Wednesday, February 15, 2012

RED RIDING HOOD (2011)

For what it is RED RIDING HOOD is an entertaining enough movie. It's kinda a dreamy, light-weight re-telling of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, but instead of a girl walking to Grandmother's house there's a small village that's being terrorized by a werewolf. Unfortunately the "werewolf" doesn't look like a half-man/half-wolf creature, but instead like a large CGI wolf that walks around on all fours.

After the first few killings, not shown onscreen, just implied, a holy man (Gary Oldman) and his soldiers comes to the village to kill the wolf. Through all of this the beautiful Amanda Seyfried is caught in a love triangle between the man she's loved since childhood and the guy her family has arranged for her to marry.

I attentively watched the entire movie, but I would have been much happier if the filmmakers had went ahead and bumped it up some with the violence. With a PG-13 rating I assume they were going for a young teenage girl audience which is sad because this story had some real potential to be something unique, but instead they took the safe and easy path and ended up with a watchable but wholly forgettable film. The main thing RED RIDING HOOD accomplished was making me want to watch LEGEND again.

Worth a rent, but that's it.

Monday, February 13, 2012

THE THING (2011)

I'm not a filmmaker, but I would think the main reason that you would go through the trouble of making a prequel to a movie that you love (I assume the filmmakers here love John Carpenter's THE THING) is to expand the story and challenge yourself to try to make an even better movie. That's just my thinking, maybe I'm a fucking idiot. I'm using ALIEN and ALIENS as my scale of reference. So with those thoughts calculating into my expectations of this new THE THING I was really, really dumbfounded as to why this movie feels more like a remake than a prequel. In fact, if I didn't already know this was a prequel the only thing that would have clued me in while watching it was at lame tacked on ending during the closing credits. Other than that it felt like a remake...an unimaginative one at that.

A Norwegian research team accidentally discovers a huge alien spaceship in Antarctica. They call in a group of American paleontologists so they can stop talking in subtitles. A large alien "survivor" is excavated out, still encased in a large block of ice. The dogs start getting all upset, then suddenly the alien jumps straight up out of the ice like he's a goddamn acrobat and flies through the roof! Before you can say "Well, that was silly." out come the flamethrowers and everybody's in the wreck room getting tested to see if they're an alien. Yawn.

If James Cameron had gone this route, instead of Marines fighting an army of aliens and their mother on LV-426 he would have just told the Nostromo story over again, but with a CG alien. As far as I'm concerned, such a lack of imagination is inexcusable. I've seen more thought put into a porno parody than this movie.

Despite all that, I didn't hate THE THING remake, I mean, prequel . It was mildly entertaining, the pace was good and it wasn't blasphemous towards the 1982 version, but I'll never watch it again and after awhile I found myself admiring how attractive Mary Elizabeth Winstead is more than really caring what happened to the characters. Worth a single viewing, but that's about it.

Original - The Thing From Another World (1951)
Remake of original - The Thing (1982)

Friday, February 10, 2012

SLEEPER (1973)

Clever early Woody Allen comedy that suffers somewhat from dated humor.

In 1973, Miles Monroe (Allen), the owner of the Happy Carrot health food store, goes to the hospital for a simple surgery. There's a complication, so doctors place him into an cryopreservation state. He stays frozen until the year 2173, when he's illegally thawed out by scientists who are part of a rebellion against the oppressive government and they plan to use Miles as a spy because he has no "biometric identity" and can be tortured for months and months without giving up any useful information. That might sound dark, but it's not at all.

Audiences back in 1973 must have found this film to be pretty funny (since it ended up making back 9 times its budget at the box office), but SLEEPER is pretty dated. Jokes about Howard Cosell and Charles DeGaulle might have flown back in 1973, but I can't see them bringing many laughs today. That's not to say there isn't any humorous moments thought...the robot scenes were pretty funny.

If you're a huge Woody Allen fan then SLEEPER is a required watch, but others would be better off sticking to early Allen classics like ANNIE HALL or LOVE AND DEATH.