News and Notes: Technical Edition (with Books)

 - Let's start with why it doesn't matter that Starz decided not to continue its contract with Netflix. This news is being treated the same way that Netflix's split with Showtime (and the never-to-be HBO deal), but I for one am happy to hear this.

 Consistently, I've found that Starz content on Netflix tends to be the most egregious examples of "pulling a fast one" on streaming viewers. In an era where "full screen" means something very different than it did five years ago, Starz streaming movies and TV shows on Netflix were constantly shown as "letterboxed" 4x3 images. If you aren't quite sure what I mean, try watching a show like MTV's Jersey Shore on a widescreen TV. See how the black bars are still on the top and bottom of the screen, even though it doesn't fill out the left and right of your TV? This is a fake "widescreen" that only really worked on old television sets.

 MTV released their Jersey Shore DVDs in the same fashion, and Starz did it with everything I watched from them on Netflix. It's a lazy alternative to providing 16x9 enhanced content and it actually diminishes the size of the picture on your screen. While it might have been nice to watch newer Disney films on Netflix, it certainly wasn't worth the drop in picture size. Not in this day and age. Netflix is hurting, and more companies jumping ship isn't necessarily good news for them, but I avoided the "Starz" section of Instant Viewing like the plague after being burned repeatedly. Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.

 - Speaking of "Full Screen," it makes me chuckle when I see stores (like one I will soon no longer be with) that still sell new DVDs with that moniker. Widescreen has slowly become the norm, and the pan-and-scan 4x3 discs are less and less desirable for customers. Many studios don't release new movies in "Full Screen" anymore, because it doesn't mean the same thing it used to. Not so long ago I would have to pay careful attention to the DVD cover of a movie I wanted to pick up in order not to buy one with a butchered "full" transfer.

 Every now and then, I put this video up, just to give folks a primer of what I mean by "pan-and-scan," because it doesn't just mean removing the black bars from the top and bottom of widescreen films:



  I often wonder what families who made the transition from standard TVs to widescreen TVs do with their collections of "Full Screen" DVDs when watching them. What probably happens is that they set their TV to automatically zoom in on the image so it fills the whole frame, creating an image twice as messy as the one shown above. Imagine taking a "Full Screen" image and then stretching it out even further to the left and right, because that's what probably happens. Yikes. I've seen it done before with VHS (hell, I did it once with the Star Wars Holiday Special) and if you really don't mind things looking messy, I guess it's watchable. But again, we were watching the Star Wars Holiday Special here, and mostly in fast-forward.

- Some time in the near future the Cap'n might have a book review up again. It's been a while, I know, but I've started reading Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror by Jason Zinoman. From the introduction, it certainly seems to be interested in Wes Craven, Sean Cunningham, George Romero, John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon, and Brian de Palma and uses the William Castle produced, Roman Polanski directed Rosemary's Baby as the point at which Old Horror passed the torch to Modern Horror.

 I was a little nervous starting out because I have followed much of the history of Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, Halloween, and Alien, but the chapter on Rosemary's Baby already included an anecdote about Vincent Price I don't think I've seen anywhere to this point as well as a more balanced approach to Castle's involvement into bringing the picture to Paramount than is evident from Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture. The next chapter is about Hitchcock, particularly Psycho's oft cited influence on Modern Horror, and seems to be adding some nuance to the claims that it spawned the slasher films of the next two decades. Anyway, I'm clearly only starting the book, so I'll give it a proper review when I finish. I will say that it really makes me want to start working on a book idea I've had for years...

Spoiler of the Day: They Live

 Aliens have infiltrated our society, and are posing as the wealthy, or police, or politicians; anyone who has real power. They keep humanity down by brainwashing them with hypnotic signs that say "OBEY" or "MARRY AND REPRODUCE." Fortunately, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper discovers a box of sunglasses hidden an a resistance-run church, and he convinces the rebels to destroy the signal aliens send out over television, allowing the world to see them for what they really are. After kicking ass (he was all out of bubblegum, or this movie might be called "They Wait for Him to Chew Bubblegum") Piper is mortally wounded but destroys the TV antenna, exposing the aliens. But don't worry, "Hot Rod" fans; he came back to life just in time to beat up Morton Downey, Jr. at Wrestlemania V.

 Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Event Horizon

Spoiler of the Day: Dark City

 *All Together Now* Aliens have been kidnapping humans to study their behavior. The city our hero (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in is not on Earth, but a floating station somewhere in space. The aliens periodically wipe the memories of their subjects, set up new scenarios, and watch them play out. With the help of Doctor Schreiber, the aliens' human accomplice, Sewell learns how to manipulate the city, save Jennifer Connelly, and defeat his captors. At the end they stand on a pier. Sewell writes down his experiences and sends them to Earth, where the Wachowski brothers and Joel Silver promptly replace the word "aliens" with "robots," change the title to "The Matrix," and sit back and make megabucks. Then two terrible sequels.

 Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: They Live

A Theory About Star Wars

 ...or really a theory about George Lucas, I suppose. Star Wars is, as usual, the method by which Lucas has chosen to again antagonize geeks everywhere. By now, most of you have heard about the change to Return of the Jedi where Darth Vader screams "Noooooo!" before throwing the Emperor deep into the Death Star, as well as a few other "adjustments" to the Original Trilogy* (and the Prequel Trilogy, but really, who cares about that?). Attentive internet geeks have been pitting George Lucas from 1988 against the George Lucas of today, once again desperately trying to appeal to the director / producer. That, or to once again make the argument that the guy is a money-grubbing hack. Or that other thing - the totally overboard reference to what Lucas is allegedly doing to your "childhood" that I cannot abide by repeating.

 At this point, it gets really old hearing about how angry people are at George Lucas and about documentaries like The People vs. George Lucas, etc. Every time the inevitable re-release of the film comes out, people swear they're being cheated and that "this is the last time you'll get MY money, George!" and then news comes out about changes and then the hyperbole kicks into high gear. Star Wars came out on DVD - but it was the Special Editions. Then Lucas released the Original Versions on DVD, but not anamorphically enhanced and with 2.0 stereo mixes (direct ports from the Laserdiscs) and that was ripping people off so of course they aren't going to buy it. Now the Blu-Rays are coming out and another series of alterations are in place and fans are shocked to discover that a man who has digitally altered every single film he's directed for DVD and Blu-Ray release once again took the opportunity for more tinkering.

 Here's the catch - I think he knows that you're going to complain. He also knows (as I do) that the calls for boycotts are no reflection of actual sales. They haven't been in the past - and I've worked in places that sold those movies and toys and I know for a fact that people continue to buy the versions of Star Wars they claim to loathe - and I strongly believe that other than grousing the internet community, Lucas knows exactly what he's doing. He doesn't even mind ruffling those feathers, because it helps his cause.

 Lucas has, once again, shrewdly concocted a way to keep everyone talking about Star Wars as the Blu-Ray release approaches. It's not enough to sell ad space and to make deals with Best Buy about exclusive this or yadda yadda that; despite what's said about the man, George Lucas knows how to get his audience passionate about Star Wars when it's time to have their wallets out. Whether the passion is positive or negative, I suspect he doesn't care, because here's what's going to happen: outraged fans are going to scream all the way up and down the internet about the classics being "butchered" again, swear that THIS TIME they won't be buying them, and then quietly ordering that nine disc boxed set off of Amazon so that the next time they see their friends, they can authoritatively rant with indignation.

 The changes we DO know about aren't the only changes, which may or may not be true - we know that puppet Yoda from The Phantom Menace is now digital, and that Obi-Wan's "dragon" noise is, *ahem* more suggestive, and that Ewoks blink now - but the earliest promise from Lucasfilm was of more "surprises" in the films. In order to be a properly incensed geek, that means purchasing the set (on the down-low, of course) in order to catalog the changes before someone else gets to it and then poring over every minute detail on chat boards.The people who yell the loudest online are almost always the first people to say to you "can you believe that Lucas did THIS and THIS???" at the first opportunity, usually before the average fan even noticed.

 So is this outrage surprising? No, not really. Is it fun to sit back and listen to? Yeah, it kind of is. If people really stuck to their guns and didn't buy this Blu-Ray set after rating it with one star on Amazon sight unseen, I'd be more impressed with the sturm and drang, but I don't see that happening. I've yet to decide if I'm going to pick it up or wait another year (*ahem*, thirty-fifth anniversary of A New Hope) for some other, cheaper, repackaging once this version is pulled from shelves (20th Century Fox, like Disney, will do that to drive up demand). I'd like to see those extra three discs of footage, and wouldn't mind watching the films in high definition, but it really depends on if I have a hundred dollars to spare in two weeks. I waited on The Lord of the Rings and that worked out well enough. Lucas has my passing attention, and he may well have my money, but I can't give him the outrage; just a passing glance and "Huh, this again?"




 * Actually, it's not even the Original Trilogy at this point. For a detailed examination of how the original films became the Special Editions and then the DVD editions, go here.

Spoiler of the Day: Knowing

 The mysterious code that Nicolas Cage was trying to decipher came from aliens, who whispered it in the ear of a little girl fifty years ago. It contains all of the dates and death counts of Earth's major disasters, including an impending Solar Flare that will wipe out Mercury, Venus, and Earth. As Cage searches for a way to survive, mysterious men follow him around, and are waiting when he locates the final set of coordinates. The strange men are aliens, and they take him, his son, and the little girl's granddaughter away in their spaceship, along with other people chosen arbitrarily to be saved.


Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Dark City

Spoiler of the Day: Signs

 There ARE aliens invading Earth, but they're stupid aliens. Why? In their infinite wisdom, they decided to conquer a planet comprised of the one weakness they have: water. Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, and kids defeat one of the aliens with a glass of water. Oh, and then Phoenix, a failed baseball player, beats the alien to death with his baseball bat. Who needs germs when you have baseball bats?


 Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Knowing

Retro Review: The Blair Witch Project and Book of Shadows - Blair Witch 2

 At this point, it's been so long since The Blair Witch Project came out that people have by and large forgotten all about the film. Considering that we're still feeling the impact of "found footage" movies, including no less than three that I can name released in the U.S. this year (The Troll Hunter, [REC]2, and the upcoming Apollo 18). That's not including [REC], Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, The Last Exorcism, Cloverfield, The Zombie Diaries and The Poughkeepsie Tapes. These are, in one form or another, the offspring of The Blair Witch's Projects success; a low-budget horror film passed along like an urban legend until it was time to explode in the mainstream. It captured the zeitgeist at a time when horror was winding down from self-referential Scream knockoffs, and scared the hell out of a lot of people.

 And then there was that second film. Yeah, I don't blame you for not remembering Book of Shadows.

 Back to the success story - The Blair Witch Project was a movie I'd hear about long before I saw it. In 1999, the internet was agog about this "found footage" of three film students making a documentary in Burkittsville, Maryland about the "Blair Witch" legend. Something went horribly wrong and they were never heard from again. In fact, I bet you remember the tagline:

 In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary...A year later their footage was found.

  Very few people knew who Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were, and since The Blair Witch Project ended without credits, there was good reason to perpetuate the myth that this WAS "found footage" and not a horror movie designed to make you think it was real. By the time it opened wide in the U.S. (in the summer of 1999), internet savvy geeks already knew it wasn't (online critics love to be the people who have the "scoop" that shows the seams of an illusion), but there were plenty of "John and Jane Moviegoer"'s who didn't know. I was taking some summer classes at N.C. State, and there was a guy in one of the poetry classes that I overheard talking about having a bootlegged copy of the film. A clerk at Schoolkids Music claimed it had already been in "secret" screenings in Raleigh when I purchased the soundtrack (containing footage from the film as part of a CD-ROM feature). I always seemed to be one step behind The Blair Witch Project.

 And then it opened at The Rialto, and the next part is not going to endear the Cap'n to theatre owners. I can only say that it's something I did once and never again, and not something I would do again. Some friends were in town to see The Blair Witch Project with the Cap'n and friends, and the midnight showing was SOLD OUT. But we needed to see that showing of the film, so while standing in front of the vacant box office, we noticed that instead of using special tickets, The Rialto (at the time) had the kind of tickets one could purchase at, say, an Office Max. So we maybe kind of bought a roll of tickets from Office Max, tore five off, and got in line early. And it worked. It was a shitty thing to do, but it's the kind of thing you'll do at twenty to see the movie everyone wants to see. Our ruse wasn't a total success, as before the film started the manager came out to say that he knew some people got in when they weren't supposed to, and we shrunk in our seats a little. The moral of the story is don't do this, kids - you'll feel shitty about it twelve years later.

 The movie? Well, if you were old enough to see it in 1999, then you already know what The Blair Witch Project is like. It's a nice setup, a whole lot of pointless bickering, some carnival tricks to rattle you, and a baffling ending that's really only effective with an audience willing to be scared shitless already. The reason that nobody remembers The Blair Witch Project is that when people know it's a film and are watching it at home with no suspension of disbelief or desire to really let the adrenaline take over, the film is a total bore. There's virtually no rewatchability to The Blair Witch Project, and other films have taken the crude elements and refined them with less believable but more effective narratives and gimmickry. The success of Paranormal Activity is in large part a reflection of how much it borrowed from The Blair Witch Project in publicity and execution (appropriately ten years later, following an excessive cycle of gory horror films often lumped together under the moniker "torture porn").

 By the time that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 came out, nobody was that interested in the film anymore. The curtain had been lifted, the actors done the publicity rounds, and the directors moved on to make... well, not much for seven years. They didn't even want to make Book of Shadows, and instead acted as executive producers for new director Joe Berlinger, a documentary filmmaker best known for the Paradise Lost films about the West Memphis Three. Book of Shadows was Berlinger's first (and, as far as I can tell, last) narrative feature, which he co-wrote with Dick Beebe (the House on Haunted Hill remake). It attempted to look at the Blair Witch phenomenon, but quickly devolved into a terrible movie about possession, murder, and surveillance footage wrapped up in a pale Rashomon "multiple perspective story" mold.

 It took quite a while for me to muster up any memories about Book of Shadows, which should give you some idea how forgettable the film is. Until I looked it up, I'd completely forgotten that it involved two different "Blair Witch" tours in Burkittsville or that one ended up butchered and everyone else went to a house with excessive closed circuit cameras. I vaguely remembered people being picked off and someone being accused of being the witch, as well as stock stereotypes of Wiccans, Goth Chicks, hippies (?), and mentally unstable characters.

 Looking at the film from a distance, it's kind of funny how many people I recognize for roles they took after Book of Shadows: Jeffrey Donovan is now better known for being the lead on Burn Notice, Kim Director worked with Spike Lee before and after the film, and Erica Leerhsen played virtually the same role in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Only Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner haven't done anything I noticed since 2000. Oh, and there's that Kurt Loder guy; wasn't he in Get Him to the Greek or something?

 While it should come as no surprise to people that I saw a movie with Cranpire where he fell asleep, I can't honestly fault him for nodding off during a late showing of Book of Shadows. There's nothing in the movie worth staying awake for, and I think he got more out of the nap than I did the movie. The only other fun tidbit is that when the DVD came out, Artisan was desperate for a gimmick, so they tried a variation on the "flipper" disc: on one side, the movie; the other had the soundtrack. The problem was that the disc was often too heavy for CD players and when it wasn't, the film portion scratched easily, meaning you could never sell the damned thing when you got bored of having it around. And yet, I suspect if you go anywhere with used DVDs, you'll find a copy of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in the "three for $1" bin. It's still not worth it.

Spoiler of the Day:The Forgotten

 Julianne Moore's son was abducted by aliens, who are conducting an experiment on human bonding. That's the reason only everyone else thinks her son never existed. Aliens. The title is appropriate because it's exactly what you'll do after you've seen the film, until someone (like the Cap'n) says "aliens did it." Because aliens did it, just like in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.


 Speaking of which...

Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Signs

Blogorium Review: Fast Five

 Will wonders never cease? It turns out that Fast Five is even better than Fast & Furious, a movie I was pleasantly surprised with. The racing shenanigans are further toned down, mostly replaced with some clever (if absurd) chase scenes, more action, and the structure of a heist film. Oh, and there's the ace up Fast Five's sleeve: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who injects an adrenaline rush into an already testosterone laden explosion fest.

 After breaking Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) out of prison, Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) are on the run from the law. They meet up with Dom and old partner in crime Vince (Matt Schulze) in Rio de Janeiro, where Vince has an offer from some quick cash on a car heist. Things go wrong when Zizi (Michael Irby), an associate of Rio crime lord Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida) betrays them and kills federal agents aboard the train being robbed. Now Brian, Dom, and Mia have Reyes' men on their tail, as well as Rio officer Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky) and DSS Special Agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson). The clock is ticking, and they need to settle the score in Rio before Hobbs tracks them down - but they can't do it alone. To steal $100 million from Reyes, they'll need a team...

 If you somehow haven't heard anything about Fast Five, the most critically well received and highest grossing of the series to date, Dwayne Johnson isn't the only attraction for audiences. The team that Dom and Brian assemble includes cast members from every previous film in the series: Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) from 2 Fast 2 Furious; Han Lue (Sung Kang) from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift; Gisele Harabo (Gal Gadot), Tego Leo (Tejo Calderon) and Don Omar (Don Omar) from Fast & Furious, and the aforementioned Vince (Schulze) from The Fast and the Furious. Each member of the team has a specific function in the heist, and their interaction provides a much needed comic relief between car chases and fight scenes. Brewster and Gadot, in particular, have more to do than be concerned window dressing for the manly men than they did in Fast & Furious.

  While Fast & Furious was very much Vin Diesel's show, rightfully so considering he was returning to the series, Fast Five's appeal belongs as much to Dwayne Johnson as it does to the original bad boy. Johnson has the better entrance, the better lines, and the better chase scene. His team is more lethal, better organized, and nearly take down the "heroes" on more than one occasion during the film, and they handle a late ambush without hesitation.

 Johnson is almost cartoonishly muscular in the film, just barely squeezing into the five-sizes-too-small t-shirts, a contrast to Diesel's loosely fitting t-shirts and wife-beaters. Their fight scene doesn't disappoint: from the moment that Hobbs destroys Dom's car and then slams his head into what's left of it, it's clear they're evenly matched and the ensuing brawl does justice to both larger-than-life action stars. It makes sense, considering that Diesel and Johnson of them have been away from the genre for a while (both, at times, with Disney, in The Pacifier and The Tooth Fairy respectively).

 As heists go, I'll give Fast Five credit for not trying to reinvent the wheel or out-think themselves. There's only one piece of misdirection, and I have to admit that because of where it happens in the climactic chase scene, I didn't catch it immediately. Most of the film is setting up a heist that never happens, as the heat comes down on our heroes too soon and they have no choice but to resort to brute force, leading to a wild (and probably impossible) pursuit between Reyes' crooked cops, Dom, Brian, and a bank safe through downtown Rio. The property damage and implied fatalities go by so quickly that all you can do is laugh at how ridiculous and audacious the set-piece is, one the closes with a bridge chase that puts Bad Boys 2 to shame.

 Returning director Justin Lin has another factor working for him: the ability to convey geography, spatial relationships, and a logical flow to action sequences. That shouldn't be so much to ask for, but so many "action" films are obsessed with rapid cuts and disjointed edits that make the flow of chases and fights impossible to keep up with. Even The Expendables wasted what should have been a great fight between Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li with incomprehensible cuts and tight closeups. While Lin's Fast Five showdown between Hobbs and Toretto has some of these problems, he handles all of the vehicular action with great aplomb, giving a sense of momentum while never sacrificing coherency to look "cool."

 The Cap'n may have been exaggerating the lack of racing in the film, although it's limited to one street racing scene involving stolen police cars and the final moment in the film, a Rocky III-ending-like culmination of Brian's obsession with beating Toretto in a one-on-one race. The cars themselves move into the background, less as objects of fascination for the guys (and gals), and become tools to pull of the kind of robbery no one should be able to organize. Combined with Fast & Furious, this appears to be the direction the series is headed in, where cars are the secondary factor in action set-pieces, which is fine with me. The post-credits setup for Fast Six (or whatever they call it) implies that Johnson will be back, along with a surprise cameo and another returning cast member. If Fast Five is any indication, I might actually enjoy where the series goes, if not where it originated.

Spoiler of the Day: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

  Aliens (oh, I'm sorry Mr. Lucas, "extra-dimensional beings") have been waiting for someone to bring back the last crystal skull to their ship somewhere in the Amazon. When Indiana Jones, et al, return the skull, one of the "aliens" ceases to be a crystal skeleton (or something like that, I really don't remember), and the ship flies off. Our heroes sit down at the top of a mountain near where the ship was and Henry Jones, Jr. explains that the translation of "treasure" could also mean "knowledge," at which point everybody in the audience starts laughing.


 Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Forgotten

Blogorium Review: Fast & Furious

 Well, color me surprised. For the last ten years, I'd given at best a disinterested gaze in the direction of The Fast and the Furious and its sequels; they seemed like stupid "street racing" movies with fast cars that had (as Clint Eastwood so eloquently put it in Gran Torino) "faggy spoilers" and stupid paint jobs. I was a Vin Diesel fan from Pitch Black (and later, xXx), but that wasn't enough to overcome the charisma vacuum that was Paul Walker, and I really could care less about neon green, nitro-injected, tricked out cars tearing down city streets.

 See, while I do play video games, racing games are my least favorite. I never play them - not even Spy Hunter. I don't like Gran Turismo, I don't like Need for Speed or Midnight Club, and I'm not even that big into Mario Kart. Burnout was the first racing game I could get into, and only until it stopped being important that you could be bad at racing. When I ran out of demolition derby challenges, I lost interest quickly.

 Street racing never really appealed to me in any form or fashion, and generally reminded me of the mouth breathers in high school that needed everybody to know how cool they were with their loud muffler kits and off the line peeling out. So yeah, you could say I didn't want to have anything to do with The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Hell, I didn't really care about Diesel's return to the series in Fast & Furious - so what?

 I mean, look at that poster: see the tagline? New Model. Original Parts? Are you kidding me with that garbage? Why would I want to watch these movies if it's all about macho car racing and jargon about kits and injection systems and everything else I just don't care about? Couldn't I just watch Bullitt or The French Connection, movies with actual stories? Or hell, if not, why not one of the Transporter films? Those have Jason Statham in them, and we all know that's a plus.

 But then something crazy happened: Fast Five. Normally, I wouldn't care about the fifth movie in a series I already wasn't going to see, but returning director Justin Lin and Universal had an ace up their sleeve: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. If you know Cap'n Howdy, then you know I've seen almost every Dwayne Johnson movie not aimed at children: The Scorpion King, The Rundown, Walking Tall, Doom, Gridiron Gang, Southland Tales, and his cameos in Reno 911!: Miami and The Other Guys. Hell, I even saw Faster, and hated it, but was happy to see Johnson in a movie not released by Walt Disney.

 When someone adds The Rock as Vin Diesel's adversary, I'll pay attention. It didn't hurt that Fast Five was getting better than I thought was possible word of mouth from critics, and that it was being likened less to a racing movie than to a testosterone laden Ocean's Eleven. So I decided that it would be a good idea to check it out. That just meant deciding whether I needed to watch the other four movies first.

 I settled on watching Fast & Furious instead, as it directly leads into Fast Five, and because I'd picked up enough from the internet to understand who the characters were and their relationships. Brian O'Conner (Walker) is an FBI agent on the trail of a mysterious drug lord named Braga. Dominic Toretto (Diesel) is a muscle car enthusiast and thief who has too much heat on him and needs to lay low. When Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is killed by Braga's sidekick Fenix (Laz Alonso), he comes looking for revenge, and crosses paths with O'Conner, who infiltrated his gang years ago but didn't arrest him. O'Conner also hooked up with Mia (Jordana Brewster), Toretto's sister, so that's a sore spot between the two. Brian's FBI team, led by Penning (Jack Conley), Trinh (Liza Lapira), and Stasiak (Shea Whigham) are trying to bring down Braga, but also want Toretto, and Brian is torn between his loyalty to the agency and his respect for Dom.

 There's only one "street racing" scene in Fast & Furious, and it actually serves the plot in such a way that I can't really complain about it. Dom and Brian are called in by Braga's right hand man Campos (John Ortiz) for a race to test their skills as drug runners, along with a few other soon-to-be dead guys with quickly sketched out personalities. The race, along with most of the other car chases and stunts in the film, are well shot and structured by Lin and editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner, and for the most part are practical instead of heavy on cgi trickery. The exception to that are a series of tunnel shots that I'm not sure would be possible practically, so I'll give that a pass. Overall I have to say I was much more impressed than I thought I would be - Fast & Furious may not be Bullitt or The French Connection as car chases go, but it's certainly up there with The Italian Job and probably better than the Transporter films.

 I guess it's easy to poke fun at overly macho films and say that two guys who respect each other are actually looking for a shot to jump the other one's bone, but I didn't get that vibe from Fast & Furious. If I understand it correctly, 2 Fast 2 Furious is ludicrously homoerotic, but Fast & Furious seems more about Brian and Dom trying to navigate their status as "cop and criminal" and which is which at times. I didn't ever get the impression that just because Brian is obsessed with beating Toretto in a race that he wanted to kiss him or anything, but I'm sure somebody will be happy to correct me for missing that subtext. Riggs and Murtaugh were hot for each other too, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I guess. Guys can't be friends any more, since Freudian analysis slithered its way out of classrooms and into "guy movie" breakdowns.

 Anyway, so Vin Diesel was the Vin Diesel I remember from Pitch Black - the stoic guy who doesn't need help and comes through in the clutch, and while I don't think I've ever seen a Paul Walker movie before*, I didn't find him to be a personality-less bore like the Sam Worthingtons or the Channing Tatum's of current action movie. He didn't exactly stand out or anything, but he's good at the "serious face while driving" kind of acting that this movie required, so that's cool. Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez don't really get to do a lot in this movie, but I guess they were fine for not having seen the first movie. I guess I should mention Sung Kang, who appears at the beginning of the film as Han, a character that died in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, making this a prequel. I mention this because he figures prominently into Fast Five, along with Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson (from 2 Fast 2 Furious).

 So I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by Fast & Furious and am looking forward to seeing Fast Five now. I can't promise that I'm going to watch the first three movies (that's asking a little much if you ask me), but then again I didn't really picture myself seeing, let alone enjoying, Fast & Furious two years ago. I guess you can teach and old dog new tricks, unless the trick insists on interpreting every case of male bonding through a homoerotic lens - I'm looking at you, Frodo and Samwise. You're not fooling anybody...



Post-Script: For the point of clarification, I'm not trying to imply that there's no such thing as male bonding in film that does include sexual overtones, or that I really care when that is the case. By including a semi-anti-gay slur at the outset of the review (which is actually what Clint Eastwood uses to describe the spoilers he hates on cars) and voicing my frustration at this "if two guys are friends in a movie, they must be gay" trend that started out as a subversion of "guy movies," for reasons I'm not really sure need to exist (is it supposed to rattle the security of hyper-aggressive, macho guys? To push them out of their "comfort zone" and imply that their movies have an agenda contradictory to their own?). It's not that the notion isn't worth exploring, but to apply it to everything, including Back to the Future, doesn't actually help make the case - it undermines the concept by stretching the analysis to fit when it makes no sense. At a certain point it becomes almost as much fun as digging for Freudian overtones in every single horror movie, even when the evidence is flimsy at best. I do think that you can actually just be two guys (or two girls) that respect each other and work together to find a common goal without secretly being into each other, and ignoring that for the sake of making a point about "macho" movies undermines when it actually is the subtext. So yeah, that's about it. Please correct the Cap'n if you need to.


 * Strike that - I've seen Joy Ride, which I liked, and Pleasantville, which I guess I forgot he was in.

Four Reasons for "Spoiler of the Day"

 If you've never seen a Four Reasons before, it's because I don't have a chance to do them that often. The Cap'n is usually so focused on doing a review that I rarely opt instead to focus on any four aspects of a film that build one case (the most recent entry was about how silly Tron Legacy was), and of all of the specialty columns, it gets the least coverage. Ironically, I've chosen to bring it back tonight to discuss something most of you can't see (yet).

 Over on my non-Cap'n Howdy social media site (which is not linked for various reasons), I've started doing what I call a "Spoiler of the Day*" a feature devoted to giving away the ending (or twist) of one movie every day. At first this might seem cruel, particularly when I try not to spoil endings of newer movies on the Blogorium. In fact, despite not answering the question of how John Carpenter's The Ward ended - and instead hinting it was similar to another movie (Identity) I knew people hadn't seen - The Ward and Identity were two of the first SotD.

 I do have four very good reasons why I'm doing this, and I thought I'd share them here before I integrate the Spoiler of the Day to the Blogorium as a supplemental post next week.

 1. Chances are, You Won't be Seeing These Movies Anyway - While it won't always be the case, you can look at SotD as an extension of the "So You Won't Have To" reviews. I'm going to try to spoil all different kinds of movies, but the bulk of them will be ones I know people didn't see but might enjoy knowing what happened at the end. How do I know this? Because Blogorium favorite The Happening generated all kinds of disbelief when I explained what's killing people. Sometimes all you need to know is the premise of a movie you didn't see to appreciate how stupid it gets, and I guess most of the world didn't know that (SPOILER) plants conspiring to wipe out the northeastern U.S. was what The Happening was about. If that's a service I can provide, then I'll happily share the dumbest twists to the dumbest movies.

 2. The Obvious Choices Aren't on My List - Look, spoiling Psycho or Citizen Kane or Soylent Green or Planet of the Apes isn't any fun. Even if you haven't seen them, you know what happens. I'd much rather throw a curveball and spoil Murder By Death completely out of context in the hope that it sends someone to the movie with a desire to figure out how what happens, well, happens. Because they won't always be "bad" movies, I might leave out certain plot details and just cover the ending in order to generate interest in the film itself. The spoilers won't always be in context, in part because of my next reason...

 3. I'm going to have fun with it - This isn't just another Moviepooper situation where I simply recap the film for people who don't know whether they want to invest time in it or not. There will be cases of misdirection or occasionally misleading facts. For example, when I spoiled The Boogens, I went a step further and implied the movie was somehow tied to C.H.U.D.? Why? Slight resemblance in the monsters. And it made me chuckle. I don't want this to be a dry recap of what happened in a movie - I want it to be as entertaining as anything else on the Blogorium.

 4. Down the Line, It's Going to Be Interactive - After I've been doing this for a while, both with movies I've seen and ones I happen to know the ending of, I'm going to bring back the poll on the right hand of the screen. I'll ask you what you want to see Spoiled, what you've always wanted to know the ending of but can't be bothered to watch or find yourself online (and Moviepooper, while handy, is far from comprehensive). For example, want to know what happened at the end of Blues Brothers 2000? Me neither, but someone out there might! I'll find out for you (I think I know, actually) and post it. If you have one that you'd like to share, I can arrange that too.

So there are my reasons for arbitrarily spoiling the endings, twists, and unexpected turns in a movie every day. It started as a lark, but when you've sat through as many movies as I have that nobody is ever going to watch, it's best to find some way to put that trivia to use. Look for the feature on Monday, when I'll be spoiling... let's save that as a surprise.



* I'm seriously debating switching it to Spoiler FOR the Day, just because there's something grammatically troubling about Spoiler Of the Day that I can't quite put my finger on.

Retro Review: The Sixth Sense

 editor's note: if, for some reason, you actually don't know anything about The Sixth Sense, this is absolutely the wrong review for you. However, if you found this review by Google-ing "Sixth Sense Spoiler," you're going to get it. Consider that your warning.

Long before people hated (or had forgotten about) M. Night Shyamalan, he was the "hot new up-and-comer" with his debut film* The Sixth Sense. If you were somehow drunk for the entirety of the summer of 1999, it's possible that you didn't hear about this suspenseful ghost story with a wicked twist**, and have somehow never seen or heard of the movie where Haley Joel Osment (remember him?) "sees dead people."

 Specifically Bruce Willis (SPOILER), who plays a child psychologist killed in the opening scene by one of his former patients (Donnie Wahlberg). Of course, he doesn't know that until the end of the film, even if eagle-eyed viewers can see that Dr. Malcolm Crowe never physically interacts with anyone during the film and nobody talks to him other than Cole Sear, the kid who sees ghosts. The ghosts, by the way, are spooky and sometimes quite gory (like the accidental gunshot victim kid), but aren't actually dangerous to Cole. Most of them are sad or lonely or need to pass something on. This doesn't stop Shyamalan from milking every ghostly encounter for the maximum creepy factor, but you have to remember that I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who's already seen the film.

 When The Sixth Sense came out, all we really knew about the movie was the "ghost" angle, and that there was a twist. The ghosts are played for scares, and it's quite effective, in the same way that The Haunting (not the one that came out in 1999) or The Others are. It's a clever move not to make the ghosts actually menacing, until you watch the movie again, and then it's just a lot of building tension to mess with the audience in order to pull a switcheroo. The same problem exists with the twist, because a) if you know there's a twist, chances are you're looking for it (I was), and b) the best twists make you want to watch the movie again. If you figure out the twist early (say, when Crowe is "having dinner" with his wife at a restaurant), then there is no rediscovery in watching the film again - you did it the first time. All of the color coding is easy to figure out and The Sixth Sense becomes an elaborate game of "follow the rules" twist filmmaking.

 Maybe I'm being meaner than I ought to be, because I bought the Shyamalan promise - that he was a spiritual successor to Steven Spielberg - through Unbreakable, a movie I also used to really like (and probably still enjoy more than The Sixth Sense) but it all fell apart during Signs. I gave up after he started lifting narrative beats wholesale, and have only seen one of his films sense - The Happening. Most of you know that The Happening is a colossal failure in almost every respect, and is hilarious because of it; I either subjected you to the film or you've heard about it from me. In the interest of fairness, The Sixth Sense is still highly regarded by just about everywhere in the critical community, and people still seem to love the movie. Don't take that old Grumpy Gus Cap'n Howdy to speak for the consensus opinion here.

 After Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender, Shyamalan is pretty much a joke - audiences reported laughter when his name appeared on trailers for Devil - and even his die-hard fans have given up making excuses for the lousy writing, awkward editing, bad performances, and the pompous, thin-skinned auteur / actor himself (Lady in the Water features Shyamalan as a writer who is destined to "change the world," while the least likable character is a film critic). Nobody knows what he's doing next, and I'd go so far as to say they don't care, either.

 The reason I really wanted to bring up The Sixth Sense, which was for 1999 a highlight of an already packed summer of great movies (and The Phantom Menace) was because I have, as usual, a story related to events surrounding the film. The air conditioning was out in the auditorium we saw the film in, so the staff propped a door facing the back of the theatre open, and crickets got in. We knew this because the whole audience could hear them chirping. A colleague of mine (Professor Murder) eventually got up from his seat, crawled under the screen, and we heard "THUMP THUMP THUMP" and the chirping stopped. The packed auditorium gave him an ovation, and he cut the back of his head on a curtain staple. Forgive me if I look back at that night and consider this moment to be the highlight of seeing The Sixth Sense.





* Which was not actually his debut film - he made this and this beforehand, and he wrote Stuart Little. Seriously.
** My own fake poster quote, but here's what the New York Observer's Andrew Sarris wrote at the time: "An effectively understated and moodily engrossing ghost film with a surprisingly satisfying jolt at the end."

TV Talk: Treehouse of Horror XI-XXI

 When last we left off, the Cap'n had finished watching the first ten episodes of The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror series, which covers seasons two through eleven. Even though I decried an evident case of diminishing returns as the series went on (in effect stopping nearly when I stopped watching the show), I noticed that I seemed to be missing "Night of the Dolphins," and I figured why not sit down and catch up with eleven years' worth of horror-related anthologies that I hadn't seen (some at all).

 I was left with a "good news, bad news" scenario: the good news was there were flashes of my favorite Treehouse of Horror's, but the bad news was they were often fleeting, and a rarely did one of them lasted for an entire segment of its episode.

 Things get off to a shaky start in Treehouse of Horror XI with a parody of the Bill Cosby movie Ghost Dad, but evens out with the final segment, the aforementioned "Night of the Dolphin," which manages to fit in nods to Jaws and The Birds and has a fitfully dark ending. The middle segment, "Scary Tales Do Come True," is symptomatic of a problem that plagues the latter eleven Treehouse entries: many of the parodies are tangentially (at best) tied to horror.

 A Hansel and Gretl meet other fairy tales would make sense in the context of other Simpsons anthology episodes (which have covered works of literature, myths, or Biblical stories), but it begins a trend of moving away from Twilight Zone stories and horror films to other parodies - some of which don't even make sense. But Transformers? Mr. and Mrs. Smith? The Harry Potter spoof doesn't even get a pass because if you took that, "Scary Tales Can Come True," and "Four Beheadings and a Funeral", a Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper story, and put them into their own anthology.

 I'm more willing to give the Mad Men-esque spoof "How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising" because it at least continues the trend of zombie celebrities, even if it is just a variation on the Homer the Grim Reaper segment from XIV. However, "Bartificial Intelligence" doesn't make any sense in a Treehouse of Horror, and a Golem story (like "Hex in the City") eventually shifts from possibly horror related to cheap ethnic jokes. A Fantastic Voyage (really?) spoof turns it self around into a variation on Treehouse of Horror II's "Homer and Burns share a body" joke, followed by a song-and-dance vaguely reminiscent of the "Bart Simpson's Dracula". "The Ned Zone" never really goes anywhere, and "Married to the Blob" starts great but falls apart long before Dr. Phil appears as himself. A Tales from the Crypt-style opening sequence falls apart as soon as Smithers appears, which is a shame.

 The nadir of the latter Treehouses is"The Day the Earth Stood Stupid," a segment that seems to be a take on Orson Welles' infamous "War of the Worlds" hoax, but then devolves into a boneheaded (and woefully unfunny) critique of the War in Iraq, with Kodos and Kang arguing about who said they would be "greeted as liberators" and ends with an awful "hearts and minds" gag. Of course, if you like Kodos and Kang, then stay away from "E.T.: Go Home" which seems promising but quickly goes south.

While there are some serious lowlights, it is fair to mention that there are some sporadically clever segments: there's the spot-on Hitchcock homage "Dial 'M' for Murder or Press # to Return to Main Menu," a pretty good take on Dead Calm (although I can't imagine most fans getting that reference) marred only by a pointless A Clockwork Orange reference ("Simpsons did it!"), the Twilight parody actually has a few good jokes, as does Pierce Brosnan's evil house in XII. While I don't love "Frinkenstein", it was amusing to hear Jerry Lewis as Professor Frink's father gleefully collecting organs at the Nobel Prize ceremony. "The Island of Doctor Hibbert" and "Survival of the Fattest" are pretty good, and the 28 Days Later "tainted Krusty Burger" segment is great but drops the ball at the end.

 The closest thing other than the Hitchcock segment is an almost perfect send-up of Charlie Brown cartoons called "It's the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse." For a while, it sustains the animation style, but overuses a few obvious gags (Marge's trombone, for example) and breaks the tone with Nelson and the bullies before halfway redeeming itself with a racist pumpkin ("all pumpkins are racist; the difference is I admit it!"). The Grand Pumpkin and Tom Turkey's screams of "Revenge!" still make me chuckle.

 
Watching the second half of the Treehouse of Horror episodes (plus one), I can see many of the things I've noticed while popping in on The Simpsons over the years after no longer being a regular viewer - jokes are periodically funny, but often are followed by something that reminds me of a better Simpsons episode. The "jerkass" phase of Homer Simpson is abundant in many of these episodes, and it's more grating than hilarious. The pop culture references become more obvious and get lazier as time goes on, and much of the sharp writing of earlier years is undermined by lazy shortcuts or, worse, an inability to stick the landing. While I don't plan on watching the show regularly again (and the episode "The Real Housewives of Fat Tony" really guaranteed that), it was nice to catch up on what used to be a Halloween institution, even if several Treehouse of Horror episodes joke about airing in November.

Blogorium Review: Fright Night (2011)

 Tonight I'll be taking a look at the 2011 remake of Fright Night, a film I've been looking forward too. That's odd, because I don't usually look forward to remakes, but the combination of an intriguing cast and a vampire-versed screenwriter had me on board. Was it a story worth revisiting? Let's see...

 Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a geeky teenager in the outskirts of Las Vegas trying to maintain a relationship with Amy (Imogen Poots), a girl he'd have had no shot with a year prior. It comes at the expense of his life-long friendship with "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has been desperately trying to get Charley's attention. Students have been going missing, and Ed is convinced that Brewster's next-door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire. Charley is eventually convinced, but it comes too late to help his friends, his mother Jane (Toni Collette), or even Amy. He turns to illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant) for help, but it may be too late to stop Jerry from destroying everything important to Charley...

 In the interest of full disclosure, I did not sit down and rewatch Fright Night in preparation for this remake. I have seen Fright Night several times (boy, that sounds defensive, right?), starting in high school and periodically on TV, and I really wanted to show it during a few Summer Fests but could never fit it in. However, I didn't feel like it was necessary to come in to the new Fright Night with the original fresh in my mind. There are a number of changes made between the 1985 version and the 2011 version - some superficial, some significant - and I was intrigued enough by the cast, as well as screenwriter Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) that it seemed like a leap of faith worth taking.

 Strangely, the superficial changes are the ones that aren't so much of a problem: changing Peter Vincent from a horror show host to a Criss Angel-esque illusionist doesn't impact his role in the third act, although it complicates it in the same way a major change to the narrative does. Evil Ed's role in the film is basically the same, although Noxon adds an interesting narrative shift where Charley has outgrown Ed's obsessive nature, to the point that he now has to blackmail Brewster into investigating Jerry. The transplanting of the film to Las Vegas (actually Albuquerque, New Mexico) helps overcome some logistical issues - the neighborhood is sparsely populated with people who often sleep all day and work all night, cell phone reception is terrible, and a vampire like Jerry could easily sustain himself without drawing attention.

 While most of the changes to this version of Fright Night work pretty well, some of them hamper the story with respect to pacing. For example, there's no good reason for Charley to seek out Peter Vincent the magician - his website makes some superficial claims about Vincent being a "vampire expert," but it's not as though Brewster couldn't do most of the work on his own. In fact, he has, as a scene in the school library with Amy makes clear - Vincent only confirms his research. Beyond that, Peter Vincent's motivation for helping Charley and Amy comes waaaaay too late in the film and seems to exist to give Jerry and Peter something to talk about in the basement. Even the reason Vincent's show is called "Fright Night" seems perfunctory.

 It's a similar problem that Fright Night suffers from early in the film - everybody knows Jerry is a vampire, and Colin Farrell is playing him as the slightly creepy guy who toys with his prey, so getting Charley on board takes longer than it needs to. To illustrate the point, both films have a scene where Charley and Amy are about to have sex, but Charley is more interested in Jerry than his girlfriend. In the original, this happens at the beginning of the film, setting up that Brewster is already suspicious. In the remake, it happens at least half an hour into the film, after we've seen Jerry turn Ed into a vampire.

 Pacing and motivation issues didn't actually affect my enjoyment of the film, though; there's still plenty that Fright Night has going for it. The cast is uniformly ideal for their roles, with Colin Farrell being the standout as Jerry Dandridge, a vampire who clearly doesn't feel threatened by Brewster, Ed, Charley's mother, Amy, or Peter Vincent. He's cocky, dangerous, and slightly off-putting - there are weird touches with Jerry that elicited uncomfortable laughter from the audience. Anton Yelchin has an interesting line to walk as a geek who is trying not to be geeky, and Imogen Poots' Amy is a character that shifts from mostly inconsequential to very important as the story progresses.Toni Collette's Jane Brewster doesn't have much to do outside of the chase sequence which is, for all intents and purposes, the centerpiece of this Fright Night.

 Much has been made of David Tennant's Peter Vincent; I've heard people say he's making fun of Russell Brand, that he's too "over the top," and that this Vincent isn't as compelling as Roddy McDowall's. To the last complaint, it is true that Peter Vincent's role in the story feels less significant because he doesn't mean the same thing to Charley that host Peter Vincent did. To those who throw the Russel Brand comparison out there, aside from a British accent, lack of shirt, and what turns out to be a wig, the argument is superficial. He's playing a variation of the "David Tennant" tenth Doctor from Doctor Who. If you haven't ever seen the show, I guess it might be easy not to catch that, but he's much closer to the Doctor in Fright Night than to Criss Angel or Russell Brand. I actually enjoyed Tennant's profane, guarded Vincent - he's not trying to outdo McDowall, or even draw comparisons, and whether he needs to be in Jerry's house with Charley or not, Tennant is a welcome presence at the end of the film.

 A note on the 3-D: I opted to see Fright Night in 2 dimensions, in part for cost but also because an already dark movie made dimmer by glasses didn't seem that enticing to me. There are a handful of silly "at the camera" shots, and it seems clear that the car chase, where the camera circles around inside of the car (similar to Spielberg's War of the Worlds) is meant to be seen with "depth." That said, it really didn't make much of a difference, so I recommend seeing the film without the gimmickry, otherwise you might not be able to make out important sections of the story.

 In summary, Fright Night is an entertaining, if imperfect, re-telling of the other Fright Night, which I have not seen very recently. It's different enough not to bother purists and certainly has enough going for it that I easily recommend the film to anyone looking for a horror movie in the dog days of summer. When I get around to Horror Fest: The Remake (and it is going to happen in the next three years), Fright Night is going to play, and not on the "shitty but kind of funny" night like, well, Shit Coffin. It's somewhere between Piranha and The Hills Have Eyes as remakes go, but let's be honest here, that's not bad company to be in, is it?