Quick Hits on a man with two thumbs

Roger Ebert 

1942 - 2013 

I’d like to start this blog entry by mentioning the death of Roger Ebert. He was a vital part of my movie going and made me expect more from a movie. We didn’t always agree. I still think that Kick Ass was a great movie while he didn’t get it. I still think that The Twilight Series has some merit while he focused too much on the stupid look on Kristen Stewart’s face. A face only Pattinson could love. Yet I always respected his opinion. From the time when I was a child and he was the fat guy to Gene Siskel's skinny guy and I watched his show weekly to now, when I wanted to start writing a movie reviewing blog,  and I went to RogerEbert.com and studied the style of how he gave information on movies without ruining them. I can say that Roger made me want to strive to be better at this movie critiquing than I am. 

     He found a way to tell a story with his words and deliver meaningful critique rather than just mean spirited rants on what he hated. I was constantly impressed with the knowledge of film Roger Ebert had. He knew every movie a movie wanted to be and he held movies as the art they were. Constantly under fire by filmmakers (who wanted/needed his thumbs up to make their film) Roger never wavered from his belief that movies needed to earn his praise. He famously hated the movie “The Brown Bunny”, and was attacked by the director of The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo, who called him fat and placed a curse on his colon. Roger retorted “It is true that I am fat but someday I will be thin and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.” Gallo and Ebert later became sort of friends, especially after he reviewed a recut version of The Brown Bunny and said that the movie in the new form was a better product. In a world that had more critics than supporters, Roger Ebert supported when he felt the movie earned it (see Dark City) and critiqued when movies deserved it (see Hick or The Brown Bunny).
    I do not pretend that I am half the writer or half the person Roger Ebert was but he had a passion for movies and shared that with me and made me want to share that with you loyal reader. For that, I will always be grateful. I will continue my blog, in order to honor his memory. Roger Ebert raised the quality of the movies we see by pushing directors to give us quality or face the dreaded downward turn of his thumb. RIP Mr. Ebert, you've earned it.


Now on to this weeks movies. In this down part of the movie season, I’ve seen a few movies that deserve a chance to be reviewed so I will give you my special blend of movie reviewing.

Spring Breakers

    I’ll begin with the movie that people have been talking about all over the place. Not because it is a great movie but because it stars former Disney Channel stars that are taking a step into the world of more adult roles. For Vanessa Hudgens, anyone with an interest has seen her naked when someone hacked her cell phone. For post-Bieber Selena Gomez, well you are not gonna see much more than you have already. Not that the nudity is not prevalent throughout Spring Breakers, indeed there are more crotch shots per capita than any movie since the original Porky’s. Sometimes you kind of wish they had told you that the movie was sponsored by Girls Gone Wild.
    The story revolves around four girls and their adventures on Spring Break. Selena Gomez plays the innocent and appropriately named Faith. She is the religious girl who is friends with rebel girls Brit (Pretty Little Liar’s Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) who in order to pay for their trip, steal a car, rob a diner and set the stolen car on fire. Faith goes along with it because she needs to get away from her ultra religious life even if only for a week. Needless to say if you’ve seen the trailers, things go a little wonky while they are down there. The meet a drug dealer/rapper Alien played by James Franco, are arrested for partying too hard,  and soon are robbing spring breakers. The movie has a kind of frenetic energy and a way of doubling back on itself to the tagline of “Spring Break, Spring break forever.” There is an artistry here but if you were gonna go to see Disney girls gone bad, you will be mostly disappointed. As a film, it is effective and tells a good not great story. I wanted more and wish that I knew more about why the girls were who they were. Yet the movie doesn’t fail the viewer. If you can get past the girls gone wild moments and watch the stories being told, you will enjoy this movie.

Mr. Unhappy sez: Independent filmmakers can go one of two ways. Genius or failure. By that scale, I would say Spring Breakers is more genius than failure. As a mainstream movie, I’d say it is trapped in independent film. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Olympus Has Fallen

    I thought more than once while watching Gerard Butler run through the white house killing North Koreans (they are the new Russians in action movies nowadays) that this is the movie A Good Day to Die Hard should have been. John McClane would have fit in this movie like a well tailored suit. Gerard Butler plays Secret Service Agent Mike Banning. He is the ex-special forces guy that can take out an army with a shoelace and a pair of thong panties. After a horrific accident gets him put out of the White House and into a desk job, he is on hand when a small military force of North Koreans take over the White House. Luckily for the nation John Mc...erm Banning knows everything there is to know about the secret ways in and out of the white house. He fights his way through the terrorists and proves to be quite hard to kill. He frustrates and decimates the paramilitary force occupying the White House. Morgan Freeman is great as the acting President (or as his Lean on Me character might say the HNIC) and Aaron Eckhart is very presidential but they all play characters that do their parts but don’t offer much in the way of character depth. Olympus Has Fallen is as close to a new Die Hard as I’ve seen and for that, it is worth checking out.

Mr. Unhappy sez: Yippee Ki-Yay motherfucker... This is a good ride to go on. Bruce Willis and the Die Hard producers should look at this and slap their heads and say “Oh! That is what a die hard movie should be!”

The Host

Stephanie Meyer has been mostly slammed as a hack writer who writes Mormon fundamentalist propaganda. I will say that Twilight as a story is an awful movie. Nothing really happens for the first 100 pages and yet something keeps you reading. So I can understand the criticism of Twilight the movie. It didn’t have a lot to go with and therefore you were dependent on what few action beats they do have. In The Host Meyer again has a love triangle. Not between a werewolf and a vampire but between an alien invader and her human host. The movie opens with the world having been taken over by parasitic hosts that have made taken us over and made the world a better place. There is no greed, no war, no problems with the environment. There are pockets of human resistance and we are immediately thrust into the story of Melanie Stryder, a human who wants to remain that way. When the seekers (aliens police) come for her and her brother she sacrifices herself to save her brother and is implanted with Wanderer, who begins to relive Melanie’s post invasion life. First Wanderer collaborates with the Seekers, much to Melanie’s chagrin. Melanie fights the invasion of her body and succeeds in making things hard on Wanderer. Eventually they go on the run from the Seekers and hook up with Melanie’s Uncle in the desert. The Host suffers from the same problems as Twilight in that there doesn’t seem to be two hours of story in the book. Not much happens in the middle and the beginning and end seem anticlimactic. Still, like Twilight, I found enjoyment out of the movie and the teenage girl in me, loved the love story. It gets complex inside that noggin of Melanie Stryder. I had a few ideas of where the story could have gone but in the end, the movie is what it is. There is no real conclusion but it does have the same obsession as love that was so prevalent in Twilight. I’m not sure if that is a good message for tweens or not but in this world I’ll take a bad view on love rather than a atheistic view of love(by that I mean that no one believes in love) any day.

Mr. Unhappy sez: The world seems pretty cool. Although I don’t think an alien wants into my head... it’s a mess. Surprisingly this movie is not.

Evil Dead

I have a certain affinity for Evil Dead. It is not a great movie but it is a movie that introduces us to the great Bruce Campbell. His character of Ash is probably one of the most iconic characters in movie history. I’m not overselling it. So when you announce that you are making a remake of Evil Dead, a fan of the original might cringe a bit. But the filmmakers don’t try to remake the movie as much as reinvent the story. There are similarities. A group of less than genius kids go out to the woods and find the Necronomicon in the basement of the cabin. That a cabin in the woods has a basement seems to not phase anyone but I doubt it is as common as not having one. The differences are subtle. One, the main character is trying to get clean and is quitting her crack addiction cold turkey. Mia is damaged and her friends are nearing the end of their rope with her. So when she smells the decaying bodies of cats and starts believing the woods are out to get her, they just assume she is trying to get them to take her home. Soon the evil in the woods infects Mia and the others one by one, forcing them to mutilate and kill each other. The new Evil Dead constantly ups the ante and does things that the original couldn’t. Yet it still has the feel of the original film. The humor while not missing is subdued but the violence is every bit as great as the original and may rival the sequel. I look forward to seeing where this story goes in the future. The news of an Evil Dead II in the making no longer makes the fan in me cringe but smile in anticipation.

Mr. Unhappy sez: A great horror movie scares you and makes you an accomplice in the characters deaths. Evil Dead makes you root for their deaths.