Brad's Week in Dork! (1/12/14-1/18/14)

Wow, I really knocked em out this week.  A double feature of Dr. Strangelove & Buckaroo Banzai at The Alamo on Sunday launched me into a Peter Weller-A-Thon I was not expecting to partake.  But then the retail plague took over my life, and I pretty much bunkered down in the apartment, and did nothing else except watch movies.  Not too different from my normal day to day activities, just accelerated.  Next week I need to get back to my comics, gotta finish Sailor Twain for book club, and Grant Morrison's Animal Man is singing her siren song.

Dr. Strangelove Or - How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb:  Yikes.  This is one angry film.  Behind every snarky laugh, or straight up goofy punchline, you can feel the daggers of Stanley Kubrick's white hot rage.  Not at the (doomsday) machine, but at the careless dolts who run it.  The underground politicians, the meek military minions who should know better, the marching order pilots with the bomb between their legs - there are a million and one scenarios that could save us from total annihilation, but we can't be bothered to back down.  Dr Strangelove is a tremendously silly movie with bumbling fools named Jack D Ripper & Bat Guano helping our way to THE END, but every chuckle is accompanied by a pang of guilt.  On this latest rewatch I was reminded of the recent assault from Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street.  Both films are comedies by way of auteur wrath - searing condemnations against America's head-in-the-sand populace.  No wonder Strangelove drove The Wife to tears, as the credits rolled she could not bring her self to eek one giggle while a Nazi Scientists sprung to life, and mushroom clouds littered the landscape.  Hi-Larious?  God no.  But...yes.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension:  James Bond.  Indiana Jones.  Buckaroo Banzai.  The holy trinity of cool.  These are the guys 8 year old Brad wanted to grow up to be, role models for my developing morality and lady killer destiny.  The thing is though, he may not be as popular these days, but Buckaroo Banzai has Bond & Jones beat in the coolness department.  Not just a super spy or a nazi smashing archeologist (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Banzai's done a bit of that too), Buckaroo is a bestselling rock 'n' roll scientist neurosurgeon adventurer who breaks dimensional barriers as easy as ringing a bell.  Possibly the first film to truly understand the appeal of a comic book universe, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai drops its audience into its wild world of Red Lectoids & watermelons, and lets you catch up rather than explaining its peculiarities.  That's a lesson more movies should learn; it's not about the origin, it's about the hero in the thick of it, whether it's Buckaroo Banzai, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Superman, Spider-Man, or The Wolverine.  So, is the world finally ready for a rebooted Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League?  Probably not.  The 1980s seems like the only decade to properly spring such oddball fruit, but I'm willing to watch if you're will to try Hollywood.

Leviathan:  Such a wannabe film.  John Carpenter's The Thing + James Cameron's Aliens = nice try.  But it's fun to watch George P Cosmatos work out his aspirations.  Peter Weller is obviously the best thing about this movie - his One Minute Manager struggling to handle his asshole minions (I'm looking at your Daniel Stern!), and that's before the fishy genetic monstrosity starts downsizing the staff.  It's a goofy movie with an obviously shoddy practical effect hiding in the shadows, but there is enough charm in the players to make Leviathan a passable movie night.  The question remains, is Deep Star Six the superior aquatic retread?  It's been a decade or two, but I think I'll side with Leviathan - gotta snag Deep Star for the rewatch.

Robocop:  "Somewhere there is a crime happening."  How many times have I watched Robocop?  50? 100?  A lot is the answer.  I don't even know how to talk about it anymore.  It's hilarious.  It's badass.  It's genius.  Paul Verhoeven directed both a sendup of consumerism and a righteous action film filled with the best bloodwork of the 1980s.  Kurtwood Smith and his gang of tyrants are possibly the scariest batch of hoods in cinema history, and I find it impossible to separate myself from the first time I saw them butcher Officer Murphy with their cackling shotgun fire.  It's the first murder on screen that truly disturbed me as a child, and for years I could not watch the movie without fastforwarding through the opening execution.  I don't know what Jose Padilha's remake has to offer, but a PG-13 shoot 'em up seems to miss the point of Verhoeven's massacre.  Robocop is a heightened attack on Gordon Gecko's America, and if you loose yourself in the torrents of red, you might miss the giant middle finger stretching out from the Netherlands.  But it is also undeniably a glorious genre picture with cyborgs and CEOs.

Of Unknown Origin:  Certainly one of the strangest forgotten gems of yesteryear.  Peter Weller is Bart Hughes, a yuppie businessman climbing the corporate ladder while basking in the success of his recent town house renovation.  Everything is just gravy until a beastly little rat tears a hole in his dishwasher's drainage line.  A small beginning that quickly escalates to all out war between vermin and man.  Don't believe the trailers or the poster.  Yes, this is a horror film.  But there is not mutant monster here.  No supernatural terror.  The villain here is simply an NYC rat and Peter Weller's deteriorating sanity.  As much as I enjoy films like Tombstone, Cobra, Leviathan, and First Blood Part II, Of Unknown Origin is George P Cosmatos's masterpiece.  This is a claustrophobic siege film in which the terror burrows up from within, the rat in the walls as well as the one nibbling inside Weller's brain.  Another film scratching at the villainy of greed, and possibly the best character to showcase Weller's talent - the entire film thrives on his ability to crumble in front of us.  No one talks about Of Unknown Origin, but now is the time for its moment in the sun.  The DVD is long out of print, but you can snag one pretty much anywhere for less than 10 bucks.  It's worth the blind buy.

Lone Survivor:  This is a tough movie.  And it sparks complicated emotions from this viewer.  It's a helluva story.  Based on the book by Marcus Luttrell and ghostwriter Patrick Robinson, four Navy seals battle it out against a hundred Taliban soldiers in the mountains of the Kunar provence, after they release a shepherd and his two sons from their custody.  The film is absolutely punishing.  Obviously, the title is a spoiler, and you go into the story knowing that these guys are doomed.  It's nearly a sadomasochistic act waiting and watching these guys catch bullets in their bodies and crash down the mountainside.  My heart was in my throat for the entire film, but when the Afghan Villagers took up arms against the Taliban I suddenly felt the pangs of the "Based On A True Story" hypocrisy.  All films are fiction.  Whether their narrative or documentary.  A camera is present, so is a storyteller.  There might be truth to be found, but Lone Survivor is not a FACT, and it bothers me when people react to "True Stories" as Truth.  The machine gunning villagers just felt wrong, and the movie absolutely fell apart for me at that point.  Marcus Luttrell committed a noble act in bringing this story to the public.  He wanted to tell the story of those friends he left on the mountain.  But it's also big business now.  He's making a lot of money on this tragedy, and however virtuous his action may be, that collection of wealth bothers me a little.  And the liberties the film takes nag on me.  The film Lone Survivor is certainly a rousing saga of military triumph, and I'm weary of criticizing something that has become so (wrongfully) politically charged.  But Lone Survivor is a fiction - like Saving Private Ryan, The Dirty Dozen, and Battleship.  Filmmaker Peter Berg seriously loves and respects the armed forces, so do I, but I'm reaching a point where our blind belief in the True Story distracts from what should simply be a Good Story.  And I recognize this as a weird (possibly hypocritical) point of view coming from the guy who put Pain & Gain on his Top Ten Films last year.  Like I said at the start, complicated emotions here.

Bottle Rocket:  In anticipation of the March release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wife and I decided to work our way through Wes Anderson's films in chronological order.  She had never seen Bottle Rocket before, and my last (& only) experience with Anderson's first movie was a negative one.  Not sure what my initial problem was, but on this second go-round I really took to Luke Wilson's romantic plight - it feels like a dry run on to the mentally fragile heartache found later in The Royal Tenenbaums.  Is there another actor out there who can pull of Sweet as perfectly as Luke Wilson?  Every expression, a bird's broken wing.  Owen Wilson is also fantastic as the film's bad influence.  He's an imp, a sad creature desperate to remain attached to his childhood buddy.  I'll take a million Dignans over one You, Me, & Durpee.  It's impressive how well formed Wes Anderson's world already is in this first venture into filmmaking, even when he's still working out his artificial world - the slomo, the soundtrack layering, the color palette.  Some herky jerky story beats, but Bottle Rocket succeeds more often than it fails.

You're Next:  John Carpenter's name gets thrown around a lot when talking about this festival crowd pleaser, but it's less Michael Myers then it is Assault on Precinct 13.  What begins as a run-of-the-mill stalk & slash cabin film quickly transforms into a root 'em, toot 'em table-turner in which Sharni Vinson steps up to the predatory challenge.   In that regard, the film actually feels like a tip of the hat to Ridley Scott's Alien - a haunted house picture in which the likely heroes are dispatched and the audience is left with one badass Final Girl to cheer on.  You're Next is not a peek-from-the-cover horror, it's an action fist-pumper worthy of your raucous popcorn screams.

Short Term 12:  VODed this in the middle of the week, and I'm left curious as to why this film ranked at the top of several critic's Best Lists last year.  Brie Larson is the lead supervisor of a residential treatment facility, not quite juvenile detention, and certainly not a hospital.  Got a problem child?  Dump 'em here.  Shortly after college I spent some time teaching English & Creative Writing at a private school for troubled kids, and I felt a lot of those frustration pangs rise to the surface while watching this movie.  However, I never connected with Larson's relationship troubles or her twenty something worries.  I don't flat out reject this film the way I did Frances Ha, but I also recognize that the psychological troubles of youth do not interest me anymore (if they ever did).  There is sweetness in this story, and some strong performances.  It probably is Brie Larson's best work to date and I look forward to future roles.

Thief:  "Lie to no one."  After penning some solid teleplays for shows like Starsky & Hutch and Police Story, Michael Mann entered cinemaland with a straight up crime classic.  James Caan's journeyman thief has a lot in common with Richard Stark's Parker series - he's just there for the job.  Don't get in his way, and he'll pay you no nevermind.  Stand between him and his score, or him and prison, and you'll get dropped quick.  Mann is obviously entranced by the process of burglary, and his camera lingers on the minutia of the job.  The director is obsessed with getting the fiction right.  He goes as far as placing known thieves in the roles of detectives, and actual Chicago cops in the roles of henchmen (the most famous being Dennis Farina).  The film is slick as hell, with some gorgeous night shooting that tingles with Tangerine Dream's neon synth score.  I've seen this film a handful of times, but the 4K Restoration on the new Criterion Blu Ray reveals an array of details I'd never noticed before (ex. Caan's sideburn scar), and it's essential for fans of the underworld subgenre.

Elite Squad - The Enemy Within:  Picking up several years after the first film, Wagner Moura is still heading up Rio De Janeiro's Elite Squad despite a dissolved marriage and a son drifting into liberal ideology.  His second in command Andre Ramiro is a Frankenstein Monster of sorts, and when a prison riot escalates into a quick-trigger assassination the Brazilian people turn against Moura's necessary fascism.  Just when you though Rio was a Dante-like Inferno, the government corruption sinks to new horrific depths, and no white shining morality goes unscathed.  The Enemy Within is a solid sequel to the original horror show, but I feel about it the same way I feel about The Godfather Part II - I got the gist in the first film, and I pretty much already saw where this film was going to take its demons after the original's credits rolled.  Again, the message being, don't go to Rio.

Twenty Feet From Stardom:  For the first time ever, I have already seen all of the Best Picture films nominated for the Academy Awards.  The only categories I need to bone up on are Best Actress & Supporting Actress (gotta see August: Osage County), Best Animated Film (haven't seen a single nom), and just two films in the Best Documentary Category - both of which I tackled this week.  Twenty Feet From Stardom is a fluffy, glorified VH1 Behind The Music about the unsung background singers behind Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, etc.  It's fun enough.  Lethal Weapon's Darlene Love naturally being the highlight for me.  However, the idea that this is the frontrunner, when powerhouse docs like The Act of Killing & The Square (see below) are standing next to it seems like another idiotic example of America's head-in-the-sand mentality.  After all, another feel-good musical, Searching For Sugarman, took home the gold guy instead of the far superior, socially conscious docs like 5 Broken Cameras & How To Survive A Plague.

The Driver:  "I'm going to catch the cowboy that's never been caught...dessssspperado..."  Ryan O'Neal is an impossible to catch getaway driver who captures the dogged determination of police detective Bruce Dern after one too many successful robberies.  Too bad Dern is not the star.  His wildman cuckoo routine is endlessly watchable, but O'Neal is a big sack of human boredom.  His dead eyed stares are less cool then they are annoyingly dull.  The man has no emotion.  He drifts through the screenplay, playing googoo eyes with the mysteriously sultry Isabelle Adjani, but things don't get exciting until he hands the reigns over to the stunt drivers.  Walter Hill knows how to crash a car.  When the engines are racing, and the various array of cardboard boxes are getting smashed, The Driver is certainly watchable.  And again, Bruce Dern spitting foul hate and screaming whacko at his mollycoddle partner is delightful.  Watch his movie, ignore O'Neal's, and you can have a good time with The Driver.

A Fantastic Fear of Everything:  Simon Pegg plays a disgraced children's author who abandons talking hedgehogs for London's most vile serial killers.  Unfortunately, his exploration of the Jack The Rippers of this world has driven him into a catatonic state of agoraphobia (as well as various other maladies).  Who doesn't love Simon Pegg?  Assholes.  But I gotta admit that he makes poor picture choices outside of his Edgar Wright pairings (Star Trek & Paul not withstanding).  A Fantastic Fear of Everything has its moments thanks to Pegg's commitment to fear, but the story deteriorates into a mediocre mystery involving launderettes and finger chopping.  I wanted to love it, but after I finish typing this sentence, the film will most likely drop from my memory immediately.

The Square: In 2011, Egyptian filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was determined to document the people's revolution, in which thousands of Christians & Muslims gathered in the Tahrir Square in Cairo in an effort to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak.  But once they succeed...The King Is Dead, Long Live The King.  Noujaim had several years to record these events, and The Square practically takes us up to the present day, and thanks to Netflix it can stream into your home tonight.  Idealists find their cause shaken, but not shattered.  What is victory?  What is loss?  It's a powerful piece of journalism, and if not for the revelatory experience that is The Act of Killing, I'd give Oscar to The Square.

Drive:  "You look like you're hard to work with."  What is this?  My tenth rewatch?  Sounds about right.  This time around I can't help but see the influence of both The Driver & Thief.  The opening scene is a straight up lifted from Walter Hill, and Ryan Gosling's anonymous wheelman has the facebashing meanness of James Caan mixed with Ryan O'Neal's don't-give-a-shit blankness.  Drive is homage cinema, and I'm not sure it quite elevates it the way a Tarantino film can sometime achieve.  But it's slick, cool, and twisted.  It respects its characters enough to take them through the black hole of violence and leave them appropriately shattered.  Until that last breath in the second to last shot.  Hope?  In a Refn picture???  Yep.  This is also my first time through the film post-Breaking Bad & Inside Llewyn Davis, so I found myself paying close attention to both Bryan Cranston & Oscar Isaac.  Cranston's gimpy Shannon is light years away from Walter White, a soft low-rent entrepreneur who shakes hands with all the wrong people.  Almost from the moment he walks on screen you know he's fish bait.  Isaac's reformed convict is just a puppy dog.  It's a cliche story the audience doesn't bother to sympathize with because it's simply the catalyst to spring Gosling's Driver into action.  Still, I believe every word he says at his Welcome Home party.  Drive is a fun crime film.  But it's no Only God Forgives, a film that currently ranks at the top of Refn's work for me.

The Dark Knight Trilogy:  "There are many forms of immortality."  Are you ready?  Christopher Nolan's Batman Saga is my absolute favorite cinematic trilogy.  Sorry to Star Wars, The Godfather, and The Lord of the Rings.  All fine films, but The Dark Knight Trilogy is the only set of films that takes its material as seriously as the comic books.  This is Frank Miller's world, Neal Adams's world, Jeph Loeb's world, etc, etc.  Batman Begins is still my favorite of the batch.  It's the only story (including comic books and animated series) to truly detail the psychology of Bruce Wayne.  The use of fear is exceptional - young Bruce's fear of bats essentially kills his parents, that fear becomes his weapon, and Ra's Al Ghul uses it to assault the people of Gotham.  Of course the Scarecrow has to be involved.  The Dark Knight is the only comic book film to up the villain ante and succeed.  The Joker is Gotham's response to the presence of The Bat Man and the dream of Harvey Dent's savior smashing upon the rocks.  And The Dark Knight Rises takes the saga to its epic heights with the siege of the city dropping its players into a Dickensonian nightmare.  The films are not without their flaws, like any trilogy, but I can forgive the exposition and the questionable shakey cam battles and even the leaps in logic.  I am simply thankful for the gravitas Nolan grants these characters.  An epic worthy of David Lean.

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (1/12/14-1/18/14)

    I suffer for my art.  I’m not getting too deep into it here, but I made some choices this week that had some repercussions, and even as I write this nearly a week later, I’m still feeling ‘em.  This is Chinatown.  Anyway, I finished reading a book, got some writing done, and generally had a pretty good week, in spite of some painful sleep deprivation.

Brave:  Upon second viewing, I still want this movie to be so much more than it is.  Pixar takes on the Medieval fantasy epic and ends up with a mild bit of entertainment.  It’s beautiful to look at, and the characters are fun.  But there’s not nearly the amount of awe or heart one would expect from Pixar or a movie called Brave, featuring a red haired princess with a bow.  I know the production was rather storied, with the original writer/director getting the boot part way through.  And the film does feel tonally awkward, like something was lost in translation between directors, maybe.  I keep hoping they’ll do a sequel that can get past the issues of the first and tell a more exciting, more heart-felt adventure tale.  Merida could be a very good character, and something Disney/Pixar needs, a proactive female hero.  But this movie does not live up to its potential.

The Driver:  This film has three major problems.  Ryan.  O.  Neal.  I don’t know what was in the water in the 70s that made people think O’Neal could be a leading man or anything more than a background extra (assuming scenes called for lifeless hunks of wood to drain energy from the shot).  He’s absolutely dreadful.  A bowl of gravy is more dynamic and exciting.  You can see that this movie (along with Thief) were hugely inspirational to the far superior Drive, but even in that comparison, Ryan Gosling’s dead-eyed Driver is SOOOO much more interesting to watch (and this from a guy who finds Gosling a bit hard to look at).  Otherwise, I enjoyed the movie.  It had a lot of that pointless dickery between characters that was so common in the 70s, but the look and feel of the film make it worth that slog.  Honestly, if Ryan O’Neal were replaced by another actor…or a crash test dummy with a photograph taped on the face for example, the movie might be considered a classic.  As it is, it’s worth a watch if you like the era or are a big Drive fan, but there’s no reason to rush right out and see it.

Doctor Strangelove:  There are parts of this movie that I love.  There are other parts, mostly the last ten minutes or so, that I simply don’t get.  Peter Sellers is absolutely fantastic as Mandrake, and as Muffley.  But as the titular Dr. Strangelove, while wacky, I didn’t find him especially good.  In fact, it seemed more like a Gene Wilder character…and I don’t mean that in a good way.  Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott are intensely crazy and wonderful.  And the movie is shockingly dark.  Maybe not so shocking, considering it’s a comedy about Nuclear War.  But it’s grim, man.  Some of the dialog is so horribly funny.  As a whole, I find the film too uneven to sing the praises of, but at the same time, it should be seen.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension:  “Why is there a watermelon there?”  As a young lad, I watched a few movies more than a few times.  They spoke to some essential part of me in some way.  Howard the Duck, Big Trouble in Little China, The Princess Bride, and yes, Buck Banzai.  An homage to the adventure heroes of the past (specifically Doc Savage), Buck Banzai was still dripping with the wilder elements of the 80s.  An all star cast of that-guy actors turn in heart-felt performances, giving it their all for a movie that probably shouldn’t have worked.  Though funny, the film isn’t the joke it might have looked like on paper.  There’s some serious (and seriously strange) world building, developing a history for its characters, even tertiary ones.  I can not recommend this movie strongly enough.  But you’ve got to be ready.  You’ve got to embrace the madness.  And it’s there, believe me.  It’s one of the most powerfully strange films ever made.  And at no point does it pull back and give you a moment to readjust.  You’ve got to roll with the punches.  It’s so worth it, though.

Tales from the Crypt:  Yeah, this movie’s dull.  A bunch of TV actors and Peter Cushing enact a handful of lifeless horror tales.  Anthology films are usually hit and miss.  This one is miss and miss by more.  The TV show, for all its many faults, is a far more worthy effort.

    I finished Hedy’s Folly, a good overview of Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil’s inventive collaboration.  Like a good book should, it got me wanting to read more about various elements.  And like a lot of these history books I’ve been reading, gave me some story ideas.

You’re Next:  Had this film just had a tripod or a steady cam, I’d have enjoyed it a heck of a lot more.  The first half is pretty blah, but the second half makes up a lot of ground.  It’s funny, intentionally, without being jokey.  The gore effects are practical, which is a welcome surprise in this day of crappy looking CG blood.  It’s pretty darned violent, without being annoying about it.  And as I said, the second half is really good.  Once they get the obligatory and not especially surprising twist out of the way, and shift the tone a bit, it improves drastically.  But that shaky cam.  I simply can’t get past the shaky cam.

Sudden Fear:  Hardly one of the best Noir out there, this tale of a petty slight being repaid ten fold is still quite good.  Joan Crawford is not an actress I’ve ever found particularly drawing up to this point, but she’s excellent.  I may have to refocus a bit on her in the coming months.  And the giant skulled visage of young Jack Palance is terrifying and wonderful.  Seeing the story play out is at turns heartbreaking and exhilarating.  Noir fans should definitely check this one out.

Gojira:  As a pretty big Godzilla fan, it’s kind of odd to say this, but the first film is actually not anywhere near my favorite of the series.  Going back and watching it, I see it more as a film about the shattered societal mindset of post WWII Japan.  Much of what I love about the series is missing here, with the exception of the emphasis on the every day struggles of people in the face of unthinkable horror.  As the folks at Criterion said in their Three Reasons trailer, “It’s not just a monster movie.”

The 'Director's Cut' was weeeeird!

The Snow Maiden:  A Russian folk tale fantasy film, the production design is beautiful, and the story is interesting.  But the pacing is a bit ponderous.   There are so many singing numbers, it gets to be a bit much.  Still, the look and feel of the movie are very good if you’re in the mood for medieval fairy tale settings.  I just wish the story was more interesting and the pace a bit quicker (it was Russian, so I know I'm asking a lot).

The Other: “I’m king of the mountain…Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”  Two creepy-ass twins are living on a farm in the 30s in this slow paced supernatural tale.  The twins seem to have some kind of psychic ability, being guided by their old Russian grandmother.  One kid is a little bastard and one is a whiney snot.  I think this could be an interesting story, but it isn’t.  It’s just kind of boring.  Oh, gosh.  And then there’s the twist.  Ugh.  The twist.  I think maybe this is the movie I’ve been mistaking for The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane for years.  I remember being freaked out by seeing it on TV at a friend of a friend’s house when I was probably 6 or 7.  Both have that weird, uncomfortable 70s horror movie vibe, creepy kids, and a slow pace.

    On Saturday, I got the word that a short film script I wrote is ready, and a potential actor is being contacted.  That made me very happy.  And over the course of the week, I’d finished up doing an outline for another script.  So, I spent much of the afternoon and evening working on that.  I got about a third of it written.  Not bad so far.  But there’s a long way to go.

-Matt

Brad's Week in Dork! (8/25/13-8/31/12)

I caught my last film of the summer this week (You're Next) and I'm thankful that this latest horror gem made its way onto my Fistful of Summer 2013.  But the real big screen treat was catching Razorback at the AFI Silver.  Yeah, you read that right.  The Australian Giant Pig movie played this week at The American Film Institute.  What next?!?!?  Dead End Drive-In!?!?!  Uh...that's next week.  Ha!  We certainly do live in a Brave New World.  I've never been happier as a film fan living in the Washington DC area; this may not be L.A. or New York, but we're on our way.

The rest of the week was filled with blu rays and VOD.  Rewatched a couple of 2013 releases, and both Pain & Gain and Trance have shot to the top of my favorite films of this year.  The Rock and Rosario Dawson certainly deliver fun genre bending turns with their respective roles.  Very different, but bother are equally as demented.  The less said about Nicolas Cage in Frozen Ground the better.  How the mighty have fallen (I know, old news, right?).  Matthew McConaughey is certainly making a play for this year's Actor of the Year...too bad none of his movies are quite as good as his performances.  On two separate nights I fell asleep watching Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop 1 & 2 - it's what Netflix was born to do.  And the absolute best movie I watched was A Boy And His Dog.  Holy cow!  It had been a while since my last viewing, and that little beast of a flick floored me.  Truly one of the best blu ray releases of the year.

Razorback:  "Somethin' about blowin' the shit out of a razorback brightens up my day!" This is not simply a Jaws knockoff - it's the ultimate Jaws knockoff! Forget Piranha, forget Orca. They might have the marine life, but Razorback takes the Man vs. Evil Nature plot and uses it to propel its narrative down a music video dreamscape so smokey & cacophonous Tony Scott & Terry Gilliam wake from terror sweats contemplating their failure to capture it's insanity. Bill Kerr is Jake Cullen, a Kangaroo hunter who trades one killing spree for another after a boar the size of a rhino carries off his infant grandson. Partnering with Canadian blank slate Gregory Harrison and wildlife tracker Arkie Whiteley, Kerr navigates an endless display of foreground skulls to rid the outback of the great beast. But is Razorback the real threat, or does the true face of pockmarked evil belong to Dicko Baker and his piggy pleasure squeals?  A lost 80s classic well worth your attention.

You're Next:  This was a deceptive little movie. After years of the internet hype machine, and a batch of mediocre-to-terrible trailers from Lionsgate, I was ready to dismiss You're Next as just another slasher flick in an already redundant genre. And for the first twenty or so minutes, I did not give a good god damn about anything happening on screen. Disgruntled family bickering, killers attack, yawn. But then Sharni Vinson (so bendy and proud in Step Up 3D) reveals herself as one tough cookie, her John Carpenter theme starts thumping, and suddenly I'm cheering for a Final Girl in a way I haven't since Ellen Ripley. You're Next is not a dour, dumb teen slasher. It's a crowd pleaser. A violent, root 'em toot 'em siege film that's got more in common with Assault on Precinct 13 than The Strangers. It's fun! And that's the message that's getting lost in the marketing.

The Frozen Ground:  A couple years back I was really championing the mega acting talents of modern day Nicolas Cage. The man was devastating the silver screen with mountaintop performances in The Bad Lieutenant, Kick Ass, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Drive Angry. The internet had turned against Cage, but I was right there with him as he sank into Season of the Witch and Ghost Rider 2. Just fun goofy movies elevated by his commitment to absurdity. But then came Trespass. And Seeking Justice. And Stolen. Yeash. Just absolutely boring direct-to-dvd dreck. Sadly, that trend is not broken with The Frozen Ground. It's a far too serious and dull serial killer pursuit picture; it plays like an A&E attempt at The Silence of the Lambs. And haven't we had enough of those already. Cage is mundane and checked out. I'm sure John Cussack is having a ball playing Next Door Evil, but it's a character we've seen a dozen times before and often better. The Frozen Ground is going to be one of those movies I forget fifteen minutes after I write this sentence. Oh yeah, Vanessa Hudgens is a stripper/prostitute damsel. So what? She's abysmal.

Beverly Hills Cop:  The 80s Action Comedy was born with this Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production, and Eddie Murphy has never been better than he was here as the wisecracking fish-outta-water Axel Foley. His black man assault on rich white society is infectious.  Axel Foley is the cross hair on Reagan Era consumption, but Beverly Hills Cop is too damn funny to be a genuine cultural critique. Great music, great one-liners, great violence, great Bronson Pinchot. Anything beyond that is just the cherry on top.

Sweet Tooth Volume 1 - Out of the Deep Woods:  Here's a strange one I've been hearing good things about for quite some time now.  Given the fact that I've recently enjoyed Lemire's Underwater Welder, Trillium, and - *gulp* - Green Arrow, I thought it was high time that I tackled his weirdo post-apocalypse book.  The funny thing is, it's not that weird.  Sure, the world has gone to pot.  Children are born these days with antlers, hooves, and snouts, but so far Sweet Tooth displays some fairly typical world-gone-by tropes.   After his pop slips into the nether, our hybrid hero Gus attempts to break free from his religious fear with the help of sharpshooter woodsman, Mr. Jepperd.  But do friends exist in the Apocalypse?  Volume 1 certainly doesn't leave Gus in a better place than where we met him, and by all accounts life is going to get a whole helluva lot rougher before this series reaches its end.  The rest of the Sweet Tooth volumes are at the top of my shopping list for this year's Baltimore Comic Con.

Pain and Gain:  "When it started, America was just a handful of scrawny colonies. Now it's the most buffed, pumped up country on the planet. That's pretty rad." I've never cared for the Mark Wahlberg tough guy routine. I just don't buy it. At the same time, I'm not sure there are too many other actors out there that can achieve the comic heights of his self deprecation. Boogie Nights, The Other Guys, Pain & Gain. When he's playing dolts with delusions of grandeur, Wahlberg is your guy, and his Daniel Lugo just might be his greatest bonehead creation yet. Too bad he gets completely overshadowed by Dwayne Johnson's coke fiend Jesus freak, El Dad. His weak-link convict earns more laughs out of the depravity displayed on screen than any other Bayified scumbag. And speaking of Michael Bay, Pain & Gain is his crowning achievement as well. Where we've all chastised the fratboy for his homophobic, sophomoric, and misogynistic sight gags in the past, his pretty picture fart joke sensibilities are essential to Pain & Gain's success.  Based on True Events?  Yeah.  Crime for laughs?  Yeah.  Awkward?  Yeah.  But it's damn entertaining.

Mud:  The Matthew McConaughey renaissance continues with this Southern Gothic coming-of-age story. Two boys dealing with their own family melodrama discover McConaughey's cross healed hobo living in a boat in the forest. Jeff Nichols, the director of Shotgun Stories & Take Shelter, certainly knows how to pull great performances from his players, but I've found his screenplays lacking in the climax department. The narrative twists are telegraphed a mile out, and I'm more than a little full of the innocence-lost plots.  McConaughey makes it work, but the story is too rote to be memorable.

Beverly Hills Cop II:  "You can never have too much firepower."  After their successful collaboration on Top Gun, Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson, and Tony Scott reteam for this hit-the-beats sequel.  Eddie Murphy is dragged back into Beverly Hills after Rony Cox's Captain Bogomil is gunned down by a member of the Alphabet Gang.  Again we get the Axel Foley ogling of swimming pools and strip clubs, but the one-liner attacks seem less important than the sunsets and explosions.  The comedy comes from the back & forth banter between Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, & Murhpy but this sequel is an action film first solidifying the Bruckheimer/Simpson formula that would go on to bust blocks with Bad Boys, The Rock, and even Pirates of the Caribbean.   It's a slick flick, and a lot of fun, but it's certainly not as refreshingly humorous as the original.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World:  Edgar Wright's bombastic celebration of all things geek - video games!  comics!  anime!  music!  movies!  manga!  hair dye! - is also our generation's answer to The Graduate.  Michael Cera is another lovelorn misanthrope struggling with his apathy when Mary Elizabeth Winstead's roller blading Amazon literally steps out of his dreams to wreak emotional as well as physical havoc.  If Scott Pilgrim wants to get with this beauty he must battle & defeat her League of Seven Evil Exes.  This brilliant structure centered around Street Fighter kombat allows for one hilarious gonzo encounter after the next; the highlights being Chris Evans's skater stunt team and Brandon Routh's telekinetic, vegan douche bag.  You probably have to be of a certain age to appreciate the surreal landscape, but for those folks in the know, Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a biting mockery of our pop culture obsessed lives.  Love & Self Respect may be the answer, but can you achieve such goals while swamped in the imagination of others?  At the very least, Scott Pilgrim proves that Edgar Wright is more than just a Cornetto man, and he's probably the most visually enticing director to land under the umbrella of Marvel Studios.  Forget Avengers 2 and Batman vs Superman, Edgar Wright's Ant-Man is certainly the most fascinating superhero film of 2015.

Trance:  "Bring it to me."  A second viewing of Danny Boyle's latest sealed my appreciation for this neo-noir.  Trance begins as one of those long-con mindbender movies, but as the screenplay works its way to the end, the film reveals itself not as an M Night Shyamalan twister concerned with plot-flipping but a villainous deconstruction of character, proud in the onion its peeled.  The film has heists, gangsters, amnesia, violence, and quite possibly the most interesting Femme Fatale I've experienced (neo or otherwise).  And the fact that this Femme Fatale is played by Rosario Dawson, an actress I've adored for years but who never seems to get the right part, is a real treat unto itself.  This is not Kiss Me Deadly or Chinatown.  Trance is very much a Danny Boyle film, shot with vibrant digital photography and crafting a style decades removed from Sam Spade.  Boyle may have gotten more acolades for his last couple of Oscar baiters, but for my money Trance is the most exciting film he's made since 28 Days Later.

Welcome To The Punch:  I was hoping to follow one dashing James McAvoy scumbag with another, but unfortunately, this Cops & Robbers saga is nothing more than a long snooze.  Mark Strong is a gangland daddy drawn out of the underworld when his son catches a bullet.  It's McAvoy's job to bring him in, but when the boys in blue reveal themselves to be the true villains, the two rivals must team-up John Woo style.  'Course Eran Creevy is no 90s era John Woo, and the action is nothing more than quick cutting and smokescreen i.e. boring.

A Boy and His Dog:  You know how critics (and know-it-all bloggers like myself) will say, "They don't make movies like that anymore?"  And often times you can just simply dismiss that as the bullshit it truly is.  However, with A Boy and His Dog, that annoying sentiment is most certainly the case.  In fact, the real answer is that there is only one A Boy and His Dog.  In the year 2024, World War IV granted the Earth the Nuclear Wasteland it always feared.  It lasted four days and by the end of it all, the only occupations in existence were marauder and rapist.  Unless you're a telepathic dog, then you also have the option of being a female hunter.  That's right, A Boy and His Dog is the story of Don Johnson's rapist and the dog who helps him get his prey.  It's an ugly, mean, angry film.  A movie that could have only come from the mind of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, and its a miracle that character actor LQ Jones managed to bring it to the silver screen.  Jones had directed only one other film before this, and would only direct an episode of The Incredible Hulk after this.  It is a masterpiece of the genre.  Yes, yes, yes A Boy and His Dog is the precursor to Mad Max and a half dozen other Apocalypse stories.  But this is not anti-hero cinema.  Don Johnson is an evil little shit.  But he's the product of our ignorance, our need for war.  Sure, it's all very hippy dippy, but you gotta respect the rage behind the pen and behind the camera.  Watching the special features on the Shout Factory bluray, you get an understanding of the massive quest it took to get the film adapted, and I am so excited for all the new fanboys this disc will certainly create.

--Brad

A Fistful of Summer 2013! (Brad's Picks)

That's it folks.  Summer's over.  Back to school.  So what grade do we give 2013's Blockbuster Season?  I'm thinking a big, dud of a C.  As always, when April pushed into May, my heart was filled with joyous anticipation for the titanic tent poles Hollywood was churning down their production line.  I like all kinds of films, from the smallest micro budgets to the embarrassingly corpulent Baytrocities.  I vote YES on Proposition Transformers 4!  And with 2013 offering Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast & Furious 6, Pacific Rim, The Lone Ranger, Man of Steel, and The Wolverine my fanboy hard-on was throbbing with an intensity not felt since...well, last Summer when The Avengers & The Dark Knight Rises ruled my soul.  And frankly the films leading into these Blockbusters only ranged from the "Ok" to the "Pretty good."  I needed a great crop of Extravaganza to feel solid about this cinema year.  Oh well.  Of the bloated behemoths listed above, only one movie makes my Fistful of Summer list.  They weren't all bad - heck, some were pretty good - but, nearly every flick this year has left that bitter taste of disappointment on my tongue.  None more vile than...

Star Trek Into Darkness.  It's been nearly three months since my last viewing, and JJ Abrams's So-Damn-Dumb sequel still manages to enrage this Trekkie.  And that's just annoying.  I hate being that asshole.  Rereading my angry, incoherent review of the film all I can do is shake my head at the fanboy cliche Into Darkness brought out of me.  I'm actually looking forward to rewatching the film so that maybe, just maybe, I can find something positive to say about that mess.  Is it truly the worst Star Trek film as voted by Trekkies?  I don't know about that...Star Trek Nemesis has to be the nadir of the franchise, but it's nice to know that I'm not alone in the disappointment.   Does it's lackluster display at the box office mean the end of this lens-flared crew?  Probably not, but I smell new director and budget cuts in the Enterprise's future.  And that's a good thing.

I think the biggest shock this summer was how much I enjoyed The Lone Ranger.  *crickets*  Have I lost you?  Did you immediately click away at the very idea of a positive word thrown Jerry Bruckheimer's way?  Of course not, you're still reading just to see what insanely idiotic thing I'll type next.  After all, how could I possibly hate so hard on Star Trek Into Darkness when I had so much damn fun watching The Lone Ranger?  I don't have a good answer for you.  The Lone Ranger is an absolute train wreck, but I found myself riotously laughing as men had their hearts eaten from their chests, and bandits squealed in joy at the possibility of duck foot rape.  What the hell was Disney thinking with this one?  It's a horror show, but it's also so damn weird that I found it utterly compelling. If you want to read more of my absurd Lone Ranger praise than click on over to my Daily Grindhouse review.  If it wasn't for this past weekend, The Lone Ranger would have certainly made this Fistful of Summer.

Finally, before we get to the Top 5, I just wanted to reiterate how the Blockbuster failed to excite this year.  Again, I enjoyed Pacific Rim, Elysium, Furious 6, & Man of Steel to a degree, but all fell short of their source material.  Cinema is failing too often to reach beyond simple nostalgia, and that's worrisome.  There are going to be fewer and fewer billion dollar returns like The Avengers.  The bubble will burst.  Wishful thinking?  Summer 2015 will bring us Star Wars - Episode VII, Avengers 2, Batman vs Superman, James Bond 24, Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Jurassic Park 4, Independence Day 2, Warcraft, Assassins Creed, The Fantastic Four reboot, and a new Terminator.  Will the world show up, or are there gonna be a lot of unhappy suits in Hollywood?  I sense some duds, or at least a batch of films that cost too much and make too little.  Or maybe that's all bullshit.  Maybe, after 34 years, I'm just finally hitting blockbuster fatigue.  

I certainly needed more protein in my diet, and this year I made more of an effort to hit the art theaters for those hipster, indie darlings.  Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, Jim Rash & Nat Faxon's The Way Way Back, Quentin Dupieux's Wrong, and a slew of VOD offerings gave some much needed respite from the Summer drought.  Still, I'm not an art house goon, and none of these tiny pictures could quite crack my Top 5.  So, shall we get on with it - 

5.  You're Next:  Possibly one of the most twisting cinematic experiences I had this year.  I just watched it this past Tuesday in a completely empty movie theater, and it took me from an exhausted seen-it-all horror aficionado to a hand clapping, seat jumping, school boy.  You're Next has been languishing on the Lionsgate shelf for a couple of years now, and I was sick of hearing about it six months ago.  Not to mention that the marketing for the film makes You're Next look like just another home invasion flick a la The Strangers or Funny Games.  And for the first twenty minutes, it's just that.  The Animals creep along the woods, the kills are fairly ordinary...then Sharni Vinson gets her hands on a meat tenderizer.  You're Next shifts a bit; the plot opens up, and suddenly the film is a whole lotta fun.  This is not some brooding slasher, it's a very 80s, kick-ass chick movie.  Not too many of those around anymore, and I can't help but feel that You're Next gets everything right that the Evil Dead remake gets wrong.

4.  Iron Man 3:  The First Mega Movie of the Summer is also the only Blockbuster to land on my top five.  Forget Avengers - Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3 is the real sequel to last year's Marvel Masterpiece, and even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of that Super Group, director Shane Black still delivers the finest entry in Shellhead's trilogy.  The intergalactic destruction brought down on New York City had lasting effects on Tony Stark; his panic attacks deliver a level of humanity to the character in the same fashion his alcoholism did in the comic books (we'll just have to settle on this PG-13, family friendly affliction).  Black manages to bring his wit & banter with him, a mean feat not yet accomplished by any of the Marvel Studios henchmen.  It's not Lethal Weapon, but there is enough of that flavor to invigorate the franchise.  Ben Kingsley's The Mandarin also happens to be the most surprisingly entertaining villain of the Super Hero genre, even if Guy Pearce's wronged scientist is a bit of a dullard and the film's revelations leave ignorant geeks to rage on the message boards.  Marvel continues to build its universe, and I'm still giddy for more.  Thor, Cap, The Guardians of the Galaxy - I'm all in.

3.  This Is The End:  The first film this year that left me 100% satisfied was this silly, stoner deconstruction of celebrity.  "Deconstruction."  That's probably giving the film too much credit.  This Is The End is just too damn funny to ignore.  Seth Rogen & Jay Baruchel play themselves, a couple of dimwits who use their good fortune to gorge upon Carl's Jr, video games & pot.  When Rogen drags Baruchel to James Franco's party the sky opens up and Revelation hits - the good get zapped up to heaven, and the bad are left behind to battle demon dogs as well as each other.  This film is bananas.  The entire cast has a blast destroying their personas; Danny McBride is exceptionally reprehensible, taking to the new rules of Thunderdome like a cannibal duck to water.  This Is The End is dumb, gross, and ignorant.  And I loved every second of it.

2.  The World's End:  And now for something completely different.  Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, & Nick Frost reteam to take on the Apocalypse but from a very British perspective.  The World's End still has plenty of silly, but whereas This Is The End often succeeds with stupidity, Wright's screenplay wins on childish wit.  There is a difference, a small one maybe, but it's enough to push one film over the other.  Several themes and in-jokes are carried throughout the Cornetto Trilogy, but the key ingredient has to be plutonic love.  I might still prefer both Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz, but after a second viewing I think The World's End displays the strongest on-screen friendship yet.  It's a broken relationship, five friends that drifted apart years ago, but when Simon Pegg reaches a breaking point, the draw of his high school memory pulls the more successful chums back together.  A high school reunion involving an epic pub crawl through their home town.  Of course, as movies have taught us over and over, you can't go home again.  Especially when the body snatchers have set up shop.

1.  Only God Forgives:  Before the Summer started I postulated that at year's end this film was going to land on top, and as I write this, I seriously doubt any other film of 2013 will topple this beast from super stylist Nicholas Winding Refn.  Self-fullfilling prophecy?  Naw.  Refn just makes the slick & awful kind of films I love.  But don't confuse this Shakespearean battle between Heaven & Hell as another Drive.  Those looking for a recreation of 2011's cool zen Michael Mann'er will be sorely disappointed.  Only God Forgives is a deeply painful exploration of self-hate mixed with heavy handed gobs of MacBeth & Oedipus Rex that nearly ruptures from symbolism overload.  It's easy to see why some dared to Boo at the Cannes Film Festival, or why those craving more dreamy Ryan Gosling would reel back in disgust. Thai Boxing, Karaoke, Uzis, Samurai Swords.  A lot of nifty elements can be found within the frame, but the film is more concerned with terrible redemption than video game versus combat.  Certainly not for everybody, but Only God Forgives left this viewer completely satiated in a Summer season doused in mediocrity.

--Brad