The films seems to be getting good reviews overall. Howard and I are, ahem, less enthused…
Posts Tagged ‘Movies’
Howard Waldrop and I Review Thor
Monday, May 9th, 2011How I Spent Last Weekend
Thursday, April 28th, 2011I’ll let Dwight do the blow-by-blow. I was too busy running around greeting people and refilling the food bowl to offer up too many additional impressions. Thanks to everyone who came out.
Given enough time, I might put up a few impressions of Mean Streets and Get Carter, especially if I can do some screen shots of those 70s fashions…
Dear College Humor: Your List is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011Warning: Deceased Equine Flogging Next 500 Words
So: A little while back College Humor put up a list of the top 100 movie comedies of all times based on the votes of their readers. (If you want to avoid giving these idiots click traffic (and you should), this Fark thread helpfully offers up the entire list in the fourth post.) Based on the evidence, their readers are all either people who have consisted on a diet of nothing but chips of lead-based paint for several years, or under the age of 18. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a credible choice for number one, but not only is that about the only thing they got right, it’s almost the oldest movie they have on the list; both Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles came out a year earlier. (Man, what a year Mel Brooks had! It’s pretty much been a long, slow slide ever since…) That’s right: The oldest film on the list is from 1974.
No Eeling comedies. No classic screwball comedies. No Marx Brothers. No Charlie Chaplin. No Buster Keaton. No Harold Lloyd.
However, even in the woefully inadequate time period covered, the Super-geniuses at College Humor managed to leave off This is Spinal Tap, but managed to make room for Jackass, Jackass 2, Black Sheep (a film that comes in at a robust 28% at Rotten Tomatoes) and (at number 11) Spaceballs.
I think this may in fact be the worst “Best of” movies list ever submitted to the public at large. Perhaps College Humor should rebrand themselves as “Middle School Humor”…
George R. R. Martin’s Top Ten SF Films
Friday, April 1st, 2011There’s a lot to like on George’s list, such as having Forbidden Planet as the number one film. I disagree with him on how well Star Wars holds up, but it’s still a pretty credible list.
Howard Waldrop and I Review Battle: Los Angeles
Monday, March 14th, 2011Short description: Better than Skyline, but no great shakes in the SF department…
Un Court Essai Sur Les Exemples Récents Du Cinéma Loup-Garou
Monday, February 28th, 2011Last year when Howard Waldrop and I reviewed The Wolfman (executive summary: don’t waste your time), I offered up a list of other werewolf films that would be more worthy of viewing. Two of those, Ginger Snaps and Kibakichi, were films I hadn’t seen when I wrote that. I’ve now managed to see both, and can offer up judgment: Ginger Snaps is well worth seeing, but Kibakichi isn’t.
Ginger Snaps tells the story of the two Fitzgerald sisters, one (Ginger) hot, goth-y and redheaded, the other (Brigitte) dark and mousy, who go through their rebellious outsider phase by snapping artfully staged photographs of the other’s fake suicides, smoking, fighting with the stuck-up girls in field hockey, and generally behaving like teenage girls. Unfortunately for them, mutilated dogs have been showing up all around their neighborhood, and a late night encounter with what’s been killing them in a park leaves Ginger with wounds that heal entirely too quickly, newly grown patches of hair, a sudden taste for fresh blood, and the beginnings of a tail. And did I mention that the werewolf attack falls on the same day she get her first period?
Om Nom Nom
This is a very solid film with good acting, a clever script and firm direction. It can be enjoyed either as a straight werewolf film, or an extended (and unsettling) metaphor on the wrenching changes puberty inflicts upon the female body. (The film garnered a lot of comparisons with Carrie when it first came out.) Of werewolf films of recent memory, I would have to count this second only to Dog Soldiers.
Also, Katharine Isabelle looks really, really good just before she goes all four-legged.
On the other hand, Kibakichi is one of those films where all the best scenes are in the trailer. You would think that a Japanese film with werewolves, demons, samurai and Gatling guns would rock, but unfortunately Kibakichi has the quality of an exploitation film and the pace of a lush period drama, which is exactly the opposite of what you should be aiming for. The special effects range from the passable (they’ve mastered the art of copious geysers of blood) to the laughable, including one scene where the ghosts (demons? demon ghosts?) rip apart a gambler and its obvious that the attacking creatures are puppets on strings. (And at one point the titular protagonist is menaced by what look like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, except not nearly as convincing.) Plus the werewolf transformation scenes are sub-par. While not unremittingly awful, even gorehounds and Asian horror fans are likely to find it disappointing. It also has possibly the worst dubbing I’ve ever seen in a film.
Howard Waldrop’s Review of the Decade of SF/F/H Film Now Up
Friday, February 25th, 2011He took a little different approach than mine, just covering things we reviewed.
My Top SF/F/H Films of the Noughties Piece is Now Up
Friday, February 25th, 2011Howard’s piece should go up pretty soon as well.
Interview with Winter’s Bone Director Debra Granik
Monday, January 31st, 2011Lots of interesting tidbits here. I knew the film was relatively low-budget by Hollywood standards, but I didn’t know it was only $2 million. Personally, I’d rather have 100 Winter’s Bones than one Avatar, but I’m not running a Hollywood studio…
Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright (based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Brandon Routh, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza
I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World recently, and enjoyed what I thought I would enjoy about it, and was slightly less annoyed than I thought I would be annoyed by.
The setup (for those of you who didn’t watch a single film in theaters for the first half of 2010; the trailers were pretty ubiquitous) is that schluby Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, about which there shall be much more anon) splits time between sharing a tiny efficiency with his gay friend and playing bass with his band, Sex Bomb Omb, before he meets Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, and has to fight her seven evil exes to win her affections. Actually, Pilgrim doesn’t seem quite as schluby as the trailer makes him out to be, because he previously dated a hot girl named Envy (Brie Larson) who’s now a pop superstar, and when the movie opens, he’s just started dating a 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl “with the uniform and everything” (Ellen Wong). I should point out that his schoolgirl girlfriend is cute as a button, and looks absolutely nothing like Korean model Hwang Mi Hee in the following picture:
Scott Pilgrim's 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl girlfriend looks absolutely nothing like this
Hmmmm….where was I? Oh yeah. She looks nothing like that. Anyway, Pilgrim soon throws her over for Ramona, whose evil exes come out of the woodwork to fight him in flat-out-impossible video game battles in real life. All of it is good, over-the-top fun. If you’ve ever watched a Coyote-Roadrunner cartoon and gone “Hey, wait a minute, there’s no way he could have survived that long a drop,” well then, this movie isn’t for you. I’ve never read the graphic novel it’s based on, but I’m guessing it’s very true to it.
All the evil ex fights are filled with amusing and completely insane action. The best is probably the fight with Envy’s bassist (Brandon Routh), which is not only high on the splat-fu, but also combines the absurdity of veganism giving you supernatural powers with the even more amusing absurdity of Vegan Police stripping away those same powers (“Chicken isn’t vegan?”).
The movie has a lot going for it. Edgar Wright is a hell of a director. Hot Fuzz is one of the funniest (and most underrated) movies of the last ten years, and he’s a master at keeping the action moving along at a steady clip. That aesthetic serves him well in a movie designed for Generation Twitch, in which almost every aspect of the characters “real” life has been speed up and Nintendofied. Also, although I didn’t grow up Nintendo, I’ve played enough video games that the antirealism of it (when Pilgrim dispatches an evil ex, coins rain to the floor; when he gets in a particularly good blow, a voice announces “Combo!”) was amusing rather than annoying. And the acting is almost uniformly excellent. Except…except…
(sigh)
Except for the Michael Cera Problem.
There are many actors in Hollywood with a broad range of characters. Michael Cera is not one of them. While he was fine in Superbad, he wasn’t any better than McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) or the fat kid (Jonah Hill), and while he was also fine in Juno, he was probably the weakest link in an otherwise exceptionally strong cast. After watching both, I got the distinct impression that Cera’s range extended from teenage awkwardness to awkward teenageness. “Do you…want an actor…who can…pause………awkwardly?” He does the awkward pause thing even more frequently than Topher Grace does his “slight pause before the…eyerolling delivery” thing, and it’s considerably more annoying. There’s no reason he should have become this generation’s Hollywood go-to guy for male teenager leads over the likes of, say, Zombieland‘s Jesse Eisenberg, who looks a little bit like him. (Then again, since The Social Network is a serious Oscar contender and Scott Pilgrim wasn’t quite the hit the studio was hoping for, we all know who got the better end of that decision…)
In Juno he had a supporting role, but here he’s the center of the film. Fortunately, the nature of the film tends to accentuate his strengths and (generally) mask his weaknesses. You don’t notice his flatness of range nearly as much when everything around him is exploding. But he’s still the weakest actor here, except…
Except that his love interest, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is if anything even flatter. Maybe this was a conscious decision on Edgar’s part, given the source material and the film’s overriding aesthetic. Maybe Ramona’s anime-hair colors are suppose to indicate that she’s every bit as useless and ornamental as the Princess in Donkey Kong. She’s a goal with a backstory, not a person.
So, can you enjoy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World if the actors playing the two central characters aren’t that great? I did. Your mileage may vary.
If you can buy into the cartoonish nature of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this is quite an enjoyable movie (though nowhere near as good as Hot Fuzz). If you’ve ever mastered the art of mashing six controller buttons at the same time to rip off an opponent’s head, this is the movie for you.