Embracing the Melodrama Part II #77: Quicksilver (dir by Thomas Michael Donnelly)

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who doesn’t love Kevin Bacon?

Seriously, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have a positive reaction to seeing Kevin Bacon on screen. He may not be a star in the way that Bradley Cooper or Bollywood sensation Shah Rukh Kahn are stars but still, he is one of those actors that everyone just seems to instinctively like.

I think, to a large extent, that is because, despite the fact that he’s been around and acting forever, Kevin Bacon himself still comes across as being a normal, blue-collar sorta guy. Whenever you see him being interviewed, you get the feeling that Kevin Bacon basically shows up, does his job to the best of his ability, and, as opposed to many other actors, he doesn’t take himself or his movies too seriously. He’s justifiably proud of the good films that he’s appeared in and he’s never had any problem admitting that he’s been in a lot of bad films as well.

In fact, it was Kevin Bacon’s openness about his bad films that led to me discovering 1986’s Quicksilver. This is the film that, in a 2008 interview, Kevin Bacon referred to as being “the absolute lowest point of my career.” (Consider, for a minute, that this is being said by the same Kevin Bacon who had an arrow shoved through his throat in the original Friday the 13th and that will give you some clue of how much disdain Kevin seems to have for Quicksilver.)

Naturally, having read that, I knew that I simply had to see Quicksilver. I’ll admit right now that I was hoping to discover that it was some sort of loss and unappreciated classic. I wanted this to be the review where I defended the unacknowledged brilliance of Quicksilver. I wanted to say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Kevin! Give Quicksilver another chance!”

But no.

Quicksilver doesn’t quite suck but it definitely comes close.

At the same time, it is interesting as a classic example of what happens when a filmmaker tries to assign some sort of deeper meaning to or find inherent nobility in an activity or job that really isn’t that interesting. Often times, this will happen with sports movies. A director or producer will make the mistake of thinking that just because he’s obsessed with beach volleyball that means that there’s a huge audience out there just waiting for someone to make the ultimate beach volleyball film. Or, you’ll get a film like 1999’s Just The Ticket, where Andy Garcia is described as being the “world’s greatest ticket scalper” and the audience is supposed to be impressed.

In the case of Quicksilver, it’s all about being a bicycle messenger. I’m assuming that, one day, director Thomas Michael Donnelly was stuck in traffic and he happened to see a bike messenger rushing down the street, whizzing past all of the stalled commuters. And Donnelly probably thought, “I wish I was that guy right now!” Every day after that, whenever Donnelly was stuck in traffic, he thought back to that bike messenger and slowly he grew obsessed. All of his friends and his family got sick of listening to him talk about how much he envied the freedom of that bike messenger. Finally, a little light bulb turned on over Donnelly’s head and he said, “I’ve got to make a movie out of this!”

And then the bulb burned out but nobody noticed.

Kevin Bacon plays Jack Casey. When we first meet Jack, he’s a successful stock broker and he’s got a really bad, porn-appropriate mustache. One day, he’s sitting in the back of a cab and he goads his driver into getting into a race with a bike messenger. The messenger beats the cab. Jack is amazed!

And then, perhaps the very same day (the film is so poorly edited that it’s hard to tell), Jack not only loses all of his money but all of his parents’ money as well. Since poor men couldn’t afford facial hair in the 1980s, he shaves off his mustache. Desperately needing work, Jack applies to be a — you guessed it! — bicycle messenger.

The rest of the film is basically Jack delivering messages and talking about how he’s free now to live the life that he’s always wanted to live. And the thing is, you like Jack because he’s being played by Kevin Bacon. I mean, Kevin Bacon is so inherently likable that audiences even liked him when he was trying to kill Professor X and Magneto in X-Men: First Class. But, at the same time, you listen to Jack go on and on about how much better his life is now and you just want to say, “Who are you kidding?”

Needless to say, Jack has a group of quirky coworkers. Of course, by quirky, I mean that they are all quirky in a very predictable Hollywood sort of way. For instance, there’s the crusty old veteran and the goofy fat guy and the hard-working Mexican guy who wants to start his own business in America and the cocky black guy who is mostly notable for being played by Laurence Fisburne. One thing they all have in common is that they all love and damn near worship Jack, who has quite the common touch despite having formerly been a super rich stock broker with a bad mustache.

Anyway, Terri (Jami Gertz) also wants to become a bicycle messenger but she’s being used to deliver drugs by Gypsy (Rudy Ramos). She and Jack fall in love and, along with helping out his quirky coworkers and finding a way to make back his fortune, Jack also has to deal with Gypsy. It’s all very dramatic (though the drug dealer subplot feels as if it was awkwardly inserted into the film at the last moment) but mostly, the plot is just an excuse for scenes like the one below:

Quicksilver is … well, it’s not particularly good. It has a few good bike weaving in and out of traffic scenes but it’s definitely no Premium Rush. But it is kinda fun, in a “Oh my God, look at the 1980s” sorta way. And, for what it’s worth, it’s a film that proves that Kevin Bacon can be likable in almost anything.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #76: Children of a Lesser God (dir by Randa Haines)

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, we all know that The Hurt Locker was the first best picture winner to have been directed by a woman. And we also all know that, when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar for that film, she was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

But do you know the title of the first film to be both be directed by a woman and to be nominated for best picture? Well, you probably do now because I’m assuming that you’ve read the title of this post and you’ve seen the picture of the film’s poster above. But, let’s just pretend that you don’t so I can triumphantly say, “The 1986 film Children of a Lesser God was the first nominee for best picture to be directed by a woman!”

And the name of that director was Randa Haines. Never heard of her? You’re probably not alone in that. After making her feature debut with Children of a Lesser God, Haines only directed three more theatrical films. Instead, she’s spent most of her career in television and, if not for the nudity and the language, Children of a Lesser God could probably pass for a well-made Lifetime movie. That’s not necessarily a criticism because I happen to like well-made Lifetime movies. But still, it’s not surprising that Children of a Lesser God was the only 1986 best picture nominee not to receive a nomination for best director.

(For the record, Platoon won best picture and Oliver Stone won best director. Nominated in Haines’s place was David Lynch for Blue Velvet.)

As for the film itself, it’s a well-acted and well-made film. It’s not exactly great in the way that we ideally expect a best picture nominee to be. It’s directed a bit too much like a television movie and the film ends on a happy note that doesn’t exactly feel earned. (If any film would have benefitted from a bittersweet conclusion, it would have been Children of a Lesser God.) Still, at the same time, you can tell why the film was nominated. It deals with a social issue (in this case, the way that the deaf are marginalized by mainstream society) and it’s a romance between … well, I was going to say mature adults but actually, William Hurt was 15 years older than Marlee Matlin when they played lovers in this film, which adds a perhaps unintentional layer of ambiguity to their relationship. Children of a Lesser God was also the first film to feature a deaf performer in a lead role and, when Marlee Matlin won the Oscar for Best Actress, she became both the youngest and, to date, the only deaf actress to win.

Ultimately, Children of a Lesser God is more interesting from a historical point of view than a cinematic one. But the value of history should never be underestimated! It’s a worthy-enough film and Matlin’s angry performance holds up well. (As for William Hurt, how you respond to his performance will depend largely on how much tolerance you have for his voice. Whenever Matlin communicates through sign language, Hurt repeats aloud whatever it is that she’s said. As a result, the film is basically 2 hours straight of William Hurt talking and, on occasion, it’s a bit too theatrical and distracting. If the film were made today, the filmmakers would probably just use subtitles.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even if it didn’t lead to bigger things for Randa Haines, Children of a Lesser God did open the door for others to follow.

Neon Dream #1: Maserati – Inventions

Posted on May 16, 2015 by necromoonyeti

On a bit of a lark, I posted an article last week about some of my odd experiences as a kid on the internet in the 90s. That got me listening to a bunch of music that has no obvious connection to the things I wrote about. My metal choices became more industrial. I fired up the Lost in Translation soundtrack for the first time in ages. I fell in love with vaporwave’s sardonic spin on muzak and smooth jazz… Hey, this sounds like an excuse to post a music series!

90s internet was obsessed with fantasy and science fiction. “Nerds” were more likely to be online. (My family got dial-up because my mother was a computer programmer.) Free online gaming was dominated by MUDs and forum RPGs, as they were well suited for text-based environments and stemmed from a long tradition. Most of all, it was the easiest place for that demographic to congregate. (Why do we have Sports Bars but not Dungeon Masters’ Taverns?) If you came to the internet enjoying console RPGs, you might well leave loving anime and Dungeons & Dragons, too, and sharing an odd obsession with that island off the east coast of Asia that gave us so much of it. Japan was an exotic world full of technologically advanced cities, as I imagined it, and its number one export for me was high-tech fiction.

That is how I came to engage futuristic universes like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. Japan brought cyberpunk into the mainstream for my generation. (It was years before I watched Blade Runner.) The internet was the new frontier of technology, so the genre sort of resonated with the medium through which I encountered it. Ghost in the Shell in particular asked a lot of relevant questions regarding how technology impacted identity. On the internet, anonymity was a sort of virtue, and that always fascinated me. I also saw, as time went by, a lot of commonalities between the internet and cyberpunk’s dystopian societies. Corporate monopolies replaced niche vendors. Advertising expanded wildly, still all in-your-face pop-up adds pushing pornography and all-you-can-eat, 0%-down, free trial chances to become an instant winner. Forums became overcrowded, scaling up from hundreds of active users to tens of thousands. Screen names ceased to provide even temporary identification as people no longer bothered looking at them. Copycat conformity and superficial cheap thrills dominated where people had once engaged each other with thought and imagination.

In both cyberpunk and the internet, you had an acknowledged gap between the corporate world and the masses. In Final Fantasy VII, for instance, Midgar’s dark, towering inner city emitted a filth of neon commercial sleaze and ill-earned luxury that opposed the sunshine and suffering warmth of its dilapidated ghettos. This disparity was clear, both to the player and to Midgar’s fictional inhabitants. The antagonists were balding, broad-wasted businessmen and corporate gangsters. The heroes toppled the system through sabotage, creating a ripple effect that rocked the masses and–not so much in FF7, but definitely elsewhere–turned them against their corporate overlords. The fact that capitalism felt evil or sleazy, both online and in the fiction, proved awareness of the gap. If the system was working properly, the masses would willingly accept their position and not eye commercialism warily or respond to tremors beneath. There would be no vulnerability–no means to revolution–and subsequently, in a lot of these stories, nothing to drive the plot forward.

The gap emerged in fiction because it made for an interesting story. It emerged in real life because the internet simply hadn’t been reigned in yet. Corporations were still scrambling to keep up with rapidly changing demands emanating from an unregulated hive mind. In both cases, the appeal was a sense of empowerment. Anonymity within an unstable system enabled anyone, theoretically, to mastermind changes in behavior of the masses and then slip back into the shadows. It was a utopian dystopia. It was too easy.

Today’s social media, integrated subliminal advertising, and tailor-made instant-gratification entertainment indicate a highly functional, invulnerable corporate society. The internet is a bleak, soulless place where people narrate their artificial lives to the wind, proudly displaying every ounce of their shallow identities. You might grasp the banality for a moment and try to spread the word, but open ears are hard to come by, and before you seek them you just have to watch this Youtube video about the 10 craziest moments in… something. C’est la vie.

But that is why internet and the 90s makes me reflect nostalgically on sweaty used car dealers in crooked toupees; Tokyo as an exotic, futuristic world; Groomed corporate elites snorting cocaine on their private jets; Sleazy, shameless advertising; Revolutions begun by untraceable, nameless figures in archaic chatrooms; The machine consuming itself and collapsing into anarchy; Most of all, the freedom to roam a vast, incomprehensible urban landscape without consequence.

Maserati are a post-rock band from the music capital of the southeast: Athens, Georgia. “Inventions” appears on their 2007 release, Inventions for the New Season (which I always thought was a really awkward title). Their line-up at the time included the late Jerry Fuchs, who was involved in a lot of significant acts before his tragic death: !!!, MSTRKRFT, LCD Soundsystem.

This song found its way into my mix as a result of my brief foray into RPGMaker. I got it in my head to make a cyberpunk RPG based loosely around a collaborative story that I took part in back on the Nintendo.com forums in ’98. Futuristic tile sets were pretty hard to come by, and I turned to music to set the tone of the game. I put “Inventions” to work when the player finished up the introduction sequence and became free to explore. The song captured for me the feeling of walking along the massive streets of a futuristic city in the dead of night.

Quick Review: Mad Max – Fury Road (dir. by George Miller)

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Leonard Wilson

When Mad Max: Fury Road was first announced, I was skeptical. We saw what happened when a director returns to a franchise they excelled at. Neither Ridley Scott’s Prometheus nor Lucas’ work on the Star Wars prequels were as amazing as the originals. Fury Road may be the exception to that rule, at least when compared to The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The visuals are bright and colorful, with chase sequences that left me smiling through it all. The 3D adds a nice touch, particularly in the chases (without giving too much away), the movie feels as if it was built for a 3D showing. I’m not sure how it comes across in a regular format.

Without looking at those films, Fury Road hits the ground running (almost literally) and continues to do so for most of the film. While the title of the film belongs to Tom Hardy’s character, Max takes something of a back seat to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, who is the true heroine here. Max is the character that introduces the audience to the Wasteland, a world left barren after war and where Gas, Water & Blood are the richest commodities around. While I liked Hardy in this, I had the feeling that they could have put anyone in the role of Max and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
Furiosa is the one that carries the bulk of the story.

Fury Road’s plot is simple & thin, but given that it all takes place in a Wasteland made mostly of desert, it worked out okay for me. I wasnt expecting a whole lot on the story front, but was happily surprised with it. Imperator Furiosa is sent out with a crew for a Gas run, but decides to follow her own agenda, putting into motion the pursuit from the Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and one of gis up and comimg lackeys, Nux (Nicholas Hoult).

From a pacing standpoint, Fury Road shifts it’s gears often while managing to still keep the engine purring. Some of the chases are chaotic, with cars flipping through the air and wanton destruction all over the place. You even have cycles riding over dunes and speeding through salt flats. However, it never reaches a point where you can’t see what’s occurring. The film has just one moment that I thought was slower than it should be halfway in, but it also serves to set up the 2nd act. The movie is mostly one big truck chase, but it’s done incredibly well. If you’re looking for something incredibly deep, this might not be the film you’re looking for, though the movie does try it’s best to accommodate with the script.

Another standout is the music. I’m used to hearing Tom Holkenborg (a.k.a. Junkie XL) as the remix track maker for most of Hans Zimmer’s scores. With Fury Road, Holkenborg has a number of pulsing drum rhythms and guitar pieces that fuel the chases. While it may sound a little like his work on 300:Rise of an Empire, the music fits. Note that I if you’re looking to buy the score, there’s a deluxe version with extended tracks, perfect background music for motorcycle rides on your favorite highway.

Fury Road is rated R, though I’ll admit that it wasn’t as violent as I expected it to be. It can get bloody at times, but the film never becomes a gore fest or anything along those lines. As far as nudity is concerned, there are only two instances of this and both are related to the story. In my showing, we had full families, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of reaction (as far as I can tell).

So far, we’re on track for an interesting summer.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #75: Witness (dir by Peter Weir)

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I was lucky enough to watch Witness, a best picture nominee from 1985.

Taking place in Pennsylvania, Witness tells the story of what happens when an Amish widow named Rachel (Kelly McGillis) and her 8 year-old son Samuel (Lukas Haas) decide to take a trip to visit Rachel’s sister. Traveling on an Amtrak train, Samuel is amazed by his first view of the world outside of the close-knit and insular Amish society. However, Samuel’s excitement soon turns to horror when they arrive in Philadelphia and he witnesses a man being brutally murdered.

Detective John Book (Harrison Ford, who received his first and, to date, only Oscar nomination for this film) is assigned to the case and arranges for Rachel and Samuel to stay with his sister. John soon discovers that the murder was committed by two crooked cops, McFee (Danny Glover, who is pure evil in this film) and Ferguson (Angus MacInnes). John goes to his superior officer, Chief Schaefer (Josef Sommer) with his evidence. Soon after, McFee attempts to kill and seriously wounds John. John realizes that Schaefer must be corrupt as well.

Book manages to drive Rachel and Samuel back to their farm in Lancaster County but, after dropping them off, he passes out from blood loss. Knowing that sending John to the hospital would reveal Rachel and Samuel’s location to Schaefer, Rachel’s father (Jan Rubes) reluctantly allows John to stay at the farm.

And so, while McFee, Ferguson, and Schaefer search for him, John temporarily pretends to be Amish. He works in the fields. He helps to build a barn. He becomes something of a surrogate father to Samuel and he begins a forbidden flirtation with Rachel.

He also goes to town, where he watches as an idiotic local bullies the Amish, knowing that their religion forbids them from fighting back. John responds by punching a bully, upsetting both the Amish and the a local store owner who yells that this will be terrible for the tourism. In many ways, the scene is played for laughs and applause but there’s a very serious subtext here, as it would appear that the area’s main appeal to tourists is that you can humiliate the Amish without having to worry about any sort of retaliation.

While we, as viewers, definitely get some satisfaction from seeing John punch that jackass, it also allows Schaefer to discover where he and Rachel are hiding. One morning, McFee, Ferguson, and Schaefer pull up outside the farm. They get out of their car and, as the sun rises and with beautiful green fields on either side of them, the three men hold up their shotguns and start to walk down the road….

Witness may technically be a cop film but it’s actually so much more. It’s a character study of a deeply cynical man who finds himself changed by simple and innocent surroundings. It’s a love story, with Ford and McGillis illuminating the screen with their chemistry. It’s a celebration of community, with the harshness of Philadelphia being contrasted with life among the Amish. It’s a film full of beautiful images and it also features an excellent performance from Harrison Ford.

It’s a good film. I’m glad that I witnessed Witness.

Song of the Day: The Thrill Is Gone (by B.B. King)

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Arleigh

“When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.” — B.B. King

The blues is a music style that has always pulled me in from the very moment I first heard it. I probably didn’t even realize it was the blues, but as I got older it became the one type of music that would always spoke to me.

So, it’s one of profound sadness when I read that B.B. King, one of the giants of the blues, has passed away at the age of 89.

B.B. King stands tall and his influence on electric blues and blues rock musicians over several generations looms large. He now joins the other two Kings, Albert King and Freddie King, who with B.B. King were called the Three Kings of the Blues Guitar.

The thrill is gone. The thrill will live on forever.

The Thrill Is Gone

The thrill is gone
The thrill is gone away
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away
You know you done me wrong baby
And you’ll be sorry someday

The thrill is gone
It’s gone away from me
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away from me
Although, I’ll still live on
But so lonely I’ll be

The thrill is gone
It’s gone away for good
The thrill is gone baby
It’s gone away for good
Someday I know I’ll be open armed baby
Just like I know a good man should

You know I’m free, free now baby
I’m free from your spell
Oh I’m free, free, free now
I’m free from your spell
And now that it’s all over
All I can do is wish you well

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #74: Perfect (dir by James Bridges)

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Okay,before reviewing the 1985 film Perfect, I have three things to say.

Number one, I nearly captioned the picture above “John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Little Xenu.” And then I laughed and laughed. But, in the end, I resisted temptation because I’m an adult now.

Number two, Perfect came out in June in 1985, a few months before I was born. As a result, I have no idea what the 1985 reviews looked like. However, it still seems to me that you’re taking a big risk when you give a movie a title like Perfect, especially when the movie itself is far from perfect. How many reviews opened with, “Perfect fails to live up to its name…”

And finally, as a result of seeing both this film and Staying Alive, I have to say, “What the Hell, John Travolta?” Seriously, what the Hell was going on? John Travolta gave a great performance in the 1970s, with Saturday Night Fever. And then in the 1990s, he was good in Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Face/Off, Primary Colors, and a few others. (For our purposes here, we shall pretend that Battlefield Earth never happened.) Even though most of Travolta’s recent films have been forgettable, his performances have generally been adequate.

So, seriously, John — what was going on in the 80s? Because judging from both Perfect and Staying Alive, John Travolta apparently totally forgot how to act during that decade. When I reviewed Staying Alive, I said that Travolta’s performance managed to create a whole new definition of bad. But he’s actually even worse in Perfect. It helped, of course, that in Staying Alive, Travolta’s character was supposed to be stupid. In Perfect, on the other hand, he’s actually supposed to be a brilliant reporter.

Or, at the very least, he’s supposed to be brilliant by the standards of Rolling Stone. Travolta plays Adam Lawrence, an award-winning reporter for Rolling Stone. The magazine, by the way, plays itself and so does its publisher, Jann Wenner (though his character is technically named Mark Roth). What’s interesting is that the film itself doesn’t necessarily paint a flattering picture of Rolling Stone or Jann Wenner, though admittedly a lot of that is due to the fact that Wenner himself gives a performance that is even worse than Travolta’s. It’s impossible to watch Perfect without thinking about the fact that Adam is writing for the same magazine that would eventually put Dzokhar Tsarnaev on the cover and publish the UVA rape story.

Anyway, if I seem to avoiding talking about the exact plot of Perfect, that’s because there’s not really much of a plot to describe. Adam, a hard-hitting investigative journalist, is doing research on a story about how people are hooking up at gyms. Wenner agrees. “We haven’t done L.A. in a while!” he says. Adams joins the a gym called the Sports Connection, which he is soon calling “The Sports Erection” because he’s a super clever reporter. He falls in love with an aerobics instructor, who is played by Jamie Lee Curtis. She doesn’t trust reporters but is eventually won over by Travolta’s … well, who knows? Mostly she’s won over because the plot needs some conflict. She gets on Adam’s computer and she types, “Want to fuck?” Adam says sure but then tries too hard to dig into the dark secret from her past. “You’re a sphincter muscle!” she shouts as him. Adam writes a compassionate and balanced article about the Sports Connection. Wenner edits the article and turn it into a sordid hit piece. (And again, you wonder why Wenner agreed to play himself.) Feelings are hurt, issues are resolved, and eventually everyone takes an aerobics class.

Honestly, the entire movie is mostly just a collection of scenes of Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta working out. And, in all fairness, Curtis does about as well as anyone could in this terrible film. Travolta, on the other had … well, just check out the scene below and maybe you’ll understand why I had a hard time concentrating on Travolta’s acting.

Perfect fails to live up to its name.

Film Review: Maggie (dir by Henry Hobson)

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Maggie is a terrific and sad film about a father who finds himself helpless as his teenage daughter slowly dies. It’s a thoughtful and heart-rendering film and it’s one of the best of the year so far. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at some of the reviews.

Of course, there’s nothing new about a good film getting bad reviews. I’m actually surprised that anyone even bothers with reviewers anymore, considering just how often they get things wrong. There are any number of reasons why good films get dismissed. Some movies are genuinely ahead of their time. Some critics prefer to judge based on genre than by what they actually see on screen. Occasionally, a critic feels obligated to like or dislike a movie based on the politics or culture of the moment. The fact of the matter is that most film critics like to feel important and the easiest way to feel important is to hop onto a bandwagon with all of the other critics.

So, what’s the excuse as far as Maggie is concerned? Why does Maggie, one of the best films of the year so far, only have a rating of 51% on rotten tomatoes? In Maggie‘s case, it’s a combination of genre (Maggie is a zombie film and there’s a lot of critics who still feel guilty over liking The Walking Dead) and star. Maggie has been promoted as being an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, even though his role is essentially a supporting one. The majority of critics have been willing to admit that Schwarzenegger gives a good performance but they always have to qualify the praise. As a result, you have critics at both Hitflix and the A.V. Club writing that Schwarzenegger’s performance works because his character is designed to take advantage of Schwarzenegger’s limitations as an actor, as if all good performances aren’t, to some degree, the result of good casting. In order to make up for praising Schwarzenegger (who is not only an action star but a Republican as well, which is a combination that many reviewers — especially those who work exclusively online — will never be able to see beyond), many critics undoubtedly feel obligated to be overly critical of Maggie.

(What does that 51% mean anyway? That Maggie is 51% good?)

As for the film itself, it tells a simple story, one to which a lot of people will undoubtedly relate. As the film opens, we learn that the zombie apocalypse has already begun. The world has been hit by a virus. The infection spreads slowly, forcing the victims and their loved ones to watch as the infected are gradually transformed into mindless and cannibalistic zombies. However, the U.S. government has reacted with swift and ruthless efficiency. Martial law has been imposed. The infected are allowed to say with family up until the disease enters its final stages. At that point, they’re taken into quarantine and are euthanized. Though we never actually see a quarantine center, we hear enough about it to know that there is nothing humane about it. (Indeed, one reason why Maggie is so effective is because we know that the real-life government would probably be even less humane than the film’s government.) Society has contained the plague but it’s done so at the cost of its own humanity.

College student Maggie (Abigail Breslin) has been infected. She was bitten by a zombie and, as a result, she now has a grotesque black wound on her arm. As the virus moves through her body, her eyes grow opaque. Her veins blacken. When she breaks a now dead finger, she reacts by chopping it off with a kitchen knife. As there is no cure, all Maggie can do now is wait until she is sent to quarantine.

Her father, a farmer named Wade (Schwarzenegger), brings Maggie back to his farm with him so that he can take care of her during her final days. Wade knows what quarantine is like and he has no intention of forcing his daughter to go through that. With government doctors and police officers constantly and, in some cases, forcefully demanding the he give her up, Wade protects Maggie as best he can. He sleeps with a rifle at his side, knowing that eventually he’s going to have to use it on his own daughter.

And I’m crying again. Between this review and the one I did for Terms of Endearment, my face is going to be a mascara-smeared mess.

Maggie is a low-key and thoughtful film, a meditation on life, love, family, and death. Though the film does feature Schwarzenegger fighting zombies, most of the action happens off-screen. Instead, we just see the haunting aftermath. Schwarzenegger doesn’t deliver any one liners in this film and the film deliberately plays down his action hero past. He’s still got the huge body and the muscles but, in Maggie, they’re not intimidating. Instead, they’re evidence that Wade has spent his life working the land and they actually emphasize just how helpless Wade is in the face of Maggie’s disease. Director Henry Hobson makes good use of Schwarzenegger’s heavily-lined and weather-beaten face. His sad and suspicious eyes communicate everything that we need to know. When he cries, you don’t consider that you’ve never seen him cry before. Instead, the moment captures you because the tears and the emotions behind them are real.

But really, the film ultimately belongs to Abigail Breslin. It’s appropriate that the film is named after her character because the film really is her story. Maggie is about how she deals with knowing that she’s going to die and how she searches for meaning in her final days. It’s a good and heartfelt performance, one that reminded me of Brigitte LaHaie’s poignant work in Jean Rollin’s Night of the Hunted.

So, ignore the critics.

Ignore that stupid 51% on Rotten Tomatoes.

See Maggie.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #73: St. Elmo’s Fire (dir by Joel Schumacher)

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God! Aren’t rich, white people just like the worst!?

Actually, usually I would never say something like that. I usually find class warfare to be tedious and I personally think poor people can be just as annoying as rich people. I had no interest in the whole Occupy Wall Street thing and I once referred to V For Vendetta as being V For Vapid.

No, I may not be much of a class warrior but then again, that may be because I never met any of the characters at the center of the 1985 film St. Elmo’s Fire. Seriously, if anything could turn me into a slogan-spouting, window-smashing revolutionary, it would be having to deal with any of the self-centered, entitled characters in St. Elmo’s Fire.

St. Elmo’s Fire is about a group of seven friends, three of whom are played by actors who co-starred in The Breakfast Club. These friends all met at and are recent graduates from Georgetown University. St. Elmo’s Fire follows them as they laugh, love, drink, do drugs, and try to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

For instance, there’s Billy (Rob Lowe), who has big hair and wears one dangling earring. Billy was in a fraternity and spends most of the movie wishing that he still was. Billy also plays the saxophone and he has a wife and a kid who he has pretty much abandoned … well, you know what? I like Rob Lowe. He seems like a fun guy and his DirectTV commercials were all classics but oh my God, does he ever give a bad performance in St. Elmo’s Fire. Some of it is because Billy is not a very likable character. He’s supposed to be the rough-around-the-edges, secretly sensitive rebel type but ultimately, he just comes across as being a loser.

And then there’s Jules (Demi Moore), who does too much cocaine and, as a result, finds herself fearing that she’s on the verge of being sold into a sexual slavery. Jules doesn’t get to do much other than be rescued by the other characters. Fortunately, when it looks like the group is drifting apart, Jules attempts to commit suicide and brings everyone back together. Way to be a plot device, Jules!

Wendy (Mare Winningham) is the sweet but insecure virgin who has a crush on Billy. Wendy works as a social worker and ends up getting insulted by the very people that she’s trying to help. Winningham gives one of the film’s better performances but you can’t help but feel that Wendy deserves better friends.

Speaking of good performances, Andrew McCarthy also gives a pretty good one. McCarthy plays Kevin Dolenz, the idealistic writer who everyone is convinced is gay because he hasn’t had sex in 2 years. However, Kevin is actually in love with his best friend’s girlfriend. As written, Kevin runs the risk of coming across as being insufferably moralistic but McCarthy gives a likable performance. He turns Kevin into the nice guy that we all want to know.

And then there’s the Breakfast Club alumni.

Alec Newberry (Judd Nelson) was the vice-president of the Georgetown Democrats but now, because it pays better, he’s taken a job working for a Republican senator. Alec’s girlfriend is Leslie (Ally Sheedy). Alec obsessively cheats on Leslie, claiming that he can’t be loyal to her unless she’s willing to marry him. The group of friends is largely centered around Alec and Leslie though it’s never really clear why. Alec and Leslie are boring characters and, as a result, they’re a boring couple.

And then there’s Kirby (Emilio Estevez). Estevez gives a likable performance but he often seems to be appearing in a different movie from everyone else. Kirby is working on his law degree and he’s in love with a hospital intern named Dale (Andie MacDowell). Unfortunately, Dale isn’t as interested in Kirby as he is in her so Kirby responds by stalking her and trying to change her mind. There’s an earnestness and sincerity to Kirby that makes you like him, even if his behavior is actually rather creepy.

As for the film itself — well, it’s directed by Joel Schumacher and there’s a reason why Schmacher has the reputation that he does. As a director, Schumacher is good at gathering together an attractive cast but he has close to no idea how to tell a compelling story. St. Elmo’s Fire plods along, dutifully telling its story but providing little insight or surprise.

If you’ve read some of my previous reviews, you’re probably expecting this to be the point where I argue that St. Elmo’s Fire works as a time capsule. But, honestly, this film doesn’t have enough insight to really work as a time capsule. I mean, if you love 80s hair and 80s fashion, you might enjoy St. Elmo’s Fire but, then again, you could always just do a google image search and have the same basic experience.

Crimson Peak’s Visually Stunning Gothic Horror

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Arleigh

Guillermo Del Toro has become the one filmmaker who seems to excite both the elitist cinephiles and the geek community whenever he comes out with a new film. He’s done both pop-friendly extravaganzas (Pacific Rim, Hellboy) to critically-acllaimed arthouse fares (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone). His name has been attached to so many projects of all stripe that one wonders if he ever gets time to rest.

Most of these projects never get past the concept stage, but when one does and he goes all out in directing such projects we get something that excites the fanbase like his upcoming gothic horror film Crimson Peak. It looks to be Del Toro’s love letter to gothic horror of the past with his own visual flair for the morbid and the beautiful in one package.

The film stars a who’s who of powerful performers from Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston to Mia Wasikowska and Charlie Hunnam.

Crimson Peak is set to haunt the public this coming October 16, 2015