So, it’s been a while because I’m lazy and there’s no other
excuse. So, instead of listing my favourite films of 2013 during this 2013
list-making season, I’ll instead talk about the last 5 movies I watched during
the 2013 list-making season. That and I haven’t written anything in ages so to
do several mini-reviews will make up for not writing anything in ages. So, good
or bad, here are my list of movies I watched at the end of 2013
Phantoms (Joe Chappelle, 1998)
After the death of Peter O’Toole, I wanted to watch The Lion
In Winter, one of the greatest movies, in terms of performance, ever. Failing
to find a good copy of that I instead watched Phantoms, probably his lowest
point. He did admirably, all things considered, and there is one awful moment
of shit dialogue he had to contend with, he was pretty cool in it. Though I
don’t usually side with the Ben Affleck haters, I will agree he really wasn’t
great in this one. Liev Schrieber was fantastically creepy, however.
One thing that impressed me as a kid watching this is that
the common sense thing happens: the military gets called in and scientists
check out the bullshit supernatural thing. They all die, of course, some of
them in particularly horrific ways (some I had forgotten since I’d watched it
as a kid), and their role was simply to have more bodies to add to the kill
count. There were some good creepy moments, and it’s strange that such a
bullshit film like this will set up and pay off stuff, whereas bigger budget,
better received films don’t bother and cut shit out completely and confuse the
audience. I’m referencing a scene where two main characters drive through a
ghost town, and find a car sitting there with the engine running and no driver,
as if the driver simply vanished. Later, when they find that their car wont
start, one of them gets and idea and they return to that first car to find that
it’s dead as well. Its nothing much, but it tells you something about modern
movies that many things aren’t set up well enough of the pay-off is erased
completely.
Aside from the gross-out moments (there aren’t a lot, but a
mutating dog is gross enough for me to look away) you’d be surprised the kind
of mileage the director Joe Chappelle can get out of mundane, un-horrific
things. A friendly looking dog, sitting under a street lamp, is an ominous
sentinel for a larger monster. A silent, staring man is creepy, and its
surprising how simple and effective back-lit silhouetted people in terms of
freakiness. Some of the scares are undercut with cheese, like two severed heads
in a bakery oven (?) because the monster wanted to store them for later?
There is one scene in particular that is very nostalgic for
me, and one of the reasons why I wanted to revisit this film. Once a bunch of
the main characters meet up they find themselves in an inn. They hear music
from upstairs and split up to investigate. Now, when I was younger, in the
primary-to-early-high-school age, I spent a lot of time with this one guy. He
was exposed to shitty movies like this (he had cable before a lot of us had)
and thus we’d end up watching shit movies like this on DVD, or a bad cam
version someone had burnt for him. One night I was over with my folks, and
while he and I watched Phantoms his mum, a piano teacher, and my mum, who can
sing and taught the choir, played music and sung songs together. Loud enough
that I thought that the music I was hearing was the one that was freaking out
the characters. It means very little to anyone but me but that was very nostalgic
for me to revisit.
**stars
Virus (John Bruno, 1999)
Would you believe I watched this before I made everyone
breakfast on Christmas day? Virus is one of those movies that I had seen as a
poster in the back of comic books and decided once years ago that I had to tape
it from the TV when it showed up. It’s a very simple movie, but it stood out in
my mind as one of the few horror movies that uses cyborgs as a source of
terror, as opposed to zombies or other monsters. The other film from this time
period is Star Trek: First Contact, never the less I suppose that the fear of
technology element was a response to Y2K, but maybe not as this film was
written by Chuck Pfarrer, a former navy
SEAL who wrote this as a comic book in 1992 as Hollywood didn’t have the
technology to create it competently back then, or so the reasoning was. Pfarrer
is an interesting guy, who wrote many a screenplay and one of the first to
write about the assassination of Bin Laden.
The plot
is basic, as a living energy bolt takes over the MIR space station, and gets
beamed down to a Russian research vessel. There it takes over the machine
shops, churning out little robots before using the crew as spare parts. A
salvage crew (Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis (she considers this her worst
film) and William Baldwin) come to take the ship and claim the money but
inadvertently wake up the virus and begin bullshit all over again.
The movie has some great production work, with the robots
and cyborgs and such, little techy gears and wires and animatronics and puppets
and that sort of thing. But other than that, it’s a dud, but an ok way to pass
the time. One other thing to note, is that this is one of the post-Once Were
Warriors Hollywood films that Cliff Curtis was in. That movie sent him and Temuera
Morrison to the states. Morrison ended up in Barb Wire (1996) and Speed 2
(1997) during the 90s, and Curtis did things like this and Deep Rising (1998),
where he played another sea-fareing dangerous Maori.
*stars
Battle of the Damned (Christopher Hatton, 2013)
I saw a trailer for this and wanted to give it a try. It’s a
pastiche of Escape from New York, Hatton’s other film Robotropolis (2011), and
a series of zombie movie clichés. Dolph Lundgren’s character Max is sent into
Singapore to locate a rich man’s daughter, and escape the zombie plague
contained within. In aid of this he uses killer robots that the stumbles
across.
This has all the makings of schlocky trash, which means it
could be fun. It certainly has better CGI than Sharknado, that’s for sure, and
there’s generally a level of care put into the production. It borrows a lot of
shaky-cam from the 28 days films, and has a cold washout effect placed on all
the visuals, which can get pretty boring.
Max is a pretty boring character, despite Lundgren’s
presence. He isn’t cheesy or silly enough for him to be fun in the context.
There are moments of making him a little bit interesting, like how he has to
use old-man glasses to read maps, that kind of thing, but not enough to make
him stand out in a cheesy, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon kind of way. One
super-distracting thing for me was how badly Dolph runs now. Its like he has a
really bad back, or knees, and runs with his shoulders back like it hurts, its
really noticeable, as zombie movies have tons of running. The rest of the cast
is ok, none of them really stand out. David Field, who is an amazing Aussie
actor and does these great Oak commercials, is pretty substandard as the
prerequisite human villain of the piece. He does get one amazing moment when he
literally screams ‘BETRAYAL’ just before he’s killed, though.
All in all it felt like it was a waisted opportunity. The
thing about these straight to DVD b-movies is that the marketing, the title or
the trailer, is always infinitely more cheesy and more fun than the actual film
itself. They had oppourtinities to make this film super self-aware and fun but
it just doesn’t work. One character saying ‘serious nerd-gasm’ upon seeing the
robots felt both out of character and forced. Now if the whole this was filled
with this kind of cheese, it just might have worked.
Matt Doran, who plays Reese in the movie, lives near me, and
I missed out on serving him at work recently. I was going to tell him I kind of
enjoyed the movie, in a trashy way. I’ll have to wait until next time.
***stars.
DOA: Dead or Alive (Corey Yuen, 2006)
I just wanted to watch something a little sexy on Christmas,
so I thought about this. I never got around to seeing it when it came out,
knowing full well that it was going to be shit, but I was more lenient in my
assessment this time around.
The film is very simple, as a host of characters from the
video game meet up on an island to have a fighting tournament. Of course
there’s something a little bit more sinister going on, involving Eric Roberts
as the main villain (a lovely surprise to see him here) but that’s because a
movie needs a plot, whereas games don’t. In fact, why DOA is popular is because
the designers of the original game worked out a way for the breasts to bounce
on all the girl characters in a titillating way, and thus turned an otherwise
unremarkable fighting game into something legendary. Hence the need for a beach
volleyball scene, as in the game the breast bounciness was so appealing in the
volleyball sub-game they made a whole volleyball game around it.
Its along these lines that I must mention that, while the
girls are all very lovely, none of them have the soft, bouncy breasts of their
videogame counterparts.
The fights are all great. The film is a mess in terms of
focus, scope and visual styles (one character is a master cat burglar, the
other like someone out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc.) but the fights
are all well done. Its like you’ve made a car-racing movie; the plot and the
acting can be crap, but if the car races look like shit then you’ve failed on a
fundamental level. So at least it has that.
One scene I want to point out is a fight between the
wrestler character Tina (Jaime Pressly) and her dad Bass (Kevin Nash). It was
set up by Eric Roberts to be this whole thing as a fuck you to the characters,
but it ended up being fun. The daughter beats the father and he’s proud of her,
and gives her a big smile and a thumbs up. She doesn’t hate him but he
embarrasses her like a proud father tends to do. It’s refreshing to see that,
in Hollywood populated with post-Spielberg-daddy-issues-for-all-main-characters
style directors, we could have a father and child ACTUALLY come to blows and
have them still love each other afterwards with no moody angst. I mean, the movie
is trash but that bit made me genuinely happy. That and all the hot girls.
***stars
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013)
The movie looked great. And we saw it in 48 frames, which
was amazing. The cast were all top notch, the action was amazing and the
locations, the sense of scale, was staggering. Martin Freeman is a triumph as
Bilbo, particularly in the scene where he meets Smaug and he makes the most out
of every second. That’s just about it. I want to watch it again.
*****stars
Faster (George Tillman Jnr, 2010)
Here’s a movie that suffers from a bad title. I don’t know
what you’d call it but Faster is the shittiest name you could have used. It’s a
movie that’s surprisingly involved, one of those kind of movies where you’ll
just pop it on while you do other stuff and find that it takes a lot more to
watch. The film has style, with a lot of great music. Some scenes have
tremendous pace and energy, others don’t, and sometimes the film slows down the
momentum to its detriment. It’s also a surprisingly long film.
The story revolves around The Driver (Dwayne Johnson), who
gets out of prison on a trail of revenge over the murder of his brother. While
on his rampage Driver is being stalked by The Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) who is
out to stop him, and The Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) a slick assassin hired
to take him out.
To the films credit it goes into great detail with these
main characters, which is good as it gives them all strong motivations. You
feel for all of them, and understand them, which is a rare thing for dumb
action movies and that sort of thing.
(spoiler zone)
What I want to talk about mainly is the disconnect between
the poster and the title, which seem to market this film to the Fast and
Furious crowd, and the tone of the film, a ballsy 70s action crime revenge
film. This also plays to the soft ending, where he gets his revenge and moves
on with his life. The trailer shows us the original ending, more nihilistic,
where I assume the Driver dies in battle with the Killer. Its even suggested
that the Killer’s wife (Maggie Grace) kills Driver, if the movie stills are to
be interpreted as such. This fits the tone of the film and the 70s crime dramas
its imitating: the Killer could have chose to leave the Driver but is constantly
testing himself and is obsessed with seeing who will win. A theme of the film
is that not all people he wants to claim revenge on are unrepentant in their
crimes, others have made amends and the path of revenge isn’t always righteous.
As such he should have died at the end, confirming this message, that his path
will ultimately end in destruction. They even have a scene where he visits his
ex-girlfriend to find that she has a husband and a family to this new guy, and
the child he had impregnated with her had been aborted. Thus he has no ties to
anyone anymore, there’s only revenge. The final action scene suggested in the
trailers was pretty sweet as well, unfortunately, so the end is a bit of a let
down.
All in all though, it was worth watching. Especially for the
first 10 mins alone.
****stars
wow I'm a lazy fuck. Happy new years
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