by ·Comments Off on Targets (1968, Peter Bogdanovich)

P-Bog’s first (official) feature is a doozy, following two stories and expertly building tension until they collide at the end. I’d seen P-Bog’s latest movies, She’s Funny That Way and the Tom Petty doc and The Cat’s Meow, but none of his most famous work, so I checked this one out for Shocktober.

Cranking out a cheapie thriller with Boris Karloff, P-Bog himself plays film director Sam who cranks out cheapie thrillers with Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) – although the Orlok pictures look like more generic costume/castle/monster flicks (Corman’s The Terror, specifically), while Targets is up to something else entirely. After his latest screening, Sam is plotting something new, a more self-reflexive movie which will use Orlok’s star power in a different way, but Orlok is sick of it all and decides to retire immediately (Sam: “I’m gonna go offer it to Vincent Price”). Orlok will go back and forth over the next day, finally agreeing to read the new script and un-canceling his speaking appearance at the local drive-in.

Meanwhile, Bobby (a clean-cut Matt Damon-type) has a bland life with his mom, gun-nut dad (James Brown of Objective, Burma!) and inattentive wife (he tries to tell her he “gets funny ideas”, but she fatally doesn’t listen). After calmly scouting locations, he shoots his wife and mom, leaves a note for the police then heads out on a murder rampage, first targeting highway drivers then positioning himself behind the drive-in screen. He starts shooting spectators – real violence erupting from behind/inside a horror film – until Orlok marches over and slaps him down.

Long takes, unusually naturalistic movie, complete with stumbled lines and people talking over each other. Orlok/Karloff watches himself in Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code and Sam comments “all the good movies have been made.” Fascinating blend of P-Bog’s cinephilia and realistic violence (based on a California sniper attack a couple years prior). Uncredited script work by Sam Fuller, apparently, and shot by the great Laszlo Kovacs.

K. Uhlich:

Struck this time by how mercilessly this Corman-produced quickie portrays the banality of evil. One of the finest treatises on the subject, in addition to how viewing movies as an escape is an outright denial of their much more ambiguous function in society.

by ·Comments Off on Emma Stone Drive-In Double-Feature (2011)

full title:
Emma Stone-starring Soulmate-seeking Rom-com Drive-In Double-Feature

Crazy Stupid Love (2011)

From the co-writers of Cats & Dogs and Bad Santa, and also the writer of Tangled. Emma Stone has big eyes, and we didn’t know what she’s doing in the movie, but figured we missed that while in traffic on Moreland for the first 15 minutes of the film. Turns out it’s the surprise ending that she’s Steve Carell’s grown daughter, and the joke’s on poor Steve since his sweet daughter is dating Ryan Gosling, the sex machine who irrationally befriends Steve and gives him dating advice. Steve needs this since he’s divorcing Julianne Moore for sleeping with coworker Kevin Bacon. Steve’s son Bobo is infatuated with a 17-year-old Analeigh Tipton. Thanks to twitter, I know that the night Katy and I were watching this movie, Analeigh was reading Ender’s Game and watching Oliver & Company while sick in bed. But in the movie she takes nude photos of herself, prompting Zodiac killer John Carroll Lynch to attack Steve, starting a big comedy fight, after which Steve and Julianne are perhaps hopeful that they can maybe be friends again or something, because they are soulmates, just like Gosling and Stone, Bobo and Tipton, and everyone has exactly one soulmate, whom they will definitely meet and have a chance to date, and if you let that person go you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

Friends With Benefits (2011, Will Gluck)

Emma Stone was in this too, but who was she? Let’s see… it was past midnight and Katy and I bought pops. Ended up not raining, which is good, but too humid and lethargic to do anything but watch the stupid movie. So Emma Stone, not positive who she was, but Justin Timberlake (who has alzheimerin’ dad Richard Jenkins) is wooed to New York City by hottie headhunter Mila Kunis (who has drunkie undependable mom Patricia Clarkson). Justie and Mila become best buds, then no-strings-attached fuck-buds (Katy says this beat the actual No Strings Attached, which starred Ashton Kutcher, so duh). They both have huge commitment phobias because of their wacky parents but it turns out they are soulmates, and they know if they let each other go they’ll regret it for the rest of their lives. Shaun White appears in a would-be-funny cameo if anyone gave a shit about Shaun White (Tony Hawk is way cooler).

More interesting than the romance and the carefully-positioned cameras and sheets to conceal nudity was the movie’s subversive commentary about the pretty young idle rich. A spate of recent documentaries make out fashion and magazine/newspaper businesses to be unforgivingly high-pressure, but Justin is the art director of GQ and seems to have plenty of time off, as does Mila, who’s the kind of person who places high executives at GQ and Amazon. The only “work” we see Justin do (besides discussing typefaces with homosexual sports editor Woody Harrelson – times new roman?!) is deciding between two things presented before him – this cover or that cover? This article or that article? Both times his decision is reversed by someone who is not his boss, and a photo shoot is turned into a gay dance party by homosexual sports editor Woody Harrelson, making Justin seem increasingly like Tim Robbins in the Hudsucker Proxy, a highly-paid poster boy, grinning and pursuing his soulmate while the real work is being done elsewhere.

From the director of Emma Stone’s breakthrough Easy A (though it was Crazy Stupid Love that was full of Scarlet Letter references) and the cowriters of an upcoming film about “a relationship expert who cannot keep his own love life in order.”

by ·Comments Off on John Turturro Drive-In Double-Feature (2011)

full title:
Animated, Machinery-Themed, John Turturro-starring Sequel Double Feature at the Drive-In

Cars 2 (2011, John Lasseter)

In the first movie, Turturro plays a hotshot open-wheel race car named Bumblebee, I think. Larry the Cable Guy gets mixed up in a Man Who Knew Too Little super-spy plot with Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer, while Owen Wilson is off having a biggest-dick contest with Turturro. The guy who developed the so-called green alternative fuel turns out to be the bad guy, because green fuels are fake and ultimately cause more environmental harm than fossil fuels. As Ruppert says in Collapse: corn! don’t make me laugh. Katy and I loved the Barbie & Ken short. This sequel was more exciting than the predictable first movie.

Transformers 3 (2011, Michael Bay)

Then Turturro, having learned humility and the value of friendship in the first movie, uses his money and influence to help Shia The Beouf fight Megatron and Shockwave and revive Roddimus Prime, whose ship crash-landed on the moon (Katy says there is no “dark side” since the moon rotates, and that the man in the moon is a myth). Frances McDormand was an army guy, I think, and John Malkovich was his usual Malkovichy self. Patrick O’Dreamy from Katy’s shows played the evil human who’d stop at nothing to defeat Turturro’s and The Beouf’s schemes because the Decapitrons have promised that he’ll be king of the humans after they win using some Fifth Element columns to bring an entire planet into Earth’s orbit, or something along those lines. More comprehensible than part one, with the masturbation/embarrassment jokes easier to take since I saw them coming this time. Oh, and the Spanish teacher from Community.

by ·Comments Off on X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963, Roger Corman)

A film worth watching even when Pere Ubu is not performing a live score. The movie doesn’t have a lot of incidental music so they were playing most of the time, and they added some other fun stuff (rimshots at the bad jokes, soundtrack-looping to repeat lines of dialogue). Got applause after an intense few minutes of music when Ray is driving away pursued by a helicopter towards the end.

An intense but oh-so-stiff (like he’s in a trance) Ray Milland (Ministry of Fear, Dial M for Murder, Panic in Year Zero) stars as Dr. X. He has an empty shell of a beautiful doctor friend to fall in love with, two male co-stars who both appeared in Kubrick’s Spartacus, and a shifty manager played by Don Rickles. Plot, he invents an eyedrop that lets you see through things, tests it on himself, accidentally kills his friend, escapes to a circus, becomes a mystical healer (well, diagnose-r) under Rickles’ supervision, is finally hunted down by the cops who chase him to a bible revival tent where he claws his eyes out and does not scream “I can still see!!” over the end title.

Corman wastes so little time on character development that he actually has to pad the runtime to make the movie count as a feature. So we get more bubbling lab equipment at the start, and more blurry perspective shots of Las Vegas at the end (apparently gazing at Vegas through x-ray eyes just makes it look skewed and blurry). Among the blurry bits there’s a repeated shot of a half-constructed building pasted skeletally against a flat sky with X’s narration about watching the city become unmade. This bit conveys the horror of X’s condition far better than the hundred shots of Ray Milland looking nervous ever could, and along with the over-the-top ending it gives the movie a real sense of terror peering out from all the camp and sci-fi silliness, elevates it far above its MST3K-worthy contemporaries.

Because of pacing problems and mostly uninteresting writing and acting and sets, I wouldn’t want to watch X more often than I do, once every three or four years. But I wouldn’t want to watch it any less often either. It’s a crap classic, and I enjoy it every time.

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.