Conan the Musical!

For you Conan the Barbarian fans, here's Conan the Musical. Thank you, Internet, I love you:

Splice (2010)

Tagline: The future is born.

Curiosity: Vincenzo Natali directed the cult sci-fi hit Cube and one of the shorts for Paris je t’aime. Dude’s credit is good with me.

Plot: Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Avonlea’s Sarah Polley holy crap) are scientists who do sciencey things, like genetically engineer new animals so they can harvest their proteins for a pharmaceutical company. When the lovers try to take their experiments to the next stage – using human DNA – the higher ups forbid it. They do it anyway, though, and create Dren (Delphine Chanéac), a human/kangaroo/frogs/whatever else hybrid. And for reasons never explained, she has a poison stinger tail! Keeping Dren a secret gets harder as she grows up, especially when she starts making googly eyes towards Clive.

Thoughts: I’m just drop a big ol’ spoiler here in all caps: INTERSPECIES EROTICA. Spliced has elements of Alien, Species, The Fly, and of course Frankenstein (ALSO, Jurassic Park, but I can’t tell you why). Because it recalls so many classics, Natali overreaches in his attempt to do something original. Sometimes that works, like when he throws some comedy into the sci-fi/horror blend. Sometimes that results in his characters doing things that are really fucking gross and uncharacteristic, like when they engage in INTERSPECIES EROTICA.

I mean, I like the principle cast. Brody is good, if a little too idiosyncratically New York-y compared to all the Canadians. Polley displays incredible range¸ switching from cold and clinical to loving and motherly (and vice-versa) in seconds (Also, she was on Avonlea! That show was so much more family-friendly than this!).

But about halfway through, the movie starts to go places I don’t want to visit. I was raised Catholic, man; I can’t deal with INTERSPECIES EROTICA. My girlfriend and I actually walked out after a thoroughly disturbing scene. I’d write about it, but it’s like the second-to-last scene. We really should have left sooner. We could have been fighting dinosaurs in Jurassic Park III in the arcade!

Reflection: INTERSPECIES EROTICA.

Straight to Hell (1987)

Tagline: A story of blood, money, guns, coffee, and sexual tension.

Curiosity: It stars Joe Strummer. ’Nuff said.

Plot: When three hitmen (Strummer, Sy Richardson, and Dick Rude) and their tagalong lady friend (Courtney Love. I know, right?) miss their mark, they dodge their boss’ wrath (Jim Jarmusch) by robbing a bank and fleeing to Mexico. There, they fall in with a band of coffee-loving degenerates (The Pogues… with sombreros?). But with fingers always near triggers, it’s hard for anybody to trust a body.

Thoughts: Given its cast, I wish Straight to Hell was a lot better. Strummer, Love (pre-Hole), Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, and The Pogues all turn in performances (Grace Jones too, but we know how I feel about her). But without a coherent script, it’s an awfully painful viewing experience.

Straight to Hell was completed in about four weeks. I mean the entire thing, from conception to post-production, took about a month. That’s not a good sign, and whole chunks of superfluous and/or badly recorded scenes attest to the ramshackle production. This movie could only appeal to devoted fans of Strummer and/or writer/director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy), and even then it’s not a sure thing. Hole fans are going to be let down by a screeaaaaaaacccchhhyyyyyy performance by Love.

Yet I intermittently appreciated the film. When it bothers to be funny, Straight to Hell’s absurdities are actually pretty great, from the ridiculously profanity-free dialogue to the bad guys’ addiction to… coffee. It’s so much sillier than heroine or cocaine, which I suppose was the point. Strummer’s actually not half-bad here, although Richardson is the one who consistently delivers the best takes (That he recalls Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction is a nice plus). The best thing I can say about Straight to Hell is that it made me feel OK with checking out Strummer’s performance in Mystery Train and, just maybe, Cox’s Hell follow-up, Walker.

Reflection: No, seriously, The Pogues are Mexican banditos. Really.

Book of Eli (2010)

Tagline: Some will kill to have it. He will kill to protect it.

Curiosity: Denzel Washington fights Gary Oldman over the Bible, only instead of using words, they use guns and swords. Also this is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Plot: Thirty years after nuclear war destroyed the world, Eli (Washington) is on a mission to protect what might be the last known copy of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. A mass book burning after the war has essentially reset history - a whole generation of people has grown up without an understanding of religion or science. There is no context. When local entrepreneur Carnegie (Oldman) learns about Eli, he does everything in his power to obtain the book. What follows is a battle of wills with some cool fight scenes and hammy dialogue about if religion should be used to instill faith or obedience.

Thoughts: Eli is better than I would have guessed. I’ll give it that. Directors/brothers Albert and Allen Hughes have a thin filmography, but their visual sense is pretty got-damn great. Nine Inch Nails/How to Destroy Angels collaborator Atticus Ross provides excellently NIN-ish music. The fight scenes are brutal yet economical – Washington moves with fluid movements. Sometimes that gets a little over the top, like when he starts plugging guys off buildings without even really aiming, but overall it looks cool. Of course, Washington makes everything look good. Oldman gets a little ridiculous, but the role kind of demands he do so.

Less successful is costar Mila Kunis. Just about every review I’ve read says she was miscast, and my girlfriend and I agree. Loved her in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but watching her act next to Washington and Oldman is just awkward. She’s just not on their dramatic level yet.

Kunis doesn’t sink the movie, though. There are plenty of issues with the film – the story is sometimes a little undercooked, especially near the end – but nothing truly ruins Eli. It’s a solid post-apocalypse movie.

Reflection: Now I feel guilty about not renting The Road. The book is so good! I’m afraid!

Big Fan (2009)

Tagline: Eagles suck! [Note: This is not actually the tagline.]

Curiosity: It’s my boy Patton Oswalt. I have to support him. And I liked – but didn’t love – The Wrestler, which writer/director Robert D. Siegel wrote.

Plot: Paul (Oswalt) is generally thought of as a loser by his family. A parking lot attendant, his life revolves around worshiping the New York Giants. He spends his days working on speeches that he later passes off as spontaneous missives for sports talk radio and his nights calling those stations in. His only friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan), is there for it all, including a case of miscommunication that gets Paul beaten up by his favorite player, star quarterback Quantrell Bishop (Johnathan Hamm). When the beating gets Bishop suspended from the season, Paul is torn between receiving the damages and care he deserves and keeping silent so the Giants can play well, much to his family’s chagrin.

Thoughts: It wasn’t until the very end that I realized the filmmakers were perhaps fond of Paul. Everything leading up to that felt a little condescending, so while the ending validates the character and film, it doesn’t make Big Fan anymore than a one time viewing experience for me. It is intentionally bad – Oswalt knowingly delivers poor performances to mirror Paul’s own terrible acting, Siegel gives the character lackluster dialogue because Paul would never be able to say anything approaching poetry. It serves a point, but that point does not in turn justify the entire experience.

Big Fan takes a while to get, and in doing so, is a tedious film. It looks like it was done on the cheap too – some takes feel like decisions of necessity, not taste, wile the cinematography is grainy and wanting. The story sets out some interesting plot points but never finishes them, like the fate of Bishop or the migraines Paul develops after his beating. Just as in The Wrestler, Siegel seems reluctant to resolve his story, making Big Fan that much more of a drag: A lot of this stuff goes nowhere, and even the turning points that show up feel forced (Paul’s beating, in particular, could have used more build-up. I’m surprised Bishop hadn’t been caught sooner for assault, considering how quickly he flies at the titular big fan). But at least Paul turns out to be a good guy. Misguided and creepy, but he’s alright.

Reflection: Why the hell have I been watching all these sports movies lately?

Legion (2010)

Tagline: When the last angel falls, the fight for mankind begins.

Curiosity: Baby girl picked this one out. She told me she only wanted to see it for Paul Bettany’s abs, even though the movie poster to the right is thoroughly manipulated.

Plot: God is done with people’s bullshit, so he sends all the cherubim and seraphim to kill them. The archangel Michael (Bettany) think that’s a dick move, so he pulls a Kyle Reese and helps this preggers lady (Adrianne Palicki) save her baby so he can grow up to redeem mankind. But the angels have the same powers as the agents in The Matrix and fuck shit up! They attack the good guys with an ice cream man and an old lady!

Sadly, the two best characters (Charles S. Dutton, Alien³, and, weirdly enough, freaking Tyrese Gibson) don’t survive. But man does waitress lady smoke a shit ton of cigarettes in an effort to make her unborn child’s life difficult.

Thoughts: Well, now I know what the first two Prophecy movies would look like if they thoroughly cribbed plot points from the first two Terminator movies. Legion is too self-serious and unimaginative to function well as B-movie fare, and it mangles Christianity enough to be sacrilegious. Blasphemy hasn’t been this boring since the last Marilyn Manson record.

But I don’t necessarily care that the movie gets the Bible wrong. I’m more frustrated by simplistic filmmaking. Director/co-writer Scott Stewart often nickels and dimes his scenes to save time and money, resulting in action sequences that lack punch and dialogue exchanges that don’t feel fully fleshed out. Several times, my friends and I felt like there was a line or two missing, as if the characters were responding to dialogue that only they could hear. Same could be said for the story – Stewart often skips a couple plot points to advance the story without actually advancing it.

That scene with the possessed grandma was cool though. And Tyrese and Dutton are both so awesome. I wish this movie was about two black guys who kick the shit out angels, instead of the story of white trash screaming all the time. Michael Jai White, please correct this mistake.

Reflection: After a while, we just started quoting The Terminator furiously, and it was better than the real dialogue. Poop on this movie.

D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996)

Tagline: No Fear. No Limits. No Brakes. Just Ducks.

Curiosity: This film made me so got-damn angry when I was a kid. SO. ANGRY.

Plot: Charlie (Joshua Jackson) and some of the other Ducks are awarded full scholarships to the prestigious Eden Hall Academy (yeah, even the ones who don’t live in Minnesota). Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez), meanwhile, has accepted a job with the Junior Goodwill Games, marking the first time in four years that the Ducks will have to work with a new coach. Coach Ted Orion (Jeffrey Nordling) is kind of a dick – harsh but fair. The Ducks refuse to take any of his criticisms, though, especially once the varsity hockey team starts a war with them.

Growing up is a bitch.

Thoughts: While I certainly didn’t feel this way at the time of its release, I prefer D3 to D2. D2 was all about spectacle without realism, where D3 is about growing up, accepting change, and learning how to play good defense. The film centers on Charlie, and he is clearly the stand-in for Mighty Ducks fans everywhere. Of course Charlie would freak out when Bombay moved away. So did I. Of course he would lose his shit when Hans (Joss Ackland) died. So did I. Of course he’d wanna make out the metal-loving, politically active Linda (Margot Finley). She inexplicably likes Pantera!

D3 isn’t a perfect movie. It’s heavily reliant on voiceovers (the laziest form of storytelling in movies). It’s not a particularly funny movie. In trying to clean up D2’s mess, it has to make certain allowances, like having the entire team move to Minnesota to go to high school in order to further the characters. Most of D2’s lamest elements (the duck call, knuckle puck, that fucking cowboy) are either toned down or removed altogether in favor of a slobs vs. snobs story.

What really matters is the film’s main ideas about what it means to grow up. Friends will come and go. They’ll move away. They’ll die. They’ll fade away. But you have to hold on to what they meant to you in the moments when you were together, and in that sense they’re still alive and present. Let go, but hold on to what you need.

Reflection: HANS! HANS NO!

D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)

Tagline: The puck stops here.

Curiosity: I loved D2 just as much as the original Ducks movie back in the day. Surely this one holds up too…?

Plot: Picking up right about where the original left off, Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) leaves Minneapolis for a chance as a hockey player. He’s about to enter the NHL when he blows his knee out at a minor league game. Back home, he hooks up with Jan (Jan Rubes), brother of sports store owner Hans from the original film, and settles into a life of shilling athletic equipment when OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE he becomes coach of the U.S. hockey team for the Junior Goodwill Games. He rounds up some of the old ducks, scores some new ones, and takes on the world.

And by “world,” I just mean Iceland. Evil, evil Iceland.

Thoughts: Oh. Oh wow. That’s not… that’s not how hockey works. At all. One of the things I like about The Mighty Ducks is its local scope. It could have been set anywhere, characters debate about whether or not “it’s just a game,” moral lessons are gleaned from believable actions. None of that happens in D2. It’s louder and shinier and the uniforms are a little bit cooler, but nothing makes sense. Characters use moves that would never possibly work in a real game. They do things that would totally get them penalized, like icing and hitting a guy in the chest with a hockey stick five or six times in a row. They focus on broad ethnic stereotypes, whereas the original only stereotyped inner city youths. There’s a big difference, boy-o. Also making super badass Fulton Reed (Elden Henson) a Grateful Dead fan just seems counterintuitive and/or lame as balls.

Still, the film is not without its highlights. Estevez is still pretty cool, even though it becomes clear that Bombay is incapable of being nice once he puts on a suit. It’s nice shorthand, but wow. Bombay + suit = total dick. Charlie (Joshua Jackson) is so dang cute and loveable. Otherwise, this one’s pretty stupid.

Reflection #1: I know it’s ignorant, but this movie is the reason why I can’t trust Icelanders. Not completely.

Reflection #2: It’s bullshit that Bombay uses a duck call to recruit the Ducks. He never used that hit in the first movie. You expect me to believe all of the kids would make the connection? Reed doesn’t even know when the U.S.A. was formed! Unbelievable!

The Mighty Ducks (1992)

Tagline: He’s never coached. They’ve never won. Together they’ll learn everything about winning!

Curiosity: For a certain generation, this is the most important sports movie of all time (followed by Air Bud, Angels in the Outfield, Rookie of the Year, and Space Jam. In that order. Happy Gilmore would be in there too if your mom wasn’t such a wet blanket about the language).

Plot: As a child, Gordon Bombay (Emilioooooooooooooooo Estevez) is super good at hockey, but he totally blows the state championship and grows up to be an alcoholic lawyer douche bag. When a cop pulls him over for dranking and driving, the entire city rallies to have him banned from practicing law. His boss, Mr. Ducksworth (Josef Sommer), talks him into community service. Now he’s got to coach a rag-tag team of misfits (Including Joshua Jackson, Wet Hot American Summmer’s Marguerite Moreau, The Adventures of Pete & Pete’s Danny Tamberelli, and mo-fuckin’ Aaron Schwartz from Heavyweights) to victory. But they’re so bumbling and angry! How can he reach these inner city youth?

SPOILER ALERT: He buys them nice things and tries to stop acting like such a dick all the time.

Thoughts: Fuck yes Mighty Ducks is still good. I had reservations going into the film – Estevez is such a wiener for the first half hour or so. It’s like Bad News Bears without the humor. But then the team starts to coalesce once Bombay realizes that sometimes the real winners are the ones who try to have fun and play fair. Moral lessons for everybody!

Some of the humor falls flat – Goldberg (Shaun Weiss) and Guy-Who-Isn’t-Screech (Guy-Who-Isn’t-Screech) are meant to provide wisecracks for the kiddies, but mostly they’re just two lame-ass kids who won’t shut the fuck up. The best kid is obviously Jackson, because he’s so sad and sensitive and he tries so dang hard to be good at hockey. Also he super wants Gordon to bone his mom (Heidi Kling). So there’s that.

The Mighty Ducks moves awfully quickly. I was surprised at some of the scenes’ brevity, which some cynics might dismiss as Ducks being a sports movie by the numbers. Those people suck pickled ass. My only real complaint is that the movie is set in Minnesota, yet nobody has a Midwestern accent. Also they should have used Prince and/or Husker Du more often in the soundtrack. Otherwise, it’s a great movie about flying straight. And not crippling your friends. And avoiding drugs. And getting your mom laid by Emilio Estevez.

Reflection #1: This movie is the reason I never trusted Lane Smith (the villainous Hawks coach Jack Reilly), even when he played Perry on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Reflection #2: Holy shit, that’s Danny Tamberelli!

Reflection #3: Holy shit, that’s Marguerite Moreau!

Reflection #4: Holy shit, Aaron Schwartz got wicked hot!

Reflection #5: I would like to submit that Johnny Tsunami is also one of the most important sports movies of all time.

The A-Team (2010)

Tagline: There is no Plan B.

Curiosity: It’s a remake… errrrrr, re-imagining of a popular TV series which I have never seen. Look, it has Liam Neeson, OK?

Plot: A crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team.

Thoughts: The A-Team, or, if you prefer, Yelling Explosions Forever, is better than it has any right to be. It’s by no means perfect, but compared to other TV-to-movie adaptations, it manages to get all the points right. Hannibal (Neeson) smokes cigars and loves it when plans come together. B.A. (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson) has a Mohawk and pities fools. The other two guys (Midnight Meat Train’s Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley) do whatever the hell they did on the show. And just like in the original program, the bad guys can’t shoot for shit.

The movie surrounding those things just isn’t quite as good. The special effects are often lacking, and it’s never good when a film that reportedly cost $110 million looks this cheap. The story often gets a bit convoluted for a movie that’s primarily concerned with explosions and male wish fulfillment. Product placement for Budweiser is obnoxiously prevalent (Raise your hand if you have traveled to Europe in search of a Bud. Anyone? Anyone?) And I’d criticize Jackon’s acting chops if I wasn’t pants-shittingly afraid of him beating my ass (OK here goes: Dude mumbles a lot). Scenes often come down to dudes screaming at each other. Sometimes it’s funny; something’s it’s grating. Overall, though, not the worst way to spend my Monday night.

Reflection: Yo, I’d make out with Bradley Cooper. That dude’s chest is scrumptious.

Command Performance (2009)

Tagline: Dying is easy. Rock ‘n’ roll is hard.

Curiosity: Dolph Lundgren is a rock ‘n’ roll drummer that fights terrorists!

Plot: Dolph Lundgren is a rock ‘n’ roll drummer that fights terrorists!

Also there are some other people who do some other things. But mostly it’s about Joe (Lundgren) and his quest to A) rock the balls off fans and B) save the Russian president (Hristo Shopov) from gettin’ killed dead. He gets a partner, Mikhail (Zahary Baharov) along the way, as well a creepy way too young love interest, pop sensation Venus (Melissa Smith).

Thoughts: Lundgren wrote, directed, and starred in this love letter to rock and/or roll, and I was pretty stoked to find out he can actually play drums (in addition to having a master’s degree chemical engineering and a third degree black belt. Did you know he won the European karate championship in 1980 and ’81? Did you know that he is, scientifically speaking, the dreamiest and the creamiest?). As always, dude is the tops. The music performed in the movie isn’t always good, but it isn’t meant to be either. For a direct-to-DVD flick, Command Performance boasts an awful lot of authentic, original music.

The film around him is a little by-the-numbers, though. It’s a little Russian Die Hard, but with less awesome stuff, perhaps due to a smaller budget. Still, Lundgren gets in some cool fight scenes, and even cedes the spotlight enough to Baharov that his character feels both real and important.

One thing that bothered me a bit, though: The sub-plot in which we learn how an average yet super sex rock star like Joe learned to beat the shit out of people is way, way more compelling than the main story. I vote Lundgren drafts a Command Performance prequel.

Reflection: I take it back. If I was in Venus’ place, I’d be so totally into Lundgren too.

Way of the Dragon (1972)

Tagline: MAN, CAN WE USE HIM NOW! Bruce Lee is back in the fantastic all new adventures of the Super Hero from “Enter the Dragon...” ..his last performance is his best!

Curiosity: Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris.

Plot: Chen Ching Chua (Nora Miao) knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Tang Lung (Bruce fuckin’ Lee) and asks him to help defend her restaurant from gangsters over yonder in Italy. Tang shows up and beats the gangsters up, down, and all around (except off, ’cause that would be a completely different movie). Annoyed that Tang is so dang good at kung fu fighting, the Mafia boss (John T. Benn) hires international karate masters to fight Tang. The strongest and best of these new arrivals is Colt (Chuck fuckin’ Norris). Can Tang take him down? Will he ever stop being scared by sexually aggressive Italian women? Will he take his shirt off and do that high pitched screaming thing?

[SPOILER ALERT: Yes, no, yes.]

Thoughts: At a trim 90 minutes (Give or take. Like pretty much all of Lee’s films, there are plenty of alternate cuts, ranging from 80 to 100 minutes or so), Way of the Dragon is a little more focused than Lee’s other films up to this point. This comes at a price, though. The characters and story are less developed. Tang shows up pretty much just because. The Mafia is obsessed with controlling a Chinese restaurant in Italy… just because. As always, though, these lacking elements are canceled out by the action.

Compared to Fist of Fury or The Big Boss, Way of the Dragon’s fight scenes are much more minimalist, often focusing on one-on-one combat and how the slightest movements – both intentionally and unintentionally – can determine a fight. One idea the film slips in is “no way as way.” Tang announces his moves as he performs them early in the film to intimidate his foes, but it also shows how the character is very much into routine. He can perform these moves without thinking because he’s practiced so much and they follow a preset pattern that his enemies can’t figure out. But when he comes up against someone just as skilled – Colt – Tang has to alternate his pattern and even use unconventional moves, like ripping off Colt’s chest hair, to gain the upper hand. It’s when Colt can’t similarly adapt that he begins to lose the fight. It’s a pretty long, brutal scene too, which justifies the movie around it.

Reflection: This was much more satisfying than the time Lee fought Jackie Chan in Enter the Dragon.

X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-1997)

Tagline: *SNIKT!*

Curiosity: I’ve been re-evaluating items from my childhood. X-Files doesn’t hold up so well now that I know there was no real ending in sight, but The Simpsons is much funnier now that I’m old enough to get all the jokes.

Plot: Professor Charles Xavier (Cedric Smith) runs a school… FOR MUTANTS! KIDS WITH SUPERPOWERS YEE-HAW! There are many obstacles against his best students, the X-Men. Humanity at large is pretty freaked out about mutants. Magneto (David Hemblen), another mutant with the power of magnetism, thinks that mutants should just kick the shit out of er’rybody, but the psychic Xavier thinks that’s kind of a dick move.

Also the characters represent any oppressed minority ever.

Except for furries. That shit’s gross.

Thoughts: Up until now, I’ve been a pretty good judge of which of my previous passions have held up and which have aged horribly (HORRIBLY!). But I’m not completely sure if I love X-Men because I was “the right age” for its original run, or if it’s just still a solid superhero cartoon.

There are numerous faults with the series. Compared to Bruce Timm’s run with DC’s animated shows (Batman, Superman, Justice League), X-Men looks terrible. The animation is choppy, cells are frequently colored incorrectly, and voices don’t always synch up with mouth movements. The first season ignored characters’ histories in the comics in favor of something more streamlined for Saturday morning shows, which only hampered the show later on. Cable (Lawrence Bayne), for example, started off in the show as a Rambo-esque cowboy, not a clone baby with psychic powers and an arm infected by a techno-organic virus from the future. Easier to explain initially, but the writers quickly retconned the new origin once they tried using him in future stories. The stories got more ambitious later on, to a fault (The “Phoenix” and “Dark Phoenix” sagas add up to nine freaking episodes… 11 if you count the two-part “Out of the Past” episodes which set up the “Phoenix Saga”). The final season is kind of a wash.

But there is so much good stuff crammed in. Exiles fans get the creation of Morph, a character killed in the pilot who proved so popular that the writers brought him back for a story arc that spanned the entire second season. The equality message is pretty strong, which is good for kids. And the characters are so dang awesome. Wolverine (Cal Dodd) gets all the love, and rightly so – dude kicks a lot of butt. Cyclops (Norm Spencer) gets in some pretty choice shots too, like when he takes out Mr. Sinister (Christopher Britton) in the second season finale. Taken as a whole, the series simplifies some of the comic book’s greatest storylines (“Days of Future Past,” “Dark Phoenix Saga,” “The Phalanx Covenant”) and allows a lot of popular characters (Nighcrawler, Cable, Colossus, etc.) to get their due. Ultimately, it was one of the greatest sci-fi shows of the ’90s, and I’m pretty stoked to finally own the series on DVD.

Reflection: HOW SWEET IS THIS THEME SONG?