FDR: American Badass; A Pre-Review

I just watched the Redband trailer for the upcoming movie FDR: American Badass and I must say this has the potential to be one of the worst movies that will come out in the next year.

View the Trailer and we'll continue from there.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1hTnL8XBKk&w=640&h=360]

Saying that this could be one of the worst movies to come out this year may be a bit of an understatement but there's one thing I must also say. There is no amount of money you could pay me to NOT watch this movie. Not only does it feature Barry Bostwick as FDR, but it also stars a hodge podge of some of the greatest comedy actors to grace, in many occasions, the small screen through TV movies and sitcoms including but not limited to; Ed Metzger, Paul Wilson, Lin Shaye, Kevin 'Hercules' Sorbo, Bruce McGill and Ray Wise.

The thing that is appealing to me about FDR is it's obvious grasp of the campy movies from the 70s and 80s that it's embracing all too well. This is a prime example of what grindhouse films used to be; bad makeup, worse acting, terrible writing and a boat load of fun. Movies like this can't be, or are extremely hard to take seriously. Compare the poster for FDR:



Against the poster for the upcoming Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter:



The two don't even come close to eachother. But based on poster alone, which are you more likely to see? A dark semi-vague movie that you assume is about Honest Abe hunting down Vampires (Please don't let them sparkle!) or would you rather see some movie that features a guy in a freaking wheelchair weilding a Tommy gun?

I'll take the Tommy gun please. From everything floating around the internet Abe is going to take a bit more heat since it's based on a book. It always seems that people get in a fuss over book adaptations, with FDR, you've got nothing to worry about. It's straight up new material.

FDR has the potential to take over a spot in my heart that has up to this point been filled with a love for the fake movie trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS which was made by Rob Zombie as a teaser trailer shown with the Grindhouse Double Feature presented by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez in 2007.

I always hoped Werewolf Women of the SS would get made but now I think I may be able to be happy with FDR: American Badass. Regardless of the ridiculous plot that FDR has, Nazi werewolves spreading the polio virus, it is exactly what you would expect from a film that appears to take a lot of lead from the films of Russ Meyer through the 60s to early 70s.

I will always have a soft spot for films like this in my heart, campy films are super enjoyable as long as you aren't expecting to get much out of it. I'll see you in the theaters on release day for this one for sure.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

Last night, as I ate a healthy (ish) dinner of Crispix, a hard boiled egg, a piece of beef jerky, and pineapple, I was struck with the idea of a new old review of Jim Jarmusch's 2003 sleeper Coffee and Cigarettes.



I call it a sleeper because it's a great movie that didn't get the recognition it deserved. Even now it has a small cult following as do most of Jarmusch's other works including; Ghost Dog (1999) Dead Man (1995) and Stranger Than Paradise (1983).

Coffee and Cigarettes is a unique film in that it is a film made up of 11 short stories. All separate but connected only by the theme of Coffee and Cigarettes. Each vignette usually has two to three people sitting in a diner somewhere smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

Here's the Trailer:

http://vimeo.com/6423267

You'd think it would be boring, but when you've got the cast that C&C has, it's really quite interesting to see. Some of the duo's/trios are as follows;

Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, Jack and Meg White, Joie and Cinque Lee (Brother and sister of director Spike Lee) served by Steve Buscemi, Cate Blanchette in dual roles conversing with herself, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, and my favorite scene consisted of The RZA sitting in a diner with The GZA being served by actor Bill Murray who's doing research for a new role.



It's normally hard to make a vignette film that doesn't lose steam but Jarmusch has suceeded hands down. It's a dialogue driven film but each scene never lasts more than 10 minutes so you've got enough of a change up that it continually seems fresh as you're watching.

One other thing that I really enjoy about Jim Jarmusch is the fact that he worked with analogue film and it shows in his films. The picture has a grainy quality to it, and it's presented in black and white making contrast very important. It's not a glossed over film like all the HD movies that come out anymore, it's gritty and causes the viewer to listen to the dialogue even more because you aren't distracted by something in the background.



Coffee and Cigarettes doesn't rely on fancy sets or camera work either, most of the time the scenes are viewed from maybe three or four different angles, this makes the filming process easy and enjoyable for the actors and the director alike. I think that really shines through with this film.

The interesting thing about Coffee and Cigarettes is the fact that it was a work in progress for 17 years before the feature film was released. Jarmusch started the Coffee and Cigarettes series as three shorts, the first released in 1986, the second in 89, and the third in 95. In 2003 he finished his project which combined the first three shorts with 8 new ones. The impressive thing about this is that you can't really tell which three are the old ones. They fit together with such precision that you are led to believe they were all shot in 2003.

I highly recommend Coffee and Cigarettes to anyone who's a fan of well written dialogue that feels natural. Natural and awkward all at the same time. Just the way a cup of coffee and a cigarette should be.

The only thing I regret is the fact that this film could not be made today, every cafe that these scenes take place in are now smoke free. I would love to go into a small cafe like many of these duos and just have a long conversation with someone over a pack of cigarettes and four or five pots of coffee, and I'm not even a smoker.

Melancholia (2011)

*There is a good chance there will be a couple of SPOILERS in this review.

The other day I posted my preview of Upside Down starring Kirsten Dunst. In that post I'd mentioned she hasn't really been in anything of merit for the past few years. Nothing has changed with seeing Lars von Trier's Melancholia last night.

This movie is not for everyone. Myself included. I've been called a snob about film and cinema before, and I embrace that. I enjoy being a bit of a snob, I like being able to enjoy a film for reasons like acting abilities, scenery, set design, costuming, etc. and being able to explain myself for said reasons. But as beautiful as moments in this film were, nothing was able to drag me out of the depression that Melancholia forces upon the viewer.

When I saw the preview for Melancholia last week when my friend asked if I'd like to see it, I thought it seemed interesting enough. Check it;

Melancholia (2011)

When you view the trailer it doesn't seem like it's a 'End of the World Movie' But it is. It is a blatant, albeit, creative-(ish) re-imagining of such films as Armageddon and Deep Impact only there's no blowing up a planet that is taking stars out of major constellations in some of the space scenes. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention there's lot of space scenes? They distract from the sadness, only by giving you more stuff to be sad about. Also, Melancholia is the name of the aforementioned planet that's smashing through the galaxy, not just a clever play on the title on how you're going to feel for hours after seeing the film.

A brief synopses of Melancholia is this, a horribly dysfunctional family gathers to celebrate the marriage of a really nice guy and a seemingly nice girl. During the party the bride sees a star in the sky she hadn't seen before. She starts going nuts, sleeps with a different guy instead of her husband on her wedding day, the groom and his parents leave, there is much sadness and mopeyness on the part of the bride. Daddy issues and Mommy issues abound and we see part two. There is no definite expose on how much time has passed between part one (the horribleness) and part two (the horribleness part 2). You have to assume it's been at least a couple of weeks because the once blushing bride (Kirsten Dunst) is now pallid and run down to a degree of depression I haven't seen since Atonement. Then you see Dunst get nursed back to health by her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) while we learn that the star is actually a planet that has been hiding from us behind the sun is on a course that will bring it in to do a 'pass by' of Earth. And then you just get more and more depressed as Kirsten now 'knows things' like how many beans were in a jar at the wedding as part of a raffle that no one actually won. Weird. And the spiral never ends, you just get more and more and more depressed and then the movie ends.

I wouldn't say I hated this movie. There are many things I disliked about it though. For one, what can only be described as the prologue was 15 minutes of footage that would have been more appealing at the end of the film. So it was long, and it was also devoid of dialogue, and it was accompanied by this awful violin driven fugue ripe with transitions from Major to Minor keys with a shotgun blast of tri-tones thrown in to make the listener cringe.

The second major problem was the fact that the entire movie was shot in shaky-cam style. There was a sign posted outside of the auditorium stating that if you're prone to motion sickness, Melancholia may not be the right choice to see. There were few reprieves from the shaky-cam and when we did get breaks it was during scenes with little to no action thus making you more bored than you were sick.

The third major issue was the dialogue. Directed and Written by Copenhagen, Denmark native Lars von Trier, the film doesn't translate well. Had it been presented in Dutch it probably would have been fantastic. There are few foreign writers that make it big writing English screenplays. There's a reason they say English is the hardest language to learn and even harder to write. There are too many nuances that come easily for native English speakers that people who learn English as a second language don't always grasp. Many lines were ill-suited to the scenarios in which they were presented.

A final thought on Melancholia is this, aside from the bad, this is a very impressive new look at an imminent doom story. It's beautiful in all the right places, including a scene of Kirsten Dunst bathing in the light of Melancholia as it draws close enough to shed more light than our own moon. As well as almost every shot where Trier shows the Moon, the Sun, and Melancholia all lined up across the sky.

I fell in love with a number of the scenes in this film, but beauty alone won't keep me interested enough to recommend this movie to too many people. If you have a chance, and if you want to spend two hours watching a film that makes you feel like you've been watching for 7 hours. . . See Melancholia.

Melancholia (2011) Directed and Written: Lars von Trier. Starring; Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Cameron Spurr, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier.

Contagion (2011)

Contagion takes off as soon as it begins.  The beginning is relatively standard, we’re introduced to four characters; they catch a cough, think it’s nothing and begin to pass it from person to person until the worst happens.  The first half of the movie flies by as the virus spreads and the various government agencies attempt to learn its origin, contain the spread, and cure it.

The premise is excellent.  A virus is an enemy that resonates with each of us.  It’s a silent and deadly killer and who doesn’t remember SARS, H1N1, or any other animal flu that has threatened our health in the past ten years.  Contagion is the acknowledgement of the very real and very terrifying what-if.

The first two-thirds of the movie are excellent, the government fights to keep the the virus in check and find an cure, a freelance blogger hopes to reveal the corruption in the government and families are torn apart by the virus.  There are so many things that could have made Contagion a great movie; good stars, a ferocious and identifiable villain, and breakneck pacing throughout.  Yet something ends up missing.

Nearly two-thirds of the way through the movie, the tank runs dry and all you’re left with is a bunch of dead, famous stars.  Those that survive are flat and uninteresting.  The story stalls.  I spent the remainder of the movie expecting something to happen, waiting for something to go wrong, because I was being lulled to sleep by how slow the movie had become.  And then it was over.  No more fear, no suspense, no reason to care.

I expect that Contagion will be much like SARS and H1N1, once it’s all over most people will barely be able to remember what it was about or what started it.

I recommend letting this one slip by.

-Josh

Contagion (2011) IMDB
Directed by: Steve Soderbergh
Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, and Gwyneth Paltrow

Alice in Acidland

Alice in Acidland, a lurid twisted tale taking only the name from the beloved Lewis Carroll story Alice In Wonderland and bastardizing it and morphing it into a classic Propaganda film designed to keep kids, and according to this film, young girls away from the dangers of LSD.

LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) was created in 1938 and was originally used for psychiatric uses around 1947. As its popularity and success grew as a therapeutic agent, the CIA began trials to apply the chemical to mind control and chemical warfare designs. Through their testing on both young servicemen and students the drug took off as a recreational drug to youth culture during the 60s culminating in its eventual prohibition.

Alice in Acidland was made at the height of the fight against LSD in 1969 by John Donne and written by Gertrude Steen. This is one of those Propaganda films that you can watch and tell that the director doesn’t really have any issues with the drug scene while the writer sits on their throne having never dropped acid, never shot up and most importantly never inhaled.

The film is, thankfully, a few minutes shy of being an hour long. Forty-three of the fifty-three minute duration of the film is in shocking Black and White as we learn of Alice’s first invite to a party house. Alice is an honor roll student who has never done a bad thing in her life. Well, while at her first party she is introduced to alcohol, tobacco, pot and lesbian sex. The next time round she gets a ride from her father and then goes and changes into more alluring clothing, a wardrobe fit for the hippie free love generation, a long flowing dress and moccasins. Upon arriving at her second party she throws herself at one of the males in attendance, as if she were magnetically attracted to him.

On Alice’s third go around she starts inviting friends along to the parties she is attending only this time something goes horribly wrong. When Alice arrives this time, everyone takes a blotter tab of LSD. Alice can now feel everything around her, her extremities become amazingly sensitive, her fingertips can feel the air, etc. It’s at this point the film turns on the color. If you’ve ever seen an acid trip in a movie, like Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny, you’ll be sorely disappointed by this one. It consists of a black room with two naked women who are either dancing around or standing still with no amazing swirls of color or trippy funky music. Alice is starting to have the time of her life as she runs her fingers over the smooth marble of the fireplace mantle. Only trouble is that one of the men has taken her friend into one of the bedrooms and Alice is powerless to protect her and as Alice falls deeper and deeper into her trip into Acidland she realizes her friend has just gotten raped and murdered by the man she introduced her friend to.

It’s at this point the trip, and the movie, ends. We pull out of the darkness and get our final view of Alice as she is in a padded room wearing a straitjacket while the voice over informs us that had she never met those so-called friends who led her down the path to destruction, her friend would still be alive and she would have graduated high school.

That’s the biggest disappointment and also the biggest appeal of Propaganda films for me. They are so blind to any scientific research done towards any drug and automatically preach on how bad they are regardless of the evidence behind them. They are so quick to say that if you have one sip of alcohol when you’re underage you will then smoke cigarettes and then try LSD and end up in a mental ward.

Propaganda films were made to scare the uneducated youth (and their uneducated parents) about any form of immoral action, be it sex, violence, drugs, alcohol or even cheating on a test in school.

Propaganda isn’t about truth; it’s about fear and its fear that built America from the 30s to the 70s. The Public Service Announcements that I grew up watching were finally becoming more truthful in what they preached (minus all of the DARE films we ever had to watch) and that means America is fed up with being lied to. Regardless, Propaganda films are fun to watch! Just because of how ridiculous they were and once you’ve watched a few you can tell which of the actors and directors are actually a lot more open minded than what they portray in these films as they play their characters tongue in cheek as compared to a straight actor really living in their character. (Heath Ledger’s Joker or Jack Nicholson’s Jake from Chinatown best represents an example of the previous statement of straight acting, really getting into the character. Tongue in cheek- Any role from Nicholas Cage.)

Don’t be afraid, watch a couple, they’re normally less than an hour long and who knows, you may learn something.

Super 8

Summer blockbusters are not my thing.  Traditionally they’re over-produced, rehashed sequels, or movies featuring racist robots that transform into cars whilst thing explode.  Super 8 caught my attention because it is not a reboot, a superhero movie or a sequel, instead, it is an “original” film.  (I feel like it requires air-quotes because it draws heavily from films you’ve probably already seen.)

When I told people that I saw Super 8 the most common comment I got was, “Oh, I saw the commercial for that.  Have no idea what it’s about.”  Abrams likes to keep an air of mystery about all his projects; what was Lost about again? So I’m not surprised that no one really knows what it’s about before seeing it.  I’m not sure why it’s a secret, but apparently it is.  Well I’m going to let you in on it.

The movie opens at a funeral and we learn that 12 year old,  Joe (Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother.  He is left in the care of his distant father and spends his time with his friends, filming a zombie horror movie on their super 8 camera.  While filming late one night they are witness to a train crash that unleashes an unseen monster into the night.  The kids don’t see the monster and are more concerned with what would happen if thier parents found out that they were there.  As with most stories where a monster escapes: it doesn’t stay hidden or secret for very long.

While the trailers tend to make it seem like the film was a scary movie it really isn’t, it’s intense - with action and explosions aplenty.  The train crash was intense and really well done, but despite being a monster movie it failed to provide any real scares or surprises.

One thing that did surprise was the comedy.  I found myself laughing much more than I expected to.  The young actors delivered their lines with good comic wit and timing.  I can’t say if this is a compliment to the actors or Abrams for being able to drag that kind of acting out of children, but the films comedy helps it remain lite.

It’s easy to see that Super 8 was heavily influenced by producer Steven Spielberg, but what’s hard to say is if this happened during the filming, or if it is a result of J.J. Abrams watching Spielberg’s films as a kid.  Abrams grew up during Spielberg’s sci-fi stage, when he released Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.  The movie draws quite a bit from those films, with a dash of Jurassic Park.  I also couldn’t help but feel like the movie also resembled The Goonies and Sandlot, but that may just be a result of the young ensemble cast.  While it takes from all these movies it didn’t feel like a rehash but instead like an evolution of movies that I’ve enjoyed in the past.  While those were the start of something, this feels like the close of that chapter.  To those of us that are the target audience of twenty-five to thirty this is a remembrance of adolescence and childhood wonder.

I don’t know if Super 8 will be as long lasting as those other films, if I had to guess I’d say it won’t.  It’s probably missing whatever that magic piece is that makes something like E.T. a staple for 30 years.  That still doesn’t mean that this is a movie to miss, with the summer blockbuster list consisting of transformers and superheros that couldn’t be any more uninteresting, Super 8 might be one of the few good films that come out this summer, at least until award season rolls back around.  

-JP

Viral Video

Trailer
Super 8
Written & Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Staring: Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths, and Elle Fanning

The Mighty Ducks

I decided today was a feel good movie type of day, and to fill that bill, I went with the 1992 classic, The Mighty Ducks starring the great Emilio Estevez and a veritable who’s who of child actors, many of whom have gone on to lead great acting careers.

The film starts off introducing us to a young Gordon Bombay getting a ‘pep’ talk, “If you miss you aren’t just letting me down, you’re letting your whole team down,” from his coach before heading out to make a penalty shot that would make or break the team’s goal of district champs in 1972. Bombay misses the shot and his hockey career is over before it even begins. Fast-forward 20 years and we see Bombay, lawyer at large 30-1 (he’ll claim 0 since he scored with one of the court officials) thinking his life is pretty sweet. After yet another win in the courtroom he decides to have a little fun with drinking and driving (the first of many lessons in the film) when he is pulled over and sentenced to 500 hours of community service coaching the District 5 youth hockey team.

The team is a ragtag bunch of kids who barely know which end of the stick is used to hit the puck, let alone where they should go once they have that figured out. Bombay takes what he learned from his coach when he played and begins yelling at his team to listen, and when that fails, he resorts to teaching his team to take dives and fake injury in order to raise their chances of winning. It doesn’t work out so well and Gordon is eventually confronted by one of his team members, Charlie Conway, played by an extremely young Joshua Jackson who convinces Gordon, along with some help from Gordon’s old friend Hans, who also owns the local hockey supply store, to develop his own form of coaching which leads to playing hockey with eggs, tying the goalie to the goal and having the team hit pucks at him, and playing catch with a football when warming up for a game.

Once Gordon decides he has to coach his own way and not the way his coach taught him, the team begins to pull together and grow, picking up a couple of figure skaters and a hard hitting giant of a kid who breaks a lot of windows and can hit the goal one out of every five shots.

The team grows because of a rise in self-respect, respect for each other, and respect for Gordon. They aren’t just kids from a poor neighborhood any more. They’re better than they were, they aren’t District 5, they are the Ducks. The Mighty Ducks and they’re here to play hockey and have fun!

Once the ducks begin playing as a team, they start winning, thus begins the great montage of game clips leading up to the culmination of the film, the district finals against Gordon’s childhood team, and coach, the Hawks. The Ducks already lost to the Hawks early in the season when they were still lowly District 5, but they are more than ready for this final grudge match to claim the title. Throughout the final match we are kept in suspense, as the Hawks are stronger and faster and better players leaving the Ducks behind 2-0 in the first period. The Ducks manage to get their score back up and in the third period we are shown our first glimpse of the now legendary Flying V maneuver. The Flying V is exactly what it sounds like, when viewed from above it looks like the migratory flight pattern that ducks take when heading south. The puck is passed within the V as they fly down the ice and scoring a goal leaving us with a nail biting 4-4 score. Then the penalty kicks in and the Ducks have one final chance to beat the Hawks. Gordon asks his team who should get to take the final shot and it is decided that Charlie should finish what the team began at the beginning of the season.

This is the time for Bombay to really shine and show his team, Charlie, and the audience watching, what he’s learned through his ordeals from dealing with work, his old coach, and becoming the coach he is now. He pulls Charlie aside and tells him “You may make it, you may not. But that doesn’t matter Charlie, what matters is that we’re here! Look around, who would have even thought we’d make it this far? One, two, three, triple deke. Take your best shot, I believe in you Charlie, win or lose.”

This may seem a little cheesy, but watch it and I dare you not to get a big goofy grin on your face. Yes, it may still be cheesy as heck but it’s a good message and you’ve got to love Disney and their not so subliminal messages to youth and adults alike.

The Mighty Ducks is a timeless story of the underdogs coming up to be heroes. It shows what sportsmanship should be. It shows what hockey used to be. Maybe it’s time for Vancouver to re-watch this classic and learn a thing or ten about what being a sports fan really means.