Sovereign
SOVEREIGN is a very solemn and creepy true crime movie about a doomed father and son. We know from the opening flash-forward (with what sure sounds like real 911 recordings) that they will be involved in a shootout with police. A traffic stop gone wrong, small time end-of-the-road shit, nothing spectacular, but just as final as if it was.
Most of the movie is not exactly about crime, it’s just about their lives shortly before that fateful conflict. Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay, BEFORE I WAKE, THE TOXIC AVENGER) is a quiet, gawky teenager who doesn’t go to school. He tells police he’s home schooled, and it’s basically true; he follows a lesson plan and everything, but usually there’s no teacher. His dad Jerry (Nick Offerman, THE KINGS OF SUMMER) is away on business most of the time, putting on small seminars about debt elimination and forestalling foreclosures. He’s an expert, I guess, because they’re threatening to take his house away but he refuses to accept any communications about it and spews all kinds of arcane (what he considers) facts about why they can’t do that. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Brothers Grimm (20 years later revisit)
August 26, 2005
THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.
It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Toxic Avenger (remake)
Man, a Hollywood remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER has almost happened a million times since, what, the ‘90s? I always thought something like that would be funny or interesting or maybe even good. For a while they said it was gonna be for kids, a live action version of the cartoon Toxic Crusaders. Fifteen years ago it was gonna be from the director of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villain (but he did TERMINATOR GENISYS instead? I love you Arnold but you gotta get your priorities straight). Later it was gonna be the director of SAUSAGE PARTY, a movie I did not finish but I wondered if an animator would want to give us a goopy partly animated Toxie I thought that could be cool. But it became more promising when Macon Blair, the star of Jeremy Saulnier’s MURDER PARTY and BLUE RUIN, and director of I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE, signed on to write and direct. That was in 2019, so that’s how many years I’ve been waiting just for this version. One of my friends saw it at Fantastic Fest two years ago and raved about it, but it went without a distributor until finally the TERRIFIER people Cineverse picked it up. These things take time I guess.
It’s hard to live up to all that, but I still had a great time with Blair’s transmutation of my questionable childhood favorite. It has some of the spirit of what we love about the original, blended with a concoction of entirely new active ingredients. It’s not the same story or even the same character, Melvin Ferd. Instead Peter Dinklage (THE THICKET) plays Winston Gooze, who is also a janitor (this time at a sinister pharmaceutical company called Bi-Toxiphetamine Hydroxylate) but he’s a grown man whose wife died of cancer and now he struggles to make a connection with his teenage stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay, THE PREDATOR). If I had been guessing what the TOXIC AVENGER remake would be about the entire time they were developing it I would’ve needed at least a couple more months to come up with that one. That may be the single most surprising change from the original: this one is sincere about some things. (read the rest of this shit…)
The 40 Year-Old Virgin (20th anniversary revisit)
August 19, 2005
I completely forgot that I reviewed THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN when it came out in 2005, but there it is. It’s not the kind of movie I normally review, but I thought it would be important to include in this series as the most influential comedy of the summer and as the opposite of WEDDING CRASHERS. That one was about smarmy well-paid pickup artists really falling in love while trying to just get laid via deception, this is about an awkward dork who works as a stocker at an electronics chain store and doesn’t own a car who has spent his life deliberately not trying to get down women’s pants, and the lie to the woman he’s falling for is just not telling her that he’s okay with not having sex yet because he’s scared he’ll do a bad job.
Steve Carell (last seen in BEWITCHED) plays Andy, friendly but socially awkward action figure collector whose life changes after his co-workers David (Paul Rudd, HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS), Jay (Romany Malco, URBAN MENACE, TICKER) and Cal (Seth Rogen, DONNIE DARKO) very reluctantly decide to invite him to fill a vacancy in their after-hours poker game in the store. He does such a bad job of joining in their locker room talk that they figure out he’s a virgin and make it their quest in life to help him change that. “From now on your dick is my dick. I’m getting you some pussy,” vows Jay. (read the rest of this shit…)
Red Eye (20th anniversary revisit)
August 19, 2005
RED EYE is a simple thing: a tight and well-made PG-13 thriller, nothing deep, but entertaining to just about anybody. And it happens to be the only movie like that directed by the late great Wes Craven, and he made it post-SCREAM trilogy using all those chops gained from shooting Woodsboro scrapes and chases. But it’s really in more of a suspense vein than a horror one, and it starts out feeling like a DIE HARD type movie, with quick shots depicting some so-far indecipherable sinister plot (the stealing of a wallet, the preparation and delivery of a mysterious crate), and establishing a set of characters in the bustle of the airport while a bunch of flights are delayed.
Lisa (Rachel McAdams, also the primary victim in WEDDING CRASHERS) was in Dallas for her grandma’s funeral, she’s headed home for Miami and already receiving calls from work. But she’s a self-declared “people pleaser, 24-7” so she doesn’t mind helping flustered hotel employee Cynthia (newcomer Jayma Mays, later in the SMURFS and PAUL BLART franchises) placate irate regulars the Taylors (Robert Pine and Teresa Press-Marx). (read the rest of this shit…)
Supercross
August 17, 2005
I have honestly been curious about SUPERCROSS, a.k.a. SUPERCROSS: THE MOVIE, for twenty years now. My curiosity has been satiated. I am now SUPERCROSS: THE VIEWER.
I think I saw a trailer or two for it but I’m sure most people never heard it of it. I’d bet it was heavily advertised on relevant sports broadcasts and not as much for the rest of us. I noticed on the credits that it was a production of “Clear Channel Entertainment Motor Sports,” which I guess is part of the same Clear Channel then infamous for monopolizing the radio market. Most of us learned about them after September 11th when they released a list of songs for their stations not to play (including anything by Rage Against the Machine). I guess radio ads must not have been enough, because it only made $3.3 million toward its $30 million budget. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Skeleton Key
August 12, 2005
Even though there were only a handful of horror movies that came out in the summer of 2005 I did not bother to see THE SKELETON KEY. And I believe it was a conscious choice. I tended to dislike Kate Hudson in movies and I think I snobbishly assumed her participation meant it was some phony mainstream horror movie for the normies or whatever. Also I think I still (correctly) distrusted screenwriter Ehren Kruger because of SCREAM 3. Being surprised to like THE RING didn’t fully change my opinion of him.
Hudson (between Garry Marshall’s RAISING HELEN and the Russo Brothers’ YOU, ME AND DUPREE) plays Caroline Ellis, who quits her job at a New Orleans nursing home, disappointed with how dehumanizing it is, and takes a private hospice gig looking after a stroke victim in a plantation house in Terrebonne Parish. Friendly lawyer Luke (Peter Sarsgaard, K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER) convinces fussy Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands following THE NOTEBOOK) to hire her to look after her husband Ben (John Hurt not long after HELLBOY), who is bedridden, doesn’t talk and seems terrified all the time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Eenie Meanie
EENIE MEANIE is a crime movie that went straight to Hulu last week. It stars Samara Weaving (MONSTER TRUCKS, THE BABYSITTER, READY OR NOT, AZRAEL) and I like that lady so I watched it.
Weaving plays Edith Meaney. The title is a cute nickname a bad person gave her – she prefers Edie. Orphaned by her dad (Steve Zahn, WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES) going to prison, she somehow fell into being a teenage getaway driver for grown up criminals. Many years later she’s away from that world, going to school – even got a job at a bank! – until, you know, an inciting incident.
It’s triggered by her bank being robbed, but it really has nothing to do with that. She ends up in the hospital, where a blood test finds that she’s pregnant. Against her better judgment she decides to go find the father, her ex-boyfriend John (Karl Glusman, THE NEON DEMON, THE BIKERIDERS), and let him know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Four Brothers (20 years later revisit)
August 12, 2005
I reviewed John Singleton’s FOUR BROTHERS twenty years ago and hopefully I’ll have a few new things to say about it, but the sad truth is my verdict has not changed. This is a movie that starts off with a real good hook and then doesn’t do enough with it. It’s thoroughly okay.
The screenplay is by David Elliot (THE WATCHER) & Paul Lovett, the team who later did G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, and the hook is that an old lady named Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan, THE EWOK ADVENTURE) is in a convenience store in Highland Park, Michigan when it gets robbed, and ends up shot to death. It turns out she was a beloved member of the community who helped hundreds of troubled kids find foster homes. But there were four kids so bad nobody would take them, and she adopted them herself. So her funeral brings all four brothers back home, they get to talking, and decide to go find out who did this. (read the rest of this shit…)
Highest 2 Lowest
I’ve been watching Spike Lee movies since I was a teenager in the late ’80s. Okay, I still haven’t seen SHE HATE ME, but otherwise I see all of them, and any new one is obviously gonna be an event for me. They’re pretty infrequent these days, though – it’s been five years since his last movie (DA 5 BLOODS), seven since his last theatrical release (BLACKKKLANSMAN). So I’m thankful that even though it was made for Apple TV+ the new one is playing at my favorite theater, SIFF Downtown, f/k/a Cinerama.
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST is, yes, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), itself based on the Ed McBain 87th Precinct Mystery King’s Ransom (1959). So that means it tells the story of an executive dealing with a kidnapping/ransom situation while also trying to take over control of his company. Instead of the shoe industry this time it’s the music industry, and instead of the guy who runs the factories he’s a Grammy winning, cover of Rolling Stone, “best ear in the business” producer/label owner/icon. Denzel Washington (RICOCHET) plays David King, founder of Stackin’ Hits Records, obviously. (read the rest of this shit…)
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