Tag Archives: comedy

Night at the Museum

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In case you’re wondering, there are two factors that led me into the treacherous mazes of kid movie-dom. 1) There’s only one thing I actively want to see that’s out right now (leaving aside things I’d be willing to see a second time, I mean). 2) Nearly everyone I know who isn’t me, and certainly everyone local, has kids. And since we were all free for the holiday yesterday, the obvious conclusion was to catch a flick. And Night at the Museum has seemed to be the best kid-movie option of the season. On the other side of it now, I’m willing to stand by that pre-assessment.

Still, though, it was a kid movie through and through. When you’re a dad and you’re afraid of disappointing your son one time too many… Here’s the thing. I started to say what kind of thing you do in a grown-up movie vs. in a kid movie. But let’s face facts. Unless you’re actually irredeemable, your eight-year old son isn’t going to get disappointed in you in an grown-up movie. But when you’re stuck in a kid movie and you’re afraid of blah blah blah disappointment cakes, you go get yourself a steady job as a museum night watchman, and make sure that it’s in the museum where the magical artifact of plot convenience animates all of the exhibits and skeletons and statues and so forth. Because kids dig that.

While you’re at it, may as well include a couple of pretty girls as potential love interests, a comedic fight with a monkey, and a sly reference to a certain movie from last year about the forbidden love between a man and his cowboy. Because now you have something for everybody! Okay, though, I’m being harsh now. The plot was dumb, but since it wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a vehicle for a cool premise, I can forgive that. I mean, not if the execution of the premise was terrible, but as it happens, the execution was absolutely fine. So, cool museum hijinx plus cool effects means that if you’re the type of person who has an undiscriminating kid who wants to see a movie, almost any other choice you can make right now would probably be worse.

Slither (2006)

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You know Creepshow? Well, obviously you do; I didn’t mean to be insulting. So, here’s my point. Imagine if the meteor that turned Stephen King into a plant instead landed in Hicksburg, The South, USA and got all The Thing on the local residents, and then it and Malcolm Reynolds got into a competition for the same girlfriend. In this circumstance, you would be watching Slither, an excellent space monster movie that is inexplicably failing to sell tickets. I mean, this movie has alien cow-tipping!

More impressively even than that, though, it has that degree of reality that I was just praising in The Hills Have Eyes, where it feels like actual people are in this actual situation, somewhere just down the road and not in my life only through sheer geographic and temporal luck. Which is quite a feat for an alien-in-a-meteor flick. So, good on them.

Also? Someone I’ve had drinks with was in the credits. That’s never not cool.

The Back Lot Murders

What can I say about The Back Lot Murders? Well, for one thing, it has Corey Haim’s finest performance since… uh…. Dream a Little Dream 2? Yup, that’s right, he lights up the screen as the blue-haired drummer of a band on the verge of making it big, now that they’ve cut loose their songwriter, who combined the band’s only source of talent with anger management issues the size of that stack of million CDs required to go golden. (I know I’m reaching. You would be too. This thing was awful.)

Well, okay, lights up the screen is an exaggeration, since I couldn’t even tell it was him, and once I did pick him out, it was obvious that he was slumming all the way. And why shouldn’t he? You’ve got a group of talentless hacks recording a music video on the Universal backlot, in order to tie in to the success cash cow that was (no lie, here) Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. The only problem (other than that pesky lack of anything resembling talent; seriously, they could have dubbed *some* local LA band that’s good but starving. They exist.) is the mysterious masked killer wandering the lot slaughtering crew, topless groupies, and eventually the band.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all you need to know to make up your mind. Obviously, I bought it on first sight in the Fry’s horror section a few months ago, and with slightly less info. (Well, I couldn’t possibly have guessed just how bad the music would be, could I?)

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)

There’s not a lot for me easily to say about this movie, because the premise is so simple. It all worked, I’ll say that. Good comedy, good action, good acting, a few bits of true cleverness. It made me (and the rest of the sparse early Sunday audience) giggle throughout.

The previews spell out the plot pretty well, so I consider this plot synopsis to be spoiler-free: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (who looks as good as ever, I must say) are assassins who don’t know about each other despite several years of marriage. The marriage is drying up, when suddenly they discover the Truth. Hijinx ensue.

I spent the first forty-five minutes or so enjoying myself, but slightly confused. It was moving way, way to slowly for the action-comedy I was expecting to see. Then, something shifted in my head, I reclassified it as a comedy of manners but with assassins (dark, sure, but not even black comedy), and instantly it worked better than ever. Probably better than the average comedy of manners if you’re me, because of how assassins are more interesting than the rich people that usually fill out that subtype.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

What better time, I figure, to see a lot of movies than when you’re supposed to be doing something else entirely? This weekend, for example, I was supposed to be putting all the non-essential bits of my life into boxes, so as to then move the boxes to storage spots, and therefore have less to take care of over the next few weeks. All of which I did, you see, but I also saw movies.

First, I got to the head of a line that only ended up forming a few minutes before start time, because of how I cleverly picked a movie that started before most people got off work, and thereby avoided the opening day mega-crowds. Which there may well not have been, though I hear it did the best of the weekend, a victory for sci-fi movies everywhere, says I. In particular, because it has a horror movie to contend with next week and so cannot possibly maintain first place two in a row.

The upshot of all this meaningless preface is that I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy unreasonably early in the release cycle to only now be reviewing it. Except, see, for the packing and loading and moving and unloading that I had to accomplish. Plus, there was tiredness. In any case, my bad.

I’m going to say, Good Movie. It didn’t quite nail the bureaucratic morass hilarity of the opening scenes, but it proceeded to lampoon it thoroughly throughout the rest of the movie, so that was pretty cool. It certainly welcomed the unfamiliar viewer with open arms, but had enough new jokes to provide more than just comfortableness for the initiated. The romantic subplot was expanded, which I didn’t mind on the face of it, but I also didn’t find that either lead could really pull it off.

Additional thing: Adams wrote in a new villain character. This did not bother me as much as it was supposed to as a loyal reader/viewer/listener/player/whatever, I think. Really, I liked it a lot, because it added another facet to the whole ‘each “book” should end with tremendous ease-of-use toward having a sequel’ thing that Adams has always had going for him. Which sequel I’d like to see, because when you get down to it, watching everyman Arthur Dent react to the galaxy in all its myriad insanity is fun. I do have a concern over the whole Douglas Adams died and will not have writing credits on future sequels aspect, though.

The problems: It was merely good. Probably this is true of the books as well, and I just don’t know by having avoided them lately. Certainly it’s not a problem for going to see it, because, well, things that are good are worth seeing. But it’s not good for longevity, either in the individual sense or as the basis for a series of movies. That said, lots of not-at-all-good movies have spawned sequels, so. And also, the opening and closing dolphin song was kinda terrible, in the made me want to claw out my eardrums if only that would end the pain sense. But I can avoid it on any future viewings. I will avoid it on any future viewings, unless I’ve been strapped down like a prisoner being forced to listen to Vogon poetry.

On a completely irrelevant note, I was not shown the expected Serenity trailer before the movie. How dare they?

Sahara

The thing about buddy action-adventure flicks is: hard to talk about. Because, we’ve seen it all before. In Sahara‘s case, it’s James Bond (they nearly always are), but if he had retired from the secret service to become a deep-sea diver, and also if he had made friends with some guy at some point in his life.

The rest of it is exactly what you’d expect. Is there a pretty girl in danger because she’s stumbled across a secret that could threaten the fate of the world? Is there a power-mad industrialist willing to protect that secret at any cost? Is there a boss somewhere that wants the world safe, of course, but wishes his stuff would not get destroyed quite so often? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then there are more seminal works that you ought to see instead. If you do, though, this one is pretty good. They found the right balance of drama, comedy, and explosions. Plus, there’s a civil war treasure hunt, just to add a new flavor for the palate.

This Dirk Pitt guy seems alright. If I can figure out what the first book of the series is, I’ll probably pay Half Price Books a visit and attack the stories from multiple angles. The problem being, my to-read shelf is failing to get smaller. You’d think with the moving and packing things up, I’d have a little bit more discretion. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I really thought I would. In fact, though: I would not.

Sideways

So, early this week, I saw Sideways. Without a doubt, the best thing about it was the bleu cheese burger that accompanied it, since I was at the Alamo Drafthouse, prince among movie theaters that it is. Other than that… this review is going to have spoilers, because it’s hard enough to come up with anything to say even if I don’t worry about them.
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Napoleon Dynamite

I saw Napoleon Dynamite yesterday afternoon. This is good, because now I only have one thing left to do before my trip. This is also good because I really, really liked it. It’s bad, though, because I have no clear idea how to express what about it I liked. I mean, even to myself. It has everything I don’t like in a movie. Deliberately framed shots that scream ‘look, I’m a movie over here!’ Characters in which I have no legitimate interest. Slice of life reality as the setting. A plot resolution that came essentially from nowhere. And yet, there’s some kind of perfect storm thing going on, because I thought that the combination of all the elements was great, such that none of them really even bothered me during the few times I wasn’t actively enjoying myself.

Perhaps it’s because everything touched by Mormons is pure gold.

Probably not, though. I know it was funny, but funny isn’t really enough to make me want to see it again and recommend it to people, by itself. Lots of things are funny. Most things don’t leave me with a goofy smile on my face just thinking about bits and pieces of it, or having a similarly goofy conversation last night with a friend who independently saw it for the first time the same day, with the whole ‘”Do you remember the cow?!” laugh of hilarity while everyone else stared at us’ thing going on. This did, though.

And, yeah, I eventually came to care what happened to a few of the characters. This is unusual, in movies where I don’t care during the first ten minutes or so.

You may note I haven’t described the plot. This is because I don’t even really know what that was, although I know a little better than I know why I liked it so much. In short, it’s about this kid in high school in Idaho, the template upon which high school geeks are drawn, and a snapshot of a few weeks in his life during which Things Change. Which still doesn’t say a lot, since that is (except for the character and duration being specified) that point at which any story should be told, if it expects to be even mildly interesting.

In short: Weird scenario, but funny. Mormons. Good, but I can’t say why exactly. Is this review worthless? I think it is.

Bubba Ho-tep

Sure, there are lots of mummy movies. Like the one with Brendan Fraser and the one with Abbott & Costello. And there are lots of JFK movies, like the one with Martin Sheen and the one by Oliver Stone. And there are lots of Elvis movies, like, um… y’know, it’s weird that people don’t make Elvis movies, but I guess there’s still Jailhouse Rock and the one with the clambake.

My point is, this ground is well-trodden. What you don’t see very often is any two of them in the same place. And all three? Unheard of! Except, obviously, not anymore. That’d be pretty weird, if I was just blathering on about things that don’t go together, randomly. But I (unlike previously) digress. The point of all this is that a movie pitting the elderly and retirement-homed King of Rock & Roll and most recently assassinated President (or so they would have us believe, to the point of dying him black to further the cover-up) against a redneck mummy out to steal their souls was made a few years ago, receiving a limited theatrical release and the beginnings of a cult following on DVD.

The story is simple. Simple enough that what I started to write would be a restatement of what I already just said, so I’ll skip that. What makes it good is the mood and the leisurely pacing. It’s easy to get lost in the sad lives of these men, sad because they believe they’re really Elvis and Kennedy, sad because they believe they’re saving their fellow inmates from a soul-sucking mummy, and sadder by far if they really are who they say they are. I’m making it sound depressing, and it is, but it’s also not. It’s hilarious, at times a little scary, and the melancholy mood lends it enough gravitas that it doesn’t turn out to be the cheesy B-movie it so desperately wants you to believe it is. Instead, it’s a story about heroes who still have legitimate heroism left in them fighting against a villain who isn’t just robbing them of their souls, but of what little dignity they have left.

For a movie that is about, well, you know, it has a great deal of heart to it. On top of which, it’s very, very funny. I can’t really think of a reason for anyone not to watch it.