Bad Movie Tuesday: Perfect Sense
Perfect Sense is bleak, unintentionally hilarious and features Eva Green eating lipstick and toothpaste before she loses her sense of taste.
I get that the movie is about the dramatic loss of all senses. However, before each sense disappears the director included intense moments of pretentiousness. The beginning of the film features people breaking down in wild moments of depression. The scenes reek of a first time director and his artistic vision. His vision includes making Ewan McGregor put his head against things.
These moments remind me of a quote by Roger Ebert when he wrote about the nice film Jeff, Who Lives at Home.
“One stylistic note: In nearly every scene, the Duplass brothers use quick little zooms in and out. Given the usual meaning of a sudden zoom in the grammar of the cinema (they translate as whoa!), these have no meaning at all. They’re simply devices to remind us that the story isn’t really happening but is being directed. Instead of whoa!, they translate as Duplass! They’re good directors; they’ll outgrow this.”
David Mackenzie directed this film and it proves he has talent. The film was a hit at Sundance and the Ediburgh film festival but he over directs several moments which cheapen the dramatic appeal. The visuals are top-notch and he managed to land a stellar cast. However, I hope he grows out of his unintentionally hilarious bouts of pretentiousness. Watching Green voraciously eat lipstick is depressing and it takes away from the story because of how serious it is treated. There is an entire montage of people eating whole unskinned fish, trash and mayonnaise. If this was such a personal story why cut to a man shoveling lard into his mouth. The scenes are supposed to be weighty but instead made me say “oh, geesh.”
Andrew Lapin from NPR sums it up when he wrote:
“It’s difficult to impart feelings of profound sadness with an image of Ewan McGregor shoving a stick of butter in his mouth.”
Perfect Sense is a movie about people slowly losing their senses. Ewan McGregor is a chef and Eva Green is a doctor. They eat soap together, they cry together and they eventually can’t see each other. The momentum comes crashing down whenever a sense disappears. the tagline for the film is “without love there is nothing.” Without the directing flourishes this could have been a nice/bleak love story.
The look is good, the performances are fine but it is a bleak train on pretentious wheels.
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Best Fights of Film Part 1: Troy (2004)
When it comes to memorable fights Troy (2004) holds a special place in my heart. As Achilles, Brad Pit (Moneyball, Tree of Life) graced the screen with two magnificent fight scenes that will forever bless my memory. In this corner…
Boagrius is played by Nathan Jones (Charlie’s Farm), a monster of a man at a lean and mean 6’11”/360. Most likely type-cast as “over-sized muscular warrior guy” he has menaced the screen in Conan the Barbarian (2011), The Condemned (2007), Fearless (2006), The Protector (2005), Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1996) and even Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)—meaning he has faced Jason Mamoa, Steve Austin, Jet Li, Tony Jaa (Ong-Bak) and Jackie Chan! Not a bad resume for a Big’n’Tall baddie.
This fight is super brief, but super awesome. And Pitt’s jumping stab down the collar bone had me speechless when I first saw it while keeping me wowed every time I see it again.
Hector is played by Eric Bana (Hanna, Star Trek).
This fight opens with badass lines, has nail-biting music, and drips amazing spear and shield-fighting choreography that Hollywood had never before seen! Yup, movie action and combat choreography has come a long way over the decades, hasn’t it?
For my daily dose of awesome, this movie is loaded with great quote badassery! “If they should ever tell my story, let them say that I walked with giants. I lived in the time of Hector, tamer of forces. Let them say–I lived–in the time of Achilles [–Sean Bean].” I don’t care what kind of flack this movie got from some. The fight between Boagrius and Achilles was brief, but jaw-dropping, and the duel of Hector and Achilles (Eric Bana and Brad Pitt) was nothing short of legendary. “You will not have eyes tonight. You will not have ears or a tongue. You will wander the Underworld blind, deaf and dumb and all the dead will know: this is Hector, the fool who thought he killed Achilles [–Brad Pitt].”
Anyway, I hope you like these fights as much as I did and, if you haven’t seen the movie, I hope that you now have a reason to watch it. To find more of my best fights just do a search for “best fights of film” in our search box.
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John’s Old School Horror Corner: The Nesting (1981)
MY CALL: The only scary thing about this movie was that I managed to find some positive reviews for it on Amazon. Stupid. Not scary. Only stupid. The word stupid comes to mind quite a bit while watching this movie. The ghosts and the story are stupid. The main character is stupid. The title is stupid. And people only die for stupid reasons. WHAT TO WATCH INSTEAD: For some old school haunted house-ish action that is so bad you’ll laugh I’d aim for The Sentinel (1977) or Night Wish (1990) to pick a few randomly from the masses. If you want less scary, newer and way more intentionally funny then go for The Hazing (2004), one of my personal favorites.
This stupid movie is about a stupid agoraphobic writer who moves into a secluded estate haunted by a bevy of malevolent hooker ghosts.
After years of therapy Lauren (Robin Groves; Silver Bullet) decides to take her agoraphobia treatment into her own hands and tries a “Do It Yourself” hypnosis kit which she tries once and quits. With the increasing pressure of the release of her next book and her fear of wide open spaces she naturally decides to spend some time out of the city in—wait for it—a wide open space! Evidently her true fear is of populated metropolises because this agoraphobic covers a lot of ground. She drives two hours and goes out in the woods and encounters some creepy secluded McMansion that looks like a fictitious house of unique architecture illustrated on the cover of her last book, The Nesting, from which this flick inherited its unfortunate and, if anything, misleading title.
When Netflix suggested The Nesting I thought I was in for a supernatural vermin flick where roaches or something eat the tenants. No such luck. That would’ve made for a much better movie.
I truly wanted to watch this instead–sadly it’s not on Netflix. Just look at the images on the back. This…looks…AWESOME!!! Giant roach attacking a chick in her underwear…million dollar idea! Just stop reading this review, go find this and watch it! Now!
Let’s pause for a moment and take note that we’re out in the boondocks where the folks are simple, speak slowly, and shoot trespassers. So, thinking that she saw someone looking out from the second floor window (presumably from their own house!), she trespasses inside to investigate the somewhat dilapidated home, which seems oddly familiar to her even from the inside. She smells perfume and finds a lit cigarette, even sees someone walking on the other side of an opaque window, and it didn’t occur to her overly entitled WASPy mind to sneak her ass back outside of there before owner or groundskeeper or whatever called the cops or shoot her in the face claiming eminent domain. Why Lauren feels there is something that needs to be solved by some random writer chick from the city is beyond me. She finds no one, contacts the owner to discover no one lives there, and somehow shifts from sleuthy suspicion and breaking/entering to future tenant as she feels this would be a great place for her to do some writing. Huh!?!
For a ritzy, writer, big city white chick with a socially debilitating phobia she is surprisingly hard to phase. She ignores a number of major red flags. When she asks the owner (John Carradine; Buried Alive, The Sentinel) about renting the house, the old guy looks at her like he saw a ghost and literally strokes out in front of her! I don’t know if you’ve like ever seen a horror movie, but this is how they f***ing start! Then, to our agoraphobic who intends to stay out in the woods alone, they say she can’t get phone service for at least a week. I think that if I was having panic attacks at the very thought of walking outside I’d probably like access to a phone to voice my mania to a therapist or shockingly patient boyfriend.
She starts having weird nightmares, shit starts moving on its own, she finds a record playing in the attic (which she had never been in before!), and after just one night she quite casually mentions that she thinks the house might be haunted. However, she seemed to have no intention of leaving. Are you kidding me!?! If you’re place isn’t haunted, then you have strangers sneaking into the house (while you’re in it!) and messing with you and you have no phone and no one living nearby. I’m going to go ahead and consider that a strong point of concern, phobic chick who lives alone. If that wasn’t enough, by the third night of her stay she is assaulted by a bordello of hooker-geists. Like something out of an Ed Wood film, she runs through a crowd of extended grabby arms which somehow never manage to grasp her. With her terror finally eclipsing her curiosity, she still makes no effort to leave the damned house. At this point, I think she deserves to die for her stupidity. [At this point I’d like you to scroll up to the movie poster beginning this post and read the tagline at the top.]
The deaths in this movie, like our protagonist and the writers’ definition of agoraphobia, are all stupid. Her psychiatrist comes to check on her progress and ends up falling off of the roof of the house when he is distracted by the unwarranted laughter of some spectral prostitute.
Later, Lauren’s alcoholic country bumpkin handyman gets a little too handsy with her. Luckily she is saved by the telekinetic assault of a sex worker’s spirit. When he tries to get away he is ultimately dispatched by a bunch of random lake zombie arms pulling him to a mucky, unexciting death.
A local oaky gets road-ragey after she asks a few too many questions and tries his hand at vehicular homicide. He must yell I’m going to kill you a dozen times yet I have no idea why her line of questioning got him so bloodlusted. At no point yet—STILL!!!—has Lauren even considered leaving the house. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how many good opportunities there were for her to notice that this is not a good situation and decide to leave. After all, nothing was keeping her there but curiosity—or stupidity. [Again, I’d like you to scroll up to the movie poster and read that tagline again.]
On another totally random note, the owner’s grandson is a physicist (living out in the boondocks) and is recruited to help Lauren prove that the house is haunted…while she continues to live in it!!! After he agrees, we never again hear anything about physics or proving that the house is haunted. WTF!?! Just about the only sensible thing about this movie was when we see the flashback during which all of those whores got murdered in the first place.
Eventually you find out why these undead venereal disease carriers are lingering around the house and why they never try to kill Lauren. There was, in fact, a reason and it’s stupid! Don’t see this movie.
Yup, that’s how I felt after suffering through this movie–no desire to go on.
Best Quote of the Movie: “You’re too damned crazy to be crazy!” Sound like the words of an esteemed physicist from the boondocks, right?
The WTF Factor: Just past the two-minute mark, The Nesting is perhaps the only movie EVER to justify having a case of the shakes and dropping your keys when trying to deal with a door lock. In this case, the main character is an agoraphobic writer who is horrified at the prospect of leaving her home to run errands or whatever. They sell her terror of open spaces (i.e., public) pretty hard [in the opening scene anyway—after that her phobia was evidently forgotten]. This in mind, when she drops them later while being chased by something scary no one will be saying crying oh God. But this never happens! She ends up staying in a haunted house with nothing keeping her from leaving throughout the whole movie. So what the Hell was the point in showing her drop the damned keys?!?!
Now I’d like to talk about misleading movie posters for a while…
Above we have the most mainstream poster for this movie. Who are those ghostly figures outside the house? And why are they shrowded in fog? Looks for like “The Fog.” And why make the sickle such a big deal when it’s in one minor scene?
Okay, so the house in this one [above] is not the same damned house!!! And now we see Lauren, or some other psycho chick, with the sickle as if this was some female psycho-killer movie.
This one, AGAIN, is showing the wrong house! And what’s with the demon hand holding the candle? We have no demons or monsters in this. Just panty-geists. What’s with the evil serpentine eyes? There is so much going on here that has nothing–NOTHING–to do with this movie. At least there’s no sickle.
Do a GoogleImage search and this may be the least common movie poster you find, yet it’s the most accurate. People get murdered in a mansion.
I simply included this in case anyone wanted to read a less bitter synopsis of the flick.
Have a good one, people. That is, unless you watch this.
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Trailer Talk: Here Comes the Boom (2012)
CLICK HERE to see the trailer.
Release Date: October 12, 2012
Cast: Kevin James (Zookeeper, The Dilemma), Salma Hayek (Puss in Boots), Henry Winkler (Royal Pains, The Waterboy), Bas Rutten
Looks like fun. We have Kevin James relying on situational comedy over his normal male hysteria, a strong-hearted underdog saves the day story, and mixed martial arts. It’s not gonna’ be hard to fill theaters with these goods.
Kevin James plays a high school teacher at a school whose harsh budget cuts threaten the discontinuation of all extra-curricular activities. Opposing these unfair cuts, James steps up to find a way to make the $48,000 necessary to save them. When he learned how much MMA fighters get paid even when they lose a match ($10,000) he feels he has found his solution. We’ll get to watch an overweight 42-year old biology teacher learn the pains of training, stumbling through the “lower levels” of MMA matches, and find himself through this bloody-knuckled good deed. Hmmmm, sounds suspiciously like Warrior (2011) without as much drama and a huskier star.
Kevin James pulls a “Warrior” and dislocates his shoulder. Salma Hayek’s got this.
With Henry Winkler as his trainer and Salma Hayek playing his fellow teacher, supporter and love interest, we have plenty of opportunities for good laughs outside of watching James getting his ass kicked. There’s also real-life MMA star Bas Rutten, who worked with James and director Frank Coraci on Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Zookeeper, and even appeared a couple of times on The King of Queens. I’m guessing they had at least some part in dreaming up this story together.
I wonder if he’ll be able to shock us with his physical performance. Putting on a good game face during a tough fight or training session may set him up for more dramatic roles in the future.
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MY CALL: This filthy alien abduction flick was written and directed by Tom Kincaid, who is no stranger to classlessness. Kincaid is the lobotomized mastermind behind Mutant Hunt, Robot Holocaust, and a whole lot of porn. This movie is so bad that you wish it was intentionally spoofy, but it’s not. It’s a giggling, guilty pleasure for adult horror fans that started out as preteens watching horror flicks to learn about female anatomy. IF YOU LIKE THIS THEN WATCH: Mutant Hunt (1986), Alien Contamination, Deep Space, Galaxy of Terror, Inseminoid, Dreamaniac, Nightwish, Humanoids From the Deep, Slugs, Hardware, Of Unknown Origin, to name a few budgetless pieces of vintage crap at which you should delight in rolling your eyes.
The story quickly sets sail after an old man walking a cute little dog turns into a melty monster, sheds his skin, becomes some fly-headed goon and runs off with a floozy, presumably to rape her since, let’s be honest, that’s just what happens in most 80s horror (e.g., Galaxy of Terror, Inseminoid, Humanoids From the Deep). What is it with Tom Kincaid and melty villains? Melty cyborgs in Mutant Hunt, melty horny aliens in this.
Another cover/poster. Just charming.
For reasons I don’t understand, a young, attractive female doctor and a detective team up to solve a series of brutal virgin rapes. Evidently doctors have carte blanche to skip out on their medical responsibilities when a detective fails to consider asking other cops for help. The doctor is confounded by the victims’ amnesia as if the date rape drug (roofies/rohypnol) wasn’t yet mainstream. Come on, chick, there’s no need to pester Dr. House on this one. A frat guy could have solved this medical mystery.
Um, like yeah, duh, whatever! I totally did medical school.
All of the victems have been virgins—in Manhattan! Has Tom Kincaid been to Manhattan? Not a lot of virgins past baptism-age. I guess this is before Sex in the City made it known that there are simply none left. Our attractive doctor heroine suggests that she, too, is a virgin. Again, before Grey’s Anatomy revealed that doctors, when not in the immediate field of vision of their patients, are having sex like animals nicknamed Dr. McDreamy and Dr. McSteamy.
Our next victem is a meal-skipping, cokehead, ex-gymnast model who, of course, works out naked between swimsuit photoshoots. I don’t know many virgins these days, but I can say that none of them are coked-up model exhibitionists in Manhattan. Her gay photographer, much to his own surprise (huh?), turns into a slimy tentacle-flinging rape monster, steals her innocence and scratches up her face.
Are we really gonna just sit here and not point out what a rip on The Fly this thing is?
LeeAnne Baker (Mutant Hunt, Necropolis) plays a nurse who, for lack of a better explanation, spends an awful lot of time naked for someone who practices abstinence until marriage. Anyway, her boyfriend surprises her by showing up to her apartment for their date early and, guess what happens next? Yup. He turns into a slimy rape monster.
Horror movies and shower scenes… Nope. That’s all. I had nothing else to say.
Truth be told, every woman in this movie seems to be a virgin—even though they all look and/or talk like floozies, spinsters and tramps. If they had just given it up in high school then these monsters wouldn’t be a problem. This film is really Tom Kincaid’s message to the world that a healthy sex life leads to a healthy life. This, of course, was coming from a gay porn director in the 80s who was watching his male leads dropping like flies from AIDS.
Later on, our hospitalized victems—who were admitted with what appeared to be acid burns on their face—have completely healed overnight. But fret not, they turn into naked murderesses. Then, as if responding to some sexually transmitted homing beacon, they wander to the tunnels under the city where our monsters live. How these women make it from the hospital to the sewers totally naked in broad daylight with no witnesses, questions, arrests or whatever is beyond me. What happens next really made me feel guilty for watching this. This roving burlesque bevy gathers in an alien hot tub where they rub each other down with some manner of truly disgusting thick, white slime. I wonder what that is?
Get in. The slutty water is fine.
There is only one fight between the protagonists and any of the monsters, which are quite strong and bulletproof. Luckily the lady doctor found their one weakness: wooden boards! WTF!?! Bullets cannot penetrate their intergalactic skin, but hit it over the head with a two-by-four and it’s twitching on the ground with blood erupting from a massive headwound! Really?
This is what happens when they don’t use virgins…testicle-heads.
The monster transformations appear painful and they are deliciously disgusting. The gore and creature make-up in this is far superior to Mutant Hunt and represent the only thing that Tom Kincaid got right. This is the cheap gore I hope for when I sample random 80s horror fare. Such a shame that it’s limited to just a few scenes.
People forget how awful life was before they manufactured Lipitor.
The acting is really something special. Everyone in this movie is trying to prevent an ongoing series of rapes, the worst of all heinous acts next to murder. I’ve seen a few episodes of SVU and, well, people tend to get emotional about this stuff. All the while, there is never an ounce of passion from our stoic actors. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, though. After all, this is a film in which basically the entire female cast disrobes to full frontal nudity. You won’t find Shakespeare by holding your casting calls in strip clubs. They stare, emotionless, as they watch monsters dying, possessed naked chicks bathing in reproductive filth, and hear explanations about these aliens’ rapey motives. Emotionless! Like they were just waiting in line at the bank.
In summary, if ever there was a single way that this movie failed, it would be credibility. Some randy aliens looking for some action land on Earth and try to impregnate our women—okay, I buy it, I suppose that could happen. But they manage find six attractive adult virgin women in Manhattan—no fucking chance!
What they Hell am I even looking at!?! WTF is that!?! Why would you make that the DVD cover!?!
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Safety Not Guaranteed
Warm characters, several questions and an audience that stayed until the end of the credits. Safety Not Guaranteed is a gem of a movie that intertwines time travel and comedy. What I love is that the time travel and characters are given the respect they deserve. The characters are three-dimensional wonders and Mark Duplass is turning into an indie leviathan.
What makes Safety Not Guaranteed work is the wonderful script that creates likable characters. Leading the charge is Aubrey Plaza. Plaza (Parks & Recreation) is equal parts gawky, pretty, intelligent and weird. She is able to be goofy and confident at the same time. Her intro to Duplass is a highlight of the film.
Jake Johnson (New Girl, 21 Jump Street) is making a wonderful niche for himself as the fast talking jerky guy who has a heart of gold. His character takes an interesting journey that feels slightly unnecessary yet completely uncliched.
The story centers around a man who posts an ad (see above) requesting a partner to join him in time travel. The request is earnest and truthful. Jake Johnson’s writer decides to find him so he takes two interns played by Aubrey Plaze and Karan Soni to assist in the story. Jake strikes out at his attempt to get in with the potential time traveler so he enlists Plaza to get the story. What follows is the blossoming relationship between Plaza and Duplass. The two form a bond due to their “weird mojos bonding.”
Plaza’s introduction to Duplass is a wonder of cool dialogue and confident acting. The two bond quickly and move forward with their plan to go back in time. Duplass is able to portray a man who is who is incredibly capable or crazy. His performance walks the line perfectly. You like him yet stay skeptical.
I love that this is not a movie about time travel. It is more interested in the characters. I also like how Duplass character is actually being followed. What makes it better is that the government agents are skeptical because the suspect lives in a house in the woods.
I won’t say whether or not the time travel happens. If they do it is secondary to the plot because character development is what matters. Safety Not Guaranteed is a movie about interesting people who have to take their own journeys involving time travel, love and loss.
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Mirror Mirror
Mirror Mirror is a cheeeky film that employs zany humor and a hasty yet unique look to provide a breezy 90 minutes. The movie is perfect when you’ve worked a 60 hour week and it is 106 degrees outside. My girlfriend and I watched this as a way to unwind and not be challenged.
Here is an example of the cheeky dialogue:
Brighton: Snow White is dead. One of God’s great mysteries is his plan for each and every one of us…
Queen: Speed it up.
Brighton: Snow White lived, she died, God rest her soul, Amen. There will be a buffet lunch served at two.
Here is another random moment.
Snow White: I’m leaving the castle.
Guard #1: Is she allowed to leave the castle?
Guard #2: I don’t know.
Guard #1: I won’t tell if you don’t.
Guard #2: Pinky swear?
Lily Collins is a cute little bugger who handles the role well. Like Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman she isn’t given much to do. She smiles, looks confused and has insane eyebrows.
The movie was directed Tarsem Singh who is known for his visuals and head-scratching dialogue (Immortals). He is a hands on director who creates beautiful films that nobody watches (The Fall, The Cell). I wish he would have been given several more months to develop a look that makes Snow White distinctive. you can see touches of his famous vision but they don’t gell like his prior films. Instead of creating a new spin he adds another chapter to the Snow White saga.
This chapter involves Julia Roberts acting saucy, Lily Collins facial expressions and Armie Hammer having fun. Together they go through all the Snow White clichés and ends with Sean Bean in a loud yellow outfit.
The best thing Tarsem does with the film is developing the seven dwarves. I loved the seven dwarves. The men have personalities that shine amidst the visuals. You can single out nice moments for each actor and you cheer for them. I love that Mirror Mirror didn’t cast seven British actors then shrink them via CGI like Hunstman did. They are a delight to see on-screen and you will recognize a lot of them from prior work.
The film is light fluff. Never challenging, sometimes engaging and often catches you off guard with a cheeky little joke.
Watch Mirror Mirror. Forget that you watched Mirror Mirror….Then a few hours later remember that you kinda liked Mirror Mirror.
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Bad Movie Tuesday: Seeking Justice
Seeking Justice starts with an interesting question. How far would a man go to get the person who hurt his wife? Would he allow somebody to kill the person if he had to break the law in the future? Seeking Justice could have been an interesting potboiler about a young man who protects his wife but can’t stomach the repercussions. His hesitation puts him on the wrong end of a dangerous group of people who are everywhere and nowhere.
However, the producers cast Nic Cage as an incredibly bored husband who protects a bored January Jones while an excellent Guy Pearce hunts them down. The plot gets so convoluted that you give up trying to follow and learn to appreciate the boredom. The only saving grace is when Nic Cage has to do a stunt because you get to see a stunt double with a bad wig.
I’ve started a bad Nic Cage movie tradition. The bored acting pic while doing something intense. This trademark boredom can be seen in Next, Season of the Witch and Frozen Ground. It continues in Seeking Justice.
Bored jogging
Bored Mardi Gras
straddling a guy while bored
Bored while getting framed for murder
The movie has so many plot twists that you lose track of what is going on? I have no clue about what happened during the last half of the film. Something about dirty cops, journalists and January Jones playing a cello.
The biggest problem I have with the film is that Guy Pearce is given nothing to do. Guy Pearce can act his face off. He was awesome in Lockout, villainous in The Count of Monte Cristo and old in Prometheus. He could have carried the movie on his shoulders and maybe given Nic Cage an excuse to wake up. Instead, he falls into the background while Nic Cage goes on a quest to clear his name.
Don’t watch Seeking Justice. Nic Cage is bored. The plot is incomprehensible. It is perfect Bad Movie Tuesday material.
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Movies, Films & Flix Roundtable: The Expendables 2
Mark: The biggest relief about this film is that it won’t have a 17 minute monologue by Mickey “loud breather” Rourke. That dude has developed a weird acting thing where he breathes incredibly loud after each sentence. Watch Immortals, Iron Man 2 and Passion Play for proof.
Chuck Finley: it’s called the Ultimate Warrior Method
Mark: Two things bother me about this trailer. 1. JCVD is looking for 70 tons of plutonium. Seems excessive. I miss Eric Robert’s rich evil guy…he just wanted money and not world domination.
2. I’m not stoked about more Arnold and Bruce. this means less of Dolph’s Viking and Jet’s shady money grubber. I hope The Expendables 3 features the two of them on a road trip in the style of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
John: 70 tons!?!?! I looked online and estimates for Plutonium stores in the world are only 500-1000 tons. He seems to want quite a bit considering that the old Trinity A-bomb only used 6.2kg (~13.64 lbs). Maybe he’s just been watching Battleship and Falling Skies too much and is getting paranoid about our ability to defend ourselves against an alien invasion.
Mark: Maybe plutonium is code for HGH. JCVD is attempting to hoard all the workout supplements. That is a huge problem for the expendables.
Sweet Sugar: Note to self: next time I go zip lining in Costa Rica, bring machine guns
Mark: I wonder how many innocent sloths were killed during that gunfight? People never consider the sloths.
John: Yeah, they never consider how f’ing DEADLY they are! I hope you don’t find yourself in a Central American jungle besieged by sloths. You’ll think “oh, how cute…” and then they’ll mess your day up!!!
Mark: Imagine this scene: The Expendables are pinned down by sloths and Terry Crews comes in with his automatic shotgun and just starts blowing up sloths everywhere.
John: Then a sloth Matrix-leaps from a tree doing one of Neo’s Superman-posed missile-punches and burns a hole through Crews’ chest like a meteor just went through it! Then its still-blind newborn slothlings hobble in like mutants attracted to the scent of blood and feast upon him. Mwahahahaha…MWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Wait, did that get weird? Maybe a little weird? I think I went too far that time.
Mark: That is a wonderful visual. Would they become super sloths due to the HGH? If I ever tried to explain this conversation to a third party it would be very awkward.
John: SGH.
Mark: I guarantee three people in the 2012 olympics will be busted for SGH.
John: Phelps is gonna get caught smoking a clump of sloth hair looking for an edge.
Mark: Aside from the 70 tons of stolen SGH I’m worried about the director Simon West. He is the man responsible for When a Stranger Calls, Mechanic, Tomb Raider and an episode of The Cape. His only good film was the gonzo Con Air. That was 15 years ago. Now, he doesn’t have a mulletted/buff Nic Cage to shoulder the absurd carnage.
Megan: Hey now… I am prepared to defend Tomb Raider and any movie that was pre-emaciated Angelina Jolie.
John: Hmmm…well, if he gave the 140,000 lbs of SGH to 140,000 Chinese gym rats. Then he could have a pec-tastic army of Bolo Youngs! Finally, Van Damme and Bolo Young could put their Double Impact and Bloodsport differences behind them and take over the world as BFF-besties.
John: Hey, where’s Bolo Young in all this? He and Terry Crews could have a pec dance-off.
Mark: what is more impressive and why? JCVD splits or Dolph Lundgren front kicks.
John: JCVD splits back when he was stronger, heavier, and had a heels on the seats of two chairs in his Bloodsport hotel room.
Mark: I chose front kicks for two reasons.
1. Everybody knows a front kick is coming. Everybody knows the direction. However, everybody gets flattened by it.
2. After Bloodsport where he demolished Bolo Young and his nuggets with a blind split JCVDs splits became gratuitous. Tree splits (kickboxer) Naked Splits (Timecop) Split personalities (Double Impact).
Mark: My dream for Expendables 3 is Michael Jai White and Keanu Reeves are the bad guys. Wesley Snipes (Demolition Man reunion) joins the crew as Dolph Lundgren’s step brother.
John: MJW and Keanua could be like Master Blaster, where Keanu sets up a howdah saddle on one of MJW’s pecs. Slightly awkward, though, considering that Keanu is taller. And Ray Parks as a knife-fighter tunnel rat type.
Mark: Do you know what happens to tunnel rats when they get hit by an automatic shotgun?
Same thing that happens to anybody else when they get hit by an automatic shotgun.
Megan: This wold only work for me if it was “Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite” -Where he uses his patented technique of slapping opponents in the face to catch them off guard.
Tony 9.5: This movie is going to kick ass; as it should. Brings back an old school feeling of how action movies should be…ACTUAL stuff being blown up, someone probably getting knocked down in a fight scene…I guess the exact opposite of the latest Star Wars trilogy; green f’n screen… I am looking forward to this one, and I think it’s actually going to be better than the first. Hold your beer and whiskey up boys, it’s going to be good…
Mark: If you played a drinking game where every time an Expendable missed a shot, punch or kick you take a shot….your lips would never touch an ounce of alcohol.
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Magic Mike (2012)
MY CALL: I really get tired of saying this, but the trailer looked so promising and I had high hopes for this flick [CLICK HERE to see the trailer]. So many things went wrong with this movie pitched by former male stripper Channing Tatum. This flick really would benefit from another round of thoughtful post-production, some reshoots and even some rewriting. Just to be clear, not a glowing recommendation. WHAT TO WATCH INSTEAD: Striptease (1996), though from the female perspective, succeeded in all things that Magic Mike tried and failed to execute except for the “rookie taken under the veteran’s wing” component.
Some of the stars at the Entertainment Weekly photo shoot got a little nervous that Manganiello (far right) would wolf out and grind them up into his protein shake. Judging by his size, a relevant concern.
Mike (Channing Tatum) is a likable character. He sports an ever-approachable “aw, shucks” grin that will make ladies skip a heartbeat and a not-so-gooey yen for something more out of life. The story is simple enough. A veteran male stripper takes a sharp, young transient under his wing. Then we (sort of) see what it’s like to be a male stripper: the lifestyle, how enamoring it is to the young and aimless, how impractical it may appear with time to the more mature and experienced. Then there are some romantic and drug-related sideplots.
Are they doing YMCA or Macho Man? I can’t tell.
And what’s going on with the big ugly guy in the back left? It’s a bit awkward.
“You don’t want to know what I’ve gotta’ do for 20s.” That line seemed really funny in the trailer, but somehow totally awkward and not funny in the movie.
Several scenes from the trailer seemed like they had the potential to affect audiences—Mike’s candid attempts at sincerity, not too over-the-top on the job humor, his jest about his “first fight” with Cody Horn. However, this movie was so poorly shot and under-produced that these scenes were much more effective in their abbreviated trailer snippets than in the movie itself. Some would argue that a low budget and simple camerawork shouldn’t detract from good content. But here I beg to differ. With the exception of a few dance routines, camera angles seemed to be chosen with all the convenience and thoughtlessness of setting up a tripod in a stationary position to capture the goings-on of a baby shower. From time to time the top of an actor’s head may stray outside of the frame, which felt amateur. There were many scenes which had no background music. I normally wouldn’t even notice the subtle tune lingering behind actors’ dialogue. That is, unless, it’s not there. It felt like watching a screening of a scene in post-production before they scored the film. As a result, the background noise felt like, well, “noise.” For example, while having a chat on the beach, their feet splashing in the water felt fake and hardly in sync with their movement. My attention shouldn’t be drawn to this. Just amateur—and strange when considering the tactfulness of Soderbergh’s grittier installments like Haywire and Contagion. This movie really felt like they never finished post-production or assessed the need for reshoots.
Unfortunately, as huge as that complaint was, that wasn’t the only problem. Joining Tatum at the bro-spa for butt waxes was Alex Pettyfer (In Time, I Am Number Four) who plays Adam, a rookie to the business who is unwarily recruited by Mike. I was hoping that this would make for some fun “firsts” as he is hazed into the business by some overly handsy patrons or shyness on stage or having his first manscaping appointment waxing his nether regions. All good funny ideas, right? We see none of this. Just an awkwardly hands on lesson about crotch-popping by McConaughey (Dallas) and a forgettable prank by a fellow stripper—neither were done well. Adam’s transition into the business is boringly smooth. The majority of the strip routines were dull, too, even a bit awkward or wooden, except for a few of Tatum’s Step Up tributes.
The other strippers include Matt Bomer (White Collar, In Time), Adam Rodriguez (CSI: Miami) and 53-year old Kevin Nash (Rock of Ages), who appears quite out of place and always seems “lost” during stage routines as if he were at a rehearsal with a hangover. True Blood’s Joe Manganiello (Big Dick Richie) felt sorely under-utilized in terms of dialogue. However, there was one very funny, though brief, scene of him preparing with a penis pump, which he pumps so hard that he gets a little woozy. The “fluffy” comedian Gabriel Iglesias plays the club DJ and drug dealer.
As Dallas, Matthew McConaughey plays mentor, friend and villain (sort of). His villain phase, along with some drug-related issues introduced by the DJ to Adam, made for a sideplot which I found unnecessary and far too serious given the misleadingly light-hearted movie the trailers suggested. As Adam’s sister, Cody Horn does okay—maybe even well. But while she’s supposed to serve as a love interest for Mike, she comes off as a moral compass and delivery vessel forcing Mike to weigh what he wants out of life. I hate to sound shallow, but I didn’t find her to be a remotely credible mate for Channing Tatum—not by a long shot. Diminishing her effectiveness as a love interest was Olivia Munn (HBO’s The Newsroom). In the trailer Munn is just some chick who comments on Mike’s furniture (that he made) whereas in the movie he spends more time pursuing her than Cody Horn. [Oh, and for all the Olivia Munn G4 fans, you see her topless.] In sum, more things that the trailer misadvertized and more things about this movie that didn’t work.
Despite having more shiny abs and waxed chests than a Gilette ad marathon, the cast is impressive and full of guys that guys like to root for.
What did work was the endearing bromance between veteran thong-slinger Mike and 19-year old Adam in the first half of the movie. Very cute. Reminded me of college. Their dynamic slowly broke down as the more dramatic elements of the movie stacked up on their way to an abrupt ending. I also really enjoyed the all scenes depicting Mike’s (et al.) casual and indulgent lifestyle—especially the opening scene with Olivia Munn when neither of them know the name of their threesome’s third from last night and they joke about it while she sleeps. I suppose, of course, that for women and gay men there was another major success to this film: LOTS of bare male butt. Butts in thongs, butts in bare-assed chaps, buts without so much as a G-string, even shadowy silhouettes of butts (and, ummmm, you know—a teensy bit of that, too). I feel that fans affected by such eye candy are responsible for any and all positive reviews of this movie.
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