One for the Pinneapple Express

This is the first Judd Apatow project that I have been genuinely interested in, which prompted me to do a little research. It's directed by David Gorden Green who's first film George Washington is a near perfect representation of small town America. If you haven't checked it out yet - George Washington is a great date, home alone, or watch it with your parents who think The Shawshank Redemption is a work of genius movie.

I am excited to see these funny boys, Apatow and Rogen, tackle a movie that involves a plot and not just an idea. Jokes work better when they're centered around situation and although the living room can produce hilarious moments, I want to spend my ten dollars on an adventure.

All in all, this will most likely be an enjoyable film. I'm thinking The Big Lebowski meets Half Baked and the reviews I've read, based on test screenings, have been exciting. Who cares if they were written by someone called 'The Midnight Toker'. Stoners are people too you know.

George Washington
Directed by David Gordon Green

Home Videos - Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands

This is the second installment in a surprisingly fun trilogy from director Nicolas Winding Refn starring Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish heartthrob who has just recently made his way across the seas to the American Film Industry. You’ll recognize him as Le Chiffre, the man with a blood-weeping eye in Casino Royale.

These movies are about deals that go wrong because in actuality, deals usually go wrong. So many films are about the process of fixing, by superhero like gun toters, it’s refreshing to see a film about the logistics of a crime. Scratch that. This film isn’t realism. It’s an attempt at realism that takes place in a world very similar to ours, where men find themselves in situations that are completely beyond their control.

Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, a thug movie with white people (this is Denmark), is a refreshing take on the stereotype of the gangster. The title character Tonny is unredeemable, a truly unlucky and untalented dealmaker. Mikkelsen plays him beautifully, as he does all of his roles, a tough guy with awkward undertones. Tonny is out of jail (it’s a little hazy here why he was in jail for the first place and how much time has passed since the first film) and heads to his dad’s chop shop looking for work. Throughout the film he’s trying to regain the trust and respect of his father, the lord of a small crime ring, but nothing seems to go his way.

When Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino were making stylish pictures with clogged sink narratives Nicolas Winding Refn was making something entirely his own. Only the Danes can take the underbelly of society and turn it into a subtle and suspenseful exercise in endurance. Pusher, the first in the series is by far the most adventurous in style and structure, but the second installment builds on its idea, not it’s story, which results in a sister film instead of a sequel.

The Dogma movement has passed and I doubt that filmmakers will find their way back to it, but it’s effects are alive and well in style and tone. The interaction between two characters, when done right, can be just as redeemable as a man flying through the air with guns ablaze.

Yes. You can watch this movie without seeing the original but I do recommend that you see Pusher at some point and time.

NY Times Review

James Bond Please

Anyone else excited for the new 007 Quantum of Solace? My father wasn’t a James Bond fan, so unlike a giant portion of the world, I’ve only seen the one with Christopher Walkin as a bleach blond helicopter flying villain. Casino Royale has personally, and I think for a whole new generation of film watchers, gotten me excited about a fifty-year long traditon.

Quantum of Solace

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army, directed by visionary Guillermo del Toro, taught me that CGI, when not trying to make things look real (as if they belong in reality), can be positively astounding. Trying to make something look like play-dough delivers an oddly satisfying effect. The creatures in this movie not only look amazing, their small inserted histories boost their standing from flimsy effect, to essential story builders . A.O Scott is right, Hellboy II is “a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun”.

I just want to clear this up, right away. Sci-fi Fantasy is one of my Achilles Heels. The hardest things for me to do is separate my love of unicorns and mermaids from any ability I might have to look at a film with an objective eye. That said, I still think this movie was completely watchable, finessed with an imagination that is more difficult to harness than you would think.

Like the first Hellboy, the story is kinda all over the place. The Elven Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) wants revenge on the human race for our greedy and destructive nature. He needs to reassemble the Golden Army, an innumerable force of machine man killers, which requires taking down his father, kidnapping his twin sister and reassembling a crown that makes him the Commander in Chief. Sprinkled in between this epic fairytale is love, crisis of allegiance and some seriously pulpy humor. Don’t be afraid to laugh at things are supposed to be serious. My guess is that del Toro wants us to have as much fun as he's having.

Hellboy II reminded me of a few things – The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Star Wars. When Hellboy and the troop head to the ‘Troll Market’ we get a sneak peek at the underbelly of the beast world. It’s about two doors down from the bar on Tatooeen and it’s a really fun moment in the film. We also get a new character in Hellboy II - Johann Krauss, voiced by Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame, is a collection of vapors that get clothed in a robot like, deep sea diving suit. He can inhabit the bodies of other creatures or loan a little of himself to get some information from a dead tooth fairy. I’m sure that someone like Storm is a badass to a loyal X-Men fan, but she’s got nothing on this guy.

Maybe it’s the CGI. Maybe it’s the characters. Or maybe its just more fantasy than superhero that makes Hellboy II a refreshing romp through the summer movie season. ‘Red’, as his friends call him, is played perfectly by Ron Perlman. He’s cheesy, at ease with being cheesy, lovable and ugly all at the same time. I can’t believe that I fell for his romance with Liz Sherman (an also aptly cast Selma Blair), but I did. Just as much as I did in the first film. I credit most of this to Pearlman and for the same reason that I was touched by his performance in Jeunet’s City of Lost Children. It turns out that the Beauty and the Beast story really is timeless.

As I was leaving the theater a friend said, “That movie will be really great on TBS”. I think he’s right. Some movies you can watch forty times and they don’t get old. Hellboy II is no There Will Be Blood, but I can’t watch that movie everyday of my life.

Thank You Chad for the brilliant insight.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
A.O. Scott’s NY Times Review
Guillermo Del Toro’s Notebook

WALL-E

Many things have been said about WALL-E, the ninth installment from the Pixar Disney union and they’re all true. It’s an amazing representation of the future, bleak as it may be, fitting nicely in the pantheon of Sci-Fi. The first forty minutes are less like a cartoon, without dialogue or dance numbers from the good old days, and more like Anime than anything America has put out to date. Kids will be drawn to WALL-E’s cuteness while adults will identify with his (it’s?) geeky tendencies. WALL-E represents what people have wanted all along, not a human-like robot with features that remind us of ourselves, but a cute tin can that acts like us. He makes ‘goodness’ an evolutionary faction.

WALL-E is a robot who has been left on planet earth to do some heavy duty cleaning. He’s not the only robot, which the trailer leads you to believe, he’s merely the last functioning robot, and the movie never definitively explains why. This is an important factor in Sci-Fi, no-one can explain to us why LA looks like Tokyo’s long lost sister in Blade Runner, it just does. Allowing the viewer to come up with their own conclusions is what makes the genre interactive, a relationship which few studios are willing to entertain these days.

So WALL-E is alone with a cockroach for a buddy (who makes for some of the cutest jokes for those of you who have been confronted with their indestructibility) collecting trinkets from the mounds of trash he builds each day. When a new and flashy robot mysteriously shows up on earth he falls in love with her sleek features and laser toting abilities, putting an end to his loneliness.

When Eva goes into autopilot, WALL_E does everything he can to wake her up, but soon enough she is picked up by her chaperon rocket and taken back to a floating spaceship filled with fat people who haven’t walked in over two hundred years. (This is space remember.)

How do we know this? Because WALL-E is so taken with Eva that he grabs onto her recon vehicle and followers her, inevitably bringing enlightenment to the human race. This is where the movie disintegrates slightly. WALL-E isn’t heavy on plot and as the end approaches we begin to feel the effects, withdraws, of being away from that earth portion of the film.

These are my only two complaints. Plot and pity. Painstaking effort was made to anthropromorphise WALL-E into Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp but what we end up with is a Buster Keaton who is all pity. What was great about the Tramp was that he was an opportunist, he would steal, sneak and trick to get ahead. I felt so bad for WALL-E after twenty minutes that I never felt anything but that for the entire movie. He was almost too good natured, which in a fit of originality, is the exact opposite of what we’ve been taught to think about the evolution of the robot. I can’t blame viewers all over the world for crying for him, he’s effective.

It is highly recommended that one sees this movie in a theater. It will no doubt stand the test of time looking equally as crisp and expansive on home HD television sets, but it’s beauty shines most bright on the big screen. Like space, in it’s awesome and majestic glory, WALL-E is best experienced with a little imagination and a digital projector.

WALL-E