The Reel World

“You give me a uniform, you give me a number on my back — and I’ll give you the guts.”

More than any sport, baseball is all about numbers. Unfortunately, some of those numbers — like 73 (home runs in a single season) and 500 (career homers) — mean a little less in light of the steroid era. Others, like 56 (Joe DiMaggio’s legendary hitting streak), seem destined to live on forever. The most significant number on that shortlist might be 42, worn by Jackie Robinson when he broke Major League Baseball’s color line on April 15, 1947. 42 — the film, not the number — is significant for a somewhat surprising reason. The movie succeeds as rousing, crowd-pleasing entertainment by functioning less as a straight-up biopic and more as the story of how Robinson became, arguably, the country’s first African-American crossover star.

 "Lucky Bastard was a pornographic website that invited fans to have sex with porn stars. The following footage is believed to be the last video shot for the site."

You know exactly what that kind of an intro means. You should. The found footage genre has been around even long before it was turned into a modern trend by The Blair Witch Project. Since that time the genre has appeared in both large and small budget films. The shaky footage usually covers a variety of sins by the filmmakers. Rarely does the genre have anything clever or new to dispense. That's not exactly true with Lucky Bastards.

“Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

With those words begin an adventure that started with the legacy of Willis O’Brien’s  The Lost World. You see, dinosaur films are nothing new; they have held our child-like fascination since the industry was born. Jurassic Park was, however, something very new when it thundered into our cineplexes and forever in our imaginations 20 years ago. The marriage of brand new CGI technology with Stan Winston’s superbly detailed animatronics models transports you back 65 million years in time. CGI technology has improved since then and has become somewhat commonplace, but there is nothing common about Jurassic Park.

Remakes, reboots, and sequels: these are the trends in Hollywood that seem to make fan boys groan.  Some films should be left in the past, and some franchises simply need to come to an end.  But every so often a film comes along that dares to show us something new, and the end result manages to capture some of the magic that got us to love the original film to begin with.  The new Evil Dead filmmakers managed to succeed in doing just that and deliver a film that has me excited about what is next for the Book of the Dead and all those unfortunate enough to flip through its pages.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Evil Dead franchise, this entry into the series will likely be a gore-soaked experience you won’t soon forget.  And for the hardcore fans of the series, there are plenty of winks and nods to the previous entries to keep you grinning as well as some new twists to the mythology that you’ll either find groovy or you’ll simply sink into your seat and groan.  But one thing is for certain, fans will miss their beloved Ash and his “boom stick” this go around.

When I tell you The Host is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, you’ll probably think I’m exaggerating. There’s a decent chance you don’t know me and that we’ll never meet, so there’s no way for you to know I’m not prone to hyperbole or making “Best Ever/Worst Ever” statements. Obviously, I haven’t watched every movie that’s ever been made, but I feel reasonably confident in saying I’ve seen more than most people. Since I don’t make pronouncements like these lightly, I’m going to do my very best to explain why The Host — a stunningly bad sci-fi/romance that utterly fails as a work of science fiction and as a big-screen love story — is among the most inept films I’ve come across.

The Host is based on Stephenie Meyer’s 2008 novel of the same name. I suppose you could blame part of my extremely negative reaction to this film on some sort of prejudice against the Twilight author or her super-successful vampire franchise, but that bias doesn’t totally exist. (By the way, that was the one and only time I’ll be using the T-word; I don’t need to invoke it to discuss the unique atrociousness of this film.) Anyway, the nicest thing I can say about The Host is that it seems interested in exploring Big Ideas about the nature of humanity and the loss of free will. Unfortunately, those ideas are mangled by storytelling that veers back and forth between overly simplistic to shockingly incompetent, as well as a pair of romances that are likely to leave the sappiest of moviegoers groaning out loud.

"Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse."

If you are a fan of director Chan-wook Park, you are used to the kinds of bizarre images and somewhat enigmatic story elements that dominate the landscape of Stoker. While none of the images here reach quite into the territory of Oldboy, it's hard not to plug into the disturbed nature of the film's themes and story. I left the movie with more questions than answers and a little bit lost as to how exactly I was going to approach this review. I had not seen Oldboy at the time of the viewing or since. I did go out of my way to get some exposure to the film's famous imagery through clips and stills. Even still, I've never been more confused about a film than I am about Stoker.

For years it seems DreamWorks Animation has been living in the shadow of Pixar.  Sure, DreamWorks has had their success with Shrek and Ice Age, but when you stack the films next to Pixar’s library, you see Pixar just seems to be the best at what they do.  That is until The Croods came along; with the new DreamWorks release it would appear the animation studio has stepped up their game and released their best-looking 3D film to date.  My expectations were not too high with this release, but I was at least relieved I wouldn’t be watching Ice Age Ten: The Ice is Still Melting.  With a theater screening filled with what appeared to be thousands of little screaming children (remember in Gremlins when they were watching Snow White?). Before the film I had been face- palming myself, feeling this had been a bad idea, but once the lights dimmed and the film began, my worries faded away.  The story may be a little weak, but there is something there that hooked me and kept me engaged throughout the Croods’ journey, and it turned out to be good eye candy that the entire family can enjoy.

From the start no time is wasted as Eve (Emma Stone) narrates the dangers of living in this dangerous world.  As far as Eve knows, she and her family, the Croods, are the last of their kind.  Fearing the night (and everything unfamiliar or unknown) the family takes shelter in a cave until the sun reappears and everything is thought to be “safe” by Grug (Nicholas Cage), the father and leader of the group.  Grug is a neurotic, overprotective parent who simply expects at any point something could happen and kill them all, so with the exception of family hunts, they never stray too far from the cave.  And as a teenager, living this cramped lifestyle surrounded by her family is becoming overwhelming for Eve, and her sense of adventure (and being a rebellious teen) is just too much.  Besides, living in a cave with your overbearing father, mother, brother and grandmother sunrise to sunset is enough to make anyone want to venture anywhere despite all forms of danger.

“I'm tired of seeing the same thing. Everybody's so miserable here because they see the same things every day, they wake up in the same bed, same houses, same depressing streetlights, one gas station, grass, it's not even green, and it’s brown. Everything is the same and everyone is just sad. I really don't want to end up like them. I just want to get out of here. There's more than just spring break. This is our chance to see something different.”

Somehow I really doubt that Gomez’s character’s desire for something different was quite like what she got. You remember Spring Break, right? A week-long vacation from high school or college, time spent somewhere exotic and with a lowered or no drinking age limit and girls with low inhibitions. Now that is the premise for spring break vacation as I know it; Spring Breakers depicts a slightly different view; a view of drugs, guns, and James Franco in cornrows. Spring Breakers reveals the darker side of Spring Breaks where innocence is lost and the idea of inhibitions is a foreign concept. Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens shed their former Disney Channel personas and get down and dirty in Harmony Korine’s wild tale that makes it clear that returning to Disney Channel is definitely not an option (well, at least for one of them).

"What's the secret to getting in...There has to be one, right?"

You will probably never look at Princeton University in quite the same way again after you've seen Tina Fey's latest film, Admission. Under the guise of a poorly-played-out romantic comedy, the film offers us much more comedic insight into the mysterious world of college admissions than it does about relationships. The film was actually based on a novel written by Jean Hanff Korelitz and takes us deep into the labyrinth of how a prestigious college goes about accepting its future students. Of course, it's a romp and not intended to depict the actual process. Still, there are moments when you have to cringe and wonder to yourself if they don't just hit too close to home at times. It's that aspect of Admission that has me quite shocked that Princeton allowed themselves to be used as the college in question here. I guess they figure their reputation can take a tongue-in-cheek hit from Tina Fey. Good for them.

It’s like I always tell people, the only thing better than one gloriously over-the-top action spectacle centered around an attack on the White House is TWO gloriously over-the-top action spectacles centered around an attack on the White House. Lucky(?) for us, Hollywood is happy to oblige in 2013. Channing Tatum gets a chance to protect Jamie Foxx from a very hostile takeover in June’s White House Down, but they’ve been beaten to the box office punch by Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart in the junky, wildly entertaining, and more mythical-sounding Olympus Has Fallen.

This one-two punch of presidential peril is the latest, inexplicable example of two films with similar themes being released in theaters within months of each other. In years past, we’ve had dueling volcanoes (Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano) asteroids/comets (Deep Impact vs. Armageddon), Truman Capote movies (Capote vs. Infamous) and, just last year, revisionist Snow White tales (Mirror Mirror vs. Snow White and the Huntsman). It’s an odd group of pairings, but frankly I’m a little surprised it took this long for Hollywood to make what is basically “Die Hard in the White House.”