Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, dir. Sam Peckinpah (1974)

STEVE says:

You can't beat that for a title, can you?

I saw this movie first about 15 years ago, and remembered it only in bits and pieces. Since we started up our Peckinpah retrospective last month with Convoy, I've been wanting to watch it again, hoping that it was every bit as good as I remembered it. 

According to IMDb: "An American bartender and his prostitute girlfriend go on a road trip through the Mexican underworld to collect a $1 million bounty on the head of a dead gigolo." Yeah, but that's only the set-up. Said bartender, Warren Oates, soon learns that his prostitute girlfriend recently spent three days and three nights with Alfredo Garcia, which only serves to make the idea of decapitating him more appealing. When Oates learns that Garcia is already dead, killed in a car accident, it only makes his job easier - but also goes a long way in making him more despicable. For a while, anyway.

It's strangely crafted: I thought the first half dragged, with all the talk about dreams and finding a better life, but come midpoint I realized its purpose, and understood just how necessary all that talk was. The first half of the movie is the calm before the storm...

3.5

Knowing Richard Black, dir. Jon-Marc Sandifer (2001)

NIKKI says:

There were so many things I enjoyed about this film. I loved listening in on calls between Jon-Marc and his friends, I thought the discussion Jon-Marc had with a friend and a female stranger at a bar at the end was fascinating, and I especially enjoyed Jon-Marc's roving-reporter stuff when he interviewed his colleagues about interracial dating. Sadly, these things were asides to the film's main purpose which involved Jon-Marc securing a date for a woman he'd only met once, who was in town for one week, and wanted to "experience" a black man for the first time. 

The catch, if it can be so called, is that the woman wanting the date is also black. And so while Jon-Marc spends most of his time chasing up friends to go out with the woman, Marilyne, I wanted to hear more in the way of discussion about the fact that Marilyne, in her early 40s and living in Africa, has never been romantically involved with a black man. Whenever the film brings this topic up, it becomes extremely compelling. When discussion ends and we go back to Jon-Marc and his pimping (which is essentially what he's doing), tedium sets in.

Still, Jon-Marc is great. He's so charismatic and his friends are so interesting that I was never actually bored, just frustrated at his choice of focus. Chasing the dates was not that interesting. Without rewriting the film, I thing Jon-Marc should have confessed at the start what he was doing. To listen to the men react to dating Marilyne knowing her background surely would have created some great discussions. 

2.5/5

The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Coen (1998)

Smother, dir. Vince Di Meglio (2007)

NIKKI says:
What is it with Diane Keaton and her new career as a meddling mum? How is it that there's become a "meddling mum" genre at all? The Family Stone, Because I Said So, Mama's Boy ... and now this. I liked Diane when she was funny and vital and used her talents for good instead of banal. Smother is apparently so bad, no one in America wants to release it.

Well, it wasn't that bad. It was pretty bad, but I'd recommend it over Because I Said So. Dax plays a guy who loses his job right when his wife, played by Liv Tyler, wants to start trying for a baby. At the same time, Liv's writer cousin comes to stay, as does Dax's mother, who is convinced Dax's dad is having an affair. Shenanigans ensues and mum ends up getting a job with Dax, ruining his relationship, getting drunk at a bar, and vomiting on the floor all in the space of a few days. And then, of course, she starts to feel sorry for herself and she and Dax begin to see each other's points of view and its all happily families at the end when mum drives off with the writer cousin.

But, it's all so very weak. The jokes are lame, the smothering mother angle has been done to death, as has the baby-wanting wife scenario, and no matter how much effort Dax gives his performance, everyone involved just looks they want to be somewhere else. More over, the final scenes take place at a funeral where Diane and Dax make a mockery of a woman's death with their petty fighting and we're not supposed to care because the dead women was so insufferable. So -- dead old hag jokes, that's about where we're at with this one.

Sorry Diane, but you're losing me.

Had the movie played up its dramatic storyline involving a 60 year old woman losing her husband to infidelity after so many years, maybe we would've had something. But it only briefly touches on that, which is most disappointing.

2/5

Steve did not view.

The Killer Elite, dir. Sam Peckinpah (1975)

NIKKI says:
A few years ago, Steve and I went on this '70s movie kick where we caught up on all the classic '70s movies we'd either not seen or not seen in a really long time. We discovered some brilliant stuff. The Killer Elite would have fit that period perfectly, and may have have come out looking a bit better then -- with our minds and hearts drenched in '70s-ness -- than it did tonight.

I didn't dislike the film, but I felt it was a bit of a mess, unsure of exactly the story it was trying to tell. I don't know if it was a revenge film, an investigation into CIA off-shoot groups, or the story of a man getting back on his feet after intense physical rehabilitation. It may have been all of these things, but issues were raised and dropped throughout as the film moved from one almost-plot to the next.

The film opens on elite agents Caan and Duvall at a party. They go on their way to a stakeout point, and are the best of friends. We ascertained that either one was to die, or betray the other. Steve noted that as big names, death wasn't likely. And so one betrayed the other. Caan gets shot in the knee and the elbow and is left, in the movie's words, "a cripple".

So a great chuck of the movie is then spent on Caan's rehabilitation. There was very little conflict during these scenes. He simply took it like a man and did his stretches. I wonder to what end did we need to see this? Establishment that he was taking it like a man may have taken one scene and a montage. Here we got scenes after scene of hospital bed, walking up steps, walking over bridges, falling down in restaurants... But no outwards intensity seemed to build.

And then he's just back in action, and gets himself a job that will see him go head to head with Duvall. And then it all plays out just as you might expect -- shoot-shoot-chase-chase-someone-ends-up-dead. But to what end? What was my purpose here? To see Caan exact revenge? If so, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as I had hoped. Was it so gain a greater understanding of these off-shoot groups, as suggested by the written introduction to the film? Well, I didn't really gain much knowledge at all, expect that such groups exist and are rather corrupt.

This isn't to say the film wasn't entertaining. Peckinpah's direction was intense at times, and the actors were reliable. But, it didn't shoot fireworks off for me the way The Parallax View did, or The Conversation, or even Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Feels like a miss to me.

2.5/5

Brutal, dir. Ethan Wiley (2007)

STEVE says:
When you're a die-hard 0ld-school horror fan, like me, and you see the names Jeffrey Combs and Michael Berryman in the cast list, there's really no doubt that you're going to watch the movie, no matter what else it has to offer.

And in the case of Brutal, let me tell you, it ain't much.

"Hostel meets The Silence of the Lambs", says Stuart Wilson from Independent Film Quarterly.

Yeah, he's full of shit, that guy. Either that, or he's seen neither Hostel nor Silence, because Brutal was neither as gory as the former nor as well-plotted as the latter. In fact, the words "well-plotted" don't even really apply here, as the film was only on nodding acquaintance with screenplay structure, anyway. Arguably, Berryman's introduction could be viewed as the midpoint, but I think that's more coincidence than anything. There was no discernible turning point between Acts 1 and 2, no character development of any kind, and dialog so laughable as to make Ed Wood cringe.

And y'see that guy in the poster, there? Yeah, I don't know who he is. He's not the killer, that's for sure. The killer looks something like Bun E. Carlos, circa 1975. That guy on the poster, I don't know. Kind of Billy Zaney? Either way, whatever - he's not anywhere in the movie.

As for Combs and Berryman; Combs starts off alright as the likable small town sheriff, but turns quickly into the stereotypical bad guy sheriff usually played by the likes of Joe Don Baker. His transformation is so quick, in fact, it might have been an afterthought. "Hey, you know what? Let's make Combs a bad guy, too!" It was fun to see him play out-of-character (he even has a love interest, here), but turning him into a creep by the end was such an obvious move, it speaks to the ineptitude of Wylie as a screenwriter (he of House, House II and Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror). Berryman, on the other hand, plays a much more interesting character than is usually his lot - he's an autistic bloodhound trainer - but is criminally underused.

We could have spent less time on the boring murder scenes and more with Berryman helping with the investigation; less time on the melodrama between the sheriff and his deputy and more on actual police work; less time trying to be clever and more on research into police procedure and, you know, learning how to write.

1/5

NIKKI says:
Wow, I had a feeling it would be bad. I had no idea it was going to be as bad as it was. Usually, when I project like this has a couple of interesting names attached, it's somewhat above schlock. Not so Brutal. Schlock is too nice a word for what we have here.

So, some animal mutilations are occurring in Black Water and before you know it, bodies are showing up chainsawed to pieces and buried with their hands sticking out of the soil. We may, the sheriff's eager deputy, Zoe, stipulates, have a serial killer on our hands. You know, because they usually start out killing animals (sorry, Wylie, but I don't think these things run quite so concurrently). Sheriff Re-Animator does not believe his cohort, who he is also sleeping with despite being married with a family and up for re-election soon. Even the flower the killer leaves behind on the body and the fact that it directly correlates to the street the victim lives on does not convince the Sherrif that this is the work of a serial killer. "Black Water is full of church-goers!" he argues.

You know, it's one thing that the flowers won't force him to admit he's got a serial killer on the loose, but what about the fact that five grisly murders have occurred in his small, back-end town? He reckons more than one individual is behind this? Isn't that a more frightening prospect?

Anyway, five grisly deaths and someone decides it's time to call in the FBI. Ace reporter, Rick, tells the cops that there's no need. They're better off without the FBI who have nothing but a history of fucking up investigations with their, and I quote, "science". So, instead of launching a proper investigation and getting in the CSI crews, a coroner, or an ME (the local vet does these autopsies), Zoe enlists the help of an autistic bloodhound owner to help her sniff out the crims.

Are they serious? The FBI was called in to find out who leaked song on the 'net from Guns 'n Roses' Chinese Democracy record, I think they might get a call when girls show up mutilated one after the other in the span of about a week. (That, of course, being how your average serial killer does things.)

By the way -- it is only after the autopsies that the cops find out each body was missing a heart, which goes nowhere. And the killer is a teacher involved in a flower-planting project at school -- something a quick canvas of the neighbourhood might have revealed. The Sheriff's own son was involved in the flower project, but he failed to make any connection.

Okay, so investigative techniques and intelligence were left on the cutting room floor. This is still is a silly movie with one redeeming factor in Michael Berryman. I was also forced to high-five Steve when his prediction dor the end of the film -- that while the killer slays every girl he meets within moments, he will capture Zoe, torture her for a bit, explain his system to her, his motives, taunt her a bit more, before raising the axe and getting shoved aside at the very last crucial moment -- came true to the very last detail.

So, the writer knows something about convention, I guess.

1/5 (for Berryman)

Good Will Hunting, dir. Gus Van Sant (1997)

NIKKI says:
Steve rings me at work: "What time do you finish?"

I say: "Six, but I'll likely be home about 5.30."

And then he says: "Claude and I will wait for you then -- we're watching Good Will Hunting."

And it's not even my birthday!

Claude, who is somewhat of a piece of young, innocent clay that Steve and I are moulding into the next David Mamet-slash-Martin Amis, comes over to our house to get schooled on all things books and movies. It's great to have him around, to share stuff with him, and have him respond so well. Apparently, I told him to watch Good Will, that I thought he would like it, and so it was his selection for this night.

I was thrilled, needless to say, as it's one of my favourite movies. A life-changing kind of film that made me cry like a baby that anything so perfect could exist purely for the purposes of entertaining me. It's the way I feel when I hear Bruce Springsteen's "Independence Day" or Don McLean's "Empty Chairs". I always think -- what if this talent went unrecognised? And we didn't even know we were missing out?

Ah, but Good Will always gets me pondering in big, melodramatic strokes. I just love this film. I love the story, I love its intent, I love the grand statements, the tiny details, the writing, the music, the direction, the big speeches, the little interludes. It's just a great piece of work. It builds so well to an inevitable and fitting conclusion. It's funny and tragic, and it gives us Ben Affleck pre-dental work -- and isn't that what the film's all about? That flawed men are worth putting some effort into?

Still brilliant after 10 years.

5/5

Dario Argento's World of Horror, dir. Michele Soavi (1985)

NIKKI says: What a weird choice for a Saturday afternoon movie. To be honest, after watching it, I didn't even feel like I'd watched a movie. It's more snippets of Dario's best scenes interspersed with some dialogue and melodramatic narration. An Eye for Horror is much better, more informative, structured documentary. I'm not entirely sure what Soavi was going for with this one? Perhaps it's a promotional film? Still, I learned a lot about Dario's genius for in-camera effects, and I won't soon forget the bee who had the big operation to get his stinger removed and was then tied to some fishing wire to swarm about Jennifer Connelly's head in Phenomena.

A big operation! They put it under with ether and everything.

Dario's mind is a scary one. But he talks a lot here about how his movies are visual reflections of and reactions to his dreams and nightmares. He says at the end that he doesn't really know himself all that well, and would love to tunnel into his own mind and live there for a while just to get to know himself better. Something about living in Dario Argento's mind for any length of time is pretty scary, but the fact that the man himself longs to do it is sort of scarier.

It is indisputable that the man is a brilliant artist. This movie demonstrates that. It's just a pity it didn't focus more on Dario and the why and hows of his dreams and visions. There's lots of behind the scenes stuff, lots about the effects, and the music, and the enthusiastic Dario running about bringing everything together. But there are too many drawn out scenes from movies like Zombi that one figures the audience watching the documentary would no doubt be familiar with.

Ether!

2.5/5

STEVE says: This documentary is 23 years old, which may go a long way in explaining why it seemed to offer so little - I was already familiar with most of it.

While it was interesting to learn about the insects and other effects in Phenomena, the huge crane shot in Trauma, and the film stock used in Suspiria, that's not really what I signed up for. From a doco called Dario Argento's World of Horror, I expected to learn a little more about, you know, Dario Argento's World of Horror.

There were some interesting points, glimpses into Argento's childhood, and confessions that he doesn't really know himself and how murder is beautiful, but these last come off as someone who's trying to sound creepy, rather than a true artist discussing his creativity. Like that interview with Stephen King where he says, "I have killed a few people, but they haven't found the bodies, so I think I'm alright." Way to fuel the stereotype there, bud.

As an Intro to Argento sort of thing, World of Horror might be alright, but I'd still recommend the more recent An Eye for Horror to get a comprehensive view of the guy.

2/5

Arthur, dir. Steve Gordon (1981)

NIKKI says:
We both just wanted something familiar to kick back to. I chose They Live! and was vetoed. I know, right? So, then I thought of Arthur, and it was just so perfect. Ninety minutes we both knew so well, with laughs maybe every five.

There's not all that much left to say about Arthur. It's just a perfect romantic comedy that brings to mind all those phrases along the lines of "they don't write 'em like that anymore". Because they don't. The comedy here is effortless and unforced. Dudley Moore entertains just by being there, and Liza Minnelli is edgy and charismatic without overdoing the sexy/needy/wrong side of the tracks thing. And it's a sweet story about a man learning how to love himself enough to give himself to someone else. He's learning, in basic terms, how not to be alone.

I just learned the writer/director only ever wrote this and The One and Only with Henry Winkler, and a handful of episodes of shows like Barney Miller and Chico and the Man. He died in 1982 at only 44 years old, which kind of makes this movie all the more poignant. Wow, that's really sad. Still, the guy left behind a genuine classic, that's going to be funny and moving forever.

Some of Arthur's best lines:
Arthur: "You're a hooker? Jesus, I forgot! I just thought I was doing GREAT with you!"

Hobson: "Thank you for a memorable afternoon, usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature."

Hobson: "Good afternoon. If you and your undershirt will take two paces backwards, I could enter this dwelling."

Arthur: "Not all of us who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we're not poets."

Arthur: "I often think ... fish must get awful tired of sea food. What are your thoughts, Hobson?"

Hobson: "A little tart like that could save you a fortune in prostitutes."

... and on and on and on.

4.5/5

Lost Boys: The Tribe, dir. P.J. Pesce (2008)

STEVE says:
The only reason - seriously, the only reason - to watch this movie is to see Corey Feldman reprise his role as Edgar Frog.

You know it's bad when a Feldman cameo is the selling point, eh?

1.5/5

The Lost Boys, dir. Joel Schumacher (1987)

STEVE says:
I saw this in the theatre in 1987, and I remember being a fan (even bought the soundtrack - on vinyl!), though today I can't remember why. It's all style-over-substance, everyone being so ultra-cool in a pre-goth, new-romantic kind of way that is completely belied by their mullets.

At first glance, the correlation of the Lost Boys of the title to the Lost Boys of Peter Pan is brilliant. Boys who never grow up, never age, never die. But the premise is handled so poorly, it almost seems as if it was dismissed entirely. It's hinted at during the opening credits sequence, with a "missing child" poster here and a face-on-a-milk-carton there, then completely ignored for the rest of the film. Surely that's a massive oversight. Did Schumacher not get the reference? Or was he too busy worrying whether Haim's wardrobe was gay enough?

Then there's the tone. Kiefer Sutherland's gang of Lost Boys are the prototype for the dead greasers from Sometimes They Come Back, all over-the-top with their tough-guy taunting and their inane giggling at inappropriate moments. All but Sutherland's David, who's still over-the-top, but in an Ace Merrill kind of way. Jason Patric plays Michael completely straight (in keeping with the homo-erotic theme, perhaps; Will he come to the other side with the Boys, or stay human and be with his new girlfriend, Star?), where Corey Haim, Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander play their roles for comedy. This all works fine until they all get together and the serious Michael is up against melodramatic David while Sam and the Frog Brothers are cracking wise. It just doesn't fly.

Worth noting is the fact that we were plagued with phone calls during this movie and not once did Nikki think to quote Tim Roth from Reservoir Dogs - "Motherfucker! I'm tryin' to watch The Lost Boys!" I mean how many times does that opportunity arise in life, huh?

2.5/5

NIKKI says:
Regardless of Schumacher's overall point, I still enjoy this movie. Is it great? No. Does it have some glaring issues? Yes. Still, it's a CLASSIC! Like all classics from the '80s -- think Mannequin -- it has its issues, its flaws, its hero-lines, and over-the-top outfits. Should a movie be faulted because it's a product of its time? For the most part, The Lost Boys follows the rules -- it's well-structured and well-paced, and scary when it needs to be. (Steve made me watch the scalping bit again and even though I know it's less than half a second long, it's still scary as hell!) So, give it a break!

...

Again, though, I have to agree, in part, with Steve. The main problem is a messing up of tone. Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland are so super-serious all the time that the Frog humour doesn't quite gel in the way it perhaps wants to. The humour grooves it all up for the teens, but no-one told Jason and Kiefer they were in a groovy teen flick. What we see in their performances is the pre-stages of two intense acting styles, both actors forceful on screen no matter what their roles, both never to be seen again in such lightweight fare. It messes with things, but perhaps the movie wouldn't have the intensity it does have were these actors acting any differently?

I just love this movie. And I love my memories of its key role in my life -- watching it with my mum, watching it at my 11th birthday party, getting accused of stealing it off a friend's sister, taping Corey Feldman's interview on Sally-Jessy after it where he wears the big spotted tie and says he's clean when you can tell he clearly isn't ...

3.5/5

Twilight Zone: The Movie, dir. John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante & George Miller (1983)

NIKKI says:
Somehow, I'd never seen this movie. But then, I guess I'd not seen that many classic sci-fi flicks before meeting Steve. What was I doing with my time? Oh yeah, I was watching The Breakfast Club again.

This one didn't really do it for me. Apart from the final segment, directed by George Miller, about the gremlin on the plane wing, I can pretty much take or leave the rest. In fact, I think I'll take Joe Dante's and pretty much just leave Spielberg's and Landis's. I thought the ideas in Landis's were interesting, about the bigot forced to endure damnation at the hands of Nazi extremists, American soldiers in Vietnam, and the Ku Klux Klan. But his brief time with each group really doesn't teach him anything. He'd already be fearful that he'd slipped into an alternate reality, so the specifics of those realities aren't really going to alert him to his bigotry. So, it becomes a bit fanciful rather than meaningful. I would have made him prejudiced against one group, and then perhaps the story could have focused on that. The way it is, it's a hodge-podge of ideas that trivializes, in a way, prejudice and bigotry.

The Spielberg story was too whimsical for me. It reminded me of the more cloying Amazing Stories episodes, where magic is at the hands of everything. Dante's was better, but ran on too long, and didn't explain enough about what was going on. Not that I suppose a Twilight Zone episode needs to explain itself, but I didn't get a sense of overall purpose beyond "be careful what you wish for", which is bor-ring. And Steve is right that some of it was more over the top than it needed to be.

But the gremlin on the wing is just perfect. Scary and freaky, with a performance from John Lithgow that could go over the top, but doesn't. And the gremlin is damn scary. The shots outside the plane are so realistic. It's something else that makes me never want to fly again. If only they could have extended that scene maybe 80 minutes -- that would have been a movie!

2.5/5

Chapter 27, dir. J.P. Schaefer (2007)

NIKKI says:
This is one of those movies centering on an ugly topic that likes to think its edgy and daring. There's an element of daring to it, but only in that Jared Leto went to such extreme lengths to resemble Mark Chapman, and that much of it is filmed outside the Dakota building where Chapman shot John Lennon. It's a portrait of a disquieted mind, of a man who resented what he believed to be the "phoniness" inherent in Lennon's celebrity lifestyle that he convinced himself that killing the singer was absolutely necessary. The problem is, if you've read Jack Jones's book, Let Me Take You Down, or know anything really at all about Chapman, this movie doesn't cover any new ground. All it does is put us beside a visual representation of the man in the three days leading up to his horrible actions. I'm challenging myself to come up with a point for that, a reason for the film to exist?

It's the stuff of legend, is it not, that Chapman waited outside the Dakota for Lennon to emerge, to get his autograph? And when Lennon did emerge, he signed Chapman's record and went on his way, only to return with Chapman still there, this time primed to shoot? I believe most people are aware of the bits and pieces found in Chapman's apartment, and that he equated himself with Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. So, Chapter 27 is simply a visual representation of these very famous facts.

In the beginning of the movie, Leto as Chapman says he could tell us about his family life, but he just didn't want to. Yet, for me, that's where the story is. We all know what happened, I was interested in finding out why. We don't know much about Chapman at the end of this movie. We know he's damaged, but how did a respected, world-travelling aid worker residing in Hawaii get to this point in his life? Why did Salinger's book impact him so deeply? Where did his obsession with Lennon come from? Was his madness recognisable to anyone else in his life, his wife, his friends?

I feel like the film took the wrong focus. I commend Jared Leto on a brilliant performance, but I wonder to what end have his efforts led? I have no greater understanding of this act. I'm still aware Chapman was a bit mental, but I knew that going in and that's all I'm taking away.

2/5

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Director's Cut, dir. Steven Spielberg (1977)

NIKKI says:
Very happy to take a second look at this movie in its new Director's Cut edition. I like the movie. I get caught up in whimsy and the adventure of the whole thing, as I'm sure I'm supposed to. I really enjoy Richard Dreyfuss in all-out manic mode as the man who knows something is out there. But I found watching the movie for only the second time, that I felt bad to Dreyfuss's family who were really just abandoned while he went on his quest into the unknown. I can understand him perhaps leaving his wife behind, she who didn't fully support him in this thing he was going through. But his children?

The scene where Dreyfuss is in the bath, just losing his mind -- those kids really experience something there. That is a tragic moment for them as much as it is for their dad. I feel like Spielberg really did something great there, letting us see how this whole business was affecting the kids. But then the kids just leave and Dreyfuss never gives them a second thought.

I really struggled to fully be with Dreyfuss in those final moments where the aliens take him away. I know I was meant to feel good for him, and happy that his journey was about to take its inevitable next step. But I just sat there thinking -- what about the kids? If this whole thing was just so big that it blocked everything else out of his thinking, then the movie should have let us in on that. Or simply done away with the kids in the first place.

The other thing that bothers me -- why doesn't Dreyfuss take the mud and trees in through the door? Why doesn't he build the thing outside?

Ignoring those issues, it's a good movie. I don't know how much the original cut differs from the director's version, but this one we watched was well-paced and gripping when it needed to be, it had that glittery Spielberg innocence, and some dashes of great humour. It's Spielberg back when he was trying to tell stories instead of trying to change the world.

3/5

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, dir. Jake Kasdan (2007)

STEVE says:
There's a scene in Walk Hard where a young Dewey Cox is waiting in the wings with Buddy Holly as The Big Bopper performs Chantilly Lace. He's understandably nervous about following the Bopper, so Holly (a pointlessly cameoed Frankie Muniz) offers to go on next and take the heat, allowing Dewey to then follow. Moments later, the stage manager alerts everyone that Elvis (Jack White, for some reason) wants to get out early, so he'll be on after Holly, and Dewey will follow them all. I guess it's meant to be funny, and it was in a cute, obvious sort of way, but that's not the reason I bring it up.

See, before we watched Walk Hard, Nikki and I had just finished a 30 Rock marathon - eight or nine episodes back to back because we just couldn't turn it off - and I can't help thinking that maybe Walk Hard would have been funnier if it hadn't had to follow such a brilliantly put-together show.

Not likely, though, considering Walk Hard was co-written by "the guy who brought you Knocked Up and Superbad", Judd Apatow. The more movies I see advertised with "From the Guy Who Brought You" in relation to this guy, it seems less a selling point and more a condemnation.

I was very surprised to find that, for an Apatow movie, Walk Hard followed the proper screenplay structure, but I credit that to the other half of the writing team, director Jake Kasdan. Jake's dad, Lawrence Kasdan, is the guy responsible for writing The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat and Silverado, to name a few, and it seems some of that genius has rubbed off. Still and all, Apatow was involved here, and his vision extends about as far as Vern Troyer's dick, so instead of a hilarious take on the rock star biopic, Walk Hard ends up being a tepid spoof of only two such movies, Ray and Walk the Line - which, structurally speaking, were pretty much the same movie, anyway.

Was it funny? I gotta be honest, here... I don't remember laughing more than once, when Dewey and his band went to India and inadvertently met the Beatles. In yet another spot-the-celebrity scene, Jack Black did the worst Paul McCartney ever - with what sounded like an Irish accent - but Justin Long, Jason Schwartzman and the ever-trustworthy Paul Rudd played George, Ringo and John, respectively - and rather convincingly - as the tensions within the group began to flare.

With Apatow involved, I was expecting a poorly structured rock star cliche that drags on for longer than it has any right to - basically a rock-themed Talladega Nights - but Walk Hard, while by no means great, was nowhere near that bad. It couldn't be.

2/5

NIKKI says:
Yet another Apatow-penned film people kept telling me was just HIL-arious that turned out to be funny in spots but mostly just annoying. I wasn't annoyed at the concept or the star, what bothered me was the lazy, hack-ish presentation. It's a rip-off of Ray and Walk the Line, two similar, equally boring and unfocused TV movies that somehow made the big screen. When you're going to parody such films and you have loads of better, more influential, more powerful films at your fingertips, why go for just these two? Is it because the audience you're aiming your movie at will only know these two movies?

What about The Buddy Holly Story? La Bamba, The Doors, Coal Miner's Daughter, Sid and Nancy? On NPR, the introduction to an interview with Reilly and Kasdan says the movie takes on "old music films", but but Kasdan and Reilly admit it's not movies they ripped off but famous stories about musicians. And that might be true, but where do Dewey's 22 children fit in? Which famous rock star killed his own brother? And then his father? What are we parodying exactly? A parody of rock-star biopics and no-one dies in a plane crash?

The movie is not really a parody of biopics, but a parody of rock styles in general. Dewey emulates everyone from Bob Dylan to Mac Davis. The Dewey Cox character develops as the times developed, and his style of music shifts and changes in a way mirrored by no actual musicians. It's a series of "hey wouldn't it be funny if" moments that don't pull together.

The film bothered me because it didn't know if it wanted to be a parody or an outright send-up. The broad, often stupid humour didn't fit, and worked only to bring the film down to a slapstick-y, funless level. It's a case, I reckon, where the joke is king. Dewey doesn't really have a story of his own. He has the obvious turn out of the spotlight and eventual comeback, and he learns that family is all that matters. But so what? If you're gonna put the effort in, you should have something to say. This movie just points out that a lot of music careers were fuelled by the same things, and that deaths of family members are just so funny. And?

2/5

Re-Cycle (aka. Gwai wik), dir. Pang Brothers (2006)

NIKKI says:
So, Oxide Pang says it's not an anti-abortion film. And while that makes me feel a bit better about the whole experience, I don't know if he's entirely telling the truth.

Consider: Angelica Lee runs through a giant red blubber hole full of aborted fetuses that she's told are "discarded" things along the same lines as her childhood toys. She is informed of this by a little girl who reveals herself to be Angelica's aborted baby. "It's not that I didn't love you," Angelica says to the little girl, holding her, and crying. And she resists following up that thought, but we're aware by this stage of the danger of discarding things.

The whole movie about the place things go when casually tossed aside. Is it irresponsible of the Pangs to compare childhood toys with aborted fetuses? The movie is about a woman who is forced to confront the supernatural world where her discarded things reside -- most prominently, her discarded story ideas. She's a novelist suffering writer's block brought on by the pressures of writing another blockbuster. She's not in the best frame of mind to create, and what she does write, she invariably deletes or tosses into her wastepaper basket. The basket begins to stir, and she starts seeing weird things like dark figures and a broken elevator.

Soon, she's in a fantasy world where dead bodies hang in trees and deformed human figures squirm, twitch and unnaturally bend, following her, stalking her. She must get to the a place called the Transit for safety, and must venture through this land of discarded things. She meets characters from books she hasn't finished writing, images and ideas left hanging when she's hit the delete key. There's even a giant pyramid of discarded books, from which other books fall and slide -- so many discarded ideas, she could have written hundreds of bestsellers.

The Ideas Hell is a fascinating concept. And that part of the film kept me interested. As a non-practicing fiction writer myself, I know the hell of ideas conceived and lost, invented and left to languish. I know the horrors of the blank page. I have the repertoire of excuses. And I felt genuinely creeped out at the prospect of my ideas living in me somewhere, waiting for their opportunity to develop and grow.

But is this the same as the babies my body waits to have? I just don't think it is. If Oxide Pang is truthful in that he meant nothing more by the fetus-bubble than simply as a plot device that causes issue for Angelica, then fair enough. But it's the part of the movie that struck me the most. I can't free myself of it. When you choose to say something like that in your movie, you have to be aware of the wider effects. It goes beyond story telling and starts to become something else. Too sensitive? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted my Pang movie to feature Angelica running from ghosts and bloody things, and not charging headlong into them.

It's an interesting idea. It's provocative, and absolutely beautiful to watch. It, too, makes me want to get some ideas out of my head, lest they fester and mould and start twitching.

2.5/5

STEVE says:
After watching the piss-weak remake of The Eye earlier this week, I was excited - nay, burning to see another horror movie from the Pang Brothers.

This, however, wasn't it.

Re-Cycle starts out as a conventional HK-horror flick - young female writer, haunted by visions, etc. - but then takes a quick, unexpected turn into the land of Dark Fantasy. There were elements of horror all the way through, but elements don't make the whole, and I was left with a bit of cinematic whiplash, which is maybe why I didn't get into this one so much.

The concept was great - the writer finds herself in the Land of the Discarded, confronted with things from her past ranging from toys and books she had as a child to characters from her own unfinished stories and her own aborted daughter - but it got very heavy in the end, almost a Pro-Life PSA, which, having been duped once already by the Horror/Dark Fantasy bait-and-switch, I wasn't at all into.

2.5/5

Alien Resurrection, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (1997)

STEVE says:
Couple weeks ago, Claudius and I watched Alien. He was impressed enough to borrow the box set, but only got to watch Aliens and Alien 3 before heading back to Melbourne. (Not one of those who'll borrow something and hang on to it for six years, Claude returned the set before going back.)

So tonight, searching for something to watch, we decided to finish up the Quadrilogy (having now officially replaced tetralogy as the word for a series of four).

I like Alien Resurrection. Sure, it's nowhere near as awesome as the original, but what is? And maybe it's not as good as Alien 3, but it sure beats the pants off Aliens, in my opinion. In truth, it's probably somewhere between those two in its action-to-creepiness ratio, but has the distinction of being a Jeunet film, which in this case makes all the difference. I'm talking, here, about the weird eroticism inherent in Act Three, specifically in the scene where Ripley is taken to the Alien hive, and later when she confronts the Alien-Baby. Jeunet, you wacky Frenchman!

(Note: Five years later, this same plot would be used, almost beat-for-beat, in Jason X. Like they just took the script and replaced all "Alien" references with "Jason". It takes balls for the tenth movie in a ridiculously popular horror franchise to rip off the fourth movie in another, and I salute them for it.)

3/5

Nikki did not view.

Panic in the Streets, dir. Elia Kazan (1950)

NIKKI says:
After this and The Sweet Smell of Success, I think I only want to watch movies from the 1950s. This one is about a man trying to stop the spreading of the plague. Richard Widmark is a health services officer who has 48 hours to find the people responsible for the death of a grifter in New Orleans. The grifter was discovered with gunshot wounds to the chest, but he died from plague-like symptoms. Widmark wants the press left out of it lest a national scare is caused and the men he must track down disappear to Africa or somewhere and take their diseases with them.

Ooh, it's a tense one. Another before-its-time picture with rapid-fire, super-smart dialogue, and intensity to burn. Widmark is just great, and so is scary-tall Jack Palance as the heavy who'll do anything -- including tossing a dying man over a second floor banister -- to get away from the cops.

It's shot on location in New Orleans, too, with a great old-timey inside look at the city that no longer exists. I loved this one, and must watch more like it.

3.5/5

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (aka. L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo), dir. Dario Argento (1970)

NIKKI says:
Well, this officially becomes my second favourite Argento flick after the brilliantly awesome Profondo Rosso. The reason I loved this one so much? Because I understood everything that was going on. That's unusual with Argento. Often there's so much subtext going on, and concentration on frightening visuals that the plot gets left a bit behind. (I think Argento himself has said that plot and acting talent are the least focused on ingredients in his pictures.) Here, though, the film is plot-heavy with great actors and decidedly light on thrills and effects. It's clearly early Argento (his debut as a director, I believe), and its just great.

Tony Musante (the great and tragic Schibetta from Oz) plays a guy who witnesses a fairly harrowing murder inside an art gallery. He spends the rest of the film searching for the murdered in the black suit, hat, and gloves. The killer taunts him, kills others around him, and he must hunt deep in his memory to piece together just what he really saw at the museum.

The whole thing about memory and the mind playing tricks is fascinating. So, not only have you got Argento telling a story, he's doing it with a message. Just what do we see when we view events from afar? How can we ever be sure that what we're seeing is the truth? What is truth when it comes to reliance on memory and sharp-moving visuals? This is a really great exploration of those themes, and it's tense and scary when it needs to be, bloodthirsty at just the right moments, and packed with interesting characters.

It's truly one of his best movies. The development of the artist is so obvious in this one, down to the black gloves, the close-ups on the eyes, and the spurting blood. Old Dario is always the best, and this just proves that.

4/5

STEVE says:
On the back of the DVD packet, Argento is said to have "single-handedly created the Giallo genre". Just think about being the one who created a genre. That's pretty fucking cool. Romero and Zombies, Stoker and Vampires, Bava and Giallo. Sweet.

This claim, however, is almost immediately disputed on the commentary track by Alan Jones and Kim Newman. It's Mario Bava, they say, who created the genre, but Argento - and specifically this film - was the first to make use of it after all the rules were laid out.

Either way, I don't like to think of Giallo as a genre. I think of it as a style, like Film Noir, something that happened organically and only classified in retrospect.

Even if he didn't create it, Argento clearly knew how to use the style, and this movie has it in spades - unlike some of his later work in and out of the Giallo mold. At some stage Argento became less interested in story and more in shocking visuals, and I think Giallo - whether a genre or a style - was the poorer for it.

3.5/5

The Flock, dir. Andrew Lau (2007)

NIKKI says:
I just don't know what to say. I found The Flock interesting and chilling. I didn't find myself disliking the movie while it was on. But, I'm not sure I liked it all the same. Then again, it's not the kind of movie you walk away raving about. It's harrowing and brutal. In fact, that might be one thing I liked most about it -- it pulled few punches. Richard Gere wants Claire Danes to know just how horrible the world is that she's soon to enter, and in order for us to get what she's going through, the movie puts us through it, too. It can be hard to stomach, but it's refreshing to see a Hollywood movie do this. It reminded me of Se7en and 8mm in that way. Still, it's hard to like, and it might wrap things up a little too conveniently.

I enjoyed seeing Richard Gere as this horribly scarred man on a mission. It was a change of pace for him, and he was quietly frightening as a case worker for the department of human services who believes a recently kidnapped girl is the victim of one of the pedophiles he has to monitor.

Claire Danes was great, too, as his protege, who must learn the ropes in a matter of a few weeks. They were really good together. I've never really been into movie-actor Claire Danes and still can't help seeing her now and forever as Angela Chase. But in this I really saw what the big deal is about her. She reminds me of Gwyneth at times, though without the silver-spoon iciness that makes it hard to believe her as edgy and damaged (sorry Gwyneth, but still I love you anyway). Claire Danes just has a real stare in her eyes, a hardness about her, and she was able to play on that here.

The bad guys, though... bit too James Patterson, as Steve noted. The kidnapping ring resembled Kiss the Girls, and the twist was less a twist and more an inevitability. It was nonetheless disturbing. I think maybe the final scenes with the face-licking was slightly over the top, and the timing of all involved was rather convenient, but the point was made. There is an element to society that most of us would rather ignore than confront head-on. Gere's character, at one point, screams at a room full of sex offenders in therapy: "You made me waste my life!" And there's probably the most interesting layer of this story. Not only is the bad element out there, there are also people who spend their lives alongside them, whether tracking them, monitoring them, or assisting in their (so-called) reform.

This movie makes its point well. It's a hard road getting there, though. You might need to wash afterwards.

3/5

STEVE says:
Yeah, Nikki pretty much summed it up for us both, there: part Se7en, part 8mm, part Kiss the Girls and part Silence of the Lambs. I'm sure I could throw a few more titles in there if I looked at it again - but I don't want to, at least not for a while.

And that's not to say The Flock is derivative, necessarily - the themes in these movies will crop up again and again as this archetype is explored. You just don't expect to find so many of them in one place, is all.

3/5

Sweet Smell of Success, dir. Alexander Mackendrick (1957)

NIKKI says:
Further proof that they don't make them like they used to. You know, we're supposed to think we live in the age of liberation, but watching a movie like this one, you realise things weren't so stilted and stale back in the day. So, they couldn't outright say bad words on screen, instead creativity came into play, and the evil words and callous thoughts and true reflections of the time had to be delivered smartly and less obviously. Well, this movie takes even that a step further. It's clever, but relatively free of innuendo here -- this is 1957 and Sidney Falco, press agent, chastises the naive young Susan Hunsecker:

"Start thinking with your head instead of your hips... By the way, I got nothing against women thinking with their hips. That's their nature. Just like it's a man's nature to go out and hustle and get the things he wants."

Wow, really? I often forget how progressive movies were back then if you just knew where to look. This is up there with the best crime drama and film noir in that it takes a harsh look at men, women, New York City, and society at large. We look at the way starlets and politicians and people in the public eye are made or broken by the press -- it feels like a new thing. But it's origins are old. This is the story of columnists and press agents and the tearing down of a young man's reputation based on the personal views and desires of the columnist himself, and the need for recognition by the press agent. The seedy pair come together and they don't care who's lives they destroy. And by the time one of them decides he has a conscience, it might just be too late.

This is a classic in every sense. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are on fire, trading jibes like racing tips. The writing is super-slick, the story builds expertly, and the fall out is devastating.

I said to Steve during that I just wanted to go live in old time-y New York where men wore suits all the time and the women were always coiffed, and there were cigarette girls and jazz clubs, and guys said things like "What me run a 50 yard dash with my legs cut off" instead of "watch me calm this guy down with my smooth, fast-talking". I miss the old days, especially the ones I only get to look at through some old filmmaker's lens.

4.5/5

Cactus, dir. Jasmine Yuen Carrucan (2008)

NIKKI says:
Tense and smart -- that's really all I was hoping for with this one. And it delivered. It's a road-movie in the grand old Aussie tradition of road-movies, with men on a mission through dust and desolation. No matter how much you isolate yourself, the movie tells us, threats abound both physical and psychological.

John kidnaps Eli and takes him on a dusty drive across country. Eli is not sure what he's done to deserve this treatment or just who it is John is delivering him to, but he seems to settle into the idea that someone has it in for him. And so, instead of wondering he starts to figure out a way to escape, His attempts are thwarted at every turn by John who Eli realises is not your average delivery man. John's car gives away the fact that he's a family man, so Eli begins to use that knowledge to get close to his kidnapper. The two begin to form a bizarre kind of kinship that plays itself out in deep conversations interspersed with incidences where John must remind Eli who's boss.

But the outback proves it's not hidden, that eyes are everywhere, and that as tough as you think you are, it's 10 times tougher. The plans of both men are soon thwarted, and shit really starts hitting the fan.

In the end, you just don't know who to root for. The movie plays with convention, screws with our conceptions of good guys and bad guys, and ups the ante as far as the whodunnits and whydunnits until the end. It's a decent little movie, with some amazing lead performances, great scenery, and clever writing. My favourite bit? You might think being bound and gagged in a dingy car in the middle of the Aussie outback is torture -- what if, at the same time, the Wiggles' "Hot Potato" is on the stereo ON REPEAT? Now what's torture?

3/5

STEVE says:
This was not the movie I expected it to be. I was hoping, I guess, for more of a Hitcher or Road Games type thriller. Instead, I got psychological drama and character study.

That said, it wasn't a bad movie, and I'd like to see more of its type. It was well-written and well-made overall, but it was not what I was in the mood for, so I'm rating it on a curve.

3/5

Right at Your Door, dir. Chris Gorak (2006)

NIKKI says:
Oh man... it was like I was trapped in my house, too, and the slightest movement might send up dust fumes that would make me cough up blood, like poor Lexi in the movie. Oh, it was creepy. But, so well done.

A series of dirty bombs go off in downtown Los Angeles and the city is closed off. Brad's wife, Lexi, has just left for the city on her way to work. When the bomb goes off and he looks out the window to see LA on fire, Brad acts on instinct -- he goes to find her. But it's not that simple. Cops are blocking the roads. They don't want anyone heading into the city. The word comes down that everyone in the outlying suburbs should seal their homes away from the toxic fumes and wait.

Brad wants so badly to find his wife and have her be safe that he can't bring himself to seal off his front door. With no sign of Lexi, he gives in and does what the radio tells him to do. And then Lexi returns.

Oh god! It's so harrowing what these two go through. And it's difficult to say any more about the film without giving the good stuff away. It's a great comment on how we react in crises and who we choose to trust, to follow, and pin our hopes on. It's also a great comment on relationships and their strengths and weaknesses when faced with difficulties. It's about panic and fear, it's about resistance and truth.

A really decent movie with some great writing, some shocking effects, and a central idea that might once have seemed far fetched, but now feels somewhat inevitable. Steve and I instinctively answered this movie's big question at the same time, and then I spent the rest of it wondering it I had been truthful. What, the movie dares you to answer, would you do?

4/5

A Clockwork Orgy, dir. Nic Cramer (1998)

NIKKI says:
We wanted our blog to be comprehensive, so we had to watch one of these at some stage. We were going to blog about Sex City, the adult flick based on Sin City, but it was so terrible we turned it off after about 10 minutes. Turning off a porno due to bad quality -- has that ever happened before?

Anyway... this one was alright. It was hilarious, actually, to see just how Nic Cramer and his cronies took the classic film and rejigged it for the adult world. He's gone all out, too. The costumes are great, and the girls use the same bizarro language Alex and the Droogs used in the original ("Viddy well" and "Welly, welly" and all that, and there's an attempt at a message involving women using their muscle to clean up the streets and get ahead.

The gag here is that Alexandra the Droog is a violent sex-addict who must be cured of her affliction. She's caught, jailed, and then forced to watch hours and hours of gross-out porn in order to get her head right. Meanwhile, her fellow Droogs must bust her out of captivity, all the while continuing their rampage against the perverted on the streets.

It was fun. Kaitlyn Ashley gave one of the craziest, bravest porno performances I've ever seen. You know, I don't know if I agree with the end -- I felt like the men these girls were challenging ended up getting too much enjoyment out of the whole thing. But, I guess that's porn for you.

2.5/5

Run Fatboy Run, dir. David Schwimmer (2007)

NIKKI says:
The Pegg group, for me, is a bit like the Gervais group -- anything they do, I will watch; anywhere they go, I will follow; anytime they wish to slum in less than stellar productions, I will support them while patiently waiting for them to get their collective acts together.

That last one mostly applies here -- just as we watched Ricky in Night at the Museum, so we watched Pegg in Run, Fatboy, Run. It looked like a cute movie, even from the trailers, but I kinda thought wedgie jokes were beyond such a creative genius as Simon Pegg. Still, I put that thought aside, hoping scenes of Pegg pulling his britches from his ass-cheeks were purposely placed in those trailers to reach the Lowest Common Denominator crowd -- you know, the people who buy movie tickets. Well, there's a lot of that kind of humour in here -- wedgie jokes join blister-popping gags, cock jokes, bad-hair jokes, rash jokes, humping-a-mannequin jokes, you name it.

But then it's really not Pegg's movie. From the sounds of it, it's another comedian's movie that Pegg stepped in on for reasons I'm not too familiar with. And then David Schwimmer directs, and while he starred in one of the funniest shows in TV for 10 years, he's not the most skilled comedy director. The timing feels all over the place with this one.

On the plus side, I guess it's a cute movie with a cute story. I don't know what possessed the Pegg group to put their energies into it. It just doesn't seem like their sort of thing. The story, at its heart, is rather generic. It's even been done before in a movie called Running. I laughed a few times, but I don't think it'll ever get a revisit.

So, here I wait for Paul, which Pegg wrote with Nick Frost about two guys travelling the USA together, and The World's End, new from Pegg and Edgar Wright. Then we'll be back on track, and any and all wedgie jokes might serve a deeper purpose.

2/5