Intacto (2001)

  This is a Spanish film about people who have the ability to steal other people's luck with a touch.  As a concept, it's not new but they handle it pretty well.  They do a great job highlighting the psychological turmoil it would cause someone to realize that they are only alive because they robbed someone else of their chance.  

From a cop who survived a horrific car accident at the cost of her husband and child to a guy who survived the Holocaust as a child, at the expense of...well, everyone else, it's a very select world that Tomas Sanz finds himself born into, after being the only survivor of a plane crash. 

His guide, Fernando, is looking for someone with enough luck to challenge The Jew.  Contests of blind chance are set up ranging from the benign (opening a box with a bug in it and seeing who it lands on) to the you'vegottabefuckingkiddingme (Russian roulette with only one empty space).  Prizes are houses, cars, and then people.  Taking a picture of someone allows you to steal their luck, to use them until they die.

Tomas is initially skeptical, then amused at the thought of trading on his luck.  That is, until his girlfriend's picture ends up in the pot.  All of a sudden, it's no longer fun and games.

It's a bizarre little film that treats a supernatural thing very normally, which I like.  These people are more like criminals or fetishists than superheroes.  Plus it's got Max von Sydow.  You really can't go wrong there.

Little Voice (1998)

  This is another quirky British comedy.  This one is about a girl named LV (Jane Horrocks) who was so traumatized by her father's death that she became a shut-in.  Her only comfort is the stack of records in her room, classics by Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, and Marilyn Monroe.  Out of some weird quirk, she is able to mimic them almost perfectly.  Her mother (played to batshit perfect insanity by Brenda Blethyn) looks at her as a burden, an anchor to her old life when she'd much rather be out dancing every night.

Everything changes when Mum brings home a local talent scout for a shag.  As soon as Ray (Michael Caine) hears LV sing, his eye light up with dollar signs.  Here is his big ticket.  He starts coaching her out of her agoraphobia and  into performing for someone other than the picture of her dead dad.

With some helpful advice from a painfully shy pigeon fancier (Ewen McGregor) who has a crush on her, LV takes the plunge and sings her little heart out at the local cabaret (owned by Jim Broadbent) for a one-night engagement.

One of the things I liked most about this film was how they never tried to fix the relationship between mother and daughter.  Brenda Blethyn is less Mama Rose and more Mommie Dearest and you never forget it.  Even after the Act 3 climax, she shows only the most ephemeral sense of concern for her progeny.  It's refreshing that they didn't feel the need to schmaltz it up with a tearjerking reconciliation in the last hour.

Of course the most impressive part of this whole thing is that Jane Horrocks actually did all the voices she was supposed to have in the film.  There are a couple of moments where you could close your eyes and she would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Blow Dry (2001)

  When I was watching this movie I seriously thought I had seen it before but I could have sworn it starred Craig Ferguson instead of Alan Rickman.  Turns out, that's a different movie about a British hairdresser involved in a competition called The Big Tease.  Is that a big thing in Great Britain?  I don't know.

Natasha Richardson (RIP) stars as Shelley, a former professional hair model who is dying of cancer.  She lives in the same town with her ex-husband and son but hasn't spoken to them in nearly 10 years after absconding with his other hair model, Sandra, on the eve before the National Hairdressing Competition.  Now the competition is being held in their hometown and she sees it as the perfect chance to reconcile the people she loves.

Of course, Bill Nighy is in this movie.  I'm pretty sure he's contractually obligated to be in every single British film released.  Him or Colin Firth.  He's the slimy rival who is not above cheating to secure his victory, dragging his daughter (Rachel Leigh Cook, who fell off the fucking planet around this time) along with him.  There's a cute little Montagu/Capulet thing between her and Josh Hartnett, sporting a godawful British accent.

Despite staunchly refusing to go back into competition, Alan Rickman eventually caves, both to foil his nemesis and as a tribute to the woman he loved.

It's a fun little comedy with a great cameo by Heidi Klum as a bitchy hair model.

Full Contact (1992)

  I really wanted this to be a better movie.  That's probably my fault.  After all, the director, Ringo Lam, is more noted for directing Jean-Claude Van Damme's Maximum Risk. 

I love Chow Yun Fat, but this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen him in.  He plays a bouncer named Jeff at a Bangkok strip club (which isn't nearly as dirty as it sounds) who gets called in after his buddy, Sam, racks up a huge gambling debt he can't pay off.  Desperate for cash, Jeff, Sam, and their other friend Chung decide to join up with Sam's gay magician cousin Judge and his crew to knock off an armored car.  Unbeknownst to them, Judge has taken a payment from the mob boss to kill them all after the job.

So Chung catches a bullet to the face and Jeff manages to hole up in some poor Thai family's house with the bad guys outside.  Judge sends Sam in to finish him off.  Being a giant pussy, Sam shoots his friend and then runs out crying.  Judge proceeds to blow up the house, murdering the entire family except for Jeff and the teenage daughter, who just gets horrible burns.

Jeff takes Burned Girl and heads to a monastery to recover.  Meanwhile, Sam and the bad guys go to Hong Kong and Sam starts dating Jeff's stripper girlfriend, Mona.  Eventually, Jeff comes back for revenge and there are a couple of decent shootouts.  This leads to the only mention of Burned Girl in the rest of the film.  Jeff throws her out there in conversation to make Sam feel guilty for shooting him.  That's exactly as lame as it seems.

Payback this is not.

Four Brothers (2005)

  This was even better than I thought it would be.  Honestly, I wasn't expecting anything more than a generic action film.  I certainly wasn't expecting Chiwetel Ejiofor as the bad guy.  That was like getting to the bottom of the cereal box and finding that your prize is a lost Rembrandt.  I love him as a villain!  He has just the right amount of crazy combined with the creepy stare and low voice.  It's gold, man!

Oh, yeah, there were other people in this too.  Mark Wahlberg is playing ghetto again, Tyrese Gibson is a ladies' man (banging a smoking hot Sofia Vergara), Andre Benjamin is the one responsible member of society, and Garrett (TRON Legacy) Hedlund is a pot-smoking wannabe rocker.  These are the titular brothers, in town for revenge after their mom (Fionnula Flanagan, who I looove) gets shot.

Again, I would have been happy with a straight 'find the bad guy, kill the bad guy' plot but they take it up a notch with a couple of decent misdirects. 

The only bits that dragged the film down were the ones where the four main principals were interacting.  There was a lot of "dude-talk" which mostly consists of them expressing their grief by calling each other homo.  I was in the Army.  I know that's a fairly accurate depiction of how men spend their time in the absence of women, but it's really boring to watch. 

Other than that, the movie goes really quickly from shoot-out to car chase to shoot-out.  Much better than all that mushy crap.

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (2003)

  This movie kicked ass.  I thought it might have been a remake, based on the number of different posters I found during my GIS, and it is the latest reboot in a long series of the same.  Like Doctor Who.  Or Batman. 

Seriously, this character has been in 26 feature films since the 60's, a stage adaptation, and a TV show that lasted 5 seasons. 

So this incarnation follows the current Zatoichi as he roams from town to town with his cane sword, righting wrongs and helping the needy.  But this is much more Smokin' Aces than Blind Fury (although Blind Fury was an American remake of the 17th film in the series, Zatoichi Challenged, which may explain why the character seemed idiotic).  In the same town we find a master swordsman turned ronin looking for bodyguard work to pay for his wife's medicine who ends up getting hired by the local yakuza boss.  There are also two con artists dressed as geishas who make ends meet by seducing men and then robbing them on their path to vengeance.  Plus, all the local boss' hired muscle.

There is still some shitty CGI to contend with, in the form of overly bright sprays of blood and severed limbs flying, but this is way more forgivable than Azumi since it's played more for camp.

Comedy is a hard thing to get across a culture gap, so I usually dislike the attempt at comic relief but this one isn't so bad.  Shinkichi is a lousy gambler but good-hearted and does a couple of great scenes without coming across as a caricature.  There's at least one major surprise regarding a character that isn't who they seem to be, and then another couple of small surprises.

And then...  Giant tap-dance number.  No, seriously.

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning (2008)

  This was very nearly an awesome movie.  So close!  It claims to be somewhat of a prequel to Ong Bak:  The Thai Warrior but it's really not.  Set in 1451 AD, this is the story of a boy raised by a gang of thieves after his parents are killed by a power-hungry Crown Prince and his evil Chief of the Army.  I'm not as up on my Thai history as I probably should be, so I have no idea if that's based on records or not. 

Tony Jaa wrote, produced, directed, choreographed, starred and probably did the catering in this film.  Normally, you can expect the quality of the movie to decline exponentiallywhen you see someone's name more than twice in the credits.  Maybe because this is foreign or maybe because it never goes more than 7 minutes without fighting, but it stays pretty good throughout.

The only thing that ruins it is the goddamned cliffhanger ending.  That is the most bullshit thing people can do with sequels and it is happening more and more.  Studios see a cash cow and they gotta just keep milking.  It drives me nuts.  Especially since I just added Ong Bak 3 to my queue (at #473).  It's going to take two or three years to see it at the rate I'm going.  What's that?  I could just move it to the top?  And what about the other 472?  There has to be some order otherwise it's just chaos and oblivion!!!

/calms self

Anyway, Tony Jaa whips some serious ass in this movie.  Including a fight on the back of a live elephant with a dude (chick?  It's hard to tell) who acts like a vulture.  It's just as surreal to watch as it is to describe.

Escape from New York (1981)

  This is a classic John Carpenter film.  I don't know why I don't own it.  Maybe I'm waiting for a boxed set.  For those of you who haven't been introduced to the awesomeness that is Escape from New York, here's the plot:

It's the "future" in 1997.  Crime has exploded out of control to the point where there is only one prison in the US, the island of Manhattan.  Yep, we've cleared everyone out, put up a 50 ft wall, and mined all the bridges and tunnels out.  Now we don't even have to have guards, we just throw everybody in there and let them have their own society.  Everything works fine and dandy until Air Force One gets hijacked and crashes into the middle of downtown.

Lee Van Cleef (The Bad from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) is the police commissioner who recruits Kurt Russell's S.D. "Snake" Plissken on a mission to rescue President Donald Pleasance.

Side note:  No fucking way we'd ever elect Donald Pleasance.  He's like 5'5", chubby, and bald.

He has just under 24 hours to recover the President before he misses a big peace conference, thereby dooming the free world.  He gets into the city on a glider and meets Ernest Borgnine, a cabby who claims to have been operating in the city for 30 years.  Which either means that the government walled Manhattan without evacuating the inhabitants or made it voluntary to live in a super-max.  Anyway, Cabby takes Snake to see The Brain who knows where the Prez is being held.  The bad news is that Donald Pleasance is the prisoner of The Duke of New York, Isaac Hayes.

I didn't notice this the first time I saw the movie, but The Duke's main henchmen are named Rehme, Romero, and Cronenberg.  Robert Rehme is a producer and George Romero and David Cronenberg are both directors.  Carpenter loves putting little wordplays and references in his movies.  Just look at They Live with the Frank Armitage gag.

Anyway, Snake kicks some serious ass and a lot of people die.  It's awesome.  Apparently, this was the role that transitioned Kurt Russell from fresh-faced Disney star to action hero.  Oh, that's right, Kurt Russell was the voice of the bloodhound Copper from The Fox and the Hound.  I shit you not.

If you need more proof of how awesome this movie is, I point you to this article from Cracked.com.

Azumi (2003)

  Man, this was one of the worst Japanese films I've seen since Sukiyaki Western Django.  Terrible CGI, lame plot, and bad acting.  That is a trifecta of FAIL.  Honestly, these effects make it look like it was made in 1973, not 2003.

Azumi is an orphaned girl who has been raised with 9 boys to be an assassin.  Their master is under orders from a priest to keep peace in the country by killing anybody that would make a fuss.  For a minute, I worried it would go in a Minority Report: Feudal Japan Edition kind of way but no worries.  Everyone is a bad guy.  After training these ten kids for about a decade, he decides they're finally ready for the big mission.  He rounds them up and tells them to pair up with their favorite person.

Azumi pairs up with Nachi, and the lingering glances they give each other hint at some kind of romantic angle further down the road.

That is, until Master tells them that if they truly want to be considered assassins, they have to be willing to kill anytime, anywhere, any body.  And to prove their mettle, they have to kill the person they chose to stand beside.  Personally, I would have been extremely wary of the first kid who moved.  That's a motherfucker you really don't want at your back.

Since the title character really can't die in the first reel, that squishy little would-be subplot goes right out the window, but it sparks a sneaking sense of discomfort in the character.  She and the other four survivors journey with the old man to go kill some warlords.  They gank some dude while he's fishing and think they're pretty good.  Unfortunately, the second dude on the list gets smart or at least manages to hire underlings that get smart.

Enter a ninja that looks like a monkey, three gangster brothers with only a handful of braincells between them, and a genuine mass murderer who dresses like a girl and has a thing for roses.  It is all downhill from there.

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

  This is another comedy about Broadway actors.  It stars one of my all time favorite people, John Cusack, which made me rent it despite the fact that it was written and directed by Woody Allen.  I have not yet seen a movie by him that I have loved.  This one got closer than most.

John Cusack is a playwright in the 20s who is trying to get his original script produced on the Great White Way.  The only way he can come up with the money is by striking a deal with the local mob boss.  Of course that comes with strings.  In this case, the string is Jennifer Tilly, the boss' chorus line girlfriend who wants to be a real actress.  She is accompanied by Cheech, the bodyguard who would rather be playing craps.  Cusack's character really develops a crisis of faith when Cheech turns out to be a better writer, punching up the script into a hit.  He also has to deal with his infatuation with his narcissistic leading lady who hates the second female lead's chihuahua, his leading man is a compulsive eater, and he finds out his girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend.

There are some very funny parts to it but overall, it just fell a little flat for me.  It didn't seem like it really came together as a whole, although I did like the overall premise that the difference between a writer and an artist is the lengths to which one will go to see their work done right.

Noises Off! (1992)

  Normally I'm not very interested in farces.  They're usually slap-happy Three Stooges-type things that get on my nerves.  This one was surprisingly funny.  Maybe it's the all-star cast.  After all, you can't usually go wrong with Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, John Ritter, and Christopher Reeve. 

The plot follows an acting troupe taking a British sex farce on the road.  Along the way, their personal dramas cause innumerable rifts that end up spilling over into the play.  Allow me to try and explain all their connections.  /deep breath

Lloyd is the director trying vainly to get this show off to a start in Des Moines so he can go back to New York because he is also directing Hamlet on Broadway.  He hates everyone in his cast.  He's sleeping with Poppy, the stage manager, and also with Brooke, the ingenue.

Dotty is the leading lady who is sleeping with Garry.  They break up in Miami, causing her to lock herself in her dressing room at every opportunity.

Garry can't complete a sentence, finishing everything with "you know".  He flies into a jealous rage after his break-up with Dotty because he thinks she's taken up with Frederick.

Frederick is kind of an idiot who constantly wants to know his character's motivation and back story.  He  gets nosebleeds whenever he sees violence and also can't stand the sight of blood.  He is almost as useless as Brooke.

Brooke is blonde and too dumb to ad lib when things start going wrong on set.  She is also constantly losing her contact lens, forcing the entire cast to drop to the ground and look for it.  She has a "nervous disorder" after she learns that Lloyd is also sleeping with Poppy that requires him to fly to Miami to cajole her into going on-stage.

Selsdon is an old character actor who is nearly deaf and a drunk.  He can't understand anything less than a shout which makes the cast terrified that he'll get soused and forget his cue.  He is constantly trying to hide bottles of scotch around the theater, which they are constantly trying to take away from him.

Belinda is the second female lead and the troupe gossip.  She's the one who breaks the news about who is sleeping with whom, which causes all the tension between Lloyd and Poppy.

Poppy and Tim are the stage managers who are desperately trying to keep this play running.  They handle all the props, the set, and the understudy parts despite stage fright and general ineptitude respectively, while putting up with Lloyd's attitude and the quirks of the cast.

Did I miss anyone?  No?  Good.  So there you go.  Take all those characters, toss them together, and stir.  Voila.  Instant comedy.

The Howling (1981)

  This is a pretty decent horror film.  Apparently, it spawned 7 sequels and a werewolf craze in the early 80s.    The special effects (always the key for horror films) stand up pretty well, even now.  Rick Baker (who won an Oscar for The Wolfman this year) started work on it but ended up handing it off to Rob Bottin.  Now, I've been in the business long enough to know* that werewolf transformations are some of the hardest special effects to do convincingly.  They're so difficult, even with CGI, that more modern movies have resorted to just doing a shimmer effect, then showing a wolf.  I point to Blood and Chocolate (which isn't a bad little werewolf film for teens) and the Twilight series**.  

The other way to do it right is to not show the monster too early.  Here you don't see the actual transformation until two-thirds of the way through the running time.  This builds up a sense of suspense and keeps your budget manageable. In fact, if I hadn't read the Netflix sleeve (which has a fairly worthless synopsis, btw) I might not have know this was about werewolves at all for the first 45 minutes.

Karen is a TV anchor who has been contacted by a mysterious serial killer.  She and her team are trying to get some undercover footage of the guy but their equipment kind of sucks and she ends up locked in a porno booth with the serial killer before the cops show up and kill him.  Understandably traumatized, Karen talks to the station's resident shrink who sends her to a retreat up the coast for some R&R.  It's called The Colony. 

Karen and her husband Bill pack up and move into a cabin.  Immediately, they start noticing weird things...like that everyone there is some kind of lunatic.  Pun firmly intended.  There's the nymphomaniac bitch, Marsha, her creepy-ass brother in a sheep's fur vest (you get it?  /nudge nudge), the old borderline-demented guy who keeps trying to walk into the bonfire, and a host of other crazies.  Furry hilarity ensues.

Ooh, I just thought of an awesome movie idea:  werewolf loose in a furry convention.  Solid gold right there.

What separates this movie from other B-grade schlock is its rewatchability.  There are so many little in-jokes and puns and references to other werewolf movies that there's probably some kind of associated drinking game.  Hmm, a Google search seems to indicate otherwise so there's an untapped market for all you alcoholic movie buffs out there.


*read a lot of articles in Entertainment Weekly
** from what I can tell from the trailers

Fiesta (1941)/Let's Go Collegiate (1941)/Up in the Air (1940)/Minstrel Man (1944)/Rhythm in the Clouds (1937)/Sitting on the Moon (1936)

  This movie is only 45 minutes long but it manages to have about 7 musical numbers, which is kind of impressive.  It's set in rural Mexico and, surprisingly enough for the times, almost all of the cast is Hispanic.  It's about a woman named Cholita who returns to her family hacienda after some time living in the capital.  Her family is all excited because she's supposed to marry local good guy Jose, but instead, shows up with some radio nancy-boy named Fernando.  So Jose hatches a plot to pretend to be a bandit, scare the interloper, and kidnap the girl until she loves him again.  It doesn't work, but Cholita finds out that her new beau is a gold-digger and dumps him anyway.  The comic relief does rely heavily on the stereotype of the perpetually sleepy dumb guy in a poncho and his equally stupid slap-happy friend but they can mostly be ignored.  And it's in glorious Technicolor.

  This one manages to have both horrible stereotypes of blacks and Asians.  It's about two guys on crew club in college who have just discovered that their star rower got drafted right before the big race.  So they find themselves a ringer, in the form of some big dumb truck driver and commit academic fraud in order to win a race.  Even to the point of obstructing justice by impeding (and mildly concussing) a law enforcement official so he can't arrest the ringer, who happens to be an escaped bank robber.  To win a RACE.

This is one of those things that has always simultaneously fascinated and repulsed me about the Sport culture.  I don't get it, and I don't think I ever will.  It's a game.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter who wins.  And yet, people risk life and limb over this crap.  That's amazing to me.

  This might as well be the sequel to the above movie.  It's got three of the same cast members, two of them didn't even bother to change names.  This time it's a murder mystery, though it's really more like "somebody gets shot and this idiot does everything he can to stick his nose in it".  The local radio diva gets popped during rehearsal and pretty much everyone has a motive.  The local police are always a couple of steps behind a page and his friend, the janitor (three guesses as to which one he is in the poster).  Frankie, the page, is trying to solve the murder so he can impress the new receptionist which seems fairly standard.  I judge my prospective mates by how they do guessing whodunit during Law & Order reruns.  Anyway, the killer gets caught and everybody is happy.  Apart from the people who got shot.  Their day was pretty much ruined.

  This was an Oscar nominated film, for Best Musical Score at the 17th Annual Academy Awards and lost to Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly.

It's about a guy who makes his big debut as the star of a minstrel show, meanwhile his beloved wife dies in childbirth.  He blames himself and leaves the baby with his two friends to raise while he gambles internationally for five years.  He shows back up only to have his friend's wife tell him to GTFO for being a deadbeat.  He goes to Cuba but can't stand the idea of doing all the songs that remind him of his dead wife.  During a fortuitous shipwreck (not the same one), he seizes the chance to reinvent himself.  He lives in complete obscurity until his daughter decides to star in a revival of his debut musical.  Then he shows up to meet her, on stage, in full makeup, during her big break.  This is possibly the worst introduction of an absent father that could be arranged.  The only way it could be worse would be if he had pushed her into the orchestra pit and just taken over.

  This is another old movie glorifying fraud.  Young Judy is an aspiring songwriter who is about to be a homeless songwriter.  She gets a rejection notice from a big shot, Paul Hale, and decides not to take that shit laying down.  She immediately bleaches the letter, except for the signature, and retypes it giving herself free reign of Hale's apartment.  Through lying her cute face off, she manages to get her songs heard by a radio sponsor, cajoles a notoriously cagey and hot lyricist into a partnership, and even gets his ex-girlfriend (and current paramour of Paul) to sing them on the radio.  Everything is going swimmingly until the poor bastard gets word of what's going on.  This is a musical, so instead of getting arrested or even called out for her shenanigans, the lyricist steps in and paints Paul into a corner during a live broadcast, so he can either take the humiliation privately or risk looking like an asshole.  We're never told what Paul did to be treated so badly.  Presumably, he ate live kitten sandwiches or something.
  So this is the story of a drunk songwriter who ruins his career to promote his girlfriend, a faded actresss, as a radio star who then almost ruins her career salvaging his. But who gives a shit about that?  This is the LAST movie in the collection.  I'm free!  I'm freeeee!!!!

/does victory lap around living room
/eye falls on cellophane wrapped box of 50 Mystery Films on the shelf

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, you know what, they can wait until next year.

HANNA (2011)

 This was a good film.  My only question is whether it's good enough to own.  See, I watch my movies in alphabetical order.  When I get to the end (currently Zorro:  The Gay Blade) I start right over at the beginning (The 3-Penny Opera).  I won't own a movie if I can't watch it multiple times.

So I'm on the fence here.  I love movies with an unlikely hero (check), violence at the drop of a hat (check), and that are visually arresting (check).  HANNA ticks off all the right boxes.  In fact, she reminds me a lot of the character River Tam from Serenity.  She's just slightly too cool, too composed to be a normal 12-year-old girl, which I totally dig.

The cast is great.  Cate Blanchett is rocking the Evil Redhead role, Tom Hollander is wildly creepy as a German assassin, and Eric Bana doesn't suck too terribly much.  Saoirse Ronan is the eponymous Hanna, a girl raised in utter isolation and then released upon the world.  She starts out at a terrible disadvantage, thrust into a race that has simply been on pause during her absence.  A CIA operative will stop at nothing to possess her, her dad just kind of sets her loose with no guidance, and she has absolutely no coping skills for dealing with the rest of the world that a normal adolescent would have.  This becomes glaringly apparent when she meets a girl her own age after escaping from a holding facility in Morocco.  Sophie, her counterpart, can't stop talking about reality TV stars like she knows them, the merits/disadvantages of a boob job, and other trivial ephemera that seem retarded but are totally normal for a kid.  You know what's not normal?  A kid that speaks 7 languages fluently but doesn't know what the sound of a ringing phone is. 

The pint-sized Jason Bourne overcomes her difficulties, either giving things a wide blue-eyed stare like some adorable alien or violently murdering the shit out of people.  Even when her tiny world comes crashing down on her, she bounces back with aplomb and a vicious right kick. 

I'm sure someone will make this into a metaphor for puberty, what with her dad allowing her to make choices, the first real taste of independence and the simultaneous horrors that go with it, navigating the dangerous waters of boys, finding friendship, and being able to take those first tremulous steps toward adulthood, but fuck that.  It's about a tiny spy kicking ass and killing people on two different continents.  That's awesome.

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

Hey, guys, guess what? This is my 200th post! Yay! 

  So this was the Christy pick for April.  Apparently, she was a little incensed that everyone else has been doing a "better" job of picking movies. I put better in quotes because that's not really the point of the Experiment but try telling her that.  Anyway, she pulled this one out and I have to admit, it's a better fit than most of her other ones. 

This was written and directed by David Twohy.  If that name sounds familiar you probably saw it at the beginning of Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick.  Bonus:  he also wrote the screenplay for Warlock.  I don't know if he's resting on his laurels or if the success has gotten to him, but my main problem with this movie was how smug it seemed.  There were all sorts of little hints and teases in the dialogue as though he didn't think you'd get the joke otherwise.  I find that annoying.

Other than beating you over the head with the "twist" this is a really fun little thriller.  The suspense doesn't come from the whodunit part so much, but from the action sequences which is where Twohy really excels.  Timothy Olyphant is fantastic (as always) but Kiele Sanchez (Lost and The Glades) really stole the show for me.  Milla Jovovich kind of phoned it in this time around.  This was also my first shot at seeing Chris Hemsworth act in something before Thor comes out.  He doesn't have much of a part but I guess he did okay.

So, yeah, it's not Agatha Christie but it's a fun little summer movie if you just want to see some violence and have a high threshold for bad dialogue.

The Big Show (1936)/Black Tights (1962)

  This is a singing cowboy film from 1936.  It stars Gene Autry.  You've never heard of him.  He plays a stuntman who gets called in to impersonate a movie star at a personal appearance gig after the real guy takes off on vacation.  He ends up being way more talented than the original guy, meets a girl, foils a robbery, sings, does trick riding and then permanently replaces the poor bastard whose only crime was not leaving a number where he could be reached during his vacation.  The moral of the story:  There is always someone better at being you than you.

  I love watching people dance.  That probably sounds a little weird but fuck it, I don't care.  I have watched So You Think You Can Dance since its first season, I own Riverdance, and I love ballet movies.  From Center Stage to Black Swan, I love them.  This is not a great movie; the dances were filmed live and look horribly overexposed before editing in little expository scenes with Maurice Chevalier.  Roland Petit directs, choreographs, and performs in four excerpts of his Ballet de Paris Company:  The Diamond Crusher, A Merry Mourning, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Carmen.  It stars some very famous ballerinas including an incredibly young Cyd Charisse.  The dancing is great, especially Carmen.  Cyrano runs a little long and I thought The Diamond Crusher made no fucking sense whatsoever and was boring.  I do tend to think of ballet as serious, high-brow art so A Merry Mourning was a little surprising because it's a comedic piece.  But Cyd Charisse really can't go wrong.  The woman was just amazingly charismatic.  I have a total girl-crush on her.

Happiness (1998)

  This is another recommendation from one of my paramours, and oh boy, was it a doozy.

It's one of those "not for everyone" kind of movies.  Unless you're part of that weird fringe group that thinks dismemberment, pedophilia, and misery are hilarious, you should not watch this movie.  It's definitely for the It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia crowd.  In fact, I have been sitting on this review for five days, wondering how I was going to be able to describe it without sounding like the most depraved, soulless bitch on the planet.

Because I thought it was hysterical.

The awkwardness and daily horror of these people just compounds, folding over onto itself like one of those master-made katana blades.  It's hard to do awkward humor well.  I did not like Napoleon Dynamite; in fact, it's one of the only movies I have ever walked out on unfinished.  I didn't find it funny because it was too close to people I had actually known in real life.  Thank God I don't know anyone like the people in Happiness.  Holy Jesus. 

Now that I've had a few days to think about it, the difference between the two sets of characters is innocence.  In Napoleon Dynamite, the characters really had no idea how big of losers they were which made laughing at them really unsporting for me.  It's like kicking a peglegged kitten.  The characters in Happiness are incredibly aware that they have the losing raffle ticket in the game of Life. 

You have Joy, the woman who cries all the time.  Her life is shit (failed folk music career, dead end job, inability to connect with men).  She is trying so hard to be good and positive but her self-esteem is a china doll on a high shelf in an earthquake zone.  Her sister, Helen, is a successful author (who secretly struggles because her life has been so perfect she doesn't feel as though she deserves success) and her sister, Trish, has the perfect domestic life married to Bill, a therapist (secret pedophile).  One of Bill's patients is Allen, who fantasizes about his unattainable neighbor, Helen, and makes obscene phone calls to relieve the tension.  For a minute, there's a chance he might make a connection with his other neighbor, Kristina, as two socially awkward lonely people, but then that takes the express train to WTFville.  I cackled like a goddamned hyena during that whole piece.  Bill's son Timmy is eleven and beginning to struggle with puberty, which leads to the most awkward and disturbing father-son talk ever. 

Based on the Netflix sleeve, I was expecting to be disgusted but I actually found myself enjoying the entire film.  And in six months, maybe a year, I might see the sequel Life During Wartime.  But you should not take this as a blanket "I liked this, so you'll like it too!" kind of recommendation.  It's more like a warning.  I liked this movie.  You should worry if you liked it too.

Side note:  the actor who plays Vlad, the weird Russian cab driver (Jared Harris) has been cast in the upcoming Sherlock Holmes sequel as Professor Moriarty.  I find that ridiculously exciting for some reason.

Trick'r Treat (2007)

  I gotta say, this was the best horror film I have seen in years.  How did I miss this little gem when it came out?!

God, I can't even describe the plot.  It's basically a mash-up of fucked up Halloween stories gloriously exploding all at once.  So there's this town somewhere in the heartland that is obsessed with Halloween and they throw this big party and parade every year.  Their whole schtick is that you have to follow the legends of Halloween if you want to make it safely through the night.

Don't blow out your jack-o-lantern, or otherwise harm it.

Check your candy.

Treat the kids that come to your door...or beware of tricks.

Be respectful of the dead.

And really, are those so hard to mind? 

So, there are five little plots that end up intersecting based around each rule.  There's a chick who hates Halloween, although to be fair, I would not be happy if my significant other had me dress as the robot from Lost in Space. 

There's a principal who just wants a nice Halloween where he can let his hair down without obnoxious kids spoiling it. 

His crochecty old neighbor who just wants to be left alone with his little dog named Spite.

The unpopular geeky girl who gets invited out with the cool kids for a ghost story.

And the group of hotties in town for the big costume party.  One of them is concerned she'll never get her V-card punched. 

Running through the tapestry of the narrative is the bobble-headed little creature on the poster.  He's not really explained but he doesn't really have to be.  Just trust me when I say he's awesome.  Utterly and completely batshit-insanely awesome. 

Run, do not walk, to the nearest available console and stream the shit out of this from Netflix.  You will not regret it if you enjoy hilarious horror films.

The Prince of Tides (1991)

  This is another recommendation, this time from my friend Tamyka.  Despite the goofy poster, I actually enjoyed the movie.

This is the second movie directed by Barbara Streisand that I've seen.  The other one was a personal favorite, The Mirror Has Two Faces.  I liked it because I could really identify with the protagonist in not feeling attractive.  I'm sure everyone has felt ugly or undesirable at some point in their life.  I liked this movie because it reminded me of what it means to be Southern.

Make no mistake, this is a Southern film.  It may be set half in New York City but it is a quintessentially Southern movie.  The main character, Tom, comes to NY to talk to his suicidal sister's psychologist (say that three times fast) and help her unravel some of the repressed memories that cause the sister to try and kill herself over and over.  Doing this also helps Tom put his shattered life back in order through the magical twin powers of therapy and adultery.

There's some subplot about teaching the therapist's kid football but frankly, I tried not to pay attention through those parts.

Tom grew up in a dysfunctional family in South Carolina, the son of an abusive shrimp fisherman and a passive aggressive social climber.  Both of these are well-known Southern tropes.  So is the constant air of secrecy, of never showing anything in public but perfection, and an eventual hatred of your mother.   You learn to push pain away with humor and then, later, with alcohol.  It's hard to describe what it means to be Southern to someone who's not without sounding like you're describing the worst thing ever.  There are wonderful things about the South, once you get past the xenophobia and suspicion.  They'll give you the shirt off their backs, as long as you don't mind them talking about it to everyone they know about how you've fallen on hard times, bless your heart.

So Tom is scarred by his upbringing, including one life-shattering incident he had managed to bury.  Why two people can go through the same situation and one be able to cope and the other (a twin, no less) make multiple suicide attempts will remain one of those neurological quirks for therapists to talk about at their conventions.

But to hell with all that!  This movie has George Carlin playing a gay neighbor and not as a comedian playing gay, but as an actor playing a gay character.  (They call it playing straight when you do a role without trying to be funny, but I thought that might get a little confusing.)  You should watch it just for that.

Reaching for the Moon (1930)/Royal Wedding (1951)/The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1958)

  So most of you realize by now that I watch a lot of old movies.  What you may not know (but could probably guess) is that I also read about old movies.

For instance, I had read about Douglas Fairbanks in his role as one of the founders of United Artists alongside his wife, Mary Pickford.  (They were the original Hollywood power couple.)  I knew he was renowned as a stuntman, performing a variety of amazing feats in several iconic roles (The Thief of Baghdad, The Three Musketeers, and Robin Hood).  I know he's been referenced in tons of other movies, including Blazing Saddles.  I had, however, never actually seen one of his movies.

This is not a very good movie.  The plot is thin, it relies a great deal on stupid coincidences, and the two main characters have zero chemistry.  As a romance and as a music, this is a total fail.  I'm also not sure anybody told Douglas that this was supposed to be a romantic musical.  He certainly treated it like it was an action film, putting in stunts where none were actually called for.  I'm sure conversations with the director must have gone like this:

"You want to slide down a fireman's pole?  But the scene is on a cruise ship...No, I'm not saying it wouldn't look cool, Douglas, just why the fuck would there be a fireman's pole on a cruise...You know what, fuck it.  You want to pull some Olympic gymnast shit on a pole, we'll put in a fucking pole, you big baby.  Yeah, go on, while you're at it.  Might as well jump over a couple of balconies too, show-off bastard."

So, some rich dude with no time for love gets made fun of by a female aviator and decides that he must drop everything he's doing to pursue her, even if it means booking a transatlantic ship voyage (thankfully not on the Lusitania this time) in order to woo her.  Meanwhile, he loses every penny in the Great Depression, stocks plummet, and all his Wall Street friends kill themselves.  But who gives a shit about human tragedy?  You gotta win that girl who laughed at you away from her limp-dick English fiance.  He ends up getting the girl only after he falls into a deep depression and she feels sorry for him.  She gives him a pep talk about not giving up, and she's sure he'll make another fortune.  Then it cuts to their wedding day, and sure enough, he has completely bounced back by investing in steel...right before WWII.

  I guess this is continuing the trend of old movies with people whose names you'd actually recognize.  I mean, if you've seen a musical from before 1981 then you've probably seen Fred Astaire.  And Peter Lawford was part of the Rat Pack so most dudes will have heard of him.  Jane Powell and Keenan Wynn, maybe not so much. 

The movie is about a brother/sister dance team that gets the opportunity to play in London during the week of then Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Prince Philip.  On the boat ride,  the sister (Jane Powell) meets Peter Lawford, playing a member of minor nobility.  They bond over the fact that they're both kind of slutty and begin seeing each other.  Meanwhile, Fred starts dating one of the dancers in the show (Sarah Churchill).

It's a very typical musical of the time (everyone gets married) but that's not really a reason to watch it.  It's Fred Astaire dancing.  The man could make inanimate objects look good when he danced with them.  And I have not seen a single male dancer to rival him since those days.  Maybe Gregory Hines.

To be clear here, I'm talking about movie entertainers not hardcore professional ballet dancers.  I don't follow that world closely enough to make judgments regarding their charisma.

  I was a little surprised to learn that this was made into a musical.  The story of the Pied Piper is one of the darker fairy tales out there.  There are a couple dozen different endings, depending on the source but basically the town of Hamelin has a rat infestation.  A piper dressed in mismatched, motley clothes shows up and offers to rid the town of its problem in return for gold.  A bargain is struck and the piper lures all the rats to the river and drowns them.  Then the townspeople tell him to fuck off when he asks for his money, so in retaliation, he lures all of their children away.  The nice stories say that he hid them somewhere until the townspeople relented and paid him.  The less nice ones claim that he tripled the price.  The worst ones claim that he drowned them in the river like rats, killed them himself, or worse.

Side note:  Hey, Hollywood, I hear you're looking for some gritty reboots to fairy tales.  Here ya go, it's practically gift-wrapped.  It'll be like Se7en meets Cinderella.  You're welcome.

All the music in this is based on the orchestrations of Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian composer who wrote "In the Hall of the Mountain King", one of my favorite creepy classical pieces.  I don't necessarily know that his music is meant to be accompanied by English singing; some of the songs' lyrics seem a bit rushed or tortured to try and fit the bar.  For classic movie fans, you'll know the song as the one being whistled by Peter Lorre in M, another movie that could use a good dust-off.

Seriously, I'm tired of seeing nubile teenagers as the only victims of serial killers.  That's not scary anymore.  It's time to really go for the jugular.  After all, if you want a movie that allegorizes the loss of innocence and the horror of the world, having a victim be a prepubescent kid is a better bet.

Only cinematically, of course!  Please don't go out and murder a toddler and then tell the police I told you to in my blog.  Jesus.  I don't need that kind of publicity.

Romance & Cigarettes (2005)

  This was recommended to my by Clay, who also strenuously recommended The Fighter.  So far, he's two for two.  (ahem, Christy!)

So this is a bizarre little quasi-musical starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, and Christopher Walken.  I say quasi-musical, because the only person who actually sings in the movie is Mandy Moore.  Everybody else is either lip-synching or singing over the actual pop track.  It was directed by John Tuturro and produced by the Coen Brothers, so you know it's going to be weird.

I have to say, though, it did make me totally forgive Kate Winslet for being in Titanic.  I had always held a grudge against her for that movie because I hated it soooooo much.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen the whole movie all the way through.  I've caught bits and pieces over time, against my will.  Here, she plays a foul-mouthed red-headed slut named Tula who has an affair with James Gandolfini and wrecks his marriage.  That's her in the poster.

The movie is filled with big-name people.  Mary Louise Parker and Mandy Moore play the couple's daughters, Bobby Cannavale is Mandy Moore's boyfriend, Steve Buscemi is Gandolfini's work buddy, Eddie Izzard is a priest, hell, even Elaine Stritch comes in to play Gandolfini's mom.  There are probably more that you'll recognize but that's all the ones I could think of.

Yeah, the plot is fairly simple:  Susan Sarandon finds out about Gandolfini's affair with Tula and it wrecks their marriage.  He has to decide between his wife and his mistress, while Susan calls her crazy uncle (Christopher Walken) to help her find the red-headed slut so she can cut her.  Tula works at Agent Provacateur and there's a hilarious fight between the two ladies through the store. 

Side note:  Is it bad that the first thing I thought of when I saw the sign was "ooh, they have a new collection out, I need to go check it"? 

There are a couple of little side plots, but they're not really worth mentioning.  In fact, the only criticism I would make is that the side plots do more to take you out of the movie, than add to it. 

I really like the art direction and costumes, the pops of color in an otherwise gray urban landscape.  There is a beautifully shot underwater musical piece that, for me, was the stand-out of the movie.