Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Venom Wearing Denim

Venom (2018) is the second try at a Venom movie, this time without Spider-man.

This starts with Riz Ahmed’s space vehicle crashing in the Malaysian jungle. Ahmed is playing a kind of Elon Musk character, which seems to be everyone’s current go-to villain. I wonder if that bugs him. Everyone aboard dies, but some biological samples are recovered - and one escapes. It takes over a native and starts walking to the airport.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is living the good life. He is in a great relationship with corporate attorney Michelle Williams. He is some kind of YouTube investigative journalist, working for Ron Cephas Jones (Bobby Fish from Luke Cage). He is supposed to be doing a softball fluff piece on Ahmed, who Williams works for. So he peeks at her work laptop email, and finds out about some people who have gone missing. When he gets to the interview, he confronts Ahmed, and of course gets kicked out.

Then he finds out that he is fired, and that Williams was fired too, since she was the obvious source of the info. She throws him out, so now he’s unemployed, alone, and living in a Tenderloin SRO. Then Dr. Skirth (Jenny Slate), who works for Ahmed, comes to him with a story about weird experiments at the labs on the Marin headlands. (I had to look up her characters name: it sounded like Dr. Skirt or Scairt to me.) So Hardy goes to investigate, and gets taken over by the space symbiotic Venom.

Note that this is about 40 minutes into the movie, which is way too long to wait. Venom is violent and goofy and makes Hardy feel all funny. He goes to the restaurant where his ex and her new boyfriend, Dr. Reid Scott, are eating and makes a scene. It’s a nice that new boyfriend isn’t a jerk, but a nice and helpful guy, who tries to get some help for Hardy.

Anyway, we get some good action in here, some chase scenes, some fight scenes, some Venom eating people’s heads scenes. It all goes by too quickly - the whole movie is under 2 hours, with an extremely long end credits - and I don’t know if that counts the Into the Spider-Verse preview tacked onto the end.

Still, I’ve got to say this was a fun ride. Ms. Spenser loved Venom, because he was so metal. She liked a lot of the rest, but noted that Slate as Dr. Skirth was kind of wasted in a very small role. I noticed the same about Ahmed - he gets one or two character beats, and then just does exposition.

So, a good comic book movie - not top drawer, but better than the first five Sony Spider-Man movies. And, by the way, we’re watching Spider-Man 3 again as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Monday, January 28, 2019

Straight Outta Brockton

Before I start in about Straight Outta Compton (2015), I should make it clear: I’m as white as a boy from Brockton can be, and I know close to nothing about rap. I just found out that “Don’t call it a comeback” and “Mama said to knock you out” are in the same song (Deadpool 2). But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig it.

This is the story of N.W.A, with special attention to Easy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre. Easy-E (Jason Mitchell) starts out running drugs, a dangerous business. Ice Cube, played by the real-live Mr. Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson, Jr., is a high-school kid, but that’s just about as dangerous. Dre (Corey Hawkins) is a DJ, who gets kicked out of his house for being a deadbeat. They are working in a club band, where the owner wants slow jams and none of that hard stuff. Dre wants to take Ice Cube’s raps and strike out on their own, with Easy-E’s money.

This is pretty much a standard music biopic. Our heroes fight adversity at home and in the streets, get crooked representation, fight and make up, and always pursue their own creative vision. The difference is that these guys are raw.

I liked this a lot, although parts were pretty intense. My one complaint is that the soundtrack was great, but there was a lot of conventional movie background music. When they weren’t doing an actual track, it sounded very bland. Not all movie music has to be dull orchestral stuff.

As I understand it, the cast really got the look of their characters. The only one I could judge were the two or three spots where Snoop Dogg (Keith Stanfield) showed up. He’s got a pretty unmistakable look, and it was uncanny.

I guess they took a lot of liberties with the historical facts (like most biopics), like giving short shrift to DJ Yella and MC Ren. I mainly mention because Aldis Hodge from our fave TV show, Leverage, played Ren. Wouldn’t have minded seeing more of him.

Sunday, January 27, 2019

Omega Man, Oh God

Can you believe I’ve never seen The Omega Man (1971)? Ms. Spenser had, and we’d seen the Vincent Price Last Man. But we can’t see the Will Smith version until I’ve seen this.

To give you an idea of what this is like: It starts with Charlton Heston riding around a deserted Los Angeles in an convertible, shooting up zombies, then going to the movies. Woodstock, “Held over for three years.” He’s seen it so many times he can recite it from memory. But he knows something those crazy hippies don’t: The world is on the brink of a disastrous war, a war fought with biological plague weapons. These weapons spread a disease that turned everyone into crazed, pale, light-hating “zombies”.

Note: these zombies aren’t really zombies. We meet two of their political leaders, Anthony Zerbe and Lincoln Kilpatrick. They are anti-technology mystics with a medieval feel, but after that war thing, that might be rational. So other than the aversion to light, they are really pretty normal. They don’t seem to re-animate corpses or eat brains or anything.

Anyway, Heston was a biologist working on an vaccine for the weapon, and managed to get himself inoculated. So he’s safe as long as he can avoid getting killed one night. Then he spots another survivor, and she pretty, black Rosalind Carter. She puts him in contact with a group of naturally immune street kids and hippies, but they are slowly succumbing too.

As I understand it, it is traditional for last man on Earth stories to develop into interracial romances (see The World, Flesh and the Devil, The Quiet Earth). But when it’s Charlton Heston, it resonates. The racial and social politics of this movie seem overwhelming now. Not sure how they played in 1971 - all my friends thought this was a kickass horror film (which is partly why I didn’t see it). Now it seems like a twisted social parable, about the reckless establishment and the feckless youth, with only scientist/scholar/adventurer/soldiers like Heston to save us all, even if they wind up crucified. Heavy, man.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

The El is a Lousy Combination

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) is an odd kind of an action-art film, like Smokin’ Aces made by Quentin Tarantino. We queued it up mostly because it was written and directed by Drew Goddard who made Cabin in the Woods.

The El Royale is a once-swanky, now a little run down hotel in Tahoe, split by the California/Nevada border. One day, in the late 60s, it transpires, several interesting people show up, possibly by coincidence.
  • A folksy, slightly off, priest, Jeff Bridges
  • A lovely black woman, Cynthia Erivo
  • A shady, talky, and kind of racist vacuum cleaner salesman, John Hamm
The place seems to be deserted, but they finally roust the desk clerk, bellboy, manager and sole employee,  a pimply Lewis Pullman (son of Bill). A little while later, a hostile young woman, Dakota Johnson, shows up and signs the register “Fuck you”.

She checks into her room and drags another woman, Cailee Spaeny, tied and gagged, out of her trunk. John Hamm starts creeping around and finds a secret passage with one-way mirrors to see into all the rooms. Bridges and Erivo go to the bar and serve themselves drinks (Pullman has disappeared again). Bridges puts something in Erivo’s drink, but instead of drinking, she clocks him with a bottle. It seems that everyone has a secret.

I won’t give away most of them, except Erivo’s: She’s a struggling singer with a gig coming up in Reno, and the El Royale is the only place she can afford. She spends many scenes just singing old soul tunes a cappella. It kind of stops the action dead but it is quite lovely. Erivo did her own singing, live, and either she’s got a great voice, or the combination of a beautiful woman, singing classic songs unaccompanied makes you think she does.

About halfway through the movie, we find out what Johnson and Spaeny are about. Chris Hemsworth shows up and the violence takes off. This sort of causes the movie to take a left turn, but it’s a pretty good one, and grounds the movie right in a certain part of the 60s.

The movie has a great sense of place, and some great characters. The cast is strong, and the writing clever. There is something slight about the movie - it isn’t profound or very deep. But it is entertaining.

There is even a hint of the novel The Maltese Falcon - Sam Spade objects to “the La Paloma”, saying “The La is a lousy combination.” Maybe so, but a fine movie.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Economy Upgrade

We saw Upgrade (2018) on the recommendation of The Mads. They set expections that this would be a B movie, and that let us enjoy it as such. But it was director Leigh Whannel (Insidious) that sealed the deal.

It stars Logan Marshall-Green as a mechanic who restores old cars. When his wife comes home in a futuristic self-driving car, we understand that this means he is a throwback to an earlier era, and this is the Future. He takes her to drop off his latest at the futuristic underground home of tech billionaire Harrison Gilbertson, who tells him about the latest chip he has built. On their way home, the robocar goes rogue and dumps them into a homeless encampment, where some scumbags kill his wife and leave him paralyzed.

After some ritual humiliation of being crippled, Gilbertson offers him a chance at walking - he’ll implant the new chip, and it will allow him to control his limbs again. He’ll have to keep quiet about it, of course - it won’t be a legal procedure. But they both agree to go rogue for this.

The first thing Marshall-Green wants to do now that he can walk again is hunt down his wife’s killers. The police are helpless, but his implant has started talking to him. It has analyzed the surveillance footage and figured out where one of the assailants hung out - a dive bar called Old Bones. The fight  isn’t going so well, so the implant asks for permission to take direct control of the body. When it does, it kicks major ass.

The fight scenes are very fun, with Marshall-Green fighting like a robot with perfect precision. Gilbertson wants to be a spoilsport and stop the fighting, so he tries to shut down the implant. The implant tells Marshall-Green to find a hacker, so he crawls up with a partially shutdown body to get free of the constraints. When that’s done, he can keep coming for the men who killed his wife.

You’ve probably guessed who is behind the killing and paralyzing. If not - SPOILER - Gilbertson did it to get a test subject. Now that he has implanted the device, and the device has got a hacker to remove any external controls, you definitely can guess how it turns out. If not, no spoilers.

Like the Mads said, this is a B movie, but a fun and well made one. The future tech art direction and special effects work better than some bigger budget movies we’ve seen. The action is fun and interesting - what with the computer chip taking over the human to move with uncanny accuracy and precision. It’s all handled so well, we never wanted more of a budget.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Predator? More Like Bass Fisherman

We kind of cheated on The Predator (2018) - we actually saw it with family over the holidays. However, we did not watch it on Netflix so it didn’t count. Also, I get very grumpy watching movies that I want to see under less than perfect conditions - in other words, in my home, in my seats, with my love. But I didn’t grumble too much, I knew we’d be seeing it again. And so we did.

It starts, as is traditional, in some South or Central American country, with a band of covert soldiers sniping on a gang of some sort. It doesn’t really matter, because as is also traditional, a spacecraft crashes nearby. These Predator guys don’t seem to be that great as pilots. Any way, everyone gets killed except sniper Boyd Holbrook, who grabs a few pieces of predator armor and mails them to his PO Box before getting picked up by the Feds.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t paid his PO Box fees, so the postman delivers it to Holbrook’s autistic son and estranged wife. He starts playing around with it, activates it and maybe learns something about how it works.

We also meet Olivia Munn, an exobiologist brought in to check out the Predator from the incident, in a secret facility run by Jake Busey (playing the role that his dad played in Predator 2). Here we get the joke about what a terrible name “Predator” is - but it sounds cool. Then the pred gets loose.

In the meantime, Holbrook is being sent to a psych ward, to cover up the whole incident. I won’t go into to the whole group of crazies, but it includes Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane. They are on a bus to processing, but when the call about the predator breakout comes through they head for the facility. Of course, our band of crazies breaks out and meets up with the exobiologist and head to Holbrook’s home town to hide out at his ex-wife’s place. There, they find that their son is wandering around trick or treating with the armor, and the Predator is coming. All the threads have come together.

This entry into the franchise is famously written and directed by Shane Black (with a writing assist from Fred Dekker of Monster Squad and Night of the Creeps). We’ve enjoyed a lot of his scripts, even if they have some quirks (like having it take place on Halloween - he always includes a holiday). We get some cute callbacks to earlier movies (“Get to the choppa”), but it also builds on them. There’s a cute preda-doggie, based on the hunting dogs in Predators. Then, there’s the ending, which I won’t spoil, but I don’t know what it means for the sequel (if this is considered canon).

We liked this a lot - I guess it didn’t get much fan love, but who cares? The loonies are fun, there are a lot of good kills, and I even liked the kid. Ms. S, of course, thinks it’s the best movie ever.

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Party Girl

We were pretty excited when we heard about How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2018) - a film based on a punk rock short story by Neil Gaiman, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig’s Angry Inch). It wasn’t quite as amazing as it could have been, but we were glad we watched it.

It’s about 3 British high-school punks in 1977, AJ Lewis is the slick confident one with the bleached Mohawk, Ethan Lawrence is the chubby “social liability, and Alex Sharp as Enn, the protagonist. He is probably most serious about punk, writes a fanzine and draws comics. They go to a punk show being promoted by Nicole Kidman, playing Boudicca, a sort of Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood promoter and fashion plate, stuck being the big frog in little pond Croyden.

The boys hear about an after party, but get lost on the way and find an odd house. The girl in the fancy vinyl dress at the door let them in, and they go looking for the band. Instead they find some wierd stuff - mostly dead-faced men and women in vinyl fetishware, dancing to odd space music. Lewis tries to get friendly with the girl from the door, Lawrence gets into the dancing, and Sharp finds a girl all alone, because one finger splits into two fingers at the end, which is considered an imperfection.

He’s a little freaked out, and likes it better when he meets Elle Fanning, who is getting browbeaten by her elders. When she takes scissors to her party frock (at least she isn’t wearing vinyl), he teaches her about non-conformism and punk - which she’s never heard of. I guess her people are more into krautrock (a movie in-joke). So he invites her to hang out with him and go to a punk show.

They go home together, and his sweet old horny mother is pleased to meet her. Then they spend a day doing punky things - hanging out and going to record stores. They go to the show and get dragged into an open mike, where they improvise a song together - it’s kind of punk. It also puts them into a dream world together, where only they exist, surrounded by cells and microscopic worlds, or something.

You see, these strange people are aliens - as you figure out pretty quick. They are on Earth to live the human experience, and then there will be a big feast. SPOILER- they aren’t going to eat the punks, it isn’t a cookbook. Everything is more or less explained, which is my least favorite part of the movie.

It’ s all a touch didactic, with lessons about free will and non-conformity and being human and punk. I liked it better when it was mostly a mystery. Also, there isn’t as much real punk as you might expect. The sound track tends toward “krautrock”, a 70s term for sort of arty, proggy, trance electronic sounds from outer space being made in Germany for a while. The band Matmos does the score, who are electronica, and pretty krautrock.

The story, of course, is a familiar one. We thought of Romeo and Juliet and Roman Holiday (now on the list). But really, this movie isn’t about the story, it’s about the feels. Alex Sharp doesn’t just look kind of like John Cusack, he also looks kind of like Neil Gaiman. Emma is both the good girl who is looking to rebel, and the good girl the (male) viewer knows would fall for him if she just checked out his radical music/lifestyle. So, again, a little didactic or schematic, but heartfelt. This part worked for me.

But my favorite part was just the boys poking around in that old house, opening doors at random and finding odd rituals, communal dancing, sexual oddities or political arguments going on. It is kind of dreamlike and crazy, and that’s what my experience with trying to talk with girls at parties was.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Say It Loud

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) is a bit of an odd duck. It is, basically, documentary footage of the some of the key figures of the American Black Power movement, shot for Swedish TV. I imagine someone found this trove of film and decided that is was important for us, the 21st Century American audience to see.

So we get to see Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Louis Farrakhan. We get to see the amazing Angela Davis, interviewed in prison. This covers a range of the movement, from non-violence, to stronger measures, from Black Panther to Nation of Islam. We hear interviews of these people, who could be eloquent or intimate, or both, but all are arresting. There is commentary from modern Black artists, like Talib Kweli, QuestLove and Erykah Badu - and Harry Belafonte, who spanned both eras.

Why Sweden? Because they were there, because they thought this liberation struggle was important. There is a little bit in the middle about how the magazine TV Guide took umbrage at these foreigners daring to criticize (well, document) America, which is amazing. Who would ever consider taking TV Guide seriously?

I don’t know if I learned much - I lived through that era. But I did get to see the faces and hear the voices of people whose names were on the news, but not speaking for themselves.

My only issue was with the music - It was a mostly modern score by the Roots and QuestLove. I was hoping to get a real Black Power Mixtape - some Aretha, some James Brown, maybe some Parliament and more than some background “Soul Makossa” and Jackson 5. Well, maybe that’s another documentary.

Monday, January 7, 2019

Burn Baby Burn

Our local free weekly listed Skyscraper as the number 1 worst movie of 2018. Several podcasts we enjoy also ridiculed it. So of course it was the first Netflix movie we watched in 2019.

It starts with star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson getting his legs blown off in a hostage situation. Ten years later, he is in Hong Kong, getting ready to complete his security audit of the world’s tallest building (named after a Mad Scientist), the Pearl. His wife, Neve Campbell, and two adorable kids are staying in a luxury apartment in the otherwise empty tower. They are planning to go to the night-time panda feeding at the zoo, while Johnson’s buddy Pablo Schreiber takes him to see the bosses.

They give him the tablet that controls the building’s security and safety features (AKA the MacGuffin), keyed to only Johnson’s biometrics. On their way to the offsite control center, someone tries to steal the MacGuffin. Then it turns out that Campbell is bringing the kids back (their son had an asthma attack), skipping the pandas. They notice a sketchy security crew on their floor, but don’t see them setting a huge fire two floors down.

So we have an updated Towering Inferno with some Die Hard thrown in. The Rock is blamed for the fire, since he was supposed to have the MacGuffin, and only he seems to know that his wife and kids are trapped above the fire. So he has to avoid the police, climb a flaming building, rescue his family, and the billionaire who owns the building, and get the bad guys. And he looks great doing it.

I won’t try to tell you that this movie makes much sense. But I will tell you:
  • In an early fight scene, one of the Rock’s prosthetic legs gets torn off. Yes, he is a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
  • The bad guy hackers, even though they have the MacGuffin, still whisper “We’re in!” when they hack the security system.
  • Campbell barely needs rescuing, kicking all kinds of butt and pointing the police at the bad guys.
  • Hall of Mirrors fight at the end, as homage to Lady from Shanghai (or homage to one of its homages).
  • To fix the security system, they turn the building off and on again.
And this doesn’t even cover the Rock covering his hands in duct tape and climbing the outside of the building.

I will admit the that villain, Roland Moller, is no Hans Gruber. His character is named “Botha”, but not “Botha Deez Nutz”. Also, the action is over the top and the plot nonsensical. But they must have known that - this much camp (“We’re in!”) can’t be accidental.

It might just be how darned likable Mr. The Rock is. But I would rank this up with San Andreas and Rampage, and above The Meg. That may be damn faint praise, but it’s good enough for us.

Thursday, January 3, 2019

Ringing out 2018

I used to resist these year-end roundup posts, now I kind of look forward to them. I actually took the day off yesterday to write this - then out-of-town guests showed up and I got a better offer. So, as 2018 recedes into a distant memory, here we go.

It looks like we watched 19 movies from 2018 in 2018. The rate at which we are watching new movies seems to be increasing. Most of the big action movies or sequels were just OK - enjoyable but not knockouts. Deadpool II was probably our favorite there. For new, original movies, again, not so many great ones. We enjoyed DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time more than most, I think, partly because of the cast, partly out of love for the book. But I’d say our fave was Annihilation. I can see why some people had a problem with it - I thought some parts looked a little cheesy, like a TV movie (or Netflix). But I couldn’t resist the world building, and the mystery of it all.

Ms. Spenser is still looking for good horror, and we’ve found some. We watched the entire Wan/Whannel Insidious franchise in 2018, capping it with 2018’s Last Key. It’s good series, made great by the characters of Elise, Tucker and Specs. Hereditary, on the other hand, was a beautifully made, extremely scary horror movie that we just didn’t take to. Possibly because it was too extreme, possibly because the ending was so ordinary in what started out so original.

It doesn’t quite fit into the horror category, or any category, really, but we also saw Sorry to Bother You. It was a lot of fun, and pretty brilliant, but also kind of a mess. The shaggy anything goes structure cost it points in the black-comedy-horror-political-metaphor contest (winner: Get Out). 

But our favorite 2018 movie was probably Crazy Rich Asians. It had plenty of problems: wealth porn, racial representation, and the fact that we usually don’t care for modern soap opera rom-coms. But it had so many gorgeous, charming stars (of all Asian persuasions), and was so much plain fun, we couldn’t help it.

For non-2018 movies, we watched a lot of recent-ish (2017 for ex) movies. Baby Driver was pretty cool. My plan to watch dance movies instead of action movies didn’t really pan out after we’d watched two or three. We didn’t watch as much Shakespeare as I’d planned - mostly because Ms. S. got tired of it. 

We didn’t watch as many “old” movies (black and white, studio system era) as I would like - they just aren’t making them any more. We did see a few Boris Karloff’s and some noir/crime B movies. 

We did get a few movies off of the Saved queue: we saw Candy, which wasn’t all that great, but I’m glad to have seen it. 

One change we made in 2018 was to drop Netflix streaming, and replace it with Hulu. We’re watching on an Amazon Firestick, so we can watch some Prime as well. We’re not in love with either one - Amazon makes it hard to find the free, Hulu plays ads for other shows over the credits, series go away just when we’re starting to like them (Lucifer) and shows we expected to like get gross and violent (Dirk Gently). We will probably go back to Netflix, if only for the new season of MST3K and Orson Welles’ Breaking of the Wind. We’re realizing that, for streaming, it’s not a matter of picking a service and sticking with it. We’re going to do a month here, a few months there, as shows come and go.

In Christmas news, Ms. S. got me a DVD of Forty Guns. We haven’t watched it yet, or any other DVD this year. I’m afraid that the first DVD of 2019 will be Skyscraper. Stay tuned.

In conclusion, the best movie of 2018 is Bringing Up Baby, same as every year. But I’m beginning to think maybe we should replace it with something by the Marx Bros. 

Happy New Year!