Sunday, July 28, 2019

House Party

I wonder if modern comedies like The House (2017) just aren’t for us. We like Will Ferrell, we like Amy Poehler, we love Jason Mantzoukos, but we didn’t like this movie much.

The premise is pretty simple: Ferrell and Poehler have a lovely daughter who was accepted at the college they went to. They expect a town scholarship to pay her way. But the mayor (or chief town councilman or whatever), Nick Kroll, says the town’s budget won’t allow it. So they need to get the tuition somehow.

Meanwhile, Ferrell’s friend Mantzoukos is stressing because his wife is leaving him and his house in foreclosure, due to his gambling problems. So they all go off to Vegas. Ferrell and Poehler are reluctant at first, but a streak at the craps table puts them within range of tuition. Then they lose it all. Someone says that the house always wins, so Zouks has the big idea - what if they are the house? They convert his empty and soon to be foreclosed house into a casino and it’s off to the races.

The situations and jokes are mostly pretty funny, but none of it holds together. Ferrell has a nice bit where he’s afraid of numbers - He sees a $30,000 tuition bill and goes “Three million dollars!?!” It even pays off later when he has to remember the combination to a safe. But it makes it hard to imagine him as a functioning adult. Poehler has some inappropriate discussions with their daughter about her nickname in college: “Smoke a lot of pot and piss on the lawn” Amy. They smother their daughter and ignore her by turns, and yet she seems devoted to them. In fact, the daughter is in kind of a different movie - one of those sweet grounded comedies about a girl coming of age - that we don’t really get to see.

Plus a lot of the bits look like improvs that didn’t quite work, but they used them anyway.

I’m skipping a lot of pretty good stuff, like Kroll’s affair with town treasurer Allison Tillman (Brooklyn 99), and the whole mafia thing. Also, I can’t say we hated this - we watched it, laughed a little, but at the end were kind of - I guess this just isn’t our thing.

However, when I checked the reviews, I see that most people didn’t really like this movie. Actually, it was kind of a love it or hate it, no middle ground movie. So maybe we liked it better than most. Or maybe just liked it for the Zouks.

Friday, July 26, 2019

Endless Love

When Netflix recommended The Endless (2018), I was intrigued and concerned. It looked like one of those metaphysical horror movies, like maybe a darker John Dies at the End. But how dark, I wondered?

The movie stars (and was written, produced, and directed by) Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. They play brothers who make a tenuous living cleaning houses. One day, Aaron gets a package containing an old video tape. It’s a tape of a young woman (Callie Hernandez) saying, if you came to the camp and there’s nobody there, it’s the Ascension, and they’ll be back soon.

It turns out that Justin and Aaron were members of a cult, the one who sent the tape. Older brother Justin thought it was a suicide cult and pulled his brother out and ran away. Since then, they’ve been living dull, meaningless, friendless, lives with little money for more than ramen and a car with a dodgy battery. Aaron remembers the cult as a nice place, with friendly people and good food. And the tape proves that they haven’t suicided yet. So he convinces Justin to go visit them, just for old times sake.

The place does seem pretty wholesome. The people are warm, a little weird but harmless. They take in damaged people and treat them well. Like Kira Powell, who had been living with a tweeker gun nut. They brew beer for cash, and make a good living. They play cult games like tug of war with the sky (a guy in the dark shadows on a ladder is on the other end). So Aaron is feeling pretty good about sticking around, and Justin agrees.

But strange little things start happening. They see two moons in the sky -  one of the cultists says it’s just an optical illusion, but the legend says when there are three moons, the Ascension will begin. But the main minor miracle is the appearance of impossible photos or videos. In one scene, Justin dives to  the bottom of a lake and pulls up a locked box. When they open the box, there’s a Polaroid of Justin and Aaron in the boat - taken only seconds ago. Also, there’s a monster in the lake.

So, Justin isn’t having a great time. He’s freaked and wants to leave. Aaron is settling in, enjoying the good food and companionship. When Justin can’t get the car started, he tries to walk out, and there he encounters some of the neighbors. Including the tweeker gun nut and his buddy, who are the main characters in a previous film of Benson and Moorhead, Resolution (I should have watched this one first, but it looks a little grim. Maybe). And he finds out the horrible secret behind the cult.

Which I won’t reveal. I’m not sure it’s actually that great. The first part is best - the tension between Justin’s fear of a suicide cult and Aaron’s acceptance of and into an alternative community. But of course, there has to be something going on. Just because it isn’t the coolest thing ever doesn’t mean we didn’t like this.

Two more things. One: This is almost a comedy - at least it has a lot of comedy in it, especially the the tweeker gun nut part. Two: It was made very cheaply (which is why the producer/directors play the leads). The special effects are simple (and all practical?), which makes them almost scarier than something bigger might be. The crane shots are actually drone shots, and so on. Good for these guys. I look forward to Resolution and many more.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Silent Film

We almost didn’t watch A Quiet Place (2018). Firstly, I’m still kind of nervous about horror. Second, I thought the premise sounded a little shaky. If you make a sound, you get killed, but they’re going to have a baby!?!

It starts in a deserted upstate NY town, with a family silently trudging through. The dad is director John Krasinski, the mom is Emily Blunt (his real-life wife), and they have a daughter and two young sons. As they forage through a grocery store, the youngest son wants to play with a toy space shuttle. Krasinski takes the batteries out and takes it away, saying it is too noisy - in sign language. But the daughter lets him take it and he replaces the batteries. On their way back home, the little boy puts the batteries back and it starts making rocket noise. Instantly, a space monster grabs and kills him. The rest of the family silently creeps away.

The space monsters are blind, but have very acute hearing. As long as you stay perfectly silent, you should be safe. Fortunately for this family, their daughter (deaf actress Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, so they all know sign language. They live in a house in the country, and never sweep or close doors. They lay down paths of sand to walk quietly on. Life goes on and Emily Blunt is expecting.

One odd thing about this horror movie: It’s rather peaceful. Everyone walks around slowly and deliberately like monks in meditation. On the other hand, everyone seems to have plenty of time, even though something like washing the dishes quietly would take an eternity. Everyone has clean clothes, and we see the process of washing clothes. But it’s just a show.

Minor SPOILER - this does get much more tense, but the body count is low (other than most of the world’s population). And there’s a hopeful ending - and a promise of a sequel.

Now how about Bird Box, where you can make all the noise you want, but can’t open your eyes? Worth watching?

Monday, July 22, 2019

Aliens Again

Ms. S wanted to see Aliens (1986) again after we rewatched Alien. It was even better than we remembered it.

It starts right where Alien left off, with Sigourny Weaver and Ripley in the escape pod. They get picked up and Weaver discovers that she’s been drifting for decades. A nice man from Weyland-Yutani, Paul Reiser, tries to help her re-integrate into society. But nobody believes her story about the alien, and she is suspended for blowing up the ship. But when the colony on the alien planet stops communicating, they start to wonder.

So they bundle Reiser and Weaver onto a ship with a Marine squad, who are a fun and muscular bunch. Take Vasquez, Jenette Goldstein, who does chin-ups and busts the chops of her fellow Marines. Also, Bill Paxton (“Game over, man”, “It’s a bughunt”) as Hudson, and Lance Henrikson as Bishop, the android.

On the planet, they find nothing alive - except Newt (Carrie Henn), a little girl who is hiding from the aliens. She doesn’t want to trust the Marines, but Weaver brings her out. Now they just have to deal with the many, many aliens at different parts of their lifecycle and get the hell off the planet.

The main thing I took away on this watch is how suspenseful the movie is - more than Alien, I think. Once they get to the planet, the tension doesn’t let up for a second. Last time, I think I was disappointed by how survivable a planet full of aliens was. The team lasted for days, and the little girl for months. Whereas on the Nostromo, one alien was all it took.

Next, Alien 3. What do you think, are we going to like it?

Monday, July 15, 2019

Dark Star Crashes

When we first watched Dark Star: Hyperdrive Edition: Director's Cut (1974), it wasn’t that long after it was released, and it was already a midnight cult movie. (Of course, that was the theatrical cut, but never mind.) We wanted to watch it again, partly because I always remember it as being about one guy and some robots - and I’ve never even seen Silent Running.

The spaceship Dark Star has been on its mission to blow up unstable planets for many years. The captain died in a stupid accident, the ship is showing signs of wear and tear, and the crew is getting a little strange. Talby, played by Dre Pahich but voiced by director John Carpenter, sits in a dome under the stars and just watches. Doolittle, played by Brian Narelle, talks about surfing in Malibu. Boiler, Cal Kuniholm, just wants to find more planets to blow up. And Pinback, played by co-writer and SFX man Dan O’Bannon, claims to be on the ship by accident - he isn’t even Pinback, he’s just wearing his uniform. He is responsible for taking care of the ship’s pet alien, a giant red beach ball with clawed feet. That’s great prop work there, and his fights with Pinback are great comedy.

The movie kind of meanders along, until the smart bomb they are dropping on a planet gets stuck, and they have to talk it out of exploding.

This was John Carpenter’s student project, with some additional material added - not all material that Carpenter was happy with. In fact, the Special Hyperdrive Edition is actually shorter than the theatrical release. So the muffin-tin chestplate on the spacesuit came from poverty, but also made it fun. It seems that audiences didn’t get that, and just thought it was cheap. At least we all got it later on.

Since we got it from the library instead of Netflix, I won’t be blogging about The Cloverfield Paradox, which we watched after this. We liked it (recognizing it as a big step down from the first two). It was mostly a kind of fun “haunted spaceship” movie. But watching Dark Star definitely helped set the mood.

What It Says on the Box

We’re big fans of the “How Did This Get Made?” podcast, so of course we’re also Jason Mantzoukas fans. Since he’s the co-star of The Long Dumb Road (2018), we thought we’d give it a try. It’s your basic road trip with Tony Revolori (Grand Budapest Hotel) as the straight man and Zouks as ... Zouks.

It starts with Revolori setting out from his parents Texas home in a sensible car and a little folding money for the road. He’s heading for art school in LA, snapping pictures with a film camera along the way. His car breaks down just as Mantzoukas is getting fired from his job as a mechanic - ranting and swearing and letting everybody know just what he thinks of them. He offers to fix the car, and then cadges a ride as far as the next town, so he can take a bus to Las Vegas.

As you might guess, there is no bus stop in the next town, and so the road trip continues. Revolori is naive and sheltered, Zouks is inappropriate, and they ... bond? Kind of - but on their second night together, Revolori tries to sneak away alone, but the car won’t start. They have adventures - not the kind where the car ends up in pieces and the police and the mob are chasing them, but the kind where someone looks up a lost love from high school and gets humiliated.

In the last adventure, they meet two girls in a bar - One who has the hots for Zouks, one (Grace Gummer) who went to art school in LA. They have a magic night together and then - SPOILER - they get in a big fight and go their own ways. The end.

If you have seen Zouks on, say, Brooklyn 99, you have a pretty good idea about what he’s like here. If you like that, you’ll probably like this.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Silver Lake is Missing

Under the Silver Lake (2019) is a clever little indie by director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) with maybe less going on than you might think.

It stars Andrew Garfield as an LA layabout. We first meet him on the balcony of his apartment, checking out the topless lady across the way through binoculars, while talking to his mother on the phone. He assures her that work is going great, but his landlord is giving him 3 days to pay the rent or get kicked out.

Garfield notices an interesting young woman with a little pocket dog and goes over to meet the dog - and her. They watch How to Marry a Millionaire and make out. Her roommates, two women and a guy dressed like a pirate, come home, and she invites him to come back the next day. When he does, she is gone and the place is cleaned out.

That’s the set up - the rest of the movie will be a Pynchonesque search for her. Pynchonesque, because his search leads through the scenes and urban legends of LA. There are signs and portents of a Dog Killer - She had a dog! An underground ‘zine tells of the legend of the Dog Killer, and of the Owl Woman, a deadly assassin who hunts nude in an owl mask. The guy who wrote the ‘zine believes that the secrets are in a map (of LA) on the back of a rare cereal box. A billionaire has gone missing, along with three women (maybe one of them is her!). The punk band Jesus and the Brides of Dracula may know something, or maybe the three performance artists who hang out with them do. And why are there so many skunks in Silver Lake?

The paranoia, mystery, specific sense of place and wildly inventive conspiracies make it so Pynchonesque (I just like that word), but I feel like Pynchon has something behind all the mysteries. I may have missed something (OK, I know I missed a lot), but I feel like there wasn’t really anything here. I guess the director, transplanted from Detroit to LA, wanted to make a movie about how weird it is, but maybe couldn’t get at the heart. Or, this is just a fun silly conspiracy movie. It is at least that.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Hey Baby, it’s the Fourth of July

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) didn’t get very good reviews, but what the heck, it’s the Fourth of July, so we put it on. I honestly can’t tell you much about what happened in it, but we enjoyed the heck out of it.

Basically, it’s twenty years after the first film. Humankind is more united than ever before and have been adapting alien tech for our own defense. Then, an alien ship appears, and we kill it. Yay! Then, its daddy shows up - a ship the size of Europe. It squats on Earth and starts drilling down to the core to suck the life out of the planet. Then we get a McGuffin, and that lets us kill the alien queen and drive them away. Yay!

Two things:
  1. The cast is great. We get Jeff Goldblum, Brent Spiner, Judd Herschel and Bill Pullman from the last movie, plus Liam Hemsworth in place of Will Smith. Action faves William Fichner and Robert Loggia are on hand (both generals). Charlotte Gainsborough and Angelababy don’t get enough to do, but are certainly present. And everyone brings the gravitas or sense of fun that they are there for.
  2. The effects are way cool. The ships appearing through some kind of interdimensional nanotech thing made me go “wow” (maybe because I was expecting something more boring). The scenes under the giant space ship, where the sky is replaced by lighted windows is kind of mind-boggling - even when it’s treated very matter-of-factly: “Well, at least you got some light in here.”
I’ll leave it there. We may have slept through parts of this, or at least weren’t always paying a lot of attention to the plot. But it was overall fun, with great effects and a lot of things blowing up, And that may just be enough.

Monday, July 8, 2019

Blow Up

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2015) was recommended to us by word of mouth. It sounds like one of those heartwarming old-people stories, but my sister told me it was much more. For one thing, the old man mostly liked blowing things up.

The 100-year-old man is Robert Gustafsson, an inmate of a Swedish old age home. It is is 100th birthday, and he is fed up. He slips out the window (don’t worry, he’s on the ground floor) and heads for the bus station. He only has enough money to go to a little nowhere town, but a rude skinhead demands that he watch his bag, so he takes that onto the bus with him. The bag contains a large amount of cash, because the skinhead is part of a criminal organization.

At the nowhere town, Gustafsson meets up with a retired guy and they get drunk together and decide to head out together and share the money. They may realize that the crooks are after them - they accidentally kill one - but probably don’t know that the police are looking for the vanished old man as well.

Mixed in with this is the story of the Gustafsson’s life. His father was a bit of a crackpot who went to Russia to promote birth control. When he was killed there, his son accidentally (maybe) blew up their landlord, and was sent to a sanitarium. Throughout his life, he fought in wars, starting with the Spanish Civil War, because he loves blowing things up. He saves the life of Franco, visits Stalin (gets sent to the gulag when he mentions Franco), and eventually gets a job with the Manhattan project. So possibly a better title would be The 100-Year-Old Man Who Loved to Blow Things Up.

Things get quite out of hand, and it is all rather drily humorous. The most surprising thing, I thought, is that the old man’s wisdom was almost non-existent. Actually, he was kind of an idiot. But he was lucky, and blowing things up is a useful skill, it turns out.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Get Happy

Happy Death Day (2017) has been getting some random good buzz, so we queued it up. We liked it so much we watched the sequel.

It starts with Jessica Roche waking up in someone else’s dorm room. Her dad is calling on her cell (it’s her birthday), and she is very hung over. Israel Broussard, whose room it is, is a little nervous and a bit geeky. She isn’t enjoying her morning. She insults Broussard’s Asian roommate on her way out. She walks home through a series of memorable but unimportant scenes. We find out that she is a member of a mean girls sorority, where she gets shamed for staying out all night, but her roommate, Ruby Modine, tries to be nice and gives her a cupcake for her birthday. Roche throws it in the trash.

Later that night, on her way to a party, she is lured into a tunnel and has her throat slashed by someone in a baby face mask - the face of the college mascot. Then she wakes up in Broussard’s room again.

Yes, this is Scream meets Groundhog’s Day. Confused, she walks out of his room and heads home, seeing the same memorable sequence as the day before. And even though she avoids going out, the killer was waiting for her in her room and kills her again.

After a few times around, she starts eliminating suspects - tracking them until she’s sure it’s not them then killing herself to wake up again in the same place. But each death costs her something, and she may not have many lives left.

This is a good premise, written by Scott Lobdell,and well-executed by director Chris Landon. The best part is Roche as a mean girl who gets better. Her mother died a little while ago, and that is what has got her acting like a jerk. We get to see her hung over, smug, confused, scared, opening up, and kicking ass. Her relation to Broussard is also very sweet. And it ends with the discovery that she has never even heard of Groundhog’s Day.

For the sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, we start with Broussard’s roommate, Phi Vu, waking up in his car, and going back to his room, where Roche and Broussard are together. It’s the day after the events of the first movie. Vu is pissed at being kicked out of his room. But there’s something going on with his thesis project, a particle accelerator. His team has started to get positive results, but the dean is closing him down. He hears some funny noises, and heads off to investigate, and gets killed by Babyface. And wakes up in his car. Now, it’s happening to him.

At least, when he tells Roche and Broussard that he’s getting deja Vu, they know what’s going on. It’s also obvious that the particular accelerator is what caused the time loops. I won’t tell who is trying to kill Vu, but will let you know that the curse gets transferred to Roche, and she is waking up in Broussard’s bed again, on her birthday. Now she’s desperate to get back to her old life, until she discovers that her mother is alive in this universe.

In some ways, this is a straight continuation of the previous movie. We get more of some of the characters, including Broussard, Vu (and a team of physics nerds) and the mean girls of the sorority. We get Broussard stretching herself to save the day, again. And in the end, it turns out that Roche has never heard of the sequel to Back to the Future.

Then there’s another ending. On our disc, this is followed by some outtakes. It was very difficult to tell if the darn thing ever ended. Since there probably won’t be a second sequel, that will have to do.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Family Matters

Kin (2018) is another one of those small-scale, character driven, indie thrillers, a genre we didn’t really know existed. But we’re getting the idea.

It  starts with a black youngster, Miles Truitt, cruising around on his bike in abandoned buildings, scrapping. He sees some weird things, including a heavily armored body and a big black box. He heads home to find his white (adopted) father Dennis Quaid pissed off about him getting detention. Quaid is a construction worker trying to do right by his kid - “I’m tough on you because the world is tough.”

One reason for his attitude might be his other, not adopted son, Jack Reynor, who shows up after a stint in prison. Quaid warns Truitt not to get to friendly, but they seem to get on. But it turns out that some of Reynor’s “friends” from prison want a lot of money for protecting him in prison. Long story short, Quaid gets killed in a robbery gone bad - also most of the protection gang, lead by James Franco. Now Reynor really has to get out of town.

He tells his little brother that their dad will be working round the clock shifts, and they should go on a road trip. So they take off. They start to bond, and Reynor decides to spend some of the robbery money at a strip club. He lets Truitt (who’s about 13?) pick a girl, and he chooses Zoe Kravitz. Things get a little out of hand, and the bouncers start beating up on Reynor and Kravitz. But remember that weird black box from the abandoned building? I forgot to tell you that it’s an alien weapon, and Truitt uses it to start blasting the club. So Truitt, Reynor, and now Kravitz take off together.

That’s the kind of funny thing about this movie - for long stretches you forget that the kid found alien tech. We get occasional cuts of two armored types coming after the weapon, for a good bit on stolen motorbikes. But this is mostly a simple family drama about bad decisions, race, and in the end, a missing mother.

The ending is a bit pat - I’m not in love with it. It leans too heavily into the SF premise that most of the movie leans away from. In fact, I kind of wonder if that premise is even necessary. But some of these indies embrace genre not because the story needs to be told in a genre, but because the people making it love genre. So El Royale was mixed mystery-thriller with cult-horror. Colossal adds kaiju to an addiction story. And so on. I only figured out that these are somehow a category because I see previews for them in each others’ movies.