"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

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…)

August 6th, 2025 | 11 Comments »

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).

SUMMER 2005It’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…)

August 4th, 2025 | 16 Comments »

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.

SUMMER 2005But 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…)

August 1st, 2025 | 14 Comments »

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…)

July 31st, 2025 | 8 Comments »

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.

SUMMER 2005It 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…)

July 29th, 2025 | 10 Comments »

The Devil’s Rejects (20th anniversary revisit)

SUMMER 2005July 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…)

July 23rd, 2025 | 16 Comments »

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!

SUMMER 2005For 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…)

July 21st, 2025 | 26 Comments »

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

July 15, 2005

I’d like to say Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY plays better now than it did then, but for me it’s the reverse. I can guess based on some costumes I saw when I went to see the 2023 movie WONKA that there are people who grew up on this one and still like it, but for people my age I felt alone in believing it even had some good qualities. It was disappointing because I had faith that Depp would have an interesting take on Wonka, and that faith was not rewarded. But I could point to many things I liked about it, so I felt a little protective when people said it was worthless.

SUMMER 2005I’m partial to both the 1964 book by Roald Dahl (or at least the version of it that existed in the ‘80s) and the 1971 film by Mel Stuart starring Gene Wilder. After a teacher read the book to us in class I decided Dahl was my favorite author – I read James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Danny the Champion of the World, The Twits, George’s Marvelous Medicine, The BFG, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, I’m not sure what else. I remember waiting what seemed like forever for The Witches on inter-library loan, and it was worth it. His dark sense of humor really appealed to me. His descriptions of awful people next to those scratchy Quentin Blake drawings. When I found out he wrote “Lamb to the Slaughter” (the short story turned into the Alfred Hitchcock episode about the woman who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb) I was amazed. When I found out he had a book for adults called Switch Bitch I giggled. (But I never read that one.) (read the rest of this shit…)

July 18th, 2025 | 16 Comments »

Superman (2025)

If you’ve had your fill of comic book movies that’s between you and your Zod, but SUPERMAN (2025) is a particularly good one. It’s literally and figuratively colorful, it’s perfectly cast, it’s joyously funny and silly, but it deeply and sincerely loves its characters, especially its cornball hero and his do-gooder point-of-view. Also it heavily features cinema’s first great super hero pet. Being the rare one of these with a writer/director (James Gunn, SLITHER), not to mention the advantage of being the official kick off to a new do-over DC Comics (Detective Comics Comics) cinematic universe, it has a very specific setting, tone and visual style. In that sense it reminds me of what I liked about comic book movies in the ‘90s, but otherwise it feels very modern.

I personally believe that there’s more than one way to make a good movie, so I will not be disavowing Zack Snyder’s MAN OF STEEL, but I like that this one takes the exact opposite approach. Snyder’s version emphasized the awe – it was about a god-like being coming to a quasi-realistic earth, and how humanity reacts. We witnessed him as mortals, looking up trying to catch a shaky glimpse of him in the sky. Gunn gives us a world where “meta-humans” have been around for centuries, and Superman has been public for three years, so people are used to it. Right off the bat Gunn and director of photography Henry Braham (ROAD HOUSE remake) put the camera steady on Superman’s face when he flies, like we’re right there with him. He’s one of us. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 16th, 2025 | 43 Comments »

Wedding Crashers (20 years later rematch)

July 15, 2005

WEDDING CRASHERS is kinda like an old nemesis of mine. I reviewed it very negatively on The Ain’t It Cool News twenty years ago and though mostly people believed me there were some talkbackers who also saw it in preview screenings who got kinda mad at me. It wasn’t as controversial as my THE TRANSFORMERS pan or anything but I was applying a similar (in retrospect overblown) destructive fury to it – the headline was “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS.” It was being hailed as a new comedy benchmark, or a return to the raunchy R-rated comedy, but I swore it would fade instantly. I made a challenge to one guy to meet back in two years and see if he still considered it a “comedic gem.” 

SUMMER 2005If we had followed through on that bet I’m sure I would’ve lost. Its popularity lasted at least five years, which I can clock by realizing in hindsight that this movie is the reason my wife’s younger cousins asked us to play “Shout” by The Isley Brothers at our wedding. But by then THE HANGOVER had come out and I think it quickly replaced WEDDING CRASHERS as the bro comedy of record (no judgment for that – I’d say it’s a funnier movie). (read the rest of this shit…)

July 14th, 2025 | 37 Comments »

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