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Run, Fatboy, Run (2007)

Basic plot: An unfit security guard trains for a marathon to earn his ex-girlfriend’s respect.

David Schwimmer’s directorial debut feels like a perfect pilot for a sitcom. The underdog hero, the ex-girlfriend, the gambling addicted best friend, the goofy ethnic landlord, and the ex-girlfriend’s new asshole boyfriend are all here. With a nice cookie cutter plot that could’ve made for a great episode of Seinfeld, Run, Fatboy, Run still has its moments of solid jokes, but when 30 minutes of good jokes are stretched into a 90 minute comedy, something’s going to be missing. Like at least another half hour of good jokes.

When the credits rolled, I was a little shocked to see it was actually written by Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) and Michael Ian Black (Stella), because none of the humor seemed remotely like either of their styles. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just a movie. Totally passable.

Hot Rod (2007)

Basic plot: A wannabe stunt man tries to earn $50,000 for his step-father’s heart surgery.

Andy Samberg is the best thing to happen to Saturday Night Live since Will Ferrell left in 2002. In fact, Hot Rod was originally written with Ferrell in mind and it definitely seems up his alley in terms of simple plot with lots of room for ad-libbing. The problem here is that Samberg seems to write pretty funny jokes that he later films rather than making up hilarious shit on the spot ala Ferrell, and the latter is definitely the kind of funny this movie could’ve used.

Now, to be fair, this movie still made me laugh a lot. It’s retarded humor, but it still got more than one mini-guffaw out of me and was dangerously close to getting an “I like it” rating. In the end it falls a little short and feels like a third tier in quality to Will Ferrell’s second tier stuff (like Blades of Glory). I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind seeing it again, but it’s not a title I’m dying to own or rushing to tell everybody they NEED to see.

Horrorfest is a 31 day event throughout the entire month of October. More details here.

Candyman (1992)

Basic plot: An urban legend haunts a woman studying urban legends.

Spoilers ahead.

Scariness: 3

At the beginning of the film, I didn’t know whether the Candyman was “real” or if it was a copycat killer, but either way if there’s one thing I DO have a fear of, it’s humans that murder other humans because that shit absolutely exists. About a third of the way through the movie it becomes pretty obvious that the lead character is just imagining everything and killing people herself. The way it plays, I think it’s supposed to be some major reveal at the end, but you always knew it was either that or this guy was just some sort of non-sensical ghost and either one completely killed the scariness for me.

Acting: 4

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t particularly good either. The “killer” is also insanely boring.

Gore: 3

Because the kills are either done by a ghost or our heroine (Tyler Durden style!), they’re all either offscreen or aftermath shots to try desperately to set-up a surprise that you can assume is coming after about thirty minutes.

Gratuitous Nudity: 5

Lots of side boob and the biggest nipples in the goddamn universe.

Soundtrack: ??

Okay, this category confuses me because the score is by Phillip Glass and it sounds awesome. The problem is that it doesn’t remotely match the tone of the movie. This is a movie about a serial killer in the ghetto in the early 90s, and the score makes it sounds like it’s trying to be the next Omen or Exorcist – which it is not at all. The problem is, I feel like this mismatched score almost completely ruined the movie for me just because it made everything feel so much more serious than it had any right being. This is a standard horror movie yet the score is treating it like it deserves Oscar nominations. The horrible mismatch didn’t work at all for me.

Overall: Meh

Hate is a strong word, but I wasn’t a fan. If the movie had taken itself less seriously, I probably would’ve enjoyed it more despite the dull villain. I wouldn’t try to return it if someone gave it to me as a gift, but you’ve gotta take that with a grain of salt because I also own movies like National Treasure 2 and Shrek 3 thanks to that same logic.

Horrorfest is a 31 day event throughout the entire month of October. More details here.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Basic plot: After a family’s car breaks down in the desert, they are hunted by inbred cannibals.

Scariness: 3

It was hard to not constantly compare this to Texas Chain Saw Massacre from the moment the grainy footage popped up on the screen. The difference is that Texas got crazy WAY faster and maintained that intensity nearly the entire runtime as it picked off its characters one by one. Hills kills a few people at once with one or two exciting scenes, and that’s about it.

Acting: 4

It wasn’t terrible and I feel like I should at least give the weird looking bald guy credit for being weird looking and bald, but nothing about this movie really excited me.

Gore: 4

Most of the kills against the protagonists are boring gunshot wounds. There’s a scene where a dog tears up a guy’s ankle that looked kinda gross, but that’s as bad as it gets.

Gratuitous Nudity: 0

A couple has sex in the backseat of a car, but you don’t see anything.

Soundtrack: 7

The score is very Planet of the Apes-esque and if you know me you should know that’s enough to get it a couple points.

Overall: Meh

I can’t quite bring myself to hate this because it’s considered a classic horror film, but it really didn’t do anything for me at all. I thought the first 45 minutes were incredibly boring and the last 45 weren’t nearly interesting enough to make up for it. I’m huge, huge fan of Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street, but based on his earlier work (this and Last House on the Left), he got a lot better once he got slightly more polishable budgets behind him. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of The Hills Have Eyes.

Horrorfest is a 31 day event throughout the entire month of October. More details here.

Frankenstein (1931)

Basic plot: A mad scientist creates monster. The monster proceeds to kill people.

Much like Nosferatu, the original Frankenstein doesn’t remotely fit into the Horrorfest grading scale, and the sad thing about it this time around is that I don’t even have that much to say about it. It’s a classic story told in black and white with decent acting but rather boring pacing and uninteresting scare scenes.

I respect it because it’s a classic that I’m sure was incredible at the time. I might even buy it if there were some sort of classic monster DVD set that included documentaries about the evolution of the creatures, but aside from that I don’t really have any interest in seeing it again. I’m glad that I did so I can say that I did. And that’s that.

Horrorfest is a 31 day event throughout the entire month of October. More details here.

Pet Sematary (1989)

Basic plot: A pet cemetery can bring the dead back to life.

Scariness: 4

80% of the movie isn’t the least bit scary, but the last twenty minutes involves a possessed child murdering people – which still isn’t “scary” but the childish laughter is kinda creepy. There are far too many misplaced attempts to give the story depth that it doesn’t need, and some of the subplots/characters seemed absolutely pointless.

Acting: 3

None of the actors are necessarily BAD, but I also didn’t particularly like or care about any of them. The “baby” is one of the cutest kids ever and that’s the closest this gets to a sympathetic character.

Gore: 4

Most of the movie is completely calm, but one particular slice with a scalpel grated my spine with a nice graphic cut to another one of my greatest gore weaknesses – the Achilles tendon. That one cut got to me enough to warrant 4 points on its own. Everything else is either offscreen or just aftermath damage from something we never saw.

Gratuitous Nudity: 0

At this rate I either need to add more slashers to the list of consider dropping the category.

Soundtrack: 6

Two year olds laughing is now an incredibly creepy noise. The score itself didn’t seem too special, but that misuse of innocence was really smart.

Overall: Meh

Pet Sematary really didn’t do much for me. Had it been a part of Stephen King’s Creepshow series as a short film, I think it would’ve been pretty awesome, but the story feels needlessly and desperately stretched into an hour and forty minute feature here. I’m sure the book was a scary-good experience, but the movie is outstandingly uninteresting 70% of its runtime. I wouldn’t be angry if someone gave me a copy, but I’d never go out of my way to pick it up myself.

Horrorfest is a 31 day event throughout the entire month of October. More details here.

Cube (1997)

Basic plot: People are trapped in a giant cube made out of cubes – technically with booby traps, but that’s not actually as important as it sounds.

Scariness: 4

Like most horror films, Cube kicks things off with a nice, violent first kill. It’s enough to keep you on your toes for the first half hour until it becomes annoyingly evident that this movie isn’t actually about seeing how cool the traps can be. Instead, it’s about trying to solve the cube, which COULD be interesting if it weren’t for a few factors:

1) Solving the cube involves a shit-ton of math that doesn’t mean a damn thing to the vast majority of people.

2) They “solve” it approximately three times before ACTUALLY solving it and somehow not even ONE person gets killed by a trap despite two incorrect theories.

3) It’s stated flat out, as if it’s a major plot point, that The Cube has no purpose and that NO ONE is behind it (not the government, not rich people, not even aliens – NO ONE). … What? The giant cube designed to kill people with booby traps has no point at all? That’s not gonna fly for me.

Acting: 3

A lot of the acting is pretty awful, but a lot of that probably has to do with Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie production quality. Everything looks terrible, and it certainly doesn’t benefit the no-name actors.

Gore: 6

During the two trap kills, the movie gets a 10 for gore. One guy gets slashed to piece and another gets his face burned through with acid, and both look pretty awesome in that campy horror way. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie (70 minutes of it?) is super-boring in this category.

Gratuitous Nudity: 0

None at all, but the given the cast, I think I’m grateful.

Soundtrack: 0

Did it have one? I don’t remember.

Overall: Meh

Cube could’ve been really cool and I had high hopes for it. As an indie movie, the cheat to use only one set the ENTIRE time is pretty brilliant, and if you’re Stephen Hawking the mystery of the Cube might be solvable as a viewer. The dialogue mostly sucks and not nearly enough people die. Meh.

Extract (2009)

Basic plot: The owner of a flavor extract company…owns a flavor extract company.

I’m not about the sit here and claim I’m a huge Mike Judge fan. I never really watched Beavis and Butt-head anymore than I watched the redneck celebration that was King of the Hill. Also, while Office Space is one of my Top 50 favorite movies of all time, I haven’t even bothered to locate a copy of Idiocracy, so clearly my loyalties are practically non-existent. I went into Extract with equally non-existent expectations and left with the same caliber of excitement.

Extract is. It just is. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of scenes that made me laugh out loud and the jokes are quality, but the plot is lacking to say the least. Jason Bateman stars as Joel, the owner of the extract company. Joel seems like a pretty likeable guy, but his plight is essentially that he has an annoying neighbor with damn near a carbon copy of Lumberg’s speech patterns from Office Space and that he hasn’t had sex with his wife in a month. That’s about it. Most of the story evolution revolves around the selling of a company that no one cares about with a handful of amusing situations here and there.

Aside from the fact that it IS legimately funny throughout, the movie’s strongest piece is easily its cast. Jason Bateman mastered this exact same character he’s playing here back when he was named Michael Bluth in Arrested Development. It’s a role he knows and he has solid delivery with jokes that feel tailored to this alternate reality version of that character. Ben Affleck has been in way to many of my favorite movies for me to ever bash the guy, and his character here is a fun supporting part for once-upon-a-time A-lister. Since J.K. Simmons is awesome no matter what he does, his role in Extract is no exception, and I don’t think you could find a guy on the planet that would argue against the casting of Mila Kunis in anything.

I can’t emphasize enough that the movie did make me laugh. I wasn’t falling out of my chair every ten seconds, but quality humor is sprinkled evenly throughout. The problem lies in the fact that by the time the credits role, there wasn’t anything particularly memorable about it. Give me a month and I doubt I’ll be able to tell you a single joke or quote from the film, but there are worse movies you could spend 90 minutes on. If you’re really curious, check it out on DVD.

I wouldn’t return it if someone gave it to me as a gift, but I can’t foresee there ever being a scenario that I’d be buying movies where there wouldn’t be something better to buy whether it’s in a $5 bin or $2 on Black Friday.

A Life Less Ordinary (1997)

Basic plot: A man kidnaps the daughter of his ex-employer. Plus angels for some reason.

Last week Trainspotting was a moderate success for me as I started the task of watching Danny Boyle’s entire filmography. Wednesday, A Life Less Ordinary finally showed up, but since I had practically never heard of it before this Boyle-a-thon I had pretty non-existent expectations. I think that was a good thing.

When I was making my way through Steven Spielberg’s filmography this past November I ran across a few movies that were obviously not the top of the legendary director’s game. A Life Less Ordinary gave me similar feelings to what I experience watching Amistad or Always. At times, it was more obvious that a talented director and writer were behind the movie, but more often than not everything fell flat or at the very least felt incredibly imbalanced.

The film stars some now famous actors is some of their earlier roles. Ewan McGregor is our bumbling hero and Cameron Diaz is the headstrong woman that’s going to help him become a better man. It’s an odd love story, but surprisingly entertaining from time to time with Ewan grabbing much bigger laughs than I was expecting the film to be capable of after the first ten minutes.

Regrettably, the movie also ventures a little too far into obscure indie picture on occasion – almost to the point that it feels like a student film in terms of both cinematography and story. If the film had JUST been about McGregor and Diaz it very well could’ve been quite good as a quirky romantic comedy, but for unknown reason they’ve added an entire subplot involving two angels that are responsible for making these two opposites fall in love. The problem is that these angel characters, played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo, don’t make sense at all.  Their actions are all over the place and their motives fall by the wayside to the point that it feels like the writer forgot how they got in the story to begin with.

Oddly enough they seem to tie together as the driving “moral” of the story about whether love is fate, or controlled, or something but the finale loses a bit of its flair when you consider it revolves around the importance of the characters that more or less ruined anything resembling sensibility. If they had just been hitmen instead of angels then hitmen then angels, this premise could’ve been very Coen-esque if treated right, but they dropped the ball.

The movie still got some really solid laughs out of me and had a lot going for it. Just not quite enough. I would pay $1 or $2 for the DVD, just because it’s Boyle.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Basic plot: British talk show host David Frost gives President Nixon his first television interview since his resignation.

Going into this, I was expecting one of the most boring movies of the year. Afterall, it’s a movie about a television interview. Doesn’t that seem slightly redundant to anyone else? Like writing a book about short story, it just didn’t seem like a necessary concept. At best, it seemed like it should’ve just been a documentary about the actual players involved recalling the historical interview, but instead we essentially get a reenactment of a documentary randomly sandwiched in between a full-blown reenactment of the interviews interspersed with a reenactment of what may have happened before, after, and between the interviews. So sort of like a political version of Adaptation except slow and dull.

Regrettably, my expectation for one of the most boring movies of the year wasn’t far off. Just to set things up fair and square I’ll admit right out that I barely have an interest in modern politics let alone politics from before I was born. I’m very opinionated and I’ll vote for whoever seems to most closely agree with me on things, but generally speaking I do not keep up with these sort of things currently when they actually effect me, so I certainly don’t know anything about how they worked 15 years before I would ever say my first words.

All “Watergate” means to me is “Bad president”. If you asked me to explain to you what happened during the whole Watergate scandal, I’d probably end up giving you the run down of what happened in that one scene in Forrest Gump and then try to pretend that The Watchmen was a documentary and slowly diverge off into talking about how badass Rorschach is. I wouldn’t know where to begin with explaining why it was such a huge disappointment to America. “Watergate” = “Bad President” is all I ever really cared to know. Just enough to pick up on the less detailed references to it.

In one sense, I suppose that’s the entire point of this movie since THAT is the exact legacy that Nixon ended up leaving behind, but just the same it also means I didn’t really care about the first 75% of the movie at all. The movie ended up having a little more depth to it than I was expecting – since I initially thought it would just be a 2 hour interview. In reality, it’s more about David Frost’s struggle to corner Nixon into what he wanted him to say. Also in reality, this wasn’t a dynamic I was particularly interested in.

I get what it was trying to do and the performances really are spectacular. I would’ve been perfectly happy if Frank Langella had taken Best Actor for his portayal of Richard Nixon, or even if Sam Rockwell or Kevin Bacon had snuck their way into Best Supporting Actor nominations. All of the acting here is stellar. All of it. There wasn’t a single character I felt was miscast (again, admitedly knowing nothing about the actual events).

However, that’s where the impressiveness stops. The fact that this got a Best Picture nomination blows my mind. The direction, cinematography, and even the writing – considering that even the original stageplay writer still had half is work done for him by the real, recorded interviews – don’t seem particularly worthy of praise. People gave The Reader crap for being the “odd choice”, but I’d rewatch that any given day over this snoozefest that happens to have great acting.

If you’re a huge fan of last millenium’s politics, maybe this will hold more water(gate?) for you than it did for me, but as it stands I can’t think of one single person I would openly recommend this to that isn’t a film graduate – and even then the only reason I’d recommend it to the film grads is because it is technically a Best Picture nominee. If you want a prime suspect for why so many Americans couldn’t care less about the Academy Awards, this is a glowing example of pretentious, slow burning drama that 90% of the country would simply not enjoy and thus choose to ignore other no-name nominees assuming similar outcomes.

As a film snob, I’ll still admit that it’s technically a good movie, but I’m not in any hurry to watch it again. Possibly ever. Not that I’m remotely bitter about watching it to begin with; it’s just a “one time is enough” movie that’s good to watch to appreciate the performances and easy to leave behind after that.

Check it out if you already had an interest prior to reading this. If you didn’t have a prior interest, you won’t be missing much if you continue to maintain that stance.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Basic plot: A Christmas Carol – minus Christmas and plus mediocre romcom writing.

First, a disclaimer that will probably be longer than the review: I had absolutely ZERO intention of seeing this ever. After work yesterday (yes, I work almost every Saturday – half of them by choice), I went to see The Hangover with some friends (full review coming very soon). After the movie, we went to the nearest bar to grab a drink and some food. As anyone that ever read a single World Beer Tour Session from me should know, I’m a lightweight.

All I had eaten all day was a Hot Pocket and some chips. Everything else was liquid. All I ordered in the way of food was cheese fries, and I ended up having three Snake Bites, immediately after which everyone decided we were done. I try my best not to drive even a tiny bit buzzed (plus, at my weight, after the third I was a lot bit buzzed anyway), so I decided to walk back to the theater and buy a ticket for whatever the very next showing was.

And that is how I ended up seeing Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. So while I saw The Hangover first, I’m reviewing it second because 1) I don’t want this post being at the top of the blog indefinitely and 2) Let’s be honest, this review isn’t even really a review after these past three paragraphs.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was a movie. That’s about it. I mean, it technically had all the requirements to be considered a movie. There were actors and the actors talked and did things that could possibly make what might be considered a story, so I guess I’d call it a movie.

I love Jennifer Garner and actually think Matthew Mcaugaughnaughay can be pretty funny sometimes, but with Ghosts, it feels like no one involved wants to be there. It very, very distinctly feels like a paycheck movie with a simple formula. Step one, take a classic story (in this case A Christmas Carol) and spin it around a modern love story. Step two, get a couple of attractive people to stand around on screen for 90 minutes. Step three, make money. Regrettably the end result is a mostly lifeless waste of time.

To be 100% honest, it’s not even that I can’t enjoy chick flicks. When Harry Met Sally is one of my favorite movies ever and even stuff like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days got way more laughs out of me than I ever would’ve expected, but Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was weak to say the least. I wouldn’t call it awful but there is absolutely no reason to put any effort into watching it. I think maybe four moments got a chuckle out of me.

I had pretty low expectations and this sort of met them. Where does that leave me? Short seven bucks and safely back home. I should’ve just waited an extra twenty minutes and seen The Hangover a second time.