Patton
January 23, 2008 | 1 Comment
“Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
Every time I think about this movie, I can feel a surge of testosterone coursing through my system. I swear, I think my penis gets an inch longer for a time, too. Guys like war movies and this is my all-time favorite. It doesn’t have the best battle scenes or the best special effects. The main character never engages in any hand-to-hand gladiatorial battles with the enemy. It doesn’t have a lot of blood in it, either. So why is it so good? One name: George C. Scott.
General George S. Patton was a warrior without compare and a true man’s man. He was, perhaps, the greatest general this country has ever seen. To say he was bold, audacious, hard, bloodthirsty and aloof would be wholly inadequate. He was, perhaps as simply as can be put, larger than life itself. And to successfully portray a man like that requires a supremely gifted actor giving the performance of a lifetime and, in this, Scott does just that. The famous opening speech gave me goose pimples the first time I saw the movie. Hell, I wanted to go grab my father’s .30-06 rifle out of the closet right then and there and march off to war behind the man I was seeing on the screen. Nevermind it was the mid 70’s and we weren’t at war with anyone at the time. It just didn’t matter because I wanted to follow that man into battle. Such was the nature of General Patton. That George C. Scott could recreate him so accurately and intensely puts his performance at or near the top of any ‘best of all time’ list.
“The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill *their* blood. Shoot *them* in the belly.”
After the stirring speech the movie takes a breath and begins to unfold in a more normal fashion. Patton, like the hand of a god, takes command of the U.S. forces in North Africa and transforms these rag-tag soldiers into a hungry, aggressive army through sheer force of will. His victories pile up as does his fame. He is just what the doctor ordered! Morale improves and soon it appears we might win WWII after all! There is a problem, however. General Patton is not a quiet man nor is he a particularly nice man. He is, in the eyes of many, quite offensive and he does some very harsh things. Such is the nature of war. But now that things are going well, it seems the American people are much less inclined to allow him his faults. And then, at a very inopportune time, he gets angry at a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. He slaps the soldier, calls him a coward, and orders him to be marched to the front. Popular opinion turns against him and his turn from brilliant field general to worldwide embarrassment is complete.
“We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads on our tanks.”
Buried in controversy and shame, he is removed from command. America, it seems, cannot afford a harsh, unforgiving general to lead its armies. He is used as a decoy for a while; a humiliating duty, to be sure. But, as all fallible heroes of legend do, he gets a second chance. Being a true hero, he takes advantage of this second chance and leads us, once again, to victory multiple times after the invasion of Normandy. He even used the Nazi’s own Blitzkrieg tactics against them and pulled off some of the most remarkable victories of the entire war.
“The last great opportunity of a lifetime – an entire world at war, and I’m left out of it?!? God will *not* permit this to happen! I *will* be allowed to fulfill my destiny! His will be done.”
But what then? What if doctors finally managed to cure the world of all its ailments? They would no longer be needed. They would fade from existence over a short time. Such is what happened after World War II. With no more fighting, there was no need for the pure warrior. A glimpse into this lonely afterlife is seen; an afterlife that the general himself was well aware of. In real life, General Patton died of complications of injuries incurred after an automobile accident in December of 1945, not long after the war. Some people would point that incident and decry the unfortunate timing and the ironic nature of his death. I suspect, though, that the General himself wouldn’t have thought it so bad. Better for a warrior to die than to live out a long life with nothing left to fight for.
“There’s only one proper way for a professional soldier to die: the last bullet of the last battle of the last war.”
Well said, General. Well said.
Popularity: 13% [?]
The Cloverfield Phenomenon
January 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Yes, I used the “P” word. From the mysteriously tantalizing trailers to the obsessive pursuit of all the viral marketing material to the LOUD $41 million dollar noise made at the box office this past weekend, Cloverfield is now, officially, a phenomenon.
And you just KNOW the folks at Paramount are giddy about how well it’s doing especially considering the budget for the movie is estimated to have been only $25-30 million. JJ is already thinking about what comes next and I’m sure the studio will want to get an official multi-sequel deal in place very soon.  For all you scavenger-surfing viralists, get ready for more online adventures with Tagruato and Slusho (and probably more MySpace pages).
Remember:Â You can’t drink just six!
Popularity: 8% [?]
Free Movie Monday for 1/28/08
January 21, 2008 | 9 Comments
It’s a holiday for some folks, but not for us. Here the Free Movie Monday express just keeps on truckin!
New in the prize library this week is Fatal Contact, a good martial arts movie with a decent story but a crappy ending. Don’t let the ending waive you off though, you aren’t watching it for the story after all.
Same rules as usual, spot something you want in the library, just be the first person to reply to this message saying what you want and we’ll ship it your way.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Fatal Contact
January 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
Martial arts movies are kinda like porn, the story exists only to get to the next action scene. In that light, Fatal Contact is an above average porn movie, but it’s still porn.
Kong (Jacky Wu Jing) is a nice guy, a nice guy who is also on the Chinese Olympic kung fu team. When he’s not training for the Olympics he keeps himself limber by performing in low budget acrobatic shows, think Cirque du Soleil without the huge cast and stage. OK, he twirls stuff on stage, but he does it really really well! After one of his shows, some guys that run an underground fighting organization approach him and offer him $2000 to fight one match, win or lose. Kong is a nice guy though, and underground fighting is illegal, so he declines.
Enter Siu (Miki Yeung), a cute girl who shows an interest in Kong after he says no to fighting. Unfortunately for Kong, this girl is the definition of a controlling girlfriend. Not only does she encourage Kong to fight, but she keeps jumping in to the negotiations to get him more money.. though I suppose it’s a good thing, since he’s far too nice to handle business on his own.
Anyway, Siu talks Kong into trying out a fight, he does, and he wins easily. They want him to come back the next week, and with her encouragement he says yes.. and wins again. At this point his skills are obviously far above anyone he’s meeting, so the guy running the show starts to raise the stakes, getting better fighters and more money involved. After several rounds of this Kong starts to change.. a little. During the fights he’s getting meaner, but only when really provoked. And even when he does get “meaner” he doesn’t totally come unglued.
There’s other stories involved of course, the guy running the fights is trying to expand his territory, Siu is obviously trying to get Kong to make more and more money for her own reasons, she’s got a friend who’s a hooker that she gives life advice to, there’s “The Captain” (Ronald Cheng) who helps look after Kong and Siu and who has his own story of course.
But it’s all about the fights, and the fights are excellent. Yes, there are wires used on occasion, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. The battles look realistic and there’s no “let’s jump on the roof and run up and down walls” crap here. Picture martial arts street fighting, and this delivers that picture. I really like the way Jacky WuJing moves, he seems to act fairly well judging from his facial expressions (I don’t speak Cantonese so had the English track playing) and I could see him one day becoming a star in Hollywood assuming he learns English.
The story doesn’t suck (except the ending, which just blows) and there’s some good humor to go along with the action. It’s a solid 3 star movie, might have been 4 if the ending were different.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Cassandra’s Dream
January 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This is Woody Allen’s third dark foray, along with CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS and MATCHPOINT, into what can drive someone to murder, and if they can get away with it.
Allen makes a movie a year, and most of them are New York City comedies of one sort or another, but this is his third movie in a row set in London.
Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Ferrell) are brothers, two working-class Londoners. They go in together to buy an old boat and restore it, naming it CASSANDRA’S DREAM.
Terry is an auto mechanic with a gambling problem who gets into debt with loan sharks. Ian works in the family restaurant, but has dreams of business deals involving hotels in California. He’s smitten with a beautiful actress, and feels he’s not going to be able to continue to win her affections without suitable financial backup.
With them both needing money, enter their rich uncle who has a proposition. There’s a certain business associate of his who’s causing big problems for the uncle (Tom Wilkonson) which might lead him to jail, and he’d very much like to see the man dead.
Neither brother is a career criminal, but with the one’s gambling problems and the other’s thirst for the good life, they slowly begin to convince themselves that murder is an option.
Then they try to meticulously plan out the murder (With guns harder to get in England, serious consideration is given to strangling, knifing, or bludgeoning). But of course, things don’t go quite as planned.
This is a tense thriller with a a haunting soundtrack by Phillip Glass.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Good Luck Chuck
January 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Boobs. More boobs. Sex. More sex. More boobs. Couple of laughs, little bit of romance, more boobs, and more sex. There you go, the quick summary of Good Luck Chuck.
Charlie (Dane Cook) is a successful dentist and a good looking guy, who gets lots of women. He’s never found the “right” girl though, and always ends up breaking up for one reason or another. But there’s a twist, it seems that the girl will marry the very next guy she dates after breaking up with Charlie. Boil this down to the essence and it’s Boinking Charlie = finding Mr. Right. Once word gets out Charlie literally has them lining up to have sex with him. For the good of the women, Charlie goes with the flow.. after all, he’s just spreading happiness.
The root of this curse stems from a birthday party where an 8-year old Charlie was playing spin the bottle and ended up getting jumped in the closet by a 10-year old Goth girl. She takes off her shirt, showing that someone out there makes black leather training bras, and asks to see his penis. When he refuses, she rips open his shirt, scratches his chest and starts kissing him. Charlie escapes the closet (something I’m sure he regretted a few years later) and crawls back out into the room, and the embarrassed girl curses Charlie.. resulting in his unusual love life.
Two things go wrong for Chuck. First he realizes that he’s in love with Cam (Jessica Alba) and second he gets bored with all the humping sans relationship. I have to think that it’s Cam’s fault, cause Chuck is banging a ton of really hot women, women that don’t need to be wined and dined, they just want him to lay some pipe. Consider this a moment. Charlie literally can have a lunchtime boink, then an evening boink or two with an endless supply of hot women and never has to do any “relationship work” to make this happen. Better still, the women *all know about each other* so it’s not like he has to keep a secret. But I suppose it wouldn’t have been much of a romantic comedy if he didn’t fall for Cam, damn her.
If I’d seen this movie in theaters I would have given it 3 stars. It was funny at times, it only had one really slow section, and there’s a ton of nudity. But I saw this as the unrated DVD, and that’s getting it an extra star. Why? Well, I was able to do a frame by frame analysis of Jessica taking off her shirt and showing some side boob… when the romantic part kicked in, I was able to fire up the notebook to check email, and there’s a lot of extras worth watching. The extras included a “sex matrix” where you see extended sex scenes, a gag reel that’s funnier than the movie, some featurettes that themselves included lots of boobs, deleted scenes, and an ad lib section where you see just how much funnier the movie could have been.
Final result, it’s a 4 star DVD, toss it in your Netflix queue with confidence.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Cloverfield
January 17, 2008 | 4 Comments
Warning: This movie is not for anyone that has the slightest hint of motion sickness. The entire film is shot 100% from the perspective of a hand held camcorder in documentary style… you know what I’m talking about -Â Blair Witch but much better.
Initially when this movie was made it was very hush, hush and had multiple cover names while it went from editing to post to marketing so it would remain a secret. The first anyone outside of a very small circle of people inside Paramount, saw anything, was the trailer attached to Transformers in July of ‘07. The trailer gave no indication as to the theme or plot and ended in nothing but a cryptic date of 011808. The fanboys went wild trying to get to the bottom of what this meant, and I was no different. Later it was discovered the film’s title was Cloverfield or Project Cloverfield and it was a secret project from JJ Abrams that involved a monster attacking New York city ala Godzilla and King Kong. Now you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting time telling you the stuff you already know about it, and I’m avoiding telling you anything you don’t. Well that’s because any information I offer will spoil the movie for you and we don’t do that around here.
The movie follows the story of a group of people trying to get out of the city in the minutes/hours after the initial attack. The creature sinks tanker in the Hudson river and rips the head off of Lady Liberty before their very eyes. This is enough of a wake up call for these folks to say it’s time to get out of Dodge. The group consisting of Caplan, Miller, Yustman, Stahl-David an Lucas try to escape a city over run by the Military, explosions and a giant monster… That you do get to see, and oddly enough you see it pretty often.
The production value is high, the sound is excellent and the effects were outstanding…Â and had it not been for a weak plot device that made half the audience start saying WTF are they doing… this movie would’ve been 5 stars.
In the traditional style of the monster movies of the 60’s, Cloverfield delivers exactly what you’re looking for if that’s your cup of tea.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Terry Jones’ Barbarians
January 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
I’m such a history nut…at least when it comes to history about wars and pillage and stuff like that. I’m also a huge Monty Python fan so when I found out about Terry Jones’ Barbarians, a 4-part series about the little-known tribes of Europe that were always the bane of the Romans, I had to have it!
History and Comedy are two things you might normally consider hard to mix together, but the brits seemed to have discovered the secret: A dry subject like history should only be mixed with comedy that is also dry. Enter Python alum Terry Jones! Following in the footsteps of several of his Python brethren, he narrates (and editorializes) this nifty little series to great effect.
History, as it turns out, has always held a rather dim view of the “barbarian” hordes of Europe. Although Rome was always viewed as corrupt and rather vile at times, at least the Romans were always viewed as being … well … civilized. The wealth and technology available allowed the Romans to build the fabulous cities whose ruins still stand today. We know of their many remarkable achievements in art, medicine, architecture, politics and, yes, warfare. But what of their foes? Always portrayed as tribal, savage, and superstitious, historians on the whole gave them little regard. But now, thanks to some clever deductive reasoning as well as newly unearthed evidence of their cities and civilizations, we now know that long-held view of these Barbarians was simply a fabrication of the victors who vanquished them – the Romans.
The Celts, as it turns out, built the first intercontinental highway system! As well, they created a *very* precise astronomical calendar that is believed to be the first to ever of its kind. It was much more complex – and accurate – than anything the Romans ever devised. Many other very surprising accomplishments have been discovered about the Celts and they are covered here in this material. And the other three episodes include equally fascinating information about the Goths and other peoples.
And through it all speaks the inimitable Terry Jones. He does a great job here of explaining with dumbing down the material (much). And he infuses the whole series with some very nice commentary and dry humor, too. My only real complaints about the series are 1) it’s too short. I would like to have seen more than just 4 episodes…and 2) while they did a great job explaining the ‘what’, they spent very little time on the question of ‘why’. A bit more attention there would have been fantastic. But complaints aside, this is still 4 stars worth of material.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Alvin and the Chipmunks
January 17, 2008 | 2 Comments
Let’s have some fun! Alvin and the Chipmunks is the animated cartoon brought to life, along the lines of Scooby, Underdog, Garfield and other cartoon animals gone celluloid. I know what you might be thinking: “Another cartoon animal graphically imposed in and around live action … but the others were so bad!†Yes, they were. However, this one is different in that most (if not all) sequences involving the furry critters are very well done.
Alvin, Simon and Theodore … did you catch yourself humming the tune? … are minding their own business preparing for the winter when they find themselves suddenly uprooted and moving to the city. Through happenstance they end up with Dave and the fun begins. (By the way, Jason Lee is Dave, he of the “My Name is Earl†fame. I knew I recognized him, but I didn’t realize just how annoying he is.)
The three chipmunks are the same curious “kids†they have always been in the cartoons, always finding ways to turn neat into messy, and with a certain munkish charm. They fall into a nice routine with Dave, singing and playing, but there has to be a villain, right? “Uncle Ian†(of Jett Records) is predictably self-serving and even more so when he learns the chipmunks can sing. He proceeds to do all he can to make as much money as possible on their munky grooves.
The chipmunk story grows weary in parts (and is moderately predictable) and the director tries to cover the lulls with cute chipmunk antics. In some cases … it works. In others … not so much. The movie was entertaining overall but one which I should have waited for the DVD release. It was, however, a great father-son day, so because of that time spent together, I’ll give it 3 stars (instead of 2).
Popularity: 12% [?]
Free Movie Monday
January 14, 2008 | 8 Comments
Several new titles have been added to the prize library, including a couple of brand new releases, White Noise 2 and The Ten.
The rules remain the same, but if the last couple of weeks is any indication then competition for this weekly giveaway is increasing. So, first to post saying what they want gets it (rules on the library page)!
Popularity: 9% [?]
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