Back From Vacation

I've returned to the frozen wasteland of the Mid-Atlantic form the sunnier climes of Las Vegas. While home is where the heart is (I keep it in a jar next to my bed) Vegas runs a close second. While there, I engaged in the expected drunken debauchery. In fact, before you are allowed to leave the city, you have to demonstrate a .015 blood alcohol level (no problem), business cards from at least three strip clubs (check) and citations for public disorderly conduct (one will do; I collected eight).

I found myself at a casino one morning at 7 in the AM and took down some notes, which I'll share with you. Because sharing is caring. Enjoy and tune back in for some movie related fun.

Early morning in a casino coffee shop. A few dregs from last night still washing up on the shore, trapped and smashed by the grating music of the slot sirens. The air is thick with first and last cigarettes, the occasional scent-bite of stale beer, fresh coffee and buffet eggs and bacon. Soft rock blares, keeping thoughts at a minimum.

But, who wants to think at 7 in the morning in a second tier casino in Vegas? Not the players. They have shark eyes focused on the big win, the jackpot, the thing that gets them out bed and into these palaces of cheap dreams. Not the staff, coming off all-night drunk-and-hooker shifts. They’re deaf and blind with fatigue and boredom. Too many flashing lights and sloppy passes by toilet brush salesmen from Topeka.

A push cart heavily laden with cases of beer and limes. Reinforcements for the bars, fodder for the “first thing in the morning” drinkers. The lime is for citrus, to fight off scurvy, of course. You can’t have a successful career as a loss addict, if you have bad teeth and bleeding gums.

And they are all loss addicts. No one who is a serious gambler wants to win. Every incremental victory is fed back into the machine. The talk of the big wins is less passionate than the lamentations of the losses; that's where the action is. We all know that dreams never come true. A place like this just confirms that. It makes crystal what we’ve already decided is the center-point of reality...we all lose in the end.

That bright, beautiful past, glowing like neon nights in our rear-view mirror. It all comes to an end, baby. You can try to push it back, try to maintain, but it always falls apart.

We are meant to be transients, a brief flash of light, then darkness. Our curse is that we know this. The lion doesn’t wake up knowing he’s one day closer to death. The gazelle ruts and eats, one eye open for the lion. But that’s not us. We keep both eyes open on the immutable past and the declining future.

A trio of elderly women waddle past, fat with the American dream or some hydrogenated version of it. Is this what nursing homes of the future will be like? Run by Caesar's Entertainment Corporation with nurses in micro-minis, flashing lights to bring on grand mal seizures to be swiftly medicated by attendants in tuxedo tee-shirts? Hooked into intravenous fluid drips, chained to a slot machine, blast of music, tinkle of coins, stirring memories of hot sweaty nights of youth?

There is a blue sky painted on the ceiling. Was it done out of a sense of irony? If so, that would restore my faith in humanity. Some smart assed prankster, grasping the lunacy of the task at hand, decides to mock the people who he is building a temple of loss to. Here’s the sky, the only one you want to see, blue and white paint on concrete and stucco.

An apt metaphor for the world we’re immersed in. Television and video games letting us live other lives. Relationships that are born, live and die as electrons over wires. Wrapping ourselves in layers of distance. Don’t talk about religion and politics. Don’t share your feelings. Don’t show weakness or doubt. Wrap yourself into a little ball and build an ego-world, where you are star, cast and critic of your own made-for-tv movie.

The fake sky, the flashing lights, the all you can feed trough, 80s pop, ringing buzzers from random slot machines. What’s it all for? No, who’s it all for? The loss addicts don’t know, don’t care. They only have eyes and ears for the Big Bust Out. For the employees, this must be like a low-rent Hell, Dante’s Casino, with the Brimstone Suite, now 666 a night. It’s environmental nostalgia; a time when the music, the lights, the barely there waitress outfit were something unique.

Vast seas of information have inundated us, turned the unique into the ordinary and left us swimming for islands of the past, hoping we’ll feel something new when we get there. But, it’s a lie. There is nothing new. We find the limitations of the human mind in places like this. Where we vomit out the same cave paintings and earth-mother tits and shiny beads that we’ve fondled and fought for since we dropped out of the trees.

What doesn’t change is the universal nature of the modern American coffee shop. It squats on every corner, selling liquid vibrations. We are sucked into its milky black hole, willingly giving ourselves over to muscle spasm, brain jitters and frequent bathroom trips. But, why not? America has always been a jacked up society. We sucked down cocaine in soft drinks and fueled our wars on uppers. With 20-foot tail-fins and nuclear bombs, we showed the world that the only way to go is big. Give the world a big middle finger as you rampage into the future. It’s worked for us so far; why not just keep it up? Of course, like all rushes, eventually you come down.

And that's what this place is...the junkyard of the future. I think I need another drink.

One Paragraph Review - Her (2013)

Set in the near future, Her follows the relationship between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). The twist - Samantha is an artificial intelligence, existing on Ted's home computer as is operating system (the AIs are referred to as OSes in the film). Ted quickly falls in love with the funny, insightful Samantha, a feeling reciprocated by the OS. Problems arise, as they do in any relationship; however, as the film reaches its conclusion, something unforeseen happens that effects Ted, Samantha and all of the AIs...and which I won't reveal. Her is a great movie. It is not perfect; there are some plot points that are not fully developed. However, the story (by Spike Jonze, who also directed) is gripping, addressing a number of themes in a sophisticated fashion. Not only does the movie look at the obvious, the relationship between man and technology. It also addresses issues of how people connect to one another, how we idealize the past, how social media and ubiquitous communication technology creates new modes of community formation and is also a great love story. As a character driven story, Her relies on its cast as much as its writing. Everyone from Phoenix and Johansson on do great jobs. Johansson in particular conveys the complexity of her character using only her voice (the OS is never more than a voice in Ted's ear). An amazing film and one everyone should see and think about.

A movie with Scarlett that does not have her dressed like this? I don't know about that...

One Paragraph Review - Captain Phillips (2013) - AHOY! SPOILERS

Captain Phillips is the true story of a sea captain who decides to market a line of children's cereal. What...oh, sorry, that's Cap'n Crunch. Captain Phillips is about a Somali pirate attack on an American cargo ship that results in Tom Hanks sitting in a chair looking at the camera with a pained expression for long periods of time, until a SEAL team kills three of the four pirates )the other winds up in US custody). The end. The film is actually pretty good. Hanks does a nice job with the only fully developed character in the movie. And that is the main problem with the film. Since the characters are underdeveloped, the film is needlessly long. The first half details the attempted hijacking and ends with Hanks being taken prisoner by the Somalis in a life boat, flows by quickly and efficiently. The second half has long stretches of Hanks in the life boat talking with his captors. The problem; the pirates are one dimensional characters. This may be explained as being Phillips' recollection of how he interacted with his captors. However, it makes for a tedious and repetitious second half, one that lasts about an hour-and-a-fifteen but seems much longer. While it would be wrong to say the film is ever boring, it either needed to have at least 15 minutes of the second half cut or it needed to take some dramatic license and give the pirates enough depth to justify the amount of screen-time they have. There is nothing wrong with long movies, as long as the story they are telling needs that time. This film does not earn its length. Is it worth watching? Yes, it is; however, its flaws become evident as the story drags on to its inevitable conclusion.

One Paragraph Review - Devil's Pass (2013) (SPOILERS Ahead)

Sweet!!!! Renny Harlin, the auteur responsible for Cutthroat Island - sorry..."the masterpiece of the cinematic form Cutthroat Island" - decided to give us just what we all have been clamoring for; another found footage horror movie. Yay! A group of bland documentarians (except for Gemma Atkinson, pictured below, who is no way bland) head to Russia to look into the Daytalov Pass Incident (an actual event in 1959 in which 9 people on a sky trip died under odd circumstances; you can read all about it at wikipedia the font of all knowledge in the universe). Stuff happens, people die, we find out that the Soviets had some kind of underground base in the area where they were working on teleportation and time travel, the Philadelphia Experiment is name checked, and we get one of the most telegraphed "twist" endings I've seen in a long time. Like most found footage movies, it has plausibility problems (why would a cameraman keep filming when horrifying monsters and hostile gunmen are following him?) and the bonus issue of how some of the footage is found. Given the story, there is no way anyone would see all of the footage we are shown...a real problem when that is your central conceit. The monster CGI is poorly done and the creatures are cliched in design, tall gaunt pale skinned creatures with big mouths (see I Am Legend, Rec, The Descent, etc.). The cinematography is the usual found footage mix of dull static shots, shaky cam and shots that no one actually using a handheld camera would get, given the circumstances. It's not brain cancer inducing; it's just dull and unoriginal in execution. Which is unfortunate, since the idea for the story (what really happened to the first expedition...something that isn't actually answered in the film) and, in the hands of a better director, could have made a good movie. Oh, and please, no more found footage movies. That is one cinematic style that needs to be retired.

Gemma Atkinson at no point wears this outfit in the movie. That might have made it worth watching.

One Paragraph Review - Yellowbrickroad (2010)

In 1940, the entire population of a small town in New Hampshire heads into the woods. 300 are found dead. Only one survivor is recovered; the rest of the people are missing. 70 years later, a small group of documentarians heads down the trail - the Yellow Brick Road - to reach its end and solve the mystery of where the people of the town were heading. Well-shot and fairly well-acted (although, as with most low-budget films, the performances are uneven), Yellowbrickroad is a nice mix of supernatural and psychological horror with overtones of H.P. Lovecraft. It is hampered by a conclusion that seems more like a random "twist ending" than a satisfying finale...and which features ludicrously bad CGI. After seeing the movie twice, I can say that some (although not all) of the things that seemed to be plotholes the first time around make more sense. But, the ending...it looks like the filmmakers knew they had set up the viewers for a stunning conclusion, but ran out of money and said "eh, whatever, let's just do some Jacob's Ladder rip-off." Still, the film does get points for having some genuinely disturbing moments and for being different. In an era of remakes, sequels, reboots and rip-offs, Yellowbrickroad is an attempt at telling an original story with the caveat that the filmmakers seem to be fans of Lovecraft and his brand of sanity-shattering weirdness. Check it out.

Unnecessary Movies - The Fog (2005) and Texas Chainsaw (2013)

I just got back from a week in the Outer Banks (that's in North Carolina, for those of you who are geographically challenged), hence the lack of updates. I did have a chance to check out some movies in between my beach house frolics. Two of the films - courtesy of Netflix - were The Fog (2005) and Texas Chainsaw (2013). Both were unpleasant experiences; thankfully, there was a lot of alcohol available to deaden the pain.

Spoilers ahead.

Let's start with The Fog. This is a remake of John Carpenter's underrated spectral aquatic leper film of the same name from 1980. I have a soft spot in my heart (or head, some might say) for the original, so I came to the remake with some baggage. What I found not only failed to meet the standards of the original; it failed on all levels of cinematic story-telling. There is literally nothing that worked in The Fog. The effects are laughable, although there should be some kind of award for an effects team that fails to make CGI fog look better than the smoke machines used 30 years ago. The acting is terrible, with everyone apparently as bored with the whole mess as the audience. The story makes no sense. The "rules" for how the ghosts function change as the movie progresses. I assume this was in a misguided attempt to create "memorable" kills. My favorite: the ghosts set up a table on a beach - complete with an ornate dining 19th century dining set - in order to somehow entice a local beach comber to...wrap a rope around his neck...so he can be dragged into the ocean by the ghosts. Really? And the ending is poorly conceived and executed. The heroine - who is, of course, the reincarnation of the wife one of the ghosts - is kissed by her dead husband and becomes a ghost. Huh? How does that work? She doesn't appear to die, she just becomes transparent. The movie is full of moments like this.

Ultimately, I can't fault the actors; the writer, producers and director are the one's responsible for this pathetic attempt to cash in on a far better original. If you want to see a creepy movie about ghosts lurking in a fog bank, check out the original movie. Stay far away from the remake.

Texas Chainsaw is a little better. It is a direct sequel to the 1974 original. The film begins with a quick recap of the events of that film, followed by the massacre of most of Leatherface's family (which gains about half-a-dozen extra members, who looks like roadies for ZZ Top) by a group of rednecks. Leatherface survives, as well as an infant girl. She grows up to be the beautiful Alexandra Daddario who is friends with the stunning Tania Raymonde (both pictured below; you're welcome). There are also some guys around (boyfriend, cannon fodder, etc) but who cares? Anyway, the attractive young people head to Texas when Alexandra's character finds out she has inherited an estate from a grandmother she didn't know she had. In the basement, Leatherface is still alive, having been cared for by grandma. It should be no surprise that Leatherface takes his chainsaw to Alexandra's friends and some of the locals who were responsible for killing his family. Unfortunately, the ending hurts an otherwise okay, if very "by-the-numbers" slasher flick. Alexandra finds out about what happened to her family...and decides she's going to help her cousin, Leatherface. The same Leatherface who is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of her friends. And the local sheriff is fine with Leatherface killing a bunch of people. I guess we're supposed to believe that Alexandra is...I don't know...insane at this point? Or think that the "bonds" of family trump the murder of people who are supposed to be her close friends? I guess the sheriff sees the deaths of some of the men who were responsible for the massacre decades ago as a form of justice. But that doesn't explain why he's okay with the deaths of other, innocent people. Maybe he's insane as well? Maybe it's something in the water in Texas?

Up until the ending, Texas Chainsaw was neither good nor bad; it was an innocuous pile of cliches and genre tropes wrapped up in a competently shot and acted package. With this ending, it becomes insultingly dumb. Don't reward this terrible storytelling with your eyeballs. Watch the original to see what low-budget, take-no-prisoners filmmaker is all about.

Alexandra Daddario

Tania Raymonde...almost enough of a reason to watch this movie.