Fall 2014 TV

I know, this is another of my crap posts about TV because I don't have any movie ones ready.  Still, I try to stay current and I haven't done one on this season's new crop yet.

  The biggest new thing this year is obviously Gotham.  I've watched the first four episodes now and I'm finding it to be shaky at best.  I get what they want to do by making a procedural set around Jim Gordon (Ben Mackenzie) as an honest cop dealing with corruption and weirdos but I feel like they are seriously fucking around with canon timelines and I just don't know how far they'll be able to stretch this premise. 

  I am much happier with Selfie, a show I initially wrote off as sounding stupid, but was suckered in by Karen Gillan and John Cho as leads.  This modern-day My Fair Lady sees Eliza (Gillan) hiring Henry (Cho) to improve her real-life image, as she has based everything she is around her online persona.  It sounds flimsy but I think there is a lot of room to grow, especially once they start fleshing out some of the side characters.

The award for Most Improved Series is going to Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for taking the show in a much darker arc.  Honestly, Hydra was the best fucking thing that could have happened to them.  I still think they need to kill Ward (Brett Dalton) off, since there's no reason for him to still be on this show, but I'm sure they'll do something with him.  It makes me excited for Agent Carter, which is coming out as a mid-season show around December or January, I think.

I haven't added a lot to my roster this season.  Frankly, I don't have a lot of time and I end up getting way behind on things and having to catch up all at once.  I set Constantine up to record but I haven't watched it yet.  I wasn't kidding when I said I had 30 episodes each of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  Literally every moment I have not being asleep, eating, or doing homework, I have been watching those two shows.  I'm down to three left of each so I can hopefully get back to the final season of Dexter tomorrow and then it's back to business as usual.  Just bear with me until then.

Cirque du Soleil: La Magie Continue (2001)

    I turned in my paper today.  I'm just thankful it's over.  I even managed to watch at least a movie for you guys, even though it's really more of a performance.

I love Cirque du Soleil.  I try to see one per year live and I own several others on DVD.  There is nothing like them in all the world, as far as I know.  La Magie Continue was the second full-scale production of Cirque du Soleil, back when they were struggling Canadians and not global phenomenons.  It originally premiered in 1986, and was a financial flop.  I guess somebody repackaged an old recording because this doesn't even look like something filmed in 2001.

It's easy to look back now, in light of all their success, and say that you can see the seeds of what would become an amazing troupe of performers, but I'm not going to lie.  This is bare bones stuff.  They just didn't have the money to really blow people away, but there is no denying the amount of talent their people have.  There are a couple of juggling acts, a contortionist, a trapeze artist, and a group of tumblers, plus a performance by a trio of Chinese "Meteor Jugglers", which I have just learned from Circopedia is the proper name for somebody who spins two bowls of water attached to a rope while doing acrobatic tricks.

The show only runs about 50 minutes, which feels really short especially for a Cirque show.  I would say give it a watch if you're interested in seeing the origins of Cirque du Soleil, otherwise, I would probably watch one of the newer ones.

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

  I have a confession to make.  I didn't finish my English essay yesterday.  I'm only halfway done.  I don't think I've ever struggled this hard to put words on paper before.  It's very unpleasant.  Not to mention has thrown off my entire weekend.  I don't have a single thing drafted for Monday's post.  It took me a day and a half to get through an episode of The Voice and I still have one episode left of Dexter season seven.  Y'all, I am stressed.

Not as stressed as Marilyn Monroe, though.  That poor bitch.  This movie is a dramatization of a memoir written by Colin Clarke, who was a young third assistant director on Lawrence Olivier's film with Marilyn called The Prince and the Showgirl.

In the movie, Clarke (Eddie Redmayne) and the rest of the crew are fascinated by the glamorous Monroe (Michelle Williams), but the production begins to suffer due to her personal problems and lack of experience, infuriating director and co-star Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).  The more Olivier screams and harasses, the more withdrawn Monroe gets, until she will only allow Clarke near her.

Michelle Williams does a phenomenal job of playing the delicate-as-tissue-paper Monroe without making her seem pathetic or annoying.  This is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, totally isolated by her fame.  Emma Watson has a good supporting turn here, as well, as the wardrobe girl thrown over by Clarke for the chance to be near Monroe.  She only has a few minutes of screen time but she feels very real in the part.

I've personally never seen what the fuss over Marilyn Monroe was about.  Ok, she was pretty for the time but I've never felt there was anything particularly special about her.  I think I can empathize with this character but only because of Michelle Williams' portrayal.  Still, it's a very good movie and it did make me want to watch The Prince and the Showgirl, so there's that.

ABCs of Death (2012)

  I'm supposed to be writing a four- to six-page paper for my English class right now.  Instead, I'm writing this blog post.  That probably says something about me, but I don't care.

This is billed as a horror anthology but it's really not.  I would only consider one short, "E is for Exterminate", as real horror out of the whole alphabet, but it is pure nightmare fuel.  Most of the others are just gory and gross.  There are a few that are legitimately uncomfortable to watch ("L is for Libido" and "P is for Pressure") and a couple that are really funny ("Q is for Quack", "N is for Nuptials") but I found the vast majority to just be kind of meh at worst and conceptually fascinating at best.

That should probably get more of an explanation.

Ok, so there are 26 shorts, each by a different director exploring death.  Some went for the splatter factor, some went for the concept.  "S is for Speed", for example, explored the idea of a woman running from Death figuratively as she dies from an overdose.  "X is for XXL" showed a woman who'd rather be thin and dead than overweight and ostracized.  To me, this is more interesting than just showing people dying in various ways.

I doubt I'd ever watch any of these shorts twice but I am planning on seeing the second anthology when it becomes available.

Unbreakable (2000)

  As an origin story, this isn't a bad superhero movie.  I have issues with the writing, the pacing, and the style, but not with the fact that it is a superhero movie.

David Dunne (Bruce Willis) thought of himself as just a normal guy until he was the only survivor of a train crash.  He walked away without a single scratch, much to the relief of his family.  Then he is contacted by a mysterious man named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) with a curious theory.  Price believes that David is his natural opposite, a man who cannot be hurt.  Price was born with a rare genetic disease that makes his bones super-brittle, so he read a lot of comic books as a child while waiting for things to mend, which is when he began developing the idea that comics are a form of oral history, only dressed up for marketing.  David initially believes Price is a crackpot, but cannot deny that there are things about himself that are strange.

I felt like the whole comic book angle was completely overplayed throughout the movie.  It's a neat idea, but not one that has to be shoved down an audience's throat.  I think if that had been more subtly handled, this would have been a smoother film.  The pacing was glacial with a subdued color palette that washed everything in blues and grays. The only person who really pops on screen is David, which makes sense from the comic book angle, but again, could have been a more subtle inference.

As a side note, what is up with Shyamalan and water?  Haven't like three of his movies revolved around it?  The Lady in the Water is the most obvious, but he's used it like Kryptonite for this movie and Signs.  There are probably others but I haven't really made a point of watching his films after that whole The Village disappointment.

The Boxtrolls (2014)

  This was the sweetest movie about genocide I've ever seen.  LAIKA is fast becoming my go-to studio for kids movies that aren't really for kids.  When I went to go see Coraline in the theaters, there was a little girl next to me who pulled herself into her jacket like a pillbug because of some of the imagery in that film.  It even freaked Christy out.  I didn't like ParaNorman as much, partly because I felt like it overplayed its hand.  The Boxtrolls is less overt horror, but what it does have lingers with you.

Fair warning, I would seriously reconsider taking any child under the age of seven to see this movie.

The good people of Cheesebridge have been living under the threat of monsters in their midst.  Boxtrolls are slithery creatures who come out at night to snatch unwary children.  They know this is true because of the oft-repeated cautionary tale of the Trubshaw baby who was stolen and presumably eaten.  That is until the town leader's daughter, the intrepid Winnie (Elle Fanning), sees a boy out amongst the Boxtrolls and starts to wonder.  Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) has been raised by the Boxtrolls, but is troubled by the disappearances of many of his friends, orchestrated by Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) and his squad of exterminators.  Snatcher has wrangled a promise of a prestigious white hat from Winnie's father, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), upon proof that every last Boxtroll has been eliminated.  The hat would allow him entrance into that rarefied echelon of cheese tasting only populated by the upper crust.  He is not about to let his future be derailed by a little girl in pigtails or a boy wearing a box.  Winnie and Eggs must somehow save the Boxtrolls and sway public opinion about them as well.

There is a thread on the IMDb message board describing this movie as a kids version of the Holocaust, and while I think that is an exaggeration, there is no denying the dark themes present here.  The Boxtrolls are persecuted, imprisoned, and forced to labor on a machine meant to cause their destruction.  Eggs deals with attempting to straddle two worlds, ultimately trying to decide who he is and who he wants to be, while Winnie struggles with having a father who would rather taste cheese than acknowledge her.

I'm clearly a fan of their process, but I don't have nor particularly like children.  Your tolerance may be lower.  Bear that in mind before heading off to the theater with your tots.

Forbidden Zone (1982)

  I don't even have the words to describe this movie.  Other than weird.  So very, very weird.

You guys know who Danny Elfman is, yeah?  Composer extraordinaire, has worked on pretty much every Tim Burton movie, plus about 100 other things?  Did you know that he was also the frontman for 80's rock group Oingo Boingo?  Because I didn't.  Well, he also did the music and appears in this movie, Forbidden Zone, as Satan.

Frenchy (Marie-Pascale Elfman) is just a regular teen who skips school one day to investigate the mysterious door in her basement that leads to an alternate dimension.  The king (Herve Villechaize) immediately falls in love with her, causing the queen (Susan Tyrell) to become irrationally jealous.  Frenchy's brother (Phil Gordon) sets off through the door to rescue her.

Filmed in black and white with a mix of live action and animation, there's no denying Forbidden Zone is imaginative.  As a straight art piece, it's an interesting foray into a creative mind.  As a movie, it's damn near too weird to exist.  Every scene set in "school" was too bizarre for words, the characters are insane, the plot makes no sense, and the acting is godawful for the most part.

This was Richard Elfman's directorial debut, and he enlisted brother Danny and wife Marie to help him out with it.  Both male Elfmans went on to have successful careers in the industry, but this movie is proof that everyone starts somewhere.  I cannot in good conscience recommend it for light watching, but if you really want to see the genesis of a career, give it a shot.

The Perfect Host (2010)

  This was such a great mindfuck of a movie.  David Hyde Pierce is amazing.

Career criminal John Taylor (Clayne Crawford) has just committed a robbery, but cut his foot in the process.  On the lam, he cons his way into the home of Warwick Wilson (David Hyde Pierce), who is expecting guests for a dinner party.  What John doesn't know is that Warwick is far from the mild-mannered suburbanite he pretends to be.  The party quickly devolves into a dangerous game between two predators.

See, some of you might think that I have spoiled the central conceit of the movie, but you don't need the twist.  That is the mildest part of the entire film.  Watching John realize that he has picked the wrong fucking house to hide out in -- that's what you're here for.  I'm not going to say it's flawless, because there were a couple of tonal missteps, at least in my opinion, but it's definitely worth a watch.

Love and Death (1975)

  I've never watched a lot of Woody Allen films.  My mother never liked his work, so I didn't grow up with it and I've never really cared to delve that deeply into his oeuvre.  After Midnight in Paris, however, I was more willing to give him a chance.

Boris (Woody Allen) is in love with his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton), who is in love with his brother Ivan (Henri Czarniak).  When war breaks out, Boris is sent to the front.  By pure accident, he manages to kill a dozen French generals and is labeled a war hero.  Sonja, meanwhile, has married a herring merchant and had dozens of affairs.  Boris loves her anyway and manages to woo her after her husband suffers a self-inflicted gunshot wound preparing for a duel.  They have several happy years, after a dozen miserable ones, and are finally ready to have children when war breaks out again.  Sonja has a brilliant plan, however, and convinces Boris that they should assassinate Napoleon (James Tolkan).

I've read enough Russian literature to know that this is possibly one of the best spoofs I have ever seen in my entire life.  Everything in it is perfectly on point.  Because it is so specialized, however, I'm not sure the jokes are the most accessible and you shouldn't have to have a reading list to watch a movie.  But, if you've read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy and enjoyed yourself, give this movie a try. 

The Fifth Element (1997)

  I don't know if you guys are aware, but you can totally make requests for me to watch and review specific movies.  All you have to do is write it in a comment, or email it to me.  For example, I was asked by one of my followers to review The Fifth Element, as I had not previously done so.  And voila!  Here it is.  So don't be shy.  If you want to see something specific on this blog, all you have to do is ask.

In the future, a great evil is threatening our entire galaxy.  Only a weapon created by placing stones representative of the four elements around a fifth, a perfect being, can stop it.  The fifth element is a woman named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who crashes into the back of Korbin Dallas' (Bruce Willis) cab after escaping from the police.  Korbin is just an ex-soldier trying to make a living and has no wish to be caught up in a bid to save the world.  But he finds himself doing just about anything to get near Leeloo, even if it means dealing with a psychotic arms dealer (Gary Oldman), a loudmouth DJ (Chris Tucker), and a nervous priest (Ian Holm).

This is the movie that put Luc Besson on the map for me.  There are just so many amazing moments in this film.  It's incredibly quotable, as well.  I don't know a single person in 1997 who didn't walk around saying "super-green" and "multi pass" like they were things.  If, somehow, you've never seen this movie, you are really doing yourself a disservice if you wait any longer.

Splice (2009)

  This was billed as a horror movie, but it's not.  Not unless you are absolutely terrified by Freudian psychology.

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are gene splicing wizards.  They created an entirely new organism capable of synthesizing proteins useful in pharmaceutical research and are ready to move on to working with human DNA.  However, their boss (Simona Maicanescu) pulls the plug on their research.  Undaunted, the pair forge ahead and create Dren (Delphine Chaneac), a human-animal hybrid.  Clive wants the abomination terminated but Elsa sees Dren as a test run for the baby she's too scared to have herself.  They try to keep her hidden out at Elsa's family farm but soon realize that Dren has a mind of her own.

Remember how Alien was an allegory for rape?  That's kind of what this is, except it's about raising a child and much less subtle.  Her creators are hopeful but nervous, no one gets enough sleep, it affects every area of their lives and just when they start to think it's useless, there will be a sudden breakthrough.  Then Dren becomes a teenager and everything goes to shit.  So maybe it is a horror movie after all.

Honestly, I wouldn't go to any trouble to watch this one.  If it's on, okay, but don't go searching for it. Watch Species instead.

Black Dynamite (2009)

  My friend Candace recommended this to me a couple of years ago, saying that it changed her life.  She also started referring to everyone as a "jive turkey" around the same time. 

Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) is a bad mother-shut-yo-mouth former CIA agent.  When his brother is killed in an apparent drug-related incident, Black Dynamite comes to town with the intention of bathing the streets in blood.  An old contact from the CIA, O'Leary (Detective Fusco from Person of Interest, or if you insist on reality, Kevin Chapman), tells Black Dynamite that his brother wasn't a junkie, he was undercover trying to discover where this new strain of smack was coming from.  Black Dynamite immediately picks up the case, chasing down leads from an informant named Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson).  Bit by bit, he pulls the information together to discover a conspiracy so dastardly it could only be the work of The Man.

This movie was amazing.  It is one of the most perfect spoofs of blaxploitation films that I have ever seen.  It has everything:  intentionally cheesy music, bad exposition, deliberately horrible camera work, and the worst possible 70's caricature characters.  There's a guy who reads stage direction with his lines.  How awesome is that?!  Not to mention the amount of cameos from nearly every black actor you've ever heard of, including Arsenio Hall as head of what I can only assume was the pimp union.

I've only ever seen Michael Jai White in intense action roles previously so it was nice to see him show a little humor, especially once I got to the credits and saw that he co-wrote the screenplay.  It made me like him as an actor all the more.

The Devil's Own (1997)

  This was one of those movies that came out when I was in high school that I had zero interest in seeing.  I understood what the IRA was, intellectually, but I didn't know what it meant.

As an adult, I can watch this and it means something completely different.  Not life-changing, at least not for me, but it's a decent enough film about clinging to an idea versus moving on with your life.

Frankie (Brad Pitt) was a child when his father was killed at the dining room table.  Now a man, he is one of the IRA's top assassins.  When the heat comes down after a particularly bad attack, Frankie is sent to America to buy Stinger missiles to shoot down British helicopters.  He is boarded at the home of a Boston cop, Tom O'Meara (Harrison Ford), who has no idea of Frankie's true identity.  He really starts to care for the O'Meara's, but it's all put in jeopardy when his weapons contact (Treat Williams) gets impatient for his money.

Brad Pitt's accent is terrible and it's really distracting, so I understand if you can't get past that.  There is a very young Julia Stiles as one of the daughters, however, if you like seeing actors putting in their dues.  This won't be one I own, but for once, I'm not judging Christy for having it.

Surrogates (2009)

  This film was interesting for the questions it raised more than for the performances given.

In the near future, human beings have almost completely stopped interacting in the flesh, using human replicas called surrogates instead.  Their creator, Cantor (James Cromwell), initially designed the robots for quadriplegics and others who were bed-bound, but the tech was too good to not end up mainstream.  Embittered, Cantor retreats to seclusion until his son is killed while using one of his surrogates.  FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell) are assigned the case to investigate what kind of weapon could fry a non-present user along with his robot.  Greer soon discovers that the roots of this mystery go much further than a simple murder.

Someone is probably working on a robot like this right now.  We already have technology that uses a person's brainwaves to move a cursor on a computer, enabling the previously voiceless to speak.  How much longer will it be until some enterprising soul takes that idea and turns it into a reason to never leave your house?  Want to go grocery shopping but don't want to put on real pants?  Let your super-hot (because let's be real, who's going to buy an ugly robot?) surrogate do it for you.  It essentially turns your life into a video game.  

The film also does a good job covering the myriad reasons why people hide themselves away behind technological devices.  Greer's wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) uses her surrogate more than her real body in order to not have to deal with her grief and guilt.  She has a new face, so she is a new person with no past except that which she chooses.  That's a seductive trap right there.  

There are a few too many plot holes for this to be a sci-fi classic, but it was worth watching at least once.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)

  Tyler Perry has become an industry to himself.  I don't know when he has time to sleep between acting, producing, directing, and possibly being a superhero. 

That being said, I didn't care for this movie.  I found myself completely disgusted by the main character, Helen, for reasons I will get into in a moment.  First, the plot.

Helen (Kimberley Elise) is thrown out by her controlling husband Charles (Steve Harris) on their eighteenth wedding anniversary.  Homeless, jobless, and with nowhere to go, she turns to her irascible grandmother Madea (Tyler Perry) for help.

Here's my problem:  a long time ago, my ex-husband sold my house out from under me and I got evicted, rendering me homeless and jobless, so I know where the main character is coming from here.  This is why I'm so pissed at her.  She mopes and whines and acts like a total bitch, taking out her issues on every man around her, like it's not her fault she has no skills and no ambition.  Bad things happen in life and sometimes you don't see it coming.  All you can do is pick up the pieces and move on.  Eventually, this woman starts dating the world's most understanding and sensitive U-Haul driver (Shemar Moore) only to drop him like a hot potato when her asshole husband gets shot by his criminal client.  She immediately reverts back to wanting to get even with the man who treated her badly, which she accomplishes by basically giving him Stockholm Syndrome while he's disabled.  Meanwhile, her new boyfriend is left twisting in the wind without so much as an explanation.

I love the concept of vengeance and I have gotten my share, but you don't pursue it to the point where you throw away all your personal growth.  Sometimes letting a person's karma catch up to them is the most cruel thing you can do.  If it was me, I would have laughed at the news report of my ex being loaded into an ambulance, left him to the tender mercies of his new woman, and taken a vacation out of town with my hot boyfriend, all calls forwarded to my attorney.

This was originally a stage play and has been turned into a successful franchise.  I think that's great.  I'm also not opposed to seeing other movies featuring Madea.  This one just rubbed me the wrong way.