Matt’s Week in Dork! (5/25/14-5/31/14)

    Sunday involved a lot of riding around the Northern Virginia area, seeing some parts I hadn’t seen before, and moving a bigass TV.  When I dragged my sorry butt back home, I sat down and finished Annihilation, which was really good.

Dinner at Eight:  “You’re young and fresh.  And I’m burned out.”  An all-star cast digs in to a comedy-drama about various people trying to keep it together or get it together in the post collapse world of New York City’s wealthy elite.  It’s funny and sad, in much the same way Grand Hotel was.  John Barrymore is typically charming.  It’s not as good as Grand Hotel, but it’s pretty good.

The Immigrant:  A beautiful film, with a fantastic performance from Marion Cotillard, The Immigrant is ultimately sunk by the male leads.  Be it performances or script (or a mix of the two), Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner are frustratingly uninteresting.  Phoenix is particularly bad, too.  It's like he's channeling Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront, where he's acting in one movie, while everyone else is acting in a totally different film.  I loved the world that was created, and even most of the bit parts and supporting players were quite good.  This all makes the failures of the film more pronounced.  There was a great film in this mix, but it’s lost the shuffle of love triangles and murder, and obscured by weird acting choices.  While worth watching for fans of the period, the movie is ultimately a disappointment.  It’s also part of that ‘all men are monsters; all women their victims’ subgenre that has become so tiresome.  That too could have been avoided by removing the two male angles of the love triangle.

A Fistful of Dollars:  “That’s not gonna break my heart.”  Clint Eastwood is just so darned likeably charming as the wandering gunslinger out to make a buck off two warring families.  This remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (itself an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest) finds the story transported to the Mexican/American West…by which I mean Spain.  Plenty of colorful characters, awkward dubbing, double crosses, and tough guy dialog.  And a lot of wacky killing.  The Western would never be the same.

    On Thursday night, Brad and I went back to The Alamo (we'd gone there to see A Fistful of Dollars the previous night).  This time dressed like idiots, draped inappropriately in the Flag, to see one of the most 80s films ever.  Walking up to the counter, our outfits tipped off a fellow to which movie we were going to see.  Perhaps it was a bit obvious.  And then, while we were getting ready to go into the theater, a rep from a beer company spotted us, asked to take our picture, and bought us beers (Rye of the Tiger).  Awesome.

Rocky IV:  “Whatever he hits, he destroys!”  The only Rocky film I’ve ever seen, and the only one I ever will, Rocky IV has been a weird absence in my life, now filled.  Such a wonderfully stupid, wonderfully 80s film.  Four montages?  Four?!  Fantastic.  It’s poorly shot, poorly written, and even the montages are clumsy (did I mention there are four?).  The jingoistic idiocy is palpable.  Dolph Lundgren and Brigitte Nielsen are about as Russian as Jack Kennedy.  And seriously.  What’s up with Paulie and the robot?  What’s up with Paulie and the robot?!  Excellent.  So dumb.  So awesome.

La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast):  This Jean Renoir film helps presage the Film Noir genre that would rise a few years later.  There’s even a proto-Femme Fatale.  But it’s also full of Renoir’s love of people, reveling in the everyday life of the working class.  If you’re a train person, this is some serious porn.  The train footage alone is worth the price of admission.

Witchville:  Another straight to video movie that seems like someone wrote the script based on an old D&D game.  The acting is all over the place…if that place is where bad acting lives.  The CG is typical TV level.  The costumes aren’t bad.  The action isn’t good.  Sadly, the film is just silly and goes over territory that lacks freshness.  I see so many of these movies made on very limited budgets, with limited resources, that manage to do some impressive things.  But they’re sunk in the scripting.  All the low-budget pluck and can-do spirit amounts to little if there aren’t some solid, interesting ideas at their heart.  All those great third string science fiction movies from the 80s are remembered because they combined can-do attitude with creativity.  With movies being easier than ever to get made (not saying it’s easy), creativity is too often skipped.

The Magic of Melies:  A good, informative discussion of Georges Melies and his wonderful films.  There are interviews and some recreations, as well as plenty of clips of Melies’s films, other films of the era, and photographs.  His story is a fascinating one, and very important to our understanding of film as an art form.  Movie buffs should see this, for sure.

My Fail Lady:  Rex Harrison is charmingly cruel as the language expert who decides to make a proper lady out of a low-class flower seller.  Audrey Hepburn…Well, she’s not so great as the flower seller.  The movie is fun and lavish, if a bit overlong (OK, maybe more than a bit overlong).  Several of the songs are quite good.  But I can’t get over Hepburn.  I know the movie is supposed to be somewhat broad, somewhat exaggerated, but her accent is absolutely awful, to the point of being distracting.  And they never really make her look like anything other than cute little Audrey wearing a funny costume.  Though I didn’t love the movie, Rex Harrison is enough fun that I still recommend checking it out.

    In between watching these movies, I’ve been watching more Space 1999.  Cool show.  I like how often episodes have a somewhat horror story vibe.  There’s certainly a lot of mystery and weirdness.  Other than that, I’ve just been trying to read Preacher again (limited success) and I started Authority, the sequel to Annihilation.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Brad's Week in Dork! (2/23/14-3/1/14)

I spent most of this week ticking off the last batch of Oscar Nominees, feverishly anticipating Sunday's Super Bowl.  I was perfectly content with my adequate consumption of the Major Nominees (12 Years A Slave, Gravity, August - Osage County, etc), but after I got wind of my friend Lindsey's plan to burn through ALL nominations, I kicked it up a notch.  Best Picture?  Best Actor?  Forget that.  Let's go crazy with Best Makeup, Sound Mixing, and Original Song!  Knocking out Bad Grampa & All Is Lost first thing, I spent most of the week working through the Animated Feature category.  The Croods, Despicable Me 2, Frozen, The Wind Rises.  Boy.  None of them really interested me during their initial releases, and I wouldn't have bothered if not for The Academy Awards.  Frankly, the only 2013 animated films I cared about were Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 (TACOZILLA!) and Escape From Planet Earth...yeah...well, you know...Shatner.  The less said about Monsters University, Planes, and the decline of Pixar the better.  Hell, 2014 is already looking brighter thanks to The Lego Movie, but let's cross fingers that How To Train Your Dragon 2 & The Box Trolls deliver this goods this year.

But as much fun as I had hopping back and forth from the Angelika to Landmark's Bethesda Row, my favorite theatrical experience of the week (and the best damn movie I watched) was the Alamo Drafthouse's Tough Guy Cinema screening of Streets of Fire.  Nice to see a crowd show up for Walter Hill's hyper stylized rock & roll fable, and as many times as I've fallen in love with Diane Lane's Ellen Aim, this was the first time I was utterly hypnotized by her opening performance.  Just wow.  One of my regular cinematic rants is how Jessica Alba totally fails as Nancy in Sin City, and watching Lane own that crowd and that camera just absolutely accentuated Alba's Frank Miller failure.  Diane Lane is astonishing in this movie.  So great to see this 80s oddity again, and I really need to track down a high def copy cuz Streets of Fire is a Once-A-Year-Watch for sure.  Easy to see why this is one of Matt's Favorite Films.

Jackass Presents - Bad Grandpa:  Like other Jackassy productions, there are a few cheap laughs to be found here, but how many times can you watch an asshole get kicked in the balls before you've had enough?  Somewhere Bob Saget is screaming, "NEVER!"  I do not like the candid camera format, tricking simpletons into gross-out scenarios is the lowest form of humor.  And I don't care how many dolts get fooled by Johnny Knoxville's latexed face, Bad Grampa has no business earning a Makeup & Hairstyle nomination.  Under the scrutiny of HD cameras, Grampa's mug looks like fat, sweaty putty.  It's not like the Oscars are free from W-T-F acknowledgements, but it hurts a little to see such a base concept receive encouragement.  Am I just a middle aged fuddy duddy?  Maybe.  But I'd rather watch a million subpar South Park episodes than witness Knoxville's stretched-out scrotum.

All Is Lost:  I very much enjoy watching the process of survival.  I love how this film has the confidence to trap its audience on the boat, and reveal character only through the tiniest bits of detail.  It's a great performance experiment, and All Is Lost succeeds with tension in ways that Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity stumbles about in cheap symbolism.  However, as I watched this late at night (or far too early in the morning), I found myself drifting around the halfway mark.  Not locked down in the theater seat, as each attempt at life fails, I lost interest in the hell this Old Man had created for himself. Maybe I do need a Wilson to talk to, or maybe an interior monologue.  Such concepts would certainly weaken the craft on display, but I just never fully engaged with Redford's plight.  Or I could have simply not been in the mood.

The Croods:  This one surprised me a bit.  Quest For Fire, but "For Kids!"  Nicolas Cage certainly works as the chromag dad terrified to venture out beyond his cave.  His voice lends an enthusiasm to his character in ways we haven't seen from him in a long, long time (about three or four Direct-to-DVDs ago).  Continental Drift forces the clan to explore their backyard, and it's a beautiful nightmare of owl-wovles & piranha-birds.  If you're at all familiar with the whacky, nonsensical design of the Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs films then you'll be happily equipped to handle the absurdity on display in the Land of the Lost.  The themes of curiosity & fear are simple, but important to the young audience, and The Croods is easily the most inventive looking film of the Animated Feature nominations.  A classic?  Naw.  But you know...fun for the whole family.

Despicable Me 2:  I do not care about Steve Carrell's Gru or his Good Dad/Bad Guy routine.  His story of romance and world domination holds zero interest.  But those minions?  They are just too cute for words.  I hate myself for loving them so much, but a ten second dream sequence in which one yellow fella falls head over heels for Kristen Wiig is abso-freaking-dorable.  And Isaac Washington Minion!!!  I want that toy now.  The rest of the movie?  Whatever.

Frozen:  This one suffered from the hype machine.  After weeks of friends, family, and co-workers telling me this is the best film Disney has released in ages, I was bound to finish Frozen with a lackluster spirit.  The film is pretty enough.  I dig the sibling love story.  The snowman character isn't even that annoying (shocker!).  But the film felt rushed to me.  Blinked and it was over.  I was disappointed when the real villain revealed himself, and the songs were Broadway light.  I should have seen this opening weekend, but with the world going ga-ga for Adele Dazeem, the contrarian in me wants to champion The Croods or The Wind Rises instead.  Not terrible.  It's on par with Tangled.  Good enough.

The Wind Rises:  "The Dream is Cursed."  I am not a worshiper at the alter of Miyazaki.  I've enjoyed a few of his films in the past (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away), but I've always felt a little alienated by the anime aesthetic.  Jingoism?  I've always feared that.  I like my cartoons Don Bluth.  Gasping Characters, Big Eyes, and Speed Lines?  No thanks.  American animation certainly has its own batch of annoyances, but my mind has remained shut on Anime & Manga since my 12 year old self first encountered it with Vampire Hunter D.  But I'm trying to grow.  Thanks to books like Gon, Domu, Lone Wolf & Cub, I'm more willing then ever to embrace Japan's greatest export.  Not to mention the sad fact that American Animation refuses to pull itself out of Mother Goose storytelling.  The closest we've come to exploring mature stories in the medium are Pixar's Up & Wes Andreson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Utterly pathetic.  The Wind Rises claims to be Miyazaki's farewell film, and I hope he sticks this landing as its a perfect sendoff.  Not the magical fantasy we've come to expect from the filmmaker, this film is a pseudo biography of airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.  Doing his best to ignore the moral quandary of selling beauty to the military, and witnessing his art transformed into killing machines, Jiro battles apocalyptic nightmares and a doomed romance.  Filled with dread and sadness, I really enjoyed the dreamscape Jiro shares with Italian engineer Caproni; their conversations in regards to the airplanes military destiny contribute the film's greatest narrative meat.  The not-so-rom-com that occurs halfway through never seems fully realized, but there is enough misery there to complement the film's gloomy inevitability.  Not quite enough to make me a believer, as a fan of animation, it's obvious that I have to look outside my borders if I want to experience tales beyond fuzzy animals.

Streets of Fire:  When Ellen Aim (the breathtakingly badass Diane Lane) returns to her hometown for a rock show extravaganza, she's targeted by Willem Dafoe's Black Leather Motorcycle Club.  Kidnapped and dragged into the depths of retro 80s hell, Rick Moranis & Michael Pare assemble a squad of rock & roll weirdos (groupies! motowners! rockabilly bartenders, a lesbian, maybe!) to raid the biker bar and declare sledgehammer warfare.  As ex soldier Tom Cody, Pare delivers his super sincere one-liners with all of his acting might, and follicaly challenged facial hair.  He manages to bounce back & forth from the laughably ridiculous to the totally cool, something that only seems possible in that childhood decade.  The out-of-time reality and skyscraper performances condemn Streets of Fire as a cult favorite, but it's a Kool-Aid I don't mind drinking.  From the uber masculine mind that brought us 48 Hours, Southern Comfort, Extreme Prejudice,  and The Warriors, director Walter Hill was the master of the generational gem.  Streets of Fire is a rootin' tootin' crowd pleaser for stunted youth everywhere.

Rocky IV:  When I came home from The Alamo, I wanted to continue that thrill of 1980s cinema, and in my mind no other movie sums up the Reagan Era better than Sylvester Stallone's bombastic franchise killer.   Follow-up films were bound to fail after Rocky IV crushed communism's super science, resulting in the Berlin Wall's collapse.  Using the power of Montage (30 minutes worth in a 90 minute movie!), Rocky trains faster, harder, and beardier than his Giant Evil Foreign counterpart, avengers the death of Apollo Creed, and secures the love of his family through staged violence.  Plus, Paulie marries a robot!!!  Did the 80s produce better movies?  Raiders of the Lost Ark?  Blade Runner?  Raging Bull?  NOOOO!  It does not get better than "I Must Break You."  Case closed.

Omar:  Why are all "important" films so dang sad?  Watching through this year's nominees it's obvious that The Academy only has room in its heart to mope.  My quest for total Oscar domination brought me face-to-face with a lot of tragedies, and the Foreign Film category practically delivered me into a state of despair.  Omar is the story of a Palestinian revolutionary caught between his freedom fighter responsibilities and the love of a comrade's sister.  But as tensions build and plans result in death, imprisonment, more death, more imprisonment, and more death, I started to see Omar as less of a message movie, and more as a thrilling crime saga staged against the West Bank.  Think Donnie Brasco with the added bonus of systemized hatred.  I didn't leave the theater weepy as I did with Broken Circle Breakdown or The Hunt.  Instead it was a sensation more akin to surviving a James Ellroy novel.  A good time?  Actually...yeah.

The Invisible Woman:  After the boiling violence of Coriolanus, director Ralph Fiennes tackles the burdensome lust of every college professor's favorite novelist.  Having produced a litter of children and grown tired of his wife, the wandering eye of Charles Dickens lands on a supposedly talentless young actress.  They strike up an affair for some reason, causing a stir amongst the London press, and a not-so-secret shame for their family.  The film looks nice.  I suppose it earns its Wardrobe nomination.  Screenwriter Abi Morgan certainly frames the story in an intriguing fashion, and Fiennes pulls fine melodrama from his actors.  But the story left me cold.  I never fully understood the actions of the characters, nor did I ever really care.  The best I can say is that for thirty seconds or so while the film played I contemplated pulling the dusty Dickens off my book shelf.  But the moment passed.

The Book Thief:  I hated this movie.  A Hallmark Holocaust Adventure brought to you by the voice of God and John Williams's token Oscar nomination.  A young girl learns to read while Nazis burn books in the streets and hatred sweeps the nation in the most offensively banal depiction of World War II I have ever experienced.  I think it's all well and good to remember the horrors of the past.  In fact, it's deadly important.  Our society needs films like Schindler's List & 12 Years A Slave every decade or so as a reminder of human nature's horrific capability.  But The Book Thief delivers its message with about as much passion as an after school special.  It feels like a checkmark in a high school history class.  Infuriating.

Anchorman 2 - Supersized R Rated Edition:  Simply fascinating.  The narrative is the same.  Ron Burgundy travels to the big city unleashing the hell of the 24 hour news cycle upon our hapless society.  But half the jokes are different.  Improvised comedy is both wonderful and terrible.  You film one scene thirty different ways with thirty different lines, and suddenly you can cut thirty different films.  Or at least two solidly different films.  But I preferred the original Anchorman 2.  Maybe because it's jokes were better, but probably because it was my first experience with the script.  I still managed to laugh my ass of here, but the Supersized edition fascinated/perplexed me more than anything else.  A great bonus feature, but was it worth the second price of admission?  Still working it out.

--Brad

Nintendo's Ivan Drago Punch Out!

Here's another bloody brilliant print from Spoke Art's Mucho Machismo show.  Ivan Drago takes down Apollo Creed in Mike Tyson Punch Out Style.  Depressing and genius!  The artist is Jon Smith and he's a madman.

--Brad

Dork Art: Bruce White's Velvet Painting For Your Inner Nerd

Bruce White's Velvet Paintings For Your Inner Nerd have been making the Internet rounds of late, but it wasn't until I saw the above celebration of Mr. Miyagi that I my brain exploded.  I seriously need this for my bedroom.  Sure I can get The Wife to agree.

--Brad

A Belated Fistful of America! (Brad's Picks)

So, with this post I welcome myself back to ITMOD.  I really wanted to keep up with the blog while I was in San Diego but dammit I was just having too much fun.  A Comic Con post is coming in the next few days, but first I want to celebrate this great land with my Fistful of America.  Matt's list was pretty darn epic and I don't think mine is quite as awesome, but I had to give it a shot.

5.  The Statue of Liberty Parade of Hope (Ghostbusters 2):  She may or may not be naked under that toga, but when the Ghostbusters are going up against the painted Vigo they gotta call on the old girl to kick a little NY City Ass with the help of some love-juiced goo.

4.  The American Ninja Poster (American Ninja):  A VHS classic of my youth and maybe not the most Gung Ho America movie ever made, but damn do I love that poster.  "The Deadliest Art of the Orient is now in the hands of an American."  Oh snap, watch out foreign devils!  America is gonna beat you at your own game.  Jingoistic and ridiculous, can't help but love it.  Michael Dudikoff, baby.

3.  A Mission From God Gets A Soundtrack (The Blues Brothers):  This may have found its way onto the list cuz I'm watching it right now and loving every R & B moment of it, and even though Jake & Elwood's quest to save their bankrupt orphanage might not be very "American" (well, maybe it is), the pulsing, rocking motown soundtrack sure as hell is.  James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, and Rawhide.  Start waving your flags people.

2.  Anzor Yugorksy Strips Down To His Duke (Running Scared):  Wayne Kramer's Running Scared is an underrated bizarro crime classic.  It's a neon noir Stray Dog with Paul Walker's lowrent hood descending down the rabbit hole in a race against the clock to find his missing six shooter.  Squished between the pedophile nosferatus and the scarface wannabe pimps is Karl Roden's dirtbag Russian father who idolizes the hell outta John Wayne (and in particular, his role in The Cowboys).  When it's finally time for him to step up to the plate and be a man, he strips himself of his shirt revealing The Duke inked on his back, and he struts himself towards his destiny.  Maybe not guns blazing, but head held high.  The Cowboy Way, the American Way.

1.  Rocky Bridges Nations (Rocky IV):  After the villainous Ivan Drago murders his BFF in the ring, Rocky Balboa must travel behind the Iron Curtain to wage war against the technological Super Man.  Running up snowy mountains and benching tree trunks, Rocky gets fit and pummels the mad Russian to the brink of death and humiliation.  In doing so, the Russian audience sees the soul of a warrior and chants "Rocky! Rocky! Rocky! Wal-Mart! Wal-Mart!  Wal-Mart!"  And Ronald Reagan was finally able to tear down that wall.  Big Macs For Everybody!

--Brad