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Source Code (2011, Duncan Jones)

Off to a bad start, since justwatch says peacock has got the magician-heist Now You See Me movies, but I’m not seeing it on the damn roku… it brings up this instead, the Moon director’s train-bomber Quantum Leap time-loop thingie, so let’s just see. Donnie Darko is in a quiet moment, calling an army buddy’s dad, while Vera Farmiga discovers the real Donnie in a medical tube, I guess dreaming all this? His smiling girlfriend Michelle Monaghan doesn’t know he’s a chewed-up torso whose brain is running a simulation, but nervous lab supervisor Jeffrey Wright does, and is mad at Vera for pulling his plug, though Donnie’s dream continues – it’s all like if Deja Vu sucked. When the credits come up, the streamer thinks I should watch some incredibly unpopular (100 views) generic garbage, oh boy.

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Victor Crowley (2017, Adam Green)

I think this is Hatchet 4. Four unpleasant actors are trapped in a crashed airplane while Vic attacks it with a circular saw from the outside until they flee into the swamp, hide, then fight back. One guy plays the same character he played in part three, but not the same one he played in part two or one, hmmm. “Oh no, he died.”

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan)

Prime still has ads, so I guess we’re stuck with HBO – let’s give this one 15 minutes since it’s a long movie by a best-picture winner. Marion Cotillard is evil, Anne Hathaway is good, Gary Oldman is kidnapped: we’re all caught up. Futuretanks and cybercycles and batdrones battle weightlessly on the city streets, the music louder than the explosions. It seems Oppenheimer wasn’t his first nuclear ride, as Batman nukes himself to save the city – OR DOES HE?

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Man of Steel (2013, Zack Snyder)

Oh it’s very loud, as Supe (“Soup”) rescues Amy Adams from a black hole to a ruined city where evil Michael Shannon is angry and destroys the city even more, but he cannot hurt Soup because they’re both cartoons. Is he to be reached? He’s not to be reached! I like that it’s making little jokes amongst the big fights, reminds me of Supermen of yore and their friends Richard Pryor and Kevin Spacey. Shannon can survive hurling through exploding satellites in space, he can peel back the mountains, peel back the sky, stomp gravity into the floor, but he can’t take a classic Steven Seagal neck-snap move. Soup invents his Clark alter-ego in the movie’s final moments, exciting.

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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, Zack Snyder)

Same(?) ruined city but now Soup is dead and Amy Adams is sad. This is the problem with overlong movies: the last ten minutes are all coda, so I’ll never know what killed him. Also not sure what CG monster muck Jesse Eisenberg was dealing with when the army picked him up. The Daily Planet’s front page is pretty loose with punctuation. “Amazing Grace” at the funeral is giving me The Rehearsal flashbacks. At least there’s hardly any dialogue because everyone in the movie is so unspeakably sad, until Batfleck shows up to ask Wonder Woman to form The Avengers. I miss Bale’s batvoice, but Eisenberg is fun. A guy who started his directing career with a Living Dead remake can’t help but end on a jumping coffin.

by ·Comments Off on Seven Movies, Some Television and Other Things So Far in 2011

This post has been released under the Movie Journal Amnesty Act of March 2011, which states that blog entries may be short and crappy, since I am too busy to write up proper ones.

Machete (2010, Robert Rodriguez)

I loved the Machete fake trailer in Grindhouse, but felt R.R. was stretching the joke too far by making this. It didn’t get stellar reviews, so I skipped it in theaters. Oops. So wonderful, probably better than Planet Terror. Baddies Robert De Niro, Steven Seagal and Jeff Fahey all get brutally killed, along with Cheech Marin and about two hundred others. I don’t know how Rodriguez stays on the cool/fun side of the campy comic-action tightrope, instead of stumbling like Sukiyaki Western Django or falling clear off like Tokyo Gore Police. Dude is good.

Hatchet 2 (2010, Adam Green)

Ugh, a boring waste of time. Good for you if you make a self-aware, post-Scream horror movie full of fun references, movie veterans and tons of humor and gore. But boo on you for throwing away all accumulated goodwill on an obvious rehash sequel. Boooooo.

Frozen (2010, Adam Green)

Watched to give Green another chance after Hatchet II. Full of “why don’t they try…” and “why wouldn’t they just…” moments, and I thought the cinematography was boring, but the story and acting are undeniable… quite a good little horror flick.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994, John Carpenter)

When bad horror gets me down, I like to watch this again. It’s clunky at times and likes to montage itself (each cool shot is shown three times or more) but Sam Neill is great, and it’s one of few horrors I’ve seen that takes its Lovecraftian apocalyptic premise all the way to a satisfying conclusion.

Barres (1984, Luc Moullet)

A whole movie about dodging payment in the Paris subway – only 15 minutes long with no spoken dialogue. Cute and instructive. Told myself I’d finally check out Moullet but this is all I’ve gotten to so far.

Barres:

Beauty and the Beast (1991, Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise)

Watched with Katy. What’s this new cleaning song doing in here? Must all Disney movies have a cleaning/work song?

The Clash: Westway to the World (2000, Don Letts)

A member of Big Audio Dynamite makes an interview film with some concert footage about The Clash. Very conventional, would’ve rather read The Clash’s wikipedia page and watched a full concert DVD.

Marty (1953, Delbert Mann)

The TV version from that rad Criterion DVD. I enjoyed Mann’s smooth Jimmy Stewart voice on the DVD commentary. He died two years before the DVD came out. A big shot in television through the early 50’s, he started working in cinema beginning with the film version of Marty, reaching the heights of a Cary Grant/Doris Day rom-com in ’62, then by the early 80’s he came back full-time to TV. Written by Paddy Chayefsky, acclaimed for this and Network, and also surprisingly the author of Altered States.

I’m still not clear on the kinescope process – so it was a camera aimed at a TV screen during broadcast? And this was done by the network, not by some enthusiast at home with a proto-VCR setup? And it was set up for time-shifting to the west coast? How did they get the film developed and send it to LA in an hour? Is the kinescope the reason why lateral camera moves make the movie suddenly looks like I’m watching it inside a cylinder?

“Girls: Dance with the man who asks you. Remember men have feelings too.” Marty is bored, has no luck with ladies, finally meets one who is his own speed. Meanwhile his mother is worrying over him and his aunt is moving in and his friends are telling him to forget the girl. Will love conquer all? Yes. A very small-scale but wonderful movie.

Rod Steiger would go on to star in Run of the Arrow and In The Heat of the Night, and more importantly, as the warmongering general of Mars Attacks!. He was recast as Borgnine in the feature film, but his mother and aunt made the cinema transition – the mother (Esther Minciotti) also played mother to Cornel Wilde and Henry Fonda in Shockproof and The Wrong Man, respectively. I had to subtitle her thick accent at times on the DVD here.

Parks & Recreation season 1

Now maybe I’ll be able to remember who Amy Poehler is, even though I’ve seen her in four movies. Also good to see Aziz again after Human Giant, but this was surprisingly not too funny/brilliant a season. Things have already picked up at the start of s2, so hopes are high.

Lars/Real Girl’s well-meaning brother Paul Schneider is low-key ladies’ man Mark. Nick Offerman of The Men Who Stare at Goats is mustachioed manager Ron. Bored receptionist April is Aubrey Plaza, a minor hostile character in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Poehler’s new friend Ann is Rashida Jones, the lawyer (?) who talks to Mark Zuckerberg after-hours in The Social Network, and her boyfriend Andy is Chris Pratt of nothing I’ve seen yet.

Saxondale season 1

Steve Coogan plays less of a buffoon than usual, actually kind of a bright and capable guy. He’s not super classy though, an ex-roadie for various rock groups turned independent exterminator with anger management issues, with a new young assistant whom he and his wife Mags (Ruth Jones of Little Britain and Nighty Night) somewhat adopt. Not a masterpiece of a show, but a happy diversion with some sharp comic bits.

Stella (2005)

The only season of Michael & Michael & David Wain’s show. Once I learned to tolerate how awful and stupid it is, I started to appreciate its stupid, awful, brilliant sense of humor. Or maybe I’m just stupid. Still to see: Michael & Michael Have Issues and rival series Wainy Days. Plus I never watched Reno 911, and maybe Viva Variety will come out on DVD some day.

Flight of the Conchords season 2
The Mighty Boosh season 2

These two are currently competing for best musical comedy series of the decade. Metalocalypse doesn’t stand a chance. Conchords may have the edge, because the music in Boosh season 2 was less prominent and awesome than in its first season.

by ·Comments Off on Hatchet (2006, Adam Green)

“You can’t hook up with itchy chicks. Everyone knows that.”

Second movie I’ve watched in a row (after [Rec]) with no new gimmick of its own, seemingly quite derivative, but so well done it rises above most originals. The key isn’t the story or the creature effects – I think it’s all in characterization and acting. No incredible camerawork/filmmaking but I enjoyed watching because I liked everyone in the movie (so, the opposite of House by the Cemetery).

The final girl is Marybeth (Tamara Feldman) who returns in Hatchet II as a different actress, out to investigate the disappearance of her redneck family, brother Josh (Blair Witch Project) and father Robert Englund. The cameos keep rolling from there – Tony Todd (Candyman himself) as a theatrical shop owner, Kane Hodder (Jason in Fridays 7-10) as main monster Victor Crowley, and the movie’s own special effects guy John Carl Buechler (who also directed the classics Troll, Friday the 13th 7 and Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College).

Ben; Candyman; Marcus

But we’re not supposed to know that Marybeth is the hero yet – at the start, she’s just another passenger on a nighttime mardi gras swamp tour, along with a couple slutty girls and a “filmmaker” (Bill Murray’s brother Joel, who played a milkman in Shakes the Clown), a Wisconsin couple (he played the friendly guard booth nightwatchman in Halloween 2 and she had small parts in Gremlins 2 and The Burbs) a faker of a tour guide, and our two main dudes, killjoy Ben in his Newbury Comics t-shirt and friend Marcus who grudgingly agrees to accompany his bud instead of staring at boobies in the city. Then they all stumble too close to undead vengeance-cravin’ Victor Crowley’s house and get real killed.

Tour guide Parry Shen gets real killed:

Good movie, with just the right amount of humor to keep things fun without harming the horror atmosphere. Green has made three features and something like ten shorts since this came out in 2006. Filmmakers who have not made anything since then: Alfonso Cuaron, Paul Verhoeven, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, Todd Field, Hal Hartley, Tarsem Singh, Aki Kaurismaki, Larry Fessenden, Robert Altman and Ronny Yu. What is the holdup?