Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008)

You know how sometimes you pick a movie to watch not because you think it's going to be great or even good, but the opposite? You pick a movie because you think it will be so bad that the producers/director/cast knew it would be bad so they had fun with it, or conversely they didn't think it was bad so they were so earnest in their efforts that it has the same effect. I think the word I'm looking for here is 'camp'. This movie ain't got it. It's just bad.
How often do I get to say that Corey Feldman was the best actor in a film? Not very often. I'm not sure if he was actually the best actor in this film, but his character Edgar Frog, the only thing that ties this movie to the original Lost Boys film, is the only interesting character, and he's not even in that much of the movie.
I had heard rumors for a number of years that they were making a sequel to the Lost Boys. While I haven't seen that film in a long time, it has a special place in my heart - the place where 80's films, good and bad, go to live in a fuzzy haze of nostalgia. These are generally the films that shaped me as a young person, but also ones that I know haven't really held up to the test of time so I don't necessarily want to watch them again. It's hard to keep the critical eye of an adult off of the film that you loved as a kid in spite of all of it's flaws. That's why sequels, potentially, are great. Advancements in special effects can improve over those used in old films, as well as updated music, clothing styles, etc. You just hope that the sequel captures a little bit of the feel of the original. Well, this doesn't. Hell, to be honest, I haven't seen a one that does. Remember Highlander? I loved that when I was in high school, but all of the sequels were just horrible. The television show had some decent episodes, but that's not exactly high praise.
This film really had the look of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the television series. Kind of. It's like some dudes were sitting around watching a Buffy marathon all whacked out of their minds and one of them said, "You know what this show needs? Blood, lots of blood." And his buddy sitting next to him in the bean bag chair was all like, "And the hot chicks should show their tits!" And the guy stretched out on the floor looks up and says, "Wouldn't it totally rock if we could get Corey Feldman to do this? It could be like a sequel to Lost Boys or whatever." And they all start hooting and hollering and someone yells, "Fuck ya!" and his buddy yells, "Awesome!" and doesn't realize the irony of the statement. And at the window, just for a second, we glimpse a silhouette and then switch to an exterior shot showing a man in a camo jacket and straight legged jeans with three days growth of stubble, wearing sunglasses even though it's the middle of the night. He turns his head just so we can make out his profile and he utters in a deep gravelly voice, "Papa's back in business." Fade to black.

Maybe they did this for the 2010 sequel, "Lost Boys: The Thirst".

Lost Boys: The Tribe at IMDb

Looper (2012)

It would be so easy to focus solely on the time travel aspect of this movie. Granted, time travel is integral to the movie so that might not be amiss, but the conversation would invariably be how they screwed up. You know, because I know how it works. It's all those years I put in with the Doctor, don't you know.
I was really digging on the second half of the movie and the whole nod to Akira. Pierce Gagnon, who plays Cid, is one intense little actor. I hope he doesn't get offended by my referring to him as little, and send back some kind of future me to talk me out of posting this, or you know, just blowing my fucking head off. Of course not, that would be silly. I am clearly mistaking the actor for the character. But his eyes were so intense. Pierce, I mean little in the totally most respectful way.
It's hard to watch a time travel movie that also involves killers and not think of the Terminator and it's sequels. Other than one of the gat men having played a terminator in the Sarah Conner Chronicles, there's not a lot of similarity. In fact I wish there was, not that I think Looper was lacking, but that they could have done more with the Terminator films and television series dealing with the paradox of time travel. Or do they...I think Looper and Terminator take a different approach to what time travel does to the space-time continuum. Looper goes for a direct causality in a closed universe, while the Terminator goes the less direct approach and exists in a multiverse. What do I mean? In Looper if someone kills the younger self, the older self is gone because they could not logically exist, but in the Terminator, when parents are killed after the person exists, they are just forgotten by everyone else, they do not just disappear; the out-of-time person has side-stepped into an alternate universe.
Of course Looper violates it's own rules, in a pretty big way. You can't set up a mechanic that is shown to be universal and then not follow it through because you want the happy endind. Well, I guess you can because they did that in this flick, but you shouldn't. It's terribly inelegant and a bit embarrassing I imagine. And I'm not even talking about paradoxes here. I'm just talking about wrapping up the movie without following through on the consequences of removing one piece of the puzzle.
I still really like this movie, though. It took a while to get used to JGL with that fake nose bridge. It looked good and all, but I just keep watching him and thinking, "that's not what he looks like". Once I got passed that, the film was great.

Looper on IMDb

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

When this movie hit the theatres, I wasn't that excited about it. I like the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. Sure, the third one was not the movie it could (should) have been, but I don't hold that against Raimi, I know that at the last minute his script was changed on him and he was forced to add a whole bunch of crap to make the producers happy. I liked the complete geekiness of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker. I loved the interaction between Parker and Watson and Osborn. I did not think this needed a reboot, just a rework, going back to the original idea that Raimi had. I was looking forward to going farther along the Spider-Man timeline and discovering what his life was like after high school and college. I had hoped that it would involve Dr. Connors and the Lizard.
Instead I got a reboot that didn't have Mary Jane Watson or J. Jonah Jamison. I got a new cast, a new director and new producers. I got some British kid playing a beloved American icon. I got a revamp of the origin story with definite nods to the original version but not following it. And you know what else I got? A totally enjoyable movie.
Before the X-Men, before Batman and Superman, I was a fan of Spider-Man. I have distinct memories from when I was four years old and having a Spider-Man web shooter toy. I vaguely recall watching a Spider-Man cartoon. I would be older before I would see the 1970s live action films and the Saturday morning cartoon that teamed Spider-Man up with Iceman and Firestar. It would be late grade school before I started collecting the comic books and wearing the red knit cap with the Spider-Man suit design - the hat that covered your whole face except for your eyes and that I would wear and run around the neighborhood pretending to shoot webbing from my hands, though I don't recall ever battling any of his super foes. But then I was the only kid that would pretend to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. If someone else who'd have been willing to be the "good guy" I would have gladly portrayed the villain (especially Boba Fett as I recall). But the neighborhood kids were only interested in playing with the toys. That's fine, because I had the books to read and my imagination was more fertile than all of their's combined then and now.
While I was a true collector and kept all of my new comics bagged on boards, I also had a huge collection of less than new comics garnered from garage sales and flea markets. In a couple of years I was able to put together hundreds of issues of the various Spider-Man titles which I read several times. It's because of this that I can handle a reboot of the movie series and not get too upset about it. The run of the comics has seen the origin story told and retold a number of times. Peter Parker ages and matures and then is snapped back to that moment of beginning. Would it have been nice to get more than a trilogy out of the Raimi version of Spider-Man? Hell ya. But, this new kid, Andrew Garfield, did a pretty spectacular job. It was refreshing to see Gwen Stacey be the focus of his affections. And I really like the playing up of the mysterious nature of the disappearance of Richard and Mary Parker.

The Amazing Spider-Man at IMDb

Jonah Hex (2010)

I soooooo wanted this movie to be good. I recently saw Josh Brolin in Men in Black 3 and thought he was wonderful and was discussing his performance in No Country for Old Men which in turn reminded me of W. and so I searched to see what else the library had that I might watch him in. I ended up with this. Now, I am not completely unfamiliar with Jonah Hex. I read the comic as a kid, but to be completely up front mostly remember the reboot as "Hex" where the Jonah Hex character was mysteriously and inexplicably sent into the future. I also remember hearing about this movie being made as well as not recalling a single review of it. That's never a good sign. I knew that Brolin was in the movie and that Megan Fox said no to Transformers 3 to do this, a move I bet she regrets financially at least.
This movie sucked, but to be honest I'm not sure why. I thought the acting was passable, though every time I saw Will Arnett on screen I expected him to be setting up for a joke or to be making sexual innuendos - I think he's hilarious, but not who I'd pick for this kind of role, especially after seeing him in it. Megan Fox was not a disappointment and I will say that she held her own in her scenes, but really that's not saying that much. I think it got off on the wrong foot. They did some live action for like three or four minutes and then did an animated "origin of Jonah Hex" that lasted two or three minutes and then went back to live action to tell a story that didn't give a crap about characters. Honestly, the only character I cared about was the dog, and at times the Lilah character, but only at times.
This movie should have been the origin story, and the sequel should have had Hex hunting down Turnbull. As it was, there was no character building. I read the comic book, and I still didn't have enough to go on for most of it. It was a lot of, "oh that name rings a bell" and before I could figure out why it did the character was gone.
I'm chalking this one up to a bad script and bad calls made by the director. Though I would like to give special kudos to whomever's job it was to keep Megan Fox's boobs from popping out of that dress and pushing this film into an R rating.
It just donned on me how to describe this film and what I found wrong with it - it had the look of True Grit remake, the feel of the Wild, Wild West remake and the story of a Quentin Tarentino movie.

Jonah Hex at IMDb

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

One of the things I love about these movies is that nothing is wasted. If a line is said, you know it's important and the more times it is said, the more important it is. If you know this rule, then you know that not only is Batman going to save the city in the end, but you know how, even before you know what he is saving it from. That certainly doesn't lessen the entertainment value of this film - it didn't for the first two. You just know where you're going from the beginning. But, if you're paying attention to what these films are about - just listen to Alfred to hear what it's really all about - you know that Batman ends up killing Bruce or Bruce ends up killing Batman. There is no other possible outcome. So you just sit back and let the wonderful cast do their thing.
I didn't know too much about the Bane character and am still trying to clear the images of the previous incarnation from my brain. I knew that Bane was big and smart, and I knew that Bane broke Batman's back. Since that was all I knew, my hat's off to Christopher Nolan for being directly on track with carrying over the comic book to the movie. I love the way he was portrayed as the warrior-philosopher who was the ultimate true believer. The very first time that the League of Shadows and Ra's al Ghul are mentioned I began looking for al Ghul's daughter. I'm afraid I know even less about her than I do about Bane, and I think that knowledge is from the Batman animated series and not from the comic books at all. In the context of the movie, it wasn't hard to figure out who she was, since there are only two younger women in Bruce's life and one of them is Catwoman, of I should say Selina Kyle, since they never call her Catwoman.
Ah Selina Kyle. I'm not that familiar with her portrayal from the old Adam West incarnation of Batman, more than knowing that both Eartha Kitt and Lee Merriweather portrayed her. I am familiar with Michelle Pfeifer as Catwoman and also with Halle Berry's portrayal. Pfeifer opposite Keaton was good casting I thought, the two definitely had chemistry, but the portrayal was campy with a bit of the supernatural thrown in. Was that particular Batman film directed by Tim Burton? I kind of feel that it must have been since they kept going for the humor with the Catwoman character, and that's too bad, because I think that was a big part of what turned the franchise towards the campiness of the West days. I don't even know what to say about Berry's portrayal of Catwoman. That movie had nothing to do with the DC universe and the Catwoman that interacts with Batman. But, seeing Berry dressed like that I guess was enough to get the project greenlit. Anne Hathaway, under Christopher Nolan's direction takes Selina Kyle in a different direction. She's a more than capable woman forced through circumstances to do things that she doesn't want to do, but she still tries to be good, even if she doesn't always succeed, and incidentally, looks far hotter doing it than any of the previous incarnations of the character. Okay, I'll admit it, I'm crushing a little bit. Who knows, maybe when she's tired of hanging out with Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Johnny Depp she'll read this post and look me up.
I like the way the movie wraps, with a hint that there might be more films to come. I've been hearing that Batman will be in the upcoming Justice League of America movie. But, I've also heard that Joseph Gordon-Levitt won't be playing Batman. I didn't know why that was significant until tonight. After I heard the rumor, I did look and officially there is not one attached to the project yet. I'm hoping that since Christopher Nolan is rebooting Superman this upcoming Summer that he will be involved with JLA movie. At the very least, I hope they use his version of Batman and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I will want them to use his version of Superman as well. What I really hope is that this means that there is a Wonder Woman movie in the works that will drop before the JLA movie. There is already a Green Lantern film and while it wasn't the greatest, it was as good as Thor, which Marvel seemed to like just fine as a precursor to the Avengers. What other movies do we need? None. I'm going there. We do not need a Flash movie. I always thought the character was only tolerable as part of a team. We do not need a Hawkman movie. I've always liked this character, and Hawkgirl/woman too, but, they've never been commercially viable for some reason, except as part of a combo. Plastic Man? Can't stand the character. The Martian Manhunter? That would be pretty sweet, but it's never going to happen before the JLA. Maybe afterwards if it's a big success and he's a character in the JLA movie. Aquaman? That could be an awesome movie or an awesomely sucky movie. IF they play him as the Prince or King of Atlantis who begrudgingly works with the surface worlders for a joint goal, that might work. Who will the JLA be up against? I never bought the notion that the individual super villains would band together to take over the world worked, past two or three working together and then only the correct two or three. Nearly all of the villains are megalomaniacs, who by definition don't play well with others. I think the best option is Darkseid and his ilk trying to conquer the world. That does seem a bit like the premise for the Avengers movie now that I write it, but hey, it worked for Marvel, it can work for DC. What cannot happen is the JLA going the "Super Friends" route else I will be taking the form of someone who isn't going to watch it.

The Dark Knight Rises on IMDb