unclefestering Blog

Tribulation 99 -- Review

unclefestering — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:16:14 GMT

I came across this movie in an article in the New York TImes on the director, Craig Baldwin and his newer movie Mock Up on Mu.

I threw both of these movies into my Netflix queue and forgot all about them.

This movie was amazing fun. Told as if it is a documentary from a conspiracy theorist's vault, Tribulation 99 explores how an ancient race of aliens living under Central America has been actively working to destroy America.

The footage that makes up the entire movie is a pastiche of Mexican Wrestling movies, Japanese monster movies, 50's science fiction and standard American history stock footage. The mix of all these sources are forged into a new story that washes over you like the ravings of a madman.

It reminded me of the first time I read H.P. Lovecraft. It has that same weird sense of this is our world and yet not.

I would hesitate to recommend this movie to everyone. One problem is that you get the feeling that in order to get around copyright protections on his sources, Baldwin was forced to use so many short clips of his source material repeatedly. Also, the frenetic pace of the short clips staccattoed one after the other can get wearying at times.

If you are interested in movies at the fringes, check this out. I found it to ultimately be a riveting post modern experiment.

Review: It is like a prison, easy to get into, so hard to leave

unclefestering — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:41:55 GMT

I had been meaning to watch Wages of Fear for a long time. One of the reasons that I kept putting it off was because, it is one of those movies that is universally praised. This always makes me nervous because I don’t want to be disappointed by setting the bar to high in my mind before I watch the movie.

This movie doesn’t disappoint.

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot, often compared to Hitchcock in his mastery of suspense, is clearly at the height of his craft here. It is a story of desperate men gambling with their lives in order to regain at least the sense of freedom and purpose.

The movie takes place in an industrial town in South America. (The locations isn’t clearly stated, but it is implied that the town is in Venezuela) The locals who are lucky work for an American oil company. But aside from the locals, the town is also a kind of last haven for scoundrels who are forced to lie and cheat each other to survive, because they are unable to get work.

The movie focuses on Mario, a Corsican, who barely lives off the misplaced trust of the girls working in the town's bar. He lives with Luigi, an Italian reduced to a day laborer job in a cement plant that is killing him. When Mario isn’t making time with the local tavern girl, he is hanging outside the bar with the other expatriates. He befriends Jo, a newcomer to the town, who is also on the last of his money.

The whole first half of the movie quietly builds lives of quiet desperation around all the expatriates. Clozout never tells you what brought any of them to this town, but you gradually figure out that they must be hiding from bad things to be brought to this place. It is far enough away from everywhere that the lack of any money prevents any of them from leaving.

A disaster strikes the oil company and they need to get 200 gallons of nitroglycerine to the wells at the bottom of the mountainous road to put the well fires out. Unfortunately they don’t have any trucks designed to carry the explosive safely and the road itself is filled with bumps and potholes, any of which could cause the chemical to explode.

They divide all of the nitroglycerine they have into two trucks. That way, if one explodes there is still a chance to save the wells with the other truckload.

They offer the job of driver to the expats for a big wad of cash, mainly because they are the only ones desperate enough to take it.

The movie's second half is watching Mario and Jo in one truck and Luigi and Bimba in another crawl down the side of the mountain without killing themselves. The tension of all the drivers is shown through the fear in their expressions and their shorter and shorter tempers. Every bump and puddle transforms into a potential disaster.

Although we start out not liking any of the main characters, we come to sympathize with them as each tries to survive the ordeal in their own way.

(As a complete side note, does anyone know if this movie is where Nintendo got the names Mario and Luigi?)

Review: My god! Do we really suck...?

unclefestering — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:59:25 GMT

So I'm cruising through Netflix and see Shoot 'Em Up. Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci and Clive Owen, well how bad can it be?

Bad.

Clive Owen plays a man with no name who happens to be the world's greatest tactician, marksman and gymnist, happens to see thugs trying to gun down a pregnant lady and spings into action, buying bullets with food stamps, taking the baby to the the hooker who specializes in nursing grown men that he just happens to know and taking on the entire military industrial complex single handedly to save American democracy.

And then the story gets silly.

Review: So much hype, so little pay off

unclefestering — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:22:46 GMT

Righteous Kill could never live up to all the hype that the studio is throwing at this movie. So I was disappointed, but I was surprised at what disappointed me.

I have gotten used to Al Pacino cruising through movies; doing weird imitations of himself. The last movie that I remember him actually making an effort in was Glengarry Glenn Ross. So, I was surprised that he wasn’t the weak link in this by the numbers not-so-thriller. Instead he gives a restrained performance.

It was De Niro who gave one of his stiffest and most self-conscious performances. It was strange to watch him doing so much to make me care so little.

The plot is standard cop drama. A serial killer is on the loose and is killing bad guys. The twist is that the killer is a cop. The twist depends on you not paying attention to the details of this movie and who could blame anyone for that. Jon Avnet seems determined to suck out any tension by giving the viewers the same shots they have seen over and over again in other, better movies.

John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg put in at least a little effort into their by the number roles.

Review: A pile of air where the money used to be

unclefestering — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:40:31 GMT

Directed by Austin Chick.

Starring Robin Tunney, Rip Torn, Josh Hartnett, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Adam Scott, Andre Royo, Naomie Harris.

August is like an inverted Langston Hughes poem in movie form. Instead of struggling for the deferred dream, Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett) is fighting to keep alive a dream that was brought into the world too soon. Unfortunately, his own hubris may get in the way of his goal.

Sterling is the CEO of Landshark, an e-commerce company that does… well… OK, I’m not sure what the company does. But neither do several of the characters in the movie. Sterling launched the company with his brother Josh (Adam Scott) just as the warning signs of the dot.com bubble's impending burst are becoming clear. He’s hailed as a genius and the company’s stock rises as several competitors are crashing. A quick jump to the end of the summer of 2001 and Landshark is foundering due to Tom’s wasteful spending habits, which have blown through the company’s initial capitalization and a lack of customers.On top of all this, is the external problem that by now the dot com bubble has popped and the stock is tanking.

To make matters worse, Tom’s own arrogance prevents him from closing deals. In a meeting with a potential client, Tom refuses to give them a presentation. Instead, he spouts a bunch of babble about how his company is pure “e” and anybody would be a fool to turn him away.

The pressures of the business also flow directly into his personal life. His brother no longer trusts him and is just as desperate to keep the company afloat since he has to pay for a new mortgage and protect his wife and newborn son. Tom's relationship with his parents is also rocky, as he wildly reacts to any negative comments about the business and attacks them for giving up on their own ideals. His one bright spot is his attempt to rekindle a relationship with his ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) who has just returned to New York.

This movie really made me think that Josh Hartnett could act, something I've doubted for a long time. The movie rides and falls on Hartnett’s shoulders, since he is almost every scene. You can feel the jittery energy coming off him as his persona of business whiz is cracking and he becomes more and more desperate to keep the business running and, more importantly to him, to be perceived as a success.

Two small roles highlight the fracturing of that self perception. Rip Torn, playing the father of the Landshark brothers, quickly dismisses the entire venture with questions about what the company actually does and his stentorian disapproval of a staff sitting around eating Oreos. Rarely has a cookie stood in for all the disappointment a father could have for his son.

The other is a brief cameo by David Bowie as the venture capitalist who could be the last hope to save the company, but at a ruinous cost. Bowie’s character is so dismissive of Tom Sterling that he barely bothers to look at him when they are finally in the same room.

The one thing that overshadows all of the action in the movie is that the viewer knows that one month after this takes place; all the actions in this movie will be seen as petty and small when compared to the tragedy looming in September 2001.

A great collection of short films

unclefestering — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:08:19 GMT

Paris, Je t'aime is a great example of what I love about collections of short films. The 20 directors involved were given five minutes to tell a story about love in one of the city's neighborhoods. As a whole it is uneven, but the best parts greatly outshine the lesser stories. Among my favories are the Coen brothers' tale of cultureal mistakes in a Paris subway station and the introspective story of a middleaged woman who discovers herself in a park. Among the stories that I found skippale is the tale of Tobey Maguire as a tourist who falls in love with a vampire.

Out of Balence: accurately named

unclefestering — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:38:44 GMT

Out of Balance is a documentary of the worst type: pick an easy target, show what they do is wrong and claim a moral victory. It doesn’t attempt to portray any kind of balance to the story it is telling. While there are plenty of talking heads, I expected them to quote from more than three documents to prove ExxonMobil is the greatest threat to the environment.

According to this movie, ExxonMobile is the single, greatest source of evil on the face of the planet. The company single handedly is going to destroy every aspect of life on Earth. Am I exagerating the claims made by the documentary? Yes. However, my exaggerations are not as much as you would expect.

This movie spends slightly more than an hour featuring one talking head after another from extremely radical environmental groups claiming that ExxonMobile has stifled the debate on global climate change. They claim the company has exerted undue influence on the government. And that they have created massive amounts of doubt in the mind of the public on how serious the problem of global warming is.

Of these claims made by the movie, really the middle one is the one I believe most strongly. It is also the one that they have the most documented evidence. It appears to be clear that Exxon and the other oil companies were able to use their personal relationships with the president and the vice president of the United States, to craft an energy policy that favors the current energy producers and prevent any real reform in researching and producing alternative energy sources. This part of the movie comes very late and in a way is the most compelling because, finally, people other than environmental lobbyists are on camera and they have some actual proof the match the claims.

During the rest of the movie, when the speakers are not onscreen, the viewers get treated to stock footage of the ecological devastation caused by the Exxon Valdez spill. This footage is shown again and again over the discussion that ExxonMobile funds researchers and organizations which take the position that global warming is a myth or that the effects are greatly exaggerated by the people who believe in it. This is the bulk of the movie and this is what I had the hardest time with.

Very little time in the movie is devoted to the idea of what can be done to stop the juggernaut that is ExxonMobile. Other then a couple of the speakers saying they don’t buy gas from Exxon, only about 10 minutes at the end is devoted on what people can do to make a change. And really the conclusion they draw is that the government has to tell the company it has been bad and make them change.

I know one person who thinks that global warming is a hoax. I know one other person who tends to doubt the validity of scientific studies and even he believes the global climate change is a real crisis. I think the people who are trying to move the global warming discussion back to the “Is it Real” phase have really long lost the argument. The movie tries to make the claim that this is where the energy debate is.

In reality the debate has moved on to the “What can be done to address the problem” stage. This is a fact that the movie doesn’t want to address because it would make Exxon seem like less of a looming threat.

The problem with polemics like Out of Balance is that they are all arguments with very little in the way of facts to support those arguments. What made An Inconvenient Truth so compelling was that Al Gore compiled fact after fact to show how serious the issue was and how incontrovertible his conclusions were. Here the facts are just replaced with anger and even if you agree with the idea they present, the undocumented single-mindedness of their attack undermines their position.

It's gonna be exactly like Eurotrip only it's not going to suck... Well...

unclefestering — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:36:12 GMT

I saw Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo after both the hype and all the grumbling from the disapponted fans wore out. It isn't a bad movie. And the problem is that that is the best that can be said for it.

The skinny on the plot: The two stoners from Jersey fly to Amsterdam and Kumar is carrying a smokeless bong so he can light up on the flight over. But an old lady thinks they are terrorists because they aren't white. Isn't that hilarious? No? I didn't think so either.

A government doofus sends them to Guantanamo where they escape in under five minutes and then head to Texas where they hope another friend in the government can clear the whole thing up.

So the best moments are when Neil Patrick Harris returns to play Neil Patrick Harris, a straight, shroom-popping, kinky, whore-seeking Neil Patrick Harris. The problem is that this was a fantastic cameo character in the first movie, because Neil Patrick Harris didn't have a career then. Now after the first movie, he's Barney in How I met your Mother and in a series of commercials making fun of his Doogie Howser persona.

The other great scenes are when the guys accidently break into President Bush's Crawford compound, where he is hiding from Cheney and getting high.

Other than those scenes the jokes fell pretty flat. See the original. It is much funnier.

Ripped up, wiped out, battered, shattered, creamed, and reamed

unclefestering — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:16:09 GMT

No one is going to confuse Death Race for an Oscar contender. It is a loud, fun, explosive action movie. While it has been changed considerably from the original Death Race 2000, it has kept much of the same feel, while losing the moralizing of the original (not that there was much of that). This is a great movie to end the summer action season. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and delivers what it promises.

The year is 2025. The American economy is in the toilet. The crime rate has exploded. The overcrowded prisons have been privatized and one warden has found a solution to both the prisoner population and how to turn a profit: Death Race. Three days of heavily armed and armored cars driving around a secure track doing anything to win. Any racer who wins five times gets their freedom. Any racer who survives is skillful and lucky. The entire race can be watched from hundreds of cameras broadcasting on a pay per view basis.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) has recently been convicted of murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit. Ames was a race car driver before running into trouble with the NASCAR circuit. The warden (Joan Allen) informs him that she want Ames to take the place of the race’s biggest star, Frankenstein (so scarred from past races that he always wears a metal mask) who died in the last Death Race. Frankenstein’s death has been hidden from the public to prevent a decrease in subscriptions. Since this would be Frankenstein’s fifth win, Ames can go free, if he wins.

Statham is convinced to race after a further round of blackmail and gets to meet his crew and opponents. Frankenstein’s biggest competitor in the race is Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), who doesn’t know he killed the real Frankenstein and still harbors a vicious grudge. After this quick setup we move into day one of the race. From the green light, it is a mix of fast cars, crashes, explosions, weapons fire.

Statham and Allen both make this movie. Both are ruthless and willing to double cross each other to get what they need: ratings for one and freedom for the other.

Funny almost inspite of itself

unclefestering — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:10:22 GMT

Tropic Thunder is the most consistantly funny movie of the summer. The best laughs came not from Jack Black or Ben Stiller. Robert Downey Jr. who plays a white Austrailian, playing an African American, who at one point plays an Asian rice farmer is clearly the best thing the movie has going for it. The unexpectedly second place prize goes to Nick Nolte as the crazy, double-amputee, Vietnam Vet.

You could argue that the "studio boss" ties with Nolte.

What I love about Downey's character is that he clearly knows that there is no movie being made and they are in the middle of a disaster, but he is playing such a method actor, that he can't drop the character of the black sergeant even though he knows there isn't any point to continuing.

My favorite scene is the one some people have decided to take offense to, the "retard" discussion. Neither character is making fun of the mentally handicapped, they are making fun of the studio system that boxes those characters into stereotypes.

Don't wait for the DVD.