Army of Darkness

Bruce Campbell. Sam Raimi, dir. Universal, 1992

For me, personally, here's a case of misplaced nostalgia. I thought this movie was great when I saw it in the 80's, and it's only so-so now.

But then, according to the box, it wasn't even MADE in the 80's. But I swear I remember watching it in theatre that was torn down in '88 to make way for a hyperspace bypass, so I think I've finally reached the age where I can't really trust my memoires or my mind.

Beyond that, though, this movie is NOT as good as its predecessors. No matter what my misplaced nostalgia says. I know it's meant to be cheesy, tongue-in-cheek, however you call it, but even with the homage to the bad stop-motion effects of the skeletal army, it's still a ho-hum film.

Leaves me wondering if the rest of my misspent youth was really that incoherent.

VG

Evil Dead

Bruce Campbell 1982

Better than Army of Darkness by a long shot. And just as cool as I remembered - this is the deep-woods horror movie to beat them all. But my absolute favourite is still Evil Dead 2, which I haven't found but am still looking for, and when I find it, well . . .

I'll watch it.

Duh!

VG

Goodbye Lover

Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Ellen DeGeneres, Mary-Louise Parker, Don Johnson.
Regency Enterprises, 1998.

Another tale of an intricate web of lies and deceit. Murder and insurance money scams and shifting loyalties. Interestingly done, especially the Arquette performance, which, frankly, has some extremely erotic scenes with absolutely no nudity, thus making them quite a bit more than just . . . randy (for lack of a better word).

Other than that, the best moments in the movie are Ellen D as the hard-bitten detective and her scathing repartee with her uptight ulta-religious-conservative partner. That dialogue actually makes the movie.

Worth a see.

VG

Scary Movie 2

Wayans Brothers. Dimension Films

I'm not much for crude humour, I mean, I'm no prude, but a little goes a long way. Fart jokes, zits full of pus, and EXTREMELY rude sexual jokes are the order for this movie - which is sad, because if it had just stuck to the satire of every classic horror movie ever made it would have been better.

Gotta say, though, I love the parrot - "Polly wants yo' momma's sweet a$$" - doesn't sound funny typing it here, but that little scene was freakin' hilarious. I watched that 30-second skit about five times and it was the MOST enjoyable few minutes of the whole film.

VG



PS - oh yeah, and the ganja plant rolling the pothead up in a bedsheet and smokin' 'im like a J. That was slightly funny, in the "que irony!" context.

January Man

Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, Danny Aiello, Harvey Keitel, Rod Steiger. 1989.

Dang! With a powerhouse cast like that you'd expect a good movie. This one didn't know what it was. Drama? Psycho-killer/Cop story? What?

The best actor, albeit listed down toward the bottom, was Alan Rickman as the sidekick/artist. He was fantastic, in his typical morose-grumpy-loveable way.

The rest of the story - crud! Kline had been set up years before as a fall guy for his brother and the mayor but he has to be brought back because he's the only one smart enough to track down a killer. Implausible: first, in New York I bet their are thousands of detectives who work on cases like these all the time; second, in NY this psycho-killer wouldn't be all that big a deal, especially since, in this story, they hadn't even linked all the cases together, even though all the paperwork was in one big room, apparently just waiting for Kline himself; third - if the mayor and police commissioner had set anybody up for the graft that they had committed, they never would have run the risk. Politics over principle.

Anyway, we spend the first half of the movie with Kline mooning over Sarandon, whom his brother stole from him because he could buy her expensive wine, which makes her not a person anybody should be with, but we have to go through this agonizing self-searching for over half the movie before Kline finally starts to even think about the case.

Then, when he gets started, we're treated to a special use of - gasp! "computers" (this WAS made in '89, by the way!) which was pretty quaint, all told. I actually liked that part best . . . computers before the Internet were so cool! Like Model T Fords . . . or Tuckers!

Anyway, the investigation itself is pretty cool, and there's a good scene with Aello "I don't like you, but I respect you," which was actually a well-delivered line, and I think he was one of the few actors who could use it and make it credible.

Finally, though, the final scene in which Kline apprehends the killer suddenly turns this movie into a Pink Panther farce as he's dragged down the stairwell in the brownstone. I'm left thinking, "When did we get out of hand here?''

My advice - this should have been a novel. Then you could explore all these issues: drama/corruption/muder/forensics and make it all believable. The ending however - lose the sad attempt at comedy.

Because that just made the entire film a joke.



VG

Valentine

2001 Warner Brothers Pictures. Cast includes a bunch of the "Y&B" crowd who apparently star on hit TV series that I know nothing about, OK, so

anyway, this movie ain't all that bad - rather formulaic, in your run-of-the-mill serial killer (a la Mike Meyers), but at least this guy has a purpose: to kill just this group of girls who teased him in Jr High.

Amazingly enough, he doesn't go after the guys who taunted him in the same incident, but oh well.

Kudos to the film for daring to keep the nudity at a minimum, which was basically nothing at all. Again, a shrug.

Also, points off for the two failed attempts to distract us from the true identity of the killer, which we could practically spot from the first half-hour.

Finally, the best part of the movie is imaging if any ex-tauntresses ever walked out of the movie theatre after seeing this film, trying to comb through their memories to see if they might have ruthlessly scarred some nerd in their own Jr High pasts . . . and that, my friends, would be the greatest benefit of this film - if it would make just ONE of them stop, think, and for a moment, feel sympathetic regret.

Oh well!

VG

Alone in the Dark

This movie had absolutely no idea what it wanted to be. "Am I Aliens? Tomb Raider? National Treasure? late feature 007's?"

Sadly, this is another movie adapted from a video game - which never works in translation, whichever is the predecessor. I've seen dozens of these, going either way (Video game to Movie or Movie to Video game) and trust me, it NEVER works!

Plotwise the movie was completely all over the board, and you had no idea what was going on or even why we should give a poop. So I checked the conversations with the creators to try to get some grasp of what I might be missing here, and I found it. One, the director - who just wanted to make action movies and has no concept and even less concern for such integral things as, oh I don't know - "plot" maybe? and the writer,

who should have known better, but didn't. In fact, the writer even made the telling comment, something like "you have the video game, so coming into the movie, you've got about 60 hours of play time development of these characters, so I had all that wealth of characterization to bring to the movie."

Which, as I've already indicated, he didn't. These characters were so stale I couldn't even chew them in my breakfast cereal. But it was nice to know that if I had been addicted to the video game then I'd be right at home!

Oh well. Live and learn, and give this one a pass.

VG

King Kong (2005)

I put the year in the title because I think that is the proper delination when there are several movies with the same title: you distinguish each by adding the year in parenthesis, right? I'll have to check my Elements of Style to see if it covers proper film annotation.

Anyway, this is the Peter Jackson film. Just fresh from seeing it and I must say I don't really understand all the hype. This film just "feels" as though the director, having just come off his megalithic Lord of the Rings, is under the mistaken belief that ALL movies must be 3 hours long.

This is NOT true, Pete! Lord of the Rings is a total of 14 blissful hours simply because we're going step by step through a war in a mythical land involving many different races and creatures and you've got over 20 main characters and we're also talking about the ultimate battle between good vs. evil, and King Kong is the story of an ape who's got the hots for a blonde. Which is a story that is no more than 2 hours, if that!

Seriously, you're left thinking to yourself, where was the editor of this film? Did the director have him shot and dumped his corpse in the sea? Because a good hour of this lumbering monstrousity could have been left on the cutting room floor and we'd have ourselves a dam'fine movie!

However, what we have is a ponderous, self-important piece of self-introspection, introspection such as this: How can I bring myself to love this big-nosed writer when I've fallen madly in love with this huge 25 foot gorilla?

Take the writer, baby - no one wants to kill him.

Death scene was too long, by the way. It was right at hour three and the monkey had been being shot by airplanes for a good while and if we had another close-up of his "sensitive" eyes I was going to tear mine OUT!

Finally, he let's himself go - takes the big plunge, right there on 7th Avenue or wherever, and Jack Black (who, by the way, played his role very nicely - I was truly impressed) steps up and delivers the worst line EVER

"'Twas Beauty killed the Beast"

Now, let's take a minute on this one, shall we? First of all, we as the audience already got the point: Monkey loves girl. Monkey realizes will never work out. Monkey makes ultimate sacrifice.

We had that figured out before he left the island. To give us this pretentious little line is to beat the audience's head with the dead fish of the "Theme!" By this point, Jackson is telling us that we're too stOOpid to get it and has to have Jack hand it to us on a platter.

Second, his character wouldn't really have said this. His character was the film-maker/charlatan who thought only of his career and the grandness of his own design. Sure, Jackson may be trying to tell us that his character has changed, that he now sees the true beauty of love and what you're willing to die for, but I personally thought that it would have been much more within character if Black had just looked at this dead monkey and muttered something like, "That's my career. Right there. Smack dead on Broadway." and then turned around and walked off through the crowd.

That actually would have redeemed the end.

But right now, this is the end.

Before I go, though, I will thank Peter Jackson for Lord of the Rings. I liked those and if he never makes another film again, he will always be remembered for giving the world the definitive film epic of the Tolkien books.

No matter what the Tolkien fans think, those movies were very good adaptations.

VG

Romeo Must Die

Jet Li, Aaliyah

Pretty standard fare from your basic "gangster action flick" Jet Li has good facial expressions (if you consider them subtle enough to put your own emotions onto them), and Aaliyah had fairly good acting . . . this is, of course, taking into consideration that is was the first lead role for each of them.

That aside, the story was pretty bland, and the dialogue was stilted, and the black gangsters were more charicatures than frightening, which made the whole thing seem like a farce, and let's face it, by the end of the movie, when our two leads meet up, it's like "Hey! Both our brothers are dead, and one dad just got shot and bled out on a motel floor and the other's dad just killed himself so he wouldn't face jailtime for killing his own son! Cool! Wanna go grab a burger? OK!"

Watch it only if you want to hear a loud Hip Hop soundtrack throughout the entire movie. Not really a bad soundtrack . . . just a weak screenplay.

Liked the "X-Ray effect" though - when Jet Li hit somebody REALLY HARD the camera would show the effect on the skeleton of the poor idiot who was unlucky enough to receive the blow. OUCH!

VG