Little Green Man

Saw this one last weekend.  Took awhile to get this out, probably because while not forgettable, it's also not a grab-your-face-and-yank kind of movie.  Solid, though.


Paul:  Simon Pegg & Nick Frost are a great comedic team.  I entered their world with Shaun Of The Dead, then Hot Fuzz, and only recently, because I'm on no discernible natural human schedule, Spaced.   All of which were created with, and directed by, Edgar Wright.  Shaun Of The Dead might be my favorite movie of "the aughts" (it's surely in the top 5, in any event)- a film about getting your life together, leaving childish things behind, and surviving a zombie apocalypse.  Hot Fuzz is an underrated small town homage to big city, loud, buddy cop action movies that manages to remain markedly human (and realistically violent) in spite of its references.  Spaced was one of those rare TV shows where the funny is the icing on an already satisfying human drama cake.  Mmmm... human drama cake...

Last summer Edgar Wright made his first non-Pegg/Frost movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.  I liked it.  A little.  I keep meaning to revisit it to see if I'll actually like it a lot (mostly because there's some serious love for the movie from various people whose opinions I trust), but the fact that I'm never psyched to do that, even when I have a couple of hours to kill, is a bit telling, I fear.  When I think about the movie I keep coming back to the same feeling- that Wright got done what he set out to do- make the perfect movie version of an 8-bit video game.  Problem is, most 8-bit video games get really repetitive somewhere in the middle, stay that way for a while, and then you're fighting the big boss at the end... which is really more of the same, just a little more involved.  And since it's not 1987, Mega Man just doesn't sound like a fun way to spend an afternoon anymore.

Anyway, enough about Scott Pilgrim. 

This past weekend Nick Frost and Simon Pegg teamed up for the first time without Edgar Wright in Paul.  Not the most dynamic of movies, to be sure, but it turned out slightly better than Scott Pilgrim.  In my humble opinion, anyway.

Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost) are two British nerds that skipped over the pond on a pilgrimage to Nerd Mecca: Comic-Con San Diego.  From there they go on an RV road trip through the southwest to sightsee famous UFO landing places.  On their trek they run into Paul- an escaped alien from Area 51 who's just trying to get home.  (Laid-back) wackiness ensues.

What works best here is that chemistry that Frost and Pegg have cultivated over the past 10 years, or so.  These guys are just so damned likeable.  Individually, yes, but especially as a team.  That said, they're not Cheech and Chong or Abbott and Costello.  What I mean by that is that they're not just playing the same characters in every movie they do (absolutely no offense meant to Marin, Tommy, Bud, & Lou).  The dynamic survives, but the characterization is always fresh and different.  Here they're both pretty mild-mannered, good-hearted, child-like, uh... well, nerds.  They love comic books and sci-fi.  And when they come across an alien in the desert it doesn't take much convincing for them to give the guy a ride.  Pretty basic.  In fact, the whole movie has this matter-of-fact quality about it that's quite charming... if not just a little spiritless at times.  Seth Rogen provides the voice & mo-cap of Paul, and it's his higher-than-thou approach that keeps the movie grounded.  I mean, picking up a stranded alien is wacky enough.  We don't need the character to be off-the-wall bonkers.   And Rogen makes Paul one likeable, laid-back alien dude.  Kristen Wiig shows up as a socially-repressed, religious RV park owner (co-owned with her dad- Norm from Fargo!), and for a second there I thought, "oh no, now we're going to have a wacky religious nut as an obvious contrast to our 'heroes'." But minutes later, Paul zaps the realities of evolution into her brain with some crazy ESP power and does away with that contrivance.*  There's a great little scene where she (extremely awkwardly) comes on to Pegg and escalates from innocent to naughty in 10 seconds flat.  Again, though, she doesn't take it too far (imagine a less manic Amy Poehler).  This is still a very real, human movie. 

No worries, though- there is a little Looney Tunes in this one.  Joe Lo Truglio & Bill Hader play a pair of dumbass G-Men that are assisting Jason Bateman in his quest to track down Paul.  Bateman brings the cool, and Lo Truglio & Hader bring the slapstick and cluelessness.  It works well, mostly because they don't overwhelm us with screen time. 

Oh, yeah, the references.  Yes, this one's chock full of geekified sci-fi movie references.  But they never come from out of left field and always seem to fit the plot.  In fact, a couple of times one whizzed right by me and only later did I realize it was a reference.  They do come at you fairly regularly in the final act, though.  Speaking of that, it's the last half-hour that finally sold me on Paul.  That's not to say the first 2/3 of the movie are bad.  It plods along at times, but I still wouldn't call it slow.  I never lost interest.  I think the deal here is that they kept it so deliberately chill that it lacked the peaks and valleys that can sometimes make or break a movie.  In the long run, though, I'd rather get a movie that stays steadily good than one that fails horribly by trying too hard to pander to the dummies out there with obvious false gusto.  Paul was directed by Greg Mottola, who also directed Superbad, and I kinda felt the same way about that one- it could very easily have copped out and gone all American Pie on us, but Mottola went for the comedy naturally instead of going for cheap laughs by having his characters stick their cocks in pastry or somehow unknowingly fuck old people in closets.  WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA!!!

So, yeah- good flick, all around.  You'll see more dynamic stuff this year, but Paul is a light-hearted, feel-good, chill time at the 'plex.

7 out of 10 Nerdy Sci-Fi References

* I was actually a little surprised (and definitely delighted) at how much eye-rolling the concept of religion got in this movie.  The Hollywood machine usually tries to shy away from god-bashing, doesn't it?  I guess it's more proof that Mottola was making this movie for people who think with their brains, not their bibles.  Which is why it will probably be gone by this time next week.  Catch it while you can!

Aliens & Other Assorted Critters

Surprise, surprise, surprise, Gomer Pyle!  Two great movies in one day!  And we're only at the Ides of March!


Battle: Los Angeles:  You got your military movie in my Sci-fi flick!  No, you got your sci-fi flick on my military movie!  Mmmm... two great tastes that taste great together!

HUZZAH!  The year's first truly exciting movie (that I saw, anyway)!  Certainly not the most original flick, and far from perfect, but it kept me on the edge of my seat and never dragged once in it's nearly 2-hour running time.

So, if you were wondering, yes.  It's very much like Independence Day.  Or as the guy behind me in the ticket line told someone on the phone, "it's that movie where they fight aliens.  You know, like that Will Smiff movie."  A perceived meteor shower turns out to be a fleet of alien spacecraft that park themselves along the world's biggest coastal cities and before we know why they're blowing us straight to hell so they can mine our natural resources.  We fight back.

Now, I love Independence Day.  It's big, it's loud, it's dumb as a bag of hammers, but I love it.  And while B:LA's story (and some scenes) might be very similar, the execution of that story is so very not.  In fact, I'd compare its storytelling to Black Hawk Down before I'd compare it to ID4 (yes, I just used that weird ID4 marketing tool thing that pissed so many people off.  Deal).  This movie is about the Marine Corps band-of-brothers unit that we follow through the movie and not about aliens blowing up iconic man-made structures and anti-heroes Slim-Pickensing the bad guys.  I hesitate to call it a more "intimate" movie, but it's certainly not the far-reaching, grandiose, converging-plotlines extravaganza that was Emmerich's explosion-fest.  Also, it's mostly in real-time.  Once our Marines get dropped into LA I'm pretty sure it doesn't take a break and jump ahead for another hour, hour-fifteen.  The tension this adds is pretty amazing, especially since our heroes are almost constantly being hammered by alien forces.

Speaking of the boys-in-camo, what a great bunch of likable characters we've got here.  Again, maybe not the most original, and there may be a few too many, but they're fleshed out so well that it's actually sad when one or two or ten of them die (and no one is safe here, btw).  B:LA does a pretty good job of introducing each and every one of them in the pre-game show- we see the day and night leading up to the invasion, and each time this sequence focuses on one or two individuals we get their name and rank subtitled on screen.  Front-and-center is Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), quiet, pensive, almost-retired, and still dealing with a tragic past that sows the seeds of mistrust in the other guys.  There's 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez, still a little wet behind the ears, but obviously competent (the non-moron version of Lt. Gorman from Aliens), who looks to the far more seasoned Nantz for advice...

...you know, I could spend many paragraphs going through all the characters.  I'm not going to.  All you need to know is what I said before- they're all very well fleshed-out.  Director Jonathan Liebesman does such a fine job of stressing the importance of military brotherhood without hitting you over the head with it and making it a needlessly OO-RAH!-heavy movie.  If you want uncomfortable ass-kissing like that, re-watch Transformers.  Actually, don't.  That will only make you dumber.  Go see this instead.  Anyway, Liebesman.  Yeah, great job, bro.  A near-perfect mix of action, drama, and, oh yeah- sci-fi.  Damn!  I keep forgetting that bit.  It's the right kind of sci-fi- the movie never spends too much time on the aliens, why they're here, or their technology.  I mean, it does deal with that stuff, but only so much as is needed to logically further the plot.  We learn as the Marines learn, which really makes it easy to feel like a part of the action.  It reminds me a little of the War Of The Worlds remake in that way, but if we followed the military instead of civilians.

Something needs to be said for the sound design here, too.  I saw it at Union Square in NYC and besides that fact that it was very awesomely loud, the sound design/mixing/editing was amazing.  Weapon rounds buzzing past your face, alien craft hovering over your head, the crumbling of newly-abandoned buildings... it all added to the atmosphere like nobody's business.  Again, puts you right in the action.  Like the characters onscreen, you can never really relax while watching this.

So, while it's likely stuff you've seen before, it's amazingly fresh.  And it never reeks of ripping off its source material.  Battle: LA is undoubtedly an homage to both classic and neo-sci-fi flicks, as well as the best modern military dramas.  What's great is that it never actually relies on, nor is hobbled by the existence of such films.  See it.  It's a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

8 out of 10 Ass-Kicking Marines


Rango: Holy Jesus-jumped-up-Christ, what a frakking CRAZY movie this was.

First, the basics:  Rango is a pet chameleon that accidentally winds up out of his aquarium and roadside in the Mojave desert.  He walks until he finds a town, comes up with a new persona, fools the locals with it, and becomes Sheriff.  Right away he is tasked with solving the mystery behind the desert town's water deficiency problem, and quickly becomes the (apparently false) embodiment of the hope that the town needs.

OK.  So.  First off, don't let the posters fool you- this is absolutely not a kids' film.  The little buggers can enjoy it, I think, but it's got death, sexual innuendo, existential crisis, drinking, smoking, talking roadkill, and guns, guns, guns.  And, for the first time ever, we've got an animated movie that rivals Pixar in its visuals.  I'll even go so far as to say it's on par with the last 3 or 4 films from Lasseter's behemoth.  Visually, anyway.

Secondly, don't let me fool you- this is not some kind of exploitation film.  All of those non-kid-friendly things I mentioned above are not the focus of the movie.  They exist to further the story, not to give the movie empty shock value.  An example- to assert himself as a force to be reckoned with, Rango drinks a shot of booze, then takes the cigar from the mouth of a big bad guy in the town's Saloon.  Of course, he then eats it and burps it up, setting the bad guy's face on fire, so it's not like this is a serious movie.  In fact, it's very old-school Looney Tunes in its execution, which suits me fine.  Those weren't for kids, either.

I'm having a really hard time writing about this one.  I know for sure it's great, but it's a little convoluted, to be honest.  And I think it's because...

Rango was directed by Gore Verbinski- the man behind the Pirates Of The Caribbean flicks.  And if anything is a detriment here it's the same issues that Dead Man's Chest and At World's End  have- there's far too much going on for the frenetic pace to handle.  And while I love those two movies (and, I think, Rango, too... but it's too soon to tell) I freely admit that even having seeing them a few times each, I still check out for 5 minutes here and there so my brain can catch its breath*.  Same happened with Rango once or twice.  It's like the old "too much of a good thing" thing.  Just because you can pack all that originality, wackiness, and technical prowess into a film doesn't mean you necessarily should.

Of course, now it's sounding like I was disappointed in Rango.  The reality is quite the opposite.  I was expecting something on par with How To Train Your Dragon, or if I was less lucky, Despicable Me.  What I got was... well, Toy Story 3 meets High Plains Drifter cut with a little Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (to keep your mind limber).  And that suits me just fine.  Add to that some fantastic voice acting (Johnny Depp, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Winstone, to name a few) and some seriously trippy visuals, and I'm sold.  Makes sense that Rango comes from, in part, "Nickelodeon Movies."  Those guys tend to take chances, right?  I mean, I dug Nacho Libre.  Oh.  Right.  The Last Airbender was theirs, too.  Forget I mentioned it.

So, yeah, this review kinda sucked.  But Rango most assuredly didn't.  Go see it- you owe it to yourself to have your mind blown, even if you walk away a little confused, like me.

8 out of 10 Mariachi Greek Chorus Owls

*I think DMC & AWE  are best watched either as one (very) long movie, or split into 3 parts.  It's been awhile, so I can't remember exactly where, but if you stop around 2/3 into Chest (somewhere before the island wheel swordfight, for sure), take a break, start it back up and continue to somewhere around 1/3 of the way into Worlds (just after they find Sparrow... I think...), take another break, then come back and finish it out, it's easier on the noggin. 

Adjust THIS!

Do you hear that?  I think it's a foghorn...

BOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnng.


So, I saw The Adjustment Bureau yesterday.  Um, it didn't blow me away.  Or excite me.  Or keep me interested.  At all.

If you watch Fringe (and you should) you've seen this already.  There's a group of "beings" that control our lives by making sure certain things happen or do not happen to us, depending on which will bring about the desired future.  The motivation behind it is mostly a mystery.

And yes, I realize that the movie was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (haven't read it) that predates Fringe by like 50 years.  But the show probably used that as inspiration for their "observers" storyline, and they do it so much better than The Adjustment Bureau did.  So much better.

Anyway, Matt Damon plays a guy named David Norris who runs for office in the NY State Senate, but loses.  While rehearsing his concession speech he runs into Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) and it's love at first sight.  But she leaves the building, he loses track of her, and that's it.  Life goes on.  Then we're in a park in NYC and two of the "Bureau" guys are discussing Damon.  Apparently the one guy needs to bump into Matt Damon, or something, and have him spill his coffee on himself so he misses his bus, keeping him from running into Elise again.  Bureau dude falls asleep and misses his chance to spill said coffee.  Norris shows up at his office earlier than he's supposed to and sees what he's not supposed to:  these bureau guys tweaking reality by...

...oh, forget it.  Basically, Matt Damon isn't supposed to be with Emily Blunt for some reason, and these Bureau guys are tasked with keeping it from happening.  They threaten him with a complete memory wipe if he tries to find her again, but he flips them the proverbial bird and spends the next hour and a half reconnecting with her.  Over and over again.  The movie trudges along, slowly... slowly... and then there's a lame chase scene that ends on a rooftop.  The End.

So, yeah.  The mythology of the Bureau guys is so thin in this flick that the movie is still literally making up shit about how their powers (or technology, or whatever) work in the last scene of the movie.  They can go through doors and suddenly be on the other side of town instead of in a storeroom, or office, or closet, or whatever (Matrix: Reloaded!), but only because they wear special hats and turn the doorknobs a certain way (seriously).  They can freeze an entire office (Dark City!) and plant suggestions in your brain (Inception!) with a colorful flashlight machine.  They can move objects with the flicker of a finger and make you trip and sprain your ankle.  Why they don't use all of these things from the start with Norris & Emily is a mystery.  Oh, well, actually, it's because the movie would only be 5 minutes long.

And that's the real issue here.  This was one of those movies that would have been better suited as an hour long episode of a TV show, like The X-Files, or, you know... FRINGE.  But since it's a movie, it had to be at least 80 minutes long.  And since it's a Matt Damon movie, it had to be longer.  Um, that's actually not a dig against the former Mr. Hunting-  the absolute best scenes in this movie are the ones with him and Emily Blunt.  Those two have a fantastic chemistry on screen.  Too bad the movie they got to showcase it in was this pseudo-sci-fi mess.  Michael Kelly (my favorite character in the Dawn Of The Dead remake) was great, in the limited screen time he was given.  That Anthony Mackie guy was really good, too.  He was the only Bureau guy that I cared about, and not just because he was the only one we're supposed to care about.  Good actor.  Horrible guest on Conan last week, but good actor.  Also, Terence Stamp shows up late in the movie and sleepwalks through his role.  Sleepshambles, actually.  General Zod is starting to look like he got the Fortress Of Solitude Power-Reversal in real life (Nerd!).  The rest of those bureau guys were really not good.  I mean, how can you screw up a role where it's your job to deliver deadpan, emotionless dialogue?

What else?  Um... I dunno, uh...  the movie looked OK, I guess.  It was one of those blue movies where everything's blue-ish outdoors in the city.  I guess that's supposed to be a cold look, or whatever.  I just checked, and this was the director(George Nolfi)'s first film.  Yeah.

Not a complete loss.  I want to give it a 5, but it feels wrong to call it completely "Average" since I actually cared about the two leads.  I sort of wish there was no sci-fi element and it was a drama about a lonely up-and-coming political figure who finally finds the love of his life, then loses her... only to find her again.  And I HATE those kind of fucking movies.  Damn you, Matt Damon, and your affable nature!  Damn you Emily Blunt and your totally hot British accent!

6 out of 10 counter-clockwise doorknobs.


EDIT, 6:45 PM: OK.  I thought about it over a glass of Grenache, an arugula salad, and a seriously bland slice of pizza at some place on 1st Ave, downtown.  Matty D & Emmy B were great, but the movie wasn't, so it balances out to average.  I'm adjusting my rating (BOOYAH!).

5 out of 10 silly magic teleportation yarmulkes.

Muscle Cars, Guns, Satan Worshippers, and Boobs.

It's been awhile.  Like two fortnights.  Or, you know, a month, if you're not a complete nerd.  Been busy.  Had work and two plays going on (the second closes on Sunday).  I missed out on a lot, but was able to squeeze in Drive Angry yesterday afternoon before my call.  And I'm glad I did.

When Tarantino & Rodriguez released their Grindhouse double feature in 2007 I was pleasantly surprised, and hopeful for the future. Would we be getting a new Grindhouse (™) feature a couple times a year? Even one a year? Ok, one every 2 years? EVER AGAIN?  Last year we were handed Machete, which rekindled my hope in a future of occasional low-budget, laid-back-yet-crazy, B-level-yet-oddly-quality exploitation... until I saw it.  Sadly, it just didn't "go there."  Or, more accurately, it tried waaaaay too hard to "go there".  So hard, in fact, that it ended up a convoluted mess that pandered to it's own fake low-budget BS while at the same time trying to get some kind of message across instead of delivering something even semi-coherent and, you know, fun. As far as I was concerned, the neo-grindhouse "movement" was dead.


And now Nic Cage has come along and made me a believer again.  Go figure.

No, Drive Angry is not a Rodriguez/Tarantino joint.  Nor does it claim to be a grindhouse movie.  But grindhouse it is.  Violence, T&A, muscle car chase scenes, a taste of the supernatural, all in eye-gouging 3-D!  And they got it all done without the need for fake bad film stock, fake missing reels, and fake in-house editing repair jobs for melted film.  I mean, I dug the use of those things in Planet Terror and Death Proof, but gimmicks are gimmicks.  Drive Angry manages to pull it off without the use of such things.  It's an exploitation film that, thanks to the way we both film and view movies these days, will never degrade in those ways.  It's non-retro retro.

But enough about  that stuff.  How was the movie?

Great.  Not the best thing I have seen so far this year, not the best thing I WILL see this year, and I'm probably being a little generous in my rating, but damn was this a fun little movie.  It stretched pretty far in scope, story-wise, but remained relatively humble in its execution.  The opening and closing shots (of Nic Cage driving out of and back into hell, respectively) were the most CGI-tastic.  The rest of the movie used it sparingly, as far as I could tell.  Stuff like car parts flying at the camera and enhanced explosions, and stuff.  The supernatural element to the story was underplayed until the 3rd act, with only small reminders here and there, like the "Godkiller" gun Cage is toting and the fact that even a bullet to the head won't kill him (for long).  It really was more about chasing down (and running down) satanic cultists in a '69 Dodge Charger and stopping occasionally for sex with roadhouse waitresses and bloodbath shootouts.  At the same time.  Not kidding.

The plot?  Well, that last sentence pretty much sums it up, but if I had to get all official-like, it would look like this: John Milton (Cage) escapes from hell to save his infant granddaughter from the cult that murdered his daughter and intends to sacrifice the child to Satan at midnight during the next full moon.  He enlists the help of a small-town waitress named Piper (Amber Heard) after saving her from her asshole fiancee and takes to the road in her badass car after said cult, all the while being chased by a being known as "The Accountant" (William Fichtner), sent from hell to bring Milton back.

Yeah.  That about sums it up.

Cage has been surprising me lately.  Even in over-the-top nuttiness like this he's learned to reign in that annoying crazy-eyed, faux-lunatic, fits-and-starts dialogue thing he always does.  It's like he wants to be an actor again.  I even liked him in the just-there The Sorcerer's Apprentice last year.  Anyway, yeah, Drive Angry is no exception.  He keeps it pretty quiet.  Amber Heard is unrelentingly beautiful, so I can't truly tell you if she was any good.  I'm pretty sure she was, though.  And then there's William Fichtner.  Is there anybody cooler than this guy?  He even managed to turn 30 seconds of screen time as a banker during the opening sequence of The Dark Knight into a memorable character.  He walks through Drive Angry with an unflappable blank expression and calmer-than-thou speech, belying the invincible, single-minded bounty hunter (for lack of a better term) that he is.  Sort of like the T-1000, but, you know, from hell.  The scene where he overturns a hydrogen truck aimed at a police blockade and serenely steps off of it and onto a cop car, both moving at highway speeds, is one for the ages.  Très cool.

Now, as you may know, I'm no advocate of the 3-D.  If it ain't computer animation, the 3-D blows, with a capital B.  But here it sort of worked.  More because of the grindhouse exploitation aesthetic than anything else.  This movie is marketed as being "Shot In 3-D"- it's on all the posters, almost as if the actual title is Drive Angry: Shot In 3-D [check it out here], and, yeah, it's probably the best live-action use of the technology I've seen.  I'll be OK, though, when it comes to home video and I can't see it that way.  The 3-D in this case, is more about going to the theatre and experiencing the batshit-craziness of it all than actually enhancing the storytelling.  I'm a little sad that I didn't see it closer to its release, though.  Empty theatre.  There was only one creepy older guy there.  NO, not me- one OTHER creepy guy.  Actually, two ladies walked in literally one hour after it started and stayed until the end, and they weren't shy about vocally reacting to the extravaganza, which I loved... but a theatre full of that would have been awesome.  Oh well.  I still "got it."

For out-grindhousing Grindhouse: 7 out of 10 Empty Skulls (to drink a cold beer out of).