by ·Comments Off on My Stepson, My Lover (1997, Mary Lambert)

I’ve had free screenings before, but this is the first one here that I was paid to watch.

From the director of “Pet Sematary”, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video, and “Pet Sematary 2″… cinematographer of “Smoke Signals” and editor of “Ernest Goes To Jail”. The girl from “How To Get Ahead In Advertising” is a nurse who saves the life of the guy from “Lost”, who is very rich and collects guns. They marry then she meets his son, a horse-riding house-building soap-opera hottie and falls for him instead.

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Dad comes to the house toting an antigue gun, where son tosses him off an unfinished deck onto the hard, hard rocks below. The wife/stepson affair comes out during the trial, but the son totally gets away with it, then the girl catches on and there’s a fight and the son falls off the same railing. He doesn’t die though, lives on as a paraplegic in a plot twist that IMDB users are calling “horrible and confusing”, “in bad taste”, or at least “certainly silly”.

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Between this and “Wicked Minds”, the other stepson/stepmom illicit romance I watched at work today, I figure I earned about $75. Not too bad.

by ·Comments Off on The Washingtonians (2007, Peter Medak)

Opens on a dark highway that looks suspiciously like the one in “incident on and off a mountain road” and maybe “pick me up”.

Stupid story that just gets more ridiculous as it goes. Guy moves into his grandparents’ old house with his family, finds scroll written by George Washington talking of eating children and carving forks out of their bones. Finds out it’s true and there’s an evil secret group devoted to keeping this secret and carrying on the eating/carving while wearing powdered wigs.

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A seems-familiar-but-I-guess-he’s-not-after-all Saul Rubinek plays the professor friend who summons the swat team at the end. Our male lead starred in “8mm 2”, his wife is a cartoon voice actress named Venus, evil lead was in MST3k-featured “The Dead Talk Back”. Based on a short story by a guy named Bentley. Aaaand our director, a 70-year-old Hungarian, made “The Ruling Class” and “Species 2” (those are really his horror-master qualifications?) and is supposedly now filming his next movie in Atlanta.

MoH motifs: skinlessness (not really, but someone does get threatened).

Closing joke after the news gets out and Washington has been nationally discredited, “they switched georges”:
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by ·Comments Off on Partner (2007, David Dwahan)

My first Bollywood movie. Idiotically simplistic script, a few nicely played musical numbers (annoying music though), and the most horrible constantly-gliding music-video camerawork. Are they all like this? The slickest, emptiest foreign film I’ve seen since Godzilla: Final Wars, as well as the loudest since Tetsuo The Iron Man adds up to an unpleasant viewing experience.

Apparently this was a scene-for-scene remake of Hitch with a bellybutton-pierced Indian dude in the Will Smith “love doctor” role. 42-yr-old Salman Khan has starred in almost 50 movies in the last 10 years, making him much more prolific than slacker Will Smith, but I’ll take Smith over the mugging Khan any day. Actually there’s no shortage of mugging in the movie so Khan’s antics hardly stand out except when he’s playing an 80’s gangster and lip-synching to “Pump Up The Jam”. There’s no way to look cool wearing a fur-lined coat and mouthing the word “pump! pump! pump!” in close-up, but he sure tries.

Similarly prolific Govinda is the dumpy friend, the screechy annoying “comic” role. You wouldn’t think he’d be such a good dancer from looking at him. Love interests Lara Dutta and Katrina Kaif have been less prolific only because they’re younger than I am.

One of the women has a kid, which is apparently the only detail not stolen from Hitch. There’s also a gay wedding planner (only character I liked) and an ineffectual gangster. I guess the movie fits the romantic comedy mold, though it didn’t seem too romantic.

On the plus side, I only saw the boom mic once. Even Katy didn’t like the movie (much).

UPDATE Aug 25: Yaaay, Salman Khan is going to prison today for hunting endangered gazelle.

by ·Comments Off on Transformers (2007, Michael Bay)

Movies Transformers Rips Off:

Terminator 2: the car chase scene
Short Circuit: freedom being the right of all sentient beings
Videodrome: O. Prime asking Shia to push the energy cube into his chest
Terminator 2: one is sent to protect him
Pearl Harbor: directly reused some shots, I’ve heard
The Rock: stand on a building with a flare to signal the jets!
Armageddon: lame joke
Terminator 2: the other is here… to destroy him
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: two robots enter… one robot leaves.
Alien vs. Predator: our world, their war
probably Black Hawk Down but I haven’t seen it

There’s a real problem with violating the laws of physics, but that’s just a clean transfer from the bizarre original show.

Marquee on a street theater is showing Paramount studio classics Rose Tattoo and A Place In The Sun for whatever damn reason.

The Transformers learned their chase technique from Jason Vorhees (or Leslie Vernon), because they are giant machines but can’t catch a teenage boy in a foot race. They’re not even as sophisticated as the balls in Phantasm 2.

Too much “comedy”, not enough GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING.

by ·Comments Off on Amazing Grace (2006, Michael Apted)

Movie 2 of the Key Sunday Cinema Club. Hated it, skipped the post-movie discussion to sneak into the oscar shorts. Thanks anyway, Katy! Not your fault.

Opens right up with a big damned heavyhanded metaphor, where our boy Wilberforce (his real name, haha, and played by Mr. Fantastic!) stops some white brutes from kicking their black horse out in the rain. Some poignant shit right there. Then a whole movie about racism with only one black person in it follows.

The one black person is Youssou N’Dour in his English feature film debut. We’ve discussed Wilberforce (heh) being Mr. Fantastic (double-heh) and let’s see what else is going on. The young Prime Minister is played by Benedict Cumberbatch (pffffhahaha) who once played Stephen Hawking in a TV movie. Wilberforce eventually marries young Romola Garai (from Vanity Fair and Scoop). In the parliament we’ve got Michael Gambon as a good guy and a very familiar looking Ciaran Hinds and the dude from Infamous as bad guys, and off on his own is Wilberforce’s mentor, a cataract-ridden saintly monkly fella who used to own a slave ship, played by our Albert Finney. Oh wait, and Rufus Sewell plays a leftist with scarecrow-hair who pals around with N’Dour and tries to get Wilderforce to go abolish slavery, which he eventually does, the end.

A very bad script where everyone speaks only in cliches, from the writer of Dirty Pretty Things, which I’ll have to not see. I didn’t know much about Michael Apted before, and I’ll have to not find out more. I’d been trying to forget this, but Terrence Malick produced. There were seven producers, so it’s not a major blow.

Good performances and costume details ignored the silliness of the whole thing. It’s not the absence of black people that bugs me much, since after all, it’s a historical drama that takes place in british parliament. It’s just the extreme fakiness of it all, wilbur making himself physically sick and turning to god and admiring spiderwebs, the way-easy love affair, the bagpipe coda… but I mostly can’t get past the cornbread dialogue. It’s impossible to overstate this: every line is a cliche. IMDB shows that church groups have been getting prerelease screenings, and from the comments, they seem to be eating it up.

by ·Comments Off on Little Children (2006, Todd Field)

Young parent Kate Winslet meets and has sex with young parent Patrick Wilson, even though Patrick is married to Jennifer Connelly and Kate is… well, married. Meanwhile Ronald, a convicted child molester (the motorcycle kid from the original Bad News Bears) is on the loose.

Ronald has a domineering mother, Kate feels disconnected from everything, Patrick spaces out watching skateboard kids, and Jennifer is pretty but doesn’t have much to do.

Katy didn’t like it!

by ·Comments Off on Dance of the Dead (2005, Tobe Hooper)

Pretty awful Masters of Horror episode, continuing Tobe’s long streak of pretty awful movies.

A perfectly good backstory about the deadly acid rainstorm that turned most of the world into zombies is wasted on a crappy movie about Jessica Lowndes meeting Jonathan Tucker from the Pulse and Texas Chainsaw remakes, and daring to venture away from her protective mother to attend a club run by Tobe’s old bud Robert Englund. This has got to be the most boring “extreme” nightclub in any horror movie.

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It’s all downhill from there, as Englund drinks the blood of the elderly to stay alive, and the entertainment of the club turns out to be watching zombies “dance” (the, um, dance of the dead) by shocking ’em with cattle prods. Jessica finds out one of the dancers is her druggie sister, who was sold to Englund by their mom… gets revenge by killing/selling the mom. Whatever.

The movie was bad enough before the SHOCK EDITING, which is unrelenting. Besides the usual quick-cut-crap, they keep blurring and sliding the picture with staticky sound effects to add “energy” to the movie. Ugh.

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Loud music by Billy Corgan, I might add. Credited cinematographer and editor have both done other (decent) MoH episodes, so I have to blame the flash editing entirely on you, Tobe.

MOH trademarks: just the naked women.

Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it. I wouldn’t have blamed her.

by ·Comments Off on Snakes on a Plane (2006, David R. Ellis)

The first film I see in theater in over a month is “Snakes on a Plane”. Sure it wasn’t good, but it also wasn’t bad enough or campy enough or aware enough to justify the hype. Not that I didn’t have a good time.

Things not to forget:
– the surfing scenes at the intro and outro
– the inflatable raft keeping the snakes in the main cabin
– snake expert vs. snake dealer showdown on the ground
– Sam Jackson shooting the witness in the chest at the end
– snakes are on the plane because the baddie had “exhausted every other option”
– movie would’ve been better without the witness

by ·Comments Off on Bubble (2005, Steven Soderbergh)

Written by a woman named Coleman, who unsurprisingly wrote Full Frontal.

Martha and Kyle work at the doll factory. Big order comes in, Rose is hired. Rose has a baby, an angry ex, a tendency to steal, and a thing for Kyle. They go on a date, Martha watches the kid, then kills Rose when she gets home. Martha is easily caught, Kyle’s mom joins the doll factory part time, life goes on.

Shot on HD: big deal. Released on video same time as theaters: big deal. Non-professional actors: sort of a big deal, cuz it’s a small quiet enough story that some bigtime actor might’ve wrecked it with a “performance”.

But that’s also the problem. Not much performance, except by Martha who’s quite good. Nothing to perform to. Short, nothing of a movie. What’s up, Steven? Why was this story begging to be told? It’s not even his usual style-over-substance since there’s little style. And the Bob Pollard acoustic instrumentals are crappy and out of place (as if Steven wanted us to think he hired only non-professional musicians). Why make this? Why call it Bubble? Bring back The Limey, Kafka and Solaris!