I Probably Liked It

The Italian Job (1969)

2012-02-25T14:46:00.005-08:00

Peter Collinson's The Italian Job is one of the coolest movies ever made. Almost everything about it is "cool", or at least embodied what was "cool" in 1969. It's a slick, funny heist movie, a smart comedy, and an action movie all rolled into one. It has a score by Quincy Jones, one of the coolest composers ever. And let's face it, you don't get much cooler than 1960's Michael Caine (or now Michael Caine, for that matter).

Caine plays Charlie Croker, a career criminal just released from prison, who catches wind of a big heist in Italy from the widow of a deceased friend. He had the heist all planned out, but was executed by the Mafia in Italy before he could pull it off. Croker, with the help of a crime lord still in prison, assembles his own crew of specialists and getaway drivers to finish the Italian Job.

The heist involves them starting a traffic jam in Rome and robbing an armored car full of gold bricks in broad daylight. And they have to do it from right under the noses of the local authorities and the mafia.

Michael Caine is the greatest. He is so fun to watch in this movie, he gets tons of great one liners and exchanges with the other characters. Even though his character is a criminal, he's so charming and likeable that you want him to succeed.

The one weak link for me in the movie is the casting of Benny Hill. Now, I understand that even Benny Hill was considered cool back in England, 1969. But I just can't find him funny. He doesn't work for me. For what it's worth, I think he was really well cast, as the computer guy they enlist from a sanitarium. They imply he was a rapist or at the very least a sex offender, which is pretty appropriate for Benny Hill. But then they try to make him lovable, like these are just some wacky quirks he has. And yes, there is a scene where he squeezes a fat lady's butt and chases her around in fast motion.

The car chase at the end is one of the best ever, not far behind the one in The French Connection. It wins a lot of points for having the three getaway cars be mini coopers. The final scene is hilarious, and I'm not going to spoil it, because it's such a treat. I will say, I think it owes a little something to Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.

The Italian Job is such a fun movie. It reminded me a lot of Steven Soderbergh. In fact, though I have never seen the original Sinatra Ocean's 11, I would not be surprised to learn that Soderbergh took more inspiration from The Italian Job for his remake. They have pretty much the same sense of style and humor. Check it out!

The Secret World of Arrietty

2012-02-24T12:53:00.005-08:00

Nothing will keep me away from a new movie by Studio Ghibli on opening weekend. Like Pixar, they've earned that trust. One after another, they have released movies with lush, beautifully animated, fully realized fantasy worlds, and relatable, human stories.

The newest Ghibli film, The Secret World of Arrietty, is a little different. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Arrietty takes our own daily home environment and resizes it into a vast, dangerous world full of adventure and peril.

Based on the classic series of children's novels The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arrietty is the story of Arrietty, a tiny girl who lives under the floorboards of a country house with her stern, protective father, and her jumpy, fearful mother. They are Borrowers, a secret race of bug-sized people who live off of the items that human beings, or Beans, as they call them, don't need or will never miss.

On her first Borrowing outing with her father, Arrietty is mistakenly seen by Sean, a sickly Bean boy her own age, staying at the country home with his aunts while awaiting a heart surgery. Sean has long been told of the little people in the floor by his mother, who never stopped believing in them.

As Sean reaches out to befriend Arrietty, her parents realize that they've been made, and knowing the two worlds can never meet, opt to pack up and leave before Arrietty's curiosity gets the best of them all. Meanwhile, they must contend with Sean's aunt, who has been trying to prove their existence for years, and is believed to be a bit off her rocker.

My favorite scenes were just watching the way the Borrowers navigated the human world. Arrietty's first Borrowing was a lot of fun, because we got to see the way they utilized strips of tape to scale tables, and old lost earrings as grappling hooks, and so on. I also really enjoyed the house cat. Ghibli always does great work when animating realistic animal behavior, and the cat has some really funny moments.

Though not my favorite of Studio Ghibli's films, Arrietty is still quite good. It drags on a little bit too long, but a lot of Hayao Miyazaki's films have a slower pace than American kids are used to. I think American kids and Japanese kids might have different attention spans. Or maybe the kids in our audience were just particularly squirmy.

I would recommend The Secret Life of Arrietty as a good movie for the whole family, though if your kid is impatient or the type that wants something noisier, you might want to just wait to show it to them on home video. Still, I don't have any kids, I just like movies. My wife and I saw it on our own and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

Bedazzled (1967)

2012-02-20T12:55:00.001-08:00

I've seen pretty much all of the big comedies that you are supposed to have seen, but somehow, Stanley Donen's Bedazzled has managed to elude me until now. I saw the remake back in 2000, and I am happy to the original is much, MUCH better.

Bedazzled is written by and starring the comedy duo of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It follows the journey of Stanley Moon (Moore), a lowly fry cook at Wimpy's, hopelessly in love with Margaret (Eleanor Bron), the waitress. Unable to work up the nerve to even talk to her, Moon is approached by none other than the devil himself (Peter Cook), who goes by the name of George Spiggott these days. In exchange for his soul, Spiggott will grant him seven wishes in order to win over Margaret.

Each wish rewrites reality and Stanley attempts to win over Margaret with his newfound advantages; as an intellectual, a rock star, a rich man, etc. Moon quickly realizes that every wish he makes comes at a price, as Spiggott exploits loopholes in his wording to make sure Stanley strikes out every time.

The three leads, Cook, Moore, and Bron, are all really great. Each time Stanley makes a wish, they effectively transform into different characters, so they each end up playing several. My favorite wish was when Stanley turns into a rock star. He dances around the stage, desperately screaming for love. All appears to be going well, Margaret is swooning for him. That is, until the next act begins, and Spiggott comes out and sings a song that comes across as effortlessly cool as Stanley's came across desperate. He wins the screaming girls over, and Stanley the rock star has lost out to the next big thing and fleeting nature of fame.

Also included in the cast are George Spiggott's employees, the seven deadly sins, which include cameos by Barry Humphries as Envy and Raquel Welch as Lust. She's all over the posters and ads for the movie even though she's only in two scenes.

I also love the banter between Cook and Moore. They had such great chemistry, and the movie demonstrates it. The movie is very smart and heavy with well written dialogue between the two of them. It isn't all dialogue, though. Moore shows off his physical comedic chops and there is plenty of silliness to go around. For example, whenever a wish goes bad and Stanley wants out, he has to blow a raspberry with his mouth. This provides for some pretty amazing comedy, as it gets funnier and funnier with each wish.

Bedazzled is hilarious. It's one of the all time great comedies. I thought I had seen them all. I wonder what else I've missed?

High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)

2012-02-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

Every once in a great while, one has that feeling while watching a movie that they are watching one of the best movies they have ever seen. It's a thrill, and naturally, the older I get and the more movies I see, the less frequently I experience this rush. But as luck would have it, there are still a whole bunch of Akira Kurosawa movies out there that I have yet to watch.

High and Low, my eighth Kurosawa film, and the first I've seen set in the present day (1963, that is), is many different films at once. A kidnap thriller, a police procedural, a morality tale, and an examination of class disparity, and it's all filled with the same compassion and humanity that Akira Kurosawa brought to everything he made.

The story opens with Gondo (the legendary Toshiro Mifune), an executive for a shoe company, who is poised to take over the company and oust the other men on the board, who want to make cheaper shoes and charge more money for them. After a meeting with these men goes sour, he gets a telephone call, where an unknown voice tells him that his son has been kidnapped and demands a ransom of 30 million Yen. It quickly becomes apparent that it was not his son that was kidnapped, but rather the son of his chauffeur. The kidnapper tells Gondo that he must pay the ransom anyway, and Gondo must now come to the decision: must he give up his entire fortune for another man's son?

The first hour of the movie is almost like a play, the drama rarely leaving Gondo's home. What is truly amazing about this first hour is the way it's shot. Kurosawa uses long takes, sometimes 5 minutes or more, each shot carefully composed to maximize the emotional impact of what the characters are going through. He shows a mastery of spacial dynamics between the characters, often making social statements just with where they are positioned compared to each other in the frame.

Then, an hour into the movie, it makes an abrupt and complete change. The action leaves Gondo's home, and the focus shifts almost completely away from Gondo, over to Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, the star of Kagemusha), the man tasked with hunting down and arresting the kidnapper. He and his team are good detectives, and what follows is a fascinating police procedural, as we watch them solve the mystery.

Amidst all this is a very large social statement. We learn that Gondo's large, air conditioned (a luxury at the time) home is located high atop a hill over the city of Yokohama, seemingly arrogantly looking down on the poor people below, sweating and suffering during a summer heatwave. There is a sense of local resentment toward Gondo and his place in society. Eventually, we follow the detectives and the kidnapper (played brilliantly and almost silently by Tsutomu Yamazaki) into the lowest place in the city, where heroin addicts lay in the gutter and writhe in agony.

I could go on and on how incredible High and Low is, but then you wouldn't really have any reason to watch it yourself. Kurosawa is, in my estimation, the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, and this is right up there with Seven Samurai and Rashomon as one of his greatest achievements. And those are just among the ones I've seen!

Midnight in Paris

2012-02-16T12:22:00.001-08:00

I haven't watched any of Woody Allen's recent movies since Scoop, so I don't know how he's been doing lately, but based on the overall integrity his huge body of work, he'll always be one of my favorite filmmakers. He's made some stinkers in his time, but when he's on, his movies shine.

Midnight in Paris is one of those shiny movies, a whimsical fantasy about the magic of Paris; the city's ability to transport you to another time. At the same time, it's also a dose of reality. The past can never live up to the nostalgia-laced version you see in your mind's eye. It is very much a companion piece to Allen's classic, The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Owen Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a successful screenwriter of hacky Hollywood movies, trying to launch a more fulfilling career as a novelist. On a visit to Paris with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams), he expresses his desire to stay in the city and live a Bohemian life like his heroes of the 1920's. Inez scoffs at this, and encourages Gil to spend time with her parents (Tea Party Republicans who don't like him) and know-it-all friends.

Fed up with the people in his life, Gil opts out of yet another night out, and chooses to wander the streets of Paris. At midnight, a 1920's car rolls up and waves him in. Inside, he finds the life he always dreamed of. He befriends F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso. He shows his manuscript and takes writing advice from Gertrude Stein. He meets and falls in love with Picasso's mistress, Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Soon, Gil is carrying out a love affair with the 1920's, spending his days in the cold reality of today, and his nights living it up with his heroes in the past. Eventually his night life gets complicated, too, though, and Gil must decide between his two lives.

I do believe this is the best Owen Wilson has been in a movie in ages. Since Royal Tenenbaums, perhaps? Heck, maybe ever. This is exactly the kind of movie he should be making. He's great at playing intelligent, soul searching, existential characters. I always thought his diversion down the path of dumb "Frat Pack" comedies like Wedding Crashers was a mistake (though I do love Zoolander). In Midnight in Paris, Wilson plays the Woody Allen analogue without doing a Woody Allen impression, something I never enjoy as much. My favorite moments were the dumbfounded look on his face when he realizes where he is, and the scene where he confesses that he's from the future to Salvador Dali and his surrealist friends.

Midnight in Paris is a delight. It is my favorite Woody Allen film that I've seen since 1999's Sweet and Lowdown. I never hammered down a list or anything, but I would probably also put it somewhere in my top 10 for 2011, and hey, it might even creep its way into my top 10 favorite Woody Allen movies! The guy has a LOT of great movies, so this is high praise indeed.

The Grey

2012-02-15T12:09:00.001-08:00

Look, man, it's got Liam Neeson vs. wolves. I don't even know why you need to read a review.

Actually, The Grey is a little bit more than that. Liam Neeson stars as John something-or-another (I have to go all the way to Wikipedia? Forget that!), a guy way deep in Alaska hired by a company to keep wolves away from the workers. He is deep in despair, on the brink of suicide, when the transport plane he's riding crashes in the middle of nowhere, in a blizzard. They soon discover they are smack in the middle of a pack of wolves' hunting territory. Being the only guy there with any real survival skills, he takes it upon himself to help the few survivors of the crash find their way to safety, and, along the way, learns a little something about having the will to live himself.

The movie is extremely bleak and harrowing. I won't tell you who all lives and who dies, but I'll say that not very many make it. These guys are intruding on the wolves' territory, and they are injured and tired and hungry and easy to hunt. All it takes is for a guy to fall back from the group for the wolves to bear in and rip him to shreds. The message in the end is kind of positive, if you consider the message of the world is hard and cruel but you have to keep on fighting anyway a positive message. And I kind of do.

The Grey is the first movie I've seen by director Joe Carnahan, and I have to say I am impressed. The script and acting were solid, and I don't just mean Neeson, who is reliable, I also mean the rest of the guys. They could have just been stock characters or wolf bait, but instead, they were treated as real people with real reasons to live back home.

The cinematography is top notch, too. It brings a very immediate feel to the movie, like you're there with these guys and experiencing it first hand. There are some genuinely scary shots of the wolves, especially at night, when you can see their glowing eyes watching you as your bonfire is all that keeps them from pouncing.

Speaking of the wolves, I'm not sure how much of them were real, or when they were stuffed, or animatronic or CGI. I don't believe there was very much CGI, but Carnahan does a stellar job of integrating various methods to make you believe these man-eating wolves are really sharing the screen with these wolf-feeding men.

As I said before, I don't even know why you need to read a review, you should go watch Liam Neeson be awesome. The movie isn't just some dumb action movie about a superhuman Neeson wrestling wolves, as the trailers kind of sold it. It's an intense, well made survival movie with a bit of substance that also features an all-too-human Neeson wrestling wolves.

Diamonds are Forever

2012-02-13T10:54:00.001-08:00

Here it is, folks. The moment you've all been waiting for: The final James Bond movie to star Sean Connery. Unless you count Never Say Never Again, which I don't, because it's produced by a different studio and not a part of the actual series. This brings the series I started in December full circle. If you wish to read the rest, here they are:

- Dr. No
- From Russia with Love
- Goldfinger
- Thunderball
- You Only Live Twice
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service

And now, finally, comes Diamonds are Forever. I don't know what brought Sean Connery back to the role of Bond ($$$) after retiring from the role with You Only Live Twice ($$$), but I'm betting it had something to do with getting a great script ($$$), or the promise of a chance to play a different side of 007 after the life-changing events of the previous movie ($$$), or possibly the opportunity to work with Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton again ($$$). Whatever the reason, Connery is back as Bond... with a vengeance!

After the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, highlight for SPOILER His wife was murdered SPOILER, 007 has an axe to grind with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, nefarious criminal leader of SPECTRE. The movie opens with Bond tearing his way across the world, tracking down Blofeld by choking henchwomen with their bikini tops and such. He finds Blofeld before the credits, trying to alter one of his men to look like him, to use as a decoy and escape Bond's vengeance. Bond gets him anyway, before the opening titles, and the viewer is robbed of the exciting, take no prisoners James Bond movie they were hoping for.

After that, Bond is pretty much fine, and ready to take on a mission again. He is assigned to pose as a diamond smuggler and follow the diamonds to their destination, in order to uncover the smuggling ring. The main Bond girl this time is Tiffany Case, played by Jill St. John, a fellow diamond smuggler who likes to wear wigs, apparently.

Bond traces the diamonds to their source, which is, of course, Blofeld, who plans to build a reflective laser satellite with them to take over the world. Oh hey, remember when Bond got his vengeance earlier? Well, that cooled him off some, since he's taking all this pretty lightly now. I would have expected all of those emotions to come rushing back, but Bond is over his pain and has moved on to his next girl already.

Diamonds are Forever is by far the campiest James Bond movie yet. It is loaded with dumb gags that betray the clever humor of the series' best entries. Among the worst is a scene where, on the run from some henchmen in Nevada, Bond storms onto the set of a moon mission being faked, steals the moon rover and takes off in it. Come on, guys! The space program was real just two movies ago, when you had Blofeld stealing rocket ships.

This movie is also the origin of the scene where Bond gets caught in some sort of death trap and manages to get out of it unscathed, calmly brushing dust off of his tuxedo or something. That's my least favorite version of James Bond. I like it when Bond gets messed up a little, not the guy who can casually walk through a gunfight sipping a martini.

And there's more. Cake bombs. Bickering gay assassins. Blofeld dressing in drag.

I've enjoyed the first six 007 movies to varying degrees, some less than others, but Diamonds are Forever is the first one that is downright crappy. They don't even give us a proper showdown between Bond and Blofeld at the end. After avoiding Bond's grasp for six movies, the final confrontation amounts to Bond swinging him around in a crane for a while, then leaving.

I think this is it for now. I hope you enjoyed my James Bond reviews. One day I plan on continuing on with the Roger Moore series, but this one kind of killed my will to go on, at least for the time being. With a new movie coming out later this year, though, I can't imagine these reviews being gone for too long.

James Moore will be back (someday) with his review of LIVE AND LET DIE

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2012-01-31T12:56:00.000-08:00

The last time I watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was when I was 19, a freshman in college, in an Intro to Film class. It did not end well. I was having difficulty staying awake and would have fallen asleep if it weren't for Snow White's shrill, high pitched singing voice. When it was over and the class discussion began, I tore into it like a dumb teenager with something to prove.

Of course, I was wrong. Revisiting it now at the age of 30, I see now that it really is a landmark cinematic achievement. Every scene is animated with such care and craftsmanship. The amount of detail and humanity expressed in the characters is staggering. It's easy for us to take animated features for granted, but at the time Disney and Co. made Snow White, this was a huge gamble. It was unknown if audiences would be willing or able to emotionally invest in a cartoon. Nowadays, you are chided as inhuman if Up or Toy Story 3 didn't make you cry. This is all because of Snow White.

There were several sequences that struck me. Snow White fleeing into the harsh unfamiliarity of the forest, hysterically visualizing monsters in the trees where there are only gnarled branches and birds. The deep anguish of the scene of the dwarfs mourning her after being poisoned by the apple. The evil queen fleeing the dwarfs' vengeance and ultimately meeting her demise. I mean, holy crap, if falling off a cliff wasn't final enough, they really bring it home by dropping a boulder on top of her and sending a couple of vultures down to eat her remains! Disney uses the heightened world of animation to pull the audience in one direction or another, laughing one moment, crying the next, action and excitement after that.

So, I get it now. Snow White is truly a great film. It's still not my favorite Disney film. I'm still not a fan of that shrill singing voice, but I'm willing to overlook it as an artifact of the 1930's. Of the four classics I've revisited (or visited for the first time) in the last year or so, my favorite is still Sleeping Beauty. Fantasia is pretty incredible too. I plan on getting Bambi before it goes "back in the vault". It was another one I didn't much care for in my stupid days, so I'm curious to see where I stand on it.

Well, I've once again revealed myself as a complete dummy in my youth. If any of you readers have a time machine, could you travel back to that day in Film 101 and give me a swat in the back of the head, courtesy of my future self? Thanks.

Alfie

2012-01-31T11:56:00.000-08:00

I didn't know very much about Alfie before I saw it. I expected it to be a swinging 60's comedy about a charming ladies' man blah blah blah. It really wasn't that. It was something so much better. This movie actually comes down really hard against Alfie's choice of lifestyle.

Alfie, played by Michael Caine in one of his career defining roles, only thinks he's a charming ladies' man. He drifts from woman to woman, ditching them without a moment's thought if they show any signs that they're growing attached. His perceived perfect life begins to show cracks when one of his girls gets pregnant. Against his better judgment, she keeps the kid, and he finds himself acting as a weekend dad. He takes to it for a while, but is still unwilling to commit to the kid's mother, and is thus kicked out of the relationship. Not long after that, a health scare gives Alfie his first glimpse at his own mortality, which only persuades him to continue his attachment-free lifestyle with even more reckless abandon.

Caine as Alfie is all bravado. He acts cocky and confident, and addresses the camera like he has all the answers. He is a man without any respect, for women (he dehumanizes them by calling them 'birds' or even referring to them as 'it'), for other men, for social structures, or for himself. He constantly breaks the fourth wall and even basically tells the opening credits to fuck off, showing us that he has no respect for the established rules of moviemaking either.

How can anyone respect a man without any respect? They can't, and it's a slap in the face for Alfie when that fact is bluntly laid out before him. We as the audience can't respect Alfie, either. Instead, he's an object of pity, a shallow man who runs away from everything of substance ever presented to him.

This was the first time I had ever seen young Michael Caine at work. I think the oldest Caine film I had ever seen before this was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. You can see how he became such a huge star. Just like the women he seduces, Alfie draws you in with his superficial charm and wit, then pushes you away with his crass and insensitive behavior towards others.

Lewis Gilbert directed Alfie, and it's quite an accomplishment, though I find it fascinating and a bit confusing that he would make a movie decrying this sort of lifestyle and follow it up with You Only Live Twice, in which James Bond lives pretty much exactly the same way, but with none of the consequences.

In the end, after hurting a lot of people with his selfish ways, Alfie himself suffers a series of personal blows, and you could say he learns a lesson, but the movie doesn't tell you for sure if he has changed his behavior for good. He's not a young man, and he's pretty set in his ways, and it may be too late for him.

Alfie (the movie, not the character) is funny, thoughtful, and full of compassion. Not only compassion for the women who fall victim to Alfie's charms. There's even a little compassion left over for Alfie himself, who thinks he has all the answers, but really has not a one.

The Artist

2012-01-31T10:42:00.001-08:00

I was genuinely surprised by The Artist. You see, going in, I thought I was going to love The Artist, and was surprised to discover that I only liked it. The buzz around it has been so loud, and it's in black and white and old timey, visually rich. I was sure this was going to be my kind of movie.

Director Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist is the story of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star who struggles to continue his career in the face of the onset of the talkie. His fall is contrasted with the rise of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a fresh faced star of the sound pictures that George helped launch.

It was good. I liked it. There are lots of good scenes, like when George spends his fortune funding his own silent epic, when nobody is interested in working with him anymore. What he makes winds up being a pretentious piece complete with a metaphor of him being buried alive with quicksand. It fails, of course.

Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, and the rest of the supporting cast are all great. I especially liked Bejo as Peppy Miller, who goes out of her way to help George get back on his feet, if only he would set aside his pride and let her. James Cromwell is also very good as George's loyal chauffeur and best (human) friend.

And speaking of best friends, everybody loves that dog, am I right? Am I the only one that is so used to seeing trained dogs do these exact things in movies dating back to the silent era, that I'm not particularly impressed? Wasn't that dog in the Thin Man movies pretty much doing the same thing? Some people just automatically love something if a dog thinks it's people.

I guess one reason I didn't love The Artist is that I saw two other movies in 2011 with a similar idea behind them, and I liked both of them better. The Muppets and Hugo were both about former celebrities that got lost in the march of time, coming back to earn the love of a new audience, and I thought they were both more fun, more magical, and less, you know, pretentious.

The Artist is probably going to win Best Picture, and maybe it deserves it. Most of my favorite movies of 2011 weren't even nominated, so what do I know? Heck, why does a nomination even matter? Go see The Artist and judge for yourself, but also watch Attack the Block because that movie ruuuuled.

Murder a la Mod

2012-01-30T19:58:00.001-08:00

I know I said in my Blow Out review that I wanted to watch more Brian De Palma films, but this isn't what I meant. Murder a la Mod was one of De Palma's very first films. It was possibly a student film. I don't know, I couldn't find out for sure. Anyway, I'm going to keep this one short and sweet, because I really only watched this because it was a special feature on the Blow Out Blu Ray.

Murder a la Mod is not very good, but you can see throughout early versions of a lot of the techniques that eventually come to be known as De Palma's "style". Some scenes with an unsettling sense of voyeurism, some of his weird, hit or miss (mostly miss in this case) sense of humor, and importantly, much of the second half of the movie is the same sequence of events repeated from several different characters' perspectives.

Like Blow Out, Murder a la Mod is a tale of murder set in the world of filmmaking. A key sequence involves the swapping of a real ice pick and a movie prop ice pick that retracts into the handle. The lead guy from Phantom of the Paradise, William Finley has a pretty big role as a weird prankster character who spastically narrates everything he does in his mind. It's pretty bad. But he also wrote the theme song, which is a pretty rollicking piece of 60's garage rock. In fact, the theme song was my favorite part of the movie.

There are a couple of interesting moments, but Murder a la Mod is, like a lot of directors' first films, really only relevant due to what came after them. The seeds are there. It's definitely De Palma. But I see no reason for anyone to watch this unless they're a completist or something.

Haywire

2012-01-30T11:31:00.001-08:00

Over the last two decades, Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be the most versatile and chameleon-like film director currently working. He can jump from genre to genre, tell a great story, while still keeping his trademark style at the forefront. In the past, he's made slick heist movies (the Ocean's 11 series), sweeping crime epics (Traffic), a science fiction romance (Solaris), tiny improvised independent films (Bubble), and so on. Just four months ago, he gave us an apocalyptic medical thriller with Contagion. What I'm saying is, you could find a Steven Soderbergh film in just about every Netflix category. I suppose that's why he plans on retiring a few movies down the road.

Haywire is Steven Soderbergh's martial arts movie, starring MMA fighter Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a mercenary on the run from her employers who set her up for a fall. There's more of a story, but that's kind of all you need to know. She kicks lots of ass and tells her story to a 19 year old kid she takes with her. It's like a smart, slick, and stylized Steven Seagal movie, but with a hot girl mercifully put in Seagal's place.

Gina Carano is not an actor (or wasn't before this), but she did alright. She did better than I probably would have done if I ever tried acting. I thought she was better in some scenes than she was in others, which made me wonder if her better scenes were the ones that were the ones that were shot later on. Soderbergh wisely surrounds her with a lot of big talent, including Bill Paxton as her military father, Ewan MacGregor and Antonio Banderas as those plotting against her, Michael Douglas as the government man who hired them, and Michael Fassbender as a British agent she must work with.

I liked Haywire. It's not one of Steven Soderbergh's best works, but you can tell he's having a good time, and I found it infectious. Lots of cool camerawork, great editing, and a funky Out of Sight-esque score by that movie's same composer, David Holmes. The action sequences are really cool too, choreographed to play to Gina Carano's strengths as an MMA fighter. I'm not sure if this movie made a star out of her, but I bet she'll continue to find work based on it.

I'll always gladly go see a Steven Soderbergh movie upon release. I hope his talk of retirement is just talk. I hope he takes a couple years off, gets bored and comes back to filmmaking. I'm sure there are still a couple of minor subgenres he hasn't tackled yet.

Blow Out

2012-01-30T10:09:00.000-08:00

I've always been kind of back and forth on Brian De Palma. Granted, I haven't seen too many of his films, so I've never really given him a fair chance. I was touched by Carrie, but I never cared for The Untouchables. Things started to turn a little in his direction for me a few years ago, when I saw Phantom of the Paradise, his truly bizarre cult glam rock musical with a soundtrack composed by Paul Williams. Last week, I finally watched the movie that many say is De Palma's finest and most underrated work, Blow Out.

Blow Out stars John Travolta as Jack, a sound effects man for a trashy independent movie studio. The movie opens with a hilariously cartoonish parody of Halloween, a steadicam shot from the perspective of a heavily breathing serial killer entering a girls' dormitory. This, of course is the movie Jack is working on. His boss is unsatisfied with Jack's work, and tasks him to find a new scream for the victim and record some new wind audio for the background.

While at a park recording the wind and nature sounds, Jack is witness to a car's tire blowing out and crashing into a lake. He jumps into the water, and though the driver is clearly dead, he sees the woman in the passenger seat still lives and rescues her. At the hospital, he learns that the man who died is the governor of Pennsylvania, who was primed to run for president. His people request that he keep quiet about the event and aid them in covering it up by sneaking the woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), out of the hospital for them. Jack reluctant agrees to do it.

Jack takes Sally, still in shock from the accident, to a motel. While she's out of it, he listens to his recording. In it, he hears two distinctive sounds: not just the sound of the tire blowing out, but a loud bang preceding it. Jack then enlists Sally's help in uncovering a political murder conspiracy, though they are blocked in seemingly every direction they attempt to investigate. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire (John Lithgow) is cleaning up the mess he made: by making it appear that a serial killer is on the loose killing prostitutes who resemble her, he will murder Sally and make it seem like she is a victim unconnected to the governor.

Wow, that's a pretty intricate story with a lot of set up. I usually don't need more than one paragraph to give a decent description, but this one took three. What De Palma has crafted with Blow Out is a tragedy wrapped in a conspiracy. As we learn more about Jack's past, we begin to understand his desire to play the hero in all this mess. And Sally, who is not entirely clean herself, gets wrapped up in Jack's futile idealism.

Stylistically, De Palma employs all of the tricks he had been developing through the 70's. He plays with seeing the same scene from different perspectives. He utilizes split screen like nobody else. He does that thing where the foreground of the shot and the background of the shot are both completely in focus, which causes an excellent, jarring effect on the viewer. I don't know what that technique is called, but it's in Blow Out a lot and it looks great. De Palma used Vilmos Zsigmond as his cinematographer, and Zsigmond gives the film a dark, seedy look, with lots of red lights and stuff.

This is probably my second favorite John Travolta performance I've seen, behind Pulp Fiction. I'm not a huge Travolta fan for the most part, but every once in a while, he takes just the right role for himself and runs away with it. John Lithgow is great as usual, but this is really the type of villain role he could do in his sleep.

The score by Pino Donaggio is a pretty mixed bag for me. Some of the music was really unique and underlines the tension and growing sense of paranoia, but at other times, I think it goes way too dramatic and over the top.

I won't give away the ending, but De Palma himself might. If you catch on early enough in the movie, you can see where it's headed. I was pretty in-the-moment when I was watching, so I wasn't really thinking ahead, but my wife totally saw it coming. Still, the ending is appropriate and unsettling. I can see why the movie failed to capture an audience upon its release. Also, that poster up there is pretty terrible, so it might have something to do with that.

I still haven't seen a lot of Brian De Palma's films, but this is probably the best I've seen. Phantom of the Paradise is still my personal favorite for it's craziness and music, but Blow Out is definitely the better movie. He's show-offy and often not very subtle, but he doesn't come across as pretentious to me, which can make those traits tolerable, even endearing at the best of times. I believe I will be checking out more of De Palma's films in the future.

Mirageman

2012-01-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

It's not fair that every superhero lives in New York, is it? People need rescuing the world over, right? Well, now Mirageman is here to fill that void in Chile.

Directed by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, Mirageman is another entry in the "normal guy in the real world, inspired by comic books, puts on a mask and decides to fight crime" genre that we're getting more and more of these days. I've heard about a few other independent ones, but I suppose the most recognizable entry in the genre would be Kick Ass.

Mirageman is the story Marco (played by Marko Zaror), by day a lowly bouncer at a sleazy night club, who spends all of his spare time exercising and training in martial arts. You see, three years earlier, Marco's parents were murdered and little brother raped (!!!) and traumatized, now catatonic in a home. One night, a ski-masked Marco stops another home invasion and rescues Carol, a beautiful news reporter from certain rape (!!!). Carol thanks him publicly and calls him a hero. When he next visits the hospital, he finds that the news of this mysterious rape-preventing hero has brought his brother a little bit out of his shell, the first positive response in years. Inspired by this, Marco dons a costume and becomes Mirageman.

Visually, the movie is as gritty and down to earth as the silly subject matter allows. It has a near documentary style, and relies heavily on news reports to fill out the narrative. In fact, the anchors and reporters often give Mirageman advice on what he should and shouldn't do, and even downright manipulate him for their own gain.

Though Mirageman strives for a certain kind of realism, at the same time, it doesn't take itself too seriously. There's a great deal of comedy mixed in with the violence and awesome martial arts. Marco's trial and error attempts at superheroics offer a lot of laughs, poking fun at comic book nonsense, such as the length of time and difficulty one would actually encounter when trying to change into costume while a crime is in progress. He also has a hilarious sidekick figure, who goes by the name "Pseudo Robin", who is not much of a fighter, but all heart, and he has an extra motorcycle.

Mirageman has some fun with the audience, undercutting our expectations at times. At first, it seems like a typical martial arts movie is happening, where every opponent he faces, every gang of crooks, appears to be a martial arts master himself. But then, when Mirageman attempts to bust his Holy Grail, an evil pedophile child trafficking ring, he realizes how out of his element he is when facing people carrying guns.

Marko Zaror is awesome as Mirageman. It's hard to say how good he is with dialogue, as he only had a few lines in the whole movie. His actions speak for him, and he's a killer martial artist. Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and Marko Zaror have made two more movies together, and I believe I'm going to have to watch those as well.

Mirageman was one of those movies that I knew next to nothing about and had no expectations for. I was very pleased with what I got. It is action-packed, funny, self aware, and a little bit cheesy, all in all a movie worth geeking out over.

Check it out! It's on Netflix Instant if you're in America.

Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (Shuriyuki Hime: Urami Renga)

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

The original Lady Snowblood is, for my money, one of the greatest revenge movies ever made, and also one of my favorite movies. If you are unfamiliar, it was one of Quentin Tarantino's primary inspirations for his Kill Bill movies. Major narrative elements, such as The Bride's "kill list" and the division of the story into novelistic chapters were lifted directly from Lady Snowblood. He even copied specific shots from it and included the end credits song on the soundtrack. I was aware that there was a sequel, but for some reason, it took me about 8 years before I finally got around to watching it.

The first film follows Lady Snowblood (in Japanese, Shuriyuki Hime), born in prison and spirited away to be raised as an instrument of vengeance, to be unleashed upon the criminals who murdered her mother's family. It's a complicated story, and I won't go into the details, but it ends with a whole lot of blood, a large amount of it Lady Snowblood's own. In fact, were there not a sequel, one would assume that she was dead.

At the start of the second film, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, Shuriyuki Hime is alive and kicking, and it's never really explained how. I guess we can just assume she's a fighter. With her vengeance served and no purpose remaining in her life, Lady Snowblood spends her time running from the authorities, indiscriminately killing any who attempts to take her in. This is demonstrated in a single shot scene where she mows down one after another without displaying any emotion on her face.

Finally overwhelmed, she gives up and turns herself in, and is promptly sentenced to death. She gets a stay of execution when she gets kidnapped by a government official and recruited to go undercover as a servant in order to steal a document and assassinate a known anarchist. Things go further awry when she becomes sympathetic to the anarchist's cause and turns the tables on the corrupt government official and his cronies. And of course, there's lots and lots of blood. Bright red, thick blood, unrealistically and gloriously spraying from bodies like fountains. Limbs go flying, eyes get stabbed out, there's a black plague outbreak, what more could you ask for?

The first movie was a revenge story set upon a political backdrop. This time around, the politics of the period in Japan (early 1900's) are in the forefront. It's an interesting story, and well executed (pun intended HAHA), but nowhere near as visceral and personal as the simple "I need to kill the people on this list" premise of the first one. Both films were directed by Toshiya Fujita, and both are dark, stylized, and smartly plotted.

Lady Snowblood is played by Meiko Kaji, star of the Stray Cat Rock series. She's tough, complicated, a total badass, and way sexy. If the first film was about her vengeance, and how a lifetime's pursuit of it leaves her empty and without identity, the sequel is about her finding something outside of herself to fight for and be willing to die for.

While not as great as the first film, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is still worth looking into if you're a fan. I would recommend watching the first Lady Snowblood and deciding from there if you want more.

Xanadu

2012-01-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

Mostly, I like to watch good movies, or movies that I think I will like. Sometimes, I like to watch bad movies, too, but only the ones that still provide some kind of weird entertainment value to them. Surely you guys know what I'm talking about. So bad it's funny. I especially enjoy bad movies like Xanadu, bizarre artifacts from a forgotten time. Movies you can show somebody and say "See, Timmy? (His name is Timmy) This is what a bad idea looked like in 1980."

Xanadu is the only Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase ever made, and for that reason, it is a unique jewel of crappiness that deserves our respect. We are never going to get another movie like this.

Kira (Olivia Newton-John) is one of the Greek Muses, released with her sisters from a painting on a building to go out and inspire. After dancing around, she runs into Sonny, an aspiring artist, who has all of the talent but none of the inspiration. At the start of the film, he is returning to his job at a company that paints album covers, after attempting and failing to embark on his own path. Not long after, he recognizes the same mysterious girl in a photograph that he is assigned to paint and decides to track her down.

I'm a little confused about the record album cover painting job. They already had photographs, why was he painting photoreal copies of them? Was there something I was missing?

Anyway, in his search for Kira, she guides him to Gene Kelly, playing a former song-and-dance man and club owner, also being inspired by the Muse. Together Sonny and Gene Kelly hatch a plan to open Xanadu, a new club that combines the Big Bands of the 1940's with the Rock and Roll Bands of the 1980's. And also roller skates. This is demonstrated in an painfully long dance musical number where a stage with a goofy rock band and a stage with a goofy Big Band combine and form SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW!

So Sonny and Kira fall in love, but once the inspiration is given, she must move on. He follows her into the painting on the building, which is the most disappointing portrayal of Olympus in movie history and plead with Zeus and Hera to let her return.

It's ridiculous, I know. It's also totally innocent and in earnest, which is, in my mind, better than those bad movies that stink of cynicism and exploitation and making a buck. There were even a couple things about it that I genuinely liked. ELO was a good band, and there are one or two songs in there that I enjoyed, including the title song at the end. There's also a pretty great musical number, beautifully animated by the legendary Don Bluth. It reminded me a lot of the transformation sequences in The Sword in the Stone, which Bluth also worked on.

I felt the worst for Gene Kelly. The guy proves in the movie that he still has the skills. It's too bad that in his old age, he had to demonstrate his moves in a movie like this. They put him in some pretty embarrassing outfits and stuff. I hope he at least had fun and I'm not just projecting my embarrassment onto him.

So, I guess I could say that Xanadu is the best Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase I've ever seen. I'm glad to have finally seen it, in the way that it's kind of a pop cultural touchstone. But it doesn't even come close to the level of amazing badness of another disco musical I know of: The Apple. If you are the type who enjoys watching shitty movies with your friends, skip right past Xanadu and watch The Apple. Xanadu is a curiosity at best. The Apple is a hilarious crime against humanity.

Hanna

2012-01-23T20:55:00.001-08:00

Joe Wright's 2011 film Hanna could have been pitched as The Bourne Identity meets Kramer vs. Kramer. It's basically about a young girl caught in the middle of a very messy divorce. The girl just also happens to be a genetically modified kung fu killing machine.

At the opening of the film, we meet Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, I promise to learn how to say that out loud someday), a teenage girl living in the Northern European wilderness with her father (Eric Bana), cut off from the civilized world. He has devoted his life to teaching her combat, hunting, survival skills, languages. You know, spy stuff. When she comes of age, and begins to wonder what the world outside their forest is like, he gives her the option to leave, though it will alert the CIA, the agency he has been hiding her from all these years, of their existence.

They split up, agree to meet up at a specified rendezvous point, and both go on the run. Hanna is soon captured by the CIA, led by the villainous Cate Blanchett, spiteful of Bana's character's defection and kidnapping of Hanna after all these years. Hanna escapes in a really cool little sequence where you see her life of training put to the test, and leads them on a chase across Europe. Along the way, she befriends an oddball family of English Bohemians and learns what it's like to be a real person.

I really thought I would like this movie better than I did. The first half hour or so, all the way through Hanna's escape from the secret CIA facility, had me locked in. From that point on, the movie kind of lost me, only pulling me back into the story once in a while. Joe Wright, best known for period dramas that I've never seen but might look into someday, such as Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, seems to be doing his best to bring a dynamic, somewhat artsy kind of visual style to the story. It's kind of reminiscent of Danny Boyle in his more hyperactive mode. Combined with a thumping score by electronic artists The Chemical Brothers, the action sequences are propulsive and as relentless and violent as a PG-13 film will allow.

Saoirse Ronan is very good as Hanna. It's fair to say she will be around in movies for some time to come. Hanna speaks English with a German accent. I wondered to myself if Hanna was ever taught German, or if she just knows English with a German accent, since she speaks to her father in English in all of their private scenes together.

Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, made what I think was a very big mistake with her character in giving her a southern accent. I don't know if it was scripted that way, or her idea, but for some reason, it seems to me like something she would bring to the table herself. It's the kind of accent that, I don't know, might pass muster outside of America, but sounds pretty bad to us. She's done decent American accents before. I guess she just really wanted to play a Texan.

Despite it's problems, Hanna had some fun sequences and a good soundtrack to keep it going. I appreciate that Joe Wright seemed to really want to give us something different, it just didn't quite get there for me.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-01-19T11:38:00.001-08:00

Hey, I'm back! Sorry I haven't been writing many reviews lately. No excuses, just being lazy. I still love you, though. Don't let anyone think otherwise.

Today's review is my first non-James Bond review of 2012. Ironically, it's the opposite of a James Bond movie: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John le Carre's classic espionage novel. The story, set in the 70's, follows George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a disgraced British Intelligence officer who is forced into retirement after a botched operation, and then called back in to weed out a Soviet mole who has infiltrated his way up to the very top of the system. They have narrowed him down to one of only five men.

Smiley was conceived as the complete antithesis of James Bond. He is an over-the-hill cuckolded bureaucrat. Being a spy is not romantic at all in this world. Gary Oldman is excellent in the role, very understated and unassuming which are qualities much more suitable for a secret agent, if you ask me.

Tomas Alfredson, whose first film was the beautiful adolescent vampire romance Let the Right One In, directs Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with a muted, melancholy touch. The cinematography is top notch, and the acting is some of the best I've seen in 2011. In addition to Oldman, the cast includes Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, and Tom Hardy. Their performances are all as understated as Oldman's, though, and generally, the awards folks like things to be a little bit showy, so I'm not surprised that this movie is getting pretty much passed over by everyone.

As for the story, well, it's pretty dense and murky, and requires the viewer's utmost attention and patience. I admit that I may not have been able to follow it entirely, but I saw that as a plus. It's rare that a movie comes out that requires the viewer to work. I enjoyed trying to puzzle it all together, but much of the audience at the theater I was attending seemed completely turned off.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not for everyone. Personally, I enjoyed it, though it did take a while to really get going. I would very much like to read the novel that it's based upon and then watch the movie again, and see if and how that will alter my perception of it.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

2012-01-12T13:32:00.001-08:00

Ok, right now, imagine me walking into the middle of a crosshair and turning towards you and shooting you, because I'm back with yet another of my chronological series of James Bond reviews! The first five are as follows: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice. And now on to the next one.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the sixth James Bond film, directed by Peter R. Hunt, and is truly an odd man out in the series for more than one reason. Most obviously, Sean Connery opted out of this movie, and was replaced by George Lazenby in the lead role. And secondly, this movie is one of the only Bond movies where the consequences of his actions as 007 actually spill over into his personal life.

The plot this time around follows Bond on a hunt for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the diabolical leader of SPECTRE who eluded him at the end of the last movie. Bond finds a lead through a rich man who agrees to give him Blofeld's whereabouts if he agrees to romance his troubled daughter, Tracy (Diana Rigg). The romance gradually becomes mutual, as Bond and Tracy fall in love. Finally, the mission: Bond, undercover as a mild mannered genealogist, must infiltrate Blofeld's research institute in the Alps, where women from around the world are being brainwashed into releasing a disease in their home regions.

The movie cuts to the chase, acknowledging and addressing Connery's absence right away, by having Lazenby utter the line, "this never happened to the other guy" after a big fight. Oh, crap! Bond has become self aware. He knows he's in a movie. That's the only explanation for him to say that line, because it's given absolutely no other context whatsoever. I understand why they would want to acknowledge the lack of Connery, but there has to be a more clever way to do it.

By the way, let's talk about the lack of Connery. Why'd he quit? I'm sure at the time he felt his tenure as Bond had run its course, or maybe they just weren't offering him enough money. But why did they go ahead and make the Bond movie with one of the most defining moments of his entire life in it WITHOUT the actor who we all associate with the character? It's still a pretty cool scene at the end, but it would have packed SO much more of a punch if it had been Connery experiencing it.

You know what? That last sentence could pretty much describe the entire movie. This is a really cool, back to basics, character driven Bond movie, loaded with plenty of action, but more importantly, plenty of spying, something the last couple Bond movies had set aside in favor of action. Unfortunately, George Lazenby just doesn't cut it as James Bond. He gets the job done, I guess. He can throw punches and spout one liners as the script demands, but he lacks the charisma that made Sean Connery so iconic in the role. The lack of Connery casts a heavy shadow over the whole film.

James Moore will be back with his review of DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

You Only Live Twice

2012-01-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

Welcome to another installment of my series of James Bond reviews in chronological order. If you would like to read my previous entries, please follow the links: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball.

You Only Live Twice is the fifth James Bond film, again starring Sean Connery as 007. It's directed by Lewis Gilbert, a newcomer to Ian Fleming's universe. It quite literally rockets past Thunderball as the most expensive, and the most excessive, James Bond film up to this point. I chose the above poster to represent this movie in order to prove that point. Yes, there's a sequence where Q assembles a sweet ass portable helicopter for Bond, followed by a big crazy helicopter dogfight. And that's not all!

This time around, Bond, after faking his death in order to get off of SPECTRE's hit list, is sent to Japan to investigate a stolen spacecraft that landed in the Pacific nearby. A stolen spacecraft. See, Spectre is trying to escalate the cold war by using their own, larger spacecraft to eat American and Russian spacecrafts and have each country cast the blame on the other.

This is actually a pretty important James Bond film for a few reasons. First and foremost, we are introduced to 007's arch-nemesis, evil mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance), seen in 3 of the previous 4 films as only a pair of hands stroking a cat. We are also introduced to his secret evil mastermind headquarters located inside a volcano. This is the reason villains always build bases inside volcanos! The base itself served as the inspiration for Dr. Evil's base in the first Austin Powers film.

There's a lot more silliness to go around in this movie, including a scene where Bond has his face "altered" to look Japanese. He has some prosthetic eyelids put on and brushes his hair forward. The effect is less than impressive. The finale is also pure craziness, where Bond and an army of NINJAS invade Blofeld's volcano base! This is a dream come true. It was also parodied brilliantly in You Only Move Twice, my personal all-time favorite Simpsons episode, guest starring Albert Brooks as loveable-boss-slash-diabolical-terrorist, Hank Scorpio.

As ridiculous and over the top as You Only Live Twice gets, it's probably the most fun of the first five. Not the BEST, mind you, and also not my favorite, but it's loaded with action and camp value. The script is written by Roald Dahl, best known for childrens books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and he brings a level of cleverness to the story that balances out the ridiculousness.

It only took a few movies, but by this point there is absolutely no attempt to ground James Bond in any kind of reality. You Only Live Twice is pure escapism, and I can't fault it for that.

James Moore will be back with his review of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.

Thunderball

2012-01-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm back again, with yet another installment in my chronological series on the early James Bond films. If you want to start at the beginning, click here to read my review for Dr. No, and follow the links at the end for the following movies in the series.

The fourth Bond movie is Thunderball, again starring Sean Connery in the role of superspy 007. Terence Young returns as director, after sitting one out for Goldfinger. This time around, evil organization SPECTRE returns, holding the world hostage with stolen atomic bombs. The villain this time around is Emilio Largo, Number 2 in SPECTRE's hierarchy. The primary Bond girl is Domino, who also happens to be Largo's mistress.

At this point, most of, if not all of the James Bond formula has been established. He has his Aston Martin, his gadgets from Q, the theme song (this time by Tom Jones), etc. A lot of the action this time around is set underwater, which is pretty ambitious even by today's standards. The final battle at the end is a huge, no-holds-barred SCUBA melee in shark filled waters, and it is awesome.

As enjoyable as Thunderball is, and there is a lot to enjoy about it, the Bond series is also beginning to show signs of fatigue at this point. Things are starting to cross that line into the absurd. The opening sequence features Bond beating up a man in drag before blasting off with a jetpack. We're getting into silly territory.

Another thing that kind of bothered me is the amount of sharks that they must have killed to make this movie. There are points where sharks are shot with harpoons on camera. There are scenes where an already dead shark is used to act as a live one. They didn't really have any kind of rules in the 60's about harming animals in movies. I'm not huge into animal rights or anything, but seeing animals get hurt still bugs me.

Thunderball is the biggest and most ambitious movie up to this point in the 007 series, with triple the budget of the previous entry, Goldfinger. Unfortunately, it's also the point where the series shows signs of weakness. With all the staying power that Bond movies have shown over the decades, Thunderball serves as the point where the movies become more of a hit-or-miss affair.

James Moore will return with his review of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.

Goldfinger

2012-01-05T11:46:00.000-08:00

For those of you just tuning in, I'm in the process of writing about all of the early Bond movies in chronological order. Goldfinger is the third film to star Sean Connery as 007, and if Dr. No started the ball rolling, and From Russia with Love formed the template that all Bond movies are built upon, then this is the movie that refined it to an art form.

This time around James Bond is on the trail of Auric Goldfinger, a gold-obsessed businessman (in the business of gold), with plans to increase his riches by devaluing the gold in Fort Knox. Gert Frobe plays Goldfinger, who is quite possibly the quintessential evil mastermind in a James Bond movie. The oft quoted line "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die." is spoken by Goldfinger.

Though I had never seen Goldfinger before, so much of it has bled its way into pop culture that I already knew a bunch of it. Bond girl Jill Masterson, murdered by being coated in gold paint. Korean mute assassin/footman Oddjob and his razor sharp throwing hat. Bond being cuffed to a table while a laser slowly climbs its way toward his junk. And of course, the most famous Bond girl of all, "Pussy Galore".

This particular adventure is more of a standalone side mission to Bond's ongoing dealings with the sinister criminal organization, SPECTRE. No reference is made to his defeat of Dr. No or their revenge attempt in From Russia with Love. I like that; it shows us that James Bond doesn't just deal with one enemy. SPECTRE is just one of many international threats bearing down upon us.

Several Bond traditions are established or elaborated upon in Goldfinger, too. The opening credits are projected upon sexy ladies once again, a tradition started in From Russia with Love, but for the first time, the movie's title theme is played over it. The song, Goldfinger, is, of course, one of the most famous Bond themes. M, Moneypenny, and Q all make their standard appearances. Bond's flirtation with Miss Moneypenny continues, as well as a running hatrack gag established in Dr. No. CIA agent Felix Leiter also appears, though he is played by a different actor who doesn't even remotely resemble Jack Lord.

Also of note, for the first time, we get a sequence inside Q's massive weapon-testing warehouse, seeing background gags of stuntmen getting sprayed with flamethrowers while Q is talking with Bond. Bond's tricked out Aston Martin makes its first appearance in this scene, too.

Now we all know these early 007 films can be pretty damn politically incorrect at times, and downright misogynistic at others, right? Well, Goldfinger may contain the worst thing I've ever heard James Bond say. Before a meeting, he dismisses the girl he's with by telling her it's time for some "Man talk", and then smacks her ass as she goes! Whoa!

The stunts, fights, and chases in Goldfinger are spectacular. We get to see everything his car can do. The final showdown in Fort Knox with Oddjob is one of the greats. For the first time in the series, Terence Young steps aside as director. His replacement is Guy Hamilton, who is more than able to fill Young's shoes.

Goldfinger is definitely one of the best James Bond films ever made. I still love Dr. No for its lower budget, more stripped down, edgier feeling. But when it comes to the more familiar over the top spectacle that we've all come to expect from 007 films, Goldfinger is the gold standard. See what I just did there?

James Moore will return with his review of THUNDERBALL.

2011 Wrap-Up

2012-01-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

Hi, everybody! 2011 has come and gone. It has actually been one of the best years of my life on a personal level, thanks in no small part to writing this blog. One year ago today, I resolved to watch for the first time and review 100 movies in 2011. Sometimes it was a struggle finding things to say about a movie. There were a few reviews I wasn't happy with, I'll admit. But I pressed on anyway and actually achieved my goal back in October, and kept on going past it, ultimately watching and writing about 138 movies.

As for what you're reading now, I thought I'd write a little year-end piece, maybe talk about the highlights of writing I Probably Liked It. This isn't going to be a best movies of the year list (I'm not sure if I'm going to do one yet), just my personal favorite blogging moments.

So read on, if you're interested. And in case you decide you're not, thanks for reading! Keep coming back, I've got big plans for 2012. I have no idea what they are.

First things first: Here is a list of all the movies I watched in 2011.

January
1: Branded to Kill
2: The King's Speech
3: Fantasia
4: Fantasia 2000
5: How to Train Your Dragon
6: Cyrus
7: Starcrash
8: The Kids are Alright
9: Evilspeak

February
10: The Secret of Kells
11: Seven Samurai
12: A Town Called Panic
13: Cedar Rapids
14: Frankenstein
15: The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
16: Bride of Frankenstein
17: Popeye

March
18: Rango
19: Follow that Bird
20: Brewster McCloud
21: Arthur (1981)
22: Once Upon a Time in the West
23: Hausu
24: Son of Frankenstein
25: High Noon
26: Paul
27: Whisper of the Heart
28: Gojira (Godzilla)

April
29: Win Win
30: Sleeping Beauty
31: Circle of Iron
32: Four Lions
33: Black Dynamite
34: Source Code
35: Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal
36: Invaders from Mars
37: The Mikado
38: Topsy Turvy

May
39: Thor
40: Student Confidential
41: Bridesmaids
42: The Golem
43: Mac and Me
44: Heaven Can Wait (1943)
45: Winter's Bone
46: Attack the Block
47: Kung Fu Panda 2
48: The Mack
49: Tokyo Drifter

June
50: X-Men: First Class
51: The Tree of Life
52: Tales from the Crypt (1972)
53: The Vault of Horror
54: Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter
55: Submarine
56: Super 8
57: MacGruber
58: Green Lantern
59: Puppet Master
60: Microcosmos
61: Cars 2
62: Summer Wars

July
63: Good Morning
64: Fright Night Part II
65: Pinocchio
66: Samurai Rebellion
67: The Knack ...and How To Get It
68: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
69: Captain America: The First Avenger
70: A Little Princess

August
71: Cowboys & Aliens
72: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
73: 30 Minutes or Less
74: Power Kids
75: Fright Night (2011)
76: Alakazam the Great
77: Paper Moon
78: Zardoz
79: Sword of Doom
80: Wing Chun

September
81: Our Idiot Brother
82: Winnie the Pooh
83: The Outlaw Josey Wales
84: The Maltese Falcon (1941)
85: Contagion
86: The Invisible Man
87: Planet of the Vampires
88: The Thing with Two Heads
89: The Secret of the Urn
90: Moneyball
91: The Killing
92: Killer's Kiss
93: The 10th Victim
94: 50/50

October
95: The Bad Seed
96: The Uninvited
97: Patrick
98: Vampyr
99: Real Steel
100: The Last Man on Earth
101: Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell
102: The Innocents
103: Tales that Witness Madness
104: The Wolf Man (1941)
105: The Old Dark House (1932)
106: The Sentinel
107: Martha Marcy May Marlene
108: The House on Haunted Hill (1959)
109: Carnival of Souls
110: In Time

November
111: Rope
112: Winnebago Man
113: Dracula (1931)
114: Logan's Run
115: Citizen Ruth
116: The Descendants
117: The Warriors
118: The Muppets
119: Kagemusha
120: Mystery Team
121: Hugo
122: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

December
123: American Graffiti
124: Machete Maidens Unleashed
125: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
126: Charley Varrick
127: Johnny Dangerously
128: Murders in the Zoo
129: Young Adult
130: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
131: Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece
132: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
133: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
134: The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn
135: Dr. No
136: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
137: War Horse
138: From Russia with Love

That list is in order, so if you're interested in reading any of those reviews, check them out in the corresponding month on the bar to the right.

Holy crap! I just found out that due to a counting error on my part, my super special 100th movie review was NOT actually my 100th movie review! Whoops! Let's pretend that never happened.

Here is a list of my five favorite entries of 2011:

Zardoz: My friend Kent over at Cinematic Seppuku and I enjoyed writing a few collaborative movie reviews over the year, and our review for this baffling John Boorman sci-fi oddity was probably the best of them. We haven't done any since because things got busy and those ones took a long time for us to write.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell: Not only was this trippy 1960's Japanese sci-fi/horror cult classic one of my favorite movies that I watched last year, it was one of my best entries to date. Scratch that, it IS my best entry, the one I'm proudest of, anyway. It was written under the belief that it was my 100th review, and to make it special, I loaded it up with my own crappy (but hopefully funny) MS Paint illustrations.

Logan's Run: Yet another weird cult classic sci-fi movie. This was my third (and final so far) illustrated movie review. The review itself is maybe a little on the lazy side, but I think my "artwork" has improved. This time I did it as more of a comic strip. A Logan's Run fan site found it and linked it on their page, and now it's one of my most successful entries. I want to do more illustrated stuff this year, but it all depends on time and if I see the right type of movie.

Real Steel: This entry seems to be very popular among people I know in real life, probably because I really, really hated this movie. Considering that this website is about 99% positive reviews, people must have really gotten a kick out of hearing me tear into something. Plus, I think it's decently well written.

The Knack... and How to Get It: This review of a 1960's Richard Lester classic provided me with one of the highlights of my year: When I put a link up on Twitter, I theorized that Edgar Wright had been influenced by this movie. Shortly after, he tweeted me back and confirmed it! That might seem like small potatoes to you, but to be complemented on my astuteness by one of my favorite writer/directors ever was kind of incredible for me.

Those aren't all the highlights. Others include the time I experimented with Adware and dropped it because I didn't like how it was changing my priorities. Or how about when I joined the Large Association of Movie Blogs (LAMB)? They've been really cool to me and I've gained several regular readers and Twitter friends from them. Or how about the time I accidentally killed my little girl's turtle and had to find an identical one to replace it with? Wait, that might have been from Full House or something.

That's about it for now. I'll be back soon with more reviews. I would like to do more illustrated stuff this year, but it all depends on me having time and proper inspiration. I'll be continuing some of my ongoing movie watching projects, including the early James Bond films and Disney classics. Also, I'm not necessarily limiting myself to the "100 movies, 100 reviews" thing, so there might be something new and different if it strikes me. Thanks again for reading! Happy New Year!

Jim

From Russia with Love

2011-12-30T22:26:00.001-08:00

Alright, everyone! Here I am again with another 007 adventure. This time, it's Sean Connery's second go-round as James Bond, From Russia with Love.

After the huge success of Dr. No, a sequel was inevitable. From Russia with Love, again directed by Terence Young, builds upon the success of its predecessor, and establishes the template for what we've all come to know and love as a James Bond film.

For the first time, we get the opening sequence of sexy ladies gyrating over the cast and crew credits, projected upon their bodies. For the first time, we get a title song for the movie, in addition to the famous Bond theme. We also get our first ever gadget tutorial from Q, and a further glimpse of Bond's archfoes, the shadowy criminal organization SPECTRE.

This time around, SPECTRE is out for revenge on Bond, after killing their agent, Dr. No and foiling their scheme in the process. They send an assassin named Grant (Robert Shaw) after him, and set him up with Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), a Russian clerk that has no idea who she's in bed with (figuratively speaking. Literally speaking, she's in bed with Bond). The majority of the action is set in Istanbul this time around.

Bond is more clever with the one liners than he was in Dr. No. The sexual suggestiveness is played way up. I mean, this movie is DIRTY. I always knew the Bond films had this stuff in them, but I guess I had never seen one where it was pushed to this extent. I grew up on the cleaned up, neutered Pierce Brosnan 007 films.

The villains become a little more arch this time around, but only a little. It's not like Dr. No was a paragon of subtlety. Robert Shaw is one of the better nemeses in a Bond film as SPECTRE assassin Grant. And Number 3 is pretty memorable too, with the blade that pops out of the tip of her boot.

Whereas in the first film, Bond was a pretty low-tech spy, this time around, he gets some gadgets from Q, including a trick briefcase. They're still not at the heights of implausibility that they eventually reach. I believe I remember him unfolding a briefcase into a helicopter in a later one.

One thing I noticed in From Russia with Love is product placement, something we've all come to expect in a James Bond movie. There may have been some in Dr. No, but I wasn't on the lookout for it at the time. Eveready batteries must have paid top dollar for some screen time in this movie.

Though I preferred the less gimmicky, more gritty feel of Dr. No, From Russia with Love is just as good. It expands and solidifies the Bond universe and utilizes its increased budget by adding some grander set pieces and action sequences. I was actually surprised that it was a direct continuation of Dr. No. The later James Bond movies have little to no continuity from one to the next, which I think is a shame. At the end of the movie is the promise of a third, surely already in production at the time of this one's release.

James Moore will return soon with his review of GOLDFINGER.

War Horse

2011-12-30T13:06:00.001-08:00

Two Steven Spielberg movies in one week!

War Horse follows a thoroughbred horse named Joey from being purchased at an auction by a poor farmer in a small town in Wales through the mainland during World War I, being passed from one owner to the next. The horse is charmed, and through its good fortune its live is spared many times over. His original owner is a teenaged boy named Albert who loves and cares for him until the war begins and Joey is conscripted into the military.

Among the themes and ideas that Spielberg is exploring in this movie, the one that fascinated me the most is the impact of technology on warfare. We witness this firsthand when nearly the entire English cavalry is gunned down by German machine guns. It reminded me of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, where Kurosawa showed us many evocative shots of horses lying dead or dying in the field of battle.

The horse travels across enemy lines more than once, finding owners and caretakers on both sides, be they English, French, or German. Spielberg doesn't take sides in the war, he only takes Joey's side, and his owners are always humane and kind towards him. Our capacity for kindness towards animals is something that ties all of us together.

I thought War Horse was a very lovely film, sentimental and earnest; Steven Spielberg doing what he does best: pulling on your heartstrings. The cinematography is among Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski's very best, and some of the best I've seen all year. Lots of sprawling John Ford-esque landscapes. The World War I battle sequences are intense and as realistic and evocative as they can be, given the film's bloodless PG-13 rating. John Williams' score may have been the best I've heard by him in years.

The cast is very good, too. Standouts include Jeremy Irvine as Albert, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston as two English cavalrymen, and Niels Arestrup and Celine Buckens as an old man and his sickly granddaughter who one day find the horse in their windmill. Also, there is this awesome goose that lives on Albert's farm and serves as comic relief, always attacking visitors and running into their house unexpected. I'm hoping Spielberg makes a spinoff War Goose movie.

It was kind of nice to see both sides of Steven Spielberg come out in the same week. The Adventures of Tintin felt like Spielberg just having a good time, and is a lot of fun as a diversion, but War Horse is Spielberg showing that he's still a master of heartfelt, emotional storytelling.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

2011-12-29T23:33:00.001-08:00

Sherlock Holmes is possibly my favorite literary character. I've read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories. I'm sure a lot of the most devoted Holmes fans probably hate Guy Ritchie's hip, revisionist take on the classic characters and stories, but I think the characters are quite elastic and open for reinterpretation many times over. I also think these movies are quite fun, though both of them slouch for a good stretch in the middle.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson, this time on the trail of Prof. James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Joining them this time around are Noomi Rapace as a gypsy fortune teller, and Stephen Fry as Holmes' equally brilliant older brother, Mycroft.

Unlike many other Holmes films, Guy Ritchie presents them as action adventure mysteries, utilizing his hyperactive, slick visual sense to its best advantage. I like this angle, because the original stories were very much the forerunner to pulp adventure books. Holmes was an expert pugilist and swordsman, and Watson was a former military man, who did much of Holmes' legwork for him. I get so sick of Watson being portrayed as a fat sidekick who is just there to go, "Amazing! However did you figure it out?"

Downey's Sherlock is an interpretation only he could bring to the table. He's eccentric and foppish and weird, and from what I can tell, he's obsessive-compulsive, and possibly bipolar. Without a case to occupy him, he gets depressed and turns to drugs, but when he's in a manic state, he becomes obsessed with certain ideas. In addition to his infatuation with Moriarty, this time around, Holmes is hung up on disguises.

Mad Men's Jared Harris is pretty much the perfect James Moriarty. I mean, seriously, you can't get any better than him for this role. He's manipulating events on a grand scale, diabolically twisting the fates of entire nations to his will. Sherlock Holmes is truly the underdog in the face of this Moriarty.

Like the first Sherlock Holmes movie, this one isn't perfect. The two leads are great together. The Victorian England it is set in is vivid and fully realized. But man, that second act starts to drag. There's a point where they're being chased through the woods and being shot at and it changes to super slow motion as trees explode around them as they run. It looks really neat, but it grinds the movie to a halt. My mind started to wander for a few minutes there.

The droopy middle is made up for in A Game of Shadows by a wonderful showdown at the end, where Holmes and Moriarty have a chess match, both figurative and literal, deciding the fate of the world.

Like the first one, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is worth a watch, though not as good as it could be. I'm glad that Guy Ritchie has found a Hollywood-type movie that is a good fit for his style. I like his first couple movies a great deal, but he floundered for quite a while after those. For those clamoring for a more faithful yet still refreshing take on the character, might I suggest the currently airing BBC show, Sherlock? If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on the definitive Holmes of our generation.

Dr. No

2011-12-29T22:20:00.001-08:00

As much as I love the 60's aesthetic, it's somewhat baffling that I've never seen most of the Sean Connery James Bond films. I can't explain it. But I can correct it. Over the next couple weeks, I'm going to try to watch as many of the first seven James Bond films as I can, in order, before they are unceremoniously ripped from the Netflix Instant Watch menus on January 8th. If I had known they were leaving, I would have watched them sooner!

Dr. No is Sean Connery's debut as 007, directed by Terence Young, and I think it's about as good as a James Bond film can possibly be. The series has yet to establish its' gimmicks and cornerstones. The camp level is minimal. The spy action is low-tech and down and dirty. The character of James Bond is cooler and grittier than he gradually becomes. In fact, the closest Bond film I've seen to Dr. No is my other favorite Bond film, Casino Royale, though the latter is obviously on a much grander scale.

The plot revolves around James Bond being sent to Jamaica, where he finds a small island ruled by a scientist named Dr. No, who is plotting to sabotage the American space program. Helping Bond out are CIA agent Felix Lieter, who appears regularly in Bond films, this time played by Hawaii 5.0.'s Jack Lord, and Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress.

I was pretty surprised by how violent Dr. No was. There's actually a decent amount of blood in it. I assume this is because it was a United Kingdom production, and they did not have to work within the strict boundaries of the Hollywood system. Then again, I could be wrong, since Hollywood was slowly starting to loosen up around this time.

Connery is as cool as can be as Bond, but he's not quite the quip-spouting sexaholic he later becomes. He still quips and sexes with the best of them, but I think those qualities were played up in later films after proving popular in this one.

The best Bond movies are known for their villains as well. There are some pretty memorable bad guys here, including Dr. No himself, and a trio of assassins known as the Three Blind Mice (introduced by a sinister orchestral rendition of the nursery rhyme).

Let's see, what milestones do we get in this first James Bond film? We see James Bond walk into the crosshairs, turn and shoot at the camera for the first time. But get this: HE'S WEARING A FEDORA. Also, M, 007's boss gets his first appearance. And the existence of a criminal organization called SPECTRE, an ongoing thorn in Bond's side, is revealed to MI6.

So there you have it. The first 007. Arguably the best.

James Moore will return soon with his review of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-29T19:10:00.000-08:00

I've already said much of what I had to say about how much I like the character of Tintin a couple of days ago in my review of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, an old French adaptation of the character. In short: I'm a big fan. But even if I wasn't already a fan, I would have been pretty psyched for this new movie.

You see, The Adventures of Tintin's geek credibility is through the roof. It's directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson. The screenplay is credited to current Doctor Who/Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, Shaun of the Dead/Scott Pilgrim writer/director Edgar Wright, and Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish. It features Daniel Craig, AKA James Bond as the villain, Andy Serkis, AKA Gollum as the sidekick, and Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the comic relief.

Holy crap!

The Adventures of Tintin is the story of boy reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a market. Within the ship is a clue to hidden pirates' gold that leads him and his dog Snowy on a globetrotting adventure filled with peril and intrigue. Along the way, he gets help from dunderhead inspectors Thompson and Thomson and everybody's second favorite drunk seaman with an anger management problem (the first being Donald Duck, who must have been hitting the sauce, right?), Captain Haddock.

The movie was filmed using the performance capture method, where the actors' performances are fed into computers and then animated to look like the characters they're playing. These movies never seem to perform very well, mostly because of the often zombie-like rendered appearances of the characters. The technology has come a long way since Polar Express, though, and I have to say, it didn't really bother me this time around. There's no attempt in Tintin to make the characters look photo-real; rather, they're made to look like the human equivalent of creator Herge's art style.

Spielberg seems to be having a field day, letting his camera and imagination run wild. Positioning the camera in places that would otherwise be physically impossible in a live action film. The action centerpiece of the film is a huge, complex chase sequence done in a single shot. I'm not sure he captures Herge's spirit, exactly, but I think he manages to emphasize the stylistic and tonal qualities that the two of them have in common.

The cast all seem to be having fun as well, and are all perfect fits for their characters, particularly Jamie Bell in the title role. Pegg and Frost are quite impressive at making themselves indistinguishable from each other as the Thom(p)sons, especially considering how different they look in person. The dog, Snowy, is a purely CGI creation, but interacts perfectly with the actors, and perfectly captures the dog's personality from the comics. John Williams delivers a fun, upbeat score, that actually surprised me. In my mind, I expected it to be more along the lines of Indiana Jones, given the similar nature of the stories.

I'm honestly not sure if everyone will enjoy The Adventures of Tintin like I did. I have to admit, I was pretty inclined to like it from the get-go. I'm still not sure if America at large has any real reason to care about the character. Luckily for me, the rest of the world loves him, so a sequel is already on the way. Yay, Tintin!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

2011-12-29T15:29:00.001-08:00

My wife was actually much more excited to see David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo than I was. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to see it. I want to see any new David Fincher movie. But I get nervous about seeing movies with particularly brutal violence, such as rape and torture. Sometimes I chicken out entirely. I've got to say, though, I'm glad I didn't chicken out, because I found that I enjoyed the movie way more than I thought I would.

For those who don't know, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a murder mystery thriller about Mikel Blomqvist (Daniel Craig), a recently disgraced Swedish investigative journalist hired by an old millionaire (Christopher Plummer) to figure out who in his family murdered a niece he was close with 40 years prior. His life soon collides with Lisbeth Salander, a tough, brilliant, but emotionally shut-down hacker who has been more than once been sexually and physically abused by men in her life.

So, was my initial hesitance justified? Not really. Well, kind of. There are multiple rape scenes in the movie, and they're pretty intense and brutal and not for the weak of heart. But whenever I'm nervous about a movie like this, I almost always find that my constitution for this sort of thing on film is a lot stronger than it is in my imagination.

I've read the original Stieg Larsson novel that this movie is based on, but I haven't seen the original Swedish film. I should probably check it out, I suppose. I liked the novel but didn't love it. It was definitely a page-turner when the thriller aspect was going, but there were long stretches that I just didn't find all that interesting. David Fincher actually did a great job of weeding out those parts. There are several scenes of them simply researching old photos and files, but Fincher manages to draw you in and keep it engaging. The story actually continues in the book for 150 pages or so after the huge climactic mystery-solving scene. In the movie, that stuff is thankfully reduced to about a half hour or so. It's still a lot of movie after the story is seemingly over, but I felt like it really drove home that the story is more about the relationship between Blomqvist and Salander than the murder they're investigating.

I liked Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in the leads. I'm unable to compare the two of them to the original actors who played them, which may have worked to my benefit. My wife has seen the original and she says both sets of leads are good in different ways.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a pretty great thriller, and it grew on me even more over time. I've probably thought about it more than I've thought about all the other movies I've seen the last few weeks. Zodiac is my favorite of all of David Fincher's films (in fact, one of my favorite films of the last decade), and I think he applied some similar techniques to this film. Certainly the whole making research interesting thing.

If you're not a movie wuss like I am, you should totally check out The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even if you are, maybe you should give it a shot. I did, and it totally paid off. I hope that it does well enough and that they can lure Fincher back for the sequel, because the story is a great match with Fincher's sensibilities, and Lisbeth Salander is a truly unique and interesting character.

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol

2011-12-28T17:18:00.001-08:00

I never gave up on the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first 3 films were all successful to varying degrees, but were never quite as good as I hoped them to be. As great as Tom Cruise running away from (and toward) things can be, there was always a bit of an unfulfilled feeling by the end of the movie.

Brad Bird's fourth entry, though, eliminated that feeling for me. In fact, I would say it's easily the best Impossible Mission yet. The movie is full of twists, truly original high-tech spy gadgets, a likeable team of non-Cruise characters, and one inventive and intense action setpiece after another.

The film opens with the IMF breaking Ethan Hunt out of a Russian prison to lead a mission of breaking into the Kremlin. The opening titles are downright awesome, starting with Tom Cruise saying "Light the fuse" like a badass. Their mission is botched by somebody piggybacking on their radio frequency and making them look like they were there to commit an attack. Ethan and his team must now clear their name and retrieve stolen launch codes in order to prevent a nuclear war.

Like all Mission: Impossibles, the story is crazily complicated, and like all Mission: Impossibles, it matters little. What matters is that there are lots of fight scenes, chases, explosions, and espionage operations, and boy, do they deliver. Tom Cruise engages in a foot and car chase through a sandstorm, scales and rappels off the world's tallest building, and kicks ass to your heart's content.

A key factor in M:I:Ghost Protocol's success is the team Ethan Hunt is given to work with. Unlike the previous three films, all four members of the team are given personalities, backstories, and most importantly, are instrumental in the success of the mission several times over. Usually, it's just Cruise, Ving Rhames, and a couple more people who you don't even remember when the movie ends. This time, Simon Pegg returns as Benjy, a character established in a cameo in part 3, providing all the technological know-how and comic relief, Paula Patton acts as Hunt's second in command, and Jeremy Renner is a CIA "Analyst" who seems much more able than one in his profession should.

I also really loved the way the odds are stacked way against Cruise and friends. Without the resources of cooperation of the government to help them, they are left afloat and on their own. The odds feel overwhelmingly against them, and the tasks they perform are difficult, to say the least. Cruise gets the brunt of this, and he takes quite a beating throughout the film. There are several times where he jumps down from a high place and slams himself painfully onto a surface below. They really make it look painful. What I'm saying is, this mission actually seems kind of impossible.

Before I go, I can't forget to bring up Brad Bird's direction. As the director of Pixar's The Incredibles, he has now transferred to live action his ability to stage elaborate, perfectly laid out and executed intense action sequences. The production design on the movie is also ridiculously detailed and layered. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it in IMAX, but I did see it in "XP". The image was amazingly sharp. If you're planning on seeing it, I would strongly recommend paying the extra and seeing Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol on the biggest screen you can find.

Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece

2011-12-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

Before Spielberg's recent The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn was released, most of us here in America didn't even know Tintin was a "thing". Well, guess what, us? It's been around for a good long time! I remember the cartoon on HBO when I was a kid, even though I didn't really watch it. I started reading the comics a couple years ago, and found that I really enjoyed them. There's a certain timeless purity to them that appeals to me in the same way that, say, Astro Boy does.

Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece was a live-action French take on the characters from 1961. That's right, 50 years ago! That makes this one of the very first comic book movies ever made. All of the characters everybody outside of America knows and loves are here: boy journalist Tintin, his little dog Snowy, indistinguishable bumbling inspectors Thomson and Thompson, lovable drunk Captain Haddock, and deaf inventor Professor Calculus (who is not in the Spielberg film).

The story follows Tintin and Captain Haddock, as Haddock learns an old shipmate of his has died and left him his boat. With the boat are clues to a treasure (there's always a treasure). Tintin, Haddock and Snowy race the bad guys (there's always bad guys) to follow the clues and find the treasure. It's actually an original story, though there are elements lifted from Red Rackham's Treasure, one of the books the new film lifts from. They both really take an idea from that story and put a different twist on it, so one doesn't spoil the other.

In some ways, this movie actually captures the look and feel of the comics better than Spielberg's film. They have real actors dressed as the characters. I kind of preferred the exaggerated features on the CG renditions, but this movie shows that a live action movie could have been done too. Snowy wasn't nearly as cool in this movie, since he was a real dog and therefore limited to what he could be taught to do. The dude playing Tintin looks exactly like he should. I'm not sure if it's the early 60's Technicolor look or what, but the color scheme actually matched Herge's coloring style more than the new movie did. It's brighter and more primary looking.

The production values in Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece are actually pretty good. I think it was a pretty big popcorn movie in France at the time, not just a little B-production. There is some location shooting, I think in Greece. There's some fun little chases and action sequences, but nothing huge, unsurprisingly. Tintin gets in a few fist fights and they're actually pretty cool, seeing him kicking some ass.

I'm sure The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is going to create a few new fans of the character in America. I mean, I'm not expecting it to blow up, but it's definitely getting a bit of exposure. This old movie is probably not worth seeking out unless you already love the world of Tintin. If you did enjoy the movie, and the movie opened your eyes to the comics, then you will probably get a big kick out of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece. There are other Tintin movies out there, too.

Miracle on 34th Street

2011-12-24T14:19:00.001-08:00

Every Christmas-celebrating household has their own set of traditional movies and TV specials that they watch over the holidays. The other day, I was treated for the first time to the Christmas classic, George Seaton's original 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street, which was not one of those movies for my family. I'm sure that young, dumb me would have balked at the black and white and never even gave it a shot. I never even saw It's a Wonderful Life until a few years ago.

Just because I'd never seen it doesn't mean I hadn't absorbed the entire movie into my brain through cultural osmosis. I already knew all of the famous beats in the movie, since, well, I think everyone does. The rest of the movie was basically filling in the gaps.

As we all know, it's the story of Kris Kringle, a man who may or may not be the actual Santa Claus (SPOILER: he totally IS), who gets a job at Macy's and spreads the Christmas cheer to a cynical, capitalistic world. His biggest challenge is to instill a little magic into the life of a serious, skeptical little girl raised by her mother not to believe in Santa. It all comes down to a courtroom trial over the existence of Santa Claus.

It's all very sweet and charming and magical. Edmund Gwenn's Kris Kringle is probably the best Santa Claus the movies have ever provided. He embodies all the patience and kindness that the spirit of Christmas should. The scenes between him and little Natalie Wood are pretty great.

It's hard not to be cynical in the face of the crass commercialization of the modern day Christmas Machine. In fact, I was going to be all snarky about the movie just now, but I totally fought the urge because that's not what Christmas is about. As skeptical as we can often be, Miracle on 34th Street is there to remind us that it doesn't hurt to let a little bit of magic into our lives once a year or so.

Young Adult

2011-12-20T20:52:00.001-08:00

I enjoy Jason Reitman's films. I enjoy a good fart-fest as much as the next guy, but it's so nice to see comedies that try to be a little something more. That shouldn't be all that lofty of a goal, but in this day and age, that kind of comedy is really hard to come by.

Reitman's latest, Young Adult, written by his Juno collaborator, Diablo Cody, is one of his best films yet. Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as Mavis, a writer of a series of Sweet Valley High style of novels, who is unable to let go of her own High School years, clearly the best years of her life. Nowadays, though moderately successful in her career, she's a pretty hollow shell of who she once was. Pushing 40, she lives alone in Minneapolis, and spends her days watching Kardashians on TV, chugging Diet Coke from a 2 Liter bottle, and getting plastered.

One day, she gets a bulk email from an old high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) who just had a baby. This eats away at her until she snaps, packs up her little dog, and heads home, determined to win him back. In her deluded view, she's rescuing him from the nightmare of his life. In reality, he is happily married.

Charlize Theron gives a bold and funny performance as Mavis. She is truly a mess of a human being, thoroughly unlikeable, but totally watchable. Patton Oswalt is great as her foil, Matt, a former high school classmate that she forms a bond of mutual bitterness with. He never hesitates to tell her that she's a nutcase. Patrick Wilson is in a tough role as Buddy, the ex boyfriend. He's likeable and patient with Mavis, even though her behavior with him is often creepy and inappropriate.

Diablo Cody appears to have grown a great deal as a writer since Juno. The stylized dialogue in Juno that a lot of people found to be overly cutesy is not often found in Young Adult. The people talk like people, specifically people who came of age in the early 90's. With Young Adult, she has delivered a rather unflinching, darkly funny script about aging, depression, and the inability to let go of the past. There's a great turn towards the end that breaks all Hollywood conventions, and then laughs in their face.

I would rank Young Adult as my second favorite of Jason Reitman's films, behind Up in the Air. I still think he has yet to deliver his best film. I've enjoyed all of them, but none have truly blown me away. Looking at his track record so far, though, he has a good solid career ahead of him.

Murders in the Zoo

2011-12-20T09:49:00.001-08:00

I did a lot of reading over the month of October on movies made before the Hays Code went into effect. Hollywood movies were allowed to be a little more violent, or a little more sexually liberated, until the code was passed in the early 30's, which was filled with all sorts of ridiculous rules and limitations that haunted movies until the late 1960's. You know, how a man and woman weren't allowed to be seen in a bed together? Stuff like that.

Murders in the Zoo was made just before the time these rules started being enforced. It's a relatively minor film, but there is at least one scene that is one of the most messed up I've seen in a movie this old. It is the very first scene of the movie, where we are introduced to our villain, sewing a man's mouth shut and setting him loose in the jungle to fend for himself. The act of sewing is conveniently happening just below the frame, but you do see the results, and you know from the very beginning what this guy is capable of.

This villain is an explorer and zoo owner who is extremely jealous and vengeful when it comes to men making eyes at his wife. Which appears to happen quite a bit. His wife really wants out of this marriage. On the way home from the very expedition that he sewed a guy's mouth shut, another guy falls for her, against her warnings.

When they get back home to the zoo, the murders of the title start happening. The zoo guy has devised a murder weapon that can make the cause of death look like a snakebite. There are several other characters, some destined to be victims, some not. There isn't really a hero, everyone is pretty much a good guy compared to this monster. There's a scientist, and a jittery guy who is afraid of all the animals (rightly so in this movie). The fun of the movie isn't watching the good guys stop the bad guy, it's watching the bad guy bring about his own comeuppance.

Murders in the Zoo is only an hour long, which is actually pretty nice. It's a fun little horror movie that breezes right by. And by fun, I mean uncharacteristically dark and grisly for its time.

Johnny Dangerously

2011-12-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

Every, I don't know, 5 or 10 years, Hollywood decides it's once again time for a humorous pastiche of a bygone era of cinema. Usually those movies come and go without making much of a splash. Comedies are marketed towards youth, and the youth has little to no connection to or interest in the old days. But they always try, and hey, some of them are actually pretty good movies.

Johnny Dangerously is one of those movies that was on Comedy Central all the time in the late 90's. I don't believe I've ever seen the whole movie from beginning to end, but it's very possible that I've seen it in bits and pieces. I always enjoyed it, it's a really fun movie.

Made in the early 80's by director Amy Heckerling, Johnny Dangerously is the story of the rise of a prohibition-era Chicago gangster (played by Michael Keaton) who went into a life of crime to pay for his perpetually sick mother's medical bills. Meanwhile, his own brother (Griffin Dunne) is climbing the ranks of the District Attorney office. Not knowing that Johnny Dangerously (an alias) is his brother, he is determined to bring him in.

What follows is a fast paced barrage of silly sight gags and one liners, not unlike Airplane! or Top Secret!, the difference being that Dangerously plays them with a self aware wink at the audience, hell, even address the camera, whereas the humor of the Zucker comedies is found in the straight faced seriousness the actors play it with.

There's some really funny stuff in here. Michael Keaton is awesome as always, funny and mischievous and suave in the title role. Joe Piscopo found the role he was born to play: a cartoonish old timey gangster. Peter Boyle has some great stuff as Johnny's mentor. Maureen Stapleton gets some good material as Johnny's mother.

There are some great running gags throughout. I especially liked the bookends, where Johnny is telling his story to a kid at the pet store he now owns. Keaton is always maintaining his pet store business with the animals while he's talking, putting price tag stickers on dogs, polishing the turtles, etc.

When Johnny Dangerously begins the joke pacing is pretty fast and furious. Unfortunately, it can't sustain that rate through the entire running time. While still funny, the movie does gradually lose its steam as it goes. Some of the jokes are a little corny, but more gags hit than miss.

In my last few reviews, I notice that I've been throwing in another movie that might play as a good double feature with the one I'm reviewing. It wasn't intentional, it just happened that way, but I'm thinking of making it a regular feature of my reviews. Sort of a "if you like this, try these together" recommendation. With that in mind, I think Johnny Dangerously would play really well in a double bill with one of the Coen Brothers' most underrated films, The Hudsucker Proxy. Yes, that would make a pretty great movie night.

Charley Varrick

2011-12-15T12:09:00.001-08:00

Charley Varrick is one of those older movies (1973, in this case) that holds up ridiculously well. It's a shame that nobody seems to have heard of it. It was directed by Don Siegel, who had directed many movies of almost every genre before this, but had achieved a huge box office success with the gritty crime action genre with his previous film, Dirty Harry. While Dirty Harry was an over the top action movie, built around an iconic, badass performance by Clint Eastwood, Charley Varrick is much more subdued, with intelligent plotting, a more relaxed pace, and really good dialogue. In fact, I would even say that Charley Varrick is the better of the two films, if not quite as memorable.

The title character is played by the great Walter Matthau (who won a BAFTA for this performance over in the UK), a down-on-his-luck former stunt pilot, now cropduster, who puts together a gang and masterminds a low-profile, small town bank robbery in New Mexico. The robbery is a bit of a disaster, with half his gang getting killed, along with some cops, but Varrick is very good at thinking on his feet, and he and his (surviving) partner in crime manage to elude suspicion.

When they return to his trailer park and check out their haul, they realize that they've stolen almost a million dollars, which is almost a million dollars more than they expected a tiny small town bank to have in its vault. Varrick deduces, correctly, that the money must belong to the mob, and was being held there until it could be properly invested overseas. This means that the mob is going to stop at nothing until they're dead and the money is returned.

What follows is a chess game, where Varrick must stay ahead of all the obstacles in his path, including the police, a nosy old lady neighbor, the corrupt owner of the bank (played by John Vernon), and a man named Molly (Joe Don Baker), the hitman employed by the banker. The question is, will Charley Varrick get away with the money and his life?

Charley Varrick (the movie, not the character) reminds me a great deal of the work of Elmore Leonard. In fact, I would go so far as saying that this film was a direct inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown. I haven't read anything saying this, but I am sure of it nonetheless. They are quite similar in style and tone, and both contain a smarter-than-their-station-in-life hero working a long game against all odds for a huge sum of money.

Charley Varrick (the movie, not the character) is an extremely smart caper with funny moments, great performances and colorful characters. Another thing worth noting is the awesome score, composed by the great Lalo Schifrin. There are so many reasons you should all watch this movie. Check it out on Netflix Instant!

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

2011-12-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

What does it say about me that as a lover of cinema, I still have never seen a film by Godard, Fellini, or Bergman? Or that I haven't seen Gone with the Wind or The Ten Commandments? I've never seen a film by William Wyler and the only John Ford film I have seen is Stagecoach. All of these statements are sad but true. But what is even sadder is that, given the choice between watching one of these movies or watching an early, lesser film by John Carpenter, my goddamn geek instinct will always make me choose Carpenter.

Lesser isn't quite the word. In the 90's, Carpenter's work got far lesser than his second film, 1976's Assault on Precinct 13, could ever be considered. But when you compare Assault on Precinct 13 to the Carpenter craziness that was to come in the next decade; Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble In Little China (my favorite), or even the cornball fun of They Live!, it's surely the work of a director who was just starting to hit his stride.

Assault on Precinct 13 is set in Anderson, a slum of Los Angeles, where a street gang runs rampant, armed with a supply of automatic weapons. When a guy kills one of their members in retaliation for his little girl's murder, they chase him to the local police station, in the process of shutting down. The few remaining officers there must then team up with the convicts and defend their fortress from a seemingly endless onslaught of LA gangbangers.

The movie is a lot of fun once it gets started. Sort of a modern western mixed with a zombie movie, but the zombies aren't dead. The problem is, it takes a really long time to get started, 45 minutes before all the chess pieces are in place. Come on now, John Carpenter, you've got to make your way through act 1 as fast as you can.

The acting isn't exactly top notch for the most part, but the two leads are pretty enjoyable, especially Austin Stoker as Ethan Bishop, the heroic cop. Surely taking inspiration from Night of the Living Dead, Carpenter makes his hero a black man without ever drawing attention to that fact, something that is rare even now, but was practically unheard of in 1976. Darwin Joston plays the roguish Napoleon Wilson, the badass crook with a heart of gold. He spends much of the movie asking for a smoke and not telling people why he's called Napoleon.

The gang is portrayed as a faceless force of evil rather than individual people, almost supernatural. They just keep on coming, pressing down on the Precinct, and seemingly never running out of ammo and men. They've cut the power and phone lines, and after every attack, they clean up all the bodies and hide, so nobody will notice their presence. I doubt that would really work, but you buy it in the movie.

I enjoyed Assault on Precinct 13 for what it was. It would play well with The Warriors, another similar (and superior) cult movie from the same time period that I only saw recently. Maybe next up I will finally watch a film by Godard, Fellini, or Bergman. On second thought, I have the rest of my life to watch those. I'll probably just watch Buckaroo Banzai again.

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

2011-12-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

Documentarian Mark Hartley has made a name for himself chronicling cinematic histories that nobody else seems to want to touch. With his first film, Not Quite Hollywood, he explored the creative energy and weird anything goes vibe of the Australian exploitation movie scene. Along with countless trashy ones, some genuinely good films came out of that genre, such as George Miller's classic Mad Max, and Richard Franklin's demented horror film Patrick (which Hartley is now set to remake).

Now comes Hartley's second film, Machete Maidens Unleashed!, about the cinematic revolution in The Philippines through the 60's, 70's, and 80's, spurred on by schlock producer Roger Corman. Like the Ozsploitation scene, this is a lesser known piece of cinematic history that still deserves to be told.

The Philippines offered many resources for Corman to exploit: extremely cheap non-union labor, real life jungle sets, and stunt men willing to do anything for a buck. Corman made his movies there one after another, cheap and fast, utilizing many of the same actors and directors. He explored and exploited many genres there, including many Women in Prison films, some blaxploitation, martial arts, and horror. Most of these movies were, of course, terrible, but some of them do have their moments. Actors Pam Grier and Sid Haig cut their teeth making movies in The Philippines, and The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme got his start writing them. The fact that the movies were so trashy allowed him to sneak in some subversive political subtext in places where nobody would look.

Hartley's documentary is told in a series of interviews, with, among others, Corman himself, Grier and Haig, his trailer cutters Alan Arkush and Joe Dante, and director John Landis. The interviews are intercut with scenes from the movies themselves. There are a lot of interesting stories told. A particularly funny one is Arkush and Dante's story about the exploding helicopter, and how it found its way into many of the trailers they cut.

The history of Americans shooting their films in The Philippines ultimately culminates in Francis Ford Coppola bringing his infamous production of Apocalypse Now to the country. Since there's already an entire movie about how that went down, they just spend a few minutes on it, but it's still some of the most interesting stuff in the movie.

After Apocalypse Now, The Philippines started exporting their own products. We're introduced to Weng Weng, a dwarf action star who starred in James Bond spoofs such as "For Your Height Only". He was their first homegrown success story in the international scene.

Machete Maidens Unleashed! is an extremely interesting, often outrageous story. I love this kind of thing, I find the oddballs working on the fringe of the mainstream so much more interesting. I hope Mark Hartley keeps on making these documentaries and exposing the world to the stories behind all these weird grindhouse gems. Next up, he's telling the story of Cannon Films, the Israeli production company that produced the hilariously bad disco musical The Apple (WATCH IT, EVERYONE!), Breakin', its sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Masters of the Universe. Can't wait!

Machete Maidens Unleashed! and Not Quite Hollywood are available on Netflix Instant if you want to see them.

American Graffiti

2011-12-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

I try to keep the reviews on my site mostly limited to movies I've never seen before, but every once in a while, I make an exception, usually because the last time I watched a movie was long before I could form an educated opinion on it. I saw American Graffiti once as a kid of maybe 10-12. All I knew at the time was it was by George Lucas, and the guy from Jaws and Harrison Ford were in it. All I remembered about it from that initial viewing was the scene where the kid was trying to buy some booze for his girl, which is still one of the most memorable scenes in the movie.

So how does American Graffiti hold up? You know, not bad. At the time it was made, George Lucas was only known for a little seen science fiction art film called THX-1138. I'm sure that based on that movie, he was having a lot of difficulty getting funding for any of his other projects. So it was probably just as much a calculated career move for him to make such a mainstream movie, even though the result is an obviously very personal, nostalgic and sentimental take on the early 60's hot rod scene that Lucas grew up around.

Set in 1962, American Graffiti follows four teens just out of high school, having one last bang in the old town before they must choose what to do with their adult lives. Steve (Ron Howard) is trying the old "let's see other people" thing on his girlfriend (Cindy Williams). Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is on a search for a beautiful girl he saw addressing him from another car, inadvertently joining a street gang on the way. John (Paul le Mat) is the coolest kid in town with the coolest car in town, who gets saddled with a girl way too young for him, while being taunted into a race by his rival (Harrison Ford). And Toad (Charles Martin Smith) is a geeky kid who, after borrowing Steve's car, somehow picks up a girl who is way out of his league.

The four stories kind of intertwine and bounce off of each other. An alternate title could have been "Guess Who is in Which Car Now?". No, American Graffiti is better.

American Graffiti is also well known as one of the first and most important soundtrack movies. The film is wall to wall stuffed with great late 50's and early 60's period rock and roll. Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, EVERYONE else. If you wanted to, you could probably not pay attention to the dialogue at all and still enjoy the movie for the sounds alone.

The acting, though not exactly setting the world on fire, is probably the best out of any George Lucas film. The characters are all funny and likeable. Young Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford doing a bad cowboy accent are fun to watch.

The only thing I didn't really care for was the very end, where they do one of those "Where Are They Now?" freeze frames. It was really heavy handed and preachy, with one getting killed in Vietnam, and the cool kid dying in a hot rod crash. Come on, man. I felt like it was a last ditch attempt on Lucas' part to make the movie more "meaningful" or something. Totally unnecessary after 2 hours of nonstop rose-tinted nostalgia.

That aside, American Graffiti is a pretty great film. As one out of only two George Lucas directed films I even like (the other is Star Wars, duh), I'd say this is my second favorite.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

2011-11-29T20:29:00.001-08:00

When it comes to Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, I'm still learning. I've seen a few Kung Fu movies here and there, a couple of Wong Kar Wai movies, lots of Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan. Oh, and Infernal Affairs, I own that. Not much else. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin seems like a good place for me to start. It is considered one of the great martial arts movies of all time.

Made in 1978 as a Shaw Brothers production, and directed by Liu Chia-Liang, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin made a star out of a young Gordon Liu, a huge star in his own right, but best known to me as Johnny Mo and Pai Mei in the Kill Bill movies, in the role of San Te. San Te is a young man who joins the monks in Shaolin to learn their brand of Kung Fu, with the goal of introducing it to the oppressed people, and giving them a means to fight back against the Tartars.

A large bulk of the movie basically plays as the most awesome training montage ever. Over half of the movie is San Te's training, succeeding in difficult and painful trials, and climbing the ladder from the 35th Chamber all the way to the top. His first trial is simply finding a way to jump across a pool of water with a bundle of sticks floating in it, in order to get his food.

You'd think it would get boring, but it never does. San Te's single-mindedness and dedication to his goal, and the promise that his lessons will pay off in the end makes the training very engrossing and downright fun to watch. Not to mention the diversity and creativity behind each of the trials. At one point, they strap downward pointing knives to his biceps and make him carry buckets with his arms straight out. If he lowers them, he gets cut. Later, San Te invents a new weapon in order to defeat a higher ranking monk in a duel. Totally awesome.

I was really happy to see it subtitled on the DVD, rather than dubbed. The dubbing is one of the things that keeps me from watching a lot of Chinese movies. I really hate dubbing, and it seems like it's the only way a lot of these old movies are available.

So that's that. Another classic I can now say I've seen. Another gap in my knowledge filled. Next up, I suppose I should probably see Master of the Flying Guillotine, or maybe Hard Boiled or The Killer.

Hugo

2011-11-29T16:05:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure if a lot of fans out there were clamoring for a Martin Scorsese kids movie, but I know I was. About a decade ago, waaaay back when I was in college, there was an internet rumor that Scorsese was interested in directing the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This was years before the Tim Burton debacle that eventually happened. I just really like it when great directors known for more adult subject matter make movies for children, because they make them with the same degree of sophistication that they give any of their films.

Hugo is not only a wonderful, magical children's adventure set in 1920's Paris, it's also a loving ode to the dawn of cinema and the ability of movies to transport you into your dreams. Figuratively speaking, of course, we're not talking a Last Action Hero golden ticket scenario. It stars young Asa Butterfield in the title role, Hugo Cabret an orphaned son of a clockmaker who lives inside the walls of the train station in Paris, keeping the clocks running, unbeknownst to anyone. In his spare time, Hugo is trying to repair an old automaton that his father found at a museum, stealing parts from an old toymaker with a shop in the station. When Hugo is caught by the toymaker, his whole life is upturned, and he begins a journey, uncovering the toymaker's mysterious past while finding his own purpose in life in the process.

I'm not going to go into what Hugo discovers, and how it ties in with cinema, because that was all part of the magic of the movie. I loved how magical the movie felt, even though there was actually very few truly fantastical elements. Pretty much only the clockwork automaton.

The performances are all around wonderful. Asa Butterfield was great, as was Chloe Grace Moretz as the toymaker's God-daughter. Sacha Baron-Cohen continues to show his versatility and his prowess for physical comedy as the station's orphan hunting inspector. I wouldn't be surprised if Sir Ben Kingsley gets a Supporting Actor nomination for his part as Papa Georges, the toymaker.

I saw Hugo in 3-D, something I don't usually do. I was very curious to see how Scorsese utilized the 3-D technology as a tool. Unsurprisingly, it's among the best 3-D I've seen. But I learned something that I kind of already knew while watching it: As well done as it was, even the best 3-D doesn't look half as good as a 2-D movie. As deep and immersive as the experience was, I feel it would have been even more so in 2-D, without the darkened tint on the glasses and the eyestrain and the blur.

Hugo is based on a novel, called The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I suppose the studio that made the movie shortened the title in a desperate bid to make the title more memorable and hence more marketable. Or maybe they thought people would pronounce Cabret with a T instead of the French way. But in shortening it they drained all the magic and wonder from the title. Hugo gives the viewer no indication what they're going to see. Disney is doing the same thing with net year's John Carter (or JC as they like to shorten it). Hey Disney! The John Carter part isn't what interests us! It's the "OF MARS" part we want. Look at Hugo's opening weekend box office. Shortening the title didn't work.

Ok, enough ranting. Hugo is a movie that any film buff should go and see. Martin Scorsese clearly has put as much love and passion into it as anything he's ever done, if not more in some cases. I'm not sure if all kids would find it too interesting, but if you take the right kid to see it, you might just be setting them on a path to find their own love of cinema.

Mystery Team

2011-11-28T13:49:00.001-08:00

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Encyclopedia Brown books. I had a bunch of them and read them over and over again, even though I already knew the solutions to all of the mysteries. I totally wanted to be a know-it-all boy detective. Nowadays I've graduated to reading Sherlock Holmes and wanting to be a know-it-all man detective, but my affection for Encyclopedia Brown remains. Mystery Team is the story of a trio of boy detectives who steadfastly refuse to make the leap to man-detectivehood.

The Mystery Team were the toast of the town when they were seven, solving local mysteries for a dime. Now they're 18, on their way out of high school, and still dressing and acting like they're a group of plucky kids from a Hardy Boys book. There is Jason (Community's Donald Glover), the team leader and master of disguises (usually a mustache). There's Duncan (DC Pierson), the brains of the group, whose knowledge is mainly taken from trivia books. And there is Charlie (Dominic Dierkes), the muscle of Mystery Team, who is, well, not very smart.

The thrust of the movie is provided when a little girl hires them (still a dime) to solve the murder of her parents. The team, looking to step up to the big leagues, takes the case. They are then thrust from the world of cookies thieves and playground bullies into the seedy underbelly of society, where they try to remain willfully and desperately ignorant of the corruption, violence, and temptation found therein.

Mystery Team is written, directed, and produced by the comedy group Derrick Comedy, best known for their viral internet videos. Much of the humor in the movie is in the tradition of, say, The Addams Family, where a group of naive oddballs from a different kind of world are forced to interact with the way things really are.

There are actually a lot of laughs in the movie. The characters are funny, and the three leads are all really good. You can see that Donald Glover can totally carry a movie, and his chemistry with Dierkes and Pierson is a lot of fun. I dug a lot of the throwaway gags about the trio's state of arrested development, like how Duncan's thesis for a high school assignment is a list of all the dinosaurs, and Charlie's inability to say the right thing in unison with the other two. There are a few more familiar faces in Mystery Team, too, including The Office and Bridesmaids' Ellie Kemper, SNL's Bobby Moynihan, and Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza.

You can tell Mystery Team was made for a relatively tiny budget. Most of the cast is made up of friends and family of the Derrick Comedy group. There are a lot of young people playing characters who should probably be older than they are. That's all part of the charm, though; that whole putting-on-a-show-with-your-friends feel of it.

Not all of the jokes worked for me, though. The movie leans a little too heavily on poop and vomit jokes for my taste (although admittedly, I laughed at a few of those too). The best stuff in the movie comes from their own childlike view of the world, but sometimes they push it a little too far past the realm of believability, like a gag involving Duncan drinking dog pee.

Mystery Team was directed by Derrick Comedy member Dan Eckman. He does a decent job for a first film, especially when you take into account the low budget. I know the movie didn't make much money, but I hope that doesn't mean he won't get another chance at directing a comedy. It has a little bit of a weird, off-the-beaten-path sensibility, it's certainly not a mainstream comedy. Mystery Team is the kind of movie that a college-aged comedy nerd would possibly discover and show their friends, which is exactly who the target audience for their videos happens to be.

And now, since it looks like I may have written more about Mystery Team today than I did about Kagemusha, I will leave you. My final thought: If you like comedies like, say, Wet Hot American Summer or The Brothers Solomon, movies that are a little bit weird, a little bit surreal, and a little bit filthy, you will get some laughs out of Mystery Team, but it's probably not going to change your life.

Kagemusha

2011-11-28T11:10:00.001-08:00

This review is nine months in the making. I bought Kagemusha on Blu Ray in February. It took a long time to find three hours to watch it, but we finally got around to it in May. But then, every attempt to watch it was thwarted by my PS3. And now, in late November, after replacing my Blu Ray, getting my Playstation repaired, and buying a brand new damn Blu Ray player, I bring you, with great relief, my review of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Kagemusha is a sprawling samurai epic, set in the 1500s, following the Takeda clan, led by the feared and respected warlord Shingen. The film opens with a long, uninterrupted shot of what appears to be three Shingens having a conversation. In actuality, one is Shingen, one is his nearly-but-not-quite identical brother, Nobukado, who acts as his decoy (or Kagemusha). The third is a lowly bandit that Nobukado has discovered and saved from execution because of his uncanny resemblance to Shingen. He believes that this bandit could serve as Kagemusha better than he can.

His belief is soon put to the test, when Takeda Shingen is shot by a sniper and dies. If their enemies were to find out Shingen is dead, the clan would be done for, so the Kagemusha is made to replace Shingen. He must fool Shingen's clan, his family, and his enemies. Inspired by the kindness Shingen showed him, the double soon begins to carry on the ruse by choice, out of loyalty to the clan.

The legendary Tatsuya Nakadai plays the dual role of Shingen and his decoy. You may remember him as the gun-wielding gangster in Yojimbo, or maybe as the cold hearted protagonist/villain in Sword of Doom. He couldn't be more different in his roles here. Shingen is a smaller role, but must cast a huge shadow on the rest of the film. The decoy, stripped of any identity before the start of the movie, is never given a name. Where Shingen is regal and stoic, the decoy is crude and low born. It's kind of a The Prince and the Pauper situation.

Kagemusha is actually pretty delightful for the first couple of hours, before taking a dark turn, culminating in the true historical event of the Battle of Nagashino. Watching the decoy having to learn how to be another man, winning the love of Shingen's grandson, charming Shingen's mistresses, and ultimately earning the loyalty of Shingen's clan was really enjoyable and quite funny at times. The double is surrounded by many characters, and though they are not as colorful as those in Seven Samurai or some of Kurosawa's other early masterpieces, they are still interesting.

The pacing is slow and deliberate. There are many scenes played out in a long sustained single shot. Kurosawa also puts a heavy focus on the nonverbal interplay between his characters. It amazed me that sometimes he'd have like 10 different characters in a shot and you could just look at all of their faces and body language and feel like you could read them all. Pretty complex stuff.

Visually, Kagemusha is gorgeous and rich with detail. This is the first color Kurosawa film I've seen. I could tell from his earlier work that he composed every one of his shots like a painter would a painting. It turns out he paints them like a painting too. The colors are so vivid in Kagemusha, the reds and greens just leap off the screen.

I'm not sure if I would recommend Kagemusha to just anyone, however. It's probably not so much for the uninitiated. If somebody I knew hadn't seen any Kurosawa films, I'd certainly point them towards Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, etc. and if they were still coming back for more, then I would show them the less accessible Kagemusha. Still, it's another great film from possibly the greatest director.

The Muppets

2011-11-25T16:52:00.002-08:00

There are few things I love in this world more than The Muppets. Friends and family excluded, I rank the creations of Jim Henson up there with pretty much all of the greatest things in life. So it always saddened me a little when the property fell into disrepair and disuse for the better part of the last two decades. I've been hoping for a revitalization for, well, maybe half my life. I am proud to announce that Muppets are once again vital.

Writers Nick Stoller and Jason Segel, and director James Bobin bring a lifetime of love, passion, and enthusiasm to The Muppets. From the moment the first musical number begins, you can tell that Jason Segel (in the lead human role) is living a dream come true. Everyone involved in the movie appears to be having a blast, and giving it their all, and their joy is infectious.

The Muppets follows Gary (Segel) and his brother Walter. Walter has always been different. He stopped growing at age 7, he's small and fuzzy. He never knew how to relate to his world. That is, until the day he saw The Muppets on TV. From that day forth, he was The Muppets' biggest fan. When Gary and his girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams) are planning a trip to Hollywood for their 10th anniversary, they invite Walter along, so he can visit Muppet Studios.

Unfortunately, when they get there, the once glorious studio is now abandoned and decrepit, all of the locations in the tour are closed "for repair". Sneaking off into Kermit's old office, Walter overhears an evil oil millionaire (Chris Cooper) plans to tear down the studios and dig for oil there. Walter, Gary, and Mary decide that the only way they can save the studio is to reunite the Muppets and have them put on one last show.

What follows is what you would hope for in a Muppet movie. Endless gags and vaudevillian banter, big, moving musical numbers, celebrity cameos, and a hilarious and disarming self awareness that tells you that even the characters are aware that they are in a movie and that the narrative is bound by certain rules.

I loved the musical numbers. The new songs were written by Bret McKenzie of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords (whose show was co-created by Muppets director Bobin). They're clever, catchy, and silly in much the same fashion as the Conchords songs are. And the old songs are, well, there are a few old Muppet favorites in there, and I have to say, I teared up when they came on. Sorry I'm such a dork. I teared up a lot during the movie.

Bobin, Segel, and Stoller's love for the characters comes through, too. They give everybody a moment, including many of the more obscure characters that only geeks like me know the names of. They bumped up the role of Uncle Deadly, the cool looking dragon character usually only seen in brief Muppet Show gags, and gave him a little dimension for the first time. While Segel and Adams were welcome additions, I hope that now that we've been reintroduced to the Muppets, any possible future Muppet movies will be able to shift attention away from the human leads and back onto the Muppets where they belong. In the old movies, the humans were reserved for villain roles and cameos.

I enjoyed the movie a great deal, but it wasn't quite the same as Henson's Muppet movies. The energy was different. The difference was especially noticeable with Kermit. Steve Whitmire, the performer who operates Kermit, doesn't have Henson's distinctive hand acting. Obviously, he has his own. Kermit is still endlessly earnest and hopeful, but I kept waiting for him to have the frantic, frazzled energy that Kermit gets when he is trying to run his show, and keep everything from falling apart at any given moment while he's surrounded by so many loose cannons (figurative and literal cannons when Gonzo is around). That Kermit never arrives. Still, he was a good Kermit, it's just got to be tough under the shadow of Henson.

I am so happy that this group got The Muppets right. I want a whole new generation of children to see this movie for the first time and react to it the same way Walter and I did when we first encountered Kermit and the gang. There's still a month to go, but when all is said and done, I'm fairly positive The Muppets is going to be my favorite movie of the year. There just aren't enough movies with such unabashed joy and positivity out there anymore.

The Warriors

2011-11-25T08:58:00.001-08:00

Wow, where was The Warriors when I was a teenager? I mean, it was out there, but I never even heard of it until I was in my twenties, and just got around to watching it recently. If I had seen it as a teen, it would probably have been given the same heavy rotation that Evil Dead 2 and Big Trouble in Little China got in my VCR.

The Warriors is a 1979 cult classic directed by Walter Hill, set in Brooklyn in the near future where gangs rule the streets. Cyrus, who appears to be the Martin Luther King Jr. of street gangs, calls a huge meeting, with the intention of forming a United Nations of gangs. Together, they would outnumber the police three to one. But before the alliance can be formed, Cyrus is gunned down by an unstable member of The Rogues, who then pins the assassination on The Warriors. The Warriors must then get back to the safe haven of their home turf in Coney Island while every gang in the city is out for their heads, not to mention the police.

The movie has a very post-apocalyptic feel. 1979 New York is run down and nasty looking. Graffiti completely covers the subway walls. Walter Hill is also very deliberately invoking comic books, right down to illustrated scene transitions, making it appear that the film is jumping right off the panels. It reminded me of Frank Miller's comic book work of the mid-80's, such as The Dark Knight Returns, though The Warriors predates Miller's fame by a couple of years.

I love that every gang has a dress code and a theme. That's something from a lot of 80's pop culture that I wish were real. The Warriors and a few others just have logos and jackets or vests. But some gangs go all out, with pinstriped baseball uniforms, full clown makeup, what have you. If Walter Hill had included shots of the clown gang sitting in front of a mirror putting on their makeup so they could go beat some ass, they would have lost a lot of their menace.

The police are also always on The Warriors' tails. At least I think it was the police. I have a theory that they might have just been a police-themed gang trying to join the alliance, but things just got out of hand. Maybe they should consider a fireman theme.

I'm glad I finally saw The Warriors. I tend to watch a lot of older, more straightforward classics, but for me, it's always a real treat to find something like this; a unique, strange little movie set in its own universe with its own rules and sensibilities. It's a shame I didn't get to watch The Warriors over and over again in my VCR days, because it would have been perfect for that.

The Descendants

2011-11-21T20:55:00.001-08:00

Hot on the heels of my review for Alexander Payne's first film, Citizen Ruth, comes my review for his latest, The Descendants. I've been looking forward to this movie for a long time. I guess, technically, since after I saw Sideways like 7 years ago, just as I am now looking forward to his next film, whenever that may be. What I'm saying is, I really like Alexander Payne.

The Descendants is, like his films after Election, a comedy, but only kind of. It has funny stuff, but it also has a lot of sad stuff, a lot of moving stuff, and a lot of painfully real stuff. It stars George Clooney as Matt King, a work obsessed Hawaiian husband and father who suddenly finds his whole life upturned all at once when his wife gets in a boating accident and is put into a coma. He was never much of a father to his daughters, who, due to the traumatic circumstances are both acting out in their own ways, ways that he has no clue how to deal with. On top of this, Matt is in the midst of a huge land deal that could make him and his extended family millionaires, but would bruise the state of Hawaii by bringing development to hundreds of acres of untouched land. As if all that wasn't enough, his life is upturned yet again when he learns the hospital intends to pull the plug on his wife, and it is revealed to him that she was having an affair before the accident.

This guy really needs a break, doesn't he?

So the premise that drives The Descendants is Clooney taking his daughters on a trip to Oahu to find and confront the man his wife was sleeping with. It sounds like I already gave away a lot of the movie, but that was just a whole lot of set-up.

The acting is top notch. George Clooney gives one of his best performances to date. Alexander Payne has a way of taking huge movie stars and making an audience forget that they're famous. It was quite a feat he performed in About Schmidt, making Jack Nicholson the least Jack Nicholson he's ever been.

Clooney is surrounded by a colorful cast of supporting characters that are extremely well realized, even the ones who only have a couple of scenes. His daughters, Alexandra and Scottie, carry the movie along with him. Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), his 17 year old, is a bit of a wild child, but still quite intelligent, and she reminds him of her mother in the most painful ways. Scottie (Amara Miller) is 10, and she is already beginning to show signs of rebellion, even as Matt does his best to keep her innocent of her mother's transgressions. The three of them feel like a real family unit, you never question it.

Along for the ride is Sid, Alexandra's mouthy stoner buddy, played by Nick Krause. Alexandra refuses to go along with her father without Sid, and Matt, not knowing how else to deal with her, acquiesces. My little sister has brought many Sids into our lives, so I found his inclusion pretty hilarious and believable.

There are several other talented performers in the movie in smaller roles, including Robert Forster, Mary Birdsong, Rob Huebel, Beau Bridges, and Matthew Lillard as the man he's looking for. I especially liked Judy Greer, who always deserves mention but seldom gets it. She's so good in general, and especially in The Descendants.

The movie hit home for me several times, and I teared up more than once. There's a lot of underlying sadness in Matt King's journey, and a lot of tension within his family at such a trying time, but rather than being a downer in the end, The Descendants is quite life-affirming without ever feeling forced. All told, I came out of it feeling pretty good about things. I haven't done any real tallying at this point, but I'm fairly certain The Descendants will wind up near the top of my favorite movies of the year list.

Citizen Ruth

2011-11-17T09:44:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure why it took me so long to see Citizen Ruth. I love the films of Alexander Payne. So much that I can't even pick a favorite between Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways. So with the very imminent release of Payne's new film, The Descendants (which I will surely be reviewing this weekend), I thought I would go back to the beginning and finally watch his first film.

Citizen Ruth stars Laura Dern as a paint-huffing mess of a human being who, after being taken in from her latest binge by the authorities, finds out she is pregnant. This is nothing new to her. It will be her fifth child that society deems (correctly so) her unfit for. The judge gives her a choice. She either must terminate the pregnancy, or go to prison for placing her unborn child in danger through her excesses.

While being held in jail, Ruth meets a group of Pro-Life protesters who, after hearing her situation, decide to pay her bail and take her in, with the intention of using her as a figurehead for their cause. Soon enough, the Pro-Choicers get their mitts on her too, and Ruth finds herself caught in the middle of an escalating battle between the two.

The satire in Citizen Ruth is sharp and Payne does a great job of walking a fine line. He does this by making the activist groups on both sides of the issue both pretty equally corrupt and self-centered. They are both willing to do anything to get Ruth's endorsement, even though she really doesn't care about what either side thinks.

Laura Dern's portrayal of Ruth is excellent. She and Payne (and co-writer Jim Taylor) have created a perfect foil for these two groups. Even though she is a complete wreck, Ruth is also innocent in her way; not particularly smart, not interested in the greater issue at hand. Her main concern is getting her hands on some cash so she can score again and get high. Despite all this, Payne shows a great deal of empathy for Ruth and her plight. The situation she is pressured into forces her to rethink her priorities and consider maybe getting herself together.

The supporting cast surrounding Dern is a good deal of fun to watch as well. Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place are hilarious as the Pro-Lifers who take her in. I especially liked M.C. Gainey as one of the Pro-Choicers. Burt Reynolds has a small part, in the midst of his post-Boogie-Nights mid-nineties career revival.

Citizen Ruth was a strong first film, but it is still a first film. As much as I enjoyed it, I think Alexander Payne was still working out his trademark style and tone. The subject matter is bold, and was surely a great way to get his name out there, but I felt the satire in his second film (Election) was a lot funnier, if not quite as edgy, and his (and our) empathy for his often hopeless characters has only grown in his later films. Still, Citizen Ruth is totally worth checking out if you haven't yet, especially if you're a fan of Payne's other work.

Logan's Run

2011-11-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

Keepin' the review part of this one short, but guess what? I've got illustrations!

Logan's Run is a 1976 science fiction film by Michael Anderson, set in a future where everybody is put to death when they reach 30. It stars Michael York as Logan 5, and Jenny Agutter as Jessica 6, two citizens who choose to run before their time is up, searching for the legendary "Sanctuary". They wind up exploring the underbelly of the world, seeing what their society is really like, and ultimately escaping, before deciding to return and bring freedom to the rest of their people. That's the very brief version.

It was made not long before Star Wars, which means the special effects weren't quite "there" yet. There's some high camp value therein, but it's all in fun. I actually liked the movie quite a bit. The world was really cool in that stylized 70's way. Lots of unconvincing miniatures and silly future clothes. Michael York and Jenny Agutter (mmmm...) are both enjoyable to watch and easily carry the movie. Peter Ustinov is kind of horrifying as the oldest man on earth. He's not meant to be, but if I met him, I'd never want to age past 30. Speaking of which, I always wished the maximum age was much younger, like it was in the book. Death at 30 isn't nearly as resonant as 21, and the social commentary could be much richer if all the people running around in this world are practically children. There's a remake coming out in the not too distant future by the guy who made Drive. Maybe he'll delve a little deeper into that.

And now, without further ado, my take on Logan's Run in four horribly rendered MS Paint pictures. Thanks for reading!

Dracula (1931)

2011-11-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

Whaaaat? Dracula? But Halloween is over, you might say. And I might say you're right. I planned on watching Dracula in October, but I missed my arbitrary deadline by a week or so. I did, however, finish reading the book before Halloween, and holy crap, it was good.

As those scant few followers of this blog surely know, I've been watching all the Universal monster movies over the course of the year. I've enjoyed the lot of them, especially the James Whale ones, so I went into Tod Browning's Dracula with reasonably high expectations. Sadly, it was not able to live up to them.

The movie opens with Renfield visiting Dracula's castle in Transylvania, right away a huge departure from the novel, where it was Jonathan Harker's duty. Dracula uses his hypnotic powers on Renfield to turn him into his lacky. He comes along on the boat to England, where Dracula abandons him to be committed. While in England, Dracula uses his powers to seduce and transform Lucy Westenra and begin the same process on Mina (now Dr. Seward's daughter), while they try to hunt him down and prevent Mina's transformation.

There are some inspired scenes and moments that were sufficiently creepy. I loved the way the lights would only shine on Bela Lugosi's eyes when he was using his hypnotic power. And there was a great shot of the dead captain of the ship that brings Dracula to London. But despite the expressionistic style and moody atmosphere, I felt the movie suffered from being too cheap. Yes, I know all these Universal movies were made on a shoestring, but some were able to work around it and hide it more creatively than others. This movie has a scene where they're watching a wolf (Dracula in wolf form), and since they couldn't get a wolf, they just stand there and describe to the audience what the wolf is doing. I felt a little cheated.

Bela Lugosi, is of course, magnetic in the role. I can see why he is iconic. I think it's weird the way people paint such a pointy widow's peak on their forehead when they dress as Dracula, because his isn't that pronounced. I also liked Dwight Frye as the lunatic Renfield a lot. He was awesomely over the top and really fun to watch. I don't think the rest of the cast deserves much mention, though. They were for the most part forgettable, if not kind of bad. That's too bad, too, because in the book, Professor Van Helsing is every bit as iconic as Count Dracula and Renfield, and Mina Murray/Harker/Seward is a fantastic character, too.

Maybe it was because I had just read the book and they left out a lot of my favorite parts, I don't know. I thought Dracula was a pretty slow movie and was kind of bored. You know what? Besides Monster Squad, I'm pretty sure this was the first movie I've seen with Dracula in it. I would like to see other adaptations, but I hope some of them are more faithful to Bram Stoker's story. What's the best Dracula movie? Is the Coppola movie worth watching? Keanu Reeves as Harker worries me a bit. Hey, I like Keanu in things, and am willing to defend him, but even I have my limits.

I seem to be rambling, so I guess it's time to go. Final thought? Dracula has its moments, but if given the choice, watch Frankenstein or The Invisible Man instead. Blah!

Winnebago Man

2011-11-10T11:04:00.001-08:00

Ahhh, the early days of viral videos. Remember when these funny, weird little videos would float around the web and people would laugh at them and pass them around for months? Nowadays, they rarely have that kind of longevity. We watch them, laugh, and forget the next day when somebody else's embarrassing video comes to our attention.

Winnebago Man is a documentary about one of the web's first viral video sensations. I had forgotten all about this video, but the moment they showed footage from it, it all came rushing back. The Winnebago Man, known alternately as "The Angriest Man in the World", is Jack Rebney. In 1989, Rebney filmed an industrial video for Winnebago. He was so comically nasty, grouchy, and foul mouthed between takes, that somebody on the crew saw fit to edit together the outtakes and pass the video around. 16 years later, it found its way onto a fledgling Youtube, and took the world by storm. It found its way into pop culture (we're treated to Ben Affleck doing an impression, and a reference to it on 30 Rock), and had countless parody videos and even an Italian knockoff made. The documentary's director, Ben Steinbauer, became fascinated with Rebney's tragically hilarious outbursts, and decided to track the history of the video, and attempt to track down Rebney himself, if he's indeed still out there.

At first, I thought this movie was going to lay a guilt trip on those of us who laugh at viral videos. You know, because these people are human too, and this kind of notoriety could cause a lot of damage to somebody's psyche. The Star Wars Kid is a good example of that. But it doesn't judge us for laughing at these people. We can't help it if these videos are funny. It does address these issues, and even talks to some other subjects of these unintentionally videos. It's all very interesting, and you do sympathize with these people.

Winnebago Man really takes off when Steinbauer finds Rebney. He lives alone, running a campground in Northern California. He seems to be calm, at peace, and able to laugh at himself. If that seems too good to be true, it's because it is. A week later, Steinbauer gets a call from Rebney, saying that was all a ruse. I'm happy to report that Jack Rebney is still the exact same man we saw in that video, and he's irate about the youth of today and their internets and Youtubes.

As the movie progresses, we come to sympathize with Rebney, and maybe even like him a little (don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to spend any time with him). He is who he is. He's grouchy and angry even towards people he likes. The climax is when Steinbauer convinces Jack to attend a Found Footage Festival screening of his video and do a Q & A. You get a sense that Jack has come to terms with this whole thing, maybe just a little.

Winnebago Man reminded me a great deal of last year's awesome documentary, Best Worst Movie, about the cult status of the hilariously terrible Troll 2. They both follow the effects of a new kind of fame, where maybe the people who love something aren't loving it for the intended reasons. These movies both humanize their subjects while still giving us permission to find them funny. We as viewers should just all be mindful that we're all just one accident or unguarded moment away from being a cult sensation ourselves.

Rope

2011-11-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love most about Alfred Hitchcock is the way he would find ways to challenge himself. Sure, he mostly stayed within the thriller genre, so there was always the relative safety of knowing he's doing what he does best. But Hitchcock would sometimes find ways to intentionally restrict himself as a director, such as limiting his camera's perspective to only that which his protagonist could see, in Rear Window.

Rope is Hitchcock at his most experimental, taking away from his arsenal what is perhaps the most important tool a director has for building suspense: editing. Rope is a story told in (seemingly) a single shot. The limitations of the time, specifically the length of a reel, forced him to hide a cut in there every 10 minutes or so. What does Hitchcock do without editing? He finds a million other ways to increase tension.

The story follows two old prep school chums, Brandon and Phillip, who in the film's opening, have just finished strangling a man (David, a third "chum") to death. Brandon believes they have committed the perfect crime, Phillip is not so sure. All that's left to do is to wait until dark, and take the body out to the country to dispose of it.

It's not going to be that easy, though, is it? Brandon is so cocky and brazen, his head so full of philosophical justifications of his own intellectual superiority, that he can't help but see just how far he can dangle his accomplishment over everybody's heads without them catching on. The best way to do that? Throw a dinner party before they go, the guest list full of associates and loved ones of the victim himself.

Among the guests are their housekeeper, David's girlfriend, his father and aunt, the 4th chum in their Chummery, and Rupert, their old teacher, the one who filled Brandon's head with these philosophical notions (played by Jimmy Stewart). James Stewart is the biggest name in the movie, so you know he has a meaty role.

Brandon takes every chance he possibly can to drop little hints of what he and Phillip did in front of the guests. Phillip is just trying to keep it together. Rupert can see that something suspicious is going on, and is putting the pieces together. It's pretty much one of Hitchcock's "perfect murder" setups, where a character starts off thinking they're secure, and we get to watch as their schemes slowly crumble do to a missed detail here and there.

The fun of the movie is in Hitchcock's inventiveness in finding tension and suspense without edits. The camera swoops all around the apartment, following different conversations as they happen in real time, and panning in on objects, letting the audience in on details that the characters may not be aware of yet. The music is only source music, never soundtrack, and it is provided by the jittery Phillip, nervously fumbling through an off-kilter, lilting piano tune.

The lighting is pretty masterful, as well. Set in a New York high rise, the movie uses a phony backdrop of the New York skyline outside. The movie is set at dusk, though, so with some clever trickery, the backdrop is replaced with darker and darker ones as the sun sets. Things reach a crescendo when the blaring neon lights on the building across the street burst on, washing the room in anxious reds and greens.

Some of the edits in Rope are more subtle than others. Most of the time, Hitchcock just pushes in on the back of an actor's jacket and hides the cut there, where the screen is all black. There's a particularly seamless one early in the film, where he cleverly overlaps the sound of piano and dialogue from the next shot in with the previous.

Rope is more known for its gimmick than its content, but I found the story to be quite entertaining. Jimmy Stewart is always fun to watch, isn't he? Hitchcock was the master of pulling our strings, and there's a subtle psychology to the way he would put together a story, especially within his editing. It's interesting to see that he was just as able to mess around with us without the benefit of his greatest tool as he was with it.

In Time

2011-10-31T17:24:00.001-07:00

Andrew Niccol's In Time had to have been the easiest green light a movie has ever gotten. Imagine the pitch meeting: "I've got a high concept science fiction movie for you. It's in a future where aging has been cured, so everybody is sexy and young. Not a wrinkle or grey hair to be found! Hot young actors even play the old people!" "Stop right there. This is the easiest to market movie ever. You can start shooting next week." "Well, hold on, I might need a little time to polish the script--" "You. Can. Start. Shooting. Next. Week." "Off I go!"

I'm giving it a bit of a hard time. I actually had fun watching In Time, for all its flaws. Andrew Niccol wrote and directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show, which were two of my favorite science fiction films of the 1990's. Though he's never since reached the level of those first two movies, he's still quite good at high concepts and big ideas.

The idea behind In Time is that in a vague, distant future (no year is specified), genetic engineering has found a cure for aging. We are now programmed to stop aging on our 25th birthday, and then you get one year. That year isn't just the time you have left, though, it's also your currency. People buy and sell goods and services with their life. If for any reason, the ticker on your wrist runs out, you drop dead on the spot.

Niccol uses this conceit as a metaphor for the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Our hero is Will Salas, played by Justin Timberlake, who lives in the lower class district (Time Zone) of Dayton (get it? Date-on! HAHAHA). He lives quite literally day to day, and gets by working in a factory. While out drinking with his buddies, he comes across a guy with over 100 years left in his life, and saves him from the "Minute Men", who are kind of a time mafia? They steal people's time. The guy is from the land of the rich, where people can afford to live forever (New Greenwich, which is a ton more clever than Dayton). While hiding from the Minute Men, the guy tells Will all about how there's no reason everybody can't live forever, and the rich just keep raising taxes and the cost of living in order to control the population. Then, while Will is sleeping, he gives him the remainder of his life.

When Will wakes up, his first plan is to take his mom and head up to Greenwich, but when his mom dies on the way to meet him because bus prices just went up, it becomes... personal. He heads to Greenwich on his own, wins another millenium in a poker game, gets chased by Time Keepers (the time police, led by Cillian Murphy), falls in love with and kidnaps a rich man's daughter (Amanda Seyfried). Together they become Chronobonnie and Time Clyde, sort of Robin Hood figures who steal time from the rich and give to the poor.

The story is pretty fun. It lifts elements from a lot of different sources, which is OK if they are put to good use. I personally enjoy movies set in elaborate sci-fi worlds with their own sets of rules, so that aspect was fun for me. In Time's weakness is in the script itself. The dialogue is often pretty bad. Every bad play on words and pun involving time is used. The characters mostly feel pretty stock. They feel more like they're there to serve their purpose in the story than be real people. The class metaphor is forced on us pretty hard and often feels belabored and obvious.

The cast is actually pretty good. I actually like all the young-ish actors in it, and think they all could have done better if their characters had a little more depth. Andrew Niccol wisely put his best actors in the roles of older characters. Cillian Murphy and Vincent Kartheiser give the best performances. Kartheiser does a variation on his Mad Men character when playing Sylvia's father. He definitely sells the weight of old age better than I think Timberlake would have done (and Olivia Wilde, who I never bought as Timberlake's mom). There's one guy I want to point out, one of the Minute Men, who doesn't even have much of a speaking part, but decided it would be awesome if he wore a fedora slightly tilted. I have nothing to say about his performance, I just thought he looked ridiculous. He could be one of Timberlake's backup dancers.

Overall, In Time was a decent piece of cheesy entertainment. I'm not sure if it was worth a trip to the theater for, but we only paid matinee prices, so I can't complain. The fun of the movie is largely in the details of its well-realized world. I just wish they took a couple more passes on that screenplay to make the characters and dialogue a little more well-realized too.

Carnival of Souls

2011-10-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie quite like Carnival of Souls. At least, I've never seen a movie from this time period that feels like Carnival of Souls. Made independently by director Herk Harvey (his only feature), the movie feels nothing like your typical early 1960's horror fare. It forgoes traditional shocks and gimmickry many of the B-Movies of the time rely on. Instead, it tells a different kind of ghost story, mournful, elegiac, and all too human.

Carnival of Souls is the story of Mary, a young woman who, at the start of the movie, hurtles off a bridge in a car with her friends, an accident in a drag race. While the police are trawling the river for the car, she mysteriously comes ashore, dazed but seemingly unhurt. We learn that she is a professional organ player and is soon going to move to Utah to play at a church. On her way there, she drives by a creepy abandoned amusement park, and then out of nowhere, sees a ghoulish figure (played by Herk himself).

Mary moves into a boarding house and begins her job, but still something feels off about her. She is cold and distant, and has no interest whatsoever in associating with other people. This is much to the only other boarder's chagrin, because let me tell you, he is interested. Over the course of the movie, things escalate. Mary continues to see the ghoul. At times, she herself seems to fade out of existence, all sound drains from the world and nobody hears or reacts to her. She is still drawn by the memory of the old amusement park.

I think what most struck me about Carnival of Souls was the truly independent feel of the whole thing. Most movies in the late 50's and early 60's were brimming with glamor and artifice. Everybody was beautiful and wore only the most fashionable of clothing, all the locations were phony and perfect looking. Besides the actress who played Mary, who was making a real go at the acting thing, the cast is made up of amateur local actors. The acting for the most part isn't top notch, but there's something that just feels real about these people. They look normal. They dress in clothes that normal people wore in 1961. The locations aren't sets and sound stages, they're real locations. You get to see what a department store in Salt Lake City must have really looked like 50 years ago. That kind of stuff fascinates me.

In some ways, Carnival of Souls feels a few years ahead of its time. It feels much closer to a movie from the late 60's or the 70's even, than it does to its early 60's brethren. The dialogue is more natural and less stylized. The camerawork, editing and sound design have a bit of an experimental vibe to it. There's a beautiful and mesmerizing sequence where Mary is playing the church organ in a very sensual manner while the ghosts and ghouls in the amusement park waltz.

It's too bad Carnival of Souls failed to perform in its initial release. I'm not sure if this was just a one-off for him, or if Herk Harvey had aspirations of making more films. I wonder what else he would have done, if he had been given the opportunity.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

2011-10-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

I would stay the night at a haunted house for $10,000. The trick is this: Stay in one place for the whole night, and never separate from the group. Why doesn't anybody ever do this? Come on, losers!

House on Haunted Hill is a fun little chiller brought to us by the great P.T. Barnum of B-Movies, William Castle. He added another layer of fun to his movies with his love of twists, gimmicks, and trickery. Even though these gimmicks were primarily to put butts in seats, there was a real sense of showmanship behind them too.

The characters in this movie are a lot like the audience of a William Castle movie. They have been issued a challenge by a millionaire to stay the night in a haunted house. If they stay all night, they get $10,000, no ifs, ands or buts. The millionaire is played by Vincent Price, a man who is on his 5th unhappy marriage. The other four wives have met unfortunate ends.

One of the guys staying in the house is played by the jittery dude from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. He's a bit of a drunk, but he knows the history of the house, and he explains to the others (and the audience) that there have been a lot of grisly goings on in there. Bodies found with missing heads, a giant pit full of acid in the basement. A question to all you homeowners: If you buy a house with a giant acid pit already installed in the dungeon, do you keep it? Does that increase the property value?

So the group gets locked in, and there are some ghost sightings, but to me they don't look like ghosts, they just look like an old lady on wheels. But still, severed heads appear and disappear. One particular lady appears to be seeing all these things. Then somebody turns up dead, hanging from a rope. Also, I don't know how far ahead Vincent Price planned for this, but he has a bunch of adorable little coffin shaped boxes containing a handgun for each of his guests, just in case.

Anyway, the plot makes little sense, and once the twists start adding up, one after the other, the house of haunted cards comes tumbling down with even a little bit of questioning. Who is betraying who? Is the house really haunted or not? How long did they have that planned? Not important. What matters to Castle is that the shocks keep coming. He surely knew if he kept surprising the audience, the logic of the surprises wouldn't really matter in the long run.

I've read that House on Haunted Hill played in theaters specially rigged to release skeletons upon the audience at certain times in the movie that might call for skeletons. See? That sounds like fun, doesn't it? That's what William Castle's movies were all about. Fun. And as ridiculous and hilariously convoluted as House on Haunted Hill was, it was still a lot of fun.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-10-29T09:57:00.001-07:00

We all find the subject matter of kooky religious cults to be fascinating, don't we? I mean, as far as I can tell, that's pretty universal. The non-religious among us get to point at them and go, "SEE?" and the religious among us get to go, "at least that's not us, right guys?" Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense, unsettling, and engrossing look at what it's like to be in such a fringe religion, and the psychological damage they can cause.

Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Melizabeth Molsen in the title role (just Martha, really), as a girl who, after two years of living on a farm with a tiny sect, sneaks away and finds refuge with her older sister and her husband. Unfortunately, though she could elude their physical grasp, it is much more difficult to escape the hold these people have on her psyche. She has become seriously warped by years of psychological battering.

The narrative unfolds in two timelines, with flashbacks covering her time with the cult alternating with the present scenes of Martha desperately struggling to adjust to her freedom. She's distant and uncommunicative with her sister (played by the always welcome Sarah Paulson). As far as the sister knows, she was off with a boy for two years and now she's back. Of course, as Martha's behavior gets more and more bizarre and downright scary, the sister figures out it goes much deeper than that.

In the flashbacks, we see Martha's initiation into the cult through her own eyes. Upon her first meeting with Patrick, the charismatic leader of this commune, played by a scary great John Hawkes, Martha loses her name and is rechristened Marcy May. Of course, that's the first step, taking away the identity. Over the course of the flashbacks, we see her shattered much further, until eventually, she is actively aiding in indoctrinating the newbies.

The acting is all around great, but this is Elizabeth Olsen's movie all the way. Your heart breaks after first witnessing the outcome of the poor decisionmaking of a wayward youth, and then seeing first hand the events that caused all that damage. She has some pretty tough scenes in the movie.

John Hawkes is also pretty amazing as Patrick. At first glance, he seems benevolent enough, though it quickly becomes clear that there's a sinister undercurrent to everything he's saying. He demonstrates in his performance that ability a cult leader has to get under a person's skin, pick away at their vulnerabilities, and bend them to his will. From the things he makes these people do, especially the women, you can tell that he gets off on the power. In the very first scene, we see that the men get to eat first, while the women wait in the next room until it's their turn to have a crack at what's left.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is written and directed by Sean Durkin. I believe it's his first film. I really liked a lot of the dialogue, I think he really nailed that brainwashed culty way of speaking. A great example is the speech Patrick gives when he teaches Marcy May to shoot a gun, before then trying to talk her into shooting a living thing. There's a single line of dialogue in the movie that creeped me out to the extreme. It implies something extremely disturbing, and then it is never elaborated upon, wisely leaving it to the audience's imaginations. I won't spoil the line, I'll let the reader see if they can figure out which one I'm referring to.

Visually, Durkin plays a lot with contrasting Martha's two homes. The farmhouse she lives in, though seemingly homey and welcoming, is crowded and claustrophobic. She sleeps in a cramped room with the rest of the girls, practically in a pile. Everything is shared, she has no possessions of her own. She's trapped in by the forest surrounding the farm. Conversely, her sister's summer home is large and open. The walls are white and pristine, and there are huge windows everywhere. She's not walled in by a forest, instead, there's a lake out front. But for some reason, the summer home never feels welcoming either. It's a rental, so none of the furniture is theirs. It feels too clean, almost alien. Adding to the discomfort is the fact that her sister's husband is openly resistant to even letting her stay, because he doesn't understand her and she's really ruining his vacation.

One going to see this movie should be warned of a couple things: 1: Not a first date movie. Some pretty disturbing sex scenes are within. And 2: Don't expect a clean resolution, or very much closure, even. This isn't that type of movie. You never know at the end of the movie if she is really free from Patrick's clutches or not. It's wide open for discussion. I know people who find movies like this infuriating, so if you think you are one of those people, this movie is probably not for you. Even I was shocked by how abrupt the ending was.

Martha Marcy May Marlene was, for me, a scarier movie than all of the horror movies I've watched in the last month. Knowing that similar things to this go on in the real world makes ghost movies feel utterly ridiculous by comparison.

The Sentinel

2011-10-27T10:45:00.001-07:00

Whew. I think I got in over my head with this one. But more on that later.

This was a horror movie from 1977, notable for featuring young Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small parts. It stars Woody Allen as Alvy Singer, and follows the various pitfalls in his relationship with Diane Keaton... oh wait, that's Annie Hall. What, were Goldblum and Walken a package deal in 1977? Oh, man, they should have been a comedy team, that would have been amazing. Sorry, that was stupid.

Starting over, The Sentinel was a horror movie from 1977 by director Michael Winner, the guy who made the Death Wish movies. It's one of those Catholic horror movies that were so popular in the 1970's after the success of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.

It's about a model named Alison (Cristina Raines) who moves into a new apartment because she wants to live on her own for a while before hooking up with her boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon). The place is beautiful, and the real estate agent seems suspiciously eager to rent it to her, dropping the price like crazy. Not long after moving there, Alison starts feeling weird, having flashbacks to her youthful suicide attempt (she walked in on her dad having an orgy). She has all sorts of weird neighbors that creep her out, including an old blind priest upstairs and an old man with a bird on his shoulder and a cat that he makes cakes for, not unlike Danny McBride in Pineapple Express (ok, pretty unlike that). When she mentions them, she is told that the only other tenant is the priest. So, her boyfriend sees something wrong and he sets out to get to the bottom of all this.

Turns out that the building is the gateway to hell and all these weird people that only Alison can see are damned. Also, Michael has a secret of his own, and also also, the church has plans of their own for Alison.

I've got to say, The Sentinel was pretty watchable. My favorite stuff was the more subtle horror, but it goes all out around halfway in. There's a pretty freaky sequence in the middle where Alison is attacked by her dead orgy dad.

I didn't like Cristina Raines' acting at first, but I have to say she grew on me over the course of the movie. Chris Sarandon holds a place in my heart as Jerry the Vampire in the original Fright Night, so I'm happy to see him in stuff. For much of the movie, I thought it was a good guy role, but ultimately, I guess his character was more in line with what you would expect Chris Sarandon to play. I should have known better, he even had a mustache. There are other name actors in the movie, including Burgess Meredith, Eli Wallach, and Beverly D'Angelo, and that old vaudeville duo, Goldblum and Walken, who, joking aside, actually share no screentime with each other.

The ending was way too much for me and kind of soured the entire experience. See, Michael Winner decided that when the gates of hell bust open and its denizens come out to take Alison away, they should be twisted and disfigured. So he hired a bunch of actually twisted and disfigured people to play the parts. I couldn't look, it was too heartbreaking and made me feel guilty and gross. So I basically sat with my head down for the last 10 minutes trying to work out what was going on just by listening.

I probably just shouldn't have watched the movie. I knew going into it about that stuff, I just thought maybe I could handle it. Anyway, as far as horror goes, the movie is pretty effective, and the story is interesting. I just could have really done without the exploitative stuff at the end. I guess, watch The Sentinel if you think you can handle it, but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing like I am, you should probably skip it and watch the Exorcist again, because it was a much better movie, anyway.

The Old Dark House

2011-10-26T20:53:00.000-07:00

I'm back, everybody! Sorry I haven't been updating as frequently lately. I plan on having a whole bunch done over the weekend. I hope nobody is getting tired of my Universal horror movie reviews, because I have another one here.

After seeing Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein, I became very interested in director James Whale. In research mode, I looked to see if he did any other horror movies in his career. Turns out he did another one in between, and it's really not much like the other three. I mean that in a complimentary way, of course. Not only does it demonstrate his versatility as a storyteller and director, it's also a cracking good time.

The movie I'm referring to is The Old Dark House, made in between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, and starring several of the same actors, including the great Boris Karloff. James Whale's moody, expressionistic horror style is still in full effect, but is tempered by a good deal of comedy. I wouldn't say the movie is a straight up comedy, per se, but it's one of those movies where a group of funny characters are put in the middle of a very serious situation. The balance is struck quite well.

The story follows a married couple, the Wavertons, and their wisecracking friend, as they get caught driving in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. After nearly getting buried in a mudslide, they're forced to stop for the night at the only house around. Now you might be asking is the house old? Is the house dark?

Highlight below for SPOILERS:

It IS.

The house belongs to the Femms, an old brother and sister. The brother is old and suspicious, the sister is super religious, deaf, and mean. And old. They have a scary giant drunken mute named Morgan (Karloff) in their employ, as their butler. They also have some secrets in the house. The cranky sister especially doesn't want the Wavertons and their bro to stay, but are persuaded to let them. The Wavertons do their best to be charming and polite but still seem unwelcome, so if that isn't enough, another stranded couple find their way to the house and, being a care free widowed nobleman and his showgirl companion, completely impose themselves upon the Femms. Once all the players are in place, a sometimes comedic, sometimes menacing narrative unfolds as the skeletons in the Femm family closet are set free upon our group of travelers.

The characters are all around great. The cast is such a fun and versatile array of character types, and they have great chemistry with each other. The movie has kind of an episodic feel to it where the cast splits up and we get to see how they each interact with different characters. Karloff gets the short end of the straw this time, though. Not that he isn't great, just that he is still stuck playing a hulking, non-communicative monster. What a role to get typecast as! The movie actually opens with a card assuring the audience that this is, indeed, the same Karloff that played Frankenstein. He's just that versatile, everyone. This time, he has a beard!

I especially liked Melvyn Douglas as the Waverton's easygoing friend character. He starts off the movie seemingly as a sidekick and ends up sort of being the hero and the romantic lead. Charles Laughton is both likeable and sympathetic as the widower who wants the world to think he's a hard partying socialite, but is inwardly sad and lonely. Gloria Stuart is quite good as Margaret Waverton, too. One of the best moments involves her playing with her shadow on a wall. Also, hey, she was pretty hot. What? She's the old lady from Titanic? Shut up, that's weird to think of. I'm leaving people out, but everyone is good, really. There is one more player that I'm not mentioning because I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say the Femm siblings aren't the only family members in the Old Dark House. Wait until you meet this guy, even by today's standards, he's a pretty freaky character.

I liked that there was nothing supernatural in the movie, just a messed up family in a house in the middle of nowhere. I know there are more movies that are like this, but they seem to be pretty rare nowadays. I also like a lot of the stylistic choices James Whale made. I think I mentioned in my Bride of Frankenstein review that I thought the comedic stuff was weird or something. Well, I take that back now, he handles it wonderfully. Also, the ending is quite intense and pretty brutal. Not, like, gory, or anything, but it's easy to forget that before the Hayes code got in the way, old movies could have some surprisingly jarring material in them.

I'm glad that seeing the other Universal movies led the way to this one. I know this could be sacrilege, but I might even have liked The Old Dark House better than the monster movies. I mean, I understand why the monster movies are great and impactful and iconic, but the juxtaposition of comedy and horror, as well as the strong characterization and ensemble feel of the cast really spoke to me. I think I need to dig even deeper sometime and see what some of James Whale's non-horror pictures are like. Just not the Showboat movie because I saw the play in 8th grade and haaaaated it.

The Wolf Man (1941)

2011-10-24T10:16:00.001-07:00

Here we are, edging our way towards Halloween, and here I am with another classic horror film to review. Over the last year, I've been catching up on the classic Universal monster movies. It seems to me that they are required watching that I've somehow managed to miss out on all this time. Now that I've seen the first three Frankenstein movies (2)(3), The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I've been meaning to get to The Wolf Man for a while.

The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner, stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, a man who is returning home to his family estate in Universal's Old-Timey Village Set, after the death of his older brother. While there, he meets Gwen, a local who works at the antiques shop across the way. In the shop he finds and purchases an interesting old cane with a silver wolf's head for a handle, and in so doing learns of the town's rich mythology around lycanthropy.

Through persistence and creepiness (always works in old movies), Larry also manages to land a date. A band of gypsies are in town so he takes her and one of her friends to see a fortune teller (Bela Lugosi). The seer reads Gwen's friend's palm, seeing a pentagram on it, meaning she is the next victim of the werewolf. He freaks and tells her to go while she still can and takes off himself. Moments later, she is indeed attacked by a wolf. Talbot attempts to rescue her, beating the wolf to death with his cane, and gets bitten in the process.

The next morning, Talbot wakes up to find the bite healed completely. The police are also visiting. They're investigating the murder of the fortune teller, who they found beaten to death with Larry's cane. By this point, Talbot has put two and two together, whether he wants to admit it or not: The wolf that bit him was the fortune teller, and it is only a matter of time before he, too, will become a monster.

I was quite surprised how completely character-driven The Wolf Man was. The Wolf Man himself only has five minutes of screen time, tops. The movie is more about Larry Talbot dealing with the dread and inevitability of becoming a monster. Lon Chaney Jr. is really great at this. He has extremely expressive eyes. Even when he is outwardly denying that something is wrong, you can read on his face that he knows the truth.

I don't really understand why he never becomes a full wolf, even though Bela Lugosi did. Instead he becomes the hairy dog man we all know and love today. I suppose you could rationalize it by saying he's still early in his transitioning and that were he to make it further along in his transformation he will eventually become a full wolf. The truth is surely that Universal simply wanted Chaney to play the monster, not just hand those duties off to a trained dog.

The make-up effects and transformation were groundbreaking for their time, though they were still early days for these things. As I said above, the Wolf Man has very little screen time. It must have taken forever to transform him. The first time it happens we only see his legs change. We don't get the famous series-of-dissolves on Chaney's face until the very end.

The direction by George Waggner is decent, though I thought James Whale's work in the Frankenstein, Bride, and Invisible Man was far better. Still, Waggner got some great performances out of his cast, and obviously, he helped Chaney to create a truly iconic monster, who would have been nothing if the man behind him weren't so well fleshed out.

Another thing that struck me that I'm guessing people nowadays don't really consider is that the Universal movies weren't just done one after another. I think we tend to sort of clump them all together that way when we think of them. You just associate Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as one big group. The fact is, these movies were all made over the course of several decades. I honestly don't know why that's important. I just found it interesting, I guess.

The Wolfman, while not my favorite of the Universal monster movies, was still 100% worth seeing. Lon Chaney Jr. steals the whole show, though, surprisingly, it was his performance as the man that carries the movie, adding more weight and underlying humanity to the tragic circumstances he must endure as the wolf.

Tales that Witness Madness

2011-10-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

In my last review, for The Innocents, I mentioned cinematographer Freddie Francis, who has a memorable and respectable filmography, having won much acclaim shooting movies for directors like David Lynch, Jack Clayton, and Martin Scorsese. But for me, the fascinating side of Freddie Francis was his career as a director. Through the 60's, 70's, and 80's, he made many low budget horror films for smaller studios such as Amicus and Hammer. I doubt it was the career he imagined for himself, but from the few of his directorial efforts that I've seen, I'd say he at least did his best to have a good time with it.

Tales that Witness Madness is one of several horror anthology films that Francis directed. At least four that I know of, including the cult classic Tales from the Crypt. They all have a pretty similar structure: four or five short horror stories, usually with an ironic twist ending, bookended by a character telling the stories, or something similar. In the end, there's one last ironic twist that ties it all together.

In Tales that Witness Madness, the framing device is a psychiatrist (played by Donald Pleasance) showing off his patients at a mental asylum to another psychiatrist. Each patient has a story of the supernatural that brought them there.

One story follows a boy who escapes from his constantly arguing parents by having an imaginary friend. His friend happens to be a tiger. As he begins to grow closer and closer to his imaginary friend (sneaking large slabs of meat into the bedroom and such), his parents begin to get concerned. Unfortunately, that just leads to more arguing. Whatever is a boy and his imaginary tiger to do?

Next, we have a man who owns an antique store. He puts a weird old portrait and an old timey bicycle out for sale. These items draw him in, and give him the ability to travel back in time to the subject of the portrait's past.

The third story is about a man who brings home a weird tree to display as art. His wife doesn't like the tree, as it looks oddly human and creeps her out. As the man's affection towards the tree grows, so does the woman's jealousy of it, until the tree itself takes on a life of its own...

And finally, we have a tale of human sacrifice as Kim Novak plays a literary agent trying to land a client by throwing him a grand luau, traditional of his people. Little does she realize she is aiding him in a cannibalistic ritual, with her own daughter as the main course.

Whoops, that last one was kind of a spoiler. But you know what? It doesn't matter. If you can't figure out where this thing is leading well in advance of it happening, you must be 8 years old. Which is probably the best age to watch this movie. Just like Francis did with Tales from the Crypt, Tales that Witness Madness is infused with a sense of good-natured, self-aware fun. These are the kind of R-Rated movies that a kid can watch and feel like they got away with something, and a parent (well, depending on the parent) doesn't have to be too concerned.

Of the four, my favorite was the first, with the kid and the tiger. It was like a demented prototype for Calvin and Hobbes. The one with the old-timey bike and the painting was really good, too. The painting always changed expressions, and was hilarious.

The twists are usually pretty obvious, but the fun of the movie is really in watching the stories unfold. You get to watch these oblivious characters stumble into their horrible fates, knowing you would never make the same mistakes they did, because you are smart.

Tales that Witness Madness, along with Crypt, and surely other Freddie Francis anthologies, would make for a fun night. The stories are short, usually enjoyable, fun to laugh with and at. The camera work and direction are ably done, and the actors seem to be enjoying their roles. Though Freddie Francis the director never had the opportunities that Freddie Francis the cinematographer had, I have the same amount of respect for him. He took the chances he was given, kept on making movies at the edge of the system, and he always gave us a little twist at the end.

The Innocents

2011-10-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

Haunted House movies have seen better days. The trends in horror are ever shifting, but right now we're getting all these shoddy, handheld, "realistic" ghost movies which we're supposed to believe is found footage even though the people in them are clearly acting. Fifty years ago, however, we were getting some quality ghost movies, atmospheric, unsettling, with rich visuals, and loaded with depth and subtext. Movies like Robert Wise's The Haunting, one of my all-time favorites, and this movie, Jack Clayton's The Innocents, which I think just might give The Haunting a run for it's money.

The Innocents is a 1961 adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with a screenplay by Truman Capote. It stars Deborah Kerr as a woman hired to look over a rich guy's country estate and in particular his niece and nephew. He's too busy living it up in London and enjoying his "bachelorhood" and can't be bothered. On the surface these children seem alright, but she begins to suspect something is amiss with them. When she uncovers some unsavory secrets of the history of the estate, she comes to believe that the children are possessed by two former tenants and the only way to save these children is to force them to confront the ghosts.

The movie sets itself apart at the very beginning, by opening with just a black screen with the little girl singing a haunting song (which recurs throughout the rest of the movie). We all know that little girls singing is instant creepiness. Then as the credits roll on the right, a pair of hands fade in on the left, looking as though they're furiously praying. As the credits end, the owner of the hands is revealed to be Deborah Kerr. Really artfully done.

The two children in the movie are great. They don't feel like kids acting like adults, they really do feel like adults acting like children. When they think nobody is watching they slip back into adult mode. The boy gets especially creepy when he gets the hots for Deborah Kerr.

The screenplay, direction, and cinematography are all top notch, too. The cinematography is by the great Freddie Francis, a guy whose career I find fascinating. I love that he did such beautiful camerawork as a cinematographer with films like The Innocents and Glory, and made fun, goofy horror films, like Tales from the Crypt and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly as a director. There's some incredible cinematography in The Innocents, including a memorable montage of overlaying images.

There's a fascinating sexual subtext through the movie. They, of course, dance around it for the most part, but we learn that that the people that may be haunting this place may have performed sexual acts in front of these kids. We also are treated to a very unsettling kiss or two. I would, in fact, say that the mature subject matter in this 50-year-old movie and the 100-year-old story it's adapted from would hold up as shocking to many people even today. I couldn't help but wonder after watching The Innocents if Henry James was perhaps sexually abused as a child. I'm sure that has at least been theorized by others, I don't know much about the guy.

The Innocents is a classic ghost movie, certainly one of the best I've seen. It would be great to watch it as a double feature with The Haunting on a stormy October night (hey, like tonight!). I know that the themes and styles of horror are cyclical, and I know that ghost movies will pendulum back in the direction of films such as this sooner or later. We had a decent run of them 10 or 15 years ago. But while we're waiting for that, we'll always be able to fall back on the classics.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro)

2011-10-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hey, everybody! Sorry I haven't updated with any reviews in almost a week! But there's a reason for that. It's because this one is sort of special.
That's right, this is the 100th review that I've posted on I Probably Liked It since I began on January 1st. Up there is my deformed, lumpy, MS Paint counterpart. I call him Jalm. I don't have a mouse, so this was the best I could manage on one of those laptop touchpads. Believe it or not, the pictures actually do get a little better.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was following a thread on Twitter where director Edgar Wright was discussing important or awesome films he hasn't seen yet. In that discussion, he mentioned such classics as Gone with the Wind, which I also haven't seen yet. But another title grabbed my eye: Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Unlike "Gone with the Wind", that title just screams out "WATCH ME". I did a little research and found out that Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is kind of hard to come by, but I eventually found an affordable copy on eBay, and here we are.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, or Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro, is a Japanese horror film directed by Hajime Soto, and it is completely awesome. I can't believe this movie doesn't have a bigger cult. It is not only one of the craziest vampire movies I've ever seen, but also one of the best alien invasion movies I've ever seen. That's right, folks, alien vampires!

No, not like that! You'll see. It's also loaded with a strong anti-war message and social commentary. Yayy, substance!

Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro opens up on a plane in transit to Japan. We meet some of the passengers, the pilots and the stewardess (it's the 60's so she's not a flight attendant, duh!). Everyone is unsettled by a strange ominous phenomena: the sky has inexplicably turned blood red.

That sky might be familiar to you: Quentin Tarantino used it on The Bride's flight to Japan in Kill Bill Vol. 1. To add to the apocalyptic portent, birds keep splattering onto the windows of the plane, as though they've lost all sense of direction in their need to escape from something.
To add to this doom and gloom, the pilot gets word on his radio that there's a bomb on his plane. He must go down the aisle and search everyone's luggage to find it. Though a bomb doesn't turn up, the pilot does find a sniper rifle hidden in a secret compartment in one of the suitcases. Turns out that the owner of the luggage is a political assassin who just killed the Prime Minister of England or an Ambassador, someone important, I'm tired. He hijacks the plane, but before he can do anything about it, an object glowing with a blinding light shoots by overhead and malfunctions the plane, causing it to crash.

Now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the survivors of this plane must deal with each other until they're rescued. The immediately clash. The survivors are as such: the level-headed copilot, the stewardess, an American woman whose husband just died in Vietnam, a corrupt senator, an arms dealer and his wife, who he treats like property, a detached psychiatrist, the suspected bomber, the assassin, and, incidentally, a space biologist (what luck!).

When the assassin, thought dead, comes to, he takes the stewardess hostage and leaves the plane. The copilot runs after them to save her. Little does he know what the assassin is going to find.
That's right, a spaceship. What you can't tell? Sorry, yeah, that's an orange, glowing spaceship. He falls into a trance and walks toward it like a moth to a flame, silhouetted and shimmering by the light. When he gets up to it he sees something approach. An oozing, pulsating blob. It's exerting its mind control on him.
The Space Turd throbs and then something crazy happens!
His forehead pops open! The Slime Monster disgustingly squiggles its way into the hole in his head. Then, as the assassin struggles to fight it, balls of light flash all over half of his face, and the Space Turd takes control, turning the assassin into a Space Vampire. YEAH!

The movie gets even cooler from there. The survivors argue and backstab each other and wish harm upon each other and just generally act like jerks, as the copilot and the stewardess try to keep them in line. And then we get to watch them get picked off one by one by this creepy monster with a hole in his head.

The filmmaking and effects are really cool. Hajime Soto uses all sorts of neat tricks with lighting and colors to draw us in. As you see above, he flashed a kaleidoscope of little circular lights on the assassin's face as he was being taken over by the alien. Another really cool little lighting trick happens when the Space Vampires drink people's blood.

He changes the lighting in the shot to a blue light, making it look like all life and color has been drained from the passengers' skin.

The monster, specifically the Assassin as possessed by the Alien, is truly iconic and badass. As if that gross, bright red hole in his forehead wasn't enough, he is clad all in white; turtleneck, jacket, pants, shoes, even white gloves. And not a speck of dirt of blood gets on him. This guy is good.
I'm not going to tell you who lives or who dies, and I'm not going to tell you the awesome, awesome ending, but I will leave you off with one more tantalizing glimpse into Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.
So, this is a pretty amazing movie. I recommend you hunt down a copy and check it out. I can't believe it doesn't have a bigger cult following in America. Let's do something about that, shall we?

So, that's all, folks! Thanks to everyone who has been reading my dumb little reviews for the last 10 months. Thanks to everyone who just read it once, too. I hope you liked my drawings, it was super fun to do. I definitely want to do more in the future, but this was insanely time consuming for such crude pictures. No, I'm not much better with pen and paper. And hey, I'd love to hear what you think, so feel free to leave comments on this or any of my other entries.

Bye!

The Last Man on Earth

2011-10-10T13:05:00.001-07:00

Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend is one of the great sci-fi/horror stories. That I am aware of, it was the first time vampirism was established as a medical condition rather than a supernatural one, a concept that has been used many times since. Sydney Salkow's The Last Man on Earth is the first of three adaptation, of I Am Legend, and it is probably the best.

Vincent Price stars as Robert Morgan, the seemingly lone human survivor of a global outbreak. He spends his days maintaining his sanity and humanity through a strict routine: Checking the radio for survivors, carving wooden stakes, going out for supplies, hunting and destroying vampires, disposing of the bodies, making repairs to his heavily barricaded home. At night, the vampires come to him. Led by Morgan's old colleague, Cortman, they gather outside his house and call him out, taunting him, and trying to break their way in. All Morgan can do is try to ignore it until daylight comes and he can begin his routine again.

A break in his routine occurs when Morgan finds a dog. The dog leads him to more signs of human life. Everything he is and believes himself to be is thrown into question when he finds a woman and takes her to his home.

The movie, written by but not credited to Matheson, keeps very close to the novel. There are a couple of pretty big changes, but this is the most faithful version of the three (the other two being The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, and of course, I Am Legend with Will Smith).

The first act is largely without dialogue, driven by Morgan's narration as he drives around the empty streets and hunts and scavenges his way through the wasteland. It's all very starkly shot and well executed, and is probably the best section of the movie. There's an extended flashback showing the beginnings of the outbreak and how Morgan lost his family and so on. Then, after he learns the intentions of Ruth, the woman he finds, the movie concludes with a chase sequence and finally a faceoff between Morgan and the creatures.

One thing I didn't like is that the vampires are not very strong. They seem to have pretty terrible coordination and they amble around like zombies. They also really have no distinctive features that set them apart from any other human. They just wear clothes that are too big.

Vincent Price is fun to watch, though he is not really a good fit for the role. In the first third when he is alone, going about his business, he's pretty good, but when it gets to the flashbacks that show him as your average family man, the illusion is shattered. His very distinctive voice and inflections don't really sell that. Same with when he's playing opposite Ruth.

The story of I Am Legend has a timeless quality and a true resonance. The fact that Hollywood keeps returning to it is proof of that. There has yet to be a perfect adaptation, but it's fun to watch how the story has evolved with each incarnation. It seems to get farther from the source material each time. They should do a new version every decade or so, just for the fun of it.

Real Steel

2011-10-07T23:23:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing I strive to avoid in my life, it's cynicism. I don't always win, but I do my best. That's probably why about 95% of the reviews I write are positive. I tend to look for the good qualities in things, and it's generally pretty easy for me to overlook the bad.

When the first trailers came out for Shawn Levy's Real Steel, I thought it looked ridiculous. I never really stopped thinking that, but reviews started coming in that were saying it's better than it should be. And since I have a hard time saying no to robots, I decided to go check it out and hope for a fun movie.

Real Steel is in the near future where Robot Boxing is the sport of kings. Seriously, the near future. Like 8 years from now, human boxing is gone and Robot Boxing has taken over. Hugh Jackman is Charlie, a former boxer, now down-on-his- luck robot boxer, who, after an old flame dies, is saddled with her son. They find a robot in a junk yard and fix him up and take him to fights. The robot, Atom, rises through the ranks and eventually faces the world champion, who is, of course controlled by a couple of rich, corporate people who have lost touch with the more personal, home grown side of Robot Boxing(?). Do they win? Does it matter, as long as they all learn?

I didn't expect the story to be original, and I don't mind a formulaic story if it's well told. Real Steel takes a few elements from Rocky, a few from Over the Top. The antagonistic dynamic between Jackman and the kid is surely lifted from Paper Moon. Whatever, I didn't mind. What I did mind, however, was the fact that I did not like either of the lead characters one bit.

Jackman lost me in the first scene and never won me back. When we meet him, he's taking his old robot to a state fair or possibly a rodeo or something in Texas, where he's being paid to fight a bull. He's told it's an 800-pounder, but he's disappointed to find a much larger one in its place. So he fights the bull anyway. First it charges the robot and the robot flips it over. It gets back up and the robot socks the bull in the face. I don't care that the bull won the fight. When you introduce your hero by having him perform acts of animal cruelty with a 1000lb hunk of remote controlled steel, you lose me. I'm not a vegetarian or anything, but come on.

As the story progresses, he ditches out on the guys he owes money to, and goes to court to sign the son he wants nothing to do with over to his dead mom's sister. When the aunt's husband comes to him and asks him to keep the kid for the summer, he agrees to do it for $100,000 dollars. He sold the kid to these people. He's a horrible guy. Of course he comes to love the kid by the end, and he learns all sorts of wonderful lessons, but in my eye, too little, way too late.

As for the kid, he's a cocky little shit. I just don't like cocky kids. I have nothing against the actor, who did fine, but I really hated the character. My wife says it's just me, maybe it is. There's this scene where he grabs a microphone at a match and starts trash-talking and stuff. And the way he and Jackman argue and fight through the first half of the movie is just awful. I don't mind a tough kid character, but this didn't work at all.

Another problem I had with him is he's too smart for a kid. He knows everything about Robot Boxing before we meet him. Admittedly, if Robot Boxing existed, I might have at 11 too. Additionally, he speaks Japanese (from playing bootleg video games???) and is also apparently a genius robot programmer.

I know it's a kids movie. I'm trying to turn off the cynicism. But remember all those great Spielberg movies about ordinary kids put into extraordinary situations? Hey, remember Super 8 like 4 months ago? Why couldn't this kid be more like that? Hell, Spielberg executive produced this movie!

Another thing that bugged me is the complete lack of safety procedures these robot boxing leagues seem to have. I mean, the underground fight clubs are one thing, but even the professional ones have wide open rings with just chains around them, and the audience and fighters standing right next to it. These are half ton monsters built to destroy each other! You're going to let a KID near them? There are scenes where these robots limbs and heads go flying into the audience.

Now let's take a second to do some calculating here: According to the movie these robots weigh 1,000 pounds. So that's proportionately about, say, 6 times the weight of a human. And if the kid in Jerry Maguire taught me anything it's that the human head weighs 8 pounds. That means these robots have heads that weigh 48 pounds. And they fly into the audience, presumably crushing all who stand in their way! People must die at these matches every day!

So I guess that about sums it up. I really hoped Real Steel would win me over. Instead it lost me in the first scene and never won me back. Just give me someone to latch onto other than these jerks. I'd overlook all the logic problems and cliches if only I liked the characters.

Vampyr

2011-10-06T13:20:00.001-07:00

The 1932 film Vampyr, by director Carl Theodor Dreyer, begins with a card that reads: "This story is about the strange adventures of young Allan Gray. His studies of devil worship and vampire terror of earlier centuries have made him a dreamer, for whom the boundary between the real and the unreal has become dim." It's a fitting way to start this film, which, like its hero, blurs the lines of reality and dream.

Vampyr follows Allan Gray, who stops at an inn to sleep. He is awakened by a strange old man in his room, who mysteriously tells him "you mustn't let her die", and leaves behind a package with instructions not to open it until the event of the man's death. Sensing the urgency in the old man's plea, Allan investigates, and is guided by shadows, independent of their owners, to the home of the old man, just in time to witness the man murdered by gunshot.

When Allan opens the package, he finds a book on vampires and demons. Upon reading this, he realizes that the old man's youngest daughter, who has taken ill, has been bitten, and he must find the vampire who has taken control of this family.

Vampyr is very dreamlike, with haunting and surreal imagery. There were times when I wasn't sure if Allan was supposed to be dreaming or not, because it felt like I myself was dreaming. The film was shot with blurry lines around the borders of the frame. It was made very early in the development of sound movies, so the talking is few and far between. It plays like a combination of a silent film and a talkie. When there is talking, it's in German and kind of muted and unclear. It almost sounds like English, but what it really sounds like to me is when someone is talking to you in a dream, and you can't quite make out what they're trying to tell you, but you sort of get their intent.

Though very short in length, the hazy, dreamlike quality had a bit of a soporific effect on me. I didn't fall asleep, but I could have laid down and took a nap as soon as the movie ended. I'm sure you're all happy to know that I stayed awake so I could bring you all this masterpiece of a review while the film was still fresh in my mind.

Some of the other great expressionistic horror films of the silent period, such as Der Golem, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Nosferatu, really have a way of staying with you. The lack of sound just adds to the power of the images. Vampyr is right on the tail end of that whole thing, though it does have some sound, it still feels very sparse, and the imagery still holds a lot of power. This is a great movie for a late October night.

Patrick

2011-10-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

Hey, show of hands: Who here is seriously creeped out by hospitals? I see a lot of hands coming up. Uh-huh, that's right. I'm inside the monitor, watching you all. If you don't like hospitals but you like a good horror movie, you should check out Patrick. You should also probably check it out if you do like hospitals, because it's set in a hospital, so you'll totally get to see it a lot.

Stupid intro paragraph aside (sorry, everyone), Patrick is a 1978 movie by Australian director Richard Franklin, about a young nurse who is terrorized by a comatose patient with psychokinetic powers. I first heard of it when it was featured on an excellent documentary called "Not Quite Hollywood", all about the lawless days of Australian exploitation movies in the 70's and 80's.

The movie opens with Patrick, a disturbed young man, who, after having to listen to his mom have sex with a guy in the next room, murders her and her lover. We don't see what happens next, though, it jumps forward in time after that. We'll get back to Patrick in a minute.

Three years later, a young nurse named Kathy is being hired at a hospital. The stern matron gives a long speech about all the weirdos and perverts they come across when hiring hospital orderlies. Kathy's main assignment will be tending to Patrick, who is now lying in a coma, completely brain dead. The one thing he can do is spit, as an involuntary response. The doctor in charge there is keeping his body alive basically to study him. The matron believes he should be allowed to die.

As Kathy spends time in Patrick's room, she begins to notice that he appears to be responding to her. She begins asking him questions and he responds, by spitting once for yes and twice for no. He then begins typing responses through her on the typewriter she fills out paperwork with. Of course, nobody believes Kathy.

Things get creepier when Patrick starts inserting himself in her home and social life. He can't stand to see her around other men, and jealously tries to drown Brian, a doctor she's talking to about his psychokinesis. He also ransacks her home to prevent her from sleeping with him. She thinks her husband (they're separated) is responsible. They start talking again, and Patrick doesn't like that either. Kathy only belongs to him.

Hey, this movie is pretty great! It's unsettling and weird, and kind of gets under your skin. The spooky hospital setting certainly helps with that, with the disciplinarian matron, an old man with dementia walking around all the time, and this cynical doctor. The premise is pretty original, though similar to a ghost story. Director Richard Franklin has a great knack for building suspense. I would like to watch more of his movies, especially Road Games.

Though he doesn't utter a word, and seldom moves, Robert Thompson, who plays Patrick, steals the entire movie. His big creepy eyes just stare off into the distance, and as much as you look into them, you can't really tell if there's anything there or not. The spitting is a particularly weird touch. Quentin Tarantino actually took that little detail and used it in Kill Bill.

Patrick isn't a very well known horror movie stateside, but I gather it was very successful in Australia. I strongly recommend it for the Halloween season. Good stuff!

The Uninvited (1944)

2011-10-03T15:30:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago, around Halloween, I found a list of director Martin Scorsese's favorite horror movies. I didn't watch any of them that year, but I saved the list. If you can't trust Martin Scorsese's taste in movies, then who can you trust, right? The Uninvited, a haunted house film from 1944, directed by Lewis Allen, is the first of the movies from that list that I'll be reviewing this month.

The Uninvited stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as Rick and Pamela, a brother and sister who stumble across a beautiful abandoned cliffside home. The first sign that something is weird about it is that their dog wouldn't come with them up the cliff. They had to carry him. But then the dog sees a squirrel and all is right with the world again. It chases the squirrel into the house and they follow. As Rick and Pamela explore, they fall in love with the beautiful house, and decide then and there (well, Pamela does) that they must buy it. Isn't it weird that this brother and sister are acting married? I thought so too, but be quiet, these were more innocent times.

Tracking down the owner in town, they negotiate a deal. He's willing to let it go for insanely cheap. They meet with some resistance from his 20-year-old granddaughter, Stella, whose mother used to live there, but they buy the house. After they move in, strange things start to happen. They discover a studio room in the house that gives them the willies. A bouquet of flowers wilts and dies in moments. Rick hears a woman crying at night. Their dog runs away.
Rick has become infatuated with Stella and they let her come visit. She becomes possessed by some force that makes her almost walk off a cliff. Luckily, Rick catches her.

These strange incidents cause them to do some digging around on the history of the house and Stella's family. What they find is a winding trail of secrets and intrigue, and the only way for them to unhaunt this house will be to sort it all out.

I've got to say, The Uninvited sounds a lot more fun on paper than I had watching it. It was definitely an interesting story and a well made movie, but I felt it moved too slowly and the creepy stuff happened far too infrequently to hold my attention. There are long gaps between the haunting events, and I just wasn't invested enough in the family intrigue.

But it's not all bad. It's actually a pretty important film, from what I've learned. It was apparently one of the first times in Hollywood history that ghosts were used as something unsettling and otherworldly as opposed to for comedy. The cinematography is excellent, really atmospheric and moody. There are some really interesting and effective haunting scenes, a highlight being a seance they conduct for Stella. They could have got away with not showing an apparition at all for the ghost, but they do show it, and it looks pretty cool, especially for its time.

So The Uninvited wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean it's not for anyone. I'm guessing people more interested in horror film history will appreciate it. Martin Scorsese did, so who am I to judge?

The Bad Seed

2011-10-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

It's October, everybody! I'm sure most of you know what that means. That's right, horror movies. I'll be watching as many as I possibly can over the next month, so keep checking back!

The first movie in my month-long celebration was the classic 1956 evil kid thriller, The Bad Seed, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and based on the play of the same name, which was based on the novel of the same name. Like all movies from the 1950's, it's about the Penmarks, a happy, loving family with the sweetest little girl in the world. For the first five seconds, anyway, because the very moment you meet little Rhoda, you can tell something's off with her. She's just a little too sweet. It's got to be an act.

It doesn't take long before her true colors are revealed. When the matter of a penmanship award she lost to another kid in class is brought up, she goes batshit. Then, when Leroy, the simple groundskeeper they employ sprays her feet with his hose, she flips again. Leroy isn't fooled by her act, though. He can see right through her with his powers of simplicity.

While Rhoda is away at a school picnic, her mother, Christine, while entertaining company, hears on the radio that a child has drowned at the park. Afraid at first that it was Rhoda, she is relieved to hear that it was another child. But when Rhoda comes skipping into the house like nothing has happened, Christine is more than a little bit unsettled. She talks to Rhoda about it and Rhoda doesn't seem phased by it in the least; she just wants a peanut butter sandwich.

Fuel is further added to Christine's suspicions when Rhoda's teacher comes to visit her, and she learns that the child that drowned was the little boy that Rhoda lost the penmanship award to. On top of that, Rhoda was seen fighting with the little boy on the dock that he fell off of. Aw, crap.

I won't go any further than that. The Bad Seed is meticulously and cleverly plotted, and I don't want to ruin too much, in case I've already convinced you to watch it. If you need more convincing, I'll say this: the little boy isn't the last person to kick the bucket.

The acting is really great, especially the little girl, who, along with Nancy Kelly as Christine, and the lady that played the grieving mother of the little drowned boy all got Oscar nominations. I honestly wasn't expecting the acting to be so good. I just expected a campy 50's B-movie. The screenplay based on the play based on the book is solid and entertaining. Whoever wrote it must have done their research on psychopathic behavior, because little Rhoda fits the description to a tee. The cinematography, also nominated for an Oscar, does something very difficult to pull off: keeps the storytelling fresh and interesting, even though the majority of the movie is confined to one small set.

The 1950's offered a particular challenge for filmmakers: finding ways to tackle mature subject matter, without falling under the scrutiny and censorship of the Hayes Code. There is a certain slyness in the best films of the period, like, say, how smartly Billy Wilder's The Apartment dealt with suicide. The Bad Seed is plenty subversive, but even it ran into some walls. The original, much darker, and more appropriate, ending had to be changed. I think they did a decent job with the new ending, but now knowing how it should have been, I have to say I would have preferred that.

After the movie is over, there are still a couple more surprises. First, a card comes up, entreating the audience not to spoil the ending for others. How cool is that? It would be pointless to even try to ask people not to ruin endings nowadays, since all the information is readily available before the movie even comes out. After the card, we're treated to a final curtain call of the cast, each taking their bows, smiling, and with good humor. It's really funny, especially the very end of it, with Rhoda. If you don't already know about the last shot in the credits, I won't ruin it here. Watch the movie!

50/50

2011-09-30T15:31:00.001-07:00

Nobody knows how to deal with cancer. Yet at some point sooner or later, we're all going to have to, either first or secondhand. I've been there. Secondhand, I mean. It really sucks, man. Director Jonathan Levine's 50/50 is a comedy about dealing with cancer with your friend, Seth Rogen, based on writer Will Reiser's own experiences dealing with cancer and Seth Rogen. It takes its example very much from the Apatow school of comedy, dealing with painful or uncomfortable situations with humor, and balancing the dirty jokes with the sweetness.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Adam, a 27-year-old guy who gets a kind of cancer on his spine. It of course, turns his life upside down, as it would anybody that young. He spends a good deal of the movie in shock or denial, refusing to accept the possible outcome of all this. The movie follows Adam and the people around him as he navigates his way through chemotherapy and the eventual operation. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good. He manages to sell the weakness and vulnerability pretty well. It must be awful going through chemo, all the puking and the always being tired and stuff. One thing that rang true to me was how lightly he closed a car door when he was getting in. I've witnessed that.

Rogen is his best friend Kyle. Basically playing a movie version of himself, as Rogen often does. He's pretty floored by Adam getting cancer, but he does his best to keep Adam occupied and cheer him up. Rogen is actually pretty awesome in this, it's one his best roles to date. There's a hilarious moment about halfway through where he calls Adam's girlfriend on some bullshit she's pulling.

The rest of the supporting cast is very nicely rounded out by Bryce Dallas Howard as Adam's girlfriend, who maybe isn't mature enough to deal with the situation, Anjelica Huston as Adam's overbearing mom, Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall as two older cancer patients that Adam befriends, and Anna Kendrick as Adam's therapist/love interest.

Kendrick especially stood out for me. She's fresh out of grad school and still working on her dissertation, not quite a doctor yet. Andy is only her third patient. It's fun watching her awkwardly feel her way through the therapy, genuinely wanting to help him, but also eager to try out all of her recently acquired skills on him. She makes all the mistakes in the book, including the whole getting involved with a patient thing. Although, to her credit, she does her best to keep a professional distance while the whole ordeal is happening.

50/50 manages to walk a narrow line very well. It deals with cancer and mortality without getting sappy or overly sentimental. It teeters on the edge sometimes, but I think it saved itself for the most part. It keeps positive and upbeat when it can, but it isn't afraid to take things into dark territory. As hard and depressing as things got, I still remember a lot of laughing and joking around in my own secondhand experience, to lighten the load. Thankfully, it isn't a tearjerker. I don't think saying it has a happy ending is much of a spoiler, since the guy who wrote it about himself lived to write it.

50/50 brought back a lot of crappy memories, but still managed to be funny about it. It feels genuine, personal, and emotionally real. The audience in the theater was really into it, even applauding at one point in the middle. I think this movie is going to have strong word-of-mouth going for it. There aren't a great deal of decent comedies out in the fall, especially since we're in that dead zone between the summer movies and the Award season movies, so 50/50 is a good bet.

The 10th Victim

2011-09-29T20:03:00.001-07:00

There's a certain European sci-fi aesthetic from the 60's that drives me crazy (in the good way). It's that sexy, mod-era, Andy Warhol-ish design style you see in movies like Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik, Planet of the Vampires, even the early James Bond films. Barbarella is probably the absolute pinnacle of that style, in that it created an entire well-realized, bizarre universe out of it. It's one of my favorite movies. So, when I recently found out about Elio Petri's 1965 film, The 10th Victim, I scooted it right up to the top of my queue.

The 10th Victim is a science fiction film loaded with action and social satire. Set in the not-too-distant future, in a world where all war has been eliminated. Mankind's lust for violence has been diverted into a legal system of murder-as-entertainment: The Big Hunt. If you register for The Big Hunt, you must go through ten rounds, five as the Hunter, five as the Victim. The Hunter hunts, the Victim runs. Whoever lives wins. If you manage to survive ten rounds in the hunt, you gain fame, respect, and a million dollars. A not entirely unfamiliar, but very cool premise so far, right?

The movie opens with a woman running through the streets, and a man with a gun chasing after her. He frequently misses, and she stops and taunts him whenever she gets a chance. Eventually, she lures him into a S&M club, where she comes out as the entertainment, wearing a silver bikini and a mask over her eyes. She comes to him and seductively tells him to remove her mask, and then she turns around, and shoots him. Wait, there's more: With boob guns! She shoots him out of her bikini top.

We find out that this woman is Caroline Meredith (I suppose the Italians' idea of an American name), played by the most legendary of Bond Girls, Ursula Andress. She just finished playing the Victim in her 9th match. In the next and final match, she gets to be the Hunter.

Next, we see a jockey about to start a horse race. That is, until his boots explode. These boot bombs were placed by Marcello Poletti, played by Marcello Mastroianni. This was his 6th time in the hunt. In his next match, he'll be the Victim.

Marcello is in for a challenge. Caroline has corporate sponsorship from a Ming Tea company, who has given her pretty much unlimited resources to get her 10th kill in front of their cameras. There's a scene where Caroline and her corporate overlords are flying over Rome in a helicopter, scouting out locations for her to perform her deed. They settle on The Temple of Venus.

Marcello, on the other hand, is broke, and having all of his possessions repoed. A neat little detail, I thought, was his comic book collection. They were actually treated as something of value in a 60's movie! Unheard of.

Caroline then starts formulating a plan to get Marcello to the Temple of Venus. She "runs" into him, telling him that she's an American journalist writing a piece on the "sexual habits" of the Italian male. She says that she's representing "millions of unsatisfied American women" and she offers to pay him for the "interview". Although unaware that she is his Hunter, Marcello is suspicious of her, as he should be of everyone.

They get to know each other, and of course, they fall in love. She is moved by a sermon he conducts for a cult of "Sunset Worshipers". He takes her to his ex-wife's house, where she discovers he is hiding his parents, not wanting to turn them in to the state to be eliminated for being old. He explains most Italians hide their parents, usually surgically altering them to look like teenagers. As they fall for each other, they also keep at arms length. Marcello is reasonably sure she's his hunter, but can't do anything unless he's 100% sure, since he would get 30 years in prison for killing anybody else.

Anyway, I'm not going to explain any further, because the movie is a whole lot of fun. It gets crazier and crazier towards the end, with one double-cross and fake-out after another, until flying completely off the rails into absurdity. That's not meant to be a criticism, the movie is a comedy, and it knows what it's doing. The final scene is ridiculous and funny.

There are a lot of very funny little asides thrown into the movie as futuristic social commentary. While scouting locations, one of the Ming Tea reps mentions that he went to the Vatican on his honeymoon with his 18th wife. A news reports in the background that the "National Association of Homosexuals in France have outlawed The Big Hunt". Marcello nonchalantly walks by a fist fight in progress. When Caroline, watching via surveillance cam, asks who those people are, she is informed "just some students discussing art". The hilariously ironic slogan of the Ming Tea company.

The production values are pretty cool. You know, because of that sixties thing. Marcello has this pet robot thing with baby doll arms. There's this awesome outdoor lounge with inflatable chairs all around. A practice arena where hunters and victims run around shooting guns and dodging cars. And, I was surprised to discover, the movie is subtitled, instead of the usual crappy dubbing I usually find with Italian B-movies.

The two leads are both fun to watch, apart and together. Marcello Mastroianni is a badass in it, and Ursula Andress is strong, capable, clever, and (of course) sexy. The movie is surprisingly progressive for its time. They never question Caroline's abilities as a hunter. She and Marcello are adversaries on an even playing ground.

In conclusion, go find yourself a copy of The 10th Victim and watch it! Especially if you're a fan of the retro sci-fi stuff.

Killer's Kiss

2011-09-28T09:34:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous review for Stanley Kubrick's film, The Killing, his previous film, Killer's Kiss, was included on the special features of the Blu Ray. It was very nice of Criterion to do this, since many would consider it worthy of a release of its own.

Killer's Kiss follows Davey, a boxer, who at the start of the movie loses a big fight. He meets a dancer named Gloria, who is dealing with her abusive boss always forcing himself on her. The two of them decide to run off together, but she gets kidnapped by the boss, and Davey gets a murder pinned on him. It all comes to a head with an exciting chase sequence and a showdown with sharp objects inside a creepy old mannequin warehouse.

That's about it for the story. It's not even really a story in any kind of linear sense. There are several diversions in the narrative, like Gloria's story about her ballerina sister. Gloria narrates the whole story over a long ballet dance. Killer's Kiss has a real stream of consciousness feel to it, like Kubrick was making it up as he went along. In some sense, he probably was.

Killer's Kiss was made independently by Kubrick with a little bit of money he borrowed from an uncle. He shot it in the streets of New York, using what was available to him. No elaborate sets, or crazy attention to detail here. He's just grabbing shots whenever and wherever he can. As a result of this, Killer's Kiss has a realism not generally found in his later films. You really get a sense of how run down and seedy the Times Square area was in the 50's.

The final chase and showdown is pretty badass. From the way it started, I didn't expect the movie to get so exciting at the end. The rooftop chase has some extremely real moments, one where one of the crooks trips and falls and gets back up. I assume that Kubrick just kept that in. At another point, one of the guys hurts his leg and can't go on. I think this was just to get the boss guy alone with Davey, but still, that's not something you see in very many action movies. The mannequin factory showdown is crazy, too. The boss guy has an axe and Davey has this hook thing that he's catching it with. All the while, Kubrick is cutting away from the fight to show us creepy, foreboding shots of severed mannequin heads and hands. Really cool stuff.

While not quite as good as Kubrick's later work, you can see the seeds of what he was to become in Killer's Kiss. The running time is crazy short, just a bit over an hour. It's kind of noir-ish, but without much plot to speak of. The dialogue doesn't pop like it did in The Killing. Still, it's an enjoyable little thriller, and worth watching just to see the humble beginnings of a cinematic giant.

The Killing

2011-09-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, I purchased the Criterion Collection Blu Ray of Stanley Kubrick's classic racetrack heist film noir, The Killing. This was my first time seeing it, as well as his previous film, Killer's Kiss, which is also featured on the Blu Ray.

I've seen I guess about half of Kubrick's films now, maybe a little more than that, but The Killing was the first one I've ever seen that feels, you know, kind of mainstream. It follows a group of guys plotting to steal $2 million worth of betting money at a racetrack. Besides Johnny, the mastermind, these guys aren't criminals, just normal guys who have some unfortunate circumstances in their lives to motivate them. Each have an important role to play in the heist itself.

The first two acts follow the plotting of the heist, as Johnny gets all of the pieces in line. We also see all of the guys at home, and learn what is driving them. One of them, George, is a pushover in a loveless marriage. If they remade this, he would be played by William H. Macy. Hoping for a little bit of respect, he tells his wife what's going on, and she, in turn, tells the guy she's sleeping with on the side, and they hatch a little plot of their own.

The third act is, of course, the heist itself. It's pretty brilliantly staged, where we see one guy perform his duty, and then jump back in time a bit to see what the next guy does. Though techniques like this are not rare for slick heist movies now, it was pretty unique for the 1950's. It reminds me, surely not coincidentally, of the third act of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown.

I won't spoil the ending, of course, other than to say that things do get bloody. Do they get away with the robbery? And then what after that? It has one of my favorite endings I've seen in a long time. The last line of dialogue is killer.

Even though it was still very early in his career, Stanley Kubrick's presence is still very much felt. The lower budget probably prevented it from having the ridiculously exacting detail that Kubrick later obsessed over, but the cinematography is still great. The acting is good, too. Little flourishes and details in their performances make the characters seem far more human than a lot of other movies from this time did. My favorite character was probably the sharpshooter Johnny hires to take down a horse to cause a distraction. When we meet him, he's demonstrating his skills by shooting a string of man-shaped targets. When he's done shooting, Johnny hands him his little dog back and he plays the rest of the scene cradling a puppy.

I really enjoyed The Killing. It was noir all the way, with razor sharp dialogue, but not so dark as to be depressing. The heist was truly fun to watch play out. It was interesting to see a young Kubrick at work, and I admit, even a bit of a relief that it wasn't as esoteric as his later work tended to be. And this is coming from a guy whose favorite Kubrick film is cinema's greatest riddle, 2001: A Space Odyssey. See it if you haven't already!

Moneyball

2011-09-25T07:33:00.001-07:00

As I sat in the movie theater and looked around at the audience before Moneyball began, a thought occurred to me: I think I might be the only guy who is here as a fan of Bennett Miller's previous film, Capote, and not as a fan of baseball.

You see, I'm not really a sports guy. I know the rules to all of the games, and I can follow them, but rarely do they hold my interest. I used to go to sporting events with my dad, of course, but my attention wandered a lot, especially during baseball. My only knowledge of baseball came from how much certain players' cards were worth. That was my version of Moneyball. And, you know what? Now that I think of it, that's not too different from how they played Moneyball in the movie.

Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the woefully underbudgeted Oakland A's baseball team. The team is OK, but their best players are getting poached by rich teams like the Yankees. When Beane and his people are forced to put together a decent team for the next season, he is disillusioned by the way these old men are picking potential replacements. By their social lives, who they're dating, pure intuition. He realizes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way these guys are playing the game.

On a trip to Cleveland to visit the Indians, Beane notices a young guy whispering advice to one of the manager types. Clearly his opinions are worth something. Beane approaches him to see what's up. He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a just-out-of-college economics major who has put a finger on the very thing that's been bothering him. These teams are buying stars, spending millions of dollars on home run hitters and guys with 100MPH fastballs. They should be constructing a team based on a million other things, but most importantly, the ability to get themselves on base. He has written a computer program reducing all of every players' stats down to one number to demonstrate this. Beane buys Peter Brand from the Indians and puts him to work as the new Assistant GM for the A's, where the two of them set out to prove that his algorithm works.

They're met with nothing but resistance on all fronts. His staff just balks at the pudgy nerdy kid who has suddenly rocketed past them in the ranks. They don't understand why he's picking over-the-hill players, players with weird pitches and permanent nerve damage in their arms, instead of picking out some good rookies on a hunch. The players don't understand what's going on either, though they're happy to be playing at all. The team's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a particular thorn in Beane's side. Even when the team is constructed in the way Beane wants, Howe still refuses to utilize the players in the ways they're needed.

Previously, Beane had always kept himself a safe distance from everybody, not going to away games, not even watching the home games. The only way he can get Moneyball to work is if they're all on the same page, so Beane has to learn to engage with his team and employees. And when it finally does start working, nobody understands what is happening. When they're losing, Beane is the bad guy, and when they're winning, it's all because of Art Howe. At one point, a game announcer says "there's something random going on with this", which is ridiculous, because it's the exact opposite of random. Nowadays, 10 years later, every team plays baseball using Billy Beane and Peter Brand's methods. They changed the way the entire sport is played.

Brad Pitt is good as Billy Beane. He's a guy who, in his youth, was the victim of such blind prognostication by the baseball scouts, at their urging, turning away from a full-ride scholarship to pursue a sure-thing career as a superstar baseball player. When their assurances proved wrong and his career never took off, he stepped down and got a job as a scout, forever haunted by the choice he could have made. I wish he wasn't chewing and spitting tobacco through the whole movie. It's so gross to watch! But at least he wasn't making a game of spitting it on dogs and stuff, like The Outlaw Josey Wales did.

Jonah Hill is also pretty great as Peter Brand. He's been having a pretty good run with his last few movies, and this is probably the best he's been yet. There are a lot of funny moments where Peter Brand is reacting uncomfortably or awkwardly because he's a bit out of his depth. Even he questions whether they can get away with playing baseball by his method, and has to decide if he can commit 100% to what they're doing.

The filmmaking is quite good. I actually liked Moneyball better than Capote, although nobody in this gave quite as good a performance as Philip Seymour Hoffman did in that. The screenplay is credited to Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. I can only assume they called Sorkin in after The Social Network came out, because he demonstrated his ability to write engaging dialogue of characters explaining potentially uninteresting subject matter to each other at length. I didn't actually know Sorkin was involved in this until I saw his name in the end credits, but I kept thinking about him through the whole movie, so his presence must have been felt.

Like any good baseball movie should be, Moneyball is earnest and optimistic, but unlike most of them, never gets too cloying or sentimental. I think you can also interpret it as being about America, too, which is another quality every baseball movie should have. In our current economic climate, there are hard times everywhere, with such a huge federal deficit, and with a whole bunch of crusty old dinosaurs running things in the same old way and resisting any new ideas. Like Billy Beane and the Oakland A's, maybe Bennett Miller intended Moneyball to double as a call for America to work together to find a way to change the way the entire game is played.

Secret of the Urn (Tange Sazen: Hien Iai-giri)

2011-09-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

Secret of the Urn is the tale of Tange Sazen, a one-armed, one-eyed Samurai character famous in Japanese literature. There have been many adaptations of this story and others featuring him, in manga, in movies, etc. But look at me, speaking like I'm knowledgeable of the subject, when actually, this was the first time I've ever heard of Tange Sazen. This particular version of Secret of the Urn was made in 1966, by famed director Hideo Gosha.

Hideo Gosha is a Japanese director who never really got a lot of attention here in America. A few of his movies are available here, most famously Sword of the Beast from the Criterion Collection (which I have yet to see), but for the most part, you have to find them by other means. Secret of the Urn is one of his early works, more fun and less dark than his films were eventually to become. I was elated to find it on Netflix Instant Watch.

The story begins with a samurai named Samanosuke, who is told to execute a man who is married to a girl he grew up beside. Loyally doing his duty, he is tricked and betrayed, first by the man he is executing, then by his own people. He loses his right eye and his right arm. In the scene, his arm actually flies through the air and lands in a flock of birds, scattering them into the sky.

The story picks up one year later, with Yokichi, an over-the-hill bandit overhears the lord of the Yagyu clan talking about how they need 300,000 Ryo to pay for a shrine renovation for the Shogun. Obviously, the clan would go broke with that much Ryo (I mean, obviously, right?), so the lord asks his man to retrieve the Earless Monkey Urn, which is said to contain a million Ryo.

Hearing this, Yokichi goes to his cohort, a music teacher/prostitute named Ofuji, who is really calling the shots, and they hatch a plan to snatch that can. They go to the river where the Urn is being picked up, and surprise! The samurai transporting it are attacked by ninjas! There's this really great sequence where the urn is passed back and forth between ninja and samurai as they all get cut down one after the other. Finally, a dying samurai manages to get the urn to a little orphan boy. Ofuji and Yokichi try to get it from the boy and he runs off, only to meet... Samanosuke.

Only Samanosuke no longer goes by that name, he goes by Tange Sazen. No longer the loyal and noble samurai he was only a year before, he is now bitter, grouchy, and foul mouthed. He is homeless, and supports himself as a hired sword. Sazen helps the boy, Ofuji and Yokichi get away with the urn, and joins up with them. He's pretty much doing all this to stick it to the system that threw him away like yesterday's trash.

Over the course of the movie, Tange Sazen forms sort of a family unit out of these people, and becomes the leader of the Thieve's Temple Gang, a comical group of thieves. He also gets justice for himself, gets the urn into the right hands, and uncovers corruption in the very top level of the government.

Secret of the Urn was a really enjoyable movie. The characters are all likeable. Tange Sazen is clearly a hero of the post-Yojimbo era, the flea-bitten, gruff samurai with a hidden heart of gold. The little boy doesn't care about the urn, he just wants Sazen to teach him the sword. Ofuji is sort of a scheming love interest, where you can't immediately tell if she's loyal to Sazen, or to the urn. Yokichi and the thieves are comic relief. It was interesting to me, because I've never seen a Hideo Gosha film with such light-hearted elements before.

Hideo Gosha's action sequences are always impressive. Unlike many other samurai movie battles, which were slow builds of tension as the fighters size each other up, and then suddenly over as fast as one stroke of the sword, Gosha's were more modern, fast paced, choreographed sword fights. The great twist, of course, is that Tange Sazen is only able to use his left hand. There's a scene where he's holding the urn and tossing it up in the air and mowing a couple guys down before catching it.

I have to admit, there were a couple of dangling plot threads, like when the Urn turns out to be empty with writing inside it, they never really explain what the writing means, and where the million Ryo is. It's surely addressed in some of the many other versions of the story, right? Maybe they didn't explain it all because the story is so well known in Japan that everybody there just knows the answer. I don't know, I'm no Japan expert, just a real big fan of their stuff.

So check this movie out. It's on Netflix for all to watch. And if you're interested in digging deeper for other Hideo Gosha fare, might I recommend the two films he made after this, Samurai Wolf and Samurai Wolf 2? Those are also a whole lot of fun, and have a pretty awesome lead character.