WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 02/03/08

Second Hand Lions was a wonderful film and a joy to watch. All of the characters were very colorful and the actors breathed them full of life.

That was a modern fantasy done right too. I loved the fairy-tale like stories of the great uncles’ pursuits in their younger days, as well as the slow reveal of where the lines of truth and fiction blended. It reminded me a lot of Big Fish which was another movie I adored. I definitely recommend both of those films.

Originally Written 02/03/08

I had a lot of problems with The Astronaut Farmer. I could’ve cut it some slack if it was more of a modern fantasy or fairy tale, but it had too many real and serious moments to be taken as such. It’s one thing to follow your dreams, but when you put your family at serious risk, then it’s just selfish.

I wanted to bitch slap Billy Bob Thornton’s character several times in the movie. His wife was also too blandly and blindly supportive of him for most of the film. Second, there’s a deus ex machina which occurs to wipe out all of the family’s financial trouble, and glosses over that source of strife. So overall I found the mood and theme of the story very unbelievable and aggravating and more than a little troubling.

Originally Written 02/03/08

I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield, after missing it for the past couple of weeks due to various circumstances. I saw it with my friend Paul on Friday night. It was pretty cool. It’s definitely Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project and it has some of the problems that the original Blair Witch did as well. The camera work does get shaky at times. I never got dizzy, but there were a few spots where I was ready for it to stabilize.

Also, it had the same trouble with stupid characters doing stupid things, but that’s also kind of the charm of these films. I was getting a little tired of the party banter in the beginning and the monster could’ve showed up a few minutes early. However, once the action got going, I thought the characters worked well. I was chuckling at them at times, but that’s good.

The drama was bare-bones and there wasn’t any character development, but you can’t have that in this type of movie. I also thought the mechanisms they used to drive the drama were fairly effective. Having the footage from an earlier tape the camera was recording over pop into the movie from time to time was an obvious trick, but I liked it.

I liked the first person POV of the camera too. It’s been likened to various video games, which I think is a good analogy. It’s a fantastic and fun ride and I was laughing with joy several times throughout the movie. The action and pacing was quite good and everything worked pretty well.

I really liked the shots of news footage that was used in a few spots of the movie too, which gave just enough needed information, but not heavy exposition to slow it down. I was worried that they wouldn’t show enough of the monster, but there were several nice shots and scenes with monsters that were really cool.

So it wasn’t high art, but it’s a really neat experiment and a successful one at that. It was also just plain fun. I had a good time watching it. Heh, my friend Paul and I had a good laugh when the Statue of Liberty loses its head. “You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!”

Written 11/30/07

I went to see The Mist tonight. I’d heard some good things about it, so I was really interested in checking it out. It was a mixed bag, but fairly decent. Director’s have a tough time bringing Stephen King’s stories to the screen, in part because he can tell a tale in such a way that makes a silly concept believable, whereas in a movie it might not fly.

The Mist is a good mix of horror as well as atmosphere. It has some nice monsters, but also a good bit of the end-of-the-world drama where a small group of people watch society fall apart. It’s the same type of society in a microcosm setting that I like about good zombie movies. Things started out really well. The characters were arch-types but they were nuanced and played off one another well, that is except for the protagonist of the fundamentalist nut job. She was a cardboard figured who was really grating.

Unfortunately, from what I remember of the story, she was the same way in the novella. Once again Stephen Kings shows he has an axe to grind against religion, or at least a certain interpretation of it. He’s done that in several other stories as well. The character could have worked as an even-handed critique of the dangers of an over-zealous interpretation of religion, if only she’d been given some nuance like the other characters, but she was too much a caricature. It’s odd, most of the film-adaptations of King’s films fail because they didn’t translate his stories well enough, but here I think they translated it a little too well. They had the story warts and all, and I think a little bit of depth to that plot would have worked much better.

The monsters were pretty cool and the scenes with them were great fun. They were a little cartoony in their design for a couple of the beasts, such as the faces of the giant spiders, but I think it worked well. It’s not as good as that film, but I don’t think I’ve seen a monster film that’s been as fun since Pitch Black. There were lots of different beasties to enjoy here.

So the first two-thirds of the film were great, but it fell apart in the last act. There was the heavy-handed twisted-religion angle, and also the ending annoyed me. I was worried about that, since I remembered the story ended very ambiguously and I didn’t think they’d let that happen in a mainstream film.

I was impressed with the ending at first, since it was a little different but very hard-core. If they’d ended it there, that would have been fine, but then they had to tack a stupid Hollywood ending onto it. It’s not as egregious as the one in A.I., but I still wanted to slap the director for it. It got a couple of points for its irony, but lost even more for how it de-constructed and went against the whole mood of the story.

Oh well, I still liked enough of the film to find it enjoyable. It’s definitely flawed, but it’s a good ride. If you don’t see it in the theater, it’s definitely a good rental. I’d give it 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5.

Originally Written 11/13/07

I braved 30 Days of Night with a friend this evening. We knew it had mixed reviews, but we were curious about it and it looked like it could be a fun goofy movie. Wrong! Sometimes bad is bad. It wasn’t fun bad, it was boring and stupid bad. It was wretched!

It started out with some promise and had a bit of style to it. Then it went to hell pretty quickly. The director confused action and suspense with quick edits and shaky cameras so you couldn’t see what was happening, and freaking loud sounds. I know they wanted to make it gritty and dark, but the vampires were just ugly thugs and the violence was pointless and artless. After a couple of shots of bloody-faced pseudo-philosophy spouting Russian Eurotrash, I was immensely tired of them. And quit screeching already, you want to scare me, not annoy me to death. I did find the flicker of amusement at seeing the likeness of Tor Johnson in the mix though.

The movie was full of pointless scenes, confusing exposition, inconsistencies and plot-holes. I wasn’t expecting anything great, but it wasn’t even entertaining. I think the movie had about five minutes of enjoyment for me. There was one fun and unintentionally goofy scene where one of the guys chases after the vampires with a giant construction truck, which conveniently had a tar-chewing chainsaw mounted on the front. Now that was cool, but sadly it didn’t last and we were back to the same old crap again.

I haven’t hated a film this much in some time. It’s been awhile since I’ve left the theater annoyed and borderline angry. Heh, I guess we had it coming and at least we had some fun kvetching at how crappy it was afterwards. Man, it’s like Underworld, but not as entertaining or good; actually that film is a masterpiece compared to this turd. Now there’s a warning for you!