BadAss Movies Day 2: Winter's Bone

Don’t let the boring title or shitty poster fool you, this is an amazing modern day noir set in the Ozarks with some of the best performances of the year.

Why its badass:

-A great adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini.

-Jennifer Lawrence. Somehow she manages to be tough, maternal, badass and naïve all at the same time.

-John Hawkes' incredible performance as Teardrop. Nobody doubted his range, from Me and You and Everyone We Know to Deadwood to (of course) Eastbound and Down but his transformation here is so impressive its like he’s been getting into character for forty years.

-A banjo score!

-The beautiful bleak cinematography.

- Her reaching in for the second hand (you’ll know it when you see it).

Cinematic Relatives: Brick, Fargo

Check out BadAss Movies Day 1 here.

Two green movies and Thor

Here’s a quick breakdown of the upcoming superhero releases based solely on trailers and hearsay.

3. Green Hornet: Stephen Chow directing a Hollywood superhero movie starring Seth Rogen with Nicolas Cage as a supervillain, coming out Summer 2010? Awesome!

Then Chow drops 0ut, to be replaced by Michel Gondry? Okay, still cool.

Then Nicolas Cage drops out, replaced by Christoph Waltz? Still fine.

Then its pushed to dump-month January? Uh-oh.

The trailer is a bland-a-thon? I’m getting concerned.

And their post-converting it to 3D? Maybe it’ll be better than The Last Airbender.

Pros: The writers. Director. Hopefully practical effects.

Cons: Cameron Diaz as a plucky new secretary. Isn’t she 40?

2. Green Lantern: A dumb-looking purple alien gives Ryan Reynolds a ring and he gets a new CGI body that can project ‘magic fist.’

Isn’t Green Lantern the guy who’s allergic to yellow?

Pros: Ryan Reynolds seems very nice when not buried underground.

Cons: From the director of Vertical Limit!

1. Thor. Check out Anthony Hopkins' golden eyepatch. Then remember this is from Kenneth Branagh the director of the clusterfuck that is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I cannot wait for this movie b/c everything here screams high-profile train-wreck.

I will not look away.

Pros: Natalie Portman is so hot its dumb.

Cons: It’s Thor. There are no cons.

Cautious Optimism, 'Cowboys vs Aliens' be thy name

The Cowboys vs Aliens trailers hits the web on wednesday and i can't wait. I love westerns, alien invasion movies, genre mash-ups, explosions, director Jon Favreau and the cast. So what could go wrong? Well like a beaten dog, I've at least learned to taper my expectations. Here's why:

5. Wild Wild West: A Mega-budget summer tentpole that combines westerns, science-fiction, and 'comedy'? We've seen this before. Wild Wild West effectively killed Barry Sonnenfeld's (previously impressive) big screen career. The only things to walk away from this with any dignity were the theme song (which i can still sing) and a giant mechanical spider.

4. Jonah Hex: A mega-budget summer tentpole that combines westerns, science fiction and 'comedy'? We've seen this before. Jonah Hex effectively killed Jimmy Hayward's (never impressive) big screen career. The only things to walk away from this movie unscathed were the Mastodon score and Megan Fox's cleavage (see previous).

3. Iron Man 2: Jon Faveau's superhero sequel made a ton of money but anyone who argues its a good movie is lying through their teeth.

It's a boring mess filled with tedious action sequences, an incoherent story, f/x for f/x sake, and wall-to-wall one-liners that let us know the characters care just as little as the audience does. It's better than Wild Wild West or Jonah Hex, but then again so are a lot of things I don't want to stare at for two hours.

2. Vs movies: Freddy, Jason, Alien, Predator, Santa Claus, Martians, The People, Larry Flynt. The bar is not as high as we'd like it to be.

1. Space Cowboys: What if this is just a remake of a shitty Clint Eastwood movie?

Comedies with Zero Laughs Day 1: The Adventures of Pluto Nash

This movie is the equivalent to a sit-down dinner at Wendy's. Its sad and its quiet and somehow you feel worse when its over. 

The only thing sadder than when this movie aims for comedy is its sorry attempts at action sequences. 

Pluto Nash apparently cost over $80 million. Unless Eddie Murphy got paid 75 of that  I challenge you to tell me where the money went cause the sets and effects are at a high school play level.

Closest laugh:

(Someone breaks a WOODEN stool.)

Pluto Nash: Do you have any idea how hard it is to get wood on the moon? 

Seriously. That's what we're working with. 

Also Alec Baldwin has half a scene. I wanted to laugh. I genuinely did. 

Directed by Ron Underwood. Director of City Slickers AND Tremors!

 How could you Ron? 

Fuck Pluto Nash. 

(although props for having an 80 million dollar movie where randy quaid is the second biggest guy on your poster)

3 reasons NOT to be optimistic about Machete

Today was the premiere of the trailer for Robert Rodriguez's Machete, adapted from the trailer from Grindhouse and surprise -- it looks a lot like the trailer from Grindhouse. 

The movie could be fun. Michelle Rodriguez looks hot in an eye-patch, they cast the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as Steven Seagal and they even got Robert 'I-haven't-shown-emotion-on-screen-since-Rocky & Bullwinkle' DeNiro. 

But despite people's affections for the original faux-teaser there are reasons to assume this movie will bomb. 

1. Irony: There's a difference between liking something and ironically liking something. Hipsters and internet trolls are notorious for their ironic love. This  is code for 'Maybe I'll download it while scanning through youporn.' 

Say what you will about 'Mainstream Culture' (aka people who watch Two and Half Men) but when they ironically love something they bring it the fuck back (see Betty White). 

When hipsters and nerds ironically love something you get Motherfucking Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane. In other words, colossal failure. 

2. Mexico: Nacho Libre, Man on Fire, The Mexican, Bandidas, 

From Dusk till Dawn 3: Hangman's Daughter. 

The 2000s have not been kind to Hollywood films set south of the border. 

3. Planet Terror: Didn't Rodriguez already try and make a celebration of b-and-c-grade movies that inexplicably had an oversized budget, an 'intentionally' bad script and recognizable stars. And wasn't that easily the worst part of Grindhouse? 

For the record, I love Death Proof but the best part was easily Don't!

(I can't stress enough DeNiro was really in Rocky & Bullwinkle, he even mocks his Taxi Driver scene)

BadAss Episodes: Alias 'Phase One' (2003)

I decided to finally check out a show that I completely ignored for all of its run. 

Season 1 of Alias is fun. Over the course of 22 episodes a series of small reveals and reversals finally all culminate in 'the semi-big twist' ('Mom?')

And for twelve episodes Season 2 seemed to be on the same trajectory.  Syd's mom's loyalties flip-around, no one knows what Sloan's up to. 

In fact by 'Phase One,' the post-Super Bowl episode, you feel like Alias is pretty much on a very entertaining variation of auto-pilot. (keep in mind Alias' version of auto-pilot puts Jennifer Garner in lingerie, and then tells her to change b/c it clearly isn't sexy enough)

And then J.J. Abrams laughs in our face just b/c he's smarter. 

From Syd's mid-air exploding plane escape onward the show does not stop. It gives you more plot than most series finales and at this point we're only halfway through the season. 

Why its badass: 

- Aforementioned lingerie / plane escape

- Sloan disappears. 

- He's replaced by the eternally badass Rutger Hauer. Who's smart enough to realize that Syd and her dad are double agents IMMEDIATELY. Because they are. And its obvious.

- Syd's dad gets tortured. Hard.

- Syd has to tell Dixon the truth, but doesn't have time to deal with the hundred-thousand follow up qts. He wants to fucking kill her. Also they're randomly standing by oil rigs.

- Sloan is chilling on a beach somewhere with his dead-again-live-again wife having pulled off the most inexplicable plan in history. (Did he place the wine glass in his bathroom in the earlier episode, if so who was he acting for when he almost dropped his towel in shock)

- Syd finally hooks up with vaughn (ending their boring looks of longing) 

- They take down SD-6. I thought there would be four more years of build-up. So glad I was wrong.

- And of course, Frannie, the chick who was there to -- well it never really was clear why she was on this show -- but she gets owned by her Face Clone. Amazing. (its never addressed but does the new double agent Fran continue to run her restaurant? Is she in any way qualified or prepared for that? I would like to see a cold blooded killer deal with a kitchen staff)

Anyway, I'm so used to incremental soap-opera like story telling on television I forgot how much fun it can be when characters actually do shit. 

BadAss Episode.

Movies to DRUNK by -- Day 1

This is a quest to find the perfect movie to make fun of while drinking with friends. There are certain criteria, violence, cool characters and a tone that takes itself pretty seriously. Why make fun of a movie already making fun of itself?

Todays Entry: Doomsday (2008)

What's it about: Neil Marshall (The Descent) makes an homage to every John Carpenter movie ever made (with the possible exception of Memoirs of an Invisible Man with Chevy Chase) 

Violence: 

Heads are smashed. 

Limbs are unceremoniously removed.  

A body gets run over by a tank and explodes like a blood-filled balloon. 

A fucking rabbit explodes! How often do you get to see that 

Grade: A

Characters: 

It's always nice to see Bob (Smee) Hoskins but he has nothing to do but waddle.  

Its a bad sign when the only memorable character is a chick with tribal tatoos and even now I can't remember if she actually has any lines (although her sendoff is pretty amazing). 

Rhona Mitra plays the lead and I'm all for movies about badass chicks, but her character traits are limited to 'can-remove-eye-and-use-it-as-a-camera.' 

The main bad guy has a decent Mad Max-vibe and although he's forgettable he wins points for having one of the greatest character intros of all time, dancing out in front of  crowd of cheering cannibals to the song 'Good Thing' by -- wait for it -- the Fine Young Cannibals (I just got it. Genuis). 

Grade: C

Overall: 

Even though Marshall's in on the joke, the movie takes itself just serious enough to make it fun to sarcastically rip on with friends. Unfortunately the movie completely falls apart in the last third when Rhona finds herself in the scottish countryside and the movie LITERALLY goes medieval. 

If you're not adequately drunk by the time Malcolm McDowell shows up, you're in serious trouble (but that goes for real life as well). 

Drinking Grade: B+

Actual Movie Grade: B-

Happy 4th! Coming soon: 'Movies to DRUNK by'

Happy Fourth all!!!

Tomorrow we launch our 'Movies to DRUNK by' feature. Highlighting flicks perfect for sitting back with friends, drinking way too much and constantly be a smartass. Should be fun. 

See you then. In the mean time celebrate America by 

drinking, eating processed meats and blowing up a sm

all part of it! Awesome-est holiday ever. 

What the shit is going on with Scream 4?

Or Scre4m as dumbasses want it to be called. The first two Scream films are a lot of fun. But then it all went to hell when they didn't bring back screenwriter Kevin Williamson for Scream 3 and instead hired Ehren Kruger (Reindeer Games, Brothers Grimm, Transformers 2 rewrites). 

It's weird to defend Williamson considering his other movies are I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Teaching Mrs. Tingle and Cursed (a werewolf movie seriously pictured left. yes that's the wolfman giving you the finger). But Williamson really did nail the two Scream films. 

Scream 4 reunited the screenwriter, director Wes Craven, Neve Campbell (somehow still adorable) and many surviving members of the previous films. 

Word was the script was badass and the ending was so cool they wouldn't even let most of the cast see past page 75. 

But word has broke from Williamson that he's off the project and was replaced by ... Ehren Kruger again. 

Apparently the re-writes are so bad that unhappy cast members are either dropping out (Lauren Graham) or bitching loudly (Hayden Panettiere).

Despite the fact that this is a blatant retread to a franchise that's thirteen years past its prime, it at least seemed like there was hope for this project. But that's all getting pretty seriously Kruger'ed (who to be fair wrote one pretty good movie Arlington Road).

I'm trying to think  of the best Scream ripoffs from the late 90s. 

BadAss Movie: three burials of melquiades estrada (2005)

This is a completely underrated modern-day western. It's directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel). It plays  with structure much like Arriaga's earlier scripts but in a slightly more low-key manner.

In the movie Barry Pepper plays a border patrol agent who accidently kills the titular Melquiades, an illegal immigrant who's best friend is a fellow ranch-hand played by Jones. 

Essentially the movie is about Jones kidnapping Pepper and taking him on a horse-bound trek through the american southwest to the place where Melquiades asked to be burried. 

Why its awesome: 

- the quirky sense of humor 

(a horse gets monumentally destroyed in this movie and its hilarious)

- Tommy Lee Jones'  low-key performance  that pre-dates his work in                                                                                  No Country for Old Men by two years. It's hard 

to believe that this is the same guy that cackled his way through the god-awful Batman Forever.

-Great supporting turns by Melissa Leo, January Jones and Dwight fucking Yoakem.

- January Jones' (pictured left) sex scene. You may expect it to be hot. But instead its one of the most depressing / hilarious things I've ever scene. 

- killer cinematography

- the last line of the movie which really makes you re-think everything that's come before

Cinematic Relatives: No Country for old men, The Proposition, 3:10 to Yuma

a damn shyamalan

I've heard from friends and many sites that paying to see The Last Airbender in 3D is a ripoff. The movie was shot for 2D then went through post-conversion process  to make it 3D. This means not only is there no reason to pay more to see it but the conversion renders the darker scenes incomprehensible. 

Now technically I believe that paying to see the 2d Airbender is just as much of a ripoff. Who wants to see more of a shitty movie? I still believe Blues Brothers 2000 would have been better in ZeroD, where you sit in an entirely dark theatre and occasionally a song plays. 

How did M. Night come to this? Let's take a look (ignoring Wide Awake, if I wanted to see Rosie O'Donnell as a nun who plays baseball i'd ... (insert joke here))

The Sixth Sense (B+): Cool little movie that is actually more fun the second time even though technically it makes absolutely zero sense.  I don't care if you figured out the twist b/c a) you're lying b) it doesn't matter anyway, the movie's a cool low-key ride. 

Unbreakable (A-): What if superheroes actually existed? A million comics, movies and tv shows have tackles the idea. but none like this. its like watching the original Superman played a-thousand-percent realistic.

Signs (B+): This movie's beautifully shot. Love the birthday video. I'm curious how the movie would be different if he got his original choice Clint Eastwood. Also anyone who bitches about the water stuff at the end is an idiot. The 'how we beat the aliens' beat is always the most pointless obligatory part, and this had at least been set up. 

The Village (C): This is where it all falls apart. Signs just made hundreds of millions of dollars and no one told him that he was writing a shitty TV episode. I wish he would keep the first half of this movie and then have the guts to actually follow through. 

Lady in the Water (C-): This is a sub-first draft. Apparently people at Touchstone had the audacity to tell him the script wasn't ready. So instead of - you know - working on it, he went to Warner Bros. They gave him 80 million bucks and in a rare moment in history, Touchstone was proven correct.

The Happening (D): What do you even say? Not only does the movie suck, but the acting sucks, the cinematography sucks, the dialogue sucks, the logic sucks, the fucking craft services probably sucked. This is not a movie. It is a filmed 'idea abortion.'

Woody Allen's Best films

Woody Allen recently announced his six favorites among his films. They were Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, Husbands and Wives, Bullets over Broadway, Matchpoint and Vicky Christina Barcelona. 

People went off on his choices, but its not a bad list. Reading interviews through his career Zelig is one of the few movies he consistently says nice things about (he never praises anything), Husbands and Wives is pretty vintage Woody and the rest were all nominated for Oscars. 

Having said that here are the Real top five:

5. Sweet and Lowdown: Sean Penn and Samantha Morton are amazing in this. Their last scene together where she 'tells' him she's married is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in film. 

4. Stardust Memories: I can see why people rejected this movie when it came out, but now it's like watching a Soderbergh-esque comedic dissection of woody allen's career that just happened to come out in the early 80's.

3. Bullets Over Broadway: "The world will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina." Line for line this is his most quotable work. 

2. Bananas: There's too much awesome here to mention but this is what the aliens in Stardust Memories meant when they talk about his 'early funny ones.'

1. Annie Hall: This is the obvious choice but there's a reason for it. The offbeat structure, the downbeat ending, the fucking lobsters. It's a perfect movie. 

why Jonah Hex sucking sucks

Fun slasher films dominated the b-movie scape throughout the 70s and 80s. But like most things profitable they were run into the ground. 

People forget that there were zero mainstream slasher films in the nineties until Scream (1996) revitalized the genre. Without that film we wouldn't have the constant barrage of horror films we see today.

In exactly the same way, b-westerns were the shit during the 60's and 70's. From Sergio Leone to the Django films, Sartana, Death Rides a Horse to Johnny Yuma this genre is lost art. It gave weird looking actors leading roles and violent filmmakers a chance to run wild. Who wouldn't want to see a movie called The Ugly Ones, or They call me Hallelujah or Heads You Die ... Tails I kill You! 

In a time before indie-filmaking, b-westerns were the first true indie movies. You could make profit on weird flicks with off-kilter sensibilities. And we need that to come back. Jonah Hex could have heralded a return to the days of fun b-westerns but instead it was a colossal failure.

It's a shame. 

A horse with a gatling gun on it? Badass.

John Malkovich blows up pioneers while sipping absinthe? Badass. 

Weird-ass western about a guy with a fucked up face fucking up people who fucked up his family with an 80 million dollar budget?  Badass.

Jonah Hex? Ass Bad. 

I heard equally bad things about Wild Wild West eleven years ago. I ignored them all. And had to see for myself. Josh Brolin is cool and Megan Fox is hot but you could say the same about Will Smith and Salma Hayek in 1999.

I love b-westerns. I love steam-punk.  There's a movie to be made here.  Why does Wild Wild Jonah West Hex have to suck so incredibly bad?

The great tragedy is we may never have a modern day Lee Van Cleef (sorry michael madsen and / or bronson pinchot).

gore(verbinski)-fest

The makers of Rango released their first non-inexplicable-mechanical-fish related teaser today and its pretty good. Cool look, Cool music and a gag where a hawk with a can on its face slowly turns its head. What more could you want from an animated flick? 

In honor of this, how about a rundown of director gore verbinski's filmography: 

MouseHunt (B): Underrated comedy, where two guys hunt down an animal and Christopher Walken has a great cameo (this could also be a word-for-word summary of kangaroo jack except substitute 'underrated' with 'shit-fest' and 'has a great cameo' with 'cashes a check while I watch.')

The Mexican (?): If brad pitt and julia roberts shit in the woods and no one remembers, did it really happen?  Are there still DVDs of this out there? Do people own them? 

The Ring (B-): Haven't seen this since theaters but as I recall all Naomi Watts has to do is not fall down a well. Cue a giant television which hits her in the face, knocking her into the well. It was one of the funniest things i've ever seen. Also without this we wouldn't have classics like Shutter and One Missed Call.   So screw The Ring for ending Shannon Sossamon's career. 

The Weather Man (C): All I remember about this movie is Nicolas Cage getting hit with milkshakes and Michael Caine saying 'Camel Toe.' In retrospect maybe i'd like it more now. 

Pirates of the Caribbean: the curse of the black pearl (B+): People remember this one fondly b/c of the surprise of Jack Sparrow. But...

Dead Man's Chest (A-): All the other characters were really boring. Dead Man's Chest takes those boring characters and gives them all extremely cool things to do. Sure its bloated and amped up to eleven but its also a shit-ton of fun. I will never understand the nerd-hate for this movie, except that it lead to --

At World's End (C-): If any movie could be immediately remade i would vote for this one. First of all it doesn't jump off from DMC instead it actually wastes time with more exposition, making the second film (which i love) pointless. Second it figures bigger is always better. Spectacle for spectacle's sake is boring. I never thought i'd live to see a movie where a pirate swordfights a squid-man on the top of a ship as it spins around a whirlpool ... and I'm           BORED shit-less. Literally i was so bored my shit didn't want to come out b/c then it too would have to watch the movie.

But anyway, Rango looks good. Enjoy the owl mariachi band  and hyper-quick hunter s. thompson  cameo.