Howdy all,

Here’s three quick reviews from local moviephile Weber or Demonic Weber as he is known in some circles. Great choices if you are looking for something to keep you entertained in doors that does not involve either crisco or twister.

Enjoy,

Frank

So I go to the video store, find couple of movies before the ballgames start. Tigers kicked the Yankees asses and Michigan beat Michigan State. Anyway, at the video store I find two movies, take them up to the counter. “We’re having a deal,” the clerk informs me “three for $9.99.” I jump for joy, all my dreams answered, I get to leave line and find another great movie to enjoy. Searching the shelves hoping to find that one movie that jumps at me, even though I just spent 10 hours to find two that were worthy of my superior taste. Coming back in disappointment to the counter, I spot it. The Return Tray. Was there a movie there that I miss looked? Is there some out there that had better taste in movies and rented a great movie and brought it back just for me? Or did they hate it, returned it early only to tempt my curiosity? Curious George must have been a fine film. A character worshiped by so many….. First graders. And I, I have so much in common with first graders. Then, I see it a treasure in the midst of trash. The golden print. The holy grail of moviedom. I take the movie to the clerk. “This is the movie I want.”, I proclaim with great confidence as the customers in line cheered. I found the perfect movie. Rushing home as fast as I can I whip into the garage, slam open the door, turn the TV on and pull the movie out of the case. Curious Friggin George. O cruel fate, the shame I felt as I loaded my DVD player could not be measured. By the way, if you believed a word of this story, you see what movies I reviewed. It’s all about misdirection.

REVIEWS…

THE PROPOSITION

Starring Guy Pearce (LA Confidential)
Charlie, played by Pearce, finds himself screwed over when he has to chose to either watch his younger (good) brother hang on Christmas Day or track down and kill his older (evil) brother. A grisly shoot out at the beginning of this movie suddenly stops and slows to a crawl in a character study of good versus evil. Half way through the film, the line between good and evil blurs. Can Charlie kill his brother? Can he let his younger brother swing from the gallows? Does evil beget evil? If a good person can become evil, can a evil person become good? The acting though not Oscar worthy delivers on intent but not in depth. A very good western but then again what is good?

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

Starring Edward Norton (Primal Fear, Fight Club) David Morse (St. Elsewhere, The Negotiator)Edward Norton surprises you every time you see him. He changes characters so often, even within the same film (Primal Fear), that you’re never sure what to believe from him. In Down In The Valley, he plays a gee-golly aw-shucks cowboy, Harlan, from South Dakota who falls for a young girl in the Valley. The father of the girl, played by David Morse, doesn’t trust Harlan or believe his wholesome image. Slow moving at the beginning but picks up a lot near the last quarter, you wonder if it’s ever going to get where it’s going. It not only gets where it’s going but twists and goes somewhere you’re not quite expecting. The ending was a little disappointing perhaps confusing. Still a really fun ride when you’re with Norton.

LUCKY # SLEVIN

Starring Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Sin City) Bruce Willis (Hudson Hawk, Four Rooms) Lucy Liu (Kill Bill, Charlie’s Angels) Morgan Freeman (Unleashed, Dreamcatcher) Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Dave) Stanley TucciTypical setup pit two warring gangsters (Freeman and Kingsley) against one another, the exception is a stooge caught in the middle, Slevin (Hartnett). Every one’s against Slevin, he’s been beat up, robbed, mistaken for a gambler who owes some big debts, and his girlfriend’s cheating on him. This doesn’t bother Slevin one bit, through it all he just keeps smiling. Misdirection in this movie is a character own its own. Than once The Usual Suspects comes to mind in that you’re trying to put the pieces together. Good acting all around balance the glossy feel the film has. A well rounded movie.

Of the three above movies, my pick would be Lucky # Slevin. The others are great movies but you didn’t need to get through the slow parts in Slevin. Funnily enough, Slevin is the longest of these movies. Hope you found the reviews useful.

Give Em A Chance

-WEBER

Contributed by Weber

Greetings friends,

Below you will find the first of many contributions by the star of the epic Motor D short film, Interview with the Vampire: The Count Chocula Story and the still unfinished masterpiece Coxalot, Mr. David Kandt. For those of you who have never met him or had the pleasure to watch a film with him, Dave displays a child-like wonder to every film he sees. It reminds me of the same youthful exuberance of a young boy who discovers that you can kind of see a boob in the scrambled porn stations on the old school cable hook-ups.

Enjoy

Frank

Snakes on a plane… Has the world ever created a greater killer? Consider time,
disease, famine, war, zombies, misfortune and even bad luck; these things are
nothing in the face of the imminent danger presented to us by a pile of snakes on an
in flight plane. I’m sorry, that’s “mother fucking snakes on a mother fucking
plane”, to be precise.

This movie will undoubtedly receive all kinds of theatrical criticism for lack of
plot, character development, special effects, creativity and cinematography. But
those are all easy opinions to hold because it’s easy to beat a guy when he’s down.
So the question really is, “What can be said at the benefit of SOAP?” Snakes on a
plane is a movie that at its inception was intended to be a serious drama / horror
film that wanted to scare the life out of those who are afraid of snakes, flying,
the dark, suffocation and drop down oxygen masks. What a bunch of sissies they
targeted! I’m a tough guy, so snakes “ain’t shit” to me. But if I were a sissy,
then I would have sissied my pants so badly the row of seats in front of me would be
wet, and angry.

A brilliant woman once said, “It’s the ability to see under what is shown that makes
the difference between assessing which [movies] are good and which are bad.”

SOAP, the unknown acronym for ‘Snakes On A Plane’ was a ferocious “jump out at you”
suspense flick with so much “out jumping” that it could make you ’startle’ even when
you knew with full confidence that a snake was about to do an “out jump”. Snakes,
the unexpected all time jumping champions of the world (you know, the creature with
no legs), can jump like mother fuckers. Up ladders, over persons, out of toilets or
whatever obstacle they needed to concur. But beware; their only motivation to do a
“jump” is for the love of doing a “bite”. So if your wang is hanging out, or if
your nipples are exposed for an awkwardly long time on screen, or if you’re ugly and
sleeping then a snake is sure to strike out against your gratuitous indulgence to
the audience.

So did I like the film? The answer is yes, but understand that this is not a movie
that you go see because you’re ‘double serious guy’ with some kind of super eye for
watching and critiquing real deal film. No sir. This is a movie that you go to see
with the good humor that it wasn’t intended for. It’s a cheesy idea that was played
out as well as could possibly be played out. Put yourself in the position of the
director; you come into work one day, the boss says, “Here’s your new project. It’s
called ‘Snakes on A Plane’.” After kissing ass sufficiently you go to lunch and
peruse the script. You immediately realize that you’ve been handed that one script
that is a total box office embarrassment that everyone openly loves to hate and that
your career is over and your only recourse is to make the best out of what was
dropped on your nuts. What would you do?

The answer is you pay most of your budget to get Samuel L. Jackson to frontline the
movie and spend the rest of your budget getting B and B+ actors and actresses to
fill in the remainder. The only actors that could have done an equally impressive
job in delivering the true calmness needed to handle that cursed situation of having
snakes on a plane would be Magnum PI, Sgt. Martin Riggs from Lethal Weapon or Claude
Van Damn from anything he’s played in… you know his typecast.

So before you go hating, just remember that if you were sitting in that window seat,
and the take off of the plane was bumpy, and it was a red eye from Hawaii, and you
hated snakes, then this documentary would have led to all kinds of government
funding to say that they’re sorry that you’re black.

But I digress.

It’s just a good movie for those who like to be entertained, not for those who are
demanding of the movies they watch. You’ll not be moved to make drastic changes to
your life, but you will love it! I next hope to see a sequel to this movie.
Perhaps “Snakes on A Truck”, or “Snakes in A Submarine”. Or maybe step it up a
notch to something like “Snakes AND Spiders Everywhere”.

Review Contributed by David Kandt

There are several reasons why one would tire of this first initial bearing writer/director/actor. Could it be due to his pitiful inability to separate himself from his films? Certainly. Could it be his reliance on formulaic (and therefore predictable) films? Of course. Or perhaps, could it be his insistence on marketing himself as a brilliant, creative mind? Sure.

But I am not going to rant about those things here.

Yes, we have all witnessed, and perhaps have partaken in, the almost-too-easy-to-make complaints and criticisms of Shyamalan’s films . . . In The Sixth Sense: Doesn’t this doctor have other patients? Who’s paying for these house calls? In Unbreakable: Is it really believable that you could go through your whole life without ever getting hurt or sick and not at least notice that you’re unusually healthy? And would you really need to ask a loved one if you have ever taken a sick day? In Signs: These aliens can jump from a standstill to the roof of Graham Hess’s house, but they can’t kick down a pantry door? And, even though their weakness is water, they chose a planet composed of nearly 75% water for its resources? And, finally, in The Village: Why was a monster suit hidden in the floorboards of the quiet room where Noah would have access to it? And how would Ivy know what the claw of one of the monsters would feel like, since she has never seen one? But, like I already stated, picking apart the continuity and plot holes present Shyamalan’s films is not the subject of this rant.

The subject of this rant is M. Night Shyamalan’s shameless self-promotion, and how it really cheeses me off that everywhere I look, Shyamalan is trying to make himself into some kind of living legend.

I recently saw an except in Entertainment Weekly from the new book The Man Who Heard Voices, Or How M. Night Shyamalan Risked his Career on a Fairy Tale. Right away, I had to read the article. I found myself ensnared by the shear pretentiousness of it. For Shyamalan to honestly indulge in the idea of having writer Michael Bamberger follow the creation of his newest film, he had really sunk to a new low. I cannot think of any other writer/director who has attempted to brand himself like this.

Essentially, the excerpt from the book covers Night’s “historic” flight from Disney because they didn’t see eye-to-eye about his upcoming flick Lady in the Water. In a nutshell, bigwig Disney president, Nina Jacobson, didn’t “get it,” so Night cried and then moved to Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. bit. And now this movie is upon us, hence the reason why M. Night Shyamalan has been so in my face. And so on my nerves.

Shyamalan was recently welcomed as a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Aware of my annoyance with said director, Frank wondered how I could stomach watching the interview. After claiming that I was gathering “material” on the man, I braced myself in front of the television. I only slightly considered that nothing could top the pomposity of having a book written chronicling the making of the film Disney didn’t want, and as annoyed as I was, Shyamalan did not disappoint. He proceeded to explain to Stewart that the story present in Lady in the Water actually began as a bedtime story he frequently told his children. This said, after a short peek at the movie: A flash of a teeth-baring creature that was a cross between a hyena and a dog here, a glimpse of a screaming woman being carried away from a swimming pool there. Seriously, a bedtime story? Or is it what M. Night Shyamalan wants us to believe?

I am now convinced that this man’s power to annoy has led to his success as a filmmaker. He generates “been there, done that” scripts (he has actually been threatened with a plagiarism lawsuit over The Village), and mediocre directing at best, so what else could it be? The insistence of this writer/director/actor to use his first initial before his otherwise complete name can drive people crazy, in addition to Shyamalan’s brash confidence in including his name as part of his films’ titles. And if that is not infuriating enough, just look to Shyamalan’s repertoire of films with their recycled “twist” endings, and how he pretends there is an honest message in each of these films. Pretending that he wants to transform the way we live and act in light of our fear is embarrassing. He would much prefer to transform the way he lives, with the millions of dollars he stands to make with each film.

I’m on to you, Shyamalan.

With all of that being said, considering I am very much in love with an aspiring filmmaker, there is much I stand to gain in light of these revelations.

Frank, I think it’s time to hire a writer (I heard that you know one) to document the trials and tribulations of your next motion picture, which, by the way, you cry over, and must include water, alien life forms, a cute little boy, and a twist ending a blind person could see coming. Oh, and we really need to work on that name of yours. I was thinking “F. Afterdark Levanduski.” Or “F. Teatime Levanduski.” You pick.

Rant Contributed by Double B Rebbecca