Reflections on "Bad Movie Night" by Cap'n Howdy

 Bad Movie Night is coming up this weekend. For some of you that means you'll be at the Blogorium, inexplicably sharing in on the agony and the ecstasy of the best of the worst I can throw at you. For some, it will be a recap you take a look at later on, and think to yourself "wow, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through that." For the Cap'n, it's a fun, if admittedly unorthodox way to spend time with friends. It's also a good opportunity to clarify a few things, as I do from time to time. There's an inherent contradiction coming up, but I am vast and contain multitudes. Or I'm a walking contradiction. I can't remember. Anyway, let's discuss how Bad Movie Night fits into the evolving notion of the Blogorium and the Cap'n Howdy mission statement overall.

 Without fail, at some point during Bad Movie Night, someone is going to ask me if I'm going to see X or Y terrible movie, and I'm probably going to say "no". A friend recently asked if there was a review on the Blogorium for Tusk, and was confused / disappointed when I explained that I stopped watching the movie around the time that Johnny Depp showed up. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the point at which I realized that nothing Kevin Smith had in store for Tusk was worth investing any more time on. If you really want to know how I feel about post-SMODcast Kevin Smith as a director, there's a review for Red State out there that pretty much covers it. I'll add that it isn't particularly enthralling to hear his M.O. for making movies that aren't sequels is to get really high, record a podcast, and then turn whatever he comes up with into a movie. You know, like "Jaws with a moose." Nevertheless, I fully expect a question about how excited I am for Mallrats 2 (not at all).

 That said, it's totally fair to ask me that, especially at something called Bad Movie Night. Historically speaking, the get together-s hosted by the Cap'n have centered around horror movies or schlock, and primarily schlock. They're fun films to rally around, and are conducive to a party atmosphere. It's an informal crowd that comes to Blogorium events, and while you aren't expected to participate in any MST3k-like riffing on movies, I don't discourage making comments when something just doesn't make sense. The specious plot that bridges gratuitous nudity in Andy Sidaris films practically begs for some level of commentary. But I wouldn't do the same if I was at Nevermore (well, sometimes, but much more quietly). We do, on occasion, watch screwball comedies or more serious fare, and there's talk of branching into different "fest" directions, but let's stick with Bad Movie Night for now.

 Bad Movie Night was borrowed from a tradition my brother and his friends started more than a decade ago: during birthday celebrations, they'd each buy the birthday boy or girl the worst movie they could find, and everyone would have to sit through it. They would drink heavily and apparently it got quite loud. I'd never actually been to one, but the first Bad Movie Night was built loosely on that premise. Having had some experience with Horror Fest and Summer Fest, I thought I could program one that had some really entertaining stinkers, and we'd kick it off with a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage. Trust me, while highly entertaining, it falls squarely within the rubric of "bad movie". That was followed by The Giant Claw, Batman and Robin, Mac & Me, Troll 2, and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. A good time was had by all, and whenever possible, I've tried to keep it going.

 The Blogorium has existed in various forms over the years, but since I moved to this service, I've kept the "about" information over to the right basically the same. Sometimes, the phrase "Trash Savant" has come back to haunt me, because it implies that my movie watching palate is limited to sifting through lots of garbage to find the Least Worst Of. And I get it, because around the turn of the century / millennium / whatever, there was a point where the Cap'n and friends would go see anything. Like, literally, we'd just go see a movie to see a movie. How else do you explain watching The In Crowd, or Loser? Or the double feature of The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and The Replacements when I had an entire multiplex to choose from? Yes, I saw 8mm and Idle Hands and the first two Resident Evil movies. On the big screen. I don't know why. Well, I do: they were playing and we had already seen Payback or whatever else we really wanted to see. Sure, I also spent the summer of 99 watching Eyes Wide Shut and The Sixth Sense, even The Blair Witch Project and South Park (and, yes, The Phantom Menace), but for some reason only the bad movies stuck.

 It continued over the years, and yeah, I would organize group outings for Alien vs. Predator or The Matrix Reloaded, or Professor Murder and I would just go see, well, anything. Again, allow me to stress that yes, we only saw Paycheck because we were too late for Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. I don't remember why we went to see Godsend or The Butterfly Effect, or even Saw. A lot of that was a throwback to high school, I think, when we would regularly go to the discount theater to see things like The Big Hit or Suicide Kings, or The Big Lebowski. And also Godzilla, Lost in Space, Scream 2, and whatever else was playing. It was fun, and cheap, and bad movies are tremendously entertaining. The summer of 2008 had to be a record for "what's playing this week," because I saw The Dark Knight, The Happening, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. One of them was good.

 But, over time, they became a smaller part of my cinematic consumption. I know that a lot of friends from that era didn't necessarily keep up with that, which is why I'm still chided for not having watched Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. I'll probably still get grief for it, because I have no plans to watch it, and what I'll go out to the theater to see grows more and more limited. Most of the things I've seen on the big screen over the last year ended up on the Best of List. The last two movies I saw were Birdman and It Follows, both based on the great word of mouth I had been hearing from friends. Despite what people might assume, It Follows was the first movie I saw in theaters from 2015. These days, if a movie just looks bad (like, oh, Seventh Son), I'm less inclined to see it just to see it. The last time that happened was probably Movie 43, which was every bit as forgettable and terrible as you've probably heard. Lockout was the last time I really had fun with a terrible movie, which is why it's playing as a double feature with Lucy at Bad Movie Night this year.

 Herein lies the aforementioned contradiction, because I do still watch bad movies. Hell, I watched Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster last week, and Sorority House Massacre II the week before that. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, good movies. In the past you'd have reviews up for those, instead of It Follows and The Babadook. In fact, Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II are probably going to end up under the "Cranpire Movies" banner, which is what I tend to use when I want to talk about schlock. It's not that Cranpire will watch anything (even he has limits), but it's become a running joke between us that he'll sit through what I won't. Still, the two (technically three) Sorority House Massacre films are so disparate, even from each other, that I'd like to share their charms with you all. But I'm probably never going to watch Taken 3. And I doubt I'll ever finish Tusk.

 The funny thing about having had this blog for so long is that I'm frequently held responsible for reviews I wrote years ago. That's fair, I suppose, but I have tried to evolve as a writer and as a reviewer, so when I look back at a quarter review of something like Student Bodies and have to defend it when someone from the film takes exception to it, I cringe a little. Not because I didn't write it - I did, in the middle of a Fest - but because it's not really a review. It's a reaction to something that happened that I wrote quickly while people had a smoke break. It's a time capsule of a moment in the history of the Blogorium, but it's not how I would write it today. But you can't tell that to somebody who finds the review through a Google search - it's not an ongoing evolution of film criticism to them. It's a review, one that says the movie they like sucks.

 Or worse, it's The Mechanic review, which was a run of the mill Jason Statham movie, where I didn't feel one way or the other about it. In fact, by and large I gave up reviewing films headlined by Statham because they'd all be like The Mechanic - an overview of the plot, general comments about the action, he was good, the supporting cast was okay, the story was serviceable. Other than the Crank films, it's a pretty succinct reaction to most of his starring roles, and if I can't add anything to the conversation, I'll find something else to review. That doesn't stop people from reading The Mechanic review - which they do - and assuming that's currently how I feel about the movie. Honestly, four years later? I've forgotten almost everything about it. Even the "World Champion" ring, but it doesn't matter. Everything is contemporary on the internet.

 Which brings us back to Bad Movie Night and bad movies in general. As long as the Blogorium exists and posts can be found ala carte on search engines, people can and will safely assume that's all the Cap'n is about. And that's fair - I like the Dr. Re-Animator picture at the top of the page and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman background scroll bar. Perhaps someday they'll change, but hopefully it gives visitors an indicator that things aren't taken too seriously around here. Please don't think that I don't enjoy bad movies: one of the things that drove me crazy in film courses was an attitude of intellectual snobbery, of a dismissal of "low art" that wasn't to be bothered with. It wasn't rampant, but there is an attitude of "if it isn't a classic or a modern classic, it's not worth bothering my time with". I remember working with someone who sneered at the idea that Peter Jackson would adapt The Lovely Bones because it was "pop fiction" and that he was "above" that*. He should just stick to Tolkein, I guess. Look how well that worked out for The Hobbit.

 Over the years, I've tried harder to provide a balance of "high" and "low" art, and to be honest with you, I don't watch a lot of these neo B-Movies. If you read my Hobo with a Shotgun review, you'll notice that I didn't have a lot of fun with the movie. I hated Machete Kills. There wasn't enough about Wolf Cop to merit a review, to be honest, and I don't watch Syfy Channel Originals. It's not a matter of being dismissive of them, to jump back a paragraph - I don't particularly care one way or the other, and I'm not going to tell anyone not to watch them. I try to mention them as little as possible, so unless someone asks why a Sharknado movie isn't at Bad Movie Night or Summer Fest, you won't hear about it in the Blogorium. It's the same thought process behind the Transformers series: I haven't seen them, I'm not planning on it, so why devote time and energy into insulting them? There are literally thousands of blogs that do that. But if you want to know about The Beach Girls and the Monster, I've got you covered.

 Moving forward, the goal is to try to bring you reviews for films you maybe haven't heard about, old and new. If it's a major release, I might review it if there's something worth bringing up I haven't seen anywhere else. Otherwise, you probably won't see it until the Recap. In the meantime, I'd rather focus on movies like Under the Skin or Spider Baby (to name a couple from last year). They're very different movies for very different audiences, but I really enjoyed both of them, and you might too. I'm always open to suggestions, but it's been a long time since the Cap'n would go watch literally anything. By the same token, I'll pay money to see Samurai Cop with an audience, even though I own two copies of Samurai Cop. It was worth it to see their reaction. That was the same situation with Things at last year's Bad Movie Night - I suffered through it alone so I could see the faces I made on my friends. And by the way, they could have left, but no one did.
 

 This year's Bad Movie Night is a... shall we say, unique assemblage of "so bad, it's good"**: Continuing in our trend of "being afraid of women in the 1950s," there's Devil Girl from Mars, followed by High School Confidential, Disney's The Black Hole, Raw Force, the aforementioned Luc Besson double feature, and a special Trappening. Because you shouldn't always know what you're getting at a Bad Movie Night. A recap should follow some time next week, and then after that, it's back to whatever strikes the Cap'n as worth writing about. Maybe schlock, maybe not. We're on the cusp of blockbuster season, so maybe those will make it into the mix. I'm not sure. Above all else, my goal for the immediate future is to make Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium as unpredictable as possible, so as to keep you from settling in to "this is what to expect." Hell, I might even go back and re-review some of the older posts, just for kicks. Stay tuned, and if you're on your way to Bad Movie Night, prepare yourself...



 * I never saw The Lovely Bones, so I can't weigh in on whether it was any good or not, but it's a similar attitude to refusing to read a book that's been adapted into a film - like Trainspotting - because that "taints" the source material. And yes, that was another instance that came up with a similarly dismissive person.
** That's a big criteria for me - bad movies that are just bad are a waste of everybody's time.

Blogorium Review: Argo

 I was listening to the radio the other day, and a sports commentator decided it was a fair point to compare a team he wasn't fond of to Ben Affleck.

 "Sure," he said "they're having a great season right now, but you can't ask me to forget about what they were doing a few years ago. It's like Ben Affleck - yeah, The Town was great, Argo was great, but you can't just make me forget about Gigli, Reindeer Games, Jersey Girl, Pearl Harbor and Daredevil*."

 The general point (and I know this because sports radio is mostly about repeating the same point over and over again for three hours) was that just because things are good now doesn't mean that we have carte blanche to forget about when they (being it Ben Affleck or the Atlanta Falcons) were terrible. Or, I suppose, maybe it's that we shouldn't forget that they WERE terrible, therefore their recent success needs to be tainted by that.

 It seemed funny to me, because for one thing I don't really see the point in that, but more importantly it seems to reinforce a theory that there are no second acts in show business** (let alone sports, which is a ridiculous notion considering how frequently the makeup of teams change over time). As someone who followed Ben Affleck from small parts in Dazed and Confused to a high school / college student that saw every Kevin Smith movie to a guy who watched his friend lose his grip on reality during Gigli***, I was as skeptical as anyone when Gone Baby Gone came out. I bought into the "Ben Affleck is snarky asshole who makes terrible decisions in film roles" conception of the actor, willfully forgetting that I had seen him in movies I really enjoyed.

 So when Gone Baby Gone, Affleck's directorial debut, was pretty good, I was taken aback a little bit. The concept that a quiet, reflective Ben Affleck had been hiding there all along, that the possibility that Affleck and Damon were more than what anyone expected of them after Good Will Hunting (and certainly after Dogma) was a little revelatory. Matt Damon spent most of the 2000s becoming the action star that Affleck failed to be with Michael Bay and John Frankenheimer, and Affleck sat out leading roles after Surviving Christmas, not because he had "given up" but because he needed time to prove he had more to offer****.

 My polite skepticism continued through The Town, although I will admit I was more interested in seeing The Town than Gone Baby Gone. It was one thing to see Affleck direct a film, it was another entirely for him to direct and star in his sophomore effort, but I'll be damned if that wasn't also a really good movie. Neither are my favorite films of their respective years, but I own both of them and have seen them again since. For whatever choices he made as an actor in the late nineties and early 2000s, Ben Affleck has a fine eye for direction, for choosing compelling stories, and in casting the right actors for the roles. What he may have lacked in front of the camera he certainly made up for behind it.

 Which brings us to Argo, the reason for our unnamed sports pundit's rant. Ben Affleck is (deservedly) getting a lot of positive buzz for his third film, and it may well carry over into awards season, and maybe that rubs people the wrong way. "How dare this Ben Affleck, who I said was a fraud for Good Will Hunting and who was in all those bad movies be the talk of the town now? How dare he???" Well, sports and movie critics, I have to say it's because Argo delivers the goods. And more importantly, Ben Affleck went the extra mile and proved that he isn't just a very good director - he can still carry a movie too.

 Instead of rehashing what Argo is about, or how politically appropriate the story turned out to be our current global climate, I thought I'd focus on something I wasn't expecting from a movie about the Iranian Hostage Crisis: how funny the move is.

 There are large stretches of Argo - mostly while Tony Mendez (Affleck) is setting up the titular fictional film that gets him into Iran - where you'll find yourself laughing quite a bit. Mendez recruits Hollywood makeup effects man John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) to help him buy the script for Argo from writer Max Klein (a great cameo by Richard Kind) and drum up enough publicity to convince the Iranian government that he really is part of a Canadian film crew scouting locations in Tehran, and not just a specialist for the CIA that rescues hostages like the ones hiding in the Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber)'s basement. Most of the midsection of the movie, while Mendez is creating the ruse, is a prolonged jab at Hollywood and movie-making in general, and it lightens the tension of the beginning of the film (which recreates the raid on the American Embassy) and the end of the film (after Mendez touches down in Tehran).

 What I was so impressed by is that it doesn't dilute the tension in the second half of the film, despite the fact that information about Mendez's success or failure is readily available in the public record (or, at least, it is now). Even if you've accidentally heard how the story ends, Argo succeeds in keeping you on the edge of your seat as our protagonist(s) head towards their plane out, even if part of what really happened was "augmented" for cinematic purposes. Affleck maintains the fine balance between self-deprecation and serious business as Argo needs it, and the film is by my estimation more successful than Gone Baby Gone or The Town as a result. They feel like very good dry runs, and Argo is the culmination of what Affleck knew he could do as director and actor. He succeeded, as far as I'm concerned, and I look forward to whatever he chooses to do next.

 If Argo becomes the second "welcoming" by Hollywood to its prodigal son, I have to say I'd be okay with that. If it was a chocolate Easter Bunny movie - all good flavor, but no substance, then maybe I'd be a little more hesitant, but Argo is both entertaining and substantive. You don't just move on to the next digestible piece of cinema after you're finished, and I look forward to seeing Argo again. If I had my druthers, I think The Master is more ambitious, but it's also more difficult to enjoy, if more interesting to experience. It's easily my favorite Ben Affleck film and is a strong contender to be one of my favorite films of 2012.

 Since I brought up Arkin and Goodman, and so as to not make this entire review about Ben Affleck, I'd like to also point out the fantastic cast of Argo, in large and small roles. Richard Kind (who most of you would remember recently from A Serious Man) has a one scene cameo, and you probably noticed Bryan Cranston (Red Tails - that's what you know him from, right?) and Titus Welliver (The Town, Dinosaur Island) in the trailer, but let's take a look at the many other familiar faces of Argo.

 There's Zeljko Ivanek (In Bruges, Heroes, everything), Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog, Creepshow), Tom Lenk (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Michael Parks (Kill Bill), Chris Messina (The Newsroom, Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and lest I forget the hostages themselves. Affleck intentionally went with actors that looked like the actually hostages and weren't very "well known," which is odd because I immediately recognized Rory Cochrane (Dazed and Confused), Clea DuVall (The Faculty), Tate Donovan (Love Potion Number 9), and was later able to pick out Christopher Denham (Shutter Island, Sound of My Voice) although I initially mistook him for someone in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. My mistake.

 Well folks, if there's a lesson to be learned other than "never listen to sports radio," it's probably that even if we all assumed that Ben Affleck was the problem (and not Michael Bay or Kevin Smith), and even if he maybe was for a while there (*coughBennifercough*), it is possible to break free of your negative stigma and to be successful doing what you really want to do. And if you're successful at that, you end up in a Terrence Malick film that people are already raving about. And not be the guy who made Red State or Transformers 3.

 Non-Directly-Affleck related post-script: Even though this experience has taught me to be less cautious at the mere presence of a name associated with dumb tabloid stories or crappy movies, I continue to be hesitant every single time I see a trailer for a Tom Cruise movie, even when I really enjoy it (Mission: Impossible: III / Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol). Jack Reacher, not even the Affleck Theory is changing my mind about you...

 Non-Directly-Affleck related post-post-script: At some point, I should also explain how this theory applies to Brad Pitt, who is continually viewed through the "hunky leading man" image cultivated during Legends of the Fall even though he frequently chooses to work with fascinating writers, directors, and in films you wouldn't expect "that" Brad Pitt to be in. Maybe when I see Killing Them Softly...


 * He also mentioned 200 Cigarettes, although I strongly suspect he never saw the movie because that's not exactly a Ben Affleck vehicle...
** Because, y'know, nobody ever heard of that Robert Downey Jr. guy again after he relapsed during Ally McBeal.
*** Seriously. He went temporarily insane and put a 12 pack container on his head, declaring himself the Sprite Pope. He then marched around my room issuing decrees, because Gigli snapped his brain.
**** For the record, I'd like to say I really enjoyed him in Hollywoodland, Smokin' Aces, and Extract, all of which happened between Surviving Christmas and Argo.

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 Double Feature Review: Being John Malkovich and Dogma

 Let's jump back to November of 1999, somewhere in the greater Guilford County area of North Carolina. A young Cap'n was a... sophomore (?) in college*, living on campus in a dorm with like-minded film geeks and friends nearby with similar interests. We had some friends in town, some cars available, and The Janus Theatre not far away. They just so happened to be showing both Being John Malkovich (just opening) and Dogma (out for a few weeks). We had internet access, were acutely aware of both films and the buzz surrounding them.

 One one hand, music video director Spike Jonze's first feature film, dealing with puppeteer John Cusack discovering a tunnel into the head of John Malkovich. On the other, Kevin Smith's fourth film, comparatively epic in scope, about the descendant of Jesus trying to stop two rogue angels from wiping out humanity. The Catholic League had already condemned one of the films, and strangely it wasn't the one about being able to control another person by inhabiting their mind, or even the moment of meta brilliance when Malkovich climbs into the tunnel and enters his own head.

 You already know all of this, because I doubt there's a person reading something called Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium that hasn't seen both films - probably several times. We were a jubilant bunch of college kids ready for a fun time with some pals from out of town, and it only made sense to stick around and watch them in one night. Not everybody stayed, but those of us that did were in for an experience. Want to venture a guess which one we saw first?

  If you guessed Dogma, you would be smart to think that. We weren't so smart, so we watched the decidedly unique, eccentric Malkovich first, and then stumbled into Smith's Dogma, gobsmacked by the fiercely idiosyncratic debut from Jonze. Oops. Looking back on it now, knowing what I know about each film, I would have flipped the order (if not removed Dogma altogether, but we'll get to that), but the reason we went to The Janus in the first place was to see Being John Malkovich. That Dogma was playing there, in such close proximity, scheduling-wise, was an added bonus for Kevin Smith-philes who wanted to stick around. Malkovich was always going to come first, and regardless of how into Kevin Smith you were, there's no comparison.

 Let's say that somehow you knew exactly how Being John Malkovich unfolded, with all of its unexpected turns and "Ma-Sheen" cameos. Even knowing all of that, including how it plays out with Malkovich the puppeteer or the baby with John Cusack trapped inside, you still wouldn't be prepared for how well Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman unfolds this madness and compounds it as time goes on. It's such a joyfully strange movie, a curio that pays off with repeated viewings and paved the way for Adaptation and the Kaufman / Michel Gondry team-up that produced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the eventual solo Kaufman magnum opus Synecdoche, New York (not to mention the tonally similar Be Kind, Rewind, Where the Wild Things Are, and even The Science of Sleep).

 After a few friends took off, we went back in to see Dogma, the hotly anticipated, apparently forcefully recut, dropped from one studio because of backlash from religious groups and picked up by another fourth film from Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy). To say that we were massive Kevin Smith fans in 1999 is frankly an understatement: I firmly believe we watched Clerks as frequently as we did Army of Darkness and Cannibal! The Musical on weekends and followed any and everything that Smith said online. In fact, during one online chat, young Cap'n managed to get a question in about working with comedians and improvisation to the slacker auteur, and he answered it. It was as close a brush with greatness as when Henry Rollins let a good friend of our grab his butt (true story).

 So anyway, Dogma itself. Oddly, but the thing that sticks out from that screening was seeing the trailer for American Psycho for the first time - I didn't really know who Christian Bale was (sorry, Empire of the Sun fans, the Cap'n was ignorant) and was vaguely aware of Bret Easton Ellis' novel and the film's turbulent production history. And then Dogma started.

  Do you remember how you tried to convince yourself that you liked The Phantom Menace or House of 1000 Corpses even when you secretly understood it sucked? How you couldn't process looking forward to something so much that when it didn't live up to lofty expectations (or even the deliberately lowered expectations that come technically from a Kevin Smith fan in the 1990s)? If you were like me, you probably kept talking about things that were immaterial to the quality of the film itself: like how it was pro-faith without being pro-organized religion. It lampooned Catholicism as an institution but not faith in principle, etc. That's true. It also had a shit monster, Jason Lee shooting people, some hockey playing teenage monsters, more vaguely homophobic comedy, more sex jokes, a contrived and tenuous connection to John Hughes as a means to get Jay and Silent Bob into the film, and a runtime of 130 minutes.

 The longer version that doesn't actually exist because Smith decided he liked keeping the additional deleted footage deleted doesn't necessarily make much of a difference. At two hours and ten minutes, Dogma is too long, to leisurely paced, and not funny or interesting enough to sustain interest. Not that I didn't keep trying for another three or four years after that. It wasn't until a point well after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that I went back and realized that between Clerks and Clerks 2, I didn't actually enjoy any of the Kevin Smith films as much as I told myself I did. I've been down this road before so I'll keep it brief, but Dogma was possibly the moment that began the shift in perception. I may have told myself I really liked it, but I can't remember what it was about Dogma that sent me out of the Janus happier than after Being John Malkovich.

 I sure miss The Janus - it's no longer in existence, and while the "Bistro" section of the Carousel tries to replicate it's atmosphere, it's off by a mile. The Screen in Santa Fe came close, and possibly the Colony or Mission Valley are similar, but I do miss that theatre. It split the difference between arthouse theatre and multiplex very well, and we saw some fantastic films there.

 Talking about all of these double features really makes me want to have another one, if I could think of two movies I really wanted to see playing closely enough together. That, and finding friends who have the time to do that (increasingly difficult) or want to spend that much time / money on what can often be seen as a calculated gamble. Seriously - ask anyone who went with us to see Idle Hands.





* Second year for sure, but I'm not positive the credit hours would technically count me. Hrm...

Five Movies: The Five Worst Movies I Saw in 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 Additional Awards:

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

Fifteen Minute Movies - Grosse Point Blank

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

So You Won't Have To: Red State

 This might sound strange, but I really prefer not writing So You Won't Have To reviews. It saves me the time of sitting through some unendurable piece of crap, and generally speaking you wouldn't be seeing it anyway (e.g. Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong and Monsterwolf). However, enough people at work have been asking about Kevin Smith's Red State, a movie I had the misfortune of seeing the other day. Not only is it bad for a film; it's barely coherent as a Kevin Smith movie (one must accordingly lower one's standards for a director who openly admits he won't film action sequences* because it's too hard). Well, I'll save you the trouble of dropping any money on this waste of 88 minutes. If you paid upwards of $60 to see the film earlier this year with Smith in attendance, then I hope it was worth it for you.

 I'm going to try to keep this brief, because just telling you a little bit should go a long way. What starts out as a stupid sex comedy, complete with unlikable protagonists and a teacher that couldn't possibly keep her job for more than a month**, followed by the introduction of a protagonist getting a blowjob on the side of the road (by a guy, because he's shamefully gay. How do we know this? Because when he arrives at the Sheriff's office because he IS the Sheriff, he lies about where he was and cries in front of a picture of his wife). So it's not enough to have to sit through Randy (Ronnie Connell), Jarod (Kyle Gallner), and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) trolling around a Craigslist-esque site in the hopes of having a four-way with a Sarah Cooper (Melissa Leo); they also have to crash into Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root)'s car before being drugged and hauled away.

 To where, you ask? Thankfully, there's no real question about it after a ham-handed introduction to the Five Points Church, which is unmistakably a proxy for the Westboro Baptist Church (who protest military funerals and proudly carry around signs that say "God Hates Fags." Yeah.) Like most of the heavy-handed commentary in the film (more on that in a bit), Smith wastes no time trashing the Church in order to make the fact that they trap Randy, Jarod, and Billy-Ray in order to kill them for their sins. This is the stage of the film that briefly apes Hostel, down to the execution of a separate character while the others scream. It's the only thing that comes close to the "horror" that people have been misled into believing that Red State might be (constant coverage on horror sites like Bloody Disgusting hasn't helped, nor did Smith's initial suggestions it was his "horror film").

 But worry not, because Red State is more of a clumsy mishmash of fundamentalist criticism, sex comedy, and siege film. As though it weren't enough to spend fifteen minutes on Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) delivering a sermon - and I mean fifteen minutes of nothing but said sermon - Smith then turns his critical gaze towards a Waco-like storming of the compound, led by ATF Agent Keenan (John Goodman). Keenan is given orders to wipe out Five Points, and struggles with the excessive use of force. See? It isn't just the hateful church to blame - the government is also reactionary and violent.

 Ugh. Okay, let's be quick about the rest of this. Much ado has been made about how this doesn't "look" like a Kevin Smith film because he shot it mostly handheld on a RED Camera. It's true that it doesn't look like a Kevin Smith film, but that doesn't make the visual style any better. Instead, I get the impression that Smith is very enamored of the handheld style of television, and he tries to ape it to the best of his ability, resulting in arbitrary camera angles, jagged, pointless edits, and his usual framing subverted by the ability to quickly swerve around. The visually unappealing nature compliments the forced, insipid monologues, and that's not a good thing.

 I'm going to go ahead and spoil the end of the film, because it ALMOST went in a direction audacious enough to salvage the garbage preceding it: after Keenan and his men gun down the last of our heroes, a blaring trumpet fills the air. Cooper and his "family" take it as a sign of the Rapture and drop their weapons, preparing to ascend to Heaven. And for a second there, it seemed like Smith was going to go that way, taking Red State in an entirely different direction***. But he doesn't - instead we get a long debriefing of what happened after Cooper tells Keenan to kill him, which he didn't. The three agents turn off the camera documenting the debriefing and get "real" about their excitement to lock up Cooper and subject him to "coke can dick" prison rape. To really underscore his position, Smith closes the film with another mini-monologue from Abin Cooper, followed by an off-screen voice (Smith's) yelling "Shut up!"

 Thank goodness I didn't have to see this film with Kevin Smith fielding questions afterward, because that's exactly what I would say to him.


* See the SModCast Network live interview with Edgar Wright.
** In addition to cursing and cracking homophobic jokes at the expense of her students, she openly denigrates the Westboro Baptist Church proxy in the classroom. Since the film takes place in our litigious present, you find me a teacher that gets away with what she does in the first ten minutes of the movie that isn't Cameron Diaz.
*** At one point, that WAS the ending, but Smith opted to go with a less interesting denouement.

2010 Year End Recap, Part Two

An important note from the Cap'n: While every review available is included as a link, the placement of the film on these "year end" lists may not appear to reflect the review. As time passes, I have the opportunity to reconsider films, revisit initial reactions, and every now and then, change the way I feel about movies.

Let's continue not with the top, but the bottom. Originally, I thought there would only be one or two truly awful films I saw in 2010, but revisiting this year's reviews, that was not to be the case. If Tron Legacy was the last movie I could (weakly) say I didn't hate, then just imagine how bad the following ten films are. When the Cap'n says "NEVER AGAIN," I hope you grasp the magnitude of the cinematic dreck that follows.

Whenever possible, I have included links to the original reviews, indicated with an asterisk (*) films that technically had screenings in 2009, and expanded on why I will do my best never to watch these films again.

Alice in Wonderland - Tron Legacy barely got a pass for its visual palette, but the Tim Burton Players Present Alice's Adventures in Narnia doesn't. Not only is this not reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice novels, but the sense of whimsy one might hope from Tim Burton is replaced with a dour, joyless adventure story about slaying the drag- er, Jabberwocky. The dirty trick I played with this review in April is better than anything you'll find in this inexplicably popular film.

The Wolfman - That's right: I say in the review "neither loves nor hates," but I'm also never going to watch the movie again.

The Descent Part 2 - What a difference watching this movie with a like-minded audience can make. When I first watched The Descent Part 2 - a wholly unnecessary sequel - the fact that it was marginally coherent and pretty gory was enough for the Cap'n. The second time (at Summer Fest III) we slogged through the bad writing, awful lighting, rotten acting was only partially redeemed by the gore. And the gore is pretty good; The Descent Part 2 was not, and twice is enough.

Faster - Again, it has a "So You Won't Have To" tag on it. Faster billed itself as a stripped-down revenge film, then delivered anything but.

From here on out, things get rather vitriolic.

Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film* - This was a late addition to the list, which is why there's no review. Also, the documentary doesn't deserve one: Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue is a freshman level analysis of horror films through a sociological lens, often coming to erroneous (or ridiculous) assertions about changes in the genre over the 20th century. My personal favorite? How about comparing Leatherface in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake to Osama Bin Laden, based on the specious logic that he can "disappear and reappear on a whim, keeping us in a constant state of terror," which describes almost every horror boogeyman, including all of the ones that existed before Osama Bin Laden declared war on America. The grossest offense this documentary makes is to copy the structure of David Skal's The Monster Show, which does a much better job laying out the case that horror films reflect social movements.

Survival of the Dead* - I should have learned my lesson with the terrible Diary of the Dead, but curiosity (and positive reviews) got the better of me, and I went back to the George well. Not the George Lucas well, which gets the lion's share of complaints, but George A. Romero hasn't made a film that's remotely watchable for the last five years, and he's been working exclusively in his beloved "living dead" territory. If Diary's insulting, obvious narration wasn't bad enough, Survival's wafer thin characters and idiotic "Irish Cowboy" feud plot bored me to no end. For people who complain about Land of the Dead, I can't imagine how you found this drivel watchable.

Kick-Ass - Okay, so while I don't love Scott Pilgrim, I at least understand why people might. Fan favorite Kick-Ass fails to deliver on ANY level, from its "superheroes in real life" premise to its obnoxious protagonist or the totally pointless Hit Girl. Matthew Vaughn kills the only remotely interesting character, Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy, and ensured that not only would I ever watch his film again, but I'm definitely going to see Kick-Ass 2.

Cop Out - There are only three films I've never finished: Horror of the Blood Monsters, Neil LaBute's remake of The Wicker Man, and Cop Out. You can, therefore, only imagine how insufferable, unfunny, and ineptly constructed Cop Out must be that despite the presence of Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Sean William Scott, Jason Lee, Michelle Trachtenberg, Guillermo Diaz, and Kevin Pollak, I couldn't bear to sit through more than thirty minutes. The best I could muster for this skid mark on the underwear of Buddy Cop Comedies was a brief footnote at the end of The Other Guys.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - I shouldn't even have to tell you how much I hated this soulless, money-grubbing waste of ninety minutes. Every possible positive is squandered, including seemingly novel ideas like "micro naps" and the suggestion that Fred Krueger might be innocent, are squandered in order for cheap scares that aren't scary. That two of my favorite movies of 2010 feature the "stars" of this wretched film - Rooney Mara and Jackie Earle Haley - saddens me further. I always swear off of Platinum Dunes films, and I really should have learned my lesson after Shit Coffin, but if that title is appropriate for their Friday the 13th molestation, Shit Coffin 2 doesn't properly prepare audiences for what they do to Freddy Krueger.

And yet, A Nightmare on Elm Street is not the worst movie I saw in 2010. That honor goes to:

Resident Evil: Afterlife (in 3-D) - I'm not going to spit more bile at this worthless, lifeless, pointless sequel. Instead, I genuinely want for someone to explain to me how, in any way, the fourth Resident Evil film, the return of Paul "What Script?" Anderson to the director's chair, is good? Even the moderate pans of Resident Evil: Afterlife on Blu-Ray claim the film is still watchable. How? Even better, I'd like one of the vocal fans of this movie, the people who bragged its opening weekend silenced the "haterz," to walk me through how, in any way, this film doesn't fail at every single thing it tries, from the 3-D to the action to the impenetrable story. Make your case, please. People want to give this movie a pass, even when they hated it, and this movie does not deserve it. Never Again.


Tomorrow, we'll look on the bright side of life, and I'll discuss my favorite films of 2010. See you then.

Cap'n Howdy's Documentary Roundup

Welcome back to the Blogorium, readers; today the Cap'n will take four quick looks at five documentaries that have, alas, been sitting on the "to write about" pile since May. I don't have quite enough to say about them individually, although I do recommend all five films for various reasons, and many of them are available for Instant Viewing on Netflix.

Champion - Joe Eckhardt and Cecily Gambrell's documentary about ubiquitous character actor Danny Trejo is fascinating and frequently enlightening, helping to separate the actor from his character "type." Trejo - who first landed on my radar with a small role in Desperado - began his life as a criminal and drug addict, but after serving prison time in San Quentin and entering a 12-step program, he cleaned up and became a drug counselor.

Strangely, it was then that the tattooed, muscular, Charles Bronson-esque Trejo began appearing in films: while visiting a young man he was sponsoring on set, Trejo met an old friend from prison and joined the cast of Runaway Train, first as an extra and then as Eric Roberts' boxing coach. Champion features a number of interviews with actors and directors who work with Trejo, including Robert Rodriguez, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Steve Buscemi, and Antonion Banderas, but the star of the show is Danny Trejo, who tells much of his own story directly to the camera, and whose presence on-screen is palpable beyond the "tough guy" in Machete.


American Swing - The true story of Plato's Retreat, the Manhattan "swinger's" club, focuses on the people who worked there (and a few visitors, like Buck Henry) and pays particular attention to Plato's founder Larry Levenson, whose appearances on Donahue and Midnight Blue only increased the club's infamy. Directors Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman compile the fond recollections of the sexual freedom of New York in the 1970s and early 80s, while paralleling the rise and fall of Levenson with his "anything goes" couples' retreat. Some of the stories must be heard to be believed, and if you saw the Plato's Retreat segment on VH1's "I Love the 70s," this documentary does a fine job at contextualizing the lurid - and at times disgusting - scene from the people who knew it best.

Small Town Gay Bar and Bear Nation - Malcolm Ingram's 2006 documentary on gay bars in rural Mississippi is endlessly watchable and, at times, infuriating (specifically the appearance by Reverend Fred Phelps, who you may know as the man whose group pickets military funerals). Ingram's tour of bars that are, were, and (at the time of filming) will be is a portrait of life where being who you are is literally life-threatening - as was the case for Scotty Joe Weaver, an Alabama teen murdered, semi-decapitated, and burned for being gay. The struggle with finding self expression in the Deep South is primarily Ingram's focus, although the sense of community stemming from these "small town gay bars" resonates the most in the end.

I would be inclined to say more about Ingram's 2010 documentary, Bear Nation, but I'm positive that the one hour version (with commercials) I saw on Logo is anything other than truncated (IMDB has the running time listed at 82 minutes, making it double the length of what I saw). As it is, I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of Bear Nation, which documents the rise of the "Bear" movement - gay men who are hairy, overweight, or have a less effete build than the stereotypical "homosexual." Of particular interest amidst the interviews with bears, cubs, twinks, and admirers is the rising debate about bear culture being appropriated, sanitized, and marketed, creating new divisions in what was otherwise considered a welcoming subculture. While I understand that Kevin Smith executive-produced Bear Nation, his section in the version I saw was rather long, and its purpose - to demonstrate bear culture in mainstream media - may have been more effective if it were counter-balanced with other examples, like John Waters' A Dirty Shame. Again, I haven't seen the entire film, so this may be an erroneous comment. I look forward to seeing Bear Nation in its full form and highly recommend Small Town Gay Bar.

Don't You Forget About Me - A 2009 documentary released on DVD this year, Don't You Forget About Me is a retrospective of the films of John Hughes, who for all intents and purposes defined "teen cinema" in the 1980s with Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and The Breakfast Club. In 1991, Hughes walked away from directing and the spotlight, occasionally writing under an alias (with Beethoven, Maid in Manhattan, and apparently, Drillbit Taylor). The documentary interviews many of his cast and crew, including Judd Nelson, Howard Deutch (who directed Pretty in Pink), Kelly LeBrock, Mia Sara, Geddy Watanabe, Annie Potts, Ally Sheedy Richard Elfman (Oingo Boingo provided Weird Science with its instantly recognizable title song), Andrew McCarthy, along with admirers Kevin Smith, Jason Reitman, Richard Roeper, and Roger Ebert. The usual holdouts - Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick, Emilio Estevez, and the normally available Anthony Michael Hall - are nowhere to be found.

The central purpose of Don't You Forget About Me is also its biggest weakness: filmmakers Matt Austin, Kari Hollend, Michael Facciolo, and Lenny Panzer want to know where John Hughes is hiding in Chicago and why he won't return to "save movies" in the 21st century, and the film is split between interviews with collaborators and the crew of Don't You Forget About Me trying to find Hughes. Why? They want to show him the documentary footage they've completed in the hopes that Hughes will be so touched, he'll return to public life. Instead, Hughes rightfully chooses to ignore the filmmakers who appear at his home, unannounced, and the end result is a documentary that's more self-serving than inspiring.

I understand that their interest in appealing to Hughes (who died after the documentary was completed) and attempting to show him his impact on a generation of filmmakers, but the on-screen presence of the documentary crew distracts the focus of Don't You Forget About Me, turning the film into more of a personal film, like Winnebago Man or Bowling for Columbine, than a true focus on the subject. In the end, I found myself rooting for Hughes to dismiss this ragtag film crew, in part because they openly admit how dubious their stalking of John Hughes is, and at least one of them clearly knows their conceit won't work. Don't You Forget About Me is half interesting career retrospective and half self promotion, and the halves don't add up to anything more than an interesting curio.

Blogorium Review: The Other Guys

It's taken me some time to get to reviewing The Other Guys, the new film from Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. Like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The Other Guys is a pretense for McKay and Ferrell to insert their goofy humor into a specific genre: in this instance, the "buddy cop" film. Unlike 1970s news anchors or Nascar drivers, the Cop film has been explored more than once in the last ten years, which hampers The Other Guys in a way earlier collaborations didn't.

Detectives P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Charles Danson (Dwayne Johnson) are the big bad boys of the NYPD, constantly getting involved in wild shootouts and destructive car chases. Since they can't be bothered to do their own paperwork, it usually ends up on the desk of Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell), whose partner Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) can't stand. Hoitz made a mistake and shot the wrong person, curtailing a promising career, and Gamble's lack of ambition - and surprisingly hot wife Dr. Sheila Gamble (Eva Mendes) - baffle him to no end. Hoitz and Gamble bear the brunt of abuse from the force, including detectives Martin (Rob Riggle) and Fosse (Damon Wayans, Jr.), but when one of Allen's seemingly inane investigations may involve a massive Ponzi scheme at the hands of David Ershon (Steve Coogan), they might have a big break. If only Gamble and Hoitz can convince beleaguered Captain Gene Mauch (Michael Keaton) to let them investigate, and if they can keep the mysterious Roger Wesley (Ray Stevenson) from killing them both...

There's really not much to say about The Other Guys; of the Adam McKay / Will Ferrell collaborations (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers), this is going to be the film I revisit the least. That's not to say it isn't funny, but I find that the silliness is toned down in The Other Guys, or directed towards running jokes that only halfway work (hot women are inexplicably attracted to Ferrell's Detective [?] Gamble, or his insistence on listening to The Little River Band to get pumped for cases). The "losing face" midsection doesn't work as well in The Other Guys, in part because it interrupts the mystery and doesn't serve the narrative as well as it does in Talladega Nights or Anchorman.

Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson aren't in much of the movie, but their extended cameos add necessary spice to the beginning of The Other Guys, even if their (SPOILER) deaths don't make any sense, even as a spoof of "Super Cop" movies. It's a convenient and inexplicable way to get rid of their characters, which does open the door for the rest of the story. It opens the door for Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr. to take over, but their roles turn out to be about as incidental as Jackson and Johnson.

On the other hand, there are a handful of running gags that work very well, including Captain Mauch's supposedly unintentional quoting of TLC when giving Gamble and Hoitz advice, or Hoitz's unending grief for accidentally shooting Yankees' Short Stop Derek Jeter. Wahlberg actually benefits the most from the goofy character touches, and his explanation for knowing ballet saves an otherwise directionless scene involving his ex-girlfriend. There's a revelation about Gamble's past about halfway through the film that shouldn't work as well as it does, but Ferrell sells the transformation so well that I didn't mind.

It also helps that McKay and co-writer Chris Henchy have a knack for writing throw away lines that consistently bring the biggest laughs (one involving a hobo orgy and Gamble's much derided Prius comes to mind immediately), and the cast seems to be having a lot of fun. Ice-T's narration was a nice surprise, and while I can't guarantee it, there's a line that comes so close to the premise of Dexter that I wondered aloud if it was an intentional reference*.

It may be that The Other Guys suffers from the inevitable comparison to Hot Fuzz, which deconstructs the "buddy cop" genre with such insight that any subsequent take is going to pale in comparison. The only real new take The Other Guys makes is killing off the supercops early in the film and handing over the detective work to Hoitz and Gamble, who do actually follow a trail of evidence and do actually crack a case - mostly without cheap saves. This is nice, but as the film doesn't go as far afield as one might expect, the exercise is less than exemplary. The Other Guys is, admittedly, light years ahead of Cop Out, a movie I had so much trouble finishing that the Cap'n eventually gave up on reviewing both films at once**.

I also want to mention the end credits, which run alongside graphics on how a Ponzi scheme works, how the economic crisis happened, and who benefited from the taxpayer bailout. This is timely and rather informative, but the film handles it as such a secondary plot point that the graphics seem wildly out of place, even if they inform the "crime" Ershon is perpetrating.

Are you going to chuckle during The Other Guys? Oh yes. There are times when you'll laugh quite a bit, even if it doesn't reach the same sublime goofiness of Anchorman or Step Brothers (there's nothing that comes close to "Boats 'n Hos" in this movie) and the bizarre supporting characters are considerably scaled back (despite fine turns from Mendes, Coogan, Stevenson, Keaton, Riggle, and Wayons Jr.). Considering how much footage from the trailers is nowhere to be found in the film, I sense that there's a much funnier version of The Other Guys waiting in the wings for DVD and Blu-Ray release, so while I'm not necessarily say wait to rent it, there's a good chance the film will step it up in an "Unrated" form. Either way, feel free to check it out.



* it's something along the lines of "a good cop knows how to use his dark side for good, and then he moves to Florida"

** I genuinely disliked Cop Out, a movie that at no point elicited a chuckle from the Cap'n. I don't blame Kevin Smith for the dialogue (because he didn't write the film), but his workmanlike direction does the film no favors, and the performances he draws out of Tracy Morgan, Bruce Willis, and Sean William Scott are frankly pathetic. There's no reason for Cop Out to be as unwatchable as it was; it took me three tries to get through the painfully unfunny "interrogation" sequence.