Category Archives: Film

Red (2010)

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Remember that time when they made that movie about a bunch of retired astronauts who went back into space one last time, for some reason? Red is like that, except about spies. The Double-Oh kind, I mean. On the bright side, it’s quite a bit funnier than I remember the astronaut movie being, as long as you don’t look too closely at the romantic subplot that Bruce Willis kicks off by kidnapping the hot mom from Weeds in order to head off (self-fulfilling) attempts upon her life. But of course it all works out, as movies do, without any long-term police involvement. Anyway, though, aside from that it’s a fun, breezy romp of exactly the type you’d expect from a spy movie based on a graphic novel of some kind. There’s a plot, but only enough to justify young spies trying and failing in spectacular ways to kill old spies; definitely nowhere near enough to comment upon. So, if you like that kind of thing, or just recognizable actors being reasonably funny? Dig it.

It’s a Funny Kind of Story

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It’s really no wonder I see as many movies as I do, since I intend (with failures, sure, but the intent is always there) to see a movie on any given Wednesday afternoon, and then I still see other movies on the weekends or whenever. This Wednesday’s movie was It’s Kind of a Funny Story, an accurately-titled light drama about an overstretched New York City teen who asks to be committed to a mental hospital to get away from his suicidal thoughts, and only realizes after the fact what being committed actually means. And then he, y’know, learns about life and love and himself, and a lot of his fellow patients learn about these things on the way. If this sounds more than a little twee, well, it kind of was, but it had that type of self-aware tweeness that seems to say, look, this is basically a real story, and sometimes life can be a little twee, and, what are ya gonna do?

But the important thing is that it was often funny and extremely sweet, and sometimes I like movies that make me feel good. (I always like movies that make me laugh.) Oh, and another important thing is that it was populated in the main by very talented actors. Other than a few of the ancillary high school kids, pretty much everyone was really good. Good enough for me to take note of it, I mean, and one has to be a pretty strong outlier (in either the good or bad direction) for me to take note of one’s acting skill. So there’s that. But mainly, the funny and the sweet.

Devil

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It turns out that there was another M. Night Shyamalan movie this year besides The [apparently horrible] Last Airbender. Devil had very little of his touch, though; only the story concept was his, with both script and direction handed out elsewhere. I honestly don’t have an opinion on whether that’s particularly good or bad, though I will say that it was less overwrought than, for example, The Happening. It was extremely religious, which is another of his hallmarks, though I suppose with a title like that it is to be expected here. The premise is simple and more than enough to determine if it will hold your interest: a group of people are on a malfunctioning elevator when suddenly bad things start to happen, including an eventual belief that one of the people trapped on the elevator is the devil, tormenting people for their sins even before they are dead.

On the one hand, I felt like a lot of what happened outside the elevator was fluff to pad out the movie and could have been cut, up to and including a last moment shock reveal that was neither shocking nor revelatory to me, despite that I had not figured out the “twist” ahead of time or anything like that. But then again, it’s an 80 minute movie, even padded. It was good enough for what it was, I guess, but I think I have to be disappointed by the fact that not nearly enough energy was spent on script and face time in the elevator itself, because, violent deviltry in an enclosed space, with no way to know who to trust? That sounds like an incredible premise to me, yet I don’t feel like it’s what I actually got.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

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Upon realization of the upcoming release of a new Resident Evil sequel, I cleverly hosted a movie night to catch up on the previous three movies, which had a high degree of plot and character consistency across them. I’m glad I did so not only because at least two of the three movies are genuinely good, but also because the continuity has continued onward. Afterlife begins with Alice’s assault on another (or possibly the primary?) Umbrella stronghold, and then settles back into the business of the lot of the movies: finding friends and survivors (the only difference in a world with this few remaining humans being how long you’ve known a survivor) and especially finding a place where the zombies can’t get at you. I suppose it’s much the same as the Walking Dead series, except with the addition of the evil multinational conglomerate and a heightened sense of action.

Not as well-themed as Extinction nor as campy as Apocalypse, it was nevertheless an excellent sequel, with good character and action moments aplenty. Basically, if you like anything about this series, it is continuing to deliver the goods, and if you don’t, well, sometimes people and zombie entertainment don’t get along. It happens. I guess.

Machete (2010)

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I don’t even know where to begin. All I can tell you is that from the moment Machete started until the credits rolled (complete with promised sequels!), I had a grin on my face the size of Texas. At one point, I believe I actually whooped at the screen. There is just not enough hyperbole in the world to express how much I loved this movie, and I know I’m going overboard with the praise already, like by a lot, but I can’t stop myself. It is really comparable in plot and character development to what 2012 did with set design and special effects. In fact, if 2012 had not existed, I would call this the most over-the-top movie I’d ever seen, and I still think the fact that it goes in other directions will make anyone who loved that movie love this one without having to feel like it’s ripping anything off.

Of course, Machete is ripping something off, and that something is an entire decade of drive-in cinema, picking and choosing plot points, recurring themes, and larger than life characters at will to create the ultimate expression of 1970s badassery. Oh, and it’s ripping off limbs and heads by the cart-load, but that probably goes without saying. I don’t think there’s a single character that Danny Trejo (in the eponymous role) doesn’t fight or fuck his way through on his rampage through a slightly surreal version of Austin to take out Steven Seagal’s conniving drug lord; it’s not clear that Machete knows any other way to interact with the populace at large. Robert Rodriguez has surpassed Planet Terror in every way, and all with a movie he fleshed out from a fake trailer, apparently because modern politics reminded him of the idea? I am grateful to you, crazy Arizonan lawmakers!

I kind of wish I was watching it again, right now.

The Last Exorcism

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Here are the things you should know about The Last Exorcism before you go see it.

1) Despite having his name all over the previews and posters, Eli Roth is merely the producer. It seems like he should ought to make at least a few more movies before all the new people get to attach his name to their work a la Wes Craven.
2) It is shown documentary-style, with the inevitable moments of implausibility that this brings. People carrying cameras just won’t act like this in real life situations, and Blair Witch only got away with it by being the first. That said, I only found myself rolling my eyes at the cameraman a handful of times, which is better than average.

If you can get past those downsides, it’s not a bad little movie. The premise is just about enough to justify the price of admission all by itself: a small town exorcist in the Deep South travels around in response to peoples’ letters about crazy relatives or dead livestock, puts on a nice little show for them as a placebo effect to drive away the “demons” that are vexing them, and goes home with a nice wad of cash. Only, he’s started to feel guilty about the whole thing and is getting out of the business. Not only that, but he apparently feels badly enough about it to expose the chicanery inherent in the whole system by taking a documentary crew along on what will be his last exorcism. You can guess how that turns out, of course, but there are still twists and turns aplenty before the plot is played out to its conclusion, which you may well have a prediction about already. (At least, I’ve never seen a horror-with-camera movie that didn’t end with every single character dead or worse. Have you?)

The Expendables (2010)

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You have likely seen various previews for The Expendables, the main selling point of which is that it contains 75% of the action stars from the past three decades. I mean, of the previews, not the movie. My point is that the previews did not actually try to sell the movie on any axis other than star power. And there is some extent to which I have to agree with this decision, because the script was only barely distinguishable from some of the early ’70s Marvel comics I’ve been reading lately; about the only significant differences are a) the lack of radiation-spawned superheroes and b) the concept of the tinpot island dictator having American backing; after all, we weren’t very cynical quite yet, as of 1971. Still, it was on the whole a pretty decent movie in which a lot of familiar people are involved in a wide variety of car chases, gun battles, and explosions, just as advertised. Don’t expect to have any significant memories about it the next day, though.

Despite this barely positive review, I feel compelled to make two more complaints beyond the genericism. Firstly, I found the title a little misleading as to the tone of the film. I’m not saying it’s shiny and happy and nothing bad happens as in some action flicks, but it really isn’t nearly as dark as it should be. And, I’m disappointed in Jason Statham’s romance subplot. After enough consideration to convince me into writing this paragraph in the first place, I think the problem is not merely that it was disconnected from the rest of the movie and therefore irrelevant. Rather, it’s that he was presented as a secondary main character after Stallone (who had plenty of character development moments with other strong side characters), yet this half-hearted attempt to develop Statham’s character hurts things more than if they had just let him be a sidekick. If neither he nor his plot had existed in the movie, it would have been the same movie. If both had existed without the rest of the film, they could have been the seeds of a completely different (and maybe stronger) alternate film. But crammed together, it made an otherwise generic movie with several interesting characters worse. And that is sad.

Piranha 3D

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MV5BMTU3NDg2NTY4Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM0OTE3Mw@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but it has been too long since anyone released a good monster movie.[1] Which is not to say Piranha 3D is itself good, because that word doesn’t really apply in a traditional way to this particular subgenre in nearly the same way that Joe Bob Briggs’ drive-in totals do. Honestly, the title tells you everything you need to know about the plot, which is that a school of hungry piranha are about to crash a co-ed beach party to blood-spattering result. I will say that as a prior resident of San Marcos, Texas, where the original Piranha was filmed, I appreciated the scene in which naked nymphs are filmed making out underwater through a glass-bottomed yacht, as this was clearly a shout-out to the sadly defunct Aquarena Springs mermaids.

As for those drive-in totals[2], there were 11 breasts, 15 bodies, and one full-blown spring break massacre. Multiple propellers to the face. Frying pan to the piscine face. Head rolls. Torso rolls. Legs roll. Penis rolls. Drive-in academy award nominations to Jessica Szohr for vomiting in 3D, to Jerry O’Connell as the sleazy video promoter, to Christopher Lloyd for saying, “They don’t have fully-developed genitalia!” with exactly the delivery you’re imagining, and to Richard Dreyfuss just for showing up. Three and a half stars, and if you do in fact want to check it out, hell, I’d go again.

[1] I mean, besides Sci-Fi SyFy original motion pictures, weekly on Saturday nights.
[2] …that a quick web search [to see if I could compare them with the original count, which likely does not exist due to the movie’s 1978 release date being too early] tells me every reviewer on the planet is referencing this weekend.

The Other Guys

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You know how buddy cop movies, even the comedic ones, have these heroic types who rush in, guns blazing and authority fully-bucked, to destroy a lot of property, set off several explosions, and generally save the day in the most visible way possible? This movie isn’t about them. You know the wisecracking jackass rival cops who inevitably do the wrong thing but are never quite actively evil, just in the way a lot? Not them either. Not even the cop who’s three days from retirement and will probably die nobly very soon. Nope, as the movie itself will tell you moments in, this one is about the other guys, the ones who are relegated firmly to background shots, the ones who fill out paperwork and ride desks.

In addition to a reasonable amount of comedy, there’s also some amount of social relevance: the big case isn’t about drugs or prostitution or terrorism; no, it’s about financial shenanigans, in the tens of billions of dollars range. You know, exactly the kind of thing that’s been in the public consciousness since 2008 or so. I wish I could say that big of a lead time has been enough to get it back out of our minds, but the way things have gone, nope, it’s every bit as relevant as when the writer first started the script. (Thankfully, the main focus on comedy keeps it from being too trite, the way the same movie written as drama would’ve been.)

All in all, it’s not life-changingly funny or life-changingly insightful, but it was a decent way to spend half an afternoon.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

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I am thinking that today may be a good day to watch movies. Not sure yet if that’s how the rest of my day will proceed, but I can state definitively that it has begun that way, with the Prince of Persia movie that came out back in May. Which I think was the only movie I’ve actually missed all summer? Yay for being caught up! Possibly because it was based on a video game or possibly because I never heard anyone really talking about it, I am surprised to report that it was pretty good.

In the pro-column: a good soundtrack and really a lot of excellent action sequences that captured the spirit of both the specific game it was based on as well as the whole series, while cleverly jettisoning the majority of that game’s plot, which was good enough for a platformer game, but, well. Instead, our titular prince must unravel a plot to overthrow the throne of Persia when he is framed for the murder of his father the king, with only a princess who hates him and a sporadically magic dagger for allies. Y’know, pretty much the same plot as any action-adventure movie, when you get right down to it, but on the bright side, those are usually good.

In the con-column: way, way too many “sly” references to current events, including a search for weapons of mass destruction and railing against high taxes. This is why Star Wars is the better movie, y’know. Nobody was complaining about taxes in Star Wars. That and the desert may be the only substantive differences, though.