Like its part 1, THE COLLECTOR (2009), I can’t say that the 2012 sequel THE COLLECTION is any great shakes. But man, it starts out with a bang.
If you haven’t heard of THE COLLECTOR it’s because it was a pretty low key release, opening on 1,325 screens. The first SAW movie was released on almost a thousand more screens. I make the comparison because this one’s definitely in the SAW vein – in fact it started with a rejected script for a SAW sequel. It has a genius inventor/torturer in an S&M mask who sets up preposterous contraptions, bear traps and hidden razor blades in the sizable home of a rich family. But the cool gimmick is that the protagonist Arkin (Josh Stewart, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES) is a traitor who installed the security system and then tried to rob the place while they were supposed to be on vacation, not tied up by a maniac. He stumbles on this nightmare and tries to do the right thing and help them. They’re like “I’m so happy to see you! Wait– why are you here?” (read the rest of this shit…)
Dito Montiel is a director I’ve kept an eye on since I saw his underground fighting movie FIGHTING. That one’s not good for action filmatism, but it’s really enjoyable as a more realistically textured take on the LIONHEART type of movie, and it has alot of personality. The example I always give when I try to convince somebody to see it is that the ultimate goal of the fight manager character played by Terence Howard is to get enough money to franchise an IHoP. So see that one, everybody. Totally underrated.
EMPIRE STATE is Montiel’s first movie that doesn’t have Channing Tatum in it, instead it stars an occasionally Tatum-esque Liam Hemsworth, a.k.a. the only expended Expendable as of part 2 (spoiler). There’s something odd about an Australian doing a New York meathead character, but Thor’s little brother has more range than I knew. Maybe Tatum was Montiel’s DeNiro, and Hemsworth will be his DiCaprio. I guess we’ll know that’s what’s up if Tatum starts doing a bunch of DTV cop movies with 50 Cent. (read the rest of this shit…)
“Well, I didn’t think it was terrible or anything.”
–Vern, outlawvern.com
For the most part PAIN & GAIN is not that bad in the usual ways that Michael Bay movies are bad. Check this shit out: I honestly had no major stylistic problems with this one, other than some late-in-the-game freeze frame/on screen graphic things that are supposed to be funny (listing the side effects of cocaine use, saying “this is still a true story” during a crazy part, etc.) Even the action scenes are fine and have a good energy to them. I think maybe when Bay is limited to what he considers a low budget ($26 million) he has to do more planning and less shooting everything from a hundred different angles to slap together later.
What I really expected to be deadly in this movie was the jokes. Of course I hold a grudge against Bay for the way his and Simon West’s editing and framing began the crumbling of the visual language of action cinema that led to the current state of things where only a very small percentage of American action movies are worth watching if you are hoping for there to be action scenes in them. That’s what he’s gonna have to answer for when he gets to the Pearly Gates, but it’s definitely not the worst thing about his movies – that would have to be his terrible sense of humor. BAD BOYS 2 and the TRANSFORMERSes especially can’t go a minute without some unfunny ad-libbed jibber jabber, or a cut away to a dog fucking something, or a sassy black lady swearing at somebody (or vice versa), or a cartoonish service person or government stooge being an asshole for no reason other than to reflect Bay’s world view. So when this joker said his next movie was gonna be a comedy I heard the JAWS music.
This is the third time I’ve seen PROMETHEUS. I saw it twice in the theater. It’s one of the most divisive movies in the history of outlawvern.com comments, and I wanted to see how it played after sleeping on it for a while. I still like it and think that its great filmatism overcomes its underlying stupidity. But I’ve got a few new thoughts on it.
We’ve discussed alot of unscientific things these scientists on the Prometheus do, but one I don’t remember thinking about before is that they’re totally jumping to this conclusion that humans were engineered. All they’re going on is the “DNA match,” that “their genetic material predates ours,” but doesn’t that seem more like we evolved from them than they purposely created us? I guess they’re going on the cave paintings, which they assume were made by the Engineers and did in fact lead them to this planet. But I don’t know, I don’t feel like this Engineer theory has been adequately proven. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, eh? More like THE YOU KNOW TO BE HONEST I KINDA LIKED THIS ONE SPIDER-MAN if you ask me.
Over the years I’ve gained a rep as an anti-Nerdite, due to some of my challenging of online conventional wisdom and use of insensitive terminology (some people get mad when I use “nerd” instead of “geek”). But the truth is I rarely miss a comic book movie, and I even like some that you all hate (SPIDER-MAN 3, X-MEN 3, MAN OF STEEL it seems, probly something else I’m forgetting). Not to mention the whole issue with STAR WARS prequels and CRYSTAL SKULLs. Face it, geeks – I like this shit more than the people who like it do!
That’s why it surprises me that I never got around to seeing THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN until now. I mean I had intended to see it in the theater in 3D and everything. But everybody said it was bland and they confirmed that they really were re-doing the original story already so I lost the urgency and never got to it. (read the rest of this shit…)
I like doing these re-reviews. Alot of times I feel differently about a movie as I get older, or I notice new things after seeing it more than once, or I benefit from being removed from the context of the hype and the reactions I’d been hearing when it came out. But it’s a challenge too because it’s so easy to be redundant. More than once I wrote a draft of one of these and then read my old review and found out I unknowingly repeated an idea or even an exact phrase. Shit. Like I was doing I, ROBOT and I was real proud of this joke where I rewrote the 3 Laws of Robotics in my own way. Then it turned out I already did that years ago.
And as the gap narrows here at the end of the series it’s getting pretty ridiculous. This was only 2 years ago, and I haven’t gone off to live a quiet life in a monastery and stick fight in a remote village or anything like that. A man can only gain so much wisdom in that period of time, so my views haven’t really changed on the movie of THE RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES of the starring James Franco. It’s still a very enjoyable dumb man’s thinking man’s sci-fi. (read the rest of this shit…)
COWBOYS AND/OR ALIENS starts out great. Daniel Craig wakes up with an apparent gunshot wound and a weird metal device locked to his wrist. He doesn’t remember who he is or what the fuck happened. He does remember how to fight, though, so when some guys try to rob him he kicks their asses, steals their clothes TERMINATOR style and heads into town. (And all this without talking.)
Other than that metal thing it plays as a straight western for a while. Paul Dano is a crazy asshole who terrorizes the town, shooting his guns off and demeaning innocent people because his dad (Harrison Ford) is the cattle baron and he thinks he can get away with anything. But when he picks out Craig, a random bystander, to flip some shit at, he finds himself crashing nose-first against a wall of badass. This stranger doesn’t know who the little shit is and can’t pretend to be scared of him, so he knocks him on his ass. In the scuffle the kid accidentally shoots a deputy, a crime the sheriff can’t overlook despite who his daddy is, so they both get arrested, to be transferred to federal custody the next day. (read the rest of this shit…)
The best way to explain the genius of INCEPTION is just to describe what’s going on at the climax. The main characters are all asleep on a jet, dreaming that they’re in a van that’s crashed and is falling off a bridge. All but the driver, Dileep Rao, are asleep and are also in a dream-within-a-dream where they’re tied together floating weightlessly in an elevator. Joseph Gordon Levitt is preparing to wake them up, the rest are asleep and in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream about blowing up a snowy fortress. But Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page are asleep there because they’re actually in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream where Leo is making the emotional decision to leave behind a SOLARIS-type living memory of his dead wife Marion Cotillard to go into a limbo to rescue his client, Ken Watanabe, who has lived a whole life there and is now an old man and forgets that he’s not in reality, because time passes at a different pace within each of these worlds. And there is a decades long slowed down music cue that tells Leo the van in the first dream is about to hit the water and wake them all up.
And here’s the kicker: all of this was understandable even on the first viewing for knuckleheads like me and the millions of people who made it a huge hit summer movie. I mean, you don’t have to like it, but it takes a silly motherfucker to deny the accomplishment of making such an effective mainstream thriller out of a concept this complicated. (read the rest of this shit…)
This is another one I never would’ve watched without painting myself into a corner with this review series. It falls into the small percentage of big summer movies that I just had no interest in seeing at all. Alot of the ones I miss, like, say, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4, I didn’t get around to seeing them, and I heard they were bad, but yeah, sure, I’d watch ’em. Probly will some day. But not this one. I wouldn’t have.
If I had turned off TERMINATOR SALVATION about 2/3 in I would’ve come to you and made a case for it being underappreciated. I mean, I think it is, it doesn’t deserve the worldwide wholesale rejection and scorn it gets. But it has such a crippling case of T.A.P.s (third act problems) that it’s hard to be excited about it after you get to the end.
But let’s talk about what’s good in it, because there’s plenty of it, and nobody ever talks about that. First of all, a good cast. John Avatar himself, Sam Worthington, plays the anti-hero Marcus, a death row inmate (we don’t actually know exactly how Riddick he is – “My brother and two cops are dead because of me” is the only explanation of his crimes) who gets the lethal injection and then wakes up in a post-apocalyptic battle between man and machine. On one hand, hey, I’m alive, and I’m free! On the other hand… (read the rest of this shit…)
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THANKS EVERYBODY. YOUR FRIEND, VERN
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
CJ Holden on Fantastic Four (2005): “The best part of Story’s TOM & JERRY is indeed the animation and its dedication to show every animal in…” Jul 12, 06:27
Pacman2.0 on Fantastic Four (2005): “Story’s TOM & JERRY movie is kind of…I don’t want to say anything which indicates it’s in any way worth…” Jul 12, 04:39
CJ Holden on Fantastic Four (2005): “Yeah, the comedy (well, “comedy”) SHAFT was just baffling. I wonder if Sam Jackson was contractually bound to make it,…” Jul 12, 01:44
CJ Holden on Dark Water: “I totally confused this with SKELETON KEY for some reason. Am I the only one who laughed at the poster,…” Jul 12, 01:33
Glaive Robber on Dark Water: “I honestly think this is a GREAT movie, and I can recall such wonderful memories of it even though it’s…” Jul 11, 20:37
Glaive Robber on Fantastic Four (2005): “I kinda buy the arc of the Fantastic Four maybe not wanting to be who they were in the 2005…” Jul 11, 20:17
Rozar Smacco on Fantastic Four (2005): “I’m somewhat in a state of disbelief that burningambulance squandered all credibility at the expense of 2005’s Fantastic Four. Claiming…” Jul 11, 20:01
Mr. Majestyk on Fantastic Four (2005): ““Everybody knows the Fantastic Four are fantastic. What this movie postulates is…what if they weren’t?”” Jul 11, 14:40
Mr. Majestyk on Dark Water: “I used to work in Long Island City across the street from the gas plant, which is a barren wasteland…” Jul 11, 14:31
renfield on Fantastic Four (2005): “What annoyed me about this, and also about the incomparably superior Spider Man 2, is the focus on the hero…” Jul 11, 14:22
VERN on Fantastic Four (2005): “Thanks PJ, I’m sure I saw that teaser at the time but I don’t remember it. Funny shit.” Jul 11, 13:46
emteem on M3gan 2.0: “Personally, I loved every stupid fucking moment of this fucking stupid movie. I really hope it makes enough at home…” Jul 11, 12:44
Aktion Figure on Fantastic Four (2005): “Oh, and the first thing that happens after Bruce is teleported to this office building? He falls down an elevator…” Jul 11, 09:07
Aktion Figure on Fantastic Four (2005): “Thanks for that PJ. I really, truly needed a sensible chuckle today. That was like the opening video of a…” Jul 11, 08:58
PJ Audenzia on Fantastic Four (2005): “Your account of the Debbie situation made me laugh a lot. A moment I really enjoy is when Ben, a…” Jul 11, 07:44
Like its part 1, THE COLLECTOR (2009), I can’t say that the 2012 sequel THE COLLECTION is any great shakes. But man, it starts out with a bang.
Dito Montiel is a director I’ve kept an eye on since I saw his underground fighting movie 
“Well, I didn’t think it was terrible or anything.”
