Movie Update 31

Crank: High Voltage


Remember when I said that the original Crank was actually less over the top and insane than it advertised itself as? This sequel, which brings back most of the significant characters in some way and attempts to escalate on everything the first movie did, corrects that issue. Instead of having to keep his heart rate up by doing things like getting into fights and having sex with Amy Smart, Jason Statham's heart has been replaced with an artificial one and he must keep its battery charged by doing things like electrocuting himself and having sex with Amy Smart (because it generates static electricity through friction, obviously). There's a lot more violence and nudity and general zaniness in this movie, so it succeeds at surpassing the first movie in that way. It does have a different problem though, which again prevented me from really liking the movie - it just seemed too mean-spirited. People don't just get hit in the nuts, their genitals get destroyed. A man is forced to punish himself for messing up by graphically cutting off his own nipples. Just lots of messed up stuff like that, and I thought it was usually more gross than entertaining. Otherwise, it's as kinetic and crazy as advertised, with a few moments of inspired originality.

Hoosiers


Hoosiers is as predictable an underdog sports story as you're ever likely to encounter. Gene Hackman comes to a small Indiana town to become the high school basketball coach, and he struggles to gain the acceptance of the locals before molding the team into an unlikely winner, more successful than they've ever been before. Dennis Hopper plays the father of one of the players, a drunk and embarrassment to the town who actually knows a lot about the sport. Barbara Hershey is a teacher at the school who questions Hackman's methods but eventually warms up to him. There's a kid who's supremely talented but unwilling to play, and a bunch of ignoramuses who have it out for the interloper. Though it's nothing you haven't seen a bunch of times, Hoosiers is still a charming and well-executed version of that formula. The acting is solid, and the basketball scenes are authentic and exciting. It was a bit weird for the only black people in the movie to appear at the end as players for the big bad final opponent (the movie takes place in the 50s), but otherwise there's not much to really hold against the movie. Pretty likable stuff.

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming


A weird mix of comedy and politics, The Russians Are Coming tells the story of a Soviet submarine crew that accidentally runs aground on an American island and attempts to get back in the water without causing an international incident. Unfortunately, they run into difficulties, and things are exacerbated by the locals who are alarmist about the threat and quick to gossip. Things almost totally boil over in a remarkably tension-filled stand-off before the film remembers it's a comedy and deflates it in a pretty cheesy, feel-good way. It's a likable movie, with some frustrating side characters and maybe too long a running time but not much else to complain about. The best part is probably Alan Arkin's lead performance as one of the Russian crew members, who doesn't actually get a ton of dialogue but when he does always manages to make a lot out of very little. I'm honestly not totally sure what it was trying to accomplish, but it's a pretty good movie.

Tom Jones


There's something about 18th century England that is just inherently interesting to me. The British accents, the horrible class inequality, the technology still stuck in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, it's just... I don't know. Interesting. Tom Jones is based on a serialized novel published during that period, and features Albert Finney playing a bastard who's been raised in kind society and grown up to be a womanizer, well-liked by many but hated by some. The movie actually won Best Picture, which seems kind of strange, but I guess movies could do that back then without being dramas about serious issues or mediocre. Wow that was pretty harsh, I've actually really liked most of the recent winners of that award. Oh well, whatever. Tom Jones is funny, has an intriguing little plot about the secrets people sometimes keep, and has some nice performances. It also frequently features characters talking to or just looking at the camera, which somehow never gets old. And now that the movie has expired from Netflix streaming, the site doesn't have it at all. What's up with that, Netflix?

Movie Update 19

I feel like I should be building these posts around common themes, so I can give them more interesting titles than just a number, but right now the movies I watch are dictated by what's on my carefully curated list and what's about to expire from streaming. So... whatever.

Dead Alive


This was part of an impromptu horror marathon I had last Saturday when a bunch of crap was about to disappear. It's one of Peter Jackson's earliest movies, before he had started working in Hollywood, and it's also possibly the most disgusting movie I've ever seen. There's an obvious campiness and sense of humor to the extremely gory violence, so it isn't very difficult to watch, but it's still pretty darn gross. Leaking fluids, strange creatures, and dozens of people getting chopped and torn to bits. It's basically a really kooky zombie movie, except the plague is caused by a weird rat/monkey thing, and they're almost impossible to kill short of chopping them into tiny pieces. There's no real logic to it, they can pretty much do whatever the insane script calls for. Very fun, very gross movie.

Ed Wood


A sort of biopic about the career of one of Hollywood's most infamous directors, from around when he meets the great Bela Lugosi to the completion of Plan 9 from Outer Space, his most infamous film and maybe the worst ever made. Being a Tim Burton movie, it's not just a standard biopic, with a weird sense of humor reflective of the kind of mind that might produce crap like Plan 9. It's a very sympathetic story, showing Wood as a bright, friendly, enthusiastic man who just happens to make garbage. Johnny Depp is very good  as Wood, though Martin Landau sort of steals the show, winning an Oscar for playing the morphine-abusing, vulgar, theatrical Lugosi. The rest of the cast is solid too, and the black and white cinematography is generally excellent. And I loved how the film's moment of triumph is centered around the filming of one of the worst things to ever appear on a screen.

Kicking and Screaming


A funny but also thoughtful comedy by Noah Baumbach, who's known by many as a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson, and watching it you can envision how that partnership might have started. I found it incredibly easy to relate to the movie's main characters, but I expect that's true of most people who ever graduated from college and weren't sure what to do next. The four friends all stay together in town, unable to move on from their experiences for whatever reason. We get a really good idea of why they're friends in the first place, but also what might cause that friendship to end. Really, they're all just scared to get started on that whole real life thing, which I'm not sure anyone was fully prepared for. Solid acting, really good story, and it's just a funny movie, too.

Moonstruck


This is the kind of movie people talk about when they use words like "delightful". Moonstruck is kind of an oddball romantic comedy, starring Cher in a remarkably natural performance for someone I don't really think of as an actor as a widow who decides to settle for remarriage with someone she doesn't really love. Things change when she meets her future husband's brother, a one handed baker played by a charmingly unhinged Nicolas Cage. The two have nice chemistry, and things happen about the way you might expect. Also, Cher's dad is having an affair, and her mom suspects it but is too nice to make it into a tragedy. Olympia Dukakis does a really nice job with the part, and both women won Oscars for their work. The movie's sense of humor is definitely off-beat in an unexpected and likable way, and while nothing in the film is groundbreaking, it's pleasant to watch all the same.

Poltergeist

A horror film for the whole family, directed by Tobe Hooper and written and possibly actually directed by Steven Spielberg. Ignoring the debate over who really had creative control of this movie (I'm guessing the true answer involves the word "both"), it's a pretty decent little paranormal movie. A family gets terrorized by ghosts that can move furniture and suck people into another dimension filled with goo. There's a bit of humor, but it's mostly the kind of horror movie intended to elicit a few jumps without being truly terrible or horrifying. Not that most kids probably wouldn't be freaked out by it. The eventual explanation for what's going on is pretty unsatisfactory, but the climax itself is exciting enough. There are a few ideas here worth checking out, especially if you like a little jolt but don't want to see anything truly traumatic.

Movie Update 14

I really liked all of these except for one. See if you can guess without reading the capsules!

All the President's Men


Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story. The film was only released a couple years after Nixon resigned, and it's fascinating to see a film linked so closely to a historical event. Parts of it would be unbelievable if it wasn't a true story, and it sheds a light on just how crazy the scandal was. The two leads are great, their boss also does a fine job, and it's just an extremely well-put together film. My only real disappointment is that they don't cover as much of the timeline as I would have liked, but at some point they just ran out of time. It's still over two hours.

Bonnie and Clyde

I have to think this is one of the most important films in cinema history when it comes to the depiction of violence. It's quite a bloody movie, and though The Wild Bunch holds the title as the king of violent mainstream 60s movies, it didn't come out until two years later. Bonnie and Clyde is also just a good movie, turning another true story into an interesting plot and resting on great performances by a young Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Gene Hackman also has a nice little role as Clyde's older brother. There were a few spots that felt a bit aimless, but the film lays a blueprint for movies about heists and criminals that would be copied for decades.

In the Heat of the Night


This movie actually beat Bonnie and Clyde for Best Picture at the Oscars, and it was an odd coincidence that I saw them on the same day. Night is also an important film, mostly for its depiction of racism. Sidney Poitier is a Philadelphian homicide detective who gets pulled into a murder investigation in a sleepy southern town after being essentially arrested for the crime of being black. He butts heads with the chief, played by Rod Steiger, who won Best Actor. They eventually try to put their differences aside in order to solve the crime. Night is notable for having real things to say about race while still managing to just be a really good crime movie. Some of the scenes involving race almost border on parody now, but things are still bad enough now in some cases that I guess it's mostly believable for an uneducated, isolated town over forty years ago. Another well acted, solid film.

Intolerance


I usually manage to find something good in these old movies even if the general act of watching them isn't particularly pleasant, but if there's one area where I sometimes struggle with that, it's silent dramas. I didn't like D.W. Griffith's Way Down East, and if anything his earlier Intolerance is even more of a struggle. It's over three hours long, and doesn't really have what I'd call a plot. It has four story threads from four different periods in history, showing the bad things that happen when people can't get along. It's sort of a response to how people reacted to Birth of a Nation (which I still have to see), and feels more like a very long history lesson acted out by mimes than a movie. I can understand how it was significant at the time, and how huge of a production it was. But I just didn't really like watching it at all.