Retro Review: Star Trek - Nemesis

 Lost amidst all of the 30th anniversary hoopla of now cult classics like Blade Runner and The Thing and Conan the Barbarian (as well as established classics like E.T., which beat up on those movies all summer, and maybe The Road Warrior too. I'd have to check, but that's not germane to this review) is the more important anniversaries, like, uh, Chasing Amy hitting the fifteen year mark. Or Good Will Hunting, and let's be honest here, if you'd asked the Cap'n which of those movies he's be watching again fifteen years later, younger me would be wrong in a big bad way. But we grow older and wiser, so we revisit things every now and then.

 Speaking of movies that aren't any good, Star Trek: Nemesis, unlike Chasing Amy, was maligned when it came out ten years ago (this December) for "ruining" the Star Trek: The Next Generation film series (and with competition like Generations and Insurrection, that's saying something). It broke the "even numbered film = good / odd numbered film = bad" rule of thumb for Trek films, and pretty much guaranteed we'd never see Captain Picard on the big screen again. In fact, Paramount handed the keys to the franchise over to JJ Abrams, who rebooted the whole franchise and (with the screenwriters) relegated Picard, Data, Worf, and Geordi to a comic book prequel that assured us they wouldn't be showing up with Chris Pine and company.

 For people who still want to argue that Nemesis "isn't that bad," I'll see you on the other side of the Mr. Plinkett review of the film. In fact, I'd almost considered just posting that as my "Retro Review" and writing "nuff said" because it covers almost all of the basis of why Nemesis is not, in fact, all right. It's yet another watered down retread of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which producer Rick Berman helpfully points out in the extras by explaining that Nemesis needed "a strong villain" because that's what made First Contact and Wrath of Khan successful. The jury is apparently out on what made The Voyage Home a bigger success, as its "strong villain" is a probe looking for humpback whales (SPOILER).

 Anyway, so the reason I thought Nemesis might be worth coming back to had nothing to do with B-4, the stupid "dune buggy" away mission, the pointless transposition of the Kirk / Khan storyline into a TNG movie, using characters not designed for action movies in a totally inappropriate context (the Plinkett review of First Contact, by the way, covers in some detail why the TNG movies failed even in success). It's not about the "mind rape" sequence of Ron Perlman as a creepy vampire bat Reman, the heretofore unknown "sister" species of the Romulans* who happen to look like a planet of Nosferatus, or even the Admiral Janeway cameo that confused me because I always understood that Voyager didn't end with the crew in the best esteem of the Federation. Mind you, I never watched Voyager, even the episode with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, so this is purely from a point of willful ignorance, although Trekkers I know have told me watching the series isn't worth my time.

 Where was I? Oh, right, Nemesis. It's hard to stay focused on such an unmemorable film. So I thought I'd check it out again because it was the only movie I associated Tom Hardy with until people started raving about Bronson**. In fact, it came as a surprise that Tom Hardy had a career resurgence (that continues to thrive) because he's so uninteresting as Shinzon, the Picard clone-turned-slave-turned-leader-of-the-Reman-Resistance that screenwriter John Logan opted to pair him with Ron Perlman as a vampire bat in order to make our villain vaguely menacing.

 But I did think it was cool to see a young Tom Hardy screen test with Patrick Stewart and more than hold his own, which doesn't really translate to Nemesis. In the movie, it's not clear what the hell Shinzon really wants to do, or what he cares about, or really anything. Instead we get stupid Brent Spiner slapstick (doubled!) and pointless chase scenes and an ultimately inconsequential story about an upset in the Romulan Empire after Shinzon wipes the Senate out. Why inconsequential? Well, for one thing, that supernova completely wiped out Romulus, causing Nero to go crazy and travel back in time in order to destroy Vulcan and then fail to wipe out Earth. So not only do the alternate universe Romulans still distrust the Federation, but now one of their own was responsible for killing almost all of the Vulcans and disrupting history, etc.

 Anyway, so needless to say that I was very impressed to see that Tom Hardy could be charismatic and menacing and have, well, screen presence after Nemesis. It's not his fault that the movie still sucks, and it's a testament to his work ethic in the studio system and beyond that it wasn't a career killer. Also, I don't hang it on director Stuart Baird (who also made Executive Decision and U.S. Marshals but also edited some much more impressive films), even though he gets a lot of grief for coming as a Trek "newbie" and making a movie like Nemesis. It's not totally his fault that Nemesis is a lousy Star Trek: The Next Generation movie, and the final action scenes between the Enterprise and the Scimitar look good. It's just the rest of the movie, including the awful wedding of Riker and Troi that kicks things off, that make the film so hard to sit through.

 So ten years ago this was what we had to point to and say, "well, maybe Insurrection wasn't the worst TNG movie they could possibly make after all." Now we have a odd-numbered Star Trek movie that almost everybody seems to like (Star Trek) and people are looking forward to the sequel to that. Patrick Stewart is crossing his fingers that Charles Xavier doesn't have a cameo in the Wolverine sequel and that maybe they'll just ask him to come back for X-Men First Class: Days of Future Past, and Jonathan Frakes is directing television after the one-two punch of Clockstoppers and Thunderbirds. Meanwhile, Tom Hardy was in Bronson, Inception, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Dark Knight Rises, and Lawless***. I did not see that coming, but at least something good came from such a limp closing to "classic era" Star Trek.



 * What this means for the implied connection over the series between Romulans and Vulcans has probably been explored in more depth on a Trek site I don't have time to look for, but are Remans also distantly related to Vulcans? Does it even matter?
** I haven't seen Black Hawk Down, along with several other Ridley Scott movies not featuring Tom Hardy, like G.I. Jane, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and anything after American Gangster and before Prometheus.
*** And coughThisMeansWarcough...

Blogorium Review: Cosmopolis

 David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is a difficult movie to like. I don't mean that it's not an interesting film or that there isn't a great deal of thematic and visual material to merit watching again. That's not really the issue at hand. However, at every opportunity, Cronenberg makes decisions to remove the audience's ability to engage with the characters, the narrative, and even the dialogue. It's as though we're meant to appreciate Cosmopolis as an exercise in alienating the audience.

  From the get go, something is amiss with Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson)'s day: the young hotshot entrepreneur / trader wants a haircut, but the city of New York seems to be conspiring against his wishes. His chief of security, Torval (Kevin Durand) warns him that getting anywhere is going to be impossible because the President is in town and traffic has slowed to a crawl, but Packer wants what he wants (although he's more fond of using the royal "we" when referring to his wishes). so they set out in his state-of-the-art limousine. Over the course of the day, he travel slowly enough to skip out and have three meals with his newlywed bride, Elise Shifrin (Sarah Gadon), a poet and heiress. Along the way, he also picks up various business advisers: Shiner (Jay Baruchel), Michael Chin (Philip Nozuka), Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), and "philosophical consultant" Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton), as well as entertain art dealer / mistress Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche). Eric even manages to discuss business while undergoing his daily physical exam.

  The film is constructed of a series of vignettes as Eric waxes the philosophic about aging, trading, art, protests, wealth, and the "credible" threat to his life Torval has been monitoring all day. As his life begins to collapse - a result of bad business deals, dissolving relationships, and the death of his spiritual mentor, Brutha Fez (K'Naan) - Packer becomes more unpredictable, more unhinged, and his placid veneer cracks to reveal the nihilist underneath. It's not until nearly the end that any of this is evident, as Robert Pattinson's Eric Packer is a blank slate, concerned more with the intellectual than the physical  - a theme that appears throughout Cronenberg's filmography, most notably in Crash, Dead Ringers, and more recently, A Dangerous Method. Accordingly, I hesitate to take the easy path of blaming the actor, mostly associated with the Twilight series, for the distant and unlikable protagonist of the film.

  A co-worker of mine described the film as an "existential meditation on the 1%" and that's not far off from what Cronenberg, adapting his screenplay from Don DeLillo's novel of the same name, seems to be attempting. It's hard to relate to anything that happens to Eric Packer at any point in the film, even if cultural anecdotes like a "Pastry Assassin" (Mathieu Amalric) who "pies" him is something we're familiar with in passing. To keep us off guard, Cronenberg and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky also place the camera uncomfortably close to the actors in Cosmopolis (think of a film like Repulsion as a good basis of comparison), giving the film a heightened sense of reality. We're physically close but emotionally and philosophically at a distance from the characters at all times. The most that happens in Cosmopolis occurs in the final scenes between Packer and Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), and even that manages to detach us as the film heads towards its inevitable conclusion.

  On the other hand, I left Cosmopolis with a great appreciation of what Cronenberg, the cast, editor Ronald Sanders, and the score by Howard Shore (partially performed by the band Metric) accomplished. Cosmopolis is not an easy film to engage in, but it has a wealth of interesting concepts. I'm interested in seeing the film again for asymmetrical imagery, to examine the deliberately artificial first scene in the limo between Pattinson and Baruchel, and to draw the threads together in the seemingly episodic narrative.

  While I could appreciate A Dangerous Method, I felt that the idea of separating and internalizing the salacious sexual content removed any point of engagement in the film beyond a strictly intellectual level. Cosmopolis, while intellectually divorcing itself from the audience for most of the story, nevertheless manages to connect on a visceral level, even as it denies viewers basic expectations (including the final shot - no pun intended). On the other hand, it is often funny in a way absent from all but the most vicious of black comedies. I can't think of another film that generates the kind of uncomfortable laughter during a prostate exam that Cosmopolis does.

 The visceral reactions aren't always positive: during every showing of Cosmopolis' three week run, there was at least one walk out, if not more. One disgusted viewer explained that the film was "over the moment it started" and I can't say it's an unfair reaction. Cosmopolis is a demanding film that promises nothing and pays off only scant rewards the first time around. When I say it's not a film for everyone, that's not a value judgment on audiences. It's just a fact. You're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting while watching Cosmopolis, and I can't guarantee that what you come out with is going to seem worth it. But if your ears perk up when you hear "Cronenberg" and "DeLillo" together, or how Robert Pattinson fits into the equation, it may just be worth the challenge.

Retro Review: Sex and Death 101

editor's note: In his continuing quest to re-post older reviews that never made it from the old Blogorium to its present home, Cap'n Howdy has been delivering piles of digital bits to me in the hopes I know what to do with it. Some movies are older than others, but most of these come from a period between 2006 and 2009, when the move took place. Enjoy

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It seems fitting that almost twenty years after his first screenplay, Heathers, writer Daniel Waters would return with a kind-of-sort-of sequel. Oh, I'm sorry; did you not hear about this? Sex and Death 101? Well, I won't lie to you and say "oh I followed it from day one", because it was a surprise to me too. The good news is that this kind of surprise is the good one.

    Roderick Blank (Simon Baker of Land of the Dead) is a normal guy living a normal life, about to be engaged when he receives an anonymous email. This email has the name of every woman he's ever slept with, and it turns out his fiance is number 29. On a list of 101. You can imagine where this is going, but you might be surprised where it ends up. The list comes from... well, I won't spoil that. Let's just say it involves Patton Oswalt and a white room. Again, that's only giving you part of the scenario.

    First things first: don't expect an actual sequel to Heathers with any of the characters or story returning. Sex and Death 101 is more of a thematic sequel to Heathers (if you want to even call it that). I bring it up only because much of the film is going to remind you of the dream sequences in Heathers, and in a good way. Much of the tone of Sex and Death 101 is bizarre but inspired black comedy, and more than a few times I laughed as hard as "I love my dead gay son!" in this film.

    The catch, and there is one, is that the movie is slow to get going. It wasn't until probably twenty minutes in or so that Baker really settles into the role and the film gets fun. In the meantime, there's the weird presence of Mindy Cohn (The Facts of Life) as his assistant and a supporting cast that includes "oh! that guy" or "hey, why do I know her?". Everything seems a little forced early on and I really thought I wasn't going to like this movie.

    But the Heathers connection gets a little clearer when Winona Ryder enters the story as Death Knell, a not-acutally-a-serial-killer who beds sleazy guys and puts them in comas. Her first real scene in the movie, involving a newstand owner, hints at where Waters actually wants to go with this premise, and things only get better from there.

    Waters wrote and directed Sex and Death, so much like Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this is his undiluted vision. Every step of the story is filled with double-backs, fake outs, tricksy narration, and some really clever in-camera trickery (watch that bar scene about three quarters of the way in). His writing is still as sharp as ever, and for the first time in years you'll hear an actually clever OJ Simpson joke. Oh, and Patton Oswalt is in the movie, and a lot more than I thought he would be.

    Ultimately what compels me to recommend the movie is that it frequently zigs when you expect it to zag. The writing is clever, the casting at times inspired, and even though it starts and ends a little shaky, there's more than enough in between that you haven't seen in a long time, if at all.

    Sex and Death 101 isn't going to blow you away like Heathers, but it will amuse you. I get why it didn't have larger press, because this is the kind of movie that's a little too weird for the Superhero Movie crowd and more subversive than the "quirky" comedy fans are interested in. If you're willing to let the film settle in, you'll be in for a pleasant surprise, which is exactly what we hope for in "lost" movies.

So You Won't, uh, Or Maybe You Will (I Dunno): Legend

 So yeah... Legend. Ridley Scott's Legend, his follow-up to Alien and Blade Runner. I understand that Legend has a cult following and it has its ardent defenders, and as a result I wondered why nobody ever said to me "Cap'n, you should really check out Legend!" I mean beyond the director, Legend has Tom Cruise going for it, TimeCop's Mia Sara* and Dr. Frank-N-Furter himself, Tim Curry as "Darkness," the ultimate embodiment of evil. On top of that, Rob Bottin (The Howling, John Carpenter's The Thing) handled makeup effects, and that's always a plus. So why don't I know people who recommend it? It's never happened, so when I came across the movie last week, I thought "why not see what this is all about?"

 And I watched Legend, and, uh, yeah. I get why it never came up in many film conversations. Legend is a bit of a mess, cobbled together by Scott and writer William Hjortsberg of a dozen or so different fantasy elements and then crammed together into a "hero's journey" narrative halfheartedly. And I'm not averse to the fantasy genre, which bears pointing out: I continue to enjoy Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal (two of Legend's 80s contemporaries) which contain many, if not almost all, of the same story elements. While I'm not as big of a fan of "sword and sorcery" fantasy films, I would hardly qualify Legend as being part of that subgenre. The movie looks great, and has some memorable imagery, but there's also so much being crammed into the film for no apparent reason that after a while I just gave up.

 For the record, I watched Ridley Scott's preferred Director's Cut, which clocks in nearly thirty minutes longer than the theatrically released version. It also restores Jerry Goldsmith's score to the film rather than use the Tangerine Dream music most people associate with the film. I did check out some of the shorter cut and will address it later in this review.

  Okay, so Princess Lili (Mia Sara) has an innocent heart but a bit of a mischievous streak, so while singing and cavorting in the woods with "forest child" Jack (Cruise), she disregards his warning while showing her something very special: two unicorns. A human must never touch a unicorn, and when Lili does, it upsets the balance of the world, allowing Blix (Alice Playten), a goblin, to poison the unicorn and steal its horn. Blix is a servant of Darkness, the Lord of Night, who needs both unicorn horns to ensure that a light is removed from the world and that he may reign supreme. Unaware of what happened, Lili and Jack return, and while she toys with his infatuation, a storm arrives and covers the forest in frost and snow. Lili and Jack are separated, but help arrives in the form of Gump (David Bennent), an elf, Oona (Annabelle Lanyon), a fairy, Screwball (Billy Barty) and Brown Tom (Cork Hubbert), two dwarves. They help Jack to protect the last unicorn and to defeat Darkness, who discovers he desires something even more than ruling the world: the young princess.

 That's the simple plot synopsis, leaving out additional goblins and secondary characters who provide us some more information about Lili and Jack. (SPOILER ALERT from here on out, I guess) From this point, Legend basically moves into "teaching Jack how to be a hero and save the day" but without really having to do much of anything in the way of growing as a person, er, forest person. Lili and the second unicorn are captured by Darkness, and he attempts to woo the princess to no avail, and then Jack defeats him by "bringing light to darkness" with the help of his friends. Lili falls asleep, and Jack takes her to where they were separated, and after retrieving the ring she promised to marry whoever found it, she reneges on that. Well, she may have forgotten the whole thing ever happened. Still, Jack happily sends her along her merry way and the unicorns are fine with Gump and Oona and Brown Tom and Screwball. Jack runs into a patently artificial sunset and that's end. And they lived blissfully ignorant ever after...

 Every time I try to write about Legend, despite the fact that I was really impressed by the way Scott holds back revealing Tim Curry in his (very impressive) Darkness makeup and how the manufactured (in studio) forest (but with real animals living in it) most of the time doesn't look like a set, I keep getting bogged down in how "safe" the film is. It makes me all the more cruel to the movie, because it's such a consequence free film where characters can say or do anything and nothing matters at all.

 Take, for instance, Blunder (Kiran Shah, who most people know as Elijah Wood's Hobbit stunt double). Blunder is introduced as one of Blix's friends, and participates in the hunting of the unicorns and is present when Blix steals the horn. Blunder is too impressed by the magical power of the horn (which acts like a magic wand of sorts) and when he speaks ill of Darkness, a zombie (?) rises from the ground, picks him up, and carries him down a hole. It's treated with all the severity of an "uh oh!"

 We meet Blunder again later when Jack and company find themselves in Darkness' dungeon, where a pair of demonic butchers are cutting up a dummy to eat. While trying to help them escape, Blunder is dragged off, kicking and screaming, to what one would assume would be his doom. Instead, later in that same sequence, Brown Tom and Screwball find Blunder inside of a meat pie, tied up with vegetables around him, but very much alive, and he joins them in defeating Darkness. In fact, he's with Gump and the rest at the end of the film, including the unicorns. Yes, unicorns, because even though one was poisoned and lost her horn, it's strongly implied that this isn't enough to kill a unicorn and that the horn can be reattached. Hopefully in a way that makes it look less wobbly than earlier in the film.

 See what I mean? I can't not point out things that demean Legend or make it sound ridiculous because after a while it was clear to me that nothing mattered in the film. Even Darkness (correctly) points out to Jack that he can't really die, because there can be no light without darkness, that they are "brothers eternal." When he's sucked into space (?) and becomes a constellation (?), it's not really a satisfying conclusion for our antagonist. It's more of a "meh." If there are no stakes in this world, forgive me for no longer being invested after an hour of watching Legend. Even the admittedly cool looking Meg Mucklebones (played by Joe Dante regular Robert Picardo) scene doesn't seem to really advance the plot or really sell to me that Jack is capable of destroying Darkness. And I'm pretty sure that's the only reason it's in there at all.

 After taking a quick look at the Theatrical Cut, I will say I'm glad I watched the Director's Cut instead, because the opening crawl laughably oversells the fantasy world and you see Darkness almost immediately afterward, cross cut with the demon butchers cutting up that dummy, presumably to really sell how eeeeeeevillll it all is. If you're interested in other differences, I refer you to IMDB's page. While I can't say I enjoyed the version of Legend I watched, it certainly sounds like a vast improvement over the other cut, even if I did miss out on the Tangerine Dream music. That is, by the way, not intended sarcastically, as most of the people I talked to after watching Legend specifically mentioned Tangerine Dream.

 It's been nearly a week and I'm already forgetting a lot of Legend, which is not a good sign. Since I don't know whether you folks have seen it or not, I can't honestly say I watched it So You Won't Have To. Nobody ever mentioned it, so I can't be sure you didn't already see it. If you did, then I'd certainly be happy to hear you take on why you like it so much. Again, if you did. I know enough to know that it does have a following, as Blade Runner does (another Ridley Scott movie with multiple cuts that didn't make a strong impression when released), so perhaps you could shed some light on the darkness of this review, so to speak.


 * What, did you think I was going to say Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

Retro Review: The Wizard of Gore (2008)

 editor's note: In his continuing quest to re-post older reviews that never made it from the old Blogorium to its present home, Cap'n Howdy has been delivering piles of digital bits to me in the hopes I know what to do with it. Some movies are older than others, but most of these come from a period between 2006 and 2009, when the move took place. Enjoy

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The Wizard of Gore reminded me a lot of Hellraiser: Hellseeker (aka Hellraiser 6 for those not keeping track), which is not necessarily a good thing. There's a twist, it feels like, and the movie is slow in doling out information when it's clear we should be sussing this out sooner than we do. It's not that the ending is bad per se, but the landing is a little rough.

    That being said, small pleasures are to be had watching Wizard, particularly from supporting cast members Brad Dourif and Jeffrey Combs. Most importantly, of course, is Crispin Glover himself as Montag the Magnificent, the Wizard of Gore himself. When he's onscreen the movie instantly perks up and dilutes the lackluster performance from lead actor Kip Pardue (Thirteen). For once, Bijou Phillips isn't the weak link in a movie, and for that I'm thankful. Combs doesn't do much until late in the film, but when he does it pays off what seems like a wasted cameo.

    As for the "Gore", it's not as much as I expected, but when used is effective (mostly the violence is limited to Montag's stage show). The Suicide Girls, hyped incessantly on the front and back of the dvd do exactly what you'd expect them to do in this movie: a) wear fetish gear, b) take their clothes off, c) die horrible deaths at the hands of Montag.

    There's a bit of a mystery in Wizard that you can work out for yourself pretty quickly once the mysterious "link" in all the murders is named, and while the movie goes one step better than you'd hope with the "twist", the way it gets there and the effects technique to indicate Pardue is losing his grip on reality are handled poorly.

    It's a renter, and if people are up for it, I might throw it on during horror fest. It's not going to replace the original in anyone's mind, but Suspiria is still better than both version (eat that, Diablo Cody!).

Blogorium Review: Lawless

 There was pretty much no way I wasn't going to see Lawless, the new film from director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road) and writer Nick Cave (of "and" The Bad Seeds, The Dirty Three, and in this film The Bootleggers). In fact, I broke my "don't go see a movie alone" for the first time since Eyes Wide Shut to catch a 9:25 showing the night it opened. While I used my employee ability to see it for free, believe me when I say I would have paid to watch Lawless. With that combination of director and writer, a story (based in fact) about three brothers who bootleg alcohol during prohibition and the cast they'd lined up, I wasn't expecting to be disappointed.

 The Bondurant brothers: Forrest (Tom Hardy), Howard (Jason Clarke), and Jack (Shia LeBouf) distill moonshine in Franklin county, Virginia, the "wettest county in the world" and business has been good to them. The brothers are the stuff of legend around Franklin county, in large part because Forrest has the ability to survive injuries and illnesses that would kill any other man. His "indestructible" nature and propensity for speaking little and sudden, brutal outbursts of violence have the respect of other moonshiners, and keeps the unpredictable Howard and sensitive Jack in their good graces. Things change when the normally amenable local police come under the jurisdiction of Mason Wardell (Tim Tolin) and Special Deputy Charles Rakes (Guy Pearce) come in from Chicago and begin making demands, or else.

 Forrest decides not to play along, raising the ire of Rakes and ending up on the wrong side of a screwdriver to the throat. Jack, eager to prove he's strong enough to be a part of the family business, strikes a deal with Chicago gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman) and keeps the Bondurants in business while his older brother recovers. In the meantime, Jack decides he wants to woo Bertha Mennix (Mia Wasikowska), the daughter of a local preacher. She takes a liking to him, but her strict religious family recognizes trouble immediately. The success of the Bondurant boys enrages the Special Deputy, and he reveals just how far he's willing to go to end the legend of Forrest Bondurant once and for all.

 In a lot of ways, Lawless is a companion piece to The Proposition, and not merely because both are "period" stories; both films deal with familial bonds between brothers on the wrong side of the law and the consequences that can bring, albeit to different ends. Outside factors force the brothers to choose against their best interests in order to protect each other. If The Proposition is a "western" set in colonial Australia, then Lawless is a rural "gangster" film mostly without gangsters. Floyd Banner is a minor role, and while the boys do travel to Chicago to do business, if you're expecting something like Boardwalk Empire based on the chronological setting, prepare yourselves accordingly. This is more like Public Enemies by way of Matewan, but in a the best possible sense. Like The Proposition, it is a violent film, at times graphically so, and with that in mind I can understand why Roger Ebert considers it the kind of story that only deals with horrible people doing horrible things.

 From people I've talked to, Shia LeBeouf seems to be their concern as the "weak link" in an otherwise strong cast, but I have to say that as the weakest of the brothers, as the one who most desperately wants to impress Forrest, LeBeouf's Jack has much of Lawless to carry and does it quite well. You can understand what he sees in Bertha and why she's taken with him, even if the Bondurant reputation keeps her at bay. Speaking of which, Wasikowska has what should be the thankless "love interest" role and makes Bertha someone we care about, someone we worry for when Jack lets success get to his head. To be fair, Jack's success alongside Cricket Pate (Chronicle's Dane DeHaan) is born out of hard work, and when things go well, it's hard to blame them for celebrating and emulating the likes of Floyd Banner and Al Capone.

 Guy Pearce nearly steals the show as Charlie Rakes, the preening, squeaky-voiced Special Deputy with an affinity for brutality, matched only by his insistence on keeping clean at all times. Rakes wears one pair of gloves when beating Jack and another for when he chooses to use his gun. It's a greater insult to mar his face or mess his hair than to openly break the law, although it turns out there's one thing that Rakes hates even more than being disliked by criminals. With his shaved eyebrows and strange accent, it would be easy for Charlie Rakes to slip into caricature, to stand out too much from the rest of the cast, but Pearce always keeps him in check, a potent threat and not merely a joke of an antagonist.

 I realize I haven't even mentioned Jessica Chastain, who plays Maggie Beauford, a woman who left Chicago and came to Franklin county looking for work. She ends up in the gas station / restaurant the Bondurants use as a "cover" for their business, and like everybody else in Lawless, her history is far more complicated than one might suspect. Chastain has more to work with than Wasikowska as a character, and I was pleasantly surprised that despite what and who Maggie knows that her character's development is more than a plot device. There are a number of other recognizable actors in smaller roles that made me happy as the film went on: Noah Taylor (Almost Famous, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) is Floyd Banner's right hand man, Lew Temple (The Devil's Rejects, Unstoppable) is one of Franklin county's deputies, and even Jason Clarke, the Bondurant brother who isn't as well known, has been memorable on Brotherhood and in Death Race, Public Enemies, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

 Okay, so clearly I haven't even mentioned Tom Hardy yet, who is the main attraction for most people who don't know who John Hillcoat is. After The Dark Knight Rises, he's on everybody's radar, and while I'd love it if more of you would go back and watch Bronson, Layer Cake, Inception, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I'm happy you're going to see Lawless because he's in it. And disappoint Hardy does not: Forrest Bondurant is mostly silent, and Hardy finds ways to diminish his size under baggy sweaters and an oversized fedora. When Forrest speaks, he often begins by muttering or making a noise that feels less like an acting choice and more like an appropriate reaction to he's just heard. There's a great scene near the end of the film between Hardy and Chastain that suggests even Forrest can't separate the legend from fact about his life.

 I mentioned before that Lawless is based on a true story, documented in The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, grandson of one of the brothers. The film closes with a picture of the real Bondurant brothers as boys, and gives greater context to Jack's narration during the film, one that rides the line between the myth of the family and the reality as it moves forward to the other side of Prohibition. Also adding to the film's slightly unreal quality is the choices in music (performed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, as well as The Bootleggers, Ralph Stanley, Willie Nelson, and Emmylou Harris), most of which are anachronistic to say the least.

 That said, while it's initially strange to hear "White Light / White Heat" or Townes Van Zandt's "Snake Song" in a film set in the 1930s, the lyrically appropriate choices don't distract in a way that, say, Moulin Rouge does. Only "White Light / White Heat" is immediately recognizable, and it appears more than once during the film in different incarnations.

 Finally, this may simply be the Cap'n alone on crazy island, but the climactic showdown of Lawless reminded me of the end of Porky's. That's not in any way meant to diminish my enjoyment of the film, or even to suggest that the two movies are in any way similar, but somewhere my loony brain made that synaptic connection. Go figure.

Retro Review: Burn After Reading

 editor's note: In his continuing quest to re-post older reviews that never made it from the old Blogorium to its present home, Cap'n Howdy has been delivering piles of digital bits to me in the hopes I know what to do with it. Some movies are older than others, but most of these come from a period between 2006 and 2009, when the move took place. Enjoy

---

I promised Eck's Mass schwag, and we'll get to that momentarily. I wanted to start by thanking Tom for the awesome gift he delivered unto me via my box at work, Burn After Reading.

  About halfway through the last semester, the film students started yapping about how excited they were about Burn After Reading following No Country for Old Men yadda yadda, and it wasn't a total surprise to hear almost all of them bagging on the movie the week after release. It didn't come as much of a surprise because I suspected a retread of the Fargo to Lebowski situation in the late nineties, and having finished Burn After Reading, that's exactly what happened.

  It seems like the bigger a phenomenon a Coen Brothers film is, the more likely they are to follow it up with something totally off the wall. After O Brother Where Art Thou turned into a bluegrass sensation, they made The Man Who Wasn't There, a really bizarre tribute to film noir in black in white that lost pretty much all but the die hard fans. Going back before that, Fargo proved to be something of a curious hit that caught on with non-Coen fandom, and then they released The Big Lebowski, a movie that confounded average audiences and took five or six years to really achieve the cult status it has now.

  Burn After Reading is not likely going to have that kind of cult audience ten years from now, but that doesn't make it a disappointment. If anything, it might be remembered as a sort of Hudsucker Proxy for aficionados down the line*. Burn After Reading is the Coens take on espionage films, packed (like Lebowski) with idiots.

   What's funny is how straight they play the "thriller" angle, down to the way too serious music. But that's not actually what the movie's about. As Adam put it, BAR is about "one woman's quest for plastic surgery by any means necessary", and it's really hard to argue against that, especially by the end. Everything in between is a comedy of errors set in motion by selfish morons trolling around and being generally despicable. It's not hard to see why people find this movie difficult to like.

  Of course, if I boiled down The Big Lebowski to "a stoner who wanders around trying to get his rug back while dealing with a series of selfish assholes", you might not rush to see that either. Plot is rarely the most important part of a Coen Brothers film. They're more interested in seeing how characters interact, and damn do they have an interesting cast assembled.

  By now you've seen Frances McDormand and George Clooney all over the trailers, with a smattering of John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Pitt's Chad Feldheimer steals every scene of the movie he's in, and you've really never seen him play a character like this. I would liken it to Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou, where he really cuts loose and feels free to be goofy.

  However, I don't want to take anything away from Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, or my two favorite parts of Burn After Reading, the CIA agents in charge of making sense of the shenanigans you'd call a plot. J.K. Simmons and David Rasche pop in at various points in the film, not so much to catch us up but to further address how ridiculous the plot twists get. Many of you know who Simmons is, but it was a real treat to see Rasche, of tv's Sledge Hammer in the movie.

  The film may never attain "cult classic" status, but it's nowhere near the mess you might have heard it was. Of course, film students who cannot remember their film history are doomed to repeat it...

Blogorium Review: The Expendables 2

 Around this time two years ago, the Cap'n was way out west and The Expendables was in theatrical release. There was a bit of a kerfuffle on the internet* because The Expendables opened against Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Scott Pilgrim lost. I may have had a thing or two to say about that, because they selectively chose to denigrate The Expendables even though Scott Pilgrim also came in behind Eat Pray Love, Inception, and The Other Guys as well. But The Expendables weathered the storm, even with some shaky hand-held action chicanery and over-earnest monologue-ing from Mickey Rourke.

 It was a throwback to action movies that managed to upset action movie (no pun intended) die-hards for its adherence to new action movie techniques (see: hand-held camerawork during fight scenes) and also upset the kind of people who pretend to be action movie fans but actually just assume that it means every "action" movie is exactly like Commando or YouTube compilations of Steven Seagal kicking people through windows. I saw both kinds of reactions, and both camps seemed to say "boo hoo, it didn't meet my expectations so it sucks." And okay, it wasn't the movie it could have been, but to expect The Expendables to be the last twenty minutes of Rambo for two hours is absurd.

 To expect any action movie to consistently be as ridiculous as Commando is asking too much. People tend to forget that Commando has a few (not many, but a few) scenes where Arnold isn't punning or brutally murdering people. Predator has a LOT of those moments, and so does Die Hard and First Blood. Even Bloodsport has a story, threadbare though it may be. I know, you're shocked, but it's more than a 90 minute string of explosions and arterial spray, and other than maybe Bloodsport, I think you'd consider those to be some of the best films the action genre has to offer.

 But anyway, so we got past The Expendables and the people who didn't automatically feel "disappointed" it were pleasantly entertained, even if it wasn't great. And now, without the burden of political careers or Scott Pilgrims, there's a sequel. So how was The Expendables 2?

 Basically, it's exactly what it needs to be. Not a whole lot more, and certainly with things that improve on the first film but also some changes that I wouldn't really call "improvements." Still, overall I have to say that it delivers on the action, has a few good laughs (and a lot of chuckles / groaners) and is going to provide the "popcorn entertainment" quota for late summer action. It doesn't feel bloated like a Battleship or unnecessarily convoluted like a Bourne Legacy, and for the most part West and the cast get things right about where they need to be.

 This time, since they killed off "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Eric Roberts, there was a need for new villains, so Stallone and director Simon West (Con Air, The Mechanic) brought in Scott Adkins (Undisputed II, The Bourne Ultimatum) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD, Universal Soldier) to give Barney Ross and his crew some real trouble.

  The first thing The Expendables 2 does better than The Expendables is streamline the plot: instead of some kind of rogue-CIA agent funding a military coup / dictatorship in a fictional South American country that our team are vaguely invested in, Van Damme's Villane / Villain (it depends on what site you check) makes good on the promise implied by the name "expendables" by kicking Barney (Stallone)'s knife into the chest of a team member. (SPOILER ALERT) To be fair, it's kind of a cheat because a) it's the new "Expendable" Billy (Liam Hemsworth), the sniper who announces two scenes earlier that he wants to leave the team to be with his girlfriend, and b) because Liam Hemsworth is mostly in the movie so they could use his last name in the trailer to trick you into thinking it was his older brother Chris, prompting guys to say "Oh shit! Thor is in The Expendables 2" when in reality it's just the dude from The Hunger Games. In fairness, he does blow a guy's head off with his sniper rifle and holds his own for a while.

 Anyway, Villane and his crew the Sangs (who have goat tattoos on their necks for a reason Van Damme sort-of explains) steal the layout of a Russian mine where weapons grade plutonium is stored from our heroes, so the movie becomes a combination of "stop them from selling the plutonium" and "get revenge on this asshole" that invests the audience in the story. I'd be lying if I said we get to know more about the individual members on the Expendables - Jet Li leaves after the first action sequence, providing a waffling "maybe I'll be back, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll start a new life." and then parachuting out of the plane.

 Randy Couture and Terry Crews don't get much more to do than they did in the first one, Jason Statham only gets two scenes to really show off (one in a church and the other fighting Adkins at the end), but I guess it's nice that Dolph Lundgren has a few defining character quirks introduced this time around. Stallone (who co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Wenk) incorporates some of Lundgren's actual life into Gunner's character by making him a former chemical engineer (and Fulbright Scholar) who worked at a nightclub "to impress a girl" (all true, although I'm not sure if he was working at the club to impress a girl or because he was a 3rd degree black belt.) It makes up for the notable absence of Mickey Rourke, even if that means we're spared another monologue about the value of human life.

 Most of the focus in the film is on Stallone or the new / returning characters. In addition to Hemsworth's Billy, when Jet Li takes off before the title screen, Church (Bruce Willis) tells Barney that Maggie (Nan Yu from Speed Racer and Lundgren's Diamond Dogs) is going to join them on the mission to retrieve that map Villane steals. Maggie can hold her own, and is in a lot of ways more interesting than most of the guys on the team. She also gives Stallone the opportunity to be funnier because Barney Ross is so uncomfortable around women that he just can't understand why she keeps flirting with him. Van Damme is also good to see, although if you've seen Universal Soldier: Regeneration or JCVD, you know he's more than capable of putting his weathered face to use as an imposing adversary. He's a bad guy out for the money, but the Sangs have a code built around respect, so he's very particular about how he deals with the Expendables.

 Oh, and then there's the other driving force of the film, which provides for some of the best (and also worst) adjustments between the last movie and this one: Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris. Of the three, only Willis really seems to be playing a character, as Norris and Schwarzenegger are basically playing their personas. Case in point: Chuck Norris, introduced after killing an entire Sang team and blowing up a tank, walks into frame to the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (?), is identified (repeatedly) as a "Lone Wolf," and proceeds to provide a "Chuck Norris Fact" in the span of three minutes.

 And look, it's kind of funny at first, until he leaves shortly thereafter and it's clear that when (and if) he shows up again that's all he's going to be used for. He's a walking reference to the fact that people mythologized Chuck Norris. But then we get to Arnold, reprising his cameo from the last film as Trench, who is a walking "one-liner": he says "I'm back" or "I'll be back" repeatedly, and when Chuck Norris walks up next to him, I kid you not Schwarzenegger says "Who is next? Rambo?" It's like Arnold wrote all of his dialogue for the film and delivers it in the worst possible way (seriously, when he has things to say relevant to the plot, the delivery is much better).

 Oh, and then there's this exchange between Church and Trent:

 Trent: I'm almost out. Stay here - I'll be back.
 Church: No, you've been back enough. I'LL BE BACK.
 Trent: Yippie-ky-yay.

  The walking, talking reference to your more famous movies is a little groan-worthy, but it is mostly contained near the end, where Statham was a pretty good knife fight with the largely unused Adkins (seriously, check out some of his movies), Stallone has a better fight with Van Damme (even if they re-use footage of one of JCVD's high kicks right after he did it the first time), and I have to say that I laughed at Arnold and Bruce in the Smart Car and Chuck Norris' use of an airport scanner. That said, it's not exactly the direction I was hoping to see these movie go in. We're seeing them because we know who these action stars are, not because we want to be reminded of their "greatest hits." That just reinforces the assumption that The Expendables as a series is a glorified YouTube compilation of action tropes.

 But overall it's a fun time at the movies. I really enjoyed Van Damme and Statham's "I now pronounce you man and knife" and Dolph Lundgren being a part of the team (and failing miserably to impress Maggie) and let's be honest here: there's something cool about seeing Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger standing side by side and shooting at Jean-Claude Van Damme and assorted goons. I still wish that Randy Couture and Terry Crews had more time to shine, but I guess the third movie is an inevitability, so there's always next time, right?

 Oh, one final note: so Simon West made Con Air (which I liked) and The Mechanic (which was a serviceable but not great Jason Statham vehicle) and also a few other things I didn't see or didn't like (The General's Daughter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider respectively), so I didn't really know what to expect here. The Mechanic was competently shot but the action scenes were few and far between, so it was hard to say what we'd get here. I'm happy to say it's mostly an improvement over the impossible to watch fight scenes in The Expendables (I'm looking at you, Lundgren / Li fight), so that's an improvement over Stallone. The pre-title sequence was good and easy to follow other than awkward framing in the Jet Li "knives vs frying pan" scene. Still, I don't think the series has quite found a director that can convey the action in a way that does it justice. So that's something to think about for next time, if you ask me. And by that I don't mean the movie leaves itself blatantly open-ended - it has a beginning, middle, and an end, but it's clear there can (and more than likely will) be more Expendables adventures. I mean, the producer has to make good on promising Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, and Clint Eastwood for part 3**!


 So yeah, if you didn't like the last one I'm sure you'll find lots of things not to like about The Expendables 2. And to be fair, it's not like they knocked it out of the park. It's more like a "ground rule double" of action films, which is probably less than what you expected with this kind of lineup but it's getting them in place for a grand slam. I hope, anyway.


 * Interesting tidbit: Auto-Correct didn't even blink when I typed the word "kerfuffle" even though I'm positive I've never used that term before on the Blogorium and I'm honestly surprised to think that it might qualify as an actual word with a working definition.
** Two of the four names will be in that movie, and I bet you can guess which ones.

Retro Review: Super High Me and The X-Files: I Want to Believe

 (editor's note: The Cap'n realized there was a series of Blogorium posts from 2008 that never made the transition from our old stomping grounds to the new one. As a result, it seemed like a good idea to share some other reviews that had been otherwise "lost" over the past four years).


Last night, I watched two movies:

    X-Files: I Want to Believe and Super High Me.

    Guess which one was surprisingly engaging and changed the way I perceived someone?

    If you guessed Super High Me, you're correct. As the title would suggest, the documentary is a parody of Super Size Me, wherein comedian Doug Benson (The Marijuana-Logues, VH1's pick something) finds out what the effects of smoking weed all day for thirty days straight are.

    This one joke premise actually gets expanded a little bit since Benson, a noted pot-enthusiast, has to stop smoking pot for 30 days in order to accurately judge a month of doing nothing but getting high. I was always kind of lukewarm towards Benson, because it seemed like he always had the obvious joke on Best Week Ever or I Love the (fill in the blank), but it does turn out that he just works better blue.

   During the 30 days of not smoking pot, Benson also becomes surprisingly lucid and more observational in his stand up (which he continues doing all 60 days), even if he doesn't notice it. It's actually quite interesting watching him go from stoned to sober to stoned again. I wouldn't call it regression when he hits the end of no pot, but there's a definite shift in his material.

    The rest of Super High Me is devoted to learning more about California's medicinal marijuana program. Benson meets people who run the dispensaries, the cameras are present when the DEA raids in the middle of the night, and he jokes with other comedians about getting high. As far as the "effects" go, there's not a radical difference in his medical tests, psychological profile, or psychic ability (you heard me), althoug his sperm count goes wayyyy up.

    Recommended as a renter if you like Doug Benson, are a stoner, or like stand up peppered with frequent drug use. Not recommended if you thought Super Size Me was a life changing experience.


--

    The most damning thing I can say about X-Files: I Want to Believe is that it's disappointing. After all these years, the best Chris Carter could come up with was a third rate episode of CSI featuring Mulder, Scully, and Billy Connoly playing a pedophile priest.

    Oh, excuse me - a possibly psychic pedophile priest. That, along with a ridiculous twist involving organ transplants and two headed dogs are what qualify this sub-par episode disguised as a movie as being "paranormal". What it really means are endless (and pointless) arguments between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson about "the darkness" and "believing".

    Everything about the film is perfunctory, from the camerawork to the lackluster score and the grasping at straws way the film both tries to ignore the series but throw in as many "hey remember this" bits. For example, in the span of 60 seconds, we see Mulder a) walk to his "I Want to Believe" poster, b) eat sunflower seeds, c) a picture of his sister, d) the camera pan up to see the pencils in the ceiling, even though it doesn't make sense in the house they live in. Oh, and the basketball, just in case. All they were missing was an "X" on the window.

    There's a George W. Bush joke that's so behind the times that it wouldn't have been funny in 2004, let alone 2008. Why they dragged Mitch Pileggi in for such a pointless and unnecessary cameo is beyond me. He's literally only in the film because fans would've rioted otherwise, because there's no other reason for his totally wasted screentime.

    Frankly, everything about X-Files: I Want to Believe is a waste. It's nowhere as horrendous as the series finale; it's just unnecessary. The worst sin the movie could have commited was to exist for no good reason, but that's exactly what happened. If for some bizarre reason Chris Carter gets a shot at one more movie, they'd better make it a damn sight more compelling. Even die hards can only take so much abuse; ask George Lucas.

(Mis)Adventures in Projectioneering: The Brain Wrap

  This edition of Adventures in Projectioneering might lean a little on the technical side, but I'll try to keep it at a minimum. It's mostly about those nights where everything goes wrong, and in order get into detail without simply throwing out jargon, I'll explain some of the ins and outs of being a projectionist. The important part, when I'm running around like a maniac trying to fix one problem after the other, I'm sure you've all experienced.

 Maybe it's the older equipment at the theatre I'm working at, or maybe it's Cap'n Howdy's "ring rust" (a.k.a. general incompetence) that caused things to fall apart not once, not twice, but four times during one shift this weekend. All four of them involved "Brain Wraps," which is the first piece of jargon I can knock out for you.

 So this is the Brain, which sits on a platter with the film:

  
 The film runs through the Brain, which determines the speed and prevents things from moving too quickly or too slowly. If the film moves too quickly or too slowly, it will begin to wrap around the Brain, hence the term "Brain Wrap." (Google apparently likes the term as one word, but I'll stick with my interpretation as amateur projectionist).

 Brain Wraps can happen for other reasons as well; for example, if you thread the film the wrong way through the rollers or if a piece of film jumps over one of the rollers, it can cause the film to tighten around the brain until it can no longer feed through the projector and the film comes to a dead stop. The inert film will then melt as a result of the heat in the projector's lamp, which I gather you've seen or heard of in some form or the other. It's a nice "meta" technique in movies that want to draw attention to the projected image, as well as how Zack Snyder ended his trailer for Dawn of the Dead.

 How it happened four times in one night is still something of a mystery, as one of the things I do is check and double check the platters and Brains while films are running. The platters and projectors are old, and the Brains are constantly being repaired. We're all aware that each projector has its own particular quirk (some run a little slow, some have film that jumps off of the rollers), so it's important to monitor them to make sure everything is going smoothly.

 The first one seemed to be doing fine: it started normally, and when I came back to dim the lights and adjust the volume, it was still running through the Brain nominally, but when I came back upstairs from getting the next showtimes, something went wrong. And because I didn't go check on it sooner, Cap'n Howdy got to join the "Wall of Shame" where burned film hangs. Why it wrapped, we aren't sure, but wrap it did, to the point where the film around the brain was three or four inches around, which is really bad.

 After that, I was extra vigilant, and since I was still training, the normally scheduled projectionist was also keeping a close eye out, which makes the next three all the more mysterious. I checked, double checked, and then was triple checked by the other projectionist, and everything was good. The threading was correct, the platters were on the correct setting, and there was no reason for a Brain Wrap. And yet, we came back to three separate projectors to find that the film had jumped over a roller and was beginning to wrap. All were easily fixed without having to make an emergency splice (therefore avoiding three more trips to the "Wall of Shame"), but my trainer was at a loss for how or why these phantom wraps occurred.

 Nevertheless, this led to much running around, desperately trying to keep everything on schedule without letting a small problem get bigger (and it will) while hopefully keeping things invisible for the audiences below. For the folks who had to wait ten minutes for us to fix the melted Brain Wrap, I apologize. That's on me, and it won't happen again. I should have learned that lesson twelve years ago when a similar problem happened during Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man. Alas, general incompetence gets us when we least expect it. Until next time...

Retro Review: Drillbit Taylor

 (editor's note: The Cap'n realized there was a series of Blogorium posts from 2008 that never made the transition from our old stomping grounds to the new one. As a result, it seemed like a good idea to share some other reviews that had been otherwise "lost" over the past four years).


Let's talk about Juniorbad, which is what the clever title of a review for Drillbit Taylor should have. Fair or not, that's exactly what the movie is: a younger, less amusing version of Superbad written by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow.

    The only significant difference is that Owen Wilson is the title character, a homeless military deserter approached by three freshment to act as their bodyguard. See, in their first week at high school, a surprisingly crafty bully manages to fool both the principal and the children's parents into thinking he's the victim, while in the meanwhile he's trying to run them down in a car after school (I'm not making this up). Hence, the need for Drillbit Taylor to protect them.

    Everything else maps out pretty much the same way. There's the skinny nerd hero who kind of reminds you of Michael Cera, the fat kid surrogate for Jonah Hill, and the quirky shrimper wanna-be McLovin. This might be cute in its own right, except that Drillbit Taylor lacks just about everything Superbad had going for it. When you knock the age of the characters from seniors to freshmen, and accordingly cast pubescent kids working with a PG-13 script, it gets hard to go anywhere new.

    It's not that the kids aren't likeable, because half of the time they are. The other half of the time, the script shoehorns them into doing things that just don't make sense. Of course, when you're talking about a movie that stacks the odds against them so much that it get ridiculous, I'm not sure where my loyalties should lie. I am pretty sure I shouldn't have been rooting for the bully to just kill the kids, which I did on a few occasions.

    The problem is that Drillbit Taylor seems like the kind of movie that should precede Superbad, and not follow it. Remove Wilson from the equation and it makes sense that the three youngsters (Nate Hartley, Troy Gentle, and David Dorfman) would get over being bullied and become the ignored nerds we meet at the beginning of Superbad. That being said, the story just isn't very interesting in and of itself, which tends to render most of the film moot.

    You can find little moments of amusement in Drillbit Taylor, mostly coming from the adults who seem to be in a different film than the children. Director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) packs the movie with cameos from David Koechner, Cedric Yarborough, Lisa Lampanelli (playing herself), Adam Baldwin, Frank Whaley, Matt Besser, Beth Littleford, and Stephen Root. Danny McBride (Foot Fist Way, All the Real Girls) has the closest thing to a supporting role as one of Drillbit's homeless friends, but even he feels restrained by the "kid friendly" rating.

    Perhaps it's the PG-13. Maybe it's just the feeling of "been done, and better at that". All I know is that Drillbit Taylor is at best a middle of the road, watered down version of a much funnier movie. And I watched the "Unrated" version.

Quick Review: The Shark is Still Working - The Impact and Legacy of Jaws

 If you're the kind of person who reads about movies online (and I certainly hope you are, because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this), you've probably heard about The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws. Chances are you heard about it a few years ago, wondered if and when you'd get a chance to see it, forgot about it, heard about it again, then forgot about it again, and then recently heard it was going to be an extra on the 37th Anniversary Blu-Ray Special Edition of Jaws: The Movie That Ruined Summer Movies Forever.

 Is that a fair characterization of Jaws? Not really, but since it comes up almost every time people mention the slow decline in quality of "Summer" movies, in large part because people get tired of talking about George Lucas and Star Wars, which was the other movie where marketing and promotion factored in as much if not more than the film itself. Of course, Jaws and Star Wars are both entertaining movies that make movies like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones look like the garbage they are. I chose those two films coincidentally, of course. If I had seen a Transformers film one could argue I should substitute that for either film listed above, but I haven't and won't.

 So before you badger me about getting off on a tangent about the relative quality of "Summer" movies today vs. 30+ years ago, it is worth noting that this exact argument figures into The Shark is Still Working. Not in great detail, because there isn't much in The Shark is Still Working that approaches the phrase "in great detail," but it is a fun and comprehensive overview of Jaws. And by comprehensive I mean that it covers nearly everything you might have ever wondered about Jaws.

  That includes a brief look into the making of (with some discussion of Laurent Bouzereau's The Making of Jaws), voice-over actor Percy Rodrigues' role in the trailer narration, Peter Benchley's book, the poster art, the locations used in the film then and now, the story behind the U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue, Steven Spielberg's reaction to not being nominated for Best Director, interviews with nearly every surviving cast member, crew member, and Universal pictures executives, Jaws Fest, memorabilia collectors, John Williams explaining the shark theme, a beach that uses the theme to warn swimmers to get out of the ocean, the film's impact world-wide, the marketing, what happened to The Orca (and The Orca 2), what happened to Bruce the Shark, how CGI would ruin Jaws, interviews with fans including Eli Roth, M. Night Shyamalan, Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Bryan Singer, and tributes to Martha's Vineyard locals who appeared in the film (both living and deceased).

 This doesn't cover everything you see in The Shark is Still Working, which is narrated by the late Roy Scheider and features Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfuss, and Scheider prominently. It's quite impressive for a fan made documentary to manage to bring together nearly everyone involved in the film (especially since quite a few major subject are no longer with us) but I had the distinct impression that there was so much to cover but not enough time to give it all proper attention. As a result, The Shark is Still Working jumps around from subject to subject before viewers really have time to settle in on the significance of what's being discussed.

 Now, I'm not saying that The Shark is Still Working should be Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy. That's a four hour overview of the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series that covers nearly anything you can think of in detail. The Shark is Still Working is 101 minutes long and manages to cover many bases, and much of what director Erik Hollander and writer James Gelet find was new to me. I don't wish to diminish what The Shark is Still Working accomplishes, but my honest reaction was that it covers as much Jaws ephemera as humanly possible but generally speaking doesn't go into depth about most of it. It's a very entertaining documentary and has some fantastic interview subjects, and the footage of Spielberg watching the Academy Award Nominations is worth the price of admission alone. (Spielberg tries not to be upset that Jaws is nominated for Best Picture but not Best Director, and his faux-disappointment masks the face of a 27 year old genuinely feeling slighted for his efforts).

 Getting back to where my review begin, the concept of Jaws laying the groundwork for Summer Blockbusters (including the repeated statements of Smith, Roth, Singer, and Shyamalan that emulating Jaws' impact weighed heavily on their own careers) is in The Shark is Still Working. But like many other elements of the Impact and Legacy of Jaws that bear more investigation, it only touches on the issue. The Shark is Still Working may not end up as the "Be All, End All" documentary about Jaws, but it is a fine conversation starter. Considering that you get this and Bouzereau's The Making of Jaws as extras on the Blu-Ray for a movie you should be buying anyway, that's a pretty good way to see The Shark is Still Working after all these years.

Retro Review: Lost Boys - The Tribe

 (editor's note: The Cap'n realized there was a series of Blogorium posts from 2008 that never made the transition from our old stomping grounds to the new one. As a result, it seemed like a good idea to share some other reviews that had been otherwise "lost" over the past four years).


Insert Joke about Vampire Film "sucking"

In ten years, nobody's going to be defending Lost Boys: The Tribe. No one is going to be watching it again, for one thing, but even if some curious teenager decides to double feature the first and second film (we'll get to the possibility of the third film further down), odds are they'll find The Lost Boys far more compelling then its anemic sequel.

    Lost Boys: The Tribe works very hard to mimic the structure of the original, down to recreating classic moments from the first film. The big problem is that none of it is very interesting. It turns out that if you try to retain the atmosphere of a film from the 1980s but remove all of the wardrobe, music, and cheesy haircuts, things don't work. Rap metal and excessive profanity don't actually qualify as "updating" the world of Santa Carla.

    The cast is uniformly bland,  which kills any interest in the vampires. In The Lost Boys, Keifer Sutherland was so much more interesting than Jason Patric that you wanted to see them drag him into the night. In The Tribe, all of the vampires are surfers who say "fuck" and "dude" a whole lot and like to stab each other because they can't die. And videotape it.

    The leads are vanilla, at best. Going by the names, I guess they're supposed to be loosely related to Corey Haim and Jason Patric's Emerson family, although that's never addressed in any way. They have a "kooky" aunt that's meant to fill in for the mother and crazy grandpa, which results in the worst callback to the original film at the end.

    Corey Feldman, who really ought to be the one thing this film has going for it, is a total bust and he can't help it. Feldman's voice aged a lot faster than the rest of him, so Edgar Frog sounds like a fifty year old in the body of a twenty something. In The Lost Boys, it was kind of clever that someone as young as the Frog Brothers could be experts on killing vampires, but when you add twenty years, it's just kind of stupid. Ideally you should push this world further down the line and have someone like Nick Nolte playing a much older Edgar Frog (ala Kris Kristofferson in Blade). Feldog just don't have the heft to pull it of.

    I never thought I'd say this, but director P.J. Pesce is no Joel Schumacher. There's zero visual flair in this movie, unless you count borrowing shots from the original, and even those look more like ripoffs. The script by Hans Rodionoff, when not speeding its way through the plot of the first film (the transformation from human to vampire is no longer a gradual thing but instead happens over the course of a few hours) is busy making unnecessary pop culture references. The Goonies one I was willing to ignore, but the extended Big Lebowski name dropping really irked me.

    Oh, and there's the pointless opening with Tom Savini who agreed to be in the film as long as he only had to work one night. Look for a really weak retread of his From Dusk Til Dawn character at the beginning of the film.

    Ultimately, there's not a lot of reason to watch Lost Boys: The Tribe. While I don't remember seeing The Lost Boys when it came out (I would've been eight), I did watch it on home video six and seven years later and throughout high school. Even removed from the 1980s, it was still an entertaining movie with "kid" protagonists, Mouth from The Goonies, Bill from Bill and Ted, the old man from Tron, and that strange cover of "People are Strange". As I got older, I came to appreciate Edward Herrmann, Dianne Wiest and Kiefer Sutherland. And the fact that despite being the idiot who made Batman Forever AND Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher had once upon a time made a decent movie or two.

    Lost Boys: The Tribe has none of that going for it. I don't think I'll be watching it again. I find it hard to imagine there'd be a nostalgia for this particular era, so it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to revisit the "aughts" with this film.

***
Spoiler-ish Alert, if anyone was still thinking of watching this.

    Finally, let's discuss the actual ending; not the one where they kill the head vampire surfer moron, but the one during the credits where Corey Haim's name inexplicably appears right before Corey Feldman's. Normally, that'd be a "what the fuck?" moment, but since the music fades out, we can guess there's something coming.

    Sure enough, Edgar Frog is sitting under a lone spot light talking into the darkness, saying things like "cut the theatrics! I know you're there." Then we see a shadowy Corey Haim, looking much worse for the wear (nearly unrecognizable to be honest). They hint at some kind of history between the first Lost Boys film and The Tribe, and then they say some really cheesy stuff and attack each other. Cut back to the credits.

    Alternate endings on the dvd carry this thread further, but suggest that Edgar Frog's brother Alan (Jamison Newlander) is now a "Master" vampire and is coming back to exact his revenge on the Coreys. Either way, we're being promised a third Lost Boys movie that has all the makings of being MUCH worse than The Tribe. Tell you what, gang; go find Jason Patric and get him involved, because if you're going to pursue a continuation of the original film using people willing to come back, then you might as well grab him too.

Cap'n Howdy Presents: (New) Adventures in Projectioneering!

 Well, I wasn't expecting this. It's been twelve years since the Cap'n worked for or in a movie theatre, and that was one of those "chain" types (it still exists which is why you might have noticed the fact I no longer identify it by name) and I thought that I'd probably never find myself in a projection booth again. Not because I didn't enjoy it, but because it tends to be the kind of job high school students get over the summer or stick around through the fall and move up from concessions to usher to projectionist. I know this is the case because it's what I did.

 The Cap'n is no spring chicken, so it seemed like if I'd been away for so long and that the younger generation was no doubt better equipped to handled these new fangled "digital" projectors we hear about. Speaking of which, true story: when I went to see The Dark Knight Rises a few weeks ago, before the IMAX showing, I saw it at a large (but different) "chain" multiplex and when the movie ended I could see the Windows toolbar at the bottom of the screen. As in, no film whatsoever, we were watching a projection of somebody's digital copy of The Dark Knight Rises. I'm not making justifications for people who pirate movies, but it's an uphill battle convincing them that you're in for a better experience watching a theatre's projected computer screen for $15.

 Anyway, so with digital projectors being in vogue and projectionists not really in demand (you can program those things and they run themselves, reducing the person in the booth to a minimum-wage IT employee), it hadn't crossed my mind in some time I'd ever be working in a theatre again. But then I got word from a friend whose husband worked for a local theatre that they needed a projectionist and all I needed to do was drop by. And all of a sudden, with limited funds, a very part time job, and lots of spare time I could be using to make money (sorry readers, but this here Blogorium is a labor of love, not a lucrative cash cow for the Cap'n), I decided why not go check it out.

 Now this particular theatre was enticing because I've been going there since I was a kid. It's been here since before the Cap'n lived in this state, and while it's changed hands a few times over the years, it turns out one thing hasn't changed at all: the projection booth.

 I expected to be rusty at threading a projector (and I was) but I had no idea I'd be working with machines as old as I was, kept in working order by a dedicated team making the best of what they had even when parts were in short supply. And by that I mean "we don't make that kind of part anymore" short supply. It's impressive to see projectors that I saw movies on as a kid still playing films today, including The Dark Knight Rises. 35mm film is still where it's at, as far as this Luddite is concerned.

 The other thing I'd forgotten was how much fun it is to physically thread the film through the machine - yes, it can be maddening when you have four movies starting within five minutes of each other (still better than eight to sixteen), but there's something about being in the background, watching the audiences sit down to watch a movie, and getting everything ready. Because much of the equipment isn't automated, I also get to do little tricks like lower the lights on cue, adjust the sound between trailers and the film, and sometimes physically lift the shutter covering the lens.

 It's the kind of thing you forget that you enjoy doing, a job that's entirely behind the scenes but results in people being able to escape somewhere else for a few hours. Being a projectionist is a unique sort of job in that you are responsible for the experiences of anywhere from two to two hundred people, but only you know what that responsibility means. I'm not diminishing the front of house folks (who are all very nice and laid back people - the atmosphere of the theatre is very laid back with no uniforms or restrictions on facial hair, etc.). Believe me, they get the complaints if I do my job badly, but don't think I don't know if I goofed up. Chances are I'm trying to fix it, and every time a piece of film is a little too loose or rides to the side of a roller, I am hoping that doesn't sully your moviegoing experience. People don't go out to see movies that much any more, so it is incumbent on me to make it worth your while.

 Do I make too much out of this? Maybe. I mean, it's not like I'm making much more than what I did twelve years ago. But I enjoy doing it, and I'd forgotten how much I could enjoy doing it, even as a second part time job. If I ever get a call back from full time work, or if the Blogorium magically turned into a hit or something tomorrow, I still think I'd hang on to this gig for as long as it lasts. If nothing else, the stories will be good, and I have a few already.

Blogorium Review: Savages

 It hasn't exactly been the best start of the millennium for Oliver Stone. After he pretty much owned late 80s and early 90s until Quentin Tarantino took his throne of "edgy filmmaker" (appropriate considering that Stone took Tarantino's script for Natural Born Killers and changed it to suit the movie he wanted to make), things kind of dropped off. I don't know where you folks stand on U Turn and Any Given Sunday, but I still like them, but it's pretty much the consensus that Stone fell off of the radar and started making movies that were at best "okay" after 2000.

First Stone tried to get in on the "somewhat historical sword and sandal" movement, post-Gladiator (this would include Troy, 300, and also Ridley Scott's other foray, Kingdom of Heaven) to less than desirable results. Alexander is pretty much a mess, and that goes for all three (four?) cuts that are out there - the action heavy / homoerotic removing "Director's Cut," the messy theatrical cut, and the "fuck it, here's a combination of the two" Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut. Honestly, I never saw the "Director's Cut" because it seemed silly to accentuate the action over Alexander the Great's relationships, but I saw the theatrical and final cuts. I guess the last one is the better of the two I saw, but it's no Gladiator, and Gladiator sure isn't Ben-Hur*.

 I never saw World Trade Center and W. was okay but oddly toothless. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps had some pretty good performances but suffered from music choices and visual metaphors that were way to "on the nose." Look, it's cool if you want to cover the financial crisis using Gordon Gekko because in many ways this happened because stock brokers and traders decided to emulate Michael Douglas after Wall Street, but to have someone blow a bubble that floats up over the New York skyline and then bursts, followed by the stock numbers plummeting overlaid on the same skyline is laying it on a bit thick. And I'm being generous here, because people seemed to hate Money Never Sleeps and World Trade Center, while generally well reviewed, always gets forgotten when compared to United 93. And when was the last time you heard anyone mention W.?

 This brings me to Savages, which is being touted as a "return to form" for Stone. For me, a return to form means we're looking at the guy who made Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July and JFK and Nixon and Salvador and Natural Born Killers and even though I don't really like it, The Doors. Because that Oliver Stone was at least interesting. And Savages is not quite that, but it is definitely a better movie than anything Stone's made since 1999 (or, if you really insist that Natural Born Football sucks, then 1994).

 Savages, which is based on Don Winslow's book of the same name (and co-written by Winslow and Stone and Shane Salermo) is the story of O (short for Ophelia, which seems like it should have some significance but only really ties in because there's a painting of the drowned Hamlet character) played by Blake Lively. She narrates the film and pretty much admits that she's going to be unreliable from the get-go because she (SPOILER) tells you a lie by saying "Just because I'm telling you this story doesn't mean I'm alive at the end of it." Unlike other unreliable protagonists (I'm looking at you, non-Batman Christopher Nolan characters), O isn't crazy so much as she isn't very bright. But we'll get to that in a little bit.

 O is dating Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a veteran of Afghanistan and also probably Iraq who came back and started growing and selling weed with Ben (Aaron Johnson), who O is also dating. They have a happy little thing going on and a thriving business with their smuggled in from Afghanistan pot until a Mexican cartel sends them a message, in the form of a video of decapitated folks who said "no" to their business proposition. Ben is more of a zen kind of guy, who spends a lot of time around the world making things better, so he's amenable to making a deal. Chon, on the other hand, is still fixed in a mindset of hostility and sees the cartel trying to make a hostile takeover. He has some buddies he served with who provide security at a distance with sniper rifles keep an eye on their meeting, in case things get nasty.

 The cartel sends Alex (Demian Bechir)to speak on behalf of the boss, Elena (Salma Hayek), and yeah, it's pretty much a "join us or we'll make your lives hell" kind of offer. Ben is hesitant, but Chon really angers Elena by saying "you want us to eat your shit and call it caviar," so things get testy. Elena also has Lado (Benicio del Toro), the muscle, who we meet killing a lawyer named Chad (Shea Wigham cameo) in what you could call a ruthless manner. Lado doesn't like Ben and Chon, so when the order comes down to kidnap O, he makes it his personal mission to keep an eye on her.

 From that point on, the movie gets more interesting, which is not to say it wasn't before. It's just that if that were my entire review I could have skipped the movie and just recapped the trailer. The trailer sells it as just a kidnapping movie and that Ben and Chon are going to get her back and escalate the violence, Taken-style or something to that effect. But that's not really what happens in Savages.

 Instead, the film takes some time to breathe and lets the characters get to know each other a little better. We get to know Ben and Chon more, which is good because otherwise it would be easier to characterize the film as "John Carter  and Kick-Ass vs. Frida and The Wolf Man." Also, Elena gets to know O, in part because her own daughter Magda (Sandra Echeverría) doesn't want to have anything to do with her. In an interesting wrinkle, we first meet Magda while she's on the phone with her mother, shopping in the same mall O is about to be kidnapped from. Stone could have laid it on thick there but mostly the parallels between the two young women is kept in the background.

 Also, I haven't mentioned sleazy DEA Agent Dennis, played by John Travolta. It's been a while since I've seen Travolta in anything, so I forgot just how good he can be in movies and not just as tabloid fodder. Here he's great as a corrupt agent playing more than one side, simultaneously feeding Ben and Chon information while plotting across the border in order to keep his pockets lined and his ass out of the line of fire. While ethically dubious I have to say I admire his ability to avoid the same fate as Chad on more than one occasion.

 Stylistically I guess you could say that Savages is a little closer to the Oliver Stone of Natural Born Killers, but it's nowhere near as wild as that movie. Yes, sometimes it switches to black and white or goes slightly slow motion, and there's the juxtaposition of classical music with graphic violence, but more or less the film is told in a straightforward fashion. Where it's closer to Natural Born Killers is in the violence, where Savages really just does not hold back. There's a scene where Lado whips a guy until his eyeball pops out, and then the eye just hangs there for the rest of the scene until the mole is douse with gasoline, place inside of a tire, and then set ablaze by Ben (at Elena's bidding). It's not a sensationalized violence so much as the kind that makes you cringe a little, like when Lado blows off Chad's kneecaps (this would be more of a spoiler but Chad dies in the same scene we meet him early in the film).

 So Savages is an entertaining, if violent movie. I like that both sides make their case about how the title applies to the other (again, not in a heavy handed way. I feel that's necessary after Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), and while I was expecting to enjoy the supporting cast I did end up liking Kitsch and Johnson and Lively as well. Good job, Oliver Stone - I did not see that coming. I also liked the smaller roles / cameos in the movie, like Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) as Ben and Chon's money launderer, Leonard Roberts (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heroes) as O's security guy Hayes, and Joel David Moore** as a computer programmer who I don't think ever says anything in the film but you see him two or three times.

 But as much as I'd like to close things out like that, I do feel like I should pull a switcheroo just like the ending of Savages. Well, I should say "endings" because there's a climactic shootout during a hostage exchange where pretty much everybody dies and then O says "that's how I imagined it would happen, anyway" and then abruptly jumps back to explain what DID happen, which makes more sense considering we had already seen the formulation of the plan earlier in the movie. It is kind of a cop-out, not only because Stone (and Winslow and Salermo) give you the emotionally satisfying conclusion you were probably expecting in its entirety only to pull the rug out, but also because it feels like they couldn't make up their minds.

 Yes, O is unreliable and you set that up early on but if we're really going by that then how could we possibly have seen the conversation that sets up the actual ending of the movie? No one she communicates with was privy to it. I just took it that O was narrating parts of the movie but after a while the movie took over and we're just seeing the narrative presented to us not as O saw it but as it was unfolding. She can't possibly know half of the things we see, so you just get over the structure of film as flashback.

 Anyway, so it's like they had two endings, couldn't decide which one they liked more (the "movie" ending or the "appropriate for the world of this movie" ending), so they decided to use both. And it detracts a little bit, especially when it goes on to these ambiguous statements about what happened afterward and what living like a "savage" means and O waxing the philosophical. It's not enough to derail Savages, but I have to say that the movie doesn't quite stick the landing. Otherwise I had fun watching it, cringed a little bit at the cruelty, and enjoyed the acting and direction. This is the kind of Oliver Stone I could get used to watching again - maybe not at the top of his game, but still making interesting movies that don't hold back so much.


 * Fair? Maybe not, but it's hard to argue that this wave of historical "epics" doesn't in some fashion borrow heavily from Ben-Hur or Spartacus or Demetrius and the Gladiators.
** I guess most of you would say from Avatar, but since I haven't seen Avatar he's "Hatchet's Joel David Moore" to me.