NoWo600Wo: Good. Bad. Ugly. Etcetera.

Last weekend I learned that there is something scarier than the concept of unkillable Nazi zombies.

Good

Outpost

Outpost features the scariest historical zombies since the conquistadors in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. A man working for the C.I.A (I think) hires a group of mercenaries to take him to a currently war-torn area in Eastern Europe because he is on the hunt for something the Nazis left behind. The mercenaries believe he is just hunting for gold, but he is actually searching for a machine that controls time and energy, a project similar to what Einstein was working on before he abandoned it because of the nuclear bomb. A group of Nazi ghost/golems/zombies are protecting the place and start picking off people one by one in really gross ways. Outpost is somehat similar to a John Carpenter film, except that I think if anything, we get to know the characters in Outpost even less. Which is possibly the film’s only flaw.

Bad

Airborne

This is a movie that got played a lot on TBS when I was a teenager. One of it’s taglines is “the first rock n’ roll rollerblading movie”, although if you check out the poster, it has at least three taglines. It is a super cheesy movie that has never been released on DVD , but somehow Netflix Autoplay has it (you think it would be since a young Jack Black and Seth Green are in it and companies like to cash in on that sort of celebrity, but my boyf reckons there are some song rights issues). Given the fact that just about everything in this movie seems super-dated to the early 1990s doesn’t help the cheesy factor. It’s your standard teenage movie about overcoming the odds, or bullies, or being a California extreme sports kid who spouts surfer dude and Buddhist philosophies in strange non-sequiturs that is forced to move to Cincinatti. This is one of the few teenage films where the hero is rightfully mocked by his new classmates. Our hero’s name is Mitchell Goosen, which isn’t a very surfer dude name. He is dull and can only speak of waves. His cousin, played by a very awkward and not-cute-yet Seth Green is a kid still trying to figure out his identity, as noted by the fashion montage to “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred at one point in the movie. I felt extremely embarrassed for Seth Green throughout this entire movie. Jack Black is one of the bullies, and you get to see that he’s been doing his hyper persona for a good 16 years now, although he is actually kind of funny in Airborne. Anyway, Mitchell teams up with his bullies at the end to help defeat the bullies from the prep school in some downhill rollerblading race. Seriously, all this film was missing was serious class issue overtones and that speech from Wet Hot American Summer about defeating the evil “other” team from the other camp. Directed by Rob Bowman from The X-Files. Seriously.

(I would have posted videos of both the Seth Green fashion montage and the speech from WHAS, but Youtube has removed the fashion montage due to song rights, and I can’t find anything other than 10 minute clips of WHAS).

Ugly

The Room

Meet your new worst movie ever that is scarier than unkillable Nazi zombies. I don’t even know where to begin with this. The Room is a drama that tries hard to be a Tennessee Williams-type play but fails on a massive level. Although this movie was apparently made in 2003, the clothes and the look of the entire movie screams “early-mid 1990s Cinemax/Skinemax movie!” Presumably due to budget constraints (I’m not sure I’d consider $6 million budget constraints though), Tommy Wiseau writes, directs, produces, and stars in this movie as Johnny, a well-to-do banker and relatively nice guy with an accent of undeterminable origin who is being cheated on by his girlfriend/fiancee of 7 years, Lisa. Due to budget constraints, I’m sure the entire cast was found from a Craigslist post. There are a few gratuitous, overlong sex scenes. The first one happens within the first 5 minutes of the film and caused my uterus to shrivel up and die. The soundtrack for the film sounds like Color Me Badd, and Johnny pulls out a cassette recorder at some point, so this kind of proves that Mr. Wiseau’s points of reference ceased to exist around 1993. Despite all this and the rampant misogynistic overtones of the entire film, it is highly entertaining and good for a laugh. Just a warning again though: consider whether or not you want to become celibate before watching though. The sex scenes are that gross.

Etcetera

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Eh, I liked the documentary on the Jason X DVD better. But I guess this is good if you want to see more interviews with the cast members of the series rather than horror critics and historians

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Hey, I finally found a Friday the 13th movie other than Jason X to like! This one had likeable characters, and jokes that actually worked. The only things I did not get however was that Jason went after two female characters who were basically good people and good camp counselors, he tended to terrorize children in this one, and he walked at a really brisk pace (but he’s Jason, so he’s constantly a monster-man with purpose). I’m slowly working my way through the series, and none of the video stores had Part V, so we jumped ahead to Part VI.

I should probably recognize that trying to piece together a reasonable mythology for the Friday the 13th movies is not a good idea. This isn’t Lost, Supernatural, or Harry Potter.

NoWo600Wo: What did I call my short entries again?

I had to look through my tags to remember what I called my entries with a bunch of short reviews in one post. Going back to school has caused me to have a lot of brain farts.

Domino

Oddly enough, this movie is the only one I’ve seen that is possibly a direct descendant of Orson Welles’ F for Fake. It states up front that the story may or may not be true. Written by Richard Kelly, it fucks up with the time frame, putting Domino Harvey in more modern times at a younger age than she actually was – so her father Laurence Harvey (star of the original The Manchurian Candidate) died closer to the early 90s rather than the early 70s, and her mom decided to move her to LA just because of Beverly Hills, 90210. I honestly wish that this was a better movie than it actually is because Domino Harvey was an interesting woman. But it’s overlong and overstylized. This would have been a logical follow-up for Tony Scott after True Romance came out, but in the 2000s it felt strained and oftentimes ridiculous. The only thing I learned from this movie is Mo’Nique the comedian is actually a pretty good dramatic actress.

John Carpenter’s Vampires

Although I should just say, “Fuck it, it was free,” this wasn’t that great. Perhaps a couple notches above Ghosts of Mars. It featured what I hate most in bad movies: implausible, sudden, and ultimately pointless romances – like, so sudden that you’re like, “Wait, what, huh? Since when are they a couple?” Another tacked on element: really bad and unnecesssary boner jokes. My boyfriend thinks it was James Woods’ doing, since I don’t really remember John Carpenter being much a boner joke fellow. Then again, John Carpenter didn’t write this movie. He did write the soundtrack though, which was pretty much recycled from They Live. Gone completely was the camaraderie felt between his characters in his earlier films.

Citizen Kane (for Intermediate Beginners)

While I am a bit of an Orson Welles nerd, Citizen Kane is actually not my favorite Welles film (that would be F for Fake, with The Trial as a close second because I’m a sucker for Anthony Perkins filmed in black and white). I tend to only watch Citizen Kane every 5-7 years partly because I’ve never quite gotten over my initial reaction to it from when I was 15: this is a sad movie. That original sentiment still stands, although perhaps I feel slightly less sympathetic towards Charles Foster Kane due to recent events in my life and in the zine community (namely a car company trying to sponsor the zine fest I help organize – we refused).

At about 104 minutes, Citizen Kane is very well paced and this film is famous for its innovative cinematography. The film is about a newspaper reporter delving into the life of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane shortly after his death. His famous last words were “Rosebud”, and the reporter is told to find out what it means. He speaks with Kane’s former (and usually spurned) friends, associates, and ex-wife, and they tell what they knew of Kane from their point of view, so the story is told in a non-linear fashion. Joseph Cotten plays his college buddy Leland, who is given the job of theatre critic when Kane takes over the newspaper The Inquirer at the age of 25. The picture above is from the scene where Kane, Leland, and Bernstein write a charter for what the newspaper will stand for.

The thing that I caught this time around: Kane was a hoarder. He hoarded expensive items like sculptures and works of art as well as other things (and hell, newspaper franchises), but a hoarder nonetheless. Of course, the whole sad part of the story is that he bought all these things and other extravagant items because he wanted to be loved. It seems that part of his falling out with Leland began when Leland realized that his hoarding of both expensive items and other newspaper outlets were getting in the way of what they originally stood for, and that Kane may no longer be “for the working people and disenfranchised.” It is Cotten’s performance as the older Leland, as well as Welles’ performance as the younger Kane that provide the lighter, funnier moments of the film.

Another thing I caught this time around, and this may partially be because of my recent viewing of A History of Violence and my realization that Viggo Mortensen, a typically pretty man, has the ability to make himself look really ugly with no effort or make up at all. The women who portray both of Kane’s wives in this film also have this ability, although to a slightly lesser extent. But it’s because that being with Kane is draining the life and joy out of them. There is a really simple scene or montage of Kane and his first wife and their meals together. At first they sit very close together, but as the marriage wears on, they sit further and further apart. Kane’s second wife, an aspiring, but really bad opera singer just turns plain ol’ whiny and shrill as their relationship wears on.

Everyone who has been alive in the past 35+ years knows that Citizen Kane tops about every film list as the #1 best movie ever made, as well as a work of art. What some of those people don’t know is that it took about 35 years after the film came out for that to happen. Citizen Kane was not a box office hit, nor a critical one, although that may have been due to the fact that Charles Foster Kane was based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and threats from Hearst almost caused the film to not be released, and Hearst made his film critics and gossip columnists pan the film. HBO made a film called RKO 281 some years ago about the making of and attempted repression of Citizen Kane with Liev Schrieber as Orson Welles.

My boyfriend, who watched this film with me for the first time, wrote about it in his blog.

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