Freaky Tales
I don’t know much about Oakland, but FREAKY TALES seems designed to be the Oakland-est movie of all time. So Oakland that Too $hort is the narrator and one of the producers and has a cameo as a cop and is a character in the movie played by rapper Demario “Symba” Driver. Also they have a cool retro synth type score but they got Raphael Saadiq to do it.
It’s presented as an anthology film, but it’s the type where each of the stories intersects a little bit and ultimately becomes one story in the last chapter – actually not that far off from the structure of WEAPONS, which I watched the day after I watched this. What it made me keep thinking of though is the made-for-cable movie COSMIC SLOP, even though this is pretty different and definitely way better. I guess just because it’s weird stories hosted by a music icon and named after one of his works.
Although there’s a sci-fi element in a stylishly fake looking “cosmic green stuff” that pops up occasionally (Short Dog figures it “was just one of those freaky things that made the Bay Area so damn fresh” at the time) I think it comes closest to being a crime movie. There’s a hitman, a corrupt cop, and everything revolves around a botched robbery of Golden State Warriors point guard Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis, TOP GUN: MAVERICK). I of course enjoy that type of story, but the standout chapters for me are the two about circa ’87 Bay Area music scenes, following some punk rockers and then a female rap duo, each group having a fateful incident after leaving the same showing of THE LOST BOYS. (read the rest of this shit…)
Weapons
Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with BARBARIAN (2022), is back with his ambitious followup. Cregger has mentioned being inspired by MAGNOLIA when trying to explain what he’s doing here, which might sound kind of ridiculous, but it makes it fitting that it’s New Line Cinema putting a whole lot of faith in a promising new director. Pretty big budget, final cut, advertising based on mystery and “from the director of BARBARIAN,” and they even gave it an IMAX release! But I think their confidence is warranted.
The only thing we really knew about from the somewhat cryptic trailers is a mysterious event explained in the opening by a child narrator (reminded me of SHOGUN ASSASSIN). One night at 2:17 AM in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen kids get up out of bed, run out their front door into the night and don’t come back. The weirdest part is that they’re all in the same class, taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE). So when she comes to school the next day only one kid is there, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Since nobody can figure out what the fuck happened some of the parents, especially Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, THRASHIN’), assume Justine had something to do with it. She’s getting harassing phone calls, threatening knocks on the door at night, her car vandalized, and she has no teaching to do. Things are not going great for her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Eddington
As some of you are aware I am an avowed triple-A (Ari Aster Appreciator). I loved his two hit horror movies (HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR) and then I loved his flop comedy (BEAU IS AFRAID) even more, so obviously I was gonna see his new one EDDINGTON no matter what. When it was announced it was described as a western, which is a stretch – nobody would put this in the westerns section at a video store. But yeah, it has feuds and jurisdictional disagreements between a small town sheriff, the mayor and the Native law enforcement just over the border, trouble in a bar, various groups trying to profit from a big construction project, things devolving into a big shootout. I get it.
Of Aster’s other movies it’s closest to BEAU, but it’s less surreal and, to me at least, not nearly as funny. In fact it might’ve made me laugh less than any of them. But there are certainly some good ones in there and I did laugh just thinking about some of its ideas while discussing it with friends.
What it definitely does achieve is a stressful portrait of what our lives have become in the last half decade. It’s set in May of 2020 and begins with a series of confrontations over mask ordinances. Eddington, New Mexico Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, U TURN) doesn’t want to wear a mask when officers from the Pueblo tribe insist he follow the law in their jurisdiction. Later he forces a grocery store to allow in a guy who refuses to mask (James Cady, “Train Conductor,” HOSTILES). Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, THE EQUALIZER 2) happens to be there and tries to calmly reason with Joe, who then goes outside and does a livestream announcing that he’s running against him in the next election. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Fantastic 4: First Steps
It took Marvel years to finally get back the movie rights to the team they call their “first family,” and then they had the bad luck to release THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS two weeks after James Gunn’s SUPERMAN. It won’t matter in the long run, but right now you can’t miss the similarities in its approach: it’s light and stylized, it’s old timey, it skips over the origin story and gets right to it. It feels like a restart because it’s set in a different reality than the MCU and it’s the sixties – theirs has some flying cars, a race of mole people and possibly less racism. I believe they also got baby monitors and fist bumping early over there.
So in many ways it feels fresh for a Marvel movie. The retro-futuristic designs are very appealing, and it’s always nice when they have one that’s a visual experience. But I’m sorry to say it’s not nearly as fun or as funny as SUPERMAN, mostly a glossy surface with nothing but air beneath. I remember the idea of these characters from the 2005 movie – here are those ideas again, looking less embarrassing (love those turtleneck sweater uniforms!) but really not exhibiting much more depth than before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Sky High
The last super hero movie of summer 2005, and maybe the last kids movie too, is Disney’s SKY HIGH. It’s directed by Mike Mitchell (DEUCE BIGALOW: MALE GIGOLO), with a script originated in the ‘90s by Paul Hernandez, later rewritten by Bob Schooley & Mark McCorkle (creators of the cartoon Kim Possible, plus they wrote 7 episodes of the New Kids on the Block cartoon).
It’s a play on comic book super heroes, but not based on any existing ones, so it’s your basic dollar store super heroes with standard abilities, generic names and no real origins, they just genetically inherited powers. It’s the kind of comic book movie where the opening credits have to be in comic book font and there are drawings that do not look worthy of a comic book that dissolve into the live action shots. You know – like a comic book! Have you seen these? A bunch of little squares with stuff drawn in them.
Michael Angarano (last seen in LORDS OF DOGTOWN) stars as Will Stronghold, a kid whose parents are the world’s most famous super heroes, The Commander (Kurt Russell, last seen [briefly] in JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME). He’s about to start attending Sky High, a secret school floating in the sky for the children of super heroes. But he’s kinda terrified because he hasn’t developed super powers, which seem to be related to and/or a symbol for puberty. So he’s very self conscious. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Island (20th anniversary revisit)
July 22, 2005
Michael Bay’s THE ISLAND was a notorious financial flop – his first – and still his worst movie according to my friend Matt Lynch, who is knowledgeable about such things. But it did enjoy some time with a reputation as “the not-as-bad Michael Bay movie,” as recorded in my review when I first got around to seeing it in 2013. I seem to remember sort of agreeing with that assessment – because the editing and insanity is toned down it’s a less pure Bay experience but a more tolerable one if you fucking hate his usual style, as I certainly did when this came out.
But I guess now that I’m a little softer on his works in general it doesn’t really seem like a good use of his time to be doing the dumb man’s version of intelligent sci-fi, with a pretty cool idea ripped off from PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR according to a copyright infringement lawsuit that DreamWorks settled for seven figures. I assumed it was probly just a similar premise they came up with separately but reading the Wikipedia summary of CLONUS this actually sounds much closer to a remake than plenty of official ones! But I can measure it on its own merits, even if stolen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Fight or Flight
FIGHT OR FLIGHT – which is not called FLIGHT RISK, I keep getting those two titles mixed up in my head – has been advertised as “from the makers of JOHN WICK.” In this case it doesn’t mean the directors, the writer or 87Eleven, it means Basil Iwanyk’s company Thunder Road, who also backed 24 HOURS TO LIVE, SILENT NIGHT and TRIGGER WARNING. Specifically it’s part of their lower budget arm Asbury Park, who did BLACK SITE and RED RIGHT HAND.
Director James Madigan said in a Q&A that “Everybody wants to make ‘JOHN WICK on this’ and ‘JOHN WICK on a plane’ and ‘JOHN WICK goes to Bangkok,’ or whatever it is. You can’t make JOHN WICK unless you’re Chad, and you shouldn’t try.”
I have in fact seen this called “Josh Hartnett’s JOHN WICK,” which would be a completely unfair quality comparison, but I accept it in the spirit it was intended: to convey that it’s an absurd assassin-related action movie where Hartnett (HALLOWEEN H20) clearly did a bunch of training to pull off some good choreography. It’s sort of low rent and tonally messy but I like this type of movie and I like Hartnett so I had fun with it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Hustle & Flow (20th anniversary revisit)
If you’re keeping track, please add HUSTLE & FLOW to the list of summer ’05 movies that hold the fuck up. Maybe at the top. I think this is the first time I’ve seen it since the theater, and I wasn’t sure if I was building it up in my memory. No, this is really something special.
It takes place in Memphis, where small time pimp and weed dealer DJay (Terrence Howard, WHO’S THE MAN?) revives an old dream to become a rapper. It kinda happens by coincidence. First one of his customers (Claude Phillips) insists on trading him a Casio keyboard for drugs (“What am I, a pawn shop?”), which gets him thinking about playing music. Then he runs into Key (Anthony Anderson, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT), who he knew in middle school, at a convenience store, has a conversation and ends up going to watch him record a singer at a church. If DJay had shown up five minutes later or if Key hadn’t needed batteries none of this would’ve happened. But they do, so DJay later shows up at Key’s house, raps for him and convinces him to come over and help him record a demo tape. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Devil’s Rejects (20th anniversary revisit)
July 22, 2005
In my review of HOUSE OF WAX, when I alluded to another movie being my choice for the most notable horror movie of summer ’05, I was talking about THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. It’s Rob Zombie’s second movie, and I don’t remember anybody thinking it was odd that he could make a sequel to his debut THE HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES that was not advertised as a sequel and was so different from the original that it kinda stands on its own. We just all agreed it was interesting. Instead of a stylized spookhouse ride on elaborate sets it’s a gritty ‘70s style criminals-on-the-lam movie, putting the previously more cartoonish Firefly family – serial killers Otis B. Driftwood (Bill Moseley, PINK CADILLAC), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and the clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig, SPIDERBABY) – out on the road to steal cars, lie low and cook in the sun.
And it’s got that 16mm grain I love – dust of the gods. Of course Zombie couldn’t resist using a few wipes and giving the credits gnarly freeze frames that look like lobby cards for some ’70s Italian sleaze movie that makes you feel dirty. He recruited cinematographer Phil Parmet because he’d shot handheld as additional d.p. for Barbara Kopple’s documentary HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. Maybe the most crucial choice is that the soundtrack is all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers Band, Three Dog Night and stuff like that. Guitars that sing instead of crunch. That changes everything. (read the rest of this shit…)
Bad News Bears (2005)
July 22, 2005
I have a confession to make: I don’t think I’ve ever seen the original BAD NEWS BEARS movies in full. Parts, maybe. I know people love the first one. I don’t remember it. So this review comes from the rare perspective of a person who saw Richard Linklater’s remake in theaters and is returning to it after 20 years of still not seeing the original to find out why nobody seemed to think this stacked up to it. Ignorance is bliss!
For me the main movie to compare it to is BAD SANTA, which came from the same screenwriters, Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (CATS & DOGS). Obviously it’s not as good, but it’s the second best movie at presenting Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic asshole in a way that is somehow really funny and ultimately sweet in a way that doesn’t seem too phony because the guy is still an asshole, he just made a small gesture that shows he’s trying. This is a PG-13 family-friendly-ish sports movie, so the change is a little bigger than just wanting to give a stuffed elephant to a child after getting shot by the police, but it still maintains his acerbicness to pretty uncomfortable levels until the last couple innings of the big game. (read the rest of this shit…)
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