Jurassic Park III (2001)

More dinosaurs!  I honest to God didn't even remember what this movie was about.  I thought it was the one with Vince Vaughn but apparently that's the second one which is not on the server.  The good news is that it's a really fast watch, only 92 minutes; the bad news is that it's still completely unmemorable.

Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) was clearly scarred by his experiences on Isla Nublar and has since sworn off any dinosaur discoveries that aren't buried in tons of rock.  But when a yuppie couple, the Kirby's (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni), offer him a blank check if he will act as a tour guide for a flyover of Isla Sorna, he agrees because money is money.  He even brings along his assistant (Alessandro Nivola) to charm the couple so he won't scare them off with his normal personality.  Unfortunately for Alan, and really for all of us, the couple are full of shit.  Mr. Kirby is actually in bathroom remodeling, not a multi-millionaire, and they intend to land on the restricted island to find their son (Trevor Morgan) who was lost in a parasailing accident.  Yes, really.  Of course, Alan is beyond pissed that he has to shepherd these total greenhorns through the worst camping trip ever but at least he gets another chance to study velociraptors up close.

This one had pterodactyls and that is the most positive thing I can say about it.  This right here is the reason I wasn't excited about the new sequel.  I'm going to hold on to the glow of the original and hope that fifteen years is long enough for someone to put together a script that is worth the franchise label.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

  This is the gold standard of gritty Westerns. There are no "good guys" in white hats, only bad men doing bad things for various conflicting ideologies. 

Pike (William Holden) is a career criminal but the life is starting to grind on him.  He wants to get One Big Score and then retreat to Mexico but his past, in the form of a former gang member (Robert Ryan) hired by a vengeful railroad boss, is closing in on him.  He links up with a Mexican general (Emilio Fernandez), agreeing to steal sixteen cases of rifles from the U.S. Army in exchange for protection.  This puts him at odds with his own teammate, Angel (Jaime Sanchez), who is angry because the general attacked his village and stole his woman (Sonia Amelio).  Pike and his second-in-command, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), must tightrope their way through this pit of vipers if they want to survive.

No joke, this is not a movie you can breeze through.  Fortunately, the blu-ray is absolutely stunning, which helps alleviate some of the heaviness of the drama.  Just try and focus on the parts of the screen that don't have someone getting shot.  For my money, hands down the creepiest scene (and also some incredible foreshadowing) is right at the opening credits where the outlaws pass a group of kids laughing and giggling around something on the ground.  The camera pans over finally and reveals the children gleefully watching a handful of scorpions being overwhelmed by fire ants.  It's deeply disturbing and sets the tone of the entire movie.  I can't say that I necessarily enjoyed the experience but I do feel more complete for having seen it.

The Expendables (2010)

I can't believe it's been five years since this came out.  I bought it a while back along with both sequels but this is the first time I've sat down and watched it since the theaters.  I have to say, it actually made more sense this time.  Maybe I wasn't paying attention in the theater or maybe not having ambient noise made it easier to process the dialogue, but this came a lot closer to good.  Still a popcorn flick, definitely, but one with a hint that more is going on.  The fight scene edits are still terrible, though.  Original post:  8/21/10

  I took a week off from posting because my favorite cousin, Christy, she of The Experiment, came up to visit. So of course we watched movies. She hadn't seen Kick-Ass, which I had, so I threw that on. Then we decided we hadn't seen nearly enough awesomeness for one day, so we went to see The Expendables.

If you saw the line-up of actors and thought "Ugh, what are they doing? None of those guys has acted in anything since the 80's" you can shut your stupid face! If however, you looked at that same cast list and thought about constructing a giant model of Stallone's head using the mountain of spent blank shells they invariably used in the movie, congratulations! You are an 80's film fan.

Don't go for the plot, which is pretty thin. A group of mercenaries decides to take on a suicide mission in order to reclaim the last little bit of soul they have left. Really, only one of them decides that and the rest just come along for the ride. The editing is a little schizophrenic, and that fucking shaky-cam threatens to ruin the fight scenes, but none of that matters.

The movie is gloriously violent. Eric Roberts is a slimy, sleazy bad guy and you can tell he's the bad guy because he's the only one who looks like he knows what a dry cleaners is. Dolph Lundgren is a drug addict, though it's never mentioned what particular drug he's on. Something that gives you crazy eyes and makes you sweaty.

Meth? Heroin? Estrogen? We don't know.

Jet Li and Jason Statham break their curse of working together. Probably because Li is criminally under-used in this film. That's just a personal opinion, however. If the rest of the gang had just turned him loose on bad guys like a kung-fu Tasmanian Devil and sat back to smoke a cigar, I would have been happy. Of course I would also have been pleased if every line of dialogue had been replaced with more fight scenes. I'm pretty easy in that regard.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

  Have you ever been to a dinner party or out to eat with a couple who have been together a long time and they start fighting in front of you?  At first, you're embarrassed for them, then you get kind of pissed that they can't keep their shit together, and you end up almost sickly fascinated by how far they'll go to hurt one another.  When it's over, you and your date swear to each other that you'll never end up like the So-and-so's.

That's what this movie is, except there is no politely excusing yourself and getting the hell away.  It sucks you in and doesn't let you go until it's done with you.

George (Richard Burton) is an associate professor at a small college.  He is tired from a faculty party and just wants to go to bed, but his wife, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), informs him that she has invited a young couple over for drinks.  Nick (George Segal) is an up-and-coming biology professor, married to wealthy if high-strung Honey (Sandy Dennis).  They have no idea that they are the newest pawns in a long-running game of marital sadism between their hosts.

Burton and Taylor were married during the time of filming, which adds another layer of verisimilitude to the performances.  This was nominated for every single category of Oscar and won five, including Best Actress for Taylor.  It's an incredibly powerful film with a sucker punch ending that will make you laugh and then go shower.

Exit to Eden (1994)

  The 90's were a terrible decade.  Just godawful in every respect.  Case in point:  the 90's gave us Exit to Eden, a film where comedienne Rosie O'Donnell dressed in leather fetish gear and cracked one-liners while Dana Delaney and the guy from Strictly Ballroom nakedly cavorted around an island and fat Dan Aykroyd disapproved.  Eat your heart out, 50 Shades.

L.A. detectives Sheila (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred (Dan Aykroyd) are tracking a pair of diamond smugglers.  They find out that a random photographer, Elliot (Paul Mercurio), has taken pictures of the smugglers at an airport and may be the only person alive to have seen their faces.  Sheila and Fred then learn that Elliot has left the country to be a guest at a private island owned by his therapist (Hector Elizondo) so he can work out his BDSM issues in a non-judgmental setting.  The diamond smugglers (Iman and Stuart Wilson) figure this out as well and everyone decides to go undercover to try and get to Elliot first.  Unfortunately for all parties, Elliot has caught the eye of Mistress Lisa (Dana Delaney) and remains unavailable as he works out his kinks under her tutelage.

I had only ever seen this movie in a very truncated form on cable as a kid.  It wasn't good then.  Seeing the unedited version helped, but didn't really improve it.  There almost seemed to be two distinct movies happening at the same time: one a middling Rosie O'Donnell cop comedy and the other a rom-com with fetish trappings.  It's like the producers knew she couldn't carry a whole film by herself so they wanted to give her breaks where all she had to do was voiceover exposition, like a bad episode of Dragnet.  Delaney tries but her character isn't really fleshed out enough to be the female lead.  Aykroyd isn't given a lot to do, which is a shame since he was probably the most accomplished of the entire cast.

This movie tries to be daring with its depictions but doesn't offer anything in the way of real growth.  It's message is pretty much the same as other 90's rom-coms.  No matter what's wrong, love will fix it.    Unresolved childhood issues?  Get a girlfriend and they go away.  Estranged from your family?  Find a man and all is well.  It's this idea that you can't be a whole person, that you have to find your "other half" and then magically all your problems will disappear.  It's never been a belief I ascribed to, which probably explains why I've never cared for romantic comedies.   Having said all that, watching Exit to Eden isn't the worst way to spend two hours of your life if you're looking for a light comedy.

Daredevil and a bunch of other TV shows

As I mentioned previously, I spent most of the weekend burning through Netflix's Daredevil show.  I also watched a season and a half of Eureka from SyFy (ugh, I still hate that branding), twenty straight episodes of The Daily Show and a short-lived NBC offering from 2007 called Journeyman.   Daredevil was easily the best of the bunch.  Holy God, I could not stop watching that show.  I had to force myself to take breaks to eat and do other human things, like feed and walk the dog.  Every single aspect of the show is brilliant and executed perfectly.  Charlie Cox is phenomenal (and has an amazing ass, BTW) as Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen lawyer with lofty motivations and a very dark secret as a masked vigilante.  Blinded in a childhood accident, Matt's other senses have grown to extraordinary proportions, allowing him the kind of reflexes and perceptions to more than make up for his lack of sight.  He and his partner, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson, the comic heart of this series), start their own firm to stand up for the little guy.  Their first client, a woman named Karen Paige (Deborah Ann Woll, a blonde now instead of redheaded Jessica from TrueBlood), is accused of murder after stumbling into a plot headed by crime lord Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'onofrio).

What I loved (among other things) was how Fisk's villain is handled.  He's not some cartoon character with a rubber face or a one-note bad-for-the-sake-of-plot villain.  He has depth, feeling, real motivations for his actions, and comes alive on screen.  Part of that is great writing and part of that is D'onofrio's ability to show the subtlety of a big man trying to balance a ruthless need for control with a yearning for human connection.  He doesn't just get an origin, he gets a love story.  That's amazing.

I could literally go on for pages about the fight choreography, the symbolism, the supporting cast, the connections to the overall Marvel universe, and how exciting and bold the story decisions were, but I think you should just log on to Netflix and watch it yourself.  Then come tell me and we can gush over it together. 

  It wasn't as vital for me to burn through Eureka as fast as I did Daredevil.  I have seasons 1-4.0 (seasons 3 and 4 were split into two parts each and sold separately) on DVD and I spent the better part of the last month working through 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0.  I had seen all of season three while it was still airing regularly, but I hadn't had a chance to watch season four past the first couple of episodes.  In case you've never heard of it, here's a basic rundown of the plot:  U.S. Marshal Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his daughter Zoe (Jordan Hinson) find themselves in a super-secret town called Eureka, populated almost exclusively by geniuses.  After helping solve a kidnapping, Carter is offered a job as town sheriff and must contend with science run amok.

Season four opens with Jack and four of the main characters getting sent back to the founding of Eureka in 1945.  When they find their way back to the present, things have subtly shifted and they must essentially relearn "their" lives without revealing that they have traveled through time.  Complicating matters is the addition of temporal stowaway Dr. Trevor Grant (James Callis) who snuck out of 1945 so he could see the future and also woo Jack's love interest, Allison Blake (Salli Richardson-Whitfield). 

  Speaking of time travel, last night I finished up a 13-episode run of a show I barely remembered ever existing called Journeyman.  Kevin McKidd stars as Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter who suddenly finds himself bouncing through timestreams like a very location-specific Quantum Leap in order to save people.  He is aided by his ex-fiancee (Moon Bloodgood) who can also do the time-jump thing, and hindered by a nagging wife (Gretchen Egolf) and an asshole cop brother (Reed Diamond) who is still in love with Dan's wife.  It got better as the series went on, approaching good even, but layered on way too much of the interpersonal drama between Dan, his ex, his wife, and his brother.  Some of the editing I thought was really nice and I liked the way they used music to tie to a particular year, but it just couldn't get out from under its own weight and was swiftly canceled.  I have it on the server but I don't know how well it will stand up to repeat viewings so it might get deleted eventually.

Executive Decision (1996)

  Sorry this is going up so late in the day.  I binge-watched the entire 13-episode run of Marvel's Daredevil on Netflix, starting Friday and going through half of Saturday.  I'll probably do a whole post tonight or tomorrow to run down all the TV I've caught up on this weekend.  But for now, let's dive into the 90's.

Analyst Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell) is called in to the Situation Room after radical terrorists seize control of a commercial air liner.  Grant believes that the hostages are just a smokescreen for the real threat:  a chemical weapon on board that will devastate the eastern seaboard.  He convinces the Secretary of Defense (Len Cariou) to send a team of elite soldiers, led by Lt. Colonel Austin Travis (Steven Seagal), to board the plane in mid-air using technology designed by Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt).  Grant and Cahill join the team to provide analytic and technical guidance only, but when things go wrong, both men find themselves trapped in the terrorist-controlled 747.  Their only ally on the inside is a flight attendant named Jean (Halle Berry).

Oh, pre-9/11 hijack movies!  You used to be so campy and fun.  If they tried to make this movie now, it would be grossly poor taste.  But what I love most about it is the subversion of all the previous action movie tropes of the 90's.  It opens with Steven Seagal leading his team of elite, tastefully ethnically diverse soldiers and positions him to be the hero.  When we are introduced to Grant, he is a bookworm trying to conquer his fear of flying.  Grant and Travis's characters have a negative history, so Travis should have been the one to shoot down all of Grant's ideas and generally be the negative voice.  Instead, both men are shown to have professional integrity, able to put aside a previous bad call in order to put the mission first.  Then, when you think it's going to turn into a buddy movie about Grant and Travis working together, Travis drops out and Russell's character has to carry the whole rest of the movie.  It was brilliant and I am shocked that it was not a Tom Clancy story.  It was more of a Jack Ryan story than Jack Ryan.