reviews

Hercules (2014)

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twohalfstar

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Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is the great WWE success story. When the juggernaut wrestling promotion tried its best to launch Hulk Hogan’s movie career with its first foray into film production, 1989’s No Holds Barred, the results were mixed. Hogan remains the most widely known household name in wrestling, but his movie career, which featured long-forgotten titles like Suburban Commando & Mr. Nanny, didn’t exactly pan out as planned. The Rock, on the other hand, basically launched WWE’s movie-making division all by his lonesome. His first three starring roles in The Scorpion King, The Rundown, and Walking Tall basically built WWE Studios from the ground up. The Rock’s world-class shit-talking skills & excessive mugging in his wrestling promos translated well to action stardom & he’s been the sole wrestler who’s been able to make a long-term career for himself on the big screen (though Bautista may be next in line).

The secret to Johnson’s success? He’s actually a damn good actor. He has a lot of weird, mostly untapped energy that can reach far beyond the limited roles he’s been landing. With early parts in action shlock like Doom & The Scorpion King, he’s proven himself to be one of the last Schwarzenegger-type muscle gods who manage to look convincing while kicking ass & dispensing pun-heavy quips indiscriminately. He’s perfectly suited for action movie roles, but he’s also being underserved in them. Riskier projects, like the more unhinged Southland Tales and Pain & Gain, have unleashed a different Dwayne Johnson altogether, one completely independent of the Schwarzeneggers & Van Dammes before him. He has a manic beast lurking under that confident exterior, just waiting to out-weird any other action star in the world, Stallone & Cage included.

Unfortunately, Hercules does not employ the offbeat wild-man Dwayne Johnson, but instead opts for the cookie-cutter action star The Rock. He’s in full Scorpion King mode here, hitting so many familiar Schwarzenegger beats that I assumed it was secretly a Conan the Barbarian remake that couldn’t secure the rights. Hercules’ opening narration plays like a trailer to a much better film, The Rock slaying a succession of giant, mystical beasts with ease. It slows down from there, limiting the action to a single episode of Hercules and his rag-tag crew of super-warriors leading an army into an epic battle, the exact kind of narrative you’d expect from vintage Conan the Barbarian story record. The movie has a sort of charm in its limited scope, especially in its lighthearted approach to mass violence and in The Rock’s natural magnetism. Most of Hercules’ best moments arise from The Rock’s inherent coolness. He just looks like a total badass as he wears a lion’s head as a crown, defeats wolves & charging horses with just his bare hands, and smashes a hooded executioner to pulp with a smaller, less talkative rock. Hercules makes for a much more convincing, enjoyable superhero adaptation/reboot than the similarly reductionist films I, Frankenstein & Dracula Untold, but in the end a lot of your enjoyment will hinge on how much you enjoy spending time with The Rock, as opposed to how much room Dwayne Johnson is given to be his enchanting self.

The transition from babyface wrestler to action hero makes total sense. Both roles require a convincing “good guy” to put the world’s depthless “bad guys” in their place. The Rock has had a few great action roles over the past decade or so, and with the exception of a couple missteps like The Tooth Fairy, he’s managed to avoid the pitfalls of Hulk Hogan’s career path. It’s just that after watching what a stranger, more nuanced Dwayne Johnson can do, it’s worrisome that he’s still making something this close to The Scorpion King at this point in time. Hercules can be a fun, one-time viewing for the audience, but let’s hope it’s not a damning career-trajectory indicator for Johnson. He can do so much more when given the chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

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fourstar

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One of the best aspects of the ancient art of recording television on VHS tapes was the commercials that you’d incidentally gather as a byproduct. A VHS recording of an old Sifl & Olly episode or Lifetime Original Movie may have been made irrelevant by the advent of YouTube, but the much trashier, more disposable art of a television ad is for the most part lost in the process. There’s a reason websites like Everything Is Terrible go back and dig up this garbage. An advertisement can serve as a time capsule of the era in which it was made. Even something as mundane as a car commercial feels strangely foreign 20 years later. A VHS recording of a pan & scan Jurassic Park isn’t particularly useful in 2015, but if you read between the dinosaurs there’s some useful glimpses into the world that was watching it: what the people were wearing, what hacky jokes they halfheartedly chuckled at, what bullshit later haunted their attics & dumps. Advertising is a low form of art, but it’s art that can later serve as a cultural relic.

Bad movies can work the same way. Mac & Me has just as much to say about where our culture was in 1988 as Cinema Paradiso, if not more. What kind of a sense of 1959 would you get if you only watched North by Northwest & The 400 Blows and completely avoided the likes of Attack of the Giant Leeches & Plan 9 from Outer Space? An incomplete one. We are not sophisticated people at heart. Our garbage has a lot more to say about who we are than our fine art ever will. When we create fine art we transcend our true natures and achieve greatness beyond our limitations. When we create garbage we’re being honest about the ridiculous fools we are at heart. A bad movie is a mirror to our worst, most banal impulses. A great bad movie makes us love those impulses. A great bad movie makes us love being a dumb, simple people.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Michael Bay’s production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was The Best Bad Movie of 2014. It deserves to have great longevity as a cultural relic, as it somehow captures the entire zeitgeist of our worst cinematic impulses in one ridiculous package. I’m talking lens flairs, found footage, product placement, inclusion of viral videos, over-reliance on CGI, shaky cam, action confused by quick cuts, large-scale destruction of a major city, a phony third act death crisis, and a dubstep beat for the rap song that plays over the credits. The film itself is an example our greatest, most frequent sin of recent years: the reboot. More specifically, it’s a gritty reboot, the most ludicrous gritty reboot of the post-Dark Knight era (although the peculiarly humorless I, Frankenstein certainly gave it a run for its money there). To top it all off, it boasts an above-it-all sense of irony that compels the movie to periodically point out how inherently silly its premise is. Characters poke fun at one another for “doing the Batman voice” and frequently mock the idea of talking humanoid turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the last five years of bad taste in a nutshell. Or, if you will, on a half shell.

Despite its self-aware irony, there are still glorious moments when the film loses itself in its own ridiculousness. A few action set pieces, particularly a downhill slide and a rooftop battle, are the kind of far-fetched, detached-from-physics kind of fun that you’d expect in franchises like Fast & Furious and, less effectively, Transformers. The movie’s villains, a mech soldier Shredder & a corporate prick William Fichtner, are genuinely terrifying figures worthy of the film’s dark tone. There’s a “beating up the bad guys” vibe in the way the villains are dealt with that feels more like a sincere kids-playing-with-action-figures kind of storytelling than some of the film’s more ironic detachment. The found footage sequence briefly mentioned above, however, finds the film losing itself in its own ridiculousness more than any other. In this scene investigative reporter April O’Neil is digging through her childhood camcorder recordings only to discover that she herself raised the Ninja Turtles as pets in her father’s laboratory. April O’Neil is the source of the Turtles’ affinity for Pizza Hut® pizza; she is the one who named them after Renaissance painters; she is the one that saved their lives by casting them to the sewer. It’s a highly unlikely connection that the film makes & one I greatly appreciate for its lunacy.

There’s even a sense of purpose to the film’s hideous creature design. After April saves the infant Turtles by sending them underground they go through a strange transformation. Through a brief stop-animation effect & training montage, the cute-as-a-button Turtles morph into the ugly, alien-looking things that have been derided since the movie was first advertised. It was only until actually watching the film (as opposed to the ads) that I realized their ugliness had a purpose (even if it wasn’t intentional): puberty. The “Teenage” part of the characters’ namesake is stressed heavily in this incarnation. Their awkward, not-at-all-right appearance is only the tip of the pubescent iceberg. The teenage Turtles are hormonally violent, potentially dangerous young men who dream about running away from home as soon as they’re old enough and spend way too much money on their vehicle in the meantime. They struggle with creaky voices, fart openly, listen to loud music, get coked out on high doses of adrenalin, and have to answer to an angry rodent father figure when they miss their curfew. The most off-putting detail of all is the way they constantly hit on a nonplussed April O’Neil, calling “dibs” on her & whispering “She’s so hot I can feel my shell tightening” in moments of unearned, unseemly bravado, but also excitedly freaking out when she actually responds to them, bragging “I totally talked to a girl!” The Turtles are just as much teenagers as they are ninjas in the film and it’s just as awkward & disgusting as teenagers are in real life.

There are a few other bright spots to praise, like a legitimately cool animation effect that opens & closes the film (in a look that tips its hat to the characters’ comic book roots) as well as the decision to shroud the iffy CGI in darkness, which I think always benefits the format (as opposed to brighter looks like Avatar’s). The casting also shines here. Faces like Whoopi Goldberg, Taran Killam, and Will Arnett keep the mood light as physical reminders not to take the film too seriously. Arnett’s particularly funny as the flustered butt of throwaway gags, like when a Turtle calls him a “human nerd” or when he’s cooking alone to “Careless Whisper” in his apartment. Megan Fox is serviceable, not too distracting in her portrayal of April O’Neil, but not adding much either. I like to think of her here as the human Michael Bay calling card, as if the superfluous explosions weren’t enough on their own. As mentioned above, William Fichtner’s villain is as chilling as always; it’s a performance that honestly feels like it belongs in a much better film. The movie’s tone may be self-contradictory in places, but it ultimately is successful in being both a cheap thrills type of fun at face value as well as a comprehensive cultural relic when considered in the context of its place in time.

The worst part about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that I have so much fun watching it. I eat this garbage up. I first saw the film alone in a theater on a Friday night, drunk, and lightly surrounded exclusively by groupings of young dads & sons. I felt like a total goofball to be the only one chuckling as they watched in respectful (or bored) silence. C’mon, dads! It’s a fun movie! Tony Shalhoub totally plays a gigantic, scrotum-esque rat! C’mon kids! Shredder totally has badass knives for hands! My enthusiasm was unreciprocated long after I left the theater as well. No one was interested in even talking about the movie, much less watching it. I still can’t convince people to watch it, even for a goof. My love for 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a dirty secret only because no one cares to hear it. I believe the problem is that my timing is too soon. That 1993 Chrysler commercial incidentally archived on a VHS cassette during an X-Files episode wasn’t culturally significant until at least 2000. In a few more years the gritty Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot will cease being a fresh, undistinguished wound and earn its rightful status as a precious artifact, a prime specimen of our modern blunders, a more valuable cultural marker than all of the Boyhoods & Birdmans in the world. As a shoddy product so distinctly of its time, its value will only increase as the years soldier on.

-Brandon Ledet

Riding the Bus with My Sister (2005)

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onehalfstar

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“I’m not stupid, I’m just different.”

When I first learned that Riding the Bus with My Sister existed, I was both fascinated and frightened. Rosie O’Donnell playing a mentally challenged person whose main hobbies include riding the city bus and buying toilet seat covers held promise for sheer what-the-fuckness, but I knew that so-bad-it’s-good can end up being so-bad-it’s-really-bad real quick.

My worst fears were confirmed, unfortunately, in the opening credits as the words “Lifetime” and “Hallmark Hall of Fame” scrolled across the screen and were further solidified when Beth, waking from her disabled slumber, smiles into the mirror and in a loud, grating voice shouts, “Good Morning!” From that point forward, the WTF factor of seeing Rosie O’ Donnell play a mentally “retarded” woman with a heart of gold diminished every time she was on the screen.

Now I know it’s not politically correct to use the term “retarded” but it’s inexplicably used throughout Riding the Bus with My Sister, its negativity undermining many of the positive messages the film is trying to convey. One character even asks early on, “They still use that word?” It also doesn’t help that Beth is treated like crap the entire movie. In the first five minutes she is called a “hippo” by a downstairs neighbor, glared at with disgust by her fellow bus riders, and openly insulted for being lazy & living off the government. It would have been just as effective if director Anjelica Huston (Why?) flashed “People hate the handicapped” in bold red letters. For a simple woman who only wants to ride the bus, drink discount brand cola, and one day go to Disney World, she is treated as a drain on society.

The person who treats her the worst is her sister Rachel, a career woman living in New York who must leave behind her fashion photography business to take care of Beth after their father passes away. In a wholly unlikable performance, Andie MacDowell phones it in as the self-absorbed Rachel. MacDowell’s only job in the movie is to look nice & be annoyed by Beth’s antics. Rachel moves in with Beth to help her adapt to life on her own, but soon regrets it as Beth irritates her with conversation-starters like “Hey Rachael, I put seven red fishies inside of this can, do you think they can swim in cola? I sure hope so. I would hate to drown them.” Rachel’s characters arc (and the arc of the entire movie) amounts to the realization, “Hey, I’m kind of a piece of shit because I never really accepted my mentally challenged sister.” We learn this through a tedious parade of at least ten flashbacks of the sisters eating dirt, painting, even suffering seizures; all accompanied by sparse, acoustic guitar. This goes on for two hours.

The most frustrating thing about Riding the Bus With My Sister is that Beth is looked down on by Rachel but she seems to have life more figured out than her developmentally “superior” sister. She has her own place, lots of friends, and a routine she enjoys. She even has a similarly disabled boyfriend, Jessie, who treats her well, takes her out on dates, and has hobbies of his own like karate & riding his bike. Of course, in one of the many ways the movie manipulates viewers’ sentimentality, Jessie is beaten by a group of thugs towards the end of the film.

Kudos should be given to Rosie O’Donnell, though. While her performance mostly consists of rocking back and forth, shouting, and contorting her face, she does succeed in coming across as genuinely handicapped. In one of the film’s best scenes, Beth mourns the loss of her father by sobbing uncontrollably on a bench outside the hospital while eating a doughnut, drinking a cola, and wearing a kitty cat t-shirt. In another she talks about boning Will Smith. There are a few memorable moments like that in Riding the Bus with My Sister but with minimal plot development and a near-absence of likable characters the film falls apart. What could have been a heartfelt drama with camp value fails because the story doesn’t go anywhere. In the end, the viewer is left feeling as confused & unfairly abused as Beth is in the film.

-James Cohn

See No Evil 2 (2014)

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see no evil

onehalfstar

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A lot can change in 8 years. Technology & cultural tastes are especially vulnerable to the passage of time. Fashion, language, entertainment, and modes of communication & business can go through massive transformations in just 8 months, let alone 8 years. 2014’s See No Evil 2, the sequel to 2006’s See No Evil, makes the mistake of ignoring these transformations entirely. It sets the lackluster sequel on the same night as the gross-out slasher original, but makes no attempts at continuity in the characters’ appearances or electronics. In one movie, they’re texting on bejeweled flip phones and in the next they’re discussing what’s trending on Twitter. It’s jarring.

The continuity issues don’t stop there. The two films are vastly different in both the stories they tell & the tone they tell them in. At the end of See No Evil there are 3 survivors from the hotel massacre & the supernaturally strong serial killer, Jacob Goodnight (ugh), is ultimately defeated when his heart is impaled. See No Evil 2 is set in the morgue that accepts the bodies from the hotel & there are no survivors to speak of. The killer’s eye is still missing from an attack in the first film, but his not-impaled heart is still beating in an early ambulance scene. There’s also no mention of the fact that he literally has maggots for brains in the first film or that his favorite hobby is to collect eyeballs as trophies of his kills. The eyeball collecting is a curious detail to ignore, since the pun in the film’s title is almost entirely dependent upon it. Without the eyeballs there is very little connecting the two films besides the title and the Jacob Goodnight character. Even the actor/professional wrestler who plays Jacob Goodnight is billed differently in the two films. In See No Evil he is simply billed as his wrestling persona “Kane”. In See No Evil 2, he’s graduated to Glenn “Kane” Jacobs.

Of course, consistency is not necessary to making an enjoyable slasher film starring a professional wrestler. It’s conceivably possible that the two drastically different See No Evil movies could peacefully co-exist as entertaining, loosely connected gore fests. As James pointed out in his review, the first See No Evil is surprisingly fun. It boasts “a sick charm because it knows exactly the kind of film it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything more.” See No Evil 2 unfortunately loses sight of the original’s tried-and-true cheap thrills slasher format and mistakenly attempts a slow burn suspense that is frankly beyond its limited reach. The first See No Evil is a surprisingly nasty gore fest overstuffed with vile, hateful characters that viciously get their comeuppance one at a time. See No Evil 2, by comparison, is overstuffed with bland couples sussing out their even blander relationship dynamics until they’re uneventfully killed off-screen. By the time a throat is finally slit in plain view an hour into the film & Goodnight discovers the morgue’s stash of bone saws, I felt like a sick bastard for cheering. Without any other entertaining element in play, I had a terrible case of unsatisfied bloodlust during most of the run time.

There are a few lonely bright spots in See No Evil 2. Kane, excuse me, Glen “Kane” Jacobs is visually terrifying enough in real life to be an imposing figure in a slasher movie without much help, something the first See No Evil uses to its advantage. See No Evil 2 goes the extra mile and costumes him in a plastic burn victim mask & black rubber apron that does wonders for his appearance. When he pauses to inspect his new, “improved” visage in a bathroom mirror he has a fairly hilarious “What have I become?” moment that I got a kick out of. The film’s central idea of throwing a surprise birthday party in a morgue also has an amusing charm to it, as does Kane taking chair shots to the head, something he’s been well-trained to do in the wrestling ring. Like most things in this franchise, though, the chair shots gag is exploited much more effectively in the first film, which makes the moment a little hollow. Similarly, by the time See No Evil 2’s sole over-the-top gore arrives in the last ten minutes (the killer is pumped full of vibrantly blue embalming fluid) the film had already asked for too much patience & instead of the “Awesome!” reaction it was looking for, I found myself thinking “Finally!”, something I didn’t experience with the first film.

Of course, it’s a little unfair to constantly compare the entertainment value of See No Evil 2 to that of its predecessor, but it’s a comparison that the film itself encourages often. There are frequent flashbacks & recaps of the first film in its sequel, unwisely reminding me that the product was actually fun at one time. In these recaps it becomes overwhelmingly clear just how different the two movies are. In 2006 See No Evil was imitating the recent successes of ultraviolent (in an icky way) horror flicks like Hostel & Saw, which allowed it to supplant minor details like a decent script or a reason to exist with detached eyeballs and buckets of gore. In the 8 years since its release Hollywood horror had softened greatly, aiming its sights on a PG-13 crowd, playing down bloodshed in order to sell more tickets. Instead of ignoring this trend like it ignored the continuity in the films’ story, the See No Evil franchise also softened in those 8 years. You can see the difference in See No Evil 2’s flashbacks, the dank squalor of the first film clashing with the clinical cleanliness of the second.

Although the films are ostensibly set on the same night, the 8 years that separate them are impossible to ignore. Updating See No Evil 2 for the watered-down 2014 slasher aesthetic was a huge mistake. It was a franchise well-suited for 2006’s often disgusting brand of gross-out gore & torture. Remove its mean streak and there’s not much left besides a bald, one-eyed wrestler in a plastic mask gloomily gazing in a bathroom mirror, asking himself “What have I become?”

-Brandon Ledet

Arakimentari (2004)

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three star

A short, brisk documentary about Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki, Arakimentari tiptoes the same line as its subject: the division between fine art & shameless erotica. Araki, a photographer, is an excitable pervert even in his old age, rapidly firing off lofty platitudes about the visual appeal of vaginas & what it means to be an artist. The movie itself begins with the questions “What is a photographer? What is photography?” before diving head first into Araki’s unique world of daily self-documentation & bondage model photo shoots. As a total weirdo and a sexual deviant, Araki comes across here as the (much cheerier) Robert Crumb of photography.

Araki reached his peak cultural popularity in the 1990s & Arakimentari is smart to mimic a 90s aesthetic in the telling of his work. There’s a truly hip 90s NYC vibe in the movie’s long stretches where aggressive electronic music (provided by DJ Krush) plays over blindingly fast slide shows of Araki’s photography. The movie works best in these montages, allowing the art to speak for itself. Portraits, flowers, everyday objects, and muted landscapes mix with Araki’s obscene erotica in surreal bursts. Several photographers are interviewed to help provide context for Araki’s significance, but musician Björk is also included as a kind of Ambassador of 90s Cool. She explains that she found his work when she lived in London during that decade, describing what a powerful discovery it was at the time. Björk also points to the significance of Araki’s book about his deceased wife in a moment that gets a deservedly calmer, tenderer type of slideshow than the rest of his work does here.

Arakimentari is not a prying, tell-all type of documentary. It offers its subject’s life & work for review in the best light possible. It tells the story of an energetic degenerate with a photographic eye & a constant smile, without asking him to reveal too much about either himself or his detractors. Its best moments occur when the art is offered for viewing free of context, but Araki himself is an amusing character & deft storyteller that makes the rest of the run time worthwhile as well.

-Brandon Ledet

Knucklehead (2010)

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wrasslin

halfstar

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Who is the target audience for Knucklehead? Is it for kids? There are plenty of fart jokes & slapstick antics, but there are also homosexual innuendos, religious mockery, and racial stereotypes. Is it for fans of professional wrestling? The movie features WWE superstar Paul Wight (aka Big Show/The Giant), but the fight scenes are too infantile to whet any wrestling fan’s appetite, the climactic fighting competition consisting of a half-assed wrestling montage accompanied by generic nu metal. But probably the most important question for the sake of this review is: Is this movie for anyone? The answer is definitely not.

The first time we meet the 7 foot, 450lbs hero at the center of Knucklehead, he is descending from the rafters during his orphanage’s rendition of The Wizard of Oz. He is playing the Good Witch, but the gentle giant soon ruins the production by clumsily destroying the set. Why is a full grown man still an orphan? Simply, the film explains no one wants to adopt a giant. It becomes apparent, however, that Walter’s below average intelligence & awful luck are the true reason. In his very next scene he burns down the orphanage’s kitchen by throwing grease on a raging fire. What a knucklehead! Inexplicably, the orphanage has no fire insurance and must raise the money quickly or all the poor orphans will be evicted. But in an act of divine intervention, Walter is pushed through a stained glass window at the exact moment that former MMA fighter turned promoter Eddie Sullivan is asking God to wash away his gambling debts. It’s a miracle! Eddie sees the potential in him and they soon embark on a road trip to New Orleans for the “Beatdown on the Bayou”, a fighting tournament with a $100,000 prize that will solve both their problems. Their journey basically amounts to a series of formulaic gags involving farts, poops, and urine (sometimes simultaneously), that are punctuated by lessons about family, determination, and faith.

It’s obvious the filmmakers were imitating the Farrelly Brothers with this attempt to mix sweet, light-hearted comedy with gross-out humor but, unlike the Farrellys, they don’t give us any characters to care about or any truly gross-out moments. I watched a human giant flatulate, act silly and beat people and I still wasn’t entertained. That’s pretty sad. Knucklehead does have some offensive moments, but not the good kind. As is standard for a lot of WWE entertainment, the minority characters are stereotypical and the butt of a lot of the jokes. We encounter a trucker smuggling Mexicans; a Jewish boxer Sugar Ray Rosenburg, the Monster of Matza, who Walter is convinced to beat down because “That guy hates Christmas”; and a smooth hustler black child that runs boxing fights out of his dad’s house. The movie pretends to have themes like the power of hope and believing in miracles but at its heart it is deeply cynical: Sister Francesca agrees to let Walter fight only after her cut of the purse is mentioned; Eddie’s love interest who works at the orphanage, Mary, reveals she used to be a stripper; a Jewish bookie runs fights out of a synagogue.

Will Patton, Dennis Farina, and Wendie Malick are all excellent character actors who have done great work in the past, but every time one of them was on the screen in Knucklehead I sat perplexed, asking “Why are you in this movie?” There is no point in hiring talented actors if there is nothing interesting for them to say. Case in point: Eddie’s statement “What do you mean the engine’s smoking?” as an engine is billowing smoke. Paul Wight is likable enough, but can’t be expected to carry a feature length film after the poop jokes outwear their welcome. Not even a mildly entertaining bear fight, reminiscent of Hercules in New York, can save this dumb, poorly written dud.

I feel like a Knucklehead for having sat through this movie.

Knucklehead is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

Prêt-à-Porter (1994)

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twohalfstar

Robert Altman’s follow-up to the surprisingly potent (and far superior) Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear), applies the director’s casual, large-ensemble aesthetic to the colorful backdrop of Paris Fashion Week. Altman’s typically nonjudgmental tone is somewhat absent here as characters frequently devolve into the kind of self-parody you’d expect in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but they’re more or less charming all the same. Prêt-à-Porter is a loose, amused take on the fashion industry that tries to succeed less on having something to say and more on having someone interesting say it.

In true Altman form, the cast is stacked: Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Forrest Whitaker, Rupert Everett, Julia Roberts, Lauren Bacall, Tim Robbins, Lyle Lovett, Tracey Ullman, Cher, Naomi Campbell, Teri Garr, and Harry Belafonte all participate in some capacity. By filming during Paris Fashion Week, Altman achieves an even larger ensemble cast of familiar faces than usual, which unfortunately may be the film’s greatest accomplishment. I was drawn to Prêt-à-Porter when I read that even Björk had a brief cameo as a runway model. “Brief” is even a generous word for it, as she merely passes across the screen in her Mother Nature Incarnate mode, the (real life) fashion line she’s modeling having something to do with snow & wilderness. The themes of different fashion lines are a consistent source of amusement for the film as they each intensely focus on a singular, seemingly empty idea: boots, subway cars, Scotland, etc. An American news reporter with a Southern accent works as an audience surrogate as she politely navigates the vapidity of each runway show. One campaign simply marketing nudity, the complete absence of fashion, finally prompts her “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” Network moment & she storms off.

Prêt-à-Porter occupies a strange space between light ribbing and outright mockery. Parts of it feel like Altman’s fashion world version of Guest’s Best in Show, but it never completely tips in that direction. Other parts feel like an undercooked version of the everything-is-connected story Altman had told many times before in much better films. A couple hours loafing along with this impressive assortment of celebrities is not a particularly bad way to spend your time, especially if you have severe 90s nostalgia or an intense interest in the fashion industry, but it could’ve been a much better film if it pushed itself a little harder in any specific direction.

Prêt-à-Porter is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

See No Evil (2006)

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see no evil

three star

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“Look into their eyes, can’t you see the sin?”

I approached See No Evil, one of the first films produced by World Wrestling Entertainment, the same way I approach most WWE programming lately: with lowered, realistic expectations. No one expects character development, plot progression, or Academy Award winning performances from a WWE produced slasher flick helmed by a former porn director. We expect lots of gore & bad acting and, thankfully, this modern B movie delivers both in abundance.

See No Evil’s paper thin plot centers around a group of eight delinquent teens who are sent to an abandoned hotel in hopes renovating it into a homeless shelter. Their punishment goes beyond manual labor when Jacob Goodnight, played by WWE superstar Kane, starts putting his hook through various parts of their bodies. The premise is absurd and you might ask yourself a few questions while watching: Why are the lights and water on when the place has been abandoned for years? Why are the teens given mops and brooms to renovate a giant hotel when it looks like it would take a team of hundreds? Asking this kind of questions is pointless because once Goodnight starts piling up the bodies you’ll have forgotten them. Sure, the sets are dreary and derivative of films like Hostel & Saw, the dialogue awful, the characters uniformly unlikable. Yet, despite all that, See No Evil has a sick charm because it knows exactly the kind of film it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything more.

It’s not hard to spot the allusions to other, better horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Friday the 13th, but See No Evil‘s gnarly death scenes, the kind of scenes that make you squirm on your sofa & put your hands over your face, still stand out for their sheer gruesomeness. Besides your standard impaling and eye gouging, we are “treated” to a few images I wouldn’t want to spoil. The movie even has its clever moments like Goodnight rigging a bell trip wire to the hotel’s beds, alerting him to any fornicators, and his inevitable demise, which is as gruesome and ridiculous as any I’ve ever seen. Kane doesn’t have much to say but he does bring a presence to the role and at 84 minutes the film doesn’t outstay its welcome.

So, despite its genre trappings, WWE’s first slasher film is a success and a pretty damn fun watch. That’s if you don’t have weak stomach and are enticed by seeing a professional wrestler gouge people’s eyes out.

-James Cohn

Cake (2014)

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fourstar

Over the weekend, I was able to make my way to the movie theater to see Cake. I didn’t know anything about the film until I came across the trailer last Friday. Where did this movie come from and why didn’t I hear anything about it? Maybe it’s because of a lack of advertising or the fact that I’m so behind with the times. I was so eager to watch it that I was first in line to see it Saturday morning. I was surrounded by tons of silver-haired old ladies, so I was pretty much in my element. The film brought out some inappropriate laughter, gasps, and lots of tears from just about everyone in the audience. Cake was a movie for real people about real people, and I absolutely loved it.

Jennifer Aniston really showed the world that she could be more than just a funny, flirty girl who stars in a rom-com every now and then. In this film, she plays the role of Claire Bennett, a pill-popper recovering from an unknown, tragic accident. Claire has such a horrible attitude that she drove just about all of her friends and family away. The only person in her life is her paid housekeeper, Silvana (Adriana Barazza). In her support group consisting of other women dealing with unhealthy addictions, one of the members, Nina (Anna Kendrick) commits suicide by jumping off a freeway. After having a few confrontations with Nina’s ghost, Claire develops an obsession with Nina’s family and suicide. This strange little obsession actually helps Claire come to terms with her personal tragedy and take initiative to get better.

Cake is simply a sweet story with a good bit of crude humor and lots of heart. After reading a couple of reviews about the movie, critics did not seem to enjoy the film’s slow pace, but I really enjoyed the way the movie dragged on with no straight-forward answers. It allowed me to develop a connection with Claire; she’s a nut job that I want to be best friends with. I personally know a few individuals that suffer from chronic pain and pill addiction, and I was shocked at how authentic Aniston’s performance was. It was so spot-on that it was scary. Eating her prescription meds like candy, grunting and complaining all the time, and acting like she has nothing to live for. Even if you have no interest in watching this type of film, it’s worth sitting through just to witness Aniston’s impeccable acting. Her performance really “takes the cake.”

-Britnee Lombas

Anna and the Moods (2007)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

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threehalfstar

It’s nearly impossible to be hard on Anna and the Moods, an animated short children’s film from 2007. It’s not perfect, but it is perfectly charming. Because the title character was voiced by the musician Björk I expected a story about a young girl singer in a rock band called The Moods. Instead I was treated to a quirky, compassionate take on puberty and what The Fresh Prince would call The “Parents Just Don’t Understand” Dilemma.

Anna and the Moods tells the story of a young girl who is expected to be consistently cheerful & obedient by her family, which she does willingly until she one day wakes up transformed. No longer a sentient beam of sunshine, Anna finds herself plagued by “moodicles” (hormone-induced moods). Her image shifts from that of a precious little girl to a moody goth teen and she decides to freak her parents out instead of playing to their expectations. She smokes cigars, commits petty crimes, listens to loud music, and develops a questionable taste in boys. Disturbed, Anna’s parents subject her to psychological evaluation, where a doctor, to their horror, diagnoses her as a “teenager”. Instead of prescribing her a solution to the newfound shifts in her mood, the doctor teaches Anna how to deal with flawed parenting. The movie takes a mischievous stance on the sudden changes that come with puberty, encouraging kids to misbehave, but also warning them that their parents are going to be jerks about it.

Directed by one of Björk’s former bandmates from the alt rock group The Sugarcubes, Anna and the Moods works with some hideously cheap CGI, but uses the handicap to its advantage. The characters look like snotty versions of Margaret Keane’s “big eyes” paintings and the whole picture has a bending, warped surreality to it that fits the puberty-altered mindset of its subject well. Monty Python veteran Terry Jones narrates with a perfectly measured children’s book tone that makes the movie’s less successful elements (like an unnecessary potshot at Michael Jackson) more than forgivable. It’s not a complicated or even a good-looking film, but as a short, fun trifle with an empathetic message & a sense of mischief, it’s sincerely entertaining.

-Brandon Ledet