My Theater Experience With The Expendables (2010)

First, I would like to introduce you to a new segment called Looking at some Trailers. Which I will find a better name for eventually, but for now, bear with me. Here are some of the movies showed in the previews for The Expendables, and what I thought of them based on the trailers:

Buried

Oh, hell yeah, this looks awesome. I mean, what more could I ask for out of a movie? A race against time, a dark, claustrophobic motif, and characters distressed and not knowing what to do. Just pure bliss for a thriller fiend like myself. I feed off things like this, and seeing a new one really gets my blood boiling. Will definitely be seeing this on opening night.

The Town

This sent chills down my spine. First of all, directed by the guy who made Gone Baby Gone? Sign me up! But it just looks really cool. The espionage, the dreary, drab settings, the off kilter and creepy Halloween masks…this just looks like a really cool movie. I can assure you this will be on many top 10s for the year, and I’ll review another horrible Japanese horror remake if I’m wrong!

…please, please don’t let me be wrong…

The Green Hornet

Alright, somebody needs to fire Seth Rogen’s agent. What’s the deal with this guy? Can’t he ever appear in a movie that is an actual film, and not just some cheap-ass bucket of “awkward” laughs and hammy acting? It’s insufferable. Also, “let’s act like villains so nobody knows we’re the real heroes”? That’s retarded, get this off my screen and never bring it back. Phew.

There were also trailers of The Last Exorcism, which looks so lame that I’d rather bash my head against a wall seven times than watch it, and SAW 3D, which if anyone thinks it’s really the end of the franchise, you need to get a reality check. But I’m not going to post those trailers, because I’m better than that, and this segment is going on too damn long already.

So, without further ado…drum roll please…THE EXPENDABLES, directed by Sylvester Stallone and starring more people than you can count!

Yes, this was all set up to be the action movie extravaganza of the summer, and did it live up to those expectations? Well, let’s just say it had an unfair disadvantage. But it’s still a hell of a ride. This movie is so jam packed with explosions and so completely action packed that your head will just about explode even just thinking about it! Of course the main draw was all the big names. I mean, they got Bruce Willis, they got Jason Statham, they got Jet Li, they got Mickey Rourke, they even got Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger, back on the silver screen at last! What a treat.

I’ll just go ahead and tell you that the best scene of this movie is sadly one of the shortest, and it’s where Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone meet in a church. Willis does his typical latter-day role where he plays an almost mobster-like character who keeps in the shadows and intimidates through words rather than through guns and punching people like in the old days. Schwarzenegger is a pompous older mercenary who doesn’t have time to help out Willis’ cause, and it results in one of the best lines in the movie – I won’t even spoil it for you, it’s that good. This scene is just great. Seeing all three of these huge icons on screen together even for a few minutes is a ton of fun.

But the rest of the movie doesn’t slack off too much, either. The plot is pretty simple – a bunch of ragtag, weathered mercenaries are hired to go take down a governor in South America (who is played by Angel from Dexter…). One of them, Lee (Jason Statham), is having troubles with his girlfriend. Which means…he finds out she cheated on him because she didn’t know what he did at work even though they had been living together for a year and a half. Got that? Good, because it doesn’t come up very much again, even if they do try to shoehorn in a positive message about how he’s trying to find himself. It doesn’t really take any kind of precedence over the main story with Stallone, though. Speaking of Stallone, he’s trying to fight his way to save a pretty girl who he got the hots for the second he saw her. A noble cause, and I will ignore the clichéd nature…sometimes that’s just what you need after a long day’s work.

And the explosions, oh, man, the explosions. They’re all over the place here. They’re so abundant that by the end they’re even happening on top of one another; it’s flat out ridiculous. But it’s also really awesome. It’s like Stallone just went, “Hmm, we need explosions in action movies. Okay, put in about fifty times the usual amount. That ought to do it.” I love every second of it.

If I had to pick out any real problems with it, it’s not so much about what the movie did wrong, but more about what it could have been. This movie is a lot of fun, but with the pedigrees of acting involved, it should have been a real epic as opposed to a short, quick film like this. This should have blown us away and given us a transcendent work of action masterclass. But the fact that it did not really live up to our expectations doesn’t mean much, because this is still a pretty solid film.

The Expendables uses a lot of action movie clichés, but it never actually feels dated or trite for all that, and its quick, snappy pacing and huge doses of explosive fun are really enjoyable. It’s clear that Stallone really loves action movies (and I would hope he does a lot, for what he does for a living), and I really enjoy the earnest, balls-out way The Expendables executed its foray of action-packed goodies. It’s an action fan’s action movie. I can’t picture any fan of the genre hating it. This is Stallone’s latest contribution to the genre he loves, and if you want an explosion-filled action flick, I can recommend this with no caveats.

Review: Maniac! (1980)

Director: William Lustig

Starring: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081114/

"Now you're mine forever."

-Frank

You know when a movie has an exclamation point after the title, it’s worth checking out!! It makes it sound all the more urgent, which subtextually means you should see it faster!! Okay, okay, I’m not going to do that for the whole review, but I am going to talk about this classic 80s slasher flick called Maniac!.

Now, when you think of a 80s slasher movie, what do you think of first?

Well…this is nothing like that. You have a really cool cover of a guy holding a bloody scalp with a knife, drawn in that traditional 80s style that was always so damn cool…must just be another goofy flick, huh? Not exactly. Maniac! is a tale of a depraved photographer who kills young women in the night due to the uncontrollable urges that plague him after his mother ‘betrayed’ him. It is a sad story in equal proportions to its status as a horror story, and the dark grime of the bleak 1980s cityscape that surrounds the characters makes the viewer feel really lost in this movie’s tortured existence. This is a very depressing movie that doesn’t really lighten the mood with any laughs or goofy kills like others did. And for that it’s all the more interesting – this isn’t just a silly slasher movie; this is a realistic, depraved tale of a man tormented by his own demons.

When Frank, played by Joe Spinell, kills, he turns his victims’ scalps into hair for his life-size dolls. This provides a really unsettling motif on its own as we see shots of him putting them together and moving them around, but it also gives us one of the film’s best scenes toward the end – and I won’t spoil it for you.

Spinell is a first rate horror “villain,” and his stoic, blank expression turns from unassuming and a little creepy into flat out disturbing at times. He’s just so insane that even when he knows he’s insane, it’s still scary and unpredictable as hell. As for best scene that demonstrates his acting…well, take your pick! The first scene where he kills a prostitute is one of the best ones, as we see his transition from a bland, un-feeling man to a psychotic, uncontrollable murderer in vivid clarity.

Even though I never get why the victims in these movies have to scream “Stop it” all the time. It’s not like that actually ever dissuades anyone, you know. It’s like, “Oh, she’s saying stop it? Gee, I better quit strangling her or else she might get really pissed! My bad.” Seriously, THAT’S JUST SILLY.

But the movie is still a good one. It’s a slow burner, and it takes its time to get to where it wants to go, but that’s part of the fun – it’s fun to watch the suspense slowly building up. It’s fun to watch a pretty young thing get stalked in the night, and it’s especially fun when the suspense is layered on thick and heavy, with that kind of 80s sleaze and vintage look to it. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go kill someone myself. Just in case you were wondering. So go see Maniac! if you crave more of that 80s style slashing. It’s well worth your time. 

Review: Darkness Falls (2003)

Director: Jonathon Liebesman

Starring: Bland white people!

IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0282209/

“The first time shouldn’t taste like blood.”

-Kaitlin

There are some things that just aren’t scary, and you can’t write a believable movie about these things no matter how hard you try and actually get it to scare anybody, no matter how good the writing or acting is. Like the Tooth Fairy. You can’t possibly write about the TOOTH FAIRY and have it be scary or well written in any sense. Fortunately, Darkness Falls doesn’t even try at either of those, and thus we’re graced with another whimsically destructive holocaust of everything that the horror genre tried so hard to create with this completely horrible film. And I think that was my cue.

Our movie opens with a backstory so silly that it just had to be narrated by a hokey British accent. Apparently there’s a town called Darkness Falls, if you can believe that (I thought the title was a reference to, well, darkness falling…), and in that town there was a lady called the Tooth Fairy, who gave kids gold coins whenever they lost their teeth. Well, I sure hope she had a nice income to support herself even with all of that frivolous spending going on! Apparently she got burned in a fire and had to wear a porcelain mask from then on. When two kids went missing, the first person the town suspected was the Tooth Fairy, even though there was no evidence that supported that theory, and they killed her. The boys were found the very next day.

Oops! So sorry we killed a lady without even bothering to ask questions. Durr! I guess reason and logic are just thrown out the window when there’s somebody around who isn’t a round peg in the hole of what people consider normal. I thought there was a thing called tolerance or understanding or something; I guess not. But at least she now haunts people who lose their last tooth. I guess that’s comeuppance enough, even though those kids had nothing to do with her murder. Do you ever notice that these supernatural revenge plots never make sense?

So then we flash forward to another time, where a kid named Kyle is losing his last tooth. After his mom kisses him goodnight, a gender ambiguous child sneaks into the house, and invites him to come do something. He declines, and then they have a romantic moment, because even though he looks about five years older than her, he’s apparently taking her to a dance that weekend as his date. And they kiss a couple times. Yeah. Didn’t you ever have these romantic, spontaneous nightly drop-ins from girls you liked when you were 10 years old? Gee, it’s almost like this movie is whimsical or something.

Yeah, same age? I think not. But hey, who am I to obstruct young love?

Then she leaves, he goes to sleep, and wakes up to this:

…well I have to say, I’m glad the movie showed us that. Now there is absolutely no doubt that it will NOT be scary at all! So he goes and gets his mom, who says the words “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” See, there’s your mistake, lady. Anybody who says that in a horror movie will inevitably die two seconds later. And wouldn’t you know it, she does, big surprise. This whole scene could have been effective, but again, it’s the fucking Tooth Fairy, how is that scary? It removes all tension when you even so much as whisper that name in a scene like this.

So then we fast forward 12 years…can’t this movie just pick one timeline and stay with it? It’s jumping around more than the Energizer Bunny. If he was on crack. This time we see a young woman named Kaitlin talking to a doctor about her brother Michael, who hasn’t been sleeping well. The doctor says they’ve run all the tests and since none of them showed anything abnormal, he must be fine. Even though she tells him her brother hasn’t slept for more than 10 minutes in three weeks, he must be fine anyway, since the tests didn’t say anything. Gee, why do I get the idea that these morons would overlook a disorder even if it had neon signs on the person’s head proclaiming it for the whole world to see? USE YOUR BRAINS.

So Kyle comes back into town after 12 years of absence and talks to Michael, and the kid basically says it’s hopeless and that he’s going to die. Kaitlin takes him outside and shows him Michael’s drawings, which actually look scarier than the real monster in this movie, and then they split up and Kyle goes to hang out with his old buddy Larry. And apparently people think he killed his mother. Why? I don’t know. The fact that they even remember him after 12 years is weird on its own. Some douchebag picks a fight with him and pushes him around for no real reason, even going as far as to shove him off the porch and down a hill into the woods.

“These are MY WOODS,” he shouts as Kyle beats him up and flees. “Nobody messes with me!”

I’m sorry, but what the hell? What is this, grade school? Did this guy just never grow out of third grade? Why the hell is he picking on Kyle anyway? It’s completely silly. And why isn’t his friend Larry helping out? He just kind of sits there and watches while Kyle gets beat up. Luckily for the audience the guy who picked the fight gets his head cut off by the Tooth Fairy, and yes, that did kill a fair amount of my brain cells when I wrote it…

But yeah, just as the laws of lame horror movies would dictate, Kyle gets arrested for the murder of the bar-fight-picking douche and it doesn’t look good, since he has a bag full of flashlights and anti-psychotic pills. Hey, I don’t blame him; if I was in this movie I’d need that stuff too. It’s completely reasonable.

Yadda yadda yadda, the doctors think Michael’s condition is a result of dementia, meaning he thinks his dreams are real and self inflicts wounds to himself. Gee, that sounds like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Big surprise there; a terrible movie with no originality ripping off one of the most iconic stories in the genre. This movie has no shame. Oh, and it turns out their plan is to put Michael in a sensory deprivation chamber and turn off the lights to ‘cure’ him. Why do doctors in these movies always have the worst possible plans in coincidence with the movie’s plot? It’s practically foolproof, like a math formula. Have a movie with some particular horror niche -> Someone puts the most fragile and easy-to-get character in said niche situation.

So Kyle gets bailed out of jail by Larry, who apparently decided to finally get off his ass and do something useful. And hey, I didn’t know they offered bail for guys who were suspected of cutting someone’s head off! Oh well, who cares, the movie will be over faster if we just quit nitpicking. Larry gets killed by the Tooth Fairy, leaving Kyle to go back and try to stop them from putting Michael in the sensory deprivation chamber.

In a truly hilarious scene, Kyle barges in and tells them to stop the sensory deprivation thing, and Kaitlin just goes with it, no questions asked. Then a second later he gets dogpiled by the police who drag him away, shouting “You have to believe me!” the whole time, because that’s real convincing. Then he gets taken to the police station, where of course all the police get killed by the Tooth Fairy too, even though they should have lost their teeth years ago and been traumatized then, but I suppose that’s too much for this movie’s small brain to handle…and then we go back to the hospital for about the twentieth time in this movie, because they could only pay to use about three different locations total for the entire duration of the film.

The rest of the movie is just these idiots running around while Kyle screams “STAY IN THE LIGHT!” Seriously, if you played a drinking game for every time he said that, you’d be drunk about five minutes into this chase scene. Which would make the movie more bearable.

Oh, and the Tooth Fairy turns into this!

Beautiful, ain't it?

Luckily she, uh, EXPLODES soon after…yes, the Tooth Fairy explodes; I just wrote that. I’m having a hard time believing it myself. Why does she explode? How can anyone touch her and fight her if she is a ghost? I don’t know, the movie never explains any of it. Fuck it, just fuck it all to hell; the movie’s over and I haven’t been more glad in a long while.

I mean man, does this movie ever make me want to hurt people. Darkness Falls is the kind of movie you’d show to that one kid you hate to get revenge on them for whatever they did to you. And frankly, I think it’s a pretty harsh punishment. This is just so insipid and so lame on every level that it’s unbearable. I mean…GAH! Darkness Falls? More like Darkness Fails than anything, really. This is pretty much the worst of that whole trend in the early 2000s where every horror movie had to have some hokey superstitious plot point in place of actual scares and fear, pretty white people in place of actors who could at least get the job done and a safe, happy ending that assured you it was okay, because, you know, god forbid anything actually end in a way that sticks with you afterward. This movie just ended on a jump scare. Laughable, really – although only in the way that it makes me want to beat the people who created it with blunt objects while I laugh. Pfft. I’m just about done here. 

Review: The Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008)

Director: PJ Pesce

Starring: Corey Feldman, Tad Hilgenbrink, Autumn Reeser

Website: http://www.lostboysthetribe.warnerbros.com/

“I hate fucking vampires.”

-Edgar Frog

You know, I review too many crappy sequels to good movies. I should stop doing that. I should review something totally out of my usual field. So that’s what I’m doing! I’m going to review something that is nothing like anything I usually review and…psych! Just kidding. Here’s another review of a crappy sequel.

The Lost Boys 2, made 20 years after the original one; why do I already think this will suck without even watching a minute of it? Well, let’s jump in and take a look. It starts out with a bunch of surfer bum morons jumping a fence and going out to a private beach to surf. They’re caught immediately by the owner, an older man who tells them that he owns everything in the vicinity. He bares his vampire fangs, and in turn the surfer bums bare their own…so they were all vampires. What a twist! Of course they outnumber and kill the guy, and they start kicking his head around like a soccer ball and mostly uttering loud, dumb swear words like the bunch of ghetto-born mongoloids they are.

So…yeah. These are our Lost Boys now. Will somebody just shoot me so I don’t have to do the rest of this review?!

We get our theme song by Airbourne, and I wonder why they couldn’t have just gone full stop and gotten the real AC/DC, and then we are introduced to our main characters, a brother and sister team named Chris and Nicole. They’re going to stay with their aunt, who opens the door and greets them in the most over the top way possible. Seriously, it’s like she’s having a nervous breakdown…of joy.

So she charges them $650 a month to stay in a shed in the back and sleep on futons…I guess being family doesn’t exclude them from having to sleep in a dirty old garage without any real beds, does it? They go out to explore the town where we learn that Chris was a pro surfer who got kicked off the pro circuit, and he’s looking to start up surfing again. The guy at the desk gives him the address of the Frog Bros. shop, which turns out to be an old trailer in the middle of nowhere, and Chris leaves a note so the Frog Bros. can know where to find them.

“Oh, yeah,” says Nicole sarcastically. “Leave our address at the creepy Texas Chainsaw Massacre trailer. Great plan.”

Well, as long as it’s not a cross-dressing Leatherface, I’m okay with that. I am okay with anything TCM-related as looooong as it’s not a cross-dressing Leatherface.

So Chris meets up with a guy named Shane, who apparently was also a famous surfer, and who apparently disappeared. Seeing that they have these things in common, it's only logical in this movie that neither of them think to ask any questions about any of what happened to them, and Shane invites Chris to come to his party. Even though Nicole wants to go, Chris wisely says no, and that Shane was just too weird. Then their aunt comes in and offers them to watch The Goonies with her…which is weird, since the star of that movie is in this one too, but I guess it’s an acceptable in-joke. Sort of.

So they go to the party, get into an argument with some dude, and split up. Nicole runs into Shane, who she immediately likes because…he’s hot. Meanwhile Chris gets in with a sexy young girl in a red bikini and silk sash, and gets in the shower with her and starts making out. Sounds good…so what is the other couple doing?

"Watch as I drop my voice lower, only open my eyes halfway and pretend to be the coolest guy in the movie..."

They go into a room, close the door, and talk philosophy. Well…I guess that’s a refreshing change, even though I don’t fully believe it. After some mumbo jumbo involving ‘changing life through our perceptions,’ he hands her a drink and, when she asks what it is, just says “It’s good, try it.” That’s…not a very strong endorsement. But they hook up anyway. To the tune of a really crappy alternative rock song.

As you can imagine, the drink has an effect on Nicole that she really didn’t want, as she starts throwing up in the car and when they get back home she attacks him. She probably would have killed him if it weren’t for…an actor that nobody hears about anymore yet was popular as a child! Yes, it’s Corey Feldman, reprising his role as Edgar Frog and perhaps taking the name a little too literally. He sounds like he has a frog stuck in his throat. This character is just silly all around. I know that’s what they were going for, but man is this stupid! He drinks a shake made of eggs, garlic and holy water for breakfast. He talks in the most ridiculously silly monotone ever put on celluloid.

"I need MORE SCENERY to chew, stat!"

And get this. When Chris goes over to his house the next day and asks how he knows so much about vampires, he replies, with utmost seriousness, comic books. That’s right, comic books. He…says that vampires getting killed by only stakes to the heart are a myth, but somehow comic books have the right answers. Hundreds of years of vampire fiction debunked by some shmuck in a trailer with vampire comic books, isn’t this movie wonderful? Bram Stoker doesn’t have it right, but guys in their mothers’ basements making comic books for a total audience of five do. God!

So let’s recap: In a surfing town, all the surfers are vampires. They like to prey on tourists and convert them to be vampires, too. The only guy who knows anything about how to stop them is a freak surfboard repairman who lives in a trailer, drinks concentrated garlic, eggs and holy water and reads comic books. Stupid enough yet?

Nicole: “Do you know how it is for me to want to drink blood? Do you know how disgusting that is? I’m a vegetarian!”

...

I rest my case. This movie is clearly off its rocker, and any attempts of mine to try and make sense of it now would be futile…as well as inadvisable. I’m having way too much fun with this one, so I might as well just…ride it out till the end. This is getting pretty long, though…

So the cops don’t help him at all with finding the missing Nicole, merely content with saying “We have a system” in response to any form of logic. Chris gets taken to the vampires’ den by one of their guys, where he’s ‘initiated in’ by Shane – which basically means a big, flashy car chase scene with the police that doesn’t further the plot at all. We get a scene with the aunt which is actually pretty sensible, as it shows she knows her priorities and doesn’t like the way her niece and nephew are handling themselves – very understandable. But she ruins it by saying “You guys need to stop acting like a bunch of vampires.” Huh. Irony. It’s funny. Get it?

At the beach at night later on, the vampires and Chris pick up a group of girls and start prepping them for feeding time. It results in this:

They obviously are the Reptilian Vampires, the ones who took their doctrine from Python in the Lightspeed movie. Tremble in fear. I know I did.

Edgar Frog shows up and delivers lines like “Who ordered stake?” while holding up two wooden stakes, and I have to say this time around he looks like he’s having a lot more fun. I mean, the guy says with a straight face that he is an ONLINE MINISTER and got ordained by clicking a few buttons. That’s so stupid it’s awesome. And hey, it worked for Hunter S. Thompson to become a doctor, so why not? But yeah, this guy pretty much ends up with all the good lines. Like after Shane gets set on fire: “Build a man a fire…he’s warm for a day. Light a man on fire…he’s warm for the rest of his life.” That’s so silly it’s…well, you know.

To make a long story short, they kill Shane, turn back into humans, Edgar Frog tells them he’ll send a bill, and they go home. The story ends with the aunt giving them a lecture thinking they’ve been doing reefer this whole time, and they drink some beer to forget the whole thing after she leaves. Which should be anyone’s reaction.

"It's okay sis, I'll never make you act in another movie about surfing vampires again."

Okay, okay, this movie wasn’t all THAT bad, I admit. It’s bad, sure, but it’s a fun kind of bad, and you can tell nobody really expected it to be anything else. Corey Feldman is pretty hilarious for all his hamminess, the whole surfing vampire thing is just hysterical and the movie is just kind of fun. It’s a trashy kind of fun, but if you want some laughs, a few beautiful young women and a few good action scenes…well you could do worse. Not as bad as I was expecting. And that's all I have for you right now.

Review: Jack (1996)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, Jennifer Lopez, Diane Lane, Adam Zolotin

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116669/

"What do I want to be when I grow up? Alive."

-Jack Powell

This movie was marketed entirely wrong. See that colorful movie cover up there? See how colorful and goofy it looks? Well, that’s not this movie at all. I’m totally serious; I went in expecting a really silly, banal comedy and came out actually thinking about my life and feeling pretty depressed and soulful. Would you expect that from looking at the cover for this movie? No? Well that proves it, movie executives; you guys need better marketing campaigns for your movies.

Even more perplexing is that it’s made by Francis Ford Coppola, director of the Godfather movies and Dracula, which I’ll be reviewing in a couple of days. This is not the kind of movie anyone expected him to make, but it’s a personal one, as he lost his own young son at an early age. Upon reading about that…well, it all clicked into place for this movie.

So, Jack…it’s about Robin Williams as a young boy who has a tragic disease that speeds up his cell aging by about 4 times the normal rate, making him appear 4 times older than he really is. As you can imagine, this is a cause for the parents to be pretty overprotective – so much so that they went all the way to Bill Cosby as a tutor. That’s some real parental love right there! But soon enough he wants to go to a public school and be with kids his own age. And they let him. And hijinks ensue – but surprisingly, they’re…not all THAT stupid and not all THAT annoying to watch. It’s played straight.

I’m as surprised as you are. A movie that had Robin Williams being directed to act like a 10 year old is actually doing a reasonable and mature job of handling the subject. My jaw was on the floor. I was expecting to hate this movie! I looked at the summary, looked at the cover and went, that can’t possibly be good. Did I just…randomly go into a parallel universe where terrible, heinous ideas turn into good movies? Did I get hit on the head? Whatever the case, I’m not complaining.

Jack sets things up pretty well, all things considered. The acting is really top notch, with Diane Lane as the mother giving a believable performance and all of the child actors doing very well. Williams is the central focus, of course, as he stumbles his way through life with a wide-eyed curiosity and a very authentic ten-year-old boy way of talking and walking. The scenes on the playground where the kids interact with him are all really great, as they slowly learn to accept him as he is – maybe it’s a little too quick, considering how mean little kids can actually get, but hey, it’s only a 2 hour movie. And the whole sequence starting with his asking out his teacher (Jennifer Lopez) to the school dance, leading up to his heart contraction, is just mesmerizing.

His parents don’t want him to go back to school due to his illness getting worse with age. This is one of the film’s most memorable motifs. His spirit slowly breaks and he becomes depressed, losing his will to do anything but sit around and be safe. His mom just tries to be the best parent she can be, but it’s clear as day to the viewer that she’s making the wrong choice on this – Williams doesn’t need to be pampered and preserved; he’s not going to live that long anyway. He needs to go out like he does in the rest of the movie and just live. His speech at his graduation ceremony is schmaltzy, but it’s really touching, too. Very well done.

There are a couple really stupid things about this movie, though…mostly centering around Louie’s mother, recently widowed and always searching for a new man. If the laws of implausibility and wrongheaded comedy ever had a gold-mine, this is it, as she actually flirts with him and tries to get him to go out to dinner with her. Later on at a club they meet again and they dance, with him actually grabbing her ass…well, uh, okay. This plot point is just creepy, really, and doesn’t add much to the movie besides something to take away from the genuine emotive power of the rest of it. Yay for pedophilia? Seriously, it actually borders on disturbing. And just imagine what would have happened if some passerby had discovered them all in the clubhouse – what would it look like? A grown man sitting around with kids in a clubhouse looking at nude magazines?

But I realized that that is not the correct way to approach this movie – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what the movie wants to get across. Jack is a movie about childhood and the short time we sometimes have on this Earth, and its moral is that we need to let go and just live every second like it’s our last. I liked it for its bare honesty and earnest disposition. It was a nice little trip through the eyes of a very unique child. The acting is great, the story is pretty interesting and the themes are worldly and relevant to anyone. Jack is a good movie. Go see it.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Starring: Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzeti

Directed by Sergio Leone

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064116/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_West

"Once Upon a Time in the West" is the kind of movie you fall in love with. It shows all the aspects that people have come to enjoy about the western genre, and through the eyes of complex characters as they struggle, fail, and prosper in a live-or-die environment.

It starts off with a group of robbers standing around at a train track. And that is it; they just stand there, drinking water and investigating the actions of a fly for about 5-10 minutes. And yet it is fascinating to watch. They are then confronted by Charles Bronson, who plays a role similar to the one played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's other "Spaghetti westerns": he does not have a real name, is generally a loner, and does not talk very much. Unlike Eastwood's character, however, his is motivated by personal reasons rather than money. He is also different in the fact that he frequently plays what has to be one of the creepiest harmonica ever (and he is consequently refereed to as "Harmonica" as the film progresses). Its haunting sound does not always spell doom...but sometimes it does.

In the following scene, a family by the surname of McBain is about to welcome their matriarch, who is arriving from New Orleans at a nearby train station. However, they are brutally murdered on their farm by a gang of outlaws lead by Frank, portrayed by the legendary Henry Fonda in a role where he plays against type. His calm demeanor and soft blue eyes that brought a sense of humility to his other characters make this role even more sinister. Although his action show that he posses a certain level of intelligence, he is too cold-blooded to be anything more than a killer.

When Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) first arrives, she observes the town around her in what is one of the best shots of the whole film. It shows everyone just going about their daily lives before entering the outskirts, revealing the beautiful mountains of Monument Valley in Utah where it was filmed. It is set to the brilliant score by Ennio Morricone, who is basically to Leone what John Williams is to Spielberg. On a side note, the whole soundtrack to this film is brilliant, from the aforementioned harmonica tune, the main theme which I just mentioned and even the humorous "trotting" music that is played later on. It just really sets the tone for the movie and this scene is the perfect example of it.

Before arriving home, she goes into a shop where she meets Harmonica, as well as Cheyenne (Jason Robards), a crude outlaw who nonetheless has a heart and ends up. When she finds that her family is dead, her mourning is brief and her tough personality makes her decide to remain where she is in order to make a new life for herself, becoming a symbol of self-reliance and individualism that helped propel the West into a established part of American culture.

It turns out that her family was killed because her husband had refused to hand over his land to a railroad baron named Morton (Gabriele Ferzeti) who is in collaboration with Frank. Morton is a surprisingly sympathetic villain because, although he does posses a sense of monetary greed, his real goal is to have is railroad reach the Pacific Ocean before he succumbs to tuberculosis, which is slowly crippling him. It is interesting to see him and Frank interact with each other because even though they are technically partners, they have different goals and ways of getting things accomplished...and they do not get along very well. Frank thinks that he is physically and emotionally weak, while he believes that Frank is a wild man who is too dangerous to be associated with. As a result, the uneasy relationship slowly but surely deteriorates.

On the other side of the conflict, Jill, Cheyenne, and Harmonica, despite not always being on the best of terms themselves, manage to form an alliance in order to defend the farm. Meanwhile, Jill discovers her late husband's (Frank Wolff) plans and decides to pursue them. I will not say what they are, but they continue the whole theme of a new beginning for the people who live in the West.

In short, this film is a masterpiece. The great acting, fantastic music, and wonderful story all come together into this wonderful work of art. Almost needless to say, It is one of my personal favorite movies of all time. I definitely recommend it.

Review: Lightspeed (2006)

Director: Don E. FauntLeRoy

Starring: Jason Connery, Nicole Eggert

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822827/

"Don't you know speed kills?"

-Python

Stan Lee was responsible for many great comic book characters, like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, The X Men, Dr. Strange and many more. You’d be hard pressed to find a guy more influential and revered than him in the comic industry. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t created his share of unbearable crap, too. And if you thought Spider-Man 3 was the worst thing he had ever put his name on…well, just wait until you get a load of Lightspeed. This putrid, half-cocked attempt at a superhero movie somehow manages to use all the regular clichés of these movies and yet never creates anything worth viewing.

Yup. Yup, you have to be pre-etty bad to do that. And in case you were curious about this pile of cracked up pig vomit, well we're going to review it today. Brace yourselves. It's going to get pretty damn stupid, I'll warn you right now.

The movie starts off with perhaps the most boring shoot-out and secret-agency espionage ever as we see people we don’t know wearing all black so we can’t see what they look like running around a bland looking office building and trying to kill one another. What are they trying to do? I don’t know. Maybe they were trying to stop the production of this movie…but it doesn’t work, since the green lizard-man hybrid gets away in the end.

"This is what happens when you don't eat your vegetables."

Yes, a green lizard-man; it looks like something Reptile from Mortal Kombat would vomit up if he ate the Lizard from Spider Man and also drank a gallon of Drano. Apparently his name is Python, and yes, he's going to get a lot of screen time in this movie, so prepare your Jaegermeister. It's going to be a long hour and a half.

After a very poorly done CGI explosion, we cut to 4 years earlier, which honestly begs the question of why you couldn’t just show this part first, seeing as it is, you know, the BACKSTORY. But maybe it’s actually important; maybe what they’ll show us here will totally justify the lame first part...but I doubt it. We get a scientist that is talking to his assistant about a research project he’s been doing that can heal dead human tissue by fusing it with snake skin, or something like that. To test it, even though he’s never done any tests before, he decides to burn his own arm over an open fire.

…doesn’t that seem a little STUPID to you? Why would you test it out on yourself before at least seeing if the snakes work? What if they didn’t work? You’d feel pretty dumb then, wouldn’t you?

Okay, to be fair, his sister is in the hospital with a horrible burned body due to an accident, and that’s why he’s doing all this. But she dies like right after his stem cell lab gets shut down anyway. He breaks into his lab, and…somehow starts a fire from nothing at all...and then presses a button that was conveniently right there to get a skin-cell transplant from one of his snakes, turning him into the un-threatening monstrosity he is in the present day. Don’t you wish you had a button that did that? I know I do. Boy, I tell you; I'd use that damn button every day if I did!

Then we go back to the present time, where we get an incredibly jumbled sequence of shots of the rescue squad taking the one surviving cop from the explosion to a hospital. His legs and pelvis have been completely crushed, they are told. The doctor tells the secret agent commander guy and…random blonde woman agent…that he can do an experimental procedure to get the injured agent, whose name is Daniel, to walk again. And with only so much as one line of dialogue explaining what that procedure is, the chief says ‘do it.’ Boy, the people in this movie are really reckless about experimental science, aren’t they? You’d think they’d have…questions, or something, but I guess those are just for morons.

So after Python comes back and slaughters everyone in the hospital except for Daniel, kidnapping the witness who could have helped identify him, nobody ever mentions it again, and the secret agents and hospital orderlies who died are apparently completely forgotten about. Instead we get a training montage as Daniel tries to learn how to use his legs again! Yeah…that’s not cool at all. By the amazing power of his indestructibly elastic clothes, the amazing Daniel spontaneously learns to run at high speeds just like the Flash, except unlike the Flash, he just really sucks. The only explanation really given boils down to ‘radiation.’ That’s it. Just ‘radiation’…because of course, it does whatever the writers want it to do. In a good movie, this might matter less if we could get into the story, and if it was clever enough. But Lightspeed is the kind of movie that makes me wish I was watching a horse’s rectum instead, so you can imagine how well that holds up.

Oh, and did I mention he just walks into a sports equipment store and buys his whole costume right there in the open? I just…I can’t…okay, just look at the picture and tell me if you think this costume justifies the stupidity of just buying it in a hockey apparel store:

Seriously, look at him; he looks like a drunk reject from the Justice League. Outcast because he couldn't put down the bottle long enough.

So he thwarts a robbery at a convenience store, probably only due to the fact that nobody can stare at that costume for more than two seconds without laughing. One of the guys even gets on the roof…how, I don’t know; but he does. And when confronted by, uh, “Lightspeed,” I guess, he backs up and falls off the roof of his own accord. Clumsiest robber ever? I think he’s definitely a candidate.

A reporter takes some pictures of him, probably to sell them on eBay, and then we see that Daniel’s girlfriend can’t find a connection between the reptile dude and the scientist who blew up in the lab four years ago. Because I guess she needs it spelled out for her in bold letters. Also, note that nobody seems to care that a man who should have been limping around, moving a step or two every five minutes on his crutches, is now walking like a normal guy with no trace of any injury at all. Huh. I guess I shouldn’t have doubted the scientific miracles in this movie after all. Silly me.

The reptile guy kills a bunch more secret agents and invades a scientist building where he finds a machine that can generate coldness, which has been getting a lot of fanfare lately among the scientific community. He says in the hokiest voice, “Did you know that this was one of my original creations before the burn experiment? Before I was reborn…before I was born.” That last part is actually hissed like he thinks it sounds scary. Well, I hate to be the buzzkill here, but it’s not. It’s not scary at all. Not even a third grader could find this even one bit intimidating. And to think Stan Lee actually produced this…dreadful. Maybe this movie's director caught him doing something embarrassing and blackmailed him into it. That's the only excuse.

Before I go on, what the hell is the logic in having all the agents run around in broad daylight in those black ninja outfits? They’ve been doing this all movie long and I am just about fed up with how dumb it looks. Look at these idiots running around on the grass like they’re actually camouflaging themselves; it’s just silly. Why the black masks and full-body suits? It doesn’t look like every bit of it is armored; they’re just wearing ski masks over their heads. Uh, that really only works at night, you blithering idiots, not in broad sunny daylight. Ghost Squad? Is that what these guys are calling themselves? Because I’ve never seen such…visible, easy to see ghosts.

"These black clothes will definitely help us blend in and do our covert secret work, and nobody will EVER notice us out here in the parking lot!"

After trading some hammy dialogue with Mr. Scaly-Skin here, Lightspeed saves his girlfriend from being crushed by a falling object and then decides to take off his mask and drink his medicine right in front of everyone, revealing his secret identity, as nobody else has to take that kind of special medicine to make sure they don’t screw up their body from the ‘radiation.’ Smart move there, guy; couldn’t you have just gone out of sight before you did that? But nobody ever thinks to mention this again, even though they see Daniel in the next scene. What a load. These 'secret agents' are about as perceptive as…as blind people, for Pete’s sake! The guy who got exposed to radiation in an accident and recently underwent surgery mysteriously disappears every time that Lightspeed character shows up. Pay attention! No, you know what? Blind people are MORE perceptive than these yahoos any day. Secret agents my ass; these morons couldn’t find out who took the cookies out of the jar before dinner.

So the agents are interrogating the guy who they caught from Python’s team, and Python actually kills him from his own hideout by…typing his name in on the computer and pressing a button. Okay. That’s a really lazy and convenient way to write out a character. We see him next killing off the senator who shut down his stem cell research operation from four years ago, and why didn’t he do this four years ago or something? I don’t know, I don’t really care. Let’s just move on.

A guy is tortured and gives up the location of the safehouse where Daniel and his girlfriend are staying. Python goes and kidnaps his wife and…forces her to sit down and play the piano. That’s oddly un-threatening. Then we see Lightspeed show up and demonstrate his amazing acrobat skills – yes, he can do back flips and jump over people’s heads now – and he confronts Python with an amazing display of horrible and unconvincing acting, before Python knocks him down and kidnaps his girlfriend-thing again. Why can’t Lightspeed stop them even though he’s clearly still conscious and able to fight? Because we need to pad out this movie longer! Oh, please, somebody help me.

So we get a generic supervillain plot about defusing bombs around the city, which works because Lightspeed is fast enough to do it. Python beats up the girlfriend a little, kills his assistant when he tries to talk some sense into him, and then goes on this huge, whiny rant, shouting over and over about how he didn’t do anything wrong and that they took everything away from him. Sheesh, dude, get a blog; it'll help you vent. And this is the point where his voice completely crosses the line into something that honestly I don’t think anyone could take seriously; he sounds so goofy. “Don’t you know speed kills?” is one of his lines, I am dead serious. Although I guess I should applaud them for saving that joke until now…

So it’s revealed that the secret agent leader guy was the real traitor the whole time, which doesn’t make any sense, but the movie is almost over anyway. He gets shot and killed in like an instant, and by Python no less, making the whole thing entirely pointless. Then Python gets shoved out of a two-story window on fire, Lightspeed and his girlfriend are reunited, and the movie ends. FINALLY, it ends.

Man, this is rancid. If you think you’ve seen a bad superhero flick, just watch this one and you’ll be begging for Spider-Man 3 and The Spirit. The acting is totally cardboard, the direction looks like it was made as a home movie, the plot is hacked up crap that a fifth grader could do better than, and there are so many plot holes you might as well call it Swiss cheese and just be done with it. How could anyone green light this? How could someone honestly look at this and say, “Yes. This lives up to the rest of the things Stan Lee has endorsed. Let’s put it out for the world to enjoy”? I don’t know, but I never want to see this again, and neither should you. Just run away…at the speed of light, even.

Or just don’t rent it. Either one works.