Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello Spazio)

Ooooh, look, everyone! Planets! Vampires! Terrore! Spazio! This is actually a pretty important science fiction film from 1965, directed by the legendary horror director, Mario Bava.
It is cited as a major influence on the visual style of Ridley Scott's Alien, among other things.

Planet of the Vampires is a pretty misleading title. It's a bit of a reach to call the creatures in this movie "vampires". I assume the company that released it in America wanted a catchy, eye-grabbing title that would put American butts in seats.

Terrore nello Spazio follows a crew on a spaceship who are drawn to a mysterious planet. After a crash landing is averted, everybody on the ship suddenly loses their senses and tries to kill each other. The captain, Mark keeps himself together and helps everyone else come to. They follow a distress call from another ship, and when they get there, they find the ship full of bloody corpses. And then the mystery goes deeper when they return to the ship later and the corpses are nowhere to be found. Somebody or something on this planet is messing with them.

I don't want to ruin the plot, since it kind of relies on the mystery, so I'll stop there.

Much like Spaghetti Westerns, Vampires was made in Italy on a teeny, tiny, shoestring budget, and starred slightly bankable actors from all around the world, in order to maximize international sales. It has pretty crappy dubbing, which was also just the way things were done at the time. In these old Italian movies, they didn't even record sound on set, they just worked it all out in post.

Unlike most space adventures of the period, the pacing for Planet of the Vampires is slow and suspenseful. Mario Bava adds atmosphere by filling the sets with fog and unsettling red lighting. He made do with his extremely limited resources by having minimalistic sets that can easily be reused for other locations (I'm pretty sure they only build the one ship).

The production design, cheap though it is, still has that awesome 60's aesthetic. I especially liked the crew's uniforms, which looked extremely similar to the costumes in the original X-Men movie, but with collars that go all the way up to their ears, pretty much completely immobilizing the actors' necks. There's also a cool sequence where they find an ancient alien ship with these giant, 15-foot alien skeletons in it that look pretty great.

Though interesting, the movie isn't perfect. There's a lot of the characters just going back and forth from one ship set to another on a tiny fake planet set. The repetition of this, combined with the slow pacing, started to wear on me by the end. The budget constraints prevent the movie from being great, but Mario Bava's skill in atmosphere and suspense make Planet of the Vampires an interesting watch.

The Invisible Man

It's been a while since I reviewed an old Universal horror movie. Maybe I should have waited a few weeks and saved this for October, but I had some spare time for a short movie, and The Invisible Man fit the bill at only 70 minutes long. Once I discovered that it was directed by James Whale, the deal was sealed.

The only James Whale movies I'd seen were Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. I think it's safe to say that those are both pretty great movies. I don't know that much about Whale except that he was openly gay in the 30's and the movie Gods and Monsters, which I haven't seen but want to, is about him. His Frankenstein movies were both pretty amazing feats, the first one a dark and emotional Gothic horror story, the second one a smart, fun, and inventive sequel.

Whale made The Invisible Man in between Frankensteins. Based on the story by H.G. Wells, it follows Jack Griffin, a chemist who experiments on himself, only to make himself invisible. Being able to do anything he wants, Griffin goes mad with power and goes on a killing spree. Meanwhile, the townspeople of a small English village, the police, and Griffin's own former colleagues go on a manhunt for the man they may never be able to find.

Claude Rains owns it as Griffin. He's already invisible at the start of the film, and he spends pretty much all of it either completely wrapped in bandages or voicing over a special effect, but he remains charismatic and engaged in his role. At the beginning, while he is locked away in an inn trying to find a cure for his condition, he's actually sympathetic. He's mean and abusive to the innkeeper and his wife, but you can understand why he's so tortured. As the movie goes, he finally snaps, strips off his clothes and starts breaking stuff and attacking people, laughing maniacally all the way. He'd almost still be likeable if it were just mischief that he's causing, throwing mugs on the floor and stuff. But all the stranglings kind of undo that. You can't like a guy who strangles and laughs.

Visually, The Invisible Man really feels like a stepping stone from Frankenstein to The Bride of Frankenstein. It's still moody, atmospheric, expressionistic, and full of pathos like the first Frankenstein film, but Whale's knack for innovative special effects is starting to shine through. I hate to be the guy who doesn't do research, but I didn't, so I don't know if these invisible effects had been done before this movie. Even if they have, though, he integrates them and utilizes them very adeptly. And I'm guessing a lot of the tricks he used are still used today, but with the aid of computers and whatnot.

So The Invisible Man was good stuff. I need to watch the rest of these Universal monster movies. I might try to in October. I still haven't seen The Mummy, The Wolf Man, or Dracula. There's also another James Whale horror film from the period, a haunted house movie, from the looks of it. I plan on checking that out too. So, I guess you might consider this review a taste of things to come.

Contagion

I've been a fan of Steven Soderbergh since, wow, since Out of Sight came out, which was when I was 15 or 16, right at the onset of my burgeoning deeper interest in filmmaking. I would even go so far as saying Soderbergh played some part in my deeper interest. I haven't seen all of his films, but I've seen many of them, and with the exception of maybe the Ocean's sequels, they've all been good (and even the Ocean's sequels have their share of moments). I guess I'm saying all this to illustrate that I know I'm in good hands when a Steven Soderbergh film comes out, and that sentiment again proved true with Contagion.

Contagion is much like his Oscar-winning epic Traffic, in that, instead of a single straight narrative, it follows several characters from around the globe, tracking the progress of a fast-spreading new virus as it tears its way across the world. Unlike Traffic, though, Contagion plays more as a thriller or even a Chrichton-esque horror movie. It never goes too far into the realm of science fiction, keeping the situation grounded enough in reality to be believable and genuinely scary.

Matt Damon plays the relatable human side of the movie, as a man whose family are among the first victims of the virus, trying to protect his daughter from sickness and all the other dangers that could come from a world ravaged by plague. He's good as always, I really can't think of anything bad to say about Matt Damon in anything, especially his work of the last five years or so.

Contagion also stars Laurence Fishburne as the head of the CDC, Jennifer Ehle as a CDC researcher working on a cure, Kate Winslet as an epidemiologist searching for the origin of the virus, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Org. investigator, and Jude Law as a corrupt blogger, profiting from the panic he's helping stir up. Many other good actors appear in smaller roles, too, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hawkes, Bryan Cranston, Enrico Colantoni, and so on.

Soderbergh and the writer, Scott Z. Burns, clearly did a lot of work to show how an outbreak might actually spread and what might happen as we race to find the cure. It takes place over a pretty long period of time, since it wouldn't be realistic for a cure to be found and distributed overnight. I'm pretty sure they used the recent Swine Flu epidemic as their jumping-off point. Soderbergh uses some extremely cool editing to show the virus' progress via montage. The montage stuff was probably my favorite stuff in the movie.

So Contagion is totally worth checking out. Steven Soderbergh once again proves himself a capable and versatile director. I think he's made movies in almost every single genre by now. Besides, with all this talk of him retiring in the next couple years to become a painter, we should try to enjoy Soderbergh in theaters while we can.

The Maltese Falcon

Is it wrong to say that I didn't love The Maltese Falcon? I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still a good movie. I enjoyed it. But isn't it supposed to be, like, the big daddy of all film noir? I was surprised at myself.

The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, stars Humphrey Bogart as hardboiled detective Sam Spade. He and his partner, Archer, is hired by a "dame", or, in our modern parlance, a "woman", to follow a guy. When Archer and the guy both wind up dead, Spade becomes embroiled in a deadly standoff over a solid gold falcon statue from Malta.

Bogart is pure Bogart as Sam Spade. I've only ever seen him in Casablanca, but that's pretty much what he does. I like him alright, I guess, but he's not my favorite star from that period. He delivers a lot of his dialogue extremely deadpan, almost emotionless. I suppose that's how we know he's tough. My favorite moments with him, though, are the ones where he changes up his normal delivery and shows a little more humanity. As Sam Spade, he plays all sides of the case, making everyone believe he's working for them. When he's with criminals, he makes himself seem corrupt. When he's with the cops, he cooperates with them. Things can get pretty hairy when cops and criminals are in the room together, and that's part of the fun of watching him work, figuring out exactly where his loyalties lie.

My favorite character in the movie was Joel Cairo, the sniveling henchman played snivelingly by Peter Lorre, master of sniveling characters. I always like Peter Lorre in things. He was an interesting actor, and always brought a quality to his roles that only he could bring.

My real problem with The Maltese Falcon, and what really kept me from loving it, was just the sheer volume of telling when compared to the lack of showing. I know it's from a different period, budgets were lower, cinema was a lot different back then. But so much of the movie is people standing in a room, telling Spade exactly what they did, in as much detail as possible, and then Spade telling them what he did too, or what he's going to do next. Very rarely do we actually see things being done. Maybe I'm a little impatient, or maybe I've been spoiled by all these new-fangled movies where things happen.

The Maltese Falcon was made in the early 40's, which was really the onset of the film-noir genre. I'm not even sure if Citizen Kane had come out yet and revolutionized the language of film. They weren't really playing with lighting and angles as much as they could have been at that point, which is when film-noir got really fun. Still, it was an important movie for the genre, and I'm happy to have finally seen it.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Wow, looking back at my reviews, it's been a long time since I've done a Western. Unless you count Cowboys and Aliens, I guess, and that movie is maybe best left forgotten. Well, seeing as I'm now a Texan, it's about time I saw Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is about a simple farmer, whose family is murdered by a bunch of out-of-control jerks who happen to be fighting on the side of The Union. I don't know my Civil War too well, but I got the sense that they were just mercenary types, not actual uniformed enlisted men. Josey is found brooding and grieving at his son's grave by another group of men who are on the trail of those guys. He winds up joining them and fighting as a mercenary type on the Confederate side.

When the war ends, his group is persuaded by their leader to go turn in their arms to a senator and swear an oath to the Union. Everybody goes but Josey, whose war is not yet over. When the group is betrayed and gunned down, Josey goes crackers on them and mows them down with a Gatling gun. He manages to escape with his own life and that of a badly wounded kid that used to ride with him. There's a huge price on his head now and everybody and their mother is after him.

As the movie progresses, Josey Wales stays one step ahead of his pursuers, outsmarting them when he can and shooting them when he can't. He finds allies on his way, and forms a new family of sorts. Eventually it all comes to a head in a big awesome shootout.

Clint Eastwood is doing his tough guy thing, which we all know he's the best at. He's not quite The Man with No Name, since we know his story from the start, but he's almost as iconic in this role. He chews tobacco through the whole movie, which in and of itself is disgusting, but when you add to it the constant spitting, it's doubly so. And then add to it that he's always aiming his spit at things. You know, whatever he can aim at: scorpions, dogs, dead guy's heads, live guy's heads, horses, shoes, cattle. The one thing he never aims it at is a spittoon. If anybody needs any gift ideas for Josey Wales, let me know.

The supporting cast is pretty great. Josey's "family" consists of an Indian girl he rescues from being raped at a trading post, a clever old Cherokee man who acts as his foil, and an old lady coming down from the north with her granddaughter, who he rescues after their wagon train gets raided. I liked the old Cherokee man, he got a lot of the best lines.

So The Outlaw Josey Wales was another very good western revenge flick. I still prefer the heightened reality and stylization of the Sergio Leone films, while Eastwood's directing style is much more simple; clear and straightforward storytelling. Josey Wales definitely has better dialogue than the Leone films, since it wasn't all worked out after the fact in overdubbing. I could have done with less spitting on things, but I bet that was pretty historically accurate. A lot of spit in the old west and not nearly enough spittoons. It was a new frontier.

Winnie the Pooh

Oh, man, why can't more of the new Disney movies be like Winnie the Pooh? This movie really got it. It nailed the feel and tone of the original Winnie the Pooh shorts, but with just a little bit of a modern sensibility thrown in. We all should have gone and saw this the weekend it came out, but we were all busy seeing the final adventure of Harry Potter and friends. Okay, can you blame us? It was Harry Potter.

Winnie the Pooh is just like its predecessors. Gentle, full of wit and whimsy, and set in the rich little universe of the Hundred Acre Wood, which is apparently both inside Christopher Robin's head, and also located on the page of a storybook. That sounds inconsistent, but you never really question it.

The storybook is narrated by John Cleese, and the characters interact with the words on the page like it's nothing out of the ordinary. The story follows Pooh on a single-minded search for hunny, which leads to him helping Eeyore find his tail, which leads to Owl driving them all into a panic over a nonexistent monster. Every character gets a good chunk of movie, except maybe Kanga and Roo, who mostly sit this story out. The story has pretty much the attention span of a little boy playing with his toys, bouncing from one vignette to another at a moment's notice, taking the time to go on diversions and distractions, but it all comes together in the end.

The voice acting is mostly dead-on. The voice of Pooh sounds pretty much just like the original guy who did it. The rest of the characters aren't exact matches, but they match the originals in spirit and intent. I especially liked Craig Ferguson's take on the know-it-all Owl, who got many of the movie's biggest laughs. I was surprised about Tigger, certainly the favorite of every kid. He was definitely mine, but now, not so much. It must be a sign of aging, but now he just tires me out.

There are also some really great original songs in Winnie the Pooh, as well as reprises of the famous ones. Sometimes the songs are sung by the characters, and other times they're sung by Zooey Deschanel, who has a pretty perfect voice for this (we're all agreed that she's pretty perfect in general, right?).

It's too bad Disney chose to release Winnie the Pooh on the same day as Harry Potter, but then again, I can't imagine it would have broke the box office these days, anyway. I'm glad I got to see it on the big screen when I had a chance, though. Surely it will become a favorite of millions of little kids, and something at least tolerable for their parents, if not downright joyful, around Christmastime.

I don't believe I've seen the original Winnie the Pooh shorts since I was a kid, but I feel like I remember them pretty well. This made me really want to see them again. I hope Disney has Blu Ray plans for them, as I would love to add them to my collection.

Our Idiot Brother

Hi, everyone. Hope you all had a good Labor Day weekend. I had a nice one. Saw a few movies. Here's one of them.

Our Idiot Brother is a new comedy, directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Paul Rudd as a slightly thick-headed, good natured, hippie-ish guy who, after being arrested and jailed for selling weed to a uniformed cop (he said he was having one of those weeks), is forced to move back in with his family. His three sisters, each living very different, but successful lives, don't really want him around, so he kind of bounces from one sister to another, innocently throwing each of their lives into disarray.

This kind of thing is a pretty standard comedy formula: X-factor thrown into normal lives, x-factor messes everything up, x-factor helps characters realize that maybe they weren't living the ideal life after all, and everyone learns a lesson. What makes Our Idiot Brother stand out a little is just that it goes down easy. It has a far gentler tone than the other R-Rated comedies coming out these days. Paul Rudd's character is so goofy and likeable that I couldn't help just feeling happy watching it.

It was nice to see Rudd do something different. He's been playing those kind of Jack Lemmon-y schlubby guys a lot lately. But when you see him in things like Anchorman, Wet Hot American Summer, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, you know he's actually a capable and versatile comedic character actor too. In Our Idiot Brother, Rudd's character Ned is gentle and overly trusting by nature, and has probably spent the last 20 years in a permanently stoned haze. His sisters have lived with it their entire lives and have little patience for him, but many of the people around him find him affable and easy to talk to, even confide in.

The supporting cast is all around very good, too. Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, and Zooey Deschanel play his sisters, Steve Coogan as Emily Mortimer's documentarian husband, Adam Scott as Elizabeth Banks' sci-fi writer neighbor, and Rashida Jones as Zooey Deschanel's girlfriend. Elizabeth Banks and Rashida Jones are two of my favorite comedic actresses, and, having both worked with Paul Rudd before, are pretty in touch with his rhythms. One of my favorite subplots features Rashida Jones helping Ned get his dog, Willie Nelson, back from his ex-girlfriend, who is basically holding it hostage at their organic farm.

The movie plays out not unpredictably if you know the formula, but enjoyably enough. It's not going to change the world. I had a bit of a problem with the very last scene. There was a perfect end point for the movie, but it felt the need to tack on one last unnecessary scene at the end that felt pretty contrived. The movie goes on for maybe two minutes too long. Despite the ending, though, it's a very easy movie to like, and you'll probably come out of it in a pretty good mood.