Trailers for Movies that Look Good

Cold Weather

This just looks like a flat out good movie.  I'm totally excited.  I don't think I've seen a great low budget American movie since Primer.



Winter in Wartime

Winter in Wartime is a Dutch WWII movie.  Those are usually pretty good.  The last one I saw was Flame and Citron which was severely underrated.  This one was nominated for an Oscar or something.  Plus the Nazis loose in the end.


Even the Rain

In this movie it appears that Gael Garcia Bernal attempts to use his smoldering good looks to solve a water crisis in Bolivia.  I'm sold.

Trailers for Movies that Look Good

Drive Angry

There is no doubt I'll be there opening weekend.  This is the Cage I've been waiting for.  And was that actress wearing cut off mom jeans?  I think she was.  How bad is this going to be?  So bad I may see it twice.  Is Cage funnier when he freaks out or when he tries to play it cool?  I don't know.  I hope this one offers up instances of both.

Win Win

In some ways this movie looks a little trite but I'm excited to see actual wrestling in a movie.  Almost every movie or TV show that thinks it should, for some reason, include a scene of high school wrestling gets it completely wrong.  Oddly, one of the best wrestling scenes I've ever seen in a movie was in Rushmore.  Both the Station Agent and The Visitor were very good and I expect this to be equal to those two at least.  And Bobby Cannavale is always funny.


Rage

This one could go either way.  Guillermo Del Toro's name as producer doesn't really mean too much to me, though I don't think he would help produce something he didn't find enjoyable.  It could be a real thriller which don't appear very often.  We'll see.


Incendies

 

 This movie just looks amazing.  I can't wait.

Movies of My Youth: Wildcats

Wildcats

Wesley Snipes has a huge penis.  You know how I know?  I've seen the movie Wildcats at least twenty times and it makes a cameo appearance about half way through.  No lines, it's just a sight gag.  There are several other penises featured but only one is famous.  Actually, Woody Harrelson's penis might be in there but Snipes pipe is so big you can't really focus on anything else in the scene.  Seriously, for a second you think, god, that guy has skinny wrists and then it dawns on you and your own penis shrinks back in fear.   But alas, Wesley Snipes penis isn't why I remember this movie so fondly.  It's Goldie Hawn's boobs.  Just kidding, but seriously folks.
Wildcats is a football comedy about a female football coach at an inner city high school.  This movie is almost exactly the same as The Bad News Bears.  Which isn't that weird since it's the same director. Goldie Hawn plays the coach who loves football because her dad loved football and he died or some shit.  She accepts the coaching position after the head coach of the rich prep school she works at won't hire her for an assistant coach position.  The coach is played by Bruce McGill and, guess what, he's an asshole.
So begins her long odyssey of convincing a bunch of good for nothing hooligans that football is worth playing and she can show them how.  She has a hard time juggling their lack of desire to be coached by a woman and the two young kids she is raising mostly alone.  Her older kid is Robin Lively whom you might know from another classic childhood favorite, Teen Witch.  At one point she dies her hair green in an attempt to "look punk."  But really this movie was made in 1986 and she should've gone with more of a hardcore look.
So surprise, surprise through a number of contrivances she turns the rag tag bunch into a decent football team.  But she needs a quarterback still.  Enter Mykleti Williamson as Lavender "Bird" Williams.  The dude is 29 and he looks it.  His character is the kind of person who could sell you a watch from inside his Columbine style duster.  But apparently he's an awesome quarterback and they convince him to play on the team.  It's unclear whether he actually goes to school or if he's just from the neighborhood and they let him play.  Regardless he turns their team around and it's all set up for a grudge match against Goldie Hawn's former school and that asshole coach I mentioned earlier.
Guess what happens in the end.  Go on, guess.  C'mon, just guess.  Ok, fine, they win the game thanks to some real football know how.  That's the main difference between this and The Bad News Bears.  They win in the end.  I've always wondered if they lost in the end would more people like this movie.  Probably not because I bet most people still can't sit through the first hour of the movie to get to the final game.  I don't think I mentioned it before, but this movie is generally regarded as being terrible.  On imdb.com it only gets 5.5 stars.  That's shitty, Ron Runnie Ron gets a 6.1 if that tells you anything.  I find Goldie Hawn charming in this one though, full disclosure, I have a huge crush on Goldie Hawn of the past.  From the seventies to the mid eighties I don't know if there's an actress I feel crushier about.  Maybe it lasts to the early 90's I'd have to do some research because at some point she just sort of vanishes from my memory.  Maybe around the time of the Banger Sisters.
This movie was directed by Michael Ritchie who mad a few of my favorite movies of the 70's:  The Bad News Bears, Smile, and Semi-Tough.  Plus Downhill Racer.  Unfortunately Wildcats sort of marks the downhill part of his career.  Though he does go on to direct The Golden Child.  Eric and I used to watch this with amazing regularity.  It was a classic Saturday or Sunday afternoon HBO staple.  Of course what I really love about this movie isn't that it's a football movie or Goldie Hawn or Wesley Snipes's penis, it was watching it with my brother and the shared joy we got from watching this movie when we figured no one else cared about it all.

Movies I'd Rather Watch Than the Forthcoming Adaptation of On the Road

Rango

No Strings Attached

Grown Ups

Four Lions

Is it too late for me to get a blurb on the above poster? I think I'd like to go with "Not Funny." And this comes just days after I posted a review in which I said something to the effect that carrying unstable explosives automatically makes for good cinema. How quickly FOUR LIONS came around and made me eat those words. If you even watch two seconds of the linked trailer, you'll see that the sight gag that opens the preview (and the movie as well) is culled right from THIS IS SPINAL TAP's Stonehenge bit.

My main beef with the movie is that ninety percent of its jokes fall completely flat. It just isn't funny. The theater was pretty quiet, with the exception of one old woman who whooped loudly at every joke they threw our way. And throw them they did. It seemed that they were hoping to get laughs through the law of averages rather than quality writing.

Part of me wonders how many people in the audience actually enjoyed it. It seems like the type of movie that left-leaning people will be expected to find funny because of its controversial subject matter--I expect many people will alter their opinions in order to feel not left out from the hordes that are singing its praises. I do applaud the filmmakers for having the courage to push the envelope and make comedy out of a subject many would consider taboo. I also think that the acting was good, given the material. They did their best. The main faults of FOUR LIONS begin on the written page, and later in the cutting room. I suspect that very little was left on the floor.

The movie is overlong, or it feels overlong at just over 100 minutes. Part of the problem is that it is unfocused. They time spent in a terrorist training camp is over in the first half hour of the film and seems to be just a vehicle for gags. The other problem is that the climax of the movie feels interminable. It is long. It feels like they are trying to make every possible critique of terrorism and counter-terrorism that they can, and tack some gravity and sentiment on there to boot. It feels heavy handed and may have been more successful if they just stayed in the shallows the whole way through. After that they throw two more lengthy scenes at you. And then, as if you hadn't seen enough, the credits are peppered with scenes that didn't make the main bulk of the movie.

I can't say that I found the trailer particularly enticing, but a couple of glowing reviews had pushed me to check it out in spite of my gut feeling. I feel let down. Failing to deliver on the promise of laughter should be considered a form of terrorism.

What the Fuck?: Liam Neeson Will Fight You.

When did Liam Neeson start fighting people in movies?  I guess it was that first Batman.  But why?  It's an odd career choice to, at fifty, start beating people up in movies.  I haven't seen his new movie yet but he obviously beats somebody up with the same moves he used in Taken.  I'm just curious why.  Taken was ok.  I didn't really buy him beating up a bunch of dudes half his age even if he used to be in the CIA or whatever.  I'm not sure but I think retired CIA agent vs current Armenian thug is a tougher match than was presented in that film.  He cut through those dudes like Tony Jaa in a class full of yellow belts.  Is this really the best we can do?  Why is Liam Neeson doing all this stuff?  I'm pretty sure we haven't seen the last of Liam Neeson kicking ass and I'm unclear how I feel about it.  I'm not even going to bring up the Star Wars movies because for the most part I'd like to forget they even exist.
And on another note, did he really piss his pants as this picture would have us believe?  I kind of hope so.  I found it on some blog that claimed it was true.  But that's a blog, who reads those anyway?

The Mechanic

The Mechanic

Action movies.  I've never really known how I feel about them.  At their best they are thrilling, tense and harrowing.  At their worst they are also a pure joy to witness (Oh, the abject failings!).  But in the middle there is a wide expanse of unwatchable garbage.  These days most action movies are also science fiction movies.  There are precious few straight action movies being produced (probably the last good ones were the first two Bourne movies).  There's also so few good straight up science fiction movies being made but that's a whole other post.
The seventies was a great decade for action movies.  The technology was in the right place.  They had real explosions, real car chases, and stunt men kicked ass.  One of the underrated gems of the seventies is a little watched Charles Bronson vehicle called the Mechanic.  Bronson is great in it but I could never really except Jan Michael Vincent (in any context) so I thought an adaptation wouldn't be a bad idea.
And it wasn't.  The remake of the Mechanic is a decent action movie.  Jason Statham is probably the only bankable action star in my book at this point.  The fact that we're still letting Sylvester Stallone make shitty action movies at 60 should be proof enough that there is a dearth of action stars available for mass consumption.  Statham is acceptable, he at least looks like he can do action things.  Every performance of his is remarkably wooden.  He has never really delivered dramatically for me but at least he has recognized that fact and put himself in roles where he doesn't need to do so.  Besides, who else do we have for these types of movies?  Matt Damon?  C'mon.  In the remake, the role previously played by Jan Michael Vincent is played by one of my favorite actors, Ben Foster.
Ben Foster is one of the few actors whose movies I will see no matter what they are.  I like that he has focused on smaller interesting roles, he's quickly becoming a go to character actor.  Also, he is my brother's man crush (we're all allowed one, right?).  He is a huge upgrade over the sloppy Jan Michael Vincent.  Donald Sutherland also appears in a small role as Statham's mentor and Foster's dad.  I also love Donald Sutherland.  Have I told all of you that I met him once?  Probably.  I know I tell Lauren every time we see him in a movie, or so I've heard.
Anyway, a lot of shit explodes, there are some neat gadgets and cool fight scenes.  That's all I wanted out of this movie and it was pretty much all I got.  So I have to say I enjoyed it.  Especially when you compare it to other movies of this ilk coming out recently.