Scream 6 is currently filming in Montreal. Yes, Neve Campbell is not in it, and yes, they should pay her. And yet, the movie is still getting made.
Shooting was done on Sherbrooke St. West today, and they had dressed up a whole block to look like New York. I thought it was hella interesting so I snapped a ton of pics to show off here.
– This is why it’s still worth watching movies, when there are unique works of art like this being made. Yeah, it’s a bit of a bold statement but fuck it, this adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story really stood out; though flawless it is not.
– Richard Stanley hasn’t directed a feature-length fiction film in over twenty years, since his two (personal) cult favorites ”Hardware” and ”Dust Devil”. Add this one to the list as a worthy entry in his cinematic oeuvre.
– It won’t be for everyone (like his other films), that’s for sure. But this is the work of someone with a truly distinctive vision. And what a vision it is. And the sounds…
– Nicolas Cage is actually the weakest element. This is one of his unhinged performances for which he’s unfortunately become expected to deliver, which often turns a scene into unintentional (?) comedy. He does for alpacas here what he did for bees in ”The Wicker Man”…
From what I’ve read, his performance was deliberate, as director Stanley apparently wanted him to play it like Cage’s ”Vampire’s Kiss”. For my money, bad decision. His character is odd and over-the-top from the beginning when I think he should’ve been played straight.
– In fact, one aspect that is a bit hit-or-miss is how most of the characters are all a bit off-kilter from the get-go, with some weird dialogue throughout.
– I especially liked the teenage daughter, the Wiccan Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur). Some would complain that her practicing witchcraft brings nothing to the plot, but it’s a great character trait that adds to the overall unique mood of the film as far as I’m concerned.
– A big part of the mesmerizing quality of the film is the incredible score by Colin Stetson, Like Stanley’s other films, the music holds a *very* important place.
– I don’t remember seeing a better lightning sequence than here. Just beautiful. ”It’s drawing the lightning.”
– Honors the works of Lovecraft in its depiction of the unexplainable otherworldly, which is no small feat. The design, setting, and effects are incredibly well designed and depicted. A real achievement on what was apparently a six million dollar budget…
– There are also some very ”The Thing”-esque scenes/effects, which makes sense since *that* film owes some to Lovecraft.
– I often complain about the (to me) incomprehensible super-success of films like ”It”, which is generic and by-the-numbers at best. THIS is what a genre film with an actual singular style, vision, and personality really is.
This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy asks the question:
What ever happened to the good old days of sci-fi — when spaceships were real models, monsters were made of latex, and laser guns were just curling irons painted silver?
And the answer is a fun romp through science-fiction, camp and b-movie films.
Or is it?
Here’s the synopsis from their site:
For three ordinary guys Tom, Jeffrey and Gavin, this just became a reality. One minute they were watching an old b-grade movie, the next they’ve been thrust inside the movie itself and at the helm of a rickety old spaceship. Panic ridden they stumble into a space battle. and make a mortal enemy of the evil Lord Froth while unwittingly saving the space princess Lady Emmanor. Then suddenly Jeffrey starts to change into a sci-fi character called Kasimir. They must adapt quickly if they are to survive long enough to find a way home. For all they know they could be next. If that happens they will be lost in this world forever. They embark on a quest to find a cure for Jeffrey and a way back home. This is an action-packed comedy adventure of giant lizards, space battles, robots, aliens, warlords and amazons that has to be seen to be believed.
All of this is true. This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy delivers on its promise of a tongue-in-cheek look back at the drive-in campy classics and, on the surface, pokes fun at the tropes and delivers a resolution that fits in with the plot. The acting is not terrible, as the cast is asked to swing from the real-world to the over the top genre-speak of bad-sci-fi.
That being said, This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy is a deeply flawed movie. I don’t mean the production values, as many of the sets, props and costumes are bad “on purpose”. (Though I would have cheered if someone from hair and makeup would have brushed Christian Nicolson’s hair out of his face.) The writing is flawed.
Spoilers ahead, as some plot points will need a deeper examination to explain my disdain for them.
Every woman in the film appears as a sexual conquest to be won or a reward for the male heroes’ development. Every single one.
It would have been one thing is this only happened inside the Oz-like world of Space Warriors in Space, the b-movie they’re sucked into. But this also happens to the women in the “real world”. They’re leered at on the convention floor. Both Gavin and Tom make comments about the cosplayers dressed as Amazons. Getting with Emma is the main plot for Tom, even if he is distracted by the actual Amazons who capture him and threaten him with either torture or pleasure.
It was gross and turned me on the protagonists, who act in this way without any ramifications or development, and the women in the film achieve nothing more than gifting themselves to the men once the guys achieve a certain level of confidence. Tom wins Emma! Yay.
There are also a series of gay jokes peppered through the movie. From an awkward fall where one guy lands on another guys’ back (lolz i guess?) to the entire character of Bruce, played by Jarred Tito, is a dated, inappropriate prancing fop whose over-exaggerated gay stereotypes are played for laughs and the result is cringy-er than it sounds.
As well, and this is admittedly a smaller deal, but for some reason this movie sees fit to mock sci-fi and genre fans at every chance it gets. Everyone at the convention is a poorly costumed mega-nerd lacking in any social skills. Jeffrey is treated as pitiable because of his fandom, and Gavin is deeply ashamed of his. Tom points out that he doesn’t care for sci-fi several times, and it is this character trait that of course makes him the hero of the piece, as on fans are affected by the mind-altering powers of the world they’re in.
Who is this movie for? People who want to win women, think gay guys are funny, and laugh at nerds?
I was into this movie when I was watching it, but once everything was over and the credits were rolling, I was left feeling like I’d eaten too much Burger King. Sure, it was okay going down, but now it’s just sitting there like lead.
It’s pretty rare to watch a movie where the sheer joy of those involved in making it drives the film forward, yet that joy is plainly evident when you watch Lowell Dean’s “Another Wolfcop”.
Following in the footsteps of Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (Toxic Avenger), with a touch of Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins 2) thrown into the mix, Dean’s continuing saga of a drunk werewolf cop cashes in on charm and gore (sometimes charming gore) to hit it off with his audience. Officer Lou Garou (ben la) does have some problems remembering to read the Miranda rights. But he pretty much always gets his man, like some sort of murder-furry Dudley Do-Right.
Dean had this to say about revisiting the Wolfcop universe:
“My goal with this film (as with the first WolfCop) is to create a unique, immersive “comic book” world. Regardless of how absurd the material gets (and it gets quite absurd), I believe it is important to take a very serious approach to the storytelling.”
A few familiar faces do some good work here. Yannick Bisson (The Murdoch Mysteries and those Scotiabank commercials that were on Hockey Night in Canada for years) is good as the grease-slick villain. Cameos by Kevin Smith and Lawrence Gowan add some ham and cheese to this sammich, filling it out just right.
I don’t want to go too deep into the plot of the movie itself because giving anything away will take away from it. Besides, it’s a movie about a cop, who’s a wolf, and he fights evil. You’re either in or you aren’t at this point.
When you get a chance to watch Another Wolfcop, be sure to bring your friends with you, get a bunch of popcorn, and sneak some booze in. Like joyriding in a dune buggy, it’s a bumpy ride, but buckets of fun.
I sat down with my wife this past weekend for a good old popcorn movie night, and we charged up “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”. I don’t usually offer write-ups of big blockbusters, but it’s been a few days and this movie is still giving me complicated feels. As such, I’m going to try and hammer down a few of them on the keyboard.
The main talking point about this movie in the press has been its box office performance; with a budget of 175 million dollars, it only managed to scrape together 39 million domestic, adding another 107 million foreign, and lost nearly 30 million dollars for Warner Bros.
Those numbers make John Carter look like a smash hit.
Doubling down on that, the critics hated King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. It’s at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, as critics were pretty savage in tearing it down.
No one liked it, no one went to see it, and it came and went this summer without much hoopla.
But I think I liked it, and I don’t really know why.
It stars Charlie Hunnam from “Sons of Anarchy” as King Arthur and Jude Law as the villainous Vortigern. The supporting cast includes Aiden “Littlefinger” Gillen, Djimon Hounsou, and Eric Bana. The casting is fine, though I can imagine studio executives all promising to never pour so much money into a film helmed by a cable TV star ever again.
It was directed by Guy Ritchie.
And this is where the movie, the box office, the critical response and my feelings all go sideways. “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” is absolutely a Guy Ritchie movie. Above and beyond any other plot, theme, genre or experiment.
Nothing else that can be said about this movie can eclipse that fact. It’s not even fair to say that Ritchie’s fingerprints are all over it, as it seems as if he’s grabbed hold of the whole project like it was a wad of playdoh and just squeezed and squeezed until it squished through his fingers, leaving a gooey mould of his grasp behind.
Imagine if “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, “Snatch” or even “RocknRolla” were remade to include Excalibur. Hunnam’s Arthur could fit right in with Eddy, Turkish, and One-Two effortlessly with his plotting, scheming and cons.
The thing is, Ritchie has already moved past those smarmy underworld con-game movies with his Sherlock Holmes and even the under-appreciated “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” spy-hommage. King Arthur as a wise-cracking streetwise hustler is really strange, it’s really unexpected. Even the trailer doesn’t quite prepare the audience for this take on the true-born king. It is really quite odd.
So, yeah, but what I wanted to capture was the essence. So, the story, for me, has both an esoteric aspect and more conventional aspect. And if you can marry those two successfully, then you succeeded. So I like the idea that it’s a story about a man’s inner struggles with himself, and he starts off completely dependent and then ends up being completely independent.
…
There is a terrible danger, particularly in the Arthurian legend, of getting bogged down into too many famous characters – and we were liberated from that by just going ‘this is about a kid retaking his throne and he’s got to pull a sword out of a stone in the interim’. I mean, congestion is a big problem in narrative, right? And so, wherever you find congestion, find an efficient way of getting through it. So it just didn’t lend itself to time for a bit of romance. We were dealing with a bit of bromance here and there. But yeah, I think we’ll leave the romance to a latter, another incarnation.
But the movie is bogged down by narrative. There are all these characters introduced that muck up the screen, and Arthur spends most of the time playing Robin Hood rather than conquering England. They spend time with his streetrat friends, but don’t bother introducing Merlin, Lancelot or Guinevere. Mordred attacks King Uther at the start of the film, and Morgan le Fay is a non-entity as well.
Don’t forget that this movie clocks in at over 2 hours in length, so the idea that there isn’t time for these iconic characters is a strange one to justify.
Now, here’s the twist; I agree that this movie is a failure of a King Arthur movie, but it is a wonderfully weird and fun Guy Ritchie caper movie.
Once I was able to turn my expectations over, I realized that this isn’t a movie about a born-king rising to the occasion, freeing the sword from the stone and conquering a fractured nation. This was instead a movie about a street-wise grifter and his colourful gang of friends looking to stick it to the man, who then get in over their heads due to events beyond their control before beating the odds and coming out on top.
With magic swords.
Once I parsed it that way, I was on board. The movie made sense, and it was a fun silly romp that was half-action, half-parody, cruising by on the strength of some witty banter and some sly grifting. It became good.
Sort of the way you can look at a horror movie, and while knowing that it is not a finely crafted piece of cinema, but still appreciate it for succeeding in what it attempts to do, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” works when put in the right context.
So I’m left tossing around the thoughts in my head:
“Can a movie that failed in its premise but succeeded in finding an identity be good?”
“Can a movie be accidentally good?”
“When a movie fails at everything it sets out to do, can it still be good?”
I don’t know.
I do know, however, that Aiden Gillen looks suspicious no matter what role he’s playing. Even if he’s a noble knight, I can’t shake the idea that he’s not one step away from pushing someone out the moon door.
Jimmy (a Jason by any other name) returns to the podcast and he has a major announcement/reveal. The absolute mad man has watched every single film on “The List” and he’s got a few ideas to share with Scott and I. He also talks about his new and fresh project with Scott that kicked off this week “Know More Than You” where he and Scott have seeded 96 cartoons and will be slowly weeding through them to determine what is the best cartoon of all time. Fun times! Enjoy the show kids!
So let’s preface this with the fact that I love most of Richard Linklater’s films. A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life, the Before trilogy, Boyhood and of course Dazed and Confused all rank somewhere in my ever growing list of “great movies”.
There are a few movies that I’ve watched a lot. My room used to be in the basement of the house, so more or less the entire basement was appropriated to be my room. This meant that my “room” was as much a living room as it was a bedroom.
Anyhow, I used to put on movies the way most people put on music. If I bought a VHS tape, it would mean that I was ready to watch this movie multiple if not dozens of times. Films like Clerks, Mallrats, Empire Records, Hackers and Trainspotting all made that heavy rotation. So did Dazed and Confused.
All that to say that I might just be a little bit biased when a movie comes rolling out in 2016 written and directed by Richard Linklater and touted as the “Spiritual Sequel to Dazed and Confused“.
That’s not just marketing talk, Everybody Wants Some!! is most certainly the spiritual sequel to Linklater’s 1993 film (wow, that makes me feel old), in a multitude of ways. Where D&C takes place on the last day of high school, EWS!! is the first weekend of college. D&C takes place in the late 70s (1976 to be exact) and EWS!! takes place in the early 80s (1980).
Both films deal with finding your place in an ever expanding world that outwardly seems to care less and less about you. The football players of Dazed and Confused wonder about their fate as they move to college and losing their “top dog” status in high school. The baseball players of Everybody Wants Some!! are dealing with that exact reality. They were the best players on their high school teams, now they’re in a fight with equally talented players for a spot on the lineup.
Without expressly taking the same characters and checking in on them in college (which would be an impossible task with all of the actors being 23 years older and mostly in their 40s), Everybody Wants Some!! plays as much like Dazed and Confused as you can get without being fully derivative.
Of course, the other similarity is that both movies are essentially about nothing in terms of plot. The characters bounce around from party to party, with hanging out in between. You’re not watching this movie for the plot, you’re watching it to see these characters, from their different walks of life and philosophies interact and figure their shit out.
In the same way that Dazed and Confused doesn’t have hammy “jokes” neither does Everybody Wants Some!! Instead, you’re just along for the ride as the characters themselves are genuinely funny. I got genuinely excited by some of the casting choices when I saw Glen Powell in the role of Finnegan. He was easily among the best parts of Scream Queens (which I also loved) and it was cool to see him get a major role in a fantastic Linklater script. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So Sarah and I had some friends over to watch some movies and hang out and it just so happened that one of the movie channels was in the middle of a Matrix marathon. We watched the end of the first film and I set my PVR to record the other two, under the presumption that I will watch them working out or something to see if they hold up. We watched Reloaded up until the “Neo vs a hundred Agent Smiths” fight, mocked said fight for its now incredibly jarring and subpar CG animation effects and then decided to revert back to original movie watching plan: watch Hangover III. Not sure if you saw the final installment of the Hangover series, but it was not very funny. It had funny moments sure and I might have been kinder to it if it wasn’t related to the genius that was the first Hangover movie. Full disclosure: I was not super into the second one either and felt like it was too much of the same except you know, it was in Thailand. The third does mix up the formula a little more but in such an unfunny way that I was legitimately bummed about how the series went so far downhill.
So, witnessing two sequel/trilogy failures that initially had me excited back to back got me thinking in general how hard it is to really “nail” a trilogy. In fact, with the exception of Episodes IV-VI of Star Wars I cannot really think of a single trilogy that hits on all marks the whole way through (and even then, the prequel trilogy for Star Wars ruined the series pretty handily years later). (SPOILERS for some trilogies ahead)
Hangover: 2 is the same movie as the first and 3 is not very funny, has too much Ken Jeong and doesn’t really feel like an epic conclusion to the characters.
Matrix: Fuzzy ending, confusing side-plot where Agent Smith somehow was the main bad guy (but not really) and fight scenes so long they got incredibly boring. Not to mention the Dragon Ball Z/Superman Neo/Flying Agent Smith fight scene in the third one.
Back to the Future: First two are solid gold and I have a soft spot for the third, but the old west BttF has almost none of the time hopping and timeline alterations that made the first and second ones great (and is essentially just an old west version of the storyline from the first). I know some people somehow love the third installment above the second. But I think those people are crazy.
Lord of the Rings: I might be in the minority here, but I really feel like all three of those movies were just the same movie again and again. Walking, epic battle, Frodo adventure, epic battle, repeat.
Dark Knight: First two were standout and the third was also extremely good, however it still seemed to fall short. Bane’s crazy voice, Bane figuring out who Batman was by… I dunno… recognizing he was sad? Prisoners just mending a broken back to the point where Batman can now do some hardcore freeclimbing? Yeah, it’s got issues.
I could go on. Mad Max, Indiana Jones, Toy Story, Mighty Ducks, Terminator, Aliens… these are mostly beloved on the whole, however, if you pick them apart into their individual pieces there are almost always weak links in the series. The only rule is that usually the first one was pretty great. I mean, it has to be right? It has to be so good that a major studio greenlights multiple sequels. If they can reproduce the box office of a successful film twice then everybody gets a new BMW. Or something. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve got a list of movies to watch that feels like it’s never-ending. In a way, I guess it really is never-ending, because it’s also ever-expanding. That’s the nature of loving movies – you keep finding out about other ones you want to see. Unfortunately, this situation causes some movies to get stuck on the list, and never get watched. So once in a while, I make a point of watching something I heard about years ago.
I remembered hearing Dave Grohl talk about how obsessed he was with his Neve board at some point, and that he was making a movie about it. Being a sound guy, I was curious about this, but I failed to keep up with news of the film’s production. Until yesterday.
Sound City got released in 2013, and watched by me in 2015. It’s a documentation of the legendary Sound City Studios, where hundreds of incredibly important records were created, ranging from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours to Nirvana’s Nevermind. The studio itself would have failed and closed early if not for a few bold investors (and some incredibly dedicated staff) who brought the place to life and kept it afloat for decades, well into the digital age. In 2011, after facing significant financial issues, the studio ceased commercial operations and sold off a bunch of its gear (notably, the Neve board Grohl loves so much), and is now privately run by Fairfax Recordings.
By all accounts, this is a really interesting film, stacked to the nines with recording anecdotes and wonderful insights into specific musicians’ careers and experiences. However, the film changes direction suddenly, without warning, at the time of Sound City’s demise in 2011 – now focusing on Grohl’s personal studios, where the Neve board now lives, and on a series of recording sessions organized by Grohl as some sort of tribute to the studio that no longer was. This segment goes on for way longer than it needs to, and becomes an unnecessary epilogue to an otherwise perfectly fine story.
The movie’s not even that long, clocking in at under two hours, but it could have been done in a cleaner way, and that’s a bit of a bummer. If it’s meant to be a film about one man’s obsession with a particular audio tool, that’s one thing, but if it’s meant to tell the story of one of the industry’s greatest recording studios, that’s another.
Anywho, I’m off to watch more music-oriented documentaries. Got favs?
Like many of the kids in my generation, I was partially raised by television. There was always a nice gap of time between when school ended and when my parents came home, and I took full advantage of it, cramming in as much TV as I could handle. Lucky for me, that timeslot was often full of Just For Laughs re-runs, which meant that I got to watch ten years of stand up comedy, over and over and over, whenever school was out.
I’d see the same comics do the same sets month after month, but I somehow never got bored of them, and after a while, a few of them naturally became my favourites. Amongst these was the great strange character of the early 90s known as Bobcat Goldthwait.
If you’re unfamiliar with Bobcat, well, he was a loud guy with a strange voice, who looked disheveled all the time. On the JFL special in question, he has too much eyeliner, and is wearing a white t-shirt with “Kill Seinfeld” written on it with a sharpie – at least, that’s what I remember. I can’t seem to locate that image now. He became well-known as the guy who set Jay Leno’s chair on fire (as pictured above), so that anecdote was in his bit, which I always enjoyed. As a kid, I couldn’t believe that someone would have the balls to do something like that, but as an adult, I understand that that was the point. Bobcat was being a shocky comic, one of those “out there” personas that I seem drawn to. It really worked back then, but that type of thing couldn’t possibly last, right?
Correct! The wild, crazy Bobcat of the 90s is no more. Goldthwait really found his voice in direction, as he went on to direct Jimmy Kimmel Live, as well as a few movies along the way to 2014, most of which he also wrote. Among these is an absolute gem called God Bless America (trailer below) which is well worth throwing into your Netflix cue – it’s a bloody good time.
However, if you do end up on Netflix, and you think to yourself “Hey, there’s also a special by this Bobcat guy, maybe I should check it out!” then please, for the love of all that is holy, heed this warning: that hour is one of the worst comedy specials I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching. It’s got 20-year-old bits, all of its hits are misplaced, and Goldthwaite just keeps pulling the “I shouldn’t have said that” face, and following it with copious facepalms. I suppose it was a last-ditch effort at doing comedy again, but it was not a successful one. Bobcat Goldthwaith’s place is truly behind the camera, and I’m hoping he stays there.