If you’re going to see an awful movie about a dude with a flaming skull for a head riding a flaming motorbike, this is probably the one to see. Not to say it’s good. It’s not. It’s laughably bad. But lordy, what awesome shots of flaming skulls and flaming motorbikes, all heavy metalish and trailing smoke and crazy zooms and tilts and God of War style chain flinging and other things going fiery. The Nicolas Cage overacting in between is just gravy. His style complements the CG, as his face gets all distorted and his eyes pop and smoke comes out of his head, like when a character in an old-timey cartoon sees a hot chick. I’m pretty sure he even goes AH-WOO-GA! at one point, like a steam whistle. He wouldn’t be out of place in one of those Mask sequels Jim Carrey passed on. I only wish that when he promised early on that when the demon takes hold, no one is safe, he didn’t then spend the rest of the movie defending women and children. That’s not very demonic.
The bigger issue is how long can Idris Elba maintain being cool when he’s in movies like The Losers, Thor, Prometheus, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance? I wonder if he thinks he’s hidden in Ghost Rider because of his fake French accent, like maybe you won’t know it’s him. I see you, Idris! Look, I’ll allow him no more than eleven or twelve stinkers before I start to think a little less of him. Also, since this is a movie based on a Marvel comic, I looked for a Stan Lee cameo and didn’t see one. Why would he not show up for his cameo? Was he getting his teeth whitened the day they were scheduled to shoot?
Act of Valor is an offensive movie. But not for the reason you think. As a guy who has dutifully answered his annual Calls of Duty, I can dig on Act of Valor’s fetishistic loving lingering shots of men and their hardware. A submarine slipping sleekly underwater, or those adroitly scudding riverboats, or a wordless nighttime jungle creep, or the calculated way heavily armed men communicate by gently squeezing each other on the shoulder. Some of the procedural stuff is fascinating up until it gives way to its inner Michael Bay and breaks out into satisfyingly R-rated firefights. I could do without the blatant pandering to the videogame sensibility of it all with pointless FPS POV shots. Like I said, I’ve already answered to my Calls of Duty.
After the jump, so what’s the big deal? Continue reading →
Plenty of movies have songs. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for example. Or whatever AC/DC song that is — they all sound alike — in The Avengers. But not many movies take the time to show us characters listening to songs. There are three points in Roadie when Ron Eldard’s character listens to a song and reveals something about himself. Regret, fury, and longing, in that order, and each for a different song.
The character, Jimmy Testagross, a recently out-of-work roadie for Blue Oyster Cult, is otherwise pretty bottled up. He’s a combination of childlike vulnerability and the guarded quality of a picked-on teenager. He wears on his face the perpetual ingratiating smile of someone always waiting to discover he’s the punchline of a joke that he’ll have to laugh at to get people to like him. I’ve previously written off Eldard as a TV lightweight who works best with a CG monster or Ben Kingsley doing the heavy lifting. But there is nothing TV lightweight about what he does in Roadie, from his paunch to his pathos to the way he takes a slap or steals a glance. During one scene, he lets down his guard and explains why Blue Oyster Cult is unique, and what the music means to him. It’s like Paul Giamatti talking to Virginia Madsen about wine in Sideways: so this is what this man is all about.
Then there’s Roadie’s supporting cast. Lois Smith smolders with a combination of confusion and anger as Jimmy’s abandoned mother; Bobby Canavale shows that being a smooth clown doesn’t have to mean being funny; and the remarkable Jill Hennessy is a revelation to someone like me who thought Crossing Jordan was the name of that post nuclear apocalypse thing with Skeet Ulrich. She’s far more than the usual object of affection. And as the person singing one of the songs Jimmy listens to, she’s got a sultry set of pipes. Queens is also a character in the movie, which is no surprise given that director Michael Cuestra and writer Gerald Cuestra have been here before. Their first movie, L.I.E., was a darker look at the same area from either end of Roadie’s age range.
But don’t be fooled by Roadie’s happy-go-lucky romcom DVD cover. This is no romcom. It’s a grown-up movie about the inability to be a grown-up, like Young Adult minus the double twee of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody.
Home invasions are low hanging fruit for horror movies. It’s one of those timeless fears: What if a bunch of dudes break into your house, your sanctuary, the place where you’re safe and relaxed, and have their way with you? It’s the ultimate “what if they get in here?” scenarios. One of the earliest home invasion movies I know is the original Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart, which holds up well even if it has a charming civility as far as home invasions go. Among the worst recent ones I’ve seen are Trespass, which isn’t a home invasion movie so much as a Nicolas Cage movie, and Secuestrados (Kidnapped, in English), which is the sort of tasteless pointless stylish trash that gives good horror movies a bad name. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with Paul Andrew Williams brilliant brutal Cherry Tree Lane, which isn’t available in the US yet. Someone get on that. It is the Straw Dogs of the 21st century.
Until that time, there’s Mother’s Day, not to be confused with the original Troma film it’s supposedly based on. Speaking of trash. The original Mother’s Day was one of those gross 70s rape movies that recreates the feeling of stumbling across Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s porn stash. But this remake — which is absolutely not a remake — is a mean lean smart script about colliding systems. On one hand, a veritable beer commercial of good-looking fun-loving privileged friends. On the other hand, the eponymous mother and her brood of mismatched white trash kids. A literal and figurative tornado is brewing.
Briana Evigan, recently locked in a house with a tiger in Burning Bright (get it?), is locked in a house with a whole other kind of tiger this time. The icy menacing Rebecca De Mornay isn’t mad; she’s just disappointed. She’s like the crocodile in Black Water, just waiting, watching, keeping her prey in place until she’s ready to either pounce or saunter off. It could go either way. She’s as sexy as she was in Risky Business, as dangerous as she was in Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and as sexy as she was in Risky Business. Did I mention that she’s sexy? With an unlikely brood at her beck and call — wait, she had all those kids? — she is the biggest baddest wolf since Cate Blanchett in Hannah.
Mother’s Day is out on DVD this week.
In The Avengers, as Robert Downey Jr chews high-tech scenery on the control deck of the SHIELD helicarrier, he observes that someone is playing Galaga. It’s just a throwaway joke in a string of throwaway jokes. But the difference is that it’s not thrown away. It’s a setup for a visual gag that scores a place in the credits for Galaga creator Namco.
But is Galaga the right choice? If you want to include a gag about a young technician playing videogames in a high-tech control room, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to go with Team Fortress, Skyrim, Counter-Strike, or Modern Warfare? Just work your way down the Steam usage statistics until you get to the highest paying product placement. Or maybe you should just go with Farmville to ensure the greatest number of people in the audience gets the gag?
But like so many other things in The Avengers, this is a nod to boys of a certain age. The Tony Stark of the Iron Man movies and now The Avengers is the right age and exactly the right demographic to identify a Galaga screen. And the audience is exactly the right audience for this fond brief wink.
As for why some young technician on the deck of a helicarrier would set up an emulator to play a 30 year old arcade game…well, who are we to question what SHIELD employees do to entertain themselves? At least it’s work safe.
The premise of Area 407, yet another found footage movie, is that a bunch of actors who are really bad at improvisation do a lot of improvisation (i.e. screaming their dialogue) when their flight to LA crashes onto a secret government breeding ground for camera shy velociraptors. This movie is notable for having somehow secured the back half of a ruined airplane (pictured). That apparently ate into the budget that would have been spent on CG velociraptors.
I like how sky marshals are now a trope. According to Hollywood, every flight has a sky marshal, and therefore an easy way to introduce a gun. Just pick the most unlikely character on the airplane. That’s the sky marshal. In Bridesmaids, it was the nerdy guy sitting next to Melissa McCarthy. In Area 407, it’s the hot chick with the on-again/off-again Australian accent.
Area 407 is available on video on demand, but don’t bother. For a far better movie about plane crash survivors stalked by predators, check out The Grey or the first episode of Lost.
Some of the best horror movies veer off in unexpected directions. There’s nothing quite so nice as having absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. And there’s nothing quite so dull as watching a supposedly scary movie line up the plot points and knock them down like dominoes.
But, really, there’s no point calling Penumbra’s unfolding mystery a horror movie. This Argentinian gem reminds me more of Martin Scorcese’s miniature urban odyssey, After Hours, with the same black humor and the same off-kilter sense of place. Penumbra’s main claim to being a horror movie is the prior body of work of the brothers who wrote and directed it, Adrian and Romiro Bogliano. Their last movie was Cold Sweat, a goofy potboiler about creepy old men who use social media to lure young people and then kill them with nitroglycerin. The kidnapped heroine is slathered in the volatile stuff, so she has to be rescued by slowly dragging her out of the building on a blanket so she won’t explode. But only after removing her clothes because, you know, they’re soaked in nitroglycerin. There hasn’t been a more perfect marriage of narrative and disrobing since Saffron Burrows stripped out of her wetsuit to electrocute a shark in Deep Blue Sea. The hero in Cold Sweat wears a shirt that says Sorcerer. Get it? If so, you’re exactly the kind of person who doesn’t deserve Cold Sweat.
Penumbra could easily get by with a nod to a couple of classic thrillers of the 70s. But if I told you what T-shirt the hero would wear, it would be a spoiler. The delight of Penumbra is having no idea where it’s going. That’s the point. It’s a smart, sexy, slow burn with a bit of subtle social commentary, a flawed and unlikable main character, a great sense of mystery, and a satisfying payoff.
Penumbra is currently available wherever fine videos on demand are sold. And for another example of why Argentina is a country worth watching for nifty genre movies, I also recommend the thoroughly charming Phase 7.
Game of Thrones fans might know Kate Dickie (pictured) as a mother who doesn’t have a grasp on how long you’re supposed to breastfeed. But she’s so much more than that, as anyone who’s seen the Scottish thriller Red Road can attest. And in Outcast, she is to female magic users what Gandalf is to dude magic users. I shall henceforth name all my female magic users after her character in Outcast.
Outcast is a supernatural thriller from 2010. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a horror movie. Not your usual horror movie, to be sure. It’s Scottish, drenched in the bleak grey of Scottish weather, lore, and low rent housing. It’s got a great cast, most notably Dickie as the druidic version of Alice from Martin Scorcese’s 1974 movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Dickie’s character is on the run from what we assume is an abusive husband. Only this abusive husband can be deterred by blood glyphs on the walls. The cast also includes James Nesbitt as an Irishman out of his element in Scotland, a nuance that will be lost on a lot of us Yanks, along with the piker vs. gypsy subtext. But you can’t deny Nesbitt’s appeal as a slightly confused magician. He certainly looks the part. There’s a thin line between “wizard” and “homeless”. Together, Dickie and Nesbitt are the Sarah Connor and Arnold of celtic Terminator plots.
This is ultimately a movie about a custody battle, but with spells. And I love the way magic is portrayed here. Grimy, unpleasant, painful, requiring clean up afterwards, and with rules beyond human ken. Real magic means that when someone tells you to eat bony roasted pigeon flesh, you don’t ask what for. As Nesbitt says during the obligatory shot from The Shining — you know, with the camera look up from underneath as he leans his head against a door and roars at the person on the other side — “Them’s the fucking terms!”
You’ve also got some young lovers and it’s such a relief that they’re not awful, which would have been the case if this were an American horror movie. However, as with most horror movies that have the courage of their convictions, Outcast will get a bit ridiculous before it’s over. As Christopher Lee would have told you while prancing merrily toward the end of the original Wicker Man, “Them’s the fucking terms”.
Outcast is on Netflix instant view.
The point of zombie movies is partly that the people we know and love will track us down and kill us. Everything else — whether they walk or run, whether they’re dead or infected, what they eat, how they got that way — is incidental. If you use that primal fear as a starting point, if you’re not the type who denies 28 Days Later is a zombie movie, then movies like The Crazies (both of them) and the underrated Impulse (the 1984 one) are a subset of the zombie genre.
That’s where The Signal comes in.
After the jump, enter the mind of a “zombie” Continue reading →
Sometimes kids make a swordfighting video and post it on YouTube. Maybe they do it with lightsabers. At best, it will have some good production values and decent fight choreography. And it’ll usually be over in about ten minutes. Good work, kids! You’ve obviously watched The Matrix several times! The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian production working its way into US arthouse theaters, is cut from the same cloth. The difference is that it’s stretched out over ninety minutes. An exhausting, pointless, mostly samey ninety minutes.
The production values are pretty good considering it takes place almost entirely in a run-down tenement building. Oh, another hallway. Now some guy’s room. Then a hallway. Then another guy’s room. Then another hallway. Nakatomi Plaza this ain’t. The fight choreography and physical prowess on display are undeniably impressive. In fact, the first shot of our hero punching a punching bag is electric. The movie also deserves props for its gratuitous knife porn, which unflinchingly considers what happens when you introduce sharp things into fist fights. You might recall Jason Statham’s knife fight on a bus in one of the Transporter movies, which was toned down in the editing. It’s got nothing on The Raid. This movie even saves refrigerators from the punchline they’ve become since the last Indiana Jones movie!
But one of the first rules for any fight that’s going to last longer than ten minutes is that the audience has to care about who’s fighting. No such thing happens here. You could be charitable and say The Raid resembles early John Carpenter. But Carpenter put grit and even characters into his early movies. There was a rough-hewn affection for violence in movies like Assault on Precinct 13. Consider the labor of love that is the extended fight scene in They Live. But without characters or affection, with only stunt men and slick choreography, The Raid runs out of creative steam and turns into drawn-out repetitive scenes of mostly random men yelling and punching and kicking. All the early clever stuff with guns, knives, and refrigerators is forgotten in favor of a ridiculously long boss battle against a boss character with about 10,000 hit points. If I want that, I’ll go play something by Capcom.
Netflix somehow convinced me to watch a French thriller called Black Heaven. Until I knew what was going on, it was a nifty thriller with an appealing cast and an even more appealing location. So that’s why people talk about the south of France! But then it turns out it’s about a videogame.
The game in the movie is called Black Hole, and it seems to consist only of people walking around, voice chatting with each other (ha!), and having cybersex (not shown, although the movie isn’t nearly so shy about its IRL sex). The obvious inspiration is Second Life. In fact, the French title of the movie is L’autre Monde, which means The Other World.
There is apparently keyboard mashing combat in Black Hole with a hefty death penalty and the option to loot characters you’ve killed. In other words, the sorts of thing no modern online game with any reasonably large player base would do. The interface is minimalist to the point of being non-existent. Obviously, the filmmakers want their videogame to look more like an animated movie than a videogame. Also obviously, they are as clueless about actual videogaming as the folks who made Gamer with Gerard Butler and that NBC cop show Life in which the police hack a computer by getting to level ten of Prince of Persia.
One of these days, someone will make a movie that actually shows how people play videogames online. Until then, for a much better hybrid of thriller and videogames, please see the Spanish movie King of the Hill (El rey de la montana) without reading anything about it.
What had me most excited about The River, ABC’s latest post-Lost paranormal activity, is the team behind it. One of the creators is Oren Peli, the director of Paranormal Activity, a horror movie every bit as effective, iconic, and ill-suited to a franchise as Blair Witch Project. The first two episodes of The River were directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who put some creative visual styling into his House of Wax remake. But where he really got my attention was with Orphan, a splendid slice of latter-day Hitchcock with some really good actors thrown in for good measure. When Peli and Collet-Serra are pressed into service for TV, I want to be there.
But executive producer Steven Speilberg, fresh off executive producing Falling Skies and directing Tintin, should have been a red flag. Because The River is thoroughly TV in the worst sense of the word. It has no edge. It plays out with a soft safe made-for-TV feel, from the Lostly lush locale; to the ghost-of-the-week episodic format; to the convenient found-footage conceit recalling dopey reality TV ghost hunters; to the blandly telegenic and unremarkable cast. It’s all as menace-free as horror can be. Nice try killing the Jewish guy in the first episode. It’s so obvious that any character’s lifespan is proportionate to the number of lines he or she has.
Furthermore, it even fails as a haunted house fun ride. Peli uses tricks from Paranormal Activity, like fast forwarded film, sleeping people dragged out of bed, and bodies flung forcefully, usually at the camera. I expect footprints in flour next week. When the only memorable scare — and it’s not a scare so much as a mildly creepy shudder — is a monkey peering out from under a mask, I might as well just watch that scene from The Omen where baboons freak out on Lee Remick’s car.
In 2008, Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and semi-famous weirdo, became the world’s sixth “space tourist”. That is, he paid Space Adventures Ltd $30,000,000 to put him on a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan and shoot him off the planet at 17,500 miles per hour.
A man on a mission, after the jump Continue reading →
I honestly can’t tell you how I ended up watching Pitch Black on Netflix. It’s one of those things that just happened, not unlike waking up in Bangkok with a tattoo on your face or a shaved head. I might have mistakenly remembered that it’s a cult classic and that my sense of disappointment from seeing it in theaters over ten years ago was misplaced. That way lies madness. That way lies rewatching things like Soldier, Dune, or Stargate.
Pitch Black is awful. The writing is terrible, the production design is cheap, and the dramatic tension is entirely artificial. The cast mostly flounders, particularly poor Vin Deisel under the misguided notion that he’s the most bad-ass intergalactic criminal since that guy who didn’t like Mark Hamill either. When Deisel goes nose-to-nose with a space bat, lunging left and right to stay in its blind spot as it turns its head, Pitch Black loses its last faint shred of credibility. The worst sin any movie can commit is to betray its own conceit. Here is a movie about terrible terrible space bats that will eat you if you venture into the dark, except for all the times various characters venture into the dark and don’t get eaten.
It’s kind of cool seeing Claudia Black considering how much I hear her in videogames like Uncharted, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. And I’ve always liked Radha Mitchell, who somehow seems to rise about the various genre stinkers she’s been in. Which reminds me, hey, she was in that Silent Hill movie! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Maybe I should watch that again, since I actually ended up with the Silent Hill DVD somehow, which is a bit like waking up in Vegas with a missing tooth and a tiger in the bathroom.
With The Sitter, Director David Gordon Green obviously intended a latter-day Adventures in Babysitting. Take a charismatic lead, add a handful of adorable kids, and send them out for a night on the town where they run afoul of criminals. The twist? A hard R-rating, which Green undercuts with one safely sappy facile redemption after another.
If there’s any reason to see The Sitter, it’s to re-affirm that Max Records is a kid to watch. In Where the Wild Things Are, he was easily as fascinating as those enormous weird puppets, and whatever payoff that movie offered came from how good he was in his final scene with Catherine Keener. Records is one of those rare expressive child actors with a very adult grasp on what he’s saying, and how to express it even when he isn’t saying anything.
In The Sitter, when it comes time for Jonah Hill and Records to have their convenient redemption scene, you get good writing, two lovely performances, and surprisingly delicate subject matter for such an obtuse movie. It turns out Records’ character, a 13-year-old kid with psychiatric issues, is merely gay. Hill explains this to him, and Records lashes out and says he doesn’t want to be a “faggot”. “Don’t say shit like that,” Hill admonishes. He then explains to Records that, look, high school is really going to suck, but once he gets to college, no one will care that he’s gay. And then he’ll get an awesome job in the entertainment industry. Facile? Sure. But it’s the sort of scene that deserves a far better movie.
Also, The Sitter is a little fascinating for Sam Rockwell hopelessly miscast as a vicious drug dealer. No one handles being miscast with as much enthusiasm as Sam Rockwell.
