help you stop asking!

2011-12-07T09:44:00.000-05:00

Good day to you all, Educationeers! It occurred to me that during all of this social programming, good old Cap'n Howdy hasn't taken the time to focus on the important issues, like family or the questions that make up life. Fortunately, the Video Daily Double has exactly the solution. Prepare to fully understand how we ought to deal with our nuclear family and those puzzlers that make up every day experience.

Stop asking and start learning!

---

Our first film, Friendship Begins at Home, is about being friends with your family. Think of them as the friends you can't get rid of. Ever.

Our second film, Answering the Child's Why, is really about how adults address the stupid questions of childhood. It turns out the answer isn't "shut up" or "because I said so," but is yet another opportunity to indoctrinate the next generation. Who knew?

P.S. I double dog dare you to answer the "why did he die?" the way they do in this film.

Retro Review: Last Action Hero

2011-12-06T21:17:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the first time you watched a movie and KNEW it sucked? Not retroactively, like you saw a movie as a kid and liked it and then later realized how indiscriminate the tastes of juvenalia are. No, like the moment in your adolescence when you first understood that movies can be boring pieces of crap drizzled all over your impressionable mind (I was going to go for a food metaphor but the end result was so disgusting that the image of crap dripping on an exposed human brain seemed preferable.) I remember that movie clearly: Last Action Hero.

I can't with any good reason explain to you how I'd seen as many Arnold Schwarzenegger films as I had by the age of 14, but in addition to both Terminators, I'd seen Predator, Commando, The Running Man, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Total Recall, and Conan the Barbarian. Had I seen Conan the Destroyer, it's possible this whole story would have been rendered moot, but I hadn't at the time. But I HAD heard of Last Action Hero. You might have too: in 1993, it was being advertised relentlessly. From the director of Die Hard (and Predator) and the writer of Lethal Weapon (or re-writer, actually. the guy who would eventually write X2 wrote the first draft) and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This was the same summer as Jurassic Park, so if you don't remember Last Action Hero, that's okay. No one else remembers it either. Nobody seemed to remember it then - my strongest memory of seeing Last Action Hero was going to see it opening day and being able to count (on one hand) the number of people in the audience including my brother. That's never a good sign for a movie so heavily advertised. At the time I was still blissfully unaware of the concept of movies that studios blew a lot of money on that turned out to be total flops, so as Last Action Hero unfolded, it was a stark introduction to reality. Good writers and good directors and famous actors could make shitty movies. Unfunny, stupid, strained, boring movies.

Now they put on a good show of trying to trick you into thinking that Last Action Hero isn't garbage; there's plenty of self-referential Hollywood comedy in the "movie" world of Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger). Celebrities appear as variants of their popular characters for stupid cameos that would make the Zucker brothers shake their heads (I wish I could tell you why Sharon Stone is in the movie but I can't remember. Oh wait, yes I do. It's the same reason Robert Patrick is in the same scene.) This is like a high rent version of _____ Movie, but when they can actually afford to hire the personalities and not someone who looks nothing like them.

Anyway, once you get past a somewhat clever plot device like F. Murray Abraham being the bad guy because he "killed Amadeus," there's nothing worth watching the film for. I remember we walked out understanding that terrible movies happen to good people, that we should be more judicious in what we saw, and not to trust advertising. Well, two out of three wasn't bad.

I've never seen Last Action Hero again in the ensuing 18 years. I can't see how that would need to change. Make your case, if you want...

Fifteen Minute Movies - Grosse Point Blank

2011-12-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

Well, eventually - I'm more than fifteen minutes into Grosse Pointe Blank, but I had to share the beginning of the tape with the rest of you. One of my forgotten joys about VHS was the random collection of trailers you'd find in front of the movie, and Miramax put together a doozy to proceed this one.

In the order they played, this is what Bob and Harvey Weinstein think you might like if you rent / bought Grosse Pointe Blank:

Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion
Playing God
Gone Fishin'
The Sixth Man
The Prophecy 2
Chasing Amy

No joke. The trailers don't make much sense, that placement really doesn't make sense, and to be honest with you, aside from the first movie I don't know that any of them are remotely similar to "John Cusack as hitman who takes a job the same weekend as his high school reunion." I greatly enjoy Grosse Pointe Blank, and have fun every time I watch the movie, but I never once considered any of the other films advertised in front of it as a good "double feature" option.

For those of you who don't remember some of those titles, let's do a quick recap: Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion is the one with Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino as airhead valley girls who try to make a splash at their reunion. Playing God was David Duchovny's first major motion picture after The X-Files broke big (and before anybody knew what Kalifornia was), and also features Angelina Jolie. I've seen it and even I don't really recall specifics about the plot. Gone Fishin' is that movie with Joe Pesci and Danny Glover that everybody saw the ads for and didn't see. The Sixth Man? Kadeem Hardison and Marlon Wayans in a movie about the ghost of a basketball player who helps his team. The Prophecy 2 was the sequel to The Prophecy and is notable for having Jennifer Beals, Christopher Walken, and Glen Danzig.

And then there's Chasing Amy. I think most of you know Kevin Smith's first "departure" from purely juvenile comedy and how people like to pretend that it's actually good, but I'm going to put all that aside. After all, it's not Armageddon's fault that it's the second least deserving Criterion title. The point of mentioning Chasing Amy (a movie that I have never once thought of when watching Grosse Pointe Blank) is the trailer, which is such a sanitized and toothless take on the film that they don't even show that the main character is a lesbian.

Oh, and there's a spot for the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack. So how far did I make it into the movie after all that set up? Well, about as far a Martin Blank (Cusack) watching the Grocer (Dan Aykroyd) gun down a target and ruin his hit. The rest, as they say, was for another day...

The Most Hated Sequels of All Time Trailer Sunday!

2011-12-04T20:06:00.000-05:00

Blues Brothers 2000

An American Werewolf in Paris

Batman & Robin

Rocky V

The Godfather Part III

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Blogorium Review: Midnight in Paris

2011-12-04T01:01:00.000-05:00

There is a fine line that comes with writing about Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, one that exists because the joy of his film is central to not knowing the premise. At the same time, it's not enough for me to tell you that Midnight in Paris is absolutely worth your time; Woody Allen films are an acquired taste, and in the last few years it's been hard to know what you're going to get. With varying degrees of success, he's worked in thriller (Match Point, Cassandra's Dream), slapstick (Scoop), atypical Allen fare (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), perhaps too typical Allen fare (Anything Else, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), and experiments like Everybody Says I Love You, Melinda and Melinda or Whatever Works, where he substituted the "Woody Allen" surrogate for Larry David, a singular personality in his own right. I liked some of them when others didn't, and didn't like several of them at all.

Midnight in Paris is a return to a whimsical Woody Allen, and at the risk of spoiling things to much, an inversion of The Purple Rose of Cairo. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter striving to be something more, and is having trouble with his first novel. His fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) brings Gil along to Paris where her parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller) are visiting on business, and it is apparent that he doesn't quite seem in sync with their world view.

Gil idealizes Paris of the 1920s, much to the consternation of Inez, who is more interested in their future home in Malibu. Gil's frustration is exacerbated by the appearance of Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda), a pair of intellectual blowhards who Inez fawns over (and is, perhaps, a bit too drawn towards). One night, Gil decides to walk home while Paul, Inez, and Carol go dancing, and finds himself lost in Paris. As the clock strikes midnight, a strange car pulls up and its passengers beckon the would-be novelist to join them.

And this is where I hesitate to go further. It's not as though you couldn't find out for yourself what the "gimmick" or "twist" is, so to speak, but even knowing where Gil goes and who he meets doesn't properly convey how delightful Midnight in Paris is. I thought I understood where the film was going from speaking to friends, but Allen constructs the narrative in such a way that as it unfolds you become more invested in the parallel stories - Gil's adventures after midnight and the increasingly evident cracks in his relationship with Inez, many of which are so fundamental that one wonders how they ever got so far.

By necessity, I'm going to warn you off from anything after this point by slapping a big SPOILER warning. I want to talk about Gil's midnight adventures, and in particular a second layer late in the film that pushed the conceit further along, so be advised. From here on out I'm going to mention specifics about who Gil meets, how I thought it was going to impact the story, and why Midnight in Paris is smart enough to push forward beyond a simple "appreciate what you have" story.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT SO DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU

So I don't want to talk too much about how Gil interacts with the Fitzgeralds (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) or Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) or Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), or the procession of cameos for Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Buñuel (Adrian de Van), Dali (Adrien Brody), or Joséphine Baker (Sonia Rolland), which are admittedly fun but secondary to the main part of the "Gil in the 1920s" parts of the film. The initial encounters, particularly the look on Owen Wilson's face when he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, are understated comedy, but the real meat of that portion of the film is his budding relationship with Adrianna (Marion Cotillard), a woman drawn to Picasso, Hemingway, and eventually Gil.

My initial understanding of Midnight in Paris was that only the first twenty or so minutes took place in the present, so I was pleasantly surprised to see Allen move Gil back and forth through time. At first it's unclear whether this is really happening or just in Gil's mind, but as the film pushes forward one begins to understand that this is not imaginary - first Gil finds a diary in a Parisian market that belonged to Adrianna (as we discover in a moment where he finds a woman who can translate while Gil sits on a park bench). Later, after Inez's father becomes suspicious of Gil's late night activity, Allen explicitly shows us what happens to a private detective hired to follow the American in a comic aside that says "this is real."

All of the "1920s" moments are fun and provide some of the better laughs in Midnight in Paris, not limited to Gil's explanation to Zelda Fitzgerald of what Valium is, or Dali's obsession with the rhinoceros, or the way that The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie figures into a conversation between the time traveler and a young Buñuel. The Surrealists' reaction to Gil's predicament (and how he responds) was another highlight, and I must admit that the bluster of Hemingway made me chuckle.

The transitions and how they affect Gil would, under normal circumstances, fit into a Wizard of Oz / Alice in Wonderland sort of narrative where the protagonist learns what they really wanted all along was right in front of them, so I appreciate that Allen puts that "lesson" in the mouth of Paul, the least likable character in the film. We like Gil, and we want Paul to be wrong, so even when Stein and Hemingway reinforce that position, it's hard to accept what should be a standard movie trope.

It's not until Gil and Adriana go walking in Paris at night that Allen throws another wrinkle into the story - Adriana, like Gil, wants to belong to a different time (in this case, the 1890s), and as they sit in a 1920s cafe, a horse drawn carriage pulls up and they are whisked off to the Belle Époque and the Moulin Rouge. It wasn't that his deciding to leave was unexpected, but her decision to stay I found to be very interesting. It's a telling moment that distinguishes their view of the world, although to keep the narrative from being too pat one could argue that Gil doesn't stay in the 1920s because he also feels daunted by the literary competition.

Ultimately I found myself quite charmed by Midnight in Paris, not simply because it was a return to form for Woody Allen but because the film was so damned enjoyable. It's clever without being cloy, familiar without being obvious, and light without being inconsequential. And it's funny in unexpected ways. In most hands Midnight in Paris could be a thuddingly obvious sort of film, a great premise with a leaden message, but Woody Allen brings whimsy to the movie and raises it up another level. It's easily one of the best films I've seen this year, and not one I was expecting to enjoy so much when it came out.

The Beginning of the (Year) End.

2011-12-01T21:53:00.000-05:00

Well gang, it's December, which means I'm one month away from embarking on my annual "Year End" lists. The problem, as I see it, is that I have a LOT of movies I want to see and only one month to watch them. Out of a list of potential titles (and of varying degrees of interest), I've narrowed it down to what I really see before January rolls around. They are (in no particular order):

Drive

A Dangerous Method

Hugo

Melancholia

The Tree of Life

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The Muppets

Martha Macy May Marlene

The Future

50/50

The Guard

Our Idiot Brother

Midnight in Paris

The Trip

Troll Hunter

The Devil's Double

Road to Nowhere

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Rango

The Ides of March

Another Earth

The Descendants

Tabloid

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

and just for the hell of it: The Thing.

If you were curious, this is what I've already seen this year:

Attack the Block
Super
Hobo with a Shotgun
Bridesmaids
Paul
Fast Five
The People vs. George Lucas
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Drive Angry
More Brains: A Return to the Living Dead
The Mechanic
Killer Elite
In Time
Cyrus
American: The Bill Hicks Story
Jackass 3 / 3.5
Scream 4
Thor
The Hangover Part II
Horrible Bosses
The Change-Up
Blubberella
Ride, Rise, Roar
Sucker Punch
X-Men: First Class
The Ward
Quarantine 2: Terminal
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
Exporting Raymond
Fright Night
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Red State
Blood Runs Cold
Bong of the Dead
The Dead
The Puppet Monster Massacre
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

So I have quite a few down, but many more to go. Stay tuned as the Cap'n tries to negotiate working 40 hours a week and watching everything on that first list. I can do it! Right?

Money and What We Spend It On, Today on the Video Daily Double

2011-11-30T10:46:00.001-05:00

Huzzah, Educationeers! Cap'n Howdy is back with another fact filled Video Daily Double. Today we're going to look at what currency is, and then something you should not spend it on. Unless that's your thing. Then again, according to the second film, your thing is a bad thing. Don't touch it. Shame on you!

SHAME!!!

---

Our first film, What is Money, answers the question you never thought to ask. The answer, by the way, is not "delicious."

Speaking of delicious, our second film is called Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb. Can't imagine why.

Retro Review: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

2011-11-29T14:58:00.000-05:00

Quick story: in the world of quasi-counterculture of high school circa 1998, there were very few things as exciting as the impending release of Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I know this because I and friends of mine were quasi-countercultural in high school, insomuch as one could be where we went to high school. For a few of us, following the every movement of the film was like a trail of breadcrumbs to something that of course would be amazing. Even more amazing, we hoped, than the release of Thompson's oft-delayed Polo is My Life (which never came out, by the way).

As recently as five years ago it was fashionable for assholes to assume that people only knew who Terry Gilliam was because of Fear and Loathing - I guess because the assholes making that assumption weren't old enough to see it themselves. If this qualifies as justification, I think it's fair to point out that before I had a working understanding of what the words "Monty" "Python" "Flying" and "Circus" meant in conjunction, I had already seen Time Bandits. In fact, I'm positive that I had seen Time Bandits on home video long before Monty Python registered in my brain. I was traumatized at a young age by the parents who failed to recognize "Evil" and were destroyed, orphaning Kevin until Sean Connery arrived as a fireman (and not Agamemnon) to rescue him.

To be fair, it was probably years later before I saw Brazil, which is what most defensive geeks cite when someone throws the "you only like him because of Fear and Loathing" slur, but I did see The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys in theatres (with a bonus Independence Day trailer in front of Monkeys, which I remember for no apparent reason). Anyway, so the collision of director we liked and author we loved (with Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke, no less) we a "must see" affair. We put on hawaiian shirts, poker visors, and headed to the Grande in Raleigh.

It didn't matter that critics savaged the film, or that people got up and left during the movie while we howled with laughter. We loved it, and though the film died the quick death at the box office, it became its own bona fide cult phenomenon on video. Hell, it even has its own Criterion Spine Number (175). Eat that, fashionable assholes.

But that is not the quick story. Oh no. That's the background to what happened after we saw the movie, where our own bourgeoisie version of "Gonzo" kicked in. See, a nearby high school was building a new annex and we'd been sneaking by there on weekends and evenings to poke around the in construction and rarely secured proto-building. We figured that night would be a good opportunity to do the same, and the driver in question parked his Dart across four parking spaces as we tromped around the pretty-much completed and now totally locked new area. The important part here is how he parked the car, because otherwise there's a reasonably good chance the local police wouldn't start investigating potential tresspassing.

But he did, and they did, and we three geniuses came marching around the building like people with something to hide (rather than walk all the way around the campus and pretend we'd simply been out for a stroll nearby), so they took our ID's and ran them while we sweated it out. Of course, being suburbia, they just told us to go home and we did and that was that. There's no good ending to the adventure, because we lived in and near a city where police are bored, kids are even more listless, and misdemeanors aren't worth anybody's time.

Still, at the time it felt like a fitting cap to seeing the film, and it wasn't like we didn't visit other high school campuses and tool around (forgive me, but I have a fascination with structures designed to be populated but are instead deserted, hence my dalliance with abandoned mall exploration years later). We watched Fear and Loathing again and again on video, and eventually Thompson published The Rum Diary, Kindgom of Fear much (MUCH) later, followed by Hey Rube. I still haven't seen the critically lukewarm-ed The Rum Diary adaptation (also starring Depp) but I did watch all of Gilliam's subsequent films, including the terrible Brothers Grimm, the Cormac McCarthy-level bleak Tideland, and the fascinating but inevitably compromised The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I haven't tooled around and empty campus in a long time, though. It seems a little perv-y now.

Fifteen Minute Movies: Adventures in Babysitting (Part Two)

2011-11-28T18:35:00.000-05:00

However, this does not cover the second fifteen minute increment of Adventures in Babysitting. Oh no. I didn't say arbitrary, well, arbitrarily. I mean it. Today we're going to jump ahead past the chop shop, the Buddy Guy "Babysitter Blues," past the double-F-Bomb-in-a-PG13-movie gang fight and hospital chase to the University of Chicago party that Anthony Rapp decides the kids need to attend. Where two guys are convinced that Elisabeth Shue's Chris is "Miss March" from Playboy. Where we meet "The Rudd."

By this I don't actually mean Paul Rudd, but instead the character that Paul Rudd would be playing if Adventures in Babysitting were made immediately before / after Wet Hot American Summer. Rudd's a little too old to be playing a college junior / senior now, but somewhere between Halloween 6 and Wet Hot I could see him playing the dude who logically outwits the "Miss March" idiots, woos Chris, and then drives the kids to Dawson's garage to meet Thor.

Ah yes, Thor. I believe I mentioned him last time. Why? Because chances are you saw another movie in 1987 with the guy who plays Thor, the guy who owns Dawson's Garage (which I guess probably makes him Dawson, but whatever). The actor's name? Vincent D'Onofrio. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the face will, from another rather famous 1987 release, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

Here's D'Onofrio as Private "Gomer Pyle" in Full Metal Jacket.

and as Thor in Adventures in Babysitting.

Maybe you can understand why it is I never once thought I knew who the mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting was. The best part? Full Metal Jacket was in theaters two weeks before Adventures in Babysitting, so there's a slim chance that eagle-eyed cinephiles might have seen D'Onofrio's transformation from pudgy psychopath to God of Thunder.

So we have a moment where the childlike innocence of a girl who loves Thor saves Chris and company from being five bucks short in paying for a blown out tire, and then we're off again. Fifteen minutes was winding down just as Chris drives past the fancy restaurant she and Bradley Whitford were going to eat at, and the kids see his car! Is there a showdown looming? Were there shenanigans with Brenda at the bus stop? Well, I guess you'll have to watch Adventures in Babysitting, because when this feature resumes, I'll be moving on to another movie...

Until then, keep watching in bite-sized portions!

Somehow I'd Never Done This Before Trailer Sunday

2011-11-27T10:43:00.000-05:00

Dr. No

From Russia with Love

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

The Spy Who Loved Me

The Living Daylights

Goldeneye

Casino Royale

Blogorium Review: Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides

2011-11-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

The newest Pirates of the Caribbean film, On Stranger Tides, isn't exactly a disaster, but that's not as reassuring as you might think. The movie is lacking in nearly every way: the plot, the acting, the strangely stunted sense of scope (despite visually sumptuous locations), even the villain feels less imposing than he ought to. I'm half tempted to chalk it up to director Rob Marshall, who was not only taking over for Gore Verbinski after three films, but has a track record (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine) that in no way prepares him for a rousing adventure film of swash-buckling and derring do. But I don't know that I'm willing to hang it all on Marshall - the story doesn't really work in the first place.

Why the story - a overly complicated race to find the Fountain of Youth featuring zombies, mermaids, and Blackbeard - is incongruous with the other films is due in large part to the fact that returning screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio built their script around Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides. The film, accordingly, feels like characters from earlier Pirates films shoehorned into a separate narrative, one that can hardly accommodate them. At first it seemed odd to me that a series that managed to incorporate Davey Jones, voodoo curses, the Kraken, the afterworld, and undead pirates would be unable to intermingle with zombified crew members, mermaids, and the Fountain of Youth (hinted at in At World's End), but the end result is a movie that shouldn't have Jack Sparrow in it but does.

Speaking of which, I don't know what Johnny Depp was thinking during On Stranger Tides. It's as though he knows he supposed to be playing Jack Sparrow, but often forgets under the demands of playing the lead (a semi-romantic lead at that), so for much of the film he's painfully ordinary, and then as though he's remembered he's playing Captain Jack, Depp will swagger or make a funny face. The performance is uneven at best, but then again Jack Sparrow should never be the lead of one of the Pirates films. He functions best as a secondary character - a ruthless, conniving trouble maker with rotten luck - as a counterpoint to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan. If coupled with compelling leads and a strong villain, Depp is able to shine and be loopy. On his own, he's adrift.

And there's nobody in On Stranger Tides to help take the attention away from Depp's "am I or am I not Jack Sparrow" routine. Penelope Cruz doesn't have much to do as Angelica Teach, daughter of Blackbeard and someone who Jack (possibly) corrupted at a young age. Depp and Cruz do their damnedest to generate chemistry, and while the effort is evident, the end result is less than palpable. Worse off is Sam Clafin as Phillip, a missionary being held captive aboard The Queen Anne's Revenge, who has as much chemistry with fellow captive Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (as mermaid Syreena) as a couple of mops in a bucket. Their story is so uninteresting that I failed to care a) when Blackbeard appears to kill Phillip, and b) when the film never bothers to explain exactly how Syreena "saves" him near the end.

Oh, speaking of Blackbeard, it's probably fair to note just how unimpressive Ian McShane is in a role that should have fit him like a glove. Instead of the imposing presence that Edward Teach ought to be, given that he has a supernatural power over his very ship, McShane underplays Blackbeard at every opportunity. I never once believed he was dangerous, capable of betrayal, or short tempered and cruel enough to murder people (even though he does). The sense of urgency surrounding his need to find the Fountain - due to a prophecy of his death - also never connect in McShane's face. He says all the right things, but one never believes that he's really concerned about anything. Instead of towering, he's annoying - his cruelty is tacked on and half-hearted.

Only Geoffery Rush emerges with something close to a memorable performance, though it takes the better half of the film for Barbossa to emerge as anything more than a stooge for the Royal Navy. Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire, Snatch) has flashes as Scrum, the sort of substitute Gibbs (although actual Gibbs, Kevin McNally, is in the film and traveling with Barbossa). Keith Richards has a perfunctory cameo that makes even less sense than his appearance in At World's End. By the end of the film I'd forgotten that Richard Griffiths (Withnail & I) played the King.

So Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides sometimes looks nice, is sometimes entertaining, but not really good enough to make it more than a movie you could wander in and out of freely. Pay no attention to the mermaid tears or silver chalices or the rules of finding the fountain, because they really don't matter. They belong to another story, one without a nice wrap-up scene featuring Gibbs and Jack on the beach, explaining what just happened. Unfortunately we have this middling affair, not bad enough to be avoided and not good enough to recommend. If you, like me, were invested in the previous films, then On Stranger Tides is likely to keep you half involved for two hours and fifteen minutes, but the nagging feeling you could have watched something better will creep up repeatedly.

Turkey Revenge!

2011-11-24T13:20:00.000-05:00

Please come back tomorrow for a review of animal appropriate Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but in the mean time, tide yourself over with idiots unsuccessfully frying turkeys.

Yeah, Just Disregard This Video Daily Double Tomorrow.

2011-11-23T14:13:00.000-05:00

Well, Educationeers, I tried. I tried to put together a good Video Daily Double to get you through the rest of the week, but then I remembered what Thursday and Friday are. So uh, yeah. Today's short films about eating healthy and being thrifty. You can watch them while snorfing down turkey and ordering stuff online. Like I said, I tried.

Eh, to the ~~exercise in futility~~ Learn-Mobile!

---

Our first film, Dining Together, happens to also be about Thanksgiving. Not one you've ever seen, but a theoretical Thanksgiving of the "good old days" old people tell you about.

Our second film, Woman American, is about saving your pennies and not spending like crazy. See if you can get through the entire film without buying something on the internet.

Retro Review: The Fifth Element

2011-11-22T20:58:00.000-05:00

When I re-purposed "From the Vaults" into Retro Reviews, one of the first films I mentioned as an example of how relationships with films change was The Fifth Element I never got around to explaining the first experience I had with the movie, so let's fix that today.

The Fifth Element came out in May of 1997, a period when I was regularly attending films, both good and bad - McHale's Navy being the nadir of that era. At the time, though, I might have argued vigorously that The Fifth Element was every bit as bad of a film. That's right - when we saw it the first time at Waverly Place, the consensus was that it sucked. I didn't get the over-exagerrated colors, design, costumes, and performances. And that was BEFORE Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod appeared. We derided the Luke Perry cameo at the beginning, guffawed at "Tiny" Lister, Jr. as the President of Earth, and couldn't get over Gary Oldman's hairstyle.

More to the point, we weren't paying attention - I remember loudly complaining that the plot didn't make any sense, that it was too busy, and that the resolution that the "fifth element" was "love" was laughable. It seemed like a French take on Captain Planet or some crap like that. We walked out laughing about how horrible The Fifth Element was, how stupid it was we went to see it, and how much more excited we were about The Lost World or Face/Off. We'd just seen the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions in theatres; what was this garbage all about?

And that's how I remembered The Fifth Element for another year or so. I don't think I watched it again on video when it came out, and it probably wasn't until I found myself confused but fascinated with the much derided Alien Resurrection that I thought about giving a French director working on American studio films another go. I may have watched Jeunet's The City of Lost Children in the interim as well, and almost certainly had seen (and loved) Luc Besson's The Professional on video. So I gave The Fifth Element another chance.

I loved it. I had no idea why I ever claimed the film was "confusing" or "stupid," and can only point to youthful ignorance for blowing the film off. It's a goofy, cluttered, and yes, simplified to radical degree, but it's all by design. Besson is having fun with the "fish out of water" trope, in an over-cluttered world that kept building up threatened by evil. The hero is a beleaguered taxi driver just hoping to get points off of his license. The only thing that can save the universe has taken the form of Milla Jovovich, and she literally falls into his taxi. Then two monks try to steal her, police and villains chase her, and an evil mastermind almost chokes to death on a cherry. Again, we haven't even made it to Ruby Rhod.

There are very few films that I can so vividly remember pulling a complete 180 on than The Fifth Element. From totally dismissing the film to embracing it and showing it to friends in college, I struggle to think of another such radical turnaround in two viewings. It just goes to show that when you see a film in your life can make all the difference. Sometimes you just aren't ready for it, but when you are the difference is night and day.

Fifteen Minute Movies: Adventures in Babysitting (Part One)

2011-11-21T21:32:00.000-05:00

Walking on a treadmill in short increments is going to provide a fun and hopefully continuing series for the Blogorium, one I'm going to call Fifteen Minute Movies. The length will eventually increase slowly but surely, but as it does, I'll generally be finished with one movie and starting another.

You see, there's an old TV / VCR combo unit upstairs, and all of the surviving tapes that I didn't banish to storage purgatory are up there, including the original Star Wars trilogy, the Thin Man series, various Disney movies, and all sorts of films that my parents found interesting and *cough* made copies of. I mean, taped off of AMC. Yeah... that's the ticket. Back when AMC didn't have commercial breaks during movies - which actually was the case twenty years ago.

Anyway, so today we'll look at the first fifteen minutes of Adventures in Babysitting, a movie I'd been orbiting around since finding $4.99 copies of the DVD at the place I worked at before the place I work at now (I was forbidden to mention it by name, mention it's logo with the star in it, or mention the giraffe by name, so why start giving it props now?). I never did pick up that DVD, but the tape sure was upstairs, and I haven't seen Adventures in Babysitting since high school (I'm pretty sure that's the last time I saw it all the way through). It seemed like a good place to start; I didn't remember many of the details but recall enjoying it at age 8.

Also, since David Gordon Green is all-but-giving-it-the-same-name remaking the film as The Sitter with Jonah Hill, it seemed appropriate to watch the movie that's pretty much entirely based on, at least from the trailers I've seen.

Here are a few tidbits I didn't remember / didn't know from the first fifteen minutes of Adventures in Babysitting (the only thing I did recognize immediately was Elisabeth Shue dancing and lip-synching to "And Then He Kissed Me" in what is now obviously an appropriation of Tom Cruise's "Old Time Rock 'n Roll" Risky Business scene).

- I forgot that Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) made his transition from writing for Steven Spielberg-produced films like Gremlins and The Goonies to directing with Adventures in Babysitting.

- This is, by the way, a pre-Back to the Future part 2 Elisabeth Shue, but post-Karate Kid.

- On the other hand, the film was a post-Back to the Future for Maia Brewton (who appeared as one of Lorraine's younger sisters) before playing Thor-obsessed Sara Anderson, but pre-Parker Lewis Can't Lose, where she played Parker's sister Shelley.

- Other casting notes during character introductions: Chris (Shue)'s boyfriend at the beginning of the film? The West Wing's Bradley Whitford. Brad Anderson (The Walton's Keith Coogan)'s best friend? Dazed and Confused (or Rent)'s Anthony Rapp. Chris's best friend Brenda? Carlito's Way's Penelope Ann Miller (or, if you prefer, Big Top Pee Wee's Penelope Ann Miller).

Now, based on what I just looked up on IMDB, I could tell you who it was that played Thor in the movie, but that's a few more "Fifteen Minute"'s away. Let's just say it's a name you're recognize, and considering the other movie he was prominently featured in for 1987, you'd be surprised. But we'll get to that.

So what else did I get in the first fifteen minutes of Adventures in Babysitting? Well, Columbus and writers David Simkins and Elizabeth Faucher efficiently set up why Chris Parker doesn't have a hot date, why Brenda prevents her from dodging babysitting the Anderson kids, that Brad has the hots for Chris, Darryl (Rapp) is kind of a pervert, and provides the impetus for the whole gang to head downtown. Not too shabby to include a song-and-dance scene and the credits. Well played, Columbus.

Join us next time for more Fifteen Minute Movies, wherein I pick another section of Adventures in Babysitting to report back with!

All MST3k Trailer Sunday!

2011-11-20T18:15:00.000-05:00

Mitchell

Cave Dwellers

Warrior of the Lost World

Laserblast

Teenagers from Outer Space

Eegah

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie

The Cap'n Presents: Adventures in Projectioneering (Part Five)

2011-11-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

This entry in Projectioneering is just barely about movies. That's your warning. What follows is a brief account of what projectionists and ushers do when given too much time and disposable promotional garbage. It is a tale of wanton abuse of information and violence. Prepare yourself.

During the summer of 2000, when management clearly wasn't paying attention to the "upstairs" part of the theatre, it was not uncommon to see four or five projectionists during a shift. For a sixteen screen cineplex, that breaks down to roughly three-and-a-half to four movies per projectionist. Needless to say, we had a LOT of free time in between (contrasted to when I was running all sixteen by myself, which required elaborate charts of what to start, what stopped, and what needed to be threaded in order to ensure everything started on time). We'd play cards, tell stories, arbitrarily edit trailers, and just generally be buffoons because nobody had the good sense to send two or three of us home.

One evening, when we realized that the free CD-ROM's of some now defunct internet provider were never going to sell, we decided to have our own gladiatorial combat session in one of the theatres. I mean, the ushers were asking for it, and we were game to take them down a peg. We fashioned weapons out of the plastic wrapped, stock paper cases, and prepared ourselves. It was only a matter of deciding which screen to shut down for our battle.

We decided on number 12 - where What Lies Beneath was playing. Most of the time nobody was ever in there anyway, because What Lies Beneath sucked. It was the kind of thing you could just sense - even dogs knew that Robert Zemeckis, Harrison Ford, and Michelle Pfeiffer laid a rotten egg in any theatre dumb enough to keep it around. Accordingly, we figured nobody would really miss a showing of it if we "removed" the screening for a week night.

Of course, as we were preparing for war, some hapless couple came in to buy tickets for (what else) What Lies Beneath. In an act of pure cruelty, we sent the assistant manager of projectionists down to explain that the air conditioning was leaking and that we had "closed" the screen for the night. With our lie firmly in place, they agreed to see something else, accepted passes for What Lies Beneath another night, and we staged war!

Projectionists being the clever sort we are, we hid a cache of cds in the ceiling to deprive the ushers of much needed ammunition, and brought it out as we moved in. We took the high ground and the advantage, and as the foolish popcorn and soda cleaners charged the stadium seating, we pelted them with cds. I crafted a sort of bolo using the discs and some duct tape and went wild with melee attacks, and our victory was decisive. I mean, they never really had a chance.

In retrospect, this may be the exact moment that management realized there were too many projectionists working at the theatre, and as many of them left for school, they opted not to replace them, leaving me alone most days. On the weekend they'd put someone on the other side, but we rarely if ever saw each other. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But man did we give those ushers a thwacking.

Postscript: If, for some reason, you were the couple trying to see What Lies Beneath that night and are reading this, I apologize. Not that you missed the terrible movie, but that we misled you - it wasn't that theatre with the leaky air conditioner. That was the one with Scary Movie in it.

A Well Informed Video Daily Double Makes the Best Decisions!

2011-11-16T20:12:00.000-05:00

Greetings, my Educationeers! It's nice to see you heeded my ~~warnings~~ suggestions yesterday and got on the right side of society. You're better than being one of those no-goodniks, those wasteful nonconformists that spend all of their time bucking trends and ironically appreciating things. Today's Video Daily Double should help keep you on track with a lesson on civics and on what it means to be an informed wife.

Learn on!

---

Our first film, A Citizen Makes a Decision, teaches us that we should research positions instead of blindly following... waitaminute... that doesn't make sense. Why would a well studied opinion help us when it's so much easier to repeat talking points verbatim without considering what they mean?

Our second film, A Word to the Wives, gives you the option to live in a nice kitchen while you're barefoot and pregnant. That's all you really need, right?

Retro Review: The Birth of a Nation

2011-11-15T21:19:00.000-05:00

Truth be told, I've only seen D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation once. I may have even slept through parts of it, to be even more honest. I saw the three hour plus film in an Introduction to Cinema class my freshman year of college, along with Top Hat, Citizen Kane, The General, Casablanca, City Lights, The Graduate, and Do the Right Thing (all of which I had, shamefully, not seen prior to that point). Appropriately, I've seen all of those films again since that class, but somehow never got around to reliving the glory of the KKK.

The Birth of a Nation was early in the curriculum, as it was taught chronologically, so it was a warm September afternoon (after lunch, at that), when I meandered into class and plopped down for a 187 minute silent film - a silent film that did, admittedly, make serious strides towards changing the way movies were made - about the South during Reconstruction. I should have known we were in trouble when Griffith portrays the first freed-slaves-turned-Congressmen as lazy degenerates lazily sprawled around Washington, D.C., but I had no idea how much worse it would get.

I gather that most people who never took a film course have been spared The Birth of a Nation and only know it by reputation, much of which is well deserved. As you've probably heard, the Klan are the heroes, saving South Carolina's Cameron family from the hands of a "rogue black man" named Gus. Meanwhile, lascivious mulatto named Silas Lynch is supposed to be rallying the black vote in the south, but instead he has eyes on a pretty white aristocrat. I nodded out for parts of the film, but what I saw really stuck with me.

The story is supposed to be about the Camerons and the Stonemans, two Southern families with sons on either side of the Civil War. The sons, Ben Cameron and Phil Stoneman, are friends, and not even fighting against each other can diminish that. After Lincoln is assassinated, the young men return home where Reconstruction is running wild in Piedmont, South Carolina. Newly liberated slaves are taking advantage of their freedom, drinking and gambling and lusting after pretty Southern belles. These are the sorts of things you remember, even when I had to look up the names of the two sons in the film.

The Birth of a Nation is unabashed in its racial stereotypes, ones that echoed throughout every Stepin Fetchit appearance of episode of Amos 'n Andy. African Americans freed from slavery aren't humans, they're animals, ready to take advantage of any opportunity given to them in this film. D.W. Griffith indulges in the worst stereotypes, and in the meantime treats a KKK raid at the end of the film with heroic flourishes - they sweep in to save the heroine from the evil Negro, and then are included in a montage that implies both Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ approve of their actions.

Look, I'm all for movies that push buttons, and The Birth of a Nation certainly pushed its fair share for the past 96 years, but no amount of camerwork and editing techniques can overcome the ugliness that is Griffith's film. I hesitated even reviewing it - limited memories notwithstanding - because I have no idea who would come looking for a write up of this films. Film history texts do a better job of contextualizing Griffith and the film and of giving the due credit for its technial innovations, but what I'm left with consistently is how one-sided the film is and how wrongheaded its protagonists seem in the cold light of history - especially the Klan of the 1950s and 60s. Every time I think about looking at The Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, I think twice. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.