2013 Recap: The Bottom of the Barrel

 Folks, we've come around full circle again; 2013 has left us and 2014 began just a day ago. I'm not really sure where the year went, and there were a lot of things I meant to do that didn't happen, so hopefully the Cap'n can pick up where I left off. In the meantime, there's a year's worth of movies to recap, and as I do every year, we'll start at the bottom and work our way up.

 I lost count of how many new movies I saw in 2013 (it's somewhere north of 40, but the list I put together is eluding me, so we'll stick with that estimate), and thankfully most of them were very good to really good. Some even great, but we're not here to talk about those today. Nope. Today is about the small, but vocal minority of true garbage that assaulted my ears and eyes in 2013. Some I've already forgotten most everything about, some I regret even considering sitting down to watch. At the race to the bottom, First Place is an unenviable position, and I really struggled deciding which of the following nine films sucked the hardest. Every time I think "yeah, that's the one I hated the most," I see another one on the list and change my mind. So this year, there will be no numbering - they're all the worst.

 And I watched them So You Won't Have To.

 Movie 43 - There's an old adage that the more recognizable names you see on a movie you've never heard of, the worse the movie is. Most of the time this pertains to direct to video releases on already clogged shelves, and usually to indie dramas, but every now and again comedies. For something like Movie 43 to make it to theatres, even in the "dumping ground" time of the year, is a testament to the inexplicable star power willing to blemish their resumes with this shit.

 When either of the "haven't been funny in a decade and a half" Farrelly brothers are involved (Peter, in this case), that should set off alarm bells, but with so many talented people directing segments of this Kentucky Fried Movie wannabe, I remember that we rationalized it would at least have something worth seeing. We were clearly not paying attention to the warning signs, and nothing about the lazily titled Movie 43 was worth seeing. Not Hugh Jackman with testicles on his throat; not Chris Pratt shitting all over a taxi to impress Anna Faris; not Jason Sudekis and Justin Long as Batman and Robin at Superhero Speed Dating (spoiler - one of the women was a dude! Hilarity!). Let's not forget about the wacky game of Truth or Dare that turns Stephen Merchant into an Asian caricature with a penis tattooed on his cheek! Or Halle Berry making guacamole with her boob!

 I had to look some of these up because, to be perfectly honest with you, we'd already forgotten about most of Movie 43 by the next day. Looking at IMDB, I thought "oh yeah, that was in the movie, wasn't it?" and then I remembered that it wasn't funny and that's why I forgot about it. And before long, I'll forget about it again, and hopefully you will too. Don't let the list of names on the cover lure you into a blind rental or Netflix streaming - it's not worth it unless you desperately need to lose and hour and a half of your life. You'll remember as much of Movie 43 by not watching it as you will by enduring it, so why bother?

 Kick-Ass 2 - I'll keep this brief. I hated Kick-Ass when I saw it in 2010, and that position hasn't softened at all. I was vaguely curious about Jim Carrey as Colonel Stars and Stripes based on the trailer and it seemed like expanding the world of "real life" heroes and villains might maybe be worth looking into. And it wasn't. Kick-Ass 2 is more of the same stupid swill that I didn't like at all three years ago, and apparently not even fans of the first movie could choke this one down. I already didn't care about Hit Girl, but her adventures as "Mindy the normal girl in high school" that ended up as a stupid retread of Mean Girls really made me miss Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy. Nothing about Kick-Ass 2 is worth mentioning, so I'm just going to move on...

 R.I.P.D. - Speaking of movies with nothing worth mentioning, here's a transparent remake of Men in Black that substitutes ghosts for aliens and stars Ryan Reynolds from Blade Trinity and Rooster Cogburn from the Coen brothers' True Grit. Oh sure, it's Jeff Bridges, but he's playing Rooster Cogburn without the eye-patch. Also Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon is the bad guy (SPOILER for the first three minutes of the movie) blah blah blah lousy special effects blah blah blah lazy jokes blah blah blah lots of shooting and yelling end of the world etc. R.I.P.D. is neither bad enough to hate nor good enough to give much more attention to. It simply limps along, reminding you of better movies that you could be watching instead of this. In fact, I watched a MUCH better movie before this (more on that when we get to the Best of 2013) and was so excited by it that I decided to use R.I.P.D. as a kind of "palette cleanser," which may be exactly what it's good for. If mediocre is your thing, this is the movie for you.

 Bullet to the Head - I don't really have anything to add to this beyond what I said in the original review. I only bothered to review three of the nine movies on this list, and in both instances I'll just include the links. There's a much better Stallone movie that came out in 2013 (Escape Plan) that you should see instead, because Walter Hill's un-buddy cop / revenge film is somebody's cup of tea, but not mine.

 Evil Dead - I get that people like that the remake of The Evil Dead is really violent. Like non-stop, unpleasant, close-up on the gore violent for most of the movie. Got it. I 100% don't believe the continued insistence that the effects are practical and that there's "almost no digital effects" in the movie. Sorry, I've seen it twice and you can see the digital effects, even during parts of the commentary where the director claims there aren't. But that is another argument for another day. The problem with Evil Dead isn't that it exists - there can and are good remakes of horror films out there, so I'm willing to put aside my affection for the original and let this exist in its own right.

 The problem with Evil Dead is that it's extremely violent, and nothing else. If you're looking for a movie where people are slowly, painfully mutilated, with long shots of the aftermath where they're half-crying and half in shock while removing needles or nails from their skin, good news - you'll find it in spades in Evil Dead. There's no humor, no characters, not much in the way of plot (that isn't abandoned, anyway), but lots of moments designed to remind you that this is a remake of The Evil Dead. Just one that's grittier and gorier and more hardcore. Because that's all horror fans care about, right? Oh, also just throwing Bruce Campbell onscreen after the credits to say "Groovy" in silhouette., because you gotta have Bruce, right?  It's no secret why the best and worst reviews of this film said the same thing: "It's REALLY violent." That's all there is to Evil Dead, and it's not enough.

 A Good Day to Die Hard - I like the theory that Red Letter Media has that each Die Hard sequel is designed to make the previous film look better by comparison. At the same time, it terrifies me to think how bad Die Hard 6 is going to have to be to make this piece of shit look good.

 G.I. Joe: Retaliation - I originally watched this as a planned week long segment called "The Rock Report," wherein I'd see every Dwayne Johnson movie released in 2013 and cover them for you. After G.I. Joe: Retaliation and another movie on this list, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to track down Snitch and Empire State. Going back to Movie 43, it's probably worth pointing out that I should have known better than to be interested in a movie with Dwayne Johnson, Ray Stevenson, Jonathan Pryce, Walton Goggins, RZA, and Channing Tatum (SPOILER briefly). Somehow (see above), it's only the second worst Bruce Willis movie I saw this year.

 True, I'd never seen the first movie and I don't plan on ever seeing it. True, it had gone extensive reshoots that delayed the film for half a year. True, it was the sequel to a G.I. Joe movie. But dammit, it had Dwayne Johnson and he made the Fast and Furious series better for two movies in a row (more on that in a later post). I now understand why Joseph Gordon Levitt and Christopher Eccleston didn't bother to come back for this (and it had nothing to do with Don Jon or Thor: The Dark World). It's a thoroughly average and mostly boring "action" movie that makes me glad I didn't watch the first one and pleased to know I don't need to see any more of them.

 Machete Kills - I'd love to believe that some day, Robert Rodriguez will start making real movies again. But with Sin City: A Dame to Kill for around the corner and the promise / threat of Machete Kills Again in Space looming, somehow that doesn't seem likely. That's too bad, but at least I know that this downward trajectory is something I can avoid from here on out, rather than risk being disappointed again.

 Pain & Gain - If there has to be a "worst of the worst," the absolute skidmark on the underpants of cinema for 2013 (that I was willing to watch), this is probably it. Machete Kills really sucks. A Good Day to Die Hard isn't even a Die Hard movie by the shaky standards of the fourth film Movie 43 barely deserves to be called a movie. But Pain & Gain not only reminded me why I stopped watching Michael Bay movies after The Island, it made me angry.

 I've been following a lot of the "controversy" surrounding Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street from people who are boycotting the movie in principle because it "glorifies" Jordan Belfort. Having not seen The Wolf of Wall Street but having seen Goodfellas and Casino, both of which are also based on real people who did horrible things and benefited in some way from the films based on their story, I have a hard time with the "outrage." This is what Scorsese does. With the exception of Hugo and Kundun, almost all of his protagonists are morally compromised to varying degrees, and some are downright unlikeable. As a storyteller, he gets you invested in them, even if you don't like them, and yes, to some degree that helps people like Henry Hill and "Whitey" Bulger (who Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed is loosely based on).

 Why people weren't comparably outraged by the glorification of the pieces of human garbage in Michael Bay's Pain & Gain boggles my mind, because when you see pictures of the real criminals who kidnapped and killed people, it's abundantly clear that turning them into Anthony Mackie, Dwayne Johnson, and Mark Wahlberg is only making them look like a million bucks for the movie version. Bay also makes the film a comedy, specifically styled after the Coen brothers, even though it's abundantly clear that Michael Bay does not understand what makes a Coen brothers movie funny. He got the "dumb criminals" part and stopped there, content to include his usual bag of tricks: hot chicks, fancy cars, oiled muscles, and rampant homophobia.

 The worst part is that, in spite of all of this, Pain & Gain is still sometimes sporadically funny, in spite of itself. Most of that comes from the very talented cast, trying hard to sell what is inherently unfunny but so unbelievable it becomes ridiculous (when Bay has to include a title card to remind you that "This is STILL a True Story" when Johnson is burning severed hands on a grill, you should get some idea how crazy it gets). But then, at the very end, when they finally do get caught, the closing credits cuts to photos of the actual perpetrators who did the things we're seeing played for laughs, and it's hard to see Pain & Gain as anything other than a glamor shots version of their lives. Michael Bay wants us to enjoy these assholes for the things they did, and laugh because of how silly it sounds. So I think I'm good going back to not watching his movies again. We seem to get along better that way, and the rest of you can wonder why I haven't and won't see a Transformers movie.

 The good news is that from here on out, things only go uphill. The next section(s) will deal with the middle ground - movies I liked but didn't love, but would recommend nonetheless. Thanks for wallowing through the worst of it with the Cap'n.

Blogorium Review: Pacific Rim

 So by now you've heard of this "Pacific Rim" movie; you probably didn't see it, but you've heard of it - I think I can count on one hand the number of people I know who saw it, including me. That's okay, because I totally get why you didn't go see it, and I kind of sympathize. You see, the Cap'n was torn about seeing Pacific Rim myself (tense switch!). Since you've heard everybody else's opinion, I guess you can hear my rationale and then maybe I'll talk about the movie. But it was pretty good if you aren't feeling patient (but be patient. C'mon.)

 On the one hand, I've seen every one of Guillermo del Toro's movies, and really liked to loved most of them. By most, I mean that some of the more "mainstream" joints aren't my favorites. I like Hellboy a lot, but I don't love it. I really don't like Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I enjoy Blade II and it's definitely better than Blade and Blade Trinity, but it's not my "go to" movie in his collection. If I'm being honest, I'm much more inclined to sit down with one of the more intimate, "smaller" films like The Devil's Backbone and Cronos. Pan's Labyrinth too, but I can't honestly call that a "small" movie. Maybe less epic in scope than Hellboy, right?

 Even though I don't enjoy Hellboy II, it didn't stop me from seeing it in theaters, just like I did with Hellboy. I support Guillermo del Toro whenever I can because he brings a distinctive vision to his films and is fond of fully fleshed out worlds, well beyond what happens in the direct narrative. When possible, I try to support the films he produces, like The Orphanage (pretty, pretty good) or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (pretty, pretty okay) - I haven't seen Mama yet, but I'll get around to sooner or later.

 The problem is that I don't really care about "Giant Robot" movies. I didn't see the Transformers movies, and while I often cite my polite disagreement with Mr. Michael Bay about what constitutes a "movie," I also never really gave a shit about the source material. I had a few Transformers, including the one that was a boombox, but... eh. My tolerance level for robots beating each other up is pretty much however much of Robot Jox is left on the Sci-Fi Channel late at night*.

 As much as I'd like to pretend this wasn't the case, kaiju movies are also not really my bag. I like the first Gojira movie, but not so much the sequels and definitely not Godzilla 2000 or Final Wars or the Matthew Broderick one. I guess I kinda liked Mothra and Gamera  and maybe Destroy All Monsters! but I'm not a devotee to this stuff. That's more of my brother's wheelhouse. In fact, he should probably review Pacific Rim for you guys, but since he's not here, I'll do it.

 So you know my handicaps going in: will watch any Guillermo del Toro joint, but don't care about giant robots and am politely ambivalent towards kaiju. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm so ambivalent that on this very blog I mistakenly used the term "gaijin" ("non-Japanese" / "alien") interchangeably with "kaiju" ("giant monste"r?) because I didn't realize the difference. Sorry, astute readers. That must have been very confusing. Anyway, my desire to support the director (and co-writer) did win out over the non-appeal of giant robots fighting kaiju. And you know what? It's a pretty good movie.


  While I never saw the Transformers movies, I do remember hearing how fucking stupid they were from people I did know who still saw all three of them. This (and Robot Jox, and let's be honest, Real Steel) confirmed my theory that Germans Love David Hasselhoff... wait, no... that movies with giant robots fighting each other or monsters is just going to be inherently moronic. And if I'm going to watch inherently moronic, I can do it with more entertaining films.

 Luckily, Guillermo del Toro didn't get that memo, so he approaches Pacific Rim from a non-sarcastic direction, leaving irony behind and just focusing on building a world where giant monsters come up through the pacific ocean via a "breach" and start destroying things. How would we adapt? Would be build giant robots to fight these monsters? Sure, why not? Would it work? Pretty well, at first. Would we get complacent because said monsters are losing? Probably.

 That's the prologue to the film, which I appreciate - 99% of the time in this modern world of "franchise building" in movies, the first ten minutes would be the entire movie. They would intentionally withhold information or set things up with no intention of paying them off in the two hours of THIS movie, but instead save it for the inevitable sequel. Not when del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham are making the movie - they give you some well designed exposition dump and then drop us into the height of humanity's hubris.

 We meet our protagonist, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his brother what's his face (Diego Klattenhoff) as they take their Jaeger (giant robot), Gypsy Danger, out for a stroll around the coast of Alaska. SPOILER ALERT FOR THE FIRST FIFTEEN MINUTES: They then get their asses handed to them by a kaiju who also kills what's his face and leaves Raleigh in a bad way.

 (Note: I had to look up the name of the character that Hunnam was playing because I couldn't remember it. Honestly I don't remember hearing it much because, let's be honest, it's a pretty stupid name)

 We jump forward five or six years when the governments have given up on Jaegers to defend us from kaiju (who get designations not unlike hurricanes: category 4, etc). Instead they're going to just build huge walls and hope that does the trick, until one of the kaiju cuts right through one in Sydney ("like butter") and luckily the Ausrtailan Jaeger manages to beat it to death. This gives Stacker Penetcost (Idris Elba - seriously, that was his character's name?) his one chance to throw a last ditch effort to use Jaegers and bombs to close the breach once and for all, so you know he's going to have to recruit Raleigh out of retirement.

 And just describing that sounds stupid. But somehow when you watch Pacific Rim, the inherent silliness of the plot just makes sense. They explain "drifting" - the process two Jaeger pilots use to control the machine in tandem - well enough that you buy it would kill someone to do it alone. Basically it amounts to a mind meld but if the connection is strong enough they can work in unison, so lines like "I'm in you brain, remember?" don't feel so dumb as they do out of context, like in this review.

 Look, I'm doing a bad job of not making Pacific Rim sound as dumb as you thought it did when you decided not to see it, but it's really a lot of fun to watch and not just because "Robot punch Monster! Yay!" I'm sure that on some level, Pacific Rim does appeal to our "Lizard Brain" sensibilities, but del Toro also includes all of his favorite fetishes in the film, like Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman), who deals in kaiju body parts on the black market. Or the dueling scientists (played by Torchwood's Burn Gorman and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) who should just be comic relief but do actually impact the storyline in important ways. Day's subplot, in fact, is probably more interesting that just watching Jaegers filled with Chinese, Russian, and Australian stereotypes punch kaijus.

 The main event is still seeing how Gypsy Danger gets back in action and how Raleigh gets his groove back with the help of his new co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who has a similarly traumatic experience in her life, one that may or may not include a crab kaiju and a mentor character who plays a prominent role in the film with a name that rhymes with Packer Spentaflossed. I will say that the fights deliver, are mostly coherent, and more importantly don't feel like CGI for 20 minutes at a time, which they almost have to be. I will fully admit to being totally invested in the fight between Gypsy Danger and 2 kaiju in Hong Kong, right up to and including the "no way they put that weapon in there!" moment.

 The characters are, by and large, not developed or at best wafer thin, but they serve the story well. At least one of two of them get moments that give you some perspective on why they do what they do, and some of them even change a little bit during the story. Honestly, I think I liked Day's Dr. Newton Geiszler the most, followed closely by Hannibal Chau (who explains why he chose that name), which works out because they're on-screen together for a healthy chunk in the middle of the film. I even cared about Mako's back story and liked that she's as much - if not more - of a liability than Raleigh is inside of Gypsy Danger. The ending was satisfying, and despite it being reasonably well wrapped up, could be okay with more adventures in this world.

 Which is a shame, because there's no way that's going to happen. Why? Because people thought "wow, that looks like a stupid movie" and went to see Grown Ups 2 instead. Sometimes I sarcastically point out that Box Office Numbers are the C.R.E.A.M. of Studio Executives lives, but in this case it's probably true. To them, this movie failed only slightly less than The Lone Ranger, and it gives them a rationale to argue that Guillermo del Toro is better suited to make "smaller, " "art house" fare that critics love and nobody loses millions of dollars on, rightly or wrongly.

 And that's fine, because as we've established, I REALLY like those movies. But I wouldn't have minded seeing what del Toro's version of The Hobbit looked like, and I desperately wanted somebody to give him the chance to make a big budgeted, hard R version of At the Mountains of Madness. He couldn't convince Universal to give him the money to do it even with Tom Cruise starring and James Cameron producing, so the implied "failure" of Pacific Rim isn't going to bolster his case. That kinda sucks, if you ask me. And you don't have a choice because I'm the one writing this.

 Thanks for sticking it out to the end, by the way. I'm sure some people left during the preamble, but you didn't. So thanks for that. You should go see Pacific Rim, because I bet you'd enjoy it. I mean, before long it'll be at the $2 theater which will no doubt make your decision easier, but I implore you to check it out. It's much better than you assumed it would be, and probably better than I thought it might be. I'm not even going to use the "it's not perfect" qualifier because perfect movies are pretty hard to come by as it is, and that shouldn't diminish the really damn good ones by comparison.

 So go see Pacific Rim - if you already saw the Transformers movie, you owe your brain that much. If you haven't seen a Transformers move - kudos to you! Go see Pacific Rim to celebrate it! 



 * Wait... they changed the Sci-Fi Channel? To what? You mean where all those shitty "Crocappotamus vs Ninja Squirrel" movies play? Bummer.

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.

The Cap'n: Debunker of Rumours.

Every few months, I hear one of the two statements about my movie viewing habits:

1. You didn't see that? I thought you saw everything!

2. Well, of course _____ sounds bad. Everything you show at (fill in the blank) Fest is bad.


or some variation thereof. When hit with both in the course of two days, it seemed like I needed to once again step up and dispel some assumptions about what I watch, what I show others, and other erroneous assertions made about the Cap'n.

The first assumption is fair, and goes along with the theory proposed last week about what non-cinephiles think that "film geeks" do with their time: watch everything. The truth of the matter is that I have neither the time, the money, nor the inkling to watch every single movie that comes out. I can't even see all of the critically well regarded films, though I do keep track of them, bookmark reviews so I don't forget they exist, and hope that I remember when the DVD or Blu Ray comes out so I can add it to an already lengthy Netflix queue.

As it is, I see as much as I can, where I can and when I can, but I'm just like you "normals": I have other concerns that occupy my time, I have the same mundane day-to-day tasks to deal with. I fit in movies late at night, or in small doses so that I have something to write about (which also takes time). While I'd love to be able to wander from theatre to theatre and soak in everything, then head to the video store (supposing they exist anymore) and rent every old title in stock to accompany the new releases I picked up, I can't do that. Yet. When I can, I'll let you know.

I also read, which may or may not come as a surprise (I don't really know what you assume the Cap'n does with his spare time), not always about film, but in reasonable doses. I find that if I ever want to pursue an education and career writing about film, I should soak up as much information as humanly possible about the aspects of cinema I find interesting, so the texts range from academic theory, compendiums of interviews with directors, writers, actors, and editors about process, work by other critics I admire, the occasional bio or autobiography, and one or two movie guides to use in order to find something I haven't heard of - and that tends to be plenty.

To address the second comment (which the first dovetails nicely into), I openly admit that the "about" blurb on the right side of the page says "trash savant," which implies that the Cap'n is knowledgeable about a certain type of film, one that others might hold their nose while walking past were the metaphor extended to food rather than cinema. I understand that, and it is true that that is a facet of what I watch, show, and discuss. It's also true that the Cap'n has a term coined in his honor: the "Trappening," a deliberate misleading of friends to come over and watch a movie only to show them something horrible (named for my devilish enjoyment of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening and the dirty trick I played on everyone during Horror Fest III).

Somehow these facts, coupled with Bad Movie Night - an appropriation of what my brother and his friends do for each of their birthdays - has given people the strange notion that this is ALL the Cap'n is interested in. Yes, I take a certain amount of pride in finding the obscure and rightfully forgotten films for festivals; more often than not, those are the films that unite the audience and energize them between films with slower pacing or that are less easy to react to. The atmosphere created by a "party" movie can lift the group up and continue momentum over the night, as many fest attendees will attest to.

Let's address the main point for a moment, and where assumption one dovetails into assumption two: the idea that I will, or would want to, watch "everything." The second postulate goes further to assert that I will watch anything as long as it is "bad," which is demonstrably untrue. In fact, I turned the point around to the person who made it when he bemoaned how terrible Transformers 2 was. Here is a reasonable facsimile of the discussion:

Me: Now wait a minute... I never saw Transformers because it looked awful. You not only saw Transformers and hated it, but still went back and saw Transformers 2, which you knew you wouldn't like.

He: Yeah.

Me: And I'm the one who watches "bad" movies?

He: Fair point.

In the interest of full disclosure, the conversation then turned to the fact that I had seen Michael Bay's The Island, which I didn't like, in part because it sounded exactly like Parts: The Clonus Horror, a film I only knew existed because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you want to negate my point, there's your opportunity. I also mentioned an interest in seeing the 1989 film Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren, which was met with some derision.

Red Scorpion may well be a terrible movie; in fact, I've seen no kind words written about it, but my reasons for seeing it have nothing to do with the "quality" of the film. My interest in seeing Red Scorpion, like my interest in The Island, has to do with its place among other films. That the existence of Red Scorpion is one of the most surprising things in a film as revelatory as Casino Jack and the United States of Money spoke to me. I had no idea that lobbyist Jack Abramoff dabbled as a Hollywood producer, and this apocryphal piece of film history makes seeing Red Scorpion worth the diversion into "bad" movie territory.

Every now and then, I'll get a wild hair and watch something like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li or s. Darko or, yes, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, and despite the fact that the first two reviews appeared with the caveat SO YOU WON'T HAVE TO, people seem to think that I only seek these movies out. Yes, they're easy to describe and the reviews are often memorable because I go out of my way to describe the lunacy and ineptitude on display, but it isn't the only thing I write about.

The fact that I enjoy the loopy, nonsensical narrative of Death Bed and its novel, totally unexpected way of having the bed "eat", or the fact that Hillbillys in a Haunted House delivers nothing the title promises (but is still charming in a stupid, earnest manner), does not mean that I'm only going to program those films at festivals. What I run into by the time you get to 8 official "fests" is the risk of repeating yourself too much and running out of films that are going to surprise people. So I take risks - some pay off, like the deliriously offensive Blood Car and ThanksKilling, and some don't, like the turgid Matango or the lifeless Navy vs. the Night Monsters.

Do I sometimes relish in how much you hate these films? Yes, at times; I never said the Cap'n was sadistic, but many of you keep coming back knowing that there's a 50/50 chance things could not work. They can't all be as woefully pathetic and hysterical as The Giant Claw, after all. I appreciate your willingness to venture into uncharted territory with me, but by this point I had hoped more people would realize that's not all that makes up the Cap'n.

If not, then maybe "Good Movie Night" would be fun, if a bit redundant conceptually. Beats me; I just thought you were already watching those without my involvement. Am I assuming too much?

From the Vaults: Cap'n Howdy and the 80s Nostalgia of Doom!

I see the advertising from 300 is now gone and replaced with Transformers. I could go on a rant about Michael Bay ruining my childhood memories, but that's actually not going to happen in this instance. Why, none of you ask?

Well, I never watched Transformers. To be honest, I've never seen the movie, nor do I believe I've watched a single episode of the half hour *coughcommercialcough*, ahem, show. The truth is that I have very few memories of television shows from the 1980's, period, despite being born in 1979 and being a child during what is considered the "peak" era of kid cartoons.

I wasn't allowed to watch GI Joe, didn't find He-Man very interesting, having fleeting memories of Voltron and Thundercats, and no memory whatsoever of Transformers. Accordingly, unlike many people my age obsessed with the eighties, I also have never seen Dallas, The Golden Girls, Who's the Boss, Charles in Charge, What's Happening, Growing Pains, or Silver Spoons. In fact, I really don't know much about eighties tv programming. Again, things like The A-Team, Alf, Punky Brewster, Moonlighting, and Family Ties are lost on me. Never watched them. Don't have an overwhelming urge to go back and find out what the deal was.

To me, Mr. T is Clubber Lang, the guy who killed Mickey in Rocky III. Bruce Willis is John McClane, the guy who blew up the Nakatomi building in Die Hard. Names like Scott Baio, Soleil Moon-Frye, and Tony Danza mean nothing to me. I think it's pretty clear that the name Marty McFly means more to me than Alex Keaton.

But I wasn't just soaking up movies at a young age. Yes, I was very much aware of things like The Goonies and Tron or Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones as a youngster, but I did see some tv. Just not what everyone else was watching. I have fond memories of watching Lost in Space on USA, and the old game shows that followed it, like Press Your Luck. I watched Danger Mouse and You Can't Do That On Television, and when Nickelodeon stopped going off the air at 8:30, I watched Nick at Night. Well, except for Donna Reed. But Dennis the Menace, Mr. Ed, The Patty Duke Show, My Three Sons, Bewitched, and Green Acres? Sure.

I also know I watched Fraggle Rock for a brief period, and The Muppet Show is embedded in my memory from an early age (the first two movies my parents took me to as a baby were The Muppet Movie and The Empire Strikes Back, if that helps clarify why I am like I am). Scooby Doo was in the cards, too, but even at a young age I remember preferring episodes without Scrappy.

I was very late in the game when it came to the Disney Channel, so I was behind on things like Ducktales, Gummi Bears, Darkwing Duck, and Talespin. Rescue Rangers never did it for me. Actually, neither did Gummi Bears. I could go look, but I'm putting Tiny Toons in the later bracket of 1980's cartoons, which exempts it from discussion, much like shows like Twin Peaks (which I was aware of but didn't really see.)

A really, really vague memory is floating around in my head of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy mini-series and some episodes of the Tom Baker Dr. Who on PBS. I clearly recall being disgusted at them eating the talking cow in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

There were also things like Mr. Wizard and sort of randomly assorted Nickelodeon programming floating (Double Dare) around, but by and large I didn't know characters on what folks consider the big 80's cartoons, and I certainly had no idea whether the toys were good or evil. I was really into Star Wars at that age, and watched a lot of Disney movies.

Speaking of which, I realized recently while talking to people who were born in the mid eighties why something like The Black Cauldron has no meaning to them whatsoever. I saw The Black Cauldron when I was six, and every time we went to the video store I asked if it had come out yet, and it hadn't. I saw the movie once, and then not again for another ten years, when it finally came out on VHS while I was in high school. Whereas many of these movies were around for people to see, Cauldron simply vanished, and if you didn't see it in theatres, it meant absolutely nothing in the interim.

Who knows? I know that certainly movies were not the most impacting influence on my young life (I didn't mention this before but I read a lot too), and yet the Sacred Cows of the 1980's mean almost nothing to me. Michael Bay turning Transformers into some crappy action movie doesn't bother me the way it might bother some. Or does, I should say. But if he decided to go after The Goonies or Back to the Future, there'd be hell to pay.

So You Won't Have To: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The downside - if there could be such a thing - to watching Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy is that when the opportunity presented itself to sit through the Platinum Dunes remake, I opted to bite the bullet. I can't even say I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010); I endured it.

Imagine that you're a big fan of a band, and the guy who tormented you in high school shows up again in your neighborhood, moves in, and makes friends with everybody you know. Not only that, but he inexplicably loves the same band that you do, even if there would be no chance he'd be caught dead listening to something you liked in school. But he likes it for all the opposite reasons you do. Like hipsters. Yeah, imagine he's into the same band you are, but in an ironic way. And then he starts a cover band that plays all of the songs in a way that makes fun of them. Now you look like the asshole that's yelling "come on guys! they're really good!", while everybody thinks the shitty cover band is better than the real deal.

That's Platinum Dunes: they've consistently found a way to remake horror movies that disregard actual fans of the films in favor of appealing to hipsters that think "that movie sucked anyway, but I know the name of it" and will go see it for that reason alone. So the movies make money, even if they lack basic film-making coherency. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is probably the best of their remakes and it's at best a shell of the original film. Without the iconography of Leatherface, it's R. Lee Ermey terrorizing teenagers. I think I've made it clear how I feel about Shit Coffin.

Their latest strip mining of a franchise is A Nightmare on Elm Street, which I believe you heard the Cap'n endured. The remake manages to strip anything interesting about Freddy Krueger, Springwood, the parents, the kids, and even the dreams away, leaving a husk of a movie that walks a familiar walk, whistles the same tune, but doesn't manage to keep you interested.

I'm going to give you five simple ways the producers, director, writer(s), and cast contributed to a movie I almost turned off seven times during the 90 minute run time:

1. Freddy's not scary - or funny, for that matter. Don't let people fool you into thinking that the jokester Freddy is gone or that he just makes "dark" jokes; that's not true at all. Freddy makes jokes, they're just really bad. And not corny, Part 4 puns, but jokes that don't even make sense. Look, I understood the context of "how's this for a wet dream" in Dream Master, but when Freddy says the same thing to Nancy because she's sinking in a hallway made of tar, it just sounds stupid.

I'm going to share one more exchange for you, between Freddy and Nancy:

Freddy: Little Nancy. Now that you caught me, what game do you wanna play next?
Nancy: Fuck you!
Freddy: Ooh, sounds like fun. It's a little fast for me. How about we hang, first?

Now I know what you're thinking, but the only hanging you see is maybe Nancy's friends behind pipes. I honestly couldn't tell, and besides that doesn't actually address what Freddy's suggesting or what he then tries to do, which is cut her.

In fact, that's all Freddy does. He doesn't sneak around and fuck with people; when the movie isn't copying shots directly from the original film, all Freddy does as walk around and scratch pipes or walls (which shoot out sparks). I don't know whether to pin this on Jackie Earle Haley or the direction or the script, but there's really nothing for him to do here. Freddy doesn't even really seem to relish what he's doing, even when he says he is. There's no sense of being toyed with, or that he's enjoying torturing the Elm Street kids. He just kills them and moves on.

2. The kids aren't interesting - To be honest with you, this really killed the movie for me, because I didn't care about one of these characters. Not the goth-ed out, comatose-acting Nancy, or the Hot Topic Quentin (the Glenn character), or I don't really know what they're supposed to be other than dressed in black and mopey Kris ("Tina") and Jesse ("Rod"), who you can only identify as such because one dies floating above her bed and the other dies in prison. There's another character, Dean, that is killed so quickly into the movie that I didn't care who he was.

It does, however, set up a funeral that's so bad I nearly renamed the film A Twilight on Elm Street. All of the kids are mumbling into their chests and staring woefully at each other about some stupid shared history they have (which you can figure out well before they do) until their parents drag them away, shushing any sense of camaraderie we might have been able to follow. Remember how Nancy and Glenn and Tina and Rod may not have been the best of friends, but you could tell that they were all there for each other? Remember how Nancy stays with Tina because she's scared and Glenn stays with Nancy so she's not alone, and even Rod is a little shaken about his nightmares but he won't tell Tina? How they seemed like they'd actually hang out? Not these paper cut-out remake versions.

Oh, since I brought up the parents...

3. Why are the parents even in this movie? - Look, it's great that the producers got Clancy Brown to come in and play Quentin's father. He's not playing the John Saxon role, mind you, because that character doesn't exist, but I guess I'll give them credit for getting it half right: character actor appears in a paternal role in A Nightmare on Elm Street film.

But then again, the script just ruins all of that promise. Every family in Springwood appears to be a one-parent, absentee / latch-key family of people who don't really give a shit about their kids. When it's far too late in the film for you to honestly care that the parents killed Freddy (this time without the botched trial - more on that in a minute) in order to suppress the memories of our main characters about being molested and cut (and they make no bones that's exactly what happened. There are pictures!) the parents still are conveniently ignoring the fact that "suppressed memories" don't leave people with gaping claw marks in their chests (Kris and Jesse).

The parents might as well not be in the movie, because they emote just about as much as their zombified children, and at no point did I believe any one of the actors playing an adult gave two shits about their child. Not once. In fact, the only reason I can think that the parents are in there at all is to expand the backstory and shoehorn a dream / flashback of Freddy being burned alive, which brings us to the next crippling story problem...

4. The cheap "did he or didn't he?" gimmick - By now you've probably heard that A Nightmare on Elm Street decides to pursue the subplot of "did Freddy really molest the children, or did they just say he did because their parents asked?" It doesn't work at all because a) director Samuel Bayer includes shots in the flashbacks of the parents finding claw marks on the kids' backs that just doesn't have any other explanation, and b) because they have no intention of pursuing the subplot.

It's a cheap way to get Nancy and Quentin away from Springwood to the preschool where everything "allegedly" happened, and so they can whine about how their parents killed an innocent man, only to immediately find Freddy's "cave" where all the horrible evidence is on display. In the span of five minutes Rooney Mara and Kyle Gallner go from emotionlessly moping about their parents to feigning shock that Freddy really was a child molester.

The idea itself isn't a bad one; while it totally changes the Nightmare on Elm Street lore, in a remake you can get away with shifts like that because it's an interesting deviation. It changes Freddy's motivation from predatory to retribution, which might not work out as well, but at least it's something different. In a movie that slavishly recreates the iconic imagery of the original (and not as well any time), this is the one big change I can point to that has any ramifications on future sequels.

But they chicken out. Freddy's a despicable child-killer and deserves to be burned alive (again) when Nancy drags him out of the dream world, only to appear again in a shock ending.

Rather than discuss the stupid, cheap scare ending (that fails to replicate the surreal ending to the original in any way) I want to discuss a lazy cheat on the part of writers Wesley Strick, Eric Heisserer, and director Samuel Bayer that drains any tension from the second half of the film...

5. Micro-Naps - Early in the movie, Quentin's research on sleep deprivation brings up the concept of "micro-naps" where the brain shuts down for a few seconds after 72 hours without sleep. According to the movie, it means you're "dreaming without knowing it," which I guess would come in handy in blurring the lines of reality and fantasy, which the remake to that point has been pretty bad at doing (reverting to a "red and green" color palette to indicate "nightmare" really makes it easy to figure out the beginning of the film).

Unfortunately, micro-naps instead become a cheap way for Strick, Heisserer, and Bayer to have Freddy appear any time and anywhere for a "jump" scare because they can't build any tension in this film. Freddy never does ANYTHING during these "shocks", except quickly pop into frame and then immediately disappear. The only thing close to interesting that ever happens is a quick chase scene in a convenience store where Nancy drifts in and out of the boiler room nightmare while Freddy stalks her. And that's over pretty quickly. After that, it's really just used for cheap scares until the last dream showdown.

---

Folks, I hated this movie. A Nightmare on Elm Street doesn't work as a remake; it doesn't work as a stand-alone film; it doesn't work as a horror film. What it did do was make me angry that people lined up to go see this garbage en masse a few weeks ago, because the kind-sorta know the name. It may be due in part to just having watched Never Sleep Again, it may be because I'm a little more forgiving of mangling a Friday the 13th formula than the Nightmare on Elm Street (and Shit Coffin still managed to strip anything away from Jason, Mrs. Vorhees, or Camp Crystal Lake), but this film was a test of my patience. I feel embarrassed that I wasted an hour and a half sitting through it, but I did it so you folks won't have to. Even though some of you have already told me that you will.

So let me say this: You Will Regret It. There is not amount of morbid curiosity that will compensate for the shallow, surface level retelling of this film by people who don't give two shits about your enjoyment of the Nightmare series. They don't care, and they will continue to put out these soulless husks of horror films with names you recognize because the ironic cover band is in vogue now. And I don't know what we can do about it.