Just Juice Him!

It's also been a long dang time since we've said much about blog favorite Jason Statham.  Obviously, this is in part because he hasn't done a particularly good movie in five years (OK, I love the first two Expendables movies, but come on...Crank 2 is his last masterwork).  Here's hoping he and The Rock have some seriously awesome screentime (baby oiled battle royale).  But seriously, we love this guy.  He's just been making it difficult lately.  However, if Rosario Dawson proves anything, we're willing to wait...years if necessary...to continue loving him.  In the Mouth of Dorkness is all about love and forgiveness for cinema sins.  Except you, Robert Rodriguez.  You've really dropped the ball, sir.  Oh, I kid.  We'd forgive you, too; if you ever make a good movie again.  Anyway.  Statham.  Be badass again.  We've missed you.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (1/5/14-1/11/14)

    Didn’t get a heck of a lot of movie watching done this week.  I’ve been trying to catch up on some reading and planning for the upcoming return to gaming, and I’ve just been danged tired.  Trying to sleep hasn’t been working out too well.  I did get around to solidifying my list of Cinematic Resolutions for 2014.

The Wolf of Wall Street: There are like eight things on earth that interest me less than Wall Street and stock exchanges, so this movie had an uphill battle to rope me in.  Still, the popping style, funny dialog, and solid performances had me smiling and laughing.  Considering Lawrence of Arabia is one of my all time favorite films, and I only watch the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings, this may be an odd statement.  But the biggest problem I think I had was that the movie was just too long.  It wasn’t boring.  Not really.  Though the second half did drag at times.  But I feel like I got the point, like the message was delivered, but then it just kept going and going and going.  I don’t think, as some critics have said, that this movie is morally bankrupt.  I didn’t feel like the filmmakers were saying this sort of thing was good.  Only that it happens; it happened.  And yes, rich people get away with stuff all the time because they’re rich.  That’s just the way it is.  But within 24 hours of watching the movie, most of it had faded from my memory.  It's something I've seen, and something I enjoyed while watching, but not something that left any kind of mark on me.

Clerks II:  I really, really, really love Rosario Dawson in this.  She’s so danged cute and funny.  The rest of the movie?  Pure Kevin Smith.  If that sounds good to you, you should like this film.  I have to admit, after a few years of trying really hard to be one of the cool kids who liked Kevin Smith films, I realized I don’t.  I enjoyed Mallrats the one time I saw it, but never felt the need to watch it again.  And Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back came out while I was working in a theater, so it holds some kind of place in my heart (I may have even taken a lady friend to it, which might account for the positive vibes).  Otherwise, blah.  He’s still running through the same gags, the same obnoxious half-assed social commentary, the same bunch of dick jokes.  The nerd humor feels forced by this point, almost like self parody.  And shoehorning his wife into the film was…um…weird.  Really weird.  Creepy weird.  It just didn’t work for me.  But then, neither did Clerks or Chasing Amy.  I never felt connected to the 90s and Kevin Smith never left them.  (edit: Upon reflection, I think I’ve figured out one of the things that bothers me about Smith’s work.  He subscribes to that particular 90s brand of pseudo-feminism in which women are ALWAYS right and men are ALWAYS wrong, and if a man doesn’t immediately change any and every aspect of himself to fit what a woman wants, he’s an asshole, and part of the Patriarchy [a shadowy conspiracy that seems an awful lot like the Nazi version of the Jews, running everything from behind some horrible penis curtain].  This is just a half baked theory right now, but I think I might be onto something.)

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Gamera VS. Guiron:  “It’s a planet.”  This one is pretty darned good.  The Gamera movies are more kid friendly (read: shoddy) kaiju movies, and their American releases had some epically bad dubbing.  All the stuff with young Richard Burton cracks me up.  And the ending piano bar thing with eventual host Mike is priceless and weird.  Perhaps not in the upper echelons of the series, but a darned fine entry, none the less.

Raiders of the Lost Ark:  Straight up, one of the best danged movies ever made, and one of the very top action films.  It’s also the film I can trace a great deal of me back to.  At the core of my interests, my loves, and my way of looking at the world, there is Raiders.  Karen Allen was one of my very first crushes, and became a template for the tough, black haired ladies I’ve always found myself falling for.  Indiana Jones became the model for my ideal self (one never achieved).  History, geography, religion, archeology, and fighting Nazi bastards became essential thoughts for young Matt, and paved the way for my life to come.  It’s beautifully shot, tense, funny, action packed, and sweeping.  It’s a true homage to the serials and adventure films and fiction of the 30s and 40s, and a great way to spend an evening.

47 Ronin:  If I were 13 and had never seen any movies about samurai, or any Asian fantasy films, this would probably have been pretty cool.  A good springboard movie for me to get into other, better films.  Unfortunately, I’m nearing 40 and I’ve seen everything in this film done before in much, much better films.  I was hoping for a Pirates of the Caribbean type action fantasy film with a Japanese style.  In stead, I got a made for TV, slow paced retread, with little passion and less excitement.  I liked the look and feel of the film, but the script and the acting were not so good.  And shooting digital made everything look cheap, like soap operas.  Still, it wasn’t awful, just dull.  It should have been much, much better.

    I finally got around to listening to Kate Nash’s new album, Girl Talk.  It’s more polished than her previous work, and very catchy.  She’s talking about the same stuff, bad relationships mostly.  But some of her poor London girl charm is missing, due to that polished, studio sound.  And there’s a weird undercurrent of feminism lip-service, like she’s trying to set herself up as some kind of crusader.  But that feels a bit half-hearted.  Whatever the case, the album is pretty good, and fans of her earlier work should enjoy it.

Despicable Me 2:  I didn’t love the first film, but I enjoyed it just fine.  This second movie is more of the same.  It’s funny, occasionally very funny, and cute.  But at the end of the day, not something I’ll be thinking back on too much.  If you enjoyed the first one, by all means, check this out.

Images:  I guess this film captures the point of view of someone who’s completely insane, but that doesn’t really make for a particularly watchable movie.  There’s little to latch your brain onto, so very little to understand or follow.  Every scene and shot is unreliable, so what does anything matter.  In that classically 70s way, everyone is absolutely awful and emotionally bankrupt.  Just unpleasant.

We Are What We Are:  Writer/director Jim Mickle and frequent collaborator, actor/writer Nick Damici have put together another entertaining, atmosphere rich, modern horror film.  I watched Mulberry Street on a whim, and was shocked that such a silly premise turned out to be such a moody and watchable film.  Stakeland, their follow-up was equally as moody, and also quite entertaining.  And now with We Are What We Are, a remake of a Mexican horror film from a couple years back, they’ve cemented their place as high quality-low budget film makers to watch.  This movie looks better than many big budget Hollywood films, has excellent acting, and a good slow-burn pace.  Mickle isn’t re-inventing the wheel here.  He’s not breaking new ground or making movies that will change the way you think about film.  But he’s making good horror movies.  And that makes him a rare breed these days.  Horror has been a near dead genre since the late 80s, and now I’m starting to feel like there’s still potential in it.

    That’s about it for this week.  A lot of things in life are kind of on hold for a bit right now.  My holiday horror isn’t quite over yet.  Soon.

-Matt

The 2013 Dorkies- The Best and Worst of Cinema (Matt’s Picks)

                                       "The Year That Sucked…Until it didn’t."


    Following as it did on the disappointing 2012, 2013 was a long, hard year for this film buff.  Not a lot of the extreme ups and downs of last year, or even the crushing disappointments.  It was just so bloody blah.  It wasn’t until the very end of April that I saw a movie I enjoyed to any serious degree (Pain & Gain).  That’s bad.  Worse is that the movie, directed as it was by schlockmeister Michael Bay, dismayed me greatly by remaining on my ‘best movies of the year’ list as the months wore on.  Ugh.  The film snob in me simply never warmed to having a Bay film in my top 10.  Thankfully, as the Autumn came upon us, things started looking up.  I went from struggling to find ten movies I enjoyed to being able to make a top twenty with some movies left over.  Thank goodness.  (Take a look back at the Dorkies of the past: 2011, 2012).

Best Movies

10.  Europa Report:  Probably the best put together found-footage movie to date, this is handled the way I’ve been saying found-footage films should be for years.  It’s edited and presented as a documentary, with talking heads accompanying the events depicted.  The characters are good, not the idiots movie makers would normally put in situations like this (see: Sunshine).  The story itself is compelling and uplifting.  And to me, this feels like a tribute to those we’ve lost in the pursuit of progress, as opposed to the more typical ‘it’s so dangerous, why even try?’ attitude presented in space-based science fiction films.

9.  Oblivion:  Is Oblivion the most creative film ever made?  No.  Is it a solid, beautifully filmed story, fully immersed in classic science fiction?  Yes.  People kept comparing this movie to Moon, and I don’t think that’s fair for two major reasons.  One, only one of its many concepts is shared with Moon, and Moon, though fantastic, is not even close to the ‘original’ film it was held up as (see: Silent Running and Outland for proof).  This film doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it makes the wheel look really good, and roll really smooth.  And no shaky cam!

8.  A Field in England:  Out of the frying pan (war) and into the fire (drug-fueled trip into magic and madness).  To say the absolute minimum, this movie isn’t going to be for everyone.  The characters are all quite mad, the film is shot in such a way as to heighten that feeling, and even before the characters ingest psychedelic mushrooms and tug a man out of a magic hole, the movie was quite bizarre.  Don’t stop here, man.  This is bat country.

7.  Why Don’t You Play in Hell?:  With all the weird and wild entries in the Gonzo madness of Japanese cinema, they finally got it right.  Funny, disgusting, wacky, and kinda amazing, nothing can quite prepare you for this movie.  The acting, even on secondary characters, is so good.  I found myself with a serious case of the giggles throughout, even during horrible scenes, because the whole thing just worked so darned well.  It made me almost dizzy, but I was loving every minute of it.

6.  Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie:  Better than the Avengers.  Bam!  Yeah, I said it.  The Avengers was largely lauded among comic nerds because it remained so ‘true’ to the comic source material.  And while I can’t argue that too strongly, I would say that it remained ‘surprisingly true,’ all things considered, but still took a great deal of liberty.  Not this movie.  This movie is what staying true to the source material is really about.  At no point was this sugar coated or re-packaged for John Q. Lucnchbox.  Ultramarines is a straight-up Warhammer 40,000 movie, and it makes absolutely no apologies and doesn’t give you one bit of help in engaging with it (beyond good characters and a good story).  I never much cared for Warhammer as a game (especially when alternative options came around), but I always loved the setting.  And this film gets it right, 100%.

5.  Journey to the West:  It’s a very, very rare non-English language comedy that I enjoy.  Not because of any anti-foreign sentiment, but because of all things, I think comedy doesn’t tend to translate well.  There’s so much culturally specific quality to what makes us laugh.  Most of the Chinese comedies I’ve seen have been somewhere between boring and…extremely boring, because I simply didn’t find the humor.  I was sure it was in there, somewhere.  But I didn’t find it.  Kung Fu Hustle was a rare exception, and it’s director, Stephen Chow, is back with this take on the classic mythological/fantasy adventure, Journey to the West.  This movie focuses on the coming together of the band of adventurers, and features lots of weird, wild, over the top action and well, weirdness.  And it’s just darned fun to watch.

4.  Inside Llewyn Davis:  Somewhere around the release of A Serious Man, I realized that I don’t just like some Coen Brothers movies, I love the Coen Brothers’ movies.  I think, if I had to pick just one (well, two) director as my favorite working today, it would be this team.  With only one real misstep (Intolerable Cruelty) in there repertoire, and no sign of loosing steam, they’re really the bees’ knees in my book.  This story of a shiftless folk singer, drifting through New York in the early days of what would be the folk revival of that time, is painful and funny in the way the brothers do so well.  A great cast of odd characters support Oscar Isaac as the titular Llewyn Davis.  A man with every opportunity to learn life’s great lessons.  Every danged opportunity.

3.  The Great Beauty:  The existential ennui of an aged Italian playboy, living a life of parties and petty social infighting.  How European, right?  How Italian.  And it’s an homage of sorts to art/foreign film aficionado golden boy Federico Fellini.  At this point, it would be difficult to put into words just how awful the film sounds to me.  But, it’s great.  It’s funny, it’s beautiful, it’s sad, and it’s wistful.  And though obviously inspired by Fellini, it’s missing that certain something that makes me hate the director’s work.  Director Paolo Sorrentino has crafted a beautiful look into latter day party people, urban adepts who stayed in the game too long, and the wild world of those with too much money and not enough drive.  It’s really quite good.

2.  The Wall:  I saw a lot of films dealing with loneliness or loneness this year, and none was better than The Wall.  The premise is simple.  A woman wakes up one morning trapped behind an invisible wall, possibly the last living human.  How does she deal with that?  It’s profoundly moving and beautiful to look at seclusion.  The film manages to capture the romance of solitude hand in hand with the sanity shaking emptiness of forced separation.

1.  Only God Forgives:  Were you like me?  When you were watching Drive a couple years ago, did you keep saying to yourself, ‘man, won’t these people just shut up; can’t they just stare at each other for way, way longer?’  Well then, do I have a movie for you.  Oozing with mythological significance, the story is fairly simple.  A bad guy (whose mother may very well be Satan) wants to be redeemed.  To redeem himself, he wants to fight God.  God is a retired detective in Thailand.  Simple, right?  If you go to movies to see lots of action, or people talking, you can pretty much skip this one.  If you like to be challenged; if you enjoy visual feasts; or if you thought Drive was just to mainstream and ‘Hollywood’ and wanted something more like Valhalla Rising, then you must see this.  It’s one of the few times I felt giddy, felt the heady power of cinema, during this mostly uninspired year.

Best Actress:  Martina Gedeck (The Wall):  It was nice to find myself having to make a hard decision on who to pick for this category this year.  Too often there are too few interesting roles for women, and too few of those go to worthy actresses.  Gedeck has to carry the entire movie on her shoulders, and she does so while making it look easy.  Runner up: Amy Adams (American Hustle).

Best Actor:  Dwayne Johnson (Pain & Gain):  I don’t know from wrestling, but Dwayne The Rock Johnson is one charming bastard, and over the last few years he’s been climbing up the hill toward being one of my very favorite contemporary movie stars.  Pain & Gain brought him to the top to join George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and Tony Leung.  His comic timing and loveable idiocy were so incredibly endearing that even when the most awful acts were being perpetrated, I couldn’t help but hope things would work out for him.  A genuinely excellent performance from an actor who puts a smile on my face whenever I see him.  Runner up: Michael Nyqvist in Europa Report.

Best Supporting Actress:  Kristin Scott Thomas (Only God Forgives):  Has anyone ever done quite this good a job of portraying manifest evil?  One of the most vile and terrifying movie villains of all time.  Do not stare too long into the abyss.  Runner up: Amy Adams (Her).

Best Supporting Actor:  Javier Bardem (The Councilor):  Watching Bardem’s face contort in terror as he looks into a sexual abyss was genuinely one of the best single scenes in 2013 cinema.  The movie wasn’t that great, but Bardem elevated every scene he was in as this sort of half-assed Tony Montana.  When he wasn’t on screen, I kept hoping he would be again soon.  Runner up: Shin’ichi Tsutsumi in Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Best Director: Nicholas Winding Refn:  This guy is making a certain type of movie that very definitely appeals to me.  Quiet, slow (but not boring), highly visual, ultra-violent, and very challenging.  I know he’s referred to Valhalla Rising as a science fiction film.  But he’s also crazy.  I’d like to see him tackle something really out there, like Logan’s Run or The Incal.  Refn is one to watch.  Runner up: The Coen Brothers for Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Bottom 5 Films of the Year:

5.  Star Trek Into Darkness:  Almost everything in this movie is wrong.  As a long time Trek fan, the complete bungling (not to mention unnecessary rehashing) of an iconic character (Khan) was saddening.  But the fact that all the character and relationship development from the 2009 film was thrown out the window and everyone was back to square one, was unforgivable.  Add to that the idiotic villains, overly complex but totally stupid plot, and awful callback after callback to Wrath of Khan, and you’ve got a film that killed my excitement for this re-launched franchise.  At this point, I care almost as little about what happens with the next Star Trek film as I do with the next Star War, Transformers, or Avatar film (read: none).

4.  Oz the Great and Powerful:  From James Franco’s stoned bemusement to the rampant amateur hour CGI to the same-old-same-old Raimi bag of tricks (seriously, the guy’s been doing the same half dozen camera shots for 30 years), this movie is a colossal fart in the face of the surreal wonder of L. Frank Baum’s original books.  It gets everything at least as wrong as the beloved 1939 version, but also manages to fail as a stand-alone piece.  Just awful.

3.  Machete Kills:  No.  I didn’t think this was going to be a ‘good’ movie.  But I was not prepared for how danged awful it was.  After a mildly amusing opening, the whole thing fell apart almost at once, and for it’s excruciating runtime, Danny Trejo was literally the only thing that wasn’t terrible, and he had virtually nothing to work with.  I really like Trejo, and I really want to watch him do his thing.  But this film was terrible.

2.  The Host:  Stryder/Wanda (Wanderer) must fight Seeker and her Soul henchmen in this super subtle (yeah, that’s sarcasm) excuse for polygamy.  It’s more ham-fisted than a fist made of ham, more boring than a giant drill, and …well, it sucks.  For a long time I kind of thought this would be my number 1 worst film.

1.  Kick-Ass 2:  Sitting in the theater, watching the opening scene, co-Dork Brad and I looked at each other and flashed ‘oh, no’ faces.  And it never got better.  Every single ounce of charm the first film had was absent in this terrible follow-up.  The actors were bad, the script was worse, and everything felt like nobody quite knew what was happening.  Really, really bad.

Take a hike, Quality.

Runners up: World War Z, The Purge, and Jack the Giant Slayer.


Best Score: Only God Forgives

Best Soundtrack: American Hustle

Video Discoveries:

    As the Summer came to an end, and 2013 was beginning to wear me down, I found myself turning back to film history.  Always a fan of older films, I tend to pepper my viewing with all sorts of classics and not-so-classics from the Silent era, the Pre-Code days, the Golden Age, and more.  This Fall, however I began to grasp at them as a drowning man.  I even went Criterion Crazy in November.  So, what follows are a few of the really excellent finds from yesteryear.

10.  The Mercenary, The Great Silence, & El Condor: Three awesome Westerns, thanks to Brad.
9.  The American Astronaut: A very, very weird comic Western Sci-Fi film. And so funny.
8.  Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht: A really excellent remake of the classic silent film.
7.  Sulivan’s Travels:  A fantastic Depression era comedy.  Great script.
6.  Summer Interlude:  This helped kick off a Bergman feeding frenzy. I guess I’m a fan now.
5.  Challenge of the Masters & My Young Auntie: Two must see martial arts films.
4.  Marketa Lazarova:  Czech film?  Who’d have thought.  OK, show me more.
3.  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: It’s my happening, and it freaks me out.
2.  Design for Living:  An absolutely hysterical and shockingly naughty comedy.
1.  Leave Her to Heaven:  I fell in love with Gene Tierney.  Hard.

Video Re-Discovery:

Chung King Express.  When I first saw this film back in 1999 or 2000, I just didn’t get it.  I think I was expecting some kind of action movie, maybe some sort of martial arts film.  I was interested in it for two reasons, it was being put out on Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder line and it had Brigitte Lin.  What I got was some kind of romantic comedy…or something, I don’t know.  And I didn’t like it.  After reading the weird memoir The Film Club, I was prompted to give the film a second shot, and I’m so glad I did.  To say the very least, I enjoyed it much more the second time around.  I’d changed as a person, my tastes had changed, and my expectations were different.  I found the film moving and deeply charming.

Actor of the Year:  Amy Adams (Man of Steel, American Hustle, Her) had a great year.  She’s an actress who’s been around for a while, and who I’ve enjoyed in a few films before.  But 2013 was a revelation for me.  She’s probably the only thing that didn’t suck in the second half of Man of Steel, and plays probably the only live-action Lois Lane I don’t want to push under a train.  She gives heart to American Hustle; and in both that and Her, she turns in subtle and nuanced performances I found captivating.  Do I have a new favorite actress?  Maybe not.  But she’s on my radar now, for sure.

Discovered Actors:  I made three particular discoveries this year.  Having now seen Greta Garbo in films, I get it.  I get why she was such a phenomenon.  She’s dynamite; there’s no denying.  I’d seen Gene Tierney in a bunch of movies and thought nothing of her.  Perfectly beautiful, but not especially memorable.  That’s because I’d been watching the wrong movies.  She left me absolutely breathless in Leave Her to Heaven, and I’ve since seen her in a bunch of excellent performances.  Almost supernaturally beautiful, your instinct might be to ignore her acting talent.  But it’s there.  And finally, watching a bunch of Ingmar Bergman films, I couldn’t help but appreciate the versatility and power of Gunnar Bjornstrand.  Be it a bastard of a pastor or a gregarious squire, the man brought the goods.

Moulder’s Beard (the only good thing in an otherwise unwatchable film): Scotty’s shirt from his drunken bar hop in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Most Unfairly Maligned Film: The Lone Ranger.  What did you people want?  It’s all the fun of a Pirates movie, but in the West.  Great.

Most Unjustly Lauded Film:  Gravity.  Like Children of Men, I can’t help but feel that the gimmicky long-shots are more important than telling a good story or creating compelling characters.  Worst astronaut ever.  I did love that final beach shot, though.  The movie as a whole?  Meh.

Glad to See You Again: Rosario Dawson.  An actress I’ve wanted to be a fan of for many years, but who keeps doing movies I either can’t stand, or won’t watch.  But with Trance, an otherwise forgettable film, Dawson finally sinks her teeth into a solid performance that I found myself enjoying much more than the rest of the picture.

Best Remake: Journey to the West

Worst Remake: Evil Dead

Best Quote:  “Jesus Christ has blessed me with many gifts; one of them is knocking someone the fuck out.” -Pain & Gain

“Hey, it’s better than Avatar.” (Movies that might not be great, but are still better than Avatar)

5.  Her
4.  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
3.  Byzantium
2.  Furious 6
1.  Elysium

The Biggest Disappointments:

5.  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  I was expecting more of the same, and I got it.  But the movie did leave me a bit cold, because of the desperate need for considerable trimming.  It's fine.  But not as good as the first part.  And yeah, as has been asked so many times, why is this a film trilogy?  Also how sad is it that the best Elf character was the one that didn't come from the book?

4.  Pacific Rim:  Del Toro just keeps missing the mark, and it’s getting depressing.  The movie is fun, and there are some very good sequences.  But the plot totally sucks.  I didn’t actually like Top Gun, so seeing it rehashed didn’t do anything for me at all.

3.  Star Trek Into Darkness:  For all the reasons I’ve already talked about.  And it’s just not fun to watch.  Is it Nemesis or Generations bad?  Time will tell.  But it’s not good, and killed my interest in this re-launched alternate universe.  Back to the original series for me.

2.  Elysium:  There’s so much good in this movie.  But the message is too heavy handed, and the ending feels totally false.  Still, if you’re a William Gibson fan, there’s a lot of stuff to love in the realization of the horrible future.

1.  2013:  Yeah, I’m picking the whole year.  While the last couple of months turned things around, so that I didn’t leave the year on a sour note, that still left 10 months of heart-sinking awfulness.  The fact that numbers 9 through 20 on my list this year are nearly interchangeable, and I only feel comfortable with 8 movies on my top ten list says a lot.  Even a lot of the bad movies weren't even bad enough to mock.  On top of that, so many movies that did look interesting never played anywhere near me.  And that’s frustrating and disappointing.  2013 looked amazing when it started, but movie after movie didn’t live up.  Here’s hoping next year turns it around.  Where’s my 2011?

Most Anticipated Film of 2014:

Godzilla:  Yeah, there are a few 2013 movies that don’t seem to be getting theatrical runs (if that even happens) until 2014, so I sure want to see them.  And there are a bunch of very cool looking movies coming as the year goes on.  But I’m a long time Godzilla fan, and I’ve been hoping for a good, serious take on the venerable beast for a long time.  From the director of the low budget Horror/Sci-Fi kaiju movie Monsters, this film looks like it might be amazing.  Sure, things could go terribly wrong and it might totally suck.  I can’t imagine anything like that dreadful 1998 version, but there is a lot of gray area between that film and ‘good.’  I’m hoping this new version doesn’t end up there.  Runner up: Guardians of the Galaxy (what world do we live on?!).

Top 20:

20.  Thor: The Dark World
19.  Upstream Color
18.  Renoir
17.  Stoker
16.  All is Lost
15.  Pain & Gain
14.  Computer Chess
13.  Lone Ranger
12.  The World’s End
11.  American Hustle
10.  Europa Report
9.  Oblivion
8.  A Field in England
7.  Why Don’t You Play in Hell?
6.  Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie
5.  Journey to the West
4.  Inside Llewyn Davis
3.  The Wall
2.  The Great Beauty
1.  Only God Forgives

-Matthew J. Constantine

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