Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/3/2014-8/9/14)

    Coming back to the world after a genuine vacation…Ugh.

Howard the Duck:  What can I say?  I love this movie.  Yeah, it’s got some awkward dialog and acting.  Yeah, it’s weird as hell.  Yeah, it’s super goofy.  But it’s so wonderfully 80s.  I just can’t get enough.

Game of Thrones Season 3:  The third season is more of the same.  If you’ve liked the previous two, you should like this one.  It does feel slightly more on task this season.  There was a point at the beginning of season 2, where even I, nudity aficionado that I am, was wishing everyone would just put their danged clothes back on and get on with the story.  Season 3, while heartily dosed with naked flesh, doesn’t let it get in the way of telling the tale.  A fine show, and some seriously good fantasy.  I keep going back to my thought that this is a chronicle of the events that happened in the next Age of Men, after the King’s return in the Lord of the Rings.  Anyway, good show.

Redline:  While it has more style and panache than 90% of the anime you’re likely to see, Redline will still feel just as familiar.  People who aren’t bored to tears by the handful of recycled plots/characters/designs that you find in anime should find plenty to enjoy.  I am not one of those people, so I found the whole thing pretty dullsville.  If it wasn’t for the attempted, pseudo-Heavy Metal magazine vibe, there’s be nothing to make it stand out.

Hercules:  This is not a good movie.  The script is bad.  The usually charming Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a bit bland.  The effects aren’t good.  That said, I mildly enjoyed watching it.  I liked several of the supporting characters/actors, particularly Ian McShane.  I liked the idea of how the mythology was used, even if I didn’t always actually like it.  I like the idea that people, so indoctrinated in their supernatural worldview, would see the supernatural first, and reality a distant second.  Actually, that very thing is quite common today.  I was frustrated by the way Atalanta was used.  A supreme badass in the myths, and a member of Jason’s crack team of heroes, she is written like a token female in this film, and dressed in what looks like ancient Greek fashionable work-out gear.  Now, the costumes in these films are never going to fly in modern film, with everyone being so prudish.  If they were going for accuracy, there’d be a lot more male nudity, and a lot more nudity in general.  But her costume stood out in a way I found off-putting.  It looked extra wrong.  Anyway, this is better (by far) than The Legend of Hercules, but not as good as most of the other Greek myth related films of recent years (Clash and Wrath of the Titans, Immortals, 300, etc.).  Well, it’s better than 300: Rise of an Empire.  But then, most things are.

    Friday night, I headed into DC where I enjoyed a Lincoln Assassination walking tour.  Another of those events in US history it seems like we hear about all the time, but hear very little detail of the affair.  The tour had many interesting factoids I was completely unaware of, and it was cool to walk to the various locations where the events took place.

The Trap:  Richard Widmark bastards his way around the high desert as a mob lawyer roped into doing what he doesn’t want.  Tensions run high, blood will spill, and Widmark will stare hatred as fierce as he fires bullets.  Lee J. Cobb is extra sleazy, with his squinky eyed smarm.  I feel like this is a forgotten classic.  Fans of Noir especially should like the mean characters and vile dialog.  Worth tracking down.

Vera:  I can’t say that I loved this movie, but it was certainly interesting.  It’s a heck of a weird movie, with lots of images and not much talking.  It suffers a bit from the lack of budget, but then if it had a much bigger budget, they’d have probably had trouble getting such a strange film made.  It feels a bit like a horror movie, and a lot like a particularly strange fantasy film.

    I read Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites.  It’s the selection for the next graphic novel club meeting.  I wasn’t blown away, but it was definitely the best thing we’ve read in a while.

The Tiger Woman: Perils of the Darkest Jungle:  Though she does get knocked out and tied up a lot, The Tiger Woman is a shockingly tough lady for the time this movie serial was produced.  Though women wielding their strength weren’t all that unusual in pre-Code movies, by the 40s, they certainly were.  So this Tarzan knock-off stands out.  Linda Stirling isn’t a great actress (few in this serial are), but she trades jabs and kicks with the roughest of them.

    Though getting back into the swing of things is always difficult, the week had some bright spots.  Also, as the Dreamlands crowd-funded film made the needed money, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Dreamlands, and about some of that trippy, psychedelic 70s fantasy music.  Iron Butterfly, Caravan, David Bowie, and more.  Good stuff.

-Matthew J. Constantine

A Fistful of The Maligned! (Brad's Picks)

Oh January.  What a wonderful dumping ground you are.  The Awards Season is over.  The Oscar Nominations have been picked.  Goodbye 12 Years A Slave, hello The Legend of Hercules.  For most moviegoers this is a time for catchup, snatching the good word of Lone Survivor, Frozen, The Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle.  But we here at ITMOD dream of the great bad movie, or the next forgotten misunderstood gem.  Sure, Renny Harlin specializes in write-off trash these days, but as you'll see below, he's ticked off a fun film or two in his time.  Maybe his baby face Hercules will ascend to the art of high camp.  Or what about this Jack Ryan fellow?  Or Aaron Eckhart's sexy stick fighting Frankenstein?  Look - these are long shots.  But gold has struck in January.  Remember The Grey, or Doomsday, or Rambo.

And I love to play contrarian.  The Great Defender.  While the world championed the arty ennui of Frances Ha, I was going to bat for the offensively weird The Lone Ranger.  I don't think you can really call yourself a movie fan unless you've encountered and battled for the underdog.  But in the batshit trenches of the Internet you can find fellow weirdos, and suddenly distributers like Shout Factory start producing Special Editions of Halloween III and Tank Girl.  When putting together my own list of Favorite (Unfairly) Maligned films I found it difficult to choose older films - the problem being that given enough time even the most hated films find their fanbase.  So who knows what popularity the films below will find in the future; all I can tell you is that when friends hear of my enthusiasm for these flicks a quizzical look crosses their face.  My co-dork Matt joins me for some of these, but no matter how hard I try he can't bring himself to understand the films in slots 3 & 1.  I'm gonna break him one of these days.

5.  Your Highness:  I'm generally not a fan of pothead humor.  I've never smoked a joint in my life.  And the glorification of weed and booze irritates the hell outta me.  I'm a regular L7 (after all, I just used L7).  But dammit, I can't help myself when it comes the stupidity of Danny McBride, Seth Rogen, and James Franco.  Mixing their brand of idiocy with the absurdity of the Deathstalker genre ignites a childish glee within.  Teaming the foul sloth McBride with Franco's Prince Charming in a latex heavy quest through mushroom wizards, wood nymphs, and minotaurs?  Hell yes, that is hilarious.

4.  Knight and Day:  Released not to long after the couch jump incident, when the world turned against the smiling scientologist, Knight and Day is an inexplicably titled action romance from journeyman director James Mangold that tickled all my right fancies.  Tom Cruise is utterly bonkers here, his Ethan Hunt persona cranked up to 11 and it's both terrifying & appealing to Cameron Diaz's bored bridesmaid.  Their flirtation is adorable - a genuinely cute middle aged couple, something you do not often find in cinema these days and certainly not found within the action genre.  The challenge for you is to separate celebrity from the movies - tear up your US Weeklys, your People Magazines, set yourself free and rediscover your love of fiction.

3.  Die Hard 2 - Die Harder:  "Another basement, another elevator. How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"  Look, I'm not going to try and tell you that Die Harder is superior to Die Hard.  That's just foolish.  But Die Harder is a fascinatingly bizarre upping of the ante.  The film is filled with scenery devouring performances from a variety of familiar faces: William Sadler, Franco Nero, Dennis Franz, Fred Thompson, William Atherton, John Amos, Robert Patrick, Tom Bower, Art Evans.  Director Renny Harlin pushes the violence to extremes with blood splattered massacres, throat slicings, and icicle impalements.  There are not two lines of dialog without at least one juicy F Bomb.  Classy?  No.  But the sequel earns its "er" for sure.  Dumb and goofy, I love it.

2.  The Ladykillers:  Filmed directly after a true abomination (Intolerable Cruelty), but before their critical renaissance (No Country For Old Men), Joel & Ethan Coen chose to transplant an Ealing Classic to the American South.  They picked Tom Hanks for their ringleader and it's a shoot-for-the-moon performance not seen from the Oscar Winner since the early days of The Money Pit.  People tell me its not funny.  I don't get this.  I bust my gut laughing every time I watch another weirdo crook attempt old lady homicide.  The Ladykillers is not Fargo.  I see similarities to the comedy on display in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy, but at the end of the day it's a feast of caricature.  You either accept that or you rewatch The Big Lebowski for the 100th time.

1.  Domino:  After years of photographic experimentation, Tony Scott took all his hand crank tricks, his splicing magic, his saturation pallet, and set fire to subtlety.  The "Based on True Events" screenplay doctored by Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly is an absurd assault on Reality Television and our celebrity obsessed culture.  Kiera Knightley gets pornographic with her posh accent, joining forces with the toeless Mickey Rourke, and showing Brian Austen Green & Ian Ziering how a true Beverly Hills diva throws a tantrum.  It involves nunchucks, machine guns, and lapdances.  There can't be a shot in this film that doesn't last more than half a second, but if you can train your brain to keep up, then Domino offers a sensory barrage like none other.  One of my absolute favorite films of the last ten years.

--Brad