Movies

So Be Kind Rewind is coming out in a few short days, and I’m really looking forward to it. I think this the first movie of ‘08 that I’m excited about, in fact.

The premise (two dudes accidentally erase all their VHS tapes, and decide to re-shoot them all by themselves) might seem either far-fetched or hokey to you, or maybe you’re not a Jack Black fan. Even if both of those hold true (and I can understand being annoyed by Black at times, though I really think he’s good in quite a few things), I still think you should approach the movie with an open mind.

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I think I, like many Indy fans, were probably a bit skeptical and reserved after hearing news of the upcoming fourth Indy pic. The (then) trilogy had ended on an appropriately high note in terms of quality, so the immediate worry when hearing about a new film is, of course, that they’re going to screw it up completely.

And the movie may well be a misstep—George Lucas seems to be taking an unfortunately close interest in the production, and with no Nazis, is it really going to feel like a proper Indy picture? What about that title? The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? I like Shia LaBeouf, but will he be another Short Round?

Amazing how the thought process can be short-circuited by, well… something like this:

Now I’m whistling the theme to myself as I work, and thoughts of Lucas’ meddling are disappearing quickly. There still could be issues, of course. The initial trailer music sounds a lot more Zimmer than Williams (yes, the distinction is probably pretty minimal), and whither John Rhys-Davies or, for that matter, Sean Connery?

Still, though… I have to say I’m pretty excited now. Opening day, here I come.

The weekend’s worst punchline, however, is reserved for Paris Hilton’s The Hottie & the Nottie (Regent Releasing). The final count will show that the critically reviled comedy featuring the seemingly talentless Hilton has sold a meager $25,500 in tickets at 111 locations over the weekend. That’s only $230 per screen for theaters that were convinced to book this disaster. That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.

Quoted from Fantasy Moguls.

In case you’re curious a masochist, here’s the trailer, available in HD even.

I love that the movie bombed so convincingly, but I hate that it still managed to open in 111 theaters, when movies like Juno open in just a few, and eventually only ever trickle to my neck of the woods. Dear America—fix this.

UPDATE I just actually watched the trailer, and in between the dry heaves I read the text on the page, and I couldn’t not post this:

And then it hits him: June needs a makeover. But as Nate and June become friends and she emerges from her cocoon, Nate slowly realizes that the girl of his dreams isn’t the hottie at all. It’s the nottie — who turns out to be something of a hottie herself.

Reading that makes me hate everything.

Okay, this is my first post, so I’ll start by giving my top 20 movies for 2007.  I used to judge people based on their movie tastes, so it’s therapeutic to lay myself bare right off the bat.  And for the record, I still love Mars Attacks and plan to torment my children with it, should I ever have children.

1.  Inland Empire
2.  There Will Be Blood
3.  I’m Not There
4.  No Country For Old Men
5.  Zodiac
6.  Atonement
7.  Michael Clayton
8.  Gone Baby Gone
9.  Into the Wild
10.  Once
11.  Grindhouse
12.  The Simpsons Movie
13.  Superbad
14.  Southland Tales
15.  Blade Runner: The Final Cut
16.  No End In Sight
17.  Sicko
18.  The Lives of Others
19.  28 Weeks Later
20.  Sunshine

Inland Empire:  I don’t know if this movie has an official release date, but it would be my favorite in either year.  This is the one where Lynch finally goes all the way into his obsessions, unencumbered by studio constraints and without having to make compromises to investors.  I was skeptical of the video approach at first, but now I hope Lynch makes every movie this way.

There Will Be Blood:  P.T. Anderson was done channeling Altman and Scorsese when he came out with the wholly original “Punch Drunk Love.”  Now he’s gone one better on the master himself, Stanley Kubrick.  The themes, the stylistic flourishes, even the score, are reminiscent of some of Kubrick’s best work, but Kubrick never got to work with the madman Daniel Day-Lewis.

I’m Not There:  Yes, Cate Blanchett looks and sounds a lot like the mid-60s Bob Dylan, but the real joy in this movie is watching how Dylan the artist carefully manipulated what we know of the man.  Creating a realistic portrait of Dylan is not the point, or even beside the point, it’s the opposite of the point.

Grindhouse:  ”Planet Terror” was fun, but it was really more of an inside joke intended for Z-movie fans.  ”Death Proof” was the real deal, full of genuinely disturbing violence, tough women and the coolest car chase since, well, “Vanishing Point.”

Political Movies:  It seems like most good movies out this year had something to say, at least peripherally, about the arrogance of U.S. foreign policy, or the dangers of the Patriot Act.  But even Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” originally out in 1981, was hailed as being so “now” when it was released on DVD last year.  I don’t think it’s a sign that filmmakers are entering the fray as much as it is a reminder that things don’t ever change all that much, and any movie that deals with the abuse of power will seem relevant to any generation.

Southland Tales:  Is it wrong to love a movie for what it tries to be?  Richard Kelly has all the ambition of David Lynch and P.T. Anderson, without the skill to fully recreate that vision on screen.  But it’s buried up there somewhere, and you can see snatches of it from time to time, and boy is it awesome, with all its giant CGI zeppelins, floating ice cream trucks and rips in the space-time continuum.  I’d rather watch an over-reaching failure like this one than any ten movies like “300″ or “Transformers.” Sure, those movies succeed on the terms they lay out for themselves, but are those terms worth my ten dollars?

Atonement:  It’s sad that this movie didn’t wind up on more year-end lists, even though it does fall under the dreaded “prestige picture” category and is reminiscent of the kind of movie Miramax was releasing every other weekend in the 90s.  That wasn’t always a bad thing, and this one is a pretty good adaptation of a pretty great book.  Plus, the hottest shot in any movie out this year is when Keira Knightley’s shoe falls off in the library (granted, the effect is spoiled when it’s clearly seen back on in the next shot).

This year caused more “lump-in-the-back-of-my-throat” moments than any year in recent memory.  Hal Holbrook crying over Emile Hirsch’s departure in “Into the Wild,” the look on Marketa Irglova’s face at the end of “Once” as she plays her piano, father-son bonding as Homer lets Bart hold the bomb in “The Simpsons Movie.”  I look at 2007 as the year genuine feeling came back into the movies.

I dedicate this trailer to Happy Simpleton, whose love of Rambo knows no limit:

Looks pretty funny.

Did you mourn the day that Mystery Science Theater went off the air? Rifftrax is a new Mike Nelson project that doesn’t quite recapture the full glory of MST3K, but should fill at least part of that MST3K-sized hole in your heart.

Rifftrax works like this: Mike Nelson and his team (which includes one or two cronies from the MST3K gang) record an MP3 commentary to a movie. You pay a few bucks, download the audio file, and play it alongside the DVD on your computer. (They just released a Windows-only movie player that automatically synchs their commentary and the DVD without you having to do it manually—I’ve used it a few times and it seems to work fine. Manually synching the movie and the audio commentary is do-able but can be a bit of a pain.)

The Rifftrax commentaries, like MST3K, spend most of their time mocking the movie in question. The quips range from lowbrow cracks to esoteric pop-culture references, so a typical commentary features everything from poop jokes to references to Zeno’s Paradox. In general they are quite funny; not every gag works, but they throw enough of them out there that you’re bound to laugh at something. if you thought MST3K was hilarious, you’ll find Rifftrax amusing; if you thought MST3K was the stupidest thing you’d ever seen, well, you probably won’t love Rifftrax either.

There are really two big differences here from MST3K. First, while several of the same team are involved, the actual characters from MST3K (Mike and the robots) are gone, so there is no familiar overlay of the robots sitting in movie seats watching the film. Secondly and more importantly, the movies Rifftrax mocks are mostly major Hollywood productions, rather than B-movie trash. This creates situations where the Rifftrax guys are mocking films that are actually pretty good (such as Raiders of the Lost Ark). As a result, some of the old MST3K charm is lost.

They’ve compiled quite a list of movie commentaries to date. Here are the ones that Angry Teti and I have watched, with a rating for each:

• Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace: 3.5 stars. Amusing, but I’ve spent so much of my life deriding this movie that I’m hard to impress when it comes to Phantom Menace mockery.

• Night of the Living Dead: 4 stars. This was a good one, suffering only because there was only one commenter (Mike Nelson). Commentaries are more amusing when there’s some banter between the commenters.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: 4.5 stars. I was wondering how they’d manage to successfully mock a movie I consider one of the great action films of all time, but they really made me laugh.
• Lost, Season 1 Episode 1: 3 stars. I wasn’t overly amused by this one, but Angry Teti had a higher opinion of it. Perhaps it’s because she’s a much bigger Lost fan than I am. I suspect that Rifftrax commentaries are more amusing the better you know the movie in question.

Overall, we’ve found Rifftrax to be a pleasant way to pass an evening, and a nice way to get a few hours’ more entertainment out of DVDs you’ve got sitting around the house that you’ve already watched 50 million times. Definitely won’t be to everbody’s taste, but it’s well worth giving one or two a listen.

This is another 2007 movie that’s getting some award nomination love.  As far as impact, I didn’t think it holds a candle to No Country for Old Men.  The story, about transplanted Russian gangsters in London, was somewhat weak.  The most memorable scene in the film is undoubtedly the one during which Viggo Mortenson engages in an extended fully-nude knife fight with two bad guys in a steam room.  (Must . . .resist . . .Anduril, Flame of the West reference. . . .Failed.)

I guess the main point of the movie was to show that some Russian dudes are moving West and they are, as the kids say, badass.  That’s actually something worth saying.  Given the rather amazing things getting into the news in the last few years (assassination by radiation poisoning, rampant murder of journalists), I think a number of interesting movies could be made about Russian mobsters/political corruption. 

I adore and pedestal the heck out of First Blood. It is a brilliant ^[1] movie with a great human quality in it. Unfortunately for First Blood, however, it was followed up by a batch of crappy, blood soaked, bullet-riddled sequels, that forever equated Rambo to guns, blood, gore, and killing. That’s not fair.

Assuming the old, dog-toting dude made it out of the woods ok, there was only one death in First Blood … and it was accidental. Rambo: First Blood Part II had 69 deaths and it happened to suck in comparison. Rambo III had 132 deaths and it was full-on ludicrous. ^[2]

So now, in the fine new tradition of resurrecting in-and-around 80s movies and giving them simple, non-sequelish names, Hollywood brings us Rambo. With a whopping 236 deaths, it has more death than all other Rambo movies combined. Considering the ratio of death count to suckage above, this does not bode well.

I have not yet seen it and I wonder: Is there any chance at all that it is a good movie? In my wildest fantasies, this new film recaptures some of the humanity of the original. Perhaps Rambo is forced to face his own mortality, which is not possible via bullets but is possible, mostly likely, via age. Perhaps he goes back to the small town from First Blood and finally gets to eat that meal he was after.

I plan to watch it soon. After which I plan to read First Blood the book, in which I have heard Rambo actually gets killed.

Notes:

1. Except for Col. Trautman. He’s a joke.
2. Deaths stats from geekstir.com

I saw this several weeks ago but have yet to come up with much to say about it that Happy Simpleton hasn’t already covered. Really, I try not to be a “the book is so much better than the movie!” sort of person (although it did take me several viewings before I really made peace with Peter Jackson’s LotR movies). But if you’re going to (presumably) pay Richard Matheson for the right to do a movie based on his kinda-famous novel, isn’t it a bit weird to then make a movie that is almost nothing like the book?

OK, the basic setup—the last man alive on earth faces off against scary zombie-esque creatures—is similar to the book. And for a while, the movie hints that it will stick to the spirit, if not the letter, of the novel. But I don’t exaggerate when I say that the movie’s final 30 minutes is the complete opposite, morally and thematically, of the book’s finale. The novel features a major plot shift towards the end that explains the title and makes an otherwise average survival-horror story really memorable. The movie just… never goes there at all. And it thus remains a thoroughly average survival-horror movie.

This movie could easily have been done with bothering to call it I Am Legend. In fact, as it is, it’s pretty much just a PG-13 version of 28 Days Later. It’s not an awful movie; in fact the first hour is pretty good viewing. But for some reason, they decided to remove the really good stuff and replace them with characters and an ending that are, I promise you, significantly less interesting than they are in the book.

Oh well. Maybe I’m just a “the book is better!” snob after all. But if they’re not going to at least pay lip service to the original work, what was the point of making this movie at all?

Where do you hope to live when you retire? If you answered “in a ridiculously creepy abandoned orphanage way out in the middle of nowhere,” you have something in common with the protagonist of The Orphanage. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, living miles from civilization in a labyrinthine building with a Dark History?

At any rate, The Orphanage is actually a very competent Spanish-language haunted-house movie in a style more similar to The Others or The Sixth Sense than to grislier horror flicks. Instead of facing the main characters with a malevolent supernatural enemy, it presents the supernatural as frightening, unpredictable, mischievous, but ultimately understandable once you’ve fit the pieces of the puzzle together and learned what it wants. The process of piecing together those puzzle pieces in The Orphanage involves a lot of scary noises in the attic, creepy ghost children, inexplicably dim lighting, and a seance—all ghost-story classics that we’ve seen before, but executed well enough that you won’t mind too much.

The ending is not entirely satisfying, but that doesn’t spoil the rest of the film, which kept me on edge for the better part of two hours. I don’t think this will make it onto your Great Film Classics of All Time list, but it’d be a great Halloween rental. (And despite the R rating, it’s really not very gruesome—just one or two very brief “eeeewwww” moments.)