And really, what’s not to like?  Haven’t we all in some perverse way wanted to see Danny Trejo as a badass action hero of trashy revenge cinema?  He’s an unlikely candidate with his heavily scarred face and unmistakable tattoos.  But really it’s time.  Trejo has gone from the scary fucker I’d never want to meet in Runaway Train to a lovable but gruff older uncle that has my back.  Maybe it’s familliarity.  Take a look at Trejo’s IMDb page and be amazed.  The man averages about 20 films per year.  Even if you don’t know his name, you know who he is, and he’s managed to become something few actors can ever obtain — an icon.

In some ways, and not just Trejo, all of Machete is very concious dream casting.  Having the right people in the right roles and doing it in a very winking and nodding fashion even adds to the fun and makes everyone cooler.  Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez are just doing their thing and they’re servicable enough, but there’s a perverse enjoyment from seeing Steven Seagal as the villain and Robert Deniro as a slimy senator.  At first you wonder what the fuck they’re doing in this movie, but then the shine so brilliantly that you begin to appreciate it.  When Lindsey Lohan first comes on screen as a drugged out of her head rich brat, everyone in my audience laughed at the irony.  Even though she hadn’t gone to jail yet, she had to have known the parallels to her own life and played it for laughs.  Kudos to Lohan for that.

What’s really amazing to me here is that director Robert Rodriguez managed to pull it off.  Like many people I loved the faux Machete trailer in Grindhouse, but I was never convinced it could even remotely work as a full feature.  Leading up to this movie, I was convinced this was narcissism given legs by Rogriguez’s textbook low budget antics for feature filmmaking.  But not only did he succeed in making Machete enjoyable as hell, I think he made a better grindhouse flick than he did with Planet Terror.

Rodriguez has to walk a tightrope to make this work.  He’s not making a movie that’s bad for bad’s sake.  Sure the story is generic and ripped from 70′s trashy revenge movies, but the scripted moments and dialogue are fresh and enjoyable.  Here he’s not purposely trying to make a bad movie.  That’s a one-joke that wears it’s welcome out way too early.  He also can’t make a really good movie, because then that joke falls away and you’re left with a well made bad movie.  Instead, what Rodriguez does, and this is ingenous, he makes a movie that is so blatantly over the top and outrageous in it’s gags, that it is impossible to take it seriously on any level.  It’s taking the most outlandish elements of this genre and lives in it like a kevlar pinata.  I’ll let that description sink in.

Not that everything in Machete works.  The biggest complaint I have about the movie is that it spills it’s goods too early.  Like all great movies, it opens in a way that catches you off guard and sets up the tone for the rest of the movie, but about half way through, it starts to feel servicable rather than building.  Nothing in the 2nd half really tops what came before and the movie even sets up a huge confrontation that feels primed for a killer action scene, and while what we’re given is enjoyable, it feels tame by comparison.  It also on occassion feels like there’s whole action scenes missing, and maybe there are, but in the end it feels more like every element in the trailer needed to be crammed into the movie even if there wasn’t a scene to go with it.  Basically the faster Machete drives, the more you notice how loosely the wheels are attached.  I’ll let that one sink in too.

In the end, most of these quibbles are just that and Machete remains a solid entry into what seems to be a common theme this year — the meta-movie.  Either you’ll get it or you won’t, so if the Grindhouse trailer didn’t entertain you, neither will the full movie.  Everyone else, be prepared to lose your shit.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

As the summer box office rolled to a close, there was still one big battle to be had, and it would be between a set of films that couldn’t be more different.

In one corner there was the manliest of manliest movies: The Expendebles, a history making franchise that promised to reunite the greatest action heros of modern cinema for the first time and have them all blow up a lot of shit.

In the other corner was one of the best selling runaway books since Twlight.  Indeed, the chick-lit sensation Eat Pray Love had been made into a movie by Glee‘s Ryan Murphy and starring Julia Roberts.

These films could not be more opposites of each other.  Their audiences were polarized and as our post modern audiences feel they have a stake in how well a film performs at the box office, at least one side became anxious about who would win this cinematic battle of the genders for the audience’s dollar.

But there was a third kid on the block. Enter Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Now we had a movie based on an indie comic, directed by Edgar Wright, brimming with movie, music, video game and pop culture refrences and literally dripping with geek cred from every pore of its digitally enhanced body.

Is the geek audience a third gender?  It may as well be.  Because you would be hard pressed to find three large films opening on the same day that represent more distinct and separate audiences.  Everyone who went to a movie that weekend already knew which movie they were going to and had almost NO interest in the other.  I’m sure you know by now where my personal bias came out.  I loved the fuck out of Scott Pilgrim.

I think the big thing is that all three films represent a form of wish fulfillment.  They’re constructed with very core audiences in mind and if you’re not already part of that audience, then you’re not going to get anything out of it.  While both The Expendables and Eat Pray Love look like 2nd grade level pandering and look as appealing as rubbing a cheese grater on my naughty bits, I can see how someone not in the core audience would feel the same about Scott Pilgrim with its hipster language and video game logic.  It’s simply not made for them, and as someone who’s been playing video games since she first discovered Donkey Kong in an arcade at age 4, I am the core audience for that movie.

But the bout came and went, giving us a triumphant testosterone audience putting The Expendables (34.8m) in the top spot and the chick flick audience pushing Eat Pray Love (23.1m) to a respectable 2nd place.  And Scott Pilgrim?  It came in 5th (10.6m) behind previous entries The Other Guys and Inception.

The moral of the story is while we geeks may be such a loud force on the internet that we believe we dominate the pop culture landscape, it simply is not true.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

Here’s the new DVD and blu-ray cover art for the home video release of Jonah Hex.  I guess the marketing department decided the reason the movie bombed was because Josh Brolin wasn’t pretty enough.  This is one of the most ridiculous and laughable change-ups I’ve seen in many a long time.

Lock & Load from Steven Santos on Vimeo.

Karin Fong has absolutely been directing some of the most incredible and memorable title sequences of recent for all forms of media.  I recently stumbled upon her work because of how impressed I was with the Rubicon openning sequence and was both shocked and delighted to see just how much work of hers I’ve already seen and come to love.

I’ve included some of her work below including: Rubicon, Chuck, Human Target, and God of War III.  She’s done a lot more incredible work, but this is what really grabbed me.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

Rubicon Main Titles from Jeremy Cox on Vimeo.

Human Target – Main titles from Imaginary Forces on Vimeo.

Chuck Titles from parsons dt on Vimeo.

Then there’s the case of 2007′s Drive, the similarly led Nathan Fillion vehicle (double entendre) about an illegal cross-country road race.  Drivers are chosen by captains of industry who sadistically wager which dog will limp across the finish line.  The drivers themselves are  unaware of the larger picture and manipulated like pawns in a plot they can’t escape from.  It’s basically Rat Race meets Taken.

This show had all the earmarks for success.  It was a multi-character drama set against a really simple and streamlined narrative that allowed for plot twists character turns gallore, and featured moments of inspired action and stunt driving.  The show also had an awesome cast, including the forementioned Fillion, Kristin Lehman, the always incredible Dylan Baker and a yet unknown Emma Stone.

There was, and still is, absolutely nothing like it on TV and you would think that the network that milked crap like 24 and Prison Break would be all over something like this.  And they were… at least for 4 episodes.  That’s how long it took FOX to pull Drive off the air, assumedly deciding that they had given the show more than a fair shot at building an audience.  The final 2 filmed episodes were made available online after the fact.

Every once in awhile I go back and watch the 6 episode run of this show, and while it’s not perfect, it’s impressive how it still holds up.  About the only irritating thing I find about the show is some of the green screen work they do in attempting to transition from outside shots to inside vehicles without cutting.

I know at this point it will almost seem like there’s just blind advocacy for every failed Nathan Fillion show to get a feature film, but Drive is a great show that would work as a feature film.  It’s not even that there were so many tangled storylines that need to be resolved, or that the characters were so beloved that any extra time we get to spend with them is like snuggles with a loved one, but rather seeing this premise played out to a resolution holds the promise of a fulfilling catharsis and the highly enjoyable thrill-ride we take getting there.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

Movies From Space

First up is the Space Channel’s bumper clip for going to and from commercial when showing movies.  Here in it’s full form, it normally appears chopped up into little 10 second segments on Space.  This clip made it worth me sitting through Transformers.

The girl in the clip is Canadian actress Jessica Hinkson with one short film to her name.  She’ll be one to watch.  Trust me.

So You Think You Can Dance Canada

I’m not a fan of all these dance shows.  Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m crippled. (horribly crippled now having walked around Vancouver for a week on a desperate apartment hunt)  But there’s no getting around the fact that this TV spot for So You Think You Can Dance Canada season 3 is freakin hot.

I really like the mix of Matrix like fighting and acrobatics with a techno heavy dance off.  If the actual show were anything like that, I’d totally watch.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad.  I hadn’t watched the movie since it first got released and I remembered disliking it greatly.  At the time of its release, it came at the tail end of a TV show adapted movie glut.  It also appeared to be riding off of the success of The Matrix and as such it needed to have lots of PVC, wire flying kung fu and outrageous gunfights.  This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but when it comes in a giant pop culture candy bar wrapper, is helmed by a music video director who calls himself “McG” and attempts to manufacture cool without any attempts at a story… well, there’s only so much a girl can take.  Ultimately, I found the whole thing so ludicrously outlandish that it became impossible to enjoy.  Crispin Glover kung fu master?  Drew Barrymore imitating Jackie Chan?  Dance sequences?  I wasn’t buying any of it.

Now having revisited the movie more than 10 years later, my seething hatred for it had diminished and I was able to enjoy certain aspects of it for the fun romp-fest that it was.  Is it high art?  Of course not.  But then it was never trying to be.  The movie very consciously knows how insanely stupid it is and instead works it’s ass off to make sure it’s an incredibly fun and fast paced stupid ride.  Not everything works, but some of it does, and I can’t think of another example of where I’ve seen so many pop culture references thrown into one movie.

The other thing I noticed was how acceptable the ludicrousness of the movie was in hind sight.  Back when it first came out, movies were still very much inhabiting “real worlds” and if they were not, they needed to make explanation for the reasons why.  The Matrix was an excellent example of establishing very specific rules for the world of the movie that allowed for the physics defying craziness.  Charlie’s Angels didn’t care to explain and had no interest in setting up the world around the main characters.  It was simply an excuse of these are our heroines and they kick ass.  Period.  And as time has gone on, we’ve progressed to a point where that has become more common than not.  Wanted had its characters slowing down time, making impossible jumps and curving bullets purely for the merit of being “bad-ass.”  Kill Bill made no apologies about having it’s characters fly through the air and perform impossible acrobatics.  Let’s also not forget that the whole action genre has been almost single handedly replaced by the superhero genre, where yet again we see characters like Spiderman and Iron Man performing impossible acts that only CGI can provide.  It’s scary to think that Charlie’s Angels was a trail blazer.

My greatest fear is that I’ll sound like my father who asks before a movie “this isn’t one of those ones where people fly through the air, is it?” when I say that I’m not totally enthusiastic with this trend.  I can enjoy my outrageous action as much as the next action starved girl, but there’s a reason I’ll cling to real stunt based movies like Casino Royale and Salt over movies that attempt to deliver the impossible with tongue firmly in cheek and a hard wink towards the audience like A-Team and The Losers.  But really, it’s the former that has become acceptable and terms like “escapist” and “realistic” become an increasingly rare commodity.

All trends tends to be like pendulums, but just like how we’ve outgrown the muscle bound explosion-fests of the 80s, it would seem that we’ve outgrown anything that could possibly exist in our world.  So onward we head to Tron: Legacy and Sucker Punch where everything is fabricated from scratch and our ability to anchor ourselves to the characters and their situations is like a dream that passes before the waking dawn.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

I’m not a huge fan of Snyder as a filmmaker.  When you look over his resume, it seems impressive: Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen.  He’s built his geek cred, especially debuting his last two movies to the same audience at Comicon.  My problem with Snyder is that I don’t think he knows how to tell a story.  He can put in elements that are really cool, he’s a fantastic visual stylist, and he knows how to pick his projects.  But he also has no concept of pacing outside of individual scenes and seems pretty uninterested in the actual story part of his movies.  His style and abilities would seem to be better suited to shooting commercials than feature films.  Up until now he’s been able to rely on the source material of other people to carry his storytelling deficencies (Dawn of the Dead was a remake, and 300 and Watchmen were both graphic novels) but Sucker Punch represents the first time he’s made an original film from his own original material.

What’s interesting is I haven’t seen people get this worked up about a film they know nothing about since the months leading up to Inception.  Okay, granted, that was pretty recent, but before that what was there?  The collective internet community has been freaking out about this and now with a teaser trailer it’s starting to reach a fervor, and yet no one has any idea what the hell they’re seeing.  So often the response is “I don’t know what it is, but it looks cool!”  I think the problem is that people are thinking there’s more there than there really is.  The more you look at it, it’s hard to say there’s much more than Snyder throwing all of geek culture into a blender and cutting it together with a lot of speed ramping and a shitload of CGI.  It would seem the basic storyline is a bunch of super hot young girls are locked up in a mental hospital and their only way out is to battle their demons inside their world of imagination.  What strikes me as interesting is that this is a very male way of having young girls battle their demons.  A teenage female method of catharsis probably does not involve a bunch of sexy anime uniforms and fully automatic weapons.  It’s very clear to me this is a movie about 14 year girls for 14 year old boys.

But the thing that bothers me most of all is how rapidly tired I’ve become of this cinema of the unreal.  Really you can blame Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but the mere existance of the technology made it an inevitability.  I’m talking about these movies that made the decision to shoot solely on a green screen and add everything in digitally after the fact.  The one film I can think of that’s really used the technique in a positive way is Sin City and I might argue that being comprised of three short stories prevents it from becoming tiring and overstaying it’s welcome.

No matter how good visual effects become, the human eye can still pick them out as false, and it will be a long time before that’s not the case, if ever.  So when your entire movie is built using visual effects, sure it allows someone like Snyder to inhabit a stylistic world that only exists inside the artist’s minds, but it is also constantly slapping the audience in the face with how fake everything is.  One could argue that it’s just like animation, but that’s not true.  With a film like Sucker Punch, you’re anchoring the audience in with real actors giving real physical performances and compositing everything else around them after the fact.  It’s inciting a schizophrenia in the audience asking them to invest emotional capitol in these characters but forcing them to populate a world were nothing is real and the rules can be adjusted to suit the filmmaker’s visual whims.  In the end, you’re left with something that feels like a lot of visual noise and a story that feels like it completely lacks the tension of consequnce.

To a similar end, I find the same problems in doing animation using mocap like Robert Zemeckis has adopted.  You can watch a fine film like Polar Express or an impressively flawed film like Beowolf and buy into it as an animated story, which it is.  But there’s always this element where because Zemeckis is doing motion capture of real actors and then animating them in the movie to look like the real actor with the purpose of trying to fool us into thinking it’s the real actor that it becomes that cinematic slap in the face.  Seeing that creepy CGI Tom Hanks in Polar Express is horrifyingly disjointing and completley removes all possibility of enjoying the story because you’re concentrating so hard on trying to either see Tom Hanks or not see Tom Hanks.  Alternatively, the animation of Angelina Jolie in Beowolf was top notch and looked very close to live action, but not enough, and still it became incredibly disorientating taking me right out of the story.  I still don’t remember a single line of dialogue or what her scenes were even about because my mind was too busy trying to reconcile the animation.

So for now I’m going to reserve judgements on Sucker Punch and as the months go on to it’s release we’ll see more footage and get more of a sense of this film.  As it is, it’s hard for me to see this as being much more than another example of style over substance in the absence of story.

You’re welcome,

Ashley

1) It’s not in 3-D

You don’t need 3-D for a movie to be successful.  If anything, the technology, as awesome as it was in Avatar, really only helped to cover up the weaknesses of the story by distracting with something that felt awe inspiring.  Because of it’s success, we’ve had a year of really crappy movies made even crappier by bad post 3-D conversions (Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender) which only worsen the film.  Christopher Nolan has gone on record saying he’s not a fan of 3-D and would not support a post production process for Inception and that Batman 3 won’t be in 3-D either.  Thank God.

2) You Have to Think

While I was watching the movie, I became aware of the fact that the movie was throwing a massive amount of information and details at me with little regard for my ability to keep up.  Thusly I found myself becoming an active participant of the film and glued to each and every second with utter intensity for fear that I missed something.  This is not a movie you can turn your brain off for.  I don’t want to suggest that you have to be a genius to be able to understand it; no, everything is right there in the film.  But it does demand a level of attention from the audience that is extremely rare.

3) It’s an original idea

Inception is Inception.  It’s an original idea based on an original screnplay.  It wasn’t a TV series, a board game, a Hasbro toy, a comic book, a video game, a remake of a foreign film or even a reboot of a formative original movie from the 80s that I loved when I was a kid.  It is an original movie through and through, and I never thought I’d reach the day where I treasured just how rare that is.  We need more original stories.  I don’t want to see Inception 2 (or even Re-Inception).  I like it just the way it is.  Now show me something else that’s original.  Please.

You’re welcome,

Ashley