Spiders 3D

Here is a film that sneaks into theaters today and will be in your video store in a month. It is a movie that is clearly planned for a straight to DVD release but probably had contractual obligations to play in a certain number of theaters to get the kind of promotion and upfront fees it needed. I went and looked and even BoxOffice Mojo did not have the number of screens it was playing on. Spiders (3D) is being played off pretty quickly because that is the way the movie business has gone. It won't be long until all these kinds of movies never play in real theaters, just home theaters.

I have to say from the standpoint of a guy who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, that's too bad. Creature feature ought to be enjoyed in a theater on a Saturday afternoon with a bag of popcorn and three of your buddies. Spiders (3D) is not a self aware camp classic. There is no tongue in cheek here. I saw a trailer for a very similarly themed film called "Big Ass Spider" and it looks like it will fall in the same venue as "Snakes on a Plane"or "Eight Legged Freaks". Movies with a high level of irony and hipster sensibilities. Spiders (3D) is not hip, it doesn't try to be funny or fresh. In fact in some ways the story is downright creaky. All it does is tell a traditional Sci Fi/Horror story for a brisk ninety minutes. It has a lot of traditional elements to it and it is exactly the kind of movie that you might have found as a second feature attached to the main attraction in a 1970's film release.

 Basically, spiders from an experiment on a old Soviet Space Station, end up in the subways of New York and bad things start to happen. There have been dozens of movies with giant creature themes and almost all of them have been entertaining in one way or another. The giant bunnies in "Night of the Lepus" are so silly that you will laugh at the movie. The swarm of spiders in "Arachnophobia" will make your skin crawl as you are laughing and squealing. The giant ants in "Them" are clunky but creepy for the time, and the bugs that attack the Earth in "Starship Troopers" are swarming with CGI badness. "Spiders" has some of the same kinds of thrills but they are all very mild. Early on we get the creepy from the way spiders move and the idea of them planting eggs inside a body. In the later parts of the movie we are treated to Godzilla style spectacle with Army and Air Force units fighting against the arachnids. None of it is very gruesome, this is not a spatter zone like Troopers was. This is just fighting back against big spiders.

 Two very traditional archetypes are present here. First you have the splintered family being tested and restored by adversity. The lead characters are a NY Transit official and his soon to be ex-wife public health inspector, who discover the nature of the threat. They have a tween daughter that is neglected but loved and an older babysitter who plays protector when the mom and dad can't be around. The second cliche in the movie is the military conspiracy which wants to weaponize the species. There is a hard headed colonel who leads the network of evil insiders against the general population but also the troops themselves. Nether story goes very far, they are just convenient frameworks upon which the story can rely to move to the next scene. There are no surprises in the resolution of the story, there is not a high level of fear, just a little bit of creepy.


The film was competently made, none of the actors seemed amateurish even when the story and dialogue seemed to be. The special effects are mostly screen work and CGI with a few practical on camera prop pieces. I did think there was a nice shot early on in the film when the one of the small spiders aggressively attacks a rat in the subway tunnel as the bureaucrats are talking in the background. This is a family friendly little science fiction flick that was put together on a budget, tells a conventional story and finishes quickly. It would be a very high class film for the SyFy network, but it would only rate graveyard hours on most cable networks. Don't go out of your way to find it, you can show it to the ten, eleven and twelve year olds in your house on a rainy day. Afterwards you can play a game of "Monopoly" or "Clue" and have a safe,pleasant evening at home.

Kirkham A Movie A Year

I posted on the Letterboxed Site but some of you may not be on there. Somehow I managed to make it to 55 and I can't quite believe it. To show you how long a period of time that is, I have listed one movie from every year that I have been alive. These are not necessarily the best movies of the year. In fact many of them are obscure, but I loved them at one time or another and I would heartily endorse all of them and be willing to argue the point. As I did with my James Bond List in November, I simply cut and pasted screen shots of the Letterboxed page. I will also include a link if you want to see it closer.

 

 55 years of movies on Letterboxed.

Warm Bodies

OK, here is an analogy for you; "Twilight" is to Vampires, as "Warm Bodies" is to Zombies.I've never been one of the haters of the "Twilight" series, but I never understood why the brooding emo kids were supposed to be vampires. The only thing they had in common with traditional vampires was that they drank blood. Well the only thing the Zombies in this movie have in common with traditional Zombies is that they eat brains. I don't see an automatic problem with playing with the conventions of a genre, but the whole purpose of this movie is to take those conventions and sweep them away, to tell a story that has almost nothing to do with the original set up. It feels like more of a cheat here than it did in the teen werewolf/vampire soap opera. It was a fun idea for the duration of the trailer, but for the length of a movie it kind of irritated me.

Every few years or so, Shakespeare's immortal tragedy Romeo and Juliet, is reinvented for the cinema. Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrman, stay true to the text and visualize the story differently. "West Side Story" turns it into a musical, "Valley Girl" turns it into a teen romance without the tragedy. I had missed the name of the female character in this movie until she returns back to the protected compound of uninfected humans. As soon as she was greeted by her name, I saw all the connections to the Shakespeare play. "Warm Bodies" is Romeo and Juliet with Zombies, but pretending to be something else. Frankly it is less a romance than a comedy, and the story, as classic as it may be is not quite strong enough to hold all the disparate elements together.

The leads are attractive enough and the unusual nature of their romance is played up.Nicholas Hoult was the star of one of my favorite films from the previous decade, "About a Boy". From the gawky kid he played in that movie he has grown to be the kind of handsome young man that girls might swoon over, even if he is dead. Of course he never really is, at least not from our understanding of zombies. If you are willing to accept that Zombies can be sentient, then I guess there is a chance that this will work. The internal monologue of the Hoult's lead character, "R", is funny in a self knowing and mocking way. Of course it immediately undermines all the horror elements of the movie and there is never a single moment of horror or fright. There is one jump, but it has to do with our lovers as hero survivors rather than the Zombie Apocalypse. This movie is really designed as a Valentines Day date movie without Nicolas Sparks.

You really have to shut your brain off on this one. There is an early joke about how slow the zombies move, but five minutes later, "R" is running with Julie down corridors and across airport tarmacs. Zombies can't talk, according to the internal monologue, but again, just a few minutes later, "R" is doing Tarzan speak with Julie. Except for the one incident of brain eating, he could easily be the cute mute boy next door and not a zombie. Most of the humans in the "safe zone" act more zombie like than the "corpses" they supposedly fear. With the exception of Julie, and her cute best friend (and nurse, wink, wink Billy) no one seems to be doing much in the human world. Her father, the head of the security for the "safe zone" is played by John Malkovich, in the least John Malkovich way possible. There is nothing about his character that suggests that Malkovich was a good casting choice. It is a waste of a good actor with cache to spare in oddball parts. Here he could be anybody.

If you are a fifteen year old girl, you will like the film for the cute boy and girl love story. If you are anyone else, I hope you go with a fifteen year old girl because otherwise the experience will be wasted on you. Two or three small laughs in the beginning, followed by an hour of "what the hell is this?" and then an attempt to turn the death of Romeo and Juliet into the restoration of life to our main character. The word "exhumed" is used as a punch line for a lame bit in the movie, but it is prophetic, because after I saw this, I needed to be "exhumed" from the stupor that it induced.

Bullet to the Head

I saw a couple of sites that were hating on this film. I can't understand why they would despise it so much, unless they were expecting all the punchlines from the trailer that did not show up. Two weeks ago, Schwarzenegger returned to the action scene with a movie tailored to his age and cut to fit his style. Sly is doing pretty much the same thing here, only it looks like they cut down on the humor and built up the violence to make it work for his style. Arnold has always been a little bit of a cartoon, so some of the over the top gags were appropriate there, but Stallone is much more based in the real. His milieu has always been gritty. From Rocky to Rambo and a dozen others, Sly films have always hung around the edges rather than in the glamor. "Bullet to the Head" is pretty much a grim action feature that follows a standard pattern and provides a huge dose of violence. That's it, pretty much end of story.

Stallone did not write or direct this one like he did with the last of his Rambo, Rocky films and the first Expendables. He appears to be an actor for hire here and that means his input may have been somewhat limited. He does not exactly walk through the role, but there is nothing in this that feels the least bit personal to him. The movie was directed by the once great Walter Hill. He has had a hand in dozens of movies that I have loved, but he too appears to simply be working here not invested. The movie was competently shot, in focus and used standard modern film making techniques, but nothing about it stands out. Except for Stallone's age and the amount of blood on the screen, this could have rolled out in the highlight period of both their careers, the late 1980s.

Hill wrote the book on spinning the body cop formula off into new directions. In "48 Hours" the buddy was a con, sprung from jail to help on the case (it helped immeasurably that the con was Eddie Murphy in his breakout role). In "Red Heat" the buddy was a policeman from the Soviet Union, and the Austrian Oak adds charisma to Jim Bulushi as the American cop. Here, Stallone plays the odd man out. He is the criminal enforcer who teams up with an out of town Korean American cop in New Orleans. Sung Kang is an actor I did not recognize, but when I looked him up it turned out I'd seen him in three or four films. Unfortunately, the fact that I could not remember him is indicative of his presence in this movie. There is nothing in his character that was special or fun and there was even less in the performance. Like Sly, he's just here to earn a paycheck. He does his job but does nothing to lift the movie.

Stallone is 67 years old this year. His body is pumped up and the veins in his arms pop in that style of most committed body builders. His face looks like it has aged, but normally. There are no obvious signs of the plastic surgery that many older performers suffer from. When people warn youngsters about tattoos, they often visualize the tattoo on a sagging body and wrinkled torso. I don't think the tats he sports in the film are real, but you would have a hard time using his physique as a warning to the teens thinking about body art. I had no trouble seeing him as a still tough guy, even at that age. Late in the story he has a one on one fight with a much younger and I think bigger opponent, played by recent Conan star Jason Momoa. Their fight is still believable, or at least as believable as you are going to get when guys are facing off with axes.

The axes actually reminded me of maybe the worst Stallone vehicle I ever saw, "Cobra". In that film, a cult of serial killers are after Stallone and there was a scene where they held axes in each hand and clanged them together like the thundersticks you might see at a baseball game. It was stupid there, and only slightly more real in the current film The ridiculous nature of the face off gets the one good joke in the movie as Sly's character wonders if he and his opponents are supposed to be vikings. That's about it for the jokes. I did appreciate the irreverent politically incorrect insults that his character throws at the Asian American cop. It's not that they were good, or funny, it's just that it seems like the way a person like his character would speak. It isn't cleaned up to avoid insulting anyone, it simply shows the mindset that his criminal lives in. If there was something in the movie other than Stallone to recommend it, I missed it. This is another one that is what you expect it to be. Not as entertaining as "the Last Stand", but very much a workable action flick for as couple of hours. I want Stallone to keep working, but if he makes more movies like this, his career will return to the icebox times of the early 2000s, and no body wants that.

Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters

Back in the 1990s, in Southern California, movies were preceded not only by trailers for future films but ads for the Los Angeles Times. I think there must have been some exchange agreement with the papers and the theaters, as an advertising tradeoff. Since the internet took off as the main source of info about show times and theater locations, the ad revenue dropped and the newspaper stopped being advertised in front of every movie playing in So Cal. In the ten years before they disappeared, the paper promoted it's unique position as the Company Town paper by making the ads focus on the movie business. Many of the ads had nice bits of info about movie making and some of the personalities involved. In celebration of the past, as a service to any of my readers from other parts of the world or from more recent times, I am including these snippets in my reviews for the rest of the year. In honor of today's film, you got the LA Times movie ad featuring some special effects using guns, and bows and arrows. This is especially appropriate given the nature of today's movie.




The Red Band Trailer that you see above, was the deciding point for me in seeing this film. Prior to this trailer, the movie looked like some CGI action flick that had a weird subject and a silly point of view. Once I saw the trailer, I did not really change my mind but I did add on to my expectation, violent blood splatter and reckless disembowelment. Once I knew that was coming I was on board. Sunday mornings decapitating witches and eviscerating them as they fly through the forest, yeah, that's more like my cup of tea. In all truth, it is not as gruesome as it might have been, and the CGI takes the edge off a lot of the gore, but for a stupid idea with a stupid script it pretty much lived up to my low hopes.

The idea of taking a fairy tale and turning it into the basis of an action film is not new. Heck, last year we had "Snow White and the Huntsman" and twenty five years ago there was "The Company of Wolves". The difference here is that it is all being played for laughs. Nothing is supposed to be serious, from the narration to the weaponry of the leads, to the obvious tip off of a 3D promotional tag. The very opening of the film takes a shot at a long gone cultural reference, pictures of missing children on a milk carton. Of course they are bottles of milk, the pictures are drawings and they are tied onto each individual bottle. If the script could have kept up with that tone a little more, this movie would work a lot better and be more fun. As it is, not too long after it gets started, it begins to take itself too seriously. Sometimes that is the story, which involves white witches and black witches in a struggle for dominance. Sometimes it is the characters who are not given enough to say and are reacting more than attacking. This movie needs a big shot of Bruce Campbell to make it work, instead we get Jeremy Renner. Renner is a real actor, slumming in a piece of schlock, probably for a change of pace and a nice paycheck. An while he is amusing, he simply does not have the comic persona a piece of silliness like this needs.

I do think I made a mistake in not seeing this in 3D. Usually, 3D is an unnecessary addition to a movie that needs something to pump it up. Here it probably is justified by the pieces of bloody body parts that would come flying off the screen. The sprays of CGI blood would probably be more enjoyably over the top in a third dimension. The slo mo shots of arrows, axes and other weapons would be more savory and memorable in 3D. I think I would definitely have enjoyed the resolution of the curse of hungering for things that crawl in the earth a little more. That scene did have one shot that helped Renner establish a bit more comic potential, but that trait is never developed fully and Hansel simply comes across as grumpy most of the time. The truth is there is not much logic in any of it. Characters come in and out of the story, they act for reasons that are never clear, and the witches have no personalities except the one played by Famke Janssen. Most of her performance is growling scowling CGI rendered witch talk. There is just not enough character to care one way or the other.Gemma Arteton is a slight personality with an even slighter character to play in Gretel. Again, there is not any real need to look at this as a measure of ability for any of these actors, the script and film making treat them as figurines to be played with and moved through the story to get to the next action shot.

By all means go and see this if you have a screening in 3D and money burning a hole in your pocket. It won't hurt you or insult you, but it won't make your juices flow much either. There is potential for great pulp stupidity in this film, but it can't quite catch fire like all the  witches need to do in the story. There are things about it that could work, but I don't have the energy or need to talk about them. This is just another filler until better stuff shows up, move along.

Mama

After we saw this movie this morning, Amanda and I had a discussion about the horror films we had seen recently. We usually are willing to go, and usually sorry we went, or at least disappointed. This morning has not broken the trend. We both agreed that the last time we saw horror films that worked for us was "The Crazies" and "Drag Me to Hell." Both of those are a couple of years old now, and we are still plugging along hoping for something that will give us a shiver and be glad that the lights are on. "Mama" starts off with great promise but ultimately fails to deliver.

The opening of this movie is maybe the best set up for a horror film I can remember in a dozen years or so. Before any ghosts or spirits make an appearance, we are horrified to see the desperate acts of a man at the end of his rope. Too often this story plays out in the real world and it is not an entertaining one. The anguish that the man feels can never justify what has happened but there is a sense of understanding of the emotional turmoil a person can go through. The little girl who plays the three year old Victoria in the story is just perfect. It is hard to say if she is a good actor, but in the part she delivers the right kind of innocence and trust and anxiety all at the same time. The sequence ends with the arrival of our apparition and everything has hooked us in for a strong horror experience. When the story picks up five years later, there is another very creepy sequence with the discovery of the two sisters and their return to the world. After this, things begin to fall apart.

It is a cliche to say less is more, especially in a horror film. Everyone is aware that the visualization of the evil spirit or monster can almost never live up to the imagination that we have been working on. Short shots in shadows and quick glimpses in a mirror or across a doorway are usually good for making the audience anxious and a little bit scared. Unfortunately, we need more for the story to pay off. Sometimes, like in the film "The Others" or "The Sixth Sense", the ideas get really good and surprising and they work to frighten us. Most of the time we end up with something like this, where the horror images are the focus of the last third of the story and they are a let down. A previously, nearly invisible antagonist becomes visible and then there is a confrontation that just does not work.

One of the reasons that the frights don't work as well here is that the audience has become jaded by CGI effects. The artists who put this material together can visualize almost anything, and as a consequence they do. When those images are so removed from anything bordering on "realistic", the image simply becomes a grotesque cartoon. That's what happens here, the spirit appears and then we get a chase film featuring a dark version of an animated nightmare. Slasher movies have a edge on ghost stories because when the fright comes it feels real. I think a ghost story can get away with being dismissed if it can achieve a level of believability. Unfortunately, "Mama" just can't do this. The unrealistic nightmare story of a movie like "Phantasm", feels more real despite the fact that it does not take place in an ordinary universe. Look, there are two or three good jumps, and a disturbingly real looking fall down a staircase, but the payoff feels weak.

Story does in these movies as well. There is always a complicated explanation and then a sequence of revelations that tell us what kind of result to expect. "Mama" has some nightmare visualizations that never amount to anything. The Uncle has a vision of his dead brother, which forces him out of his hospital bed to investigate. Once he arrives at the scene that he envisioned, nothing happens. The psychiatrist in the story is freaked out enough to stop his session in the comfortable home where the developing family is living, but he is not so perturbed as to refrain from going into the woods alone, into a spooky house in search of a ghost, in the dark. The vengeful spirit is pursuing a secret agenda. The psychiatrist find a key part of the puzzle from a government clerk who helped him earlier with other information. Unfortunately, instead of a creepy story being revealed in a mundane file drawer in an office building, the director (and co-screenwriter) chooses to try to amp it up by hiding this key piece of physical evidence in a warehouse that looks like it was lit by the same interior decorator of Hannibal Lecter's cell. It is also so cavernous that I would not be surprised if the Arc of the Covenant wasn't also hidden there.

Jessica Chastain's character Annabelle is the most real person in the story. She is ambivalent about participating in the recovery of the girls. She resents the life changes it imposes on her and sometimes she is just a bitch to her boyfriend. Yet she is also a woman who can empathize with two frightened little girls. We can see a potential for a loving relationship and that part of the story works. The idea that jealousy in a spirit might provoke danger is an interesting one, but it is not consistently followed. The spirit here acts in ways that are capricious and have nothing to do with the back story. The resolution makes no sense and the creep factor was gone twenty minutes before the story was over. There are a couple of scares but nothing to make me say, "I Remember Mama".

Bond Memorabilia from USC Four Years Ago

The weekend we went to the Bond Festival and got to see Barbara Broccoli, Michael Wilson, Marc Foster, Tom Mankewitz, Richard Kiel, and Maude Adams, we also stopped by this lobby display in the cinema building on campus.