"Room 237" Review

When is a documentary not a documentary? (No, not like when liars like Michael Moore or Al Gore release polemics and fairy tales with a “documentary” label.) A: When instead of, you know, documenting a subject but instead have a bunch of apparently crazy people wildly speculate as to the meaning of something, in this case Stanley Kubrick’s version of Stephen King’s The Shining, which gets some freaky interpretations in Room 237.

In case you're unaware of The Shining's plot, it's about Jack Nicholson going insane while working as a winter caretaker in a Colorado hotel with his wife and son. He's a novelist working on his latest book, but evil forces, redrum, all work and no play and here's Johnny! Well, if you think it's about evil spirits and a weird kid, you're totally wrong according to the nuts featured here. The Shining is about the Evil White Man genocide of the Injuns. No, wait, it's about the Holocaust. Hold on, it's about a minotaur! You're all wrong, it's Kubrick's confession that he faked the Moon landing!!! Oy vey.

Making the tinfoil-hatted speculation even more surreal is the use of footage from multiple Kubrick films beyond The Shining and other footage to illustrate the narration of the never-seen crackpots. The film opens with Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut looking at a club window which has posters for The Shining cleverly composited into the shot. My first reaction was, "How did they get all this footage cleared?" but as things got more removed from reality, that was the least of my worries. They all seem to believe that because Kubrick was so brilliant and obsessive with detail, there is no way that anything and everything on the screen is anything but a coded message they can't believe everyone else isn't seeing.

The basic problem, other than it's nothing but a collection of obsessive Rorschaching of the movie where every picture on a wall "proves" whatever nutty concept they've projected onto it, is that it stays long past its welcome, cramming perhaps 75 minutes of content into a 102-minute box. I've seen a lengthy thing online about the Moon landing theory which went way more in depth than what gets mentioned in Room 237 and it's too bad because it's better "reasoned" than the stuff about a German typewriter meaning Holocaust. The most-interesting segment involves the juxtapositions that occur when a copy of the movie is projected reversed (i.e. starting at the end) atop a forward-running copy. The snippets are intriguing, but mostly in the way playing Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz is.

Since movies - as with any art - can be open to interpretation, what's crazy about The Shining weirdos isn't that they're seeing something, but they've gone all the way down the rabbit hole elevating what are probably continuity errors into Rosetta Stones for their fevered imagination.

I've always read the ending of Ghost World, when Enid gets on the bus out of town, represents her committing suicide. (Go to the bottom for full explanation.) I've pitched this interpretation to several friends and no one agrees, but they acknowledge my reasoning isn't particularly kooky. The difference is that I'm not making a Federal case out of it like these shining happy people.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.





Throughout Ghost World there is a running bit where Enid (Thora Birch) encounters an old man sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. She tells him that the bus no longer runs through here, but he dismisses her saying she's wrong and one day she eventually sees the bench empty, the man gone. At the end of the movie, after pretty much thoroughly trashing her life and friendships, she packs a suitcase and goes to the bench. A bus comes along and she gets on it, riding out of town into the credits.

I've always thought the man's disappearance meant he'd died and her going to the bench and getting on the bus meant she killed herself. While putting this part together, I Googled and found a lot of people apparently share my interpretation, though the Wikipedia page reveals this: "Enid’s eventual fate in Ghost World is not explicitly shown; however, she does pack her bags and leave the city on a bus after her relationship with Rebecca ends. In a 2002 interview[5] Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff were asked if the ending of the film adaptation was a metaphor for suicide. Daniel replied "Yeah, it could be. It’s hard to figure out why people have that response. The first time I heard that I said, 'What? You’re out of your mind. What are you talking about?' But I’ve heard that hundreds of times."

Maybe his subconscious slipped it in and he can't see it, mang!

"Prisoners" Review

A veritable murderers row of Oscar-nominees - Hugh Jackman, Mario Bello, Terrance Howard, Viola Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal - plus Oscar-winner Melissa Leo star in the Oscar-baiting, but overlooked Prisoners.

Jackman and Bello are a Pennsylvanian couple who spend Thanksgiving with Howard and Davis. While the family relaxes after dinner, the young daughters of both couples go outside and disappear into thin air. While out walking with their older siblings (both families also have a teenager; son for Jackman, daughter for Howard), a creepy RV was spotted and is immediately suspected of being involved and is promptly spotted and its driver (Paul Dano) apprehended.

However, there is no forensic evidence of the girls inside the and Dano's character has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old. It doesn't seem possible that he was involved, so the police turn him loose over Jackman's objections and when Dano says something to Jackman on the way out, the latter decides to take matters into his own hands, abducting Dano and sequestering him in an abandoned building where he proceeds to cajole him into cooperating and by that I mean brutally beat and torture him to the great angst and consternation of Howard.

While the performances across the board are top-notch - forget his nomination for Les Miz; Jackman should've been nommed for The Fountain - and the cinematography by the ever-a-bridesmaid-never-an-Oscar-winner Roger Deakins (Skyfall, The Shawshank Redemption, 11 Coen Brothers movies!) is beautifully gloomy, there is something airless in the tension that director Denis Villeneuve spreads out over a 2-1/2 hour length which never feels slow as much as moving in place.

With all the time spent, we never really get inside the heads of most of the characters and their motivations. Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki (really, no one thought that post-Avengers that a different name might be appropriate?) has supposedly solved every case he's had, but misses a HUGE detail connecting a seemingly unrelated discovery to his case (that I spotted) until dramatic necessity allows him to connect those dots. A second suspect adds to the mystery, but ultimately matters nada. When all the pieces fall into place, it turns out the picture isn't as compelling as it was when half-assembled.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"Sellebrity" Review

Kicking off the New Year with Sellebrity, a documentary by celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur about the pernicious and symbiotic relationship celebrities have with the paparazzi who hunt them. Mazur is a A-list shooter and that allows him to get a good batch of AAA stars to sit for interviews including Jennifer Aniston, Elton John, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Kid Rock and Secretariat Jessica Parker as well as an assortment of paparazzi, publicists, magazine editors and others from this interconnected world.

While it's a fast-moving and fairly focused exploration of how the celebrity publicity racket has evolved (devolved) from tightly-controlled product from studios to anyone with a cell phone able to snap celebs 24/7, it doesn't really dig too deeply into how, if it's even possible, to break the cycle. When you see a small army of shooters aiming at SJP while she walks her son to school or the large armies staking out clubs and nail salons, it's hard to not sympathize and think things are out of hand and something needs to be done about it.

It really comes down to the public not buying the magazines and visiting the sites that traffic in the minutia of celebrity. No demand, no need for supply, and I'm speaking as someone who has sold "paparazzi" photos to major publications for some nice coin.

Score: 7/10. Watch it.



It's available on Amazon Instant Video, free for Prime members. I don't know if Netflix has it because CanIStream.it doesn't return any hits.

"Don Jon" Review

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has sure come far from being "the kid on 3rd Rock From The Sun" and he now adds "writer/director" to his CV with the impressive, but ultimately not-totally-satisfying Don Jon.

He also stars as the titular Jon, a stereotypical Jersey Shore-esque Italian-American Guido who likes to work out, hang with his bros, score with the hot ladies at the club and watch and jerk off to lots and lots and LOTS of online porn. You know, typical male guy stuff or something. His crank-yanking habit hits a snag when he starts dating Scarlett Johansson, who doesn't let him bed her immediately and who seems to be The One though she has some MAJOR problems with his looking at porn. (This isn't as crazy as it sounds. I once dated a girl who was appalled that 19-year-old me was a Playboy subscriber because she thought she should be enough for me.)At her urging (read: badgering), he starts to take a night class and cuts back on the porn (his real extramarital sex vs. porn wanking ratios are tracked via his confessions), but there's something wrong with how this is happening, so problems ensue.

There's a lot to like about Don Jon. JGL has a snappy eye and ear and the cinematography and editing are ace. However, there are some tonal issues which really threaten things late with the character played by Julianne Moore. She's set up sketchily and there is a detail about her that is too heavy (no, she's not fat) for the overall light tone of the rest of the film and frankly, what she teaches Jon seems rushed and too pat. I just didn't quite buy what she was supposed to represent; it's as if JGL wanted to end with a Deep Thought About Love when the previous 85% of the movie was of a different stripe.

That said, there are some astute observations, particularly about how rom-coms are the woman's version of pornography, presenting unrealistic images of what relationships are about. (I'm not going to spoil who the cast of Special Someone is but to say that the guy is sure getting around for wacky cameos.) ScarJo is also very good as a gum-cracking ball-breaker and it's interesting to see her play what is ultimately a beyatch. It's too bad that JGL totally passes on the appropriate comeback for their final scene; both my girlfriend and I agreed on what the line should've been.

Score: 7.5/10. Rent it.

"Runner Runner" Review

Runner Runner is one of those movies that isn't bad as much as inconsequentially not very good. Justin Timberlake stars as a Princeton business student who attempts to make his tuition bill - which apparently is $60,000 in one lump due - by playing online poker, only to lose despite the odds. He discovers he was cheated by the site and decides to go to Costa Rica to confront the elusive operator (Ben Affleck) whom he meets rather easily and is immediately ushered into the inner circle of money and more money. Unfortunately, there's an FBI agent (a snappy Anthony Mackie) leaning on him to help bust Affleck, problems with his gambling addict father, the hot woman (Gemma Arterton) he works with who may be Affleck's squeeze, too, and corrupt local officials demanding a bigger cut of the action.

And that's pretty much it and you can probably guess how the major story beats play out. It's a short 90-minutes long and that brevity comes at the expense of anything like deep characterizations, understandable motivations, or logical schemes and counter-schemes. Everything just sort of happens without much impact. Timberlake is OK but I was looking at Affleck with an eye as to how he's going to play Batman in the Man of Steel sequel. (He's definitely got the chin.) There's just not enough there there to get involved with or offended by.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Elysium" Review

Neill Blomkamp's 2009 feature debut, District 9, would've garnered my vote for Best Picture out the Academy Awards nominees that year. It was a sharp sci-fi tale whose political undertones were the antithesis of Avatar's heavy-handed clobbering of the audience with a placard; if you got the allegories or not, the story worked. However, as word started seeping out that his big-budget follow-up Elysium was a class-warfare story tapping into the envy madness of the Occupy Wall Street morons, I became concerned and when reviews confirmed it was pretty much as I feared - even some liberal critics were complaining about how heavy-handed it was - I decided to give it a miss in the theaters. Why should I shell out cash to be lectured by a multi-millionaire celebrity like star Matt Damon about how greedy I am when he himself is part of the rich elites who are supposedly the villains ruining everything?

While watching Elysium from my couch, I rapidly realized that its biggest problem wasn't the simple-minded "Poor people GOOD! Rich people BAD!" politics as much as it was a stupid story filled with unsympathetic and poorly-motivated characters. Matt Damon's dying poor man driven to desperate measures is an ex-con who brings a lot of his misfortune upon himself and if Blomkamp was trying to make him a complicated and conflicted reluctant hero, he fails, partially on the page and in Damon's meathead performance. (Note: While Damon is a douche offscreen, I generally like his work. Unlike some, I can cope with the toxic hypocritical politics of most celebutards and enjoy their work, but he's just weak here.)

Then there are the myriad dumb things we're supposed to just accept like Jodie Foster's evil defense director of Elysium ordering renegade shuttles bringing dirty poor people to the station shot down by her sleeper agent Kruger (an off-the-chain Sharlto Copely who appears to have decided to be in his own movie) with a shoulder mounted rocket launcher and we're supposed to believe the rockets were able to catch up to speedy ships with a couple hundred mile head start. (Aren't there defense guns on the station if this is a problem?) That badass exoskeleton bolted to Damon is put on over his clothing raising the question of how he ever showers or changes clothes. The top of Elysium's ring world is open to space, but the air doesn't leak out. Huh?

Where the world-building really fails is explaining how this system works. Yeah, yeah, the rich suck and built a space station (think: gated community) to get away from the po' folks (think: Detroit) and they hog magic medical beds in every house that can cure cancer or reconstruct broken bones and blasted faces in seconds, but if the filmmakers were trying to make a statement about the need for universal health care, they don't really explain why this magic devices aren't ubiquitous. We're just to accept that it's Mean Rich People being mean and rich, but at the movie's end we see shuttles filled with beds heading to Earth to cure the peasants. Why do these ships exist? Heck, why do people have med beds in their homes to eradicate their skin cancer cells; can't they have a community bed at the clubhouse like a tanning bed?

Even Foster's scheme begs the question: How is Elysium's government set up that a chunk of computer code can reboot the station, replace the President and allow someone to change the status of the billions of people on Earth to citizens. I get that there isn't time to explain everything, but Elysium explains absolutely nothing about how the world came to be that way. It's just, "Things sucked, so the evil rich people moved out, leaving us noble poor folks behind to suffer." Just as Avatar refused to explain what was so important about Unobtainium so as to not cloud the Manichean preaching, Elysium begs the question and hopes we'll just accept it and get on with the bone-crunching bone-head story.

Speaking of Foster, she's simply awful here; even more cartoonish than the rest of the cartoons. Sporting a severe coif and an accent even more indeterminate than Idris Elba's mess in Pacific Rim. I don't think I've ever seen a performance from her that could be described as bad, but I guess there's a first time for everything. Granted, lousy characters begin on the page, but she's nearly twirling her metaphoric mustache here. (If you want to see a better version of Jodie being sexy bad, check out Spike Lee's Inside Man.)

With all the dumb, noisy stuff going on, the excellent production design and visual effects work gets lost in the shuffle. District 9 had a very natural look in the way its prawns were integrated into the environments (though I've got to imagine the poor VFX artists trying to keep the aliens feet on the ground within the handheld camera work weren't too thrilled with the task) and that carries over here as well with few exceptions. Whether its the way the Mexico City and Vancouver locations are altered and extended to be the slums of LA and the space station or the robot cops oppressing the people, it looks and feels real which only makes the dunderheaded script feel worse.

As "income inequality" is being hyped up by a liberal media desperate to distract from their President's failed ObamaCare disaster, we'll probably see another attempt to have Elysium propped up as an Important Parable after it disappointed at the box office. While that's BS, the fundamental problem with Elysium isn't its trite politics but it's flaccid and thin story.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Snitch" Review

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays somewhat against type in Snitch, a drama that wants to crusade against mandatory minimum drug sentences, but can't quite make the supposedly fact-based story gel effectively despite a solid cast.

The Rock is a small businessman, running a trucking and construction business when his teenaged son from a previous marriage is busted after receiving a box full of Ecstasy pills from his best friend. It turns out the Feds had caught the friend while shipping the pills and in order to reduce his sentence, he set up Sonny Boy. Unfortunately, Sonny can't try the same gambit because the only person he knew with drugs was the one who screwed him over. His son facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and getting beaten in jail frightens The Rock into taking desperate measures and he offers the prosecutor (Susan Sarandon) a deal: If he can go out and find drug dealers, she'll have his sentence reduced. (This is also a plot problem, if judges hands are tied, but prosecutors have so much leeway in charging, why send first-time offender dumb kids away for a dime when they clearly aren't kingpins?)

With no knowledge of the underworld, he combs through his employee's applications until he discovers one (Jon Bernthal, Shane from The Walking Dead) with two convictions for drug trafficking. Shane's trying to avoid getting his third strike and failing his wife and young son, but gets sucked into introducing Rock to a former drug dealing pal who tests him by having him run a small shipment from Missouri to El Paso, which then attracts the attention of a Major Drug Kingpin who has Big Plans for The Rock.

Snitch is a mixed bag because while the script is subtle in some spots, it's ham-handed and soapboxy in others, as when the son's lawyer walks up and immediately rattles off a bunch of factoids about mandatory minimum laws. Also, the leap from a small-time dealer to a kingpin is instantaneous and not credible. A better aspect is how they initially reveal Sarandon's prosecutor is running for higher office by having a campaign poster unobtrusively in the background of a scene. The climax feels tacked on to throw a bone to people who were wondering when The Rock was going to get into some action and reminded me of Jason Statham in The Bank Job at the end when he's suddenly beating the crap out of some guys. The ending is also unsatisfying because the good guys have to live in fear forever for what they did. Huh?

The Rock does OK with a primarily dramatic role, but his physicality wars against the story of a desperate father trying to help his son. When he's getting beaten up by some street toughs, my girlfriend exclaimed, "They're beating up The Rock?!" While not as jacked as he is in say the Fast & Furious movies, it's still hard to believe he doesn't just go in and tear bad guys in half.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Trance" Review

I've never been too impressed with Danny Boyle, primarily because he rarely makes movies that don't sh*t the bed in the third act. From 28 Days Later to (especially) Sunshine, Boyle just doesn't seem capable of not botching his stories when they should be paying off. Trance only breaks the usual "2/3rds decent until it falls apart" formula by disintegrating halfway through the proceedings.

James McAvoy stars as a high-end art auction house employee who was acting as an inside man for a heist of a Goya worth tens of millions of pounds (because it's England) by a gang led by Vincent Cassel. However, he has double-crossed his partners and stolen the painting for himself. The problem is that during the heist, Cassel cracked his skull with a shotgun butt and McAvoy can't remember where he hid the painting. In order to recover his memories and the painting he goes to hypnotherapist Rosario Dawson under the close watch of the gang. Stupidity ensues.

While the early portrayals of the hypnosis are interestingly surreal, about halfway through Dawson starts shagging the ringleaders which slows the momentum to a crawl and tips us off that there's going to be a bunch of what Boyle thinks are clever twists ahead, but we can figure them out easily. With the "truth" constantly being messed with, it's hard to stay engaged because it's no longer a story about identifiable characters but just a series of rugs being pulled out despite our having seen the threat and sidestepped them entirely.

Well-shot with enough metaphoric glass walls and reflective surfaces to make even me able to get the joke, Trance is a good-looking flick, but with little under its shiny, cold exterior. While Dawson gives up very brief full-frontal nudity (hardwood floors!) and is good in the role, it's underwritten along with everything else. Trance is a doze.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"The Prestige" Blu-Ray Review

Made in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's 2007 film about dueling Victorian-era magicians, The Prestige, seems to be mostly forgotten despite it starring Batman, Wolverine, Black Widow, Alfred and Ziggy Stardust. Perhaps it was because the title didn't convey what it was about unlike The Illusionist, which came out a year earlier and is also similarly sorta forgotten despite being a good film itself.

Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are up-and-coming magicians and friends who are torn apart when a stage accident kills Jackman's wife setting off an escalating series of tit-for-tat attacks that lead to more death and misery for the participants. Bale's act features an illusion called The Transported Man which obsesses Jackman as to how it's done and when Bale thwarts his version, he heads to Colorado Springs where Nikola Tesla (David Bowie with one of cinema's greatest entrances) is making scientific magic and makes the apparatus for Jackman with the cryptic admonition about whether he's considered the cost of the thing. Jackman thinks he's referring to the price tag; he isn't.

I'd forgotten how out-of-hand things got in their war in the years since first seeing it. It's also a profoundly different experience watching it a second time as you realize that from the very first frames the Nolans (Christopher and his co-writing brother Jonathan, whose Person of Interest is a really cool TV show) are foreshadowing everything. Just as The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects read differently upon their second viewing, so it is with The Prestige and that extends beyond the big reveal at the very end. It can get a little too cute with the flashback structure revolving around encoded diaries, but overall The Prestige earns its applause.

The Blu-ray's image is nice and sharp, but there are very few extras - just 20 minutes of light behind-the-scenes discussion of the themes. There's no commentary. For some reason you can't stop the disc from the menu screen. I had to punch into a scene to be able to stop. Weird.

Score: 8.5/10. Buy it.

"The World's End" Review

The team behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz - director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost - reunite for the conclusion of their "Cornetto Trilogy" with the oddball drinking dramedy-slash-alien invasion flick The World's End, whose title refers both to a pub and the plot.

In 1990, five school chums attempted "The Golden Mile" - drinking a pint at each of 12 pubs in their hometown - but didn't complete it for various reasons. Now in the neighborhood of 40, Pegg, who is an alcoholic who still dresses in the Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and black trenchcoat of his youth, cajoles the old gang to leave their comfy, boring lives to attempt the Mile again. While drinking and catching up on old times and grievances, they discover that alien robots(!) have replaced many of the townsfolk. Hijinks and much combat ensue.

There are a few contrary themes going on about being responsible vs. being a free spirit and some of the beefs the fellows have with each other aren't explored as deeply as they could've been, but then again they had that robot invasion thing to deal with. Pegg gets a good showcase as the talky Gary King (he co-wrote the script with Wright) and it's odd to see Frost as a more buttoned-down type after his usually being the slobby buddy as he was in Shaun and Paul.

What's cool as that they didn't bother to make the lingo and culture friendly to us Colonists; it's very British; and the soundtrack is packed with circa-1990 "Madchester" tracks. The use of The Housemartins' "Happy Hour Again" as the closer is inspired.

Score: 6/10. Rent it.

"The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" Review

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone came and went with little critical (a paltry 35% RT score) and commercial (only $22.5 million) notice despite having Steve Carell and Jim Carrey in the cast. While not a comedy classic, it's a decently entertaining little flick.

Carell is the titular Wonderstone who has been resident at Bally's in Las Vegas for a decade with his childhood bestie played by Steve Buscemi. Their act is cheesy and losing audience and Burt is an egomaniacal jerk who beds comely female fans (illustrated by Community's Gillian Jacobs) while sporting enough bronzer to coat those giant Oscars you see outside the Kodak Theater. Pressured by a hot street magician (Carrey taking the piss out of David Blaine and Kris Angel), the pair attempt their own Xtreme stunt with spectacular failure, splitting the pair and sending Burt hunting for redemption.

The reviews were pretty lethal, so I was surprised that it was actually LOL funny in spots and not totally drenched with pathos and formulaic tropes, especially when he connects with the magician who inspired him as a boy, played by Alan Arkin. While the terrain is familiar, the path taken is off the usual paved areas. I think some were offended by just how crass Burt is, but Carell manages to make him not totally reprehensible. (Maybe some people are wimps, like the one critic who whined about the massive illegality of their comeback trick.) Carrey's character is literally nuts and not really doing "magic" so what happens to him makes sense.

With good supporting performances from Arkin, Buscemi, Olivia Wilde (as their long-suffering assistant) and James Gandolfini (the casino owner), while The Incredible Burt Wonderstone may not be totally "incredible," it's above-average and worth a watch.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.

"2 Guns" Review

Based on a graphic novel that most people probably never heard of, 2 Guns stars Denzel Washington and Marky Mark as a pair of wisecracking robbers who knock over a bank and as they head into the desert to split the take, discover that each is actually a lawman seeking to take the other down - Denzel a DEA agent and Mark with Naval Intelligence. Mark wounds Denzel and leaves him in the desert, but as things proceed the nagging fact that there was $43 million in the vault when they expected only $3 million means that the owners of that money are going to be hunting for them, too. (One guess as to who the 3rd party is.)

While it starts off like a breezy lark, 2 Guns can't decide on a tone - gritty crime or comic romp - and quickly just got noisy and dull. The hoot is that Marky Mark is supposed to be Naval Intelligence but doesn't show much of the latter. The "twist" as to who the third party involved was predictable and once you realize everyone is double-crossing everyone it's easy to spot the backstabs coming a mile away.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"The To Do List" Review

It's been a while since there's been a good teen sex comedy and frankly I'm drawing a blank on any told from the female's perspective. (i.e. It's a girl trying to get laid. Superbad, Sex Drive, Road Trip, etc. were all about boys seeking poonanny.) Seeking to fill this gap (double entendre totally intended) comes (heh) The To Do List, the feature debut by writer-director Maggie Carey who is former SNL star Bill Hader's wife.

Snarkalicious nerd hottie Aubra Plaza stars as her Idaho high school's valedictorian in 1993. She's heading to college in the fall, but is concerned that her utter lack of sexual experience will be a problem for her in the big city. Her sister (Rachel Bilson) is an oversexed idiot, so she decides to make a to do list of sexual activities to check off before leaving. The montage of her assembling this list and trying to look up in the encyclopedia various terms (and noting to ask the librarian about some of them) under her framed Hillary Clinton photo is a hoot, though just how this smart girl could be so sheltered as to have no idea why a pearl necklace isn't elegant strains credibility even in pre-Internet Idaho.Working as a lifeguard at a public pool, she's got her eyes on a hunky co-worker to punch her V-card, but there are others interested she's overlooking.

The shaggy story ambles from one episode to another delivering laughs with decent regularity. Pitching in with extended cameos are Donald Glover (Community), McLovin (Superbad) and Andy Samberg as an Eddie Vedderish grunge singer. Hader gets plenty of screen time because he slept with the director. (You go, boyeee!)

But the star is Plaza and I like her a lot. She manages to walk the line between fizzy sassy sarcasm and off-putting bitchiness. Perhaps I'm missing the old, pre-insanity Janeane Garofalo, but Plaza equally grounded Safety Not Guaranteed last year. The shortcomings of The To Do List aren't her fault and her charm helps smooth some of the creepier bits over.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Detropia" Review

As a life-long Detroit area resident, I'm always interested to note how the loudest cheerleaders for the benighted hellhole are those who wouldn't actually be caught dead living withing the city's borders. For these scolds who perch in their safe suburban homes, documentaries like Detropia allow them to scratch their itch to preen their civic-mindedness.

A loose amalgam of overly arty lo-fi footage and interviews with people scraping by in the ruins, there are very few insights to be garnered other than outgoing Mayor Dave Bing's observation that as soon as anyone gets the scratch up to get out of town, they do. Looking at the ruins and watching a UAW Local President musing about past glories while seeking scapegoats for the ruination of the auto industry is old hat to a local, but there's little here for outsiders to learn from.

Shortly after watching this, Anthony Bourdain aired an episode of his Parts Unknown series which was far more enlightening. Hunt that one down instead.

Score: 5/10. Skip it.

"Monsters University" Review

Man, Pixar has fallen off. There's no denying it - they've managed to throw away their reputation for consistent excellence and are now just churning out lazy sequels and now a prequel to the terrific Monsters Inc., the "When Mike Met Sully Meets Revenge of the Nerds" mashup, Monsters University.

Did you ever wonder about how besties Mike (voiced by Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) first met and how they hated each other at first because Sully was a lazy jock and Mike was an over-achieving social pariah and they had to form their own misfit fraternity (a la The House Bunny) in order to win a competition against all the other frat houses and stop me if you've seen this story several times before? No? Me neither, but Pixar felt it was necessary and it's definitely not because of any toys or Disney Infinity videogame tie-ins or anything like that because that would be cynical or something.

Pixar has announced Finding Dory. Oh joy. Can't wait. (Note: Sarcasm.) Monsters University looks great, but that's just technology advancing. Storywise, Pixar's lost the plot.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"Phantasm" DVD Review

I'm really beginning to wonder about the collective madness behind declaring certain things "classics." One such "classic" is the 1979 horror flick Phantasm which I watched for the first time and had two questions about:

1. How did this thing get made?
2. Why hasn't MST3K/Rifftrax torn it to pieces yet?

All I knew about it from back in the day was that there was a silver sphere flying around with blades and a drill on it. There's also one shot of a person on a bed in a graveyard being attacked by bodies popping out of the ground that was in the trailer. (See below.) Otherwise, nada. Unbelievably, there's almost nothing more to it.

It opens hilariously with a couple screwing in a graveyard. She's a blonde with some rather egregious blue-and-purple eye shadow going on; he looks like a roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd. After he gets off, she stabs him to death. Bummer, dude. Then we get interminably long shots of a kid having trouble riding his dirt bike through the cemetery and another guy wandering the halls of a mausoleum. I'm not even going to go into what their relationship is, but there are also little Jawa-looking things running around; a bar that's the size of a garage that our "hero" walks into, immediately picks up the killer blonde from the opening scene and goes off with her to shag (I know the Seventies were pretty free-lovely, but come on now); another planet (not kidding); a fortune teller's assistant played by an actress so terrible that I stopped to check whether she "acted" again (she hadn't); and a whole lot of other stuff that made me wonder, "Why is this even here?" There's a scene which consists of a guy pulling up in a Good Humor truck, pulling an acoustic guitar case out, going up onto the porch where the hero is sitting jamming on a Stratocaster, and doing a brief song together. Da fuh?

Phantasm was written, directed, edited, shot, co-produced, and generally all his faulted by Don Coscarelli (proving that Robert Rodriguez is star systems away in one-man band chops) who would go on to make three sequels and the much better (but still wildly overrated by fans) flicks Bubba Ho-Tep and John Dies At The End. (Apparently he was only 24 when he made it, but Orson Wells made Citizen Kane when he was 25, so there goes that excuse.) I love this detail from Wikipedia:"The first test screening was a disaster due to the length; Coscarelli says that he erred in adding too much character development, which needed to be edited out." MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!

I haven't watched the DVD extras yet, so I can't comment on those at the moment. The technical presentation of the disk is adequate, but it hardly matters how it looks when it's a stupid story.

Score: 1/10. Skip it.

Seriously. The only memorable parts are at the end of the trailer, minus the gore of the sphere doing its work.

"Muscle Shoals" Review

There's been a spate of documentaries in recent years covering the stories of the musicians involved in some of music's seminal hits. From Standing in the Shadows of Motown (about the "Funk Brothers", the house band at Hitsville, USA) to 20 Feet From Stardom (backup singers) and others, the stories of the unsung folks behind the music are being told and one of the more remarkable exposes is Muscle Shoals, about the titular town in northern Alabama (just south of the Tennessee border) behind some of rock and souls greatest hits and the amazingly sad story of the man who made it happen.

Just as Motown had Berry Gordy and Sun Records had Sam Phillips, the sound of Muscle Shoals' FAME Studios was Rick Hall, a man who has lived a life of constant tragic incidents which sound like a mash-up of every country and blues song cliche possible; I think the only things missing are prison and the dog dying. But despite being born into grinding poverty and having such misfortunes, he still founded the studio and assembled the house band - The Swampers (as name-checked in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama") - which backed seminal hits from Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Etta James and many more. Unless you're so white that you think Justin Bieber is funky, you've heard a LOT of the songs that came out of this humble building that looks like a carpeting warehouse more than a house of hits.

What's more fascinating is that in this tiny town (population NOW is only about 13,000) they were able to put together not one, but two groups of musicians (after Capitol Records stole the first house band) to lay down the hot soul grooves while dealing with their collective cases of crippling melanin-deficiency. (Translation: They were all white guys, not that anyone could hear the difference which is more than a little bit racist, donchathink?)

If there is a deficiency to Muscle Shoals it's that the filmmakers occasionally wander into too-artsy camerawork and metaphysical ramblings about the water and spirits, etc. There's no rational scientific or spiritual explanation for why this town turned out special and it's not as if anyone wonders why West Grand Boulevard in Detroit (where Motown's Hitsville USA was located), so I would've preferred more inside scoop on how the hits were made than navel-gazing. Still, it's a fascinating story; just a little unfocused in its telling.

Score: 7/10. Rent it.

"Embrace of the Vampire (2013)" Review

1995's cheese horror "classic" (quotes indicate mild sarcasm) Embrace of the Vampire is remembered for precisely two things: Alyssa Milano's glorious boobs. I never understood why she and her mother were suing sites that posted fake nude photos of her when the real goodies were captured for spank bank posterity by this movie about a college girl and...uh....a vampire and ummmmm, mostly boobs. I honestly don't remember what the movie was about other than the scene were Charlotte Lewis (playing some photographer who doesn't know how to hold her camera) attempts to seduce Alyssa. It is among the three best minutes ever filmed for any movie. Yes, I'm 12-years-old.

So why are they remaking Embrace of the Vampire? Beats me, but here we are with a dreadfully dull thing that manages to make college "lesbianism" (quotes indicate this is a horny boy's idea of what college girls do) boring and doesn't really have much to do with embracing or vampires.

Sharon Hinnendael (me neither) is an orphan who has come from an all-girl Catholic school to some college located in the mountains of Vancouver. (To be fair, the scenery is gorgeous.) She's there on a fencing scholarship and she'd be doing better if she wasn't constantly having nightmares and hallucinations of blood and demons and Nickleback (OK, the last one I added) and getting hazed by the mean girls on the team. She rapidly unravels, though not before she's the recipient of some supposed hot Sapphic attention from the bimbo next door and frankly I'm bored writing about this; that's how anemic this movie is.

It's over 2/3rds of the way through before the titular vampire is introduced/revealed and by then who cares? There's a prologue set in the 1700's which is meant to set up the connection between our poor girl and the vampire stalking her, but it doesn't make sense and we're left with just tedium to separate the gratuitous boobs scenes. I don't even care to spend much time beating this up, so let's just save all our time and call it a night.

Score: 2/10. Skip it. (Go look at the Charlotte Lewis/Alyssa Milano scene online instead.)

"Carrie (2013)" Review

I've never seen the original Carrie. (I'll wait while you pick your jaws off the floor. Back? OK then...) I was too young when it came out and frankly so many of the bullet points of the plot are floating in the collective cultural consciousness, it feels as if I've seen it.

Like this: Carrie is a homely girl with a crazy religious fanatic mother who is picked on in school. When she gets her period in the gym showers, she doesn't know what it is and her mean girl classmates throw tampons at her and laugh. Eventually she gets asked to the prom, but her mother (rightfully) thinks that they'll just laugh at her. Pig's blood. Psychic powers. Lots of fire and death. Kills mom. Dies. Hand comes out of grave at end.

Did I miss anything important?

Though the original Brian De Palma take on Stephen King's novel is a horror classic (or so they say), since Hollywood isn't really big on new ideas, it's time for the obligatory remake, this time with Kimberly Pierce, the director of Boys Don't Cry (which won Hillary Swank her first Oscar), calling the shots and Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore filling the roles played by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in the 1976 original.

Though there are new faces, there doesn't seem to be much new to the story. Oh, it's been updated with Carrie's shower torment videoed on a cell phone and posted to YouTube, but the modern aspects of bullying aren't really explored. Moretz is really good as usual making the thin, rote script come to life, but she's hampered by the unavoidable reality that she's not particularly plain or unattractive, what with her cherub libs and wavy hair. This isn't to say she's too glammed-up; just that she's not as drab as Spacek. Moore, on the other hand, is a shrill, one-note cartoon; the default setting for portrayals of religious people in Hollyweird movies.

My girlfriend used to watch the original version annually didn't think that much of it either and mentioned a couple of plot points that we're left out or changed for the worse, specifically that the OG Carrie was scared of her powers while Carrie 2.0(13) seem to revel in them. (I'd noticed this was similar to Chronicle's tale of why giving bullied kids superpowers generally goes badly for everyone.)

Even more damning is that over dinner, I was able to thrash out a better story that kept 90% of the plot points of the movie as presented, except recontextualize critical bits to make a much more rational, logical, "plausible" and satisfying story. As has happened so many times this year, timidity and laziness in the script development phase leads to a thin gruel result on the screen.

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable.

"We're The Millers" Review

I love movies like We're The Millers because the trailer saves me the time of having to synopsize things, so watch this:



That's pretty much it. (Note: Aniston is one of those movie "strippers" who would wear less to a beach. Actresses who don't want to do nudity shouldn't play roles which require it for basic realism.) Do you think that this band of thrown-together misfits will ultimately become an actual family? (Duh.)

While it eventually succumbs to the formula of such movies, We're The Millers delivers some great big laughs, mostly in weird throwaway remarks like why Ed Helms drug overlord bought a whale. Not up to the laugh standards of recent R-rated comedies like Ted and The Heat but worth catching.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.