Annual Halloween Crappy Horror Movie Fest movie #3: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Not too much to say about this one. It fills out the story elements hinted at in the first two movies, although it is not strictly necessary to the overall story--perhaps it was just too tempting to create an Underworld trilogy. This installment only brings out Kate Beckinsale in stock footage, opting for the almost-as-hot Rhona Mitra (who was once the model for Lara Croft).

There's basically no suspense, since viewers of the first two films know exactly what's going to happen--the thrill is to finally see vampires and werewolves go at it with swords, arrows, and claws, rather than the oddly modern and high-tech bullets of the first movie. So basically, there are vampires and werewolves, and British women in very tight clothing. Way to be.


Interesting side note: the director, Patrick Tatopoulos, was the "creatures designer" for both The Cave and Pitch Black, making this film choice oddly evocative of my film choice of earlier today.

Annual Halloween Crappy Horror Movie Fest movie #2: Gone

For my next crappy horror film I decided to try Australia's Gone, for the main reason that it supposedly stars "Chuck's" Yvonne Strzechowski (who appears in one scene and has no dialogue, alas).

As if Wolf Creek didn't teach us all what a terrifying, Chainsaw Massacre-esque place Western Australia is, Gone sets out a run-of-the-mill three-person suspense thriller, with a young hip Australian couple terrorized by Scott Mechlowicz (of EuroTrip fame, who, after this movie and Mean Creek, can probably never play a normal person again.) That's really all I can say about this movie. Mechlowicz has fully transformed from the innocent but lovable doofus of EuroTrip to a career as a B-movie creepy guy. There's really no suspense until the last ten minutes or so, with the buildup consisting of various predictable efforts by the villain to create distrust between the Australian couple--he is helped by the fact that the boyfriend is a spazz and the girlfriend is an idiot.

The grand ending (Spoiler alert!) is definitely one to go down in the hall of fame for Frightening Use of Chain Link. Other than that, meh.

Annual Halloween Crappy Horror Movie Fest movie #1: The Cave

This movie just plain sucked, despite having Lena Heady (pre-Sarah Connor and pre-300).

Send a bunch of seasoned spelunkers and biologists into a quasi-mystical Romanian cave system, and the best they could come up with to hunt them was the deformed love child of the Alien and the things from Pitch Black?

This film had a budget of $30 million--I wonder how many cups of coffee a day that could have bought in order to save children?

Mocking "conservative" movies, part 2

This is the second installment in my intermittent series poking fun at National Review Online's list of the 25 best "conservative" movies. Mostly, I am mocking the notion that there is a single unified "conservative" ideology anymore at all. Now, then, on to #6-10 (WARNING: Spoilers abound!):

6. Groundhog Day. I actually haven't seen this one, either (that's two so far), but I've certainly heard a lot about it. It's "conservative" cred apparently comes from its moral "that redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your 'authentic' instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals." All I can think to say is duh. If you do anything enough times (as Bill Murray's character is forced to repeat the same day again and again ad nauseam), you're bound to either (a) go insane or (b) discover some deeper meaning to it all. This is hardly a viewpoint upon which "conservatives" hold a monopoly.

7. The Pursuit of Happyness. Long story short, single dad sacrifices everything to provide for his young son, and becomes a fantabulously successful stockbroker in the process, all during the Reagan administration. Possibly Will Smith's best performance ever, and it certainly does demonstrate the ostensibly "conservative" virtues of self-reliance, family values, and accumulation of wealth. I have a few bones to pick with NRO's analysis of the film, though:

• "[T]his film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed." Perhaps you missed the scene where Will Smith's character gets the idea to become a stockbroker from a man driving a Ferrari.
  
• "They’re black, but there’s no racial undertone or subtext." Except for the one you just created. Seriously, you already said it was a Will Smith movie, so why was this sentence necessary?
  
• "Gardner [Will Smith's character] is just an incredibly hard-working, ambitious, and smart man who wants to do better for himself and his son." Who takes an unpaid internship based on the dream of a Ferrari and the ability to solve a Rubik's Cube (see above YouTube link).

Those quibbles aside, this was a terrific movie. Certainly some liberties were taken with the facts, but the story ought to inspire anyone who sees it.
An amusing side note: after getting the job at Dean Witter, Gardner was then recruited to Bear Stearns.

8. Juno. Sigh. If this movie has any sort of anti-abortion message to it, it's really just one that viewers impose onto it. Juno's only stated reason for leaving the clinic is that it "smelled like a dentist's office." More importantly is the fact that Juno chose to leave the clinic after running a gauntlet of a single protester. The protester was more an object of satire in the film than anything about Juno's decision to seek an abortion. A common problem in the whole abortion debate is that people see it as only being two-sided: you oppose abortion rights, or you think it's all hunky-dory. I always thought "pro-choice" was a great choice of labels, because you can support the right to choose without actually liking the procedure itself. But back to the film: aside from the imposed "pro-life" meaning (and I hate that label for reasons I'll discuss some other time), the NRO reviewer doesn't have much nice to say about the movie: "The film has its faults, including a number of crass moments and a pregnant high-school student with an unrealistic level of self-confidence." Actually, I thought it pretty much depicted the teenage years as a series of crass moments. Juno is not a particularly realistic individual 16 year-old, but she is a pretty good cypher for a generalized teenage mindset: torn between all the various pressures and expectations of late childhood, and trying to maintain her own sense of self throughout it all, blah blah blah...point being, there is a lot more going on here than just a "pro-life" or "conservative" message. Finally, recall that the movie ends with the baby being adopted by a single mother. Yikes!

9. Blast from the Past. If you wanted evidence that "conservatives" have no sense of irony or satire, look no further. "Brendan Fraser plays an innocent who has grown up in a fallout shelter and doesn’t know the era of Sputnik and Perry Como is over. Alicia Silverstone is a post-feminist woman who learns from him that pre-feminist women had some things going for them." I haven't seen the film in a good long while, but I'm trying to imagine the two actors discussing the merits of Valium-addled '50s housewives versus Prozac-addled late-'90s career-driven mothers, etc., etc. It could be that I'm too cynical. Maybe I need a good dose of 1950's-era idealism! Well, it's sure a good thing I'm not a gay black communist woman--I hear the 1950's weren't so great for those groups. This is just the same tired old "conservative" cliche that there existed some mythical past when Everything Was Better, and modern society has somehow lost its way.

10. Ghostbusters. Really? Well, there was a very Reaganesque ethic to the movie, which I think is the sole basis for including it on this list: "[Y]ou have to like a movie in which the bad guy (William Atherton at his loathsome best) is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector." Of course, the EPA buffoon as portrayed utterly failed to follow any of his own agency's procedures for information gathering, but that allowed Bill Murray to have a funny smackdown scene with him. The shutdown of the containment facility was a sterling depiction of Bush II-era disregard for the rule of law in the interest of national security (they had a warrant none of the Ghostbusters were allowed to see.) But seriously, my main concern with this movie's "conservative" creds arises from two facts: (1) a god not mentioned in the Bible tries to destroy the world, and (2) salvation is left to the New York National Guard and four snarky private contractors--four smart-asses defeating ultimate evil? That's what the movie is really about, and it's a little too timelessly awesome to just be "conservative."

Now for some video:

I triumphantly return to blogging by mocking the idea of "conservative" movies

It's not difficult to point out some movies that are decidedly "liberal," at least based on the overall tone and plot of the film. A few titles come to mind such as The American President and Dave, wherein Republican politicians receive their comeuppance by Democratic politicians or a likeable everyman character. For some reason, it seems harder to label a particular film "conservative," particularly using the present-day meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative." Sometimes I think "liberal" ideas just make for better drama--stories of an underdog triumphing against the odds are much more compelling than stories of the struggle to remain abstinent or to retain one's tax cuts. I jest, somewhat, but the reason I'm even writing this is because I have been haunted for the past several days by the National Review Online's list of the 25 best "conservative" movies (h/t Chez Pazienza at HuffPo). What, you may ask, is a "conservative" movie? Well, in this case it refers to films "that offer compelling messages about freedom, families, patriotism, traditions, and more." With such a generic definition, this should be an entertaining list. Personally, I think it shows the utter bankruptcy of the very concept of a single "conservative" ideology in 2009 America. Cue the snark.

1. The Lives of Others. Beyond a doubt, this is one of my all-time favorite movies. Set in East Berlin in 1984, it tells the story of a Stasi spy assigned to snoop on a barely-tolerated subversive playwright, and how the spy comes to sympathize with the playwright's ideals and freedoms over the Communist system he has devoted his life to. Thinking that communism and totalitarianism suck is hardly the sole domain of "conservatives" anymore, though, so I hereby reclaim The Lives of Others for my fellow political independents.

2. The Incredibles. Another one of my favorite movies, said to "celebrate marriage, courage, responsibility, and high achievement." These are "conservative" values? I think someone missed the last 8 years.

3. Metropolitan. I haven't seen it, but it apparently involves a normal guy showing up a bunch of effete New York snobs. And that's really what conservatives are all about.

4. Forrest Gump. The title character is described as "an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s." I suppose that is one way of interpreting it, but I got a rather strong anti-everything-stupid vibe from the movie, not just limited to hippies. Meh.

5. 300. Seriously. 300 is considered a conservative film. Beefcake in leather speedoes being fed into a meat grinder in the name of defending a society that kills unfit individuals at birth. It is worth noting that a major cause of the eventual smackdown they receive (aside from being horrifically outnumbered) is the betrayal of one of those "unfit" individuals who was allowed to live, and man was he pissed. I suppose the lesson is that freedom isn't free and must be defended at all costs, which is why so many College Republicans have volunteered to go to Iraq. Oh wait...

I think I'll have to make this a series of sorts, since I'm not going through all 25 in one sitting. Besides, I like to leave my reader(s) wanting more...

Greatest. Summer movie idea. Ever.

90 minutes of this would be so much better than most anythingt Hollywood has to offer:



Throw in some ballet-dancing cyborg action, and you may just have the perfect movie:

Acting shout-out: Todd Anderson in "North Country"

I watched the movie North Country this morning (h/t Netflix), a 2005 Oscar-baiting Charlize Theron film, and I have several salutes I have to make here.

First off, and obviously most importantly, it really is a pretty good film about the issue of sexual harassment, as well as how crappy it must be to work in an iron mine.

On a less-socially-conscious note, the film proves Carlize Theron is beautiful even with ridiculously-authentic '80s hair, and it offers a glimpse of hometown hottie Amber Heard in the undoubtedly-daunting role of a young (teenaged) Charlize Theron.

Really though, the point of this post is this: I must tip my hat generally to the grotesque depiction the film offers of the types of harassment the women had to endure, and specifically to Todd Anderson, who portrays a mine worker whose preferred method of harassment is to ejaculate into Michelle Monaghan's locker. I single out Mr. Anderson for his courage and fortitude, based on the fact that he may forever be known, thanks to the film's credits, as "Semen Man."

That has got to be hell on a resume.

The Oscars leave me behind, once again

Of all the movies in the latest Oscar nominations, I've seen exactly four of them:

• Charlie Wilson's War (Supporting Actor, Phillip Seymour Hoffman)
  
• Ratatouille (Original screenplay, Animated feature, Original score, Sound editing, Sound mixing)
  
• The Bourne Ultimatum (Film editing)
  
• Transformers (Sound editing, Sound mixing, Visual effects)

Of the four, the only one I didn't find disappointing on some level was "Transformers," and that was just because I had no expectations whatsoever.

Seriously, though, I'm pulling for "Bourne" for film editing--based on what little I know of the subject, that part of the film kicked ass (think high-speed fight scenes). On the other hand, I didn't like how the techno remix of Moby's "Extreme Ways" broke continuity with the first two films. Minor criticism, I guess.

Cloverfield and disaster porn

I haven't seen Cloverfield yet, but I'm sure I will at some point. The History Channel's "Life After People" premieres tonight, too. It gets me wondering--and I have no answer to this question--what it is about the destruction of familiar landmarks in movies that is so dang entertaining.

A few examples include Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Armageddon/Deep Impact, a nice compilation of which is found here:



Think of it as disaster porn: the "money shot," if you will, of all these movies is the mega-CGI scenes of destruction and mayhem. Maybe we as a culture just need to be repeatedly desensitized after events like 9/11 and Katrina, and watching NYC get blown up/flooded/smashed by a monster/inundated by leprechauns is the way to do it.

Or maybe we're just a nation full of assholes. Hard to tell. Anyway, I prefer the much more sober, survival-against-all-odds Battlestar Galactica over fluff like Armageddon.



And besides, the spoilers about the Cloverfield monster make it look pretty silly.

It's gonna suck, but I don't care.

I just learned of the sequel to Alien vs. Predator coming out on Christmas day (interesting choice.)

The original Alien vs. Predator, while highly disappointing, really sucked, but dammit, I'm still excited.

I think it's the 5-year-old in me who wasn't allowed to see the original when it came out who's most excited.

Halloween Crappy-Film-Fest Roundup, 2007

My typical Halloween tradition, in lieu of braving the slutty-nurses-on-6th-Street scene, is to rent a few crappy horror movies and then bitch about them. Now that I have a blog, I can bitch to the whole world! And besides, Halloween is such a liberal holiday, don't you think?

A quick side note: in my opinion, there is only a handful of genuinely good horror movies, but that is a subject for a future post.

This year's set consisted of 28 Weeks Later, The Insatiable, and Flight of the Living Dead. Watch out for spoilers up ahead.

1. 28 Weeks Later.

Let me first say that 28 Days Later (2003) is probably going to be included in my list of good horror films, whenever I get around to writing it. The sequel seemed to have all the components of a good action movie, but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Here's what the original had going for it: a gritty, low-budget look that somehow made it more real to the viewer; and real characters that the audience got to know and care about. A good sequel needs to do at least one of the following: (1) delve deeper into the characters first introduced in the original, or (2) continue the story begun in the original in a gripping and intelligent way. A good sequel does at least one of these (e.g. the "Dirty Harry" sequels), while a great sequel does both (e.g. Godfather 2, Aliens). A bad sequel does neither (e.g. The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions).

28 Weeks Later has exactly none of the original cast returning, so there is no delving to be done. Does it continue the story intelligently? Let's see--Americans enter Great Britain to start the reconstruction process once all the "zombies" have starved to death, allowing Brits to return to controlled areas a few dozen at a time. One survivor turns out to be a Typhoid Mary for the rage virus, she infects her husband, he infects a few people, the military starts shooting and blowing up everything that moves, and it is difficult to remember what the various characters' names are or what they are doing. So I guess the answer is no. The movie also wastes several highly underrated but very talented actors (e.g. Rose Byrne, Idris Elba), and uses its one almost-big-name actor (Robert Carlyle) as a Patient Zero (so he has very little dialogue except grunting.)

All in all, very disappointing. The special effects, given the grittiness of the original, were actually too good. If we learned anything at all from Blair Witch 2, sometimes a big budget is not a good thing.

Here's what I would've done: After holing up in a remote farmhouse for several months, the leads from the original (Cillian Murphy as Jim, Naomie Harris as Selena, and a more grown-up Hannah played by Sienna Guillory) lead a NATO expeditionary team back into post-apocalypse London, braving the few stragglers who somehow managed to survive, and facing the mutated, airborne version of the rage virus. Eventually, they have to blow up a bunch of shit, but we (the audience) actually care if one of them gets blown up as well. I'm working on a screenplay. It will be as if this last sequel never happened (cf. Halloween H20).

2. The Insatiable.

First, you have to believe that one of the original Boondock Saints is a pathetic loner, which is about as likely as Sandra Bullock or Rachel Leigh Cook being pathetic loners. Must be a movie thing.

Next, you have to believe he can steal $32,000 worth of equipment from his place of work to build a steel cage in the basement of his (rented) apartment building, that no one else will find.

The point of all this is that he traps a ridiculously hot female vampire in the cage and then tries to keep her alive by feeding her rabbits.

He also has a ridiculously hot blonde neighbor who is always flirting with him and inviting him over for dinner. Of course, when you think he has finally come to his senses and tries to kiss her, she becomes enraged, leaving him with no one except the hot vampire.

The only particularly memorable scene is the denouement, after he has allowed hot vampire to bite him. We see that she has niot killed him, but rather turned him. He knocks on blonde neighbor's door and asks "Are you ready to feed me now?"

Hardly a progressive ending, but I guess the nerd wins out in the end. All in all, this movie was crap--Netflix said I might like it, presumably because I told it I like vampire movies.

3. Flight of the Living Dead.

Maybe the funniest part is that I am not making this up--this movie actually exists. It's basically 28 Days Later meets Executive Decision, except Steven Seagal doesn't die in this one, alas.

I actually quite enjoyed this one. It doesn't take itself seriously, it is actually fairly well-paced, the acting is suprisingly good, and it didn't strain credibility any further than was absolutely necessary. I went into this one with perhaps the lowest expectations (I still have not seen last year's highly anticipated movie with the snakes, but I hear it didn't go over so well), so maybe I am just filtering it through that sort of lens. But really, it has the bully from the 80's classic Three O'Clock High playing a TSA agent, and the old guy from "Heroes" plays a sort-of mad scientist character who gets his face ripped off.

Horror movies (here I go making a list again) should do one of two things: (1) scare hell out of us in thoughtful, unexpected ways (e.g. Psycho, The Exorcist); or (2) entertain us with not-to-be-taken-too-seriously scary hijinks (e.g. Halloween). This one accomplished goal #2 in abundance.

I have to give my award for best crappy horror movie for Halloween 2007 to Flight of the Living Dead. Sorry, British zombies.

Less than met the eye

It's been a week since I saw the Transformers movie, so I've had a chance to process my thoughts on the matter. In short, I have concluded that I have no coherent thoughts other than the following (SPOILER ALERT, sort of):

1. Glenn Morshower remains one of the most criminally-underrated actors out there--although I still haven't seen season 6 of 24, he portrays one of the only non-Jack-Bauer characters to survive five straight seasons.
2. Megan Fox almost supplants Charlize Theron for my title of too-beautiful-to-be-human. Almost.
3. Questions regarding the consistency, coherence, or even plausibility of the central plot and various plot points are pointless. There is an item sought by everyone in the movie that has the power to turn ordinary electronic items into evil robots. For no stated reason, it cannot create good robots. Whether this is a meditation on the ubiquity of evil in the universe and the ease by which the ordinary can become the malevolent, or whether this is a complete failure of imagination on the part of the screenwriters, is of no interest to me.
4. Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Bug, dammit! OK, I'm over it.
5. Character development. It's important to a movie. Who the fuck are all these Decepticons that show up in the last twenty minutes? It's as though the writers suddenly remembered, in the final moments of the movie, that they needed some sort of resolution with the bad guys they had been ignoring. Plus, I didn't even notice that Megatron was voiced by Agent Smith.
6. Good call not making Megatron a large robot who turns into a small gun. It's nice to see at least one shout-out to the laws of physics. Plus, he's scarier this way.
7. It's good to see that the guy who voices Optimus Prime can keep it on his resume for this film.
8. Summer movies and deep thought do not go together.
9. Despite several hours of inundation with the message, I still don't want to buy a Camaro.

10 Minutes

This is a short from Bosnian director Ahmed Imamovic. Gives you an idea of how shitty the world can be. Just a little something to bum you out if you were having a good day.



From the YouTube description:

10 minutes by Ahmed Imamovic. 1994. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Rome, Italy. How many different things can happen for only 10 Minutes. The film won the award for the best European short film in 2002.

This short film, as its title indicates lasts only 10 minutes, but it tells a much longer story which unravels only in our imagination upon seeing the end of the film. While 10 minutes in someone's life mean nothing, they can be fatal in another: a boy and his loving family, tragedy in a war-torn city, death and destruction. All in just ten minutes. The film follows two simultaneous story lines: one set in Rome, and one in Sarajevo, in 1994, the worst time of the war in Bosnia. Although the Rome part was not filmed on the original location, that does not take away anything from the quality of the film, it was just a symbolic element anyway. Cast is great, story is very compact and well written, direction dynamic and precise. There is nothing out of place in the film: well structured, stripped of false pathos, realistic, it is very straight forward. In other words, this is a jewel of a film, and it was not by chance that it won the award for the best European short film in 2002. 10 minutes for me is definitely one of the most moving and powerful films about wartime Sarajevo. Behind the scene: I read that the director Ahmed Imamovic, in search of Japanese for the role of the tourist, had to go to the Japanese Embassy in Sarajevo and ask one of the staff to perform in the film. Luckily for the director, the Embassy allowed one of their employees to star in the film.

Vintage Star Wars

I can't seem to let this Star Wars thing go today. This is kinda cute--I think most people could do something similar on Windows Movie Maker. What makes this cool is that most people wouldn't bother to do so.

Silent Star Wars

See more like this on kontraband.com

Vader the Playa

Well worth the nine minutes of your life that you probably weren't going to use anyway:

Vadersploitation

See more like this on kontraband.com

Today's inspirational cheese

Although the hottie calls him a "lump of coal," this is pretty impressive. I love seeing that Simon dickhead get served, too:



The dude reminds me a bit of this fella, but admit it, you were thinking the same thing as me:

RUDY! RUDY! RUDY! RUDY!

Intel Building demolition - WHEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

The Intel Building at 5th & San Antonio, long the blight of the Austin downtown skline, finally went away Sunday morning, sort of. The demolition wasn't quite as complete as we onlookers had expected, although it apparently went exactly as planned, and it drew some disquieting comparisons to 9/11 from some in attendance. Of course, everyone there had their cameras at the ready. Here's my footage, complete with excessive commentary:



Of course, it wouldn't be a public event in Austin without 9/11 conspiracy nuts. Somebody (I didn't get a picture) was waving a sign with something about Googling WTC7 on it. Sigh.

Cross-posted at The Albatross.

The Squirrel

Solely in the interest of shameless self- and cross-promotion, I present my very first completed short film: