Category Archives: movies

Of Big Trouble, Autobots, and Saviors of The Universe: My Ideal Saturday Matinee

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The League of Extraordinary Bloggers is a group of like-minded individuals organized by Brian from Cool & Collected.  Each member contributes a post on the weekly assignment, which is shared and cross posted across the group.  The first assignment:

What movie is, or was, your “go to” Saturday matinee — the comfort movie you always popped into the VCR on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the movie you watched over and over again, driving your parents crazy while you recited the lines along with the characters on the screen?

Most people can point to a movie as being their go to childhood flick.  You know the one I’m talking about, it’s the one that your parents would begrudgingly pop into the VCR every weekend.  Over time the sound would pop or the picture would jump because it had been rewound far too many times.

I never had just a movie.  I had three movies, which I know refer to as my Trifecta of 80′s Awesomeness: Big Trouble in Little China, Transformers: The Movie, and Flash Gordon. And you want to know why it was so awesome? They were on just one VCR tape. My dad had a knack for making *ahem* duplicates of VHS tapes through an elaborate system of VHS decks.  With love and dedication, my dad worked it out to get all three movies on to one VHS tape, guaranteeing close to 5 1/2 hours of uninterrupted TV time.

To this day I still have a deep and profound love for those movies.  Partly due to the dedication from my dad to ensure that I had uninterrupted flow of 80s cheese pipelined directly into my cerebral cortex. To this day I can listen to the score from Transformers: The Movie and articulate the scenes in which each movement occurs.  I can go line for line with Jack Burton, and the Flash Gordon soundtrack is among my most played on my iPod.  To this day, I never grow tired of any of these movies. And I may argue that these three movies could be tied for the greatest 80s movie theme songs (Footloose can suck it!)

I have a primal compulsion to watch them every time they pop up, much to the chagrin of my wife.  Of the three, I think she prefers Big Trouble in Little China … but she will never admit to that.

More From The League:

Good Ol’ Saturday Matinee Weirdness via GeekChunks

Boys, Avenge Me, AVENGE ME! via Branded in the 80s

 

The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer Is Somewhat Amazing

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I will freely admit that I’m a Spider-Man fanboy.  Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies hit right as I was getting back into comics after a long time away.  We can all agree that by the time Spider-Man 3 hit, the magic was gone from the franchise.  I will forever be haunted by the images of Emo Dancing Street Strutting Peter Parker (somehow HASBRO missed out on making an action figure of that).  A fresh take was needed on the character, and I’m glad that Sam Raimi stepped aside.

So about this trailer.  I will spare you the frame by frame analysis, I’ll leave that to the darker corners of the Interwebz.  I will however outline my hits and misses:

Hits:

  • A real person swinging around as Spider-Man, I understand that CGI needs to be used, but in-camera effects FTMFW
  • Emma Stone looks like she stepped out of the pages of a Steve Ditko issue of Amazing Spider-Man.  It’s uncanny.
  • MECHANICAL WEBSHOOTERS #$%%^&&!!
  • The Reptile is the villain, finally!

Misses:

  • I’m not really liking the look of Reptile, what happened to his snout? Why does he look like Killer Croc?
  • The suit … I’m a purist and I know  this sounds like a nitpick, but there are few costumes that you do not mess around with and Spider-Man is on that list.
  • It’s being billed as “the untold story”, I just don’t want a long drawn out origin story.  I’m pretty sure my mom and grandmom know how Peter Parker became Spider-Man.

Call me cautiously optimistic about this one, The Amazing Spider-Man hits theaters July 3rd, 2012.

 

 

 

Fact: Michael Bay Loves To Double Dip

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One of the trends that Hollywood doesn’t seem to get tired of is the DVD double dip. Transformers: Dark of The Moon was first released on Blu Ray & DVD on September 30th. It was bare bones with no special features at all. That was a very shitty move on behalf of Paramount, as they had full intentions of releasing it again a few months later chock full of special features and in 3D.

As someone who throughly enjoys the commentaries and behind the scenes stuff, I opted to wait it out. Luckily I only have a couple of weeks left until the Transformers: Dark of the Moon Ultimate Edition Blu-Ray 3D Combo Pack hits retail on January 31st.

Transformers Dark of The Moon 3D Blu-ray from Michael Bay Dot Com on Vimeo.


Credit [TFW2005]

The Brand New Captain America: The First Avenger Trailer

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I just got done watching the latest trailer for Captain America: The First Avengers for the fourth time and I am very well convinced that this will be THE super hero movie of the summer. While Thor was genuinely awesome in its own right, seeing Captain America sling his shield on the big screen is going to be something special.

All I can say is America, FUCK YEAH!

A New Red Band Trailer for Attack The Block

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I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Attack The Block, a British science fiction film in which an inner city gang defends their neighborhood from an alien invasion. It’s produced by the Up until this point I haven’t gotten a look at the picture up until this point, but this new red band trailer is very, very encouraging.

Attack The Block is set for a limited US release on July 29th, unfortunately Philadelphia doesn’t appear to be included on that list of cities that first weekend.

Credit [First Showing]

DDOY Review: Super 8

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Director: J.J. Abrams
Starring: Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler
[rating:3.5]

While I don’t consider myself a J.J. Abrams fanboy, I will admit that I’m a big fan of his work. I appreciate the level of detail he brings to his projects and admire his reluctance to spoil the entire movie plot in a trailer. Leading up to its release, Super 8 was getting positive reviews from critics and a lot of people were talking about how much it felt like vintage Spielberg.

Luckily I’m far too distracted in my personal life to get caught up in the hype, so when I entered the theater this past weekend I had no preconceived notions. I just wanted to be entertained. The end result was a very enjoyable film that took me back to movies like The Goonies, Explorers, and The Monster Squad.

In Super 8 we follow a group of kids who had interests atypical of their peers, that got caught in the middle of a government conspiracy and came face to face with an alien life form. Sounds like E.T. right? It certainly does, but Super 8 has one thing over E.T. in that it’s a far more compelling and realistic approach to first contact with an alien species. I never bought E.T. the benevolent alien that loved Reese’s Pieces.

Super 8 is hard to define, at one point it’s a family drama and quickly veers into an action movie and then comes back around to a science fiction piece. Is there a heavy Spielberg influence? Absolutely. I do not think that it is a detriment to the film as a whole, but you definitely get a “yeah I’ve seen this before” feeling in the third act heading towards the film’s climax.

The production value of the film was phenomenal, Abrams went to great lengths to make you feel like you were in Ohio in the late 1970s. The group of child actors he assembled did a fine job carrying the picture, and unlike other movies with kids in them … he made sure they talked like middle school aged kids. There was a sense of gravity in their performances and it didn’t feel like some Disney Channel movie.

I won’t go into spoiler territory, but I will say that the creature is definitely reminiscent of others from projects that Abrams has done. I like the fact that there is some consistency in Super 8 with the creature designs in Star Trek and Cloverfield.

Overall, Super 8 is a worthwhile theatrical experience and a great start to the summer movie season.

Invaders From Mars (1986) Warped My Childhood

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What do you get when you give Tobe Hooper, director of Poltergeist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the go ahead to remake the 1953 science fiction classic Invaders From Mars? Well you get a teacher, who has been taken over by malevolent aliens inhaling frog like its a corn dog in the back of a classroom.

So yes it’s completely understandable that this movie drastically altered my worldview at a very young age. A young kid witnesses an alien craft land in his town, and finds himself the only one aware of the Martian invasion. Only his school nurse can help him, because well everyone else are basically aliens wearing human skin suits.

I haven’t had an opportunity to revisit Invaders From Mars in at least 10-15 years, so I can’t really say how it holds up. For those who have never known of the film’s existence, I’ve included the theatrical trailer below.

Jack Burton Was The Movie Studios Worst Nightmare

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I have a deep and profound love of John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China. It was a movie that I watched on a constant loop as a kid (probably not the best decision on my parent’s behalf), but for nearly 20 years it has remained my favorite live-action movie. It’s a movie that really has a cult following, and I think a lot of those followers are now guys writing for the big movie blogs.

Quint over at Ain’t It Cool News was able to interview director John Carpenter about his filmography, and towards the end touched on Big Trouble in Little China to which he had this to say:

The studio wanted RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, clearly that’s what they wanted. They wanted a movie like that. “Can’t you just do that?” They didn’t ever actually say that to me, but I know that’s what they wanted. “Xerox it.” But I had other ideas

It’s well known that 20th Century Fox sunk nearly $25 million into the film in the hopes of cultivating a new action adventure hero in the form of Jack Burton. The finished product was nothing like what they had outlined for Carpenter, and he elaborated:

I was like “What about if your white lead is a complete fool?” He has no idea what he is doing. He thinks he does… He’s this big blowhard. He’s kind of a John Wayne blowhard in the fact that he has no ability at anything, but he thinks he does and he rolls around and ‘Jack Burton says this,’ and talks about himself. And Kurt just went for it and of course to the horror of everybody at the studio. Absolute horror. They didn’t want THAT kind of comedy.

What makes the movie so great is that Jack Burton isn’t really even the hero. He’s just “a reasonable guy who has experience some very unreasonable things”. A lot of credit has to go to Kurt Russell who essentially played a character that has become a geek icon and infinitely quotable. And as eluded to during the course of the interview, Big Trouble in Little China has enjoyed a lot of success on DVD and Blu Ray having gone through multiple productions runs.

Quint really did do a terrific job in this interview, and was able to touch on a lot of the highlights of Carpenter’s career from Halloween to They Live. If you’re a fan you really owe it to yourself to check it out in its entirety.

News Credit [Ain't It Cool News]

The Apes Will Rise and Fling Their Poo

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Another trailer has been released this past week for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and it looks like it will be a pretty entertaining science fiction movie. I understand that when you head to the theaters you have to suspend disbelief, but come on there’s no way we lose a fight to some apes, even super smart ones.

Here’s how I see the third act developing in my mind.

INT: The White House’s Situation Room

President: So there are super smart apes ransacking a city?
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: Yes sir, super smart apes.
President: What’s our best option?
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: Well we could just bomb the fuck out of them with some Predator drones. The city will smell like fried monkey ass for the next 3 years.
President: Do it!

ROLL CREDITS

Here’s the entire plot that I’m gleaned from the footage I’ve seen thus far, so these might actually be SPOILERS:

  • Super scientist James Franco makes a vaccine that can “cure” everything for some company, and begins testing it on Ceasar.
  • Apparently James Franco does the company wrong, they take Ceasar away.
  • Ceasar gets thrown in with some other chimps who aren’t super smart, doesn’t love James Franco anymore
  • As Ceasar becomes more integrated with the dumb chimps, he develops a plan to get back at the human overlords.
  • Monkey breakout.
  • Poo is flung.
  • Somehow a small population of super smart apes are able to overthrow humans capable who have: semi-automatic weapons and helicopters.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters August 5th, 2011.

So Far Green Lantern Is Surpassing My Expectations

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As a B-level superhero in the DC Universe, Green Lantern doesn’t have the widespread appeal of Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman. Despite that, Warner Bros. and Director Martin Campbell seemed to have pulled out all the stops when the live action adaptation of the long running comic book hits theaters June 17th.

I must admit that I was initially critical of the casting of Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern. Like many denizens of the Interwebs he was always our dream casting for The Flash (who will probably never see a theatrical adaptation).

The more I see of Green Lantern, the more I’m impressed with the visual cues lifted from the comics while infusing them with a bit more weight in reality. I’m totally fine with the redesign of the Green Lantern Battery as it seems silly that a race of ancient race of blue-skinned aliens designed the basis of the peace keeping force around an Earth specific object. I think the CGI suit for Hal Jordan works, as spandex in space just doesn’t seem to work.

And what makes me even giddier is they went all out with the Green Lantern Corps. While the drama might revolve around Earthling Hal Jordan, the creative team went all out to give this flick a grand scope which will certainly be appreciated by the fans.

The latest trailer for Green Lantern breaks the audience into the Green Lantern Corps and sets the stage for Hal Jordan. I think this film will do well in the box office as the core demographic of comic book enthusiasts lining up for midnight screenings. Additionally we might even see some crossover appeal from the women folk that just want to see a shirtless Ryan Reynolds on a 50′ screen.