Movie #986: Eragon

Eragon is a fantasy/adventure movie starring Ed Speleers, Rachel Weisz, John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Robert Carlyle, Sienna Guillory, and Garrett Hedlund. It's based on a fantasy novel (first in a series, as is the custom) written by a homeschooled kid from Montana when he was 15. I mention that just because I think it kinda shows. 

So anyway: the titular Eragon (Speleers) is a farm boy living with his uncle (Alun Armstrong) and his cousin (Christopher Egan) in the mystical land of Alagaësia ruled over by the evil King Galbatorix (Malkovich, collecting a paycheck), his slimy vampire/mage servant Durza (Carlyle), and an army of...Urgals? Basically reddish orcs. Also some men. 

Anyway, our Arwen analog, Arya (Guillory), fleeing from Durza with a big blue jellybean, magics it away and it winds up in Eragon's lap, and then soon hatches into a dragon named Safira (Wiesz), which is a cute little puppy-thing at first but grows up really quickly (apparently by magic). From there we get your standard hero's journey; Eragon hooks up with the village sad sack Brom (Irons, apparently enjoying himself) who turns out to be a disgraced dragon-rider and insists on taking Eragon to the Varden (the resistance living in the mountains, led by Djimon Hounsou before he learned to act).

Oh, dragon-riding is a big deal. Used to be that the dragon-riders were...you know, I don't actually know what their function in Analgesia was? Elite troops? Superheroes? Demigods? Likewise, this couldn't all have been that long ago because Brom was a dragon-rider and he's still alive (his dragon isn't; a rider can survive the death of a dragon but not vice versa, in a move we call the "one-sided Dragonheart"), but everyone in Eragon's village seems to regard them as myth? Anyway, Eragon is the first dragon-rider in a long time and that's a big screaming deal for getting the resistance to rally and go after the king or something.

This movie is bad, and I've been thinking about why. It's not the effects, those are actually pretty good. Obviously the dragon is CGI, but it looks decent - there were no moments that looked badly, obviously fake. The sound design when it's a puppy is actually really cute. The fight scenes are pretty shit, lots of jumpy cuts and these people clearly didn't do their own stunts, but whatever, not everything can be Lord of the Rings. 

No, I think it's bad because it feels at once very familiar and like they're not telling us enough. We don't really learn much about the history and culture of Aphantasia, just the very broad strokes that set up the plot. But without the context of that history, it's hard to know what the stakes really are. And at the same time, it feels so much like a surface-level Lord of the Rings (or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, or whatever) knock-off that we feel like we're going through the motions. 

If we had a lead that was charismatic and fun to spend time with, that might be something, but I'm sorry, Ed Speleers is no Daniel Radcliffe. He's OK, but he's blond and bland and...so, so white (as in bread), and it was another five years after this movie that he started getting work again (he has gone on to a fairly steady career, so presumably he learned to act at some point). Malkovich is phoning it in with an apathy that's almost inspiring; at least Carlyle and Irons muster the energy to chew the scenery. Guillory would have been more interesting with more to do, same for Hedlund as Murtagh, the rogue/ranger who shows up to follow Eragon around. I kept hoping they'd kiss, that at least would have been interesting. 

I have no idea if the book is any better (it'd almost have to be, since a lot of my complaints cook down to the movie letting the audience's knowledge of other fantasy properties fill in the gaps and the book probably doesn't do that at least as much), but it's pretty telling that the planned sequels to this movie were cancelled. Throw it on the heap with Alex Rider. 

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Siren

Movie #985: Sinners

Sinners is a horror movie (but that's really simplifying it) directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, and Li Jun Li. 

In 19332, the Moore Twins, "Smoke" and "Stack" (both played by Jordan in an Oscar-winning role), return to the Mississippi Delta after serving in the Army and then going to Chicago to work for the Mob (Capone is mentioned, but they were apparently playing both ends against the middle anyway). They set up a juke joint and recruit their cousin Sammie (Caton) to sing and play guitar, local blues legend Delta Slim (Lindo) to play music, Smoke's wife Annie (Mosaku) to cook, local grocer Grace (Li) and her husband Bo (Yao) to provide signage and materials, and their very lorge buddy Cornbread (Miller) to work the door. 

They open the place and play host to a bunch of locals, including Stack's ex-lover Mary (Steinfeld) and Sammie's crush Pearline (Lawson), and Sammie blows the doors off playing and singing; his music reaches across time and summons dancers and musicians from the past and the future, the roof burns, and everyone comes together in reverie. 

While the joint is hopping, however, an Irish vampire named Remmick (O'Connell) shows up, and this situation turns into From Dusk Til Dawn real fast - everyone is killed except for Sammie and Smoke, and Smoke hangs around until the dude who sold the twins the place (David Maldonado - the dude, not the place) comes back with all his Klan buddies and fucking massacres them. Cut to 1992, and Sammie is an old man playing the blues in Chicago when Stack and Mary (both vampires) show up to say hi and offer him immortality (which he refuses). 

There is so, so much I'm leaving out, because this movie is goddamn fantastic and layered and beautiful. It is legit one of the best horror movies ever made, it's beautiful shot and visually realized, and the soundtrack and score are the best things I've heard in a movie since O Brother Where Art Thou? Michael B. Jordan's performance is amazing, he makes both of the twins distinct and recognizable, and manages to act with himself to the point that it's very easy to forget that it's one actor playing both roles. Miles Caton is not only an amazing singer, but imbues Sammie with an old soul quality and a naivety that makes him a perfect POV character, but this is very much an ensemble cast. We get Mary's frustration at not being allowed to be fully part of this world, Pearline clearly just being out for fun and then being pulled into something much bigger (and then killed), and Annie realizing, I think before everyone else does, that there's no way any of them are walking away.

And then there's Jack O'Connell, playing a vampire who adapts his approach in seconds, going from begging for his life when he's being chased by vampire hunters to trying to talk people into letting him and his cohort in (they're that type of vampire) to resorting the vicious threats when manipulation doesn't work. And yet, you can almost feel a bit of sympathy for him, as he mentions that long ago his people were driven out by the Christians, and all he wants is to see his people and hear his own music again. 

I don't really have criticisms. This was my pick for Best Picture last year, and I'm still annoyed that One Battle After Another, which by comparison I found really trite and forgettable, beat it. 

My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: Probably whatever Toasty gives me today, but failing that, Siren

Movie #984: The Adventures of Pluto Nash

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is a famously bad sci-fi/comedy starring Eddie Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Randy Quaid, Jay Mohr, Joe Pantoliano, Luis Guzmán, Pam Grier, and James Rebhorn. 

Pluto Nash (Murphy) is a smuggler living on the lunar colony of "Little America" after getting out of prison. He intervenes when his buddy Frank (Mohr) is about to be killed by gangsters, and winds up owning Tony's shithole nightclub. Over the next few years he turns it into a highly successful spot, but then gets a visit from Mogan (Pantoliano), a thug working for the mysterious Rex Crater, the unseen mob boss and casino mogul of the Moon. He wants to buy the club, and isn't subtle about it - he sets off a bomb when Nash refuses and sends thugs to kill him.

Nash goes on the run with his robot bodyguard Bruno (Quaid) and Dina, a waitress he's befriended (Dawson), and works on getting to Crater to try and...you know, I'm not sure what his plan was. Kill him? Try and talk him down? It doesn't much matter, because when he finally does (spoilers for a 24-year-old movie with 6% on Rotten Tomatoes), it turns out Rex is a clone of Nash himself! Laser-fight ensues, Crater falls to his death, happy ending. 

OK, so...this wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It is by no means a good movie, please don't misunderstand me, but having seen all four Alvin & the Chipmunks movies (dammit Toasty) and Farty the Fart Fart: Health Infartstor (DAMMIT TOASTY) this year, this is goddamn pleasant in comparison. We're very much in the post-edgey phase of Murphy's career, and Pluto Nash is a watered-down version of Axel Foley, but like...Foley's kind of a dick, right? Nash is a kind, competent guy, and god help me, he's kind of fun to spend time with. Randy Quaid is...doing his best; what a "robot" is in the context of his movie and how much sapience they have is pretty wibbly. Rosario Dawson is charming and beautiful as always, and turns in hands-down the best performance in the movie (imagine what she could do with a good script!). 

This movie seems to want to be a sci-fi 1940s detective-ish movie (I don't want to say noir, because that's not really what's happening, but let's say it's trying to be something that people would mischaracterize as noir, how's that), but it doesn't have the balls to do anything really challenging or edgy and it can't quite decide how silly it wants to be. Pam Grier is utterly wasted as Pluto's mom (and like, black don't crack but Grier is only 12 years old than Murphy while Murphy is 18 years old than Dawson, his love interest, so, um, that's a thing). 

But, on the plus side, there's some interesting world-building - gambling is outlawed on Earth, which is why we're having this kind of Vegas rush to the Moon. Jay Mohr's Tony parlays Pluto's suggestion that he adopt an Italian-American persona into a glitzy career as crooner "Tony Francis", and he remembers his friend and doesn't turn out to be a bad guy or sell him out, which I liked. I actually kinda like the twist of Rex Crater being Pluto's clone - it made sense within the story, it's telegraphed a bit by cloning be clearly a thing available to the rich and powerful, and we got a good bait-and-switch with Alec Baldwin having a cameo as a gangster that disappeared after coming to the moon. There were a couple of genuinely amusing bits in the movie, and that's more than I can say for most of the shit movies I've watched recently. 

I think this movie got the hate that it did because it's a) bad, but in a kind of flabby, unfocused kind of way, rather than actively awful or offensive and b) it stars Eddie Murphy, so that lack of bite is even worse. But like...I would watch this again in a heartbeat before I'd ever view another fucking Chipmunks movie.

My Grade: C-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Sinners

Movie #983: Reign of Fire

Reign of Fire is a post-apocalypse/action movie starring Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco, Gerald Butler, and Scott Moutter. 

Quinn (Ben Thornton) is a young boy who visits his mother (Alice Krige) at her construction site in London, and is there when the crew breaks into a chamber and finds a fucking dragon. Then we fast forward a bunch of years, Quinn grows up (into Bale), and has taken charge of a group of survivors in a castle in Northumberland. They're growing food and trying to outlast the dragons, which are dying out from starvation, but they're running out of food, too, morale is low, and Quinn and his wacky Scottish buddy Creedy (Butler) are just barely holding it together.

And then an American Army dude named Van Zan shows up with a bunch of soldiers, tanks, and a fricking helicopter (dragons have been the only thing in the skies for years), and they know how to kill dragons! And they demonstrate when one comes calling...except it kills three of them, Van Zan goes psycho, grabs a few of the survivors and leads them to London to kill the only male dragon (they're "like fish," you see, the solitary male fertilizes all the eggs that the females lay), but that goes tits up, everyone except Van Zan and his pilot Alex (Scorupco) die, the immense male dragon burns the castle, and it falls to Quinn, Alex, and Van Zan to go back to London and kill the dragon!

This movie, man. There are a bunch of really cool ideas. I love the notion of an apocalypse triggered by dragons. I love that at the survivors' castle they're acting out Star Wars (well, Empire, because why both doing the boring shit?) for the kids. The sequence of the soldiers taking down the dragon was the most exciting action in the movie (well, unless super-jacked Matthew McConaughey takes his shirt off, but that's another story), to the point that the final battle against the male was forgettable. 

I think this script just needed...something? Something to punch it up and make awesome and get us to marvel at the dragons? Maybe just showing the dragons more would have helped, because you don't actually see them all that much (the shot where we finally see the male near a bunch of females for scale is pretty awesome, but very brief). 

Generally, this movie is firmly mediocre and I enjoy it because of the few spots that aren't. The cast is one (some very talented people here), the commune in the castle is pretty cool, but this is a movie that I'd love to see a remake from a more talented director/writer.

My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium 

Next up: Sinners, but I have this feeling it's gonna get bumped when I see Toasty today 

ETA: I was right, goddammit. The Adventures of Pluto Nash, FFS.

Movie #982: Send Help

Send Help is a horror/comedy directed by Sam Raimi and starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O'Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, and Thaneth Warakulnukroh. 

Linda Liddle (McAdams) is capable and diligent in her job in Strategy and Planning at...some company run by Bradley Preston (O'Brien), but she's socially awkward, mousy, and does horrible things like eat tuna at her desk (oh noes! but then, I like tuna). She's passed up for a promotion that Preston gives to his inexperienced, kind of dumb frat buddy (Samuel), but recognizing that he needs her expertise for at least a little while, brings her along on a trip to Thailand to squeeze her for any amount of work he can before shipping her off to a satellite office. 

But then the plane goes down and Linda and Bradley wind up the only survivors, stuck together on a beautiful island with no help coming. As it turns out, Linda is a survivalist and actually auditioned to be on Survivor, so she takes to it like a fish to water (except she eats the fish). Bradley continues being an absolute douchecanoe until it becomes obvious that he will die without Linda, whereupon he tries to manipulate her into teaching him stuff, but remains focused on the utterly impractical plan of building a raft and getting home. 

Everything kind of spirals from there, and here we enter spoiler territory: It turns out that the island isn't uninhabited, there's a house on it belonging to some billionaire and Linda has been visiting the house to get supplies and freshen up. She's still very much a capable survivalist, of course, but she could have arranged their rescue at any time. Oh, and she straight up murders Bradley's fiancée Zuri (Ismail), who'd been searching the islands in the area with a boat captain she hired (Warakulnukroh) by dropping them off a cliff. 

I really like this movie, and I like it all the more because Linda isn't the hero. Yes, she's put upon, underappreciated, passed over, and abused by her boss...but like, she murders two people (possibly three; she claims she allowed her abusive ex-husband to drive drunk and that's how he died, but we have only her word to go on and we know she's capable of both self-delusion and straight-up lying when necessary). There's apparently a lot of debate about who to root for, because if not Linda, then...Bradley? Bradley is a dick in a much more "rich white guy" sense, and it would be easy to think that the worst thing he's ever done is the usual privilege corporate boy's club shit, but then he tries to poison Linda to escape on his stupid raft (that doesn't work). 

Most of the effects are solid; not crazy about the CGI boars, but it's pretty minor. The really goopy stuff - Bradley eating a bug, the blood makeup during the end fight - look really good on screen, and it's really nice to see Raimi getting back to original horror stories (first horror movie he'd done since Drag Me to Hell). 

Michelle pointed out that, plot-wise, it's got a lot in common with The African Queen, and it's amusing to think of a movie like this getting made with Katherine Hepburn in Rachel McAdams' role. 

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: Sinners

Movie #981: The Road Warrior

The Road Warrior, also known as Mad Max 2, is the second in the Mad Max series and stars Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Max Phipps, Kjell Nilsson, Emil Minty, Virginia Hey, and William Zappa. 

It's the future and there's no gas, but everyone's driving around in cars?! I DON'T GET IT NO STARS.

No, just kidding (it's a Patton Oswalt bit). It is the future, the world has largely blown itself up, and here we are in the wilds of Australia. People have devolved into tribes and gangs, and then there are lone dudes like Max (Gibson) who roll through the wasteland just surviving. (Max actually lost his family in the first movie, which I've seen but it's been a really long time.)

Anyway, Max runs afoul of the warrior-minions of Lord Humungus, escapes them and winds up teaming up/taking hostage the Gyro Captain (Spence). Gyro leads him to a settlement with a working oil refinery, and the settlers are doing OK except that Humungus attacks them daily and tries to take their gas (so maybe they're not doing that great). Max rolls in just as the Feral Child (Minty) kills one of the marauders (Jimmy Brown) with a boomerang, Humungus tells the settlers to fuck off and leave their gas, and the settlers' opinion on what to do is split.

In the end they decide to bargain with Max - he agrees to bring back a tanker in exchange for gas and supplies. He does, and then tries to leave, whereupon a couple of marauders chase him down, crash his car and kill his dog, so Max returns to the settlement to drive the tanker. And then we get a protracted car chase/battle that ends with many of the important settlers dying, the tanker crashing...but we (along with Max) discover it's full of sand while the gas is actually with the settlers.

I hadn't seen this movie previously - I actually bought it thinking it was the first one, but that's Mad Max (which I have seen, but it's been a while). I think all of the Mad Max movies stand on their own, though. They remind me in some ways of Conan stories; they're really legends about this warrior of the wasteland, rather than telling a cohesive story, which is fine. Gibson is fine but entirely too pretty as Max (I really prefer Tom Hardy's take on the character). Bruce Spence is really the life of this party as the Gyro Captain, providing any exposition and dialog we need. 

George Miller has apparently always known how to do a post-apocalyptic car battle, because although Fury Road is better overall, that's because he had a better budget and years of experience behind him. The battle here hits some of the same notes, and while we know that Max is going to survive, there's very much the feeling that anyone else is fair game. I had no idea, for instance, if the Feral Child was going to survive, and that kind of tension is impressive. 

Effects are impressive and of course they're all practical, so even 45 years later they still hold up. I don't know that the opening narration and stock footage showing how the world ended was necessary, but it doesn't really hurt anything. 

Kinda want to see Beyond Thunderdome now.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Send Help

Movie #980: Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip

Thank fuck this is over.

Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip is, mercifully, the last of the Chipmunks quadrilogy and stars Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Jason Lee, Tony Hale, Josh Green, and Kimberly Williams-Paisley. Note that David Cross escaped this franchise after three movies. 

As with Chipwrecked, this is basically a cartoon episode plot or three stitched together. Dave (Lee) has been dating Samantha (Williams-Paisley) and things are getting serious, so Dave is taking her to Miami for the...I don't know, some kind of party involving a pop star (Bella Thorne) that he's producing. He leaves the Chipmunks (Long, Gubler, McCartney) in the care of Samantha's sadistic son Miles (Green), but the four of them find an engagement ring and decide that if they steal the ring, no engagement can take place!

I want to pause here and note that in Bender's Big Score, the first of the four Futurama DVD movies, Fry attempts to stop Leela from getting married by swapping out the pen they intend to use to sign the marriage license with one with no ink. This is played as what it is: An idiotic plan that will obviously not work. Here, the very similar plan is played as something that will work. Mostly I just wanted to think about Futurama for a minute rather than this bullshit.

OK, anyway. The kids try to fly but wind up downing the plane (like, it lands, it doesn't crash), and they run afoul of evil Air Marshal Suggs (Hale) who puts them on a no-fly list and then chases them across the country to...put them in animal jail? It's not clear. Anyway, this isn't the titular "road chip" anyway.

They don't even get to Miami. They get as far as New Orleans when they wind up on social media, Dave and Samantha come to find them, and then they wind up on the road trip back to Miami and then there's some last minute "oh, wait, we stole the ring but we now want them to marry but lol they weren't even going to get married Dave was just holding the ring for someone else!"

This movie feels, for all the world, like a straight-to-DVD release. It's not. It got a theatrical release in December 2015 and finished its opening weekend second in the box office behind The Force Awakens, because the studio really decided to go head-to-head with Star Wars. It was also nominated for three Razzies and won one, but it won for poor Kaley Cuoco for Worst Supporting Actress taking over for Amy Poehler as Eleanor (oh, right, the Chipettes are also (barely) in this movie), which doesn't make any sense because she's hardly in it.

Look, none of these movies were good. They're interesting in a "look what kind of shit used to get made" kind of way - nowadays this kind of movie would go straight to streaming. Of the four, I think the third one is the "best", and this one might be the "worst", and all of them are better than Larry fart Cable Fart: Fart Infartor, so that bar manages to remain where it was. 

In conclusion, I do not understand the appeal of the Chipmunks, and these movies aren't even interesting enough to be annoying. They're just cutely bland. 

My Grade: F
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: The Road Warrior

Movie #979: The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy is a 1931 crime drama starring James Cagney, Edward Woods, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert O'Connor, Jean Harlow, Murray Kinnell, Frankie Darro, and Frank Coghlan Jr. 

We begin with the early life of Tom Powers (Coghlan Jr.) and his best buddy Matt Doyle (Darro) as Tom sneaks beer, steals things, hurts people for no reason, and gets beat with a belt by his father (hey, I think I might have spotted some of the problem!). And then he grows up into James Cagney (and Doyle into Edwards Woods), his older brother Mike (Cook) stayed in school and is a good, honorable fella who enlists in the Army just in time for the Great War, and Tom and Matt have started running with local small-time hood Putty Nose (Kinnell). 

Putty Nose cuts and runs after Tom and Matt kill a cop (there are literally no consequences for this for them, ever), but fortunately Prohibition hits, and Paddy Ryan (O'Connor) is there to pick up the slack with his charming and kinda scary boss, Nails Nathan (Fenton). Tom and Matt live high on the hog, meet girls, Matt marries, Tom kicks his girlfriend Kitty (Mae Clarke) to the curb when he meets Gwen (Harlow), Nails dies in an accident and the whole thing erupts into a gang war that leaves Matt dead. Tom goes to singlehandedly kill the entire Schemer Burns mob, and predictably gets shot. He winds up in hospital until they kidnap him, kill him, and dump his dumb ass at home for his brother to find. 

I'm being a little flip, but this is actually a really good movie. Cagney shows us a character that we would now call a psychopath, utterly without remorse, impulsive, violent, and so forth. In what is perhaps the most telling moment of the movie, after Nails dies Tom and Matt go to the stable, buy the horse that threw him, and fucking shoot it. 

The plot would later be reused multiple times, often by Martin Scorcese. You can see the influence - guy rises in a criminal enterprise, gets too big for his britches or sticks around past when the getting is good, winds up dead. Except the vibe here is very much "hey, society creates people like Tom Powers and we're going to have to deal with that shit at some point." I was expecting this movie to be a lot more moralistic than it was; aside from the end plates it just kind of presents Tom as the monster he is but doesn't waggle its finger or shy away from showing how much fun he's having. 

The Public Enemy is one of those movies that you feel like you've seen even if you haven't seen it, and I always love watching those because it's fun to see where tropes come from. 

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-low, I think?

Next Up: Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip. At least it's the last one

Movie #978: Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked is the third movie in the Chipmunks quadrilogy and stars, once again, Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris, Jason Lee, and David Cross, and adds Jenny Slate and Alan Tudyk to the mix. 

The Chipmunks and the Chipettes are going on vacation! Dave (Lee) brings them on board a Carnival Cruise (yay product placement), whereupon everyone tries to have fun except Alvin (Long) insists on being a complete asshole and gets everyone in trouble. Simon (Gubler) continually tries to keep him in line so that his insistence on being a dick doesn't splash back on the others, but is of course unable to do so. And then due to a series of wacky cartoony mishaps, the little CGI abominations get sucked out to sea on a hang glider and crash onto an island. Dave grabs a people-sized hang glider to go after them, but his old nemesis Ian Hawke (Cross), now working as a pelican mascot for the cruise line and intent on ruining Dave's life, wrestles him for it and they both wind up on the island! 

Neither side aware of the other, the Chipmunks try to survive. They run across Zoe (Slate), a FedEx pilot who crash landed here multiple years ago (but still has access to hair care and makeup and soap, because she looks perfectly clean) and has been surviving as a Castaway parody ever since. A spider bites Simon and turns him into Simone (Tudyk), a French adventurer, making him fun and adventurous and pushing Alvin and his Chipette counterpart Brittany (Applegate) into the responsible ones. Theodore (McCartney), Jeanette (Faris), and Eleanor (Poehler) don't have much to do. Theodore obsesses over a horror movie he saw, I guess, and Eleanor breaks her foot. Whatever. 

So, turns out Zoe is here for treasure and tries to force Jeanette to retrieve it, Rescuers-style, because there is literally nothing original about this movie. Ian and Dave spar over Ian being a selfish, terrible person, but then he kind of has a redemption arc because there's nothing else to do with him at this point, eventually they make it back to civilization in time to do a concert!

I mean, it's more of the same. I found this one a little (a little) more watchable just because it reminded me more of the 1983 cartoon, but like, it's still a bunch of CGI creatures singing pop songs in unintelligible squeaky voices, David Cross and Jason Lee shilling for a paycheck, and now Jenny Slate acting silly. The only time in the movie I laughed was a bit where Ian and Dave are bedding down for the night and Ian, still dressed as a pelican, has built a nest. That's the best joke in the movie. 

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: The Public Enemy

Movie #977: Priest

Priest is an action...horror? I guess movie starring Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Cam Gigandet, Lily Collins, Maggie Q, and utterly wasting the talents of Christopher Plummer and Brad Dourif. 

In a world (IN A WORLD) where vampires are these gloopy, pale, eyeless monsters, the Church employs Priests - some kind of super-warriors with jumpy-flippy powers and cool weapons - to beat them back. This works too well, they win the war, and the priests are assimilated into society, which would be easier if they didn't have fucking crosses tattooed on their faces. One such Priest (Bettany) has retired to a life of brooding when vampires kill his sister-in-law (Mädchen Amick), mortally wound his brother (Stephen Moyer), and kidnap his niece Lucy (Collins). 

Priest asks the Church Council to be reinstated, but the lordy high monsignor guy (Plummer) tells him to piss off, we won the war, no more vampires, these are just raiders out in the wastelands. Obviously Priest can't let that go, so he follows Sheriff Hicks (Gigandet), the local law and also Lucy's boyfriend, out into the wastelands where he kills a bunch of familiars (pale humans with weird eyes) and vampires, until he discovers that this is all being orchestrated by a former priest-turned-vampire (Urban)! 

This is based on a graphic novel, and it very much feels like it. It's also inspired by Blood, the old first-person shooter video game, which I've never played. It's a little sad in some ways, because it's got a great cast, Bettany is doing his best and he's actually pretty good as an action hero, and the premise has some schlocky gothic potential. But it just kinda...ploops out? 

Like, these things are "vampires," which is fine, they're night-stalking creatures that drink blood. But what are they? It's a big screaming deal that Black Hat (Urban's character) is a "human vampire", but that's never discussed until close to the end. Familiars can handle sunlight, and that's apparently what happens when people get bitten, but people can be "infected" - does that mean they grow into the gross hanging blob-cocoons that Priest finds in the vampire train? The logistics are never explained, and that's only a problem because these are "vampires" and that word has a lot of baggage that I don't think we really needed. 

Also, making the movie PG-13 was a bad choice. This was in 2011, when everything had to be PG-13 (we were in the early stages of the MCU and the studios were realizing how much money there was in adapting comics and bringing in the 13-20 demographic, but they apparently missed that you have to adapt them well), so here we have a movie about brutal vampires that had to animate part of its sequence so it could show blood and dismemberment (the animated sequence is pretty cool, granted).

It's not a bad watch, it's fun to watch Bettany nibble scenery and Urban and Dourif chew it, but it's dark and dour and it could have been more interesting. 

My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Public Enemy, technically, though I suspect I'm going to get another crappy movie from Toasty today

Movie #976: The Omega Man

The Omega Man is a sci-fi post-apocalypse flick starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash, Paul Koslo, Lincoln Kilpatrick, and Eric Launeville. 

Neville (Heston) is the last man on Earth...sort of. He was a government scientist who was working on a vaccine for "the plague," a bio-engineered disease that causes people to choke out and die within minutes. He gets the plague but injects himself with the drug before he dies, making him immune, but he doesn't have the apparatus to make more and most of the world is dead anyway.

Not all, though. Sufferers of the plague sometimes turn into white-skinned, light-sensitive ghouls, led in a fanatical society by Mathias (Zerbe). They see Neville as the last remnant of the old world (they call him a "follower of the wheel," which I thought was a nicely poetic touch) and want to kill him to cement their hold on the new world.

But then Neville finds a small enclave of children, looked after by Lisa (Cash) and Dutch (Koslo). They all have the plague but it doesn't make you a ghoul or kill you right away, necessarily. Neville, now having a reason to bother, uses his own blood as a way to make a cure, but gets stabbed and bleeds out in a fountain in the most heavy-handed religious metaphor ever put to film. 

This is the second film adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (the first was 1964's The Last Man on Earth, and then in 2007 we got I Am Legend starring Will Smith). It's interesting to me, reading the synopses of the other two movies, that all of them involve Neville dying at the end, but the original novel and the 1964 version have Neville dying as a monster (the titular "legend") while the Heston and Smith versions have him heroically sacrificing himself after fashioning a cure. I knew that there was an alternate ending to the Smith version that was closer to the novel, but it still misses the biggest point of the novel: That the infected have a society and that they are afraid of the last man on Earth, because he hunts them during the day and kills them.

So taking The Omega Man as its own thing rather than an adaptation of Matheson's novel, it's a fun dystopian film. The shots of Los Angeles completely empty as Neville drives around are haunting, and Heston does a good job of portraying Neville as just a bit screwy from isolation. The monsters aren't terribly threatening - they look scary and Mathias' rhetoric is appropriately fanatical, but they're pale people wearing robes (that they seem to spontaneously generate, because I don't know where the hell else they're getting them) that won't use guns, so they're only dangerous in numbers. (In the novel, they're flat-out vampires.) Rosalind Cash's performance is good, but then she becomes infected and turns white and spends the rest of the movie waffling between joining "the Family" and trying to help Neville. It's a little muddled.

Anyway, it's a classic and a staple of the genre, but it's a pretty poor adaptation of the source material, and now I really want to see The Last Man on Earth. 

My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Priest

Movie #975: Observe & Report

Observe & Report is a dark comedy starring Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Ray Liotta, Michael Peña, Collette Wolfe, Jesse Plemmons, Aziz Ansari, Celia Weston, John Yuan, and Matthew Yuan. It's...not great.

Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) is the head of mall security at...a mall (I'm sure the name is mentioned but it's not important). He takes himself very seriously. It would be easy to say he takes his job seriously, but that's not remotely accurately - his job is just a way for him to live out his delusions of being a protector and a warrior. And then one day, a flasher (Randy Gambill) shows up and starts...flashing, and shows his junk to Brandi (Faris), a shallow, vapid, cosmetics salesperson who Ronnie happens to fixate on. 

The actual police, in the personage of Detective Harrison (Liotta) show up and try to do actual police work, and Ronnie fucks with the investigation every step of the way. And then the next night, someone vandalizes and burgles the mall, meaning Harrison has to come back again, and Ronnie fucks it all up again. Someone in here gives Ronnie the idea that he should be a cop so he applies, but fails the psych eval (because he has bipolar disorder and has gone off his meds because everything's going so great), we get our Abyss moment, he gets fired, he comes back to the mall, chases down the flasher, and fucking shoots him (nonfatally). 

There's a lot more I'm leaving out - he goes on a date with Brandi, there's a mall employee named Nell (Wolfe) that he flirts and talks with, and of course his right hand man Dennis (Peña, speaking with a strong lisp for some reason) turns out to be the thief. The movie does not work, and I've been trying to think about why. 

I think part of it is that Ronnie is a truly despicable person. Yes, some of that is mental illness (and also his dad left when he was very small, his mom (Weston) is an alcoholic who used to fuck his friends when he was in high school). But Ronnie is a ticking time bomb - he's a gun enthusiast, he's quite capably violent (in a plot decision I don't fully understand, he's shown to be very able to handle multiple opponents in a fight), and he's a misogynst, homophobic, racist, bigot. He sexually assaults Brandi more than once, and then assumes they're dating after their one pretty awful date (which he blackmailed her into). 

But also, the people around Ronnie don't...seem to mind? Like, a lot of people hate him, but his boss (Dan Bakkedahl) puts up with his bullshit for reasons I cannot fathom. Other folks just kind of soak up his abuse, and I have to assume some of it is because they're afraid of him (and rightly so, because he 100% reads as someone who's going to go on a shooting spree at some point), but even people who have the authority to call him out don't. 

Part of the issue is that there are no good or likeable characters in the movie. Like, exactly none. Jesse Plemmons' Charles gets close; he's a mall employee moving up to security guard and serves as a very quiet voice of reason, but then jumps in a fight against a horde of cops to help Ronnie. Nell is pathetic, but other than the fact that she's got a foot cast and can't walk and that she's a "born-again virgin," we never learn anything about her. Even Harrison, who is initially positioned as a cop just trying to do his job, snaps at Ronnie (which is reasonable) but then heaps slurs on him.

So if this is a "watch this character unravel" a la Taxi Driver (which the directed cited as an inspiration), OK, but why make it a comedy? Why try to position Ronnie as this loveable goof (which is what the trailers did)? Ronnie is not lovable, he's scary, and the fact that it's the Ronnie Barnhardts of the world who are now members of ICE just kind of puts a sobering spin on all this.

Dark comedy is tricky at the best of times, and this had some potential, but it did not stick the landing. The only things I can say in its defense is a) the needle drops are good (there's a cover of "Where Is My Mind?" that I quite enjoyed) and b) the awkward moments don't linger too long, which is often a problem in Rogen movies.

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IISNIAIFWT

Next up: The Omega Man

Movie #974: Barbarian

Barbarian is a horror movie directed by Zach Cregger and starring Georgina Campbell, Justin Long, Bill Skarsgård, and Matthew Patrick Davis.

Tess (Campbell) rolls up to a house she's rented online in a truly shitty part of Detroit, and discovers that that it's been double-booked. There's a young man named Keight (Skarsgård) staying there, and after a few tense moments in which Tess very clearly weighs the pros and cons of entering this house with a dude she doesn't know, they discover they actually run in some of the same circles and wind up having a very pleasant evening together, chatting and drinking wine.

And then the next day, Tess gets locked in the basement and discovers a hidden door leading into a dark, man-made sub-basement, quite reasonably says "fuck that", but winds up looking a little deeper and finding a room with a bed, a bucket, a video camera, and a bloody handprint on the wall. Keith gets back and helps her escape, and doesn't take her concerns seriously, goes into the tunnels...and vanishes. Tess follows when she hears him scream, finds him in the dark, and then a monster-woman (Davis) pops out of nowhere and beats him to death against the wall. 

(Sorry, did you think he was the lead?)

And then we cut to Hollywood, where actor A.J. Gilbride (Long) has just been accused of sexual assault by a coworker and is facing legal and financial issues. Turns out he actually owns the house, and he flies back to Detroit to sell it so he's got some money for lawyers. He, of course, stumbles into the hidden tunnels and finds Tess, and shit gets extremely fucky. 

Barbarian is really one of the most effective horror movies of the decade, in my humble opinion, and Zach Cregger does really amazing work. The camera work, the shot composition, but also how the story is structured - setting up the situation and then jumping back to see how we got here, and then going forward and seeing how whatever happened in the past has evolved (I'm thinking here of the serial killer (Richard Brake) hunting a woman (no idea, didn't catch the character's name), and then we see her dress in the basement in present day). The little details like the way the killer has the videos labeled - some by name, but some by physical details or actions - go a long way to helping us understand who this guy is and what he's done. 

The performances are all perfect. Both Skarsgård and Campbell play their initial meeting with an appropriate amount of trepidation, but then we get to see Keith just taking up space and becoming oblivious as it becomes obvious that he's not in danger, while Tess maintains her fear and guard. AJ, likewise, manages to get close to giving us some moments of humanity, but is never far from being a selfish and privileged jackass. And Matthew Patrick Davis gives us a terrifying but kind of sad performance as the Mother. 

This is probably the movie I've been most excited to get on DVD, since it's only just become available on physical media because fucking Disney didn't want to release it. Power the people! 

My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: Observe & Report

Movie #973: Bangkok Dangerous

Bangkok Dangerous is an action/drama flick directed by the Pang Brothers and starring Nicholas Cage (in his "must pay my back taxes" career phase), Shakrit Yamnarm, Charlie Yeung, Panward Hemmanee, and Nirattisai Kaljaruek. 

Joe (Cage) is a hitman livin' that hitman life - no connections, erase all traces of your passing, kill who you get paid to kill and don't worry about the morality of it. Deciding it's time to get out of the game, he books a gig in Bangkok - four separate hits for a crime syndicate - and when he gets there, recruits a young street hustler named Kong (Yamnarm) to be his errand boy and translator, fully intending to kill him when all is said and done.

Things don't quite go that way; Kong winds up getting into Joe's heart a little when he shows more loyalty and gumption than Joe expected, and Joe winds up falling for a deaf pharmacy...employee (I have no idea whether she's actually meant to be a pharmacist or just a clerk), Fon (Cheung). He mentors Kong in self-defense (maybe with an eye towards training him to be an assassin, but it never gets that far), and continues doing the jobs he's there for. And that's fine, because his targets are, as Kong points out, bad men. 

But then Joe is out with Fon and gets jumped by a couple of muggers, and he quickly kills them both, and Fon panics and runs away (I mean, obviously). Joe becomes despondent and goes back to doing his job, but chokes at the last minute because the fourth hit is on the goddamn Prime Minister (Keang Kunsri, I think), who Kong tells him is a good man. His employer, Surat (Kaljaruek) grabs up Kong and Aom (Hemmanee), Joe's informant and go-between whom Kong has been seeing, and Joe has to do the third act bloody rampage to free them! 

So...I actually didn't hate this movie. It's not bad. It's certainly better than the 9% on Rotten Tomatoes it's getting. Sure, it's not really treading any ground that The Mechanic, Leon the Professional, or Grosse Pointe Blank didn't already, but it's very different in tone than any of those, too. What's interesting is that it's a remake of the Pang Brothers' first film (same title), in which Kong was the POV character, was already a hitman, and he was the deaf-mute character (the conceit apparently being that gunshots didn't bother him because he can't hear them). So aspects of the characters get mixed around here, but the broad strokes seem similar. This includes the ending where Joe (Kong in the original) shoots himself in the head, simultaneously killing Surat. 

Second act drags a bit, but not painfully so. There are a couple of pretty effective scenes, most especially the one in which Joe mercilessly dispatches the two muggers and Fon stands looking out over the river, oblivious, until blood spatters her jacket. The action isn't anything to write home about, but it's fine. I actually like that while Joe is a competent marksman, he's not super accurate under pressure (he misses a lot during the river chase sequence). 

The standout performance is Yamnarm as Kong. Cage is playing Muted Cage (as opposed to Wild Cage), so we don't get much of a range from him, but I do like how he portrays Joe during the scenes where he's trying to get to know Fon and bumping up against the language barrier twice (she understands English, but of course speaks in sign). Kaljaruek's Surat is on the verge of being interesting, and I wish he'd gotten just a little more time to react when Joe threatens his wife to get him to back off. 

Overall, though, it's not high art but it's a solid enough action/drama, which is a hell of a lot more than I thought I'd say for it.

My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium-low

Next up: Barbarian

Movie #972: Nobody 2

Nobody 2 is the sequel to Nobody, and stars Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, RZA, John Ortiz, Sharon Stone, Colin Hanks, Gage Munroe, Paisley Cadorath, and Colin Salmon. 

We start just as the first movie did, with a beat-up looking Hutch (Odenkirk) sitting across from a couple of (probably) Feds (David Lawrence Brown and Denesha Lee-Labiuk), very conspicuously not explaining himself. Only this time, his wife Becca (Nielsen) and a dog are with him! And right here we have the theme of this movie; just like the first one, only this time Hutch's family is present the whole time.

Since the events of the first movie, Hutch has been working off the massive amount of Russian mob money he burned doing jobs for "the Barber" (Salmon). That, however, has resulted in undoing all of the character development we had in the first movie, and Hutch has again grown distant from Becca, his daughter Sammy (Cadorath), and his son Brady (Munroe). Realizing this, he takes the family to an amusement park that you would be forgiven for thinking is in Florida, but is in fact in Wisconsin, according to the wiki. Oh, and he takes his dad (Lloyd) with him.

He's barely there a day before he realizes that the cops here are hella corrupt (I mean, sure), as the local sheriff (Hanks) threatens him for staring a bit. Hutch does his best to make all this fun, but then his son gets in a fight in an arcade, the proprietor (didn't catch his name) smacks Sammy on the head, and Hutch goes back inside to whoop ass. And that results in the organized crime ring that runs this town, run by Lendina (Stone, but she doesn't show up until two-thirds of the way through), gunning for Hutch, until he, his father, and his brother (RZA) have to set up a trap-filled death-maze in the water park!

If it's not apparent, I...kinda wasn't a fan. I wanted to be. I really like Nobody, and I didn't realize until we'd started watching this that it's not from the same director. Derek Kolstad is credited as a writer, but if that's the case I'm not sure what happened. Nobody 2 is beat-for-beat the same movie, just with the set dressing changed. The problem with that is that it necessarily erases all of the character development from the first movie, because that movie ended with Hutch reestablishing himself as a badass but also realizing that he needed to be present for his family, and now we get to see him learn that lesson again. 

As long as I'm bitching: Sharon Stone was wasted in this role. She had a better character arc in Catwoman, even if the movie overall wasn't as good. Here, she just kinda shows up and acts nuts and kills people indiscriminately, and it comes off as a pale imitation of Alexei Serebryakov from the first movie. But again, he had some character traits beyond "bwa-ha-ha evil". 

The action scenes are fine, but they're nothing new and nothing special. There's a fight on a duckboat that's beat-for-beat the same as the bus fight in Nobody, and had me thinking "I should watch that instead." The best sequence in the movie is probably the fight in the arcade, not because the action is amazing, but because we're really on Hutch's side - but then the response gets completely over the top because this town is run by a nutbar with her own private army. 

The takeaway, here, is that I need to go back to not blind-buying movies, or at least sequels.

My Grade: C-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Barbarian, unless I get something beginning with "A" from Toasty today

Movie #971: Near Dark

Near Dark is a vampire horror movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenny Wright, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomerson, Joshua John Miller, and Marcie Leeds. 

Caleb (Pasdar) chats up the wrong young lady. Mae (Wright) talks about "listening to the night" and living forever, and Caleb, having never seen The Lost Boys (which in fairness opened around the same time as this movie so that's forgivable) presses her for a kiss and winds up getting a bite instead. He stumbles home, already smoking in the daylight, when an RV pulls up, someone yanks him in, and Caleb finds himself in a new family: A group of vampires.

The vampires' patriarch, Jesse (Henriksen), gives him a week to fit in or else he intends to let his eldest "child" (or should I say...childe? No, I shouldn't) Severen (Paxton) kill him. "Fitting in" here involves killing someone, since that's kinda how these vampires roll. Severen cleans himself up and seduces women to feed on them, Jesse and his vampiric bride Diamondback (Goldstein) pick up hitchhikers, and Homer (Miller), stuck as an eternal tween, lures in people by pretending to be hit by a car on his bike. 

Mae, for her part, seems to rely on her looks to get people alone. She and Caleb hitch a ride in a truck and she tries to get him to kill the trucker (Roger Aaron Brown), but he can't bring himself to do it...so she does. 

Yeah, these vampires are monsters, and that includes Mae, though she's a little more ambivalent about it than the others (and she does like Caleb a lot). The family rolls into a bar, intending this as a final test for Caleb, and slaughter the inhabitants in a truly terrifying manner (like, killing off the people one at a time, and in a such a matter-of-fact way that Jesse has cut the waitress' (Jan King) throat and drained her blood into a beer glass before the bartender (Thomas Wagner) really knows what's happening. 

Anyway, the one survivor in the bar (James Le Gros) is meant to be Caleb's first kill, but Caleb can't bring himself to do it, the guy flees, and the vampires are all set to kill him but get stuck in a hotel as the cops blow holes in it and the sun rises, and Caleb grabs their van and saves them!

Questionable decision, really. Anyway, meanwhile, Caleb's father (Thomerson) and sister (Leeds) are out searching for him, and wind up at the same hotel that the vampires go to after their escape! Caleb winds up getting his family out, and winds up cured by a...blood transfusion. 

This is a really good vampire movie that did not do well at the box office, largely because it opened right around Lost Boys (which...I don't think is better, I think they're about even as movies, but Lost Boys had a lot more money behind it). The vampire family has an obvious dynamic, and watching the behind-the-scenes they all came up with backstories and, most important, figured out the timeline for all of them getting turned. That actually made a big difference, I think, because Jesse and Severen have the clearest and strongest relationship, while Homer is perhaps closest to Diamondback and Mae, and Mae is really the odd one out generally (she's only been a vampire about four years). Caleb is actually probably the weakest character, but since he's meant to be our POV character that's probably pretty deliberate. 

I have a couple of niggles. I think the movie peaks after the bar scene, and the ending sequences where the vampires kind of all die inside of a few minutes feels a little rushed. I'm not sure how I feel about a simple blood transfusion curing vampirism, and I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that Mae has been murdering people and drinking their blood for years (and never really shows any remorse) and then gets cured at the end and we're all OK with that. But then again, I like the really tight focus - we start with Caleb hitting on Mae and he gets bitten pretty much right away, so it's a pretty lean movie. 

What makes the movie, though, is the vampire family's performance and chemistry, and how all that reacts to Caleb. I like that the vampires are strong and deadly, but not particularly smart or supernaturally powerful - they can't turn into wolves or mist or anything, they're just strong and fast. The movie isn't a million miles from something like The Devil's Rejects in some ways, except of course that we're not focused on the bad guys. 

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium 

Next up: Nobody 2

Movie #970: John Dies at the End

John Dies at the End is a cosmic horror-comedy (not a combo you see every day) directed by Don Coscarelli and starring Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Clancy Brown, Paul Giamatti, Doug Jones, Glynn Turman, and Fabianne Therese. It's one of those movies that, if I were not a gamer, I don't think I'd have enjoyed as much.

We open with the familiar trope of someone giving an interview to tell their strange, supernatural or unbelievable story. Actually, not that's not true. We open with our narrator, Dave (Williamson) explaining the Ship of Theseus thought experiment as applied to the ax used to behead a corpse, which then reanimates (played by Brett Wagner) and comes after the person who beheaded them, and asks if it's the same ax. Then we start the interview thing, where David Wong is being interviewed by a reporter named Arnie (Giamatti) about his experiences. 

Said experiences go back to him meeting a drug dealer (Tai Bennett) with apparently supernatural powers, and then getting a call from his friend John (Mayes), who has, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, come unstuck from time (inasmuch as he keeps calling Dave from earlier in the evening even when he's sitting in front of him). It turns out that John has tried a living drug called "soy sauce", which has opened his mind to other realities. Dave winds up getting jabbed with a needle and getting on the sauce as well, and from there we get into the weird, Lovecraftian events in which otherwordly insect-creatures come into our world, infest people to use as puppets, eventually make them explode if they can't use them or they get bored, and continually push John and Dave toward their ultimate goal.

Said goal is to enter another universe (accessed through a "ghost door" that can only be opened using the "phantom limb" of the guys' friend Amy (Therese)), where they discover a largely naked congregation of masked weirdos who tell them that this universe is a parallel one to theirs in which the dominant form of science is "beastiology". Anyway, the place is run by a big flesh-monster/living computer called Korrok (voiced by Keven Michael Richardson), which intends to eat them to absorb their knowledge and then conquer Earth. 

There's a lot more I'm leaving out, but suffice to say that the story is very much a Lovecraft/King story as filtered through millennial/Gen X humor. It's based on a book by Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong), whom I know from his work at Cracked, and the style of humor feels very much like a visual adaptation of a Cracked article. That's not a bad thing, but it does assume a lot of...not knowledge, exactly, but frame of reference? Alternate realities, monsters that you only see out of the corner of your eye, that sort of thing? It all makes a lot more sense if you've read Lovecraft and/or played Call of Cthulhu. 

But with that context, it was pretty fun. Coscarelli also directed Bubba Ho-Tep and there are some stylistic similarities, just inasmuch as it's an insane unreal situation presented in a mostly realistic way. The main difference is in scale (Bubba Ho-Tep is about one nursing home, this is about the whole world and possibly others!) and in the attitude of the protagonists (Elivs and JFK view fighting the mummy as their responsibility and are willing to die to do it; John and Dave mostly just bumblefuck their way through it and their attitude is much more "ugh, fine, we'll save the world." And actually it's the dog that really saves the world). 

The pacing is weird and while nonlinear storytelling is fine, keeping "when" we are in the story requires a bit of concentration, though maybe that's appropriate, given the subject matter. Paul Giamatti is fantastic as usual. I wish Clancy Brown had been given more to do (actually that's true of Therese; her character is fun for the little we see of her, but I think a little more variance from the two White Dudes would have been good). 

Coscarelli's films don't tend to be the most accessible in the world, but I always find them a lot of fun to watch. Also the effects here seem largely practical, and that always goes a long way to keeping me in the movie. 

My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Near Dark

Movie #969: Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, in case the clever wordplay goes over your head, is the second (OF THREE) sequels to Alvin & the Chipmunks. Obviously. It stars Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Jason Lee, David Cross, Amy Poehler, Christina Applegate, Anna Faris, Wendie Malick, and Zachary Levi. 

We pick up with the titular Chipmunks, Alvin (Long), Simon (Gubler), and Theodore (McCartney) doing their schtick where they sing pop songs in squeaky voices, when their manager/adopted father falls victim to a cartoonish injury and winds up in traction in France (if this had happened in the US, it wouldn't have worked because the US health care system would have discharged him the same day). Anyway, the Chipmunks are sent to stay with their friendly Aunt Jackie (Kathryn Joosten), but she almost immediately falls victim to a similar accident and this leaves the boys in the care of their slacker cousin Toby (a pre-Shazam Levi). 

Part of Dave's instructions was for them to have a normal childhood, so they're getting sent to school. This turns out to be high school, which was jarring because before this I realized I had no context for how old these mutant rodents were supposed to be. I mean, they're all "sassy" and talk like teenagers, or rather, they talk like how a middle-aged screenwriter thinks a teenager in 2009 might talk ("oh, it's on like Donkey Kong!" "Right back atcha!" "I can't hear you over [whatever]". Stuff like that). Anyway, they go to high school, where they are immediately beset by bullies who try to kill them (what is this, the 80s?) and the principal (Malick), who happens to be a Chipmunks superfan, tells them they have to represent the school in a music festival because if they win, the prize money will pay for the school's flagging music program!

So we've got like six different cartoon plots already, but we're not done! The evil former music exec Ian Hawke (Cross), living like a mad hobo in the basement of the record company building, gets a FedEx package with the Chipettes, the female versions of the Chipmunks. Like, literally, we've got the sassy one, Brittany (Applegate), the one with glasses, Jeanette (Faris), and the fat/loveable one, Eleanor (Poehler). And sure, let's talk about this here.

The Chipettes are literally just girl versions of their respective Chipmunks, just a little less-than. Brittany is a less-assholish Alvin, Jeanette is a less-smart Simon, and Eleanor is...well, Eleanor is about the same as Theodore. Less cowardly, maybe. They get almost no characterization. I'm not saying the Chipmunks are fleshed-out characters, but they at least all have a little personality. I was there in the 80s when the girl-versions of characters appeared, I know this song. 

Anyway, the plot is stitched together from multiple cliches. We've got Alvin joining the jocks and blowing off his family, the Chipettes vs. the Chipmunks as they're manipulated by Hawke, and Toby learning to come out of his shell and talk to his high school crush, Julie (Anjelah Johnson, utterly wasted in this role). If you've been awake for the last 20 years, you know every beat before it happens, and for those of us in Gen X who watched the cartoon, there's a palpable sense of déjà vu. Anyway, it ends up with both groups performing together (obviously) and the Chipettes moving in with the Chipmunks (obviously). 

I just...I think my biggest problem here is that I don't get the appeal. I mean, the Chipmunks have always had the same gimmick (again, pop songs in a squeaky voice) but the 80s cartoon had the benefit of cartoony adventures n' shit. This is that schtick with cliché plots, hackneyed dialog, and some truly mediocre CGI. And there's a cameo from a...sewer gopher? that the movie clearly thought I should recognize. I had to look him up; it's a thing called Digger (Dave Bauza), who was a mascot for NASCAR on Fox until the head of Fox Sports apologized for him. 

People talk about Marvel movies being soulless corporate affairs, but to me, this is the kind of thing that makes me want to make movies made in the 70s. It's real bad...

...but it's somehow better than the first one. I don't mean it's good, I hasten to add. It's like how stubbing your toe is better than getting kicked in the balls. I don't want either one, neither one is fun or good, but if I have to experience one or the other, I'll pick the one that has a timely reference to another, better movie (that'd be Alvin - remember, voiced by Justin Long - reminding us during a dodgeball game of the five Ds of dodgeball). 

Wish I could've dodged this movie! HAHAHAHAHAHAi'mgonnakillyoutoasty

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: John Dies at the End (for reals this time!)

Movie #968: The Innocents

The Innocents is a psychological (or supernatural, or both) horror movie based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and starring Deborah Kerr, Megs Jenkins, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, and Clytie Jessop. 

Miss Giddens (Kerr) is hired by a happy bachelor (Redgrave) to take charge of his orphaned niece Flora (Franklin) and nephew Miles (Stephens). "Take charge" may be underselling it; he flat-out says that no matter what happens, she's in charge and he wants to bounce around the world and bang hot twinks (this last bit is not explicitly stated) and wants nothing to do with any of them. 

So Giddens goes out to his country estate, a house far too big for the few people who live there, and meets Flora and Mrs. Grose (Jenkins), the head housekeeper. Not long after, Miles gets home from school after having been expelled, but won't say why (and this is in the days when a school could just boot a kid with no good explanation). 

Giddens begins to see people haunting the house and determines that they're the ghosts of her predecessor Miss Jessel (Jessop) and the valet, Quint (Wyndgarde). She comes to believe that the children are possessed by these people (which would be plenty weird enough, but they were lovers in life), and she fixates and getting them to admit what's happening. That winds up traumatizing Flora, and when left alone in the house with Miles, Giddens forces him to confront Quint's ghost...and he dies. 

There are a couple of interpretations here. One is that there really are ghosts and Giddens is trying to save the children. The other is that she's a few toes short of a toaster and winds up killing one kid and traumatizing the other. We never know one way or the other. The original script by William Archibald played up the supernatural more overtly, Truman Capote did some rewrites that amped up the psychologist thriller aspects, but I understand that James' original story doesn't fully explain it, either.

Ambiguous ghosts aside, though, the movie is really tense and well done. Deborah Kerr gives a fantastic performance as the naive and inexperienced governess put in a truly weird situation that just keeps getting weirder - these children are odd ducks. Flora needs constant attention, Miles speaks like a much older person and seems to be actively flirting with Giddens at times. The one you really feel for is Mrs. Grose, who loves the kids and is just trying to do her job amidst all of this shit that she is truly not prepared for. 

It's a sad and Gothic movie, it's beautifully shot, and (sing it with me) the house feels familiar by the end of it, but also manages to feel consistently too big for the people in it. It's not exactly a "fun" movie, but it's definitely a good example of how to do horror without gore or jump scares.

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: John Dies at the End, presuming I don't get something from Toasty today

Movie #967: Alvin & The Chipmunks

Alvin & The Chipmunks is kids movie based on the old cartoons and "band" of the same name, and stars Jason Lee, David Cross, Cameron Richardson, and the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Jesse McCartney. It's pretty awful.

Dave Seville (Lee) is an marketing dude and struggling songwriter who pitches songs to his old college buddy Ian (Cross), now the head of Jett Records. He gets rejected after pitching a song that sounds a lot like Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" with every bit of sentiment stripped out, but on the way out of the building picks up three stowaways: Alvin (Long), Simon (Gubler), and Theodore (McCartney), three CGI chipmunks that were in a tree that the company cut down for its Xmas display. 

These chipmunks can not only talk and reason like people, but can sing more-or-less contemporary songs in three-part harmony, so like, that's weird.

Anyway, they reveal themselves to Dave, he's all set to kick them out after they utterly trash his house until he realizes they can sing, so he writes a new, fresh Christmas song...oh, wait, it's the god-awful "Chipmunk Christmas Song" that came out fifty goddamn years before this movie? Oh, OK. Anyway, after a false start where the Chipmunks freeze up, they become worldwide sensations, Ian manipulates them with the rock-n-roll lifestyle to move out of Dave's house, but eventually Dave admits he wants a family and they're all back together and Ian is left trying to get real squirrels to sing. 

Well, I can't say I was expecting to enjoy this movie, but I used to watch the cartoon when I was a kid, so maybe some nostalgia? Nah. It plays just like someone - by which I mean a committee and a focus group - wrote it today in a boardroom, with two awkwardly old songs (the Xmas one and "Witch Doctor") remixed and crammed in. 

Jason Lee is completely unlikeable as Dave. I don't know if it's because he can't act when working with CGI (and I could understand that), but he really comes across as bland and boring no matter what scene he's in. David Cross is a little more watchable, but he's also more shameless and doesn't mind literally shaking his ass in this movie. 

And then there's the Chipmunks. I don't know if I'm just getting old, but man, I have no interest in watching CGI creatures hop around and fart. If the jokes were better, if the movie had any heart, maybe it wouldn't bother me, but as it is, I felt trapped between Chipmunks whose voice performances aren't great because they're sped or pitched up (and I cannot understand them when they sing) and human performances for people who were very clearly standing there thinking "big paycheck, big paycheck, lots of actors can't even find work, c'mon, you can do it." 

My kids would have been about the right age to enjoy this movie when they were smol (it came out in 2007, so not in theaters, but certainly in the home video market) and I'm glad it never made it into rotation. 

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Near Dark